Dalai Lama Speaks About His Awakening

Dalai Lama Speaks About His Awakening

The Dalai Lama talks about his awakening at the age of 35 years. The quote is from his book, "How to see yourself as you really are".

"When I was about thirty-five years old, I was reflecting on the
meaning of a passage by Tsongkhapa about how the “I” cannot be found
either within or separate from the mind-body complex and how the “I”
depends for its existence on conceptuality. Here is the passage:
'A coiled rope’s speckled color and coiled form are similar to those of a
snake, and when the rope is perceived in a dim area, the thought
arises, “This is a snake.” As for the rope, at that time when it is seen
to be a snake, the collection and parts of the rope are not even in the
slightest way a snake. Therefore, that snake is merely set up by
conceptuality. In the same way, when the thought “I” arises in
dependence upon mind and body, nothing within mind and body—neither the collection that is a continuum of earlier and later moments, nor the
collection of the parts at one time, nor the separate parts, nor the
continuum of any of the separate parts—is in even the slightest way the
“I.” Also there is not even the slightest something that is a different
entity from mind and body that is apprehendable as the “I.”
Consequently, the “I” is merely set up by conceptuality in dependence
upon mind and body; it is not established by way of its own entity.'
Suddenly, it was as if lightning moved through my chest. I was so
awestruck that, over the next few weeks, whenever I saw people, they
seemed like a magician’s illusions in that they appeared to inherently
exist but I knew that they actually did not. This is when I began to
understand that it is truly possible to stop the process of creating
destructive emotions by no longer assenting to the way “I” and other
phenomena appear to exist. Every morning I meditate on emptiness, and I
recall that experience in order to bring it into the day’s activities.
Just thinking or saying “I,” as in “I will do such-and-such,” will often
trigger that feeling. But still I cannot claim full understanding of
emptiness."

In 2020, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said in a speech, 

"His Holiness disclosed that 50 years ago he was reading Jé Tsongkhapa’s commentary to ‘Entering into the Middle Way’, ‘Illumination of the Thought’ and when he read that a person is neither one with the psycho-physical aggregates, nor separate from them, but exists in name only, he felt as if he’d been struck by lightning. Subsequently he was able to see that self and others are like illusions, but later realized that he had had an insight into a coarse form of selflessness. Nagarjuna refers to this selflessness in his ‘Precious Garland’:

A person is not earth, not water,
Not fire, not wind, not space,
Not consciousness, and not all of them.
What else is a person other than these?

Source: https://www.dalailama.com/news/2020/teachings-for-the-nalanda-shiksha-first-day