The Experience of Insight Quotes

“Memory is a class of thoughts which takes as its object something already experienced.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Albert Einstein wrote, “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“As the Buddha was dying, Ananda asked who would be their teacher after his death. He replied to his disciple: “Be lamps unto yourselves. Be refuges to yourselves. Take yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone besides yourselves. And those, Ananda, who either now or after 1 am dead, shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the truth as their lamp, holding fast to the truth as their refuge, shall not look for refuge to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach to the very topmost height; but they must be anxious to learn.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“When we see something pleasant, we want to hold on, not understanding the impermanence of it all. As soon as we become mindful, paying attention to what’s happening, seeing how everything is arising and passing away, the grasping and greed decreases. There’s nothing to hold onto. It’s all bubbles. And the experience of impermanence, the dissolving of the solidity of everything, brings about the letting go, the state of non-attachment.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“The expression of emptiness is love, because emptiness means “emptiness of self.” When there is no self, there is no other. That duality is created by the idea of self, of I, of ego. When there’s no self, there is a unity, a communion. And without the thought of “I’m loving someone,” love becomes the natural expression of that oneness.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“When we can settle back into the moment, realizing that past and future are simply thoughts in the present, then we free ourselves from the bondage of “time.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Perhaps at some time you have sat quietly by the side of an ocean or river. At first there is one big rush of sound. But in sitting quietly, doing nothing but listening, we begin to hear a multitude of fine and subtle sounds, the waves hitting against the shore, or the rushing current of the river. In that peacefulness and silence of mind we experience very deeply what is happening. It is just the same when we listen to ourselves; at first all we can hear is one “self’ or “I.” But slowly this self is revealed as a mass of changing elements, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and images, all illuminated simply by listening, by paying attention.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“When the mind is silent, relaxed and attentive, pain is experienced not as a solid mass but as a flow, arising and vanishing moment to moment.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“There are many things in our mind and body, tensions of all kinds, unpleasantness, things we don’t like to look at, things about which we’re untruthful with ourselves. Truthfulness in speech becomes the basis for being honest in our own minds, and that is when things begin to open up.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“We are each going to die alone. It is necessary to come to terms with our basic aloneness, to become comfortable with it. The mind can become strong and peaceful in that understanding, making possible a beautiful communion with others. When we understand ourselves, then relationships become easy and meaningful”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“From the beginning this “self” does not exist, yet because we’re so firmly attached to the idea of it, we spend much of our lives defending or enlarging or satisfying this imaginary self. Meditation helps us to see its conceptual nature, to see that in reality it does not exist, that it is simply an idea, an extraneous projection onto what’s happening in the moment.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“When you close your eyes there is the breath, sensations, sounds, thoughts—where is “man” or “woman” except as an idea, a concept?”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“In meditation, we free ourselves from attachment to that conceptualization and experience the fundamental unity of the elements which comprise our being.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“Actually, ownership is a thought process independent of the actual relationship that exists between us and objects in the world. Freeing ourselves from attachment to “ownership” frees us from our enslavement to objects.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“We rarely see that “past” and “future” are happening right now. All that there is, is an unfolding of present moments. We have created these concepts to serve a useful purpose, but by taking the ideas to be the reality, by not understanding that they are merely the product of our own thought processes, we find ourselves burdened by worries and regrets about the past and anxieties of anticipation about what has not yet happened.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“So many problems in the world—political and economic tensions and hostilities—are related to the thought, “This is my nation, my country.” In understanding that the concept is only the product of our own thought processes, we can begin to free ourselves from that attachment.”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation

“meditate upon thoughts is simply to be aware, as thoughts arise, that the mind is thinking, without getting involved in the content: not going off on a train of association, not analyzing the thought and why it came, but merely to be aware that at the particular moment “thinking” is happening”
― Joseph Goldstein, The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation