Possess the three inseparables. 

This precept advises us that our body, speech, and mind should be inseparable from virtue.

How can we keep our body inseparable from virtue.  For me, the best way is to constantly remind myself that I have given my body away to all living beings as a servant.  Everything I do with my body, I try do for others.  We can use our body to help others in many ways, for example we can use our body to cook dinner for others at home, do our jobs at work, or even type something nice on a computer.  We do not have to actually help people with our body to keep it inseparable from virtue, it suffices to not harm any living thing with it.  For example, we can be careful to avoid stepping on insects or drive carefully in a car.  The best way we can keep our body inseparable from virtue is to view it as our emanation sent into this world to benefit living beings.  We are actually the guru deity, and our ordinary self is our first emanation in this world.  Likewise, we can generate the guru deity’s body inside our body, so that when others interact with us they are actually in the living presence of the living Heruka.  Seeing a temple or a Buddha image creates non-contaminated causes to find the path in the future.  Being in the presence of a Heruka practitioner with a living Heruka at their heart is even more powerful still.  We effectively become a walking cause of other’s enlightenment.

With our speech, we can adopt a policy of “never saying anything bad about anyone ever.”  Such a policy alone is an all-day endeavor.  The speech of most people most of the time is negative, constantly criticizing others, talking behind their backs, etc.  In today’s world, especially on the internet, it is not at all uncommon for people to be incredibly mean with their words.  Since everyone else is doing it, it is very easy for us to start doing so as well.  When we do speak, we should be very vigilant to have everything we say help the situation in some way.  Since conflict abounds, instead of taking sides, try point out the common ground.  When somebody is being verbally attacked by somebody else, try calm the situation down.  When somebody does something good, make a point of praising it.  It is said that the tone with which we say something often conveys more than the content of our words, so we should always be mindful to speak kindly.  If we have the opportunity to give Dharma teachings or provide others with practical advice, we should do so.  The best way we can keep our speech inseparable from virtue is to always imagine that our speech is mounted on the mantras of our highest yoga tantra deity.  We imagine that as our words enter the other person’s ears, the mantra enters their heart.  And while we may be talking about sports or politics, because our words are mounted on the mantra, we imagine that the meaning understood by the other person is perfect explanations of Dharma. 

We generally can keep our mind inseparable from virtue by thinking about the Dharma all the time.  When we first start practicing, it feels as if the Dharma is on one side and our life is on the other.  To overcome this, when we practice we should use the examples from our own life to demonstrate the truth of Dharma; and during the meditation break we should take the Dharma we have learned and apply it as the solution to our daily problems.  If we practice in this way, the gap between our life and our practice will gradually close until eventually no matter what we encounter and what we do during the day, mentally we are thinking about Dharma all the time.  The best way we can keep our mind inseparable from virtue is to maintain the recognition that everything that arises is a mere karmic appearance of mind arising from our clear light mind.  All things are equally empty, and emptiness is unchanging, so our mind can be constantly mixed with emptiness while we go about our day.  If we train in this way, soon the appearance of our day will come to resemble karmic clouds passing through the space of our mind.  We will stop getting caught up in samsaric dramas and instead stay focused on responding with wisdom and virtue. 

Finally, we can learn to train in Tantric pure view, viewing all forms as manifestations of Buddha’s form body, all sounds as the mantra calling us home to the pure land, and all thoughts as manifestations of clear light Dharmakaya. 

We continue with our discussion of the three non-degenerations.  The third non-degeneration is not allowing our mindfulness to degenerate.  When Geshe-la first opened the temple in Manjushri, he spent three days teaching only one thing, namely we need to pay attention to what we are doing while we are practicing.  He said the methods we have work perfectly, what is lacking is focus on our part while doing them.  If we do them without distraction, they will swiftly produce all the results we desire.  If we continue to do them with distraction, they will never work even if we practice for many lifetimes.  In short, we have been given everything, all we need to do is concentrate. 

