You should use the verses I have translated on emptiness and relate that to you and me and your place, to Walmart and the whole world. There is no real one at all. The whole thing, what has been appearing to you, totally trusting that; that is totally a lie. We have been trained, habituated completely in that, and we live our life in that reality.

So when you go to Walmart, to the house and other places, go with that mindfulness in your mind. Keep your mind in that awareness for as long as you can. Try to do it for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes or twenty minutes, then half an hour, one hour. That is an unbelievable meditation, very deep meditation, the best. Otherwise, emptiness is only talk, talk, talk, then suddenly our life is gone.

You can write this down nicely on bigger paper and put it where you can see all the time.

Now the time is getting late. Death can come at any time. Hurry up. Live the whole life with this awareness.

Then after some time you will be living in this realization.

When you go to the department store, while you are going there, go with this awareness. You don’t have to buy something. For me, I try to do that, even if there is nothing to buy or I’m getting something very small, like marking pens, something like that. When I am in the shop trying to find something to buy, I do the meditation. Or when I go to the beach, I go with awareness of emptiness, or those three things I have mentioned before in my teachings, any of those.

This is so important and vital to realize this. I don’t know if there are many people meditating on emptiness, but this makes us realize it and to discover, to have strong faith in cause and effect, reincarnation, the existence of the four noble truths, hell and enlightenment, samsara and nirvana, happiness and the problems in everyday life that we are experiencing and other people are experiencing.

Then relating to emptiness, dependent arising, dependent in terms of emptiness, there is “I” because there is a base to be labeled I. The aggregates exist, so it goes on like that. But the I is extremely subtle; it is like it doesn’t exist, for my mind. Only the wisdom of subtle emptiness can eliminate the root of all the delusions and the eons of suffering of samsara, yours and mine, and that of numberless samsaric beings.

There are many learned ones who fell into nihilism or externalism. It is so difficult to realize the middle way, the subtle dependent arising. That’s why Lama Tsongkhapa highly praised Buddha Shakyamuni for revealing dependent arising to us sentient beings. The Buddha liberated numberless beings from samsara and is still liberating us now; that is his most unbelievable quality and kindness to us, skies of kindness. After that Lama Tsongkhapa put so much effort to explain this to us and wrote so many texts.

Now you understand we are so lucky to have met Lama Tsongkhapa’s teachings. Even if we did not get to study, at least we are able to have imprints by hearing from His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other great teachers, unbelievable teachers.

In regard to your question about [awareness of] emptiness not working when there are very strong delusions and emotions, that is because the mind is not stable in awareness, and you are not seeing the hallucination as a hallucination, or as merely labeled. You are not seeing that what appears as real is not there, it is empty [of inherent existence].

That realization may not be strong enough, or it may be nearly there, but then not stable. Because it is not stable, then what comes back is the object of ignorance, holding the merely labeled I as real, so then we are discriminating bad and good, ugliness and beauty, from their own side, then anger and attachment and other delusions arise. Then we are most unbelievably busy, creating negative karma. When we hold the object of our ignorance as the real I, that starts our samsara.