The past is a memory, the future is a wish or a fantasy, all we really have is "now" this moment in time.

Selflessness - "there is no entity separate from the flow of experience, no "self" to whom it is happening.

If we are not caught up in all our thoughts about our experience, there is simply experience in each moment: just seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. It is all emptiness, all without self. Of course it is not that we have to get rid of thoughts to experience emtpiness, because thoughts are empty in themselves; thoughts are merely a process, words and pictures, conditioned by certain causes and composed of constituent elements. We don't have to make things empty of self; emptiness is their true nature. We have only to experience each moment directly; each moment is a manifestation of the empty, unpossessable nature of reality.


The realization at the center of this practice is the experience that none of the five processes which make up our life - the body, the feelings, the perceptions, the reactions, the consciousness itself - none of them is enduring or possessable. We are part of a waterfall. Through thought and ego-sense, through habit and conditioning, we have grasped them for many years as our self, yet none of the processes can be held, and the very identification with them is false, the cause of our suffering. It is all a phenomenal show of light and color, gone as soon as it arises. Everything comes out of the amazing void, each day and each moment, coming out of nothing and returning to nothing.

Achaan Chaa often called our life "just this much." We continually look and hope for a new, special thing that is going to last or make us happy, fulfill our needs, answer all our questions. In actuality, what are we going to get? We will get more seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking. That's it; that's what life is. We might like it to be otherwise, but it is just that much.