Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:14 Welcome to my Bob Thurman podcast. I'm so grateful. Some good friends enabled me to present them to you. If you enjoy them and find them useful, please think of becoming a member of Tibet house us to help preserve Tibetan culture. Tibet house is the dial Lamas cultural center in America. All best wishes. Have a great day.
Speaker 3 00:00:48 This is episode 300 Atlas, Buddha and letting go of the world.
Speaker 4 00:01:15 Each of us is kind of a, an Atlas figure. You know, like the Atlas statue in New York, in front of Rockefeller center, the poor guy is holding up the whole planet earth on his shoulders and his neck is crunched uncomfortably under it. You know, his head, he's very strong, but he's holding up the world. Remember that? So all of us all the time are holding up the world like that. Even you sit quietly and you for a moment, don't think of any thoughts in your mind. You have a subliminal, whole cosmological pattern in your mind that you're on the planet earth, that you're in such and such a town that you're in such and such a building up is up and down is down. You have such and such a body. You're such such a name you're 40 years old. And so, and so is in the white house.
Speaker 4 00:01:57 So, and so is in the UN all these different, terrible things have happened. Your parents are hetero and thither. Your ancestors are ding to their, your friends, your exes, your lovers, your, oh, everybody's all over the place. You know, as you're holding a huge world picture in your mind, and in that world picture, of course you are half baked. You are half wi you sometimes do right. You sometimes do wrong. You don't know this. Sometimes feel good. You sometimes feel bad. You sort of know your limitations. You, you draw your lines, you can't do this. You can't do that. You don't understand all this complicated things. You don't do that. It's just you the way this and that. You're just filled and fixated yourself with certain type of self image within a certain type of imaged world and world picture. So the beginning of all meditations is to try to loosen and lighten that world picture, let it dissolve into space, realize that any particular part of it, if you really investigate you can't really verify it. And so you let it sort of float it away, let it melt, let it ease up. You don't have to sustain it and support it. And in fact, since you're seeking self transformation in this retreat, you can certainly decide that anything that you see around you in the world might be your delusion. It might not be this way in that way. It might not be world war five. It might not be this in that disaster area. It might not be the other, it's just your own delusion is creating that in some extent.
Speaker 4 00:03:25 And then instead borrow from the Tibetans or adapt from the Tibetans vision of the wish granting gem tree, your own wish granting gem field. Visualize it. Imagine it. And if you can't visualize in detail, because you have a limiting self image of yourself is not able to visualize, for example, to hold a stable picture in your mind, generally just run over it. Remind yourself it's there. You're at the top of the world, looking at the lake, the tree Springs out of the lake, Jack and the bin. So type of tree, all made of jewels with every mentor and angel on it, all radiating floods of light to you, booing you up and filling you up in that light and around you, all the beings and the light flowing out to them, just know that you're in that vortex and suddenly you're not your normal self. Suddenly you're rising to the occasion. You're rising to the challenge. And here are the challenges make some degree of transformation in your mind, because that will transform all the beings around you. That will please the enlightened beings. And they will feel relieved that you feel this relief.
Speaker 4 00:04:29 So now we come out of the dual refuge visualization, but not out of the field. We must feel we're in the dual wish granting gem tree field Lumin leap wound by scans of luminous light, Ray rainbow, light Ray always think of liquid gems of Emerald and Rubian diamond and Topaz and Sapphire, and just being wound with this kind of beautiful strands of light, and then filling your own mind and body up. But you don't have to sit like in some formal way or rigidly or tire yourself, try to stay awake to think. Because now we think on the first level of the path, the first thing we must transform is our self image about what we are as a human being, how we live our life is determined by what we think of ourselves as a human being. Like, what is it that we are not only who, you know, am I Joe blow or John DOE or Jane DOE, but like what, what is a human being?
Speaker 4 00:05:27 We were taught that we are some cells and those cells are made of some sort of atoms and energies. And that we are sort of randomly created out of the way our genes have developed from the genes of our parents, but that all randomly mutated from some time back in like the methane C and Charles Darwin figured out some English guy with the beard, how it did it. And then the jeans were jeans of apes and jeans of other beings and things. Well, then we personally just suddenly showed up here when the two seeds of the parents joined in our conception and then we were born and then we've been running around. And then when the body stops and the brain stops and when the cells no longer function and we die, then we cease to exist. This is what we think we are. Remember at least in one side of our being, if we have some religious affiliation, some spiritual thing, maybe we think we have some soul that is a fixed thing, or is temporarily trapped here in this physical process.
