Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin addresses a central tension: if everything arises from karma, where is free will? She uses a garden-of-seeds metaphor to show that past actions create the range of options available now—genuine choices, but bounded by what was planted. The talk then traces the Buddhist account of dying, drawing on tantric sources. Courtin details the eight stages of dissolution (mirroring sleep), the gradual withdrawal of senses and consciousness, the transition through increasingly subtle levels of mind, and how the dying mind’s strongest karmic imprints ripen to determine rebirth. She traces the intermediate state and the conception process, explaining how attachment and aversion propel consciousness toward new parents. Students ask about suicide, near-death experiences, spirit possession, and pain medication at death. The teaching assumes familiarity with Buddhist preliminaries.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 Unknown.mp3
UUID: 6a7a9309-401f-4046-bf82-b9c3b9d19560
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Unknown 1988 9 Cassettes (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 1988 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.6 minutes
Words: ~8,842
It’s really the question, isn’t it, maybe this is not what you’re saying it. But it seems when we hear the one about karma, we have this view that we call free will. Which actually really is a Christian concept, isn’t it? Free will. We’ve adopted it, haven’t we?
Well actually, way, if we would analyse what we mean by free will, let’s say, which is somehow there is something, we have this ability to make choices. And this is the way I’m now interpreting, this is the Buddhist way of saying we seem to have an assumption that that free will is not dependent on anything. It’s kind of like causeless, it’s sort of like there and it’s an absolute. And Buddhism would say that’s not possible. That everything, there’s nothing that you can find that hasn’t come from something before.
There’s nothing that you can find that isn’t the result of therefore karma but that doesn’t imply determinism. That’s the point. It doesn’t mean therefore there’s no choice because the fact is everything is dynamic, it’s impermanent. The karmic imprint the analogy of seeds and fruit, I think, is again a good one. That you know yourself, if you’ve got a garden full of flowers, hundreds of kinds, all kinds of flowers, you know you’ve got lots of options.
So the Buddha’s idea, that’s sort of like a human mind. We’ve created a cause by putting all those seeds in in the past, to have the option to, oh I’ll pick a flower, I’ll pick a rose, I’ll pick a tulip, I’ll pick a herb. Whereas you know, another kind of mind, let’s say, hasn’t got many options. All the seeds are underneath, every single seed of every possibility is in our garden actually, but only some have grown. Let’s say a lion, Buddhism would say an animal for example, has all the seeds like you and me, but their garden basically is full of like two options, aggression and attachment.
I mean, put it like that, you know. So no matter what you tell the lion about that buffalo not wanting to have its little guts ripped out for breakfast every day, the lion doesn’t have that choice, she doesn’t have that option, she can’t access that seed. But it’s there, it’s buried under the other few seeds she’s got, which are those few available to her. So the human mind has hundreds and thousands, many many many options, especially if we’ve got a good human mind, we’ve got good karma in other words. We’ve really done our past gardening really well, we’ve got a very good garden, we can pick anything we like at leisure.
It’s all due to seeds, you can never say you can pick a rose if there’s no I mean, you know it’s dependent upon a seed being there. But the fact is you can pull the rose out anytime you like, you can not pick it. So it doesn’t imply that it’s sort of fixed you know. I mean it’s an analogy but I find it quite useful and really fits with this one. So everything that we do have in the mind is due to the karma of having done it.
But that doesn’t mean there’s not attention. It doesn’t mean that you can’t think oh my goodness, anger and patience are struggling with each other, they are. You’ve got anger because you’ve got the karma and you’ve got patience because you’ve got the karma. But there is, and then there’s another quality called wisdom, to discriminate between which is which. And if you’ve got good discrimination, you’re able to assess that that one is good and this one is bad because you’ve got all these other qualities that give you the capability to even recognize that you’d rather have one than the other.
And they also due to karma, they give you the strength to be able to pick the patient’s flower instead of the anger one. To choose the patience instead of the anger one. It’s still difficult. Because you know the younger one’s quite strong too. It’s quite complex, I mean I’m trying to make it simple but it’s But there still is the point.
That there’s nothing there in our mind. That in Buddhist terms, there’s nothing that can exist that isn’t caused. It’s not possible. There’s nothing that can be in an absolute sort of, like an absolute, and the way we think in the west about free will, know, all these smelly old homeless people, they’re just lazy, that is don’t work, especially the prevalent view in America. We’ve all, this idea of democracy, we’ve all got this free will to choose to be rich, to choose to kill, to choose not to kill, and so these people in prison are evil because they have chosen to kill.
Well Buddha says effectively, that’s nonsense. Of course they’ve chosen to kill, but the power of the karma pushing them to do it is so intense that you could almost say they didn’t have a choice but to kill. Because of the karma, you know. But if you have other karmic imprints there that are also strong, having done them also before, that gives you the power and the strength to have the intelligence, to observe it objectively, even if the karma’s strong, to say no, that is a negative thing to do because I don’t want the suffering consequences so I won’t do it. I don’t know, does that make sense?
You end up with a choice, yes. Yes. A human has a great number of options, yes. Yeah, and human is a result of Yeah, that’s right. That’s one of the benefits of being a reasonable human, we can see this, yes, having the many benefits and options, yeah.
Well that’s the point, so nonetheless, the person who chooses to do the act is the individual but the individual, when we begin to analyze, is what we’re trying to do here, the individual is nothing other than the sum of their thoughts and the sum of their karmic imprints, there’s no individual apart from You know, what’s your name, please? Richard, so Richard, we all know Richard, and this is what we’re talking about emptiness now, we’ll go on to this later. Richard is just a convenient label for this bunch of karmic imprints over here, isn’t it? So yes indeed, there is Richard making the choice, but which part of Richard is intelligence, Richard is discrimination, Richard is virtue, Richard is this and Richard is that, all working together beautifully to cause this not killing as opposed to killing. And all of this is due to your strong practice of all of those things.
So the point is, and this is the point, it is interesting. It brings up this point in Buddhism about the wonder of how everything is interdependent. Everything is empty, therefore having an inherent nature. And there’s this assumption of inheritance, you like, or of something being an absolute. Which is exactly what Buddhism is arguing with, there cannot be any such thing that is causeless, absolute, in and of itself, inherent, uncaused, un interdependent.
The difference is, the point is that all the point is, there seems to be a contradiction, there’s no contradiction. It doesn’t mean you haven’t got the means, yeah, it doesn’t because it is movable. You’ve got those roses now, you’ve all that garden now, but you know how highly dependent it is. The moment you leave it for a day, piles of other rubbish start to grow, know. The moment you don’t, know, you can pull out one of those roses anytime, you can choose not to pull the rose up anytime, you can choose to do what you I mean, you can destroy all the seeds anytime.
It’s highly kind of vulnerable and interdependent. I mean, needs thinking about it, that’s all. To see there’s no contradiction, you know? Somebody else? Anyone?
Yeah, go on. I’m going back and forth. Trying to. Yep. Good.
Yeah, various points. The mind. The mind and Buddha nature is one. Guru devotion, perfect human rebirth, they’re the preliminaries. Then the first one of the first scope is death and impermanence.
And that’s where we’re still at. And now we could keep going to other things, we’re still at that point really. Very good, thank you very much. Yes, I understand. About suicide in relation to past and future karma.
Let’s now talk a little bit about the process of death, the way Buddhism, describing what Buddhism would say, what happens at death, you know. So there’s one way we’ve looked at death, is the classic way in terms of the Lamrim of how to think about impermanence and how are impermanent, how death is definite, the time of it is uncertain, what’s important at time of death. All of this, many many, all using our creative imagination, meditating again, and it gives us the energy to not waste this precious life to be realized. It is so fragile, it is so fragile. Okay, what happens at the time of death?
There’s various ways of talking about it and there are other ways therefore of meditating upon it. So you know, the esoteric teachings known as Buddhist tantra, they’re dealing very much with the subtle physiology and the subtle psychology, dealing a lot with the subtle, you know, the physical energies. And the meditators anyway, we’re to work with all of that. And there’s reasons and we’ll talk about it. They describe there’s a way of meditating on death in terms of the actual process, the the way they describe it in those texts.
And so roughly speaking, I’ll just do it very broadly here, roughly speaking, it’s what happens at the time of death, it’s like the gradual throwing off of, know, first of all, the mental level, the grosser levels of our mental capability, which is the conceptual and the sensory. So it’s the body as well, gradually. And it’s described, this whole process is described in terms of eight stages. During the first four stages, and then what’s most interesting by the this will give you a real reference point, what is most interesting in these texts, they describe this process of death as being the same as going to sleep. Physiologically, exactly the same things occur, and mentally.
The difference is, obviously death is more radical because you don’t, when you wake up, quote unquote, you wake up in another body. You know, sleep, you wake up in the same body, right? But the process, physiologically and psychologically is the same, they say. And you check what I mean, you’ll see it’s true. So they say at the first stage, the first of these eight stages, things occur.
At each of the eight stages, various things occur. Various things, as they use the term, dissolve or cease to function. So it’s a gradual throwing off, isn’t it? What death is, it’s a gradual throwing off of these various levels of what you consider you, this package, know? Physical and mental.
Going through this process now? At the time, no I know. Okay, the person who’s dying of cancer, example, friend, is he actually in that process now? Technically you’d say not. It’s only, it’s sort of you could say, because if you hear what I’m saying, you’ll hear it’s almost like old people, you know, you start to lose memory, you start to But this radically happens, there’s a certain point it radically happens.
I mean maybe you can see with this person right now, this friend, yeah it wouldn’t be if they’re living for years, know, but there’s a certain point when this begins to happen radically. You know, this is the point. So what happens is, okay the first stage of death, occurs, for example, they talk of it in terms of the four elements, the earth element ceases to function. Now you listen to this in terms of going to sleep. Becomes really heavy.
