My most dear one,
I was going to mention this to you before, but I forgot. One day here at Buddha Amitabha Pure Land I was walking outside with the Sangha. One day I went for longer walk with Roger, Tharchin, Tenzin and Sherab, so I tried to explain how to meditate on the lamrim while walking.

On the way down, I explained how to meditate by reflecting on the basis of the perfect human rebirth—how it is difficult to find again, and not only that, death is definite and the actual time of death can happen anytime. So, walking with that awareness—how many seconds are constantly going, running down—and practicing mindfulness of that. Our life is running so fast toward death, to the lower realms; if our karma is not purified we are running so fast to the hell realms, to suffer for eons.

Then when walking back to the house I explained about the false I, the object to be refuted according to Prasangika, as I mentioned in the meditation briefly before. So, when we walked back, to walk with mindfulness that the I who is walking is a hallucination. It appears as a real I walking along the road, but it is a hallucination.

Another meditation is that everything is merely labeled. This is more practice of mindfulness, looking at the hallucination as a hallucination.

I don’t know if the Sangha did this. I asked them afterwards and they said they did do that.

As I was walking up, I came to the understanding—this is because I normally don’t meditate—that there is no real I, action, object, and nothing of this retreat house, Buddha Amitabha Pure Land. It is not there and what appears is just the hallucination of ignorance. In reality, nothing is there. Of course that means the whole world, what people talk about on CNN and BBC, all the talk, bad and good, mostly bad, nothing is there.

So, basically like that. People study for thirty or forty years, but nothing is there in reality. People experience so many difficulties—for example, cancer or physical ill heath, one thing after another; and other things like suffering in the family, children who died or are sick; so many problems, so much worry; wanting to be more white so thinking of changing the skin [color]; or even if they are young, wanting to look younger—but in reality there’s nothing there. What is real, as it appears, nothing is there.

Of course, I should be seeing this all the time, but I don’t meditate. What happens is that ignorance projects the hallucination and that becomes our main life, not the reality.

This is what I wanted to say to you. Thank you very much.

With much love and prayers ...