All forms of suffering are like a child’s death in a dream. Holding illusory appearances to be true makes you weary. Therefore, when you meet with disagreeable circumstances, see them as illusory. This is the practice of Bodhisattvas. 

Things are like illusions because they do exist (as dependent phenomena), just not in the way in which they appear to our senses and mental consciousness (as having their inherent nature). When considering emptiness, it is extremely important to properly identify the object of negation and then negate it by proving to ourselves that it is totally impossible for an inherently existent “I” to exist. 

Even if we attain incredible levels of samadhi and have visions of all sorts of different deities or deep experiences of bodhicitta, we will never get out of samsara, let alone attain awakening, unless we correctly identify the inherently existent “I” and negate it. To get out of cyclic existence, we must see that the object grasped by ignorance — inherent existence — does not exist at all, has never existed, and will never exist. Our understanding of emptiness is conceptual at first and appears through the veil of a meaning that is generalised or a mental image. The next step is the union of serenity and special insight, where we combine this understanding with serenity meditation. The mind still has a very subtle mental image of emptiness at this time, but by repeatedly meditating on this, we can remove the subtle image and directly penetrate emptiness. Then we use our direct non-conceptual perception of emptiness to cleanse the mind of acquired afflictions learnt through wrong philosophies, followed by the innate afflictions we have had since beginningless time, and even the subtle latencies of the innate afflictions that prevent awakening. 

Like waking up from a dream in which our child dies, understanding the emptiness of the “I”, our aggregates, and all other phenomena eliminate our sufferings by eliminating the false view that is the basis of our attachment. If we can learn to see everything as an illusion, we can save ourselves all the anxiety and weariness that result from grasping at them as truly existent. 

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