Arise from the meditation cushion maintaining a continuity between the insight that you had during the meditation and your mental state afterwards. As you stand up, walk to the door, or speak to someone, try to maintain the awareness that phenomena - including your self, your mind, other people you come in contact with, everything around you - exist not as intrinsic entities, but as dependently related events.

This means that if I seek my self among my physical or mental constituents, I am nowhere to be found - neither among them, nor as their sum total, nor apart from them. Why is this? Because I exist as a dependently related event. Dependent upon what? I exist in dependence upon my mental designation of my self I conceive of myself and in so doing I mentally designate myself on the basis of things that are not myself.

In the act of identifying things we are co-producers of the objects we perceive. How does this occur? In what way are we co-producers of the events that present themselves to us? As we reach out with the mind in response to events, we identify them-as joy, ill health, poverty, wealth, and so forth. We conceptually designate them and we thereby create the world we experience, moment by moment. We are finally responsible for the events that we encounter.

In a life devoid of dharma the response to misfortune is anger, resentment, and fear. When prosperity arises, the response is attachment, clinging, and anxiety in anticipation of loss. When events are neither pleasing nor unpleasing, the response is indifference; the mind is cloudy and sluggish in ignorance. In this mechanical behavior we recognize the three poisons: anger, craving, and confusion.

In dharma, the creativity of spiritual practice lies in transforming our responses to the myriad events that present themselves to us. A profound aspect of this practice is to recognize how we have created, and are still creating, the events, objects, and people we encounter by the manner in which we mentally identify them. Our daily spiritual practice is profoundly empowered when we bring to it this insight into the emptiness of intrinsic identity of phenomena.

Excerpted from: A Passage from Solitude, by B. Alan Wallace. 1992 by Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, New York 14851.