Nature of Mind | Buddhism & The Big Questions: 'Do We Really Know What Death Is?' - Vidyamala

[Music] is [Music] [Music] right okay here we are again that's great we're carrying on our explorationism and the big questions um in a sense uh death is the biggest question and it is the big quest it's the great question it's a question that gives me um so it's really wonderful that vidimana is going to be talking about this evening before i introduce tonight i just there's a few usual or worky things um so just to say tomorrow evening we'll be in the lecture hall which is where you registered because we're going to watch the first of the two ian mcgillcrist interviews we'll be watching one tomorrow at eight o'clock same time uh with our host called uh beauty truth and purpose i think and then the following evening again we'll meet in there eight o'clock and we'll uh watch an interview with yarn of archer on um the sense of the divine so that's the two next two evenings so we'll be explaining um a little um other things to say so a few people could they buy a copy of um the nature of mind book so um we'd forgotten i'm afraid to put them in the bookshop so do and you can you buy one for a friend to give on when you get home as a kind of star daughter of the nature of mind it's a wonderful text you know you you just just from reading that you see ante sangratsu's vision of buddhism and of the nature of mind but yeah there's bookshop there also vidimarla's book is on sale in the bookshop she's written a very important book about working with pain very very valuable uh my book is in there and so is ibadamati's bookshop no book in the bookshop um it's about he hasn't got a bookshop she's got just got a book at the moment sure there'll be a book shop eventually called the subatomatic bookshop um and yeah one other little um little kind of worky thing is um for breakfast service can you make just check with um the team before you clock off um that's not quite nice where porting is it but anyway you know what i mean so before you go and have breakfast just check with the team is that right yeah that's right i've got cutting a nod just so we make sure that everything's been done yeah that's another little note i've been given okay so tonight we're going to i'm going to i was going to say we're going to explore the great question of death of course that exploration in all of our lives probably started many many years ago i was just remembering um i have two children um my partner's children and the oldest alex when she was about i think she was about six and i was out with her and um she suddenly turned to me and she said mr bandu have you got a daddy no no i haven't i haven't got a daddy she said is he dead mike um all very matter effective i was really struck because i didn't even know at that time that she had the word dead she said is she dead is he dead might remember i said he is yeah he is dead yeah and she said what happens when you die i thought here we go i should be prepared for this so what happens when you die i said well nobody really knows but what i think happens is you see a great big white light and you kind of walk into that light and everything feels sort of liberated she said yes but what happens before that as if everybody knew about the white light thing that was all perfectly straightforward but what happens before that um i mean i thought i said one of those lies before that you're at six at the moment um it wasn't long after her famous question when she said mature and have you got a hairband i said no i've got a hairband and i thought that so much of human life really us going around saying i've got a hairband so need to be important and [Music] really we should have that sort of benign sort of compassion to someone asking you if you've got a hairband but it also reminded me of my first you know thinking of her at that age and i was very struck that she said what happens when you die you know and if you've got a daddy is he dead what happens i remember a little bit later she went to her funeral and i said to her what was it like she said it was fine except for there were so many dead people there i said so many dead people and she met in the graveyard what a wonderful way of putting it it was fine except there was so many dead people there um but yeah i was that reminded me of of mia about that age um when my grandmother died we were sharing our life stories on the um on the team retreat and i was about that age when my grandmother died and my my parents somewhat surprisingly took my brother and i over to see i was very close to my grandmother she was i was her favorite um which basically just meant that i just went around and spent all the time in the house doing colorings and talking i used to talk a lot um i mean i don't know [Laughter] that's all done very quiet now um so she thought i was charming but i remember we went seeing my brother and i i was very really very young um my brother remembers it as well and she was on her coffin on her bed and um my father or my mother said she's asleep and i thought she's not asleep you know i've seen my grandmother asleep i'd often go around and she'd be asleep she doesn't look remotely like that you know i remember thinking she is definitely not asleep that is not asleep and then um my mom said well my father said oh she's gone to a better place i mean i remember thinking i don't know whether that's true either i really don't know and it was a for me that i could almost i i feel i don't know this is true but i feel that the reason i'm here now is as much to do with that moment as any even at that age i remember you know i was very close to my grandmother but it wasn't just about her there's a particular it's a fact of death and i remember thinking this is a massive problem we've got here you know little six-year-old me with big ears um my ears were the same size but my head was much smaller um i remember really thinking this is a massive problem this is like of course i didn't have work those sort of words but i remember thinking this is about as problematic as it could possibly be and i also understood immediately directly that my parents didn't understand you know at that age you get you have this sort of belief that your parents know and they say oh that's just that and that's just listen and i could see that they didn't understand it so that made it a double problem i've got the the reality of death which seemed to me like a kind of universal question mark over everything about life and then i could see that my parents didn't know what happened and we're all in that position we don't know uh what happens when you die we we've really got a belief disguised as a fact um so tonight vidyamal is going to start opening up this whole question of death the whole mystery of death and how that makes the mystery of our life [Applause] good thank you thanks mantra bandu and hello everybody at home lovely to be with you lovely to be with you can you hear me at the back and let me know if you can't at any point just put your hand up yeah so i've been given this title do we really know what death is and i said this to a friend actually had seen this on instagram promoting this retreat and she said well that's going to be a very short talk no but i've got a subtitle which is dying to live dying to live and i'm going to cover a few areas i'll go a little bit into um the nature of my project so far and what's been covered around this topic um a little bit into in a way i think the mystery of death equally points to the mystery of life and in a way that's perhaps more relevant in a funny kind of way to us here what does it mean to be alive let alone what does it mean to be dead go into that uh go a little bit into um the whole buddhist view on all that and teachings of the bardos said a little bit more about that um a little bit about the the whole buddhist principle very simply is that we're training our awareness now all the time that's the kind of task so that when we do encounter death our awareness can meet that with clarity and so on so i want to go a little bit into you know that's a big ask and life can be really hard sometimes so how do we apply that teaching to um in life when it's hard except about that and then i'm going to go into um you know some of the ways that buddhism describes the mystery of the mind that the sort of free mind and uh love place of love yeah so i'm gonna that's the kind of arc of the talk see how i get on with that little scrappy mind map so i think you know in all seriousness do we really know what death is but i think the answer probably is no you know in terms of we don't know it in in you know like we might as well like we know something else but perhaps we don't actually know anything maybe that's accurate but we might think you know that the sun sets in the evening arises in the morning that's something that we can kind of all agree on but i think death really is tremendous mystery one of the greatest mysteries but we have very strong hints about what death might be like and the nature of mind project so far has explored us really really well i think i'm not going to go over everything that's been in the videos because you can watch those those of you haven't seen them already you can watch those on youtube and they're really really good very very interesting so there's an interview with penny satori who's a researcher into near-death experiences and then there's a seminar between maitre bandu and nyana vacha sort of drawing out the buddhist implications of that very very good and then there's an interview with a woman called carol bowman or bauman raymond baumann bowman thank you on children's uh memories of past lives and then there's a seminar on that and in my tribe andrew has also done um sessions at the lbc sort of about half an hour talks recapping that territory so there's there's actually a lot that you can catch up on particularly about about death so i'd really encourage you all to watch those um what i took away from all those is it's all quite convincing you know when you when you really listen to these people who research these things well it seems more convincing and not convincing that something continues the near-death experiences are very convincing i mean there's one there's one that i i tried i tried to find the source i heard this years ago and i googled it and i couldn't find it so it may actually not even be true but i when i heard it i was so amazed and this is um see if i can get the story right there was a person in a house and someone came and knocked on the door and said i really wanted to thank you for um attending to me in that awful car crash some time ago yeah and they're supposed to say wow how what what happened and how did you know and this person said when i was in this car crash and uh i had it was a near-death experience i was out of my body and i saw you come and help and i saw your number plate and that when i recovered i tracked you down through the number plate and here i am to say thank you i mean i've gone goosebumpy just hearing that i i think that is a true story have you have you heard anyone about you something similar yeah and then there's another book called after by bruce grayson and he's got a very interesting story right at the beginning of the book about a person who has a near-death experience and the doctor has ketchup on his tie and he covered her over when he went into the room but before he come and to treat her he had his white coat open and he had ketchup on his tie and she she knew that he had kept up on his tie because she her consciences had left the body so it's very hard to dispute these things because they're you can't imagine them you know because there's this kind of factual details to them so i do find it all very convincing and it does really align with what buddhism teaches so really tonight i'm going to be more going into the buddhist side of things i'll just say a couple of things personally that um my grandmother died when i was i think about 23 and i'd never seen a dead person uh till then i'd seen dead animals because we had