Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 51-minute talk, Ven Robina Courtin challenges practitioners to move beyond intellectual knowledge of death into lived understanding. She begins with human rebirth—not accidental, but the fruit of past virtue—and argues why this rare fortune should stop us from wasting our life through anger and attachment. She then addresses impermanence directly: why we know these truths intellectually yet live as permanent. Using vivid examples—a breaking cup, Princess Diana, a friend’s sudden passing—she exposes how the fantasy of permanence shapes all our relationships and creates suffering. She describes the eight Tibetan Buddhist stages of dying: the dissolution of the four elements, the progressive fading of senses and gross consciousness, and finally the subsistence of subtle consciousness at the heart centre. Direct and unflinching throughout, she refuses easy answers, meeting each objection with sharp logic.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 DAR 2003 06 21.mp3
UUID: 7d05c52d-8e7c-4c6b-89e8-8dc18dd19ef5
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 51.8 minutes
Words: ~10,768
That’s all. That’s the meaning. Yeah. That’s what what it’s saying is that we’ve all got this mind and we’ve all had this it’s a continuity, beginningless continuity of mental moments and it’s continually taking some kind of form based on this, you know, this this action of karma, this proactive energy, proactive kind of law of cause and effect that whatever we do, say, and think produces results, you know, and results in terms of our own mind, meaning our future experiences. So any living being at any given moment, as we talked yesterday and as we’ll go more today and tomorrow, we’re continually experiencing the fruits of past, you know, because you’re looking at your garden, you know perfectly well.
The fruits that are there are the fruits of seeds that were planted, you know. Whether you like the fruits or not, they are they’re coming from seeds. And so if we look at ourselves like this in a very broad way, I am the fruit of past seeds. Well, the Buddhist view would be, and again, we need to think about it, is that our being born human is no accident. And we just have to look at the you know, just do a comparison, do of market research on this earth, you know?
Without any judgment or guilt, it’s a question of just comparing our situation here in Adelaide, sitting here with, like I said yesterday, this this pleasant environment and reasonable politics and reasonable health and reasonable wealth and reasonable friends reasonable jobs and reasonable conditions actually is a miracle. It’s like stunning. It’s like we’ve run the lottery, you know? If you look at the the number of people in the world, I mean, even just in general for me, seeing I mean, just in different places, the suffering is just intense, not to mention mental suffering, but the physical suffering, you know, of just so many people living I mean, I go to I go to Israel to teach every year. I went to Lebanon this year.
And still after thirty years, Lebanon’s still completely or fifteen or whenever the war stopped, I don’t remember. Just lived mean, all these people I knew, you know, they lived they’re brought up in a war zone. Fear, paranoia, family dying. I mean, just every day, you know. That kind of thing is unbelievable when you think about it.
So when we compare our life, which we sort of take for granted, you know. The the Buddhist approach is is that this is not it’s not an accident. Nothing we have is an accident. It’s not random. It wasn’t given to us by somebody.
It is it’s it’s the fruit of karma. So if we can look at our life and see it’s harmonious and reasonable and we’re intelligent, we got nice we’re nice to look at and have good friends and lots of support, I mean, that’s the fruit of incredible hard work on our part, Buddha says. Because everything, any giving being, every living being is experiencing is the fruit of their own actions. We’re the creators of our own reality, every you know, from life to life and from moment to moment, Buddha says. So we just compare and look at our situation.
It’s like a miracle, actually. It’d be extremely humbling if we could get this. And the main point here a teacher has is we think about this, the fortunate situation we’ve got, and the and the and the unfortunate situations that we don’t have, you know, which aren’t an accident, are the fruit of my hard work, then would cause us to really have a lot of energy to not waste this precious life, you know, that I worked so hard to get. So it’s a bit like it’s it’s sort of the attitude of, you know, even just something using a simple example like money, you know. It’s it’s simply if you see it properly, it’s just a resource.
These little pieces of paper with, you know, well, actually they’re plastic here, aren’t they? With numbers in the corner, they have no inherent value. I mean, it’s too small to wrap anything and you can’t do anything with it. It’s useless. And now as it’s not paper, you can’t even use it the toilet.
You know what I mean? It’s sort of useless pieces of stuff and they’re kinda weird looking. So in their nature, themself, of course they’re useless, but when we understand the meaning of money, then as a resource, we can use it for the most marvelous things. I mean, it’s got you know, it’s incredible. It’s a resource.
And now we also know that resource, it didn’t come from out of the sky. We know every single every single one with five on the corner has value because we worked for it. We can see it in terms of the amount of work we did, you know. So to waste a five one, to waste one will be of, oh, like a loss, wouldn’t it? What a waste.
Because we know it’s a resource, we know it has value, we know we can get something with it, and we know it came from something, our hard work. So for this reason, we have a we put a lot of value. If we found one of those little red ones on the street, we’d be very excited. Oh, look, there’s five dollars, we’d say. Really like we found something good.
Because not because, again, it’s inherent value, it’s because we understand its meaning. So the Buddhist is here, Atisha is saying we should think this way. We just think take ourself for granted. Well, I’m just here, this thing, I’m plonked on this earth. I didn’t ask to get bored, all these problems, blah, you know, what a drag, life’s a bother.
I mean, look at us, we’re miserable, you know? World can be. And but the Buddha is saying if we really understood that we’re this incredible resource, with every single thing, the fact that we have hands, Dalai Lama said, look, these hands are made for affection, he said. Look at them, you know. They’re made they’re soft.
They’re made for affection. They’re it’s the sweetest phrase, you know. This didn’t come from nothing. This came from our past, kindness. We’re born in a human body with a human mind that is intelligent, that can make choices, that and then most especially, we’ve got this you know, we have all these appropriate conditions that allow us, that enable us to access our inner aspirations.
