Self, empty

You are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the environment, your emotions are largely from the reptillian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can't add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator and even your best side is a superficial piece of social engineering that will fall apart as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot's war, or they give you news about your brain tumor, to name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity, and despair SELF is not only the height of hubris but it is also proof (as if we needed any) that we are above all a deluded species (we are in a trance from birth to death). Prick the balloon and what do you get? Emptiness.

-- John Burdette "Bangkok Tattoo"

Removing enchantment

When seeing these types of kamma simply as events - rather than as raw material for delight - one is struck by how inconstant and evanescent they are, totally dependent on causes and conditions that are also inconstant and evanescent. This gives rise to a sense of disenchantment for them, thus making it easier to abandon progressively subtler levels of passion and delight for new kamma and the process of becoming, until ultimately the moisture for becoming is all gone.

- Thanissaro Bhikku - "The Paradox of Becoming"