Archive Result

20030630GRRU

RU-6-30-03

Today's subject is Reincarnation. But first I would like to introduce to you the meaning of some of the prayers we're doing in the beginning of each session. The first is this mantra:

TAYATA GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SOHA

This mantra is Buddha’s mantra. Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg created an opera some time ago called hydrogen jukebox. That mantra is used in there quite a lot. It really means: Gone, gone, gone beyond. There are a lot of explanations for this , but I can't go into them at this time because if I did, I would do nothing else tonight. Let me just say that there are five steps in the Buddhist tradition, whether you look into the hinayana or mahayana. In this mantra , the five steps are introduced.

Mantra recitation is very powerful. Reciting a mantra makes quite a difference to everything, health, social development, and even in business. About 10 years ago I was in Southeast Asia. A group of upcoming bankers approached me and they wanted mantras for all kinds of purposes. They would spend 45 minutes before starting work to say their mantras. One time, they asked me for a particular mantra, to help them with the business. One of them said, ‘ I've lost my sharpness of mind. I need a mantra to give me more sharpness, so I can go and kill everybody else in my business.’ I told them I had such a mantra. They all came close to listen , and I said, ‘The mantra is: O money come, money come, money come quick soha’. I did this as a joke. But the actual mantras really work.

Next we have NAMO GURUBYA NAMO BUDDHAYA NAMO DHARMAYA NAMO SANGAYA. This is a mantra to mark your practice as Buddhist practice. You are taking refuge to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

Then we have the practice of the seven limbs. This is one of the best meditations you can do. The first limb is showing respect to the divine beings. The next is offering. Offering is a very important practice. The next is purification.

Whatever mistakes we may have made, we can regret, and then purify. 2600 years of Buddhist wisdom have told me that whatever mistakes we make are not a dead end. We do make mistakes, because we are human beings. But every mistake we make can be purified. There is no situation that is hopeless, where we can do nothing. To Buddha , that is not acceptable. We are human beings. That's why we make mistakes. If we did not, we would be divine beings. Mistakes can be purified and we can become perfect.

Yes, it is true. If you kill somebody, no one can bring that person back. But that doesn't mean that you cannot change things for yourself. Any mistake can be rectified. The example for that is silver. Over time, silver gets tarnished , but it can be cleaned. It can be nice, shiny, white silver again and again. The reason is that by its nature server is not tarnished. It just gets tarnished, particularly the pure silver. Nowadays , we have sterling silver. That is not really 100% silver. In old Tibet, I used to have things made out of pure silver. That Silver gets tarnished very easily. But every time you can wash it, clean and polish it and it can become clean and shiny again, because its nature is not tarnished. Similarly, our nature as human beings is beautiful. We are wonderful, kind and compassionate beings. We all are beautiful in nature. However, we make mistakes. We do get angry. While naturally, we are being kind, sometimes we generate hatred. But our deeper nature is human beings does not gets tarnished by that. It remains pure. We have to maintain this pureness.

I have been trained for over 60 years in the tradition of Buddhism in Tibet. Nowadays, many people look to Tibet as their spiritual home. I never realized that when I was in Tibet. When I came to know, old Tibet was already gone. In that tradition I learned that our mistakes can be purified. They don't affect our deeper nature. Our mistakes are like the skin of oranges that we can peel off. I particularly refuse to accept guilt. No one can give me a guilt trip. I won't take it. In our American understanding guilt means that it is a hopeless situation. You can do nothing. I refuse to accept that. There are many reasons, but the most important reason I can give you is that everything is impermanent. Nothing is a done deal. Everything is impermanent. It changes. We all change. I remember that I was not a big that person like I am today. I was young and quite handsome. But it's changed. I never used to wear glasses before, but now I have to because I won't see those small lines anymore. Everything changes, our looks, our way of living, our way of thinking, our friends, enemies, all of them change. Today’s friend can become tomorrow's enemy. Otherwise you would not have any enemies at all. Our worst enemies are our previous friends. Business partners start cheating each other, for example. All phenomena and beings change. All our bad actions can also change. They don't remain for ever at all. Our good deeds change, our bad beings change. They are impermanent in nature, and that is why I refuse to accept hopeless situations. It is not just on a home saying this. It is things said in the Buddhist tradition for 2600 years. Everything is changeable, whether it is movable or immovable. Even the so-called permanent structures are changeable. I have seen the Statue of Liberty being dismantled and cleaned.

