Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute workshop, psychologist and ordained Buddhist teacher Diana Taylor addresses healing, mind-body connection, and transforming suffering in the context of death and chronic illness. She begins with the neuroscience behind emotional control—how meditation and relaxation can harness the mind’s influence over the nervous system and hormones—then demonstrates a pain-control meditation from the Ian Gawler Foundation, emphasising empowerment over suppression. The core teaching explores thought transformation: stopping negative thoughts and viewing problems as opportunities for compassion, especially through Tonglen practice. Taylor illustrates how dying consciously—with clarity and acceptance—becomes a profound spiritual opportunity and a gift to those witnessing the death. She argues that diagnosis, dependency, and suffering, when met with a trained mind, transform into pathways to enlightenment and ways to generate compassion for others. The teaching is pitched at people beginning to engage with Buddhist psychology and healing practice, and draws on her own encounters with the Dalai Lama and Lama Yeshe.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 Ws 1997 03 08.mp3
UUID: a3b38e7f-5370-4a53-9b97-074327a40b91
Teacher: Diana Taylor
Collection: Workshop (Diana Taylor)
Date: 1997-03-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.7 minutes
Words: ~6,051
And instead of this kind of appearance Yep. That make me feel sick to actually embrace it. Mhmm. That rigid. We’ll do that tomorrow, because tomorrow we’ll focus more on death.
So today we’re more alive to see. If you’re exhausted tomorrow, that might be very helpful. And also with very young children who can’t communicate with babies, small preschoolers. There are two ways in which we can apply it to other people. One is by going through the meditation ourselves on their behalf.
So you don’t necessarily have to be with them for that particular. And there’s a practice called Tonglen practice, which is a very profound way of doing that. But you can also lead a meditation for a person if they’re in that state where they can go through a meditation practice. Today we’re talking about people in that category in any case. So if that’s an appropriate meditation to they’re happy to use it.
Then you can lead them through the process. Often you see, even though somebody might be like the state I was in when I was in intensive care, I couldn’t hold anything in my mind for very long, but if somebody was talking to me, I could follow what was happening. So to be led through meditation at that point can be extremely fruitful. Particularly if there’s somebody who’s got practice, who’s got a particular meditation practice. Yeah?
I don’t know. We’ve only got two days. I know. And it’s something which often comes up in other contexts. We may get to it or we may not.
But it’s it’s in Sogyal Rinpoche’s book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I asked Marilyn to have the bookshop open. When is it going to be open? Right. So yes, cruise around those books.
I’ve got a couple in my bag which I’ll leave on the table here, but please put them back if you borrow them. I can’t afford to keep on rebuying the wood. So that’s in Sogyal Rinpoche’s book, a good description of that. It’s easy to pick up from there. Okay, so the mind and pain.
Before we do this meditation, just to point out that although we talk about the mind as being distinct from the body, the mind does have this quality of being an energy. It’s a consciousness, is another way to describe it. That is not the same as the material aspect of the body. But there’s nevertheless an interdependence between one and the other. That’s quite clear.
If you read up the literature in neurophysiology and the current work on the immune system and things like that. There’s plenty of evidence now which indicates that by having some sort of control over our emotions, we also control the hormones which are running through the body. We’re controlling the functioning of the central nervous system and the neurotransmitters as well. So we can utilise the mind to alleviate physical pain. If you use hypnosis, for example, you can not only use it to alleviate physical pain, you can use it to create almost instant healing in the right sort of contexts.
Now I’m not recommending that you use hypnosis. To utilise hedonists, you need to be very aware of the dangers of using hedonists. And in particular, if somebody is psychotic or pre psychotic or if they’re severely depressed and you use hypnosis, you can get yourself into heaps of trouble. But even so, if you use the wrong sort of imagery in hypnosis, then you can get yourself into trouble. I remember when I was doing a training course with the Australian Society of Hypnosis, one of the lecturers was telling us about how he was working with a young boy who was an asthmatic to try and help the asthma.
