(ungrouped) — 2007-06-02

Morning, everyone. Today is the Dharma thing. Morning thing. So welcome everybody. I think all of you know me, so it’s cool there.

Welcome to the center. And this is Tenzin Chökyi, most of you already know as well. She’s Tenzin Chökyi. I’m Lhos Chökyi, so sounds very similar. We just call her Tensen most of the time and me Choki.

We go way back, like twenty five years, way before we met the Dharma and I have always been impressed with her. This is where you just turn the lights on. Even before she meditated for six years in solitary confinement. So anyway, what I learned last weekend, I went to the longer version of this workshop at Atlantic Medicine Buddha last weekend because I knew this time I’d be working.

I wanted to really take part. But what I realized then is that she did that workshop with Lenny Kronish, who is one of the founders of Tārā Home End of Life Care at Land of Medicine Buddha. But I didn’t realize that Tenzin Chökyi had been part of the original conversations with Lama Zopa Rinpoche at Vajrapāni in nineteen ninety two that were the conception of Tārā home and having that hospice in California and some of his earliest instruction on end of life care. So it was it was just very cool for me to learn that you were part of that role. Along with being a great meditator, she has has been working most recently, one of the many many thousands of things that she does is working with the dying at Tārā Home.

What I enjoyed or what I found really useful last weekend were all of the different experiences that both you and Lenny brought to this because I think it’s one thing to hear these different instructions and then another thing to to hear how how people have used them both Buddhist and non-Buddhist in your experience, which I think is great. So, anyway, I think it’s it’s a full day. We have lunch planned for one. So it’s but there’ll be breaks for you to stretch. If anyone needs a restroom and doesn’t know where they are, one of us is out here and we can instruct you.

There’s a bathroom down this hall and a bathroom down the back stairs. And there’s also tea in the cafe if anybody would like some. So thank you very much for Thank you. And also if people could use the microphone with questions. I know it’s kind of annoying but then when people download this program at home and I know there are a number of people that couldn’t come today, they can hear the question.

So that’s quite useful when you’re listening at home. Thanks. So welcome everybody. Thank you for coming. I’ve been looking forward to doing this program again.

As Chökyi said, we did a longer program last weekend at Land of Medicine Buddha, which is the first time that I had really worked with my longtime friend, Lenny Kronish, who’s worked as a hospice volunteer for many, many years. So unfortunately, I’ll miss her presence, but look forward to offering the material again because we’ve all found it really rewarding. So the beginning of any Buddhist practice, what we do first is to set our motivation, to set our intention for the session that we’ll have. So if we just take a couple of minutes to set our motivation. But first, just do a minute or two of breath awareness meditation to just settle our minds, get ourselves here in this room off the road.

In our bodies, just focus on the sensation of your breath at your nostrils or your chest rising and falling just to focus and center your consciousness here in your body. And now just take a minute to reflect on your motivation for coming, maybe curiosity to learn more about the Tibetan Buddhist approach to death and dying. Or you may be aging or have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and be actually facing the death process. You may realize through your practice that all of us have a terminal illness called rebirth. You may be realizing the reality that death could come at any time and that there’s no time to lose in terms of preparing.

So just take a minute to reflect on your motivation for coming to this day long workshop. So setting our motivation was the perfect preparation for the next part. What I’d like to do since we have such a small group is to have everyone go around and introduce themselves and just say what your reason is for coming here. We’re gonna be doing a lot of meditations and exercises and sharing and discussion today. So to sort of enhance the feeling of intimacy, if everyone could just go around and say your name, maybe what your experience is with Buddhist practice in general, if you have any experience as a caregiver of someone who’s dying, a hospice volunteer, or whatever else your reason may be for coming.

So we wanna start here. My name is Keith Enriquez, and I came oh, for my own interest. Keith Oh. The mic. Sorry about that.

I always forget about the mic thing. So maybe just first names if people want since it goes out on the Internet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Whatever you feel comfortable. My name is Keith Enriquez, and I came a member of Khe Sanh Ling. And I’m interested for my own purposes. And and where I work with men who will die in prison, and do die, high suicide rate and just aging, I need to I want to enhance my ability to be of help and comfort to them. Great.

Thank you. My name is Anna Montano, and I’ve been a member of Sachen Ling for about a year. While I was driving here, I was trying to figure out, well, why am I going to go? But it is a very important topic. It’s quite basic, I guess, most of what we do.

And of course, yes, I’m aging, and I expect to die. My mother is an elderly person and I think she will probably pass away before I do. So, in terms of preparing for, I think, the personal issues and then, of course, the larger issue is that, you know, we do want become enlightened so that we can help other certain beings and this is a very important part of that. I think maybe just across back and forth. Yeah.

My name is Allison. I’m actually a member of the Sakya Buddhist, Iwam Chodan, across the bay. Mhmm. But I’m a a friend contributing friend here in Kham Ling. Mhmm.

The topic is very interesting to me for a number of reasons. I have a number of friends who, in the last few years, are in their seventies, and they have have died. I had a recent friend who just died two weeks ago, and I’m going to her memorial service this afternoon. And also, I’m of the age where the mothers, the aunts and the mothers are dying. But I’m also personally interested from the standpoint of the causes and the conditions.

I went to the Dalai Lama’s talk. And that in terms of our own lives and recalling of past lives and the processings of karma from past lives in this life and then preparing in this life for the rebirth process for what our next lives will be. Mhmm. Mhmm. Great.

Thank you. Hi. My name is Janice and I came today, as I said to Jennifer, because it’s my favorite topic. I’ve been a hospice volunteer for This is my sixth year, at a twenty eight bed inpatient hospice unit here in the city. So I do that once a week and it’s a great meditation.

What else? This past year, I lost both a brother and my mother, so it became very real in to me in in my own family life. And oh, how long involved in Buddhism? I took refuge with Lama Zopa Rinpoche in nineteen ninety nine. Great.

Thank you. My name is Nancy hum, and my teacher, just wrote a book about death and dying called Mind Beyond Death. And it’s I’ve been a Buddhist for about five years, and it’s a very deep part of our practice. And also, I’m at an age where I’ve seen a lot of friends pass away or are dealing with life threatening illnesses. And I’m, you know, deeply interested in this topic and also interested in how to help them if I can.

Great. Maybe I don’t know. Maybe with the microphone, it would work better to just go back and then circle back around. It’s kind of the chord, it’s kind of unwieldy. My name is Carla, and I think that I could benefit a lot from learning of the Buddhist view about death.

I was created in a Christian family so there’s a lot of fear and I see that I could benefit from being prepared to help others when the time come and also to lessen the fear that I definitely have. Yeah, thank you. My name is Tamara and I’m here because I’ve been trusted in this topic. Thank you. Good morning.

I’m Henny and I’m here with my daughter Nina who is almost ten. I was very fortunate to have met Buddhism at a very young age I grew up a Buddhist in Indonesia and I met Tibetan Buddhism before Tamara was born. From that early time I’ve been very interested in the death and dying process and felt very very lucky when it became very useful. Whatever knowledge that I had, the little knowledge that I had, I used it earnestly to help my mother when she died of aneurysm about seven years ago. That’s really dear to my heart and feel very lucky.

Thank you. I’m Keisha. I’ve been studying Buddhism for a couple of years and I’m here mainly because I think I’m so permanent. That’ll change by five thirty. I just think that every morning I’ll wake up and I’ll feel everything that I’m doing.

And so I’m trying to really push impermanence and death into my head. So Yeah. I’m here to work on that. Sorry about the cord, guys. What to do?

My name is Janet, and I’ve been taking Tibetan Buddhist classes for about seven years. And I contemplate death. And often when I say, well, see you tomorrow, the thought comes up in my mind, maybe, if I’m lucky enough to survive. But there’s still a part of me that just absolutely does not believe that I’m really gonna die yet. Mhmm.

Mhmm. I know that for myself, it’s really important to not only to put my physical things in order, which they’re not at the present, along with Choki had mentioned some of the context of the class put my spiritual wishes in order so that when the time for me comes, that I can have a more peaceful mind. Because I definitely don’t want to die with a disturbed mind and end up in some unfortunate rebirth and have to work my way back. So whatever I can do now, if I can help to ease the fear and apprehensions and so on of the actual time of my death, that would be wonderful. Mhmm.

Mhmm. Okay. Thank you. Hi. My name’s Judith.

I’ve been around a while, and I thought maybe I’d come and see if I could get some new thoughts to think about and clear up some details before it’s too late. I’m also preparing some classes for elders on writing an ethical will. And I thought maybe I would enrich some of the material, and that’s it. Thank you. My name is Boris.

I’m also known as Amaloris or Amalah. I’m the elder here with the small e. I’m eighty two years old. I realized that I’m going to die, and every single person I know is going to die. I’m trying to prepare myself so I have no regrets at the time.

I haven’t been practicing much. I’ve been sick in here and there. So I am going to dig in now and really get ready. My mother lived a hundred and five, so who knows? Hi.

I’m Nikki, and I became Buddhist when I was living abroad in Nepal. And when I first started learning about Tibetan Buddhism, impermanence, of course, was one of the things you’re supposed to reflect on. And I reflected on impermanence, and of course, death came right up. And and then, I started thinking a lot about death and I never in my readings, they would mention death and the teachings that existed, but I never happened upon them and I never sought out a book about them. And as I started thinking about death, I kept thinking, well, this bus could hit me and this, you know, and I started thinking of all the ways I could die.

And over the past couple of years, I’ve it’s been a constant daily imagining of my death. And the one thing that scares me more than anything else about it is not knowing what to do at that moment. Because I I do recognize how powerful that moment is. And it it’s funny. I’ve at this stage, I’m not as scared about not being in my human body as I am about missing that opportunity.

So I really I really wanna know what to do at that moment. And oh. And nobody in my life has died that’s close to me. And now I’m starting to see them get older and older and I’m starting to go, okay, people are gonna start dying and I would like to be able to help them if I’m can be present to be able at least say a few things to help somebody else. Alright.

Thank you. We’re doing just introductions and your reason for coming here. What your name is and why you’re here. My name is Jackie. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. I came to see you, of course. He’s so sweet. See how you see see how you approached it.

K. Let’s see. So my name is Tim. I’ve been coming here for a couple years. And the fact that I’m definitely gonna die and I don’t know a whole lot about the process and I I think it’d be good to at least become familiar and prepare and plus everyone else will.

So to be able to help them as they cross the two if possible, but you never know. But it definitely it definitely is good to not be ignorant of this because Mhmm. It will happen, you know. Mhmm. Great.

Thank you. Kind of a waste if you don’t. My name is Sudhakshana, and I’ve been a Buddhist for a while and a member of Sachen Ling since two thousand. I’m here to understand how to approach the dying process, how to prepare for death and accepting permanence, as well as how I can utilize that knowledge in developing a Tonglen practice. Great, thank you.

Hi, my name is Shilan. The first part, I actually work in health care, and I’ve been working at a hospice here in San Francisco for the past two years. So on that side, I wanted to get, like, death and dying from a Buddhist perspective. But I also have been practicing for a while, and I just we all die and I wanna be ready and everyone I know is gonna die including the plants. So I wanna help.

Okay. Great. Thank you all. So what Chökyi had asked me to do with this day is talk about both spiritual issues relating to death, especially from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, and also to get really practical, to talk about how to actually prepare yourself practically for your own death. So to kind of give you both theory and also to practically prepare.

So what we have on the agenda for today, and hopefully you all have the schedule, what we’re going to talk about first Actually, some of you may have come here at nine o’clock for the impermanence and death meditation that Chooky led. And this is a really important thing. As many of you have mentioned, you know, Buddhism really emphasizes the inevitability of death. There’s a lot of meditations on, you know, kind of realizing impermanence and death. And unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of time to really get into those teachings at this point.

That’s a really basic teaching of the Lam Rim that you’ve probably if you’ve been studying for a while, you’ve gotten in different classes. And I asked her to do this specific meditation for your regular Saturday morning meditation just to kind of get you ready, you know, and and prepared for that reality. So many people think, oh, these Buddhists, especially these Tibetan Buddhists are so pessimistic. What a drag that you guys talk about death all the time. Like all you’re talking about is impermanence and death and the truth of suffering and all of this stuff.

And I posit the Buddha was just a realist, you know. This is reality. And the quicker you get used to it, the quicker you reprioritize your life and get get it in gear to practice spirituality. And that’s the main point of these impermanence and death meditations. And I remember when I first started doing this in this retreat center in the hills in Northern India, it was the first time I’d ever sat down and really meditated on the inevitability of my death and the fact that it could come at any time.

And the only thing I could take with me was my mind and how much mental development. And I had kind of lived my whole life kind of trying to please other people and be good and do kind of the thing, you know, the career path thing that was expected in my middle class family that was like devoted to academia and this whole thing. And then all of a sudden, I realized, wait a minute, like this isn’t gonna help me at all. And I think part of when you have these realizations, you hear all these stories about people getting the terminal diagnosis and then suddenly they quit their fortune five hundred company job and go sailing around the world or something. And this is exactly the kind of realization that we’re supposed to get through these meditations before the terminal diagnosis because we all have it.

It’s called birth. You know, we’re all in the same boat. In fact, during one of my initial death and impermanence meditations, the meditation teacher who was this woman from Iceland, she had this long sort of maroon colored hair. Her name was Þórhalla Björnsdóttir. And so she led this meditation in this accent that sounded like Bjork, the pop singer.

She gave this analogy, and she said, we’re all like falling out of an airplane without a parachute. And that’s our reality. And I’m really scared of heights. So this was a very visceral experience for me to actually visualize falling out of an airplane without a parachute. And that really got to me because it’s our reality.

It’s our experience. Okay? So I think as a prerequisite to all of the work that we’re gonna do today in your own Buddhist practice, it’s really important to focus on these meditations about death and impermanence all the time. And the result is not to bum you out. The result is not to make you feel depressed and despondent.

The result is meant to be to just realize that you have this incredible chance right this very second and to make the most of it and to change your priorities. And a really good death and impermanence meditation will make you shift your priorities and do the right thing. You know, for a lot of people, that’s the result. For me, it was the result. You know, I wrote my boss that day and said I’m not coming back to my job.

I’ve found Tibetan Buddhism. Am I going to figure out what’s going on here because this is the most important thing? And that’s the you know, a good result. You don’t have to end up in this kind of outfit. But to just reprioritize and see what the most important thing to do in your life.

So that’s the importance of that impermanence and death as a prerequisite for the work that we’re going to do today. So one of the things that I wanted to do is give you practices that you can use, you know, really practical practices from a Buddhist perspective of what you can do to prepare for death and at the death time. Okay, so the first thing that we’re going to talk about is a practice that comes from the Lojong or thought transformation genre of teachings called the five powers. Okay, and this is from a text called the seven point thought transformation by Geshe Chekhawa, which is one of the most beloved texts of the Tibetan Lojong tradition. And so we’re gonna talk about the five powers for life and then there’s a five powers for the time of death.

And these are things that you can do mentally to prepare for the actual time of death. So we’re going to start with this. Chökyi asked me to do some of the really practical stuff in the afternoon and to do more of the theory in the morning. So that’s why we’re doing some of these things in the morning. And then our second session, we’re actually going to be going through the stages of death explanation and meditation.

Now, as one person that I heard recently who gave a talk about death and dying from a Buddhist perspective and he said the Tibetan Buddhists have about thirty five different books about death and dying and the other Buddhist traditions have like two. And there’s a reason for this. Because the stages of death are explained very, very clearly in the Tibetan tradition and a lot of emphasis is put on the stages of death and how to practice during the death time. Now, why is it so skewed towards the Tibetan tradition? And the reason for this is that the stages of death are explained from the perspective of the subtle body as it’s elucidated and highest yoga tantra, which only exists in the Tibetan tradition.

So this is the reason why there’s a zillion books about death and dying in the Tibetan tradition, and it doesn’t exist in the other traditions. Not that they don’t have practices at the death time, you know, I’m not saying that, but the really specific mediteachings that are done at the time of death that utilize these subtle stages of consciousness dissolving and the most subtle stage of consciousness of the clear light are specifically from the highest yoga tantra perspective. Okay, so that’s the reason that there’s just this plethora of, you know, death and dying material in the Tibetan tradition. So that’s what we’re going to go through. And we’re actually going to do a meditation where you are going to go through a facsimile of these stages of death in meditation.

Okay, so that will take us through the morning, then we’re going to have a lunch break. And then we’re going to get into more of the practical things. We’re going to have a meditation right after lunch and hopefully you won’t be too sleepy. We were trying to have discussion group but there’s not enough to discuss yet. So we need to do the discussion group later.

So the first thing we’re gonna do is an approaching death meditation. And this is actually going through in your imagination, you know, what happens? You get the cancer diagnosis. What do you do? How do you respond?

You have to talk to your family about it. Who’s gonna be there for you? Who may create some distance? So you’re going to go through this, you know, in your imagination, go through that whole process. And part of the reason for doing this in meditation is that it’s to prepare you for this five wishes document, which is this document that details your wishes for what you want to happen at the time of death.

Okay? So we’re gonna prepare for that through meditation because the experience that a lot of people have is by actually going through it in their imagination, they become really clear about what they want. And sometimes it surprises them. Sometimes it’s really different than what they would come up with just theoretically sinking, oh, I want to be surrounded by all my friends and family holding my hand. And then they go through it and they go, no, I really want to be meditating at that point.

And it’s better if it’s quiet and, you know, they’re in the next room praying for me or something like that. Like when you actually go through the meditation, you’ll often find that different things arise than what you would have expected. So we’re going to do the meditation first. It’s quite heavy. It’s quite emotional.

You know, you’re really going through slowly, slowly imagining the process leading up to the time of death. And for a lot of people, it’s emotional. So we’re going to spend time debriefing after this happens in pairs. So you choose someone and talk to them and talk about what came up for you. And then we’re going to talk about it in a group because this usually can be quite a lot.

You know, we had some feedback at the end of our weekend workshop last time. And one of the things that people came up with was, could we have boxes of Kleenex please scattered around the room? So maybe I’ll see if Chökyi can scatter some Kleenex during our lunch break before we do this meditation. It can be quite emotional. And then we’re going to go into looking at this five wishes document which you know definitely elucidates your wishes at the time of death.

And then we’re going to go into some of the specific instructions at Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who’s given this whole area a lot of thought and is very interested in the hospice work that we’re doing. And so there’s specific instructions that Lama Zopa has said for how to deal with the body and certain things to be done at the time of death that are over and above this five wishes, which is a more general document. So you can actually supplement this five wishes document with more specific instructions that you add as just an addendum and refer to them within the document. So it’s the more specific Buddhist things. And then we’re gonna have some discussion because we’ll have a lot of food for thought after having done all of that.

Okay? And then we’re gonna conclude the day with some more practices, an essential poa practice. Poa refers to transference of consciousness. And there are several practices that can be done. And so we’ll introduce you actually to two of these during the day.

So once again, to sprinkle in and give you not only just the theory, but some tools that that you can use. And by the way, a lot of today is going to be presented from the viewpoint of preparing for your own death. But all this information can also be used to help people that you love, you know, people that you’re close to, whether they’re Buddhist or not, you know, there’s certain principles that you can use no matter what the belief system is of the people that you’re working with. So are there any questions at this point about what we’re going to cover? Okay.

Okay. So let’s get into it when it Oh, couple of practical things on the back of your schedule. Hopefully, I think she did it like this is a recommended reading list. Okay. These are just like I said, there’s so many books out now.

This is a reading list that my friend Lenny, who’s worked as a hospice nurse for years and years, and I both came up with of just our favorites in the field. And the course book we used for the course we did last weekend is this one by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It exists in paperback called The Mind of Clear Light and in hardback called Advice on Dying and Living a Better Life. And Chökyi wanted to get copies of this book to have available and there was a mix up. She was getting them from the Land of Medicine Buddha bookstore and I was supposed to be bringing them up, but nobody told me that.

So I didn’t get them from the bookstore before it came up last night because I didn’t know I was supposed to do that. So it’s all my fault. But anyway, she’s I think somebody’s coming up later this afternoon, and maybe the book will be here by the time you leave. If not, you can come by and get it within the next couple of days. I think it’ll be here, you know, by later tonight at the latest.

But this is the most amazing, clear, unbelievable explanation. I mean, His Holiness, as far as I’m concerned, is sort of the bottom line about everything. And this book is just so clear. It explains the stages of death and the intermediate state and these really advanced topics in such a clear way. So this is just highly, highly recommended.

And then some of the other books on the reading list have been around for longer. Some of you may have them already in your library. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, which came out in the early ’90s, is a total classic in this field. And he also really gets into a lot of the background of the Tibetan Buddhist principles like impermanence and things like that, you know, he really goes into a lot of detail. And then some other more practical guidebooks to this one final gifts is really beautiful.

This came out of the hospice movement. And it’s a lot about, you know, understanding what’s going on for people at the time of death, and how to support them emotionally. Was given this by hospice workers when my father was dying. And I just found it so helpful at that time, this book Final Gifts. So there are several books here.

Okay, so what I wanted to explain first is one practical technique that you can use. And this is the one that comes from the Lojong thought transformation cycle of teachings. And this is the five powers. Okay? Now, for those of you who’ve studied thought transformation at all, you will be kind of familiar that the concept behind a lot of this thought transformation teachings is overcoming yourself cherishing.

You know, all happiness comes from cherishing others. That’s the basic tenet of this these Lojong teachings is basically saying all of our problems come from our selfish concern. All of our happiness comes from cherishing others. Okay? So that’s kind of the basis.

