Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 1,402-minute session, Ven Jampa Ignyen traces our feelings—including troubling ones—back to past karma rather than external circumstances, directly challenging the Western assumption that other people cause our emotions. He explains why karma is Buddhism’s most difficult epistemological category, knowable only through an awakened being’s testimony, then addresses the practical heart: how we misattribute our feelings to events and people, then cultivate resentment and aversion from this fundamental misunderstanding. He reframes the objection that past lives are unfalsifiable: whether a feeling originates now or eons ago, we remain equally responsible for our response. The teaching also covers the mind’s beginningless continuity, inborn wisdom as evidence of past conditioning, and how karmic seeds awakened at death determine the next rebirth. Suited for Western practitioners encountering Buddhist metaphysics for the first time.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2012 07 20.mp3
UUID: b1d31050-d557-488c-afa6-e0602a926e36
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: Karma (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2012-07-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 1402.5 minutes
Words: ~6,263
Start with Actually, we’ll just start with a short prayer. It’s on the refuge and bodhicitta prayer. I’ll just recite them in Tibetan. So that’s just a short verse on really to generate positive motivation, which is essential for us in this course on karma. karma is all about the need, the absolute necessity to generate a positive motivation.
Okay, just before we start we’ll just do a little bit of breath meditation. So in the beginning we just sit comfortably and with a straight back. Purpose of breath meditation here is for us is just to relax physically and relax mentally, just to reduce the amount of discursive thinking we have. So how we do this is sitting comfortably, we focus on the breath. This is one of the four mindfulness practices.
Mindfulness practice is becoming more and more important in the modern world, very busy, our mind tends to be very busy. Mindfulness meditation helps us to relax the mind, just bring it down to a point where it’s more workable, more pliable, more happy. So here we’re just focusing on the breath itself as we breathe in and out through the nose, or in fact anywhere where we sense our lungs filling and emptying. We’re just watching the breath. And as we watch the breath, any thoughts that come up, we’re just letting them.
Just letting them go. In fact, this is one of the most important parts of the meditation is just letting go of the thoughts. We have such a strong tendency to hang on to them, to grasp them, to seize them, to own them. So here we’re doing the opposite. We’re just allowing those thoughts, whatever they may be, just to letting them go.
So we’re just, in the meditation there. Just relax. So we’re continuing with karma and last week we did some preliminary discussion on karma. And karma itself is an incredibly difficult topic. It’s quite metaphysical.
Really from the point of view of Buddhist epistemology or how we acquire knowledge, karma is put into the most difficult category. In fact there are three, said to be three categories. First, sense data. So anything that we access through the senses is the first level and that’s pretty easy. We just look at something and we can see what shape and color and we can eliminate doubt about ordinary physical things just by looking at them or listening to them or touching them.
If we have doubt about something whether it’s say glass or water, you know, we put our hand onto it and we know what it is through the senses quite directly, immediately, fully. So there the physical objects around us are like that, the coarse physical objects. But when we get into the subtle level we come to the second area and that’s like atoms and molecules. Because even though atoms and molecules may appear to eye consciousness, we can’t actually discern them, they’re just too small. So too with impermanence, right?
The I consciousness cannot understand impermanence, can it? Like we look at this table and we think it’s not moving moment to moment, right? But actually we know that it’s made up of atoms and molecules and these atoms are composed of subtler particles that are in motion. True? So that’s something, understanding, say, atoms and molecules depends on the second level of objects, the subtler, more obscure level.
And they can only be approached through reasoning, right? So in order for us to understand that the table is made up of atoms and molecules we have to apply reasons. And through applying a series of correct reasons we can prove to ourselves that there are atoms and molecules in the table. True? Everyone accepts that there are atoms and molecules in the table.
But has any of us seen one? Impermanence is like that. Impermanence is not something that we can understand through the senses. Emptiness, selflessness, also we have to approach through reasoning. These are more obscure objects.
But karma is in the third category, extremely difficult to understand. So it’s a bit ambitious for us to have karma as a topic because it is just so obscure, so difficult that it’s in its own category. Still, it can only be understood through reasoning but the type of reasoning that’s applied to understanding karma depends on the existence of an awakened being. That type of reasoning is something like, Well, karma exists because an awakened being said it exists. So this is the level that we’re looking at with karma.
karma is incredibly subtle, more subtle than impermanence, more subtle than selflessness, more subtle than emptiness. So it’s not something that we readily will understand. But that’s okay, it’s not something the purpose of the Course is not to you know, fully understand karma in a couple of discussions. Why is it so difficult to understand karma? Because karma is really the law of cause and effect internal cause and effect.
We’re aware of external cause and effect. We can see that everything in this room is the result of something true? No matter where we look all we see is the results of things, This table is the result of the hard work of a table maker and the timber was grown in some forest and then it was cut and then put together and painted. So the table is the result of various causes that come together. Our physical body is the result of various causes that come together.
Very many extensive subtle causes. You know we get the genetic material from our parents and then as that embryo grows it absorbs nutrition through the mother and develops until we get to where we are now. So this physical body that we have is the result of many causes: what we eat, what we breathe in and so on, what we drink. So everything around us we can see. Every object of the sense, the senses which are impermanent are the products of causes.
Now similarly the internal makeup of a human being, the feelings, the emotions, the experience also follows a pattern of causation. It’s generated through causes and conditions. So the causal nature of the mind itself really follows the pattern of karma. In other words, what we experience in the present has causes that go back, you know, a long time into the past. Our current feelings, mental, physical feeling that manifest in the present moment has its roots perhaps not in this life.
What we feel in the present moment may not be coming from causes that we’ve assembled in this life. The feeling that manifests in the present moment may be coming from the previous life, our previous life or it might be from the life before that or it may be a hundred lives ago or it may be a million lives ago. Very hard for us to discern where our feelings are coming from, what is the actualthe cause. Generally we tend to think that our feelings are coming from the environment around us, from other people, from our work situation, you know, from various things in the present and this is our impression. karma itself is saying no, they’re not the feelings are coming from past positive and negative actions.
But it just appears as if they’re produced fresh in the present and are just coming from our present situation. That’s the appearance for us. Now karma is said to be therefore in this third category, the most difficult to comprehend because the cause of the feeling in the present for instance may have been generated a million lifetimes ago. And to actually see that is extremely difficult. In any way, I’m not sure.
What I’m saying here you may well not agree with and that is fine. And in fact part of this course is to provoke discussion on these issues because they’re too important just in a way to leave on one side. Because actually most of what we do or a very important part of our life is working out where our feelings are coming from and dealing with our feelings. True? And the pleasant ones are generally not problematic.
It’s the negative feelings working out where the negative feelings are coming from that’s the problem for us. That’s the main problem. So whether we like it or not we are confronted. Yes. Well this is the whole debate about Yeah, No, no, And this is where we are in a society at present.
Like we’ve gone through the Enlightenment, we have pretty much thrown out metaphysics and various philosophies that didn’t seem to be explaining what’s relevant in our lives. And this area, karma, I mean it’s an Eastern idea, it’s a Buddhist idea, it’s a Hindu idea. But it’s part of Eastern philosophy, Eastern metaphysics. And so as Westerners who have gone through the process of, in a way, putting aside metaphysics and saying metaphysics is not relevant to us, science is relevant to us, right? Why should we bother with something that goes back into our previous life whether that exists or not?
You think it’s a bit of a cop out to say that it may be coming from a previous life? If I’m looking to blame you at one hundred thousand lifetime before, I might not be thinking that I’m actually responsible to. But why not? If it was I, similar to the I in this life, that caused the feeling that I’m experiencing, then, you know, whether it’s this life or a previous life, aren’t we equally responsible? Mean Right.
No, the thought that we may have, the continuum of this mental consciousness that we have in the present, especially this consciousness that imputes I on our mind body, to think that that may have gone backwell we know that it goes back in this life, you know, to an early stage, but to think that that process may have gone on in a previous life and then in another previous life is harder for us. It is harder for us to understand because we don’t have any conscious memory of it. But still, just because we have no conscious memory of something doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist. And I think we’re aware of the reasons for that. So what we’re looking at here is reallyin karma what we’re looking at, what’s relevant to us is the feeling element and where our feelings arise from in the present because exactly what we’re doing on a day to day basis is trying to what?
Manage the feelings that we have, trying toand all sorts of feelings come up all the time and we wonder where are they coming from. Why do I have this feeling about this person? Why I have this feeling about this other person? Why do I have this feeling about being in that place? And so forth.
So feelings themselves are impermanent, aren’t they? What are feelings? They’re internal states. What are they? They’re a type of awareness, aren’t they?
They’re awareness that exists within a continuum inside of us. They progress moment to moment to moment. The feelings that we have are in a sense one of the most important types of mind that we have. Because it’s the feeling that experiences the world around us. The feeling is like the taste of the world around us.