lots of pets and there's an amazing cycle of birth and death when you've got pets that you kind of breed your guinea pigs and you see a lot of birth and a lot of death so i'd seen that but i'd never seen a dead body and she was at home and me and my sister were there with my father i looked at her i was crying and i looked at her and i thought what made you nanny what made you nanny because this body wasn't her and i thought ah it was the light in your eyes it was the light in your eyes that made you nanny so then the question is what what's the light in our eyes and that's a big part of why i'm here that started a quest you know what's what's the light in our eyes i mean if i just look around i can sort of it's amazing isn't it that we're not just these kind of inert objects there is something that is flowing through us and expressing it as the light on our eyes so yeah i'm still very interested what's the light on our eyes but that was very striking that that's what made nanny nanny it wasn't her physical form and also on fourth form physics which is very very basic physics um of that 14 and we learned that energy never stops it just changes and that was like wow that energy never never looking at the physicist over there and there i hope that is that correct that energy never stops good and so i thought um that means that something in me never ends or the energy that i'm experiencing doesn't just stop it can't just stop at death so of course you can argue well it turns into you know the energy of earthworms and so there's lots of ways you can kind of rationalize that away from the continuity of consciousness but it was a very it was one of those moments again you know in the lab as a 14 year old learning that energy never stops that means that this experience of being alive some somehow something was going to continue as energy and um as part of preparing for this talk i got in touch with an old friend of mine in new zealand a doctor called case lodder dutch doctor that lives in new zealand who's a palliative care doctor and so does a lot of end of life care and very interesting he's also now quite involved with assisted dying which is now legal in new zealand as of i think a year ago there's a referendum so you can now have a sister dying so they have a you have a main doctor and then you have an independent assessor and he's an independent assessor because he's all as you can imagine there's all kinds of um very very strict criteria to be able to have a sister dying but really really interesting so he's very he's very involved in death seen loads of people dying and one of the things he said to me was oh i'm really looking forward to dying i found that amazing and it wasn't from any kind of i hate life attitude it was more i'm looking forward to the adventure and a great confidence that something amazing happens at death this is from a doctor who's seen many many people die in a palliative care situation and he said he always asks people what do you think happens when we die he always asks them that he's a lovely guy and he's a buddhist he's a he's a buddhist and um i'm going to take that home tradition and he's so he so he believes in the continuity he says what what do you believe happens and he said that people including those who are non-religious almost invariably come up with some kind of spiritual construct it's very interesting isn't it they found a way of making sense of it for themselves and when he obviously talks very sort of deeply with them and he says almost everybody has had some kind of um sort of inexplicable situation in life like we will all of if we really sort of reflect we will all have had some kind of experience in life that is pointing to the fact that this isn't everything and so he really draws that out with people but i thought that was also very interesting that people are nearing death and he helps them kind of free up their minds by remembering times when there's been some kind of opening in their life and he says he loves the conversations it's really enhances belief that something continues one thing that's very beautiful is he he says he gets people to put in the room take away all the pictures of their living relatives and put pictures of their relatives or their loved ones who have died so i thought that was interesting you know to the the the people who've already gone before have surround yourself with that rather than your loved ones who there's a lot of evidence that that people die often when their loved ones leave the room because there isn't that pull holding you back so he gets them to place these these photos off their beloved relatives and then he asked people to practice gently letting go so they're lying there in hospital and they're rehearsing this gently letting go i imagine particularly with the assisted dying because of course you know when it's going to happen so you can be doing this kind of rehearsal of how to die any and he said that not all deaths are easy of course you know it's quite we can sort of romanticize it as if we're all going to have a lovely death and of course we don't know what kind of death we're going to have i mean he talked about one catholic nun who had a complete crisis of faith just before she died and he said it was terrible terrible for her like every didn't believe in god anymore suddenly everything fell away so she had a difficult death so you know that's that was interesting um so moving on to this in a way thinking about death it inevitably brought me to life you know the mystery of death is the mystery of life and that we have this question is there life after death you know that's a question many of us would articulate so i think an even more remarkable question is is there life before death like are we really really alive now or are we just kind of existing until we die you know that's that's a very juicy question is there life before death and uh i had an experience in when i was 25 when um i've got the spinal injury i'd had i'd had a while but i had a big crisis and i was in intensive care over sick lots of things happened but uh one of the sort of strong experiences i had then was um i was i was in the ward as an auckland and it was a high-rise kind of hospital and i was looking out over the city and the city became very kind of misty it's very interesting and it was like um everything became very thin it's the only way i can describe it let everything that seemed very hard edged became very sort of thin and a bit insubstantial and misty and i really felt that i had a choice that i could have let go and it was quite it was quite appealing just kind of just drift off i mean i i don't know whether i was near death i don't i don't think physiologically i was but something was something very very um strong was happening where my hold on life was loosening and i thought i had a choice and i chose life yeah again again it wasn't massively conscious but there was definitely a point and i thought no i'm i'm not ready i haven't lived this life yet and i chose life and since then my life actually has felt qualitatively different since i actively chose life it's like i'm here because i've chosen it rather than i'm just kind of filling in time until i die and if i think about how i felt prior to that point i think i was just kind of existing so that i really want to put that out into the room you know kind of are you choosing this full-blooded kind of astonishing experience we call life or are you just kind of living in some kind of half-life so i think i think we all i think we all do need to choose life moment by moment i think we all have a choice moment by moment so in buddhism it's very traditional that um one of the kind of purposes of life is to really train our awareness to train our hearts so that we're able to when when when death comes along we're able to free ourselves from the confines of the body and we're able to um experience some big mind nondual awareness there's lots and lots of different names for the absolutely unconditioned um but some quality that's completely and utterly free that's that's very traditional in buddhism um so i was thinking about this that maybe we need to peel ourselves back from worrying about death and really just try to be alive right now and really try to take responsibility for our quality of consciousness right now because i think worrying about death can actually kind of be another ego project am i going to continue i want to continue so we're kind of worrying about death because we're worrying about me and you know we don't like the idea of not continuing of course because that's very frightening um but buddhism is also saying that this attachment to a kind of fixed autonomous identity is also delusional and it's the cause of our suffering and that there's something much more that we're a kind of flow of experience that you know it's in this form but you know i'm not kind of some rigid static hard little lump i'm i'm quite porous you're quite porous and we're kind of co-creating our experience of life all the time um so even this thing of am i going to continue and i hope there's life after death so that i can continue buddhism would say that that's just based on deep delusion because actually you don't even live like that right now you don't even exist like that right now so forget about death it's more like how can we profoundly change our relationship with our experience right now um and buddhism's got this teaching of the bardos particularly later buddhism and bado means intermediate state and traditionally there's six bardos there's the bardo of this life so that's that's a kind of intermediate state between a previous life and future life there's a bad of meditation so every time we meditate we're entering a kind of intermediate state between how we were before meditation and then we come out of the meditation and something's changed so this flow that i'm labeling vidyamala is taking some other kind of expression after the bad of meditation it's about sleep and dreams and i find that i'm really really interesting because you know we we go to bed put our head on the pillow we think we're just kind of stable fixed being and then we have this amazing experience at night with we can fly we can make things up you know we we create this whole universe in our sleep and somehow we think well that's not really real but this is you know maybe that is as real as this you know and then we wake up in the morning and we kind of more more or less look the same so we think well me as a fixed person has just had this kind of little fantasy and here i am back as this fixed person but when you really start to unpack that it's so amazing that we're never exactly the same after a dream and that dream the dream world seems so real doesn't it so real and in in buddhism you know there's training around dream yoga lucid dreaming all these kind of things so that you're even training your consciousness at night if you're very if you're very adept there's lots of practices around that and then is about of dying so that's another intermediate state you know you're alive and then you're not alive so that's an intermediate state and that's seen as this massive opportunity because you get this bright light of luminosity and this this comes out in all the near-death experiences where people see this light again that maps directly onto the the bardo teachings that were taught you know i don't know eighth century ninth century in india and tibet this idea of luminosity um then there's a bada of what's called the dharmatar which is a kind of dreamlike state so you have you haven't been able to sort of meet the light so you kind of fall into this dreamlike state probably a bit like our normal dreams perhaps and then there's the bardo of um re-becoming and rebirth so you kind of form sometimes they say you faint and then you find yourself in a new life and then of course we can't remember any of that so that's the traditional um teaching on the bardos and uh i was on a retreat here a few months ago that was really amazing actually so there's a book called the bardo to doll which i think translates as liberation through hearing yes good thank you it's so good having your animation because it just mods i'm sure he'd go like this if i got it wrong so it's a liberation through hearing so again traditionally in these cultures and in tibet in particular someone's dying somebody would be whispering these teachings into their ear and now this is going to happen and now this is going to happen and now you're going to have a bright light and you're going to have a smoky light go for the bright light oh you must have brighter okay next and then if you've missed the bright light then this is going to happen and then there's a deity i'll go for the deity oh you missed that as well but the liberations are hearing for you and i think the hearing sense is the last sense to go when you're dying anyway so we had this retreat it was amazing so um we spent the morning reading it out loud and it's quite long so this was hours of just hearing these dharma texts and we completely blacked this room out so all the windows were covered in blankets we had a shrine in the middle there was skeletons hanging by the door so you had to enter through skeletons and um it's very immersive it got quite smelly after a few days sort of bodies and no ventilation um and i lay at the back and i laid down i put a blanket over my head and i just let these words in it was really very very powerful so again you know we see a direct mapping of these vardo teachings and the near-death experiences and actually in terms of the near-death case my doctor friend he says he caused some death experiences he doesn't call them near death because a lot of people have actually died it's not they've nearly died you actually died and then you're brought back to life so if you're if your heart stops so i thought that was very interesting because in death experiences and you know i found that interesting because the skeptical part of me thinks well we don't really know because we've only got these messages from people who have nearly died and we don't know what happens after that so when he said that they have actually died i thought okay that's a bit more convincing because you know you sort of think maybe something really horrible happens after you know if you don't come back then something really awful happens you just don't know do you but anyway um okay so so this ties in very much with what budget sure was talking about last night of endless re-becoming like moment by moment by moment by moment we're having a little death and a little rebirth and that's again very traditional that we're we're continually letting go of ideally but continue letting go of this experience and then receiving the next experience letting go receiving letting go receiving with agency of course that's the thing that we have in this life is this agency of our conscious mind where we can guide our stream towards liberation rather than contraction which is what you were talking about with the um with the karma with actions having consequences so um i think one way of looking at all this is that we can see our life perhaps one of the one of the purposes of our lives there's many purposes i think but one of the purposes is to see it as training our heart mind and the tibetans call it the mind stream which i really love actually because even the mind can sound like a thing but the mind stream the mind heart mind stream we're training that away from habits of rigidifying around experience to releasing an opening that's increasingly how i understand it so the gesture would be moving from this to this that's the sort of gesture of practice and we rigidify very very automatically so we have a sense impression something unpleasant and we immediately get uh don't like it we have a sense impression something pleasant then we go oh i want more and that kind of pushing away and pulling in those are the primary drivers around this reinforcing of a sort of fixed human being that's bumping up against our experience and having unsatisfactoriness which is what the buddha said is the first noble truth unsatisfactoriness we're kind of bumping along because we keep on rigidifying around experience and we can open to something greater i thought the way maitreya bandu introduced the puja last night was beautiful you know that we that all the time there is something else something higher something deeper something broader there's another way of being another kind of consciousness that's available all the time that we're crushing it sort of crush crush it crush against it with this becoming tight and narrow so we can't see it anymore and we can't experience it anymore so that all sounds very well and good you know we're just sort of going along and we're letting go and we're releasing we're letting go and releasing and that's the training but i just want to say a little bit about what actually happens because life is just really hard sometimes for i think probably for all of us you know sometimes this process of being alive and the process of thinking oh my god i've got to be responsible for my own consciousness that's very very daunting um sometimes life is unbearable for us isn't it and uh you know i've had a lot of suffering myself in my life so unfortunately i i seem to have become the suffering expert which i i think it probably is quite funny in a certain kind of way but um it wasn't exactly the strep line i was wanting when i was teenager but you know that that i'm not i'm no stranger to suffering so i've sort of found ways of navigating it so i just thought i'd share a few of those because i know we all have dark times um i mean one of them is paul gilbert who um michael bandu interviewed for the project who's developed compassion focused therapy very very very interesting guy very compassionate guy and one of the things he draws out is is the effect of evolution on our kind of nervous systems and our brains and he often says and talks it's chaotic in there you know he says we've got anything we've got very very tricky brains that evolution has gifted us a very sort of threat-based brain very alert for anything that's going to eat us or threaten us in some kind of way and uh it used to be things like sabretooth tigers we don't have those anymore and some of the uh the researchers say that we're very oriented now towards social threat and of course social threat is there all the time you know do they like me um social media of course really feeds this we've probably all got it here to some extent you know somebody doesn't smile at you you think oh no they don't like me what have i done wrong particularly in the silence we can really get into that kind of thing um so we're surrounded by what we can perceive as threat and then we have all kinds of automatic reactions we get certain chemicals we go into sort of fight and flight mode hyper vigilance all these kind of things so the great thing that he says is it's not your fault and that can be a massive relief for people so if you are feeling all kind of oh they don't like me i'm feeling paranoid and secure and um yeah paranoid and secure they're quite familiar for a lot of us aren't they anxious and then you know we're here on a retreat and we're hearing a lot about positive mental states and you think well i should be positive i'm here on this retreat and here i am paranoid and insecure and anxious shouldn't be here a bad buddhist doing or wrong failure we'll just remember paul gilbert saying it's not your fault it's just the way you're wired up and then he says but it is your responsibility i find that so good it's not your fault but it is your responsibility because every moment we have an opportunity to meet that with kindness meet that with empathy know that it's normal rather than you're some kind of freak because you're depressed and anxious to normal it's what human brains do sometimes and then how can you make that with kindness and then respond more creatively which is what we've heard about today and last night so that's the first thing and then i think the next thing that i would recommend is to chunk it down to moments when things look really bleak and you're projecting into the future thinking oh my god it's just going to go on forever and it's awful and there's no point just that that's all mind created your mind is telling that whole story all you know is now so chunk it down to moments and one of my sort of insights is the present moment is always bearable yeah i think i think the present moment is i mean some people have challenged me on this but almost always the present moment is variable whereas that whole story isn't but the present moment is terrible and then you sort of really start to drop into that investigate that this mystery of the present moment and you realize it's not just that bleak experience but there's other experiences as well this pleasure so you open yourself up to what's pleasant right now i mean i've got back pain right now um butterflies a little bit of insecurity a little bit of anxiety and also i've got oh look there's so much matti smiling naan of archer keeps on affirming my dharma points which is brilliant you're all out there i can see the light in your eyes i mean that is just completely beautiful so the present moment starts to become a bit more multi-dimensional when you peel yourself off this kind of authorizing about everything drop back into what's actually happening and then find the different flavors behind the different flavors and there's always a whole variety and you can also make choices you might think i'm going to go and stand at the window and look at the blue sky that's a that's a positive creative choice i'm going to phone a friend i'm going to eat something you know whatever it might be there's always there's always a choice point but we can only find those choice points if we're willing to be present and another nice little saying is every moment is a new chance every moment is a new chance so if you feel totally blown in this moment which we will do and then we can think oh i've completely blown it we think oh no i've got another opportunity right now and here's another one and here's another one so just keep on seizing the opportunities no matter how far down into the sloth of despond i really love that expression sloth of despond you've gone there's always some you can always find some kind of ladder out just by one tiny little micro choice um and then this is really totally exciting and mysterious so when you really get curious about being alive right now and just being here because when you think about the present moment it sounds like a tiny little speck doesn't it like a little pin prick and you think that doesn't sound very spacious but what really happens is that this this sense of presence kind of explodes and becomes it can become very multi-dimensional and it can contain um well it's like the mind changes from being tight and narrow to being this other quality of mind which is very open and loving and i had a tiny little taste of taste of it just before when i was saying i got my back pain and a few butterflies a little bit of anxiety a little bit of insecurity and then when i thought the light in your eyes something really shifted in my awareness it became really big rather than just literally in my discomfort it became all of us and then i think you can you can extrapolate that to nth degree where you're just open to something that's completely boundless and completely luminous which is again what the buddha teaches but the doorway is here i think i think the doorway is here that's what i don't think the doorway is thinking about when when i might die because that will arrive as a moment so we practice it now we practice it now we find that doorway the like i talked about the doorway in the sky the other day you find that right here and it's always available it's always available it might be a tiny little crack or it might just swing wide open in a practice so i think or is a very beautiful word a.w.e i love the word or that we should be willing to be awed by just the kind of complete mystery of awareness and life when we're willing to