Distractions are like a thief which rob us of our spiritual life.  Distractions are our main enemy.  If we can overcome them, the rest of the path will come easily.  Distractions are like samsara’s front-line defenses.  If we can break through them, the rest of the war is easy.  Geshe-la said in Portugal that distractions are like the clouds which obscure the sun of Dharma from illuminating the sky of our mind. 

What is a distraction?  A distraction in general is any thought other than what we have decided to focus on.  If we have decided to focus on our sadhana, a distraction is anything else.  More broadly, though, we can say a distraction is any non-Dharma thought.  If throughout the day we encounter countless different objects, but we respond to them with countless different Dharma minds, then even though our mind did not remain on only one thing throughout the day, our mind was never distracted.  In the meditation session, this would be known a mental wandering – moving from one Dharma object to another as opposed to focusing on our chosen one.  But during the meditation break, we should content ourselves with just keeping our mind focused on the Dharma. 

The two most important mental factors for training in concentration are mindfulness and alertness.  Mindfulness essentially means remembering our Dharma understanding.  If we consider the contemplations on emptiness and our mind is led to a clear conclusion that everything is a dream, then our mindfulness tries to “not forget” that conclusion for as long as possible.  Our mindfulness maintains the continuum of our “not forgetting” or our “remembering.”  The longer we remember this conclusion, the more familiar we become with it, and the more deeply it penetrates into the different levels of our mind.  Venerable Tharchin explains that when we listen to or read Dharma books, we gain an intellectual understanding of somebody else’s wisdom.  When we contemplate this intellectual understanding, we transform what was their wisdom into our own wisdom.  We realize for ourselves, “yes, this is true.”  We then familiarize ourself with this understanding through meditation again and again without forgetting until eventually this realization becomes what he calls “an acquisition of our personality.”  Take wishing love for example.  Through listening to and reading Dharma instructions we can gain an intellectual understanding of what it means to purely love others in this way.  Through contemplating this again and again, we can transform our own mind into a state of loving others.  Through familiarizing ourself with this feeling of love through meditation, we make love into an acquisition of our personality – we become a loving person.  All this progression is essentially a deepening of our mindfulness of love.

Alertness is essentially being aware of what is going on in our mind.  Distractions sneak up on us like a tiger in tall grass.  We don’t see them coming and then it is too late.  Alertness cuts all the grass within our mind so we can see distractions coming long before they make it to us.  Distractions usually occur very subtly and slowly, in a way that we don’t even notice.  We thought we were meditating on our precious human life, but we realize five minutes later we have been planning our day.  Alertness protects against that.  Alertness is like a security guard within our mind that is constantly on the lookout for any threats to our mindfulness.  The key to alertness is simple:  we need to want to focus on our object of Dharma more than we want to think about other things.  It is as simple as that.  So everything we become distracted by, we should ask ourselves, “what is more beneficial to think about, this object of Dharma of my samsaric object of drama I was thinking about?”  If we do this again and again, we will quickly rewire our focus away from distractions and onto our Dharma objects.  We are desire realm beings, so we do what we want.  We need to want to focus.  If we do, alertness comes easy, and with alertness our mindfulness is left undisturbed.

