Серия ежедневной практики, курс 05 — Медитация о смерти и о конце смерти (1999, Роли), занятие 4

[Speaker 2]
So sit up straight and watch your breath, rather deep breaths, but not forced.

[Speaker 1]
One of the things you can do when you're doing a breath meditation, and it's a little tricky, you have to practice a little bit, but to be aware of your breath going in and out, you can close your throat, and watch, okay? And actually you're constricting something here, and it's not with your nostrils, okay? It's like down here, and you don't do it to your mouth, but you do it like this.

Listen. Can you hear it? Yeah, it's real loud in your own ear.

And make it soft, but it's a good way to regulate your breath. It'll make the breath. When you drop to a more subtle level, it can be the hairs in your nose, which sound the same when you're at a good level in meditation, but if you don't get there, then do it this way, and you just close the...

It takes a little practice. People mistake their... That's not it, okay?

[Speaker 2]
That's not it, okay?

[Speaker 1]
That's just a boogery nose, okay?

[Speaker 2]
But this one is...

[Speaker 1]
And it helps you regulate your breath. It helps you slow the breath down, because you can... If you're not doing a good breathing, you know, you can feel it.

So try it at home, maybe. And not too loud. Not so loud that it bothers someone next to you, but it's very good for breathing meditation.

[Speaker 2]
I look at the door in front of you, the big oak door, golden-yellow color, represents that you must die.

[Speaker 1]
You go into the first room and see the huge shoulder-height wild dog chained to the wall on the right, and think that death cannot be stopped, the karma wearing out cannot be stopped. You move on to the stand, and on top of the stand is an hourglass. And you look at it, and you see the sands running through, and most of the sands are gone already.

And it represents that your life is leaking away, even as you sleep, even as you talk to others, even as you sit in a Dharma class. You're getting older, and your life is leaking away, all the time.

[Speaker 2]
At the same rate all the time. Never pausing.

[Speaker 1]
Now as you pass down the corridor, you're running, and pictures on the wall with little lights above them are passing by quickly, and you have only a few fleeting seconds to recognize one of your teachers or one of the teachings they've given you on a certain date in a certain place. And your life is too busy and moving by too fast to stop and look at them and appreciate them and to learn deeply what they had to teach you. You're running down this corridor that way, representing the fact that even if you do decide to study or to practice, you don't have much time.

[Speaker 2]
You never have enough time.

[Speaker 1]
And at the end of the corridor there's a green door, a huge green door, rectangular, and that represents the second step of the meditation, meaning the second main division, that the time that you're going to die is not fixed. You don't know when you're going to die. And you look at the door for just a second and think, now I'm entering the meditation on how the time of death is not fixed, not certain.

[Speaker 2]
And you come into a room, it's triangular.

[Speaker 1]
You're at the... it's an elongated triangle. So you're walking in at the top of the triangle, and then it opens into a larger room, so the top of the triangle is farther away from the other two corners.

So you're walking into a room that basically opens out wider as you go. And right in front of you as you walk in is a garbage can, and in the garbage can at the bottom, like a big calendar with the number 72 on it in black, and it's in the bottom of the garbage. And that means forget this average lifespan thing, okay?

Seriously, you look at it and you say, that's a lie. That whole expectation that it builds in your mind that you will have until 72 years old or something is a very cruel lie of your culture. And there is no average for any single person.

There's no reason why you should expect to live any longer than this week or today.

[Speaker 2]
It's an unreasonable thought to say I have so many years left until the average.

[Speaker 1]
Then as the room widens out, then you're walking through an area, and it's a normal room. It has furniture all around, chairs, carpet, objects like a TV, books. And you're walking through them towards the other side of the room, and you're aware that there's like a tripwire somewhere that if you touch it, you'll die.

The bomb will go off. The place will explode. You'll die.

And one of these objects around you, you're looking at the objects one by one, like the blanket on the bed that might catch fire one night and burn you. People say, in your mind, you're thinking, that's not going to happen to me. I have a student whose mother was sitting on a couch, a normal person, and the cord was behind it, and the cord frayed, and the couch went up, and the house exploded within a few minutes.

Everything made of plastics, and a blanket could very easily kill you. A chair could kill you. Look at the chair and think, would that kill me?

Is the bomb there? How many people died slipping off a chair? And look at each object like that, and think that they could kill you.

Food on the table, and that something in there could kill you. Walk through the room realizing that all the things that you need to keep you alive, one of them will probably kill you.

[Speaker 2]
And as you're walking towards the,

[Speaker 1]
there's a door at the base of the Chai mill, in the middle, and as you get down to it, you start to approach the door, and you step on a thorn, and you lean down and you take it out of your foot, and there's a little tiny spot of blood that comes out, and look at it and think, I was thinking about, I read about Theodore Roosevelt's son, he got a thorn in his foot, a tiny thorn like that, and it got a little bit infected, and then it got worse and worse, and this happened in our monastery also, to a boy, a young boy in the fields, and he died from that. I saw him die from that. It also happened to Theodore Roosevelt's son, and just look at it and think how fragile your body is, how little it takes to kill it, and that's the meditation on how fragile your body is, how many little things can kill your body.

Think about little things that can kill your body. A little virus picked up from someone else called HIV, a little break in the chromosome of a single cell in your body, which kills you of cancer.

[Speaker 2]
Think about it.

[Speaker 1]
And then you look up and there's a red door leading into another room, and you look at it for a moment and reflect, this is the third of the main meditations, and I'm going to meditate about how when I die, it's only my spiritual life that can help me.

[Speaker 2]
Then you open the door and you enter,

[Speaker 1]
it's sort of like a greenhouse, and there's an arched corridor of glass that goes down the whole length of the room, it's like a rectangle, and you can see on the other side there are things outside the glass, so it's like a little tunnel or something, and you can stand up in it, it's pretty tall, and the room is well lit, it's like a greenhouse, and there's sunlight coming in from the outside, so you can clearly see the things outside of the little glass walls of the hallway you're walking down, and then there's more glass on the outside walls, and then in between the two you can see certain things, and the first thing you see on both sides walking down the hallway is our friends that you have, people that you love,

[Speaker 2]
and put there the three or four people who are closest to you,

[Speaker 1]
and they're talking to each other and they're laughing and having conversations, and they cannot see you, and you're knocking on the glass and trying to get their attention and banging on the glass, and they can't even see you and it makes you frustrated, they can't hear you, they don't pay any attention, it's like you're invisible, it's like they don't hear you, and this represents the Bardo, and the fact that you can't take those people with you, the moment after you die you'll be alone, you may perhaps even be able to see them, and they won't be able to interact with you at all,

[Speaker 2]
they won't be able to reach you or contact you and reflect on that,

[Speaker 1]
and then as you move halfway down this rectangular hall, the room, and you're still in this hallway, you can look at each side of the glass and you can see all the objects that are dear to you, and for me it's of course my laptop, and maybe a car that I use, and then some kinds of furniture in my bedroom, and the blankets and the sheets that I use, and some of my old work suits, and I think especially for me, photographs on the ground scattered, of things I used to like, photographs I used to enjoy of people I loved, and then my books strewn about the room, and you're walking down the hallway and the glass is between you and them, you cannot reach them, and this represents the fact that you can't take any of them with you, they will be left behind, and it will be frustrating for you, at that moment you'll be quite upset and off balance,

[Speaker 2]
and almost angry that you can't reach them anymore, and then down towards the end of the room, off to the right side,

[Speaker 1]
you see a dead body, naked, your body, and when you look at the face, it's face up on its back, and you look at the face, and the face has no features on it, it's still the contours of a nose and an eye and a mouth, but unrecognizable, no clear features, just pits where the eyes were, and a bump where the nose was, and a hole where the mouth was, but you can't recognize it. This is the stage in the meditation where you realize that you have to leave behind even your own body, and your name, and your identity, and no one will remember you shortly after you die.

Even the people who are really sensitive and compassionate and attached to you will slowly forget you after you die.

[Speaker 2]
And then bring your mind back to the Lama in the chamber behind your heart, and thank them for their blessing, and just be with them for a short time. And then dedicate it to other people.

[Speaker 1]
Think about the good karma we did today. Nobody talks about death like this. I doubt that anyone in the United States, or this kind of a group of people, has talked about these things today.

Rejoice and send out the energy to other people. Good karma, light from the pores of your body.

[Speaker 2]
Imagine people, just normal people around Raleigh, one of them gets hit here and there, and something happy comes into their mind. Okay, relax.