Rob Burbea > 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I realize that how things appear always depends on how I look.”
― 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

“This world arises from imagination… it is unreal.”
― 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

“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

“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

“Not to try and stay forever in some kind of unconstructed state, as if that were even possible, but to understand something wondrous about all experience in a way that fundamentally frees our whole sense of existence.”
― 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

“if we can maintain a stance that, no matter what the conditions, asks always, “What can I learn here?”, the times of hindrances in samādhi practice can be as genuinely valuable as the times that feel good.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“For those imprisoned in the conceiving of things the unsurpassed medicine is the ultimate truth – the teaching that things are without own-being…”
― 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

“all sense of time – of past, of future, and of present – is fabricated by clinging.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“Deep rest and rejuvenation of the whole being, emotional (and, at times, physical) healing, vitality, openings of the intuition, emotional strength that is yet pliable, increase in the heart’s capacity and in our availabilities to others, steadiness of energy and of commitment in creative and service work”
― 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

“Subject, object, time and the present, along with intention and attention, are woven together and bound in each others’ grip – under the spell of even the most subtle reification, the action of fundamental delusion. The avijjā is in the conception – of an object being known by a subject in time. And as we have discussed, implicit in this conceiving are various dualities.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“A lack of awareness of the ultimate nature of all things is the deepest level of avijjā.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“In practice we may, to a degree, shape empty perception in the service of freedom and compassion. When there is insight, we know that how and what we see are not simply givens, but are the colourable and malleable, magical, material of empty appearances. 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

“not a unity, not a plurality, with no coming, and no going, the auspicious, free from conceptual elaboration. Later in the same text it says: Whatever exists dependently, such a thing is essentially peace. Therefore both what is arising, and arising itself, are peace.10”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“If, however, we can have access to, and develop, a reservoir of profound inner well-being, it makes letting go of what is not so helpful much easier.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“attention is actually a mental movement toward some thing, and a grasping, a holding on to some object of perception.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising