Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Jeffrey Hopkins explores the psychological and spiritual implications of death, impermanence, and rebirth in this 34-minute seminar talk. He opens with a sustained critique of how we live as if the body will endure indefinitely, accumulating wealth and non-virtues through deceptive commerce and excessive attachment. He then pivots to the liberating function of meditating on death: generating realistic priorities for one’s own life, and cultivating compassion for others through recognizing their identical impermanence and shared wish for happiness. Hopkins stresses that religious practice is a means to identify and uproot mental faults. He addresses the intermediate state (the consciousness between death and rebirth) and explains deity meditation as a method of mental and eventually physical transformation. The talk concludes with discussion of how rebirth teachings can be understood both literally and psychologically, and how contemplating the traditional rebirth realms serves to confront and transmute one’s own unconscious contents. Practical and analytical in approach, pitched at serious practitioners willing to engage unfamiliar Buddhist concepts.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 Death, IS and R no date.mp3
UUID: 791ef2d7-7796-424a-8862-6489c945b9fe
Teacher: Jeffrey Hopkins
Collection: Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth (Jeffrey Hopkins)
Date: 1983 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,998
We do we do things for the body as if we were going to live for one hundred thousand years. This is like just understanding the type of thought that we have with respect to the body. It’s as if that body could remain for a hundred thousand years. Should we turn the light on a little bit? Can you?
I can’t extricate myself that easily. Oh, yeah. We’ll have some clear light at the end. We make many conveniences for the body. We go to a lot of trouble for the body.
To do this, we must accumulate a great deal of money, and to do that, we accumulate a great many non virtues through commerce, robbery, and stealing. He puts commerce in the group. This is because in commerce, so often, you’re setting a price that, especially in a bartering society, that is more than the thing is worth. Or in our society, you’re making claims for it that are untrue. Right?
When you light up a Marlboro cigarette, you are not transported off to Marlboro country, the beautiful scenery and so forth. Rather, you’re getting some smoke into the lungs that pollutes the lungs and will help to make cancer of the lungs, which is a very bad cancer. Can’t be stopped. Once it starts, you’ve pretty much had it. That sort of deception, really strange deception, where we learn that it’s not the quality of the product that matters, It’s the name of the product and then associating that name with totally unrelated things.
Right? On the television, a woman comes streaming in through the clouds. The music is playing. She’s carrying a roll of toilet paper. So that’s, you know, accumulating non virtues through commerce.
Commerce, however, can be, you know, a source of tremendous virtue, providing good quality products for people, a good price and so forth. You know, treating one’s workers well. Just because you can save a couple thousand dollars not forcing early retirement. You know, this is happening some, at least in the States. Somebody’s going to get a pension if you keep them on to a certain age so you get rid of them a couple years before that time, which reduces their pension if they get it.
It’s just well, anyway, most of the traffic on the road is a case of people engaging in activities for the sake of the body. That’s an interesting thought. Certainly when you go to the grocery store, What about when you go to the post office? And you go to work to get money. Seems to be so.
Considering the body to be very dear, we sustain it with great effort. We get angry if someone harms our body, and we’ll even get angry if someone says something bad about the body. This body cannot even withstand a thorn, but we treat it like a wish granting gem, a gem that will give you whatever you want. We cannot take it with us at the time of death no matter how great or beautiful it is, but we treat our body as if it were going as if we were going to take it with us. Even if everyone finds your body to be a great source of desire, At the time of death, they become afraid of it and do not want to approach it.
Okay? Marilyn Monroe. The dead body of Marilyn Monroe. Or who’s the well, there are a lot of great male chunks nowadays. I don’t know their names.
Thus, if you owned everything in the world, and if everyone in the world was your friend, and if you had a wonderful body, all would be left behind at the time of death. Think. I am going to die, and if I died before having a chance to engage in mental development, it would be bad. At the time of death, nothing helps except mental practice. A religious person is one who is getting rid of something, the faults in his or her own mental continuum.
We must analyze what will help and harm in future lifetimes. First, you must identify your own aims, which basically are to gain happiness and avoid suffering. Religious practice is the means for doing this is a means for doing this. First, you must determine whether religious practice is able to bring happiness and eradicate suffering. If it can, it should be adopted.
You should analyze it and not just accept it blindly. This is the spirit, the basic spirit, spirit of most Buddhist teaching of analyzing whatever it is, making use of what seems appropriate, and as I was saying earlier, like what the Dalai Lama says, leaving what is not appropriate. So one way that the what do you say? One use of meditation on death and impermanence is to gain a more realistic estimation of what one’s own situation is so that one will use that time in a more sensible way. Many people who have had close brushes with death then speak of using their life in a much more useful way.
Right? Whereas we grow up and sort of fit into a pattern that is just a general pattern that doesn’t take account of such things, and it’s up to every person to make a realistic estimation, and then whatever that estimation is, implemented. In another way, when one understands about death and impermanence and applies this to other people, one of the practices is to realize that other people are just as impermanent as oneself, and like oneself have similar predispositions to view themselves as if they were going to always live on. In other words, to see other people as also involved in a conflict between what is and how they’re conceiving themselves. And from that point of view, drawing themselves into trouble by reflecting on other people that way, getting an appreciation for the situation of other people and thereby generating compassion.
So, with respect to oneself, generating a wish to use one’s lifetime in the most helpful way possible. And with respect to others, increasing compassion, increasing knowledge of what other people are going through. For instance, everything that we’ve been talking about in the last two days, or at least any part of it that is true, is true of oneself. I mean, this is the basic laboratory, we say. Do you say laboratory?
Laboratory is the basic laboratory. The basic laboratory is here, but then once it is understood here, then it’s, you know, it’s true of every person. As I was saying yesterday morning, the knowledge that other people are quite like oneself, that in a very close way it is as if we know each other. I don’t mean through contact in other lifetimes or anything like that, but just that everyone here wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering as I do. And that tells me a great deal about each person here.
And if one has a sense of closeness and appreciation of the validity of other people’s wishes for happiness, wishes to to get rid of suffering, this easily leads to compassion, easily leads to a situation of appreciation in which it’s possible to work together with other people. So, as I was saying, the Dalai Lama’s word was, Society is kindness. The very fabric of society depends so greatly on kindness that without kindness, the very structure of society would fall apart. There’s no way of enforcing socially helpful attitudes by way of police. There’s no way.
It seems that some countries are trying this, attempting it, but it’s not working. So with that sort of spirit, know, meeting together, exchanging ideas, somebody studying one culture and coming back and talking about it, people meeting from different cultures, different religions working together, religious and nonreligious people, with that sort of basic appreciation, there’s some hope of making common effort. Once the effort is toward alleviating social problems and so forth, the acceptance of some particular system is rather minor. The systems are minor. It’s the development, the happiness of human beings that is the major thing.
Right? It’s the betterment of human society that is being sought. Thus, when in place of that, the system becomes more important than the people, Or if one is seeking for happiness and accumulation of wealth and so forth, becomes even more important somehow than the happiness one would have in making use of that money. Know? We’re seeking money, and it becomes because it’s easily definable, you know if you’ve increased this year or decreased.
I think because of its ease, as a measuring stick, becomes all one is seeking to do. Similarly, between various systems, religious systems, economic systems, political systems, lot of trouble being made by the systems. It’s like the systems are ending up using the people rather than the people using the systems. So I hope some this weekend seminar on the Tibetan Buddhist views of death we’ve done a little bit in the opposite direction of people using some system rather than the system using the people. So are there any questions at the end here?
Yes. Now would this tell you about let’s see. Your death in general or, you know, if you didn’t meet with any accidents or even if you met with accidents? No. I’ve never heard of it.
But it would seem that that if it worked, that would be one way of knowing how long things you had enough that karma, say, in the system that set it up with sufficient power to live so many years, but then you wouldn’t know about accidents. Yeah. Yes. Doing the kind of meditative practice that I was talking about this morning of thinking that today’s mind, you know, this afternoon’s mind is a continuum of this morning’s, a continuation of last night’s and going back, you can open up memories of parts of your life that you thought you never could remember. And it seems to me, I’m just speaking from my own experience now, that a change during the life to a different type of thinking sometimes can cause you not to remember how you were, say, when you were crawling about on the floor, But that actually, it’s all there.
And it’s there to be remembered vividly. And it’s a matter of having a key, some way of going back to it. And I would think it would be similar with respect to former lifetimes. We’ve become so used to this body and so forth that that’s probably why they say that around age seven or eight people stop, usually stop remembering, if they have remembered. But I don’t have any detailed explanation.
Haven’t heard anything? Yes? I think the two biggest differences are, one, that with respect to the intermediate state, it says you have the form of the person who died of your last lifetime. And I don’t know if it says for three and a half days the form of that one, the next three and a half days the next one. Whereas this book says that from the very start of the intermediate state, you have a replica of the form of the next lifetime.
Then the other big difference is that that’s mainly aimed at persons who have engaged in specific practices who are trying to cause certain deities and so forth to appear on certain days within the intermediate state. And, this book is just giving a general description of what would happen to an ordinary person during the intermediate state. So, this book, in it, the way it lays out the intermediate state and so forth, should be more accessible. Should be. But I think its style is such that it’s, you know, the style is not very accessible.
It’s a straight translation with a little bit of commentary added into it. I think it would be good to, you know, write a book in English that starts in English and would go more with how one would explain it orally. Yes? Excuse me? Deities?
Yeah, we’re Australian dialect, American dialect. Deities. Somebody said to me the other day, I’m, I’m. It was showing me on my watch how I have a game on, and he said, You’ve to take I’m. I said, I’m?
And he said, Yes, I I am. Which in American dialect is A I M. So I neither understood it from the word nor understood it from the spelling. Aim. Aim.
Aim. Aim. Aim. That’s very funny. I was in a room the other day.
There was a slight echo in the kitchen, and if you crossed a certain line, but it couldn’t understand each other. In other words, the sound had to be good enough so that you could sift through back and forth the dialect. In my dialect in New England, actually, we add in an r where there isn’t an r, and we take out an r where there is. And so you get some very strange words. I’ve tried to overcome it, but occasionally it can crops up.
In any case, the deities. What a yogi tries to do is to enter into reflection on the clear light nature of the mind or on the emptiness of inherent existence of the mind, okay, and get down to that level or at least pretend to be down to that level of consciousness in which only the clear light nature of the mind or the emptiness of inherent existence of the mind is appearing, only one’s consciousness and that, nothing else in meditative state, then take that mind and cause it to compassionately appear in physical form as a body, head, arms. So these are called deities in meditation. Okay? Which just means an ideal person, a person of pure mind and pure body, the body itself being a compassionate appearance of that deep mind.
So in the intermediate state, people sometimes Well, there are two ways of doing deity meditation. One is meditating on oneself as such an ideal being. Another is to meditate on such an ideal being in front of oneself, like inviting a guest and treating the being as a guest, but realizing the being’s mental qualities. The point of meditating on the deity in front is to make it easier to meditate on oneself this way. So it’s aimed at mental transformation, but eventually, even if you go far enough down the line, at physical transformation.
You meditate on the quality of anxiety. Right. So There are many different qualities, like there are many Buddhist. Well, there are central qualities to each deity that cover all of them. And these being the realization of the clear light nature of the mind or emptiness of inherent existence of the mind, whatever of everything actually, however one wants to put it, that sword of wisdom fused with compassion, care and concern primarily with other beings.
And then the body of such a being is an appearance of that compassionate wisdom consciousness. Now then there are many different deities according to the disposition of different practitioners, even ones that look fierce but aren’t fierce. As shown on the tomb, I think. Yeah. Yeah.
And just one more thing. The word shunya Mhmm. Shunya means empty, and shunya ta is emptiness. Emptiness, as we were saying, doesn’t refer to any sort of nihilism, but to this absence of this misconceived form of concrete existence. Over concretized.
Same emptiness. Same emptiness. Yes. Some people translate it as voidness. Some people quarrel about whether it should be voidness or emptiness.
Either is fine. Empty in common Tibetan language seems to be more like the word. In some meditation, wisdom meditation, specifically within wisdom meditation, meditation on the ultimate nature of phenomena, that ultimate nature of phenomena is emptiness, which means the absence of this over concretized, seemingly very solid type of existence that we usually believe in. It’s an awareness of it. So it’s an awareness of it.
But sunya itself is emptiness. Meditation on sunya would mean awareness of sunya or of emptiness. So the aim is to get into the state of sunya. To get into the state of sunya. That’s not bad.
In one way, shunya is something that you meditate on, but when you realize emptiness directly, the consciousness realizing emptiness, as I was saying yesterday, and the emptiness that is being realized are mixed like water and water. So to get into the Shunya state would not it’s not unacceptable. Not unacceptable. It is acceptable. I will Well, it’s not really like that in a certain way.
Yeah, no, that’s fine. The word meditate is said to have two basically different meanings. For instance, when you meditate love, it’s to seek to cause your consciousness to become of the entity of love. So we might it might be better translated as cultivate love in meditation. So if you say meditate on compassion, it means to turn one’s mind into the entity of a compassionate mind.
Whereas to meditate on impermanence or to meditate on emptiness means to take impermanence or emptiness as the object of one’s mind. Alright? So it’s bit different. A bit different. But still, indeed, when one directly realizes emptiness, that emptiness and the consciousness realizing it are like water in water, and thus there is some sense that one is trying to cultivate one’s mind into the state of a consciousness that is fused with emptiness.
That just comes with No, it’s not spontaneous. Through the practice of meditation, I’ll give you an advertisement for my new book, ten fifty four pages. Are you tired? Are you depressed? Would you like to revivify your life?