This is the miracle of this human birth that we’ve got. If you’re living in a war zone, excuse me, you don’t have the luxury of accessing your inner aspirations. You’re just struggling to survive at the most paranoid level. We have this miracle of of reasonable peace, sanity, and wealth, and health that enables us to go more deeply, to be sitting in the luxury, you know, so called luxury even of this room, sitting on hard chairs, still an incredible luxury, you know. The luxury of contemplating using this marvelous mental potential we all have to investigate the nature of reality.
What is the meaning of life? What is good? What is bad? What is the purpose of everything? That’s incredible, you know.
We take it for granted though, but it’s the fruit of our past work. Basically, we worked hard to set ourselves up in this scenario so how tragic to waste it. This is the attitude, you know. So sort of like Atish is saying, by thinking in this kind of way, it primes ourself to want to use this precious resource. To do what?
To develop this innate potential that we talked about, you know? So just a way of priming our minds, really thinking about it. That’s all. This so called precious human rebirth, you know. But it doesn’t happen overnight.
One has to think about it again and again. It’s a new attitude. It’s like you’ve never heard of money and you see all these little kind of oblong shapes of plastic. You know, you got a whole cupboard full of them and you’ve you’ve got lost your memory. You have no clue.
You have these boring things. You put them away every day. You have no clue. Someone comes along and really faint because you’ve got all this stuff. So you have to educate yourself about the meaning, don’t you?
Well, we have to educate ourselves by thinking about our life in this way as a as a resource. Therefore, would have enormous respect for ourselves, enormous kindness towards ourselves, enormous gratitude for the hard work we must have done. Therefore, the wish to use this precious resource to treat it with enormous respect and utilize it appropriately. In other words, utilizing this resource appropriately would be the very minimum use of this resource, this human life, the very minimum use, and this is actually the practice of the first scope, is to refrain from harming others. This is the minimum use.
Refrain from harming others. Just zip your lip and keep your hands to yourself, you know. If we did this much on this earth, the world would be blissful. I tell you, if we just didn’t lie, didn’t kill, didn’t steal, didn’t this, didn’t that, no one would ever get harmed ever because it took look, it’s our body and our speech that harms others. It comes from the mind, yes, but the body and speech.
So the very minimum level of practice, the very minimum thing we can do with this resource of a human life is refrain from harming others. In other words, a very simple way of saying this is, if what we are is the fruit of incredible morality and hard work and spiritual practice and virtue and not harming others in the past, which is the direct core of having hands made for affection, intelligent minds, good hearts, good environment, good conditions. It’s not just it’s not just caused less, it’s caused by our past accumulation of practice and virtue. So if that’s true, then it’s obvious that wasting this resource is doing less than that again, isn’t it? In other words, harming others with this body and speech, harm is is the way to totally harm ourself.
It’s like using it’s like it’s like, you know, insulting. It’s like it’s like using money for toilet paper. It’s a completely it’s a stupid thing to do, you know, because it has value. Not not absolute value because you’ve given it this value and it’s a resource you can use. So the same with this human life, you know, so to treat it with respect, our self with respect.
And the way to treat our self with respect and not waste this precious human resource is to not use it, you know, to do things to harm others, which in turn is what harms us. This is the point. So thinking in these kind of ways, you know. Then this moves us on very naturally to the next point which is the first point on the first scope, which is this thing Buddha’s view about impermanence. So in Buddha’s teachings, are very extensive presentation of how things you know, and again, we’re talking about how things exist here.
This is one this is a view that Buddha has about how things exist, that things exist in in impermanently. And and again, of course, the point is to get the experiential implication of this. The very extensive presentation of Buddha that everything has, you know, is impermanent. They talk about gross impermanence and subtle impermanence. And so in order in order to really access, you know, to really get in touch with how things exist at a subtle level of being impermanent or having and it’s very similar to the view of emptiness.
We could easily mistake them actually, but it’s a stepping stone to emptiness. It’s quite subtle of how there’s nothing that we can kind of hang on to because as soon as you get it, it’s already changing, you know, on quite a subtle level. And that’s most fascinating and very interesting and need we need to get in touch with that. But what Atisha is doing at this point is very skillfully moving us on from contemplation of perfect human rebirth, like the life is so precious. Then he gets us to contemplate impermanence in terms of one’s own self, death.
Why? It’s like to continue to energize us to not want to waste this life. Well, in each of these points, we’re moving to the point where we begin to actually practice, which is the first, know, the culmination of this first scope, which is the practice of abiding by the laws of morality, the laws of karma. We’re moving up towards that, so we’re priming ourselves all the way. So contemplate impermanence in relation to one’s own death is a very appropriate thing to do in order to continue to energize us not to waste this precious resource that we work so hard to get, you know.
So why we would why so we think, well, I said, I know I’m impermanent. Yes. I know I’m going to die. Next, please, we think, you know, come on, Buddha. Give me something more intelligent to get my teeth into.
He says, no, I’m sorry. We all know the words. We are impermanent, that I will die. But he says if we begin to look into experience, we will see that we’re living in a fantasy world in relation to this because we’re actually acting as if we’re permanent. Deep in our bones, we have this assumption that I’m permanent.
My relationships are permanent. The situation as it is is permanent, meaning not changing. And it’s much to do with wishful thinking. You know? So, you know, we have this all these wrong views.
Even about my little old cup here, let’s say. You know, let’s say the more you’re attached to something, and there’s cup, you know, that I like my cup. Where’s my cup? There’s my cup. You expect your cup to be there, don’t you, every day.
There’s my cup. Nice and shiny. You know, even now when I look at it and inside, it’s a bit faded because of the tea being in there, you know, I think, oh, it’s getting a bit bad, my cup. But every day, have this idea of my cup. It gets a bit dirty, you know.
Like this. So you have this view of your cup, you’re attached to it, and it it builds up this energy around it. And so then you have this expectation that it will be there, and you expect it to be there. It must be there because you want it to be there. Well, that’s seeing it as permanent.
And then if it gets bumped and you get upset, well, you don’t like to see it because you have this view, you have this picture in your mind of your nice shiny cup, you know. So then my cup breaks, let’s say, and I sort of suffer and am unhappy. What’s wrong, Robina? And I’ll say, well, my cup broke. And then everybody will understand.
