Death is like the ocean. We stand on the shore of life looking out into something that we cannot see the end of. Death appears to be endless. We see its vague beginnings as a person leaves this world, as their consciousness leaves the body at the time of death. They enter into the ocean; they go beyond the horizon. We see them not. We know not where they have gone. Strain our eyes though we may, we cannot see beyond the horizon of this life. Death is a hidden country. It is a land beyond sight, beyond sound, beyond the conditions, laws, and limitations of this world.

Today I would like to share with you a few thoughts on the subject of your death and the experience of death and rebirth. The horizon is not endless, nor is the ocean endless. On the other side of the ocean there is land, on this side of the ocean there is land. The ocean is that body of flux in between the land. While first appearing to be endless, when we journey in our boat into the ocean of existence we find that while the ocean is vast, it is not endless, death is not endless, nor is life. Life and death are two states of awareness. Really there is no life and there is no death. The idea that there is life, the idea that there is death, these are apprehensions that our mind presents to us.

What I mean by that is that the sense of life and death that we have is not necessarily correct. You may feel that you know what life is and surely you do. You know that which you’ve experienced, but there may be parts of life that you have not yet seen. So we can say that you know life to an extent. You probably know even less about death. Yet most people have very fixed ideas about what life and death is. They’re quite sure that they know. I would suggest that most people know almost nothing about life and death. They’re like small children who at the age of four or five feel they now know all there is to know about our world, its societies, structures, political systems, customs, laws and so on. The way you come to know, the way out of life and death, is through love. Love is the bridge that unites life and death — always remember this.

Death is not the end, nor is it a beginning. It is an endless beginning or a beginningless end. Death is a field of awareness. It consummates life. When we live, we feel that we exist. We’re on the light side of the moon. We feel that the dark side is somehow different. When we die and we walk through that invisible door to the other side, we forget about life. We lose our awareness of this world, the memories fade. We still exist, but just as on this side, on the light side of the moon — life, we’ve forgotten about death — so when we enter into death, most beings forget about life.

Life and death are part of a cycle that we call the samsara. The idea is quite simple. There is God, eternity, eternal awareness, a life force, an essence, an energy, a power—that is existence. We are all part of that. It is us, we are that. This endless existence has always existed and will always exist. There has never been a time that it did not exist and without time it exists also, in time and beyond time. It creates time. It can do anything in no time.

In a facet of the consciousness of the infinite God there is something that we call time. Time is a sense of separativity, a feeling that you as a perceiver — one who has experiences, memories, dreams, foreshadowings, beliefs; one who feels pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow, love, hate, jealousy, enlightenment and so on — that you as a perceiver experience eternity separately. That is to say, you are standing back from the horizon looking at the horizon. We call this life.

Life is the ability to perceive. In order to perceive we must have a sense of separativity. That is to say, we feel that we are standing back from something so that we can see it. When we lose the ability to perceive, we call this death. When we can no longer distinguish our self from anyone or anything else, we call this death. Death is an endless awareness, whereas life is a finite awareness. Death is something that can be experienced on a physical level, it’s also something that can be experienced on a psychic level.

For most people death is conceived of as a physical experience. When they die they lose awareness of separativity. They merge with eternity. Look for them everywhere, though we may, we can’t find them. Before we knew where they were. They occupied a body in time and in space.

I remember that after my mother died, when I was quite young, I tried to find her. One day, perhaps just several months after she had left the body, I was driving in my car and suddenly I thought I’d go visit her. My mother lived in another town in Connecticut. I lived in southern Connecticut and she lived in eastern Connecticut at the time, and so suddenly I thought I’d go visit her as I often did, every several weeks. I had forgotten for a moment that she was no longer alive, strange though it may seem. Suddenly I was about to turn my car — it was just an inspiration — I was driving along and thought, “Gee it will be nice to go see Mom,” and suddenly I was about to turn my car to go and see her — I was driving on the highway at the time — when I realized or recalled of course that she had died, just several months before.

