Quotes from "Why Meditate"

The past no longer exists, the future hasn’t arisen yet, and the present is paradoxically both ungraspable and unchanging. It is ungraspable because it never stays still, and it is unchanging because, in the words of the physicist Erwin Shroedinger, “The present is the only thing with no end.” Cultivating mindfulness does not mean that you should not take into account the lessons of the past or not make plans for the future; rather it is a matter of living clearly in the present experience, which includes all three times.


Most of the time our mind is unstable, disorderly, and driven by whims as it bounces back and forth between hope and fear. It is self-centered, hesitant, fragmented, confused, and sometimes even absent, as well as weakened by internal contradictions and a feeling of insecurity. It rebels against any kind of training and is constantly occupied by a stream of inner chatter that generates a constant background noise we are barely aware of. Because these dysfunctional states are nothing but the product of the mind itself, it makes sense that the mind can also remedy them. That is the object of practicing (meditation).

According to Buddhist analysis, the world is a result of the coming together of an infinite number of causes and conditions that are continually changing. Just as a rainbow is formed at the precise moment the sun shines on a collection of raindrops and disappears as soon as the factors that produce it are no longer present, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no permanent, independent existence. Ultimate reality is therefore described as “empty” of independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena. Everything is relationship; nothing exists in and of itself.