Медитация 1

[Speaker 1]
We're going to do about a half hour meditation, first death meditation, and we'll go through a very brief preliminary. So I'll go through the preliminaries in a very quick way. The Tibetan word for meditation is gom, and it means to get used to something by doing it over and over again.

This meditation will not affect you much unless you do it over and over again. And if you do it over and over again, then you'll get to chi-wa jenpa, chi-den. And it's a very, very sweet state of mind.

I can't describe it enough. I can't really give you the sense of it, but it's like being at a festival or something your whole life. Benjamin Franklin called it a continual Christmas, and it feels like that.

It feels like Christmas every morning. And you get up, and your mind is clear, and your life is clear, and no junk. And you know it, and you feel good, and you feel right about it.

And there's this joy all day long, exhilaration all day long. It's not what you thought when you saw the advertisement for a death meditation, right? So it's very exciting.

So here we go. Get into proper meditation posture. If you don't know, then go to Kadampa Center.

Ask them to teach you. Basically, right leg on top of left leg, if you do a half lotus, which is all I can do. Get your shoulders straight, horizontally.

I carry this heavy briefcase, so one shoulder is always like that. Head should be erect like that, straight forward like that, as if you were looking at Viviana. And then put your eyes down a little.

See what I mean? Then you get that neat Buddha look, you see. So don't put your head down.

Don't put your chin down. Just normally, not too high either, but like a soldier. And then your eyes down like that in contemplation.

If it bothers you to see things, then close them. But if you can keep them like halfway open, and just unfocused, that's ideal. Because then you won't get so sleepy.

Then left hand down first on your lap. And right hand on that, palm on palm. And first watch your breath.

Watching your breath means watching the feel of the breath in the inside of the nose. And try to take rather deep breaths. Try to breathe rather deeply, and then release it in a very relaxed way.

And try to get all the air out. So don't force too much, but take a good deep breath, and then take a good deep breath out. And then we'll do that for a while.

We'll watch. And then stay in there, and I'll be leading you through the preliminaries, and then into your first death meditation.

[Speaker 2]
The first step is to take refuge.

[Speaker 1]
And taking refuge, in this case, we can just think of the difference between worldly refuges like money, family, food, and think about the other refuges like being prepared spiritually to die. So compare in your mind worldly refuges, and then spiritual refuges that can help you after you die, or as you die. And we spend just a few breaths thinking about that, and then we move on to the next preliminary.

And these preliminaries set your mind up for meditation.

[Speaker 2]
Next preliminary, think about bodhicitta.

[Speaker 1]
Think about someone who needs something, physically, mentally, ill, or sick, or some other kind of problem, and think about being able to help them.

[Speaker 2]
Someone specific. Next preliminary, invite a holy being before you to meditate with you.

[Speaker 1]
Anyone you consider especially holy. The Dalai Lama, or Jesus, or Lama Zopa, or whoever you can imagine, that you feel very close to. And bow down to them mentally, which means to think about their holy qualities, something about them that you can recognize, even at your current level, and think about how holy they are for that, and praise them mentally.

Make some beautiful gift to them, some beautiful offering, something beautiful that you can see, or feel, or like a flower, or the ocean, or the side of the moon. If you don't have, if you like, then the holiest offering you can make is something about your practice that you're working hard on, and that's the one that pleases them the most.

[Speaker 2]
Sometimes I make it in the future because I haven't done it yet. Think about something negative you've done, or said, or thought about someone in the last 24 hours or so, and admit it, and see how wrong it was. Now something positive.

[Speaker 1]
Rejoice in something right you've done, something good you've done in the last 24 hours, even if it was small. Make it specific.

[Speaker 2]
Some specific word you said to someone, specific thought you had. Then ask for teachings, some kind of good teachings.

[Speaker 1]
It can be formal teachings, or something someone teaches you, someone in your family, or someone at work that teaches you about patience, or teaches you about compassion.

[Speaker 2]
But ask to stumble across these teachings.

[Speaker 1]
Last preliminary practice is to think about your Dharma teachers and other kind teachers throughout your life, and also your Dharma friends, the ones who influence you in a good way, and to pray for their long lives, and pray that they stay near you.

[Speaker 2]
A lot of what we are is determined by who we stay near. That concludes the preliminaries.

[Speaker 1]
Usually, if you need to scratch something or move your leg or something, it's a good place to do it right now.

[Speaker 2]
Then we'll start the actual meditation. When you're by yourself, this is where you can shift a bit. The preliminaries make your mind clean and ready to meditate.

