Confirming an intuitive sense I've always felt for the interconnectedness of all things, this doctrine has provided me ways to understand the intricate web of co-arising that links one being with all other beings, and to apprehend the reciprocities between thought and action, self and universe.

In the early Buddhist view, then, a persons identity resides not in an enduring self but in his actions (karma)- that is in the choices that shape these actions. Because the dispositions formed by previous choices can be modified in turn by present behaviour, this identity as choice-maker is fluid, its experience alterable. While it is affected by the past, it can also break free of the past.

The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe... All is registered in the 'boundless heart' of the bodhisattva. Through our deepest and innermost reponses to our world - to hunger and torture and the threat of annihilation - we touch that boundless heart.

The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you're worrying about whether you're hopeful, or hopeless, or pessimistic, or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That was what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.

Action isn't a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. More than some moral imperative, it's an awakening to our true nature, a releasing of our gifts.

There are the holding actions, the changing actions, and the vision of the future - what we want to see happen for the Earth. All are essential.

To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe -- to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it -- is a wonder beyond words.