just be with wise and in on this retreat that i was on on the on the bardot doll cebuti gave talks every afternoon and said but cebu is a very senior teacher in our tradition and he was saying and i thought this is really brilliant that every single moment there's a flash of pure awareness and pure awareness is this kind of unbound consciousness unbound quality of awareness and every single moment it's flushing but normally we're crushing it with our craving and our aversion our sort of habits so that's very exciting as well isn't it that for the rest of the retreat you can see if you can just have a glimpse of this this flash flash of luminosity every single moment so um [Music] you know what is that and what does the buddha say about this mind this quality of mind that is not just stuck in the senses and not just stuck in a tight way of being and buddhism has got a lot to say about that i mean it's it's it's all metaphorical it's very clear that it's beyond words so you know i can't tell you this is what the enlightened mind is like because it seems to be um outside our normal reference points of of of language and time and space but we have images so there's a blue sky that's very traditional that the this might this plot this consciousness that is not bound to just this life um one of the images is the clear blue sky and we we are being fortunate to have some blue skies this week so something you could do is go out lie on your back in the field and sky gaze that's a beautiful practice just sky gaze and allow your consciousness your awareness just to kind of be like the sky sky gaze um and one of the traditions of of buddhism called zog chan they've got a nice way of describing it where they say that the the the mind that's free is open there's openness there's clear knowing and this sensitivity so again those are beautiful words aren't they openness clearly knowing and sensitivity and they've got images so openness is the essence of mind and that's like the clear blue sky so the essence of kind of who we are is like the clear blue sky and it's open openness and then clear knowing is the nature of mind according to this tradition and that's the sun that's the sun that lights up the sky so you've got the sky and then the sun lights up the sky and then the sensitive heart quality is the energy of the mind and that's like the rays of the sun that pervade everywhere so you've got the blue sky you've got the sun and then you've got the rays of the sun so i find that very beautiful so these three qualities of the of the sort of awakened mind as openness clearly knowing and sensitive that's just within one particular tradition uh it seems to be vast i i like the word fast that word sort of speaks to me you know that kind of very evocative sort of quality of opening um and luminosity if i said luminosity already i really really love the word luminosity and a sort of metaphor that really works for me is that we are all right now condensations of the radiant nature of awareness that's what we are you know we think we're these little lumps but another way is we're all condensations of the radiant nature of reality the radiant nature of awareness we're expressing it in our own unique ways but it's something flowing through us and sangra he one of the things he said in a seminar is that we're all coagulations of the common stream of life we're coagulations of the common stream of life i've reflected on that very deeply it's it's it's unaesthetic and i think it's incredibly accurate so there's a common stream of life that we're all expressing and then we sort of clot our habits our views this kind of craving and aversions holding on to things is like this kind of clotting coagulating and then sometimes we get really crusty and scabby you know like cover like if you get a blood you get a graze and it's flowing blood and then it gets sticky and then it gets kind of a bit hard and it gets really crusty so some of us get really really crusty i think it's a i think it's a brilliant metaphor and and sort of scabby but that can be you know it can be turned back into water you know with different conditions blood can flow again and i think another another sort of image that we do is we snag when you get a fingernail on wool and it catches and you pull you pull the thread and and you suddenly got you had a night you had a really nice jumper and suddenly it's got this great big sort of thread hanging out and i think we kind of snag against life i know i snag against life it's like i stick to things and then i sort of pull i make a little hole in the fabric of life if you like so i think i think snagging is a really good word so we we need to learn not to snag and that means not to get sort of sticky against things but just to let let this kind of life flow through us and um the last thing says very very important is it's it's very obvious in buddhism and it seems to come out in the near-death experiences that love is an absolutely um intrinsic part of this awareness so it's not a kind of cool aloof abstract awareness but it's utterly saturated and drenched in love so what's that like yeah so we can all open ourselves to that it seems that it's not that you have awareness and then loves the kind of add-on but that love is an essential part of that experience that um when people have these near-death experiences they often have experiences of unconditional love that there's the light but there's also this unconditional love and somehow we're closing ourselves down against that all the time with our habits and our snagging and our clotting and our snagging and scabbing and that it's here all the time and again dante's got he says in another lecture i think this is really great as well that there's two different ways of looking at this journey of training our awareness so we can be more open to this it's free quality and he says one metaphor is climbing a mountain so you know sometimes it can really feel like hard work and we have to put in that effort like here we're putting in the effort to turn up sit on the cushions