Tenzin Palmo Teaching, Wheel of Life, Samsara in the Raw 3 of 12

you know in some especially Mariana sutras it really looks like everything you do there's a hell for it and it can be very depressing and so one time I spoke to my Lama comes from Rinpoche and said you know REM state is impossible you know I mean everything you do you there's a hell and he laughed and lost and he said no no no and he said actually we only write like that to frighten people into being good which of course doesn't work because relatively good people get frightened and the bad people could care less have you noticed I mean really good people get all worried about the smallest little thing and really horrible people doing most ghastly things and click hair you know so it's not very psychologically sound but anyway all religions frighten people try to frighten people into being ethical and he said that actually it's quite difficult to go to hell the people who are reborn in the hell realms are people who delight in cruelty in other words they're people who have quite sadistic minds enjoy the sufferings of others I have complete I mean I think the cold hells are for people who have no feeling at all like you know those young soldiers who are trained from children to kill and to torture so they've completely cut off from their emotions and and they have no empathy at all for the sufferings of others I think if they you know pressings if they die like that they would go straight to a cold Hell where there's your frozen there's no feeling and people who just a very sadistic and enjoy watching others suffer or infecting suffering themselves would be more likely to go to a kind of hot hell but the idea is not that these places are places down there this of mind as I said evening shanti david said it's a state of mind who is creating all this it created through the projections of a distorted mind so it's like we we create these Holograms from our own mental state so if our mental state is full of anger and hatred and rejoicing in others suffering that's what we're going to project out then it looks like it's coming at us we again get angry and want to destroy that and so it continued this circle so therefore the hell realms last a long time because people there are filled with paranoia and and hatred and they can't get out beyond that there is a historian of sutras how one part in the very beginning when the buddha was first starting out before he was a bodhisattva many years ago and he was in a hell realm in which he had to haul a heavy chariot backwards and forwards across this this blazing hot floor iron floor with gardens on either side beating them if they flag and he had a another person with him who together they were pulling this chariot backwards and forwards and endlessly and at one point the the companion was so completely exhausted and the would-be buddha he felt compassion for him in that moment normally you're so caught up in your own suffering and you're so angry that you don't think about any could care less about anybody else but because he was descended with buddha he had this moment of compassion and he said to the gods please look let him rest for a little bit i I will carry the chariot for both of us just let him rest now and the guard said no no you cannot you cannot be responsible for anybody else's karma you have to be your own Karma and don't you try to take it to yourself and so they beat him and they beaten so much that because of his compassion he got he left that state and he got reborn in a higher realm and that was the first moment of pure compassion which he had felt in all his long life streams and that was the start of his body settle pass to eventually in many aeons onwards becoming a Buddha so in other words it doesn't matter where you start from you know we all have Buddha nature so we all have the inner potential if we work hard to go beyond our presence ignorant state so anyway so I mean I personally wouldn't worry too much about the hell realms it's except to pray that all beings there may be liberated in a Chinese tradition especially they have a bodhisattva pod city gaba whose special role is to go down to the hell realms and help the beings there to become liberated so this is a cycle right nobody gets stuck anywhere forever you know even if you're in the lowest hell realm and no matter what you did you will eventually come out of it sooner or later depending on your mind state so all of these realms are not static it doesn't mean once you're there you're there forever yeah it's only you know part of the wheel sometimes you down sometimes your ups and downs you it down sometimes you up until we escape as I said like prison sometimes in the penthouse sometimes in the dungeons but you know people get shifted around when the Karma when the the the vipaka the results of the fruit of whatever comas it was which sent you down into that lower realm are exhausted then one is released from that into another realm into a higher realm so this is not just some place down there I mean right now on this earth there are beings in hell realms I mean imagine some of these countries right now on earth what it must be like to be in some of these countries where you know which are at war or which are in the you know real hotbeds of of terrorism and you never know moment to moment the fear the fear not just for yourself but for your loved ones your children your parents your neighbors your friends moment moment never knowing I mean you know you live in Australia and Australia is not a war with anybody and nobody is likely to attack you so it's perhaps if you could to imagine what it must be like to live in one of these worlds where you know you never know any knock at the door what it means and we're all you know lived in seeing these you know this terrible you know refugee problem is caused by by the horrors that so many of these people have had to over undergo you know just trying to get out so it's not just as hell realm it's something which happens when you dive through really naughty person you go down even right now on this earth in this human body so many people are in hell realms externally like filled with with violence and terror and and a tremendous fear and then there are internal Helman's many many people have really really incredibly intense in a health is they're living free I mean the amount of mental sickness in the world is is astronomical astronomical and there is written a report of how many people in America are on things like Valium Osetra what's justice punishing perfectly ordinary looking people and yet they can't deal with day to day life unless they're they're you know having to take all this medication and I mean people who are suffering from schizophrenia or you know all these paranoia is that people go through I mean just so many people are having a hell realm which they cannot escape from even in their dreams it's not something which is just you know well either you believe in rebirth or you don't I mean this is nothing to do with rebirth or nor rebirth this is to do with how we live in our mind what kind of mind are we living in because you know we take so much care of our external environment we take so much care of our houses that they should be nice and they should be attractive and well decorated make sure they're very clean we take care of our bodies we write foods we do the right kind of exercises we wash ourselves and you know have showers every day twice a day three times a day and we get all the right products to put on our delicate skins and then we close ourselves in all the things which we think will make us look nice and everybody says oh isn't that pretty what are we doing with our mind because where we live is not in our houses and not even in our bodies it's in online how much care are we taking to keep our minds clean well swept well and nicely decorated pleasure to live in so that we feel at home in our own mind if we we were talking yesterday about isolation one of the reasons people care isolate the isolation because they're stuck with their own mind and they cannot deal with their own mind if they're not distracted they've got to be distracted going to be reading something looking at something playing with something talking to somebody just sitting there hour after hour day after day week after week year after year with nothing except they're online so all of us live in our mind and therefore it behooves us to have a nice place to live in the rent is not high it is just ordered have a good mind we have to make friends with our minds and to know our mind and to recognize those things which make our mind unclean and untidy and to recognize all the junk that's piling up and to start clearing up and throwing out and being more discriminating about what we allow in then we have a nice line to living otherwise is more junk and the more chaos in our mind we end up in one of these very unpleasant states so many people are living in Hell realms right now like an omelet and they don't have to always be crazy many people are eaten up by anger hatred somebody did something at some time which upsets them and they play it over and over and over they never let it go something unhappy happened and they play it over and over and over they don't nickel or they want something which somebody else got and then they're jealous and then they remember that and remember that and feed it and feed it and feed it and so we create all these realms within our own mind right right now we don't have to wait to die recently I got this letter from this lady in Ireland and she was going on and on and on about somebody who had cheated her out of a house and the lawyer was a crooked lawyer apparently and hadn't represented her well and she's got the whole letter page after page after page about how annoyed she was about this and how she was still going to get her house back and so forth and so forth and then just at the end she mentioned this all happened 30 years ago you know and poor woman she spent her whole life just with her not able to let go of her resentment and disappointment so we create our suffering so much we are really very dumb we think that are intelligent but we're not intelligence very few really intelligent people in this world we just create our own sufferings and then blame everybody else so you know yes there are external hell realms you know as physical ones in these war zones and you know people living in Syria people living in Afghanistan and and so forth you know and in terrible terrible but also even in people living in the most beautiful place perfectly peaceful no threat but inwardly they can still be in a warzone inwardly they can still be in a hell room not only because of like mental afflictions like schizophrenia and so forth but because of their you know as I say you know something bad happened and they can't let it go so then we play it again again like scratching and scratching and scratching out scabs and it bleeds more and more and more instead of you know putting in a bomb then heal the body can heal itself it's wonderful we should also help our minds to heal themselves otherwise we create our own hell run five seven forever it's very very sad to see how people can do that

Channel: Bodhi Events Australia

Views: 10,980

Rating: 4.9238095 out of 5

Keywords: Buddhism, Meditation, Mindfulness, Tenzin Palmo, Samsara

Id: 4goT42-me2g

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2017