Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Kaye Miner, a Buddhist nun, opens this 81-minute teaching by defining healing from a Buddhist perspective. She walks through the nature of mind — formless, limitless, and inherently pure but obscured by delusions of anger, ignorance, and desire — using the metaphor of clouds veiling the sun. She explains how karma (action and its imprints on consciousness) is the underlying cause of both suffering and disease, arguing that while external factors may trigger illness, the internal condition of mind determines whether it ripens. She traces the connection between mind and body through subtle energy, describes different stages of death and consciousness leaving the body, and offers the practical teaching that lasting healing requires both stopping harmful actions and removing their mental imprints. Drawing on examples including a Canadian woman who recovered from terminal cancer through meditation and life-saving practice, she emphasises that healing the mind must come before healing the body, and that developing compassion and balance between self-care and service to others is essential. The talk concludes with a brief guided meditation on breath.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1995 07 08.mp3
UUID: 8476a2e2-26af-45df-aed8-a9a34a75bea7
Teacher: Ven Kaye Miner
Collection: Unknown topic (Ven Kaye Miner)
Date: 1995-07-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 81.2 minutes
Words: ~9,768
Well, I’m glad to see that everybody was chatty and sharing and talking with each other. What I thought we would do for the rest of this morning before lunch is I’d like to talk a little bit about the nature of mind and healing in Buddhism so that we actually get quite clear what we mean about by healing. And can you all hear me all right at the back? No, I’m good. It’s all right.
I talk about patience and tolerance a lot. So if I can’t be patient and tolerant with your shuffling is that working, that thing? Yeah, Okay. Oh, so as long as you can hear, if you can’t hear, do make sure you kinda tell me, okay, I can’t hear because it’s no good sitting out the back and not being able to hear anything. And there is plenty of room down the front.
It’s amazing how people find it. Yeah, anyway. So this morning I thought we’d talk a little bit about the nature of mind and healing in Buddhism so that we’re clear about what we’re talking about. Then we can have a discussion of that talk so that you’ve got the opportunity to ask any questions that may have arisen as a result of the stuff I’m talking about or as a result of your experiences with meditation, etcetera. And so then I thought we could do this, what we call a white light healing meditation.
And that’s in this little booklet. Did you see that one? White light healing meditation. That is like, of all the meditations we do with groups, that meditation is the one that people like the most. And I also personally enjoy it the most.
I find it such an incredible meditation because it’s healing. It’s healing in terms of calming the mind and the body feels good afterwards. It’s something that you can do not only for yourself but you can do for others as well. And there’s been times when I’ve been with people who are sick and dying and I’ve done this meditation with them or for them. They may not even know that I’m doing it.
And it’s been, it’s really had some benefit, you know? At the end they say, what have you been doing? So it’s one of those kind of good meditations that once you become familiar with, you don’t need to read the words. You become familiar with the technique And it doesn’t take that much to become familiar with it. So that’s what we’re going to do.
And so we’ll break for lunch at one o’clock. Does that suit everyone? Good, okay. Well, I think the first question is, are you all right there? What’s your name again?
Carol is setting up some kind of contraption here that I think is supposed to enable her to sit more comfortably. Is that right? I’m not so sure. No, no, it must go like that. It’s gotta go like, No, no, no, it’s the other one.
Oh, now we’re lucky that Steven up here is a right. All right. So I think sorry. Before we start talking about the nature of the mind, we have some business to attend to. There’s a nice big cushion here if anyone would like another cushion.
Anyone like? It’s going spare? No? Okay. We can grab it later in the break if you want.
And there’s also a car that’s got its lights left on and it’s VKG, which sounds like isn’t it VKG from Homicide? Wasn’t that the wasn’t that VKG here? VKG. The first car the left hand side on that end of Nelson Street. A gray car?
It might not be here. Anyway. Well, okay, now any other business to attend to? Can we settle down? Okay.
What I think the first question that we need to ask is really what do we mean by healing? And I’d like to hear from you. What do you think healing is? Sorry, what did you say? That you’re in now?
That’s a very good answer. What do people think? Anything that improves the state of your body and mind that you’re in now. Is that what you said? Phew.
Oh, good. Right. So not just this life? Not just temporary. Not just for the next six months?
Change. A major change? For this life? Do you have a concept of future lives? A relief from suffering.
So from what people are saying, we’re talking about healing not just in terms of the physical body, but we’re also talking about healing in terms of the mind. We all agree on that? Do think that’s relevant? Do we see that the body and mind are separate or do we see it as being one? I’m here I’m seeing nods.
I’m not hearing you see it as one. You see them linked together. Do you think the mind is the body? Where do you think the mind is? In every cell of body?
Oh, you were listening last night. That’s not fair. You thought you came up with that yourselves. Some great personal philosophy here. So we think that the mind is separate from the body?
No. I think the mind is the body. So if that’s the case, when the body dies, does the mind die? No. Okay.
So but if if the mind is the body and the body dies, can the mind The body dies. Okay. Alright. Questions? Interesting asking these kind of questions.
Do we think that the mind is the same as the soul? It’s the spirit. Do we think it’s our psyche? Same word? That’s interesting.
