"All suffering, from irritation at the weather to lifelong anger toward an abusive parent, is rooted in the belief that we are a separate being: I am here, the environment is there. I interact with my environment by grasping, attacking, avoiding, ignoring--keeping this, rejecting that. I suffer by losing what I want and getting what I do not want. Discomfort does not become suffering until it is personalized by this duality--until I perceive the discomfort as specific to me. From this perception follows a kind of personal wretchedness, and a conditioning history built up around grasping pleasure and avoiding pain. The belief in separateness is deeply rooted in our whole language and culture; it is so deep that Buddhists maintain we bring it with us at birth from past lives, and, indeed, is the reason we are born at all.
"Buddhist meditation aims to expose and cut the belief in separateness, in the exact moment of its creation, here and now, every instant. Doing so is the equivalent of a conscious death. As a side effect, the personal wretchedness of suffering, along with any sense of being trapped in it, is brought to an end. Ironically, however, this has long ceased to be the goal.
"Words like 'death' and 'emptiness' are provocative to the Western reader, sometimes leading to confused notions that without feelings, desires, or perceptions, a buddha must be little more than a smiling vegetable. On the contrary, a buddha is simply abiding in the condition of wakefulness. ...

...

"Willingness to die cheerfully, right now, that is, to live fully, to give in to the fluid, uncontrollable emptiness of experience, opens a way out of the prison of the separate self. Death, too, is empty."

Stephen T. Butterfield