And I was surprised that it had slipped my mind. How could I not remember having gone to a funeral, all the things that occur when one we love dies, and it seemed strange to me. But yet she had always been there, and then she was gone. And I realized that she was no longer on Earth. In other words, what I’m suggesting, and this is, I think, a common phenomenon for many of us, is that when a person first dies, someone we’ve been very, very close to, we intellectually accept that they have died, that they are no longer with us, but something inside of us doesn’t necessarily accept that right away. It takes a while, and I think it’s only until much later, when we’re alone, that suddenly it dawns upon us what’s really happened, that someone we’ve been very close to is gone. And I remember thinking, as I was driving on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, that my mother was no longer in this world, that I could search anyplace I wanted to and not find her, that that presence, which I had called “Dorothy,” was not to be found. It had returned to the source.

So death, then, is a change in location. It is not an ending of an energy, rather it’s an absorption of a field of energy, which we call a person. That life essence that you feel inside yourself or inside any living thing leaves this plane, this material world, and goes elsewhere.

Death is nothing to fear.

If you remember back as far as you can, you will remember death, that is to say, the absence of a physical, spatial-temporal location.

If you remember that there was a time before this life when you were not in this life, if you remember back then, you will remember no pain, no fear, no horror and that’s what it will be like when you die.

You should never fear death.

Death is not unpleasant.

Reincarnation is the process of awakening. Each one of us has an essence that does not change from lifetime to lifetime. Imagine that you are asleep and that you’re having a series of dreams. In each dream you find yourself in a different location. You’re a different person in each dream; you have the sense of a different personality. One dream ends and another dream begins. Yet that which is perceiving, the perceiver, the person who is experiencing the dream, the main character through whose eyes the dream is taking place, is always the same. The personality may be different. You might be having one dream in which you are a woman. In another dream you’re a child, in another dream you’re an adult male, but yet that actual essence, the perceiver that is inside all of those people in the dream, the protagonists, and the central characters in a dream, that essence is the same.

Life is a dream, a dream of many existences. You have a central essence that is unchanging. There was a time when that essence was not aware of its own separativity. At one time you were part of a celestial light of pure knowledge, radiance, and perfection. You existed timelessly, endlessly, as God. Then the eons of eternity moved and that ultimate intelligence, which is your real self, created a dream which we call this world, created many, many dreams without the sense of having created them, which we call the different planes of reality, the physical worlds, the nonphysical worlds. It dreamed itself into those worlds in countless forms and caused those forms to evolve, all projections of itself, parts of itself. It then caused those forms to forget, to forget that they were part of an essential whole. Gradually it awakens them, the severed connection is rejoined, the separate parts remember that they are in essence one. This is the process of reincarnation. Reincarnation is remembering, remembering who and what you really are, that you are a timeless, endless existence.

Reincarnation in this world, as in other worlds, follows a process of linear development. That’s one way to look at it. There are many theories about reincarnation. Some people feel that when you reincarnate, that life essence first comes to this world and it goes through a series of incarnations and different levels of creation so that for many lifetimes you incarnate in the mineral kingdom, then the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the human kingdom, and then eventually a time comes when you leave the human incarnations. You no longer incarnate here and then you move into subtle incarnations, that is to say, incarnations without a physical body, in the other worlds, the nonphysical worlds, and that eventually after countless subtle incarnations you return to the primeval essence of God. This is a cycle that takes place periodically. The infinite reality that we call God projects itself forth in a cycle of evolution, creating countless worlds, sustaining them, dissolving them eventually back into itself. This happens periodically. This is one theory of reincarnation.

I personally think that this is a very limited way to look at reincarnation. It certainly is accurate in a way, but if we expand our awareness we can see reincarnation very differently. Reincarnation is all about time. The idea is that there’s a fixed reality called the moment. You live in the moment right now. If there’s a fixed reality called the moment, meaning the now, then we can divide time and we can say that not only is there the now, but there’s also the future, that which will occur after the now, and of course there’s the past, that which will occur or has occurred before the now.