That’s good. Yeah. I think in Buddhism, one of the things that for me is most essential is to clearly define what we’re talking about. When we use these words, we’ve got a whole lot of baggage associated with these words. It’s very important from my own perspective that I’m clear about what do I actually mean when I say that word.
For many of us, when we talk about mind, we are thinking brain. So when I say to somebody, where’s where’s your mind? They’ll go, here. Right? Do you think the mind’s here?
Up here. Do you think the mind’s outside the body? Mhmm. Or sitting up in the crown of your head? Mhmm.
In the heart? Oh gosh, my mind’s all over the place then, obviously. It’s a very interesting thing. It’s really good to ask yourself these questions. Be clear.
Where do you think your mind is? What do you think the mind is? So I think to understand what healing is from a Buddhist perspective, it’s essential to understand what the mind is. Often they refer to the mind as being in here in the heart. But it’s not a little box in there.
It’s not something that you can actually go and kind of extract out. It’s not form. It’s got no form whatsoever. It’s got no shape. It’s got no color.
It’s got no odor. What on earth is it? Can you imagine what it could possibly be when not those things? So the mind, however, being formless, being colorless, and not being a physical entity, still has this incredible ability to know, to cognize. It also is incredibly pure, and it’s pervasive and limitless.
That’s where I think when Joy was saying about the mind being like in every cell of your body, Well, in ways it is. And in ways it is like of linked with the body. But it isn’t the body, if you know what I mean. Because it doesn’t have this kind of form to it. But it has all of these other qualities to it.
It has this ability to know. It has this ability to pervade, not just like the physical form. It has this ability to pervade and it’s limitless. And sometimes when we look at trying to describe the mind, there’s a very good analogy which I’m not sure if I ever communicated well enough. But the mind is a bit like the sky, about the sun shining in a clear sky.
It’s like the sun shining in the sky. Now today, we’ve got a beautiful clear day out there and it’d be really nice if our minds were nice and clear like the sky is. So with our mind, it’s very clear, it’s very knowing, it’s pure, it’s got the most incredible potential. Unbelievable, unlimited potential. But at the moment, it’s really quite obscured.
And for all of us, our mind is obscured in different ways. It’s obscured by any problems that we have, any sickness that we have. And it’s just like those problems that are kind of obscuring the clarity, the purity of our mind are like the clouds that obscure the sun shining clearly in the sky. Does that make sense? So it’s like, know, today’s a clear day out there.
Yeah, maybe my mind’s a bit clearer today too. You know, I’m kind of, with doing the meditation, you know how you get to rest and you start to learn the real nature and purity of your mind. But some days you look outside like yesterday, it was really kind of gray and cold and the clouds were a little not just even, they were a bit kind of thick in places. And that to me, find it such a good analogy because I look at my mind and some days it’s like this huge thunderstorm blowing in. And in Melbourne, I think Melbourne’s weather is just such a good example of my mind.
Like in the morning it might be clear, but by afternoon it’s really heavy and stormy. So we all have this kind of purity of mind. We have this unlimited potential in our mind. Our mind is limitless. It’s pervasive.
But unfortunately, we don’t really get to experience that very often. Because we have all of these other layers over it, obscuring it. These layers of delusions, I think is probably a good word. And when I’m saying delusions, I’m talking about stemming there’s many, many delusions, but the three main ones that sort of obscure our mind or cause the other delusions to arise are our anger or hatred, our ignorance and our desire and attachment. Those three main things.
When I’m talking about ignorance, I’m not talking about of pig-headedness. Mean, ignorance for me, I think the way I kind of associate that word has often been more like with a stupidity. But when I’m talking about ignorance, I’m talking about a not knowing, a not being aware. And so when I’m talking about removing ignorance, I’m meaning about transforming into awareness and knowing. The mind is such an important thing.
It’s different from the body, although the body and the mind are interconnected. And when we talk about the mind in Buddhism, we’re talking about a very, very subtle kind of wind mind energy. That’s hard to kind of explain. It’s a very because we can’t put it into a box and we can’t kind of feel it, you know, hold onto it, sometimes it’s the most difficult thing to try and conceive of. But we all know that we’ve got a mind.
We all know that there’s something that actually is happening apart from just the brain functions telling us to lift the arm up. There’s something more behind that. So the body and the mind are absolutely connected and the mind is actually carried through the body on this very, very subtle wind energy. In Chinese medicine, they often talk about Does anyone do Chinese medicine here? Well, shiatsu therapists would know some of this, wouldn’t you?
So qi is that sort of like life energy going through, life wind energy. And so the same with from a Tibetan Buddhist or a Buddhist perspective is that the mind is basically carried through the body on this very subtle wind energy. And as I mentioned briefly last night, when the body dies, that very subtle mind exits the body. That very subtle mind wind energy exits the body. And because the mind is not formless, it’s not a form, it’s that it is formless, and it is pervasive, it’s able to actually exit the body.
Doesn’t get restricted by the physical form. Now I’m putting my hand here as I have a tendency to think further ahead. When a person dies, that very subtle consciousness or subtle mind exits the body. And there have been many cases of actually observing the body after death. Now there’s two points of death.
I mean, a Western medical perspective, there’s the clinical death, which is when the heart stops beating and the lungs stop breathing. Am I right? Medical people here would know that that’s a clinical point of death. But from a Buddha’s perspective, the death doesn’t actually occur then. That’s like the beginning of a process that carries on.
And depending on the type of death and the type of illness that the person might have died from, or whether it’s been an accident, or whether it’s been a very controlled death and that the person is dying in meditation, which some of these kind of great meditation masters can do, that determines how long it is until the actual death time when the consciousness leaves the body. So if you are around somebody that dies and there is the ability to leave the body undisturbed for a period of time and you very closely watch and observe that body, you can see that a change will take place. You’re nodding your head. You’ve seen this? Yeah.
Joy, you might have seen that as well. Yeah. So it’s it’s I was just talking to you, weren’t I, about death can be incredibly interesting. You know, I mean, Buddhists talk a lot a lot about death, and some people think we’re morbid, but it it can be incredibly interesting. It is such a big part of our lives, but something so often that we completely deny.
So the mind actually exits the body at a later point after clinical death. If, however, you have an accident that kind of kills you immediately, the consciousness will be kind of exiting the body very quickly because of the impact of that accident. So a lot of meditation masters can actually stay sitting in meditation for incredible periods of time. I think maybe in this book, Sogyal Rinpoche’s book, he talks about that at one point. I’ve heard of one monk who actually sat in the meditation posture for twelve months.
Now, he was dead. His heart had stopped beating, his lungs had stopped breathing, but his nails kept growing and his hair kept growing. I mean, unbelievable. I’m a bit skeptical. I haven’t actually seen this and I’m the kind of person, unless I see it, I don’t believe one hundred percent, but I probably would believe maybe eighty percent that that’s true.
Because the people that have told me their stories, I have a lot of trust in. They’ve come up to my standards of making sense when they talk and their actions are accurate. Okay, so this mind thing, although it’s pervading the body, it is something very subtle and it’s going around on this very subtle kind of wind energy in the body. And because of that, because of that connection, it means that the mind has a great impact on the body of what happens to the body. So it’s like the mind is the creator of any sickness or problems.
It’s also the creator of any happiness. So what that is saying from a Buddhist perspective is that any illness or any problems that you have stems back to the mind. And we find that a bit hard in a way because we can see that there are external things that can cause illness, can’t we? However, for that illness to ripen on you, there has to be an inner cause as well. Okay, so it’s like there’s an inner or an internal and an external cause.
I’ll give you a good example of this. These days we say that the sun causes skin cancer, don’t we? Okay. Why is it that there are some people that can go out in the sun, they can be in it all day, they don’t wear their factor fifteen, and they never get skin cancer? But somebody that goes out that really puts on the factor fifteen and the hat and the what do they call them?
Cancer Council kind of swimsuits, head to toes or no, neck to knees, isn’t it? They will get skin cancer. Now where’s the logic in that? That some people can be out in the sun and not get it, whereas others will. So it can’t be that the sun is the only cause.
You can see logically that there must be another cause to enable that to happen. Am I making sense? So that’s an internal cause. And what’s the internal cause? Well, that’s all to do with the mind.
So when we’re talking about the mind, and the mind being the creator of our problems, and the mind being the internal cause of disease and sickness. Well, how? How can the mind do that? How is the mind the creator of that? Any ideas?
You want me to tell you, don’t you? You’re waiting for me to do it. karma comes into it. I think many people would have heard of the word karma. Basically, karma is action.
I think we often have the wrong idea about karma and we always say, oh, well, it’s my karma, like being fatalistic about it. But karma is action which I think is different to being fatalistic. Okay? So what happens is that whenever you create an action, that action lays an imprint on your consciousness, on your mind. I like that.
I work with computers. And for me it’s like saving something on the hard disk. It’s karma or those actions that you create put an imprint on your mind stream. And karma is the law of cause and effect, cause and result. So it’s like you can see it very simply in your daily life that some actions that you do will have a good result, some will have a bad result.
You can see, for example, if you go and I gave this example last night, so please be patient with me, anybody that was here last night as well. You go and thump somebody in the face, you’re likely to get thumped back. If you smile at someone and are kind to someone, then it’s likely that you’ll get that repaid. That will come back to you. You know that if you want to look nice when you go out, then you know you create the cause to look nice by putting on nice clothes, maybe, you know, doing the hair nicely, etc.
See, everything that we do is an action. Everything of our body, of our speech, of our mind is an action. And those actions have a result. Now they can be either a positive, a negative, or a neutral result. And obviously we can see that some actions will bring about a negative result.
For example, killing, stealing, lying, slandering people, things like that. You can see that there’ll be a negative result from those things. You can also see that there are some things that you can do that will bring about a positive result. Being kind, developing compassion, practising generosity, keeping good moral behaviour, you can see that those will be a positive result. Similarly, actions that we create can also result in sickness and suffering, or they can result in happiness and success and health.
So all of this comes back from the mind. It’s the mind that causes you to do these actions which yield these results. So in Buddhism, what we’re saying is that everything that happens to us is a result of actions that we’ve created in the past, whether in this life or in previous lives. And that whatever we do now will determine what will be the outcome in the future. What that kind of does is empower us.
It gives us this total self responsibility. Like it’s up to us to decide and to determine what’s going to happen from now. When we talk about many lives, sometimes it’s a bit of a hard concept to grasp. I’ve been quoted many times as saying that I believe in reincarnation about ninety eight percent. A Buddhist nun says she doesn’t believe one hundred percent in reincarnation.
Well, that’s because, I mean, I have to be honest, I don’t remember my last life. I mean, I don’t remember much of this life, I’m afraid, you know. I can’t remember what I had for dinner two nights ago. Oh yes, can. Leftover curry.
But because I can’t really remember my past life, then I have this open mind about reincarnation. I have, however, met people who really can remember past lives. Mentioned last night Lama Osel who is this Spanish boy who lives in India now and He was born in nineteen eighty-five. He was recognized in early eighty-seven as being the reincarnation of Lama Yeshe who was the founder of the FPMT. I was with him when he was a very young child and he was able to not only identify possessions that had belonged to him in his life as Lama Yeshe, but also he was doing things that we had known him to do as Lama Yeshe.
And the way he related with people, it was really quite remarkable. I mean, for me, it was like proof before my eyes. Anyway, although I don’t have like a one hundred percent sort of total belief in reincarnation, because I don’t have the development of mind, the kind of clarity of mind to be able to remember my past life, I still, having had experience with people who can, pretty much believe that it’s logically the case. Well, again, this is why we’re talking about many lives. So there’s been actions made in some life in the past that have ripened in this life with those circumstances.
They’ve been born into that situation and those circumstances have occurred and it’s the ripening of this karma that has been in the past. And it’s really hard. I mean, you know, it’s like so hard to kind of say, well, that’s not fair, you know, But there’s a lot of things that don’t seem fair, but there is a logical kind of explanation. And really, I’ve been sure I’m coming from the Buddhist perspective, but I’ve tried to think many, many times what the if I didn’t believe in karma, if I didn’t believe in many lives, then the unfairness of it becomes greater. Do you know what I mean?
I can’t find any other sort of logical explanation. So what I was trying to say with this karma and these many lives is that, as I mentioned last night too, people often think, oh gosh, I want to know what I was in my past life, or I want to know what I’m going to be in the future. And there’s this famous saying that if you want to know what you were in the past, then look at your life now. If you want to know what you will be in the future, then look at your life now. So it’s like the hearer and now, the being present now, the working on your mind now is really the most important thing.
What’s happened in the past, well, it’s happened. But what you can do now is actually transform the situation to lead your life, to guide your life to a much better way in the future. So it’s up to you. You can control your own destiny, not just with the mind but including the body and the mind. The potential is there, the power is there.
It’s really up to you. Yeah, that’s a good explanation. Do people hear that? Yeah, I think that’s a good way of putting it. Well, previous lives.
Yeah. I know. I know. Well, it’s group karma. But I mean, I know, I must say, I can’t say one hundred percent again because I don’t have that omniscient mind to be able to say.
However, there have been awakened beings in the past who have had that ability to be able to see that. You know how when you get to know somebody very well, you know that when they do something there’ll be a particular result? I think similarly with someone that’s got a very developed, awakened mind, that does know, is able to know people and situations very well, then again they would be able to see that that action will lead to that result. So I think logically that this karma really has some kind of foundation. And I think that logically if you’ve got the ability to know one individual, could have the ability, if your mind’s developed enough, to know many beings.
So then in that regard, you could see that that’s how it would actually happen. So an awakened person could perhaps see or could definitely see that that’s how the karma would happen. I think if you just say it’s bad luck, let’s just give up now. Just the way it is. Well I think we all have to find what suits us.
When I was about fourteen, a very close friend in the family really liked my sister, was six years old and she died of cancer. Now how could you say that the six year old child had done anything to deserve getting cancer? But again, with this kind of many lives, if we just look at this life, the things that we’ve done that have been pretty stupid, that have caused problems not just for ourselves but for others, you can see that you pretty well developed this life. Obviously, maybe in previous lives, you didn’t have that level of wisdom and understanding and good heartedness that you have now. Could be that possibility.
Well, think this way of thinking anyway about the mind is the creator of the problems through the actions that one commits and the imprints that it’s placed on the mind stream, I’m very much into this empowering yourself, you know, of giving yourself the ability to transform the situation. And so from the Buddha’s perspective, following that kind of logic along of karma and the mind, then the mind becomes the fundamental solution, really. The mind becomes the method to cure you, to cure your delusions and your ignorance and your hatred and all the other kind of things as well as to cure you from disease and from all problems. The mind is the fundamental solution. Basically when we’re talking in terms of healing from a disease, whether it’s a physical disease or a mental disease, then there are two things.
One is to actually stop creating the cause of that disease again in the future. And the second thing is to recover from the disease that you already have. So the mind is the fundamental solution to that. The mind has the ability to stop you from creating the causes of the problems, the sickness, etc, happening again in the future, but also to recover from whatever is happening right at this stage. From a Buddhist perspective, we shouldn’t really just concentrate on what’s happening right now at this minute with this particular set of problems that we might have at the moment.
The view is much broader than that, much more expansive. We’re talking about many lives. We’re talking about not only curing what’s happening in this life, but for the future lives as well so that you don’t have a repetition in the future. Am making sense? So it becomes something really incredibly vast.
And unless you start to see that, unless you start to understand that the mind lays those imprints down, which are the causes for future suffering result, unless you see that, then all you’re doing is like perpetuating this cycle over and over again, committing actions out of these kind of deluded states of mind that are creating the causes for problems in the future. So Buddhism says that in order for lasting healing to occur, not just for what’s happening now, but for the rest of this life and for future lives, then it’s necessary to heal not only the current disease, but to heal the underlying cause of it. Is that clear? And that underlying cause comes from the mind. Because you can see when people take medicines for an illness.
Now some people, that medicine will work, some people it won’t. Again, it depends on the mind. Again, it depends on the karma of the mind, whether there is the cause there to be healed. And unless you heal that root cause, that underneath creator of the problems of the sickness and the illness, all you’ll be doing is taking these medicines over and over and over again. And maybe it’s like you’ve got migraine and you might take some kind of pain killer that will stop the migraine, but the migraine will keep coming back and back and back.
There is something underlying it, you know? And unless that underlying cause is cut off or removed or eradicated, whatever word you want to use, then the migraines will keep coming back. Similarly, unless you remove the causes on your mind stream for experiencing suffering, unless you stop creating those causes for experiencing future suffering, then all you’re going to have coming back time after time is future suffering. There’s no end to it. You’re not able to kind of break off the root cause.
So what we have to do is basically eliminate delusions of our mind that cause us to create the imprints or the seeds for problems and disease. And so that comes about from having a proper understanding of the way we exist, the way we relate to the world, a proper understanding of the kind of unwholesome states of mind that we have, that are just so habitual with us. And that’s the best meditation, like kind of breaking through, cutting off these kind of wrong views or these kind of concrete concepts that we have. And so when we do that, when we cut off all of those things, then we can remove the imprints from our mind and then we can heal ourselves permanently, not just for this life but for the future. So we have to eliminate these negative thoughts.
We have to eliminate their imprints. And then we have to, in fact, replace them with positive thoughts and actions to be able to really heal the mind and body. Am I making sense? So that’s what we’re on about here. We’re on about learning to meditate so that we experience some kind of calmness and clarity in our mind and we understand what the nature of our mind is.
Then following on from that, we start to see how the imprints are placed on our mind as a result of our actions. Then we can see that there are actions that cause suffering results and so we think about abandoning those. Then we can see that there are actions that bring about positive results, healing our minds, healing our bodies, being able to benefit ourselves and others. And we talk about or think about adopting those positive things. I think, I’ve always got so much to talk about.
I don’t want to overload you. But I think that’s sort of the fundamental kind of stuff. And I think we do need to be clear about what this healing is. So is everyone clear now when I’m saying healing? I’m talking about really healing the mind and as a result of healing the mind, then we can heal the body.
Oh no, I mean again it’s Well, no. If you truly heal the mind, then I think the body can be healed. But when we’re talking about healing the mind, we’re talking about cutting off the actions that bring about an unhappy or a suffering result and eliminating those actions that are already laid down on your mind stream from previous actions, previous lives. Now in Buddhism there’s all kinds of different practices for this, many different things. Might just briefly talk about them.
This lady in Canada that I talked about, she was a management consultant and she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she was given three months to live. It always amazes me when doctors say, oh you’ve got three months, you’ve got six months. I mean, it’s just really kind of a very strange thing to do because who can tell? Who can tell? Anyway, she wasn’t Buddhist at all, but her friend was.
Her friend suggested that she get in contact with my teacher, Lama Zopa. So he suggested that she do all these different practices. One was to do a lot of meditation and particular visualization type of meditation. Another one of the practices was to save lives. Supposed to save as many lives as her age.
But she went even further and she was saving thousands and thousands of lives. Now saving lives can be as simple as stopping someone from squashing a mosquito to animals that are just about to be slaughtered, buying them and releasing them somewhere. I went to the Sydney fish markets once and bought all these crabs. And then I had to go and kind of release them somewhere. Sounds a bit, you know.
Anyway, so it sounds a weird practice, doesn’t it? Saving all these lives. But the idea behind it is that because you’re prolonging someone else’s life, it helps to create the cause to prolong your life. That action, again, is making an imprint on your mind stream and having some benefit. Anyway, so dear Anne, she got into this wholeheartedly.
Know, it was like, well, the doctors said they couldn’t do anything for her, so it was like, well, I’ll try anything. So she was doing a lot of meditation. She was a management consultant. She sort of stopped doing her business and she really concentrated very hard on doing this meditation and of releasing and saving lives of animals and doing other things. She went for her checkup after a number of months.
No trace of the cancer anymore. Doctors just couldn’t believe it. And sort of said, What have you been doing? And she said, Oh, I’ve been doing a bit of meditation. And they said, Well, it’s working, obviously.
Keep it up. So after a little while, she felt well and no trace of the cancer. So you know what she did, don’t you? She went back to a normal life. She went back to being a management consultant, incredibly busy kind of lifestyle, racing around, stressed, you know.
No time for meditation. She went back twelve months later for a checkup, and you know what happened now, don’t you? Cancer was back. She thought, oh, well, I know what worked last time. Well, I’ll start doing it again.
