LYWA Monthly e-letter Archive
No. 31: October 2005
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Dear Friends,
Once more, thank you so much for subscribing to the Lama
Yeshe Wisdom Archive e-letter, which brings you news from
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so much.
 Last
year many, many of you took us up on our request for you to
recite the great Sanghata
Sutra, with excellent results. So we’re happy
to report that there’s now a Web site for this wonderful
sutra: www.sanghatasutra.net.
Please check it out. Feel free to recite it whenever and as
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other people's experience of doing this.
We’re happy to announce some new stuff on our Web site.
Unless you’re in retreat in a cave somewhere, you’ve
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Our most recent addition to the website is Pabongka Rinpoche's
Heart-Spoon,
a concise and powerful teaching on impermanence. We’ve
also added many new advices to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s
online Advice
Book, especially in the "Spiritual Practice"
and "Misfortune" sections. If you have been reading
the Advice Book regularly, you can see what's new this month
by going to our Advanced
Search page and search the Advice Book section for the
phrase "Oct. 2005".
If you’re a benefactor of the LYWA you should have
received, or will soon receive, depending on where you live,
our new book Teachings
from Tibet. If you haven’t and would like to
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see here.
In the meantime, we continue to work on more publications.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s The Joy of Compassion
is being designed and Geshe Jampa Tegchok’s seven-point
mind training commentary is about to be. And we’re putting
the finishing touches on Lama Yeshe’s The
Essence of Tibetan Buddhism before sending it off to be
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This time our new teaching is by Lama Yeshe. We were going
to continue with Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s amazing teaching
on emptiness from Australia last year but will do so later.
In the meantime, please enjoy the wisdom of Lama Yeshe.
Thank you so much,
Much love
Nick Ribush
Director
Transference of Consciousness at the Time of Death
Tonight I’m supposed to talk about the transference
of consciousness according to the experience of Himalayan
yogis. However, this method that I’m going to describe
comes from the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha; it’s
not something made up by Tibetan monks. Lord Buddha gave this
teaching to his disciples, they transmitted it orally to their
own disciples, and in this manner the lineage of this method
came down through the ages to be practiced in the Tibetan
Buddhist tradition.
So, who needs to do this practice and what are its benefits?
First of all, from the Buddhist point of view, human life
and death are equally important events. To our way of thinking
there’s no reason for us to consider life to be important
and death to be bad, unimportant. Both are important.
Just as most people want to have a happy, joyful life, in
the same way Himalayan yogis want to have a happy death. They
don’t want disastrous, unhappy, confused deaths.
Of course, those who attain enlightenment in their lifetime
don’t need transference of consciousness, but those
who don’t get enlightened in this life and need another
in which to do so do.
However, we do have to separate from our consciousness at
the time of death, but when the conditions at that time are
overwhelming because of disease or simply wrong thinking,
with craving, grasping and attachment—there are many
different disastrous ways of dying—we need a method
to help us overcome them. So what accomplished yogis do to
ensure a perfect death before such terrible conditions arise
is to practice transference of consciousness.
We ordinary beings seem to be stuck to our bodies because
of sense gravitation attachment with no way out. You can call
it karma, you can call it life force, you can give any kind
of reason for this, but through training, yogis have learned
to facilitate the transferring of their consciousness from
their sense gravitation bodies and are therefore free from
the fear of dying a disastrous death. They have a great feeling
of freedom, knowing that whenever the need arises they can
transfer their consciousness by using the meditation techniques
they have practiced.
This is not just philosophical talk. Many Tibetan monks and
meditators can do this. When the time comes they can utilize
this kind of method. For example, I heard that when the Chinese
conquered Tibet in 1959, many ordinary monks happily transferred
their consciousness and left their lives because they felt
they would no longer have the freedom to exercise their religious
faith. These are true facts. It’s very useful to be
able to do this.
The reason why I think it’s important for the Western
world to know about this kind of thing is because the West
has neglected the mind and the human ability to utilize the
consciousness in such a way through being too preoccupied
with material things. Therefore I feel it’s a good thing
to introduce to you the fact that human beings have the power
to eliminate disastrous life situations, sense gravitation
attachment and the fear of death because they have the potential
to become buddha.
So we should not feel that we’re stuck somewhere and
cannot do anything. We’re capable of freeing ourselves
from any suffering or confused situation. But the important
thing to realize is that the source of all our happiness,
misery, fear and confusion is our mind, not our physical body.
Therefore we should investigate and come to know the characteristic
nature of our own consciousness. This is the way to free ourselves
from all fear.
Now, when it comes to actually transferring our consciousness
we have to choose the right time. It’s dangerous to
do it at the improper time because then we’re just killing
ourselves, which is definitely not allowed. So the teachings
give specific times to practice transference of consciousness,
which we determine by scientifically checking the signs of
impending death before the actual time comes.
These signs can be internal or external and are explained
in detail in the texts. However, when these signs come indicating
that death is imminent, there are also things we can do to
change that situation. We all know that to some extent we
can change circumstances. For instance, when our life energy
starts to run out, when our life force weakens, there are
ways we can reactivate the energy in our nervous system. Tibetan
Buddhism does contain methods for prolonging life and averting
impending death but since this is an introductory talk I’m
not going to go into the details here.
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.
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. We are in
the process of producing a DVD of this teaching.
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