Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

An enlightened being sees their agony without diminishing its reality. In other words, it doesn’t just turn away from it—but, on the other hand, simultaneously sees everything, including that agony [and] including hell, actually, as bubbles of bliss in an ocean of bliss. That’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that the ordinary mind cannot get arou... See more

Our tendency to try to escape from the universe to find a nirvana that’s sort of quiet and peaceful and apart from all this hullabaloo is undermined completely by the realization of the nature of reality. You realize that the wisdom of the nature of reality leads you into compassion for the beings who are here, and the little bit of bliss that you ... See more

Understanding that nothing is permanent will have us understand that this moment will never be again - there may be similar moments, there may be more beautiful or uglier moments, but this specific moment will never be again. When we know this, being present and seeing meaning even in the most mundane of things becomes very easy because every momen... See more

Our being resides in both the unmanifest and the manifest, the absolute and the relative. This truth, embodied in the Heart Sutra, is considered the gem of Mahayana teachings. As the sutra says: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is also form. Emptiness is not other than form, form is not other than emptiness.” The formless ocean of awareness gives rise

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