This boy was a new patient. He asked the boy to visualise himself going off in a field and there were cows in the field and so on and so forth. What he didn’t realise was that one of the things the boy was allergic to were grasses and hay. So the boy was doing this, he was under reasonably good hypnotic trance, he got a really bad attack of asthma. And the guy who was doing it almost freaked out himself because, you know, how is he going to get this kid out of it?
So he then had to get the child to imagine that he was floating up way, way, way up high and long way from the grasses and eventually the asthma attack sort of eased up. When it eased up then he brought him out of the hypnotic trance. So that’s why I say don’t use hypnosis unless you’ve had proper training in using hypnosis. But when we’re using meditations, when we’re using relaxations, need to be aware of the same sorts of things because if you it’s like using breathing meditation with somebody who’s asthmatic. It can actually make things worse if we’re not skillful with doing it.
Be aware of that aspect of leading meditation too. The point with hypnosis is that you can immediately heal skin problems, can stop bleeding. One of the lectures I sat through was delivered by a person from the States who went through surgery on her thumb where she had the ligaments tied back onto the bones and the wrist. Now if you can imagine how painful that would be if you had it without anaesthetic. She had just done the complete operation with no anaesthetic.
She showed us the video. So the video was of herself going through this operation. Was a pretty powerful experience just to watch her face as she was talking about it. So the use of hypnosis in the control of pain, of course, can be very profound. And the use of meditation in control of the pain can be very profound as well.
But here again is one of the dangers in using these techniques to control pain. If we control the pain too much, then it might be a source of danger. An example of that is in gynaecology if a woman is in labour. You can use hypnosis so that a woman is not aware of any of the pain of labor, but if there are complications, then of course whoever is present at the delivery doesn’t know that the complication is happening. So if we’re using hypnosis not hypnosis, if we’re using meditation to help control pain, then we need to be aware of these aspects of it as well.
We’re not trying to get rid of the pain, certainly, if we don’t know the source of the pain. We’re trying to get rid of it. What we’re trying to do is to give somebody a bit of relief from the pain at that particular point and to understand the pain and to be able to have sufficient to give a person the ability to control their own mind so that they can have their own self control of the pain. If you do that, then the person knows then when there’s a change in pain. They can say to the doctor, ‘Look, this has got worse or this has got better.
The medication can be changed or the medical intervention can be changed as a result of that. So what we’re doing is not trying to come in and superimpose something on top of another person. What we’re trying to do is empower a person to utilize their own mind during this process of being ill, during the process of dying. Okay? So you’ll get a copy of this particular meditation.
There’s three meditations I’m going to go through over the weekend, and you’ll get a copy of each one of those. So this one is going to be the one which, as I say, empowers a person to have some level of control over their level of pain. Now to do this, you need to have some pain. And some of you have probably already got it one way or another. Anybody who’s just shifting their position can go back to where they were.
And if you haven’t got any pain, can do things like sitting on your heel or something like that, which is sure to give you some pain. The meditation has come from the Ian Gawler Foundation. At Tārā Institute, Institute, have the incredible good fortune to have Bob Sharples as one of the members of Tārā Institute, and Bob has worked with Ian for many, many years. The Ian Gawler Foundation is well known in Victoria for working with cancer patients, Bob has been the chairperson of the healing group since it was started up back in nineteen ninety one. So we’ve attained this particular meditation from Bob by Ian.
So it’s had a long, long use with many, many patients. It’s proved to be very helpful. So putting yourself into a position you can lie down if you want to for this one. You don’t have to sit up. Oh, this this is another point, incidentally, just before we start.
When you’re leading meditations with people, if sitting up in the meditation posture is a problem, then simply get them into a position where their back is as straight as they can make it. You don’t force them into a straight back if they’ve got some sort of spinal deformity, obviously. Try and put their body into a position where the energy is going to flow as freely as is possible given the conditions that that person is suffering from. So if you want to experiment with this lying down and seeing how meditation goes lying down, then feel free to do that too. Often when we’re doing the healing courses at Tārā Institute, most of the people will be lying flat on the floor.
