If there's no meditation practice, no Dharma practice, in our life, the friends that we have become a problem to us and the wealth that we have becomes a problem to us. Even if nobody else harms you, you harm yourself; you become an enemy to yourself. Even if nobody else kills you, you endanger your own life; you shorten your own life.

Just as we need friends, wealth and all these external things, we also need to develop our mind. This is the most important thing. Developing your own mind, your own altruism or good heart is the most important thing, more important than anything else. No matter how many hundreds or thousands of friends you are able to make, that alone doesn't give satisfaction in life. No matter how wealthy you are, even if you own all the possessions that exist on the earth, again that alone cannot give you satisfaction, cannot give you happiness. And no matter how good your reputation is, that alone cannot give you satisfaction, happiness or peace in your heart. Without Dharma practice, without seeking happiness from your own mind, you cannot find satisfaction; you cannot find peace in life.

Meditation is a means of seeking happiness from within your own mind. It's a way to pacify suffering. Meditation is transforming your mind from harmful thoughts into beneficial, positive thoughts.

Without meditation practice, Dharma practice, without transforming your mind and developing a good heart, the wealthier you become, the more problems you have. The wealthier you are, the more fear you have that you will lose your wealth or that other people will steal it; and the more worry you have that you will be unable to compete with others to maintain your wealth. Then, because of your wealth, you will have many enemies. Many people will want to take your money, so many enemies will arise.

These external things alone cannot give satisfaction and you can't find real happiness through them. Not finding satisfaction is itself the biggest problem. No matter how many external things you have, even though you try to enjoy them, if you really examine your own heart, there's always something missing there in your heart. Your life is always empty; there's always something missing. Always something is not right. If you look in your heart, there's something missing—you are not satisfied. This is the big, fundamental problem.

Without Dharma practice, without meditation practice, every life situation becomes a problem. Having money is a problem; not having money becomes a problem. Having a friend is a problem; not having a friend is a problem. Living with other people is a problem; living alone is a problem. There are always problems in your life and these all come from the mind; from not watching and not protecting your mind. These problems all come from not looking after yourself, from not looking after your own mind.

Let's take the example of Elvis Presley, someone who is very famous, someone that everyone, young and old, knows—especially in the West, but also in the East. Elvis Presley, this famous singer, is better known than His Holiness the Dalai Lama, though His Holiness became more famous when he recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. However, even such a person as Elvis Presley, who had everything, six months before he passed away, while he was singing his last song he had some intuitive feeling that he was going to die soon. He was singing with tears streaming down his face. Normally he doesn't cry when he sings, but at that time he was crying as he sang, with sadness in his heart. And even the people in the audience watching him were crying.

Elvis had everything, but he didn't really find satisfaction or peace. He felt that there wasn't much to live for. He didn't make his life meaningful; he wasn't able to take the essence from life. He felt his life had been empty; he wasn't able to make it meaningful. There are many other examples like this.

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The minute before you had a huge problem, a relationship problem or something else. You felt like you were being pressed down by a mountain or you were being squeezed between two mountains. You were being suffocated by your huge problems.

However, as soon as you stop following the dissatisfied mind of desire, as soon as you separate from desire, immediately that problem is not there. Your huge problem is stopped. Your worry and fear about being unable to meet the object you desire or about separating from it, which appears to you to be a huge problem, as soon as you separate from the dissatisfied mind of desire, that huge problem is stopped. Immediately there is satisfaction and peace in your heart. Immediately there is relaxation in your heart.

As soon as you free yourself from desire, that huge problem suddenly doesn't exist. But as long as you don't give yourself freedom from desire, as long as you are tortured by desire, continuously you have a problem. Whether you go out or stay home, whether you are in the mountains or in a city, whether you are in the East or the West, you are constantly creating problems and constantly there are problems in your life. You can never find satisfaction, peace, rest. You can never find real freedom.

So, the way to obtain real happiness in life is by avoiding the dissatisfied mind of desire. The absence of problems is peace or happiness, and the way to solve problems is to free yourself from the dissatisfied mind of desire. You are following the opposite; you are not giving freedom to yourself, freedom from the dissatisfied mind of desire.

The fundamental problem is allowing yourself to be overwhelmed and controlled by the dissatisfied mind of desire. You let yourself be a complete slave to desire. Then, when anyone interferes with your desire, angerand many other disturbing, unhealthy minds arise. That is what makes your life very unhappy and brings hundreds, thousands of problems. Because of that, many physical problems also arise, such as cancer, AIDS, heart disease, ulcers and drug addiction. Even your body becomes unhealthy. All these depend on your way of thinking in your everyday life. If you think incorrectly, in an unhealthy, harmful way, all these problems happen.