These seven limbs are among the most important spiritual activities anybody can do. Today I'm simply introducing them to you.

Next in our prayers we have the mantra OM MUNI MUNI MAHA MUNIYE SOHA. This is also Buddha's mantra. I'm not going to explain that now.

Next , we have a very long , compassion mantra. I introduced that during the last Iraqi war. The number of people on both sides have died and are still dying today. That's why we are continuing to say this mantra. It is followed by the short compassion mantra OM MANI PADME HUM.

The last mantra we recite here is OM TARE TUTARE TURE SOHA.

This is a beautiful mantra. It is the mantra of Tara. She is like Mother Mary in the Christian tradition. Within her mantra there are so many activities. There is a lot of emphasis on healing. There is the healing of energies and the healing of the elements within our body. Especially in Jewel Heart it has worked so well over the years. In my own case, about five years ago I was supposed to go. I'm not supposed to be here today. Because of this mantra I'm still here. There was also a friend , within Jewel Heart in Holland. She was herself a doctor. One day she discovered that she had a terrible cancer. It was growing everywhere in her body, and it could not be treated at all. They opened her up and realized that nothing could be done and they just stitched her back up. The prognosis given by the doctors and by herself was a couple of months at the most. But it could also just take a few weeks. She was a very determined woman and she spent a total time and energy on meditating on Tara and saying her mantra. She lived five more years leading a normal life. She kept busy, driving herself everywhere, buying things, doing her gardening and everything.

We say that mantra a lot in Jewel Heart, especially during retreats. We do guided meditations and use different visualizations, especially on healing of the five elements within our body. The earth elements includes all our bones and flesh. The liquid parts of our body is the water element. The digestive power and the heat in our body is the fire element. The circulation, that is the air element. Power is very good for healing each of these individual elements and also collectively for us and others. The mantra is short and simple. But there are many different practices and visualizations associated with it. Even if I kept explaining for 30 days and nights, you would still not be able to learn everything. But to do it in practice is easy, and even if you make mistakes it doesn't matter. Tara forgives.

That is very basically, what I wanted to say about the prayers we do in the beginning of each session. I just briefly touched on that. But now I would like to come to my actual subject for tonight: Reincarnation: Fact or Fiction?

Fiction means that it is false, right? Reincarnation could be false information. But if I told you this, I would lose my job as a reincarnate lama. So I'd better don't say it. I am just joking. The truth is, I can't tell you whether reincarnation is fact or fiction. In my book ‘Good Life-Good Death’ I wrote that reincarnation is my culture. And I am not here to sell my culture. It is something that you have to find out for yourself. I can tell you that it is absolutely true and I can give you a lot of reasons for it. At the same time, I could tell you that it is fiction, and I could give you a lot of reasons for that as well.

When I first came to the United States I avoided talking about reincarnation. I was afraid that everybody would reject me. That made me shut up for a long time. Then one time in Ann Arbor, in a public talk, something slipped out about reincarnation. To my surprise, everybody nodded their heads. To me it was so strange that people so easily accepted reincarnation. Even to me as supposedly reincarnated lama, it was very difficult to accept reincarnation. So how come they accepted so easily? You know why? Because none of them wanted to leave. They wanted to stay in life. It turned out to be another escape route. If you look at reincarnation from that perspective, there is no point.

