We can never think of reality as it is. We can never imagine it; we will never know it. The moment you know it, you kill it. The moment you know it, what you end up with is an idea in your mind, an old, dank idea that you will perpetuate. You are preoccupied with the various creations of your mind. Of course, your mind is interacting with lots of other minds, and the creations of other minds in our society; mind begets mind. And you are trying to live according to the contents of this mind, your mind in conjunction with the collective one. But it is a dream life, a ghost life. It isn’t really there. You believe this mind so completely that you invest all your energy in it until after awhile it appears to be solid and real. We believe the content of our minds to be reality. We completely believe our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, and our dreams, and we make them solid by continuing to see them and believing them to be reality. If you consider the world you live in, the kind of things you pursue, the kinds of things you like, the kinds of things you want, they are nothing but repetitions of the past. There is nothing new in them. Even what you think is new is a combination of things from the past, and since it is a repetition of the past, it is not real, it is not alive, it is not what is there. It is a content of your mind. That content of mind is a prison. But the person in that prison is so mesmerized, the bars appear so powerful and strong, that you take the bars of the prison to be what you want, what you seek, and what you want to strengthen. So you end up living a life in which you are continuously supporting and strengthening the bars of your prison. You will never know these bars as bars, and you will never know what is truly there, until you are capable of throwing off the whole thing—everything that you know, that you’ve ever known; everything that you want, that you like or dislike—until you’re willing to throw away your mind completely. 

A certain natural development of the mind, of our cognitive and functional capacities, is necessary to enable us to live and to function. However, this development tends to establish us in a perspective which is not an accurate reflection of reality. This perspective tends to exclude some aspects of reality and emphasize others, and the perspective that allows us to function in the world tends to become the only reality that we perceive. We take a very small part to be the whole. This loss is much more momentous than can be imagined from the perspective of conventional reality. So your mind and personality develop, and you end up being the personality, the ego-self, living in the world of the mind. The personality is the creation of the mind. The representational mind is itself a mental creation. So you end up being a ghost, living in a ghost world. That ghost world is dark compared to reality—not only dark, but dank and old. It is merely a repeat of previous thoughts. We forget reality so thoroughly that we live our lives completely seeking the values of our conditioned mind, one conditioned goal after another, whether we call it goodness, love, success, or happiness. All these are creations of our minds. They do not exist; they never existed. They exist only in our minds. They are mirages. We seek them all our lives, and when we find them, we find that there is nothing there. They do not quench our thirst, because they are not really there. When you believe you have found one of these elusive conditioned goals, all you can do is attempt to perpetuate it in your mind, to solidify and support it, which means to perpetuate the dank, old world that we believe exists. 

It is interesting to watch how our consciousness gropes for something solid. At some point, it finds presence and says, “Well, at least I am not nothing. It is true that I have been imagining something to be real that is actually an image of the past. But now I have let it go and spaciousness has arisen. I recognize myself as I really am. I am truly full and present. What a relief!” We are relieved because for a while we were afraid that if we let go of the image, we would evaporate. That is why some teachings have been reluctant to say that there is such a thing as True Nature. Because the moment I think of True Nature, then there is me, there is True Nature, and I can sit on it. I can sit in it, I can stand in it, because it is a solid ground of reality. This idea gives us a feeling of security that we won’t disappear. It gives us the recognition that we are not just a ghost, not just a hologram.