In cold materialistic terms no earthly success lasts for long. Pile up an empire, if you will, but soon enough others will possess your mansions and erase your name. Lie low and tend your roses – still oblivion will find you out. Some tears are dropped, if you are lucky, and then you are forgotten, and whatever reverence, fear, or love you excited cools. So it has been and will be.  the great and the humble totter down the same solitary, mortal track.
 

The higher life, that abiding in holiness we somehow feel to be possible, needs as its basis a daily life nobly conducted, a porch well swept, a heart made tranquil; and the efforts to maintain a peaceful and comfortable family or to follow a satisfying professional career require for their success a communion with what is loftier and a faith in the interrelationship of actions.
 

Distress and alienation come about from not knowing and appreciating the vital interplay between the holy and the mundane, and this the Dhamma can remedy by making clear the consequences of thoughts, words, and deeds, and the benefits of understanding the processes of nature. Who would have supposed that worldly aggravations could be lessened by contemplating raindrops on a railing? Or that the most refined spiritual practices could be impeded or advanced by how attentively we was the breakfast dishes? But connections exist. The Dhamma surprises its followers with new avenues of understanding – not of remote, esoteric matters, but of the factual business of living and becoming wiser and happier than we are now.
 

The Buddhist goes by way of Dhamma – the middle way – and does the walking alone, stumbles and gets up again, picks off the thorns, gets in the open and stays there with determined effort – no slave to false hope, no listless idler, and yet no superman: just a thinking being who has become convinced that the fearful storms of the universe are born in and burst out of his own heart and that nobody can quell them but him.

To be effective in revealing truth, meditation or bhavana must include mindfulness (sati). Mindfulness means pure attentiveness, an alert, impartial function of mind that simply notes whatever appears by way of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind itself. Mindfulness does not cogitate, judge, or interpret; it only observes, neutrally and without commentary, the actual character of an object or phenomenon. Despite its quiet, unglamorous nature, mindfulness occupies an essential position in the practice of meditation, and meditation masters, beginning with the Buddha himself, have extolled it as the unsurpassed means of penetrating reality.
 

Body, feelings mind, and mental objects are always present, always available for inspection, so meditation can proceed whenever we set mindfulness to work on them.
 

When we are worried, harried, and overworked, mindfulness cuts out extraneous flutter and seeks the chief theme, the important item in any situation, much as in a crisis a talented manger might walk into a room full of screeching subordinates and single out the one who can give a coherent account of the problem.
 

Insight meditation has nothing to do with sluggish, self-absorbed fantasy, but goes with reason, clear comprehension, and practical wisdom. We need not soar off to the stars for fruitful truths. Impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and impersonality characterize all aspects of conditioned existence and remain always accessible to meditators, whether they are siting motionless in a temple or jouncing along in a city bus.

Just as in a dark room a flashlight will light up whatever object it is pointed at – the beam sweeping easily over rough and smooth, beautiful and ugly – so mindfulness lights up the crowding, jostling factors of mind and body. Understanding and practicing in this way, without strain or passion, one finds no limit at all to the field of meditation.
 

We will not be going anywhere in this life without body and mind. The Buddha, whose sovereign vision ranged over space and time, saw no place holier than this place, no time riper than this time – the here and now everlastingly full with truth. The water splashing over our hands in the washbasin, the pulse at our collar, the morning clamor of birds, the spiraling of snowflakes, the scent of pines, the ache of sudden memory, our breath fast or slow at any hour – are these not objects of meditation perpetually arising? The best meditation turns us with vigilant senses toward the play of existence to know it, from an independent stance, for what it is.

Here are body and mind – wild and awesome territory to explore.
 

Always the Dhamma requires of us activity, not passivity. Before the peace must come the search; before the calm must come the work. Whoever makes his way out of confusion does so by individual effort, sun up or sun down, in all weathers, contemplating dust and flowers and craving and fear, living at ease but not in trance, ungrasping and mindful, doing serenely what needs to be done, and discerning ahead through worldly smoke and rain a brightening landscape.
 

Seeking for a self among the processes of mind and body is like seeking for an entity called ‘music’ among or within the musicians and instruments of an orchestra. When they have stopped playing we might step forward and demand to see the source or hiding place of the symphony we have just heard.  We have experienced music, so we might insist that it exists on its own as a discrete thing; and yet, when we come to look, all we can find is an assortment of people, chairs, instruments, and pieces of paper. We cannot find any germ or nugget of ‘symphony’ curled inside a horn or a violin, or nesting in a musician’s pocket, or squeezed between the pages of the score. Obviously, there is no self to a piece of music; it comes into being depending on many conditions – the work of a composer, written directions, machines for production of sound, the efforts of the players, etc. – and ceases when those conditions are dispersed. In the same way, the self or ego we think we are exists only in a manner of speaking, only in a conventional and illusory sense; ultimately no ‘I’ can be found – only a compound of factors working together temporarily.