We have created a world that is bittersweet. Things are amusing but, at the same time, not so amusing. Sometimes things seem terribly funny but, on the other hand, terribly sad. Life has the quality of a game of ours that has trapped us. The setup of mind has created the whole thing. We might complain about the government or the economy of the country or the prime rate of interest, but those factors are secondary. The original process at the root of the problems is the competitiveness of seeing oneself as a reflection of the other. Problematic situations arise automatically as expressions of that. They are our own production, our own neat work. And that is what is call mind.

From “Mind: The Open Secret,” in The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychology, page 66.

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