But you know, everything should be motivated by trying to increase your bodhicitta motivation, your wish to become enlightened for the benefit of all sentient beings, overcoming yourself cherishing, increasing your Bodhicitta motivation. Okay, so that’s the basic guideline of all of these teachings. Now this five wishes comes from this seven point thought transformation text by Geshe Chekhawa. This is just one piece. If you ever get a chance to study this text, there are a lot of translations and commentaries available in English right now.

I remember at a certain point when I was in this long retreat, I really got that self-cherishing is really the cause of all problems. Like I got it at this deep visceral level. I remember it was actually the birthday of the great Bodhisattva, Martin Luther King Junior, very appropriately enough. And I was doing prostrations in one of my sessions, and suddenly I flashed on my mother, you know, and how much she sacrificed her life for her family and me and just what a selfish, snotty, horrible daughter, especially I was, and just how awful I was. And I couldn’t believe it.

And then it just sort of cascaded and I had this experience for about three days of realizing what a jerk I was. Know, I’d always thought I was this kind, nice person. And then one incident after another of times that I’d hurt people and caused so much suffering to others and myself. And it was all due to selfishness and self, every single one. I was desperately trying to find, you know, one incident that was not caused by my self-cherishing.

And I couldn’t find one. And this horrific experience went on for three days. I was just completely filled with remorse, you know. And that’s when these teachings became really real to me, these Lojong teachings, especially this one seven point thought transformation became extremely beloved to me after this experience because I thought if there’s one teaching I can actualize in this life, if I can actualize the seven point Lojong, I’ll be set. Know, and I often say to people if there was kind of one teaching I could take off to a desert island and it was the only one I had access to, it would definitely be this one.

So if you ever get a chance, you know, that’s a pretty high recommendation. My one desert island teaching. So if you get a chance to ever study this teaching in any detail, it’s just wonderful, beautiful. We had a weekend teaching at Land of Medicine Buddha in January on this teaching and we all had a great time. And actually the instructions on Tonglen, giving and taking, I think you, was it you that mentioned Tonglen?

One of you mentioned It was you, yeah, yeah, come from this teachings. And if we have a chance today, we’ll practice Tonglen. Hopefully, we’ll get a chance. Okay. So there’s five powers for life, and then there’s the same five powers with a different twist to be practiced at the time of death.

And you’ll get a handout which Chökyi was making a copy, and hopefully it’ll is it in the hall? Jack, could you grab the handout called the five powers? Because it might help for people to have that to refer to. I use him because I’ve known him for so long. Yeah.

Can you just send him out, Run errands for me. He doesn’t mind. Great. So if we could pass those out so you all have the five powers to refer to. Gonna have a lot of handouts today and I think she’s giving you a little folder at the end of the day to put them all in too.

I think they’re gonna put it on that archive dot org. I think that’s what they usually do. But talk to Chökyi about getting it on a DVD or something. I know. The Internet thing.

Okay. So the first power and we’re going to do the power at the time of life and then the powers for the time of death the power of determination. And this is really good to do when you first wake up in the morning before you even get out of bed. Just lie in bed and set your motivation for the day, okay? We talk so much about the importance of setting motivation and we set our motivation before every teaching that we do and every class and every meditation.

So this is the minute you wake up and become conscious, before you get up, before you brush your teeth, before you make your tea, just set your motivation for the day, especially in terms of increasing your Bodhicitta realizations. Okay? Make the determination that this day you’ll serve others as much as possible, overcome yourself cherishing, increase your Bodhicitta. Just set the tone for your whole day. So that even if you forget during the day, at least you’ve you know, put out that motivation first thing in the morning.

Okay, that’s the power of determination. Now the next the power of the white seed. Okay, Lama Zopa Rinpoche goes on and on and on about the power of the white seed, is basically purifying and accumulating merit. Okay, this is so important for our practice. We can’t get realizations from our meditation without purification and accumulation of merit.

And so many of our practices that we do in this tradition are specifically for purification and accumulation. For example, when you sit down to meditate on a lam rim topic, and we had a class a couple of nights ago about how to do retreat on the lam rim. And I really emphasize this, don’t just plop down on your cushion and immediately start thinking about impermanence or emptiness or whatever you need to prepare your mind for realizations. The analogy they often give is like the mind is like this rocky, stony field full of weeds. If you just scatter a bunch of seeds on top of this field, nothing’s gonna happen like forget about it, you’re not going to get a good crop.

You need to till the soil, chuck out all the stones, pull out all the weeds, put a bunch of fertilizer in it. This is like purification accumulation of merit. Prepare the ground and then when you put the seeds in there, they have some chance of growing and flowering. And this is what purification accumulation, it makes your mind ready and ripe and prepared to have those realizations. And in your meditation session, you do it through the preliminaries, especially the seven-limb prayer.

You know, it’s all about purification, accumulation, merit. So you take refuge, generate Bodhicitta, you know, reflect on your Bodhicitta motivation. Sometimes you’ll do the four immeasurables. And then especially the seven-limb prayer, right before you do your main meditation subject prepares your mind, okay? So there’s many ways of purification and accumulation of merit.

Traditional preliminary practices or Nundros that you do before retreat are for this purpose. There’s many practices. Serving Dharma centers is a wonderful way to purify and accumulate merit. You can do the traditional practices for some of us that are a little more action oriented, serving the Dharma center. I remember having a conversation with Lama Zopa on the eve of going into this long retreat.

He said to me, he was in New Zealand, and I was talking to him on the telephone. I was in California. And he said to me, Oh, so you’ve done your Nundro, these preliminary practices, which is one hundred thousand of this and one hundred thousand of that and one hundred thousand of the other thing. And I completely freaked out because he’d never told me to do this. I’d never done it.

Buddha, are you gonna do, light a Lama Zopa? So I said, Rinpoche, no, I haven’t. Like my whole life fell before my eyes, like I’m getting ready to do this long retreat. And he started laughing and laughing and laughing. And he goes, no, no, I’m telling you.

I’m telling you, You did your nunro, like all your years of service. I’d worked for him for like nine years. All your years of service, all your years of working so hard with such pure motivation. He’s like, no, no. I’m telling you.

So this is a great vehicle to purify and accumulate merit. You know, serve your teachers, serve the Dharma in whatever way you can. Study hard, especially studying emptiness is a great vehicle to purify and accumulate merit. Practicing compassion, doing Tonglen meditation, all of these fall under the power of the white seed, you know, the power of purification and accumulation of merit. So try and purify your old bad karma.

Keep your vows really well. If you don’t have any level of vowed morality, at least really pay attention to the ten non virtues and accumulate as much merit as possible. Okay. Now the next power, the power of familiarity. And that’s about making your practice, especially this Bodhicitta and overcoming self-cherishing, totally habitual, total second nature.

So it’s your knee jerk reaction to every situation that happens. I often say if you restrict your meditation practice to forty five minutes in the morning, forget it, you’re never going to change. It’s not enough. And this is one of those things of practicing Dharma in daily life. You have to get into this habit of Bodhicitta motivation, taking care of others, remind yourself all the time.

There’s one trick that these Kadampa Llamas used. Every time they would change positions, they would recite a little verse. So if they were sitting down and they’d stand up, they’d have one of these verses memorized in their head and they’d recite it. Standing up to sitting down, lying down to getting up. Anytime you change positions.

And there are these classic verses, for example, the eight verses of thought transformation is beautiful and that’s a great one to memorize and use for this. Those of you who do the Lama Chopa Guru Puja, there’s a whole long list of verses at the at the final lamrim prayer, at the end of thought transformation teaching. So any of these texts you can use, you know, or make up your own verse, but remind yourself constantly. And one trick is when you change positions, remind yourself. And then at the death time, you know, we go through these workshops.

And one of my students last week said, hey, you guys are talking like you’re going to be at a hospice with a bunch of Buddhists around you saying prayers and you’re going go out really mellow and be able to prepare. He’s had two heart surgeries and he’s like fifty. You know, he has heart disease running his family and he goes, I’m gonna have the big one in the middle of Capitola Mall, you know, on the linoleum surrounded by a bunch of strangers. What like, what do I do? This, the power of familiarity.

Then, then you’re like Gandhi, you know, who gets shot in the chest at point blank range. And he says the name of God, that’s in his mind. Like that’s the power of familiarity. It’s so second nature, that it comes right up. So that’s what this is all about.

Just constantly thinking of your Bodhicitta motivation, constantly imbuing your mind with that so that you’re like Gandhi. And not like Ram Dass who had the stroke and fell down on the floor and later thought, here I’m supposed to be Mr. Big spirituality. And I didn’t think about my spiritual path at all. I’m just freaking out, you know, so it was a big wake up call for him.

And he really realized that he needed to redouble his efforts, you know, and we all need to do that if it’s going to be familiar enough to be second nature, you know, when we do have the big one in the middle of the mall, surrounded by strangers and we don’t happen to have the perfect, you know, Buddhist hospice with everybody saying prayers and mantras into our ears because it’s quite possible. Okay. The next one is the power of repudiation. Now, I really like this one. The Tibetan word for this is Sunjimpa, and the connotation of that is to rip something out by the heart.

You know, this is one of those like gutsy Tibetan earthy things. And this is strike out itself cherishing wherever it shows its face. And then the text they say, just like you’d slap a thieving dog, you know, and you get this visualization of these monasteries that had these half starving dogs running around. And they didn’t get a bowl of Purina dog chow twice a day. They just had to eat whatever scraps were thrown.

So you got your big plate of Momos, you turn around to talk to somebody else. And one of these mangy, half starved dogs is stealing the Momos from your plate, you turn around. So this is the visualization, right? I wouldn’t probably slap them. I’d probably feed them more Momos.

But that’s kind of what it’s about. Like the minute it shows its face, you just bash it, forget it, don’t give it a moment of breathing room. And this is where I really like in the Buddhist texts, the sort of personification of Mara really works for me because it’s like you personify yourself cherishing as this external being, and then you can yell at it and sort of swear at it and say, look, Mara, you know, self-cherishing has run the show since beginningless time. And that’s why we’re still here unenlightened. I mean, I’m unenlightened.

I don’t know about y’all. You could all be Buddhists. But for me, I’m done. You know, I’m sick of this suffering. And the reason is self-cherishing.

And if you give it an inch, it’ll take a mile. Know, so this is about just bashing it the minute it shows its head. The minute you notice something that you’re doing is coming from that me, me, me, me, me, me, you know, that whiny little me, me, me place. Or you start to feel shut down, like what it is for me is like, my heart starts to kind of constrict and then I’m protecting this eye that doesn’t even exist from, you know, encroachment. And then it’s just this rigid shutdown kind of little block in your heart.

So whenever I start to feel that I really try and challenge it because that’s what’s going to keep you from being enlightened. So that’s Sunjimpa, power of repudiation. Some people call it the power of destruction, ripping it out by the heart. Okay. And the last power is the power of prayer.

And this is all about dedication. At the end of the day before you go to bed, it’s really good actually at the end of the day to review your actions for the day. And a lot of my students I say keep a little notebook that you carry around with you and a couple of times a day check the state of your mind, especially if you have certain vows, check how you’re doing in relation to your vows, you know, And at the end of the day, it’s really helpful to write it down. It makes a strong imprint. Check what and be sure and write what you did well.

You know, if you really benefited beings, did something really generous, make sure that you write down the good stuff. That’s all about rejoicing. And that’s a really important thing to do. And then you write down the things that maybe could use a little work, you know, and then you dedicate the merit. You pray at the end of the day that whatever virtue that you accrued during that day goes towards deepening your Bodhicitta, you know, overcoming yourself cherishing deepening your Bodhicitta.

That’s your dedication at the end of the day. Okay, are there any questions on these five powers for life? Yeah. On the dedication, I thought the dedication was dedicating the merit to the enlightenment of all sentient beings. Well, you can dedicate for different things, but dedicating specifically wanting your virtue to go for your increasing Bodhicitta because you can’t get enlightened without Bodhicitta anyway.

I mean, for sure, you should also dedicate for the, you know, your enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. But, you know, you can dedicate specific actions for specific things. So when you’re working on these Lojong trainings that increase your Bodhicitta, it’s good to also dedicate for the deepening and increase of your Bodhicitta too. Yeah. Because that will get you enlightened.

Without Bodhicitta, there’s no way to to get enlightened in the first place. Yeah. Okay. Anything else on these? Okay.

So now the five powers at the time of death. And this is actually how you can practice at the death time. And by the way, the lamas say, this is the best poa. This is the best transference of consciousness. There are all of these techniques that involve visualizing deities and reciting certain mantras and syllables and all of this stuff.

And they go, that’s all well and good. But practicing these five powers at the time of death is the supreme transference of consciousness practice. And if you can do this, you’re set. Basically, you can die with bodhicitta mind, which is what these are setting you up for, there’s no way you can go to a lower realm. Impossible.

If you die with your mind filled with the thought of Bodhicitta, with the thought of benefiting others, there’s no way you can go to any kind of lower realm. So they say this is the supreme transference of consciousness practice. Okay. So the power of determination, the resolve not to come separated from bodhicitta, even in death in the intermediate state, You know, you’re getting ready to go through this scary death process. You know, the intermediate state, there’s lots of hallucinations that accompany this state, different visions, it can be quite scary, you’re being ripped away from your body.

You make the determination not to be separated from your Bodhicitta motivation even at the time of death. Okay, that’s the determination. And hold on to that thought of wanting to become enlightened, to use your death process to increase your spiritual practice and to become enlightened for the sake of all beings. So that’s your determination then. The power of the white seed.

Give away all your possessions, you know, give away everything that you’re attached to die with a clean slate. They say it’s really good to give away everything before you die. Don’t wait for the will. Your relatives will haggle over grandma’s china and all of this business. Forget about it.

Get rid of it all before you die, as much as possible. Lama Zopa told this story about one Lama who’s practicing the five powers at the time of death, and he gave away all his stuff. And then Lama Zopa said, that was six years ago, and he’s still alive. But that’s cool. Or at least what one friend of mine’s mother did was she put the names on the, like she taped the name on the bottom of all the little tchotchkes and china and all of this stuff of who she wanted it to go to.

You know, she kind of couldn’t bear giving it away, but that was really good because at least she put like a label on it of somebody else’s name, which you can imagine must have decreased her attachment. Like one of the things that drives the cycle of saṃsāra, and for those of you who’ve studied the twelve links, is attachment, right? So this power is all about reducing the attachment and clinging in your mind at the time of death, which will shoot you right into rebirth. If there’s any chance of getting liberated from saṃsāra at the time of death, which there is as we shall see in the next section, attachment is a complete antithesis of that. So this is all about decreasing your attachment.

So for a lot of us, it’s stuff. Your relationships with people. Die with a clean slate in terms of people. For a lot of people who are practitioners, and we’ll talk about this when we get to the five wishes, they don’t wanna be surrounded by all their loved ones holding their hands and weeping and grabbing them and saying, don’t go Aunt Sarah, please don’t go. You know, doesn’t really help if you’re trying to die without attachment.

And for some people, they need to say goodbye to the people they love while they’re still conscious and then not actually have them around at the time of death. So relationships is one good thing that it’s really good to just and clear up. Like if there’s some unfinished business with someone, some resentment, the time of death is a great time to at least make it okay with that estranged relative that you haven’t seen for twenty years. You know, you may not become best friends, but at least try and communicate and clear up all of that kind of emotional entanglement so you don’t die burdened with it. Attachment to your body is something that also really drives our rebirth in saṃsāra.

So as much as possible to disidentify with your body, which a lot of Buddhist practice is about. Okay, a lot of things for all the way from impermanence through tantric, highest yoga tantric practices is about dis identifying with your body. Just seeing it as just this constantly changing continuum of body moments that your consciousness happens to be associated with at the moment. And there’s nothing about it that’s really you. Meditating on emptiness as much as you possibly can to just decrease your identification with this body, that it’s some solid self.

Okay? Now, we’re going to skip to the power of destruction, the power of repudiation. At the time of death, it’s really good to confess and repair any broken vows that you have. For those of you who have taken different levels of vows in the Buddhist tradition, whether it’s individual liberation vows, bodhisattva vows, tantric vows, really, really good to do what you can to repair these vows as close to the time of death as possible. A lot of these Tibetan lamas will die right after having done self initiation practice or having taken initiation.

They’ll get one of their teachers in to come and give them empowerment to restore their broken vows. For the rest of us and for people who might not have those vows, some sort of confession, making amends, atoning for whatever you feel you’ve done, misdeeds. In fact, when the Tibetan lamas hear about the whole Catholic thing about confession, they think it’s great. You know, have a priest come in and tell them everything you did wrong and clear the slate. They’re like, right on, you know.

When my father was dying, and I went to look after him, one of my lamas said, you know, he may have done negative things that he’s never admitted to anyone, try and get him to confess, like try and, you know, just try and get him to confess to clear his conscience at the end. And it turns out there was something that he’d done that was not a secret to any of the rest of us. But he could only admit it at the time of death the way he treated one of our relatives. And he said, Oh, I was so unkind to her. And he never would have admitted it.

I mean, his whole life he acted like she completely deserved the way that he treated her and he really regretted it at the time of death. So I was able to help him make amends with that relationship. So that’s a really important thing to do at the time of death is just confessing and repairing whatever broken vows, making amends, dying with a clean slate that way. The power of prayer, okay? Now for those of you who’ve done Tonglen practice, giving and taking where you visualize taking on the suffering of others and giving them all benefit, this is your big chance.

This is your big chance to do the biggest Tonglen. Okay? You’re going into this scary painful death process. Take on all the suffering of all beings. Make a prayer that through your death, you will just take on all of the suffering, all the pain, all the negativity to all beings.

Do the biggest Tonglen possible. There are those of us who studied this teaching and were quite suspicious about what Jesus may have been doing on the cross when he said he’s taking the sins of the world. Was he doing Tonglen? He was doing this five powers at the time of death, you know. Take it on.

In that scary moment of death, which you have the karma to experience, there’s no way around it. At that moment, just practice taking on all the suffering of others to make that death moment meaningful. And this is the part especially that the lamas say is the most powerful transference of consciousness because you die in that state of mind with the willingness to take on the suffering of all beings. You’re set, you know? So powerful, incredibly powerful.

So that’s the power of prayer. And then the yeah. Yeah. It’s okay. Oh.

I just flashed when you said if you do this, you know, it sounds like it maybe it’s selfish if you think that you’re you know, you take on all this because you’re going to be benefiting from it. But what’s bodhicitta? But what’s bodhicitta? I mean, you have to progress spiritually to be of benefit to all sentient beings. And that’s the only reason.

The only reason to get enlightened is to benefit all sentient beings. Otherwise, be an arhat. It’s much easier. It takes seven lifetimes. You just have to overcome your mental afflictions.

The only reason to practice for three countless great eons and attain all the extra qualities of an enlightened being, the only one reason is to benefit all beings. So what His Holiness the Dalai Lama calls like, you know, wise selfishness, it’s sort of this thing of, yes, of course, it benefits you by all means. But you’re doing the hardest thing that any human being could ever possibly do, and that’s get enlightened. And the only reason that you’re doing that is to benefit all sentient beings. By the way, it also liberates you from all of your suffering.

It’s like Lama Zopa has this beautiful analogy and he says, it’s like you’re going into the kitchen to get food. You take a plate into the kitchen to get food, The only reason for having the plate is to pile the food on it because you’re hungry. And then you go out of the kitchen with a plate full of food. He said, it would be so stupid if you took the plate into the kitchen and then left without any food on it. And he goes, the plate is getting enlightened and the food is benefiting sentient beings.

Like the only reason for getting enlightened is to benefit sentient beings. You don’t get enlightened because what a cool thing. And they all have like twelve arms and they look so cool. Know, and you have an aura and everybody’s gonna think you’re great, you know. The only reason at all for getting enlightened is to benefit sentient beings.

So that’s the real motivation. It’s not saying, Oh, I get liberated. The only reason not to be reborn in the lower realms is really because you can’t practice there. You know, you can only practice, in fact, human rebirth is the best. So underlying all of these things that do benefit you, by the way, is who cares?

But how can I practice if I get reborn in the lower realms? You know, how can I progress on the spiritual path, which is why through the power of familiarity, there’s no me in there at all anymore? You know, there’s just no self-cherishing motivation. There’s no like, I want to be, you know, and there there is for most of us, because for most of us, it’s certainly mixed for a long time. But it’s like, it’s like the plate in the food, You know, it’s just like the plate in the food.

You’re not getting enlightened because you think it’s such a cool thing and all your friends want to get enlightened too. You’re getting enlightened so that you can benefit sentient beings. Otherwise, there’s no reason to really. You know, you can get liberated from saṃsāra a lot easier by becoming a hinayana arhat. It’s so much easier than enlightenment.

It’s the omniscient mind of an enlightened being that can see the karma of other beings, see their past and future lives, know, has that omniscience that knows exactly how to benefit them. That’s the only reason to get enlightened, those qualities of a Buddha. Does that does that help? Does that make sense? Okay.

Okay, so the power of familiarity here is like I said, then you’re like Gandhi, you know, it’s right there. It’s right there. So you lie down, do that big tonglin at the end of your life just like Jesus and go out with that mind of Bodhicitta. Okay. So it’s really beautiful.

And this is the most powerful way to practice at the time of death. And that’s why we have to start now. That’s why we’re having the workshop today. Because you can’t start getting familiar and you can’t start practicing like that. You know, two weeks before you die.

Like we need to practice now so it’s so familiar. It’s second nature just like it was with Gandhi and there’s no question at all. Boom. It’s right there in our minds. Okay?