No argument needed. Everybody would understand perfectly why I’m suffering. But Buddha’s saying this, it’s a mistake. You’re not suffering because your cup broke. You’re not suffering.
That’s the wrong reason to think you’re suffering. You’re suffering because you thought your cup shouldn’t break. In other words, you had a wrong view, a wrong expectation. And it’s deep in our bones. We take it for granted.
It’s so spontaneous in us. And even though we know the words, experientially, emotionally, we actually have it completely wrong. So in cups and look at our relationships. Look at our daily life, you know. We put up all this expectation.
We in other words, we’re seeing it as permanent. We have an expectation, a view that it will be like that, that your house will be there when you get home, that the person who you live with will be there when you come home. We build this up, this view so strongly, and then to the to the extent that when it’s not there, we are shattered. We call grief, for example, when someone else dies. What we mean by grief, even the way they talk about it, isn’t it, Kubler Ross and all that stuff they did those years, you know?
You first have denial, then you have anger, then you have kind of acceptance, and there’s this grief. There’s this gradual process we have to go through that we take as sort of real. But excuse me, it’s only because we have fantasy of permanence that we have to do that. A person who’s really realized impermanence by much meditating, you know, has internalized this. Internalized this.
There wouldn’t be that kind of grief. And I don’t mean by that they just not care. Oh, well, my husband’s dead. That’s alright. Next, you know.
Of course, because there’s this karmic connection with that person, there’d be enormous sadness and tears. But it wouldn’t be this heart wrenching, heart splitting, terrible depression, terrible depression, denial, having to build up something again. That only comes one of the things is because of this enormous view, a view held as truth that this relationship’s permanent, that he will be there, you know, because we have this fantasy. And we don’t even notice we have it. This is we only notice we have it when the opposite happens, when it’s when it’s confronted, you know.
And this is again the theme, Buddha’s view that we’ve got these wrong conceptions, we have these misconceptions in our mind deep in the bones of our being that we have to confront by essentially arguing, using wisdom to argue with these misconceptions, you know. So, okay, Atisha gets us very specifically to contemplate one’s own impermanence, not to make us depressed, but to wake us up. It’s just the method, that’s all, you know. And it’s again, it’s just truth. We’re not trying to brainwash ourselves about something that isn’t true.
Buddha’s key point is that we’re not in touch with reality and it’s to that extent that we suffer, you see. So we’re trying to shift this major one here right at the first step by contemplating impermanence. So the very first point, Buddha Atisha talks about it in three points or three things to contemplate. The first one is that death is definite. So like I said, you know, excuse me, Buddha.
I know that, but we don’t as he’s saying. We have to look at that, you know. So we contemplate in many simple ways. We’re using simple little arguments to prove to ourself experientially that death is definite. To kind of wake up to even that simple fact, to experientially wake up to it.
So, you know, as long as I’ve said, Rinpoche says, for example, we all think that we’re living people. I’m a living person, we say. And then, you know, who’s dying? I’m not dying. My old friend in hospital’s dying.
My old grandma’s dying. The person with AIDS is dying. They’re dying people. And look at the view we have when we say it. It’s like the universe is this two, there’s this huge difference between living people and dying people.
And as soon as you hear your friends dying, you kinda talk in hush whispers, you know. And always you talk about the person only in reference to their sickness. You never see them in any other way except through the filter of, you know, this sick person. Everything is referred to that fact that they are dying. My god, he’s dying, you know.
You visit your dying auntie, how are you, you know, you feel well. I mean, you understand what I’m saying? Excuse me, if they hadn’t told you, you’d be treating him like a normal person. So it’s a fantasy. It’s these labels we have that are stunning, you know.
So it it it’s just a huge projection of all our misconceptions packed into that simple word. So you know, we I’m a living person. What do we mean by living person? What do we mean by it? We mean I mean, you look at the logic.
We don’t think of it, but you analyze it just like this. The logic is, I’m not old. Okay, we can see we adjust that. Every year we adjust that. I’m adjusting that all the time, know.
I’m fifty eight now, but when I was thirty, oh my god, fifty eight is old, you know. But then I think fifty eight, that’s not old, eighty is old, you know. Which is a relative, isn’t it? We keep adjusting that one. We certainly feel I’m not old.
That’s a valid reason to say I’m a living person. The other one is we’re we’re we’re not we’re not sick, which is a bit ephemeral. We can see that lots of, you know, well people die. And the most ridiculous of all, the most ridiculous one we totally believe, we say, I feel good. We say, oh, I feel so alive.
Or we say, oh, I feel like death. I mean, how interesting, you know? Feeling alive is gonna be a cause to make you keep alive. I mean, excuse me, princess Diana, remember princess Diana, thirty six, gorgeous, healthy, blissful, she died, you know? I’m sorry, the logic is not meaningful.
It’s not logic, it’s ego’s logic, it’s fantasy, it’s wishful thinking. It’s In other words, it’s our inability to be in touch with reality. That’s the interesting point. So we live in a fantasy world projected, made up by our mind, but we think it’s truth. Now we think we’re in scientific.
We think we don’t just believe in something. We’re always scientific. I’m not religious, know. I don’t believe in things. It’s ridiculous.
Excuse me, it’s embarrassing to see it, but we have so many beliefs based on no logic whatsoever as far as Buddha’s concerned, and you check out that he’s true. We believe in tomorrow as an absolute truth. Okay? If we said to ourselves now, oh, I’ll die today. It’s like a it’s like a joke.
We’d all laugh, you know? Now as as Rinpoche, I think somebody pointed out one and a half million people will die today. They’re all living people, and I bet you most of them are not dying living people. Young people, babies, happy people, you know, healthy people. They just breathe I mean, my friend Gunther, who worked at our center in Brisbane, who was doing all our books and everything.
It’s interesting, you know, you just expect Gunther to be there. And he set up an account for us. We haven’t quite got our nonprofit yet, the Liberation Prison Project, and he’s he’s a wonderful guy. He does the accounts for the center there, and he did our accounts, and he was the only signatory. I never thought about it, and then he drops dead.
He stopped he just stopped breathing one day and he fell on his floor, you know. His wife came home, there he is. Gunther’s dead. That’s causing all these problems now. Mean, I’m just this is a sign because we assume he’s normal.
You assume he’s permanent, you know. And now with the the money’s in his because it’s not we’re not a nonprofit yet. The money’s in his estate. We can’t get it. We gotta do this and do that.
But No one expected Gunther to die. Then we think, well, excuse me, you gotta prepare us if you’re gonna die? And Lama Zopa says, yes. Best is to think I will die today. Best, I will die today.
Now, I mean, to get to that point of realizing it is so shocking that it would mean such profound change in our life that is actually too scary for us. We’d have to do it step by step. Because if if, you know, there’s a really nice meditation we could do, one could do, you contemplate. We’ve got very vivid creative imaginations, by the way. We can use them for any creative fantasy we wish.
So how, you know, contemplate the fantasy that you’re gonna die today. Actually convince yourself you’re gonna die this evening. So then think, what will I do between now and then? It will be so much shifting, so much shift you’d have to make in your mind and your attitudes and your assumptions, it will be overwhelming, I tell you. Because you’d suddenly get a completely different sense of priorities, wouldn’t you?
It’s like any, you know, any kind of set of any kind of sense of, you know, deadline coming. If suddenly you have to get, you know, an urgent flight somewhere, somewhere or, you know, normally you’d be relaxed sitting back and these thousand things to do and I’ll this, I’ll do that, and I’ll get that done tomorrow, I’ll do this and then, and suddenly you got this dreadful deadline to get on this flight to do this urgent thing. Well, suddenly you’d really cut your priorities right down, wouldn’t you? You’d really hone it down. You’d do everything in the context of that deadline.
You suddenly got a very short time left, then you’d really get something done, wouldn’t you? We all know that. We’ve gotta get something ready by a certain time. Well, it’s a good way to think of your life. But we think of our life as being this endless thing.
We know we’re gonna die, but it’s like it’s as if we’re driving on the road, and we all know if you drive on the road, you’re going to Sydney, let’s say. You know how many kilometer it is. Every minute you’re driving, you’re always driving. You’re experiencing the journey as you go each moment, you’re experiencing it, but you’re experiencing it too in the context of how far away Sydney is. So you’re checking the kilometer, you know, the the board.
Oh, only got four hundred to go, then I’ve got three hundred and fifty, there’s only much time, then I’ll do this and that, and two hundred, and you know as you you know, your goal is fixed, and as you’re driving, you know, every minute every minute you’re getting closer to Sydney, closer to Sydney, closer to Sydney, and then you get to Sydney. Now you check, we’re doing that in reality with our life. Death is at some point. But we don’t think, we think, you know, we know it’s definite, but we don’t it’s like moving along on our journey and the death is continually moving forward with us. It’s like Sydney keeps moving as you drive.
I mean, it’s like Sydney will never come, really. You’re driving along, yeah, know, I mean, I know Sydney’s coming, but I’m driving and but Sydney never come, you know, but then suddenly one day you’re in Sydney, you get a big shock. Oh my god, there it is, you know. That’s how we live our life and it’s complete fantasy. So this idea of thinking about death, it’s not meant to make us nervous or guilty and we love to feel guilty, you know, we love to be pressured by things.
It’s not a question of that. It’s like sensible, it’s like a wake up call to give ourselves, that’s all. And anybody we know, I mean, some people right in this room might have been told they’re gonna die, you know. I remember reading about this young guy when I was living in Santa Cruz in California. This young boy, thirteen, you know, had leukemia, and he was so called dying, right?
The shift in that family was just totally fascinating. The father stopped his job. Everybody was different because suddenly, they didn’t we’re not gonna we’re not gonna have John for long, you know? So life was really meaningful, and every and even the young boy, he was when his brother wanted to borrow his bike, his first instinct, he said himself, was go away, it’s my bike. Then he thought, oh, well, I’m dying.
Yeah, have my bike, he said. Straight away cause he realized he wouldn’t be here for long. Now, if we could live our life like that, as if every moment is the last one, truly seeing the value of it, not wanting to waste a single minute, having enormous enthusiasm. Another analogy would be like you’re driving along and you haven’t got a clue how much gas in the tank, petrol. I’m in a petrol country, aren’t I?
Petrol in your tank, right? No clue, not a clue. It could be a full tank which is, let’s say, five hundred kilometers or it could be one a half a kilometer left. And you have no idea how much petrol, right? So as you’re driving and you stop for a cup of tea and you get in and it continues again, wow, amazing, it hasn’t run out yet.
This is incredible, it still keeps going. Every day is like a miracle, you can’t believe every other kilometer you get. Realize you say kilometers here, don’t you? We know you say kilometer. No.
I’ve heard kilometer. Yeah. Two roads and right. Isn’t that interesting? Both.
Both. Okay. Good. One can say kilometer. Thank you.
Don’t accuse me being American. Stop that American accent people say to me sometimes. Because in America I have to say karma. Because karma, no one can hear karma. I can’t hear that at all.
Oh, in America my name is Robina Cortin. Here I’m Robina Cortin. That’s very funny. Anyway, or if I have to have a glass of hot water, please. Because usually I don’t drink hot water, it’s obviously a odd thing, so I have to sort of stop and I say, hot water.
Then they understand. If Americans here, don’t think I’m being rude, I’m not. Okay. So we you see my point, these all it’s just it’s just the view we have. We have a viewpoint, you know, that our petrol tank’s full.
I excuse me, who told you? Who told you? If we ask ourself, will do I know when I’ll die? I mean, it’s a really intelligent thing. I know when I’ll die?
Can you put an actual time and place on it? A time and a definite time. Now, I’m sorry, we can speculate. We cannot say it’s two thirty PM, you know, on February the tenth nineteen hundred and, you know, two thousand and twenty. We can’t say that.
