verse goes on in oneness and equality, confusion vanishes of itself. And he says, perceiving that all is one means making no distinction between sage and sentient being, or between subject and object. This is another way of describing the totality of space. When you experience everything is equal, all distinctions will naturally disappear or remembering not to abide in either existence or emptiness. You should also know that existence and emptiness are not separate. These are not two, it is everything really the same. Once I said that the Buddhist sees all sentient beings as the same and is aware of every single thought in the universe, someone raised the point that if the Buddha's mind was constantly being bombarded with such a tremendous influx of thoughts, it would not be a very comfortable state. This would mean that the Buddha's mind is like a garbage can, and the thoughts of all sentient beings are being dumped into it. It would be a heavy burden on the Buddha. He says, if you take a snapshot, with a high quality camera, everything in front of the lens will be imprinted on the film in minute detail. Obviously, this was done before the advent of digital cameras. The point remains, you can see the tip of each blade of grass and the outline of every leaf. Yet the camera does not think how annoying all this junk is trying to get my attention. No, in one shot, it takes in everything without making distinctions among the objects, whether they are good or bad, long or short, green or yellow. But just because the camera does not make distinctions does not mean that the images on the film will appear confused or in the wrong order. On the contrary, everything is there clearly and in place. The Buddha's mind is like this, our mind is like this. Having an equal mind means that there is no conception of relativity between things. Everything is absolute, in the sense that there is no separation between you and others, between past and future. Because you see everything is equal, you would not choose one thing over another. It as soon as there are no longer any differences, it is as if existence simply disappears. For example, if everybody were male, the label men would no longer be meaningful, since its only purpose is to distinguish men from women, everyone being the same, there would be no need need for names. If you take an equal attitude towards everything, all differences will disappear along with existence itself. Once I handed the incense board to a student and I asked him, What is this, he grabbed the board and shook it a few times. He did that because there was no name for it. We may call it an incense board. But this is only our mind making distinctions. Why must we call it incense board?