"The deeper purpose of meditation is not simply to enjoy moments of calm, as rewarding and meaninful as they are, but to understand deeply how our minds lead us into unhappiness so that we can stop the activities that lead to those states."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"Meditation is about coming to understand things the way they are, not the way we imagine them to be or would like them to be.

We will simply pay attention to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations, thoughts and emotions as the way to stay most closely in touch with reality.

A key point in meditation then is to move our attention out of the conceptual acrobatics and fantastic proliferations of thougths and into what is real.

[...] as we observe sense objects again and again, we find that not a single one lasts.

Seeing change directly is an important perception, because concepts lead us into assumptions of continuity and permanence."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"What makes us miserable, what causes us to be in conflict with one another, is our insistence on our particular view of things: our view of what we deserve or want, our view of right and wrong, our view of self, our view of other, our view of life, our view of death. But views are just views. They are not ultimate truth. There is no way to eliminate views, nor would we want to. As long as we are alive and aware there will be views. Views are colorful and interesting and life-enhancing—as long as we know they are views. The Chinese Zen masters are asking us to know a view as a view, and not to mistake it for something else. If you know a view as a view, you can be free of that view. If you know a thought as a thought, you can be free of that thought.

Going beyond language through language is something we can practice and develop through meditation, study, and awareness in daily life. In meditation we can learn to pay attention not only to sensation but also to emotion and thinking. Learning to let thinking come and go, we can eventually understand a thought as a thought and a word as a word, and with this understanding we can find a measure of freedom from thoughts and words."

Beyond language: finding freedom through thoughts and words - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Summer 2011

"Meditation moves us in the other direction. It is an attempt to remove, piece by piece, layer by layer, all the baroque ornamentation with which we embellish our world of constructed experience. Underneath all the drama, the restlessness, the hopes and fears, behind the narratives we weave about ourselves, and even before we've thought of ourselves as ourselves, lies a simple, unadorned awareness. It's not even a thing - just an event that happens, a little burst of knowing, deep in the center of it all.

Experiencing this awareness has more to do with subtraction than with addition or multiplication. [...] The Buddha got two steps further than Descartes, beyond the 'me' and beyond the thinker: instead of 'I think therefore I am' we need only say 'thinking occurs', or even more simply, 'awareness occurs'. "

Untangling self

"Emptiness is first and foremost a condition in which we dwell, abide and live.

Emptiness thus seems to be a perspective, a sensibility, a way of being in this poignant, contingent world.

Rather than being the negation of self, emptiness discloses the dignity of a person who has realized what it means to be fully human.

Such emptiness is far from being an ultimate truth that needs to be understood through logical inference and then directly realized in a state of nonconceptual meditation. It is a sensibility in which one dwells, not a privileged epistemological object that, through knowing, one gains a cognitive enlightenment.

To dwell in emptiness means to inhabit fully the embodied space of one's sensory experience, but in a way that is no longer determined by one's habitual reactivity. To dwell in such emptiness does not mean that one will no longer suffer. As long as one has a body and senses, one will be "prone to the anxiety" that comes with being a conscious, feeling creature made of flesh, bones and blood.

For Gotama, the point is not to understand emptiness but to dwell in it. To dwell in emptiness brings us firmly down to earth and back to our bodies. It is a way of enabling us to open our eyes and see ordinary things as though for the first time. As the Buddha instructed his student Bahiya, to live in such a way means that "in the seen, there will be only the seen; in the heard, only the heard; in the sensed only the sensed; in that of which I am conscious, only that of which I am conscious.

How, in the course of Buddhist history, did the concept of emptiness evolve from a way of dwelling on earth unconditioned by reactivity into an ultimate truth to be directly cognized in a nonconceptual state of meditation?" 

After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a secular age 

"Nonattachment is, of course, what we are practicing when we meditate.
Because the self is composed of mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, reacting and so forth, it means that when I "let go" of them while meditating, I am deconstructing my sense of self - or, more precisely, the self is deconstructing, because it is not really something that "I" can do." 

A new buddhist path - p. 50

"We come to meditation with the usual assumption that the thoughts and images and feelings that arise are something that I am doing, only to realize that the thoughts, etc. have a life of their own. It's more correct to say that the thoughts are "doing" me: that my sense of self is composed of mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, reacting, remembering, planning, intending and so forth.

One's thinking, feeling, intending, etc. constantly relate back to the self-image of a "me", yet that image too is a conditioned construct.
Conditioned by what? By earlier experiences, both passive (what happened to me) and active (what I did in response).

According to Buddhism, the problem isn't that we have a self; on contrary, there's never been a real self, so there's nothing to discard. Nor do we need to get rid of the sense of self; that's necessary to function in daily life. The problem is a sense of self that feels and believes itself to be separate from the rest of the world.

