Violence, little meditation. People send forth prayers for all of those who have died in the past because of violence, conflict and other such terrible and utterly unnecessary means and send out auspicious thoughts that may those beings who died, may they rest in peace or go in happiness and in present and in future that such causes of violence and killing may cease from our little planet. See, we’re going to do this for the whole hour of my talk. There’s a few chairs in front here. It’s always good to come late because you always get the best seats.
Generally at public events, if there’s something to be learned as a sign of that, the back seat fill up first. Yeah, if anyone else, just tell them, come in, pick up a chair and put it somewhere. Donnie. If anyone comes late, tell them to come in, pick up a chair and sit up here, okay? So, I’d like to begin by telling the story of the passing or the death of one of my thirty or thirty five teachers that I had while living in the Himalayas, I tell it because he was very much of an inspiration to me in my personal life and also because I think in many many ways he exemplified the attitudes that we should all have toward death and dying.
He was an elderly lama. He’d been the abbot of one of the great Tibetan monasteries for six years and then of another very special monastery for about fourteen years. Then in his old age, the Dalai Lama had told him not to teach anymore because he was too old and his heart was bad and high blood pressure and all the things that start happening to people after they hit seventy or eighty or ninety. So, as a result, he didn’t teach publicly from the last years of his life. And, I had met him and become quite good friends with him and he said to me, Well, to practice your Tibetan, polish your Tibetan.
Come once a week and sit with me and I’ll help you practice Tibetan and I’ll be your Tibetan teacher. He said, Just come drink tea and chitchat with me. And, when he The guideline he gave me for how to learn to speak Tibetan was that I wasn’t allowed to pass any Tibetan on the road if I met them without stopping them and talking to them and I wasn’t allowed to let them leave until I had made them laugh. Now when you’re starting to learn a language that’s a bit of a challenge. Even here in Australia it is But anyway I did my best at it over the years and with some of my other I also had to do it then with everyone so when I went to visit my other great teachers many of whom were tough stern, you know, forty years in meditation retreat stuff.
I’d have to apply the same principle to them because we’re not supposed to discriminate between human beings, right? So they have to get the same thing. So I’d go in and sit with them and start talking and talking and five minutes will go by and ten minutes and fifteen. They’re kinda wondering why is he still here? I’d finish that topic of conversation and start trying, okay what else can we say here?
That didn’t work. What else can work? Anyway, this old Lama who gave me this advice was a very, very, wonderful man and I would go and drink tea with him once a week for generally half an hour or an hour and he’d sort of review my progress in both in Tibetan and my language and in my philosophical studies and in my personal practice, my meditation. So, after about five or six years went by, it’s a tradition that every year at New Year, even if the old, Lama is ill and whatnot, for auspicious reasons, you say, Well, I hope sometime this year, you’ll be well enough to give a teaching. So, went in this one year and he said, Oh yeah, sure.
I’ll do it this year. And he pulled out his calendar and he picked a date about two and a half months or so down the way. And he said, you know, I’m just teaching you Tibetan so I’ll organize for a translator. You bring, you know, a dozen, two dozen friends, however many you like to put in the room, it’s not a big room. And so, we went to, we went on that basis.
I was very surprised because he wasn’t, he’d been told by the Dalai Lama not to not to give kind of formal teachings. Anyway, the day of the teaching came and we all went in and sat down and he started teaching. And when he would speak he’d be laughing and giggling and his arms moving and very animated, very free but when he wasn’t speaking and the translator was speaking he’d kinda go a little bit like that. And after four or five or six times of translating back and forth, I’d never seen him do that before so I wondered what was going on and I was sitting right in front of him so I leaned across and asked him in Tibetan. Rinpoche what’s going on with this business?
Are you like thinking what to say next or trying to figure out if what you just said was wrong or what’s going on? He said well actually I’m having a heart attack And he said it totally casually with a big smile. Like absolutely nothing was wrong. And so because he said it so casually it kind of shocked me and I didn’t have an instant response. Was like, Is that serious?
Is he teasing? What’s going on? Anyway this goes on for another two or three times with him speaking and laughing and nothing wrong and when the translator translates him looking very concentrated kind of a little reddish purplish. So, I leaned across and said, Really? A heart attack?
Like a real one? Like a bad one? And he says, Yep, a real one. A bad one. Then the translator finished speaking and it was his time again so he like laughs and he’s choking and speaking and the subject he’s talking about is death and dying.
And so he’s going on and this goes back and forth. And so between him and the translator another two or three times happened before I kind of figured because he said it so casually and when he’s teaching he seemed completely unaffected. So then I leaned across and said like, you know, isn’t that like kinda serious? Like, shouldn’t we stop this talk, this teaching? I send everyone home and like you take a rest or something?
And he looked at me again totally casually like it was a sunny, you know, Sunday afternoon. He says, Well that’s up to you. The teaching is for you. You requested it. So we can finish now or we can finish later whichever you like.
And again it threw me into quandary. Finish now, finish later, finish now, finish later. And he said it so casually so again two or three times he spoke, the translator’s fine. But then I thought well, I’m starting to lose my nerve a little bit here. So I leaned across and said well I think it was up to me maybe it’s a good idea to stop now and finish later.
So he looked at me and says really? That’s really what you want to do? So I sort of thought about it and said, Yeah, yeah, good idea. So, the next time he spoke he said, Well, that’s it for today. I’ll finish the rest with you next time.
And he goes like this, get up and get out sort of thing. So, everyone gets up and gets out and I help him off his chair. Gets up and wanders into the other room, sits down in meditation, just sits in meditation, sits in meditation, sits in meditation, sits in meditation, and passes away. And, later I listened to the tape and on his tape he was saying that, if in our lifetime we can only learn to do one thing well, that’s to live with the knowledge that our death is imminent, it can happen at any one time and when it does happen the way we die very much reflects the value of our life. The grace, the dignity, the knowledge with which we die in a way summarizes or symbolizes or represents the totality of what we have accomplished during our lifetime.
