For the next thirty minutes, just check up what you feel. I want you to meditate on your own experience. I don’t want you to think about Buddhism, lamrim, tantra, yoga, lama or any idea. Just watch; check up on whatever you’re experiencing.

Maybe you have pain. We generally feel the energy of pain as sort of concrete, but if you check up it is also like space energy, like light. I want you to just contemplate that experience, meditate on that. Or if you feel happy, check up in the same way. Just contemplate. Don’t think that pain is bad, pleasure is good. Don’t engage in such emotional reactions, good or bad. Just emphasize natural contemplation, concentration, without too much intellect.

Even if there is depression, just look at that depression in the mind. I want you to contemplate that depression, which is in the mind, not in the body. At a certain point, that pain becomes space; you become space. Pain becomes space; pleasure becomes space. You become space, like the sky. If you contemplate like that, without emotional involvement, eventually you can have this experience. And that is the time you should not be afraid. Just hold. Don’t worry; I don’t want you to worry. Just contemplate continuously without being afraid. And in that moment, you experience losing your ego.

Every sense object that we experience appears to us as a concrete entity. There is a kind of concreteness that appears from the object itself. Normally we say that whatever we perceive in the world is real. “Everything I see or hear or touch is true, true, true!” We never question this at all. But this is wrong.

So now we are checking philosophically. You might think that checking philosophically is difficult … right view, wrong view. It’s not difficult; it’s simple. Whatever appears to your eye, to your ear and so on … instead of accepting it, believing it, be skeptical. Don’t accept how things appear at face value. Be a little suspicious, a little bit “I’m not sure.” To find the right view, you don’t need to look at space, you don’t need to look at your lama’s face or at Buddha’s face. You need to look at the face of your normal way of looking at things, your normal view. If you observe your view you’ll see that the right view isn’t there. In other words, you find the wrong view in your normal way of looking at things. 

Don’t think “The wrong view is in Italy but the right view is in the Himalayan Mountains.” Don’t think, “Buddha, Buddha, Buddha. Buddha has right view so if I always look at Buddha then somehow I’ll discover right view.” It’s not like that. Right view is everywhere, anywhere! The beautiful face of shunyata is existent within all phenomena.

Of course, we understand that this concrete appearance of ego cannot be extinguished immediately; it takes a long time to eliminate it completely. There are gross levels and subtle levels to be purified. What we can do right now is to loosen our tight conception a little bit, our uptight view, little by little. Even though the concrete appearance is still there, by understanding how it is wrong, you loosen your tight conception that holds it to be true. “Of course it appears, but it’s not true. It doesn’t exist as it appears.” 

So then you contemplate: what is my consciousness? Consciousness is not concrete. It is like a lake, having the ability to reflect. It is not form, not color, but it is always there. Even if you have a dull, dark experience, the consciousness perceiving that darkness still has the nature of clarity. I want you to contemplate that. When you observe your concrete experience, somehow it automatically disappears and the object is the clear consciousness again. When you observe that, it disappears; you should think that this disappearing is more real. This gives an injection to the mind.

So what I’m saying is that the clear energy of consciousness is with you twenty-four hours a day. Even when you are angry, clarity is there. It is basic fundamental human nature—pure, beautiful. Our consciousness is like the ocean. In that space is the potential for ego—whether positive, negative, good, bad, or ugly. It has the ability to reflect any kind of thing you want to see.

Tantra shows that human beings have the capacity for limitless enjoyment and at the same time the ability to be free from the grasping mind. I want you to understand that Buddha’s teaching is not saying that human beings should not be happy or that they cannot have pleasure. The problem is that the unclear ego grasps at concrete entities, which are non-existent. If you didn’t have this grasping, you would have as much enjoyment as possible—any kind of pleasure, any kind of bliss.