Speaker 4 00:06:25 Maybe that soul then gets taken away by a deity or something and put in a nice place. We might think something like that. But even then we normally think that that soul just began with a birth of this life. Now, the Buddhas vision of this was a very vast and huge vision. And the Buddhas saw like Darwin. He saw us as part of a great ocean of evolutionary life forms, unlike Darwin or unlike the big bang people. He didn't see it to be possible to say there was any first beginning in some particular big bang or some cosmic creation where the world was created out of nothing. He thought that seemed senseless and illogical it even meaningless to say that things were created out of nothing. Nothing is nothing. Therefore it has no in from which you can take something out. It is simply meaningless to say, create something out of nothing.
Speaker 4 00:07:17 Things are created out of other things. This is our universal experience. It is simply an incoherent use of language to say that something comes out of nothing from the Buddhist view. Therefore the Buddhas saw that life was beginningless. The world was beginningless. It had always been going on. Things have always been something else and come from those something else. And why do they come into a certain type of something, which is us a human being embodied with a body, mind and speech? How do we get to be the way we are from this beginningless time? Well, he then looked and he saw like Darwin did an evolutionary pattern. He saw that we adapt to our environment. He saw that we behave in a certain way and you reach in a certain direction. You pick up a certain fruit, you begin to get a certain type of hand, a hand that is skillful.
Speaker 4 00:08:03 That's picking up the fruit. And you know, Darwin said, this is then passed on genetically through random mutation that the gene that gives the instructions to the cells to form into a certain type of hand, they can pick up a certain fruit, eats more of the fruits gets stronger. And then that favors that development within the species and the species develops like giraffes eat these high leaves in the trees. And then the neck gets longer and longer, but not individuals, just genes do that. The individuals are just sort of examples of a species. They have no individuality, really. They're just carrying the genes of a species that was his view because of materialism, but the Buddhas saw the same kind of evolutionary into relationship with causation. But then he said, but the individual who is experiencing themselves as being the giraffe, there's a reason why they personally feel they were a giraffe, their personal feeling about themselves.
Speaker 4 00:08:55 Their individual continuity is part of reality. Therefore it didn't come from nothing. It cannot possibly come from nothing. It has its own previous continuity. So the mind has an infinite and beginningless continuity as well as body. And of course, mind is always interwoven with body, but mind is somehow experienced as irre reducible to body. And therefore in its own stream of continuity, it is beginningless as well. So by this, the Buddha got a more complicated view of evolution than the materialist does. And the Buddha saw that we personally have been embodied in various life forms life after life from beginningless time. And we personally will continue to be embodied in various life forms life after life until endless time. And the fact that we now are a particular form in human body with a human intellect in a human embodiment, is because we gravitated towards that form.
Speaker 4 00:09:52 We are attracted towards that form because we go towards what we are attracted to because of our acts in previous lives because of our evolutionary experience, just like the giraffe gets the long neck. So just in that same way, we got to be liking a being with certain senses with eyeballs up on a skull and ears flapping out on the side of the skull and nostrils in the middle of skull and a little mouth going munch much, and a tongue flapping around inside for hands and feet with like little digits and fingers and toes and different kinds of joints and things and capable of moving in this and that way and skin that isn't very hard and very honored, but it was actually sort of light and permeable. And then we became mammals and we were there for able to understand the permeability of the boundary of self another, because we bore our young within our bodies and we United with each other in fact, to create them.
Speaker 4 00:10:47 And we saw the permeability of inside and outside of the body. And then we developed the ability to imagine we developed all these extra folds in our hard disk or wet disk or sloppy disk or whatever it is, our brain and all these extra folds. We could vision an image and imagine, and in the imagining we began to develop the ability to imagine what the other feels we could, we could empathize with other beings and imagine being the other beings, we began to loosen ourselves from only experiencing the world through our own sense, organs from our own Ingo egocentric point of view. And we became able to mentally imagine and experience the world from the point of view of others. Initially only the beloved only the members of our nearest species. Only the child, the infant that we were caring for and our sensitivity would only unfold them and we'd identify with them.
Speaker 4 00:11:39 But then some more examples among our species, we became capable of imagining to all of the beings and representing all of them. And then finally we became reached to being coming and perhaps enlightened and feeling the feelings of all the other beings actually by vastly expanded empathy. In any case, this is how we came to be a human being through developing these qualities, not through being aggressive successfully, actually the successful aggressors like the dinosaur is like the tiger is so successful within a certain structure of relation to self and other and itself an environment that it doesn't have any impulse to transform itself. And it sticks at that point, eating what is in front of its face. And therefore it's not so adaptable if the environment drastically changes. Whereas we were a little unsuccessful, probably we couldn't compete with the tiger and their trip. We couldn't compete with the mammoth in their trip or the right NARAS in their trip or the dinosaur and their trip.
Speaker 4 00:12:33 So we had to go and hide in a cave and figure out some multiple options. And then somehow in doing that because of actually our weakness, we figured out about being more gentle. And then because of that, we began to chat with each other about our different miseries and how we were eaten by this and that animal. And then we began to think, well, gee, if we all got together, maybe we could surround animal and so forth. And we began to talk and we began to coordinate our activities and we began to develop technologies. And then we did in fact, become powerful and potentially destructive in fact, potentially aggressive, but we didn't achieve that ability through being aggressive. We achieved it by adapting, to failing at aggression, actually from the Buddhist view. And therefore the human being develops to be human by generosity, by sensitivity to others, ethical sensitivity, which expresses itself as ethical sensitivity and by tolerance in the patients and the ability not to react lethally to injury from others, but to tolerate that and then to sort of work it out with other rather than just chomping them down.
Speaker 4 00:13:36 And then from that grew then our creativity and our imagination and our concentration and our wisdom and knowledge of broader knowledge of reality all came from that. But this is what we are as human beings. And as human beings, we personally earned our human being hood. Yes, our parents helped us by providing genes, but we were attracted to the form of our parents. We were able to be in love with our parents because they did look beautiful to us and they looked beautiful to us because we had developed a weird idea that it's a wonderful way to be, to be a weird creature, with a funny, kind of a spine and a head bobbing around with a huge bunch of slime wear in it, senses eyeballs and ears sticking out on the skull part of that head. And some hands that can run around and do things with an opposing thumb. We developed the idea that that was a lovely way to be, which were not at all. I mean the lizard wouldn't think it was cute, but somehow we figured that was a playful, friendly, funny way to be. And therefore we were able to fall in love with those parents.
Speaker 4 00:14:39 So we personally have earned this human life form by acts of generosity, of ethical sensitivity, and empathy with others primarily. And then the attendant intelligence and concentration and creativity. It's like when you inherit a bunch of stuff, you easy come, then you don't necessarily pay attention to it. You take it for granted, but if you earn it, if you make it, if you build it yourself, you really like it. You really appreciate it because you made it yourself. You don't easily want it to be taken away. Similarly, if you realize that you made your own body, you made your own body mind complex, you created your own special human sensitivity and you did so through these self transcending actions, like not immediately eating the first person you met, not immediately using them in some egocentric drive, but learning to communicate with them and giving and conceding something with them, getting along with them, communicating, and you gave things away to them, didn't grab everything.
Speaker 4 00:15:43 And when they were a little harsh on you, you didn't freak out and you remained tolerant and patient, all self transcending actions, which are difficult not to follow that instinctual, immediate impulse of the self-centered instinct. And you develop the ability to do that. And especially when you were different type of animal that just is there and is tongue flicks and it grabs a fly. And that's just the instinct to sort of think, oh, that's a cute fly. I'll let that one go. You don't have the words to think about it. You're not thinking about Budha or Liberty or evolving. You're just fascinated by the fly, how beautiful it's and then you let one go without flickering that tongue to trap it. And as some kind of a tongue flicking lizard, it's not easy to get such an inspiration.
Speaker 4 00:16:26 And yet we have all done that. So this is called the precious human embodiment that we each have earned. And if we think about it, we cancel all those meaningless cosmologies. We begin to be a bit critical of them. We can't immediately just suspend our worldview and have a different one, but we begin to look at the boundaries of the worldview that we do have, does it really make sense that mine came from nothing or came from a stone or came from a cell at a certain moment? The way the material is try to say that the illusion of sensitivity, the illusion of mine just arises with a certain complexity of cells. And it's just in a way, therefore, as it perceives itself and its own intrinsic quality of being consciousness and in a way, therefore it came from nothing. It might just, well come from a table or a stone or a piece of dirt as some piece of slime wear. Instead we stand up for our awareness and we say, awareness always comes from awareness. And our awareness is something. It is us. And it is precious.
Speaker 4 00:17:31 Of course it's vulnerable. Our awareness. We can suffer because of our awareness. We can also experience the most exquisite things and we have a special type of human embodiment. Now look, even at the human people that we know today on this planet, how many of them are starving to death right now in some terrible ecological catastrophe inflicted by post-colonial post imperialism, exploitation of the planet, climate change, tribal dementia, prejudice, hatred disease, no thought of liberation, except liberation from this immediate agony in front of them or within them or around them, the loved ones around them. How many beings are in that state? How many beings live in cultures, where they're told to just follow the routine, fit in with the spirit, do what the collective wants you do, what the witch doctor tells you do what the chief tells you, go out and kill the neighbor, do whatever do this, do that. No thought of liberation, maybe one Charman or one person goes and flies in the between state goes somewhere else. But most of the people just fit in how many beans, just even in supposed educated, modern society just work in a factory from Dawn to dusk, get a very poor education, have no job, and then commit a crime and then go to prison til death.
