So we enter life with the seed of ignorance within us. And then in the very womb the seed flowers into a personal experience of this misunderstanding, which is here called “selfness.”

This wrong idea of “me” is awakened by our very first sensations in life: the warmth and pressure within our mother. Poisoned by ignorance, the mind immediately splits life into “warmth” and “me feeling the warmth.”

It's very important to say here that there is a “me” that is perfectly fine—one that does exist, and that experiences other things. So what's the difference between this me and the one that causes all the trouble?

When we do experience an object like warmth, we tend to think of it as something out there, on its own, by itself. We tend to think that how it got out there in the first place was from something outside of ourselves: it comes from a fire, it comes from my mother's body.

But in fact the warmth, and me too for that matter, is being produced by those seeds within my own mind. We can see this from the fact that cozy warm for one person is stifling hot to another.