Серия ежедневной практики, курс 05 — Медитация о смерти и о конце смерти (1999, Роли), занятие 2

[Speaker 1]
Start by watching your breath, which is watching the feel of the breath on the inside of the nose. And take rather deep breaths and expel all the air, but without forcing it. Take refuge, meaning try to divide in your mind your life into two parts, the worldly part and spiritual part, and all the worldly things that protect you, like your house and the money that you have and the people that you know.

And then try to think of the spiritual side of your life that protects you in a much stronger way, and after you die also. So try to get a feeling for the difference between worldly types of refuge and spiritual types of refuge.

[Speaker 2]
And think about bodhichitta and imagine what it would be like, for example, if you could emanate thousands of bodies in different places and help different people at the same time.

[Speaker 1]
Next, invite a holy being to come and meditate with you, the holiest being that you can think of, that you've heard about, or that you feel close to.

[Speaker 2]
Then think about the thing that you most admire about that being, whether you understand it fully or not, and in your mind bow down to them for that.

[Speaker 1]
Then make them offering something very beautiful in your mind, especially the offering of your own practice, something you've done well, or something you may do today, later on, that might please them. And then think of something negative you thought or said or did in the last few hours or last day. The important thing is to admit it and see that it was silly, and decide that you'll try not to do it again for a short time at least.

[Speaker 2]
Then equally, with equal attention, think about something good you did.

[Speaker 1]
And the inner ones are more important than the outer ones, like teaching a class is not as important as having one thought inside of yourself that corrects yourself or changes yourself for better. So mostly rejoice, be happy about something inside that you were able to deal with spiritually today. Then ask for teachings, formal teachings, ask that you be exposed to formal teachings, and then ask for those exquisite private instructions that the people that irritate you give you, and people like that.

Then lastly, ask, pray for the long lives of your teachers and people who influence you in a good way, even if they're not Buddhists, it doesn't matter, people around you that you work with, or people that you know who are kind or considerate or have other good spiritual qualities, and pray that they stay near you, that they live a long life.

[Speaker 2]
If you have to shift around, do it here, that's the end of the preliminaries. Then go back to your breath. Now you see yourself in front of the door of the building.

[Speaker 1]
The building is made of adobe or something like that, and it's low, and it has a courtyard in the middle, but there are many rooms that you have to go through to get to the courtyard. You're coming in from the outside, you came over the drawbridge, and you came across the meadow, and now you're at the first door, and you go into the first door.

[Speaker 2]
The first door is like a yellow color, gold color, and big. Then when you come inside the first room, it's like cruel inside of an earthen home, and to your right, a chain to the wall, with a huge

[Speaker 1]
chain, is this like a huge dog about standing to the size of your shoulder, like a five feet high dog, and a huge, you know, think of the nastiest German shepherd or pit bull, you know, in my mind it's a German shepherd from the Nazi or something, but it's big, and it's tall. If it got loose, it could certainly tear you into nothing, and it's like rabid, and it's like wild, and it's trying to get to you, and that represents the first part of the meditation on the certainty of death, that death is unstoppable. If this dog touches you, if this dog gets away, there's no way you can live, and look up at it and think about it.

[Speaker 2]
If your karma wears out, nothing can help you. Then you walk towards the center of the room.

[Speaker 1]
To my mind, the room is like circular, not square, and you go straight across to the center, and there's a waist-high stand or something, and on the stand is an hourglass, and you look at it, and most of the sand is gone already, and the sand is moving, flying down quickly, and this represents the second step or the second justification for meditation that death is certain, and you're looking at the time of your life, and it's flying by, and nothing can stop that flow, and even as you look at it, you're losing more time, and get a sense of your life flowing on.

You can't take a rest, you can't stop, it's not like you can sit down and not have another hour go by, and you're losing time as you sit, or whether you're eating, or whether you're enjoying yourself or not, and get the sense that your time is flying, and you can't even slow it down, and you're moving closer to your death, and think of those things as you look at the hourglass.

[Speaker 2]
No rest, no time to stop, even while you sleep, you're dying.

[Speaker 1]
Then you're entering a long corridor, I think of it as stone on the sides, and you're running down the corridor, and on the walls are pictures of the teachers you've had, or the Dharma books you've read, or different teachings you've been through, and you're running, and like the teaching you had with Lama Zopa one time, or the teaching you had with Geshe Tsoga, or each teaching, you can see it on the wall like a painting on the wall, and then you're running, and you don't have time to even think much about it, and then it's gone again, and then you're still running, and then the next teaching is going by, you don't have time to stop and learn it well, or study it, or meditate on it, you're running on to the next thing, and the thing has gone already, and imagine some of the teachings you've had, and how little time you've had to think about them, or study them carefully, or meditate on them properly, do a retreat on them, and you're just rushing by them, and then they're gone, and then the next one, and then that's gone, and this represents the fact that even while you're alive, you have so little time to study Dharma, so little free time, so little time that you really want to study Dharma, and that's what this corridor represents. This is just an easy way to remember the three parts of the meditation on the certainty of death. Think of some of the specific teachings you've had that you didn't really digest, or didn't really internalize, because you were rushing on.

[Speaker 2]
Now we have six parts of the meditation.

[Speaker 1]
Three that were like a preliminary, or warm-up, and then we had three that relate to meditating on how death is certain. First, we were coming out of the forest, loaded down, fighting for food at the table, which is what's wrong with not thinking about your death. The second one was crossing the bridge, and that was thinking about how good it would be to meditate on your death, and you were dumping things off your back, and then we passed the wrong idea about death meditation, and went into the right one, which is like a freedom to do what you always wanted to do, Dharma-wise.

And then we came to the first door, which is that when you look at the door, you have to think, oh, now I'm entering the three justifications for why we can say that death is certain, and then you enter the door, and then there's the dong on the right, that's the death is unstoppable, and it represents your karma, dirty karma, and then move on towards the center of the room, circular room, and there's an hourglass, and think about how your life has leaked away so far, and it keeps leaking away, at the same rate, you can't even slow it down, and then running down the hallway, don't have time to study all the things you've learned, to learn all the things you've heard about, no time to meditate on them anyway, and that's the end of the first of the three big divisions of a death meditation. Then it's always auspicious to bring the Lama into your heart, so like we did last night, ask that Lama to come into your heart and stay with you, and affect you, and they get smaller.

First of all, there's this thing where they get very happy that you asked, and they're very like attracted towards you, and they rise up and come down like Peter Pan on your head, very small, very light, facing the

[Speaker 2]
same way, and then straight down like an elevator shaft, to the level of your

[Speaker 1]
heart, behind your heart, about a half inch in front of your backbone, and you make a beautiful little chapel there for them, with a huge beautiful flower, like a big bed, and on top of that is a beautiful cushion of light, pure golden light, warm, and then they're sitting on it, and they're very happy with you, and their love and their help, the inspiration they give, is flowing

[Speaker 2]
through your veins in that golden light, and it's always warm there, and it's always open and light in that little chamber, and then you think about

[Speaker 1]
all this good karma, and you want it to help other people, so you think of the light bursting out of the pores of your skin, like little needles of light, and they go out into your town, into your city, and they touch the people there, and give them help, and make them happy. People all over Raleigh, Durham, on Saturday afternoon, suddenly something feels great, and they don't quite know what.

[Speaker 2]
Then we'll do a short prayer.