They won’t be sitting up on cushions. So sitting or lying in a position where the spine is straight. At each other. First, and then I’ll tell you about my spooky life. This is the healing meditation kit, which comes from Tārā Institute.
Inside it, there’s a whole lot of talks by Lama Zopa, which if people want to take them and photocopy them, they’re welcome to do that, provided you put them carefully back into place. There’s about seventy pages of them. Now out of those, the most valuable one is the one where he’s talking at Dorje Chang Institute, and and which pages were was it? Starting on what’s page ten? Page eleven twenty three.
It was here. It wasn’t the city centre one. It was after this one. Healing mind and body, it’s called Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, Dorje Chang Institute and Mahāmudrā Centre nineteen ninety three, transcribed by and edited by Thubten Gyatso. If you want to take the pages out and photocopy it, you’re welcome to do that.
It covers most of what’s in the other talks by Lama Zopa, but in particular it has recommendations for people who are leading healing courses and who are working with healers. So if you classify yourself at that level, it’s almost essential reading. He has got a guideline for meditation on the kind, compassionate Buddhist psychology of healing through thought transformation, which he’s done in point form, and then he’s fleshed out the points. Again, it’s a very valuable article, that particular one, Healing Mind and Body, but there’s also other articles by Lama Zopa. Okay.
Well, that that’s fair enough, but it it’s there’s some excellent articles in there. The other thing I’ve got here is Lama Yeshe’s book Life, Death and After Death, which is a wisdom transcript. I don’t know if that’s currently in print, but it could be in the library here. But there, in this one, he talks about, well, life, death and after death. But with Lama, Yeshi’s inimitable way of speaking.
It’s just wonderful reading. If you wanted it in a more academic style, there’s this one, death, intermediate state, and rebirth, which probably is in the bookshop. Lati Rinpoche and Jeffrey Hopkins. And, of course, this one, good old Sogyal Rinpoche, which is should be an essential text for anybody working in this particular field. Apart from that, there’s the books by Stephen Levine, any of those books.
And this lovely book by Ken Wilbur called Grace and Grit. There’s a few slides there. Some people have read it. Grace and Grit. It’s a story about Ken’s wife.
She was diagnosed with cancer just before they went off on their honeymoon. So the whole of their marriage was dominated by the fact that his wife had cancer and ways of trying to heal the cancer. The story traces through what happened in their relationship about the various searches for cures that they went through and eventually about her death and the way the death affected Ken himself. Ken Wilbur is noted in Transpersonal Psychology. He’s written a number of books on alternative states of consciousness and levels of consciousness and things like that, some of which are incredibly academic and like sort of chewing tough meat.
But this one is a very personal book, very readable book and I’d certainly recommend that and particularly for people who’ve got a close friend who’s dying or a partner who’s dying. It’s incredibly helpful to read about the experiences of somebody who’s been through something like that. I also have a copy of the articles that he suggested you write to America to get Mhmm. who has written about what sort of help may have helped as well. Mhmm.
Yeah. That was his own healing. Yeah. Right. So lots of resources there.
And it it helps to pull and also, there’s copies of the meditations that we’ll be doing here today, which you can take with you. You’ll need them because well, I won’t tell you why. You’ll find out in after lunch. That’s right. That’s right.
Mark you out of ten. No. You’re going to test yourselves, actually. But that’s after lunch. What we’re going to do now is to do a bit more on meditations, but I want to backtrack a little bit to the mind and pain first.
Oh, sorry, I forgot about that. I promise that. Nearly. Nearly. It wasn’t deliberate.
It wasn’t conscious. I’m a psychologist by training. I’m also a mother and a grandmother. I’ve got three children and three grandchildren. Ask me about my grandchildren.
