"Thoughts are our attempt to estabilish companionship in an otherwise empty universe. Like hearing the echo bounce off canyon walls, we keep self-speaking to assure ourselves that we exist and others exist with us.

Form can never release us from this separation because by definition it must be distinct from everything else to remain as form. To live in form means we will be distant and alone, governed by time. We try to use words to reconnect to other objects, but in the end the words do little to cross the great divide."

Awakening: a paradigm shift of the heart - p. 32

"Form needs our investment of words to sustain it, silence slowly dissolves form back into the formless. There is nothing we need to do except be willing to see without words."

Awakening: a paradigm shift of the heart - p. 155

"If you distilled out all the internal contents of your consciousness, including all thoughts and states of mind, you would again come to that same refined and simple state of being. This unprocessed sense of aliveness, both inside and out, is formless awareness."

Awakening: a paradigm shift of the heart - p. 148

"Form is what you see, the objects of sight; formless awareness is what sees the objects, the seeing itself."

Awakening: a paradigm shift of the heart - p. 28

"Wisdom lives everything and avoids nothing."

Awakening: a paradigm shift of the heart - p. 104

"The person is a product of the mind, not the other way around, and the incessant mind chatter has to be maintained for the person to believe he or she is outside looking in. We know ourselves only by making mental noise, and if the mind gets quiet, this false dichotomy of "me" separate from "my" mental experience cannot be maintained.

The concept of "I" is another thought coming from the mind.

When we actually look inwardly with awareness to see this "I", we see only thought, emotion, and memory. There is no entity apart from these thoughts.

The thoughts of the brain and the sense of I are one and the same thing.

Over time these mental functions assumed themselves to be a person.

The person who was just created out of thought now became the person outside of the brain having the thought."

Awakening: a paradigm shift of the heart - p. 43-45

"Thought gives substance to all things but does not impart essence to anything. The essence of all things is formless awareness, and nothing exists except that the formless makes it so."

Awakening: a paradigm shift of the heart - p. 35

"Hear the sounds, smell the odors, and softly see the forms arising in this moment. Resist investing energy in thinking about what is sensed and hold the sensation just as it is, free of thought. Let awareness be expansive so there are no limitations. Now sense what holds all the shapes, sounds and sensations of this moment and feel the living moment itself."

Awakening: a paradigm shift of the heart - p. 34

"Once you fully experience the nature of your mind, you are a buddha. Awareness of your true nature is the stainless, single eye of wisdom.

The distinction between being enlightened and not being enlightened is whether you experience your nature fully or not. In seeing your nature, there is nothing to see, because there is nothing there."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 181

"Emptiness means that everything changes according to conditions."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 175

"The main purpose of practice is to free ourselves from suffering."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 170

"Having no agenda for yourself is the whole point.
You have no need to get rid of or accomplish anything."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 161

"Our problems don't come from having feelings and emotions; they come from holding on to them."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 157

"The more you are able to let be and free yourself from concepts, the more you are able to open your heart. And the more you open your heart, the more you can relax in the nature of the mind."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 77

"When you look for the mind, the only thing you can find is awareness. The mind is nothing more than that. 

The nature of the mind is nothing but awareness-emptiness."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 72-73

"The mind is a succession of thoughts and emotions, instant by instant."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 65

"Thoughts and emotions are simply manifestations of your natural awareness, which, in a way, is actually nothing."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 63

"The practice is to cut through attachment and see that whatever happens is okay."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 62

"No matter how good an experience is, it is still a mental arising. It doesn't matter whether it is nonthought, peace, emptiness or whatever. The moment you cling to it, it is samsara. Actual wisdom is being able to free yourself from anything."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 61

"The path is not about being positive instead of negative. It is about becoming liberated from both positive and negative, since both of them are concepts."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 59

"It's completely natural to have thoughts, emotions and sensations when we meditate. They are not a problem unless we have aversion or attachment to them."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 58

"How we feel is very much a matter of how we conceptualize what is happening.

When we name or conceptualize something in a certain way, then it becomes that way."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 54-55

"The mind's nature is emptiness.

We think we're experiencing something external that is pleasant or unpleasant. Actually, it is only our mind. What we experience is not out there; our experience is merely a display of our mind.