Speaker 4 00:18:49 How many being are there like that or working endlessly in some fields, seeking out a living in some agricultural thing or living as a hunter in some vast snowy waste. Just thinking about getting the next seal with no time to reflect on some sort of a no concept in the culture of liberation, even in India before Buddhas time in the time of Theves there's no mention of liberation. People want duty. People want power, wealth, pleasure, progeny. They never think of liberation in the ancient songs of the VAD people. For example, no mention of the word whatsoever. Just do what God wants you to do. Which means what the priest and the Kings want you to do. And how many of us today, even in our modern society, just live mechanically, go to school, get our grades, graduate, go out, make money, have a family pay taxes, do your duty serve in the military retire. Then you live in the Florida, hopefully, and then CRO. And that's it have a nice lawn plot and hope that the heirs of whatever you've earned do better than you did. And that's it? No meaning to it finally, because you are not there afterwards.
Speaker 4 00:20:08 There's so many theories, either the different ancient religious ones that fit you under some sort of inscrutable authority of God's will or modern ones that make your life meaningless because annihilating your sense of spiritual continuity. Why would you seek to transform yourself in life in a really deep way? If there's no continuity to that, if you're the person who has sought their whole life long to transform themselves, become enlightened is the same nothing at death. As the person who's just sought to indulge themselves, their whole light long, the person who does evil and gets away with it is the same, nothing at death as the birth and who does good and even suffers for it. So why bother the deep cosmology of meaninglessness that the modern worlds lives in and that all the traditional religions have really failed to control. Although they all do provide some sort of spiritual meaning.
Speaker 4 00:21:05 They say, God wants you to do this. It doesn't really the way it is. God is doing it for that reason. Krishna's doing it for this reason or whatever, but yet the operative life controlling reality idea is that it's just material. That it's basically meaningless. Then therefore, if you think you're basically meaningless, what do you do? You really care for yourself? You will let yourself live your life long, just making money for example, and saving it and hoarding it and trying to be like a big shot, maybe a little bit in between or toward the end. And basically then just dying with that, putting your whole life, investing in this sort of thing that you will lose. You don't mind doing that to yourself. You don't mind taking this super computer that you have as a brain that is capable according to the Buddhas vision, to the end, all the awaken and enlightened teachers, according to Jesus' vision, capable of realizing the kingdom of God within you, capable of realizing the great bliss state within you, instead of turning your attention to that kind of total fulfillment of all of your wishes. And then even on top of it, developing the ability to fulfill the wishes of others, endlessly and infinitely into an infinite future of enlightened living. Instead of that, you just waste your life on some sort of ephemeral thing that will just believe you at death. And that will not even satisfy you ever, who is satisfied with wealth when they accumulated never, they have a hundred billion, they want 200 billion.
Speaker 4 00:22:39 So we now come to the preciousness of our human life endowed with Liberty and opportunity. We cancel those views of meaninglessness and for our meditation, we just suspend them. But then our meditation is not just something that we do when we sit on retreat is we slowly think, we think about the meaning of life. We think about biology. We think about DMA. We think about something coming from nothing, and we slowly get more used to the idea that that is senseless. And we are critical of worldviews that say, this is the law of nature. This is the law of reality, and that's where you fit. And that's all you can do. And we don't necessarily accept that. And if we have an instinct or intuition that we have something in us that could flower that we could really be fulfilled, that we could achieve a kind of bliss that would be deep and upwelling from within.
Speaker 4 00:23:27 And that would be a reservoir of joy for others as well, not just exploiting them or something at their expense. If we have that intuition, we let that come out and we realized this lifetime is the time that we can do that. The Liberty that we have is the Liberty from just immediate suffering and immediate reaction to oppressive environment. They call the eight liberties and the 10 opportunities come from being accessible to enlightened beings, to great saviors, to great spiritual leaders, to great saints who can inspire us to fulfill ourselves in this life as human beings. So therefore we reflect on this preciousness of our human life endowed with Liberty and opportunity. And when we do, we find a new level of appreciation of ourselves.
Speaker 4 00:24:14 So this is where we start in the Buddhist path in the path to enlightenment the Tibetan path. And this is in all the sutras in different parts, the Burmese, Sri Lanka, whatever Zen, it's all there, how precious you are, you human being because you can become enlightened reflect on this and then think about yourself and how you spend your life. And how much do you do that is valuable to you? What do you have to do that is just dishing something out to make a living well, if you can combine with that dishing out to make a living some generous gesture towards others, some cheerfulness that you convey with the food that you give them with, whatever service you do for them, however you interact with them. Then you're doing something for yourself and for them in the process of making your livelihood, that is wonderful.
