Sublime

Is this it?  Sometimes I look at my partner after a disagreement, my child after a meltdown, my house after something breaks, and I think: Is this really what life turned out to be? More often, I look critically at myself—my tired eyes, my wrinkled forehead, my struggles to join group conversations, my endless list of worries—and think: Is th

Once in a while, we have insights that make us feel like we have found ourselves, that we now know who we are, what we want, and why we are here.

What we believe about ourselves does not stand up to examination, so there is always the problem of describing our own lives in a plausible way. The old teachers named this insubstantiality “emptiness.” They thought that, contrary to the medieval idea that something cannot come out of nothing, everything we do comes out of nothing.

THE EMPTINESS OF EXISTENCE.

That’s weird—that I should be enabled to perceive, accept, & enjoy the eternity & preciousness of the non-me world just because I became aware of my own mortality. The “being able to enjoy” is puzzling.7

Here in the real world, people like me, who the Buddha called “unenlightened worldlings,” had to pursue happiness, as evanescent as it might be.