You all know this experience, or equally when you wake up in the morning and you’re really tired, it’s like your body’s like cement, isn’t it? You just cannot lift it out of the bed, it’s like so heavy. That’s because the earth element hasn’t come fully back into working. Once you get out of bed and you stretch and everything, the earth element kind of comes back and boom, off you go. We can see, we know this experience.
At the same time as the earth element ceasing to function, the sentient beings of this being the body very heavy. At the same time, I beg your pardon, excuse me. Also, mentally what happens, and I get a bit mixed up with some of these stages, but the senses, in this case, the eye sense ceases to function. We all know, you check, I’m talking to you, I’m talking to Sandy, she’s chatting away, and my eyes are open. You you have this experience, you can’t see anything, you’ve lost it for a moment, haven’t you?
Isn’t it? We all have that experience, when you’re trying to when I’m driving and you go to sleep, You’re nodding off, your eyes are wide open. But you just can’t get it, you’re struggling to hold everything in your view aren’t you? You just can’t because what they call the eye consciousness, the power is withdrawing inwards. And it is this inexorable kind of sense of going inwards.
When you’re really tired, all you want to do is go into that place of unconscious, don’t you? Everything to absorb in. That’s how it is, you know? So then mentally what’s happening is this mental capability of holding many things with your mind together. This is true, when I’m talking to Sandy, say, and I’m nodding off, at this first stage even, you can’t hold in your mind the things that she’s talking about.
You just can’t hold it. We all know this. It’s very clear. This is gradually what happens at death. And then at a certain point too, internally they say this is sort of a very subtle indication and only the person internally can experience this.
We do experience it every time we go to sleep, even every time we faint but we don’t actually retain the memory of this because we haven’t accomplished a skill to do so. But this is what happens at death. They say the inner sign is they say it’s like a mirage. And that is to say if you think about it, the interplay between this first element which is earth and then the next one which is now prevalent which is water. Isn’t it?
Do you see that? The mirage. The second stage, other things occur but these are the main points. Gradually, the water element begins to dry up, you know. Now you know yourself, when you wake up in the morning, your eyes, you’re like desperate to put your eyes, they’re so dry, you definitely need a drink, know?
Because the water element has sort of temporarily ceased functioning, that’s how they talk. So death of course is radical. The sense that ceases to function is the ears. And again, talking to Sandy, cannot hear, I missed it, completely missed what she said for the last thirty seconds, five seconds, ten seconds. We all know this experience.
The capacity of your consciousness, your ear consciousness to retain, to hear even, that is gone. It’s absorbed. Yeah. Are you talking about being able to understand? No, here, physically here.
Actually here. Like when you’re talking to someone and you’re going to sleep, can’t hear it, can you? You’ve lost it. Like I said, don’t you have the experience of when you’re nodding off to sleep while someone’s talking to you or you’re listening to something on the radio or you’re watching the television, you can’t hear, you don’t, you’ve lost it. She’s talking, you’re hearing, then you’re nodding off and you come back again.
You didn’t hear that last minute. No, no, you’re not listening. No, no darling, your ear consciousness has ceased functioning. You can’t, it’s like you just blocked your ears. It’s like you just blocked your ears.
Mentally, you can’t retain also what’s being said as well, that’s the point. So it’s like all the parts of you are ceasing to function, this is what death is, know. That’s the point, yeah. So mentally now, and I lose the mental one at each stage, get a bit mixed so don’t take this as gospel please. What happens mentally I think is that you find it really hard to distinguish between pleasure, pain and indifference.
Which you know, you think of the three different experiences we have. We’re either happy, mildly or very. Suffering, mildly or very. All these are kind of indifferent experiences. We’ve these three really.
You think about these three possible things. So at this point you can’t really distinguish. It kind of begins to be some of this neutral sense. There’s a big deal. Delicious chocolate cake, who cares?
Whereas before you were so hungry for it. Or in relation to people too, know. And you look around you and you can’t see, begin to not see much difference between your friends, enemies and strangers, you know. You’re kind of losing the plot gradually, gradually. And then the internal sign is of they say it’s like steamy, sort of like smoky steamy.
If you think of this, it’s the interplay of the water element which is now ceasing and giving of rise to the prevalence of the air element, the fire element. So you can see the interplay of like water and fire, it’s like steamy isn’t it? Smoky steamy. So at this point your ears, your eyes, your capacity to really hold many things in your mind, distinguish between pleasure, pain and indifference. Body’s heavy, know, liquids drying up.
Next stage, these kind of gradually go. Can be very quick. I mean if you die in a car accident, all this happens in a moment of time. If you’re sitting in your bed, it happens gradually. Then the next one is your eyes, ears, touch, what else is there?
Smell, taste. Nose, nose consciousness. Pretty sure nose consciousness ceases is the next point. Inability to smell. Mentally, I think at this point you can’t even put together, I think at this point it’s like the friends, enemies, strangers.
You just can’t tell the difference. Or you can’t see the difference between all the people around you. There’s just like, can’t tell you know. There’s not this vivid sort of there’s my lover, there’s my gorgeous beautiful husband, there’s my divine child, there’s my ugly old auntie. You can’t tell the difference.
There’s no awareness of that. You’ve lost this mental capacity. And then the sense to cease, I said it at this point, there’s no sense. But the element is now the warmth of the body, the fire element, which causes also digestion. This is ceasing.
So by this point, know, it’s like almost the person that you think you are has practically ceased, isn’t it? And then the final point, in the first four, of the first four when the gross level of you ceases, the air element ceases, doesn’t it? First of all, the touch and the taste cease. The tongue, as one lama put it, this flexible tongue that spent its life gossiping is now useless. It’s now blue at the root and very short, which we all know.
So this tongue is useless, right? So the tongue has ceased, the taste has ceased, touch sensation has ceased, tactile. Plus, this time, the capacity to even hold together in your mind the sense of who you are. No sense of you’ve lost your sense of even who you are. What your purpose in life is, all the things that are important, the good, the bad, your politics, your music, your this, that, all the stuff that fills our life daily.
All this has gone, gone, ceased, ceased. And then your breath goes out and no longer comes in. So at this point in the West, you’re ready for the body bag, right? Isn’t it? Virtually.
But in Buddhist view, you’re not dead yet. The subtler level of your conscious awareness is now there. Although if you’ve not practiced meditation, Buddhism would say, you’re not aware at that stage. You’re kind of, you’re sort of like you’re going past experiences, you’re driving past all these beautiful things, but your eyes are closed. You have the experience, but you’re not aware of it.
Your consciousness is now there, the subtler level. So okay, before this, sorry, before you even stop breathing, during this process where you, your grosser level of conscious and sensory awareness is ceasing, ceasing, ceasing, naturally, the Buddha’s view, your subtler level of awareness, which is where your intuition and your kind of insight, and even experiences of kind of premonition or even clairvoyance, that level of mind, which we only ever touch on in our dreams, right? Virtually. That’s becoming more prevalent. And so at this point, they say also, there’s this particularly strong sense of grasping at life.
So we all have just it’s a very powerful energy of this grasping which we all have anyway, but which arises very strongly now because death is coming. Unless of course you’ve practiced very strongly, you know, meditating and so on. But still nevertheless there’s this grasping coming to whatever, you know, yeah. And what that does, this causes to ripen the the karmic seed that is of the actions in this life that are most strong. So if you spent most of this life practicing morality or patience or kindness or Chenrezig in the context of your spiritual path or whatever, it’ll be very strong virtuous karmic seed that will ripen.
If you’ve just kind of gone with the flow and you know, anger arises, you follow, depression arises, you follow, happiness, sadness, up and down, doing the usual we all do, you know, in our lives without really questioning anything, then mostly it’s without sounding horrible, it’s mostly the negative states of mind that we just follow and let them arise and let them flourish, know, so it’ll be most likely one of the negative karmas that will ripen. And that one, this is where the first kind of karma comes in, we’ll talk about we’ll talk about karma in more detail. This one, this is this karma ripening, is a very strong one, is the karma that they say, they use the term, it’s a throwing karma. It throws your consciousness into the next life. So by this time you’re on autopilot, there’s no longer any volition unless you’re a great practitioner.
You’ve lost the plot by now. karma takes care, as Lama Yeshe says, this stage, right? And this is why at the time of death, there’s not much you can do unless you have practiced during your life, just like there’s not much you can do in your driving test unless you’ve practiced driving beforehand, it’s obvious, you know. So if you’ve practiced in your life, recognizing impermanence, thinking about life, the meaning of life, trying to be virtuous because you recognize the value for yourself, not to mention others, and that you really wanna take care of your future garden, which is a very reasonable approach, then you know, you’ll die with a more happy mind. And then when you die with a happy mind, this is the point, when you have prepared for death by living your life in an appropriate way, then death is no surprise, there’s no shock, you’re not freaking out, you’re prepared for it.
Then your mind will be more content, more happy, more spacious. When your mind is more spacious, this will encourage a virtuous seed to ripen because it’s the nature of the virtuous seeds that they are more spacious. If the mind is grasping and freaking out and fearful or whatever, which is very common, then this will activate the so called negative seeds because it’s the nature of the negative karmas to be kind of tight and grasping and fearful. It’s their nature, you know. We’ll talk much more about this later.
So then you stop breathing. And by this time, your future karmic life is already determined, pretty much. karma’s on a roll, you know. But then what happens is your consciousness could leave your body that next moment, go through the next four stages, which are sort of subtler things that occur, various subtler energies. Basically, they’re talking, this is in the esoteric teachings, they talk about how we’ve made up of all these thousands of channels.
It’s a bit similar to the way they describe in yoga, I think. There’s very precise and detailed explanations about the subtler physical energy of these thousands and thousands of, seventy two thousand they say subtle channels, like the subtle nervous system, and all the winds or the airs in the body that ride through these channels, and they had this intimate relationship with the way the mind functions, blah blah blah, there’s all sorts of things. There’s what they call the Kundalini energy, this subtle kind of red and white energies in our body. All this stuff happens, various things happen, and we go through the next four stages where eventually we get to the very subtle stage of consciousness, which is the subtlest level of your conscious being, meaning you’ve thrown off all the other grosser levels, even the subtle ones, until eventually it’s this very subtle consciousness, which they call even indestructible consciousness, beyond which your consciousness can’t be subtler. It’s indestructible.