Isn’t it cool? It’s so cool. Like this is all we need. See, this is why I say like, go off to a desert island with this teaching and you’re all set. Okay.

Are there any question? Oh, just a show of hands. How many people have done Tonglen meditation before? So almost everybody. Okay.

Who hasn’t? Is it? Okay. Okay. So we’ll see if we can get a chance to practice later in the day.

We have so much to cram into today. So a lot of the meditations I felt people were familiar with. Unfortunately, I had to cut out, but we’ll see if we can do that to just kind of refresh the experience for people. Are they yeah. You had a question.

Oh, microphone. I don’t know if this is more of a rant or rave, but while working at the hospice, I noticed that a lot of people who pass away there, none of them are really conscious and a lot of them are sleeping. So like a big fear, but they’re not sleeping, they’re in so much pain. They’re on medication. Yeah.

At the point of death, but they don’t really well, maybe they know. But I guess my concern is is if we someone is lucky enough to know like I’ve been diagnosed with the cancer instead of like driving out in your car and you die that day. Yeah, yeah. How can you actually practice this when your mind is in so much pain and you’re like unconscious. Yeah, yeah.

And a lot of people do die in a coma. We had this woman at the Hospice at Land of Medicine Buddha who’s actually there for six months. And I taught her Tonglen when she first came and she was just so happy with it. Know, she just said because people were trying to teach her all these complicated mantras and things. And she just couldn’t, you know, learn new things.

Her mind was already just kind of fuzzy, but I taught her Tonglen. And then she went through quite a lot of struggle. And we’ll talk about it later when we talk about the five wishes. She had colon and liver cancer and stomach was incredibly distended and filled with fluid and she was in a lot of pain. But she wanted to try and practice as much as possible too.

So she went through a lot of struggle trying to get the meditations right, just trying to get it balanced right so that she wouldn’t be so out of it that she couldn’t practice at all. But then, of course, when she didn’t take pain medications, she was so distracted by the pain, she couldn’t practice either. So it’s quite a fine line trying to get it right. Now, of the things that you find in Western medicine that doesn’t have this perspective that the time of death is a really crucial time to practice is this thing of like, just zonk them out. Don’t have them suffering at all.

Don’t have them in pain at all. Lama Zopa says interestingly enough, you can medicate pain but you can’t medicate suffering. Because a lot of what’s going on for people is the emotional suffering that’s an extra component on top of the physical pain and the anxiety. And for a lot of us as practitioners, we wanna work through that and be really conscious of it. So a certain amount of physical pain can be medicated, but so much of what adds on to the subjective experience of pain is the anxiety around it and sort of the state of mind around it.

It’s interesting because I was in graduate school in biochemistry and I remember taking this neuropsychopharmacology class. It was all about drug interactions in the brain. And the only thing I remember from graduate school is that the way morphine acts in the brain, it doesn’t work on the pain centers of the brain. It works on the anxiety and the fear. So your mind is labeling pain on objective sensory experience.

But what makes it pain is all the anxiety and fear, you know, on top of that sense experience creates pain. So for those of us who are practitioners, there’s ways that you can deal with what you’re subjectively labeling pain with the fear and anxiety, you know, and then a lot of people go through without those strong pain medications that most of the medical profession finds really necessary because they’re really kind of meditating and trying to work with the fear and work with the anxiety that comes up. But it’s a balance. It’s definitely a balance because, you know, it’s good to remain conscious for as long as possible and there’s a lot you can do for that. But then again, if you’re just like writhing around just completely distracted by your pain, there’s no way to practice with that either.

And then sometimes just because of the degeneration of the body, there’s sort of no way to be conscious at the time of death and to be able to do the Tonglen. This is sort of the best case scenario. If you’re conscious, you’re not too drugged, you can actually do this practice at the time of death. And it’s quite rare to have all of those conditions together. But the more imprints that you’ve made, and one of the things that’s really nice even when people are in a coma, and this is one of the things that you can specify in your five wishes to have your friends reading your practices out loud at your bedside.

Then they say that you can hear for a very long time into the death process even when you’re no longer able to respond a coma, they can hear. So you can specify the practices you’d like the people around you to be reciting and things like that. Yeah. But it’s hard. It’s not like a cut and dry thing at all.

Yeah. There was an article, I think it’s maybe Mandala, about Lama Yeshe, when he was, know, at kind of at the end of his days with his heart problem. And he writes a little essay, and I’m hoping they’re going to do more, about how the drugs were interfering with his ability to meditate. And so he was really struggling with that. I don’t know.

I think after that, maybe Lama Zopa has advised the other lamas not to necessarily go through Western medicine, I think because of that experience. It was interesting. Well one of the reasons too that this Hospice at Land of Medicine Buddha founded way back in nineteen ninety two when Lama Zopa first started talking about it was because it was so hard to find a place where people could die consciously. Like we’d have this monk who died in the intensive care unit of Dominican and he totally could have been a hospice patient. You know, was nothing medically that necessitated him being in ICU.

It was just that there was no place for him to go. So I remember when he died, we all went and the ICU gave us, I think, three hours, which was really unusual. But if he’d been in a place where his body could have remained for a couple of days, and we would have been able to really work with him without all interference of what was going on in the medications and things that they insisted on him having and the IVs and all of that stuff. So that was one of the reasons to have specifically a place where people could choose what they wanted and die really consciously like that and not have all the interference that’s just considered normal in a Western medical setting because death is considered failure. Western medicine considers death failure and they consider that they have to do everything possible to ensure that people keep living which is why the whole hospice movement started in the beginning was just acknowledging this is really natural, it’s normal, know, and let’s do it and not consider death a medical emergency and a failure but to have a different outlook on it.

Yeah. Yeah. Anything else? Any other questions? Okay, well let’s take oh right on time.

I usually run over by long shot. So let’s have a fifteen minute break and come back at about let’s see let’s come back at twelve which makes it about a thirteen minute break, then we’ll go in this into the stages of death and then do a meditation on the stages. Okay. At death, how do you, like, go through those steps and think about how do you, like, wrap in a guru devotion meditation in here? Because it seems like when you’re dying would be really I need a ton of that.

Do guru devotion. Well, we’re gonna do another practice later on that’s more of a poa where you So we’ll go through that. And I think a combination of the tonglin and that merging your mind with the mind of the through you, you know, imagine being the embodiment of all enlightened beings is really excellent. You know? So I think I think a little bit of both.

But definitely, if you the point of this was if you die with that Bodhicitta mind, You’re in trouble. You’re you know? Like, there’s no way you can go to a lower realm if your mind is just the blissful view of that bodhicitta mind. I’ve never heard that. That’s awesome.

Yeah. It’s totally awesome. Yeah. And we could just get it so second nature. You know, there’s basically any way.

Because if the throwing karma at the time of death is such a strong determinant of your next rebirth, that if your mind is completely in view with that, then you’re set. You know? Mhmm. But we’ll talk about degree devotional when we get Your mind is so pure I rejoice. That’s not what I was thinking about.

I was thinking of you know eighties whenever that when these things first started they were a lot bigger back then. It’s actually kind of Yeah. I remember that. Either that or, you know, do you wanna The material girl tour or whatever it was. Like, do you want a hamburger or a shake with Coke or your thing?

Oh, right. Those things Okay, so the next piece we’re going to do is the stages of death. And this is the piece that is unique in the Tibetan Buddhist presentation. Oops, did we have an incident? Oh.

Okay. Well, wait a minute for the cleanup crew. Yeah. Our language right there. Let me just ask you a question.

Now he didn’t knock it over. The chair knocked it over. Right? Because he didn’t intend it. So what happened That’s a whole another story, Lynn.

We’ll get to that. We’re not talking about that. We’ll get to that. That’s, you know, pramāna, valid perception. We’re not gonna get into that topic.

That’s basic studies program module four. We’ll get there. Okay, so the stages of death, and this is one of the teachings that’s unique to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, like I said before, because it comes from an explanation of the subtle body that’s unique to highest yoga tantra. Okay? And this is talking about the subtle body and the subtle consciousness and the transitions that they go through at the death time.

Now, it’s very interesting. This is why whoops, did you not get one for you when you pass them out to everybody else? Now, this is also the reason that we practice the highest yoga tantra. Because reaching the subtlest level of consciousness that you reach naturally during the death process is the goal of highest yoga tantra practice. Practice.

And this is why they say that death is a great time to practice. If you’re familiar with the process and if you’ve practiced, once again, the force of familiarity in a different context throughout your life. When you get to the moment of death, you can use that naturally arising subtle, most subtle consciousness called the clear light, which is why this book is called The Mind of Clear Light in order to practice. You can also reach the same mind of clear light through tantric practice. During the completion stage, tantra is divided into generation stage and completion stage.

And during the completion stage of highest yoga tantra practice, the winds are actually moving in your body in the exact same way that they do at the time of death. They inner, gather, and dissolve at the heart chakra, which gives rise to this most subtle mind of clear light. Both times are really important times to practice. If you’ve reached the realizations of completion stage of highest yoga tantra, which are incredibly advanced realizations, Okay? Or if you go through the same absorptions that happen naturally at the time of death, you will be able to access if you’ve practiced well and gotten used to those stages and meditated on them over and over and over again, there’s some chance that you will recognize that most subtle mind of clear light when it dawns.

Okay? And then what you do with this mind is you use it to meditate on emptiness. That’s what happens. This most subtle mind is especially attuned to meditation on emptiness in a way that the gross mind that we usually operate, our gross sensory consciousness, can be used to meditate on emptiness. But that very, very subtle mind is especially attuned to that meditation on emptiness.

And the realization comes very easy, relatively speaking. Much easier if you use that very subtle mind and turn it on to the meditation on emptiness. Now, this is the reason why a lot of these high lamas will stay in meditation. You know, you’ll often hear this lama died. Their breath stopped Tuesday afternoon.

They stayed in meditation for three weeks before they were cremated. And you’re like, what’s going on during that three weeks? This is what’s going on. They’re in all of the energy has absorbed into that clear light mind has arisen. And then they’re using that to meditate on emptiness because they have a chance then it’s happening anyway, You know, because they’re dying because they’re shedding that body and all of the energy is absorbing.

It’s happening anyway. So then some of them I heard that there was this one woman last year who spent twenty one days, after the gross breath had stopped, after his heart had stopped beating, all of these stages that Western medicine and even just our normal culture says, oh, that’s deaf. Okay, they’re done. Three weeks after that point, his body wasn’t decomposing. He still wasn’t smelling.

None of that. He’s meditating on emptiness using that most subtle consciousness. So that’s the point. And this is why we train. And in fact, the generation stage of highest yoga tantra practices, for those of you that do those sadhanas, this is the main point of doing the generation stage is just to practice the facsimile of all of these stages of death over and over and over and over and over again.

You know, was telling somebody I was talking to the other day, don’t skip over this quickly and go to the mantra. Forget about mantra. That’s what you’re supposed to just do when your mind is tired. Know, really focus on especially the stages of death. And if you’ve had that training and you know what I’m talking about and you know which point of your Tantric sadhana it is, hang out there, you know, and really focus and do that meditation really clearly.

It doesn’t matter if the rest of the sadhana you’re spacing out. Focus as much as you can. Because this is what’s going to help you at the time of death if you’ve practiced well. You know, for most people who die who haven’t had this training, they go through all these stages, but they just don’t recognize it at all. So they don’t recognize that mind of clear light when it’s arising at all.

They also say if you die really quickly, especially violently in a car accident or a gunshot or whatever, the stages happen so quickly that it’s hard to recognize them, which is the main reason, actually, that Lama Zopa came up with the hospices that we have in the organization and the different Buddhist hospices is to allow the circumstances that if people want to use the death process practice and a time to meditate, they can. And that you’re not hustling the body out of the intensive care unit the minute the breath has stopped and the minute the heart stopped beating. Because there are eight stages of death. And that happens only after the fourth stage. So you’re only halfway done at that point.

And if the hospital is shuffling you off to the morgue, you’re still in it. And in fact, that’s when the subtlest consciousnesses are becoming manifest. And that’s exactly when you don’t want to move the body, for example, at all. And we’ll get into that more in the afternoon when we go into how deal with the body, your own or someone else’s, after the breathing has stopped. And what’s really important to ensure that they’re able to have that kind of practice and that kind of opportunity.

Was that what you were gonna ask about? Yeah, yeah and we’ll get into that. Yeah, Janet. No, go ahead. We’re going to get into a lot of the details about how to handle the body.

But if you’ve got a question now. Oh, well, no. I was just going to say that the hospitals now, if you request that they leave the body until the family can arrive, which allows time for the body to not be disturbed, that they they’ll they’ll do it. And you can leave them for a number of hours. The only problem is I think they removed tubes and things with sure destroyed them a bit.

But they won’t throw them in a bag and cart them off right away. Yeah. Yeah. And people are becoming more sensitive. And we’ll talk about that later on.

Sometimes though, according to certain regulations, sometimes they only have a couple of hours. And according to what we’re going to be talking about, it’s really ideal if you can leave the body sometimes for days. And it’s quite rare to find a medical facility that will allow that to happen. But and we’ll talk more about that later on. How can they identify that for example, that lama was still in meditation after three weeks?

Did they know? How did they know? There are certain subtle signs in their lamas that are experienced with knowing what the subtle signs of when the consciousness actually finally leaves the body, like when that final, subtlest most consciousness, at a certain point, it does leave the body. It’s centered in the heart center, so there are certain signs often. For example, the heart will remain warm like the rest of the body will be cold but there’ll be a little bit of warmth right at the heart center while the meditation is still happening.

Often the head will drop and fluids will come out of both the genitals and the nostrils like a little bit of fluid will come out when the consciousness has finally left. And often the appearance of the body will completely change like it’ll lose its radiance like often with the Islamists that are in these meditation for weeks, their color is still quite radiant. And then suddenly, they’ll look different. And the radiance will leave. And suddenly, their skin will look gray.

And the texture of the skin will change. And there are a lot of subtle signs. What they did with one of my teachers, Ribur Rinpoche, when he passed away last January, they got a lama who was very experienced in determining when the subtle consciousness had left. Even people who were trained in all the signs, since it was so important not to move the body before the final meditation, they got somebody else who was very, very experienced to come in and check. And he checked some of these subtle, subtle signs.

Sometimes you can just feel it, like if you’re at all kind of in tune. If you have no other data to go on than your own intuition, sometimes you can just really tell if you really kind of check-in. Like when my father died, I felt like after about seven hours, I just noticed this real shift in sort of the energy. I mean, not to sound too Santa Cruz, but it was like, I just noticed this shift in energy, and I just felt really sure that that was it. Like, he was gone.

You know? And I felt confident enough at that point to call in, you know, the funeral home to to move his body. I just felt like there was no need to, you know, stay on for for three days. That was about, like, seven or eight hours. And sometimes you do feel a shift in energy.

And if you’re alone with someone who died and you’re the one doing prayers and you only have your own intuition to go on, I think you can really sense sometimes when when stuff is going on like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to make this comment that I think it was in the May seventh Newsweek magazine that just sold just a month ago that apparently there I just don’t remember the name, but there is a emergency room physician that’s doing studies on specifically people who have heart attacks and that.

And the realization now of Western medicine that actually when somebody has a heart attack and they think they’re dead and they try to resuscitate them, that that actually is the wrong thing to do. It’s not because what happens is the cells start to close down. Oh. But it’s that burst of the oxygen that really kills the cells. Oh, wow.

It’s not that they’re and has been doing experiments that if you, like, reduce the temperature of the body, reduce and and very slowly, put oxygen into the body that that people are being revived. Oh, interesting. So I immediately thought of Buddhist Yeah. You know, concept of that and the person’s not really being done. So, westerns Will catch up.

Will will catch up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To the Buddhist of that the realization.

Yeah. Yeah. Good. Thank you. Of those subtle signs.

Yeah. I just wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about clear light at sleep at the time of sleep or going into sleep? Let’s go through the stages now. And then when we get to the clear light stage, which is the last stage, I’ll talk about it a little bit just in terms of the different times that it manifests. Okay, so let’s go through these phases.

Now, the first four phases are described in terms of the four elements. The four elements no longer from gross to subtle, one by one, they can no longer serve as a support for consciousness. So that’s what’s happening in the first four stages. And they say one element dissolves into the other. And what they mean is that that element as a support for consciousness, it’s no longer strong enough to serve as a support for consciousness.

And then the next subtler element kicks in. And that’s the first four stages. After that stage, the subtler levels of consciousness start to become manifest. Okay, the gross sensory consciousness is finished. That’s the point that Western medicine considers clinical death.

But then the subtler forms of consciousness go through three stages, and then the most subtle form of consciousness goes through one. So we’ll go through one by one. So the first phase, it’s described as the earth element dissolves into the water element. And what the earth element is, is just the rigidity of your body. Okay, it’s like the solidity of your body, the solid nature.

That’s what the earth element is. So the water element becomes more manifest. And the water element is just the fluidity of your body, like the different fluids and so forth in your body. So what are some of the signs of this happening? This is Lynn’s favorite.

Your body becomes dramatically thinner. She’s hoping that happens now. Very long runway to the actual next phase. Not because of her earth element absorbing, we hope. The limbs loosen.

You lose physical strength and vitality. The sight becomes unclear. At this point, often you can no longer move or open or close your eyes. And you may have a sense of sinking, falling, or being buried or trapped under a weight. And a lot of us who’ve looked after people who are dying Janice probably has had this experience.

This is when they struggle and try and throw the covers off. This is really common. This is really common that the people who are dying and then they start flailing around and trying to throw the covers off. And this is because they’re getting that internal sinking feeling, but it feels like there’s some weight or pressure on top of them. And often they’ll struggle at this point.

And you’ll see this quite frequently. Okay. There’s an inner vision that accompanies each of these stages. And when you use this meditation in your highest yoga tantra generation stage practice, you meditate on the inner vision. It happens anyway as the elements are absorbing.

And when you’re meditating on the similitude of these stages of death, you meditate on the inner vision, which at this point is a silvery blue shimmering mirage. I’d like to ask now just about the inner vision, since we’re going to be discussing Yeah. In every single one of these. Because even in doing my practices and such, I’m not clear about what this how how how does this inner vision appear? Is it like like when I close my eyes, sometimes I see something up in here that that is predominantly all that I see.

Yeah. But I’m not sure if that would be, like, what the inner vision is or or Yeah. It’s definitely in your mental consciousness. It’s like in your mind’s eye. Yeah.

Yeah. You’ll you’ll have an appearance. And I think it is like that thing when you close your eyes and you have red spots or whatever. I think it’s like that. It’s definitely not an external sensory consciousness, but it just manifests as a vision in your mind.

So that entire vision is just that one thing. I think so. I that’s I’ve never heard if it’s actually the entire field of vision or if it’s just Well, mean, whatever you see, it’s only that thing. Yeah. It’s like something like this slippery blue Right.

Right. That’s what’s appearing. Like little flakes in the mirage or you don’t see little borders of fancy colors or the animals are. Yeah. I mean, she’s getting a little crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s that. It’s like that is what is happening in your in your perception your inner mental perceptual field as that element is absorbing. Thank you.

Yeah. Okay. So the second phase is described as the water element dissolves into the fire element. You no longer feel experiences of pleasure or pain due to senses or mental consciousness. Okay, so you can no longer get you know, of pleasure or pain from your direct sense consciousnesses.

Your mouth, tongue and throat dry up due to loss of saliva. Other fluids such as urine, blood, and sweat dry up. You’ll often notice when people have a catheter and a little bag that all of a sudden there’s not much urine anymore. They’re also usually at this point you know, unable to take in much in the way of any nutrition or fluids or things like that. You can no longer hear sounds.

Even the normal ringing in the ears stops. Okay? So your ear sense consciousness also ceases at this point. And the inner vision here is a thin smoke like that of a stick of incense. So like a room, you imagine when a room is filled with a sort of bluish incense smoke.

That’s what the inner vision is at this point. And by the way, this book Mind of Clear Light by His Holiness gives so much really beautiful detail about these stages of death. In fact, that’s what a lot of the latter half of the book is devoted to. So this class, a lot of the class we’re doing today is sort of a synopsis and an outline of the detail in this book. So if you’re really interested, this is a great book to get.

Okay, phase three, The fire element dissolves into the wind element. And again, this is just talking about the inability of the fire element to serve as a basis of consciousness. So the warmth of the body diminishes with the hands and feet becoming cold. And often, the hospice nurses, if they’re trying to determine how close the time of death is, will feel the feet and legs in the lower extremities. And then they’ll say, oh, it’s going to be within twenty four hours because the heat in the extremities of the body is starting to absorb.

Digestion ceases. At this point, inhalation is weak and exhalation is long. And you’ll really experience this if you’re at the bedside of somebody that’s dying. A lot of times it’ll be this sort of quick panting inhalation with a really long exhalation. You’ll really notice changes in the breathing.

The sense of smell ceases and you’re no longer able to recognize faces or remember the names of your friends and relatives. And the inner vision here is of sparks or fireflies. So just little sparks or dots of light, fireflies. Phase four, the wind element dissolves into the consciousness. The tongue contracts and turns bluish.

Physical action is impossible. The senses of touch and taste are gone. The breath through the nostrils ceases. Okay, so this is the point that Western medical science says is the monument of death. And you’ll notice we’re only on phase four.

So the breath and heartbeat sense, at this point, all external sense consciousness has ceased. So no more external sense consciousness. The inner vision is that of a flickering light over a butter lamp or candle. And they say it’s not the flame itself, but you know if you have like a candle down in an opaque container and there’s just that glow of the candle above, that’s what the inner vision is. It’s not of the flame itself.

It’s just that glow of like a candle flame or butter lamp above the container. Okay. Yeah. It happens a lot just before it goes out. Oh, right.

Right. That glowing. Yeah. Just I try to visualize what happens to a candle right before it goes out. There’s a little surge, and then it’s gone.

So it’s just perfect timing for this. Yeah. I I have actually felt that my little baby was in ICU and he was, you know, in going to die. I was holding him in my arms and I wanted to I guess because he was only seventeen days old, I still hadn’t got past the postnatal stuff. I wanted to feel him feel what his experience was dying.

And I felt this vision of a lamp as if the little flame separated from the wick. And in about a second and a half, the doctor came and said the monitor said he had just passed away. I was just amazing. When I saw this, I can’t believe that you’re looking at your body. And I thought it was my way of understanding or absorbing that my child had died.

Apparently, I was in his if he were actually experiencing a vision, maybe I was there. Just wanted to share that with you. Yeah. Thank you. You know, because of your strong karmic connection, you know, in your attunement with him.

And they also say that beings near death, like one of the characteristics of the intermediate state is clairvoyances and certain psychic powers. So they say often near death, even, you know, people can start to experience. So it may have been that he was communicating that to you kind of in clairvoyant way. Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s amazing.

Holding in. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.

That’s really beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now we have four more stages.

Okay? So if we’re lucky enough to be in a hospice situation, especially Buddhist hospice, or if we’re one of these lamas who sent their attendants to another room and dressed in their robes and sat upright in the meditation posture, this is where the real work begins. Okay? So the fifth phase, the first of the three subtler levels of mind emerges. And what you get, the inner vision is a vivid white appearance.

The texts say like an autumn sky suffused by white moonlight. And the reason they say an autumn sky is all these teachings come from ancient India, and right after the monsoon season, which is late summer, the air is really clear. All the dust and particulate has been kind of washed out of the air, so you get this very, very clear, bright On a full moon night, the air is very clear and this white appearance is very bright. Okay, now what’s happening with your subtle body at this stage is the energy from your left and right channels are entering the central channel. Now the channels we haven’t really gotten into, and I’m just going to touch on it because we could have a whole class on the subtle body.

But basically, there’s a central channel and then a right and left channel. Those are the three main channels in the body. And then there’s this whole network of seventy two thousand kind of branching channels that branch off. Those of you who may have studied yoga and be familiar with the chakras, the chakras are points where subsidiary channels branch out of your central channel. That’s what the chakras are all about.

So there are these energy points, especially because you’ve got a branching of channels at the different chakras. But what’s happening here is the winds in an unenlightened state move mostly through your left and right channels and not through your central channel at all. So for our unenlightened state of being, most of the energy is moving in our left and right channels, which gives rise to our delusions, you know, which gives rise to our delusions. So what’s happening now is the energy from the right and left channel are entering the central channel through the top, through the crown chakra. Now there’s a drop the seed of the drop is at the crown chakra, and that’s the white drop.

Like you get two regenerative fluids, one from your mother and one from your father. There’s a white drop located at the crown. It’s also suffused throughout your body, but its main seat is the crown. And there’s a red drop, the main seat of which is at the navel. And we’ll get to that in a second.

So the winds are entering and the white drop starts to descend towards your heart chakra. So that’s giving this white appearance like white moonlight on this clear autumn night, a white full moon. So that’s what’s happening with your subtle body to cause this inner vision. Now the next phase, the seventh phase, I’m sorry, the sixth phase, the white appearance dissolves and what the vision that you get in your inner vision is like once again an autumn night with a brilliant red sunset. You know, if you’ve ever been in a place like Hawaii has these incredible sunsets, know the whole sky just turns this brilliant bright red.

And that’s what’s happening in the next vision. And what’s happening with your subtle body is the winds are entering from below into your central channel And the red regenerative drop at your navel is starting to travel upwards, also towards your heart center. So that’s what’s happening in the sixth phase. I’m sorry, I keep getting the numbers. Now the seventh phase, the white and red substance are meeting and merging at the heart center.

And then you get a stage called black near attainment. The reason it’s called near attainment is because it’s almost at the clear light. The clear light’s next. So it’s called near attainment because it’s almost at the point of attaining the clear light. Okay, so the white and red drop are mixing.

The first stage of this vision is total blackness, like an absolute black night, one of those nights that you can’t even see your hand in front of you and you’re sort of stumbling around. The second half of that phase is unconsciousness, a blackout. That’s total unconsciousness. And here’s where the hard work is because you need to remember to arise from that unconscious state into the clear light. And most people miss that chance because they don’t wake up from that unconsciousness or they’re not aware that the clear light is the next stage.

Okay, and then the last stage is this most subtle mind of clear light, the regenerative drops are completely dissolving into what’s called the indestructible drop at the heart, which is the seed of the most subtle consciousness. You know, that’s the seed of this subtle consciousness of clear light. Now here’s your big chance. If you’ve practiced, then you’re manifesting the most subtle level of consciousness, this consciousness of the clear light, which you can use then to meditate on emptiness if you’ve really practiced, if you really experienced. And then you can stay in that meditation for days, even weeks if you really practice.

So this is the big chance. And this is why the death time is such an important opportunity to practice if you’ve really trained well in highest yoga tantra. Now, this clear light, as I mentioned, it happens naturally at death, which is why you take advantage of it. It also happens naturally at certain other points When you yawn, when you sneeze, when you have an orgasm, during sleep, during the transition as you’re falling asleep, most of these happen so quickly that you’re not able to really utilize them for your practice. It’s sort of about your winds getting completely kind of sucked into your central channel forcefully and the clear light will manifest.

But at the death time, there’s more of an opportunity because it can happen more gradually than at these other times. So you can actually use it for practice. Okay? So this is the point why we introduce these stages and why if you do these practices and train over and over and over again, you use this stage of the clear light mind. Okay?

Are there any questions about this point? Okay. Yeah. Judith. I was just thinking how how essential the training is because Yeah.

And how subtle. Because at this point, there is no thought, no remembrance, no connection. Yeah. Yeah. And so it has to be automatic.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve I’ve heard his holiness I’ve heard that his holiness practices this every day.

Yeah. Absolutely. And many others as well. Because when we actually practice, what we do is using our conceptual thought, we remind ourselves of what the next stage is. We go, Okay, now I’m in the red increase, next comes black near attainment.

But as you say, conceptual thought is no longer in operation when this is really happening at the time of death. And so you know, that has to be just second nature, your consciousness of it and your awareness of it through training. It’s just second nature because you no longer can use conceptual thought to remind yourself. So that’s, yeah, that’s an excellent point. That’s exactly It’s like seeing you and not thinking there’s Petra.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Petra’s who I used to be. Tens and Choki, you know? People are like, who’s that? She’s not Petra.

Yeah, it’s just that recognition without mediation by conceptual thought. You don’t have to go, oh, tall, nun, from Land of Medicine Buddha. You don’t have to go through the identification. It’s just immediate recognition. Yeah.

Yeah. And generally speaking, that occurs in completion stage practice of highest yoga tantra? Well, that’s why you can use it at the time of death. Now, in completion stage practice, you actually are able to cause the winds to enter the central channel in exactly this way. So you’re not no longer are you imagining these visions, you’re actually experiencing them because the winds are doing exactly what they’re doing at the time of death.

But that only happens in completion state. Outside of the death process, that generally only happens in completion state. So you’re not doing what we do at our level and what we’re going do in a minute. Do it as a meditation. It’s actually happening.

So in completion stage, your conceptual thought ceases, the subtle consciousness manifests, the most subtle consciousness manifests, and then you use that to meditate on emptiness at completion stage. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s no longer a similitude in your imagination. You’re reminding yourself it’s actually happening for real.

Now, don’t die then. You know, the winds start to move again. Because of karma, you don’t die. Even when all the winds and the most subtle clear light is manifest, you know, then because of karma, you reemerge from that state and the stages go in the backwards order the same way they do at the time of death. When you go into the intermediate state, then the visions occur in the reverse order and you come out, And then the grosser levels of mind begin to manifest.

So if you’re not at the absolute end of the state of enlightenment or the higher levels where you can leave your gross body completely, usually the winds start to move and you just go through the absorptions in the reverse order and then go back to gross consciousness the same way you do in the intermediate state. But just to clarify, this meditation is a generation stage meditation. Yeah, exactly. What we do when we’re meditating on it, I mean, we’re going to do it now. And when you’re doing it during your generation stage, you’re using your conceptual mind to have a similitude of the experience.

But when the winds are absorbing in completion stage, they’re going to be happening, and you’re not going to be meditating on it with the conceptual mind. Yeah. Now, if death occurs violently suddenly, are the stages the same? The stages are the same, but they usually happen so instantaneously it’s really hard to recognize them. I think it would take the most well trained yogi to actually be able to meditate on them if it’s a violent, sudden death because they just flash past really quickly.

But you do go through all the stages. It’s just that they’re so fast. Yeah. I have a question about that. So if somebody has endured trauma, like an accident, like you talked about, and is now in a coma, and that person’s mind is still going through these stages, Is that true?

Yeah. If they’re not dead yet. If they’re still breathing and they’re not dead, they’re in probably maybe not even in phase one yet unless they’re showing those signs. So for sure, even if they have some traumatic injury, even though they’re not conscious, but they’ll still have gross consciousness. It will still be manifest even though maybe they won’t be able to talk and interact and things like that until phases start to become manifest like the earth element absorbing and losing the strength and vitality and having the sensation of sinking and things like that.

It’s just harder to tell when somebody’s unconscious sometimes because some of the clues are missing. What I’m trying to say is that the mind may go through this process where they’re not feeling anything while the body is separated already. Is that possible? And the body is still The mind is going So the mind has already released, let’s say. Is that possible?

And the body is still going through. No, no, no, no. Even though certain and this is where you get into the difference between brain and mind. There are certain gross sensory processes that are dependent on the physical brain. But Tibetan Buddhism says mind is something completely different than brain.

And even when there’s been some brain injury or brain trauma and there’s certain functions that are dependent on that part of brain function that’s been damaged or no longer manifest, your consciousness is a whole different story. So part of the gross consciousness is dependent on brain, but it’s a completely separate entity than the physical brain. So those subtle levels of consciousness are not at all dependent on brain function. It’s a completely different even with gross brain damage and things like that, it can influence the gross senses. And it could lead to the cessation of respiration, which would then kick you into those more subtle levels of consciousness.

But it has really no effect on the subtle levels of consciousness. Yeah, that was my question. So even though if there’s a traumatic injury, Exactly. Other question I have is as a meditator, I have done a lot of meditation. I seem to encounter a blockage after phase three when I go through my experiences.

Inner vision rises spontaneously. Suddenly you’re in it and you sense this Okay. Then after that, there’s like a block. I’m getting to face point of meditation. Oh, interesting.

And I was at Josh not at Joshua Tree, way in the desert with Stan Groff and Jack Kornfield. And they were doing meditation. I had this inner vision. They were not doing a death meditation, but I had this thing of this firefly thing. And then after that, spontaneously, I’ve tried several times during practices trying to and I can’t get past a hurdle.

Maybe I get believe you’ve got this. Well, think, you know, for a lot of it, definitely, I mean, I think you’re ahead of the game that you can so easily do some of them. Like, for most of us, it’s really No. That’s trick that I can’t. You know?

You’re spoiled because you can do the first three quickly. No, just keep trying. I mean, may have something to do with With the fact that it’s tied in with the last breath. It could be could be something to do with that. But in your meditation, if you just keep practicing and practicing, like I say, I think that the first ones happen kind of spontaneously for you.

You’re probably out of the game. Most of us are spacing out and thinking about the grocery list this afternoon and it’s hard for us to meditate on it at all. No, this happened over several years. This was at least six or seven years I did this practice over and Over and over again. Well, might be interesting to really investigate what the block is.

Like when you feel it come up, maybe sit with the feeling and see if it’s fear of death or what it is that’s like if you feel that you’re no longer able to go forward, maybe change the focus of the meditation and drop the death awareness and just say, what am I feeling in my body? Is it anxiety? Is it fear? What’s causing the block? And you may be able to find out what’s going on.

Often when you feel something like that, I think you really often, before applying some kind of antidote or just sort of forcing yourself through, if you just really hang out with the feeling and really feel it, sometimes you can find really useful information about what’s going on for you. So I would recommend doing that just to see what’s behind it because that might, you know, then you might be able to move move through it. Yeah. Okay. I think what we’ll do is go ahead and do this meditation.

Now when you do it within the context of highest yoga tantra, you usually meditate primarily on the inner visions. But I think what we’ll do today, since this is part of preparation for death, is we’ll go ahead and meditate on all the physical signs as if we’re going through the actual death process also. Because that’ll just give us more information. It’s kind of a preview. And again, like the meditation we’re going to do after lunch, it may be kind of disturbing to really be So we’ll spend a little bit of time debriefing.

I think we’re going to go over our Hopefully nobody’s starving too much to death if we go over about ten minutes in order to complete this meditation. So if you sit upright in a meditation posture, I don’t know if there’s enough room. I was going to say sometimes if you have a bigger room, if anybody wants to lie down and go through it, but I don’t know that there’s really enough room to offer that here. But if you do feel that it would be more significant for you to actually lie down and go through it, you’re welcome if you’re not too shy to kind of fill in some of the spaces here. Land of medicine Buddha, everybody dragged cushions and kind of flung them on the floor, but we had a huge, huge room and a lot of space.

But you’re not allowed to fall asleep if you lie down. No falling asleep. Okay, so let’s just spend a minute or two just focusing on the breath to just calm our minds, get ourselves centered and then we’ll just go through the stages one by one. So in the first phase, the earth element dissolves into the water element. Your body becomes thinner, your limbs loosen, you lose physical strength and vitality.

You just feel the solidity of your body diminishing. You no longer have the strength and vitality to be as active. Your body just becomes thinner and thinner. You have a sensation of a weight pressing down on you, or that you’re sinking or falling. Your sight becomes unclear and you can no longer move or open or close your eyes.

The inner vision is of a shimmering silvery blue mirage. Next, the water element dissolves into the fire element. Your mouth tongue and throat dry up due to loss of saliva and other fluids such as urine blood and sweat dry up so your whole body just starts to feel dry. All of your inner fluids are drying up. Your throat becomes parched.

You’re no longer able to feel experiences of pleasure or pain due to any of your sense consciousnesses. You can no longer hear sounds even the normal ringing in the ears stops and your inner vision is that of thin smoke like that from a stick of incense. In the third phase, the fire element dissolves into the wind element. The warmth of your body diminishes starting with your extremities. So your hands and feet start to become cold.

You can no longer digest your food. Your sense of smell ceases. Your inhalations become short and your exhalations become long. You’re no longer able to recognize the faces or remember the names of your friends and loved ones. Inner vision is of sparks or fireflies.

Just imagine the fire element diminishing in your body, body becoming colder. Your exhalations becoming longer. This vision of fireflies. In the next phase, the wind element dissolves into consciousness. You can no longer move.

Your sense of taste and touch are gone. Your tongue contracts And you stop breathing. The inner vision is that of a flickering light over a candle. Your last thoughts now cease and the consciousness becomes more and more subtle over the final four stages. So the gross level of consciousness is completely stopped and now at the subtler level of consciousness, a vivid white appearance like an autumn sky suffused by white moonlight manifests.

This is because the energy of your left and right channel are going into your central channel and the white drop seated at your crown chakra is beginning to descend through your central channel. So the vision is clear white moonlight. And then the next phase, as the energy starts to enter your central channel from the bottom, The red drop from your navel starts to move towards your heart. The inner vision is a clear autumn sunset with the sky turned completely bright red. The red increase.

As the white and red drop meet at the heart, you have the appearance of pure blackness, completely black night, the black near attainment. And then your mind sinks into total unconsciousness. Then arise out of that unconsciousness into the subtlest mind of clear light. A mind that’s non conceptual and completely non dual. The appearance is like a clear autumn sky at dawn when the light’s just beginning to diffuse.

Physically the white and red drops are dissolving into the indestructible drop at the heart. So use this mind of clear light, this most subtle consciousness and turn your attention towards the lack of inherent existence of all phenomena. Use this mind to meditate on emptiness. And then from this clear light, the winds begin to move and you go through the appearances in the reverse order. First the black near attainment, then the red increase, Then the white appearance.

Flickering light over a butter lamp or candle. The sparks or fireflies. And then the thin smoke like incense. Then the silvery blue shimmering mirage. Now your gross consciousness is completely manifest again.

When you feel ready, you can slowly open your eyes. There any questions or any experiences that people had they wanted to share yeah Janet When I do that, I have a really hard time staying awake. That’s because your gross consciousness is no longer manifest. You’re just teasing. Well, whatever it is.

But nevertheless and I would and and, you know, I mean, even sitting up. If I did it lying down, I’d be asleep. Yeah. Sure. But sitting up, I still and it’s like, you know, kind of jerking over.

Yeah. So even when you go into your meditation feeling awake just by going through that process, you you have trouble staying awake? Yep. Any tips? You might wanna check your posture.

Often, I find it like you may wanna really make sure that your posture is completely straight. I’m just some of the traditional antidotes to sleepiness from the Lam Rim when they’re talking about developing Shine, like having the posture really straight, maybe tilting your head forward. Often when people are falling asleep during meditation, when they really check, they’ve completely slumped over. Maybe really thinking about the importance of meditating on it so that you have a really compelling sense of urgency about it. Just to kind of go, hey, tick, tick, tick.

You know, any day now this is going to happen to me and I really need to practice and rehearse so it doesn’t just seem like some theoretical thing. You have more of a compelling sense of real urgency because that’s one of the antidotes too to sluggishness during meditation is to really just think about the urgency of what you’re meditating on so it’s not just, oh God, I’ve gotta sit here for twenty minutes because I promised my teacher I’d meditate every day. You know, like, this is your life, you know, and this is the way to prepare for your death. And that may infuse you with a sense of urgency that will overcome the sluggishness. But I think, you know, check posture, maybe make sure the room’s cool enough, take off a layer so you’re even a little too cold to keep your mind kind of awake and then just focus on how important it is.

That’s what I think of to try. And it may be, you know, that again, your mind is just trying to avoid something by shutting down. I mean, sometimes sleep or sluggishness is a way of just shutting down and trying to, you know, it’s one way of avoiding and you may look at if you feel that that’s going on. If you just fall asleep at a certain point during a meditation, is there something that’s hard for you to face? And again, you may wanna shift the focus to that a little bit until you kind of figure out like what’s going on, that this is where you shut down every time during your meditation.

So does that help? Yeah. Yeah. I I just I haven’t I really haven’t been able to solve it yet. Yeah.

It seems like just maybe lots of animal karma or something. Mhmm. I don’t Is this what going unconsciously? Meditation you mean? No.

No. I mean, well, it mediteachings. But when I do the death row Especially this way. Yeah. It’s like you know, it just gets to a point and it’s like because I because I I can feel my head, like, kind of drifting back.

It doesn’t go down. It goes back. Yeah. And I and I was sitting up my wife said I was sitting up straight. I want I don’t I don’t like to lean back on my hair even normally.

But yeah. And maybe just spend some time on some purification practices, especially directed towards that. You know, like do do some kind of purification, especially in your mind, motivating and dedicating it to overcoming this obstacle of sluggishness during because once again, purification of accumulation of merit. And once that’s set the minute you sit down, it’s like you can barely stop from having realization. So it may be that you need to just spend more time on purification accumulation, especially whatever level of vows you have.

Really look to your vows. Whenever people are really having obstacles meditating, I always say, look to your vows. Review whatever level of vows you have, especially bodhisattva vows, and see if you’re getting sloppy with any of your vowed morality. Because you can’t meditate well. I mean, absolutely cannot if you’ve got any kind of sloppy morality.

And for a lot of us, the more vows we take, then the razor’s edge becomes finer and finer. But it’s the only way to get enlightened. But then you really have to be careful or else your meditation just goes to hell if you’re not really keeping your vows well. So study your bodhisattva vows. Make sure you know them really well.

And keep them. I was wondering if well, two or three things. First of all, would a fully accomplished yogi be aware of at least some of these stages as they fell asleep? Oh, yeah. I definitely think so.

Yeah. And that’s what a lot of in fact, sleep yoga is one of the advanced, you know, tantric practices. So for sure, at completion stage level of realizations, you’re using kind of every time that this happens naturally and using it for meditation because you can slow down and be conscious of the process. So for sure they say that in, for the highly advanced yogis, don’t waste even their sleep time. Like for most of us, we just pass out and hope we don’t have any really non virtuous dreams.

But for a highly advanced yogi, they would be using that time really consciously for practice too. So yeah thank you for mentioning that. Yeah. When you got to stage seven and you said loss of consciousness, I was out after that and didn’t wake up until I heard white light. Yeah.

And so I’m wondering how I can just see that every time I if I meditate on that, as soon as I get to loss of consciousness, I think I’m gonna fall asleep. Yeah. So how can I meditate on loss of consciousness without falling asleep? Without falling asleep. I think, you know, what you do when do this as a meditation is you remind yourself of what the next stage is.

Like you kind of say, okay, now I’m at the black near attainment. I just went through the red increase. The next is the clear light. So you’re really conscious of where you are relative to the other stages. And then if you have sort of set yourself up for the clear light, then there’s more of a chance that you’ll come out of it to the clear light.

Because one of the ways you meditate is like that, the previous stage, the current stage. And then the last thing you always remind yourself, watch out for the clear light. Be aware of the clear light. And in fact, last October, when a friend of ours died, Linda Rose, who was a longtime meditator, Lama Zopa’s instructions were the minute her breath ceased to shout into her ear over and over and over again as loud as we could, remember the clear light, remember the clear light. And it’s exactly to keep them focused on that, especially through that unconscious phase.

Because that’s the most dangerous one for all of us is like blank out, then you’re gone. And then the clear light’s right after that. So that’s why continual training and through each stage go, let me not forget the clear light when I get to that point. And especially at the first part of the black nerd attainment, go, Okay, next is a moment of unconsciousness. Let me arise out of that into the clear light.

And the more you set that up for yourself, the better you’ll do. And hopefully, we all have someone shouting in our ear when the time comes. I mean, was so profound. I was actually there at the time. And I was doing Medicine Buddha Puja, which is what Lama Zopa said to do.

And her best friend was shouting in her ear. And it was really intense. So yeah. Yeah. I have a question about the Bardo state.

Yeah. So that stage that you just talked about, that occurs before you get to the Bardo? Yes, yes. All of these stages are before the Bardo, the clear light and all these stages are pre Bardo stages. And then when the winds start to move again and you go through the stages in the reverse order, that’s when you’re going towards that’s the transition into the Bardo.

Oh, that is Okay. So after the Bardo is none of this happens after Bardo, after the fourteenth century. No, no, no. All of this is before the Bardo. And we’re not getting in this book has a whole chapter about the intermediate state.

And we just don’t have a whole lot of time in this class to get into exactly what goes on with the Bardo and exactly what goes on to rebirth because there’s just so much information about that. But all of this is up to the clear light and that meditation on the clear light is still happening before the the Bardo state. And then when the winds usually because of karma, then the winds start to move. And then if if you’re at the clear light at the time of death, then you go into the Bardo state. If you’re at the clear light because you’re a highly advanced yogi, then you just go back to gross consciousness and carry on.

Yeah. I just want to clarify the meditation on the last four. Because in the first four Hang on a second. Let’s not do this right now. In first four, there is something to hold on to.

There’s something familiar. So you’re letting go of your body all that. And the last four, it seems like after you’ve let go of everything, am I supposed to visualize these drops or something? Or is it just like resting? Yeah.

Well, there’s no there’s no consciousness at that point of me experiencing whatever it is. Like all of these last four visions is just an experience that is like happening to your subtle mind. There isn’t sort of this volitional Oh, should I be thinking this now because that dualistic gross consciousness has completely ceased. And the vision is just appearing because your subtle mind is going through this absorption of the the elements in the drop. So you won’t even be so conscious of them at that point at all because it’s not thinking, oh, I’m having this red increase because the navel drop is ascending.

Because you don’t have that level of conceptual consciousness to be able to identify that that’s what’s going on. In training, we train that way just to familiarize ourselves with the process. But when it’s actually happening at the death time, it’s just that subtle consciousness absorbed in this red vision. And then hopefully, because of your training on some level, even that subtle consciousness will have been trained to recognize the next one and then recognize the clear light. But it’s not a thing of like, oh, I’m doing this because this is happening at that point.

It’s just the way that we train. Yeah. I always kind of thought that the white, red, and black near attainment was still viewed in in a dualistic way. Well, your gross consciousness thinking, I am experiencing this because of this is no longer happening. Means you’re not thinking about it, but but it’s but I I always thought that it was like, you know, there’s, like, a consciousness viewing something and that there was some duality left in it until we got to the clear light.

Yeah. Yeah. But not that gross level. Gross like, oh, I’m looking at that. I’m looking at this white man.

It’s still not the subtlest consciousness. And what exactly is going on there and how much of a sense of I you know, whatever it is, it’s extremely subtle at that point. And it’s So it’s sort of like there’s three levels. There’s the gross consciousness, which is the gross sense and mental consciousness, which completely ceases after the fourth level. And then there are the three levels that are the subtle level of consciousness.

And then the eighth stage is the most subtle, mind of clear light. So how much of a sense of I’m experiencing this is happening during those three subtle ones, which is the white, red, and black? You know, I don’t know, I’ve never heard much of an explanation of how much subjectivity, I don’t think we can really relate to it. Like I think it’s so subtle that our gross conceptual mind has a hard time even imagining anything other than sinking like, oh, now I’m experiencing this. You know what I mean?

So it’s a it’s a subtler level of subjectivity but how it’s characterized, I’m not I’m you know, I haven’t really ever heard much explanation of that. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else? Okay.

Yeah. Thank you. Because this is supposed to be training our mind. Why is it that we come back up through the through the stages? You would think that that was training our mind too.

Well, just because that’s going to happen. Yeah. That’s going to I mean, in meditation, because we’re not enlightened, at some point, you know, the winds start to move. I mean, we have to kind of come out of meditation, go eat lunch, and, you know, you have to carry on. It’s great if you have time to stay in the facsimile of the clear light meditating on emptiness for as long as you possibly can.

But for those of us now, mostly we have to go to work after our forty five minutes of meditation is up. You don’t have to go backwards through them. I was just doing that in this meditation to give you the idea of what is happening, like at the death time, then you do go backwards through the visions. But in your meditation, you don’t have to do that. You can just stay in the clear light, meditating on emptiness for as long as you can, you know, and then end your session.

Usually when you do it within the context of a Tantric sadhana, what happens is that this stage is, they call it purifying death intermediate state and rebirth, purifying into the dharmakaya, the sambhogakaya and the nirmanakaya. So when you’re doing it within the context, what you do with this is you’re purifying ordinary death into the dharmakaya body of the Buddha. Then you visualize when the wind starts to move, arising as the sambhogakaya form to purify ordinary intermediate state. And then from there, you arise as the emanation body of whatever Buddha form you’re meditating on to purify ordinary rebirth. So that’s all part of the Tantric sadhana.

We’re extracting this from the context of a Tantric sadhana, but ideally you’re doing it within the context of generation stage tantric sadhana. And those three purifications are the essence of generation stage. So then in your tantric sadhana, then at the end, you just go about your business as the deity because you purified the ordinary death intermediate state and rebirth into the dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, nirmanakaya. And then the whole point of tantra is you’re supposed to go about your business imagining yourself as the nirmanakaya emanation body of whatever your chosen deity. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So to do it, I still think it’s useful to do this meditation and become familiar with it even if you don’t have highest yoga tantra initiation. And then in that case, you could either quickly go back through absorptions and then just imagine arising as gross consciousness or whatever. You’re only really allowed to manifest as the deity if you’ve had that tantric empowerment.

So for people who don’t have empowerment, they’re not really authorized to do all of that. But for those of you who have, that’s sort of the point of this whole process. Yeah. Even with the highest, having had that highest tantra, there’s still that phase though that you, dissolve back in. What do you mean dissolve back it’s after it, going into the clear light or the nothing.

Emptiness. Mhmm. At least in the forms. Said that I’ve had that you then see yourself arising as a non sessional form of the deity Yeah. Without the instruments Right.

Right. Right. Appearances. However, with Right. You know, the protection and the purification of that so that Yeah.

The, you know, every appearance, sound, and thought become Right. The mantra and the the Yeah. You know Yeah. The three without the blessings but. Yeah.

So that there is that reminder. Mhmm. That in one sense you’re acting as the deity in the world. It’s you know that is the preferred or the you know, ultimate way in which one can act. Mhmm.

But yet, there’s still the consciousness that you are in a physical human body. But emanation bodies do that. Yeah. You don’t go flying off into space Yeah. But that’s the job of an emanation body.

So you’re visualizing yourself as the emanation body to purify the ordinary rebirth into another samsaric rebirth. You’re imagining yourself as an emanation body. Yeah. Okay. So it is the same thing?

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s purifying the ordinary rebirth into, you know, imagining yourself as the emanation body. And you’ve gone through those other other stages of first, you know, the dharmakaya and then the sambhogakaya and then the emanation body is the last one. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And do you also Yeah. When reading the website about this, it seemed to indicate that this was part one. So I wonder if you are planning on having a part two session, would get into the Bardo’s case and the reverse.

Chooky is thinking about that. I didn’t know that she’d said that this was part one. That’s interesting. After she did the full course last weekend at Land of Medicine Reader with myself and my friend that’s a hospice nurse who, of course, had all of this wealth of information about the different drugs and how foggy they make your mind and all of this stuff that I don’t know, not being a medical professional. She got really excited about the idea of the two of us coming and doing a full weekend that she’s going to try and try.

Because, yeah, Lenny just had so much practical information from all her years as a nurse that I don’t have that much detail. So that’s probably why Chökyi changed the website. I didn’t know she did that. She did next November. Oh, is that?

I see. Okay. Wow. You guys need to tell me what my schedule’s gonna be. I’ll I’ll just give you my calendar and you can fill it in.

Yeah. So I think that’s that’s part of it. I was wondering when I was when I was doing the meditation and when we got to the stages, the last stages, I, I mean, I was just seeing colors. Yeah. The colors and doing it.

But then I found that if when you said, you know, the white drop or the red Yeah. That Yeah. Then what I could visualize is if I was not in this body, so in the sense of consciousness, but yet having seen having done deity poa practices Yeah. And and fortunately having somebody who has done illustrations or drawings of what that looks like, just then went as if I was looking at the drawing, not as if it was me. And I think whatever you have to train, and if you’re prompted by you know, pictures or other instructions that you’ve had about the different stages, I think it’s great.

Like, whatever prompts you to kind of remember what stage you’re in and what’s happening next, I think is great. Yeah. Okay. Well, think we’ll have to Oh, boy. I’m gonna be in trouble for keeping you an extra twenty five minutes.

Would people Since I think everybody’s eating here, is that right? Would you be able to come back at quarter after and have just a forty five minute lunch? Was that enough? Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

Is that not okay with anybody? No. Okay, great. Thank you very much. And then this afternoon, we’ll get into a lot of the real practical stuff about how to make your wishes known to the people around you.

Or even know what they are. Or even know what first figure out what they are and then let everybody know about And the other thing, and I said, what do you tell her that you’re doing? And he’s like, oh, it’s just, I tell her it’s a meditation. I go, look, she does medicine to Buddhist practice. She’s really open minded.

I think it would really help her to just know that that’s, you know, what it is and to know that this will happen at the time of death. So yeah, I think no matter whether people are Buddhist or not, like basically this is what’s gonna happen. And for so many people, the fear is the fear of the unknown. And an explanation of this process really helps them overcome that fear, yeah. Just another thing that I wanted to share with people.

There is a version of the Tibetan Book for the Dead, and it’s called the Tibetan Book for the Dead for Reading Aloud. And it was written as an opera by I I forget the man’s name, but the book is beautiful. Has beautiful pictures and it’s poetry to read it. And and I have read that to people as they’re dying at hospice and just it’s really, really easy. So it’s called the Tibetan Book of the Dead for reading Yeah.

Who who wrote who paraphrased it? Okay. Okay. Okay. Any other questions before we get started?

Are Jack and Judith coming back? Yeah. I think they took the dog out to Oh. Getting water for her baby. Uh-oh.

Okay. They’re gonna miss part of it, but anyway, what to do? We’re gonna do a meditation. So, yeah, maybe to crack it. Yeah.

Yeah. If people aren’t if they’re not gonna be making a lot of noise out there. Yeah. There’s air out there, which is helpful for meditation. Yeah.

No, Janet. Come back. Oh, she’s closing. Okay. So even though it’s right after lunch, which is a difficult time to meditate, just because of the nature of the fact that we just have one day, we gotta do it now.

So this meditation is the one in which we will imagine our own death process and be able to really kind of figure out what we want as we’re leading up to death. Now this may be the first time for some of us that we’ve heard or thought about our death in this much of a detail. So it can be quite emotional. This was the part of the program at Land of Medicine Buddha. They said boxes of Kleenex are in order, which is all we had was rolls of toilet paper.

But we’ve kind of put them around because you’re really going to be sinking in detail about your impending death and visualizing all of these stages. The real importance of doing it like this in meditation is often, as I said before, things will come up that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought about if you didn’t actually meditate on it. You may have had a whole different idea of what you wanted your death process to be just theoretically, you know, as a little storybook idea. And you may go through this and you may think, wait a minute, I wanna be left alone so I can meditate. I don’t want a room full of, hi, Emily, like fifteen of my best friends holding my hand.

You know, I may just want to be off by myself or whatever. So that’s the point of doing this meditation. Okay? So just to forewarn you, and then what we’re going to do, we’re going to do the meditation, Then we’re going to have time to debrief in pairs. Because a lot of stuff that comes up, you may not want to speak into the microphone and have it go on the MP3 or whatever.

So we’re going to debrief in pairs and then come back together for any kind of sharing of any information that comes up for you. Okay? So I’ll lead you through slowly and again for this one if you’d like to lie down which is a really dangerous thing to do right after lunch, but if you’d like to be in a more relaxed pose and lie down like we did before, that’s fine. Okay. So for a few minutes, just focus on the breath in order to just center and calm your mind.

So imagine that three weeks ago, you had your annual physical examination. A week later, the nurse called and said, we found something in the blood tests and the doctor would like you to take some more tests and then come in to talk to her. The appointment was made, the test done, and now you’re sitting in the doctor’s office feeling anxious and wondering what’s wrong. Imagine your feelings as the doctor enters and says hello stiffly. She seems to be looking at the floor more than at you.

She proceeds to inform you that you have a severe form of adult leukemia in a rather advanced state. With an overtone of despair she refers you to an oncologist, a cancer specialist, to discuss chemotherapy and other treatment options. When you press for more details, she says you have one year left to live at most. As you leave the office and return home, your mind is racing to comprehend all that is happening. Now try to experience the thoughts and feelings that arise in your mind and the sensations you feel in your body after just having had this experience.

As you contemplate your situation, how will your family and friends respond to your illness? One by one, picture each of your loved ones and imagine his or her responses. Just go through your family and friends one by one imagining exactly how each of them will respond to this news. Try to imagine who your support system will be. Who will be most likely to be close to you at this time?

And who will be the most fearful and withdraw? Picture your partner, parents, children, and friends. What feelings do you have about each person as you imagine them drawing closer or pulling away? Over the coming months you make frequent trips to the oncologist’s office, the laboratory and the hospital. After weeks of chemotherapy treatments you feel weakened, sick, and exhausted.

It’s difficult to remain hopeful and continue to fight this. Then, during your latest visit, the doctor acknowledged that the chemo has not slowed down the cancer and in fact it has progressed. He suggested it might be time to get your affairs in order and time to call hospice. How do you receive this news? As the news sinks in, is there anyone that you wanna be with at this time, or would you rather be alone?

As you lie sleepless night after night, many questions come to mind. What has been the purpose of my life? What do I regret? Who do I have unfinished business with? What can I do about these things now?

Who do I want to make decisions for me when I can’t do that for myself? As the weeks turn into months you experience increasing pain and other physical symptoms which create more questions in your mind, How do you feel about taking narcotic pain medications and other strong drugs that may affect your state of mind while relieving physical suffering? How do you feel about life support and other measures to keep you alive at all costs? What are your spiritual wishes for the time of death? Special prayers to be said, clergy or teachers to be contacted, rituals performed.

What do you want to be done with your body? Now you’re feeling extremely weak and are unable to get out of bed. You know that there’s not much time left. You’re ready to start saying goodbye to all your loved ones. Call each person to your bedside one at a time and say what you wish to each one.

Is there anything that has been left unsaid between you? In your own way, say goodbye to each one as you experience letting go. Now the time of death is nearing. Your life force seems to be ebbing away. Just opening your eyes or moving takes an enormous effort.

Picture where you are and who is with you. What is the feeling in the room? As your consciousness recedes, you feel extremely relaxed and peaceful. Your body feels light and blissful, and your mind serene and clear. Rest in this state for the next minute or two.

This meditation is now over. We’ll dedicate the inner work you’ve done to all who will die that they may experience peace of mind and the wish to benefit others at the time of death. Recognize the clear light and attain full and complete enlightenment. Just take a minute or two to come out of the experience. So when you feel ready, just turn to someone near you.

And we’ll spend about five minutes each talking about your experience. So take turns about five minutes for each person. And I’ll ring a gong at the end of five minutes, and then you can change partners. And if there’s an odd number of people in the room, which there may be, you can have a group of three and divide it up that way. Okay.

Change change partners if you haven’t already done so. What’s the difference? We talked first. Yeah. Now you talk.

Okay. Yeah. Switch first. Yeah. Oh, wait.

You meant physically. I I meant mentally. No. You have to get up and sit over the room. Just kidding.

You’ve got five more minutes. Yeah. You’re just supposed to switch partners if one of you is taking turns. Okay. Take about a minute to finish up.

Shouldn’t have let you two be together. That’s true. Good. You’re listening. That’s what it’s all about.

Oh, come on. Good. Very good. And you haven’t done this? What’s up with that?

It’s true. It’s not about you. Yeah. It’s true. It’s true.

It’s definitely not about you. Okay. So let’s are you guys okay? Did one of you not gonna turn? You alright?

Okay. Let’s come back. Come back. Come back. Don’t go yet.

Stay. So does anybody have any experience that they wanna share? Anything kind of unusual and unexpected come up? Kind of or anything at all that you’d like to share? Yeah, Janet.

Oh. Well, it depends. If people would rather do it off for confidentiality at this point, that’s fine with me or we could get we could get them to edit the the recording. If there’s anything you wanna say that you don’t want on, you know. It’s nothing that’s confidential.

Yeah. I mean, by the way, any point that you don’t want it on, we’ll just make a note of it, and they can edit it before they put it out. So don’t feel like if there’s something you really want to talk about that you don’t want to go on the tape, that’s fine. We can edit it. What I noticed when I got the diagnosis and I was on my way going back, I was like, all of a sudden, kind of like almost in a panic, not so much because I was going to die, but because I had realized now I really have just a little bit of time, which is exactly what we should be thinking all the time, but it just doesn’t come to me.

Yes. Even though even though I try to contemplate it, and at that point, it was like Oh my god. Now it’s really yeah. I’ve got this material mess, and I haven’t and and on top of that, I haven’t really done as many practices as I could have, and and I need to organize all this stuff and get it cleaned up. I want you know, because I didn’t wanna leave a big mess, and you can see, I’m talking in a panic because that’s how it was.

It was like, all of a sudden, there’s too much to do and no time to do it. Yeah. Yeah. And it was really interesting. It it kind of what it what it told me was just start now.

Just start doing it now. Know? Clean up the messes. Do the this is Right. Right.

I mean, just the material stuff. You know? There’s too much material stuff to you know, not taken care of. You don’t have things in order. You don’t have the will in order.

You know, and what do you want to do with your body and all that kind of stuff, you know? So, it’s like just, you know, I really gotta take care of that. Yeah. Yeah. Good.

Good. Thank you. That’s that’s good. That’s one of the results that you’re supposed to have. Falling out of that plane without a parachute.

It’s happening now. Good. Thank you, Janet. Yeah. Judy?

We had an interesting experience because we both found that we had thought of the same trusted person. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Oh.

Outside of our immediate family circle. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah.

Other is that when people all came to say goodbye, I found out what I was doing, which was most meaningful for me and most of the feeling, was thanking them. Yes. Yeah. So you can thank them now. Let me just say a word.

Just a thought. I thought I was quite prepared to die. I’m eighty two. I have paid for my cremation. I’ve talked to my youngest son.

My oldest two children were adopted. They didn’t want anything to do much with death. My youngest son is my has a power of attorney for health care. I have a DNR. All that kind of business is taken care of.

I don’t wanna have any regrets when I die, so I’m going to start practicing like hell. Great, thank you Laura. Anybody else? Oh Janice, yeah. She had a I rejoice Direct realization.

But I was gonna talk about was at the start of this meditation, I had total anxiety. My heart was just pounding. With the, like, the diagnosis and the whole thing? Like, just yeah. The thought of doing it.

And and I realized that what it was about was in January, I got called back for a second mammogram. And they they, like, didn’t take me the next day. I had two weeks in between. So for two weeks, I projected that I was gonna have breast cancer and how was I gonna handle it and yada yada yada, meaningless to say it was okay the second time. But I was so surprised by my anxiety Mhmm.

At that point. So I so I was somewhat less anxious about it today. Yeah. But the thing that Lynn rejoices about is that at the point of actually, you know, having gone through treatment and getting the Yeah. Actually getting the terminal diagnosis, first thought in this meditation was let my suffering relieve other beings of of their suffering.

And I was and I didn’t think too much about it until I told it to Lynn and she was, like, really excited. That’s awesome. And not only do really Hey, the power of familiarity, right? Like No. You get a gold star for the death awareness meditation.

I think it’s also it’s also having spent time with people who have died. Yeah. It’s so familiar to me now. You know? It’s like, I’ve been with a lot of people when they cross from one side to the other.

So it makes it much less intimidating. Yeah. Yeah. There may be some people in this room who were in a class with Robina years ago and me when I asked the question about, Rubina, I really I’m really worried about I have one daughter. I’m an one child.

She’s a daughter. Okay. And I’m so worried that she’s gonna plump my pillow incorrectly and that I will die with aversion and anger towards my kid. Because there’s nobody I’m more attached to and nobody who can push my buttons as well as she can. Mhmm.

So and Chris never mind what Robina’s answer was, But but, you know, like, she’s kinda rolled her eyes. But I still this is still in my mind. What to do about Amanda? Because and it came up again here. What came up in my last retreat, which was the first time I’ve ever thought this, is maybe it would be a benefit to her to be around me as I’m dying.