So, if you meditate, if you practice Dharma, right in that minute, in that second, on that same seat, you become free of problems. You have to know how to free yourself from the dissatisfied mind of desire. The method is not collecting external objects. The method comes from your own mind. You have to think of the shortcomings of desire and of clinging to the object of desire. You can even use the one technique of reflecting on impermanence that I mentioned at the beginning. Think, “My life is a causative phenomenon; it exists in dependence upon causes and conditions. The life of this person I desire is also a matter of causes and conditions; their life exists by depending on causes and conditions. These things are changing, decaying within every second due to causes and conditions. And not only that, these things can cease at any time. In other words, death will definitely happen and it can happen at any time, to me and it can happen at any time to this person I desire. So, what is the point of clinging?”

In this way, you then become free. Immediately you do not find purpose in following the dissatisfied mind of desire. Immediately you free yourself from this painful mind, the dissatisfied mind of desire. This gives space in your mind to generate compassion and loving kindness, just as clearing away fog gives space to receive sunlight, gives space for the sunbeams to hit the earth. Like that, clearing away the dissatisfied mind, this uptight, painful, discriminating thought, gives space in the mind for sincerity, loving kindness, and compassion for that other person. And you don't expect anything in return for helping that person. It's not that you do something to help the person but in reality your real purpose is to help yourself because you want that person to fulfill what your self-cherishing or your desire wants. Even though you help the person, the essence is to help yourself; you are helping them for the sake of your own happiness. So actually you are doing everything just to obtain happiness for yourself. In other words, the ultimate aim in your heart, the real goal is to obtain happiness for yourself. When you follow the selfish attitude, the worldly thought of desire clinging to this life's comfort, this is what happens.

Now, by remembering even one technique of meditation on impermanence and death, you free yourself from this dissatisfied mind of desire. Separating from that clears away this disturbing thought and gives you space in your mind. It is then easy to generate loving kindness and compassion, the sincere good heart, towards that person, and you can help them whether they help you or not. You do not have that expectation. Your goal is just to be able to cause that person to be happy because they are a sentient being who wants happiness and does not want suffering. Separating from desire gives you the space to generate this sincere good heart, this sincere loving kindness and compassion.

With such positive thoughts as this good heart, you become a reliable person, a person that other sentient beings can trust. With the selfish attitude and the dissatisfied mind of desire, you are not to be trusted. You are not a reliable friend to other sentient beings because any time someone does some action of body, speech or mind that your own self-cherishing thought doesn't like or that your desire doesn't want, you immediately stop helping that person. If you live your life with self-cherishing thought or the dissatisfied mind of desire, tyou become very unreliable. You can change at any time.

Remembering impermanence and death frees you from these problems, and there are many other meditation techniques, many different ways to think, to free yourself from these disturbing thoughts and problems. Remember all the past problems you have gone through because of the dissatisfied mind of desire. So many times your life has become complicated, so many times you have come to the point of killing yourself, of committing suicide because the self-cherishing thought or desire didn't get what it wanted or had to separate from the object of desire. So many times the thought came to commit suicide. Try to remember that the same problem will happen again; it will lead to the same problems again. Remembering past experiences is also very useful to free yourself from difficult minds such as desire and so forth.

Also think, “I am hallucinating about that person and that person is hallucinating about me.” There are many other ways to think, many other meditations you can do to see what is reality, what is hallucination. They also help. Thinking of the reality of life, of the reality of phenomena, as I mentioned this morning, helps to free you from problems.

However, the basic problem is what are called the eight worldly dharmas. As Nagarjuna explained, the eight worldly dharmas are comfort and discomfort; receiving materials and not receiving materials; having a good reputation and not having one; praise and criticism. The problem is that we have not equalized these: comfort and discomfort, receiving materials and not receiving materials, having a good reputation and not having one, praise and criticism. The desire clinging to this life likes comfort, receiving materials, good reputation and praise but it dislikes the four opposites. But if you are able to equalize these eight conditions in your own mind, you have real happiness, real peace in your life all the time. Even if everyone else in the city is fighting each other, because you have equalized these eight objects in your mind, there will be great tranquility and no fear or worry in your life. The reason discomfort, not receiving materials, a bad reputation and criticism bother us comes from our own mind. It looks as if the disturbance comes from outside, from these four things, but it's not like that. It came from your own mind.

