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It is there, even when you are not listening,”
Understanding themselves as purely relational beings and freed from their own subjective cravings, they find meaning in their accessibility to others.
Union
While the Western tradition has grown quite adept at describing what has been called the narcissistic dilemma—the sense of falseness or emptiness that propels people either to idealize or to devalue themselves and others—
all of the usual efforts to achieve solidity, certainty, or security are ultimately doomed.
Buddhism, like the Western traditions that followed many centuries later, is, in its psychological form, a depth psychology.
Just as the thoughts in our minds keep endlessly chattering as if beyond our control, so we slip from realm to realm without really knowing where we are. We are locked into our minds, but we do not really know them. We are adrift and struggling, buffeted by the waves of our minds, having not learned how to float.
it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.
His illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived.
We cannot find our enlightened minds while continuing to be estranged from our neurotic ones.
When we refuse to acknowledge the presence of unwanted feelings, we are as bound to them as when we give ourselves over to them indignantly and self-righteously.
This desperate longing for inexhaustible abundance is very common in the Western psyche, where it masquerades under the heading of “low self-esteem.”
the emptiness of the Hungry Ghosts must be experienced in such a way that reparation is no longer sought from impossible sources, so the Western student afflicted with such feelings must make the emptiness itself the object of his or her meditation.
mystical experiences as “oceanic”