And I think, you know, as I thought about it and I thought about the way he had lived and, whatnot and then I thought about the way he had died to be able to die with such grace, such tenderness, such gentleness, such caring. And, over the next days we learned that, he had, the night before written out his last will and testament. He called in his elder students, disciples and for Tibetans last will and testament means you leave parting advice like this disciple should do this retreat, that disciple should go and do this study, that training, whatever. So he’d done his sort of last testament the night before that teaching. And the morning when he had gotten up he had walked outside with his attendant and he’d looked at the sun and at these clouds.
He said, Well look at those clouds. Aren’t we just like them floating through space? And then now they’re here and soon they’re gone. And so, all of the people in Dharmasala were, who had known him for years, were very very moved. After he died he sat in meditation with no heartbeat or no breathing without any signs otherwise of death like no loss of fluids, no Tibetans call that tuk tung.
They say the great yogis when they die they call their attention, their awareness into their heart chakra and they sit there and wait for the perfect moment to leave the body. But he did this for three or three and a half days and during that time the Dalai Lama had been giving a big teaching and all of the monks from both monasteries he had been abbot of were in town. So they had actually, during that time, got in, got to come in and visit him and say a final goodbye to him. So in that same way, I thought if I can, in that same way live in such a way that when I die I can go out with that degree of humility, that degree of composure, that degree of dignity, self presence of mind. Then okay.
So, that is a very interesting subject. I think I’ll look into it a little bit more. So, I started essentially just researching various aspects of Tibetan culture related to the death dying phenomena and then trying to see how that shed meaning on this experience with this, teacher or lama of mine and eventually and you know I brought it out in book form as one of my books, from my many prolific books. Death and Dying, the Tibetan Tradition. When we speak about death and dying what we’re really talking about is the nature of life, isn’t it?
It’s something to do with our life, Our mortality. The fact that we live each day as though with the, with as the Tibetan expression goes, with the Lord of death sitting on our shoulders. That the presence of death in our life is something all pervasive every minute of our life. Something always there. There is never one single moment in our whole life when the Lord of Death is not there sitting on our shoulders.
That essentially, people die in the womb, they die coming out of the womb, they die as infants, they die as children, they die as teenagers, they die in their twenties, in their thirties, their forties, their fifties. I think the oldest person in France died just a few months ago, one hundred and twenty three years old. But everyone eventually dies and none of us know when. Somehow this reality is something very significant to us, isn’t it? It’s like a factor of our life which is extremely, extremely significant.
For instance, if you had your money in a bank and the rumor was out that that bank could fold any day. In a way, that’s the situation during our life. Somehow humans don’t seem to notice. There’s a wonderful story in the Bhagavad Gita, one of the great Hindu Indian classics. Yudhishthira goes up a hill in search of the great bow which he will need for his adventure and he has to at each stage of the journey answer puzzling questions, riddles in order to get by the guardian and go on to the next stage of getting up to get the bow.
At one point he’s asked, What are the three greatest mysteries in this world? What are the three greatest, amazing factors? What’s the most amazing astounding three things? And he said, he thought about it and he said, Well the first is that every human being, every living being will die but they all live. They all act as though it only happens to others.
They live completely unconscious of it, unaware of it, almost blind to their own mortality. They walk along completely one hundred percent ignoring their own mortality. They make plans for next year, next decade, next generation Not knowing which will come first, their next breath or their death. The second most amazing factor, he said, is that, while this is the reality, the fact that any living being could die actually at any moment. So even those who kind of intellectually accept their own mortality kind of live under this false assumption that there’s some predestined time like when they’re eighty two or ninety three or one hundred and six or one hundred and twenty or something like that.
Whereas in fact, it could be the next finger snap. And finally, he said, while this is the actual reality of the situation, they themselves go along without really investigating, without really looking into what is the nature of life, what is the nature of death. They just carry on with things as though the reality of their mortality were a non existent phenomena. So, the guardian at the gate said, you got it right. You can go.
Then he went on to his next stage and his next riddle. Riddles are always dangerous things. When Tibetans speak about how we should think of or how we should deal with death and dying, it, we can They do it in a number of ways. The first, they speak about it in terms of its spiritual significance. The spiritual significance of death and dying, of impermanence.
And there they talk about three types of death. Like many things in Tibetan, these are given extremely technical, complicated names. It’s called rough, subtle and very subtle. Sort of like in the What is it in the jewelry business? Very and very, very, very well cut and very, very well cut.
Anyway, rough, subtle and very subtle. Rough death refers to the fact of our loss of our body, the parting of body and mind. It’s also called the great death. Subtle death refers to how at each day, when we go to sleep at night the body goes like halfway to death. The mind goes into a state which is somewhere in another regions between living and being dead.
We’re not really alive, we’re not really in this world, we’re not really dead, we’re not really at the other world. We go into a state where in fact we can look both ways. We can look back into this life and we can look the other way, into death. So that’s the subtle. And on the very subtle, this is the way, the aspect in which moment to moment we kind of peak, crash, and are reborn.
Moment by moment everything we were in the past comes to a standstill and the whole process really begins again. Something like our western saying, now is the first moment of the remainder of your life. In a sense each moment we die, each moment we’re reborn. We’re reborn on the ashes of the previous moment. So each of these three aspects has a somewhat different significance spiritually or application, spiritual application.
In the Tibetan world, the first one, because each moment we die, each moment we’re reborn, this means we’re in a constant state of flux, change and transformation. That dynamic is the biggest key to our release, our growth, our transformation, our freedom. That when we understand that each moment we can begin anew, we can drop little bits from the past and pick up new little things for the future. We can begin to build our spiritual character. We can begin to build the qualities of our life, the nature of the directions in which we will unfold.
Until we notice that we don’t really come to grips with it, do we? That essentially noticing this subtle, very subtle, very subtle death, We get this, unless we notice that, we think, Oh, that’s just the way I am. Or, That’s just the way he is. Such and such. Oh yes, he’s this kind of habit, that kind of habit, this kind of person, that kind of person.
We think of them as kind of fixed or frozen in that format. But as we can see, from the histories of every spiritual tradition, this is not the way things are. You know, Paul of Tarsus riding along the road falls off into his falls off his horse, hits his head on the ground. Unlike us Irishman, who have much thicker skulls, he goes into a swoon and a trance. He comes out of it and he realizes the way he’s been living, way his mind has been working, the way he’s been thinking, the type of character he’s built, the kind of lifestyle he’s built, is a negative thing.