She started doing it again. Again, went back for a checkup, cancer gone again. This went on three times, but it took three times for her to finally realize that this was something that she had to do every day of her life. She had to make those fundamental changes in her life for always. And so now she’s very, very well, and the doctors wanted to write a book.
So I think what we’re trying to say is that it’s very much dependent upon how sincere you are, how much you persevere, what kind of karma you have from the past, whether you can purify that karma, all of those kinds of things. The beautiful thing about karma is that you can purify. I mean, like if you’ve done something bad in the past, you can actually do something to stop those imprints on your mind from ripening, which I think is just really liberating. It’s very important to know that. Okay, so we’ve got clear the connection now about the mind with the body and how the mind can be the creator of problems, how it can also heal the mind and body and how the reason behind that the causes that we create, the actions that we do that lay imprints on the mind stream, and that it’s the kind of unwholesome behaviors that we do that causes the suffering result.
Just one final thing that I wanted to say about that. Why do you think we create negative actions or we do or or we have, like, unwholesome kind of behavior But why are we creating why do we create negative karma? Well, they’re all sort of around and certainly integrated and part of it. Think the ego thing is very important. What is underlying it is the fact that we have what we call self-cherishing or self grasping.
We all know that we want to be happy, right? And that we don’t want to suffer. And so what we do is continually, every action that we create is basically out of that motivation of being happy and not suffering. But it’s the ignorance or the misguided way of thinking that means that we don’t really know how to go about it, that we don’t really know how to bring about happiness and to eliminate suffering. But underlying it, every action that we do is this kind of self grasping.
Now I bet some of you will say, look, I don’t agree with you there, Kay, because some of the nicest people I know are the people that have incredible sickness. Right? Yep. Fat and jolly. Fat and Jolly.
So it’s a very, very kind that’s an interesting question, isn’t it? And I think I think what happens is that that, again, even even when you give out to somebody all the time and you can kind of be labeled as being a good person who’s always helping others, who’s giving out all the time, Often even that, the motivation behind it may be not so balanced. And I think often when people are sick, they talk about, you know, whatever they’re doing is for the benefit of others at the expense of themselves. There’s got to be this incredible balance, you know, between balance and proper correct motivation. I don’t know if I’m making sense here.
Between looking after yourself and benefiting others. So a motivation to help others, which is not based on what it will mean for you. See, a lot of people, what we call do gooders, whose motivation for helping others is really to get some kind of self satisfaction. So there’s got to be a real honesty, I think. And then I think a lot of people get caught into this trap of giving, giving, giving, giving all the time and never think about to themselves.
It’s also important to give to yourself. There’s got to be this balance. It was very interesting hearing when people were doing the introduction today, people that were involved with caring professions and who talk about healing themselves first or understanding themselves first in order to be able to benefit others. That’s really important. There’s got to be that logical kind of approach, common sense and care and consideration for yourself as well as for others.
In fact, in Mahāyāna Buddhism we talk a lot about motivation, of benefitting others, of compassion for others. Well, I always consider myself when I talk like that as being one of the others. Often we think we’re inconsequential, but that’s not right either. We’re part of the whole so we have to kind of look after each other. I’ll be talking later on today about compassion and equanimity and things like that.
It’s absolutely essential that you have that care and concern for yourself and compassion for yourself before you can really generate it truly for others. Gosh, I talk so much. Oh, no, you must be getting sick of my voice. So, gosh, I’ve really gone over time. I want to try and do a bit of a so we got any kind of questions about that material?
Did everyone hear that question? Stephen was asking about what’s my view of these Buddhist masters who contract terminal illnesses and things. Well, they are still in a human form, and a human form is subject, of course, to decay and old age and things like that. Also, although they may appear to be well developed in comparison to us and have incredible levels of compassion and wisdom, etc, they’re not necessarily fully awakened. They haven’t necessarily overcome all the mental delusions.
So they would still be creating karma. They would still be creating the causes. That’s one angle. The other angle is that often people say, I’m not quite sure of this, but often people say that they often manifest these illnesses for us to learn from. I’m not quite so sure about that.
But I think, realistically, although they are further along the spiritual path than us, they are still subject to the delusions and creating the causes and may not have completely purified actions from the past as well. It’s a little bit hard to get into that stuff too much. I think what we’ll do with our meditation is actually to start to get a feeling for the true nature of our mind. I think what happens is from that, the awareness comes so that you’re able to start catching yourself. But the aim of this weekend is really not to get too much into that.
There’s just so much material to try and cover in a weekend like this. So I’m afraid I don’t think we’ll get into it, but maybe that’s something in our discussion groups that we could try and explore a little bit further rather than me actually do a great presentation on that. It would be useful to hear from you, you know, your feelings about that as well. Well, think all of us die. It’s going to happen at some time.
That’s one of the main things we talk about in Buddhism, that death is certain, time is uncertain, how is uncertain, and what can you take with you. You can’t take your friends, you can’t take your possessions, you can’t take your wealth. The only thing that you can take with you is the development of your mind. Did everyone hear that? Yeah, I think that’s very, very important.
