"There is a simple way to become a buddha: When you refrain from unwholesome actions, are not attached to birth and death, and are compassionate toward all sentient beings, respectful to seniors and kind to juniors, not excluding or desiring anything, with no designing thoughts or worries, you will be called a buddha. Do not seek anything else."


Birth and death - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Fall 2000

"We cannot be the experience we perceive. This means we are not our thoughts, emotions, states of mind, physical sensations or sense data."

Awakening: a paradigm shift of the heart - p. 201

"As practice matures, we reach a stage of perfect equanimity, where all the factors of enlightenment ripen. At this time, there are no cravings or yearnings, even for the next breath or the next moment of experience. There is not the slightest impulse toward either becoming or not becoming. As the mind settles into this perfect balance of noncraving, the flow of consciousness conditioned by changing objects suddenly stops. The mind then opens to and alights upon nibbana, the unconditioned, the unborn."

The end of suffering - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Winter 2013

"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