So if it’s true, think this next step. If it’s true, I cannot definitely say when I’ll die, then I can say I could die today. It’s logic. But check how you feel. Don’t be ridiculous.
I’m not gonna die today, we’ll say, you know, Because we had this huge, the way Buddhism would say, this massive mistaken conception, this deeply ingrained fantasy, this wrong view in the bones of our being at the level of assumption as if it were the truth. We just carry it with us as if it were the truth. It’s an assumption. And so it’s hard to see this. We’ve gotta deconstruct it.
And the only way to do that is to argue with it using simple logic. It’s like you have a complete fantasy that that, you know, a complete fantasy about anything. We can see, you know, when you got, you know, like one one of your friends, everybody in the world can see that he’s he’s around sleeping with everyone else except her because you have a fantasy, you know. You live in a fantasy about what’s real. If we and we can see about all our minds, we’re gonna talk about the mind more later, or the way all these so called deluded states of mind function is they’re liars, they’re fantasies.
The way we have self loathing. Everybody else sees we’re very beautiful. They really like us, they praise us. We almost we almost we literally, not almost, we can’t hear it. Because why we have a view that says I’m a creep?
This is one example. Buddha is saying this across the board. We have all these misconceptions in our mind and they are the source of our suffering, you know. And all he’s saying is this is why he says all he’s saying is we’ve gotta be in touch with reality. Not again, like I said, so that we can be, you know, so that we can pass our philosophy exam.
Oh, I’m smarty pants. Know you know, I’m in touch with reality. It’s it’s because it’s the extent to which we’re not is the extent to which we suffer. That’s the point the Buddha’s making. So impermanence is a very, very obvious one.
Very basic first step, you know. So death is definite. Now, I’m actually talking about the second one here as well. I’m sorry. I merged into it, which is the time of death’s uncertain.
That’s the point I’ve been talking about. The time of death really and truly and definitely and really is uncertain, but we all don’t think that. We all act as if I’m gonna be seventy point seven, which is the, you know, the statistics or something. But I mean, I’m sorry, you know? This is why we’re always shocked when someone dies.
We’re shocked when we die. Definitely when we die. My goodness. Time of death’s uncertain. So I’ve been making that point earlier, you know?
And the third one, the crux of it, you know, the the crux of it is at the time of death then, we should assess what’s what is important. Okay. There’s a lot of assumptions here. We have to think about these. These are the Buddha’s views, you know.
Everyone has to think about them. So given a few given a few things here, given that we have a continuity of consciousness, meaning consciousness didn’t begin at conception and won’t end at death. Given the Buddhist view of reality, Buddha’s creative principle, if you like, putting it simply, that everything we say, do, and think is itself a seed. Everything we say, do, and think does bring a result. It’s just it’s just every seed you plant on your ground, you can’t just say, well, some seeds, you know, have the potential to bring fruits and others are just they kinda float, you know?
Every seed everything we do, same thing, is a seed. It’s just how it is, Buddha says. And every and and seeds bring fruits. So, you know, we can talk about fruits being happiness, suffering, or we can talk about, you know, neutral fruits. Now forget about the neutral.
So in terms of relative reality, we know we want happiness and we don’t want suffering. So given that our mind is a continuity, given that everything we say, do, and think is a seed that will bring a fruit, this is just facts, you know, Buddha says. And given that I don’t want suffering and do want happiness, it follows logically that at the time of death, what is of value to me at that time, whenever it might be in five minutes or in twenty years or fifty years, what is of value excuse me. I think I’m half naked here. I’m sorry.
Is a Everything What’s a value at that time is the positive seeds in my mind. And this is, you know, it’s just If we think in this way, it’s just practical, you know. Practical, you know. So given that I don’t know when I’m gonna die, then it’s just to my benefit right now, to my benefit, as Amy was just saying before, to be in touch with reality, to be here and now, to to not living in fantasy worlds, not thinking of the past and the future, not being all the nonsense and all the delusions, but to be realistic, to be here, to be doing what is just appropriate, beneficial, valid, appropriate thing. Because then when I die, whether it’s in five minutes or fifty years, oh, here we are, death’s coming, I’ll be ready for it, you know, and what’s in my mind.
So another way of saying this is that, you know, if I’m living in the fantasy world, I’m completely caught up with attachment and caught up with anger and depression and pride and fears and neurosis and grasping and you’re bad and I’m good and this is this and build this up and then this and we’ll have this and tomorrow and this and that’s happiness and all this great big construction we have which is we call our life. Or again, if you ask most people what’s a value in life, they’ll say two things. It’s almost like a mantra. They’ll say health and family. So looking at it in this way, if we truly believe that what is of inherent value in life is health and family, then at the time of your death, health and family will be of inherent value then too.
But they’re not, they’re useless, worse than useless. So the point is you don’t chuck out your health and your family, you simply change, you make a paradigm shift in your view towards them, in your approach to them. So you know, if in relation to health and family and all the things of our life, we are appropriate and beneficial and kind and loving and compassionate and wise and generous, then that’s what absolutely sows the most marvelous seeds in our mind that brings us immediate happiness, and then sows the seeds in our mind that will keep producing happiness, which is what we want. Whereas if we have attachment and fears and fears and confusion and neurosis in relation to our health and family and wealth and blah blah blah blah blah, every moment, including a death, will be fearful and chaotic, you know, so it’s of no benefit to oneself. This is approach, the way of thinking.
It’s like learning to wake up, to wake up to reality, you know. And that the idea of this one, the death and the one of perfect human rebirth is just methods of thinking to wake us up to right here now. You know? What is of value now? This instant.
You know? This is the idea for one’s own sake. We’re not even discussing compassion yet. That’s way off into the third scope. You know, we’re still in the beginning of the first scope.
And so, okay, looking more deeply at death is just the topic of this weekend. We can go more deeply into this one. The you know, this is a general little approach to how to get our minds to be in touch with reality, which is that things are changing. Things are impermanent. Impermanent.