I literally grin from ear to ear, unless I’ve had to look after them for two days in a row, in which case I’ll tell you all about their negative signs. So, obviously, my children are grown. My baby’s now twenty four years old, it is a big hulking suffering type young man who objects to be caught being called the baby of the family, of course, and keeps on telling us that he has three mothers. He’s got me plus his two sisters. But he survives it all, nevertheless.
When my kids were growing up, I went back and did my post graduate qualifications in psychology. It was about that time that I came across Buddhism as well. That story is an interesting story because I was in therapy as a patient at the time, seeing as how my marriage wasn’t working terribly well and I assumed being a good little suburban housewife in those days that it was all my fault. So I was going off to therapy each day to sort this all out and one day my therapist was running late for a session. So I wandered down the street into a bookshop, which is a dangerous thing for me to do at the best of times, and came across this book called Psychotherapy East and West, which is one of Alan Watts’s books.
Those of you who have read Alan Watts know what he’s like. So I didn’t know that there’s such a thing as psychotherapy in the East, but having a curious mind I thought I’d buy the book, so I bought the book. And as I was reading it through there’s one sentence which wasn’t the main thing that this particular chapter was about but there’s just one sentence which said that the ego is simply construction of the mind. And this sentence just sort of hit me between the eyes and I suddenly realized that at least ninety percent of what I was complaining about as a patient in therapy was just something that my mind had constructed. And I could deconstruct it as easy I could construct it.
So all this sort of fell off me, and for about three weeks I felt as though was walking about three feet above the ground. I stopped therapy soon afterwards because I didn’t see much point and continue at that stage. So I also began to investigate this thing about Buddhism at that particular point. But it was about seven years before I discovered that he could actually go to Buddhist teachings in Melbourne. That stage, Traleg Rinpoche, who is a Kagyu Lama, had arrived in Melbourne about three months beforehand.
My marriage had just broken up several days beforehand. I met this guy that we subsequently lived together for seven years. It was two days after my marriage had broken up. So I met Gabriel and I met Traleg Rinpoche through Gabriel and attended teachings at the Kagyu Institute for a long time. Then Gabriel and I went on from different directions because he wanted a house with lots of people around and I wanted a house that was very quiet.
It was a bit hard for two people to live together under those circumstances. So we split up and by this stage, of course, I’d learned a lot about Buddhism from an intellectual side, but the experiential side was a bit lacking. And just as an example of this, Gabriel and I were traveling through India back in nineteen eighty two eighty one, eighty two end of eighty one, beginning of eighty two. It was just before the Dalai Lama came out to Australia for the first time. Went off Gabriel works as a radio journalist and some of you might know his program Paths to Shangri La, which used to be available on tape for a long, long time.
So he wanted to interview His Holiness to make a program to advertise His Holiness’s first trip to Australia. So we went off to Bodh Gaya, which is where the Dalai Lama was, And we’re staying in a tourist bungalow there, and the rest of the tourist tourist bungalow is packed out with FPMT monks and nuns and Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Lama’s Lama Yeshe was actually in the room next door to the room that I was sleeping in. But I wasn’t going to be a Buddhist. Right?
So I got very sick with amoebic dysentery. Adrian Feldman, some of you know him, he was there. And we’d sit on the end of my he’d sit on the end of my bed because there’s nothing he could do for me, but we talk Buddhist philosophy. So as I got better, Gabriel made an interview to to see the Dalai Lama. So being curious, of course, but not going to be Buddhist, I thought, well, I’ll see if I can come along and see what happens.
And Gabriel said, well, you know, they may say you’re not allowed through, but if the bodyguards let you through, well, why not come along? So I trot along with Gabriel, and we’re taken into this room. This is a lovely story about his holiness incidentally. Taken into a room, which just had a wooden table, wooden chairs around it, very ordinary room. And I was expecting that somebody would come and take us into a room where where there’d be lots and lots of brocade and there’d be the Dalai Lama sitting on a throne and all sorts of things like that because we’d been seeing other Lamas there and this is the sort of thing that would happen.