So in other words, to think of her Yeah. Rather than be afraid of her Yeah. Yeah. And what she can do because she can do it. Yeah.

Yeah. So but still the idea is to and she came she comes up for me for the person to have the power, which is surprising because my sister has been my has been my backstop for all these years. But Amanda’s thirty nine years old almost. It’s time, you know, she step up. And she’d want to.

But still, it’s that kind of thing. Yeah. So, when I when you we had, this is such a great idyllic dine. I mean, my god, we get a nice runway. Yeah.

And we get a chance to pick up one in the middle of the mall. Yeah. Well, I’m avoiding malls from now on. I don’t need to go to a mall. Okay.

So, I thought of the L and B hospice. This is the first time I thought of that. Not Zen Hospice, not Laguna Honda, which I’m familiar with, and not a hospice coming to my house. Always my idea has always been to be by myself. Yeah.

And a retreat even better. But this time you gave me the idea of a hospice, so I had to think hospice and what would that be. I love the idea of being around holy objects and people in red things Yeah. Costumes like this who would get me more connected in with all the people I want to pray for me. Yeah.

And if possible to be saying things for me, blah blah blah, during that time. Yeah. So I I think what came out of this for me is a team approach. I don’t want just one person. I want that one person who has a darn Yeah.

Who knows who who to call and get the get the team. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Good.

Yeah. Yeah. Over here. Snaking cord. My my my experience was that this the meditation was really different than what I expected.

I’ve had a lot of reoccurring dreams about death, but they’ve all been quite quick, like being shot in a war. Probably, you know, as a man, maybe just and then drowning. I’ve had and they’re really quite pleasant experiences at this point. I it doesn’t but the concept of having a year Mhmm. Was quite frightening.

Mhmm. Wasn’t used to that, so it was all new. But then Yeah. As we talked, it kinda kinda settled down. And while I would have a year to practice Dharma, that would be good.

So I was trying to so this is a brand new experience for me. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good.

So different. So brought up some And I think probably for other men, it might be the same. I’m thinking that maybe maybe we don’t have, you know, a lot of kind of internal experiences about about dying for a longer period of time. And maybe this would be a very useful meditation. Yeah.

Yeah. Work. It could could be very helpful. Yeah. Good.

Thank you. Yeah. In the back. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Good. Thank you. Yeah. Janet.

One of the things that I did notice, there were two two points in in in addition to all the panic and rush and all the other things that were swirling around that were kind of almost like reliefs to know. And one was that I definitely was gonna die. And the other one was I was really relieved when we got to the point where they weren’t gonna do any more chemo. Yeah. Because I felt so lousy Yeah.

And so crummy. I thought, oh, I’d be so happy just to stop doing this. Yeah. You know? And at that point, I think I was, like, kind of turning my mind towards being ready to die.

Yeah. Yeah. And I I had I had a regret. I remember I kicked my brother really hard when he was little. And and I and when I was talking to him, that came up apologizing for that Mhmm.

In addition to just, you know, thanking him and love you know, telling him that I loved him. But it’s like so I think I need to just tell him that I’m really sorry, that I really hurt him when he was little. Mhmm. I learned a lot, like, in that retreat, the experience I was mentioning before when all this remorse came up and I realized that’s what you’re left with and a lot of it was ancient things, know, and it’s sort of like, oh, I really get it now that I have to just really try and keep my bodhisattva vows and not be a jerk because you know when I’m on my deathbed this is all that’s going to be in my mind is like all this regret so it’s really good to just yeah make amends but sure yeah yeah yeah no it sort of doesn’t wear out like that karmic imprint is still in there isn’t it yeah yeah it’s a happy thing yeah anybody else yeah Akeisha One of the things that came up for me that I never thought about before, maybe you have suggestions. I don’t know how to tell my mother or my grandmother, my sisters Yeah.

And my aunt and, you know, just say, hey, guys. Can you can you go out an extra mile? Yeah. Yeah. You can come out three days after I’m dead.

Yeah. Yeah. So I can’t I don’t I don’t know how Yeah. To deal with them. Yeah.

Because, you know, they my family doesn’t know my doctor. Right. Don’t understand What’s anything about what I’m doing really. So I don’t know how I would Yeah. Not freak them out and then having them freak out when I don’t want to be freaking out.

Right. Right. Right. Yeah. There are there are a couple of things that come up for me.

One of which is they may be relieved. Like, really, I mean, they don’t always wanna be there. Chuckie and I were just talking during lunch and she said how when her mother was dying, later on her sister said, Oh, I’m so glad I wasn’t there because it would have been so upsetting for me and it would have upset mom. And sometimes we assume, like, of course, they’d want to be there. My father, when his second wife was dying, the hospital called him and said, it’s going to be soon.

And his first reaction was, I don’t want to be there. So we sort of assume that they want to be there. And sometimes they don’t. And if you actually were able to say it in a skillful way, they might be let off the hook. So that’s one thing.

And another thing, I think without having them feel dist, there are ways to skillfully explain this thing about the transition at the time of death. I mean, they obviously know you’re a Buddhist. You know, you moved out here. Like, there’s this thing going on in your life. And it may be that there are skillful ways that you don’t even have to say, don’t be in the room.

But you can say, you know, it’s really difficult when I’m going through this transition if you’re crying and hanging on and saying don’t go and doing all these things. So if you’re in the room, you know, please like subdue and don’t do a lot of emotional display. And you might be able to just explain to them like the stages of death and what’s going on from your belief system. And then they may respect that it’s not like they have to believe it for themselves. But if you explain it in sort of a neutral way and just say these are my wishes because this is what I believe is going to be happening and that it’s better not to have a lot of attachment, then they may be okay with that.

But sometimes they just kind of want to be off the hook. And if you just say that there are certain people that are going to be doing prayers and things for you and those are the people that you want their closest to you at the time, it may be okay. And the third thing is sometimes you just kind of can’t make it perfect. Like for example, Bonnie, this woman in the hospice who was there for six months and she died in March first. And she really wanted me and her son to be there when she died.

And of course, there was no guarantees that we could, but we were. It just so happened that he and I were both there when she took her last breath. And he knew, I mean, I’d sort of coached him even though he wasn’t a Buddhist. He was very sort of Buddhist friendly and I’d sort of coached him. But at a certain point, it was so beautiful.

It was incredibly moving. He sort of sang this mantra to her. It may have been preferable for her not even to hear his voice at that point because she was clearly the person, she was more attached to him than anyone. So it may have been best for her as her consciousness was exiting not to even hear his voice. But he sang this mantra in this beautiful voice, and tears were streaming down our faces.

And it was just beautiful. And it’s just kind of what needed to happen. In my sort of perfect little Buddhist agenda, that was just what happened and that turned out to be okay too. And I don’t feel that there was anything but benefit to her to be sent off with this expression of love. You know, because it’s not like he was grabbing her ankles and going, mom, don’t go and screaming.

But, you know, still, it might have been better for him not even to be in the room or be in another room, but that’s just what happened. So you can’t always you have to just kind of work skillfully with the situation, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s interesting that my ego decided that I’m so important that, of course, they would want to be there and I have to be there.

It’s interesting. We just assumed that. Yeah, we totally assumed that. Of course, they’ll want to be there doing everything. And they’re like, hey, man.

You know, so often the ones closest really want to be in the next room. Like, they don’t want to be there. When my mother was dying, she was in intensive care for days, and my father could barely be in the room. He would kind of come in, and I couldn’t be out of the room. And he couldn’t be in the room because he couldn’t stand seeing her like that.

He would come in and sort of check on me and not even really look at her and then, like, split. You know? It’s just yeah. Yeah. So everybody has their own way of dealing with it.

Yeah. Yeah. Janice? Just a couple of comments. One being that sometimes the dying person can’t let go if anybody’s in there that’s even if they’re not sobbing and crying Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But the the person that they’re closest to can’t even be near them because Yeah. Because of what What’s coming up for them. Yeah.

And then the other thing is this this morning we had a question and I think it just kind of came up a little bit. There’s no such thing as a perfect death. Yeah. And if and I think it’s important to know that there are practices that you can do. So so I just recently had a friend who died of a heart attack Yeah.

In doing the laundry, you know, and nobody was with him and he was there alone for a while after he died and But there are things you can do for a person who’s in Lombardo. Yeah. Yeah. So And we’re gonna get into that too. Yeah.

And in fact, that’s sort of next. Yeah, Janet. And also, just because you think you’re dying alone and having the big one in the shopping mall, I heard last weekend from one of the students that said somebody did fall over keel over in the aisle of the Safeway. And some total stranger came and put his head in her lap and soothed him and said these prayers and did this whole beautiful thing like a total stranger. So it doesn’t even mean that you won’t have someone with you just because you can’t control where you are, you know, either.

It’s just karma, isn’t it? You know? Yeah. Janet. Last last year, my father passed away, and my mother, had been merit for sixty four years.

And he was really close to dying, and we were in in the room with him. And we were having a conversation, and I said something that indicated that I was kind of watching out and helping my mother. And I can see from his side a sense of relief Yeah. And an ability to let go Yeah. More so than what I’ve seen Yeah.

And so I think it’s really important for ourselves to really look closely at those kinds of things which we feel like we want to make sure are taken care of when we leave. And make sure that that happens before we get to that point so that we’re not concerned or holding on because of that. And also that we can then do the same kind of thing for others. Yeah. And that book, Final Gifts, which is on your reading list, is pretty much all about that.

You know, it’s kind of all about, like, helping people tie up unfinished business and reassure, you know, the people they love that they’re gonna be okay and all of that stuff back and forth. It’s really nice. Yeah. I think he had concern that he was leaving before my mother and wanted to make sure that she would be cared for. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And that’s a big need of people, you know, to be reassured that it’s gonna be okay. Yeah. The next thing that we’re gonna do is go through the five wishes document. I’m feeling perhaps people would appreciate it like a brief break, like a ten minute break.

Is that true or do you wanna plunge ahead? Let’s go ahead. Plunge ahead. Plunge She wants go to the bathroom. Okay.

We’ll plunge ahead by popular demand. So if we could just pass this out, and if you could reach a bunch over to the other side of the room, we’ll plunge ahead with a little bit and then we’ll take a break. So now that you have figured out what you want, we’ll go through this document where you can put it down in writing. Okay, so this five wishes document is basically a living will that talks about what your wishes are in terms of your personal, emotional and spiritual needs in addition to your medical wishes. It substantially meets the requirements it says the District of Columbia or one of forty states, including California.

So I’m looking on page three, this list of states that it substantially meets the requirements for a valid legal document in California for all of these things. And it’s actually really amazing that this document has been formulated. Because when I first did this for myself in the early ’90s, I had to write all this stuff just off the top of my head trying to think of any eventuality. It was like page after page of an appendix along with my medical power of attorney, which just basically said the person who I chose is the medical power of attorney. And then all my wishes for the lamas to say the prayers and this and that and the body not to be touched, I had to just come up with it on my own.

So this helps quite a lot, although there are more Buddhist things that we’ll talk about in a minute after we go through this. So the first wish, wish one on page four, is the person I want to make health care decisions for me when I can’t make them for myself. Okay, so when you can no longer communicate whether you’re in a coma or too close to the time of death and so forth and so on. So the person that you choose is your health care agent. And you can have a first choice, a second choice, and a third choice.

You can also have co agents that both have equal say. Now this becomes a little complicated. You have to make sure that they have good communication, that they agree with each other. One woman in the workshop last weekend said, oh, I want my non-Buddhist husband and my Buddhist best friend to jointly decide. And we were saying, be careful.

They have potentially a really different agenda, and it may really set you up for conflict if they’re not agreeing. I mean, the non-Buddhist husband wants to hook her up to life support and keep her around as long as possible, and the Buddhist friend says, No, no, do not resuscitate, whatever. So if you’re going to use joint agents, just be really aware that it’s great if they’re on the same page. So first choice, second choice, third choice. It may be that the people the closest to you are not your best choice.

You know, they may be too emotionally involved to make those decisions. Also, if you are a Buddhist, it’s really helpful to have somebody as, I think it was you that said, Lynn, people with robes or with access to Lama Zopa or access to the right poojas and all of that kind of stuff. I’ve definitely thought about that. I’ve chosen two friends of mine who are both nuns that I know have direct daily access to Lama Zopa because his decisions override everything else. And I chose people deliberately who had that kind of not only To my teacher.

Yeah, yeah, access to my teacher. And also that they knew, like they were really clear on the drill. They didn’t need any prep. They had it down, how to treat the body and things, which we’ll get to in a minute. Yeah.

I have a question about that. Yeah. What if oh, microphone. Whoops. Sorry.

What if you feel that like, for me, personally, I’m actually part of in the Midwest. Yeah. Like I kinda feel also like instead of it being Lama Zopa Rinpoche to have it be Gallic Ripiche. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

The thing is is like what if it’s it should be more like a center? Do you know what I mean? Because if you got a hold of anyone at a center, it’d be like, oh, this person’s dying or passing away I don’t like your phone turned on. They would know what to do. I don’t I think legally it really does need to be an individual.

Think you can’t say, oh, anybody who answers the phone at Jewell Heart. And with Gelek Rinpoche, you’d have to be really careful because they’re supposed to be really available. And he travels a lot. So to have him be the one really making the decision, it may be a matter of hours or even minutes. So with his schedule of traveling a lot, you may want to choose somebody more accessible and maybe physically closer to you.

I mean, there’s no guarantee that whoever it is is gonna be available, but you may, And I think for sure it needs to be an individual. It can’t just be an organization for this. So you may wanna pick, like I said, somebody at Jewell Heart who’s really close to Gelek Rinpoche that you know knows where he is at all times and can get in touch with him and will honor his wishes. And that would be the way to kind of have both of the things going on at the same time. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Did you have something? Okay. So that’s it for agents.

And then there’s a whole list on page five of what you’re allowing your agent to do for you, what kind of decisions you would like them to make for you. So throughout this document, if there’s anything that you don’t agree with, you just cross it out. Leaving it as is is sort of the default saying that you agree to it. So if there’s any of these things that you don’t want your agent to do, you would just cross it out. For example, one of them says donate usable organs or tissues of mine as allowed by law.

And you may choose not to do organ donation. And we’ll get into that a little bit later on. So for example, if you didn’t want your agent to donate your organs, you’d cross through that one. Move me to another state to get the care I need or to carry out my wishes, all of these things. So you read through and cross out what you don’t want.

Okay, wish two. Wish for the kind of medical treatment I want or don’t want. Okay? And this has decisions about life support treatment. Now what you should keep in mind is my caregiver at the top of the page.

I do not want to be in pain. I want my doctor to give me enough medicine to relieve my pain, even if that means I’ll be drowsy or sleepy more than I would otherwise. So this is something to think about as a Buddhist practitioner. If you really want to consciously use the death time, you may want to cross that out. Yeah, Laura.

Oh, microphone? Where’d it go? Okay. I know in England, they have what’s called a cocktail to talk directly to the wedding action scene. You have to kind of talk right into the end of it.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. How’s that? Yeah.

Good. Okay. In England, they have what’s called a cocktail, which is made up of morphine and a upper at about the same time. So you get both. And that gives you relief of pain at the same time you’re in control of your mind.

Don’t they have something like that here? Yeah. It’s called a Brompton’s cocktail. Brompton’s cocktail. Yeah.

Brompton or Buns? Brompton’s. Brompton? Brompton’s. B r o m p t o n.

So Janice, you know about Why don’t they ever mention it in something like this? Yeah. Let’s Janice maybe knows even I do know that personally what I want is a physician who knows how to do this, you know. I in my experience at the hospice that I that I volunteer at, the doctor in charge really has a good understanding of pain management, and they work as a team. So that would be my request, would be that, you know, there be team of people, myself included, if I could be, to make these decisions.

And and it’s a lot more complex than just saying that, you know, any one thing is gonna work for any one person. Yeah. Yeah. But but there are ways to manage pain and keep people alert. Yeah.

Yeah. And it’s true. It’s really good if your health care practitioner knows that you don’t want to be knocked out to just be whatever so you won’t have to experience it, but knows that you want to be as conscious as possible. But even so, it’s really difficult, and everybody’s physiology responds so differently to different medications. I know Bonnie at the hospice that we just had, she struggled with this a lot, you know, getting the balance right.

And then it would change from day to day as her condition deteriorated. So it’s really a dance getting exactly, the right meditations for any given time. And then if you’re really sick and your body’s changing a lot, it can just change from day to day. So it’s, yeah, it’s not so clear cut. But it is really good, like Janice said, if the health care people know that you want to be as alert as possible and you don’t just want to be kind of knocked out and unconscious.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. What life support treatment means to me. And then you have choices here about whether you want life support treatment if you’re close to death, if you’re in a coma and not expected to wake up or recover, permanent and severe brain damage and not expected to recover, or any other condition under which I do not wish to be kept alive.

And so you can choose to either have life support. You don’t want life support treatment. If it’s been started, you want it stopped. Or the third choice, I want to have life support treatment if my doctor believes it could help, but to stop giving life support treatment if it’s not helping my health condition or symptoms. Okay, so you’ve got all of those what’s that?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It definitely depends on the decision of the but once again, if they know, if you’re close to your health care provider and they just kind of basically know where you’re coming from and if they’re sympathetic to your wishes, then they’re gonna be more helpful in discussing with your agent if you can no longer make that decision yourself what you want. I have one more question. Yeah.

It’s it’s related to this. I took classes from Michael Michael Roach, as you know. He said at one time that we should prolong life as long as possible. Otherwise, we could just rush into the eight cold hills or the eight hot hills with I don’t need preparation or something. Yeah.

And so what is the current opinion on that? I would just assume be out of it. Yeah. Well, what Lama Zopa says is you know, when when Michael Roach was talking about that, he was actually talking about euthanasia. And he was saying that a lot of people, believe in euthanasia for humans or animals or pulling the plug or whatever.

And he says, as long as there’s some possibility that you can still either burn off karma or progress spiritually, then you should just keep the person alive as much as possible. Because otherwise, they could just go to a lower realm immediately. It’s not reducing suffering at all. You’ve got a pet and the vet says, oh, put it to sleep. It’s in pain.

You’ll be putting it out of its misery. Well, if you’re a Buddhist and you believe that there are a lot worse places to be than a sick dog, maybe not. And maybe they’re still paying off some karmic ripening that if you terminate it, then they’ll have to just kind of experience that karma in maybe not such a great vehicle. But also the lamas say, if somebody’s on life support, they’re no longer consciously able to practice at all, There’s no chance that they’ll recover and be able to have full functioning. There’s no real need for them to be on life support indefinitely, which can cost the family tons and tons of money.

We had a friend last year who died. He actually died of an asthma attack is what happened. By the time he got to the hospital, he’d been so oxygen deprived that he had irreversible brain damage. They put him on a respirator in all of these machines. About four days later, Lama Zopa had them pull the plug after doing all these practices.

He had the people close to him do all of these practices for twenty four hours before they pulled the plug. He’d said exactly what time to do it. But in his estimation, there was no way he was ever going to recover. And to just have him on a respirator for who knows how long would cost an amazing amount of money that could better be used. And what he says now is use that money that’s saved by having them on life support in the hospital to do virtue in their name.

Liberate animals, print sutras, do all of this stuff. If you make that decision, and of course, it’s great to have an enlightened being decide like in that case. But that’s sort of the balance. If it looks like it’s just going to be indefinite and if it’s going to break the bank and cost the family that much money, it’s really better actually than pulling the plug to be able to make that decision not to hook up to life support in the first place if it really looks like it’s something irreversible because then nobody gets the karma of pulling the plug. I talked to my doctors about life support.

I was having some very serious surgery where the mortality rate was high. Yeah. And I said, I don’t wanna be put on life support and if I died during the surgery. He said, you have to be put on life support if you reach that point in the surgery. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Some sometimes if you’re in a in a setting like that, you know, they have to resuscitate. You can’t kind of say do not resuscitate if you’re in the middle of surgery. They they have to do whatever they can.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true, that’s true. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I was gonna refer to this later but this book of Advice and Practices for Death and Dying has been compiled by advice mostly from Lama Zopa. And this has a wealth of information.

He actually has a chapter on euthanasia and organ donation, and it just covers so much, including having all the practices that are meant to be done at the time of death. And we’ll get into that in a second. But this is a really great resource. And it’s in your local bookstore at Sachen Ling right now. Okay.

Wish three, my wish for how comfortable I want to be. So again, cross out anything you don’t agree with. Now there’s a couple of interesting things here I want to point out. One of these wishes is I wish to be massaged with warm oils as often as I can be. Don’t know about you all, but personally, I’d rather not be touched and messed with a lot.

Like if I’m really near death, I want to kind of be left alone and not be touched a lot. So I would cross this one off. I wish to have my favorite music played when possible until the time of death. These days, whenever you’re having massage, you have Carlos Nikai in the background in this nice suit, which for a lot of people is incredibly soothing. And this is the reason that this is in here.

But if you’re really trying to practice meditation, you don’t want a lot of background music, most probably. So you would cross that one out. If I show signs of depression, nausea, shortness of breath, or hallucinations, I want my caregivers to do whatever they can to help me. Lenny was saying last weekend, she crossed out hallucinations because there are certain visions that are common near the time of death. And she doesn’t want to be medicated against the natural process of death.

So she crossed out hallucinations. Again, I do not want to be in pain. I want my doctor to give me enough medicine to relieve pain. If it means being drowsy or sleepy, this comes up again here. So these are some of the things that you might want to read through and cross out the things if you’re trying to die consciously that will interfere with that process.

