"Enlightment is understood as a direct realization of the unconditioned or, one might say, an immediate personal experience of nibbana."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"This is how you should train, Bahiya. In what is seen, let there be just the seen. In what is heard, let there be just the heard. In what is sensed, let there be just the sensed. In what is cognized, let there be just the cognized. Then, Bahiya, you will not be in that. When you are not in that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, then you are neither here nor there nor in between. This, just this, is the end of suffering."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"As we continue to hold on to the thing, we turn it over in our thoughts, and our thoughts are also colored by the same craving and sense of insufficiency. Proliferating thoughts beset us - thoughts about I, me and mine. So when we grasp, we create anew the sense of self. In fact grasping is identical to creating the sense o self. The sense of self arises through grasping.

The 'I' is constantly defining itself in relation to something that exists: I think, I feel, I hurt, my home, my partner and so on."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition, there is feeling. What one feels, that one perceives. What one perceives, that one thinks about. What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"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

"[...] form is not yours, feeling is not yours, perception is not yours, volitional formations are not yours, consciousness is not yours: abandon them. When you have abandoned them, that will lead to your welfare and happiness."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"It is the lack of satisfaction that leads most of us to a spiritual path. in Buddhism the entire goal of the spiritual life is to end this sense of unsatisfactoriness by finding an unshakable peace, called nirvana."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"Consciousness is the most basic knowing of an object, before any words and before perception. Perception can act only after consciousness has revealed an appearance which can then be named."

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

"Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators