Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 105-minute talk, Ilia S. Durovic argues that recent scientific evidence—from quantum mechanics, biology, near-death experiences, and childhood memory studies—strongly refutes materialism and supports the Buddhist understanding of consciousness as nonmaterial and independent of brain function. He presents rigorous evidence for reincarnation drawn from Professor Stevenson’s sixty-year study of 2,500 cases at the University of Virginia, of which 895 were independently verified. Durovic then connects this framework to practical motivation for Buddhist practice: if consciousness persists across multiple lives and is shaped by karma, practitioners must extend their ethical scope far beyond this single existence. He ends by discussing how karma operates, the importance of generosity, ethics, and study as causes for future rebirths of leisure and endowment, and emphasizes that sustained, regular practice—not intellectual brilliance—is the key to genuine transformation across lifetimes. The talk is pitched at Western Buddhist students transitioning from materialist worldviews and assumes no prior initiation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Ilia Talk Three Principles 2.mp3
UUID: f286cf84-7f44-4d23-b052-251f8d9abba3
Teacher: Ilia S. Durovic
Collection: Three Principal Aspects
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~14,238
Now having raised all these questions, what I’d like to cover with you before the break shortly is, is there a way to circumscribe the number of choices here or not? Is it just a matter of personal preference and culture, which is which has been in history the case? People typically practice the religion their parents practiced and they were born and this was how it was. Or is there some evidence largely from recent scientific discoveries, which makes some solutions more probable and some less probable? And I think there is.
So I think there is a substantial amount of data, both empirical and theoretical, which invalidates materialism. The position that the mind can be reduced to matter. There is a substantial amount of data empirical and theoretical which invalidates, which refutes materialism. The possibility that the mind can be reduced to matter. This is a critical point for us because the biggest obstacles our students face is materialism.
They come from a materialist culture. You go on Yahoo in the morning to check your emails, and there’s a latest study, love isolated to one part of the brain. You know, the insula contributes to compassion. Then all of this fosters a mindset for which mental activity can be completely reduced to the brain. If that is the case, the foundation for any type of religion collapses, including Buddhism.
Then the more you study, the more the influence of the materialistic paradigm will become powerful. So we have to ask ourselves, is there evidence that the materialistic paradigm is just a prejudice or not? In my personal case, I believe the emperor has no clothes. I believe that materialism is an outdated paradigm for a variety of reasons I’ll be covering with you right now. The first and the most important is a personal experience of consciousness, which is unquantifiable, but every one of us in this room has.
Every one of us in this room is acutely aware of being conscious and any attempt which has been made by neurology to reduce or to explain away this experience of consciousness has so far failed. It’s very interesting. If you read Koch’s treatise on neuroscience, it’s a recent synthetic volume, Koch is professor at Caltech, it’s a very nice presentation of how memory functions and that’s understood and, you know, you go on and on and on, and you’re just waiting for the crux on account of consciousness. And there is, in this whole work composed by Koch, not a single convincing account of consciousness, the personal experience of consciousness. And to this day, there has not been.
This has led a leading American philosopher, Searle, to speak of promissory materialism, materialism which promises, but doesn’t deliver. Because there have been promises of a complete account of consciousness in terms of new biology since the 1960s at least. Then the second general argument which invalidates materialism is one which has been very problematic for the theory of evolution. And I have to cover these in a sort of shortened way. This is material which I have presented at TBI over nine years.
We don’t have time to go in all the details. It is the presence of altruism in genetically unrelated populations. So theory of evolution gives a good account of altruism in genetically related populations. Those of you who read Dawkins, the selfish gene, understand exactly what is being talked about. Basically, one sacrifices oneself for one sibling because one sibling carries most of the same genes one does.
Those genes are actually transmitted. Therefore, it is what is individual altruism is genetic egoism. That is sort of the standard explanation of altruism among geneticists and in modern biology. The problem is that there is now a lot of evidence of altruism within completely genetically unrelated population, such as vervet monkeys, bonobos, chimps, and so forth. Then there is no good genetic explanation of such behavior.
It’s actually no genetic explanation. So this altruism must then be dismissed as aberrant, and that is how it is dismissed. And yet, we do see, for instance, I see, you know, my dogs exhibiting altruistic behavior towards each each other. I’ve seen the cat do the same. You know, you see even chicken do this, unrelated.
You know? Where does this come from? It’s aberrant. The third general argument invalidating materialism is also a troubling one. It’s a recent one.
It comes from studies at Yale University made by Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom in 2010 on the presence of a pre verbal unlearned ethical bias in babies, in infants. Three and six months old babies, who therefore cannot speak, right, Clearly manifest a preference for other babies who help others over and again other babies who do not help others or who profit from others. Now this is completely unlearned. A child has been born a couple weeks ago, cannot speak, or where does such a preference come from? And the fourth argument, which is a very powerful argument, not well known, is the so called poverty of stimulus argument in linguistics, which we owe to Noam Chomsky.
I think he never thought I would draw on his argument to try to establish reincarnation. Chomsky was, still is, America’s most famous linguist, one of the world’s most famous linguists. And he did a very interesting study in the late sixties regarding the amount of information a child received when it was trying to learn to speak a language. Well, know, those of you who have children, the children mimic what their parents say. They look at the mouth.
They mimic verbal and grammatical constructions. But when Chomsky’s team and more recently Stromswold in 2000 tried to measure the amount of information the child got. They found that the amount of information the child got was far too little for the child to be able to extrapolate grammatical rules of any type. Yet, children before they go to school speak in a highly articulate and grammatical fashion. Where does this come from?
Chomsky developed in the theory of the of universal language, which is that somehow there was a universal encoding of the brain which predisposed the child to understanding what was said in a certain way, a sort of meta structure. The basic problem is that languages are so different that the whole theory of universal language has collapsed. But the poverty of stimulus argument remains. You have this much information and the child creates this. How is it possible?
Then from our perspective, past lives provide an excellent explanation for this. There’s a pre existing template. The language is merely relearned of the child spoken to European languages. It is modified. You spoke German in your previous life.
You’re reborn as a Dutch baby. Then Dutch and German are cognate languages, the bridge is easy to make. It also goes a long way towards explaining dyslexia, where children have deep rooted incapacities to formulate language in a grammatically correct fashion. Then again, if you were in a previous life a Tibetan child and your syntactic structure was subject object verb, so the verb in Tibetan comes at the end of the sentence, and you are reborn as an English boy, and in English you have to basically put the verb between the subject and the object, you can see that you would get dramatically confused. You have one template, but the information must be structured differently.
Then perhaps we’ll take a break now. I must apologize to you for the reticence of matter to cooperate. It’s material which I intended to present in a graphic form. So I’ll present what I can non graphically, and do tell me if it gets too heavy going, you know, and we’ll sort of try to reduce the pressure. So see you in ten minutes.
The materialist consensus. Particularly, the paradoxes involving the observer in quantum mechanics, where in a nutshell, it is found that the act of observation affects the state of a quantum system. Now a quantum system can be a system of particles. It can extend to the molecular level. Certainly, some molecules like ammonia show quantum behavior under certain circumstances.
And there is an ongoing debate, which is completely unrelated to what we do, regarding what’s known as the quantum classical boundary, where we stop using quantum mechanics and start using classical physics and where we can no longer use classical physics, but move must move down to quantum mechanics. In any case, at the quantum level, at the subatomic level, let us say, the act of observation of a particle affects that particle. The ongoing debate since the nineteen thirties has been whether since any observation a priori involves some interference in the system, that is sufficient to explain away the fact that observation affects the state of the particle or not. So the consensus opinion of what is known as the Copenhagen School, which was the school around Niels Bohr, considers that this is sufficient to explain the fact that the observance of a quantum system affects the system. One of the leading theoreticians of quantum mechanics, the Hungarian American mathematician, John von Neumann, and other great physicists, Wigner, and actually quantum chemists like Fritz London, all consider that it is insufficient and therefore they consider that observation as observation affects the quantum system and this implies according to von Neumann that the observing mind must be nonmaterial.
