Jay Michaelson

We are animals descended from five billion years of wanting, striving, and seeking. And life just doesn__ cooperate. So we suffer. And so the solution to that problem is to upgrade our minds, in a distinctly __nnatural_ way, so that the mind clings less and lets go more.

It is possible to refine awareness itself so much that the emptiness of things, and the role mental construction plays, becomes a directly apprehended reality.

At the last stages of the journey, there__ no journey at all.

Sometimes, sitting there on the cushion failing to watch your breath, it can feel like you__e the only weirdo weird enough to be wasting your time in this way. But you__e not! There are generations of weirdos, monasteries full of them, and we have the benefit of their accumulated wisdom.

Part of why I love these angry, straight, white punks is that they are stripping the dharma of its bullshit, and applying it to contexts and styles that, even if they aren__ mine, are at least different from the norm.

What a miracle, that all we have to do to be beautifully loving creatures is just relax and allow.

All relaxation does is allow the truth to be felt. The mind is cleared, like a dirty window wiped clean, and the magnitude of what we might ordinarily take for granted inspires tears.

There__ no path to liberation that doesn__ pass through the shadow.

For the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the goal is liberation: the cessation of suffering, the end of the endless hamster-wheel of dependent origination, of mental formations leading to desire leading to clinging leading to suffering and so on. Nibbana, or nirvana, was not originally conceived as some magical heavenly world, or even a permanent altered state of consciousness. It is usually described, in the early texts, negatively: as a candle being snuffed out.