No-Birth, No-Death

Your own mind is identical with reality. The great teachers of all the spiritual traditions have directed you to the nature of your mind in order to lead you to liberation.
 

If you want to awaken, do not seek for anything outside your own mind. Outside of your own mind, there is nothing. Not grasping ideas about good and evil, not depending on notions of right and wrong, let go of all dualistic thinking and realize that your true self is the unnamable void.

You cannot find a separate, independent self because there is no such entity. Therefore, you realize that every particular thing in the universe is also just an illusion, a conceptual abstraction that only appears to exist independently from the void. The unnamable void is the one mind.

When you see anything, you are just seeing the unnamable void. Nevertheless, even the void is not a separate, independent entity; its existence depends upon all the myriad things. Every thing you encounter is identical with the void; it is no-thing. When one realizes that all forms are identical with no-thing, then birth is identical with no-birth; death is identical with no-death. Awakening to the mystery of your own fundamental awareness, you spontaneously participate in the dance.

From - The Flatbed Sutra of Louie Wing: The Second Ancestor of Zen in the West
by Ted Biringer

Email tedbiringer@flatbedsutra.com

Website www.flatbedsutra.com