Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this guided meditation, Venerable Thubten Chodron invites students to examine the continuity of consciousness across time and lives. She begins by loosening identification with the present body and mind, observing how radically both have changed since infancy and will continue to change. She then traces the mind back moment by moment—from today to yesterday, years past, childhood, infancy, the womb—establishing that each moment of consciousness arises from the preceding one. Following this continuity backward, she poses the pivotal question: if the sperm and egg that formed the body came from parents, where did the consciousness in that fertilized egg originate? Since every moment of mind must have a cause, that first moment of this life’s consciousness must have come from a preceding moment of mind from a previous life. The meditation concludes by returning to present awareness, cultivating a lived sense of existing not as a static self but as a constantly changing continuum extending across lifetimes.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 GM.mp3
UUID: a53477cf-a05a-4973-bb2f-ba7302a7ef6d
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~935
In Buddhism, often hear the term mind stream or mental continuum. So this clear and aware phenomena is a continuum. It changes moment by moment. And it’s our mind that goes from one body to the next body as we’re reborn in the various realms of cyclic existence. Having some understanding and belief in rebirth comes easily to some people and not so easily to others.
But it’s something that can be developed over time as we observe our own experience in our life. One obstacle to understanding rebirth is this feeling, this conception we have inside that we’re one single person. This is me and we identify with our present body. But if we examine closer, we see that that feeling, that conception isn’t really accurate. Are you the same person now that you were when you were an infant?
Body is completely different than when you were a baby. And even your mind, how your mind thinks, what you think about, not the same, is it? And when we look at the continuity going into the future, when we’re eighty or ninety years old, are we the same person that we are now? Again, the body’s totally different. And when we’re that old, we’re gonna be thinking about different things, having a different perspective.
So recognize that both your body and your mind have changed since you were conceived in the womb, and they’re gonna continue to change. By reflecting on this, it loosens that concept that identifies the self with our present body and mind. While we’re alive, our body and our mind are linked together. So the body is form. It’s matter.
The mind is formless, but they’re linked together and they influence each other. But they also have different continuums. Before we were born, our body came from the sperm and egg, those physical substances of our parent. Our mind is a continuum from previous lives. Similarly, when we die, our body, which is physical, decomposes.
It gets recycled into the environment. So it has its own physical continuum. And our mind which is not physical in nature also has a continuum and goes on to another rebirth. Just look a little bit more closely at our mind and its continuum. Just as the body arises from causes, so each moment of our consciousness, each moment of mind arises from its causes which are preceding moment of mind or consciousness.
So begin with your mind of this moment and recognize that it came from your mind of the preceding moment. Your mind of today exists in the same continuum as your mind of yesterday. We’ll continue to trace our continuity of mind back. So the mind of yesterday arose from the day before, rose from our mind last year. Now mind of last year came from the mind of the year before, the mind of ten years ago.
What was our mind like ten years ago? Mind of ten years ago came from a mind of ten years before that. So we can continue to trace this continuity of mind one moment arising from the next. Trace this continuity of mind back to the time when we were children. Present mind exists as a continuum from the mind we had when we were five years old.
And that mind exists in a continuum from when we were a newly born infant. So even if we can’t remember what our mind was like when we were a newborn, we know we had consciousness then. We know that babies experience pleasure and pain. We know they’re living beings with mind. So just imagine what your mind was like when you were an infant.
It’s very different than our present mind, but try and imagine the infant’s mind is like. See it as part of the continuity of the present mind going back into the past. That mind as an infant came from our mind when we were still inside the womb. So even that baby inside the womb felt pleasure and pain. Even the baby in the womb, the fetus had consciousness, and we were once that baby.
Try and get a sense of what your mind was like then. And trace that continuity of the mind of the fetus to the mind of the newly fertilized egg. That combination of sperm and egg that made the body and the consciousness that entered it that made it a living being. We know where the sperm and the egg came from. Where did that consciousness come from?
What caused that consciousness? Didn’t appear without a cause. It had to have had a cause. What was the cause of that first moment of consciousness in the fertilized egg? Just as each moment of mind arose from a preceding moment, so too that first moment of mind in the fertilized egg arose from its preceding moment.
It’s the continuity of our mind before this life. Doesn’t matter whether or not we can remember our previous lives, but we can get a sense that they must have existed because there must have been some continuity of mind in the past that produced the mind of the first moment of this life. So come back again into the present moment, your mind as it presently is, and just be aware of the changing nature, the transient nature of the consciousness moment by moment how it changes. So get a sense of being not just this present person in this adult body, but get a sense of existing in a continuity, in a continuum, something that constantly changes.