Is It Easy to Eliminate Self-View (ātma-dṛṣṭi)?

Here are a few sentences excerpted from A Short History of Nearly Everything introducing material particles. Particles are not only extremely small and extremely fast, but also fleeting and transient. A particle can appear and vanish within a span as short as 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001 seconds.

Consider whether the tathāgatagarbha is busy or not? Extremely busy, yet it has no sensation and no notion of busyness. Is the arising and ceasing of matter fast? Because it is so fast—so extremely fast that it exceeds the range that the conscious mind can apprehend—the conscious mind fails to observe it, and so we come to believe that material changes are slow and that there is always plenty of time for everything.

All sentient beings are in ignorance: whatever they cannot observe themselves, they take to be nonexistent, forever trusting their own observation while being unable to trust the facts.

For something undergoing such extremely rapid arising and ceasing, what reality does it have? What obstructive quality does it have? And yet we firmly cling to the material body, believing the physical body to be real, solid, and unchangeable, incapable of being freely passed through. Because of the manas's firm clinging, a body that could originally accommodate and admit all things is obstructed by all things, with no freedom whatsoever. In reality, it is simply one's own mind obstructing one's own mind—melt the mind away!

Therefore, never think that the elimination of self-view (ahaṃkāra-mamakāra-parityāga) is easy, something to be had for the taking—reading a couple of books and thereby eliminating self-view, listening to a few hours of lectures and thereby eliminating self-view, having the mind consciousness mull it over a bit and thereby eliminating self-view, and from then on being forever cut off from the three evil destinies. There is no such simple matter, no such easy matter. If the world were full of people who had attained the first fruit and eliminated self-view, that would be sheer fantasy—something that might not even appear in a dream.

Cultivation means diligently and honestly applying oneself to practice and gradual permeation; there is no shortcut to take, and one must not resort to opportunism.