So he gets up and he thinks, drop it, start again. And he drops it and he starts again. And as a result we don’t call him Paul, today we don’t call him Paul the murderer or Paul the oppressor or Paul the bloody or names we use for Ivan the Terrible and peoples like that, which he was much like that until that point in his life. As a result, today we call him Saint Paul. Both us Irish Protestants and us Irish Catholics alike call him Saint Paul.
This dynamic of how we die each moment, how we are reborn each moment, is the manner or the reality of how our own happiness lies in our own hand. It’s the dynamic or the reality of how we can become great, how we can achieve greatness, how we can step by step slowly by slowly refine our spirit, refine the mind, develop it step by step, let the negative faults fall away, anger, jealousy, pride, hatred, all of the qualities of the mind that obstruct our own happiness and the manner in which we bring happiness or fail to bring happiness or bring the opposite of happiness into the lives of others. This dynamic is the key by which one goes from taking a downhill road, to taking an even road, to taking an uphill road. When we understand this dynamic, we are truly at the gateway of our own future transcendence. That mirror realization itself is a kind of a mini enlightenment.
Until that, we essentially put up with things the way they were. When we understand that, essentially each moment of our life takes a completely different significance than it had previously. So that’s the first. The first way in which the Tibetans speak about death and dying, trying to live in each moment with total awareness that this moment I die, this moment I’m reborn. This moment I die, this moment I’m reborn.
Something good, arises, you think this is coming, this will go. Something bad arises, negative and difficult, you think, this arises, this will go. And trying to move through that moment by moment in such a way as to bring greater happiness and transcendence to oneself and bring greater happiness and transcendence to others. The second sort of spiritual implication of death and dying, the subtle death, how each day we die at night when we go to sleep, a kind of a mini death and each day we’re reborn. Each morning, the next morning, we’re reborn.
In a way it’s taking the dynamic of how moment by moment we die and we are reborn and putting it, kind of stretching time a little bit. You know it’s a little difficult sometimes for people to, get right into the present moment. Things are kind of flowing, moving so fast. A moment seems so small. But a day, that’s kinda something you can work with, you know, like, well a day, I can like figure out where a day is.
The hair now, it’s like by the time you notice it, it seems to be gone. But a day is like you can be in the evening in the morning. In the morning you can be in the evening in your mind and at noon you can be in the morning in your mind. You can sort of throw yourself across the day back and forth back and forth kinda handling it, you know. the hearer and now that’s much slipperier fish to grab hold of.
So the spiritual significance of this second aspect of death, the way at the time of sleep the body almost dies, it goes into a death like state. And in the and you know, the mind itself has very little link to this what’s going on in this life. You know, there’s this fellow lying in bed, you know, kind of a poor uncomfortable bed in a miserable kind of an ordinary kind of room. You know, he dreams of like going to a paradise where he’s the only guy and there’s five thousand wonderful females there who all think he’s like biggest hero this side of Kalamazoo and it’s like, there he is just lying in his bed, nothing happening, right? But in his mind he’s totally gone to this paradise.
You know they say paradise is what, depending on where you come from, you know? Like the Arabs being in the desert always think of paradise as warm and moist and fertile oasis kind of places. People from mountains think of paradise as being kind of flat We actually don’t notice the landscape. But anyways, this fellow lying in his room in this kind of ordinary room, nothing special going on, know, maybe he hasn’t eaten dinner that night but there his mind is totally in some other world, some other realm. Then when you get up in the morning, somehow you have a feeling which is considerably different than the feeling you went to bed with, depending on your dreams.
The spiritual significance of this, is multi dimensional in the Tibetan or in the Buddhist tradition. Firstly, in terms of our own transformation, you know, at the end of the day, we should look back over the day. We review our day. Now we set certain kind of standards for ourselves. We look at our day, we review the whole day.
When did I fail to maintain my own standard of dignity, standard of human goodness, standard of human growth, standards of peace, standards of ethics, standards of focus and concentration, standards of gentleness and kindness with others, those kind of issues. We look over it. And then we think, Well, this is really just a moment. This is just a moment. This day is just like one moment in my infinity.
And so you think, Okay, let me notice that. Let me notice that. Let me notice that. Let me send out some kind of positive feeling towards anyone I’ve wronged today, any way I’ve failed today or people I’ve harmed today in any way. Tonight, when I go to sleep, I’m going to sleep with a very strong thought that in the next moment, which is tomorrow, I’m going to learn from today, take the lessons from today into tomorrow.
What I’ve learned about myself today will become my tools, my power, my strength for tomorrow. And waking up in the morning the next day to go into the day with that attitude. So, in the Tibetan world, this is, the first implication of the subtle death or the first application. Looking on your day by day as kind of a an experiment in your own spiritual development, own spiritual unfoldment. You look at it, how did that experiment go?
What did I learn from it? What can I do with it? That’s the first level. Second, level of this second aspect of death and dying is because when we go to sleep it’s very very much like when we die, on a number of levels. That essentially we lie down, the way the body’s, energies relax are very similar to the way the body relaxes at the time of death.
Traditional scriptures sort of describe it like this energy dissolves into that energy and the mind has this kind of vision, this kind of flash, this kind of sensation. That each day as you go to sleep the same kind of feelings or sensations or levels of consciousness transformation occur as occur exactly at the moment of death. If you watch your body at the moment you go to sleep, you watch as the it loses what we call the earth element, it loses the ability to move the arms and whatnot, look at the state of consciousness at that time. Then as the heartbeat slows, look at the state of consciousness. Then as the breath lowers, look at the state of consciousness.
And as it goes right, and then when it flips from the moment of being awake to being asleep, try to stay as alert or watchful through that process as possible. At the time of death, you’re going to experience the exact same thing. If you had learned how to go to sleep well, you will know how to die well. If you had learned how to dream well, your after death experience will be very similar. We say, Look at your dreams, you know what your death will be like.
If you do not remain aware in your dreams, you will not remain aware after death. If you get confused in dreams, you’ll get confused after death. Your dream body is the kind of the test plane, if you will, in which day by day you get to take a little practice flight into the death state. That each day when those dreams occur, it’s very, very similar to the way the after death state arises. So, Tibetans say, Tibetan yogis, Tibetan mystics say, Understand sleep, understand dream, you’ll understand death, you’ll understand the way the flow happens, consciousness flow happens after the death state.
We say the Bardo, the state between death and rebirth. So this is the, second implication of the subtle death. The way in which we can use our going to sleep moment and our dream moments as ways of exploring the after death state. It’s also said for yogis and yoginis that if they do this consciously and pursue it, for a number of months or a number of years, like on a day by day basis, their sleeping will become increasingly refined and their dreaming will become such that in dreams they only dream lucidly. They will be awake in their sleep, awake in their dreams.
And I’m sure all of you here have had some experience of that. Occasionally you’ll have a dream when suddenly you’ll know that it’s a dream. Then you can’t be sure if you’re awake knowing it’s a dream or if you’re asleep dreaming that you know it’s a dream. It’s kind of It happens randomly, whenever the elements of our body and the elements of our mind come into a kind of a perfect, juxtapositioning. But in terms of training, we ourselves can use it very easily as a training process or very directly as a training process.
So, this is the second spiritual implication. The third thing that it said here is that, with the subtle death, the third thing is that this way in which we go to sleep, dream and wake up, on another level it reflects the entirety of universal experience. I think it’s a little bit similar to the Christian idea of God the Father, God the Holy Ghost, God the Son. In a way, the moment of going to sleep is like God the Father. Uh-huh.
The way between going to sleep and waking up in Christian terms is a little bit like God the Holy Ghost. The way of waking up is a little bit like God the Son. That essentially these three states in Buddhism, I mean nothing between systems is really works on a closely scrutinized level because terminology, linguistics, cultural environments are so different. But the idea here is that when we go to sleep, just for a moment, our mind touches to the infinite nature of being. Just for a moment, it touches infinity.
We call it Dharmakāya. In Christianity that’s a little bit I think like the God the Father idea because everything comes from that. We touch that infinity just like everything comes from infinity, we come into dreams. Now the dreams, are largely an emotionally based state. They are mostly based within the conceptual mind and the fluidity of our emotions.
When infinity moves into the finite the first dimension of its movement is something like a holographic image, it’s an etheric level. Something quite subtle not to be seen by the ordinary eye heard with the ordinary air. It happens in another dimension of reality like for instance that, seventh person and the person in the seventh row back there is snoring away and presently dreaming. If we listen, we don’t hear their dream. You know, if we look, we don’t see the dream.
In that same way, when we go from infinity at the moment of sleep, that just moment when we touch infinity, The moment after that as we enter the dream, it’s like entering a state halfway between infinity and the conventional finite. It’s a level of the finite but it’s above the ordinary level or different than the ordinary level. We experience dreams in kind of a finite sense like we have three cows in the dream or seven motorcycles or something like that. So it’s something finite, countable, form and so forth. But on the other hand it’s not ordinary form.
It’s something in a dimension other than this ordinary dimension or conventional everyday dimension. Then we come out of that. The moment as we come out of that, the first moment of waking up, all beings are in a state of somewhat innocence. The first moment you wake up, like, you probably had the experience of being somewhere, you wake up and you can’t remember where you are, like if you’re traveling, on a lecture teaching tour or something. You wake up three o’clock in the morning and you say, Oh, is this London?
Paris? I can’t smell the fish, it can’t be Paris. It’s like, the first moment you wake up, there’s kind of purity in the mind, kind of an innocence or naivety in the mind. Then we move out of that and we go into our ordinary condition, conceptual way. In the third level or aspect of this subtle death as the going to sleep dreaming waking up process.
We say, The moment of going to sleep, that’s like infinity. The moment between sleep and waking up, that’s like the beatific body and the moment of waking up, that’s like the pure emanation body. That we experience the three dimensions of being infinity, subtle finite and ordinary finite in their completeness during that process and for one moment each, the first moment of each, we experience them in their purity. So Tibetan Yogis work on that, they practice Sleep Yoga, Dream Yoga and eventually get into the state where they can fully experience these, those levels of the pure mind quite, completely. Like we should take turns in the West, you know, like, instead of like, to save water and electricity and all these things, you know.
People in Kensington Park have to like sleep and practice sleep dream yoga all next week and People in the west part of town have to do it the week after and move around. Tibetans take this aspect very seriously and consider it to be one of the most easy ways to get to a mystical knowledge, to get the knowledge of the nature of your life, the nature of your mind and the nature of existence, the nature of this life experience and the nature of death. They think that particularly in the dream state it’s the easiest way of unfolding powers such as clairvoyance, higher vision and spiritual seeing, spiritual sight and so forth. So they cultivate it very intensely. For instance, one of my Gurus in India, for thirty years he slept twenty three hours a day.
This was his main practice. We think. And twice a day he could get up for half an hour each. Once to have a little and both of those times people could visit him and he’d say a few words. And he’d get up and have, well the first time he’d have a little munch and then chitchat with the visitors.
Then he’d go back to bed for another eleven hours. Eleven and a half hours. And then eleven and a half hours later he’d get up and have another little munch and go to the washroom, take a little shave, say hello to anyone else who was there to visit. And the cute thing was he had a little Tibetan LLhasa Apso dog which followed the identical routine. He’d sort of shuffle out of his bed, shuffle out into the other room, sit down, say hello to any visitors.
He was one of the very very senior most Lamas to come out of Tibet now. I’m not trying to say monks are lazy but he slept a lot for twenty, for about thirty years. And anyway, finally all of the lineage holders in his specific peer group, those Lamas who held similar lineages, all of them had died or passed away or just disappeared. Maybe in their sleep. But anyway, so they had all gone so he was the only one left alive.
Just goes to prove it’s safe to stay home in bed. So the Dalai Lama wrote him a letter. You know, in your lineage everyone except you is dead. It looks like you’re gonna have to get out of bed and do some work. That’s very sweet.
That was like, six six and a half years ago. So he got up out of bed and turned over a no leaf and since then he sleeps one hour a day and he’s up twenty three hours a day. So this is the second implication. The third implication, coarse death, a rough death. There are essentially two things involved.
One is what we should know to benefit ourselves and the other is what we should know to benefit others. Essentially we need to both of those are significant to any one individual. We ourselves should learn how to die well. We should know how to die in such a way that it will bring the most benefit to ourselves as the dying person, so that we enter the hereafter in the maximally focused state of mind. That’s the first thing we have to know.
If during our life we have learned nothing else, at the moment of death, that will be the most precious thing we know, the most precious thing we own. And if we learn ten thousand things, even though they help us until the moment of death, the knowledge of how to die in full awareness, full alertness is going to be a great, great jewel for us as individuals. It benefits us, it also benefits those around us. If we can die with dignity, we can die with joy, it’s good for us, it’s also good for our loved ones. You know, if, we can’t die well, we can’t die with dignity, we can’t die with composure, it’s not gonna help us and also it’s gonna bring added, sadness and added, confusion to our children, our grandchildren and our loved ones.
When someone dies well after they’re gone everyone has a kind of a very pleasant after flavor in their mouth. They think, Oh well, they lived well, they died well and now we inherit their house. Then we can live in it happily and say well you know Aunt Marpa who lived so well and died so well used to live here and we can say that quite happily whereas if they die badly we’re not even so sure, we’re glad we inherited that house. And we do inherit it. We’ll think, Oh, ghosts, this, that, the other bad energies.
Or we’ll hang around and it’ll remind us of the way she died badly or he died badly. We won’t have the same feeling at all. So it’s beneficial to self and beneficial to others if one knows how to die, with dignity, with alertness, with awareness. So in the Tibetan world, there’s always been a big emphasis on this. That, all of our life, we should try to live as well as we can.
And we shouldn’t think that death is just the end of a life lived well. It really is a total life experience in itself. It’s a complete and very profound, very important process, part of the process of our life. I think almost every great mystic in the Buddhist tradition from the time of the Buddha has made a big point of this with their own death. That, very seldom does anyone simply like, you know, fall off a horse or, and get run over by a stampede of yaks or something like that.
They seem to always kind of plan their death and as they get older and older they seem to watch the processes of their unfolding destiny, read the signs and then as they move towards their death, essentially do so in such a way that they leave a little gift, spiritual gift, in their dying. During their dying they leave everyone that was close to them and important to them a little spiritual gift, a little spiritual message. In one of my books, Mystical Verses of a Mad Dalai Lama which is about the life and times of the second, the great second who lived in the fifteenth century, he signed all his poems Mad Beggar Monk or Mad Mystic mad wanderer names like that, he always threw in the name mad. And he also died in that same mad kind of a way. The way his life is told is very typical of the mystics and saints of the Indo Tibetan tradition and the emphasis on how we should die ourselves in such a way as to leave everyone with a little parting gift.
A parting gift of our love, of our joy, of our wisdom, and of our humor. You know, if someone dies badly, it kinda makes us question the whole validity of the way they lived, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s okay if they just get shot, that’s not their fault. You can’t expect someone to get shot nicely or, something like that but otherwise any sort of like someone shooting you or getting run over by a train or airplane crashing on your head or something if someone actually gets to look at the way you die and those ones who are loved, close ones, it has a big influence on the totality of the sense they have of you in their life. It very much gives a context to everything else in your life.
So, because of this, all the great masters have emphasized that. So it’s said when the second Dalai Lama was getting old, he just walked around, he went on a teaching tour to all those places he had gone in his life. And at each place he said, Well, this is the last time I’m visiting, I’m too old to come anymore, so goodbye to you all. And he gave each of them a little sort of parting advice. And went to every single place over a period of about a year and a half and he’d gotten so old that on many of them they had to carry him on a of a plank one over some of the mountain passes but, because he was in his eighties.
But it took great pains to show that care, that consideration, that dignity with each, person with whom he had been close and in whose lives he had played an important role. And then he said, Well, I’ll go back to Gell, my monastery up in the mountains, to die. And the main, kind of disciples from all those areas, he told them, Come up, this winter I’m going to pass away, and it would be nice if you were there when I did so, you can join me. So they all went up and, everyone was sitting around at the lake of Gyal, When’s he gonna go? When’s he gonna go?
But when it finally came time, he just said, Well, it’ll be in this month. And he went and on the tenth day, which is the most auspicious day, he began meditating in the temple. And he called everyone with him and people came and went, but he himself did not leave the temple, his seat or his throne in the temple for the next two and a half days. His attendant said to him, Well, aren’t you getting a little sleepy? He said, Well, actually, you know, when you’re like this old and you’ve been meditating this many years, there’s not much difference between sleeping and waking, Between dreaming dreaming you’re dreaming and dreaming you’re not dreaming.
That, between meditation and meditation even, no difference. So he says, I’ll just sit here for a while. And he sat, and he sat. And then gave a last kind of half hour discourse to his, main students and just sat up in meditation and passed away. But I think, even if ordinary peoples, can’t plan with quite that amount of detail or bring that much finesse in it, into the way they use their old age and their death, I think at least we can learn, at least we can get the hint that there’s something significant about the way we do our death, the way we prepare for our death.
Now Tibetans of course like to do everything in exotic, mystical exotic ways, so what they do is when they know they’re going to die and before they’re too ill, do a retreat called poa where they practice how best to leave the body with most awareness at the time of death. So then, they go into retreat and they do this thing where they imagine the consciousness shooting from the base of the spine up to the crown and they bring it up and down and up and down and up and down, taking deep breaths and doing it with power breathing or pressure breathing. Eventually, you do it until you get a little blister on top of your head from the power of your meditation. Tibetans like to do everything with great dignity and then at the end they take a little flower and they pop it in the blister and they walk around with that on their head for a week or two. It’s a very special little flower it’s not like your average flower, you know?
Oh yeah, it’s kind of cute little, the flower I meant Actually, in the Tantric tradition, it’s a flower with certain medicinal qualities, so when you put it in there, it puts a chemical into this part of your head, so that at the time you die, this passage, it’s believed that chemical kind of keeps the energy circuitry open, so at the time of death you can project out. So, Tibetans, the first thing you do for yourself is to learn how to die well, to study the death process, watch it in your sleep and dreams, essentially become familiar with dream body as death body, going to sleep as going into death. Then do the kind of retreat where you open the death passage, those are the most important things they themselves do. In terms of what we do for others at the time of death, this again is something with, on which they have built a very specific spiritual philosophy or philosophy of dying, what do call it, Thanatology, whatever you want to call it, what you do with people when they’re dying, how you behave around them, the kind of mind states you encourage within them, the way you deal with them physically, emotionally and so forth.