We continue with our discussion of the three non-degenerations.  The second non-degeneration is effort in our practice of Dharma.  With faith, effort comes naturally.  It is helpful to dig a little deeper to understand what is faith, and what is its relationship to effort.  We can take as an example the instruction to put others first.  It begins with believing faith.  Believing faith is not blind faith, rather it is faith based on a valid reason.  Valid reasons can be logical reasonings or personal experience.  So we contemplate from our own experience all the different disadvantages of self-cherishing and all the advantages of cherishing others.  Considering these things, we can then come to a belief that being selfish is the cause of all suffering and cherishing others is the cause of all happiness.  We don’t know this yet with direct wisdom, but we believe it to be true based on valid reasons.  Believing faith then transforms into admiring faith.  Admiring faith is an appreciation of the good qualities of what we believe in.  We can admire those who cherish only others, and admire how the world would be different if everybody did so.  This admiring faith naturally leads to wishing faith.  Wishing faith is wishing that we ourself possessed the good qualities we are admiring.  We think, “wouldn’t it be great if I could completely abandon my self-cherishing and cherish only others.  I really want this.”  This wishing faith naturally leads to effort.  Wanting this good quality, we then naturally put effort into the practices that lead to such qualities.  We are happy and eager to do so.  On the basis of this joyful effort, we then gain personal experience of the truth of the instructions.  We see for ourself that it works and it is great.  This personal experience then gives us an additional valid reason for reinforcing our believing faith, and so the cycle continues at ever deeper levels. 

It is important to remind ourselves again and again that effort, by definition, is taking delight in virtue.  It is enjoying training in virtue.  If we have no enjoyment, but are instead practicing motivated by guilt, then even if we do intense retreat for many years, we actually have no effort.  And without genuine effort, we will have no results.  Many many people practice motivated by feelings of “I really should do this” or guilt thinking, “I took commitments, but I am doing nothing about them.”  In France, for example, the entire educational and cultural model is based on making people feel bad about what they are not doing to encourage them to do more.  This is a real obstacle to the flourishing of genuine effort in France because they carry this cultural norm over into their practice.  They beat themselves up about what a bad practitioner they are, and constantly judge themselves (and others) for what they are not doing instead of being happy about what they are doing.  French teachers likewise can sometimes fall into this trap and use similar negative reinforcement techniques with their students.  On the surface, it seems to work because people “do more Dharma things.”  But the joy is lacking, and without joy, there is no real practice.

Without joy in our practice, we can quickly become depressed, heavy, and despondent.  People come to a center, and instead of finding “the happiest place on earth” they find a bunch of spiritual neurotics!  Self-flagellation becomes the norm.  Quite naturally, people leave; and those who do say are the self-haters.  The more they study the Dharma, the more clearly they see all the different ways in which they are horrible and falling short, so that the more Dharma they study the more depressed and self-loathing they become. 

There are two keys to maintaining joy in our practice.  The first is to completely and totally forget about results.  Ghandi said, “full effort [itself] is full victory.”  The meaning is trying alone is success.  Why?  Because it is our trying that creates karmic causes, regardless of whether or not we succeed.  We need to mentally forget about this life, and use what little time we have left exclusively for the sake of storing up good karmic seeds for the long road ahead in our future lives.  I mentioned before that I have a dear friend who lived in a psychiatric hospital who struggled daily with psychotic and harmful thoughts.  He couldn’t stop himself, such thoughts just keep coming.  At first, he would work himself up into quite a panic thinking, “moment by moment I am creating causes to be reborn in hell due to these psychotic thoughts, and I can’t stop myself.  Surely, it would be better if were dead.”  But here, we need to make a very clear distinction between “effects that are ripening” and “causes I am creating.”  The psychotic tendency is an effect that is ripening.  How one responds to that tendency is what causes we are creating.  Far from creating countless causes to be reborn in hell, because he was applying opponents and resisting such tendencies (moral discipline of restraint), he was actually creating countless causes for future precious human rebirths!  If he had 50 psychotic thoughts in an hour and he applied effort to oppose all 50 of them, then in that hour he created the causes for 50 precious human lives with which he can continue with his practice.  When he understood things in this way, he would think, “I am the luckiest person alive.  My psychotic tendencies are actually a spiritual jackpot that keeps paying out!”  This is perfect.