It’s like So really this whole this course on karma is really dealing with feeling. Now from the karmic point of view, feelings are said to come from past action. But that’s just one of the functions of karma, it’s not the only one. And what is karma? Last week also we were talking a little bit about karma.
karma is defined as the mental factor of intention or it’s this mental state of intending to act in a particular way. And in brief a positive intention brings forth a positive action and that positive action will tend to bring in its wake happiness. So also we have very closely aligned with karma we have the whole question of ethics and the importance of practicing ethics both for not only for our benefit but for others, the benefit of others as well. So we’re looking very much at feelings. Now feelings themselves are us, you know, as we’ve mentioned, they’re incredibly important.
Feeling is the second of the four types of mindfulness. Just being aware of our feelings is very important. Being aware that they arise from causes is important. Being aware that we’re not too sure of where the causes are is important. However, what the Buddha mentioned is that happiness does come from ethics unhappiness comes from a lack of ethics.
So when we’re looking at generating positive feeling, the fundamental issue is, even if we only look at this one life scenario, is the necessity for generating ethics in order to create positive feeling. This other issue of just how far back does it go is a vast issue, it’s a huge issue. But from the point of view of Buddhism that then in a way it describes why we have such a range of feelings in the present. Or in fact how feelings can arise, you know, in relation to beings that are total strangers or in one sense, you know, if our feelings just arose from our experience in this life it would be difficult to generate strong feelings in relation to strangers or places we’ve never been orand so on. Anyway, yes?
Oh well, it’s not necessary to experience the results of all our past karma in order to become enlightened. No, that’s not necessary. If it was, then enlightenment would be impossible because we got such a store of negative karmic seeds in our mental continuum. Makes sense to me. Well, the tit for tatness is just the law of cause and effect playing out.
It’s not what can one say, just being petty for being petty’s sake or something like that. It’s simply that if you look for a cause for a particular result, you will find or you will be able to infer that there was a cause for it because it is a result and that if we scratch our nose and are distracted, we walk out on the road and get hit by a car, then that probably is a karmic result definitely and maybe the person driving the car was someone that we’d harmed in the past. Well, no, no. If the result occurred then there must have been a cause for that result. The law of causation is quite definite.
And in fact we’re in the process at present of experiencing results and laying down new causes and that’s our ongoing situation. Like moment by moment we’re experiencing the results of past events, actions and then generating the causes for new experience. What would be a negative cause because it’s a negative result? Well, it’s probably a combination of two things: being absent minded, not looking and then to actually be hit by the car also indicates or there is an implication that the person that ran you down in their car is someone that one may have harmed in the past. There is a connection between that person and what happens to oneself.
Whether they had any intention now is completely different, you know, that yeah, that’s right. But the indication is that there is a karmic link there. Karmic links only occur when things are positive or negative, not in neutral situations. So if it’s a good result then that we experience in the present it comes from a karmic link. If it’s a bad result, karmic link.
Neutral result, uncertain. So anything that happens to us on a moment to moment basis whether positive or negative is the result of past karma. No that’s right, I mean we can move to another place. Don’t Well in a sense it’s true. There’s nothing in a sense new from the point of view that we’ve had so many past lifetimes.
There’s no one that we haven’t met before and we have karma with everyone. No matter where we go on the planet. Although they may appear to be strangers to us in the present moment, actually if we were to go back into the karmic history of ourselves and that other being, we would find, Oh, at a particular point many lifetimes ago we were brother and sister or we were two ants in the same anthill or we lived on another planet and we were husband and wife or we were in the Divine realms together and we lived in the same Divine palace or we’re hell beings together pulling along a cart and we became friends. But it is said that no matter where we go, everyone we have a karmic connection with. Is that okay?
But not only for humans, all the insects as well. When we get down and we look at the ants, those ants also we have a karmic connection with and the fish and the birds. There’s no being that we come across on this planet that we don’t have a prior karmic connection with. Now the reason it’s said to be this way is that the mind itself is without a beginning. Our current mind doesn’t have a first point at which it suddenly arose.
There’s no first cause of the mind that we have. Now there areanyway, without going into too much detail there, because that if the mind is beginningless and the minds of every other being that we see, everyone here, their mind is beginningless. Had no beginning, had no beginning. Right. Really from a Buddhist point of view it’s just that the mind didn’t begin at this life.
Sitting on the mind body, yes, it just No, it is difficult for us because the aggregates or the mind body continuum that we have, what it said is that our mind came from our previous life and became associated with this physical basis in this life. We should be. We’ve got no excuse. If we’ve lived from beginningless time and we’re still ignorant, then it’s not a plus, it’s not a tick. You’re doing a job, just about the time you perfected the process, you’re always changing.
And and life of life Well, Well, probably for most of our time it is like that, that we, you know, we’re bornwhen we’re born we have inborn wisdom. We have a little bit of inborn wisdom and then there’s three other types of wisdom that we can acquire, you know, like the wisdom of study, the wisdom of contemplation, the wisdom of meditation. But when we’re born we have a little bit of inborn wisdom like the instinct to act in a particular way, the instinct not to harm or the instinct to harm, which is the opposite, which are the past negative habits. But when we’re born we have a little bit of inborn wisdom about, you know, we may be able to pick up things easily, right? Understand things.
We certainly have a knack with understanding this, a knack for understanding that. We may have a little bit of insight into the character of other people who’s good, who’s bad, who should we listen to, who should we not listen to. This is inborn wisdom. That inborn wisdom is coming from past lives. So in a sense that’s a proof of past lives if you accept the existence of inborn wisdom even at a young age.
So that would explain child prodigies, wouldn’t you? Exactly. So if you come back as someone that can play a piano at the age of three, it’s not the genes in a sense from your parents. It’s the fact that from this point of view that that being is very highly trained in their past life in playing, say, the violin or the piano. And from an early age they have strong habits and they’ve allthey have the refinement, the education that they have in their previous life.
The remnants of that are still there, that’s inborn wisdom. For instance, some people are quite ethical at a young age. This is also inborn wisdom. They have a propensity to act in one way and not another. So this isthat sort of instinct is said to be coming from past life and the hard work that people put in in their previous life.
So it doesn’t all go to waste But because the whole issue of life is so profound and complex, very difficult for any of us to really penetrate very far in the course of fifty or sixty years. Actually there’s so much to learn just uncovering the nature of the mind is so difficult that we probably need about five hundred, a thousand years to do it. There are some practices that allow us to live for that long, it said. But So anyway, within Buddhism the mind is regarded as beginningless that it wasn’t created at any particular point but it just continues, it just continues on moment to moment. And at present we have these two continua or two streams, we have the physical and the mental stream that sort of go along together moment by moment by moment.
Then we have the body and the mind. But it’s said that the mind itself, the stream of the mind has no beginning and has no end. But the physical element has a beginning, it only began at the beginning of this life. So we become associated with it at the beginning of this life and then at the end of this life we leave it, we depart from it. But the mind itself continues.
In the Christianity you say the soul continues. In Buddhism the mind continues, the mental consciousness continues And that mental consciousness then, according to karma, according to the karma takes then rebirth. So to that extent we’re a product of our karma. The current physical body that we have and the mind that we have is a product of our past actions, our past karma. It’s just the law of causation.
But there we have really two types of causation: have the internal and the external causation. Oh, very much, very much. Yep. No that’s right, the environment in which we are brought up very much influences our choices in this life. But ultimately the choices are our decision, especially once we get to a certain age.
But they do, of course. I think even now we have in the back of our mind things that our mother and father drilled into us at the age of four or five or six, they come back to us. Very much we’re influenced by our parents. And of course our parents are incredibly kind. There’s really in a sense no one kinder in this life than our parents.
Really, why is that? That’s because they actually gave uswe have this physical body. They gave us this gift of a physical body. Not that necessarily it was their intention to do so, it just happened. Mum got pregnant and that was it.
Luckily she didn’t opt for the abortion and we took rebirth. But actually the fact that our mother and father, they’ve given us this physical basis is very important. Among the Tibetans, you know, this becomes like a real focal point of remembering the kindness of other beings. And the example of the kindness of other beings is the kindness of one’s mother. And it doesn’t always suit, you know, we in the West to choose our mother as perhaps the kindest person in this life.
But when we think of actually what our parents have done, given us a physical basis and also then trained us from a very young age, then our mother and our father have been incredibly kind. And the fact that we’re reborn with our parents indicates a karmic link with our parents that was established even prior to this life. So we had a link there and that link became evident as we went through the death process in our previous life. And as we’re approaching the moment of death, at that point we awaken karmic seeds in our mental continuum. And it’s those thatwell, it’s really one karmic seed that is awakened that acts as the cause for that rebirth.