Now we'll start the real meditation. Go back to your breath. We'll be doing what's called a Sargam.

[Speaker 1]
Sargam is a kind of meditation where you review a certain series of steps, a series of thoughts, over and over again, until they become second nature for you. It's very good to connect it to what they call a mnemonic device, or some kind of picture that you can follow and remember where you are. Like if you're memorizing a text in Tibetan and you have trouble, you can connect each chapter to a different part of your hometown, and you go from house to house.

It's easier to memorize a long text. They use that in the monastery. We're going to connect the death meditation to a picture.

We're going to be moving from place to place. Then each time you come to a new place, you'll remember that, oh, that's where I'm supposed to think about that. Those of you who did the Lam Rim Mandala, we entered from the west side of that place.

Now go to the east side. The place we're going is the same. Imagine that you're in a place where there's a large building, almost like a castle.

It's made of earth and brick. It stands on almost like a small island. In the center is an open courtyard.

Around the place is a moat, like water. Then on the far side of the moat, on that bank, is empty clearing.

[Speaker 2]
Then forest begins. This will make it much easier for you to do the meditation.

[Speaker 1]
It's a lot more fun, and you can remember it easily. Imagine that you are struggling through the forest. It's thick forest, very like wild forest, very hard to get through.

You're carrying all these things, like a heavy backpack, like those soldiers in Private Ryan, all this junk on them. Imagine a big canteen and a sleeping roll, and all these things hanging off you, and heavy. Then you're trying to get through the woods, and then you break out into the clearing in front of the moat.

You're standing there in a clearing, and you're tired, and you're hot, and sweating, and you're dirty, and have all these things hanging from you, and it's heavy, and you're tired.

[Speaker 2]
Then there's a bridge crossing the moat into the building.

[Speaker 1]
You're on this side of the bridge, the far side, and just in front of the bridge at the opening is like a table covered with food and drink. There's a big mass of people milling around. You're thirsty, and you're hungry, and you're hot, and you're tired, and you have all this junk on you.

You're trying to reach some of the food and the drink, but there's many people, and it's hot, and it's crowded, and you're having to push people out of the way to get to the drink, and you do. You're pushing people out of the way, old people, young people, and you're trying to reach these things. Think about, while you visualize that, think about living a life of a person who doesn't remember death, who doesn't recall death, and who has no death awareness.

They're just grappling after small things, petty things, and hurting other people while they're doing it, and collecting bad karma while they waste their life. That represents the first part of this lam rim, the first meditation, which is on the problems of not remembering your death. You're just grasping after small, petty things of this life and hurting other people to get them.

So next time you do this meditation, you connect that to the table and the food and the people milling around. The junk on your back is all the unnecessary possessions and unnecessary relationships and unnecessary activities that you're engaged in that don't really make you happy.

[Speaker 2]
They just fill up time. If you have time, identify the possessions.

[Speaker 1]
The backpack is the house mortgage payments that are weighing you down. The canteen is big and bulky, and that's your car.

[Speaker 2]
Connect it to things like that.

[Speaker 1]
Next lam rim, the next part of this lam rim is to think about how good it would be to have a good death meditation. Here you're breaking out of the crowd and you're making your way towards the bridge, like a drawbridge that's going over the moat. You're tired of that scene.

You're tired of living like that. You're breaking out, and it gets thinner and thinner, and then you finally made it to the bridge. That whole bridge is going to be the next step in the meditation.

It's very useful for memorizing where you are. These are the benefits of divesting, the benefits of a good death meditation. Then go across the bridge slowly.

Take junk off your belt, off your chest, and throw it off into the water. It represents getting rid of those unnecessary, those extraneous possessions, extraneous activities, useless things that you work for and spend your time on. Take the New York Times especially and throw it off.

All those things, television, one big albatross around your neck and throw it off, and things like that. Just start throwing them off and feel lighter and lighter as you cross the bridge.

[Speaker 2]
Give each object a meaning in your own life.

[Speaker 1]
Then we're coming to the end of the bridge and you're light, you're very light now, but still pretty dirty and scratched up from the forest and still tired. Then you come to the end and imagine some people like a gauntlet, a few violent guards of the place or something. You're going to have to get through them.

There's some kind of big rough guys with knives or swords or some kind of blades. You start to pick up speed and you burst through them and you get through them. That represents the normal fear of death, which is a lousy death meditation.

That represents the third part of the outline, which is, what is a good death meditation? What would it be to have a good death meditation? First we get through the wrong one, which is to be afraid of death, to fear it in a normal way, in the way of a person who's suddenly faced with a life-threatening situation.

They're reduced to some kind of knee-jerk reactions to save their life, afraid. Or a person who just found out they have cancer. I went once with a student who was going for an AIDS test and thought they had AIDS.

It was very cruel. They made a mistake on the first try and said, we think you have it. Then come back in half an hour and we'll try again.

The second one was clean. But the whole experience of fear and panic, that's not death meditation. That's the next step in the Lam Rim.

The next meditation is to overcome that fear and drive past that fear and not think of death that way. We break through that kind of negative death meditation.

[Speaker 2]
You break through these people with the knives and they don't touch you.

[Speaker 1]
Then suddenly it's as if you took a bath and you're very clean and you smell good. Your body's covered with some kind of scent. I like personally an amber scent or sandalwood scent.

Your body is totally clean and you feel light and strong and happy and you're covered with these light clothes like silk. There's a grassy section in front of the building that we're going to enter a door, but before that door there's this meadow, beautiful grass, and you're just dancing across, very light, very happy. That represents a good death meditation, the kind of death meditation we want to do, which is really just some kind of unencumbered feeling.

Every moment living as if that was your last moment and feeling free and unencumbered by things you don't need or activities you don't need to be doing and feeling light and happy and lean and dancing across that meadow. That represents a good death meditation.

[Speaker 2]
Then you're standing in front of a door.

[Speaker 1]
That will be the beginning of how to do the death meditation. We'll be studying that tomorrow. Now I'll go one more time quickly through what we've been through.

We've been through four steps of death meditation so far. The first one was coming out of the forest, weighed down and struggling with the people at the table and hurting some people on the way. This is what happens to you if you don't think about your death or you don't believe you're going to die tonight.

Then crossing the bridge and getting lighter and lighter was the benefit of doing death meditation and divesting yourself and feeling lighter and lighter as you go and being happy that way. Then the third step was the people with the knives and the meadow together. That's number three.

That's what is a good death meditation. It's not the people with the knives. It's not being afraid of death and worrying about death and being panicked about death.

Rather, it's the meadow. A person with a good death meditation is feeling free and happy and light and joyful and vibrant, feeling that you have, that you're doing the right thing and you're not wasting your time. Every day is like a big Dharma party.

Feeling like that. That's the third part of the death meditation. The knives and the meadow are the third step, which is the right way and the wrong way to do a death meditation or what the goal is, the state of mind.

The state of mind that we're not trying to get and the state of mind we are trying to get. Tomorrow morning or in the afternoon, we'll enter the building, which is the actual meditation. It will have nine different steps there inside the building.

Now the traditional way to end a meditation is to think of that holy being who was in front of you that you're meditating with and you beg them to come into your heart. The idea is that they rub off on you if you carry them around in your chest all day. The scriptures all say the same thing.

They get very excited. They say, oh, you want me in your heart. Thank you.

They get smaller and smaller and they start to rise up in the air. Then they come down on your head. You feel a little light landing like a helicopter.

They turn around the same direction that you're sitting in. They're very small by now. They're like three inches high.

Then you ask them to come into your heart and they come straight down like an elevator shaft in front of your backbone. They get smaller and smaller. They're coming down a small tube until they reach the level of your heart.

It's not in your heart. It's behind your heart towards your backbone, maybe half an inch in front of your backbone. Make for them a little beautiful place there like a little cathedral, like a little capsule.

A very beautiful, quiet place. They're sitting on a huge flower, like a huge rose. In the middle of that is a beautiful mattress made of pure, warm, golden light.

They're sitting there and there's a fragrant smell, your favorite smell, like McDonald's french fries. No, amber or something. They're sitting there very happy.

They're like radiating strength into your bloodstream. The whole effect of their body, their holy mind is going through your body like your blood. They stay there all day long.

Anytime you need them, you just stop what you're doing and think about them and they're there. The last step of this meditation is to dedicate the virtue and think of the light coming out of the blood and bursting out of the pores of your skin like a flash of light, brilliant rays of light going out. All the good karma of talking about death, all the good karma of all the sweet people who made this center, from Lama Yeshe to Lama Sopa, and all the dedicated people who built this place and keep it going.

And thinking about all the good karma of having all the classes that have been held here and all that energy going out to touch other people, like a big ripple effect. Imagine all that karmic energy centered in this place, holy place here, and going out and touching other people and helping them.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, then we'll do a short prayer.