And that, if you like, this is like this, it’s sort of also where it’s like the repository also of all your karmic imprints or the computer programming, all the programming you’ve done, you know, of you. And that very subtle consciousness when the time is right, and it could be a couple of days after the breathing stops, there are various indications to show that that has occurred. Then that consciousness will leave the body and then go in, wake up if you like, into what they call the Bardo or the intermediate state between lives, which is really very much, again, experientially just like a dream. So when you go through the death, the sleep process, you know, the same thing is occurring. Everything is withdrawing in and in, all the grosser levels are ceasing.
And then the subtle consciousness is just there, then you’re kind of unconscious for a while, then you’ll wake up at various stages of the night into some various dreams, won’t you? Or not, we do but we might not notice. But this is when the mind becomes slightly more coarse, but it’s still subtle in comparison with the gross level, and then has the dreams and things, know? These weird experiences. We know in general dreams are kinda strange for many of us.
Could be pleasant, could be unpleasant. But in general, they’re not the same kind of experience, are there? There’s no sense of space and time. You think a thought, you’re there, you’re fly, all these weird things because there’s no conceptual gross mind or indeed the appropriate body that goes with it existing, is there? So eventually, when the karma is right, so in this Bardo, I mean it’s like a dream and it’s more intense because you’ve actually left that body.
So there’s a much more intense sense of very powerful grasping, ego grasping very strongly, they say. So in a way they say, it’s like but it’s a more it’s like an intuitive thing that’s happening. But this is the energy that’s there, feeling like you’re searching for another basis, for another me. Because as ego grasping, its function very strongly is to kind of grasp at me, you know. So it’s quite fearful they say.
Can be, depending. But anyway, let’s say your karma, let’s say it was a virtuous karma that ripened at the time of death. Strong virtue because you’ve practiced in this life in the context of a spiritual path, and so the virtue ripens. So by the time even that karma ripens, death already will be a very pleasing experience. Whereas they say for a person who has a non virtuous karma ripen, death is a very fearful experience.
And the reason is because your mind is now more subtle, this is before you stop breathing. Already your mind is more subtle and already you’re having like visions of your future life coming because your subtle mind can see it. So it’s gonna be a fearful one. It’s a very unhappy experience. So this could be why Buddhism would say why people at the time of death are freaking out and seeing things and really kind of enormous fear.
It’s because their future life will be a suffering one. They’re seeing it coming, know. That’s how they say. Because it’s due to karma. But if it’s many people die very peacefully.
And they even say, in Buddhist texts they say, it’s like going to the light. It’s a very blissful experience, very pleasant experience. That’s how they describe. So then what happens during this Bardo, and it could be very short, or it could be up to forty nine human days they say. That’s how they describe it.
And eventually what happens is, let’s say you’ve got the karma to be born another human being in spiritual family because that’s what you’ve created the cause to have. Let’s say whatever, you wanna be a Buddhist and you get a Buddhist family. And because you’ve been moral, gonna have a nice body. Because you’ve been patient, you’re gonna because you’ve been moral, you’ve got a good situation. Because you’ve been generous, have plenty of opportunity and things.
Because you’ve been patient, you’ll have a very beautiful body. Because you haven’t killed, you’ll have a very healthy body. All this is due to karma and you will have created all of this so you’ll get the appropriate family to go into, right? karma takes care. It’s not random, it’s not God, it’s not like that.
So then, what happens is, and this is how they describe it in the text, it’s most fascinating. You listen to this. How they say is what happens, because this main energy, the main energy is the delusion is this strong grasping, fearful, and then there’s huge attachment. Then the other energies that are there like aversion when attachment is thwarted and things like this. So these are these very strong delusions we all possess as long as we’re suffering, okay?
Or in saṃsāra. So what happens is, the karma eventually to ripen will ripen between you and your new parents. Let’s say you know, get born, let’s say you’re conceived in the old fashioned way, which is you know, mommy and daddy having sex, sort of like petri dishes and things in the text described the old fashioned way. They say what happens is, you’ve got this because you’re in this Bardo, you haven’t got the gross kind of usual body and things, so you have some kind of a capacity of clairvoyance. So when the karma begins to ripen, your mummy and daddy are in there having sex, know, new mummy and daddy, you have a vision of this and they say it’s very interesting.
This my parenthetical statement here, brackets now, putting in brackets, this is me, not Buddha talking. This is my assumption based on this, that this is an explanation of a heterosexual rebirth. If you’re going to be born a boy, you have this huge attachment to go have sex with your mum. They say it in the text, okay? Strong attachment to the mother.
So you go rushing towards, with this attachment that propels you towards, because the energy of attachment is gonna make you go towards something, right? And then you get so furious because you’re this little nothing thing and you can’t do anything you know? So then anger in the mind, because of the result of this thwarted attachment, causes you to kind of die from the intermediate state and go rushing into the new egg and sperm. I mean no wonder we have trouble, that’s how you get born, isn’t That’s kind of interesting. So it’s not a romantic view, is it, of birth?
