How Cognition of Emptiness Liberates Us from Samsara

Unawareness, the first link of dependent arising, of how we and others exist is accompanied by grasping for an impossible “soul” of persons as “me.” This grasping is accompanied by disturbing emotions and attitudes and leads to more of them. These disturbing states of mind lead to the compulsiveness of karma and therefore samsara. We need non-conceptual cognition of the lack of an impossible soul of a person in order to rid ourselves of the unawareness of how persons and, in fact, all phenomena exist, thus stopping forever the tainted aggregates of uncontrollably recurring rebirth.