"One of the radical aspects of Buddhist meditation is that it invites us to suspend the habit of reflexively ascribing existence to everything experienced and return to the perceptual simplicity of a phenomenological view. When we attend merely to what appears, as the famous teaching to Bahiya puts it, then “in the seen there will be just the seen, in the heard just the heard, in the felt just the felt, and in the thought, just the thought.” (Udana 1.10) As even a passing encounter with meditation will demonstrate, it does not take long in this mode for the reality of the external world to dissolve into irrelevance amid a swirling sea of changing phenomena. The appearances are so apparently real, insofar as they arise and pass away with such astonishing immediacy, that the question of whether or not they are “really real” becomes a mere conceptual curiosity, more distracting than meaningful."

Appearance And Reality - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Fall 2009

"When we hear the word consciousness in English, we immediately speculate that there is a person to whom this consciousness belongs, an agent who wields it, or a self that consists of it. Yet early Buddhist texts speak of consciousness only as a process unfolding when certain conditions are met: “In dependence on an organ and an object there arises consciousness.” (Samyutta Nikaya 35.93) Or, more specifically, “When internally the eye is intact and external forms come into its range, and a corresponding conjunction occurs, then the manifestation of a corresponding instance of consciousness occurs.” (Majjhima Nikaya 28)

The role of consciousness is to serve up an appearance, either from the incoming data of the sense doors or from internal channels of memory, imagination, or conception. Backing this appearance up with a constructed sense of reality is a flourish added by perception. Consciousness is merely an event—the awareness of an object— while perception is the fabrication of an accompanying image or interpretive marker. Both are impersonal activities that occur naturally under certain conditions, and both the agent behind consciousness and the reality behind appearances are convenient but illusory concoctions of the mind."

Appearance and reality - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Fall 2009

"Causality lies behind this structuring of events into plots. We arrange our lives into stories by positing causal relationships between the things that happen to us. And, as Western philosophers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant have been pointing out since the eighteenth century, causality is not present in the world as we perceive it directly with our senses; it’s a structure we apply when we think about what we’re seeing and make sense of it. We might go further and say that causality is a tool of the storyteller’s art."

Being Somebody, Going Somewhere - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Spring 2011

"Don’t believe your mind when it structures the brute stuff of the events in your life into a meaningful, coherent sequence with a protagonist at its center, struggling with problems, successes, and failures, influencing and being influenced by events, moving meaningfully from past to future in a narrative arc."

Being Somebody, Going Somewhere - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Spring 2011 

"We might view Buddhist awakening, then, as seeing through the lies of stories. Enlightenment is a flight from the shifting, anxious, fundamentally dishonest ground of stories and the historical, linear narrative sense of time, to the pure wholehearted honesty of the eternal now, where thoughts and sensations just rise and fall without needing to mean anything beyond themselves, and we are free to be nobody, going nowhere."

Being Somebody, Going Somewhere - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Spring 2011