If it were material, it does in other words, if a brain alone was observing a quantum system, that brain could be described as an overarching system, and you would eliminate an exterior observer. The second set of paradoxes which are developed by Wigner, I won’t enter into them today, which also provides strong evidence that the mind not only is non material, but has to be non material. Now, this is, as we stand at present, the strongest evidence available in the scientific realm which counters materialism. It’s not minor evidence because according to von Neumann, to give an idea of his stature, was considered the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century and formalized quantum mechanics. It is a necessity of quantum mechanics for the observer to be non material.
If this is the case, the premise, I would say, of classical science, which means broadly speaking science, let’s say, from Pascal, Newton, and maybe Descartes all the way up to the last great classical scientists, let’s say Maxwell and the Physics, you know, pretty much collapse. Because all classical science rests on the radical separation between observer and observed phenomenon. Right? So this is the first argument. Two more arguments are drawn from physics to demonstrate the non material nature of the mind.
The first comes from what is known as the Bell theorem developed by an Irish physicist at CERN in the late 1960s, which has seen a lot of developments in the last years. The violation of what are known as the Bell inequalities leads us into an extremely alien world very different from that of classical physics, A world which is probably non realistic. In other words, a world which is probably largely mental. A world which is non local in which particles can have action upon each other at a very great distance at speeds at the quantum level which are higher than the speed of light instantaneously, and a world which is nondeterministic. So initially, it was thought that these unwanted consequences of the violation of the Bell inequalities would disappear with time.
Research which has been done first by the French, a French physicist, Alain Aspect, over thirty years have shown that the inequalities are verified. They have developed sharper and sharper means to test these inequalities. And recent research by a young Austrian physicist, Gregor Weihs, gives even more confirmation to these inequalities. So where do we stand at present as far as the exterior is world is concerned from a standpoint of quantum mechanics? And this is no longer, if you wish, theory or philosophy, this is basically physical theory or fact.
Broadly speaking, number one, mind is not a material epiphenomenon. So when you assert that mind is a byproduct of the brain, you are still functioning in nineteenth century science. You are out of touch. Secondly, there is strong empirical evidence of non locality and non realism. And we can say in a nutshell at present, certainly in 2017, that we are facing a collapse of the materialist realist paradigm.
And when I studied physics, it was sort of a taboo topic. You talk about it to your professor after class as I did, you know, and he’d come up with his own explanation for the quantum paradoxes. Now it’s mainstream. My nephew studies physics or is finishing at the Federal Polytechnic. It’s just talked about, you know, the much more open way.
But I don’t know if you can see. You can see. No. A leading American physicist, Richard Conn Henry, professor of astrophysics at John Hopkins, published a matter of weeks after his retirement, an editorial in nature in which he claimed that the world was mental, in a position he had held all his life, but had never dared to make public, you know, because his career would have suffered. And I will read you what he says.
Keep in mind, it’s a professor of theoretical astrophysics at Johns Hopkins. The universe is entirely mental. One benefit of switching humanity to the correct perception of the world is the resulting joy of discovering the mental nature of the universe. We have no idea what this mental nature implies. But the great thing is it is true.
Beyond the acquisition of this perception, physics can no longer help. You may descend into solipsism, in other words, the idea that everything is your own mind, expand to deism or something else if you can justify it, just don’t ask physics for help. So in this context, it’s quite interesting that at TBI this year, we are studying Cittamātra on Tuesdays, the Buddhist view according to which there is no exterior reality or phenomena of the nature of the mind perceiving it. This view is one of the three views which is theoretically compatible with quantum physics and only three. None of the deistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is because they all teach a material realistic world.
Most of the Indian traditions are not. Two Buddhist traditions and one Hindu tradition are. The two Buddhist traditions are Cittamātra and Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka. Both are, as far as we see at present, fully compatible with quantum mechanics. The Hindu tradition is Advaita Vedanta, not the other schools of Vedanta.
And the lower schools of Buddhist philosophy, Vaibhāṣika and Sattrantika, are not compatible with quantum mechanics, because they teach the existence of a real exterior world. This is something which we can at present dismiss. Then it is quite shocking that Buddhist schools of thought and one Indian school of thought, which in the Buddhist case are at least 20 centuries old, have become the dominant reference in dialogue with modern physics. With an old friend of mine in Geneva, he’s now the Russian archbishop in Paris, he used to complain bitterly to me. He said, I don’t know.
He said, what do you have?
But the physicists, they never want to dialogue with us Christians. They only want to dialogue with you Buddhists. Then I didn’t know what to say to him. It is true that we Buddhism has become the privileged party with which modern physics engages in a dialogue. There is additional empirical evidence drawn from biology, medicine, and psychiatry which invalidates materialism.
As I mentioned earlier, as of now, there is no good theory of mind and consciousness. It’s really shocking in 2017. Neurobiologists can provide explanations of visual perceptions, actually the perception is the best explained, in terms of the visual cortex. We’re starting to get decent explanations of memory, decent explanations of empathy, but consciousness as consciousness, There’s no single convincing explanation. It’s really quite striking.
The second point which is very disturbing and it’s in process is the evidence of single neuron memories, which is identified by Kreiman. Kreiman was a student of Koch at Caltech. Then as is often the case when the student is more brilliant than the professor, they had a fallout. And Kreiman published his thesis on the neuronal basis of memory in which he had used evidence that some memories could be encoded by one single neuron. There’s no there’s no biochemical x mechanism in existence to explain this.
You know? And then Kreiman Kreiman was basically not quite kidnapped, but co opted by Harvard. I’ve never heard of Harvard creating a lab for someone at his age. He was in his early thirties. He created his own lab for him, the Kreiman lab, you know, and he is pursuing his research in single neuron memories.
Single neuron memories, if they are confirmed, probably deliver the coup de grace. You know what the coup de grace is? It’s a terrible French expression, the blow, the compassionate blow. It is a blow the executioner gave to put the end to the sufferings of the victim. It’s a coup de grace for materialism, certainly the materialistic explanation of the brain.
Because there’s no way you can, in the present state of knowledge, account for memories being stocked within one neuron unless you go completely out of biochemistry as we know it. You may have quantum mechanism, something else, but then we are already in a universe which is much closer to Buddhism. Then the third point, and I regret I can’t show the pictures to you, is believe it or not, in 2017, there is no convincing explanation of strong placebo and nocebo effects. Do you know what a placebo effect is? You are told that you’re receiving a drug, but actually it’s a sugar pill, and yet not only do you feel better, but sometimes you heal.
The nocebo effect is exactly the opposite. It’s the juju effect. Right? Someone makes a wax doll of someone and pierces it with needle and the person feels worse and perhaps even unfortunately die. Enough,, these are very strong cases of mind body interaction. There’s no explanation as of now.
All that is done is that the placebo and the nocebo effects are evacuated from studies on the efficacy of drugs. But if you think about it, frankly, instead of evacuating them, we should try to find a way to co opt them. Right? Very interesting if you could kill peep if you could kill you could heal people where do I come from? It’d be very interesting if you could heal people through conviction, if you had a way to do this systematically.
And the pictures I wanted to show you appeared in the Lancet in the late nineteen forties. There are some of the most striking pictures I have seen. They were pictures of the weals. You know what weals are? The marks of a rope or a whip.
Right? The wheals which appeared on a man’s arm once he was convinced under hypnosis that he had been tied up. Now there is no known mechanism in biology which allows the creation of wheels of that nature through mental control on the body. This is seventy years ago, this study, you know, yet nothing has been done in the field, largely because it is so at odds with the dominant paradigm. The fourth category of evidence which invalidates materialism is near death experiences, which are veridical and occur in a controlled setting.
Our near death experiences are, you must have heard about, the experiences where people who come close to dying see themselves as leaving their body. Then in the West, I mean, they often experience the tunnels of light, which don’t happen in other cultures, but they often meet beings and so forth. Those the experiences in that group which are interesting are the ones which are verified. In other words, where the person actually sees something in another room, which they had no means of knowing was there, It can be independently verified that this has happened. Now there is a fair number of these experiences which are occurring now in operating theaters, in other words, controlled environments.
The person is surrounded by witnesses. Then in quite a few interventions in modern surgery, basically one actually has to kill the person to intervene, one empties the person of their blood, brain activity ceases, are although they were under anesthesia, and in one of those cases, a Pam Reynolds case, the person was able to describe things they had no access to, and the information was verified. Then a Dutch cardiologist, Pim van Lommel, has studied systematically these cases, again after retiring, I gather because the impact in his career would have potentially been too great. And he has studied veridical near death experiences among instances of cardiac arrest in a hospital setting. These provide very strong evidence for the mind being non material.
Because during the cardiac arrest, brain activity stops within a matter of seconds, thirty seconds to one minute. If in addition, the person once they are resurrected, that’s what we are talking about, has seen things in another room, which can be independently verified that they did not know about, there is no other way to account for this than if the mind were non material. So there’s a tremendous amount of interest in these studies now and they’re being funded funded by a trust in Southampton. And the final category of empirical data which is of interest to us are the 2,500 cases of the nature of reincarnation studied by professor Stevenson and his team at the University of Virginia. Over, my goodness, sixty years.
So of these two thousand five hundred cases of children remembering past lives, eight hundred ninety five are verified. These are eight hundred ninety five children with memories of a previous life and the memory was independently verified as true. So it is a series of memories. Memories of the names of the parents of the previous life, the names of children of the previous life, memories of locations, rooms which were in existence then which are not in existence now, and so forth. Now these cases provide perhaps the strongest evidence, extant at present for the Buddhist or Hindu world view.
And they provide very strong counter evidence to the view of the monotheistic religions which don’t accept reincarnation. So as I suggested many times at TBI, you owe it to yourselves to read Stevenson’s research, especially Reincarnation and Biology, 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation Type, European cases of reincarnation. They are listed, I think, in my bibliography. Because Stevenson was a psychiatrist, he was head of the medical faculty at the University of Virginia, then his research became too controversial, so it was spun off, and he created his own department which has shifted names over the years. It was Department of Personality Studies and so forth.
But the the caliber of the research is exceptional, and it was peer reviewed, you know. The consensus is, as one reviewer put it, that either either Stevenson was mistaken or he was a Geshe-la of the twentieth century. So you really if you are interested in Buddhism at all, you really owe it to yourself to take a year and wait through Stevenson’s research. That will put the strongest possible foundation to your practice. And you have to decide for yourselves, is his research valid or invalid, and if invalid, why?
Then I presented many of these cases here, you can see them for a brief minute there. The case of James Leininger, the little boy who remembered he was a US fighter pilot in the Pacific. My mother served in the Pacific, so that was quite close to home, and who woke up, you know, with nightmares of his plane being shot down by the Japanese at age two, kicking up in the air, saying, little man on fire. Those are the first words he uttered, actually. And as soon as he could draw, drawing pictures of planes being shot down.
You know? And the boy showed a very strong proclivity for flying. He was taken to a flight museum by his father, and four, five year old year old boy at that point could explain features of the plane to his own father. And he became obsessed with trying to find some of his, mates who had flown with him in the squadron from the aircraft carrier he took off from the Natoma. Natoma is completely unknown.
So the case is fascinating. I’ll basically presented briefly to you in this context in more senses and one because the parents are practicing Baptists in Louisiana. So baptism in Louisiana is as close to fundamentalism as it gets. You are not sympathetic to those who don’t or who haven’t, been reborn in Jesus again. Right?
And, the parents luckily did not try to, as some parents do, beat these fantasies out of him, but they discouraged him from talking about them. And at a certain point, because it was affecting the father’s status in the community, he was a well known businessman, he decided to disprove these fantasies and basically demonstrate to his son that this was just nonsense, you know, and he started researching the case. So the boy had given a lot of details. The name of the aircraft carrier, the name of his mates who were flying against the Japanese, and the father tried to trace the aircraft carriers, completely unknown, And eventually did find that there was indeed an aircraft carrier called the Natoma, and that the detail as the child had given fit. The child had said that the Natoma had a wooden deck and actually had an inclined deck, which no one seemed to believe was possible on an aircraft carrier.
Then it turns out indeed that the early aircraft carriers had inclined wooden decks to facilitate takeoff. The child also gave a lot of indications regarding Corsair airplanes which he flew. It turns out he was a test pilot on Corsair airplanes. And based on all of this information, his father eventually identified the previous life young James Leininger claimed to have led, found pictures of this US Air Force pilot, you know, and was able to trace the family. And then it turns out that the child’s statements that his father had been an alcoholic were confirmed.
It had been a family secret, you know. And the father was eventually able to, trace a survivor, one of the three men who flew with James Leininger against the Japanese. My mother told me about that period. She served in China with the US State Department, and very few who fought the Japanese survived, you know, so it was quite exceptional, you know. And this man, Gary Larsen, met the child at a convention of former servicemen who had been under Natoma was very striking.
Unfortunately, I can’t show you the picture. This boy’s face was totally illuminated by meeting this 70 year old man, right, whom he remembered as a strapping, you know, young pilot. And the old man considered he was a reincarnation of his flying mate, you know, beyond the years. There’s been many cases like that I’ve presented at TBI. The case of the Sri Lankan twins, Indika and Kakshapa Īśvara, studied by Stevenson.
The case of Vijayratne, a Sri Lankan who remembered being hanged for murder, the murder of his fiancee, whom he had stabbed in the chest and who was reborn with an atrophied pectoral muscle in the area where he had stabbed his fiancee. Then I presented a Lebanese case, the case of Suzanne Ghanem, who was, a Christian woman who remembered being no. Excuse me. A Druze woman who remembered being executed by Christian militias, in Lebanon, massacred is a more accurate term. They cut a cross in her chest, you know, and who remembered clearly the name of her former husband, her children.
And in the new life as a child was jealous of the new wife of her ex husband and started ringing up. It caused a lot of trouble in both families. Started ringing up her children from the previous life to give them marital advice, which obviously coming from a child eight or nine years old doesn’t necessarily go down that well. You know? So all these cases, encourage you to investigate by yourselves.
They will challenge very deep rooted beliefs in who you think you are. It’s clear that if the continuum of consciousness extends over many lives, and this is, if you wish, like one bead on the rosary here. Right? This is our present life, and the continuum of consciousness goes back like this hundreds, thousands, millions of lives, and goes on like this hundreds, thousands, and millions of lives. If that is the case, you will look at this life very differently, won’t you?
The problems of this life, the difficulties of this life, the happinesses of this life becomes problems, difficulties, and happinesses which you have experienced tens, hundreds, millions of times in the past, and you will experience tens, hundreds, and millions of times in the future. Then once you start looking at it like that, is it worth it? Those of you who are mothers who have been through childbirth, you would experience this thousands of times in the future. You experience it thousands of times in the past. Those who are married and divorced, it will happen not once, but thousands of times in the future again.
Those who lost a child, it will happen thousands of times again. Then our deaths in previous lives will happen again in this life. It will happen thousands and thousands of times again in the future. The modalities of death change. The death by cancer will happen not once, but thousands of times.
Depression will happen not once, but thousands of times. Then, you think that Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, we have some of the best conditions in the world. Imagine if in your next life you’re reborn in Pakistan or if you’re reborn in Erisrea. How will you handle it? Many of our students are depressed because of small problems with welfare or income in Australia.
What will happen if you’re reborn as a woman in Syria? And then once you understand that consciousness is a universal phenomenon and is present in animals, what happens if you are reborn as an animal? Cannot speak, limited mental activity, basically functions on instinct, bites on instincts, licks on instinct. If you’re lucky, you’re reborn as an animal in Australia. If you’re unlucky, you’re reborn as an animal maybe in India, right?
Maybe in China. So it’s a food for a lot of thought. Right? Then if you believe this is possible, you have to try to find means to avoid such a rebirth. Even if you believe only in human rebirth, I would put it to you that there are human rebirths you don’t want to have.
But I don’t understand why you can believe in human rebirths and not believe that you can be reborn as one of the high apes like a bonobo or chimpanzee who is almost the equal of a human being. What sort of a chasm is it? Somehow, you know, a couple of thousands of years of evolution and suddenly reincarnation is no longer possible. Right? Or becomes possible.
And if you can be reborn as an ape, you can be reborn as a dog. There’s absolutely no reason why not. It is a continuum. Or as a cat, the mental the nature of the mind is the same. Or as a rat.
Being reborn as a rat in a laboratory is quite an experience, isn’t it? So as I said to you earlier, if this is random, if there is no ethical causality, then we have no control. Then we just have to accept. If there is an ethical causality, you definitely do not want to be reborn as a rat in a laboratory, or as a dog in a laboratory, or as a human being in an area where there is starvation, and where the life of a human being is worth nothing. And you have to find means, if there are means, to prevent this from happening.
Right? If you don’t believe it’s possible, then don’t do anything. You know? The difference is for ourselves. And that is where one has to examine very carefully to see if the teachings on karma and causality are true or not.
Right? So that’s why unfortunately you can’t see it. I said there are some model models among the religious models which are compatible with the data we have now. It is not true that it is a matter of personal preference. So what is the data we have?
The impermanence of physical phenomenon. This is something we all take for granted. Two centuries ago, no one would have accepted that physical phenomena were impermanent. It’s with the development of microscopes this became obvious. Judeo Christian’s traditions do not accept this, then, you know, it’s a stone in their shoe if you wish, whereas it is explicitly taught in the Buddhist tradition.
The second feature of models compatible with the data is the nonmaterial nature of mind, as I explained to you earlier, is strongly confirmed by quantum mechanics. The third is monistic idealism or interdependence of mind and matter. If the status of an observed system in quantum mechanics is intimately linked with the observer, there’s only two possibilities. Either they are interdependent, which is the Prāsaṇgika outlook, or they are actually of one nature, which is a Cittamātra outlook. That’s it.
Vedanta in this respect is very similar to Cittamātra. The fourth or the fifth feature really is reincarnation, which I personally consider based on Stevenson’s research as strongly corroborated. I wouldn’t say proven, but look at the research. You have time, hopefully you have the money to buy the books, we have some in the library, study. And the sixth is karma, and karma is a delicate point.
So what Stevenson’s research confirms is that there is an ethical causation or a relation between a remembered previous life and the present life. That I think is strongly confirmed. In the case of Wijeratne, the young Sri Lankan, who remembered murdering his fiancee, but she actually refused to marry him. He stabbed her in the chest with his right arm, so he stabbed basically her left breast, you know, and killed the poor girl. And he himself was reborn in the next life with a deficient or an absent pectoral muscle on the left side, where he had stabbed her.
Then clearly there is a relation whether this qualifies that karma or not that we have to investigate, but the relation there is. In addition, in his life as Vijayratne, he suffered from recurring bouts of insanity in which he thought he was a bird. That was one case, case of James Leininger, the young boy who remembered being a Japan an American fighter pilot. There was a strong manifestation of claustrophobia due to the mode of death. He died in a plane plunging in the water, and the boy was terrified of enclosed spaces.
There was another case Stevenson studied of an Inuit, an Eskimo fisherman, who bitterly complained to his son about the hard work he had to do. And and this is a piece of advice for students at TBI, be careful what you say. Right? Repeatedly said to his son, I hope to be reborn in my next life without a right arm. And he died, and a young child was reborn in that family, his grandson actually, without a right arm.
And when the child could speak, the child had clear memories of being the grandfather. Then, it was seen by the Inuit community as the manifestation of an oath. Oaths, promises, pledges are comically powerful. The strongest case I know which shows the physical impact of an oath within one life is a wish, repeatedly reiterated wish. Careful what you wish for.
If you wish for it strongly enough, you will be on the receiving end. So based on all of this, why should we practice? And here, I would like to move up from the present data to a song which sang to a very wealthy student of his, then I think you will see it connects very very closely with what we talked about so far. I’m sorry. You you have it on the screen.
Okay. Excellent wealthy in faith. The track of latter lives will be longer than this one. Have you prepared provision for the journey? This is the span we have to prepare for the future.
If you have not, I beseech you, give generously. The foe is a mastiff called Avarice. He is here to help, but brings home. Do you know Avarice to be an enemy? If you do, cast him behind you.
Excellent Peldarbum, the path of later lives will be darker than this one. Have you prepared a lamp for the journey? If you have not, I beseech you, meditate, since that is clear night. The foe is the benightedness which induces the sleep of corpses. He is held to help but brings harm.
Do you know benightedness to be an enemy? If you do, cast him behind you. Excellent. The path of later lives will be far more terrifying than this one. Have you prepared bodyguards for the journey?
If you have not, I beseech you, practice the divine Dharma since that is it. The foe bears a name family. It is held to help but brings harm. Do you know family to be an enemy? If you do, cast it behind you.
Excellent Peldarbum, the mountainous path of later lives is longer than this one. Have you saddled a stallion for the journey? If you have not, I beseech you. Since enthusiasm is it, do start. The foe is that deceiver bearing the name sloth.
He is held to help but brings harm. Do you know sloth to be an enemy? If you do, cast it behind you. Or you can see, if it is true that there are future lives, if it is true that what we do in this life connects with what happens in future lives, then we have to extend our scope to beyond this life. And then we have to learn to live strategically.
How do we live strategically? That we have to study. But it is not a minor topic. All of you in this room would consider trying to say for your old age as one of the most important things you can do. If you haven’t, you are considered in our society as irresponsible.
Right? Then if you establish to your satisfaction that there are future lives, and you are not preparing for future lives, and this life is just this long, and future lives are this long, you are totally irresponsible. You are totally irresponsible. And then the question is, how do you prepare? If future lives exist, are the Hindu teachings correct?
Are the Buddhist teachings correct? If the Buddhist teachings are correct, what can I practice? What can’t I practice? So that next time around, it’s gonna happen over and again, things are better than now. All of you have had difficulties in this life.
People don’t come to TBI if they’ve had an easy life. It is not a normal step for a westerner to come to a Buddhist center. And if you want these difficulties to dwindle or disappear in your next life, now is the time to do something about it. If you don’t do something now, no one will because no one can. It’s your mental continuum.
To do something, you must know what to do, how to do it. That you must study sincerely. And then you must act. It’s not enough to have a lot of to be very top heavy, have a lot of knowledge up here, and not live the teachings. Well, these are difficult questions.
That’s why I really encourage you to think very carefully about it. You know? And once you have thought like this, then you would understand clearly the meaning of this verse of Lama Chöpa through realizing the manner in which this rebirth of leisure and endowment, found only this one time, is rare and swiftly destroyed, blessed me to take its essence meaningfully without being distracted by the meaningless affairs of this life. So a rebirth of leisure endowment is a rebirth in which you have the opportunity to practice Dharma. What is leisure?
Leisure means you have time. So when you tell us at TBI, I don’t have time to do this, I don’t have time to do that, you have no leisure. You don’t have a rebirth of leisure and endowment. Endowment means you have something. You have what?
Money, health, a good physical condition. These are things which were prepared in a previous life. If you are poor in this life, it comes from the past. If you are in bad health, it comes from the past. You don’t have the endowments.