And because we’re not clairvoyant, very simply, you know, in terms of one’s own life, we don’t know when it’s gonna stop. We just don’t. It’s a fact. We don’t know it. It’s a fact.
We don’t know it. We have a fantasy as if we do, though. Like I said, it’s moving forward. As we move forward in our journey, so is our death. So it’s it’s not a way to make us feel neurotic.
It’s not a way just to be intellectual. It’s a way to actually allow us to wake up to reality and therefore to use each second of the life in a most beneficial way for oneself, you know, and therefore, of course, for others in the long term. There’s no question about that. So there’s an interesting way so there are two ways in in this Tibetan Buddhist approach of meditating, so called, on death and impermanence, and one would take these three points as the basis for one’s contemplation meditation. To contemplate these in order to kind of taste the truth of it, you know?
There’s another way of meditating which is to actually visualize process of death, to go through the actual process of death itself. And this is described in the esoteric teachings in Buddhism, in the Buddhist tantra. And it’s a very interesting process. I’ll just describe that. This is where we have we’ll get these we’re gonna print out these notes at lunchtime.
We’ll give them to you later. And then it’s described briefly. Stages of death are described in that in these notes. And so death is described in roughly eight state in eight stages, you know, eight stages. And the point of this is this is said to be a description from people’s experience of what happens to death, you know.
And so one can contemplate this as if like imagining it, you know, using your imagination, imagining going through these stages. And then one say they say when you’re, you know, you really develop a skill at meditating, you’re able to actually, at the time of death, able to go through these stage experientially because you know exactly what’s going on. You’re you’re entitled to it, you know? What’s interesting about this process, how it’s described, it’s said it’s described that physiologically and psychologically, it’s exactly the same as as as going to sleep. Exactly the same process.
The difference is that death is just a more radical one. Know, it’s a more radical one because when you wake up, you wake up on another body. Instead, you wake up in the same body when you come come you know, you wake up, don’t you? But they really do describe it exactly the same in in tantric physiological terms. And in tantric physiological terms, they talk about the, you know, the the four elements, earth, air, fire, water, and the subtle physical energies.
It’s all very detailed descriptions in tantra. As Lama Yeshe says, they’re highly technical meditation teachings, you know. So you’ll hear what I’m saying. So the first stage, there’s various things that occur at each of the eight stages, and and they talk about the death process in terms of dissolution. So it’s sort of like here we are, this package of many parts, you know, the mind all bright and sharp and clear, and the concepts and the feelings and the sense of belonging and understanding my politics and the relationship to the world and I’m this and that Australian or something.
We’ve all these clear facts. We’re all kind of we know where we belong. We’re in this thing, you know? Sort of this big kind of life we call my life. But what death is is this gradual dissolution first mentally, emotionally, and then physically of all the bits.
So you’re kinda like you’re deconstructing yourself, sort of stripping away layer by layer the parts of oneself mentally, emotionally, and physically. It’s most interesting. This is how they describe it. So here’s how they describe it. The very first of these eight stages, various things occur at each stage.
The first this first one, the the first element of the four elements to cease to function is the earth element which is the, you know, when it’s functioning well, it gives the strength to the body. So you know, this one we all know. When you’re tired, when you know, you’re really tired, your body’s like lead, aren’t you? Isn’t it? Your body’s like lead, you know?
It’s the earth element ceasing to do its job. It’s very your body’s very heavy. The same time in this first stage, the the first of the of the senses to cease functioning is your eye consciousness. Now you check this, you’ll see how I’m talking. What’s your what’s your name?
John. John. Am I talking to John? You know, and I’m and I’m really struggling to stay awake? We all have this.
You feel like heavy and your eyes, they’re open, but you can’t see them. Just you know, you’ve lost it. Because we all have that experience because your eye consciousness is like all the all your energies, you know, when you’re trying you’re trying not to go to sleep, it’s very it’s very it’s very hard, is it, to resist this incredible kind of wishing to go inside, is it to disappear? It’s not because inward, isn’t it? Everything’s kind of going inward.
It’s really hard to stay bright and alert. Well, this is this is what happens at death, but you can’t turn it around at death, that’s all, because the time is finished, you know. So your earth element ceases to function. Your body’s very heavy, like a deep deep weight in the bed. Your eye consciousness ceases to function.
At the same time, mentally, the capacity to what’s this one? I got this messed up. The capacity to hold yet, to hold much information in your mind. Again, John’s talking to me. I cannot keep it there.
I can’t hold what he’s telling me. It’s just too it’s extremely difficult, isn’t it? You’re struggling, you know? You just can’t do it. And when you’re dying, you know, when you’re bright and sharp and wide awake, we can hold a lot of information over here and the senses here and the mind here conceptually, but when you go to sleep, it’s like you just can’t you just can’t hold hardly anything in your mind, you know?
It’s a struggle. So that mental capacity is ceasing to function. Like you’re losing the plot, basically, you know? The the next thing that occurs, also what occurs at this this first stage, they talk about this at each of the stages, there’s a subtle kind of what they call a sign, a subtle kind of indicator that only you and you’re in touch with it, if you’re a meditator, you will be aware of it. This occurs, but this is a sign if we were aware of it, tell us where we’re at in the death process, you know, which is what the meditators can do.
So at this point, there’s a subtle kind of sign they say it’s like an inner thing, a mirage. And you think what a mirage is, it’s the interplay of earth and water, isn’t it? And this is because the earth element is ceasing to function, because the water element is now prevalent. So this merges into the second stage, and so now what occurs to cease is the water element. The liquids in your body begin to dry up, you know, the sperm, the blood, the spit.
You know this experience too. When you wake up in the morning, you’re really dry. Your eyes are really dry. It’s because the water element had ceased functioning to some extent during the night, and it hasn’t quite all come back again. Or you know when you wake up in the morning, you’re like lead.
It’s because your earth element hasn’t quite come back again, you know? This is what tired means. All the parts aren’t working doing their job, you know? And this is why, interestingly, when you think of it this way, why the great yogis don’t need to sleep. Because they’ve so controlled all their elements and their mind, they don’t need sleep.
