AGOL 25, Обзор медитации о смерти — стенограмма

[Speaker 1]
Okay, ready? Okay, sit like a rock, sit like a rock. Rocks don't open books and things like that.

Everybody has to die normally, if they don't practice well enough. Everybody has to die, and during the death process there's a special opportunity to see emptiness directly. So, the purpose of this meditation is to practice what it feels like to die, until you get to the point in death when you have a window of opportunity to see emptiness, if you know what you're doing.

If you don't, it'll just pass and you will be reborn someplace. So, here we go. Come, watch your body, sit up straight.

Pull in your stomach slightly and keep it there, just a slight pressure. Relax your eyelids. Small Mona Lisa smile.

Fingers are relaxed. Shoulders are relaxed and pulled back, shoulder blades together in the back. Brighten up your forehead, relax it, release it, open it, and don't crunch it up when we start focusing.

Keep it light. And your eyelids are super relaxed. If you feel sleepy you can crack your eyelids open, but don't look.

Relax the corners of your mouth. And then slowly come to your breath like getting in the saddle of a horse. This is your getting into the saddle of your meditation.

Come to your breath and start focusing on long exhales. The inhales will take care of themselves, or else you're dead already. And now slowly, naturally, comfortably start to follow with a counting.

Each exhale is one, next exhale is two. And see if you can stay with your breath sliding in and out without thinking about something else. Just be here, you're stuck here for a week, you can't go anywhere.

No use to worry about your job, or your family, or the world, or what did Trump do this morning. Just forget it for a week. And come to your breath.

That's all you're supposed to do. Then imagine where it is you might be dying in this life, if you died this month, next month. Where might you be?

I think myself I'd probably be on my bed at home. You know, I would die in my home. So think about that bed, and imagine you're lying in it.

Something happened, you got hurt in a car accident, or something happened, and you're in your last few minutes in this world. You're on the bed, and you will not get off of the bed alive. You are looking up, and close friends, close family are with you.

Some can be holding your hands, some are holding your feet. They might be crying. They don't want you to leave, and you don't want to leave, but death will take you.

Your fingers are getting a little cold, hard to move them. Your feet feel cold. It's very hard to breathe.

It's not easy to get air through your nose or through your mouth. Family is talking softly, but it's getting difficult to hear what they're saying. The cold is almost all the way up your legs and arms.

You can't hear the family anymore. You can't move your arms or legs anymore. Your mouth closes, and your nostrils shut inside, and you stop breathing.

You can't breathe. And your mind, your consciousness starts to withdraw from the world. Your eyes closed for the last time.

You can't open them. You would like to, but you can't. And the thoughts withdraw into the middle of your mind, and you're alone, and it's dark, and it's silent.

Then suddenly you're ... it's as if you're walking ... I like to picture myself close to those big mountains in Diamond Mountain, behind the retreat valley.

I'm walking down the bottom part, going downhill, and then suddenly, the pieces of rock, huge pieces of rock, the size of your retreat cottage, the size of cars are breaking off the mountain, rolling down the mountain. You can see, if you look at that mountain sometime, you can see where pieces of rock like that have come down. You can see the path they followed, and they are crushing everything in their path, and you are running, you start to run ahead of these huge boulders rolling down the hill behind you.

The noise is terrible, like many car accidents at the same time, and you're running. The earth element is collapsing inside of you. Then suddenly behind the mountain comes a huge tsunami wave, like the one that took Japan, and it's moving very fast, huge, unbelievable, unimaginable, almost blocks out the sky, and you are hopeless in front of it, and you're running as fast as you can, but the wave catches you and throws you into the water.

You're fighting just to get some more breath. You are surrounded by huge waves, you are in the water, struggling, being dragged down. And I personally, when I do this meditation, I think of Diamond Mountain, I'm being pushed by the waves down into the valley here, past this temple, and I'm just fighting to try to get some breath, some air.

And I ... just to make the meditation easier, the visualization easier for me, I imagine it carries me out 10, 12 miles through Bui, and to the other side it's just flat desert. Then the water element has dissolved, and you're just laying.

Suddenly the water leaves you in the desert, and the water drains away, and you are crawling across the desert, and the sun comes up, very very large, filling most of the sky like normal sun, and the fire element in your body is dissolving, and it feels terrible heat. It feels like being inside of a fire, and you are crawling. I imagine crawling away from Bui across the desert, fire all around me.

Then the fire starts to wear out, and then this huge wind storm comes across the desert, like a Singapore hurricane tearing across the desert, and it's tearing at your body. Things are flying past you, trees, rocks, dust. The wind is tearing at your body.

This is the ... wind element is dissolving. And then suddenly that starts to dissipate, and you are ...

I imagine standing, walking slowly ahead. No place to go, just alone in a empty landscape, and I'm walking ahead, and far away I can see a mirage, and these are the subtle elements of your body are breaking down. And you see, way in the distance you see light.

It looks like a lake shimmering, but it's just a mirage, and you walk towards it, and you get closer and closer, and you actually walk through the mirage. And on the other side, in the other land, it's all just like fog or smoke. You are walking through dense smoke or fog.

There's nothing you can see in front of you. If you put your hand out in front of you, you can't see it. Everything is thick fog, smoke.

You're walking still, hopelessly driven ahead through the smoke. And then you start to see sparks in the smoke. They say like fireflies or sparks from some machine, and you can see sparks here and there in the air in front of you and around you.

These are parts of your consciousness are breaking down as you go deeper into death. Then ahead of you, you can see a very steady fire flame, like a candle flame. So the world is getting smaller.

Your world is shrinking. It feels like you're going through a tunnel which gets more and more narrow. And at the end of the tunnel, in the dark, you can see a single candle flame.

Immobile. It's burning, but it's not moving. There's no wind.

Just a steady, unmoving candle flame, and you are walking towards this flame. And then you actually walk through the flame, because you are only small now. Your world is very small.

And on the other side of the flame, it's just black. Everything around you, total black. And still you're walking.

And then somehow, the black gets deeper, deeper black than the one before. So try to imagine a deeper black all around you, like ink. And then suddenly you're into a deeper, deepest black.

Total darkness. You can't see your feet, you can't see your arms. You can just see darkness.

Total, complete darkness. Still walking. Then slowly in the horizon, and for me, I like to imagine the east side of the retreat valley.

Those of you who did a three-year retreat, when the sun, daybreak comes, before sunrise there's daybreak. Before the sun breaks the horizon, then to the east there's this white color of the sky. Before the yellow comes, there's a white.

And that white in front of you, behind the horizon, it begins to spread all around you. And you are surrounded by white light, and you're still walking. And then a red light, like a sunset, starts to replace the white light.

And you are walking through a world of red light. And then slowly the red light dissolves, and you come to another darkness, black, and deeper black, very deep black. Then suddenly things change, and it feels like you're walking inside of crystal.

Like there's a crystalline feeling to the to the world around you. You are surrounded in a kind of crystal, or the the air is crystal, like diamond, as if you're walking through diamond. But you can breathe, and you can walk, but the world around you is like diamond.

And in this point of death, your central channel is broken open, all the chakras are broken open, and the prana is flowing freely, with no obstacle. At this point you, your physical body releases pee-pee, poo-poo, but you're not aware of it because you are deep, deep, deep inside. And at this point you can grab this small few minutes of opportunity to think about emptiness.

You can think about how nothing you see is not coming from you. Everything you see around you, everything you're experiencing, every thought, every feeling in this moment, is coming from seeds in your mind. And there's nothing around you which is coming from the outside, it's all coming from inside you.

So cancel the idea that anything's happening to you, it's all happening from you, and hold that. And we'll stay here for a few minutes, try to stay in the feeling that everything you thought was there, coming from its own side, never was. And that's emptiness.

[Speaker 2]
Then you can start to come out of that emptiness.

[Speaker 1]
I like to come out, standing on the sky as a Buddha, and suddenly come out of death, not to rebirth, but I come into a Buddha, and I'm standing above a planet, looking down. Maybe it's nighttime and it looks beautiful with all the lights of the cities. This is the world that I have to take care of, and be there, serve them, guide them.

I like to stand there with my teacher, who in the Diamond Way teachings, Vajrayana, it's my partner, and we are sort of like mommy and daddy, looking at a world, thinking we're going to take care of it. Then follow your breath for three breaths, three deep exhales, to get ready to come out. Just relax, don't get, you know, too excited about coming out.

Then slowly open your eyes, on the last inhale, take a stretch. It's good when you meditate to take stretches, that's what yoga was originally for, right?