So we’re sitting in this room and this monk comes in and his English was fairly good and he’s talking to us about the weather and things like that. And Jeffrey Hopkins walks in. Oh. And being being an academic sort of a person, I recognize Jeffrey from the back of his books. I mean, does write nice academic books.
So Jeffrey Hopkins comes in and he turns around and starts chatting to this monk, and I suddenly realized this monk we were talking to was the Dalai Lama. So when the Dalai Lama says he is a simple ordinary monk, that is exactly the way he presented himself to us. But by this stage, I realized who I was talking. So, of course, of course, my mind had suddenly changed. The label had changed, so my mind had changed, and I was all flustered, I’d sort of hid myself in the back so Gabriel could get on with the interview.
So we go on a little diversion here because Gabriel had interviewed the Dalai Lama three years beforehand, and the Dalai Lama had told Gabe that he should study Buddhist philosophy. Well, Gabriel had bought all the books, but since I was living with him, I read them. I devoured them. Gabriel never opened them. He’d just buy them.
So Gabriel rolls out all his equipment, and he switches it on, and he’s about to ask the first question. And His Holiness says to Gabriel, Do you have any philosophical questions? And Gabriel’s very quick thinking. He said, No, but Diana does. So by this stage, I was sort of sitting here like that, and I couldn’t think of any philosophical questions despite all the conversations I’d had with Geshe-la in the previous weeks and all the books I’d read.
We traveled with Traleg Rinpoche while I was reading through Nāgārjuna’s philosophy and things like that. Couldn’t think of any of them. The only question that came to my mind was why bother meditating? I couldn’t see any point in meditating. If you can read it and understand it, why bother meditating?
So I had this wonderful teaching from the Dalai Lama about about the importance of meditation, none of which I remember, except that I thought, I’ve got to remember something of this. And he used the metaphor of the clouds in the sky, and that was the thing I sort of grabbed onto. And just to round off the story a little bit, when I was ordained two years ago, I was ordained by the Dalai Lama. The day of the ordination was in Dharmasala, just after Losar, so spring weather. And it was one of those beautifully clear days in Dharmasala.
There was not one cloud in the sky. And I was looking up at the sky and remembering how I’d met His Holiness ten years beforehand. So I was very fortunate. I met Lama Yeshe at that stage as well, just the once, which was just nine months before he died. So I had the opportunity to actually speak to Lama Yeshe, which is very fortunate.
Lama Yeshe gave me a photo and he said, Here, you might need this one day. And I thought, What am I going to need that for? But I still have the photo. But I think the combination of meeting His Holiness and Lama Yeshe certainly planted seeds in my mind. And I became more and more aware of just how important meditation is.
In those days I knew very little about the mind and I certainly didn’t know about this difference between main mind and mental factors and subtle parts of mind and things like that. When we’re meditating, what we’re doing is allowing access to that very fundamental part of mind. And you cannot do that through intellectual thought. It’s impossible to do it because intellectual thought is a cognitive process, it involves the mental factors, and this part of the mind is not the mental factors. So you can’t do it through intellectualisation.
You can start to approach it, but you can’t do it. Meanwhile, I got my degree, I went on and did a PhD, started up a private practice, worked as a student counsellor for a while. The kids grew up, left school, got married, all those sorts of things. I met Lama Zopa again, started having some very vivid dreams which I conveyed to Rinpoche. He said it would be very auspicious if I went to a Dharmasala and took ordination with His Holiness.
So that’s what I did two years ago. After my ordination Rinpoche said to teach and to run healing groups. So that’s what I’m starting to do. Get a lot of pleasure out of it. Back to work.
One of the things I didn’t mention before was about the importance of the thought transformation teachings. If we read through these and begin to understand them, this is not only powerful for our own minds but also gives us a powerful tool for helping other people. And remembering also when we’re helping other people what we’re doing is we’re empowering them. We’re not giving them anything. We’re empowering them.