Speaker 4 00:25:02 Anything that you do just to earn money, then you spend that money on some house. Then you get greedy, want a bigger house and you have to spend more and waste more time. Then you sleep half the time. Anyway, how much of this precious quality time that you have evolutionarily speaking as a human being with the human intelligence, do you spend on using that human intelligence to understand yourself, to understand your world, to understand others, to understand reality. So is to be able to transform yourself to find your true happiness. How many minutes out of a 24 hour day do you spend for yourself investing in that way? You'll be shocked if you actually, inventory will be shocked. I am shocked constantly how much time I waste with this precious body that I have, which time is running out. That's the first theme, true self appreciation, not a fake self love.
Speaker 4 00:25:56 That is like, I'm great because I'm rich. I'm great because I'm beautiful. I'm great because I'm young. I'm great. Cuz I went to Harvard. I'm great because I'm an American. I'm great because I'm male or I'm great because I'm female, all these superficial self identities that kind of false pride in them is not real self love because we are really not appreciating our own vastness. Each of us is potentially an infinite being. Each of us has been an infinite being, has an infinite past experience. Evolutionarily speaking. Each of us has been a God actually. And now as a human, we have the opportunity to become more than a human or a God of perfectly enlightened being the summit, the peak of evolution, that sort of form of life at the end of all possible culmination of evolution, which is perfect compassion, meaning perfect ability to feel others' feelings and help them feel better and perfect wisdom, knowledge of what the reality of others and selfie is exactly. So is to be able to do that. This is what we can become bliss, void indivisible in action.
Speaker 4 00:27:08 But the second theme we then turn to upon doing this since this retreat, we're going quickly through these basic archos. Once you begin to cultivate a deeper sense of self appreciation, that really wants to cherish yourself and take care of yourself every moment and expand your understanding and intelligence and use this time of infinite malleability. That is the human form, the human lifetime to its maximum meaningfulness. Then we have to reflect with realistically on where we are headed and here we've now turned to something that it first might seem more disturbing, but in fact is vastly liberating. We turn to the topic of death. The second note in the scale in the Arpaio big note, and there are three roots in reflecting on death. And the first of the three roots is reflecting on the surety, the certainty, the absolute certainty we can have that we personally will die at first, you might think, well, why do I need to bother?
Speaker 4 00:28:11 Everyone knows that they die. But if you really reflect on it and meditate upon this, you will realize that you are carrying on. And I know I do. I carry on like I'm gonna be here forever. Bob Durman and this body, well slowly decaying form of this body, but still basically this body with this mentality, personality, education background, brain, body, limbs senses. And it'll always be like that. So I can go and meditate tomorrow. Next year when I retire, I'll really take this seriously and do that, do the other and transform myself, control my temper control my obsessions later later, cuz I'll be here forever. Basically. I'm sort of assuming that I'll always go on like this. So when I've been to reflect that I am going to die, I realize that I will not go on like this. Now that doesn't mean I will not.
Speaker 4 00:29:01 There will something will not go on some continuity of consciousness. Certainly I know the body will go on and it'll become fertilizer or it'll become fuel. If it is cremated, then heat waves in the atmosphere. So the body will go on in some continuity and consciousness will go on. It seems sensible. Cuz just again, just as something cannot come from nothing, it makes no sense for something to go into nothing using the term, nothing like saying something went into it or became it as if nothing were something is of course an incoherent way of using language. Something will always transform into another realm and become something else. Something cannot become nothing.
Speaker 4 00:29:51 It's simply an incoherent picture we have of something sort of blanking out. But in fact, everything that we've seen in all of our experience in nature or that even anyone has even theorized about rationally, there's the law of conservation of energy in physics. For example, something never becomes nothing. It always becomes something else. But the point is I, as I am conceiving myself as a body and mine complex Bob Thurman American, this and that, that will cease. That will die. Even Buddha died in his form. Shamo SEDAR then turned into Shamo. Jesus died, Jesus rose from the dead was resurrected, but he died on earth as a human being.
Speaker 4 00:30:41 Even God's die from the Buddhist perspective and so forth. If you see the God as some sort of transcendent absolute body, like what they call DHA truth body in Buddhism or some sort of absolute Godhead, as they might say in Christian theology, the nameless absolute, they might say in Judaic theology near GU Braman, the unqualified Braman, as they would see in Hindu theology, the absolute Dow as they would see in Chinese theology, perhaps that doesn't die. But also that doesn't live in the normal sense that we understand it as an embodiment. It's beyond all embodiment and uncreate and uncompounded made of parts and therefore of course can be eternal like space, but anything created like an embodiment made of parts and pieces and separated from the rest of the world. Then it will dissolve again and the pieces come together and go apart.
Speaker 4 00:31:40 So we reflect, we will die. It's kind of meditating. Like there you are, you have your relationships and your friends and your possessions and your house and your property and even your knowledge and your memory is, but then these are all lost. Look how we cannot remember our previous lives. Can't even remember many things that happened in this life and it all gets lost. And so we will die. We sort of subtract ourself as its self image or a self-identity that we pushing forward in the world. It gets subtracted, it gives up, it loses control. It dies. We die, you die. I die.