The second key is to remind ourselves that in the Dharma, there is no bad, there is only good and even better.  Instead of being unhappy about what we are not doing, we need to choose to be happy about what we are doing.  The glass is never half-empty, or even mostly empty, it is always at least partially full.  Just because we could do better doesn’t mean what we are doing is somehow bad.  If we judge what we do do as being worthless and inadequate, we create the causes to abandon even that.  If instead we rejoice in what we are doing as the foundation for everything that follows, then we create the causes to do more.  This is crucially important to realize.

Taken together, just being happy to create good causes irrespective of results and always choosing to be happy with what we are doing, not unhappy about what we are not doing, we will easily be able to maintain joy in our practice.  With joy comes effort, with effort comes attainments. 

Become acquainted with the three non-degenerations.  

The three non-degenerations are:  faith in Dharma, effort in our practice of Dharma, and not allowing our mindfulness to degenerate. 

Many people come into Buddhism motivated by a rejection of faith-based forms of religion.  For the modern, scientific mind, Buddhism can easily be understood as an inner science.  Indeed, we are encouraged to practice in this way, testing the instructions for their validity and usefulness in our life.  Blind faith is rejected, and we are encouraged to develop our own wisdom realizing the truth of the instructions for ourselves.  We are explicitly told to not believe somebody just because they are called a Buddha, but instead to examine things for ourselves.  Many people think of Buddhism more as a philosophy of life, or a time-tested form of auto-psychotherapy.  All these things are true, and such an approach very much appeals to the modern mind.  I remember when I first started practicing, I told my teacher, “I agree with and have no problem with basically everything in the Dharma, except this whole faith thing.”  For me, faith was for people who didn’t know how to think for themselves.  It was a convenient means of avoiding having good answers to the hard questions.  In fact, faith, to my understanding was where any religion was weakest, and wherever we were told to have faith is exactly where we should worry.  When we hear people talking about “faith” and “blessings” and “Geshe-la said this and Geshe-la said that” we quickly become very critical and we wonder whether we have found ourself in some crazed cult! 

Many people come into the Dharma with similar attitudes.  But there comes a point in our practice where faith and reliance become the giant elephant in the room we can no longer avoid.  I had been practicing for many years without really relying or having much faith at all.  I was then doing a retreat, everything was going quite nicely, and then all a sudden, I came to a screeching halt.  Nothing was working.  I was dead in the water.  I didn’t know what to do.  I then called up my teacher and explained what had happened, and she laughed at me.  She said, “you don’t know what to do, do you?”  And I said no.  She said, “you can’t do anything can you?”  And I said no.  She then said, “well I don’t know either nor can I help you.  You need to start your practice completely over from scratch.”  I asked, “how?”  And she said, “go sit down on your cushion, generate a wish to rebuild your practice from scratch and then with faith request blessings for guidance as to what you should do.  When you get an answer, do that.  When you need clarification, ask for guidance again.  Continue in this way until you have rebuilt your practice.”

Feeling like I had tried everything else, I then gave it a go.  At first, nothing.  But then, an “idea” popped into my head, so I started running with that.  Then another, then another.  I felt like I was being guided by the hand, step by step, being shown how I should rebuild my practice.  But this time, the fundamental difference was, I was being shown how to practice through reliance, not through my own effort with my own mind.  Instead of reciting the words of the sadhana in my mind myself, I request that the guru practice in my mind for me.  Instead of trying to understand the meaning, I request blessings that the meaning be revealed.  Instead of trying to understand the points of contemplation myself, I request the guru to explain it to me in a way I can understand.  What used to be just me with my mind turned into me with my guru.  I realized what still to this day is the single most important thing I have realized on the path:  If I am truly intelligent, I will rely upon my guru’s mind alone. 

If we have a choice of using a bicycle or a Ferrari, which do we pick?  If our choice is between a hammer or a nail gun, which do we use?  In the same way, if our choice is relying upon our ordinary mind or relying upon the guru’s mind, which do we do?  I consider myself pretty intelligent, but I am a fool compared to the guru.  His powers of reasoning and concentration far surpass my own; his heart of love and compassion warm the entire universe; his wisdom illuminates all.  In our Tantric practice in particular, the inner engine which makes it work is faith.  The guru-deity is already enlightened, all we need to do is impute our I onto his body and mind, and the rest happens effortlessly.  Once we have a taste for reliance, we can’t help but ask ourselves, “why would we practice any other way?”