Why do we perceive this way? It’s because our attention has fixated on this thing that we call the now. It is possible for you to unhook your awareness from this moment and project it into any moment so that you could experience this moment as the now, or you could experience any moment as the now. You could move into the future, you could move into the past — all time is eternally present — and experience any moment as the now. You can experience simultaneous moments as the now. That is to say, you could be aware of being at this moment in this moment, in this world, in this time. You could also exist in several futures and in several pasts all at once, or you can experience time in a very, very different way and that is not to divide time into the idea of past, present or future, not to have a sense that you’ve had past lives or that you’ll have future lives, but rather just to see that there is no time. This understanding will free you from incarnation because there can only be incarnation and reincarnation, birth and death, if there’s time.

Time creates the world. Time creates space. That is to say, we define space through time, but when we erase time, there’s no space, there’s no condition. A person who has attained, or experiences, or is what we call enlightened, or enlightenment, lives in a world without time. That’s how I exist; for me there is no time.

Now, we wear different hats at different times. That is to say, when we go into work it’s necessary to dress a certain way and act a certain way. When we’re at home with our friends we relax, put our feet up, and dress a different way. If I’m out jogging I dress a different way. It’s not necessary for us to be fixed. We’re flexible, we can change and adopt different roles. So it is with time. In the physical work-a-day world it’s necessary to deal with time.

You need to have a sense that,

So, in this world as we exist as human beings it’s necessary to deal with time, and this does not in any way contradict timelessness. It’s a different hat that we wear. Yet while you are operating in time, as you are attending your own funeral, as it were, you can be aware of the timeless. That is to say, you can be in the moment and beyond it at the same moment — they are the same moment. This is the enlightened perspective on time. It’s as much of a fixation to say that there’s no time exclusively as it is to feel that there is time exclusively. Both are ideas, both are ways of seeing life, but in enlightenment we flow in and out of all ways and at the same time remain beyond them.

So then, it’s quite accurate to feel that there is reincarnation, to feel that the soul or essence of a being, what they call in Sanskrit the atman, does exist. That it takes thousands of incarnations, that in each incarnation the soul grows, and evolves, and develops, that the soul — the essence — actually releases more energy in each incarnation.

Think of reincarnation as school. The child goes to school and in each grade the child learns, and grows, and develops. One day the child graduates from school … and goes, and does something else. So in each lifetime we grow and develop, we become aware. Death is going to sleep. Life is awakening from the dream.

In each human lifetime, looking at the incarnations that you have had on this planet in the physical world, we evolve, we make progress. It’s like climbing up a ladder. But we forget. You may have had a very advanced incarnation. That is to say, in your last lifetime, or perhaps four or five lifetimes ago, you had a very spiritual incarnation — perhaps you were a monk or a spiritual aspirant, someone who devoted their life to the enlightenment process. But then for the last few lifetimes you may not have reached that level. While the essence of all your lifetimes is contained within you, just as within the DNA is the racial history of our species, so within the subtle physical aggregate that we call the soul there’s a kind of a history, you might say, of all of our lifetimes. The impressions are there. We don’t always reach that point of evolution. It does come back eventually, but what I’m suggesting is that in the process of reincarnation, while it is true that in each lifetime we are making progress, we are growing and evolving, it’s not necessarily a straight line. Every incarnation is not, I suppose, what you might call “higher” than the preceding one. There is an overall course of advancement. We can see a difference.

Each lifetime is a set of experiences. We can divide the human incarnations into three basic sections. In the early human incarnations … a human being is not aware of much more than the physical. They’re not really interested in spirit, they live for sensory gratification, and that’s the way they should be, just aware of the physical. In other words, the outer being, the physical being, the physical mind, is not very well connected with the soul essence, which is pure knowledge. A human being will have hundreds or thousands of lifetimes like this. One can say these are like the animal incarnations and the same soul that is in a human body can have had animal incarnations.

Then the soul enters into a more human phase. In these incarnations the intellect becomes more operative. Reason is developed. A person is more in touch with elements of the soul essence and there’s some basic spiritual development. A person becomes interested in religion, things like that, philosophy.