Speaker 4 00:32:19 Second route is then we think, well, when will we die? And then we realize there's no knowing when we will die. Just as we definitely know that we will die. We definitely know that we can't know when we will die. We could die. Anytime when we connect this uncertainty about when we will die with the certainty that we will die, it gives a great sense of intensity to the moment we realize that this moment could be the last, any moment could be the last. This means that we should savor. We should like seek the vastness in this moment.
Speaker 4 00:32:56 It's useless to scheme and plan. I'll do this that time and the other time, because I could die before then if I plan, oh, then I'll do this. I'll have the other. If I'm putting a lot of energy and anxiety and expectation of that is useless because I could die. And here, well people die before sick people, young people die before old people, rich people die before poor people. People who live in a secure, safe surrounding have an accident and die before people who live in a dangerous place. So there is no certainty about when and where death will come and claim us. And we cannot feel secure about it if we are reasonable and realistic.
Speaker 4 00:33:36 And then the third route we take is when we do die. Now that we've become aware of what the dying process is like when we do die, only the Dharma will help us. It is said only truth will help us. Only reality will help us only whatever our knowledge and integration of the nature of reality is will that help us sort of, they could say like whatever we have integrated of generosity, ethical, sensitivity, tolerance, creativity, concentration, meditation, and wisdom and intelligence, only those things as embedded in the soul, not as embedded in some formula that we know to repeat some words, not as some sort of accomplishment that we did with the course body, mind, not with some laurels that we can rest on, but the patterns like the genetic patterns, the codes in our soul of having been generous of having been sensitive to others, of having been tolerant, of having been creative, of having been focused and concentrated of having been wise and intelligent the code in the soul and the spiritual gene that will go to build another embodiment that will be attracted to another life form. That is the only thing that goes with us at death. Nothing else is a benefit. Our possessions are not of any benefit. We cannot take our bank account, our car, our house, our land, our physical body cannot go with us. Our relationships, our loved ones. Our friends cannot go with us. Fame status power authority cannot go with us.
Speaker 4 00:35:15 All of that is left behind. So investment that we make in that is all gone at death comes to nothing only the investment we make in the deepest inner quality of our being is what goes with us, which means of course, that no good act that we did. For example, if we give any generous gift that stays with us, not because we gave a hundred dollars or such and such, but because we liked that a hundred dollars, we wanted to keep it, but we let go of it. And we gave it over to someone and that habit of giving it over and finding even pleasure in that, giving it over, creates some sort of loosening lightning in the soul in the subtle mind, the seed mind, and that seed mind then goes, and it is the seed of our future life. It is said you don't have to go to an astrologer or Sosay to find out what your future life is gonna be.
Speaker 4 00:36:12 Will I be born a yoy? Will I be at, in Tibet? Will I be in heaven? Or what if you wanna find out where you'll be in your future life, look at the seed of your mind today. What is the deepest inner part of your mind when you get away from all of your surface distractions, whatever is down inside there, is it a joyful, happy spirit? Is it an open, loving spirit? Is it a, a bubbling well of positive energy? If it is then that's the place where you will be, you will dwell in the well of positive energy. For sure. If you find an era, a little lump of fear of paranoia, of anxiety, of unconcerned, a withered neglected sort of thing that doesn't know this from that, that it's confused and terrified and hiding. Then unfortunately you'll be in a realm of confusion and terror and fear.
Speaker 4 00:37:09 So it is changing this deepest inner quality. That should be the main focus of our life in short. So now these are the three roots, the certainty of death, the uncertainty of the time of death and the certainty that when we die is this intercede. That is all important. That helps us through death and helps our next existence. When we have these three roots, we will rise to what is called awareness, confrontation, realization of the immediacy of death. And we then far from being morbid and far from being depressed and paranoid, we extremely transcendent. We become deeply intense about this moment. We recognize that this moment is everything, the seed of our being all our future states. The product of all our past states, infinite is stretching in both directions. Infinite expanses in both directions is now here in this moment. And this moment begins to become more and more infinite. And we find more and more fruition in this moment, especially when we know already how deeply wonderful the human life is, what a great opportunity for freedom it is. And then the fact that each moment of it could be the last. And what is the essential in that moment is the quintessential experience of that moment in the deepest part of the soul. Then we begin to have a soul life. We begin to have a soul intensity in life.
Speaker 4 00:38:43 So now we begin the second session and we have learned a little bit of the background about the Tibetan path. And we have learned how to visualize basically the wish fulfilling gem tree field. So now right away, we're gonna go back into the wish fulfilling gem tree field and dissolve yourself into the void immediately and let your ordinary personality and your mental worries and your thoughts and your sense of the environment around you, the room, the building, the town, the planet, let them all melt away and then arise from this spacious skylight space. Find yourself at the roof of the world. Low overlooking lake man, ABAR, not far from holy Mount Kage, looking down from a grassy bluff where you're comfortably in softly, sitting, looking down on a jewel crystal lake and the jewel crystal lake has a little lovely garden of an island growing in it in front of you.
Speaker 4 00:39:57 And from this island Springs, a giant jewel tree made of Agat and Sapphire and Ruby and Emerald and diamond substance. And in that tree high up above you, above where your forehead is, sits your mentor, the being who to you represents the highest possible enlightenment, the greatest possible spiritual power, whether it be Buddha or God or Jesus or Muhammad or the goddess or sin or sin Francis or mil REPA, or Z kapa or Padma Sababa, or LA, whoever it may be Socrates, and then not only having to be alone, but all the teachers who ever taught you, who you ever found inspiring in your life and all the angelic beings, you can imagine the day it's, you can imagine God himself and his throne. If it places you to meditate that or God us, herself, and her throne are up on the branches of this giant ju tree sitting there glowing sending down Juul, liquid, laser coherent light, raise that flow to you like liquid Alexia and crystalline tumbling down like a waterfall, like a cascade falling upon you and merging into you.
Speaker 4 00:41:25 This Alexia, immortality, buoyant, vibrant energy of wisdom. All these beings are smiling and glowing and happily greeting you there in your new meditation space. And as you fill up with their light, you no longer feel incapable. You no longer feel confused. You no longer feel depressed or anxious. You're habitual cycling thoughts washed out of you and you feel buoyant and you feel luminous and you begin to share the luminosity of the refuge tree. And then you reflect on the beings around you, your loved ones, your neutral ones, your unloved ones, and you reflect this light back out to them and they feel like low in your light. And they send you back a grateful encouragement. And you, as you send your gratitude up to the refuge tree.
Speaker 4 00:42:20 So now we're in the context just really quickly. I don't have to do it at length because you now know how to create that. And that part of the Arpaio is created in the first session. And now we can begin to turn our mind to the path itself. Now that we're in this special space and we're our meditative self, our spiritually awakened and quickened self. But first maybe we should link up with the tree, picture yourself as picking up the planet in your hand. Like you're a giant spacious being and the beautiful green planet and the vision of the astronauts with the continents in north and south America and Africa and Europe and Asia and Australia, and the Polynesian islands, Alaska north pole, south pole, the beautiful blowing planet visualize that you take this planet reverently in your hands and you hold it up and you offer the planet to all the galaxy full of enlightened beings to the wise beings who know reality of the planet and of you and of them cells and visualize that you hold it there.
Speaker 4 00:43:38 And I will recite it to it and Chan just for good Oman. So she met all them Joe bar show by giving away the whole world you offer to the Buddhas and bud and to enlightened beings and saviors and Jesus and Moses and whoever it is Krishna you offer the world up. You stop worrying and nagging in your mind about the world cuz after all the world that you think you know is, you know, from your perspective of being unenlightened, of being diluted of seeing it only from your narrow perspective. So you give away the whatever, you know, from that perspective, whatever you possess, whatever you feel, you connect to, you give away the entire cosmos to the beings who see it from multiple perspectives who see it in the enlightened way.
Speaker 4 00:44:47 That is a tremendous relief. Let them worry about it, this giving away. And then there are said to be the seven links of communion, seven limbs of communion, seven connections way of connecting yourself with this jewel refuge tree verse is the link of saluting where you salute your enlightened beings. You say, oh, hail Socrates. You who were said by the Delphic, Oracle to be the most enlightened person in the Lennic world, but felt that you knew nothing. So you went to inquire for others who said they were enlightened, what they knew and you found that it was all vain and hollow. And through that inquiry, then you brought yourself and your whole culture is recorded by Plato to what enlightenment. Thank you very much. Keep working through your teachings to us today. O Buddha, thank you very much for your great accomplishment of turning your heart inside out and seeing the world as in a new way from a non egocentric perspective.
Speaker 4 00:45:51 And thank you Jesus for showing the power of love and compassion and how you could actually let hatred and prejudice take your body and put it on the rack and wrench it in bits and still arise from death and show that the power of love and wisdom is more powerful than even physical death. And thank you Krishna for doing your dance, your RA, and your dance of adoration and your conquest of the evil king and your restoring of the world to sanity and to Liberty. And thank you za for allowing the Dow to flow and introducing us to its wondrous ways. And thank you anyone else that you might think of. So there's a limb of salutation and then the limb of offering we gave the world already. So we give away everything, even our own mind and body and thoughts, give them away, just give them up, let them go, give them over to the beings of enlightenment.
Speaker 4 00:46:56 And then we come to the limb of repentance and we think about from our ordinary perspective in our ordinary way, because we were afraid of this and that at that time, because we covered this and that at another time, because we were worried about this and that at another time we did this and that harmful thing to this and that neighbor. We took something from them. We injured them in some way. We spoke harshly to them. We spoke unskillfully and meaninglessly frivolously to them. We were untrue with them, all of the negative things that we have done. Think not doing them again, lay them down no longer defend and pretend. Well, I might have done this and I might have done that. And well, there was this excuse and that excuse and simply embraced that we did these wrong things and set them down and resolved, not to do them again and lay them out in front of them. Enlightened beings who are aware of them. Anyway, all the infinite angels who watch over us seek to help us in our lives. We set 'em down all these negative things and resolve never again to return to them. And don't just sit remorseful and grind ourselves in guilt about them. See through them, let them disappear, let go of them, but resolve never more to connect with them.
Speaker 4 00:48:13 And then we come to the limb of rejoicing and congratulating and think about the good things that we did and the good things. Also, especially that others do and their achievements and accomplishments and enlightenments, and then notice in ourselves that when others do good things, we normally feel a little envious. We feel a little left out. We think why didn't I do it? How come they did it, got that success or did that thing. And when we think that correct, that thought that envious thought that separates us from their good deed instead rejoice in their good deed and think how great they did that. At least they did it. At least they had that success. At least they had that achievement and genuinely rejoice from the depth of our heart at all the good things that other people do. And in rejoicing, thereby in a way share and the merit and the virtue and the glory and the pleasure of it.
Speaker 4 00:49:04 Then we come to the limb of thinking about the beings above us. And we think that they have knowledge. They know their reality and our reality, this enables us to take refuge in them and in knowing our reality and their reality, they can teach us methods appropriate to ourselves, to travel the path of enlightenment and the stages from wherever we are developing in whatever way we need to. And that in teaching us that then we can come to knowledge ourselves. So then we request the reign of Dharma to fall from these enlightened beings. And we think of them there in the jewel refuge tree that we're all a glow with. And remember, you don't have to visualize every detail. You shouldn't get all perfectionist and worry because you can't see every branch and every leaf and every flower and every precious person, or even the exact details of the face of the beloved mentor, your main teacher, whoever you think is the main inspiring being.
Speaker 4 00:50:03 But, uh, whoever don't worry, just know that they're there and request them please to give the teachings, make the teachings come alive in my mind, make me able to practice and perform them. And then remember that these beings don't need you. They don't even need you to become enlightened in a way. They only know that you need to become enlightened, but they are utterly transcendent. Their bliss is beyond even your state of UN enlightenment is transparent to them. They are truly transcendent. They don't even need to manifest a body or a manifestation to you. They're not, they're doing that for their own pleasure or benefit or glory. They are utterly transcendent. They are absolutely aware of the uncreate of the absolute of Nirvana. And they do not even need to be present in this world. So therefore you should ask them to be present. So then you say, Hey, Jesus, God, Buddha, Mary don't sit there in your transcendent, absolute state, be involved in the particulars of my relationality and my suffering and my confusion and my distortion and my isolation and my alienation and manifest to me always stay with me, be my friend, be my protector, be my teacher.
Speaker 4 00:51:19 And so in this way, you ask them to stay with you. These, all these spiritual beings and angels and day it is and teachers.
Speaker 4 00:51:29 And then finally, the final limb is the limb of dedication. Remember that everything you do even thinking or visualizing being in the wish granting gem tree field, it is all done. Not only for your own sake, because you are totally interconnected with all other beings, your mothers, and you're doing it for everyone else, because any change in your mind, positive or negative effects, all others, the wish granting gem trees or morphic resonance field, and every bit of your mind that you turn toward the wish granting gems, everyone else's mind is turned in that way. The planet's mind turns with your mind. If you let your mind go in some negative paranoid self indulge in self way, the planet's mind turns in that way. So you're totally interconnected with them. So whenever you do anything, accomplish anything, gain a vision, have a little sparkle in your mind. Don't appropriate it and think how great I gotta sparkle in my mind, immediately dedicated to others, share it to them. Just like as the light flows in and fills you up from the gem tree from the day he beings the divine mentors in the gem tree, it immediately reflects out as it fills you up, it flows out. It overflows from you to all the beings around you and they fill up with the same light. You immediately share it and dedicated with them. Those are the seven limbs of interconnecting with them.
Speaker 3 00:53:00 The Bob Thurman podcast is produced under creative comments, no derivatives license. Please be sure to like share and repost on your favorite social media platforms. This recording is an excerpt from the jewel tree of Tibet available through sounds true. Music for the Bob Thurman podcast is generously supplied by tensing Showga to learn more about the work and music of tensing Showga please visit his website at tensing, cho.com. Thanks for tuning in and Tashi, Dele lack.