And that karmic seed will have been created with a connection to say one’s mother and father of this life. How we die is incredibly important, but probably even more so it’s how we’ve lived in the previous life because what determines one’s rebirth is the habits in one’s previous life. Because what determines one’s rebirth is the strongest habits, the mindset one has as one approaches death. If one has strong habits for compassion for instance. In this life if we meditate on compassion, you know, half an hour in the morning, half an hour at lunchtime, half an hour in the evening and then maybe another half hour of love, just meditate on love for half an hour, we generate very strong habits to contemplate love for other beings, compassion for other beings.
Then that becomes a strong habit for us And it means that the mind has much greater potential to be positive as we enter the death process. When you don’t feel like it. Oh, yeah. Yep. Yes.
Doesn’t have a way to do No, it doesn’t, absolutely not. What it means is the past karma is setting up the current situation like producing the feelings that arise, you know, maybe I really have a negative feeling towards another person. Okay, now that’s the ground. Now then it’s my decision what I do, how I act that’s going to be the new karma created in that situation. The feeling that arises is the old karma.
So if it’s a negative feeling then, Oh, I’ve done something bad myself that produces this negative feeling in the present in relation to this other person, focusing on this other person. Now that should then indicate to us, well, you know, that was a mistake. That negative feeling is coming out of an unskillful line of thought that I developed towards that person. It’s not based on anything that’s valid or useful to me, it’s just a past bad habit of mine that’s produced this negative feeling. So in the present I have the option of like just acting without thinking based on that feeling or stepping back and saying, Actually, I don’t want to go down that road again.
All right, I’m not going to become annoyed. Now what happens, that negative feeling, if we cultivate it or we own it or we adopt it, right? That then will tend to lead into impatience and dislike, right? It’s a negative feeling that’s arising in relation to another person, tends to generate dislike for that person then, right? Which is different than the feeling.
And it may lead into hatred or, you know, a mild sort of dislike tending towards aversion for the person. Now then that may lead into anger directed towards a person and resentment. As we think about it more and more we can cultivate that feeling and justify it, right? All this process of justification is based on a lie to begin with. It’s like that initial negative feeling is untrustworthy because it wasn’t created by that person that it’s focusing on it’s created by my past negative actions.
So if we can stop at that point and pull back and say, Oh, I can’t blame that person for my feeling, then excellent. Know, even if a slight doubt arises at that point or maybe this feeling is not due to that person, it’s due to my own unskillful negative actions in the past. But even just generating a doubt is very, very positive. But our normal tendency is at that point we blame the person for the negative feeling and then we attack them and then they become unhappy. So it just has awe know the scenario, we do it all the time.
And then, you know, like there’s different ways we deal with the situation. Maybe we say something to that person and then, Oh, why did I say that? And we regret it. So we spend the day regretting what we said realizing, Oh, actually I probably got it wrong. I shouldn’t have said anything to them.
Or we mayand this is often our strategywe just don’t say anything. We don’t admit that I had a negative feeling. But then we carry it around with us day after day, week after week, month after month as if it’s some little treasure, you know, it’s like a little jewel that we carry with us as if, Oh, I’ve been so mortally offended by what they said. And the feeling that arose at that point and they’re the cause of that feeling. But what did I ever do to deserve it?
I didn’t deserve that feeling, Right? And we think this all the time: I don’t deserve that feeling. I didn’t cause it. They did. Why would they do that to me?
What I’ve ever done to them? All the good things. And we start listing all the good things we’ve done to And I helped them in the past. And look, I’ve loaned them money in the past. I’ve done this, I’ve done that, I’ve and this is how they treat me.
How could they possibly treat me? I have a few faults but not that mean. I’m not perfect, but why would they treat me that way? And this goes on and on. And so we’re happy day, unhappy about it day one.
Every time we think about this person we’re unhappy. Oh, that feeling, they’re the cause of it. And so week after week, month after month, we see the person in the street and we cross to the other side so we don’t have to talk to them. And it’s like we carry this load around of this one little feeling that arose, you know, six months ago as if it’s some little treasure, some little unwritable wrong that was done to me, right? And this we do with everyone: our parents, our brothers and sisters, our husbands, our wives, our children we carry around all these things with the assumption that our feelings are coming from other beings.
It would be an irony if in fact our feelings are coming from our past actions. Then, you know, we may be employing the wrong strategy here. We’re employing a strategy that just leads us to being unhappy, like we’re creating our own unhappiness. Why? Why are we creating our own unhappiness is because we’re acting negatively towards that other person.