Now we have to think about this. Why do these four things disturb us? That is the question. Why do these four things disturb our mind?

Maybe somebody has something to say? When these four things happen, why does it disturb the mind? Do they have to disturb the mind or not?

Student: They don't have to disturb the mind, but we respond in that way because we're not alert to the choice.

Doc: They disturb us when we misunderstand how we exist.

Rinpoche: Yes, that's the fundamental thing.

Student: We have the expectation of the opposite occurring. When we experience discomfort, we're often expecting that we'll experience pleasure or comfort.

Rinpoche: Yes, that's right. The root of the problem is the misconception of the I and so forth, the wrong way of thinking about the I, as Doc said. But even if someone has never heard of the basic philosophy of reality or the concept of true existence, even someone who has no idea what ignorance is, what the I that doesn't exist is, even if you have no idea about what is hallucination or what is reality, as Sharon said, by meditating on impermanence and death, just by actualizing this meditation, they can equalize these.

At that time there is no clinging to these four objects. At that time the four objects of desire and the four objects that bother the self-cherishing thought, particularly desire, are equalized. There's no clinging to these four things, so they don't bother or disturb you. How much fear and worry comes in our life—fear that something might happen—and the size of the problem we create about our life situation, depends on how much we cling to the four other objects. It's a psychological thing.

Through meditation you gain freedom from this thought of the worldly dharmas clinging to these four things, which always disturbs you. When you cling to the four things and you get them, it brings you up; when the four opposite things happen, it brings you down. You go up and down like this many times, even in one day.

Renunciation, the determination to free yourself from the confusion of this thought of the worldly dharmas, of this desire clinging to this life, comes from meditation. All these are psychological things.

Maybe I will read you some quotations from the Kadampa geshes on these points. The less desire you have for these four objects, the fewer problems you have; psychologically you have less worry and fear that the four opposite things will happen. Even though they're not happening now and might not happen, you worry that they are going to happen in the future. So you unnecessarily create your own problems. And even if the four things are happening now, they bother you less, and you have less worry and fear. If you cut off the desire clinging to this life, through such very basic meditation techniques as impermanence and death, even if the four things happen, they don't bother you. It's no big deal. Sometimes you have huge problems in your life. You have to go to court and it looks as if you might have to spend all the rest of your life in prison. You have a very bad reputation, and everybody criticizes to you. No-one in your family loves you; everyone hates you. Wherever you go, outside, inside, everybody criticizes you and doesn't want to help you. The whole world criticizes you. In your mind this life looks kind of permanent. This life appears as if it is going to last forever. With the concept of permanence, it appears that this life is going to go on forever; that life is always going to be like this.

It appears like this, but in reality this life is like a moment. This life is like lightning; it happens and it's gone. While the lightning is there, you see the objects around you, then this appearance is suddenly gone. The appearance of this life is the same; it happens, then suddenly it's gone. It's just a second, like lightning, compared to all our many past lives.

The continuation of consciousness does not have a beginning. For example, when we talk about conception, the word itself gives a feeling that something came from outside and took place on the fertilized egg. "Conceived" doesn't give the feeling of something coming from its own side. Something came from outside, took place on the fertilized egg—conceived, parents always talk about conceived— during the daytime, nighttime, this hour, such and such a place—they talk about this. Conceived while traveling, conceived at home, conceived in the bedroom, conceived in the kitchen, conceived in the bathroom, conceived in different places. So it sounds like its coming from the outside—something came from outside and took place on the fertilized egg.

What is the Western scientific definition of conception?

Student: Fertilization of an ovum, the egg produced by the female, by a sperm, produced by the male.

Rinpoche: You mean that those two meeting is the definition of conception in the West? That's all?

Student: That is it in its really simple form.

Rinpoche: There's nothing more than that?

Sylvia: That's the point of fertilization in a nutshell, but until the fertilized egg becomes implanted into the endometrium, the womb, conception probably hasn't truly occurred. The time of the sperm entering the egg and fusing is the point of fertilization, but then the fertilized egg divides and has to implant into the woman's uterus. When that happens, that probably is true conception. I mean, conception is a slightly funny concept.

Rinpoche: In other words, conception starts when the two materials meet together?

