Even if the whole universe is nothing but a bunch of jerks doing all kinds of jerk-type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.

Don’t just see how relentlessly time passes, without seeing that it never arrives. Even though intellectual understanding is also time, such understanding doesn’t matter much to real time.

I’d be at work at one of the series of thankless jobs I held throughout much of my life, seething with anger over how I could have been doing something better, more interesting, more suited to my talents or just less tedious and awful. This didn’t stop once I got finished with my shift, either. A huge segment of my life was given over to just feeling a kind of intense resentment toward whatever situation I was in.

But when we say there’s no self, we only mean that there is no fixed and limited entity that remains unchanging while life and time go on around it.

People in situations like this usually just make something up. Most of the time we don’t really know what reasons we had in the past for doing something. But we invent an explanation, and then we begin to believe our made-up story.