"If we want to understand how we are ordinarily misled by our false projections and how we can begin to break free from their influence, it is helpful to think of the analogy of our dream experiences. When we wake up in the morning, where are all the people we were just dreaming about? Where did they come from? And where did they go? Are they real or not? Of course not. These dream people and their dream experiences all arose from our sleeping, dreaming mind; they were mere appearances to that mind. They were real only as long as we remained in the dream-state; to the waking mind of the next morning they are only an insubstantial memory. While we were asleep they seemed so true, as if they were really out there, having a concrete existence quite apart from ourselves. But when we wake up we realize that they were only the projections of our dreaming mind. Despite how real they seemed, these people in fact lack even an atom of self-existence. Completely empty of any objective existence whatsoever, they were only the hallucination of our dream experience.

In a very similar way, everything we experience while we are awake, including our strong sense of self, is also empty of true existence. Despite their concrete appearance of existing out there somehow, these phenomena do not in fact exist from their own side at all. Only as long as our ordinary, conventional mind is functioning, or switched on, do these relative phenomena exist for us. If this ordinary mind were to be switched off, these ordinary phenomena would cease to appear to our mind.

The point is that the people and things that make up our sensory world do not exist in the solid, objective way that they now appear to us. These appearances are nothing but the manifestations of our ordinary consciousness; they are merely apprehended or labeled by our superstitious mind. However, our basic problem is not that things appear to be self-existent, but that we accept the appearance as if it were true."

Lama Yeshe