“It’s like going up on the roof or coming down to the floor. When someone climbs up there, he gets on the roof. When he comes down, he comes down to the floor. If he climbs up to the roof again and falls down, he falls down to the same floor. That’s all that most people know. No one knows being in-between because there’s nothing to measure it. When they say that in-between there’s no state of becoming, we can’t point it out. We can’t point it out because there’s nothing to mark it.
The questions we have to answer are the questions of the practice. Students for the most part want to know what merit looks like, what evil looks like, how many leaves there are on a tree, how many roots. If you want to know that sort of thing, the Buddha would probably say you’re stupid, because all you really need to know is a single leaf. Every leaf on a rubber tree is just the same. The same with the roots: All you need to see is a single root.
It’s the same with knowing people. If you really know yourself, that’s enough. You know every person in the world.”