In looking for my mind, I discovered that it seems to be in many different places. Sometimes it is drinking a glass of water, remembering swimming in the summer, feeling the breeze. In this contemplation I observed that the self is more elusive than I thought.

When we look in the mirror, the one thing we don’t want to see is an ordinary human being.

The human story is both personal and universal. Our personal experiences of pain and joy, grief and despair, may be unique to each of us in the forms they take; yet our capacity to feel grief, fear, loneliness, and rage, as well as delight, intimacy, joy, and ease, are our common bonds as human beings.

In the midst of despair or pain, you may be convinced that no one has ever felt this way before. Yet there is no pain you can experience that has not been experienced before by another in a different time or place. our emotional world is universal.

“Nothing really dies,” I told him. “It just turns into something else. Everything is always changing form. Do you remember the pumpkin that rotted into the earth in your garden? Tomatoes sprouted where it used to be. This bird will go back to the earth and turn into lavendar flowers and butterflies.”

When I ask people to contemplate selflessness, the sometimes react as if I’ve asked them to put their house on the market or give away all their money. If there was a self that existed in the way we think, discovering selflessness would be like putting our house on the market. But in the Buddhist tradition, the discovery of selflessness is called “completely joyful.” It’s not called “the raw end of the deal,” or “I’d rather go back to bed,” or “This is scary and depressing.”

Even when we speak of selflessness, the mind goes to “me.” We think, “I’m selfless,” but everything is selfless.

I have not risked seeing the world as it actually is. My eyes have snatched at things, picked and sorted them, until there was little left to see but an arbitrary arrangement of my own thoughts.

The present moment is swifter than thought.

The world we are born into—this complicated, difficult, hauntingly touching world—is the one whole thing. It is the world we awaken in, and awaken to.