So thought transformation teachings have two basic aspects. They can fall into two categories. The first one is how to stop the negative thoughts. The second one is how to see the problem as being beneficial. Obviously they’re related.
Stopping the negative thoughts and seeing the problem as beneficial. So any techniques which we can find which helps people or helps ourselves stop negative thoughts is going to create healing because that will enable people to have a more positive mind. A positive mind is a calm mind. A calm mind generates a calm body. A calm body is a body which comes back into balance.
It’s as simple as that. And the same if we see the problem as beneficial. Again, what we’re doing is generating a mind which is calm. And we can do this no matter how horrendous the problems seem to be. There are many, many techniques within the thought transformation teachings.
So, it encourages a joyful, contented mind which promotes healing. It discourages the disturbed, angry and depressed mind which promotes dis ease. The first one promotes ease, the other one promotes dis ease. We can stop negative thoughts by using techniques such as the pain meditation technique that we used before. Because again we are giving people a tool or we’re developing a tool which we can use.
By using visualisations. But also if you read Lama Zopa’s book on transforming problems into happiness and or his book on the door of satisfaction. That will give you many, many ways of working with the negative mind. Seeing the problem as beneficial. I’ll wait until the voice stops scribbling.
So what’s the best example of going through this? Transforming problems from suffering into happiness, but transforming problems is enough. The other one is the door of satisfaction. So there are two aspects to seeing the problem as beneficial. One is by seeing its inherently empty nature.
Now, there’s all sorts of things that go behind that. But I can’t teach karma and thought transformation and the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination and all those sorts of things in one weekend. But I can at least point you and say, These are the things which are worth investigating. The other aspect is using the problem as an opportunity to practice compassion. Now this is the Tonglen practice.
Using the problem as an opportunity to practice compassion, which is the Tonglen practice. Well, we’re doing in the Tonglen practice is utilising our own suffering, or this way of using it so that we actually utilize our own suffering to take on the suffering of other people. Right, right. So we take on the suffering because let’s say you’ve got toothache and instead of sitting there feeling miserable about the fact that you’ve got toothache, you meditate on all the thousands, probably millions of people around the world who are suffering from toothache at that particular time. And of those, only a small fraction will get any relief from their pain.
And if you’re a person living in a Western country, we have access to pain control techniques, we have ways of utilising our mind, we’ve had the opportunity to practice the Dharma. These people haven’t had that. And they maybe have to live with their pain. Maybe they’ve got abscesses which are going to create blood poisoning. They might even die from the fact that they’re ultimately from a toothache.
So we can develop an awareness of other people’s suffering through being aware of our own suffering. When it comes to the process of death and dying, too, is to be aware that we can use the dying process to transform our own minds. We can also use the same process to transform the minds of people around us. This is a very important point, which I’ll probably emphasise again tomorrow, but it won’t hurt to say it twice. That when a person understands that even though they are dying, I’m talking about somebody who might know that they’re going to die within a few days or a few weeks, I’m not talking about somebody who’s got a diagnosis that might be two years down the track.
Somebody whose death is imminent, by that stage, is usually physically extremely frail and there may be a lot of pain and a considerable degree of helplessness and dependency that goes with that. Normally we think of those sorts of things in negative terms, particularly if that person has been very active, particularly if that person has been, say, one of the helping professions, that to be in this state of dependency is very, very difficult. Unless we can help them to see that this very state is one of the most profound ways in which we can transform the people around us, as well as our own mind. So if we understand death, and we understand death as a transformation, as an opportunity to actually experience enlightenment. It’s the best way to experience enlightenment.
It’s the easiest way perhaps. It’s still not easy, but certainly easier than the other ways. Because we do, without any doubt, go through the stage of enlightenment while we are dying, at the end point of death. But the trouble is mostly it’s just a tiny fraction of a second, we’re not even aware of it. We do the same when we’re going to sleep, but we don’t achieve enlightenment in our sleep.