Gen-la Losang said, “at the end of the day, there is really only one practice, and that is faith.”  One of my other teachers said, “we normally pray as a last resort after we have tried everything else, but we are spiritual people.  Praying should be our first response, not our last.”  I cannot speak to other religions, but in Kadampa Buddhism, with our teachings on the wisdom realizing emptiness, faith is best understood as emptiness in action.  Venerable Tharchin said, “what is true or not is not important, what matters is what is most beneficial to believe.” Because everything is empty, it is believing that makes things true.  It is because things are empty that we can believe in different ways and actually reconstruct a new, pure reality.  If things were not empty, we could not do this, and faith, frankly, makes no sense.  But it is because things are empty that faith works.  We have faith in things not because they are somehow objectively true, but rather because by believing in them we rewire our minds and karmically reconstruct our world. 

We continue with our discussion of the three main causes of our Dharma practice.  The second main cause necessary for our Dharma practice is to rely upon a Spiritual Guide who teaches the Dharma.  When we have a legal problem, what do we do?  We rely upon a lawyer.  When we have a dental problem, what do we do?  We rely upon a dentist.  In exactly the same way, when we have an inner problem of delusions, what do we do?  We rely upon a Spiritual Guide.  If we don’t know how to get to where we want to go, we stop and ask for directions.  If our wish is to get to the pure land, we quite naturally need to stop and ask for instructions. 

Many people think they don’t need a spiritual guide.  They may think, “I will rely upon Dharma books.”  But who wrote the Dharma books?  A Spiritual Guide.  If there are some points that we don’t understand, what are we to do?  Other people think, “Buddha Shakyamuni did it on his own, so will I.”  Besides this being an incredibly arrogant thing equating ourselves to Buddha Shakyamuni, from a purely practical point of view isn’t it far easier to rely upon somebody who has already travelled the path than to forge out on our own.  Even if we were successful in the end, surely it would take us longer to get there.  And during that time, we would suffer more and all those who we would otherwise have been helping if we had already attained enlightenment earlier will be left to suffer for longer.  Why should they be made to suffer just so we can prove we can do it on our own?  But the reality is we most likely couldn’t succeed in the end.  We would become lost or discouraged.  We might be able to make some progress, but it is far more likely we would get stuck somewhere.  There is nothing in samsara that points to it being all a dream.  We can look everywhere within the dream and not have a clue we are dreaming, much less have any indication for how to wake up.  Only the Spiritual Guide, a being who abides beyond the dream but who nonetheless has the power to enter our dream, can lead us out. 

The Spiritual Guide helps us in more ways that just giving us flawless instructions of what we need to do.  He also blesses, or inspires, our mind to put them into practice.  His blessings encourage our effort, and his blessings ripen previously planted seeds within our mind in such a way that the light of wisdom begins to dawn within our mind.  If truth be told, it is impossible for us to engage in any virtue without the blessings and inspiration of the Spiritual Guide.  The tendencies within our mind are almost all negative.  We know this because we know what a struggle it is to do the right things.  Absent the Spiritual Guide’s blessings, we wouldn’t stand a chance.  All virtue arises in dependence upon blessings.  Absent these blessings, we would never have engaged in any virtue.  Without virtue, we would know no happiness. 

When we start practicing the Tantric path, reliance upon the spiritual guide becomes almost the totality of our practice.  The logic here is simple:  the Spiritual Guide’s mind already possesses all the realizations and qualities of a Buddha.  We merely need to download them into our mind and then we will too.  Having access to a source from which we can download these realizations is essential. 