What does reincarnation really mean? Are we as human beings just a collection of flesh and bones? What about our intellectual properties? We do know that our body is not us. We are not our body. If I look at my body, I will say, “This is my body." I feel that I am inside this body somewhere or that I am very pervasive throughout my body. Then, who am I? Where did I come from? Will I be here forever, or am I going to disappear into thin air one day? I don't expect to answer all these questions in half an hour today. Scientists have explored that question for decades and philosophers have thought about it for centuries. We do know that our body is part of us as long as we remain inside our bodies. The moment I leave my body it is no longer part of me. It is no longer my body, but we would call that a corpse. This indicates that something enters our body, and something goes out from there. Who is that? It is my soul, my consciousness. If that is too, I have not come out of my genes. It only occupies them. I develop and use my genes, but they are not me. That is my mind. I am not talking about the intellectual mind but about the person deep down inside.

It is not so difficult to see that I am not my body and my body is not me. The difficulty lies with the mind. What is the mind? What does it look like and what is its color? Actually, it has neither color nor shape. It is intangible. Mind is beyond physical forms and colors. Right now, my mind is trapped in my body, as long as my body remains capable. The moment the body becomes unserviceable the mind can no longer stay inside. It is like living in a rented apartment. Our body is like a rented apartment. As long as the apartment works it is good to be in there. It gives us shelter. It is a nice place to stay. It is a nice place to do something in private, where no one else can see you. But the moment it starts losing the heat, water, the air or the roof it is time to get out. Just like that, when our body becomes unserviceable we have to get out of it. The question is, where are we going? And if we're departing somewhere else from here, that also means we have come from somewhere else to be here. Where did we come from?

Buddha has an answer, but don't just buy what he said. You have to consider it. Buddha himself said that no one should just believe what he says , because he had said so. If you are intelligent, you think for yourself and find out the truth. The truth has to be discovered by ourselves. The truth is there, everywhere. But if we don't discover it, it does no good to us. Information is also around everywhere, but it depends on whether we pick it up. I can pick up spiritual information when watching Days of our Lives in television. Looking at the hourglass reminds me of impermanence. The sand is running down in the hour glass. It does not stop for a second, just like our life. Like that, truth is everywhere but if we don't discover it, it cannot help us.

In order to discover what our mind is we have to first learn about it, find out how it works. I can tell you that the nature of all mind is to be lucid and luminous. It is pure. We all are pure by nature. We are not dirty or filthy, we are great and capable. We have information, we have knowledge. The question is whether we can use it or not. That lucid and luminous quality in our mind is not produced by anybody. Parents have only given us their genes. These then produce our body. But they do not produce our mind. How do I know that? This is difficult to ascertain, but there is a lot of information about it. They are our memories. There are even some situations that we find ourselves in and which remind us of something, but we cannot figure out why or what. And when you go through with that, it is not a dream that you remember, but it really happened. Likewise, we get glimpses of our future as well. Many people like to say that what has happened in the sixties was terrible. But to me many things that happened then were great. It made people open to new experiences. People like you are now wondering about reincarnation, whether there is such a thing as a future life. You begin to ask yourselves what you can do for your future, other than just making more money. These ideas would not even have been raised in you if it were not for the sixties.

I had some talks with some of the people that did the drug experiments in the sixties, like Ram Das and Timothy O’Leary. Ram Das told me that in those days when they did the experiments they were thinking that they were exploring uncharted territory. They were amazed at what the human mind could do, the things you could see. Both, Ram Das and Timothy O'Leary were tenured professors at Harvard University at the time. Then all of a sudden, somebody gave them the Tibetan Book of the Dead. When they began to read they found that what they had thought of as uncharted territory was mentioned in that book already centuries ago. That's why many of them began to think that Tibet was a great source of spirituality for mankind. Through their experiments they obtained glimpses of what the human being is capable of. But these were just glimpses. They didn't last. It wasn't a natural development, but induced by chemicals. You can maintain the experience only as long as the effect of chemicals last. Some people have great experiences and some people have horrifying experiences. That is because these are the reality of experiences in the future. Some of us will have great experience in the future, joyful and beautiful in nature. Others will have horrifying experiences, miserable and unimaginably horrifying. Just like we can have glimpses of past lives, we can also have glimpses of the future. We probably had many of them in our life.