In the third segment of the incarnations, spirit becomes dominant, an interest in spirit. After thousands of incarnations in this world a person begins to meditate and seek their soul essence, to find their identity. That becomes the most important thing in their world. They no longer are satisfied by the things of this world. Up until that point, like the child playing with a series of toys, they’ve been very happy to play with this world — with power, politics, material possessions, love relationships, all of these things have been wonderful toys that have provided hours and hours, lifetimes literally, of amusement. But then a time comes when we put away the toys of childhood and we graduate to something else, and that is the spiritual quest for enlightenment. So we begin our journey, and this journey takes thousands of incarnations. In each lifetime we learn something new about spirit and its essence. After hundreds of thousands of incarnations, one finally attains enlightenment. Enlightenment doesn’t occur in one lifetime. It really occurs gradually over a series of lifetimes. Once you have attained enlightenment, then a number of options are open to you, which we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes.

But let’s consider the off-world incarnations for a minute. What I’ve just described to you is a kind of standard way of looking at incarnations. However, this physical world that we’re in right now is not the only world. There are other planets in the physical world, in the physical universe, but also there are other universes that are not physical. We call them lokas. These are other planes of existence, other dreams that God has, that are very, very different than the dream we find ourselves in now. I myself come from a different loka. That is to say, some souls have their origin, they begin the series of their incarnations, in this loka, the physical world. The physical world not only meaning this particular Earth, but all places that are like this Earth, that are subject to the physical laws, that have matter and energy and so on. But then, some souls begin their cycles in nonphysical worlds. One is not better than another. You could have been born in Australia and you could spend all your life in Australia, or you could travel and migrate to America.

So, some souls will, in a certain cycle of the creation, spend all of their incarnations in one loka. Some will change lokas from lifetime to lifetime. In one lifetime you may be born into one loka, in another lifetime another. Normally a person will spend a series of incarnations in a particular loka. So, you may come into the physical loka, meaning the world, the Earth or other worlds like this, for ten thousand or a hundred thousand incarnations. Then you may shift to a nonphysical loka for maybe another hundred thousand incarnations. Now this may seem like a lot of time. I mean, it’s enough just to get through the day sometimes, let alone a year, let alone a lifetime, let alone a hundred thousand incarnations. But if you remember that you are timeless, that you are eternal, that you have always been and you will always be, then a thousand lifetimes or even a million really isn’t all that long. You get a different time sense, in other words, after a while, as you get a broader perspective on existence. Yet you haven’t always been in this current form. Now let me try and explain this.

You date your birth, your inception in this world, as your beginning. So in my case I was born on February 9, 1950, in this lifetime. Before that time I didn’t exist, from the point of view of this world. But when I started to breathe in this world, you could say, at the time of birth, that’s when I came into existence. Then someday I will leave this world, I will no longer be here. And we say that that’s the time of death. So that is one human lifetime. The events that occur within that lifetime, the days, the weeks and months and years, encapsulate our experiences, our feelings, our hopes, our loves, our frustrations, all those different things.

Now from the point of view of reincarnation, we could talk about our existence in a slightly larger form. We could date our existence back to the first incarnation that we had, and just as we have a birthday, the day we were born in this world, so there was a time when we actually took our first incarnation! Our first incarnation may not have occurred on this Earth. It may have occurred billions and zillions of years ago some place else. But there was a first one! Now the question arises, of course, immediately, well what was before that first incarnation?

Before that first incarnation, you were the essence. You were not divisible, you were one with God. Then when you first manifested, when you first moved out of that infinite light and part of that light filled up a form, be it a physical or a subtle physical form that was your first incarnation. There will eventually be a time when the sleeper awakes from the dream and you will not take incarnation anymore, but that probably won’t be for a long, long time. And when you do, it isn’t that you won’t be, let’s just say you’ll be God again. Difficult to explain, but I think you can grasp what I’m pointing in the direction of.

So, then, your first incarnation may have been in this loka or in another loka. Most people in this world, on this Earth, are originally from the physical loka or from some of the lokas beneath the physical. There are some people in this world who came from other lokas, and one birth is not better than another, one loka is not better than another. All are aspects of God, but an understanding of the lokas you pass through can sometimes help you understand why you deal with life the way you do. Some people are very oriented to the physical, and that’s because their primary loka of origin has been the physical loka. Others came from lokas of spirit, of light, so they gravitate more to light than they do to Earth. They may love the Earth, but their natural inclination is more towards light. Others may gravitate more towards energy because they came from lokas where energy is very manifest in a very strong way. There are a number of different lokas. It’s like having different dreams.