It’s kind of interesting, of conception. Then reverse, if you’re to be born a girl, you have to attracted to your daddy. Okay, that’s how they say, so off you go, you start your new life. And that’s a good life. Sounds very Freudian.
Well Freud would have loved it, I know, would have thought it was great. But this is Buddha, we’re talking the esoteric teachings here. So anyway, then you start your new life and all the different so then other karmas ripen, and we’re going talk about that in more detail but I’ll just touch on it here. Because karma determines one, the kind of form you go into. If it’s a negative karma that ripens, and depending on many, many conditions all coming together, then your consciousness will then be on autopilot, it’ll go eventually to the Bardo and then probably very quickly, will find its way, boom, you’re going rushing with enormous attraction to the lion mummy.
Then your consciousness will manifest, go into the lion and will develop lion consciousness with lion body, the appropriate body for lion’s claws and fur and all the rest, know, that’s all your karma ripening to. Depending on the karma that manifests at time you die. Best example. So if someone’s taking their own life? Yes.
Same. If someone takes their own life. Pretty much this is the process that occurs for everybody. It can be more slow and more fast depending on how you die. Yes.
And for taking one’s own life, I mean, one cannot say about what’s in a person, in terms of whether it’s good or bad, you know? We can’t say unless you’re clairvoyant, you can’t really know what’s in a person’s mind. But in general, the teaching in Buddhism, which we will describe with karma, is that the motivation in your mind at the time you do an action is the main determining factor for the karmic result from that action. So we can deduce, can’t we, in general, only think of suicide. Let’s say, you know, when we’re depressed or suffering or unhappy, it’s not because we have enormous compassion.
It’s very rare. It can be for someone else who could do that, I’d say. So it’s hard to know. But that’s, yes, the same process occurs. And then depending on what’s on their mind at the time they die, that will activate a certain karma to ripen, which will determine their next life.
Yes? Of course, there’s this very intimate relationship between you and the parents. And it’s their karma at that certain point to be together in that particular life to create the cause to have you to come to them. Absolutely. Very strong karmic connection.
Definitely. I understand. Absolutely none. There shouldn’t be. Mean, course, way we the view we have now of reality, which is this view, isn’t this kind of victim oppressor mentality we all have.
There’s either I’m bad or you’re bad. Always to find someone to blame. There’s always this but that’s not the concept here. Mean, takes time to go beyond that concept, because it’s very deeply in our bones to feel guilt and shame or blame or bitterness, that kind of thing. It’s not a question of them.
We’re really working with this properly. It really goes way beyond guilt or shame or blame, anything. It’s just simply Buddha’s explanation of how come anything happens. And this is why too, when you have the view of karma and all beings being beginningless consciousness, having countless lives, good ones, bad ones, suffering, happiness, you start to get this big sense that we’re all in the same boat. So one life Osama bin Laden, the next life victim, know.
The victims now have been the Osama bin Laden before, which is very painful for us to think that our beautiful baby who died when she was two was some horrible person before. The Buddha says we’ve all been everything countless times so you get this big perspective that’s much more spacious and much more space for compassion too for our self and other people. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.
When shocked by these whispers or low self esteem, yes. Sort of why? That’s why, that’s right. We have that’s exactly right because we have this really kind of and this is quite a deep one, the more we look in our minds, more we see it. The Buddha is saying the assumptions we have now of I, of ego, actually are of being a creep.
Ego actually is a self hating thing, you know. The stronger ego is, the stronger ego grasping is, the more miserable and lonely and bereft and cut off are we. Therefore, the more aggression, the more mean, the more nasty, the more harmful, the more depressed, you name it. Okay, with our delusions, we’ll talk about all this too, some of us have got a package of the self hating ones, and we don’t harm many other people. Others others have all the ones that harm others.
But they’re both symptoms of the same problem. Do you see? So a person’s got very strong pride, doesn’t it like they’ve got low self esteem? But you know, you look at the flip side of pride. Pride is, in the negative sense, this fearful kind of wishing to constantly be the top person.
And as soon as the person who’s got a lot of arrogance and pride meets the person who’s better, they become this hopeless, I’m so bad, I want to kill myself. Do you see? Because it’s the flip side. We’ll talk about that. Yeah, behind you.
Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, sure. I understand. Near death experiences.
These fit completely with the Buddhist explanation of death. People who kind of leave their bodies during dreams even, many people have this experience, it fits exactly with the Buddhist explanation of the subtler consciousness, which has the capacity to leave the body and it does so at the time of death, or indeed, as you call it, near death. Or many people I’ve talked to, some people recently and it’s a common one of people who’ve had a lot of abuse in their lives, one of their ways of dealing with it is to literally leave their body. There’s one woman I talked to recently, this is common, I’ve heard this many times, her way of dealing was the incredible abuse she got from her father. She would literally leave her body and go to a place, she had all these names for it, go to this certain place where all the fairies were, and she’d be watching this little girl down there grimacing while she’s being raped by her dad, know.