For me personally it was very hard to accept reincarnation, although I have been labeled as reincarnated lama. As a kid, I thought that because I was a reincarnated lama I could just sit down and remember my past life. But when I tried nothing came up. Absolutely zero. Some people told me that if I got a glimpse I should concentrate on that. But I do not like to follow suggestions. I don't do something if there are no reasons. That's one thing I learned from Tibetan Buddhism. You don’t accept anything unless you have convincing logical reliable reasons. A logical reason is one that cannot be contradicted by reliable minds. For example, if I point to the pillar over there and say that that is the human being you will all say that I'm crazy. That is the rejection by reliable minds. So when I tried to remember my past life I recollected nothing. I could try to imagine something and then claim that it was for real. But I would have been cheating myself, or I would have been misleading others as well. And I couldn't ask my great teachers. Because I was a kid I thought they would beat me up. You know, when I was a kid I got beaten up a lot. If you want an example of child abuse, that's me. I grew up in an old culture. We didn't have beautiful things like Sesame Street. They would just show you a piece of paper. Then you had to spell whatever was on that paper. If you didn't learn well they would hit you. That was the old-style. And I got a lot of beatings. That's not a joke, honestly. You could tell when they were about to beat you. If they were looking a bit grumpy, you had nothing to fear. But if there were smiling and doing three prostrations you had something coming to you. You were going to get it. Sometimes I got 50 lashes at one go. I had to ride a horse. One time I could not ride for weeks while sitting down. I had to stand up in the stirrups. Anyway, that's why I had a lot of hesitation, asking about reincarnation. On top of that almost everybody in Tibet accepts reincarnation, like Americans accept hamburgers. When I got bigger I was no longer afraid of beatings but I was afraid of being rejected. If I as a reincarnated lama was asking such questions they might think, “What has gone wrong with this reincarnated lama?”

That's why I struggled with this question for 50 years. Now I cannot say any longer that it is fiction. There's too much evidence of people remembering. Forget about spiritual reasons. Forget about belief systems. It is quite straightforward. There are so many young kids who remember their past life. They are collected accounts of people remembering and there are so many of them. Some of these kids even remember their parents of the previous life. They insist that the current parents are not their real parents and that they want to go and see their real parents. And then they went and found those parents. All this is documented by Western scientific research scholars. I don't want to repeat those accounts, because you can read about them in English. There are a lot of books. In my book, I only like to present or I know myself and what I have experienced.

But think about it: Were do our habitual patterns come from? How do kids know things that we have been hiding from them, without anybody telling them? How many times parents try to hide their Playboy magazines, only to find them under the beds of their kids. How do they learn that? Where does that interest come from? In short, there is no scientist who can claim that there is no reincarnation. To me personally therefore, reincarnation is reality. I have come from a previous life and I will go to my future life. It is not just so that I don't want to die. I don’t want to die, but we all have to. But that transition from this life to the future life is made by ourselves.

You may raise the question, “ If that is true, how come I remember nothing?” Sure we don't remember anything. This is because when we died in our last life our gross mind was gradually reduced. At the time of death all our gross minds are reduced one after another. Just before we die we even forget our own name. We don't remember the names or faces of our closest relatives that we have known for all life. It is true. If you go to see dying person in hospital, you have to ask them,” Do your remember me?’ And every day the doctors and nurses ask those patients, ‘What’s your name?’ What happens is that the gross memories are shrinking. The gross mind itself is shrinking. It is becoming such a subtle mind. Let alone memories - this mind cannot even distinguish anything that is good or bad. Finally , all that is left is the colorless, formless very subtle mind. And it leaves the body and goes into open space. It goes, finds and touches with the original source. At that time, we are either accepted or rejected. If we are accepted we become part of the sea of enlightened mind. If we are rejected it depends on how good or bad our karma is, regarding what happens next. If we are lucky enough we may become another human being. Otherwise, who knows what will happen. Therefore our future is in our hands today . That's why today is so important. I can make the difference to my future today. If you wait to the time of death it is a little too late. What will happen then is based on what we do today. I am responsible for myself and you are responsible for yourself. That's why we are trying to find out what spiritual practice is. So reincarnation is like a rainfall that comes from the sky and dissolves the ground. That's what I am. That's what we all are.