I mean, Lama Zopa Rinpoche is one of them. He doesn’t sleep, you know. They don’t need to because they’ve so purified themselves, so trained themselves. They don’t need to absorb into dullness like we just assume we have to every night, you know. So then the second stage, your water element ceases to function.
Your consciousness ceases. Again, look, I just can’t I lost that fifteen seconds when John was talking. My ears are right here. I’m sitting up, aren’t I? My eyes are open.
Can’t remember a word. I’ve done that during teachings, you know. One time when I lead sometimes when I lead meditation teachings, I’m tired. And I I I say the instruction, then we all meditate on it, and then I just slightly nodding off. Don’t you don’t notice it, but I completely cannot remember what bit I did.
I just can’t remember what I said. I have to either just make it up or to ask someone to tell me I went to sleep, you know, or you you remember it. It’s extremely hard. We know that. We can see it when we’re tired, when we’re falling, going to sleep.
This is what happens at death. At the same time, the the ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain and indifference. There’s there’s, you know, no difference. Can’t tell. And then the inner sign is this sign they say of like it’s like sort of like smoky or steamy, and you think of this as the interplay of water and fire, the next element.
Now the water element has ceased and the fire element is prevalent. This merges now into the third stage, and here again, now the element to cease is the heat element, the fire element. So this is the, you know, the warmth of the body and the which causes which enables digestion and all these things. This ceases to function. The sense that ceases to function now is the nose consciousness, the capacity to smell.
Mentally, it’s the capacity to distinguish between friends, enemies, strangers. You know? No clue. Your greatest lover on the left, your worst enemy on the right, you can’t tell the difference. Just no awareness of this.
No longer able to process this. You know? It’s like you’re gradually you’re gradually deconstructing yourself. You’re falling apart. You you you you you’re kind of the person that you are.
All the bits are stopped, like all the concrete is sort of collapsing and the bricks are falling apart. All the bits that hold us together. All these different parts, the elements, the thoughts, the feelings, the this, the that, the you know, all are just ceasing, ceasing, ceasing, ceasing the function. And then mentally at this third point, the oh, I said that one, capacity distinguishing from any enemy stranger. And then the sign, the inner sign is like sparks or fireflies and you think of this, it’s like the interplay of fire and now air, the fourth element.
So this fourth point, the capacity, the sense to cease functioning is two. It’s the touch and the taste. And the tongue turns blue and very hard and short and blue and very short. And as one lama said, Geshe Rabten, he said that this tongue that spent its life gossiping is now useless. The Mentally, the capacity to even know who you are, no clue, lost it completely.
No sense of who you where you fit, what your world is, your likes, your not likes. Your whole sense of yourself in this world that we have, this conceptual construction, this buildup of this view of me and mine, you know, gone completely. No clue. And your breath. Already it’s become more labored, longer out breaths, shorter in breaths.
By this point now, finally your breath con you know, the breath ceases. The fourth element, breathing out and no longer breathing in. Breath finished. So by this point, you know, as we know in the West, usually you’re considered dead by now. You’re ready for the body bag, you know?
But in the Buddhist view, you’re not dead yet. Your gross consciousness has ceased. Your gross physicality has ceased. The gross level of your being has ceased. I might have mentioned it briefly last night, but let’s talk a bit about it here.
In tantra, they had this just they had this way of presenting how we exist. It’s quite different, you know. It’s in terms, like I said, as we were saying here, the four elements, earth, air, fire, water, and also we talk about the gross level of our being which is the gross consciousness and the gross body which is this gross body, the meat, the blood, the bones, you know, all the stuff inside. These are intimately, interdependently, know, linked. So this this process of sleep or this process of death is the is the fall is the ceasing of this level of our being, the grosser level.
So So as the body ceases, like when you’re sick, you know, if the body starts not functioning properly, the mind, which is linked to it, collapses, doesn’t it? When you have fever, your mind’s off, isn’t it? It’s hopeless. When I when I was only nearly died one time in India, hepatitis and malaria, one lama said I was close to death. I didn’t know I was close to death, but I felt like death for sure, you know, as we say.
But I remember I completely my body was wracked with these fevers, so my mind was just out of it, you know. I mean, it’s hallucinating most of the time. Had no clue where I was, who I was, or anything. Was really incredible experience. So that’s the body and mind.
Gross body, gross mind are completely, obviously linked, you know. So when the body ceases to function properly, the mind ceases to function because it depends upon the existence of the body. This is the gross level, which of course in the west is all we consider existing. But according to Buddha, it’s just the gross level, you know. So if you’re a great meditator, by this time here when you stop breathing, you are still conscious but at the subtle level.
But for us, even though our subtler consciousness is now there, we’re not because we’re not used to accessing it, we’re it’s like we’re asleep, so we don’t experience it. We don’t know. We’re not aware. You know, we’re not conscious. But right now, you know, you’re still alive as far as the Buddha is concerned.
And you’re And the subtle consciousness is there. So various process occurs here too. And so roughly speaking, they talk about the In Tantra, they talk about we’re made up of the subtle The subtle physiology consists of what they call the winds, the wind energy is a subtle wind energy or in Hindu, they use it as prana. Oh, they talk about it in Buddhism too, the prana, you know, the wind energy, the subtle energies inside the inside our body. The subtle nervous system as they call it, there are seventy two thousand subtle channels they talk about through which the wind courses.
And then there’s also They all talk about this liquid energy called the kundalini, red and white kundalini, is sort of the These are the physical components as the way they talk in tantra. The subtle physical components, not visible to the body, not visible to the eyes. Sorry. And so this so what happens roughly now speaking is they talk about how the main, the central channel is just in front of our spine. So if your spine were to continue all the way up, the central channel is just in front of that, towards the back of your head in other words.
And is sort of, you know, subtle physical energy but not visible to to the senses. It’s subtle. Goes all the way down the spine, ends at the, you know, the sex organ, the cervix for the woman and the penis for the male. And then there’s seventy two thousand other channels that kind of all through the body. That’s how they talk subtle energy.