You may have them only partly. Now in Australia, most of our students have something like a rebirth of leisure and endowment, maybe not a fully characterized one. Then it’s up to oneself, if one for instance, let’s say in past lives one has not practiced generosity. Then in this life one has financial problems, one has to work. Obviously if you have to work, there’s no time for practice, very little time.
Then you have to make sacrifices. This is the meaning of sacrifice. You didn’t do well enough in a previous life, and in this life there isn’t. Right? I was born rich, very rich.
So I say thank you to my previous rebirth. He worked hard. You know? Then the next one round, I want to help. So I practiced generosity in this life.
You know. Because I was born very rich, I could study what I wanted. No one ever said to me, you can’t study this, you can’t study that. Books, I had books. Travel all over the world to attain teachings, could.
Build monasteries, build centers, I could. That I owe to my previous rebirth or someone in the past. He sent a good gift this way. Right? Then I’m getting old.
I have to pass, excuse me, the letter on so that the next time around, the good conditions continue. If you haven’t had good conditions in this life, you must learn how to prepare the good conditions for your next life. How to get a rebirth in which you are born in good health, with intelligence, in a rich family, in a good country, with good education, make a connection with the Buddhist teachings, or whatever religious tradition you want to practice, have faith. This does not happen at random by throwing dice. Right?
You have to prepare. Now is the time. And if you are young, there’s more time to prepare. If you are old, there is less time to prepare. But it is possible to prepare.
And this way of preparing means that you will be reborn as a human being, you will be reborn in a western country or whatever country has good material conditions in the next next life, you know. You will go to a good school, you will have good parents who will treat you well. If you have bad parents, it is because of what you did in a previous life to your parents. If you have good parents, it’s it’s because you were kind to your parents. Right?
If you are abused as a child, it is because you abused in a previous life. You understand that? It’s not random. Right? If you’re alcoholic in this life, it’s because you like to drink in a previous life.
If you have a predisposition for drugs in this life, it is because you used drugs in a previous life or sold drugs to others. If you’re depressive in this life, it is because you caused sadness in the minds of others previously, you know. Once you understand this relation between the lives, this karmic relation, what you want is to put the maximum of chances on your side for the future. Now is the time to do it. And then the Pänchen Lama said this life is found excuse me.
Still not. Only this one time. Then if you believe in non human rebirth, the situation is much more critical. Because once you’re reborn as an animal, there is no way out. A dog has no way to practice anything.
So how does a dog ever get reborn as a human being? Simply due to karma which is accumulated as a human being whenever he was a human being in the past, which is activated. That’s the only hope there is. So inevitably, cyclic existence gravitates towards the lower realms. A pyramid of cyclic existence is like this.
The higher realms is just a fraction of all living beings. You can see in this world of us, there are in this room what maybe 20 people, not even 12. Then probably in the area around this temple, have 10,000 ants, 20,000 ants. How many flies? Each one of them is conscious like us.
Very small consciousness, but conscious. How many animals are there? They have no way out of that state. I mean, you can take an ant in your hand and recite om mani padme hum until you are breathless. The ant will not be reborn as a human being because the ant has never had the intention of reciting anything.
It’s very romantic when you do this, but it doesn’t work. Right? So the most important thing therefore as beginners is for us not to be reborn in the lower realms in the next life. Whatever else happens, that’s the basics. Once that happens, one doesn’t get out easily, if at all.
And then to aim for a higher rebirth, and to do this we have to know how. We have to understand how karma operates. Not just a higher rebirth, but a rebirth with leisure and endowment. It’s not enough to be born as a human being. If you are starving and you have basically never been beyond, let’s say, don’t know, you know, sixth grade, let’s assume, you know, can barely read, you know, and can’t do anything with that life.
That life is almost wasted. Right? And at that point, that life is rare and swiftly destroyed. We die fast. So we must take the essence.
What is the essence of a human life? A human life is a one life with freedom. We have the freedom to use karma to our benefit. Every one of us in this room has had difficult experiences in this life. Every one of us has had pleasant experiences.
In the future, we want less difficult experiences and more pleasant experiences. It’s in our hands. But we must know what the rules of the game are. The most important thing for you as students is to study how karma operates. Emptiness is too difficult.
You will not understand. There is no time. And it’s of little benefit to you. Buddhist philosophy is of little benefit to you. Understanding how karma operates is of great benefit.
What the virtuous deeds are, what the non virtuous deeds are, what karmic amplification is, then we cannot avoid non virtuous deeds. And our virtuous deeds are weak. But if we understand how karma operates, then when we commit non virtuous deeds, we can make them weak. When we commit virtuous deeds, we can make them strong. Those are karmic strategies.
We use karmic amplification for virtuous deeds to make them powerful. We use purification for non virtuous deeds to make them weak. Purification is not automatic. It’s not because you recite Vajrasattva mantra a thousand times or a 100,000 times that your non virtuous deeds are purified. It doesn’t work like that.
You need signs of the purification. Until then, all that does is it weakens the non virtuous karma. You’re increasing the odds in your favor for the future. Right? So this is realistic practice.
We have our present state, a path, how to transform it, and then go on what to attain. And here
It’s up to us what the goal is. The goal is beyond this life, because this life is already taken care of. This life basically, broadly speaking, our lifespan is determined by karma at birth, and very probably by our genetic background. We can modulate it, we can increase it a bit or we can decrease it a lot. But it is difficult to go beyond that factor.
If you are from a family where people consistently die of, let’s say, cancer of the intestine around 50, then this is genetically in your background. You should not make plans to live until 70, because the chances of it’s happening are small. If you are in a family where you live, your ancestors lived until well in their eighties, and in addition, you seem to have good karma, then you might, but there’s no guarantee. Right? That defines the time you have left.
You know? And what is most important, unfortunately, you can’t see it, is the advice given in another fairy tale, which I also like very much. So it gives you an idea of my readings. Right? I read fairy tales.
It is the fairy tale of the no. The rabbit and the tortoise. There’s great advice in the fairy tales. If you can read them with Buddhist eyes, it’s very good advice. You all know the fairy tale, a rabbit and a tortoise decided to race, you know, and the rabbit stormed off, and the poor tortoise did the best he could.
And the rabbit looked back, and the tortoise was not in sight, so he laid down and fell fell asleep. And the tortoise never stopped, right? And the rabbit was sleeping, and the tortoise passed him, and the tortoise approached, there he is. And he came to the winning post, and the rabbit woke up. Oh my goodness, he’s going to beat me at the race, and he ran, he ran, he ran, and he was too late.
The slow tortoise beat the rabbit. And this fable teaches us the importance of regular consistent practice, to be like the tortoise. Not all of us are bright, not all of us are young, not all of us have an excellent financial situation or supportive family. But if we practice and study every day within our capacities without stopping, we will get there where those with capacities who start, who stop, who start, who stop, never get anywhere. This is well known.
The monasteries are full of monks who really are not terribly bright, but who don’t know the meaning of the word stop. And they become Gishis and very good Geshes. And when I was in at university, we had many, you know, who were bright, but not stable. Well, everyone has graduated, they still don’t have degrees. Right?
So in this life, hard work beats intelligence in my opinion every time. The world is full of intelligent losers. Right? And in Dharma practice, hard work definitely beats intelligence. If you work hard and regularly, you really will get somewhere.
So for yourselves, the best is to think carefully about the difficult questions I brought up. Ask yourselves, What is my personal feeling about this? Read. Read out of what we teach here, the other religious traditions. The time to do it is before you become a Buddhist or before you’re anchored in a practice.
You have to find something you believe profoundly, otherwise you will not practice it sincerely. And then time is short. Even for those of you who are young, time is short. Then if you practice consistently, you will get as far as you can in this life, and if you don’t, it will not happen. It will not happen.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the possibility to show you these pictures. Maybe it’ll come up if I wait. Lesson two eleven, you could see it briefly. All the white bubbles are people who were attending teachings in two eleven who are not coming anymore. By my count, oh, I’d say 80% at least.