I would take three questions.

Audience: As I understand in the Buddhist tradition there is no such thing as a soul. So who reincarnates?

Rimpoche: Me. To me that is a theoretical point. A lot of Buddhists will say that there is no soul, but that there is consciousness. What is the difference? It is simply a matter of a name. Some people call it soul and some people call it consciousness. But there is something. You could even called it tiger or rabbit or something else. It doesn't matter. Tradition is one thing , but the most important thing is to figure out what can help us. That's why we have to go beyond traditions. You don't want to lock yourself into a box. It is like those pill boxes. You take a particular pill on Monday, then one on Tuesday, another one on Wednesday , and so on. That way you think you are in control and your life is organized. But you don't want to lock your whole life into a pillbox. We should really be free. For me the question of soul or consciousness is just a matter of terminology.

Audience: Do we have a choice , whether we are going to come back are not?

Rimpoche: Very good question. I understand that we do have a choice, but we have to choose now, not at the time of death. We create all our own karma. Once it is created it starts functioning, and then it is almost as if it has a mind of its own. We cannot control it anymore. Sometimes in science-fiction movies you will see some crazy scientist who is experimenting on something. He ends up making a huge monster. He can manage that monster for a little while but then he loses control over it and this monster takes over. Karma sometimes is like that.

Audience: How did the people in your country recognized that you were an incarnate lama?

Rimpoche: Well, there are a lot of those systems. There is divination, like the systems of checking in a particular lake. They also ask oracles. Then some trusted lamas give their pronouncement. Then there is the system of testing the kids. In Tibet there were only very few girls as incarnate lamas. It was mostly boys. They would test them by bringing a lot of different articles that belonged to the previous incarnation. Then they would bring a lot of identical ones from other sources and would lay them all next to each other. Then they make the boys pick up various articles and identify which were the ones belonging to their previous incarnation , and based on how many mistakes the kids make the lamas will figure out if they were the right ones. It was a very good system, but it cannot be verified scientifically. In my case, it was a long story. If you read my book it is probably mentioned in there a little bit.

Audience: When people die, often it is said that their consciousness will remain forever. Is this consciousness still there for the person who reincarnates?

Rimpoche: I do not believe that a person's consciousness lingers around forever. When I first came to the United States I saw on television a lot of fortune tellers and psychics. They claim to get in contact with the deceased and claim that these are talking to them. I am extremely skeptical about it. According to my own reasoning and study I was wondering how the psychics could see a departed person. After death , there are some 49 days of different processes that the departed person goes through. They go through all kinds of changes. Yet on the other hand the psychics are not lying either. They see something. They talk to somebody. I spent a long time looking into that. In the late 1980s , a lot of the old good spiritual masters were still alive. I asked several of them. They gave me an answer that I had not thought about. They told me that along with every living person are a number of spirits that accompany them. At death the person goes and the spirits remain. These spirits go and talk to the psychics. They identify themselves with the real person's name. They know everything the real person did. You think that no one else knows what you do. But the spirits know everything you do, except for one thing. When you are involved in high spiritual activities the spirits are blocked from participating. So they don't know what happens at such a time. So when the psychic later ask them what happened then they will say that they were not allowed in or that they did not see it. In Tibet this happened so many times. I also asked my teachers how many spirits were around a person. They told me that the numbers were not certain but that sometimes up to 356 spirits would surround a person.

End of the talk