When we start practice, it’s as if we’re taken to a beautiful land manacled to an idiot. We imagine that if the idiot would stop the incessant babble, we could fully appreciate the space and the tranquility.
It takes us a long time to understand that this person, whom we view as an idiot, is dependent origination.
If it were not for the noise, the distress, the interference, of what we regard as our personal thoughts and emotions, we would never have been drawn to practice in the first place.
It’s as if what we regard as our thoughts and our emotions is a beautiful and powerful dragon, constricted within the small room of the self; which in turn is located in some limited imaginary space in our head.
If that dragon is released from the room of the self, is released from the head, it can manifest throughout the whole body. This changes everything: experience transforms from something like static or echo to something like bright water, flowing vigorously throughout the body. In turn, this bright water can flow into and from the entire world. Then it is like space, like light.
Practicing in this way is how non-duality is actualized—not by some ego project to weld an imaginary world to an imaginary self, or to lift something fictional upwards.