even if we're uncomfortable and you know face our experience i suppose so there is that quality of effort and then the other metaphor is the lotus a lotus unfolding and you discover what was there all along and it talks about in in some of the chinese and japanese traditions you get these monks who attain liberation and they just laugh they laugh their heads off and they're laughing they say oh my god it was there all along it was there all along and it's just absolutely hilarious to them but you know they think it's like it's going somewhere else for something else and it's right here so it's a bit like you know the eye can't we can't see our own eye it's so close to us that we can't see it or sometimes it's like a fish swimming in water the fish doesn't know it's in water so that's i find that very optimistic you know it's climbing the mountain because we need to put effort in but it's also i mean maybe it's a bit like the activity and receptivity that that we can be like the great monks just laughing our heads off when we sort of feel like we've got the wrong spectacles on let me just take the glasses off me oh my god you know you're all content condensations of the radiant nature of one and how amazing and you always wear and yours will be yeah okay so i'm just going to finish um reading a little bit um this is an amazing book called in love with the world by a tibetan monk called young gay ringgit rinpoche and says what a buddhist monk can teach you about living from nearly dying what a buddhist monk can teach you about living from nearly dying so very very briefly he's a he was a very very very um sort of high-ranking llama bit like royalty i think and he decides to effectively climb over the monastery wall and escape because he really wants to get out of that and to just be a nobody and he becomes a beggar takes off his robes i think it's a bit like prince william leaving the royal family here i mean it is a really absolutely remarkable thing that he did and he wants to go on this wandering retreat for years and really quite soon he gets food poisoning so he has quite a lot of humiliations and one of them is actually when he's begging his whole system has been used to very you know royal food and suddenly he's having leftovers from a street restaurant and he gets very very bad dysentery and food poisoning and does really does nearly die because he's trained he's able to track the whole process with tremendous awareness so i'm just going to read you some of what he experienced it's very very inspiring very very encouraging he doesn't die obviously um but he's brought he's like a messenger from the beyond bringing us the buddhist perspective on this so i'll just read this there's a couple of passages this is when he's realizing that he's probably dying my body is deteriorating i have no money no gold coins no things of value even so i have the possibility of waking up of realizing the deepest most subtle aspects of consciousness my precious human birth is my treasure in health and in sickness for it never betrays the possibility of awakening how could any treasure be worth more than knowing that how fortunate i am how truly blessed my only offering now is how i manifest this dharma treasure how i manifest living how i manifest dying how i live this moment this only moment and then he starts going through the whole dissolution of the elements with amazing awareness so his body gets very very very heavy then he gets very dry then it gets very cold and then the air element begins to dissipate and then suddenly boom the entire universe opened up and became totally unified with consciousness no conceptual mind i was no longer within the universe the universe was within me no me separate from the universe no direction no within or without no perception or non-perception no self or non-self no living no dying the internal movements of the organs and sensors slowed way down to minimal functioning i still understood what was going on but not through commentary or voice or image that type of cognition no longer presented itself the clarity and luminosity of awareness beyond concepts beyond fixed mind became the sole vehicle of knowing i was no longer bonded to any sense of a distinct body or mind no separation existed between me my mind my skin my body and the entire rest of the world no phenomenon existed separate from me experiences happened but no longer to a separate me perceptions occurred but with no reference back to anyone no references at all no memory perceptions but no perceiver the me that i had recently been sick healthy beggar buddhist disappeared like clouds that moved through a sunlit sky as a drop of water placed in the ocean becomes indistinct boundless unrecognizable and yet still exists so my mind merged with space that's a very traditional image of the drop of water merging with the ocean it was no longer a matter of me seeing trees as i had become trees me and trees were one trees were not the object of awareness they manifested awareness stars were not the object of appreciation but appreciation itself no separate me loved the world the world was love oh my god i'm gonna cry my perfect home vast and intimate every particle was alive with love fluid flowing without barriers i was an alive particle no interpretive mind clarity beyond ideas vibrant energetic all seeing my awareness did not go toward anything yet everything appeared as an empty mirror both receives and reflects everything around it a flower appears in the empty mirror of the mind and the mind accepts its presence without inviting or rejecting it seemed as if i could see forever as if i could see through trees as if i could be trees i cannot even say i continued to breathe or my heart continued to beat there was no individual anything no dualistic perception no body no mind only consciousness [Applause] yes

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 516

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Id: ZXMw0CSL3QY

Length: 63min 10sec (3790 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022