Realizing that the sense of self is a construct gives us insight into why it is the source of our most problematic dukkha. A constructed self is not something that has any discrete reality of its own. It's a cluster of impermanent and interacting psycho-physical processes that are not grounded in anything more substantial.

The solution to our festering sense of lack is deconstructing and reconstructing the sense of self, so that it doesn't feel so separate." 

A new buddhist path - p. 43-47

"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

"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

"If we have ambitions—even if our aim is enlightenment— then there is no meditation, because we are thinking about it, craving it, fantasizing, imagining things. That is not meditation. This is why an important characteristic of shamatha meditation is to let go of any goal and simply sit for the sake of sitting. We breathe in and out, and we just watch that. Nothing else. It doesn’t matter if we get enlightenment or not. It doesn’t matter if our friends get enlightened faster. Who cares? We are just breathing. We just sit straight and watch the breath in and out. Nothing else. We let go of our ambitions. This includes trying to do a perfect shamatha meditation. We should get rid of even that. Just sit."

Do nothing - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Winter 2009

"The only purpose of zazen is to prevent the 'something else' that distracts from a sense of total presence. Any activity will suffice."

The tao of zen

"In practicing meditation, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal - quite the opposite. We're just being with our experience, whatever it is.


Meditation is about opening and relaxing with whaterever arises, without picking and choosing.


The point is not try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature."


When things fall apart: heart advice for difficult times

"Buddhism in its final summation is about abiding in the Now, and buddhist practice encourages and cultivates skillful states of mind to make that entry easier. It is a straightforward process of surrendering that occurs when the mind is calm, serene and equanimous, because those states arise from a lack of mental resistance and bring the person of awareness closer to Now."

Stepping out of self-deception - p. 215

"The point of meditation is to see what we are bringing to experience, and then to see that whatever we bring is extra and needs to be discarded."

Stepping out of self-deception - p. 42

"Sitting zazen, you really become intimate with the limitations of language, of narrative, of thought itself. With every thought there’s a “Yes, but....” With every idea comes another idea. This is the labyrinth of thought. Ultimately, you realize that “truth” is not to be found in words."

No words - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Winter 2009

"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

"Vipassana meditation has to do with looking deeply into the mind and body to discern the various processes unfolding each moment that fabricate the virtual world of our experience.

As the mind moves through the stages of assembling experience, from awareness to perception to conception to proliferation, it moves farther and farther into the realm of macro-construction. At each step we see less of things as they are and more of things as we construe them to be. Meditation practice works to reverse this process."

Unlimiting mind - p. 114-115 

"Meditation can be understood as an intentional action of paying attention, of being present with, or of otherwise choosing to be aware of what is arising and passing away in the field of experience."

Unlimiting mind - p.166

"There is a way of practising mental development (meditation) with regard to all our sensations or feelings, whether happy, unhappy or neutral. Let us take only one example. You experience an unhappy, sorrowful sensation. In this state your mind is cloudy, hazy, not clear, it is depressed. In some cases, you do not even see clearly why you have that unhappy feeling. First of all, you should learn not to be unhappy about your worries. But try to see clearly why  there is a sensation or a feeling of unhappiness, or worry, or sorrow. Try to examine how it arises, its cause, how it disapears, its cessation. Try to examine it as if you are observing it from outside, without any subjective reaction, as a scientist observes some object. Here, too, you should not look at it as 'my feeling' or 'my sensation' subjectively, but only look at it as 'a feeling' or 'a sensation' objectively. You should forget again the false idea of 'I'. When you see its nature, how it arises and disappears, your mind grows dispassionate towards that sensation, and becomes detached and free. It is the same with regard to all sensations or feelings."

What the Buddha taught - p.73

"But there’s an alternative way to approach our so-called problems. No matter what we bring to our meditation, no matter how we may be feeling, the practice is to simply sit down, acknowledge what’s going on, and then let it be. What this requires is the basic understanding that our states of mind are not problems to be solved or obstacles to be overcome. Just because something seems off doesn’t mean that something is, in fact, off. Things simply are what they are. It’s primarily our judgments about them—our expectations about how things should be—that cause us endless difficulties.


This practice, in a way, is very simple. But it is also very difficult to do; the mind is not inclined to let things be. It does not want to give up its pictures, its opinions, its ideas of how things should be. It is much more interested in analyzing, blaming, controlling, and, above all, making things “better.” But it’s possible to learn one of the most important secrets of spiritual practice: that we don’t have to be some particular way, nor do we have to feel any special way. When we truly understand this, it’s like letting go of a very heavy burden."


Reflect, without thinking - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Winter 2009