Great questions! What they call Buddha mind or awakened mind is a state where the mind is completely omniscient. It’s able to see and know all things. But it also has reached a point where it is not subject to karma anymore, that it’s passed beyond what we call cyclic existence. cyclic existence is this cycle of, birth, old age, like sickness, old age and death, you know, this kind of constant cycle that we go in.
And so the awakened mind, the fully awakened mind or the enlightened mind, we often talk about enlightenment, is the mind that is not subject to that cycle any longer. Now it doesn’t say that there’s a kind of a space up there that they go up and sit, you know, and just sort of feel blissed out forever and a day, you know. Because that mind is the enlightened mind is the full perfection of wisdom and compassion. So that awakened mind would want to manifest in a way so as to benefit others. So it’s not sitting in a space anywhere, and as we already have said, mind is not a physical kind of thing.
So that sort of awakened mind manifests in whatever way to be able to benefit others. When I got into Buddhism, thought, well, you know, if there are Buddhas out there that have got and I mean, it’s not just been one Buddha. There’s been many Buddhas and there’ll be Buddhas in the future and hopefully I’m gonna be one of them. But oh god, lost my train of thought. What was that I was going to say?
Yeah, know, I got completely carried away, didn’t I? The prospect was so wonderful. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. So they’ve got they’ve got that compassion motivation. So, oh, I know what I was going to say.
You know, I used to think, well, why can’t they, you know, just come here and go zap, you know, and we’ll be alright, you know. It’s because, you know, it’s really hard to describe. It’s it’s like they can you I know. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. It’s that kind of thing.
A Buddha can show you the way, an awakened being can show you the way, but they can’t transform your mind. They can’t actually do it for you. You’ve got to do it yourself, which I find a bit disappointing really. Out of their compassion, they would manifest in order to be able to help lead you along the path. No.
Isn’t that amazing? They say that an awakened mind can even manifest as a bridge across the water so that people can get from one side to the other. Yes, well, I have an open mind about that one too. So, yeah, so they say that it doesn’t have to be, you know, a sentient life, which is the life we’ve, you know, like we’ve got. Good.
Oh, sorry. No. Just teasing. I love these kind of questions. This is another thing that I’ve been a little bit like.
Oh, yes. Well, you know when I was saying about the causes of disease, there’s internal and external cause. External cause can also be like spirit harm. Oh, find that stuff really hard actually. Yes, so many different types of things.
We’re very limited in our view of existence and of the world and human life and things like that. But basically in Buddhist cosmology, which I don’t really know thoroughly at all, there are form and formless realms. And so the formless realms is like where spirits would be, you know. They’ve been reborn there as part of this kind of cyclic existence thing, but they’ve been reborn there without form. Okay.
And so they can still have some kind of they’re in like malevolent spirits that could have some some impact or can harm you. But they can only harm you if your mind allows it to, like if you’ve created the cause for it. So again, they can be there and have no impact on you if your mind is looked after in the right way. I do find it difficult to talk about that stuff because I don’t really I think it’s a ninety eight percent job again. I’ve got a few of those, haven’t I?
Guess I’ve always been I was brought up Presbyterian, and I’ve always been skeptical of stuff like that. And I’ve always been the kind of person that I’ve really got to see things for myself, experience things for myself to be able to believe it. But for other people it may be much easier. I really want to do this white light meditation but it’s five to one and our cook will be kind of right on time, won’t she? So we’ll have to do that one after lunch, which is a shame because I really like to do a couple of meditations in the morning.
Is that okay? Have a terrible habit. I think, you know, there’s just so much involved with all of this stuff to talk about and to think about. Really, the idea is to try and give as good a foundation as possible for understanding our mind and understanding the way of bringing about the healing process. Gosh, I think we can’t underestimate the power of our own minds and the potential that we have.
Think someone mentioned earlier about changing their life from doing to being. Was that you? Yes, I thought it was someone from over that side. I think that’s one of the things that I’d really like people to go away with after this weekend, is the ability just to be, to allow that space rather than continually be doing. Although in meditation, do meditations that are in ways active because you’re thinking about something or you could be analyzing a particular topic.
It’s very important to have that kind of meditation time where you are just being, just concentrating the breath and just sitting with that sensation and not be thinking too much because I think in our lives it’s so habitual to whatever we do. It’s always doing rather than just being. And I think that’s how life escapes us. And it’s when you have an illness or a problem that suddenly you get pulled up short and have to start taking a good hard long look. There’s this tendency for life just to go racing by without us even realizing that we’re living it.
Do people find that? Yeah, I sometimes wonder, you know, here I am, the Buddhist nun. And I think I’m actually far busier now than I ever was before. And sometimes, you know, I get to an end of a week or an end of a month, I might have one free weekend a and I sort of go, oh, what’s happened? It’s sort of like that whole time has gone past and I’ve just been running from one thing to the other and I haven’t allowed myself the time to just be and to be aware of what’s going on.
And it’s like just such a kind of habitual trait that we sort of slip into. So it’s very, very important to give ourselves that time. Sometimes it may seem a little bit self indulgent, but it’s absolutely essential to be able to be healthy in our minds and bodies and to be able to benefit others. Absolutely essential to give yourself that kind of space. So we’ve got any other questions before we break?