The third and final main cause for our Dharma practice is having all the necessary conditions for our practice.  Externally, these include access to teachings or books, time to practice, adequate food, clothing, and shelter, and that’s about it!  Internally, these include the wish to practice, faith in our teacher’s instructions, and the wisdom which knows how to use any circumstance as an opportunity to practice.  Since everything is equally empty, everything is equally potentially perfect for our Dharma practice.  The problem is not the circumstance, it is our lack of wisdom which sees how the circumstances we have are in fact perfect for us.  To assemble this third main cause, externally of course we need do whatever it takes to gain access to teachings, make time to practice, and have enough money for food, clothing and shelter.  But internally, our main task is to rely upon our Dharma protector, Dorje Shugden.  Dorje Shugden’s main job is to arrange all the necessary outer, inner and secret conditions we need for our swiftest possible enlightenment.  In dependence upon our reliance upon him, he will activate the karmic potentials on our mind to have the necessary outer conditions and he will bless our mind with the wisdom to see how what has been emanated is in fact perfect.  He attained enlightenment to do this for us.  All we need to do is ask for his help.  If we do, he will be by our side forever.

 Practice the three main causes. 

 There are three main causes that are essential for successful Dharma practice:  the wish to practice Dharma, relying upon a spiritual guide who teaches Dharma, and having the necessary conditions to practice Dharma.  Each of these is fairly self-explanatory, if we do not wish to practice Dharma, we won’t do it.  If we don’t rely upon a Spiritual Guide to who teaches the Dharma, we won’t know how to practice.  And if we do not have the necessary conditions to practice Dharma, we won’t be able to even if we want to.  If we have these three main causes, then there is nothing that can stop us.  We will continue to practice and progress until enlightenment is attained.  So the relevant question is how do we assemble these three main causes.

We assemble the first cause, the wish to practice Dharma, by correctly identifying what our problem is.  Normally we think our problem is a lack of money, the annoying people in our life, and our government.  Geshe-la says we need to distinguish between our outer problem and our inner problem.  To illustrate this, he uses the example of our car breaking down.  If our car breaks down, we normally say, “I have a problem.”  This is not correct.  Our car has a problem, we do not.  Our problem is our deluded mental reaction to our car breaking down.  This deluded reaction creates an unpleasant feeling within our mind which leaves us unhappy.  Dharma has no power whatsoever to fix our car, we need a mechanic for that.  But Dharma practice can solve our inner problem of our unhappy mind.  If we solve our inner problem, we have no more problem.  We still need to get our car fixed, but it will not be a problem for us.  The same reasoning applies to all our other outer and inner problems. 

The lamrim meditations are, if we check, nothing more than a series of meditations helping us identify what exactly is our problem.  If we correctly diagnose the problem, then the solution becomes self-evident.  It is because we are confused about the nature of our problem that we apply the wrong solutions, and despite considerable effort on our part, we remain unhappy.  In this life, our problem is our deluded reaction to what happens in our life.  Looking beyond this life, we realize our problem is we will eventually die and due to all the negative karma on our mind, we will quite likely fall into the lower realms.  If we die with a negative state of mind, a common reaction we have to unpleasant circumstances, of which death is the most unpleasant, then it will activate negative karma, which will propel us into a lower rebirth where we can remain trapped for incalculably long periods of time. 

Looking deeper, even if we manage to avoid a lower rebirth in our next life, since our mind is still controlled by delusions, in particular by self-grasping ignorance, we have no freedom or control to choose our next rebirth.  Without choice, at the time of our death, we will spin the roulette wheel of samsara, and no matter where we land we lose.  For as long as we are in samsara, we are, for all practical purposes, in a perpetual slaughterhouse where we are born only to be tormented and eventually slaughtered, only to be revived again to start the whole process over again.  Such a situation is completely intolerable and we must break free.  In reality, we are trapped in a perpetual nightmare from which we can’t wake up.  This is our situation, and we must escape from it.

