LYWA Monthly e-letter Archive
No. 32: November 2005
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Dear Everybody,
Hi…we hope you are well. Thank you for reading the Lama
Yeshe Wisdom Archive monthly e-letter. Please pass it on and
encourage others to sign up for it. This is perhaps our best
way of sharing our news and teachings with the world.
We have been working hard to establish our Photo Archive,
scanning hundreds of slides and pictures over the past few months.
We've posted a wonderful selection of these recent additions
to the Archive, like the one shown here of Lama Yeshe in Reno,
Nevada in 1980; take
a look at the rest. We can see from our website statistics
that the Photo Gallery is one of the most popular areas that
people visit on our site, so we know that many of you will enjoy
these additions—there's more to come! And, speaking of
statistics, October 2005 saw the greatest number of visitors
to our site: more than 13,000 people visited the Archive website
last month.
Inspired by this, we continue to add new material on our
website. This month, we've added a series of teachings from
Ribur Rinpoche titled How
to Generate Bodhicitta. We've also added many new
advices to Lama Zopa Rinpoche's online
Advice Book, including the addition of three
new sections! One of these new sections includes many advices
for sangha, Dharma center directors and others who work for
Dharma centers. Browse through the menus, or use our advanced
search page to search the Advice Book section
for the phrase "Nov. 2005". We now have over 225
of Rinpoche's advices posted to the online book!
Last month we told you about our new podcasts. We hope that
some of you are listening. We started with four of Lama Yeshe's
talks, the ones featured in the book Essence
of Tibetan Buddhism. To find out more about our podcasts,
see our podcasts page.
This month's podcast is from the Mahamudra Retreat with Lama
Zopa Rinpoche in April 2004.
All of the teachings found in our new free book Teachings
from Tibet are now available to read individually
on the web, including two that had never before been posted
on our website: Song Rinpoche's How
to Start Practicing Dharma and Geshe Dhargyey's In
Search of the Self. Browse the table
of contents page to access all the other teachings, too,
and find links on these pages to more teachings by these same
great lamas.
We’ve been busily sending out Teachings from Tibet
to our benefactors all over the world. Thank you all for your
very positive feedback on this title. However, we’re
not resting on our laurels. We have three more books in the
pipeline: Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s The Joy of Compassion,
a selection of four teachings on compassion from his longer
(700-page) work, Teachings
from the Vajrasattva Retreat; a wonderful teaching
by Khensur Rinpoche Geshe Jampa Tegchok on the Seven-Point
Mind Training; and a reprint of Lama Yeshe’s Essence
of Tibetan Buddhism.
As ever, we’re able to bring you all these books free
of charge largely through the kindness of the people who sponsored
their preparation and printing. So, please rejoice in these
benefactors’ merit and dedicate it to the enlightenment
of all sentient beings. However, we depend equally on the
contributions of all our supporters, not just those who sponsor
specific books, and welcome all donations, great and small.
And remember, anybody who offers $20 or more will receive
completely free of charge any new books we publish in the
twelve months following their donation. Thank you all so much.
That said, we do have a number of books by Lama Yeshe and
Lama Zopa Rinpoche that we would like to publish in 2006 and
are actively seeking sponsors for these, so if you would like
to fully ($5,000–10,000) or partially (minimum $1,000)
sponsor a book, please get in touch for more information.
And, of course, every month we bring you a new, previously-unpublished
teaching by Lama Yeshe or Lama Zopa Rinpoche. This time we
continue where we left off last time, with Lama Yeshe teaching
on po-wa, the transference of consciousness.
Thank you again, and much love,
Much love
Nick Ribush
Director
Transference of Consciousness at the Time of Death
(continued)
[In our previous e-letter, Lama Yeshe concluded with
“Anyway, when you detect the signs and reach the point
where you know that death is certain, at that time you employ
the techniques for transferring your consciousness.”
We pick up from there...]
But why do that? Death is coming and your consciousness will
transfer naturally, so why employ these techniques?
It’s because when we die it’s usually from some
kind of serious disease and at the time of death are unable
to cope, so the practice of transference of consciousness
allows us to handle our death constructively, before illness
renders us incapable. That’s the time we should use
it. However, if we don’t have a proper understanding
of the signs of impending death and know clearly when to use
the techniques of transference of consciousness we’ll
be in danger of using them too early and simply killing ourselves.
