Free Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire by Lama Thubten Yeshe, Philip Glass

that appears to us seems to exist from its own side as something concrete and self-contained. We think that merely because we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch these objects they must be real and true, existing solidly out there in their own right, just as we perceive them. But this concrete conception we have about how they exist is also a hallucination and has nothing whatsoever to do with their reality.
     
    It takes time, training, and clear-minded investigation to cut through these deeply ingrained wrong views and discover the actual way in which things exist. But we can begin this process right now merely by being a bit skeptical about what appears to our mind. For example, as soon as we realize that we are holding onto a solid view of ourselves—“I am like this,” “I should be like that”—we should remember that this view is nothing but a fantasy, a momentary projection of our mind. Nor should we passively accept that external phenomena exist in the concrete self-contained way they appear to us.
    It is better to be slightly suspicious of what our senses and ordinary conceptions tell us, like the wise shopper who, when buying a used car, does not immediately believe everything the salesman claims about it.
     
    DREAMS AND EMP TI NESS
     
    If we want to understand how we are ordinarily misled by our false projections and how we can begin to break free from their influence, it is helpful to think of the analogy of our dream experiences. When we wake up in the morning, where are all the people we were just dreaming about? Where did they come from? And where did they go? Are they real or not? Of course not. These dream people and their dream experiences all arose from our sleeping, dreaming mind; they were mere appearances to that mind. They were real only as long as we remained in the dream-state; to the waking mind of the next morning they are only an insubstantial memory. While we were asleep they seemed so true, as if they were really out there, having a concrete existence quite apart from ourselves. But when we wake up we realize that they were only the projections of our dreaming mind. Despite how real they seemed, these people in fact lack even an atom of self-existence. Completely empty of any objective existence whatsoever, they were only the hallucination of our dream experience.
     
    In a very similar way, everything we experience while we are awake, including our strong sense of self, is also empty of true existence. Despite their concrete appearance of existing out there somehow, these phenomena do not in fact exist from their own side at all. Only as long as our ordinary, conventional mind is functioning, or switched on, do these relative phenomena exist for us. If this ordinary mind were to be switched off, these ordinary phenomena would cease to appear to our mind.
     
    The point is that the people and things that make up our sensory world do not exist in the solid, objective way that they now appear to us. These appearances are nothing but the manifestations of our ordinary consciousness; they are merely apprehended or labeled by our superstitious mind. However, our basic problem is not that things appear to be self-existent, but that we accept the appearance as if it were true.
     
    Our habit of believing in, or holding onto, merely conventional appearances as if they were most true and ultimately real has been with us since beginningless time; it is not a newly-learned philosophical view. For this reason it is not easy to overcome. However, we can begin uprooting this mistaken habit merely by realizing that the ordinary way in which we view our reality is deluded, that our instinctive belief in the self-existence of things is an invalid concept having nothing whatsoever to do with the actual way in which things exist. Understanding even this much will begin to free us from our superstitious habits. Then we can begin to wake up.
     
    EGO-GRASP I NG AND I NSECURI TY
     
    Not only are the things