But we are not alone.  All our friends, family and loved ones – indeed all living beings – are likewise trapped in the same nightmarish slaughterhouse.  It is not enough for us to escape, but we must help everyone break free.  No one need suffer.  Everyone can abide in the eternal bliss of enlightenment.  At present we lack the ability to help others escape.  This is our problem.

If we understand our problem, then we naturally look for a solution.  There is nothing in samsara that can help us solve the problems of being in samsara.  Samsaric solutions, such as mechanics, dentists, lawyers, etc., can help us with our outer problems, but they can do nothing for our inner problems of delusions, negative karma and so forth.  What can help us?  If our problem is our mind, we need something that can help us change our mind.  The Dharma is exactly such a method.  It teaches us how to maintain inner peace in this life; it teaches us how to purify our negative karma, accumulate merit and receive the special blessings of the Buddhas at the time of our death; it teaches us how to gain complete control over our mind by permanently eradicating all our delusions, thus enabling us to wake up from the nightmare of samsara; it teaches us how we can develop within ourselves all the qualities of a Buddha, such as the minds of great compassion, love, generosity, patient acceptance, moral discipline, effort, concentration and wisdom.  It teaches us how to acquire these qualities quickly by explaining how we can effectively download them into our mind from our highest yoga tantra deities.  In short, the Dharma provides us with a solution to all our problems in this and all our future lives, and it gives us the ability to help others do the same.  It is the solution to all our inner problems.  Seeing this, we will naturally be very motivated to practice Dharma and we will have assembled within our mind the first of the three main causes.

We continue our discussion of the three difficulties.  The third difficulty is eradicating our delusions altogether by applying their antidotes.  The antidote to all delusions is the wisdom realizing emptiness.  In the discussion of the second difficulty, we said applying opponents to delusions is like two waves cancelling each other out leaving calm waters.  Applying the antidote is like realizing there are no waves, indeed there is no water. 

First, it is useful to say a quick word on what is the wisdom realizing emptiness.  Normally, we look out at the world and we think there is something really there.  We are merely observing what is there, and our mind and sense of perception have no bearing whatsoever on bringing these things into existence.  As such, we think, “even if I change my mind about this thing, it actually changes nothing because the thing is still going to be there.”  So changing our mind might make us feel a bit better, but fundamentally it changes nothing.  We strive to realizing an objective truth of things.  We recognize that everybody is biased and subjective in one way or another, so we try to strip away all that bias, look at things from multiple points of view simultaneously in an effort to distill the fundamental objective essence of a thing.  In science, we strive to remove the influence of the observer on the thing we are trying to test so that we can look at the relationship in and of itself, independent of those observing it. 

In reality, all this is completely wrong.  In reality, there is nothing really there.  It is all a giant karmic light show, with no more reality to it than last night’s dream.  We look out the window and see other buildings, but what we are really seeing is the reflection of karma on the surface of our mind.  Right now, we are a dream person sitting at a dream computer reading dream words.  Everything is created by mind through the force of karma, and none of it is real.  We have never actually spoken with anyone, we have never actually gone anywhere, we have never really done anything.  Our body, mind and self are merely one wave amongst many on the ocean of our mind.  For some strange reason, we think we are just this one wave, and that this wave can somehow be separated from its underlying ocean.  The things we see are nothing more than mere karmic appearances of mind.  “Mere appearance” means other than the appearance itself, there is nothing actually there behind it.  It is a mere reflection, a hologram, a hallucinogenic specter.  “Karmic appearance” means the appearances themselves are generated through the force of our past karma.  Each appearance is like a karmic echo of our past actions that has come back to us.  The aspect of the wave is shaped by the force of the karmic seed that has ripened.  “Of mind” means the nature of these appearance is mind itself.  “Nature” in a Dharma context roughly means “made of.”  So when we say an object is by nature mind, what we are really saying is the object is mind shaped in the aspect of the object.  Mind is like the playdough, karma shapes it, and in the end, it resembles an object.  It is like the gold of the gold coin.  It is like the ocean of the wave.  In the end, though, there is nothing there other than mere appearance.  The only thing that is actually there is the appearance of something actually being there.  Besides this mere appearance, there is nothing.