So, many of the texts go into this in great detail. In the Buddhist tradition, Tibetan, Indo Tibetan tradition, their idea is essentially that the beings who are around the dying person play almost as much a role as the person who’s dying. That our lives spin on and on in many, many forms, but at the time of death, we bring something into the foreground, the rest of us recedes into the background. What we bring into the foreground of our mind is like the tip of the arrow. What’s in the back is like the remainder of the arrow.
So all of us have many things going for us. Some of us have some weaknesses, some failings. In the Christian world we say some sins or wrong doings or whatever. In Buddhism we say we have some confusions or some negative karma, some lack of liberation, lack of knowledge, lack of freedom and, an excess of the five kleshas or spiritual poisons, psychic poisons, mind poisons, anger, attachment, pride, jealousy, and mental unclarity or lack of focus. That, these, if the negative comes at the time of death into our consciousness, it’s not a healthy thing, not a good sign.
If the positive comes into the mind at the time of death, this, like the tip of the arrow, will determine how the arrow flies. So, how we deal with someone at the time of death, the kind of states of mind we encourage within them, the kind of feelings, emotional tone, ambience we establish, makes a big difference. And of course Buddhists always like to take a poke at great people. And so they talk about King Ashoka, who was India’s first empire emperor. He had united everything from south of India all the way up to Afghanistan over Calcutta, the borders of Burma, all of Pakistan and so forth, all were under his rule.
And he had been a great, warrior, killed many people in his life in putting together this empire, but also after he had finished he became a very spiritual person and built thousands of temples everywhere and did a lot of good things for the people after he had killed the people who didn’t want him to become emperor. So, like most of us, he had both good and bad going for him. He had the bad of having killed so many people, the good of after he became emperor, he did very much good generally in his empire. He was a genuinely good emperor after becoming emperor. So he had both going for him.
Now he hadn’t achieved any high level of spiritual knowledge himself and he hadn’t been become a mystic or a great meditator himself, but still he had both good things, both good and bad going. So his after death experience could have gone any way. So he’s kind of destined. He had the momentum to go in a good positive direction at the time of death. But, like all the kings in those ancient times, he sort of pampered himself by having lots of serving girls around.
And in the old days, any respectable king or emperor always had three or four standing around with peacock fans. And the days before air conditioning, all that sort of stuff, you know. It was tough, I tell you. Tough. Anyway, so they’re sort of fanning him with a peacock fan.
And one of the peacock fanners come a little close to him and sort of brush his nose with the Peacock fan and being an emperor this sort of irritated him and just at that moment he died so as a result he’s after after death experience he died in this like really angry state of mind like you dummy you hit my nose with a peacock fan how dare you? So if any of you are working in the hospice industry please don’t hit your patients on the nose with Peacock fans at the moment they’re going to die Anyway, in general the idea is how we the kind of energy we put around people for their dying process makes a big difference to how they themselves spiritually and psychologically evolve That, most of us, we evolve a lot between about ages zero and eighteen or twenty. Those are like our years of continually changing, growing, transforming. We hit twenty and we go from twenty to like ninety or one hundred without much real character change. Ninety percent of humans, you know, they kind of just get on a particular thing and take off on it and they’re gone and that’s it.
You don’t see them for another ninety years and at the next time you see them ninety years later they’re almost exactly the same character wise they’re just like shriveled a bit but then as the death process starts setting in suddenly their mind starts changing very very radically suddenly they notice, Hey, this horse I’ve been riding for the last seventy years is like kick the bucket! It looks like I’m kicking the bucket! And they kind of reexamine their life and look over everything in minute and very intimate detail and get a very different take on it than they had while racing along on this horse blindly full blast in the night. And so the last few weeks, the last month or few months of a dying person, of a person’s life as they slowly die, they evolve very, very quickly almost like at the time of birth and after we had grown and changed with every day because we were looking at things very intensely rather than just doing them and taking them for granted. So the same things happen at death.
If we can deal with people in such a way that we can be very relaxed and peaceful around them. Very encouraging and supportive. Almost like as though we were in a it’s almost like working in a mental hospital or a psychiatric hospital. Their mind, they’re going through everything in their mind trying to summarize the meaning of their life, make the ultimate sense of everything they have been. We don’t know, you know, or we don’t know, some people don’t know if after death or not anything exists.
If anything does, we know it’s not the body. We know it’s not our bank account. We know it’s not our house or our car. If anything goes on, essentially it’s only spirit, it’s only consciousness, it’s only mind and what it has gathered, what it knows from this lifetime. So, they’re kind of kicking this over for this last month, two months or three months and it makes very intense internal changes.
So if during that time we can be as gentle and encouraging and, just as open and sensitive to them as possible, we can help facilitate those processes and if then, as they die, we put that positive energy in, it’ll be a great strength and a great comfort for them and also a great benefit for them if something does follow afterwards. In other words, they’ll go into it with their eyes open. You know, sometimes in the West, we hear people talking about the when they die they say, Oh, well, I hope if I die it’s like, you know, instant, like, the plane just crashes into a mountain that I never notice, or I hope when I die it’s like in my sleep I just lay down and wake up dead. We hear people talk like that. But, in the according to the mystics, of the of almost all world traditions, you know, that’s not like a good idea.
You know, it’s like jumping on an ice hockey rink with like, you know players and sticks and pucks flying everywhere and jumping on one of those with your eyes closed naked and it’s like not really well prepared that the best way to die is wide awake, aware of your process, knowing that’s what you’re going into, knowing that you may not know a heck of a lot about what’s coming but essentially if you are aware, if you are intensely present, if you are honest and if you are focused, whatever comes you will be able to deal with it most efficiently, most effectively and most beneficially. On the other hand, if you’re like they’re snoozing away dreaming about, you know, Cadillacs and, and I don’t know, whatever people dream about. But if you’re the, you know, if at that moment you pass away, then you have, you know, it’s a totally different mind state. The mystical tradition says that dying like that, often the people don’t even know they have died. That they wander and wander for days like thinking, Hey, where am I?
