Why does Buddhism put so much emphasis on meditation? It’s because our mind is so gross and our memory so poor that we forget things easily and cannot recall our countless lives’ experiences. The purpose of meditation, therefore, is to increase, or develop, our memory, or mindfulness, of reality.

Our distracted, fragmented thoughts, which we experience continuously every day, are countless. Nonsense repeatedly cycles through our mind, again, again, again, again…. It’s like in the pictures of the wheel of life, whose hub shows a pig, a chicken and a snake[1] going round and round endlessly. Like that, our pig, chicken and snake mentalities continuously reverberate in our consciousness, reducing our memory to almost nothing.

The meditation techniques that stop these three mentalities are very important. Without stopping these deluded minds we can’t see the concepts of ego that we spontaneously experience in everyday life. They’re very subtle, so without eliminating these gross minds it’s impossible to see our ego’s activity. That’s why we meditate on the energy of our own conscious experience. By quieting and eliminating our gross mentalities we create the space we need to see the concepts of ego, to recognize the entity interpreted by ego, which is non-existent.

Normally, religious people miss the point—we circle around it but don’t make much progress because we keep missing it. What is the point? The point is to become revolutionaries and totally destroy our entire concepts of ego. This is a much more revolutionary ideal than any of the theories propounded by Marx-Lenin, Hitler or Mao.