And she’d kind of then have to groan and say, oh god, I’ve got to go back again, oh god, know, she’d sort of, from this very pretty place she’d put herself, and then she went flying back into her body and started feeling the pain. I mean I’ve heard many stories like that, that fits exactly with the Buddhist explanation. And some of us, you know, due to past meditation, obviously, have the capacity to do it, although we have no control over it, it can be quite a fearful experience for many people. I’ve heard that people in their dreams can leave their bodies too, what we call astral travelling. This fits exactly with the Buddha’s explanation.
Does drugs have an effect on people dying in their consciousness? You mean like morphine and drug? Yeah, for sure. The key boarder things is to try and have control at the time of death, have the mind be clear. To have it dulled and spaced out completely is the worst scenario, you know?
So it’s not easy when it’s drugs, but isn’t there a way now when people have drugs that you’ve your own little button, you can regulate your own drugs? Well that’s a really good thing, if you can do that, to find a way where you can have some space in your mind from the pain, but to have it not completely zonked out. That’s very important. Absolutely. Someone else have a question about death?
Sleepwalking and talking in this thing, the same kind of thing. The subtle mind is really active. I remember a person It’s interesting, one of my sisters, when she was a little girl, she was asthmatic and she’d regularly walk in her sleep. She got lost, know, we’d find her two miles down the road. Now that could be something else actually, that could also be you’re possessed by spirits.
Beings from the spirit realm, is a very occupied realm that Buddha would say, we’ll discuss this in a minute, actually it’s the next point from death and impermanence, what we have to contemplate. The next point now for you, man, keeping your list, good on you. The next point, and I’ll go back and forth, the next point you contemplate on in this logical process is given that you’re gonna die, I’m coming to your point, given that you could die at any moment and given that you don’t want to suffer, do want be happy, and remember we’re not talking compassion yet, don’t get all holy, know. Of course there’s an inferior motivation, but please be practical, that’s where we’re at, know. We start here, we get some sense of value for ourselves.
So then you’re given all these things, and you think, well my goodness, you know, I could die at any moment, let me make the most of this life. And then we start to contemplate what Buddhism would call contemplating the suffering of the lower realms to increase your wish not to waste precious life because you don’t no way want to be born in one of those realms, which Buddha would say is possible. There’s this whole spectrum of possibilities of rebirth, like I mentioned, there’s the God realms, which is sort of the top end of saṃsāra, best suburbs, best suburbs, you know? Good, good rebirth. But a bit of a useless rebirth because you’re so blissed out, you don’t realise you’re still in saṃsāra.
The human rebirth is the next one down, and that’s good too, but it’s not nearly as good quality as the gods, but it’s a better type of rebirth because you’ve got more choices, because you’re not so blissed out. It’s a better life to have for that reason. Then you’ve got the lower realms, the first one is the animal realm, which obviously we share quite a bit of this universe with, these animals. But there are trillions and trillions and trillions of them, it’s really obvious there are plenty more them, isn’t it? I mean, you look at those animal shows, you look these little insects, you know, they’ve got like, I mean, have millions of babies a year.
So it’s clearly obviously more easy to get one of those rebirths than to get a human one. Know? This is a Buddhist talking, Buddhist discussion. In fact, I remember in one book, a very nice book, called The Tibetan Art of Parenting. So it looks just like a baby book with this gorgeous Tibetan baby on the front and a nice yak skin fur and everything.
It’s a really very interesting book actually, most fascinating. And there’s two different quotes in there and I’m paraphrasing both. One says that there are billions at any given moment when a human, male and female are having sex, there are billions of consciousnesses all in their own bardo, kind of all hovering around, desperate to try and get in. I mean, it’s hilarious, isn’t it? Because, you know, it’s so hard to get a human rebirth, so only one wins the lottery, or maybe two, perhaps even seven, know.
Wow, amazing. But you know, and that’s just so they’re all beings from all the different realms who’ve just died. Mean, you’ve got insects, they’re dying every second, you you have a life like a minute long, don’t you, if you’re lucky? So there’s plenty of animals, plenty of creatures. The vast majority of all the creatures I’ve got off to the topic, but I’m coming around, when I get to the spirits, I’ll come to your point.
I was linking it to the next point. So you know, say in the Buddhist texts, the vast majority of all animals in the animal realm live in the depths of the ocean, they say, sort of in depths of the ocean, in miles deep, sort of like, all stacked on top of one another. And what I find incredibly fascinating, I know it was quite a while ago, when I was in New York, I read in the New York Times science pages, that they’re finding not just billions of beings, but billions of species, brand new species. Where do they live? In the depths of the ocean where no one believed they could have existed before because there’s no oxygen, packed miles high on top of each other in sludge.
I thought that was totally fascinating, you know. So I mean, we can see they’re countless. These are the numbers we these are the beings we can see. What about, you know, our bodies are probably zoos, you think about it, if we’ve got microscopes big enough, so there must be billions of these tiny creatures we can’t even see. These are the ones we can even see, you know.