What’s going on? What’s that dead fellow doing lying down on the bed? Who is that anyway? That essentially dying, wide awake, consciously alert, fully present is the best thing we can do for ourselves. Also, it’s, the best we can do for others because it sort of gives them a sense of clarity, strength, inspiration.
Now, I think two of the most beneficial things people can do spiritually in this life is you can be present at the birth of a child and you can be present at the death of a friend. Both of those, I think, are equally spiritually powerful experiences that when you see a child, a mother going through the birth process and you see the child come out, you see the amazing fragility of that little thing. It looks a little bit like a little sticky red worm, that even a dog wouldn’t be sure it wanted to munch on. But it looks very soft, very fragile, very its mortality is very, very evident and the whole process with how it’s born is an extremely powerful spiritual statement, direct statement. A religious statement without any religion being present.
It’s the religion of truth or self evident reality. The same with the death of a friend. If we sit by someone as they die, it’s just as magical, just as powerful, just as spiritually moving, as mystically impacting as being at the birth of someone. This is the the, Buddhist idea that these two both by themselves are such dramatic experiences and they tell us a tremendous amount about our lives, about the meaning of life, the sense of life, the context of life. From the time of Buddha himself, there’s kind of a strong story of how Buddha thought this was these two birth and death had such strong connections.
In Buddha’s time there had been a great bandit who was a great martial artist. He killed almost a thousand people. Eventually he became a Buddhist monk. Buddha went to him and said, you know, No good what you’re doing. Time for a career change.
You’re getting old, you know, living in the hills, hitting people over the head with sticks and this sort of stuff, it’s like, You’re too old, you know, come be a monk, give it up. So he went and became a monk And, he was never quite sure, you know, about his kind of spiritual practice. He felt a little guilty about all these times he had, like, killed people and stuff. And so, Buddha was walking down the road one day and there’s like a little old there’s a little old lady there with her daughter. The daughter’s having a baby.
The baby won’t come out. And and try and try and try, it won’t come out. So it looks like the baby’s gonna die, the mother’s gonna die. So they call Buddha over and say, do something, you’re a great master, say some prayers, do a miracle, something like that. So Buddha said, well, I can’t do much, but, the monk with me, you know, he’s he’s got a strong spiritual connection with your village, with your people, so he can do something.
So then, this other monk, who had felt so guilty about having killed so many people, so Buddha said, if he says the following words of truth and really believes them, then the child will be born. If he doesn’t believe them, the child will die. And the words were, if it’s true that through the power of meditation, all of your negative energy from the past, if through the power of wisdom you can transcend all negativity from your past, if that’s true, then let the child be born. As he said this, he was trying to believe it as hard as he could because if he didn’t say it right with the right belief, the child would not be born, then he’d feel even guiltier. So, he’s like really putting his heart into it and then just as he says it, the child slips out of the womb and is born and so as the child does its first cries he kind of slips into nirvana or achieves liberation or transcendence from his own negative past.
But in this way, we see how the power of birth has a tremendously the birth experience in Buddhism is held as one of the prime pointers in our life to the nature of our being, the nature of spirit, the nature of existence. And just similarly the way we pass, the nature of death similarly points to something very, very significant in the nature of being. Now it’s said that anyone who applies themselves to the Tantric Yog as well, that they themselves in their meditations, in their yogic applications, can come to fully understand the nature of death and dying. They can understand the nature of the death process, the nature of the after death experience, and the nature of the hereafter. That these need not be matters of faith or need not be matters of mere belief.
We need faith or belief if we don’t have experience, the same as if you never go to London, you’ll never know what’s in London, other than through faith or belief. But that if we apply ourselves to meditation, if we apply ourselves to yoga, we can experience the very deep levels of consciousness and the very deep levels of being of life in our meditation. If we don’t apply, then of course we only have historical anecdotes to rely on, we only have, you know, other people’s talk about their practices, meditations and so forth to rely on and of course other people’s anecdotes, people’s experiences never provide much validity for us, ourselves, it just provides validity for the meditator or for the individual person. But nonetheless, in the mystical world of, India and Tibet, the Buddhist mystical world, it’s said that all people have the ability in to very simply understand the nature of their own birth, the nature of their own life and the nature of their own death. And if we simply learn to listen, we can learn.
And there’s a saying, look at your body, you can tell your past lives. Look at your mind, you can tell your future lives. This body of ours of ours is a crystallization of everything we have been during this lifetime. We chose it at birth, so if there is a previous life, there will be something there for why we chose it indicating how we remember those previous lifetimes. So the Buddhists say, Watch your body, listen to your body, you can remember your past lives.
Look at your mind, deeply, you can know where you’re going to go in the future. So, the Tantric Yoga in this way emphasizes death and dying not as a philosophy or not as a theology or not as a speculative endeavor but very much encourages, the adherents of the system or a practitioner of the system to experiment with those Yogas, to experiment with those means of knowing. And of course, you know, here in Adelaide, you’ve had many yogis and yoginis, teachers pass through over the years, so I’m sure all of you by now have completed all those yogas and you’re gonna come up at the end with long lists of names of who you were in past lifetimes, and, say how you yourself have validated all these through the seal or the stamp of your own experience. Don’t make the list too long, I’m leaving tomorrow, I don’t have time to go through them all in detail. But generally, in the, in the mystical tradition of Asia we say death and dying isn’t a fiction, look around and you see it.
It’s not a fantasy, cultivate your own contemplation, your own self knowledge. You can see it and read it within your own being. In the seeing and in the reading then you will get great wisdom, you will get great knowledge, you will get great power. Atisha himself said that, Those who cultivate the ability to understand the flow of their own karmic processes and in that way to know their own past lives, that for those beings one day of living is like a hundred years of ordinary living. So, make every effort to get to that knowledge.
It lies within you. The seeds are there with you. You don’t have to look anywhere else. Though he emphasized this very strongly, the Tibetan Yogis do the same, that essentially the seeds of our own knowledge are always with us. All we have to do is look and we will see, we will feel.