So what was occurring, one way they describe in tantra what’s occurring here is all these energies, the wind energies and the physical energies and the mental energy that’s linked to it, the gross one, are all absorbing absorbing into the central channel. And then now we’re going to go even bringing everything all absorbing to the heart chakra. It’s sort of like you’re deconstructing everything and it’s all going down to this tiny little subtle bit, you know, which is sort of becomes the building block of the new person like this. And so this gross consciousness and subtle gross consciousness and gross body now have ceased. We’re now at the level of subtle consciousness and subtle, what they call body, which is the subtle physical energies.
And so now the fifth stage, they talk about how the white kundalini, the gross level of which is the sperm of the male, but which we all possess in all these channels, the gross this this kundalini is melting as they say down the central channel and comes to the heart chakra where they call, where they say the very subtle consciousness is residing. Very subtle consciousness. The sixth, and there’s a vision of like vast sort of white sky they say. Then the sixth level, the sixth stage, they talk about the red kundalini which is residing at the navel chakra below the navel, which is the gross level, which is the female blood, but which we all possess in all the channels in the body. Right.
And that’s the the kundalini is a source of the bliss we experience, and the blood is the source of the this red Kundalini is a source of the heat that rises up to the heart chakra. There’s a vast vision of red sky, they say. They say every time we go to sleep, this occurs. But obviously, we know who remembers this. It’s very subtle.
It doesn’t we’re not familiar with it. Every time you faint, this occurs. Every time you have orgasm, this occurs. It’s a physiological thing that occurs just naturally, you know. Then the sixth stage is they say when these two come together at the heart chakra and closing the very subtle consciousness, then there’s like this black, like faint, like black vision, you know.
And the seventh one they call clear light, which is now in all the gross level of you, all the way down. You’ve completely absorbed, completely dissolved, completely deconstructed, completely come to everything that absorbed disappeared if you like, and come down to the very subtle consciousness, which is they call indestructible consciousness. This is the the subtlest level of your consciousness beyond which it can’t be subtler and it’s indestructible. Existence is beginningless time. That’s how they talk.
And it’s linked inextricably with a very subtle what they call wind body, which is really just a very subtle wind energy, which is the basis for the four elements. When when, you know, when you when you wake up again, like from death, from sleep, these come back again, you come back into life, you know. Everything comes back into you know, the life comes back, the concepts of this, the senses, everything’s all working nicely again. Then you go back to sleep again, they all absorb. You come back again like this, you know.
But when death, they don’t come back again. You’re finished. That person’s finished. So it’s a more it’s a more profound dissolution, you know. So you’re now at the very at the level of very subtle consciousness which virtually all of us are not conscious of.
Impossible unless you’re the greatest of meditators, you know. So at this point, at the very subtle consciousness, you now you know, this is and this can this can this can happen over these two days. And then your mind, you could just stay there, you know, and you could stay there for a couple of days, they say. So this is why for Tibetan Buddhists anyway, you wouldn’t move a dead body until you’re kind of reasonably certain, and there are various signs that you can use to show you that the person’s consciousness has actually now finally left the body, you know. Then it’s fine.
Chuck them in the dirt, put them in the river, do what you like. Burn them, it doesn’t matter. It’s just body now. So how long does that take? Couple of days, they say.
Usually a couple of days. One of the signs, it’s interesting, they talk about how this red Kundalini and white kundalini rises up and then leaves through the crown and the red one leaves through the sex organ and that can you could see that. But actually, a more easy seems to me, they don’t talk about it too much in the text, but this is what they say, and I know I had this experience recently. When a because the energy because the person is still there, they when you feel when you put and I’ve had this experience with person recently, a friend who died. Body’s frozen.
Person’s as dead as a dog. You can see they can really look dead. Know? I remember vividly this I don’t know. I’ve never seen too many people dying, but I remember I was in the hospital with my old friend Paul, and there he was alive, but very sick looking in the bed.
And I went away to do something, came back, and he was dead. And the difference was shocking, you know? It was so obvious. Completely, you instantly knew he was dead, you know. But what was interesting was you put your hand above his heart chakra, there’s still warmth because the mind is still there.
It’s a really interesting indicator. I know they do. I know. Well, that’s the difficulty. That’s the difficulty, you know.
The ideal scenario for ideal scenario for this approach is to just let the person be there. Don’t tell the doctors. Don’t I mean, many people do that. Many people now do that and they have you you just get to call the doctor after two days. I mean, you didn’t break the law.
It’s perfectly fine. And What happens to the consciousness if they are Yes, okay, we’ll talk about that. It’s like it can be all they say it can be very disturbing, that’s all. It could cause the consciousness to leave, is sort of like a shock out of the body, even though if you do an autopsy or, you know, really rough with the body, it can be very disturbing. Even though the mind’s very subtle, it can be very disturbing to that being.
So they always say the ideal scenario for death, if you wanna help someone who’s dying, is to is to have them, you know, where you can have control over. So for example, my friend Paul, my his wife were woke up and they’re both Buddhists. His wife woke up in the middle of night and Paul was on the floor, so she got a shock, and of course, the first thing was call the ambulance. You just do that, you know? If she’d had more sense, she would’ve just and she thought about it since, she would have put him on the bed and just brought the friends in and knowing that he was dying because he had had many strokes, you know.
And it would have allowed him to die peacefully, so she was in the hospital. Because he was in the hospital, we couldn’t take him home. We had to put him into a mortuary, and there we had we had these endless endless arguments. It was in Santa Cruz with the with the authorities to try and let us have even a day have him in the room, you know? But all the laws wouldn’t allow this, and then at four PM, they had to close, so they had to put him in the fridge.
So it was interesting. One of the things so had him in the we we they they moved him very carefully. We put him in the room, and we were doing prayers and things around him because they would say Buddhists would say that would be beneficial for his mind. So in other words, to have the environment very conducive for just quiet and peaceful, and if the