Sylvia: That's the beginning, and that fertilized egg may not go on to develop because in order for it to become an embryo it must implant into the lining of the womb. Just having a fertilized egg doesn't mean anything; it has got to be sort of planted in the soil, which is the endometrium.

Rinpoche: So, those two things meeting alone doesn't mean conceived?

Sylvia: No, it has to be nourished.

Student: Conceived and fertilization aren't equivalent terms because conception is a non-scientific term and the closest equivalent in a scientific sense is fertilization.

Rinpoche: So they don't use "conceived"?

Student: Yes, it governs everything from sexual intercourse right through to the actual implantation of the embryo and the subsequent development of that embryo.

Rinpoche: So the actual thing is that it goes into the womb and then it starts with implantation?

Sylvia: When that fertilized egg gets stuck into the uterus, the womb, for its nourishment, then we know the pregnancy has started properly. So, it's a bit different. For the shortcut you could use the fertilization, because one makes the assumption, perhaps wrongly, that a pregnancy will follow.

Rinpoche: Only after it is in the uterus, the pregnancy becomes definite? I see.

Sylvia: I can draw the diagrams later. But today we've got a different concept because we have in vitro fertilization, the fertilization outside the body in a test tube; you take the embryo and put it in a woman's uterus. So now there are different concepts. Everything's changing. And in the future we'll probably have an artificial uterus.

Rinpoche: In other words "conception" is not used by science.

Student: It's not a commonly used term anyway. Catholicism uses it, mostly in reference to immaculate conception. "Immaculate" meaning there was no sexual act, and that refers to the genesis of the child Jesus. He is thought to have been conceived immaculately.

Rinpoche: Immaculate, that means kind of miraculously?

Sylvia: Yes. miraculous, perfect, without outside help.

Student: Christians believe that God rather than man fertilized the egg - that's why Christ is referred to as the Son of God.

Student: What do you understand by the term conception?

Rinpoche: I didn't know. I wasn't sure what conception meant. I thought it was used in biological science. I thought they used the same word, but maybe it didn't have the same meaning, but I didn't know.

Student: It's being loosely used in biology.

Rinpoche: It's used in biology?

Student: One can conceive a thought, an idea, without any help from the outside, so "conceive" is a loose term.

Rinpoche: So "conceived" is only used by religious people?

Student: No. It's like give birth to. You can conceive an idea or if you talk about the start of a new group, you could say the group was conceived at this time.

Rinpoche: In other words, it started?

Student: Philosophically I guess it's changed its meaning in the last twenty years or so.

Rinpoche: It might change still more. And consciousness is produced by what?

Student: As a psychologist we believe that a conscience evolves in a child around about five or seven. It's something that grows within a child. Conscience is something that is more or less taught.

Doc: Consciousness!

Sylvia: Consciousness, at least in the medical term, is probably at the time of birth when the child takes a breath. But we're learning more and more now that in the womb the fetus or embryo is able to react to sounds of music and various other stimuli. Probably all the brain cells are developed by the twelfth to fifteenth week of the pregnancy, but then the brain still continues to develop after birth, maybe for six months afterwards. The Christian belief was that the soul entered the baby at the time of birth, but now they've more or less changed it to the time of conception or the time of fertilization of the sperm and the egg.

Rinpoche: The soul entered from where?

Sylvia: I don't know.

Rinpoche: The soul entered, then?

Sylvia: Presumably that is what gives that embryo some form of life. But it's certain, from a scientific, medical point of view, that at birth the baby's development mentally is only beginning.

Rinpoche: Scientists do use the term "consciousness", right?

Student: Are you talking about consciousness as an awareness?

Rinpoche: Yes, the awareness.

Student: Mental consciousness is any time that the mind isn't sleeping, I guess.

Doc: But why is it that you can dream when you're sleeping?

Student: Well, medically speaking, you can be unconscious if you are sick and near death.

Rinpoche: No, having consciousness doesn't mean the person's always conscious. Do scientists use the word "consciousness" or not?

Sylvia: No, we don't tend to use that in medical terms. For example, if someone's organs are all functioning but we think that they're dead, we have to try to determine whether they're dead or not, so we check out the brain to see if there's any electrical impulse in the brain. If the tracing is flat, then we say they're brain dead. Even though their heart may be beating, we say, “Okay, we can turn off the machines.”

Rinpoche: Even though the heart is beating, they are still regarded as dead?

Sylvia: The brain is dead.

Rinpoche: So that means the person is dead or alive?

Sylvia: We say that person is dead. It's a legal term now—brain dead. And they can take out the organs, the heart or the kidneys, and transplant them.

Rinpoche: So that means the person is dead.

Sylvia: That person is dead because there's nothing there; the brain is non-functioning, dead. You can't survive without your brain being so-called alive.

Rinpoche: I heard of some cases from Dr. Adrian Feldmann. He said that there have been cases where the patient's brain did not function at all, but the heart was still beating and that person came back to life, recovered.

Sylvia: It's done after a long period of time; they just don't do it immediately. But of course the longer a person is so-called brain dead, the more chance there is that they develop pneumonia, or their kidneys won't function or their heart will slow down and stop.

Doc: There's a lot of them like that in parliament!

Student: Just getting back to conception, the indigenous people of this country have a different notion of conception. Their traditional belief is that a spirit enters the woman's body, and its not seen to be associated with any sexual relationship that she might have had with a man.

Student: It came from the Rainbow Serpent, didn't it?

Student: Well, there are a lot of dreaming beliefs, depending on what the dreaming was.

Rinpoche: No, there are certain cases like that.

Student: I'm sure there are, but when you asked that question, that answer wasn't coming from the traditional people of this land. I just wanted to point out that it's not a universal belief in this country.

Rinpoche: Do you mean that certain people in the West have this belief?

Student: I don't know so much about in the West, but some of the indigenous people of this country still have that belief.

Rinpoche: There are also women in Tibet who receive a child without having any contact with a man.

Sylvia: Yes, that's possible, but they should always give birth to females. There should be no male children produced from that process.

Doc: They're saying that if a woman gives birth to a child without any male, then the children should always be female.

Sylvia: A male needs a Y chromosome and the female eggs are always X, just one type. Each sperm can be of two types. In fertilization, one type of sperm gets to the egg first or the other. But in the woman all the eggs are of the one type.

Rinpoche: The man has different but the woman has the same? I have been to Tibet two times. The first time I went, there was one family—I'm not sure but I think they are relatives of one high lama called Pari Dorje Chang; many of the older geshes of Sera Je College, such as Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, are disciples of this high lama, whose incarnation is now in Sera Monastery.

I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I think they are relatives of this lama. One very good tantric college monk, who used to be a servant of this lama, was staying at this family's house. Actually there are no men in this family, and one woman in her twenties got pregnant even though she had never had any sexual contact with a man. The family didn't know that things like that can happen, so they were a little bit scared to tell people. They felt uncomfortable about telling people the child didn't have a father. The monk asked me to check about the child, but I didn't get time to check personally about it.

Later I found out that these things do happen. It's not normal, but it does happen. The child is not necessarily a human being, because sometimes worldly gods, desire realm devas, can have contact with a woman and produce a child. Also, the head of the Nyingmapa sect, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who is very tall, very large, and there is His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche, then Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who normally lives in Bhutan. I heard a story that his father was a protector called Tamchin Dorje Legpa. I heard this story.

This is definitely possible. Sometimes the woman is not sure whether it's a dream or not; it looks very real but strictly there's no human being that you can communicate with. But I definitely believe its possible that devas can have sexual contact. They can also harm or interfere with people who is living in morality and things like that.

Is the English word "consciousness" used by scientists?

Student: No, not really.

Rinpoche: Mind?

Sylvia: We say that someone is unconscious or they're conscious, meaning they're alert and awake. When we examine a patient, let's say after they've had a knock on the head, and they seem to be what we call "out to it", we'd say the patient was unconscious. Then as they began to come awake again we'd say, “Oh yes, the patient has regained consciousness”, meaning they are awake and alert or the brain seems to be functioning normally.

Rinpoche: "Conscious" is an adjective?

Jampa: Consciousness is a noun.

Rinpoche: It's a noun, not an adjective? Oh, I see.

Student: Consciousness has been the subject of a certain amount of scientific investigation, but because the hard sciences in the West haven't concerned themselves with things that aren't visible and measurable until recent times, it didn't really get much of a look-in. But there's been a lot of work done on parts of the brain that are supposed to be correlated with consciousness, for example, and trying to find what sorts of measurable brain activity are associated with what we think of as being consciousness. But consciousness has different meanings in common language. We can sit here and be conscious of the fact that it's getting late and so on.

Student: Hypnotherapists talk about an altered state of consciousness, which people enter when you hypnotize them. But they are still aware of what is going on around them, even though they on a different plane. Hypnosis is a form of deep relaxation really. I've used both together; I've used deep relaxation as a means of getting them into hypnosis.

Rinpoche: So maybe we stop here, while we're still conscious.

Doc: It was a trick question. I feel that when you asked the first question, back then, there was a trick.

Rinpoche: I've forgotten now. You mean about conception, that's right. Anyway, in Buddha's teachings about the conventional and ultimate natures of mind, reincarnation, continuation of consciousness, and so forth, nothing is contradictory to our experience. The more we study, the more we analyze, we will find more reasons to prove reincarnation. Our own experiences in this life can prove reincarnation. You will see more and more reasons for reincarnation. Our development in this life depends on our practice in past lives. Even our present problems depend on the past.

Another thing is that Buddha explained the teachings in regard to mind and his omniscient mind is fully developed. Buddha's wisdom is fully developed; he has not the slightest obscuration interfering with the ability of his mind to see all past, present and future existence directly. There's nothing to add to Buddha's explanation of mind. From our side we analyze in order for us to understand it, but there's nothing to add to improve Buddha's teaching.

Scientists are still in the process of developing understanding of the mind. They have been changing their definitions of mind from year to year. As they develop their understanding more and more, they find some mistakes in their previous definitions. Nowadays, with more analysis, the definitions are coming closer to Buddhist philosophy. For example, I heard that the top scientists, after analyzing atoms on and on, now say that the atom is dependent on the mind, is dependent on the perceiver. And some scientists, after analyzing the object, discover that there's no object existing without depending on the mind, that there's no object existing inherently. It has all to do with the mind. So, the more they analyze, the closer and closer they come to Buddha's teaching. Science is still slowly progressing; it has still not finished analyzing and experimenting.

And reincarnation is an experience. Even though we don't remember at the moment, some people do, through hypnotism or deep meditation—some even through a simple meditation such as going back into the mother's womb. In the early Kopan courses, for a few days at the beginning of the course, we had a lot discussion on reincarnation; at the beginning of the courses we would spend about five days discussing reincarnation and the mind, and also the people would meditate on going back from today to yesterday, then to last year, then to childhood, then back into their mother's womb, then back to the very beginning of conception, and then see what they feel came before that. Some people with clear minds and good concentration got very clear mental pictures of being in Tibet. I heard that one person remembered being in a kitchen making Tibetan tea; they could even remember the Tibetan tea churn used to make Tibetan tea. The picture was very clear and so strong that it made them cry. A few people had similar experiences.

Then, through tantric meditations, such as the Six Yogas of Naropa, meditators can remember many, many lives from many thousands of years ago. When the incomparably kind Lama Yeshe visited the pyramids in Egypt, he remembered that he had lived one of his early lives in that place.

The great yogis who have actualized the extremely subtle consciousness, the clear light, can see their own and others' past and future lives. So, the existence of reincarnation is the experience of ordinary people, young and old, and of highly attained meditators. But that there are no past and future lives is nobody's experience. There are philosophies about it, but these are just ideas made up according someone's analysis and understanding. The philosophy is there, but as far as the experience, as far as the realization, nobody has realized that there is only one life, that there is no reincarnation, that there are no past and future lives. Nobody has realized this, which makes it clear that this life is not the only one. Past and future lives exist.

Please dedicate the merits to generate bodhicitta, the source of happiness for you and for all sentient beings, in your mind and in the minds of all sentient beings. Those who have bodhicitta, may they develop it.

Due to all the three times' merits accumulated by me and by other beings, buddhas and bodhisattvas, due to all these merits, which are merely labeled by the mind, may the I, who is merely labeled by the mind, achieve Guru Shakyamuni Buddha's enlightenment, which is merely labeled by the mind, and lead all sentient beings, who are merely labeled by the mind, to enlightenment, which is merely labeled by the mind.

As the three times' buddhas have dedicated their merit, I will dedicate all my merits to quickly enlighten all sentient beings.

Due to all the three times merits accumulated by me and by others, buddhas, and bodhisattvas, may the unification of sutra and tantra, the completely pure teaching of Lama Tsongkhapa, be actualized within my mind and in the minds of my family and all the students in this very lifetime—the whole path, especially bodhicitta and clear light, the realizations of Highest Yoga Tantra. May we be able to spread Dharma in the minds of all sentient beings and lead them to enlightenment as quickly as possible, and may we receive all the necessary conditions to do this without any obstacles.

[End of Second Discourse]