Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“insight is any way of looking that releases craving.”

“Sooner or later we come to realize that perhaps the most fundamental, and most fundamentally important, fact about any experience is that it depends on the way of looking. That is to say, it is empty.4 Other than what we can perceive through different ways of looking, there is no ‘objective reality’ existing independently; and there is no way of looking that reveals some ‘objective reality’.”

“Our default sense of things, our habitual mode of perception, is to project inherent existence onto phenomena, not to see their emptiness deeply.”

“There is space here, and space for reverence and devotion. When we see the void – the open and groundless nature of all things, the inseparability of appearances and emptiness – we recognize anyway just how profound is our participation in this magic of appearances. Then whether fabrication, which is empty, is consciously intended in a certain direction or not, the heart bows to the fathomless wonder and beauty of it all. It can be touched by an inexhaustible amazement, touched again and again by blessedness and relief. In knowing fully the thorough voidness of this and that, of then and now, of there and here, this heart opens in joy, in awe and release. Free itself, it knows the essential freedom in everything.”

“the delusion of inherent existence is woven right into perception and the way we experience things.”

“As we have explained, so easily when we have a difficulty in any kind of relationship, the mind falls into a view that it is ‘your fault’ or ‘my fault’ – in the language of blame. But such a limited perspective is rarely completely true, or helpful. In relating, our reactions, interpretations, communications, and subtle signals, intended and unintended, feed off and impact each other all the time, whether we are aware of it or not. Thankfully though, if we can acknowledge this and become interested in it, the possibilities of reconciliation open up. If it becomes our shared basis for understanding, then two people having a difficulty can become two looking together at the dynamics of their relating, on the same team untangling the dependent arising of a problem, rather than two accusing, two at war.”

“Painful self-doubt and self-criticism are epidemic in our culture, and can wield a power that is enormously destructive and paralysing.”

“When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised.”

“Wise people suffer when they learn. If you want to be comfortable, forget about becoming wise. People who seek small pleasures don’t get big ones.”

“This world arises from imagination… it is unreal.”

“Some of us give most or more authority to meditative experiences; some to logic; some to intuitive hunches and intimations; some to sources outside of ourselves – scriptural or scientific, for instance; and some to the overwhelming human consensus – of ‘common sense’ and unexamined everyday perceptions.”

“Instead of as self, or as belonging to self, we can regard any awareness through a lens that sees simply: ‘There is knowing (of this or that)’.”

“I realize that how things appear always depends on how I look.”

“Fifteen thousand years ago, my prowess as a hunter of woolly mammoths would probably have accorded me more status in the culture than my ability to handle the kinds of abstract mathematical concepts involved, for example, in twelfth grade differential calculus. I need to see: one is not inherently more valuable than another; I am not inherently worth more or less dependent on these abilities. If I can see this, I open a door to a more natural sense of self-worth, and to a degree of freedom.”

“Nāgārjuna and others repeatedly drew attention to this: [In a relative sense] everything is impermanent, but [in the absolute sense] nothing is permanent or impermanent.”

“When the emptiness of any object is contemplated intensely in meditation, the object fades. If the vacuity that appears in place of the object is pregnant with the meaning of emptiness, then emptiness can be said to be the object of consciousness at that time.”

“all sense of time – of past, of future, and of present – is fabricated by clinging.”

“Sometimes he used the word ‘nirvāṇa’ synonymously with ‘the unfabricated’.12 And because it is not fabricated, he also called it ‘the truth’:”

“We can trust that through simply sustaining, developing, and consolidating insight ways of looking, what needs to happen is happening – the understandings that liberate are taking root in the heart.”

“On another occasion he gave the analogy of a ray of sunlight that does not land on any wall, ground, or water to describe a consciousness which, with the release of craving, finds no object of support anywhere.”

“the more complete meaning of the word papañca. More than just gross ego-proliferation, it refers at its most subtle level to objectification – the construing and differentiation of objects (and a subject) that is part of conventional perception, the ‘making manifold’ of things:”

“without a thing – and thus also without the potential of comparison and measurement between things – time is not perceivable.”

“Here we have gone beyond what might be termed a ‘calming of reactivity’, and beyond merely a pacification of the extremes of vedanā – whether unpleasant or pleasant. Rather, what is being referred to is a complete fading and cessation of all appearances, and of all the elements that make up conventional experience – including all six sensory consciousnesses together with all their associated contacts, vedanā, perceptions, etc. All are utterly transcended.”

“For those imprisoned in the conceiving of things the unsurpassed medicine is the ultimate truth – the teaching that things are without own-being…”

“explanation is not the task of emptiness; liberation is.”

“deepening insight here and journeying further must be connected with an understanding of the emptiness of ‘This’ and ‘That’.”

“attention is actually a mental movement toward some thing, and a grasping, a holding on to some object of perception.”

“at its most fundamental levels avijjā includes ignorance of emptiness, of dependent origination,”

“A lack of awareness of the ultimate nature of all things is the deepest level of avijjā.”

“Subject, object, time and the present, along with intention and attention, are woven together and bound in each others’ grip – under the spell of even the most subtle reification, the action of fundamental delusion. The avijjā is in the conception – of an object being known by a subject in time. And as we have discussed, implicit in this conceiving are various dualities.”