Right? And this is, if you see it, a picture of people who came to greet Geshe Jampa Gyaltsen at the airport. Almost no one is still at the center. This was also in 2013, four years ago. Right?
And this is a picture of a puja for Geshe Phuntsok Tenzin before he went to India. People offering a puja for the teacher. Again, I’d say 80%, 80% are gone. So obviously, what happens to the 78%? We don’t know.
Right? Are they practicing privately or not? I have no way of knowing. I assume not because basically, once you disconnect from the center, normally people just drift away, you know. Then for yourselves, try to be among those who stay over time.
If this is a religious tradition you want to integrate. Otherwise, it doesn’t happen. Then I wanted to start talking about bodhicitta today in the context of these three principles of the path. But because the projector wasn’t working, I spent a lot of time on the preliminaries. I think it’s time well spent.
It’s a matter of covering the basics, but it’s the basics which we need. And with your agreement, I would take your questions at present instead of just forging onwards. Do you have questions? Please. Future lives.
What is the role of prayer in future lives? Prayer Yes. In this life, for future lives? Basically, it depends what you mean by prayer. If you mean by prayer, the type of prayer, let’s say, Christians engage in, the benefit is very limited, almost nonexistent.
It’s a prayer request. Dear God, please ensure that this and this happen and this and this does not happen. Then it will make you feel good, but the result is nonexistent. If by prayer you mean generating a motivation before performing an action, then the result is very great. If, for instance, before, let us say, you save the life of an insect which is drowning, you look at the insect and say, my goodness, you know, Living being like me, you know.
Suffering like me. So I must help it, you know. I really must do my best for it. And then you help, you are helping with a motivation of compassion. Then this becomes a powerful deed.
Not quite a deed of the Mahāyāna, but a powerful deed. When you recite, for instance, the 21 Taras, you are accumulating verbal virtue and asking the help of Tārā. The combination is quite powerful. Then when you pray without accumulating any virtue, almost no result. Buddha Śākyamūni said, I am my own master.
When you pray, you are not your own master. Buddha Śākyamūni said, I am my own master. I am my own protector. When you pray, someone else is your master. Someone else is your protector.
The face the Christian has in God, we put in karma. That’s why the Kadampa Geshe is I thought it was very beautiful myself. I thought it’s only it’s always quotes. He said the Kadampa Geshe is of your many of the Kadampa Geshe is, they had no deity practice. And they asked one Kadampa Geshe what he practiced.
He said karma. I practiced karma. And that’s very pure practice. Very pure practice. And I remember the late abbot of monastery, you know.
I was attending one of his classes because was at. And he said to us, he was studying Sanskrit at Varanasi Sanskrit University, and his classmate became very famous Sanskrit pandit. He was Buddhist, You know? And this Indian what is his name? I forget.
He really shocked Geshe Ngawang Samten because this scholar came to see him once. And, this Indian, very sincere Buddhist practitioner, he had an altar like this one, but on the altar, there was nothing. There was no statue of the Buddha. There was no picture of teachers. Nothing.
There was just one text, the 8,000 Verse Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra. That was it. It is one of the greatest texts on emptiness on the view. Then, Geshe Ngawang Samten said, but he said, are you too poor to have a statue of the Buddha? And this Indian scholar said to him, no.
No. He said, I take refuge in the 8,000 verses every day. I make offerings to them. I need nothing else for my practice. And he looked at us and he said, this is powerful, isn’t it?
So he truly understood the meaning of refuge in Dharma. Right? Because Dharma is teachings and the text of the support of the teachings. The rest are just representations. We take refuge in the Buddha because he taught the teachings.
Buddha is not a person in the sky who’s gonna take care of us. We take refuge in the Sangha because they are the quintessential practitioners of the teachings. But the true refuge is the Dharma, and the symbol of the Dharma is a text. There you know. That is very powerful, think.
So as Buddhists, to answer your question, Diva, we are very alone. We do or we don’t do. If we don’t do, no one does. My first teacher, Geshe Ratineau, we said, I wish I could practice for you. Then I would make your practice like a torma.
We just wrote it like this perfectly. It would be just so. But he said, I can’t. So you meditate, you don’t meditate. You study, you don’t study.
Your mental continuum is affected and no one else is. The reality is we obviously teach the Mahāyāna, we talk about the Mahāyāna, but none of us is even close to being a Mahāyāna practitioner. As Śāntideva says beautifully in Bodhicaryāvatāra, how could you strive for a state you were not even aware of when you dreamt? Even in our dreams, we’re not aware of the existence of full enlightenment, not aware of the sufferings of others, of the necessity to help them, then how can we talk about that in this life, you know? So realistic practice involves starting where we are.
We are worldly beings trying to become less worldly, trying to focus on future lives. And then trying to improve a lot in future lives, and as Nāgārjuna teaches, if we proceed in this way, then from future life to future life is like walking up the stairs, the steps of a stair. We go the situation improves in each life. Right? Or in this life, maybe we didn’t speak Tibetan or Chinese, couldn’t study the Buddhist texts, connected with Buddhism when we were old, didn’t have a lot of money, family was opposed, got distracted.
But in the next life, when we are reborn in a good family, we are actually perhaps born in an Asian family, can study the text in their in their root languages, or study them at university. We have faith, we practice more in the following life, and we become ordained. We do retreats, study one of the great monasteries. In the life after that, we gain realizations. This is the realistic way upwards.
Then a meditation on emptiness and a realization of emptiness in this life, it will not happen. The conditions are not there. Calm abiding in this life, it will not happen. The conditions are not there. By the imprints Yes.
By the time Yes. Exactly. It’s life after life. Realistic practice is in this life, do the best you can, you sow the imprints for future lives. In the next life, you will have greater capacity.
In the following life, even greater capacity. Imagine if one of us was reborn as Bill Gates with faith in the teachings. How powerful such a person is. You know what Bill Gates does now for diseases such as malaria. Right?
The power of one man. Right? Who is able to step in where the United Nations does not intervene. You know? And Bill Gates was not born despite the legends in a poor destitute family.
Bill Gates was born in a very high Brahmin, as we say Brahmin in America, you know, Boston Americans. You know? Steve Jobs was not reborn despite the legends about Apple and the Gamers, but not reborn in a poor family at all, you know. So in our cases, if we sincerely want to better ourselves and others, in this life we start preparing the next life. This is realistic practice.
Do you have other questions? Please. Like you said, Bill Gates and Steve Job, in this life, they were they would they have the privileges. They were born in wealthy families, and they could do what they wanted to do. But if we see from materialistic point of view, our very little understanding of that, but they did everything they could to make lots of money, right, which includes lots of bad karmas, maybe.
I don’t know. But I would presume to make that much money, you need to do what you need to do. So does that mean whatever they did good in their previous lives, has that been, like, canceled now, or will it be canceled? Or It depends. As you said very rightly, we don’t know what they did.
I mean, I don’t know what their business conduct was. Did they behave, you know, as ethically as they could or didn’t they? I mean, I knew some very wealthy people in Switzerland who were remarkably ethically. It was one thing which always surprised me. Keep in mind, however, that ethics has many facets and that the cause of wealth is not ethics, but generosity.
Now what surprised me was I knew we were I was a childhood friend with the son of the partner of the leading Swiss private bank. His father was an astonishingly generous man in a very secretive fashion. And once, you know, we were talking and one of his colleagues said to me, well, you know, he never gives this was forty years ago. Right? He never gives less than $10,000 because he doesn’t feel it’s worth it.
He said $10,000 makes a difference to a person, not to an institution, to a person. Then he also funded cultural events, all sorts of things. Now you might say, he did this because he had the means to do so, but actually, there was no particular pressure on him to do that, you know. So I was always very surprised by that, that people who were very wealthy are often profoundly generous. And I felt that this really, you know, corroborated the Buddhist teachings according to which wealth arises from generosity.
From generosity wealth, from ethics happiness. Ethics does not cause wealth. Karma causes happiness. A person who is ethical will have less mental delusions, less anger, less desire. Such a person will be happy.
You can be wealthy and very unhappy. You can be happy and poor. It’s two different things. You can be both. If you practice both generosity and ethics in a previous life, in this life, you will be wealthy and subdued.
You will not yell at your children, yell at your partner. You will not have uncontrolled desires, which lead one to do uncontrolled things. You know? Then once one understands this, one sees the wisdom of training the mind. This is a Buddhist teachings.
Buddhist teaching is just very simple. The mind is infinite. Who we are in the next life depends on our mind in this life. Who we are in this life depends on our mind in the previous life. So I can say one thing with certainty.
Whoever it was in the previous life was a very good person. I’m very grateful to him. And most of you in this room, you are human beings, and you can look at your previous incarnation and say, thank you. Because the main cause of a human rebirth is ethics. Simply because ethics involves the control of the afflictions, the negative emotions, which in animals are rampant.
If you allow desire or anger to become completely uncontrolled, you are setting the groundwork for rebirth as an animal or worse. If you restrain desire and anger, you are setting the groundwork for rebirth as a human being. And you may be reborn as a human being, but you need other conditions. You need money. If you want money, you practice generosity.
You don’t have to give money. You can give medicine. You can give bread. But if you do not practice generosity, you will not have the conditions in your
Of future life. He taught this many times at TBI, but somehow it never impacted the minds of the students. If you want to be beautiful or handsome, you practice patience, forbearance. Then a human rebirth which is a powerful rebirth, is a rebirth which not only has the eight freedoms and the 10 endowments, but has the 10 uncommon conditions. I don’t remember them by memory, but they include rebirth in a high caste.
In other words, rebirth in a high social group in society. Then in the old days, rebirth as a man simply because men were strong and in a society where it was a matter of, excuse me, how much your arm strength would have made made a difference. Rebirth as wealthy. Rebirth as someone whose mind is subdued, and you would basically train to acquire all these causes. Though it’s entirely up to ourselves, you know.
Other questions? Ilya, you mentioned depression and how a cause might be sadness that you have caused sadness. In a previous life, you have caused sadness in someone else’s mind. Could you maybe give an example of something that’s quite common perhaps? Well, the key here is to understand how karma operates.
So we have a result in this life, let’s say depression. That result is similar in type to the cause. Now the cause may be at any point in the past. It may be one life, two life, five lives, a thousand lives. Depression is sadness.
What is the cause? A cause similar in type to sadness within ourselves. It is causing sadness within another. Now, the more powerful the karmic object is, the more powerful and rapidly the result matures. If you cause sadness in your taxi driver by telling him in a previous life that he drives terribly, then this is someone you don’t know well, probably you didn’t intend to to hurt his feelings, it will mature, but it will not mature 20 lives down the line as full blown depression.
If in a previous life you shout to your mother’s face something which hurts her feelings tremendously, stabs her to the heart. Then you are sowing the seeds for depression in a future life, and in addition, it is a very powerful karmic deed because of your closeness to your mother. Then this will mature normally in the next life, and it can mature as overwhelming depression. Then, what is the route forwards? Once something has matured, it is difficult to eliminate.
The key however is purification. If you purify now, you can purify through offering prostrations, through reciting the confession Sūtra, Vajrasattva mantra, With the strong wish to eliminate the causes of depression, it will reduce the power of the manifestation. So this I saw in my own life many times. I did a 100,000 Vajrasattva when I was in India, then there was a very big shift in my mental outlook. I knew a very nice person, you know.
She had a very difficult life, you know. But when she met the Buddhist teaching, something was really activated. So she became Buddhist very rapidly, went to India, and then she really started purifying with great intensity, you know, just very forceful, the westerner, you know. And really, the transformation in a couple years was tremendous. It can be done.
It can be done. And then the key is not to accumulate those causes again. And then in the short term, I mean, all of you have been told depression is basically anger turned inwards. Depression has a close relationship with anger karmically as well. Depression is a maturation of anger upon oneself.
Right? One has to try to purify that, you know. You could also say that depression is learned helplessness. Learned helplessness. You know, for instance, that animals when, let’s say, a dog, when he is subjected to uncontrollable aggression, will make himself very small and freeze.
Right? It’s the only survival strategy left. People are the same. When someone is faced with something which is totally overwhelming, the reaction is to make yourself very small and to freeze. Right?
This is due to the perception of the situation as totally overwhelming. If you shift your perception of the situation, the situation hasn’t changed. As we said earlier, the world we live in is becoming more and more difficult to manage. At a certain point it will become impossible. If you learn to look at the situation differently, then that reaction of learned helplessness ceases.
For instance, how would you do this? Let us assume I don’t know the causes of your predicament, but let’s assume that it is due to very difficult situation with family members. Then, if you think this is the maturation of my own past karma, As a result of this, I will never ever experience this again. It is being exhausted under my eyes. The suffering I inflicted on others is maturing on me, and after this it is finished.
That can create a sense of profound joy in the person. Then there is no depression. Or if you’re facing material difficulties, and you think, well, I didn’t practice generosity in past lives. Now, I’m struggling. In Australia, said, what is it?
Centrelink has a gun to your head. Right? They tell you to do things you don’t want to do. Then you think, as a result of this, I have met the teachings. I’m starting to understand how karma operates.
I can actually practice generosity for future lives, ethics. Then overall, this is very positive. It’s a little bit of suffering. Without a little bit of suffering, no one no one enters TBI. And then if you look at it like that, it’s very uplifting for the mind.
Does that help a bit? Yes. Good. One of the affections secondary one of the secondary affections is forgetfulness. Then how do you based on the knowledge that you’ve done something, what what sort of something would a outcome of this kind of affliction.
And how did you go about it? Again, it’s very difficult to give individual causes, but harming the studies of others harming the studies of others, preventing one’s children from studying, preventing children from memorizing, criticizing others for their memory. You can’t remember anything, you know. Then this can create the causes for a dull memory for one’s self. And then obviously in this life as we grow older, it’s unfortunately a reality, our memory becomes duller.
Then if you practice, there are practices to enhance memory, your memory can become stronger with age. Not duller, you know. In my own case, I think I can say my memory is stronger now than when I was 17 years old. Certainly stronger than when I was 35. I can memorize things I could not do then.
You know? The first step is exercise. A mind is like a muscle, it’s exercised. If you train your memory, it will become more powerful. How do you train your memory?
Through memorizing every day. You can memorize verses, verses of Buddhist teachings for instance, Stay in your mind. Then you start by memorizing one verse. It’s very painful. Then after a while, if you do this, after a couple of years, you memorize two verses.
And then you just continue. If you combine this with a practice of mantra, especially the mantra of white manjushri, to enhance the development of memory, like when I memorized at Sera, I would always do white manjushri before the memorization session, and you memorize early in the morning, your memory will become more and more powerful within the limits of a human body. You know? And I knew a case at Sera of a very young monk was perfectly normal, just a little boy, loved to play football, 12 years old, who memorized 2,690 pages in one year of Buddhist texts. So he was tested, and they have the pecha tomes there, and they opened the tomes at random, and the Geshe would start reciting and he had to continue.
Right? At 2,690 pages a day, that’s what? That’s around nine pages a day, eight pages a day, every day. Right? Can be done.
I mean, my classmates, I memorized a page a day. Some of my classmates memorized four pages a day. That was considered top memorizers. You know? More than four pages is really remarkable.
It can be done. It can be done. But the key here is to understand how karma operates. If you start thinking in terms of karma, then your life will change for the better. Any other questions?
I’m in regards to near death experience. And I was just wondering, it is a Buddhist okay to be a organ donor? An organ donor. I didn’t hear you. Excuse me.
