The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World

The first noble truth says that if you are alive, if you have a heart, if you can love, if you can be compassionate, if you can realize the life energy that makes everything change and move and grow and die, then you won’t have any resentment or resistance.

I’ve always experienced these teachings as a tremendous affirmation that there is no need to resist being fully alive in this world, that we are in fact part of the web.

‘When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha’ means that when you see that you’re grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it’s called good or bad, make friends with that.

There are wars all over the world because people are insulted that someone else doesn’t agree with their belief system.

To put it simply, using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.

Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn’t mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems.

By the way that we think and by the way that we believe in things, in that way is our world created.

In Taoism there’s a famous saying that goes, ‘The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao.’

Another way you could say that, although I’ve never seen it translated this way, is, ‘As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else.’

The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.