Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Valham guides practitioners through a detailed meditation on dying and rebirth, grounded in the Lam Rim—the Tibetan Buddhist graduated path. He begins with Chenrezig visualization and mantra practice, then walks through a vivid, step-by-step imaginative simulation of the physical dissolution at death: the weakening and heaviness of the body, the fading of the senses, the sequential dissolution of the four elements (earth into water, water into fire, fire into wind), and the inner visions that accompany each stage—mirage, smoke, fireflies, sparks. He then describes the subtle experiences after the gross body ceases: the white, red, and black visions, the encounter with the clear light of mind, and the reversal of that process as consciousness returns to a new birth. Throughout, he emphasizes that recognizing our current mind stream—its attachments, aversions, and delusions—reveals the trajectory of our future rebirth. The teaching closes with a call to cultivate bodhicitta and refuge as antidotes, so that death becomes not a fearful dissolution but a compassionate homecoming. For practitioners with some foundation in Tibetan Buddhism.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 M.mp3
UUID: 136a9aa6-bd10-4594-884e-f83e44e38dc2
Teacher: Valham
Collection: Lam Rim Meditation (Valham)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~2,046
So again, visualize Chenrezig. Every session when we bring back Chenrezig, you should think Chenrezig is actually there all the time. But we are just focusing again on the white radiant light body of Chenrezig, being the essence of universal compassion and having the power to awaken that compassion within ourselves through the mantra and through the visualizations. Reverently, I prostrate with my body, speech, and mind. I present clouds of every type of offering, actual and imagined.
I declare all my negative actions accumulated since beginningless time and rejoice in the merit of all holy and ordinary beings, please remain until the end of cyclic existence and turn the wheel of dharma for living beings. I dedicate my own merits and those of all others to the great enlightenment. And when you recite the mantra, think that, you know, bunch of white radiant light flows from Chenrezig’s heart. As a response to your mantra, he, you know, sends much radiating white light into the crown of your head and completely purifying the body and mind, purifying the body from sickness, you know, pain, and different other imprints. And also the mind, completely purifying the mind, filling it with filling the body and mind with much radiant, blissful nectar energy.
So first of all, when we practice dying meditation, we need to set up a realistic environment around us so that we can, you know, slip into that mode of experience. Maybe you think you are in a hospital bed, you know, and knowing that death is coming closer. And you have the you have the staff of the the hospital around you, Nurses coming in regularly to feel your pulse or check the instruments, checking your heartbeat, giving you something to drink, asking you how you feel. And you have the conversations between the doctors and the nurses.
And their serious looks. And then maybe around you also, some of your friends or relatives nervously either walking up and down or sitting very stiffly in the corner or feeling kind of upset, worried, holding your hand, trying their best to make you comfortable. But in your own mind and in your own body, you feel something completely different is happening. Something you never experienced before. First, let’s take couple of minutes to imagine this situation and to think of yourself as lying on on the bed, you know, propped up with pillows.
So now the very first physical feeling that comes over you as you lie on your bed is an incredible weakness. Body suddenly starts to feel so much more heavy. Nearly immovable. And you think, it’s like my body wants to sink into the earth. And the whole body takes on an appearance of sunkenness.
And you feel so weak that you can’t even move your arms or legs. As if your body was stuck to the bed. You lost all the impulse to move around, and even your eyes begins to stare in front of you. You can’t take the picture. I mean, you can’t take the image of the whole room.
Just tend to look straight in front of you. And a strange vision of mirage takes place in your mind like heat in the desert, you know? Like heat in the desert makes everything shimmering and moving. You lose the sense of stability in your inappearances. A sense of losing control.
This is the earth element losing its power, and it dissolves into the water element. And the appearance for you is a sense of dryness all over the body. You feel thirsty and dry in your mouth. The tongue thickens at the root, and you find it difficult to speak with this big swollen tongue in your mouth. You try to say something, but it all comes out blurred.
And when people talk to you, find it so hard to hear. It’s like a faint, faint, distant voice. And then your feelings all becomes mixed up between external feeling and internal feeling. It’s all the same to you. So that when you experience the inner vision of smoke and fog, it’s like your whole room was full of filled with smoke.
The inner buzzing in your ears becoming fainter, and you’re losing your hearing. People shout into your ear, but even that is hard for you to pick up. That’s the water element dissolving into the fire element that begins to become weaker and weaker. And your body starts to feel cold from the feet. Feels cold slowly up your legs.
Digestion stops, and you can’t make out anymore who is talking to you and who is touching you when they’re holding your hand. You can’t see clearly. You can’t hear clearly. And you start to be to lose contact with the external world as the breathing also becomes very heavy and labored. Shallow in breath, and an extremely heavy rattling out breath.
And all these experiences are coming down on you continuously with the cold, the breath, and the sense of separation from your surrounding. Your mind is pervaded by vision of tiny sparks of fire dancing, you know, all over, moving all over. As if your own bed was on fire and you could only see the sparks. Next thing you know, you draw your last breath. A very short in breath and a long rattling out breath.
And after that, no more in breath at all. People around you are clutching your body. But for you, there is no more connection at all, no sense of purpose around you. In your mind, all you experience is one tiny, tiny flickering light as if it existed at the very end of a long black tunnel. Now the gross body is completely dead, stopped functioning.
And the gross mind is absorbing into the subtle mind or the subtle level of mind, the non conceptual level of mind, With this dissolution, the first experience is one of all pervading white light or whiteness, like a snowy landscape in the moonlight. Without any sense of a subject, object, division, just an all pervading experience. As the subtle form from our father moves down to the level of our heart and forms the upper part, white upper part of a small seed. After some time, the white vision begins to turn pink and gradually redder and redder until you have like a sunset copper red vision, pervading your entire inner space. That is produced by the subtle form that we receive from our mother.
Stays in the navel chakra during lifetime. And now at the time of death, it rises to meet with a white seed and form the bottom part of the white and red halves that meet at the center of our heart chakra. When the two halves come together and close-up, that subtle mind, the awareness, goes right into the center of the seed. And one experiences a sense of falling or fainting into a very dark black well. A sense of falling into complete darkness.
And at one point, a little seed at the heart opens up and lets the subtlest level of mental consciousness experience the limitless clear light that is like a crystal and pervades the entire universe with, you know, pristine awareness of clarity, without beginning, middle, or end, without subject object. It’s just an all pervading vision of incredible, you know, crystal clarity, the very subtle nature of the mind. Try to keep that light sense of clarity for as long as you can. And you think to yourself that the clear light experience of non duality, no subject objects, is the ultimate nature of all phenomena. Think that so many living beings used this experience to completely liberate themselves from, you know, saṃsāra.
Or from, you know, wrong views. Then instead and instead of compulsively being drawn into another suffering existence unconsciously. They returned as a liberated being or bodhisattva to help others on this earth. So the first experience returning to a human body is from the clear light. Going back into the darkness of the seed at the heart chakra.
Then going with the red experience. As the lower part of the sea descends into the navel chakra, experiencing an all pervading redness. Again, the red vision becomes fainter and fainter and suddenly turns into an all pervading white vision. It’s the white half of the seed descends up into the crown chakra. Now slowly that white vision becomes smaller and smaller until it turns into just a tiny flickering candle light at the end of a dark tunnel.
Again, the functions of the body like breathing begins. The heat of the body returns as the vision turns into a firefly vision again. Hearing reappears as the Vision turns into smoke, a room filled with smoke. And the complete restoration of the body and the eyesight returns as the mirage like vision goes through the mind. So we can think to ourselves as a conclusion.
Although we are not dead now, we are all along the path to death, towards death. And whenever death appears, whenever it happens, May we be able to generate a, you know, a courageous mind or bodhicitta, a universal loving kindness, and then a sound and safe direction of refuge in a a wholesome, trustworthy object. With these two as our friends. You know? bodhicitta, the best friend in life, and the refuge in the supreme beings.
Even death will be like going home. It will be just as joyful as going home, or can be just as joyful as going home. Meditation too. Also visualize the great compassionate one resting in front of you. And after when we recite the mantra, think that the radiant light from his heart is entering the mind.
You know every living being, Your mother, father, visualize your mother on your left side and father on your right, and then all the universe living beings. And each of them receive showers of radiant, you know, nectar light, bringing much peace and bliss to their mind. Reverently, I prostrate with my body speech and mind. I present clouds of every type of offering, actual and imagined. I declare all my negative actions accumulated since beginningless time.
And rejoice in the merit of all holy and ordinary beings. Please remain until the end of cyclic existence. And turn the wheel of dharma for living beings. I dedicate my own merits and those of all others to the great enlightenment. So we can contemplate like this.
That at this very moment, there are so many beings going from one life to another, leaving one body and entering another, or experiencing the, you know, the in between state. Dying and being reborn. And think the same can happen to me at any time. This what I call my life can stop at any moment. So let’s contemplate.
If if my life stopped now, what would be the most likely future rebirth? Sometimes we go to an astrologer or, you know, to people like that to find out with anxiety what’s gonna happen in the future. And Buddha gave very good advice. He said like this, if we want to know our past, we want to know what our life was in the past. Look at your present body.
That’s the result. And if we want to know what is going to be our future life, then look into your present state of mind because that’s where we create the causes for the future. So we can think like this. I mean, let’s contemplate for a while, looking into our own mind and saying, you know, Generally, if we find that our mind is filled with different kinds of attachments, aversions, and closed mindedness, then we are cultivating the lower realms. These are the causes.
These mental attitudes are the causes for the lower realms. First, contemplate that. Think about this. If it is like that or if it is not like that, whatever you find. What you feel is your predominant, you know, mental attitude going on in the mind.
From that, one can figure out where in which direction one is heading. So if we really could look within our mind stream