While it is interesting and fun to philosophically consider such things, the practical question is how can we use this understanding as the antidote to our delusions?  Some examples can help illustrate this.  Imagine for example you suffer from attachment to what others think about you.  This is a very common worry in the modern world, and we generate a lot of anxiety and stress about it.  We actively try to change what others think, and if they think something bad about us, it makes us very unhappy.  The reality, however, is there is nobody there thinking anything about you!  There is the appearance of somebody there thinking something about you, but actually this is just a karmic echo of you having thought something about somebody else in the past.  If you want to change what others appear to think about you, then change what you think about others.  If you only think good things about others, then the karmic echos which will appear later will only be others thinking good things about you.  This is how everything works. 

Another example is imagine you are afraid of something.  There is some thing that might happen or someone who is threatening you in some way.  So we are naturally afraid.  But in reality, we are jumping at shadows.  The things of this world can’t hurt us anymore than the dinosaur in the movie can eat us.  There is nothing there, and neither are we.  There is nothing in the world of appearances that can even touch our essential clear light essence.  In reality, we abide completely beyond appearance, but we don’t realize it.  Like somebody in a bad hallucinogenic trip or a schizophrenic, we grasp at projections of our mind as being actually real.  So what is there to fear?  Nothing.

Nagarjuna says for whom emptiness is impossible, nothing is possible; and for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.  We abide in a world of suffering only because that is the world we have karmically created.  If we change our karma, we can change our world, not just for ourselves but for all the being inhabiting our dream.  We currently mentally construct others as friend, enemy and stranger; but we can karmically reconstruct them as our kind mothers and indeed emanations of Buddhas.  What are they really?  Nothing.  But their function changes dramatically depending on how we impute them.  If last night we dreamt of somebody in a wheelchair, who put them there?  We did.  They are a being of our dream, so we are responsible for everything.  In the same way, if we see in the world a car accident, who caused it?  We did.  These are two waves of karmic appearance we previously set in motion which have collided.   Thanks to emptiness, we have it within our power to completely karmically reconstruct our dream from a world of suffering into a pure land.  We have it within our power to deliver people from the contaminated aggregates we have trapped them in to the completely pure and blissful aggregates of an enlightened being.  For whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.

Of all the objects it is important to realize the emptiness of, our own mind is the most important.  In particular, our main task is to realize the emptiness of our very subtle mind of great bliss.  Why?  All our infinite previously accumulated contaminated karma is currently stored on our very subtle mind.  It is like a cosmic hard-drive which stores all our karmic movies.  If we realize emptiness directly, then when a particular karmic movie appears even though it may appear to be real, we will not be fooled by it, nor sucked into it, and so no matter what appears it will have no power to harm us.  But the movie will still play.  Things will still appear to be there.  But if we realize the emptiness of our very subtle mind, we uproot the contaminated karma giving rise to the movie itself.  When we realize the emptiness of our very subtle mind, it doesn’t just purify individual contaminated karmic seeds, it uproots all them simultaneously.  We can understand how this works by analogy.  If you have a wheel with a hub and spokes, if you shine a light inside any one spoke, it will illuminate that spoke.  But if you can place the light in the hub of the wheel, it will illuminate all the spokes directly and simultaneously.  In the same way, by realizing the emptiness of any one individual object, we illuminate the truth of that object.  But by realizing the emptiness of the very subtle mind upon which all our karma is equally planted, we illuminate the truth of all objects directly and simultaneously.  This is why Buddha said, “if you wish to attain enlightenment, realize your own mind.  Do not look for enlightenment elsewhere.”