But ultimately what matters is where you are now. This is the essential point that you should concern yourself with. Where you’ve been is an interesting historical fact, but where you are at the moment is our primary concern.

Enlightenment is the awareness of eternity. Not to be aware of eternity as an objective reality, but to be eternity’s awareness, to be aware eternally, to be eternity and aware. Awareness eternal, eternal awareness. Reincarnation is a process by which that awareness becomes aware of itself. That’s reincarnation.

Karma is action. Karma is a Sanskrit word that suggests that there is a cause and effect relationship in space and time. If you save a dollar every day, then at the end of the year you will have put away $365. That’s karma. Karma occurs within a particular lifetime. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The idea of karma is that if you do something to someone or something, it comes back to you.

Most karma is not physical. Any “physical karma” that occurs actually is a reflection of “subtle karma”. Most people have a very simplistic idea of karma. That is to say, they think that karma means that because, let’s say, you hit someone, someone’s going to hit you someday, or you brought someone a present and someday you’ll get a present. That isn’t what karma means, really. Karma has to do with awareness. The idea is that you generate a certain field of energy, and that field of energy creates awareness, your awareness, and depending upon the type of energy you generate, that will condition the energy field — which you call life — that you experience, and that there’s a “causal effect” from one lifetime to another between these energy fields that you call life,. Your perception of life is regulated by what you did to some extent in your prior existences.

If you took a French class and it was introductory French and you studied it very well and you did a really good job, then you’ll find that when you take a more advanced French course it will be easier. If you didn’t do a good job it will be very difficult. Karma suggests that in each lifetime we have a certain number of experiences, but that we develop our awareness in a certain way, and that that awareness will be with us in our next life and that awareness will cause our happiness or unhappiness.

If you didn’t learn a language well and suddenly you went to a foreign country, you might have an unhappy time because you couldn’t communicate. If you learned the language well it might be just the opposite. So if in your past lifetimes you have not become as aware as you could be, then in this lifetime you may be groping with a lot of inner problems. You may be plagued with doubts, or frustrations, or fears, jealousies, or hang-ups. Whereas if you worked these things out in your past lives, then in this lifetime you’ll be able to deal with them more easily. So karma, in other words, is our mental state. And while our mental state, to some degree, is affected by the world that we’re in — by our parents, societal conditions and so on — the actual deeper field of awareness, which comes out more specifically when we begin to meditate but exists to begin with, that general field of awareness that we call personality, that which is behind the ego, is a progression of our past lives — that’s karma.

A person who hates, a person who injures others, they experience karma. Some people call that bad karma. Their karma doesn’t mean that physical things will happen to them that they’ve caused to happen to others, but it means that they will suffer. Because by experiencing a lot of hate, by causing others to suffer, they’ll put themselves into a mental state that’s very … low. And in that lower mental state, which they will also have at their next birth, in that lower mental state they will experience anguish and frustration. A person who dedicates their lives to the welfare of others, who gives constantly and works unselfishly for the well-being of others while remaining humble and happy, advances their awareness so that they will experience more happiness in this life and in other lives.

So what I’m suggesting is that if you have good karma, that doesn’t mean that you’ll be born into a wealthy family in your next lifetime. Rather, what it means is that you’ll have inner wealth. Your awareness of spirit will be greater and therefore you’ll be happier. You can be born into a very wealthy family and be unhappy. You could be mentally deranged, you could be tormented by guilt and jealousies, you could be unhappy. You could be born into a poor family, but if your mind was vast and broad and your spirit conscious, you could be happy. So karma is not a physical reward. It’s not a reward at all. Nor is bad karma a punishment. They’re operable results from things that have been done in prior births or within this lifetime.

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Reincarnation is awareness. You are trying to become aware of the timeless center of existence. In order to access and bring out the knowledge from your past lives, be they past lives in this loka or in other lokas, it’s necessary to meditate. A certain amount of this information will come out spontaneously, without having to try, but to really bring out the deeper essence of your being, the knowledge and powers from your past experiences, it’s necessary to meditate.

