When problems arise in our lives—someone has harmed us or perhaps we have harmed someone, we can relate our own experiences to the meditation on how everything comes from the mind, Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains in this teaching from December 14 at the fifty-third lamrim meditation course at Kopan Monastery, Nepal. All happiness and suffering comes from the mind—we are the creator, everything we experience comes from our karma.

When we don’t accept that what we experience comes from our own mind, it is very difficult to practice patience and compassion for those who harm us, and we want to harm back. It is important to see our own examples from our own life that everything comes from the mind. Then we are able to subdue our minds, practice compassion, and help many people through our experience. It is so important, rather than believing that everything we experience is true, to think of it as a hallucination.

Anger can’t arise when we recognize any problem as a hallucination—it is empty, it is merely labeled, so like this we need to meditate on dependent arising. This is so important to destroy ignorance, which is the root of all delusion. This is an important daily life meditation, not only studying emptiness philosophically, we need to digest and experience it. Otherwise, if we don’t meditate, we are just collecting information.