Clearly, in order to end one’s own suffering, there is nothing more important than to realize that when one acts as if the body and mind constituted a lasting, separate, independent self, one unthinkingly attributes to them qualities which they simply do not have. Nothing in the whole stream of mental and physical phenomena that constitute one’s experience of body and mind has the quality of separate, independent, lasting existence. It is all change and impermanence, moment by moment and so none of it can be ‘self and it is one’s persistent effort to treat it as if it were, that makes it a constant stream of suffering (duhkha).

Khenpo Tsultrim Rinpoche

from the book Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness

translated by Shenpen Hookham


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