When you meditate you open the doorway to eternal awareness. When your mind is in an operative state, when you’re always filled with thoughts, your thoughts and the images of thoughts and ideas that pass through your mind are like a screen that stands between your conscious self and your deeper self — the aggregate of forms, all the different selves within you. When you stop thought the curtain parts and the knowledge and powers — all the different selves from your past lives, all the different things that you are — gradually emerge and rejoin you. You become one with them. The personality from this life dissolves and all the personalities from the other lives emerge, one at a time, and then they all merge, all the personalities merge, into one being. All of your old friends return.

When you meditate for a specific period of time, you stop thought — and this process occurs automatically, you won’t necessarily be conscious of it, you’ll just be different. But it’s important to try and meditate not only at specific fixed times, but all of the time. This will happen automatically. If you meditate each day, for an hour or two a day, you open that doorway. You’ll find that also then, as time goes on, you’ll spontaneously meditate, there’ll just be less thought in your mind. There will be enough thought to think whatever you need to think, but the rest of the time the mind will be still, and as it’s still you’ll become aware, not so much of the specific memories from your past lives, because really they’re neither here nor there, but you’ll just become aware of awareness itself. All those various selves will emerge.

That’s why it’s so difficult to explain to a person about the nature of God or truth, reality, because these perceptions are so deep, there are no words. But when we meditate — you will recall what truth is, what life is all about. You can recall death, dying and being reborn; you can see the dreamer in the dream — all these things that I’ve only lightly touched upon in our conversation today.

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Feel that death is not the end. Nor is death a beginning. Death is simply a different dream that we have for a while. There are intermediate states that lie between birth and rebirth, which we shall be discussing on the “Tibetan Rebirth” tape, but what is of real importance, in my estimation, is right now. If you can gain a sense that you exist in this moment and live that moment fully, and at the same time begin to perceive that you are an aggregate, you are not one personality but that you are a collection of selves that have existed timelessly, and that you even have future selves, which you can perceive, and that beyond all those finite selves is one infinite, perfect reality that human beings call God.

If you can perceive that you are all of those things

then you will be at the core of life.

Then you will be able to play in this world and enjoy time, enjoy your life, enjoy your death, enjoy your rebirth.

And you will also be able to — in this life, in this moment — see eternity,

It’s not necessary to wait for death to understand existence.

Death does not bring any more of an understanding of existence than life does.

Try not to think so much. Try not to work out the systems of life, death, and rebirth. Eventually you will understand them. They’re quite technical, but all those technicalities don’t really matter. You may not understand how the car works that you drive, how the fuel injection system works. You don’t really need to — all you need to do is know how to drive it. So at this point in your evolution, don’t be concerned about the technicalities of the rebirth process. They become interesting in very, very advanced states of spiritual consciousness and they can be used for special forms or ways of attaining enlightenment, which we will discuss in the “Tibetan Rebirth” tape.

But for now, just become aware of both time and timelessness. As you meditate, allow those different selves to speak through you. You don’t have to think about them or focus on them. Don’t worry about having a recall from your past life experiences. You’re not trying to remember specific data or what a certain day was like or a certain world was like. You’ve had those experiences. Live in the now, look at this world, look at the people here. Because if you’re too absorbed in your past experiences you’ll miss now.

It is nice if you can bring through the power and knowledge of the past lives into this life, which doesn’t necessitate the exacting knowledge of who or what you were or what you did. The knowledge just comes. That will come through meditation and self-giving. In your passive meditation, as you sit and still the mind, and in your active meditation in which you work for the welfare of others, these things will return to you. It happens automatically. You don’t even have to try. If you just meditate and work for others, it will happen.

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But once in a while, take a walk on the water.

Walk out on top of the water, beyond the horizon into eternity, and then you’ll understand there is no death, there is no life, there is no time.

There’s only eternity.

Perfect, matchless, shining, fun, brilliant, effulgent, humorous, exciting, awesome — totally awesome.