"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