Wish four. My wish for how I want people to treat me. I want to have people with me when possible. I want someone to be with me when it seems that death may come at any time. I want to have my hand held and be talked to when possible.

For a lot of us, we don’t want this at all. Again, you know, you kind of want not to be interfered with. It’s very interesting. Chuckie and I were talking at the break about how our wishes for what we want at the time of death have changed over the years as our practice has deepened. And you know, before we wanted everyone around and like loving us and all of that stuff.

Now I really get the thing of having an attendant. Like I just want somebody who will come and spoon Gruel into my mouth and change my diaper and go away and leave me alone to practice. I don’t want all of this. So it’s interesting sometimes as your practice changes or you may have even found out in your meditation that you have wishes that you didn’t know. So this is where this comes in, like all of this stuff that most people want.

As a practitioner, if you really want to use the time of death consciously, you just may not want all of that touching and holding and music and loving and all of that. Oh, I wish to have pictures of my loved ones in my room near my bed. What did I say before about attachment? Causing rebirth and saṃsāra. This is another one of those things, just like having your loved ones there telling you, please don’t go.

I love you so much. Please don’t leave me. Like what’s it gonna be if you’re gonna have pictures around you of all of your kids and how much they love you? Okay. How about pressure the motor?

Over kindness and cheerfulness. Yeah, kindness and cheerfulness, that’s good. I want to die at home. If that can be done, that’s okay. So a lot of these are okay.

But it’s very interesting when you look through and decide as a practitioner, there may be certain of these that you don’t want. Wish number five. Lenny said last weekend, this is like a Hallmark card. And she said, it’s better to say this stuff before you die. I want to be forgiven for the times I’ve hurt my family, friends, and others.

Well, how’s it gonna feel for them to just read this list? Like how meaningful is it gonna be? So it’s okay that this is here. There’s nothing wrong with it. You don’t wanna cross it out because then it means that you’d look.

So it’s okay. It’s a prompt. But I encourage you now that you are a Buddhist practitioner trying to face death consciously, get on it and say all these things now while you can, okay? Now, this is where we get into also you can write more specific wishes about what you want done with your remains at the time of death, what practices you want. Some of the last ones, after my death, would like my body to be buried or cremated.

My body or remains should be put in the following location. The following person knows my funeral wishes, and so on. Now, you can add another piece of paper if you want more space for more specific instructions, which we will get to, the more specific Buddhist instructions. And so you can write as much detail as you like and include it as a separate attachment to this. And we’ll get into that in a second, Lama Zopa specific instructions.

Now signing the five wishes form. In California, two witnesses are enough. It does not need legally to be notarized. Lenny, who’s worked with this a lot, said notarize it anyway. You know, when the chips are down and you’re in the hospital and they’re rushing up and down the hallway wheeling in the life support system, it will be a lot more of a weighty document if it’s notarized.

So she suggested notarizing it anyway. You know, that stamp carries a lot of weight. So go ahead and notarize it. Okay? So are there any questions about just this document before we get into Lama Zopa’s specific instructions?

That’s what we do with it. Okay. Yeah, and then what you do with it is on the very back page, sign in witness. Let everybody know. Keep the original.

What I do is give my agents photocopies and let them know where the original is and just kind of let everybody know that it exists and things like that. Oh, microphone? Can you speak to organ donation as it is? Yeah. In fact, let’s get into that during the discussion period that we’ll have because I knew that that was going to be when.

Now, ten minute or fifteen minute break before we get into Lama Zopa’s advice? Is everybody yeah? People want a little how about ten? Ten. Ten minutes.

Is ten good? Okay. And then we’ll get into some more of the specific Buddhist advice. And then we’ll have a lot of discussion time for questions and answers and what about this and what about that kind of stuff. Okay, great.

Yeah. Meditation? Maybe a quick question? Sure. You can ask about anything.

It’s a total free for all when we do the discussion. One for myself. Oh, hang on one second. Before you go, I just wanted to show you one thing. Are you getting ready to type up?

Because I don’t know to ask for. Yeah. I just I’m sorry. I I just knew she had to leave, and I want her to get to the next thing. I can wait till it’s fine.

Well, why don’t you why don’t you save it and ask it ask it when we get the discussion? Then we can definitely talk about that. Thank you so much. You’re welcome. You’re welcome.

Cheers. I’m really glad that you were able to stay Yeah. At least for that part in the meditation. That was important. Yeah.

Really wonderful. Thank you. Good. Six months or something. And I didn’t die until October of last year or so.

Well, she had diagnosed with alcohol before she got here. She was already Yeah. And they were saying, like, within months when she came in two thousand three. Then And that happened to me. I had a Okay.

So now what we’re gonna do is talk a little bit more about specific Buddhist instructions to be done at the time of death, and there’ll be a little supplement I’ll give you in a minute of another sheet that you can oh, thank you. You guys are so good reminding me. I’m so loud even without a microphone. I can never tell the difference. Okay.

Okay. So the most important thing is for people to die with a happy, calm mind. Okay, karmically, there’s a kind of karma called throwing karma. And what this means is that the state of mind at the time of death is a really powerful determinant to what your next rebirth is going to be. Which is why I said before early this morning, if you die with the mind of Bodhicitta, you’re home free.

You’re set. If you die with an angry mind, not good at all. So it’s really important to keep the person as happy and peaceful and calm at the time of death as possible. And if possible, to remind them of their Bodhicitta motivation. And if they can die with that on their mind, even better.

Okay. Obviously, the more that you’ve practiced and prepared for the time of death, the better. Also, this thing that comes up for people of regrets and wishing they’d done it all differently and having all these people they need to make amends with. It’s really great to take care of all of that business ahead of time and not to have that kind of hanging over you. The other mind to avoid in addition to the mind of anger at the time of death is the mind of strong attachment.

Okay? So this is why it’s really good to, you know, if you have really strong attachments to people, it may not be best for them to be the ones in your room, especially in close physical contact with you, whispering in your ear and things like that. Because at the time that you’re wanting to just leave and go to your next rebirth, that’s going to keep you stuck. So the pictures of the family and friends all around and things like that is not such a good idea for somebody that really wants to die in this way. Because that just increases the attachment.

I remember being at this woman’s bedside last fall, and she was dying in a nursing home in Pacific Grove. And she had a brain tumor that she’d had for quite a long time. And she’d been in a karma for quite a long time, too. And at one point, I was there with a group of her friends, about four or five people. And they’d called me because the nurses had said, oh, it’s going to be within a couple of hours.

And her friends had called me saying, please come. So I was there doing practices. And at one point, one of her friends was calling out and going, Sharon, Sharon, come back. Come back. Please don’t go.

You know? And luckily, I mean, I was right in the middle of some puja or something. And luckily, one of her other friends at Buddhist said, no, no, you know, let’s not do that. She needs to go now. Just let her go.

Like, it’s best to just let her go. Because he thought the appropriate way to show his emotion was to emote like mad and be like, no, no, you know, don’t go, and to sort of hang on to her ankles. And know, Obviously Yeah, yeah. And just be like, don’t go, don’t go. So it’s really important.

And as we said before, and Keisha said with her family and it’s sometimes really hard, also depending on your culture. You know, in certain culture, there’s this thing called keening. And that’s the way that you show your emotion. And if you don’t do it, you’re thought to be completely cold hearted. So in a lot of cultures, there’s tons of wailing and moaning and emoting in histrionics.

And it’s really important, if at all possible, to keep that away from the person who’s dying because it’s just gonna be really difficult for them to go. So if you are from a culture where that’s a common thing, it may be difficult to explain to your family that that’s not appropriate behavior. Okay. In order to help the dying person have a peaceful mind, the environment should be really beautiful and orderly and calm. So caregivers, whoever’s around the dying person, it’s really good not to have a lot of mess and clutter and disorder around the person.

Sacred objects and pictures and things that are spiritually meaningful to the person, to have them around, that’s a great reminder. It’s really good when the person is dying if they can hear mantras. So if you have people around that can say mantras in their ear, especially the Medicine Buddha Mantra is a great mantra to say. There are in this book mantras called The Five Great Mantras That Close the Lower Realms that are really important to say at the time of death. And there’s a whole section in this book of what specific prayers should be done right after the breath has stopped.

So if you’re a practitioner and you really want all the details in this book, it’s exactly first do this practice, then do this, then do that, then do that. And it’s all in this book. It’s really important to be sensitive to the person’s spiritual beliefs. So if, for example, they relate to the Virgin Mary or some other belief. Don’t push their beliefs if you’re taking care of somebody else.

Obviously, don’t push your beliefs on them. I believe that bodhisattvas emanate in whatever appearance suits the disposition of the individual. So when the dying person starts seeing Saint Francis in the Virgin of Guadalupe instead of Chenrezig, I think it’s Chenrezig showing up looking like the Virgin of Guadalupe, and that’s no problem at all. So respect their wishes. You can say all these prayers and mantras silently.

You don’t have to say them into the person’s ear if that’s not their belief system. You can even say them at a distance in the other room. There are a lot of these practices, and we’re going to do another meditation soon, a transference of consciousness meditation that you can do on the person’s behalf completely silently. And I did this when my father died. I was doing certain prayers and practices.

And my brother came in the room and he goes, what’s this weirdo stuff? And I was like, Okay, I’ve got to do it quietly now. So I practiced for six hours completely in the privacy of my own mind. And that was fine. It was no problem at all.

Presence in the room is really an important thing. So when you go into the room of somebody who’s dying, it’s really good to just kind of leave your own agenda at the door and just be as calm and peaceful as possible. If they’re sleeping or if they’re in a coma, you can just sit with them and do prayers either out loud silently or do your own meditation practices. When the woman in the hospice at LMB was dying, I would just go do my practices in her room with her. I’d go up there.

And usually when I was there, the hospice caregiver would just go into the next room because they knew that I wanted to sit alone with her. And about the last week or two of her life, I would just go do my daily meditation commitments there in her room because I just felt like there was some benefit of I had to do it anyway. So I just went up the hill and did them with her in her room. So that’s really important. Let’s see.

Okay, so general instructions for the actual time of death. So when the last breath has happened, as we said before, the subtle consciousness has not left the body. So it’s really important not to touch the body at all for as long as possible. Okay? So not to touch the body at all at that time, especially not the lower half of the body below the waist.

Okay? So definitely not the feet, the legs. And sometimes it’s really if people are in a hospital room, usually the head is up near the wall and the legs are sticking out. And a lot of times, will grab the feet and the legs of the person who’s dying. So it’s especially important not to touch the lower parts of the body and not to touch it all if you can.

This woman in Pacific Grove who’s in the nursing home, her nurse on the shift where she died was actually a Buddhist. So her friends were around. And I said when her breath stopped, I turned to her friends and I said, look, there’s no need to go notify anybody. You know, her breath just stopped, but let’s all just stay and do practices. Well, one of her friends kind of panicked and ran out to the nurses’ station.

You know, the nurse came back. It was this Buddhist nurse. And she goes, you know, to certify, we’ve got to do a pulse or I need to at least listen with the stethoscope. And I said, could you please just as gently as possible, she’s like, I’m sorry, have to. And she just barely put the stethoscope on and took it right off again.

Like she just had to. She would have gotten fired if she had So she just kind of went like that and took it right off again. And I was like, Okay. She barely touched her and I felt like it wasn’t anything disturbing at all. And then we just carried on to do practices.

Now in that situation, they had given us, I think, three hours before they said they had to move the body. Before you move the body, whether it’s that you’re in some sort of facility and you have to or whatever, it’s best to touch the body at the crown of the head first. If the person has hair, pull on their hairs really sharply right at the crown of their body or rub on the top of their head or tap like that. And this causes the subtle consciousness to leave through the crown chakra, which is really beneficial. When the subtle consciousness leaves out of some other part of the body, especially the lower parts, it’s supposedly destined to a lower realm.

If it leaves out of the crown chakra, it’s destined for an upper rebirth or a pure realm rebirth. So it’s really good to sharply tap or pull or tug or somehow on the crown of the head. Like this woman in the nursing home, right before they had to come and move the body, I ended up doing the transference consciousness practice. Not that I could do it. It’s great if you have a real lama that can do it, but nobody else was there.

And then I really tapped and pulled before the funeral home came in. And then Leila lifted and grabbed her body because then they’ll lift it any old which way. So you’re guaranteeing as much as possible that the consciousness will leave the body through the crown. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

It’s okay. Where’s the mic? This is the first time I’ve heard that you wait until the body has to be moved when you tap. I thought you were supposed to do that as soon as you were aware that the person died. No, you you because that’ll make the consciousness leave.

What if they’re hanging out in the clear light? You don’t want to stop that. Okay. Okay, because that forces the consciousness to leave the body. If you can leave their body for a week without touching or moving it at all, you know, go right ahead because that forces the consciousness to leave.

And if they’re in that meditation, which by the way, even if you’re not a practitioner with all of these levels of realizations, it’s quite frequent for even ordinary non practitioners to stay in that clear light meditation from one to three days after the breath has stopped. That’s not unusual at all, even without a lot of prior training. So it’s excellent if you can leave the body without touching it at all for three days is excellent. Know, most people that haven’t been trained at all, it may be quite a lot less than that or some period in between. But that’s why it’s really great if you can have a situation where you can leave the body for at least three days or even longer if it’s possible.

But for sure, you shouldn’t touch the body right away unless they have to be moved for some other reason. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If there is an injury at the time of death, the death caused by an injury, is it normal to assume that that’s where the consciousness is leaving through is that area of injury?

Or you still have can touch the crown of the head? It depends if their breath has stopped and you feel that they’ve died instantaneously. If they have an injury and they’re still breathing and they’re still alive, it’s not necessarily that then the consciousness will leave through that point. But if they did have some sort of injury that caused death, it is maybe possible that that would have happened all almost simultaneously and that the impact or whatever it was like that would have caused the consciousness to leave through that place. But if they’re still alive, like if they get an injury that eventually causes death but it’s not instantaneous, then there’s still definitely a chance that it could leave through the crown.

So yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So when the person dies or just before, there are a couple of things that you can do in terms of other practices and things that you can do. Lama Zopa says it’s really good to put a stupa at the crown of the person’s head. So if you can get and there are these little stupas that we have around, and you can just kind of prop them up on a pillow or somehow prop them up so they’re on the crown of the person’s head. There’s also these strips of mantras that are available. And I don’t know, do you guys have those here, the ones that he says to put on their chest?

Well, there’s ones that are printed into these small What’s it called? Because I think gave it to me. It’s called the seven point something not something. It’s something about something about death. Right?

It’s on the word is death, and it’s all Tibetan. And it’s just one little tiny page of it. Yeah. It’s one it’s one because we have a whole stack of them at the hospice. Yeah.

Okay. We’ll try and get you. We used to have some at the hospice, and I’m not sure what the original one. But it’s really good to put them at the chest, and then you can just leave it there. Like even after the body goes to be cremated or whatever, you just go ahead and leave.

Like the stupa you take off when they move the body, but this piece of paper on the chest with special mantras, you can just leave on there. Also, yeah, Loris. What about the mantras we put in the Buddhas? Well, are special mantras. There are different mantras to be used when you’re filling statues and stupas and different ones for the different chakras and things like this.

So this is special mantras that are beneficial for the time of death. That’s I mean, any mantra at all would be certainly better than nothing, but we’ll try and get copies of this one. Also, if you take some sand from a Kālacakra mandala and put it on the crown of the head. And you can do that even right before the death time. You mix it with a little bit of lotion or butter and just put it at the crown of the head.

There are also these pills that are called poa pills that you can get from llamas. And you can put one of those again, put in some lotion or butter and stick it to the top of the head. Also dutsi pills, you can put one inside the mouth as the person is dying. So these are all these special practices that you want to do, especially if the person is a Buddhist. And these are all things that you can include in your five wishes document as far as things that you want done for you.

Okay. And then the mantras and things that are in this book, which I won’t go in in too much detail because there are so many of them. The really important ones that can be done are these five great mantras that close the lower realms, are great to do even in the process of the person dying. Like both with Linda Rose, who we’re just talking out in the hallway, this woman who was an old Dharma student of Lama Zopas and she died in this sort of a care unit in Santa Cruz. And I think in the two weeks before she died, she had almost constant stream of visitors doing these different prayers.

Medicine Buddha, puja, is what Lama Zopa says to do the instant the breath has stopped, immediately kick in. And it’s interesting. Two deaths that I’ve been in in the last six months, I was doing cycles of all of these different prayers while I was sitting by the bedside and the people’s last breath happened just when I started Medicine Buddha Pooja. It was really weird. Yeah.

Linda was one. I just I’d done all these cycles of the five great mantras and then I was like, okay, let’s do Medicine Buddha Pooja. And I started and that was at her last breath, you know? So all of the specific prayers to be done and Lama Zopa delineates all of them and then there are copies of all of them in this book. So if you’re really sort of in this business or you want to get all your affairs in order for your own, friends and family so they’ll know what to do for you.

You can copy. And what we’ve done at the hospice down at Land of Medicine Buddha, a lot of this book is instructions and additional prayers. We’ve taken the five essential prayers and just made a smaller booklet that we’ve made multiple copies of. Because a lot of times when somebody dies in our hospice, a lot of the caregivers are practitioners, and they want to come and do practice at the time of death. So when Bonnie died in March, we had about fifteen caregivers down in the meditation hall doing practice while her son and I and one of the other people were up with her doing practice up there.

Okay. So I think that that’s it for the specific instructions to be done at the time of death. Before we discuss, just because it’ll probably come up, I wanted to just mention that Lama Zopa has also said that it’s really beneficial. And in these first discussions we had in the early ’90s about all of this subject, it actually came up when Lama Zopa had suggested that at vajrapani Institute, where I was living at the time, at the site of Lama Yeshe’s cremation stupa, we build a memorial shrine where we would have the ashes of students made into stupas and other holy objects. And what he said was it’s incredible benefit for the person if their ashes are made into a holy object.

And then he said, their relatives will come, offer flowers and do things for their remains. And then it’s incredible benefit for their relatives because they’re actually like offering flowers to a holy object, to a stupa. Even though it’s out of a mind of attachment, he said there’s incredible benefit in doing this. So the location has changed to Land of Medicine Buddha. We have this really beautiful memorial shrine up in the meadow that’s built basically as a columbarium to hold the remains of people, which are now put in bases underneath with a stupa on top.

So now there’s a wooden base with the person’s ashes and specific mantras that Lama Zopa has delineated should go in there. And then on the top is this stupa also filled and blessed. Now in order for the ashes to go in a holy object like that, they need to go through two consecration ceremonies, both of which are done annually at Land of Medicine Buddha. One is called a Jangwa and that can actually be done even if there aren’t any remains. It’s basically hooking the consciousness of the being from whatever realm they’re in and sending it to a pure land.

And this can be done by the meditative absorption of high lamas. So this year, I think Choden Rinpoche is going to do it at Land of Medicine Buddha sometime in July. And even if you don’t have the remains of someone who’s died, like a lot of us have the pictures of our parents or somebody that we’ve loved, and then the pictures are put on little sticks with the person’s name and the Jangwa ceremony has done in relation to a picture. Also, you have things that belong to the person, like clothing or something like that that belong to the person. Yeah, did you have Actually, got a call from Deirdre this morning saying that microphone.

Khen Rinpoche, who’s the at Saramay, is in San Jose at Dharma Gate, wherever that I don’t know where that is. And he’s doing is it called Jangwa? Jangwa tomorrow. Oh, wow. So talk about death and dying, just keep it going.

Yeah. Okay, great. And then the remains are also after the Jangwa ceremony. They’re also consecrated, purified in a further ceremony called a Riwo Sangchö. And then they can be put in the stupa.

And the ones that are at Land of Medicine Buddha are rejangwa’d every year. The stupas are brought down every time a lama is there doing one of these jangwa ceremonies. So you just kind of keep not only is there an initial merit for the person in having their ashes in conjunction with the holy object, but they keep being prayed for and blessed over and over and over again. So this is something that Lama Zopa says is really beneficial. All these practices to do at the death time up until the time, and even after death, there’s ways that there can be a lot of benefit for the person.

Questions, comments, issues to discuss. Oh, oh wait, whoops, sorry. So I’m sorry. I’m losing track. What I’m passing out now, and if we can get some over there, this is a document that was Venerable Jime, who used to live at Land of Medicine Buddha and do a lot of work with the hospice there, has come up with sort of a supplementary form with the specific Buddhist wishes that you can just check off.

And this can be an addendum to your five wishes document. So we’ll just go through this quickly. As I’m dying, put holy pictures and objects around me. Let me hear the Medicine Buddha mantra in Puja. Remind me of virtuous actions I’ve done.

Remind me about Tonglen. Remind me of my regular Dharma practice, which is oh, and I forgot to mention this. It’s really beneficial if you’re unconscious, even if you’re unconscious or in a coma, but if you can no longer read or recite your own prayers to have a friend do your daily, if you have daily practice commitments, to sit there and read them out loud to you. I had a friend who was in a coma for a while. And she said that she had friends come and sit and do her practices.

And she even was aware of it. Even though she was in a coma, she was aware that her friends were reading her daily practice commitments and really grateful. So it’s really important if you have daily practices that you do to get some friends you know, who’ll do that for you if the time comes. How about putting it on I’ve got my practices on an iPod. Oh, that’s great idea.

Then you can listen to your own voice. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great idea. Okay.