We’re certainly not all sitting around here being bodhisattvas at the moment. So if we know that we have this incredible opportunity to experience the very things that we’ve been talking about and learning about in this life, then that gives us the motivation to make use of the mind. The mind is not the body. The mind, the conscious mind, can be clouded by pain, but the other aspects, the subtle aspects of the mind, can be clear of that, if we’ve trained our mind. If we know that, if we’re approaching our death with a sense of excitement and the sense of transformation, then also the people around us will see a profound transformation in us as well.
And they will be transformed by that. When you hear stories of people being profoundly moved by the death of another person, What is it that’s happened? Why has this death been so profoundly moving? Why is it that being present at another death can be very disturbing? When a death is disturbing for us to be with, it’s because that person is frightened, they’re struggling, they don’t know what it’s about, they don’t have any sense of where they’re going or what they’re doing.
It’s just fear and physical suffering. When there’s that sense of this being a transformation, of being the very point, the pinnacle of our spiritual practice, then death is something else entirely different. And by dying in that way, we give people the awareness that they too can die in that particular way, and that death is not something to be feared. Yeah, sure. Yes.
Yes. Yeah. But also when we’re looking at people who’ve maybe just received a diagnosis of cancer or AIDS or people also who are suffering from chronic illnesses which are debilitating, The same thing applies that because of the illness there is not that opportunity to run around and do things for other people. There is a quality dependency which comes. But if we understand the workings of the mind and how we can use the mind, then the illness itself becomes a profound transformation and the illness itself becomes a way of practising compassion.
So you’re not then practicing compassion by running out and doing things for other people. You’re practicing compassion perhaps by doing the Tonglen practice. Practising compassion in the sense of developing that calmness and clarity of mind which is within and beyond any sort of physical dependency and physical pain. And developing a mind towards that mind which can experience enlightenment at the time of death. So when we have a diagnosis like that, in some ways it’s a very fortunate thing to happen.
I used to think that my preferred way of dying would be to die suddenly in a car accident. So then I wouldn’t know anything about it. That was long before I became a Buddhist. But now I would much rather somebody say to me, Look, you’ve got cancer, you’ve got two years, which would mean to me, Okay, my body’s going to deteriorate, so what am I going to do about my mind? What I notice when we’re working with the healing groups is that people who come to those sorts of healing groups come with a mind which is let go very often of the ordinary day to day things which bother us because they are not well enough to cope with them in any case.
And they’re left with the central factors and the central question: What is the meaning of life? If we want to find the meaning of life, then one of the things we do is to have to understand death. If we understand death, then we understand something about life. The Dalai Lama said the meaning of life is very simple, to practice compassion. Yes.
Well, it’s important to realise that when we’re talking about the mind in that context, what you’re referring to is the conscious mind. We don’t know what’s happening at the subtle and the very subtle levels. That’s one thing to be aware of. The fact that the conscious mind is not functioning well doesn’t mean to say we’re not necessarily doing the practices. So in that situation, when I was in intensive care and I couldn’t remember the mantras, nevertheless the intention to do the mantras was imprinted there and a sense of lama zopa being present even if I couldn’t put it into words in my mind.
Was a sense of something being present there as well, a sense of being protected. So we don’t know what’s happening within the more subtle aspects of a person’s mind. That’s one thing. Second thing is when we do practices on behalf of a person, even though they may not understand at all what it is that we’re doing, the fact that we’re doing those practices is working again at these subtle levels of mind. And I mean there are countless stories about healing, Christian healing groups who practice healing and things like that.
Many, many stories about it. Some are probably true, some are probably not true. But this power of the mind is incredible. If we are aware that it is something beyond our conscious beyond the conscious mind of the person and use our faith in our practice, our faith in our lamas, then that allows these more subtle aspects of energy to be functioning as well.