Seeing That Frees Quotes

“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’.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“insight is any way of looking that releases craving.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“Our default sense of things, our habitual mode of perception, is to project inherent existence onto phenomena, not to see their emptiness deeply.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“the delusion of inherent existence is woven right into perception and the way we experience things.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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)’.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“Painful self-doubt and self-criticism are epidemic in our culture, and can wield a power that is enormously destructive and paralysing.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“I realize that how things appear always depends on how I look.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“This world arises from imagination… it is unreal.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“emptiness can also mean ‘fullness’. No thing is as small, limited, and sharply defined as it seems. Its nature is in some ways infinite, full of the totality of other things.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“When we feel embarrassed or afraid, for example, the sense of self tends to feel more contracted, more solid, and also more separate from others and from the world. In contrast, when we feel relaxed, or generous, say, the sense of self is more open and spacious;”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“Fabrication of a thing and fabrication of the self are mutually dependent. In fabricating one, the other is also fabricated. This insight into mutual dependency turns out to be of radical significance for liberation,”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“At some point we realize that any self-view that we believe is really true is a way we bind ourselves.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“I sometimes think, in fact, that one of the most precious skills a human being can learn is this way of looking at things as 'not me, not mine'. The joy, freedom, and understanding it can open are profound indeed.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“realizing the empty nature of mind actually opens up a profound sense of its mystical nature. There is knowing, but it is void of inherent existence, without a real centre and not ultimately of time. Being empty, it is essentially free and its nature is beyond all conception.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“without emptiness ways of looking a genuinely radical shift in understanding is not usually possible. And although the ultimate nature of things is beyond what can be ascribed to them conceptually, it is nevertheless the case that a conceptual view of emptiness forms an indispensable step in this realization.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“going deeper into an experiential understanding of emptiness profoundly and wonderfully re-enchants this whole world of phenomenal appearances,”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“Rather than pointing toward a final goal of cessation, delivering us to an ultimately real Unfabricated and to a view of all else as really fabricated, an unremitting exploration of fabrication and dependent arising opens a vision of the world as nirvāṇa – a world of magical appearances, groundless and thoroughly empty yet mystically appearing.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“deepening insight here and journeying further must be connected with an understanding of the emptiness of ‘This’ and ‘That’.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“Sometimes he used the word ‘nirvāṇa’ synonymously with ‘the unfabricated’.12 And because it is not fabricated, he also called it ‘the truth’:”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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:”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“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.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising