In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

If we do not let ourselves die, we cannot be reborn. I learned that dying is rebirth. Death is life.

Once we accept the fundamental transitory nature of our minds and bodies, then we can develop the confidence to dismantle our most entrenched patterns.

You are here and you are not here. Both.

Unborn awareness cannot die. Unborn awareness exists with and beyond our bodies. Death is an illusion and living is also an illusion. Death and dying are only concepts; our perceptions shape differences and distinctions.

Short moments, many times.

We begin to rely on another aspect of mind that exists beneath our reactivity. We call this “no-self.” It’s the unconditioned awareness that reveals itself with the dissolution of the chattering mind that talks to itself throughout the day. Another way of saying this is that we switch mental gears from normal awareness to meditative awareness.

could not wait to be of more help to transitory dream people who suffer because they do not know that they are in a dream, and do not know that liberation is waking up to the dream as a dream.

We inherently have free will, yet this only arises from an examined mind. Our future is influenced, but not determined or destined, by past conditioning. Until we learn how to examine our minds and direct our behavior, our karmic tendencies will compel habits to reseed themselves.

I was no longer concerned with the concepts of living or dying—for what else could they be but insubstantial concepts—but with giving everything I had to whatever was happening right now, to meet the demands of this moment without attachment or aversion, and to befriend any adversity.