Well, there’s a whole lot of things that happen. There’s a very peaceful look that comes over the face, isn’t it? A very peaceful kind of appearance. That’s one thing. The other thing is that the heat in the body starts to absorb into the heart regions so that you’d find like the feet and the hands, the extremities of the body start to get cold as the heat sort of goes in.
And so there are those kind of external signs. And then when I’m talking about the consciousness leaving the body, it’s interesting. You can actually sometimes see the hair on the crown moving a little bit, you know? Or there’s some kind of I don’t know how to explain. It’s just like there’s some point that you see like something’s left, you know, that the mind or the spirit or whatever has left.
And it can be a very subtle thing and sometimes you can be like really looking and waiting and watching and you don’t ever see it. There’s been great stories of meditation masters who have died. When the consciousness has left the body, there’s been a big windstorm or there’s been a big storm or something like that has happened, or that there’s been this storm raging on as they’re going through the dying thing. And when the consciousness leaves, that everything becomes completely calm and still. So there’s been, you know, kind of external, events happening at the same time.
It’s quite interesting, I find. Quite interesting. I just really want to be aware, if possible, when I die. I really want to get it right because there are many different stages. I think this book goes into the different stages again.
There’s sort of these external things that are happening and the internal things. It’s like you lose your power to hear and everything becomes like a mirage. You can’t see, it becomes like a mirage. Then there are different kinds of visions that you go through and then it gets to a point that you reach what they call this clear light. This clear light is a very important kind of thing to rest in and to get to.
On the way, there are kind of these visions that you may have which, if you’re not prepared for it, they can actually freak you out a bit. So the idea is like you know, I would try and rehearse almost for my death. I try and do that every day. I try and imagine and meditate on these visions that occur so that when the death time comes, it’s like, oh yeah, I know this one. Yep, and I know what’s coming next, you know.
So that the idea is that I get to rest in this clear light because it’s from this clear light that you can actually, you can control if you developed enough, you can control where you would take rebirth. Most of us in our kind of this cyclic existence I was talking about of, you know, rebirth, old age, sickness, death stuff, are just blown by what they call blown by the winds of karma, which sounds very kind of nice. But basically, our karma kind of just throws us to take rebirth in different forms, like animals and humans and things like that. So it’s sort of almost like uncontrolled because the karma has been created out of ignorance. So with these Lamas who remember their past lives and are kind of discovered, etc, they’ve been able to determine where they’ll be reborn.
Like Lama Osel, his reincarnation of Lama Yeshe, and Lama Yeshe actually left hints with different people that when you put all the information together, gave a clear direction about where he was going to be reborn. And There was one videotape made with him about five years before he died and he was actually saying on this video that next life he’d like this woman to be his mother stuff like that. It was sort of a bit of a joke at the time. Well, she ended up being his mother. This woman was the mother of Lama Osel.
So they are able to kind of predict and determine where they will be reborn, if you’ve got that developed level of mind. So from my perspective, that’s what I want to try and do. I want to get the clear light going to say, okay, this one I’ll do. No. I don’t believe that.
I actually think that it’s more uncontrolled. You know? It’s like if they had to learn that lesson. I can’t come at that. I think it’s more out of ignorance that you create the causes that throw you into that situation.
Don’t know what kind of lesson do you learn out of being in a war zone or being born and starving to death? Yeah, maybe. I don’t know, I think I find more logic in this more uncontrolled way of thinking. But that’s my personal belief, which is not to say that I denigrate if that’s your personal belief because I can’t say categorically what’s right and what’s wrong and I’d be foolish to do that. It’s more up to the individual to decide for themselves what is the most appropriate way of believing.
I don’t think we actually choose it. Like when we die and we’re kind of in that in between state before we take another rebirth, I don’t think we necessarily sit there and say, okay, know, this one’s gonna be my parent, you know? I mean, course, there have to be sort of a number of conditions present for you to be able to take rebirth. For example, there has to be the man and the woman in union and stuff like that. In ways you do, you don’t actually pick it, but in ways you have that karmic connection with those people.
That karmic connection because of past experiences, the karma in your mind stream, their karma, of that kind of stuff. So I think, I mean, there’s this one example in the teachings they give of this family and how, I can’t remember the story very clearly, but something about kicking the dog and eating a fish and all this kind of stuff. And it turned out like the dog was the mother of someone in the previous life. And so all of the people in that situation where the dog was being kicked and the fish was being eaten and the husband was arguing with the wife or something like that, they had all been in different kind of relationships with each other in a previous life. So there’s obviously that kind of karmic connection with the people that we are close with in this life.
I mean, there is some connection, and so next life, we will probably have contact with them, but the nature of the relationship could well be changed. So it’s like my mother in this life, in my next life, you know, I was gonna say it might be my son, but I mean, I’m hoping that I’ll be ordained next life. You know, yeah, you know what I mean. You know what I mean. Alright, well look, I think we should break for lunch now but how about we just spend just a couple of moments just sitting quietly and trying to just concentrate on our breath only for a couple of moments just to almost whenever we meditate and do things like that, should motivate at the beginning and we should dedicate at the end.
So let’s just spend a couple of moments sort of just thinking that, you know, our hearing this kind of information and discussing and doing meditation, may we dedicate it that we bring about a state of ultimate healing and happiness for ourselves and for all beings.