I think from my own, kind of side, you know, most people I think, don’t necessarily have to go out and accomplish those yogas or accomplish those meditations. Nice if you can of course, but you have great to have some like, you know, Buddhas from Adelaide, know, Oh yes, blah blah blah down in Kensington achieved enlightenment last week, front page of the paper, remembered three hundred of his last lives. It kind make an interesting variation in the newspaper industry and focus of the way things news are done. But anyway, even if that doesn’t come to happen, I think people’s just looking at their own life, looking at their own daydreams, watching their sleep and looking for a dream watching your dreams. Think you get a, you can get a very deep inkling of where you’re coming from, what was in your past.
And I think, in many ways we can see much about ourselves, learn much about ourselves just simply by watching not only that but I think many peoples, in rare moments of clarity from time to time really touch base with a kind of an other dimension of themselves Sometimes through experiences like deja vu, sometimes through a very lucid, clear, moving, almost, almost, shocking dreams that we have. Dreams that come very powerfully speak to us with extreme presence and after linger with us almost as question marks. What was that about? Where was that going? What is, what is the significance?
Buddhist idea is that if we watch our body, watch our daydreams, and at night, watch our dreams, we can understand those deeper levels of our self. Other than that, most important is simply to watch yourself in your life, and if there is something, you see something in your process, you follow it, but if you don’t watch the process, you won’t have anything to follow. That essentially the great benefits come, first and foremost when watchfulness or mindfulness is established as a habit in our unfoldment. When we give up the unconscious living, taking things for granted living, and we live each moment in utter clarity and utter presence. The best power for doing that, it’s said, is to be meditation on death and dying.
That when we do the meditation on death and dying, essentially, every moment we think, This could be my last moment. This could be my last day. This could be my last week. When we live like that, we live each moment with complete fullness, complete intensity, and complete presence. If on top of that we apply the Tantric Yogas then it’s said we can by means of those Yogas achieve the wisdom of immortality.
This wisdom of immortality is both in the mind and in the body. When it comes in the mind, it’s essentially achieving that level of wisdom in which our mind becomes continually, achieves the highest level of mystical experience remains in it. This is called immortal state because no matter what it’s achieved the highest. There’s nowhere it stays in that highest state. Having achieved the highest it remains in the highest.
We say achieves the wisdom of ultimate and conventional levels of reality achieves the wisdom of immortality or the wisdom of eternity. The other is with the actual body itself. It’s said that here amongst us there are immortals walking around beings who achieving the wisdom of immortality took themselves out of their body, back to their body, out of their body, back to the body. In doing that, the body becomes totally reconstructed of a kind of a magic matter, somewhat like my body. And that, after that, that body can appear in any form that, can look like a ninety year old if you want to look ninety, it can look like a sixteen year old if you’re like going out in the town for the night.
You kind of make it appear anyhow you like, the body itself becomes just pure energy. The idea in Tantra is that all matter is just bound energy. So, if we, play with that within the body once we achieve the immortal wisdom, we can play with that within the body dynamic and transform the ordinary body into an, rainbow body. The rainbow body then is just made of pure energy and it said if we do ever decide to die we don’t die because we have to because it’s pure energy we don’t die because we have to, it’s we die because, we finished all our little jobs in this corner of the universe so we fly to some other part of the universe where there’s something for us to do. When we die like that, all we leave is our hair and fingernails.
So, one of my gurus, once was telling me that when he did his third three year retreat, he was about halfway through that third three year retreat and his, I was in a group retreat with, I think eight or ten other meditators and the old guru running that retreat was claimed to be one hundred and sixty seven years old. Anyway, one day he says, Well, you know, I can’t stay here anymore, with you guys. I want to go in my own private chamber and meditate, but no one disturbed me for five days. So, but a day went by and everyone started getting a little curious, like, I wonder what’s going on, does he have a beautiful lady hanging in there or why has he disappeared? So, someone opens the door and takes a little peek and there he is over there sitting meditating but his body instead of looking like a hundred and sixty seven has kind of become to look very youthful, like maybe a hundred and forty or something like that.
And, then as he meditates, as the hours go by and the days go by, he looks younger and younger and younger and younger and younger and then it looks like a hundred years old and then a mere ninety and then eighty until eventually after the on the fifth day, it’s looking like an eight year old and then a six and then a one year old and then a three month old, and then it was just kind of like this little ball of light, this is what my Guru told me, you never know, Gurus lose some Irish blood in everyone sometimes, maybe they exaggerate, who knows? Anyway, this is what he said happened during his third three year retreat in front of him and eight other, or eight or ten of the the other eight or ten who were in retreat with him. And the fellow just essentially turned into a hovering ball of light and the hair and fingernails were just lying on the ground just a ball of light hovering there and it hovered for a few hours and then just kind of, dissipated into infinity. But according to the Tantras, when we really understand the nature of life and death together, we understand the nature of matter, of form.
When we do that, we achieve the immortal wisdom. When we achieve the immortal wisdom, we can use that either in a very conventional way as teachers or whatnot, or we can manifest it to do extraordinary things with the body and to live in the way of the immortals. It’s said in the mystical tradition of Central Asia that at any time there are one hundred and forty four thousand of these immortals living amongst us. I was disappointed there’s only about four of you out there today, I was expecting to see more here in Adelaide. But, whether or not, I know this kind of talk is literally true, or whether it’s a spiritual metaphor for the nature of our body, I think isn’t very important.
You know, Tibetans don’t care. They don’t like, go out and ask all eight people if this is really what happened or something like that. For them, like, whether it’s real as a kind of a history, or whether it’s real as allegory and metaphor, for them, the important thing is the statement for the nature of our life, the nature of what it is to be. When we understand the nature of what it is to be, when we understand the nature of what it is to not be, when we understand life, then we will naturally understand death. And understanding death or looking at death, examining death, looking into it forcefully is one of the greatest of teachers for understanding our life.
So the more we understand life, the better it benefits our death. More we look at and understand our death, the more rich and dynamic it makes our life. I think this is the meaning of the allegory of this story my, my, one of my, one of my teachers told me. But he said, his all grew one hundred and sixty seven and ten people in the room and this definitely happened and he was very convinced and authoritative. But you never know with Tibetans, you know it’s a land of magic and mystery and mystical events.
What’s real, what’s unreal. Even in Adelaide it’s hard to tell.