The Wise Heart: Buddhist Psychology for the West

by Jack Kornfield

Buddhism teaches that we suffer not because we have sinned but because we are blind. Compassion is the natural response to this blindness; it arises whenever we see our human situation clearly.

Love says, ‘I am everything.’Wisdom says, ‘I am nothing.’ Between these two my life flows.”

After more than a century of looking for it, brain researchers have long since concluded that there is no conceivable place for a self to be located in the physical brain, and that it simply does not exist. —Time magazine, 2002

When the thinking mind is quiet and the attention careful, all of a sudden we “get it.” We take a step and realize that no one took it—there are just the sensations of body movement along with sights, perception, impulses. Thoughts and opinions arise but they think themselves and disappear, “like bubbles on the Ganges,” says the Buddha. When we do not cling to them, they lose their hold on us. In the light of awareness, the constructed self of our identification relaxes. And what is seen is just the process of life, not self nor other, but life unfolding as part of the whole.

Suppose we feel a state of anger or longing. If we sense it carefully in body and mind, it will inevitably begin to change, to expand or intensify, dissolve or shift from one feeling to another. Anger may change to rage and then to hurt and then cycle back to anger. Or perhaps longing will transform into love or sadness and then to contraction and then back to longing, and then the thought will come, “What are we having for dinner?” All of this in one or two minutes.