For only thirty five dollars, you too can meditate on emptiness. Look at Nāgārjuna. Doesn’t he look happy? So there are complicated reasonings that take some ten fifty four pages to put into context. Okay.
It is meditatively. One goes through reasonings to break down belief in this type of over concretization of objects, and through putting oneself through this practice, one does realize emptiness. Spontaneous wouldn’t be the word for it. You see, it’s a matter of a lot of training and of going through reasoning, but then once one has done it and gotten used to it, one could spontaneously enter into that realization. It’s not as if one is seeking to carry the ten fifty four pages around with oneself.
The complexity, I mean it can look like that, and scholars are often like that. Way they present it. Yes. Then once it’s realized, of course, then it’s very simple. It’s extremely simple, supposedly.
I will not make claims. Your book is on the techniques? Yes, and trying to put it in context. I was on a radio show the other day, and I realized midway through I should plug my book. Otherwise, the publisher would be dissatisfied with me, but I couldn’t do it.
Yes? What it is that to leave cyclic existence doesn’t mean to leave this planet, but to get beyond to get beyond suffering. And it’s this is the symbol of the lotus, which grows up out of mud, dirt, but is itself, you know, a very pure substance. That in other words, the liberated being can appear in the midst of what for others is tremendous difficulty, but can appear in the midst of it. I think what you’re saying is there’s no conflict.
Then, well then Which is at the root of that process. Then it’s in your own hands where you are, where you choose to be. And in this case would choose to be in the thick of it in order to help others. Julie, you’ve got this one? Oh, yeah.
It says there’s no possibility then of suffering. So, in other words, the aim isn’t the next event? The former lifetime, then one has no need for the reasoning. Each person, yes. But if indeed it is the case that one has been born in so many lifetimes and so forth, and has been in every possible situation with everyone else, it indicates something about the present situation.
But it’s not as if, you know, one has to go screaming into belief and rebirth. But it is that doesn’t make it unimportant. And if the mind goes on after death, you know, that is important. But for some people it’s a very difficult matter that for them either perhaps shouldn’t be broached, you know, it’s not productive, or it’s just something they can’t get around. And, well, again, maybe there are some other things in the particular system that would be helpful.
And if there aren’t, that’s all right, too. See, yes. If you yes. If it was made to be for a person who found it very difficult, a huge stumbling block, if it could be blown up into an even larger stumbling block, then perhaps it is, and the person wouldn’t be able to go on to the next to any step. Couldn’t implement anything.
Yes. Yes. Yeah. The way traditionally of interpreting an explanation of rebirth as applying to the process of contemplating an action, carrying out the action, and finishing the action. However, that’s not seen as incompatible with also taking it literally.
For instance, we could speak of rebirth in terms of going to sleep in these eight states that one goes into and comes out of. One can I think there’s tremendous value in looking on the depictions of the beings, hungry ghosts, hell beings, even some of the weird types of animals, those descriptions, as a way of populating your own mind, of making more manifest factors that are in your own mind now? What one usually does in such practice, in various practices, is like to emanate out rays of light that go down into the hells and help these beings. Well, it’s a way of confronting one’s own unconscious contents and so forth and transmuting them. Now, I think that clearly takes place psychologically now as in one’s practice.
But that doesn’t militate against there also being realms of rebirth and so forth. But perhaps being flexible to use it in whatever way is helpful. That’s just a quick comment. Confrontation without assimilation. Yeah.
And bring about some transmutation there. It’s very interesting. If you don’t, you know, sometimes practitioners, especially in the West, don’t want to hear anything about the hells. Well, you know, in one way it’s like saying, I don’t want to hear anything about the deeper reaches of my own mind, in one way. But that doesn’t militate against there also being, possibly, realms like this.
But, you know, it’s a little hard for me to believe that they’re quite as neatly laid out, but you may as well have a neat layout. I mean, you can’t include all the possible ones. So, yes? You would think so. You would think so.
Oh, don’t know. I’ve got no idea. To me, it would seem that it would still have to be it was just a guess, up around the fourth and fifth levels. But once you get to those deeper levels, it strikes me that they will go on, that you couldn’t stop them and like freeze it in that. But that’s just my own feeling.
A phone call! It’s said that with enough wish to become aware during your dreams, You know, you can become aware. Have you ever in a dream, you know, tested the phenomenon in a dream and gone like this? Oh, must not be a dream. You know, because it you hit it and it hurts.
Other times you can reach in and sort of feel the stuff of it and then move around inside the walls of buildings, things like that. That’s fun. Anyway, yes? It’s been a great pleasure.