Created By Our Minds

In the Vietnamese literary canon, there are two lines of poetry by a twelfth-century Zen master of the Ly dynasty that say:

If the cosmos exists, then the smallest speck of dust exists.
If the smallest speck of dust doesn't exist, then the 
....whole cosmos doesn't exist.

The poet means that the notions of existence and nonexistence are just created by our minds. He also said that "the entire cosmos can be put on the tip of a hair," and "the sun and the moon can be seen in a mustard seed." These images show us that one contains everything, and everything is just one.

---Thich Nhat Hanh, in his commentary on the Heart Sutra---