“What the Buddha saw is that life is marked by four qualities: impermanence, suffering, selflessness, and peace. He saw that we keep butting our our heads against this basic reality and it hurts. We suffer because we want life to be different from what it is. We suffer because we try to make pleasurable what is painful,to make solid what is fluid, to make permanent what is always changing. The Buddha saw that we try to make ourselves into something real and unchanging when our fundamental state of being is unconditionally open and ungraspable–selfless. We discover this notion of selflessness in meditation, where we learn to zoom away from our thoughts and emotions and become familiar with these basic facts of life. Accepting the impermanence and selflessness of our existence, we will stop suffering and realize peace. That, in a nutshell, is what the Buddha taught. It sounds simple. Yet instead of relaxing into that elemental truth, we keep searching around the corner and never getting quite what we want. In Buddhist language, that is known as samsara.”

~@SakyongMipham from Turning the Mind into an Ally (Sakyong Mipham on Facebook)