Thoughts are just displays of the mind, and they do not harm the mind."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 47

"When you look for the mind and examine introspectively, you cannot find it. We could call the inability to find anything 'emptiness'. What emptiness means is that there is nothing graspable. "

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 46

"There is the cause of suffering and we must eliminate it, and yet there is nothing to eliminate. There is the cessation of suffering and we must attain it, and yet there is nothing to attain. "

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 45

"We are training to let everything come and go, without fear or clinging. This is the main reason we meditate."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 171

"We usually grasp at whatever occurs. For instance, when sadness arises, we hold on to this feeling and think, “I am so sad, I am so depressed.” But from the Mahamudra point of view, what has happened? A feeling has arisen in the mind, like a cloud. Like a cloud, it appears and then it disappears, and that’s all there is to it. This time it is sadness arising, the next time it may be happiness, the next time it may be anger, and later it may be kindness. All sorts of things arise, like wildflowers in a spring meadow. All sorts of flowers grow; all sorts of thoughts and emotions arise. They are all okay; they’re nothing special. When we understand what our thoughts and feelings are, and we experience them in this way, we are able to let them come and let them go."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 122

"Rather than frantically looking for loopholes in the teachings, isn't it wiser to accept that mindfulness won't make the plum any sweeter or the kettle any brighter? But here's the hopeful part - the more we practice mindfulness, the less we'll care about sweetness or brightness."

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"Mindfulness practice does lead to happiness, but not because the stuff of the mundane now - its sights, sounds, and the consciousness that knows them -  turns out to be better than we'd thought. Despite the myth, bare attention doesn't expose some hidden core of radiance in the empty vibrations; no such core exists."

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"The more clearly we see the lack of worth in mental and physical sensations, the less desire we'll have for them until, thoroughly disenchanted, craving will be snuffed out automatically. As soon as that occurs, pure happiness will arise by itself."

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"The Buddha discovered that the happiest mind is the nonattached one. This happiness is of a radically different order than what we're used to. When asked how there could be bliss in nibbana, since it offers no lovely sights or sounds, Sariputta, the Buddha's chief disciple, said: "That there is no sensation is itself happiness." Compared with this joy, he implied, pleasure falls woefully short. We read in the sutras that "everything the world holds good, sages see otherwise. What other men call 'sukha' (pleasure) that the saints call 'dukkha' (suffering) . . ." (SN 3.12). This isn't just an alternative viewpoint - it's ultimate reality."

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"The Buddha clearly stated the reason for practicing mindfulness: to uncover and eliminate the cause of suffering. That cause is desire. When its cause is absent, suffering cannot arise. At that point, the sutras tell us, one knows a happiness with no hint of anxiety to mar it. But that isn't because sights and sounds magically become permanent, lovely, and the property of Self. Rather, these impressions temporarily cease and consciousness touches a supramundane object called "nibbana," the unconditioned element. Although a mental object, nibbana, the "highest bliss," is not a formation at all; it is unformed and permanent. So the present moment is worthwhile because only in it can we experience nibbana - complete freedom from suffering.

Yet can't sense-impressions be pleasurable? Yes, but pleasure isn't the unending source of happiness we take it to be. In daily life we perceive beautiful sensations as solid and relatively lasting, when in fact they're only unstable vibrations that fall away the instant they form. Like cotton candy that dissolves before you can sink your teeth into it, pleasure doesn't endure long enough to sustain happiness. " 

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"Take the sunset: What happens when we see it? Ultimately, we don't. When the eye contacts a visual form, we merely see color, not a three-dimensional thing. In fact, the tint, along with the consciousness seeing it, dies out in a split-second, but we fail to catch the dissolve. Why? Because delusion blurs the separate moments of perception together, making experience look seamless. After the color sparks out, subsequent moments of consciousness replay the image from memory, dubbing it "sunset." This process takes only a fraction of a second. Nevertheless, by the time we name it, the original image is already gone. "Sunset" is a concept perceived through the mind-door, not the eye. We mistake this product of mental construction for something irreducibly real. Without the tool of mindfulness the trick is too fast to see, like trying to catch the separate frames of a running film."

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"These six main objects (sounds, colors, smells, tastes, touches, and mental objects) are all that we can know. No matter how wildly adventurous our lives are, we still can't experience anything other than these half-dozen forms. Since mind and object are the only building blocks from which a moment of life can be fashioned, there is nothing else that could possibly take place in the now. "

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"Mindfully noting mental and physical phenomena, we learn that they arise only to pass away. In the deepest sense, we cannot manipulate or actually own them. These traits are unwelcome-unsatisfactory. So the more mindfulness one has, the clearer dukkha becomes." 

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"The more mindfulness we have, the less compelling sense-objects seem, until at last we lose all desire for them." 

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"Consciousness is always aware of something. When a patch of azure bursts into our field of awareness, a blip of eye-consciousness sees the color. When a smell wafts toward us, another blip of consciousness knows the scent. Only mind and object; that's all there is to it. Our entire lives are nothing but a chain of moments in which we perceive one sight, taste, smell, touch, sound, feeling, or thought after another. Outside of this process, nothing else happens."

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"Equanimity is the nonreactive, nonmoving mind".

Stepping out of self-deception - p. 138

"The ultimate goal of life, liberation from rebirth, though in general shared by all soteriologies in Brahmanism, Jainism and Buddhism, was represented uniquely by Buddhists as the pacification of all psychological attachments through the extinguishing (nirvana) of desires, which would lead to a consequent extinguishing of karma and the prevention of rebirth."

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Nagarjuna