On page 59 of White Sail, Thinley Norbu writes:

In brief, practice means to annihilate the suffering samsaric beings created by dualistic conception.  If one does not want to kill conception, then one cannot even meditate, since meditation is the cessation of grasping mind, which is the actual object of killing.  Without doing this, one actually causes continuous reality killing because one causes continuous dualistic habit.

Unfortunately, the last thing most people want to do is to annihilate conception.  For the most part most people attach to pleasure, and avoid what limits pleasure.  They have expectations, and refuse to abandon them.  The feeling among those who do not want to abandon their expectations is that if they do, then it means they don’t have standards, and then how could you tell the difference between a realized being, a bodhisattva, and a bum?

Good question.

There are other ways in which people cling to conceptions, which means, essentially, that if they are practicing, it is pretty much a worthless activity.  What many do is try to sit quietly, focusing on breath.  Unfortunately, in the West, our practice is divorced from any kind of cultural depth.  We only have things like using foreign spices, or maybe wearing some accessory that hints at some foreign influence… that  is about as deep as it generally goes. What’s missing is a strong sense of the divine… a feeling not much unlike the old pagan notion of divinity in every bush and spring.  In reality, this is actually literally true!  But, because of some really stuffy academic types who did some early translations, we have this nutty idea of “emptiness” or “void”, which implies vacuum.  No Buddhist writing or teaching denies the phenomena of ghosts, deities, spirits, devas, you name it.  The same goes for yoga in India.

What this extirpation of spirit has done to the West is to turn us all into soulless reptilian consumers, whose only salvation is the gratification of materialistic desires,  because that is the only sensations we even are capable of registering… it is the only empirical reality and so the only reality.  The rest is just hocus pocus nonsense…  childish fantasy.

Nihilists are engaged in continuous reality killing in that they are blinding themselves to the full reality of wisdom mind, in order to bolster their conception of material reality.  This is dualistic habit.  It is nothing but poverty of mind and spirit, so sad.