You can't feel the earth if you can't feel the space.

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, 'field of power'... The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

But again and again, we should reflect back to the darkness of the cocoon. In order to inspire ourselves forward, we must look back to see the contrast with the place we came from. You see, we cannot reject the world of the cocoon - which out which we may create a new cocoon. When we see the suffering that occured in the old cocoon, that inspires us to go forward in our journey of warriorship. It is a journey that is unfolding within us.

When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think we have quieted our fear, but we are actually making ourselves numb with fear. We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us.

The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern.

The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.

meditation is a way of developing clarity, which allows us to see the precision of daily life situations as well as our thought process so that we can relate with both of them fully and completely.