So the animal realm is really occupied and it’s a suffering one. Then further on the spectrum, and I’m gonna go into these more, you’ve got what they call the spirit realm, all kinds, and they talk about a whole bunch of them called the hungry ghosts. And the main energy, so the main energy of the animal realm is huge ego grasping, huge ignorance, which is what gives them the capability of having one or two flowers in their garden, not many options at all, because of this huge ignorance, huge ego grasping, and they’re locked into their certain habits, you can’t change. Like we say, can’t change their spots, know. You’re locked into it.
Which is the suffering of being an animal. Then you’ve the spirits, who then and their main energy is enormous grasping. And because they’re disembodied, they can be quite powerful. And an awful lot of these beings, it’s a very suffering rebirth, okay, intensely suffering. And an awful lot of these beings have very strong karmic connection with the human realm, and so thus are born as ghosts, as we call, around the humans.
All these stories of haunted houses, it completely fits with Buddhist view. They’re dudes who’ve been human, very possessed, very possessive of that place, it’s my house. Well sure enough, you get born there baby, know? But as a spirit this time, that’s why you get mad and you make all the other people go away, because it’s your house, right? All kinds of these spirits, a whole kind of huge possibility, some of them very powerful, some hugely powerful beings, who can appear as very positive and can mislead humans.
And one of their jobs, when they’ve got strong connection with humans, can haunt humans or possess them. All these people who hear voices, Buddha says, excuse me, of course they’re hearing voices, no problem, you know. Whereas we think they’re all insane. They’re hearing voices, they’re possessed by spirits. All kinds, you know.
Many people see all kinds of beings, have experience, hear them, see them, feel their presence. This fits with the Buddha’s view completely. And it’s great suffering, can see, a human linking with those. Then further on the spectrum, the bottom end of saṃsāra, the worst suffering of all where most sentient beings are, and this sounds very shocking, agree, but this is the Buddhist explanation, is what they call the hell realms, the most suffering of all. All of these are just a spectrum of mental possibilities.
Even this human realm is simply a mentally created, that’s all. It’s real insofar as you can touch and feel things, but it’s not real. This is where it’s really hard to see. Buddha says we have this deep, instinctive grasping view that sees everything that we experience as having an innate nature. And this is where this emptiness one comes in, which we’ll certainly talk about.
And this pervades and pollutes our view completely, so we believe everything is real in this absolute sense. It’s real insofar as it does exist, but it’s not real insofar as it’s not absolute. It’s just a relative reality. Well then you’ve got the gods, the humans, the animals, the prettas they call, the hell beings, this whole spectrum of possibilities, and they’re all mentally created. Not sent there by God or Buddha.
Not punishment, not reward. It’s karma, you know. karma takes care, as Lama Yeshe says. And as he said one time too, hell is not some place where the devil is waiting saying I’m waiting for Lama Yeshe. Not like that.
He said it is the manifestation of the negative energy of those sentient beings. Their own negative karma has ripened in this result. That’s how Buddhism talks. So anyway, the point of the spirits back to your question. Let me recall what your question was.
Sleepwalking. Sleepwalking, thank you very much. It can be very common, like I said, that the person can be Because when we’re asleep, we’re extraordinarily vulnerable. Our body is there to be used, our spirits can come zapping in and use you. And that can be very common, which is why people have total loss of memory of it.
I had one experience in my life, only ever one. It was a very interesting one. I was in this place in England actually, one of our centres, I woke up in the middle of the night, was as clear as a day. There’s a spirit coming in the bed, it so clear, I knew it like I could see, it was such a clear experience, coming in from the window behind me, came and laid down on me and suffocated me. And then I just said a mantra, I didn’t get scared, I said this mantra, it left and walked through the door.
That was as clear as an experience I’ve ever had, you know? And that’s very common. So this is why, you you think of cot deaths. In Buddhist terms, that’s spirits coming and taking the life of the baby. Animals have the same thing.
Possessing. Animals going crazy. Because animals are very vulnerable too. Babies are vulnerable, children sleeping are very vulnerable. This is how Buddhism would say.
All these beings, spirits are very attached, very powerful, desperate, of, that is kind of harming. So they could very easily, very commonly be spirits. But talking in the night, I remember I was sleeping with one friend once, this woman, this woman I met years ago, a very lovely, lovely person, very beautiful manners and really polite and very well educated and a lovely, lovely human being. And who always everything was lovely and gorgeous and never talked about problems, and she was a lovely person. And then when she went to sleep, I was in a state of shock, I had never seen anything like it.
It was like a war all night. She’d be tossing and turning and screaming and leaping up and arguing and shouting and gesticulating and going back and I have never seen anything like it. And she had zero memory of ever having done it. I mean, I’m sure this happens with many people. Because she’s working through all this stuff as unconscious.
Because the unconscious, don’t forget, is not just from this life, unconscious is Buddhism in terms of many lives. So people can be having wars inside there, which is why many of us go crazy, because we can’t handle what’s going on inside us. But it’s all the past karmic imprints, Buddha says. Yeah. Absolutely.
Yep.