So how do we practice transference of consciousness? Basically
it’s a matter of putting our concentration and energy
in the right channel to stop it going the wrong way. The teachings
on this subject contain all the detailed technical information.
What’s the wrong way? There are many doors through
which our consciousness can exit the body—eyes, ears,
nose, mouth, navel, lower orifices and so forth—and
the teachings explain which realm we’re born into according
to which door our consciousness takes.
To be born in a pure land, our consciousness has to leave
through the crown of our head; therefore we have to learn
how to open this door and bring our consciousness to it. This
is the point of practicing transference of consciousness.
Since we can consciously, deliberately, mindfully separate
our mind from our body, we should take this opportunity to
make sure that we’re reborn in the best possible way,
make sure that from now on we go from happiness to happiness,
from happy life to happy life.
One important thing is this. You might be a good person and
live your entire life with loving kindness, but if something
goes wrong when you die, if you can’t cope and get angry,
you basically destroy the whole thing because you’re
reborn under the influence of that final negative mind.
Therefore we call transference of consciousness a super-method.
Even somebody like Hitler, who was incredibly evil, killed
numberless human beings and created terrible karma, can use
this method, die with a clean-clear mind and say goodbye to
all his or her negativities.
Death is a kind of final destination, our last chance to
make our mind clean-clear; if we can be conscious at the time
of death this is insurance to make our next life perfect.
Of course, before they can practice transference of consciousness,
Himalayan yogis prepare. They rehearse the techniques and
also make sure that they’re completely free of attachment
to even an atom of matter. That’s the most important
issue at the time of death—to not grasp at a single
thing. The grasping mind is the greatest interference to a
peaceful death, the greatest cause of fear. Grasping at anything
at the time of death is the source of confusion and ensures
a bad rebirth.
Some people don’t like to hear about rebirth but whether
you call what happens after death rebirth or something else,
most people feel that something happens after death, and that’s
good enough. If you feel from your heart or at least intellectually
that there’s something after death, that’s good
enough to be open to these teachings.
The Tibetan tradition is to give all your possessions away
before you die so that you can die without thinking that anything
belongs to you. That’s fantastic. When I was a young,
inexperienced monk, seeing old monks dying perfectly in this
way was a great help to me; it gave me a lot of confidence.
Of course, we can understand these things intellectually,
but to see actual people give their things away and die without
attachment makes you feel, “I can do this, too.”
That’s very important.
Then, we also have explanations of how to transfer our consciousness
to a pure land. However, I hope you understand what a pure
land is.
From the Buddhist point of view, there’s not some pure
place out there waiting for you. Pure means it’s a reflection
of your own pure thought, your own pure, clean-clear mind.
That’s what we call a pure land. Any manifest environment,
good or bad, comes from the mind; nothing exists externally
“out there.”
Normally we like to project nice, pleasant appearances but
somehow, without control, negative appearances arise. So it’s
important that we know how to project only happy, positive
appearances. But when I say to project good, positive things
I don’t mean in our usual exaggerated way. We can project
positively in a realistic way.
If we want to see other people in a certain way—good
or bad—that’s the way they appear. It somehow
depends on the mental decision we make. Our view of another
person as good or bad actually comes from our own mind, not
the external object, the other person.
Therefore we have a choice as to what we see, and whether
it’s positive or negative, we can make our view more
so. We have that ability. And since we can choose, we should
choose the positive.
Normally energy escapes from our various bodily orifices,
but there are various meditation techniques we can employ
to conserve it. Since our life depends on the movement of
our breath, we can increase our life span by bringing the
energy of our breath inside and keeping it there.
How many breaths are there in a life? Buddhism has an estimate
of that number. I’m sure the West does too. Anyway,
you can examine the pattern of your breath to see if it’s
stronger from the right nostril or the left. If you are aware,
signs such as these can indicate what’s happening with
your life, and there are techniques you can employ to change
the rhythm of your breath and thereby affect your life.
Also, transference of consciousness does not depend only
upon our powers of concentration. When we train in its techniques
we also use the energy of the movement of our breath and our
heart and navel chakras, or psychic energy centers. By focusing
on these points we have different experiences and can gain
different realizations.
To be continued in the next e-letter.
Lama Yeshe gave this teaching at St. John’s Church,
London, 18 September 1982. It was excerpted and edited from
the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive by Nicholas Ribush. Listen to
this teaching at recordings.LamaYeshe.com.
We are in the process of producing a DVD of this teaching.
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