You’re speaking of near death experiences or organ donors? I I was just wondering, as a Buddhist, should we be organ donors? It’s excellent to be an organ donor. Most excellent. But would it affect the consciousness for the next life if we Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?
I mean, everything depends on your motivation. So clearly, if the organs are removed the moment the heart beats, then this precipitates departure of consciousness from the body. Right? And the reality is that most of us are unable to practice death meditations. So in practice, if from your side, have a very strong motivation to help others, and you have your organs donated at death, you have accumulated tremendous virtuous karma.
Tremendous. And unless you were to be a very serious meditator, you would not be able to utilize that mind of the death state of any way. So it would definitely be something which would prepare you for an entry in the Mahāyāna in this life or in future lives. That’s very good, you know. The key here is to be realistic.
Right? Who we are, where we stand, what we can practice as opposed to what a Geshe from Seraje who spends twenty years in retreat in Bhutan can practice. It’s not the same thing, you know. In our cases, have students in the Dharma Center in the West. The teachings we get are basic.
We have to work eight hours a day. Many of us are married with children. No one does retreats. Okay. Then the death meditations, it’s not on the radar screen for us.
It’s not gonna happen. You know? What there is is karma and causality, a basic understanding of impermanence and death, you know, an attempt to turn our lives around, try to accumulate as much virtuous karma as possible, make it as powerful as possible, try to accumulate as little non virtuous karma as possible, make it as weak as possible. And then anything more than that is difficult. I mean, we have advanced teachings at TBI, but almost no one comes.
Right? So, you know, what’s the point? Among the people who received, Vajrayoginī when I first came to Australia in 02/2007, in this room, were you there, Simon? No one. Not one of you.
Among the people who received Yamāntaka, were you there? Okay. One person in 02/2008. Then the vows which are taken of vows, which are taken until one attains full enlightenment. Right?
Not over one life, but over many lives. Right? So then obviously, you know, why have these great Tantric teachings given when no one does the retreats, the vow is unkempt, the commitments okay. It’s a waste of time, you know. Harmful to the person, harmful to the teacher, then why bother?
You know? Well, the basics are what matters for us. And then on the basics, then you can build quietly as much as is possible, you know. And as I mentioned earlier, it depends on the sacrifices you make. You can understand emptiness in this life, but you have to stop living an ordinary life.
If you’re busy doing this and doing that, you know, if you have no money, you know, if you’re old, then how is it gonna happen? It’s difficult. You must read the great text. You must think you need a lot of time. You need teachers.
It takes years. Even after years, many don’t attain it. Then it is more realistic to focus on what is manageable for us. You know? This is why Geshe la, for instance, does not say anything in particular when students are uncomfortable with the concept of emptiness because basically it is unattainable for our students.
It’s presented for the sake of future karmic imprints. And if because of a belief, let us say, in God, or a belief, you know, in the law, in Judaism, people lead a virtuous life. Then as a result, definitely, they should get a higher rebirth in the next life than the goal is achieved. Right? Gold is achieved.
It’s good enough. You know? Whereas if the person is always trying to study emptiness and is leading a very messy life, in the next life, probably they will not get a higher rebirth. And then what has been the benefit? Yes.
Do you have other questions? The question I have is going to this Buddhist philosophy teaching is sort of doesn’t have that much not to go at this point in time. Is is my perception right? Everything depends on who you are. We have many different students with different capacities.
But it is not there’s no point in studying Buddhist philosophy if the basics aren’t there. If you don’t believe if you aren’t convinced of the existence of past and future lives, in the existence and operativeness of karma, if you don’t have refuge, why on earth are you studying Buddhist philosophy? Then you have to ask yourself, is that there? Yes or no? You have to answer.
Look in yourself. If there is a conviction in past and future lives, if you understand how karma operates, this is the path of the being of the small scope. If you understand refuge and you have taken sincerely refuge, k. That is it. Then you are ready to pass to the path of the being of the middling scope, and the focus of the path of the being of the middling scope is teachings on emptiness.
And then, obviously, one should be thinking of ordination because the focus of the path of the being of the middling scope is liberation for one’s own sake. Right? As a next step upwards, but the basics must be there. Obviously, if we lose 80% of the students over four years, the basics are not there for those 80%. Then we have some excellent students, you know, like like Chris Ridley, for instance, who’s been here since I started coming to Australia, who’s a a model of a student, You know?
But what is lacking is that regular commitment over time. And if you want to see and I I I’m sure he would, you know, endorse the statement. If you want to see what hard work, regular hard work leads to, take Chris. Chris is in palliative care. He doesn’t have a university degree.
He’s not an intellectual by any account. Every time Rinpoche taught, he came. There were Easter teachings, he did the teachings. He meditates at home. The difference is astonishing.
When I first met Chris, it’s very difficult for him to formulate things about concepts like
And so forth. Now when him when Geshe-la taught the Tenets class, he did not miss a single class. He not miss a single class. He didn’t miss a single class. The result is his comments, let’s say, last Tuesday in the Cittamātra class were dead on.
Sharp comments. You know? He’s not ordained. That is an example for us. A westerner can do this.
What Chris has, which most of our students do not have, is the old German term, which literally means a behind. Flesh for the sitting, the capacity to sit down and study. It’s over time, year after year after year consistently, and the results are there. Results are there. That’s why I told you hard work beats intelligence every time.
Then do you have any other questions? If you don’t, maybe call it a day, I would encourage you to take a step back after this talk and maybe put the details aside and ask yourself the basic questions, the difficult questions I brought up, and find your own answers in yourself. You’ve got to find these answers. On the base of these answers, you can create a stable practice. Stable practice is good for yourselves, it’s good for us as a community because we have too many people passing through TBI and it is far from clear that anyone benefits.
Maybe in many future lives, but I don’t have the capacity to see that. But certainly in this life, I’m not quite sure what the benefit for them is. And for the center, it’s harmful. You know? So we don’t need many students, we need good students.
And Buddhism is not for everybody. You people have different karmic imprints. If you were a Christian, you know, for 500 years, life after life, you will have a natural predisposition towards Christianity. If you are interested in Buddhism, it is important that you first make sure that that natural predisposition for Christianity is evacuated. The issue is settled.
And then you must really try to understand what Buddhism is, what the Buddha taught. I remember the most surreal conversation with two of him, is older students in 02/2008. I had just settled in Australia, and they wanted to speak to me privately. One was very sharp and the other basically just followed. And the one who was very sharp is an older student.
It’s very interesting how this one works because it it really shows that no one or many of the students did not take what Rinpoche taught seriously. We went up in the side room, and he asked me privately, is all this reincarnation business necessary? That was the crux of the question. In other words, okay, this is what the Tibetan see, but now, okay, we are between educated westerners. You can give me the inside scoop, you know.
What do you actually think about this, you know? And I said, well, basically, Buddhism stands or falls on reincarnation. There’s no middle ground. Actually, I could almost tell you what I told him. Texture, I said Buddhism is not infinitely flexible, and reincarnation is nonnegotiable.
So if there is no reincarnation, the Buddha’s teachings collapse. If there is reincarnation, in my opinion, it is the Buddha’s teachings are the strongest candidate for explaining the situation. The Indian schools of thought which teach the existence of an Ātman run into many problems. Many, many problems. And those two students left.
You know? They left. So reincarnation is a turning point. That’s why I would really encourage you to read Stevenson’s work, the work of people who recollect past lives, ask us if this is true or not true. Take your time, because that is the basis.
Once you have established that basis, you have a good foundation to start studying Buddhism. This is not taught in the Lam Rim because in Tibetan society, everyone believed in reincarnation. It was a non non issue. In India, it was a non issue. It was taken for granted.
I mean, children remembered past lives. Why would you teach this? It was obvious. Right? That’s the key.
Then thank you very much. Have a good weekend, and my apologies for the resistance of matter.