Let me listen to teachings from recordings or by reading to me from a book. My last breath, stay calm and quiet. Leave my body untouched as long as possible. Touch the crown of my head before anything else. Notify my friend and spiritual master who is art.

Now this is really important. If you have a teacher, Gellic Rinpoche, Lama Zopa, whoever it is, it’s really important to notify them as soon as possible. You can also notify His Holiness the Dalai Lama as soon as possible. These beings will do extraordinary things on your behalf. If you have a karmic connection with them and you’ve just died, get your friends to call and let your teachers know as soon as possible.

When my father died, I had an in to Lama Zopa’s main attendant and called, even though it was like two o’clock in the morning. And she said later on that she went right downstairs. Lama Zopa was in the kitchen. She told him, and within five minutes of my father’s last breath, he went up and started doing practice for like three hours. And I just kind of felt like that’s the best gift I could ever give my father of anything that I could ever do.

Especially if you’re a direct student of the lama and you have a close karmic connection with them, they can do the transference of consciousness. They could do all of these prayers. And it’s really important to let the people who are looking after you know that that’s the first phone call they make by far. Here are some contact details for my spiritual masters and friends. Shout loudly into my ear, reminding me of refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

Recite aloud the five great mantras. Put a page of mantras on my chest. Other holy objects on my head or chest. Read aloud to me my regular Dharma practice. And what’s different here today that I’m hearing for the first time, and I thank you very much for it, is the timing.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, immediately. Low, But not not the rubbing of the head. Yeah.

Not the handling of the body. Yeah. It just hands off. Everything else goes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Laura’s has something. Yeah. Yeah.

What about cloning the body? Body goes to the washroom and the tissues are closed. Well, think after that point, right? Because once it’s starting to be handled by the funeral home and things, you know, you’ve rubbed the top of the head, you’ve done the transference of consciousness, it’s being handled already. So at that point, whatever they do, if they want to put different clothing on it or whatever, it doesn’t matter so much because they’ve already been touching and handling the body.

So it’s really good to wait as long as possible before any of that happens. But then at that point, either if after the consciousness has left or you’ve done the pulling of the hair, then it’s Okay. Yeah. And by the way, I don’t know if I should advertise this. I don’t know if he wants it advertised.

But Geshe Dakpa, your own resident lama here at Sachen Ling, is a very well known astrologer. And several times recently when people have died, we’ve contacted him about the exact time to move the body because he figures it out according to astrology. And I don’t know how he does it, but we’ll just get a phone call saying, move the body at eleven o’clock Tuesday morning, and we go with it. Because if he says it’s better than any guess that we can make. So like I say, I don’t really know that he wants that widely advertised.

But I have used his services on many occasions recently and believe that it’s a good thing to do. Okay. In the days and weeks after my death, arrange for prayers and poojas to be performed for me by and then there’s some nice links here. Only in this age can you go onto the internet and arrange for poojas to be done. Make donations in my name for these prayers and poojas.

Make other charitable donations in my name for the sake of karma. Arrange for me to be included in the next jangwa ceremony. Also, in the days and weeks after death and this is one of the nice benefits about being hooked into one of these lamas we had a friend at vajrapani Institute who died very suddenly, fell off the roof of the house that he was building and fell on some spikes of rebar and bled to death in five minutes. And so in the days and weeks after his death, Lama Zopa told us specific practices that his friends should do for him, like people who had a strong connection. We’d all lived together in this community.

And so nightly for seven days, we did Vajrayoginī self-initiation. Then every seven days for forty nine days, we did Medicine Buddha Pooja. So often, if you’re close to people, you’ll be called upon as their special friends to do practices. So it’s not just about sending an email to Kopan to get the monks to do something. Often, we’re told by our lamas to do practices specifically for each other because of our close karmic connections.

And it was a really powerful time for all of us because, as you can imagine, it was so tragic. It actually made me realize that I wasn’t a good Buddhist at all because I was so shocked at what happened. And it made me realize I should just expect it. Death can come at any time. Somebody slips off a roof and falls, I should just expect it.

And I didn’t at all, and I was devastated. So it felt really good to just be able to just throw ourselves into practice for him right away. May I share a little experience? Yeah. Yeah.

I was teaching in a little school in Bhutan. And in Bhutanese, Tibetan Buddhism is an English tradition. And a little student in this school died. And for for that’s what got me interested in today’s practice art. For forty nine days Yeah.

All those school students Yeah. It’s beautiful. Because in our culture, death is usually considered the end. And then there’s nothing more you can do. You just have a memorial service and a party for the survivors.

But our culture just doesn’t have this thing of, you just keep going. Like, keep practicing for the benefit of the person. Yeah. That’s really beautiful. Yeah.

Any other questions about this specific instructions? Did you have microphone? Have a question. It was actually brought up a little bit early about organ donations. Are you going to touch on that or anything like that?

You know what? I found in this book and I’ll just read it out because it’s quite clear. This is from Lama Zopa because a lot of llamas you’ll hear conflicting things about organ donation. So I’ll just read this out. Lama Zopa says the section is called Practicing Charity with the Body.

So he says, you can give your body parts away. That’s very, very good because you know that that body is going to make charity. It’s very good for the mind, very good to keep the mind in a state of Bodhicitta. It helps for that. I don’t know what the minimum time is to be able to use the body.

It has to be arranged with the doctor. If it’s Okay for one hour, keep it for one hour. Anyway, twenty or thirty minutes or one hour. If it’s Okay to keep it longer, that’s better. It depends on the maximum time doctor says one can wait and still be able to give the body to others.

Normally in Tibet, where it’s cold and dry, you’re able to keep the body three days without problems. However, that is not always the case. If the body starts to smell immediately, it means the consciousness has left the body. Therefore, one doesn’t need to keep the body for three days if it starts to smell before then. It depends whether one dies at home or dies in the hospital.

If it’s at home, you have a choice. You don’t need to take the parts of the body to give them to charity immediately. There’s more opportunity for time to pass slowly. I think even in the hospital, if somebody discusses a situation with a doctor, they can wait for ten, fifteen, thirty minutes for one hour like that. They don’t have to do it immediately right after the breath stops.

They can wait for one hour or a couple of hours. The important thing is that the breath has stopped. At that time, the body is still soft. It’s the same as if one were not dead as if sleeping. Don’t touch any part of the body during this time.

Just leave it. After whatever period of time the doctor says one can wait just before that amount of time has passed, before the doctor does any cutting, then pull the central hair at the crown and put a poa pill there. Without touching any other part of the body, the first thing to touch is the crown. Pull the hair strongly. Then there’s a special substance called a poa pill.

And then he goes on and on about that. So basically, he’s saying, as long as possible. Usually for organ donation, sometimes it just needs to be done completely immediately. If it’s in a hospital, it can’t even wait an hour like he suggests. So he’s kind of saying to slow it down as much as possible and then to make sure that the consciousness has left the body before it’s cut and the surgery is done.

But often, I mean, what he’s saying, you can tell. He’s just kind of saying, as long as you can possibly prolong it, the better. So it’s something, you know, it’s just a choice you have to make. It’s hard though because now there’s like a sticker that you put on your driver’s license if you want to donate organs and then they’ll just do it right away. They’re not going to hang around waiting for an hour for your clear light meditation to finish.

Know, they’re just gonna kind of yank. So what he’s saying may not even be so so practical in a hospital. They’re probably just the minute the breath stops, they’re going to of wheel you in and take out the liver or whatever it is. Maybe the chronic benefits of donating your organ overcomes Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, Janet. Your statement brought up a question, and that is when you said, know, you’re clear light meditation. But after you stop breathing, does the amount of time that you go through, like the red, white, and black near attainments to the clear light, does that vary amongst individuals also? I know that it can happen really quickly in the case of sudden death. I don’t know how prolonged each of the stages up to clear light can be.

I’ve never heard anybody say, oh best case scenario with a seasoned practitioner, each stage is like an hour. I don’t know if they all still go relatively quickly and then you stay in the clear light. That was always my understanding, but I really don’t know what the maximum amount of time for those stages is. That would be a really good thing to check. And my apologies for not being here when when you did the touch the crown of the head or pull the hair.

Yeah. It says pull hard. Yeah. And and does that that doesn’t annoy the person? You’re trying to get the the the subtle consciousness to leave the body at this point because you’re doing this right before the funeral home comes in and grabs them by the arms and the legs.

Well, can’t we just don’t I thought you could just let somebody. Are you talking about in the hospital? I’m what what this stage is is before you have to move the body for some other reason. If you can leave them lying there for days and days, that’s absolutely best. But for example, sometimes you’ll be in a hospital and they’ll say, we have to move the body after three hours.

Then before you move the body for any reason, you do this to induce the consciousness to lead the body through the crown. So then you have to be quite vigorous tapping and pulling and so forth to induce the consciousness to leave. When my father died, we had some water that was from the Dalai Lama’s water from Kālacakra. Yeah. And so I brought the vial with me.

And we each individually, my family members, we all went one by one into his hospital room after he had stopped breathing. Yeah. And so I put I figured that and if the Dalai Lama power would do something, and I put a drop of on the crown of his head of the water and then just put my hand there. And my hand got so hot. It felt like it was on fire.

It was just like just and and I know it was the power of the Dalai Lama’s blessings. Yeah. That’s excellent. That it was pulling his consciousness to drive That’s excellent that you did that. Yeah.

But and then, you know, he was not Buddhist, but at that point, he didn’t know you know? And I did that when he was sick too. He didn’t know it. I just tipped it over, and I tapped it on the top of the head. He had no idea That’s great.

What I was doing. But so That’s excellent. You know, I think that probably helped a lot. Yeah. For sure.

No no question. Yeah. No. That’s a very holy holy object to have on the crown of his head, for sure. Yeah.

That’s true. What else? Any other questions, issues? Yeah. I’ve got two.

When you talked about the the ashes being at the Land of Medicine Buddha Yeah. I I did see them, and the boxes looked so small to contain a person’s ashes. It’s not all the ashes at all. It’s usually about a tablespoon. So you’ll have more.

So often what happens in fact, here’s Lama Zopa’s instructions. I forgot to pass out. If you could just pass out while we’re talking. And often, for example, like the woman who died in the hospice just recently, both of her sons wanted some ashes to scatter. One was going to go out in a boat and scatter in the ocean, and one wanted to scatter somewhere else.

And there was plenty for all of us. So it’s not that all the ashes need to be in there. In fact, there’s usually a substantial amount left over that can go back to the family to do whatever they want. It’s nice if all the ashes can be purified and blessed, but it’s not necessary that they all go into the stupa. Yeah.

Did you have a did you have something? Oh, was going to ask you if you wanted to talk about the time, the journey before we get to the clear light, that time when there’s a possibility that the mind may go somewhere else other than the clear light, that phase. Okay. Well, you always go through the clear light no matter what. And then the next stage is the bardo.

And then that bardo will direct to your next like often when you go into the bardo at a certain point, your body will look like the body of your next rebirth. So everybody goes through those eight stages, including the clear light. You never kind of get derailed before you get to the clear light. Now whether or not you’re able to stop and do the meditation on the clear light and take it into the path is another story. But you’ll at least go through all of those stages, including the clear light stage.

And then after that, when the consciousness goes into the Bardo body, which is a subtle body with all of these powers, often that stage is when the person will experience a lot of hallucinations. Some of them are frightening. And then you’ll kind of go through different levels of Bardo being sometimes they say each one can last for seven days up to a total of forty nine days. So you can have seven different bardo rebirths before you’re reborn into some realm. So the shortest can be seven days up to forty nine days.

Actually, I think it can be shorter than seven days. I think that seven is the maximum for any Bardo to be reborn. But everybody goes through those eight stages, including the clear light. It’s just that for most of us, it’s so quick that we don’t really recognize it. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Thanks for that. Yeah. Anything else?

Other questions? Okay. Yeah. How do you deal with someone who’s not Buddhist? Say someone real close to you.

Say my husband who leaves a different set of instructions. I don’t know. I I mean, I I feel conflicted if I were Yeah. And I wouldn’t move the body. I wouldn’t do this and that.

Yeah. And then he doesn’t but not believe in all that. And Yeah. He may say whatever he says that would be in conflict. Right.

And it’s not a simple matter of chanting silently. It’s something deeper than that. How does one reconcile that? I think, you know, on one level, you can try and explain to them your reasoning, like we said with Keisha, with her relatives. Just explain what your beliefs are and what you think kind of happens at the time of death.

And he may say, that’s not my belief, and I’m sorry. I mean, it may be that if you really explain to him how important you feel it is just to comply with your wishes, he may go along with what you want. But have to just respect people’s wishes. You try and do it as skillfully as possible. But I found if you’re heavy handed about it, they tend to just get defensive.

And then it can create conflict, which is not such a great thing too. So I think the best way is if you can sort of, as unemotionally as possible, just explain the death process and what you believe happens and see if you can reach some kind of compromise that because of his relationship with he doesn’t want you to be upset and maybe you’ll be able to implement some of the wishes. But the bottom line is, really have to go along with what other people’s wishes and you just can’t come down heavy because then it just creates conflict and it’s not really so so right and then you just have to trust that you know even though the time of death is extremely crucial time, it’s not all of the story. There’s still all of this karma from the whole life. Even though there is a lot of determining factor that can happen at the time of death, it’s not the whole story for what rebirth they’re going to go into.

So at a certain point, you just have to kind of trust karma and figure that it’ll be Okay. And you do your best. And then you do do prayers silently. And then you make donations. Like for my father, I got an inheritance.

And I try and make donations and support the Three Jewels as much as possible in sponsored text to be and I tried to do that because I wasn’t able to do as much as I would have liked to and all like that. So you just try and do other things even after the fact of death to try and kind of make up for it or sponsor poojas for the person and things like that. Yeah, but you really have to be skillful because it never works to be kind of a dogmatic heavy handed Buddhist. It’s not never a very successful approach. Yeah.

Anything else? Can you handle one more ten minute meditation? Yeah? One more little technique? Okay.

Okay. Chicky came back at just the right time. She likes this one. Yeah. Okay.

I had said before, I talked about transference of consciousness and said that the best transference of consciousness practice was the five powers. And I’m not changing my mind, but I’m giving you just another technique that’s more of a traditional transference of consciousness technique. And the word for this is poa. And this is adopted from Sogyal Rinpoche’s brilliant book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Now, this is a very simple transference of consciousness technique.

Some of you may have had initiations and do more complicated transference of consciousness techniques. A lot of them involve visualizations of deities and recitations of certain mantras. And they’re quite complex. In fact, the one that Lama Zopa recommends that we do at the bedside after someone’s died and right before we move the body is called Amitābha powa. It’s quite extensive and goes on and on.

So this is a very, very simplified version that’s just so beautiful because it’s the very essence of poa practice. This is also a really nice practice that you can do at the bedside of someone who’s died. You can do it very quietly on their behalf. And what you do is you change the visualization so that the holy being is above the crown of their head. And then you visualize their consciousness going in.

So you don’t pretend that you’re the person. You just do it on their behalf at their bedside, which is a really beautiful thing to be able to do, especially in those situations where the family that doesn’t understand is not around. So you can’t be loudly shouting things and reciting these mantras and doing this whole business. But it’s really nice to do this poa practice. So let’s just sit for a minute again, watching our breath to just calm our mind.

In the sky in front of you, invoke the embodiment of whatever truth you believe in in the form of radiant light. Choose whichever divine being or saint you feel close to, either Lord Buddha, Jesus, Mary, God. If you don’t feel linked with any particular spiritual figure, simply imagine a form of pure golden light in the sky before you, who you visualize as the embodiment of the truth, wisdom, and compassion of all the Buddhas, saints, masters, and enlightened beings. Fill your heart with this being’s presence and really feel that he or she is there. Then focus on the presence you’ve invoked and pray that all your negativities, destructive emotions, and obscurations be purified and that you die a good and peaceful death and be able to continue your spiritual path in your next life for the benefit of all sentient beings.

Now imagine that the presence is moved by your prayer and responds with a loving smile and sends out love and compassion in a stream of rays of light from his or her heart. As these touch and penetrate you, they cleanse and purify all your negative karma, destructive emotions, and obscurations, which are the causes of suffering. You see and feel that you’re totally immersed in light. You’re now completely purified and completely healed by the light streaming from the presence. Consider that your very body, itself created by karma, now dissolves completely into light.

The body of light you are now soars up into the sky and merges inseparably with the blissful presence of light. Remain in that state of oneness for as long as possible. So now let’s take all of the positive energy that we generated during this meditation and during our day together, all the merit that we’ve created and dedicate it so that we may be able to have a peaceful death, be able to practice as well as we can during the death time. We’ll be able to use what we’ve learned to help those around us. And that by being able to practice at the time of death, we’re able to progress along the path and quickly achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings so that we can lead them to this highest state.

So let’s just put take all of our positive energy and all of our merit dedicated towards this goal. That’s so flattering. Lynn, if it’s that fabulous. Anything that Oh my god. This is my idea.

If Tenzin Chökyi could lead your husband, my daughter, lay up oldest wife, all the non Buddhists who are who are connected to Buddhists in a sort of low key you know what I mean? Say what say what we’re doing so that there’s some sort of imprimatur put on it, some sort of authority that not you’re not scary. Do you know what I mean? I’m not? No.

Aw. Tall, but not frightening. You know what I’m saying? Would you would he go for that? Would he allow it, do you think?

If he knew this was like a couple of hour thing to just say what we wanted and so they could ask questions without you know, we don’t have to get into chapter and verse of all the Buddhist stuff. The support group for non-Buddhist loved ones. Can your family come out from North Carolina for this? Yeah, your family for everything. Yeah, yeah, there we go.

That might be easier. But there’s two different things going on here. You know, one, I I am merit to a non-Buddhist, but he would totally respect my What you want. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I would feel that I would have to respect what he wants. What yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So Yeah. So you’re almost talking about trying to convince someone of something? Just an understanding. Educate.

Educate. Isn’t that right? When she Educate. She doesn’t wanna twist anybody. They’re not Lynn.

Heavy handed. And for me to have this conversation with my daughter, I have had in my mind this conversation with my daughter for at least three or four or five years, and it never is not heavy handed. You need a third party. That’s Yeah. Neutral third parties.

What I’m saying. Yeah. She’s training Signing off. Any last questions, feedbacks? Yeah.

Oh, microphone. I going to be here on on Tuesday. It’s supposed to be Oh, Tuesday? Not today? Safe that it actually comes up.

And so yeah. Okay. It’s waiting for us in a box at L and B. It was supposed to apparently, she left a note on your note probably after you left. Okay.

How much is the book? I think it’s fourteen ninety five or something. It’s not done. Dyscannon for memberships. Yeah.

With the tax. But this is such an awesome book. I mean, this is like as far as I’m concerned, this is the bible and his holiness is just so clear and it goes through not only the easy to understand stuff, but a lot of the technical detail that’s really nice to have a wonderful clear explanation. So I just can’t recommend this book enough. They’re not paying me to say this.

It’s because it’s true. So, anyway, I’m wondering if I should get more. It’s on the list. It is on the list. It’s your textbook on the book list.

It’s considered the textbook. There are variations in the different text even on the list there because I’ve read most of them about what those visions are. For example, today, you talked about red sunset. It’s always been sunrise that I’ve read. Yeah.

Okay. So how how should we see those different things? Do we just pick one that we like? Because some of them are a little bit different. They’re slightly different.

But different people have different experience. So different teachers will teach out of what their experience has been in their meditative absorption because of their karma. I just heard that Khensur Jampa Tekchok said instead of wispy, instant smoke, it’s like a billowing smokestack from a paper factory or something. And that was the first time I’d ever heard that one. So whatever, like everybody.

But as long as you’re familiar enough, I mean, that’s the thing with all of these practices. It’s like it came out of somebody’s meditative absorption and their experience during completion stage practice and everybody’s karma is different. So it could be slightly different. There is no definitive answer. You thought about, if you do this habitually, have you thought that the actual visions are going to be similar to what we’re doing right now in our practice?

In other words, that we’re imprinting our mind with a certain way that you know, I’ve got this silvery blue patch my way. Yeah, yeah. It’s her way. It’s her way. We’re all going to have a different way.

But they’re so close. Mean, it’s some kind of smoke. And whether it’s a billowing smokestack or incense or whatever people would always be close to that story, mirage, not to your actual mind. So it’s kind of fun. It’s sort of like when Billy not talking about, he’s kind of excited.

He’s kind of looking forward to see if all To what it’s really gonna be like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m kind of like, you know, the deities that I’m visualizing are the ones that showed up to Naropa.

And they could look totally different to me. You know, it’s like you just have to go with what you’ve got. And then when the deity, you know, comes up in three d living color to you, he or she may look quite different than they look to somebody who wrote The Sadna a thousand years ago. It’s quite probable. You know, they could look like Christie Brinkley or something.

I don’t know, you know, whatever. Whoever it is these days, I don’t even know. I don’t even know what it is. Madonna, right? Yeah, mine will probably look like Madonna.

Our mind, didn’t we? What’s that? Yeah. All those deities are created by our mind. Well, they’re created by our karma, they appear in whatever way is most beneficial for our mind.

So I might not be able to relate to something that Naropa saw a thousand years ago, but it’ll appear different to me. So yeah, basically, yeah, there’s nothing self existent about deities just like there’s nothing self existent about anything else. But that’s a whole another story, and we won’t get into it today. Thank you very much. It was really nice spending the day with you.

Hopefully you have some tools to use for yourself and with the people that you are taking. Oh boy, here she goes with the thing again. The official thing. Is that from scripture? Is that in the Manaiah?

Thank you.