Ben O'Hare

“the essential formal insight meditation instructions are: find a place where the distractions are tolerable, pick a stable and sustainable posture, and for a defined period of time notice every single sensation that makes up your reality as best you can. Just as with concentration practices, more time and more diligent practice pays off. These simple instructions can easily seem overwhelming, vague or strangely trivial to many people, and so I am going to spend a lot of time laying out a large number of empowering concepts and more structured practices that have helped countless practitioners over thousands of years to follow these basic instructions.”
― Daniel M. Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book - Revised and Expanded Edition

“One more related thing here that is very important: ego is a process of identification, not a thing in and of itself. It is like a bad habit, but it doesn’t exist as something that can be found. This is important, as this bad habit can quickly co-opt the language of ego-lessness and come up with phrases as absurd as: “I will destroy my ego!” But, not being a thing, it cannot be destroyed, but by understanding our bare experience, our minds, the process of identification can stop. Any thoughts with “I,” “me,” “my” and “mine” in them should be understood to be just thoughts which come and go. This is not something you can talk yourself out of. You have to perceive things as they are to stop this process.”
― Daniel M. Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book - Revised and Expanded Edition

“what is meant by no-self: There are absolutely no sensations that can observe other sensations! (Notice that reality is made entirely of sensations.) There are no special sensations that are uniquely in control of other sensations. There are no sensations that are fundamentally split off from other sensations occurring at that moment. To begin to unravel this mystery is to begin to awaken. Simply put, reality with a sense of a separate watcher is delusion, and unconditioned reality, reality just as it is, is awakening. Quick point here: people can use the truth of no-self to rationalize all sorts of strange behaviors because they misunderstand it as nihilism. “It’s all illusion anyway,” they might say. It absolutely isn’t.”
― Daniel M. Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book - Revised and Expanded Edition

“My favorite exercise for examining suffering is to sit in a quiet place with my eyes closed and examine the physical sensations that make up any sort of desire, be it desire to get something, get away from something or just tune out and go to sleep. At a rate of one to ten times per second, I try to experience exactly how I know that I wish to do something other than simply face my current experience as it is. Moment to moment, I try to find those little uncomfortable urges and tensions that try to prod my mind into fantasizing about past or future or stopping my meditation entirely.”
― Daniel M. Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book - Revised and Expanded Edition