When we start blaming them, resenting them, hating them, getting angry towards them, then we’re creating negative karma, right? Then that becomes negative karma. And where does that go? It all settles in the mind. It just settles there.
And then we wake up in the morning and we’ve forgotten about it, but then, Oh gosh, you know, might see a photo, remind me of the person. Oh dear, there, you know. See our emotions are so powerful. And our emotions are led by our feelings, our positive and negative feelings, and interpreting where the feelings are coming from. So all of this is to do with karma.
karma is playing a central role in each moment because from a Buddhist point of view, the karma is the source of the feeling. The feeling that we have in the present moment is coming from our actions in the past. Now to really understand the complexity really implies that there is a past life scenario that actually we can’t explain everything that happens to us in this life just by what we know, who we know in this one life. This is more the classic Buddhist explanation of this where it’s bringing in many past lifetimes. And these many past lifetimes contribute to this complex experience that we have in present.
But in a way it doesn’t matter. I think we can even modify that. If we don’t want to accept past lives and we’re in a situation living in modern Western society where if we start talking about past lives then people sort of look at us and, you know, they think it’s a bit weird. That’s okay. We can actually employ these techniques even on a one life basis.
But we’re still looking at the feeling, we’re still examining the feeling. And in a sense what we’re doing is we’re saying the feeling is my responsibility. I’m the one to blame. No one else is to blame for my feelings. Right, so does that sound easier to do it that way or do people have a problem with past lives?
Yeah, no, it’s true. We’ve got enough going on in this life, let alone having to try and work out issues in our past life which are probably just as complex as this life anyway. Oh, it’s difficult for everyone. Most people. Yeah.
Yeah. I think it is very good for us to think about it because it’s in our own interest to resolve or to in a sense, resolve that issue because we’re facing death in each moment. And at some point we will go through the death process. And certainly if there is no future life then we will find out at that point and case resolved. We don’t have to worry too much.
Just That’s right, we just it’s over. The other alternative is that it’s not over and of course we realize that we are in the process of taking a new rebirth. During the death process, yeah, it’sthey’re said that there are various signs that do occur but it depends on the way death occurs. If it’s a peaceful death and especially if the person has training in meditation, then you can clearly see the signs of death as they occur and the dissolution of consciousness because the entire death process, it does take time and we have many different levels of consciousness that serially dissolve down to what’s called a clear light, which is the mind of death itself, just this very subtle mental consciousness that is the moment of death. And then from that point consciousness cannot become subtler than that but one gets to that point, one experiences actual death and then when one departs from that state of mind, one progresses to coarser states which are called black near attainment, red increase and white appearance.
And then when one gets to white appearance, it’s said that when one progresses, one leaves one’s physical body in what’s called a Bardo body. It’s like a subtle being that goes to the site of one’s rebirth. Okay, this is much that’s been written about the whole death process and how one can meditate on the death process in order to generate realizations during that process. But true, it’s something that’s going to occur in future. We will, at that point, gain direct experience of that.
But in a sense what we’re thinking about at present is how can prepare ourselves for the possibility that we do continue. In a sense that becomes our central issue in this life because this life, you know, we live sixty years, eighty years, not very long. If we do continue our future lives are endless, are without end. So that period is much, much more extensive. So we really need to take that into account.
You know, it’s like, of course, we put money aside in the bank in order to take care of a period when we’re retired. So it’s a similar process. It’s like life assurance in our next life. We need to determine what is going be a benefit to us in our next life and the lives after that, in this life. We have to do it now.
And part of that process is thinking about death and what is beyond death. Because certainly it will come. At one point we’re going to go the mind will dissolve, we will go down to the death process. Now this is another element of karma because it’s said that what is significant during the process is karma, is our actions because it’s ourthe karmic seeds that are being laid down by karma that will determine our next rebirth. There’s going to be a particular karmic seed that will generate our next life.
Now at present there’swe’re not sure what we’re going to awaken at the time of death. If we awaken a karmic seed, a negative karmic seed, then we can take a lower rebirth. Does anyone here accept the existence of the hells? Right? No, not everyone’s favorite topic, that’s for sure.
Yeah, yeah, Yeah. It doesn’t matter. I mean, if it’s useful to accept the concept then that’s okay. Depends how you define a religion. If a religion is a belief in God, then Buddhism is not a religion in that sense.
Yeah, yeah. Science of mind, maybe something like that. Well of course from the point of view of Samsāra it’s there merely because