“The best learning is realising the truth of no self.”

To have a complete realisation of emptiness, you not only have to realise that things are not inherently existent, you must also realise that they do exist dependently. When you are walking, ask yourself, “Why do I say, ‘I’m walking’?” On what basis is it said, “I’m walking?” You should think about that for a while. It is usually because your body is walking. “I’m walking because the body is walking.” But also, I am not the body.

You are thinking. Why do I say I am thinking? Because the mind is thinking. It is okay to say, “I’m thinking.” On one hand, this establishes that there is an “I”, because these activities are going on and you can label them. On the other hand, if you shift and you start applying analysis, I say “I’m thinking” because the mind is thinking, yet I am not the mind. You can go all sorts of different ways with this.

When I am feeling tired, there is the tired feeling, and then the suffering of feeling tired is my mental feeling. The feeling of tiredness is the physical feeling derived from the body. The suffering from feeling tired is mental because I am sitting there saying to myself, “I’m so tired, I’m so exhausted.” At that point, I am not even feeling the physical sensation of tiredness because I am too involved in telling myself I am mentally tired and feeling the mental suffering of being tired. It is interesting to look at that, the difference between the physical feeling of being tired and the mental suffering you go through telling yourself you are tired when you are no longer actually feeling tired.

Then you go back to the physical feeling and you say, “On what basis do I say, ‘I’m tired’?” It is very interesting to sit there because you are saying, “I’m tired.” What are the physical sensations that label us “tired”? You may never have thought about this before. We are usually so out of touch with our experience that we are not even sure, even when we start to look for those physical sensations. Here I am not talking about the feeling, I am just talking about the sensation, the physical data on which we say, “I’m tired.” What is that?

When you do a little bit of analysis, it will bring you to: “Here are all these things based on why I say I’m tired”, but being tired is not any of those things in and of themselves. When I build on top of that, “Oh I’m so tired,” on what basis is all that suffering coming from? What is the basis of that? It is very interesting to start examining.

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