Rama, a Living Buddha

The Tibetan Rebirth Process

With the advent of the books of W. Y. Evans-Wentz and Alexandra David-Neel, the peoples of Europe and the United States began to catch their first glimpse of the spirit of the land of Tibet.

Up until that time Tibetan yoga was relatively unknown in the West, and as W. Y. Evans-Wentz and Alexandra David-Neel began to publish accounts of their journeys to those snowy regions, a small but steadily growing flame of interest was propagated among persons who seek spiritual answers and insights into the workings of the cosmos.

Both Wentz and Neel went to Tibet, associated with Tibetan lamas, and themselves were initiated into basic forms of Tibetan yoga.

And I certainly recommend their books highly for colorful insights into these processes.

However, neither Wentz nor Neel either claimed to be nor was enlightened.

Both were seekers on the path and what they tried to do was present the ancient wisdom of the Tibetan Buddhists, primarily through the translation of the ancient Tibetan documents.

These translations were made by monks they had associated with, and many people have come to read these documents, particularly the well-known Tibetan Book of the Dead, and assumed that their readings of these documents has given them an entrance into the mystery of Tibetan yoga.

It is my position, however, that most uninitiated persons who have read these documents have probably been more confused by them than enlightened by them.

What I would like to attempt to do in the next hour is to talk with you about Tibetan yoga, as it was practiced hundreds of years ago.

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Tibetan yoga is founded on two principle ideas.

The first idea, of course, is that

all human beings are part and parcel of consciousness,

and that consciousness is existence itself.

And that that consciousness

has a field of attention

through which it becomes aware

of different participles of reality

or eventually it becomes

fully conscious of all of existence — which is, as you know,

what we call enlightenment.

That there are specific ways that this enlightenment takes place, in other words, enlightenment isn’t an accident, it’s rather a science.

That there are other universes other than our universe,

universes not as so much in the physical world

as universes of mind, of spirit.

That all of the universes operate through specific types of laws and once you’ve learned and mastered these laws you can operate in and through these different universes.

And that you are capable of uniting yourself with the void.

With eternity.

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The Tibetan Book of the Dead has to do with

the rebirth process.

The Book of the Dead discusses

the various bardos.

The bardos are

the intermediate planes of existence

that occur

between death and rebirth.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is often used, or certainly was used —in recent times — after the advent of death.

When a person would die, a monk would come, or a family member, and for several days they would read from The Book of the Dead.

With the feeling that the spirit of the deceased would be able to hear the reading of The Dead … and The Book of the Dead is really a TripTik, it’s a AAA Guide …

a road map, through the nonphysical dimensions.

The belief of course that surrounds it, or that underlies it,

is that all creatures and beings

in the phenomenal universe

are on a giant wheel,

the wheel of birth and death,

and that at the end of each lifetime

you die and

you will be reborn

in another world.

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The Tibetans believe that there are six primary bardos or worlds

into which you can attain rebirth.

In each of these bardos or worlds, or lokas,

there are countless sub-worlds.

The Earthly plane is an intermediate world, it’s kind of in the middle of the six.

The six are seen as a circle. Very often if you look at a Tibetan thangka, or Tibetan art, you’ll notice that there’s a symbol of the Wheel of Life. It’s a big circle.

And it’s divided into six quadrants.

Usually at the top of the circle will be the world of the Buddhas, of the enlightened ones.

At the bottom of the circle there will be the hell worlds.

There will be other worlds. Four other worlds.

Usually there’s a world for the angels and saints.

A world that reflects the consciousness of the animals

and several others.

Each of these worlds is a state of mind.

A state of existence.

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It is the belief of the Tibetan — the Tibetan Buddhists — that

your next birth

will be determined

by the composite of your thoughts and actions

in this particular lifetime.

And the

chain of

causal actions

from your past lifetimes.

It’s kind of as if you were going to be going to college and you’d studied French for a while in high school.

When you got to college they gave you a placement test.

And depending upon how you did on the placement test, they would assign you to a particular level

basic, intermediate, advanced class in French.

So,

your awareness

at the end of any given lifetime

will determine what world you reincarnate in,

what plane of existence.

What state of consciousness.

That which you have dwelt most upon in this lifetime

will be that which you return to.

This is the fundamental belief.

The thing

that you have thought about

most

is what you’ll be

drawn back to.

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The Tibetan Book of the Dead has been construed as a book that can allow you

to attain a higher birth

or to go beyond the wheel of birth and death

completely

and to enter into nirvana,

which is not necessarily the extinction of existence,

it’s simply beyond description.

But it is away from the samsara, the world of cause and effect, birth and death, pain and suffering. It is beyond all that.

So a person who practices Tibetan yoga is seeking a higher rebirth, either a higher rebirth simply because they want to enjoy a better state of existence; a higher rebirth so that they can eventually go beyond the wheel of birth and death to a state of permanence and absorption in God, in nirvana.

Or a higher rebirth so that with that higher rebirth they’ll be in a better position to do more for others.

To become a bodhisattva — one who serves others and helps them to attain enlightenment.

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The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as I suggested, is read over the body of one who has recently died, in the hope that the instructions contained within the book will enable the wandering spirit, as it passes through the bardo — through these intermediate planes of existence — to gain a higher birth.

This is really a great misunderstanding of the purposes of The Book of the Dead.

While certainly there is a time shortly after the onset of death where one can, if one knows how, go beyond the wheel of birth and death to nirvana … the principal use of The Book of the Dead is not to counsel you in what to do shortly after you die and leave the body.

Rather, it is to show you how to obtain a higher birth or full enlightenment and absorption in nirvana …

In your current lifetime, not in some future lifetime.

Or to bring your future lifetimes into your current lifetime.

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At the time of death,

at the moment of death and shortly thereafter,

there is a moment

when you are set face to face

with the clear light of reality.

In other words, you will see — shortly after your death — this incredible light.

And this light is so bright in its appearance …

That it frightens most persons.

When you see this light,

while initially you may be attracted to it,

suddenly you’ll be …

you’ll be seized with fear.

And you’ll try and run away from that light.

If you had been able

to accept and embrace that light

without running towards it or away from it,

in other words,

if you could be neither attracted nor repulsed by that light,

then you would pass on to spiritual liberation.

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It’s kind of like asking you to keep your composure

in the middle of a nuclear test,

when you’re at ground zero.

And as you watch your being — being atomized and vaporized —

To just be calm, relaxed, and happy.

If you still have any fears at that time,

they will come out,

at the moment of death

when you’re set face to face

with the clear light of reality,

with the essence of existence.

If you still have any attachments to this world — people, desires — they will all come out.

All these things will arise.

They will all stand before you.

And it’s necessary

for you

to be

neither attracted nor repulsed

by any of them.

If you are,

which most people are,

you will then

drop to a

lower level.

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Imagine that suddenly at the time of death you’re on the roof of a building … and there you’re going to have an examination.

Everyone you’ve ever known, loved, hated, been indifferent towards, every fear that you’ve ever had, whether it’s of things in the darkness that you can’t see or losing control, people who love you suddenly hating you, poverty, whatever it might be.

And all of the things that you’ve always desired and been attracted to,

in other words,

all of your thought forms,

will suddenly — while you’re on the roof of this building —

parade before you and show themselves to you.

And if you run away from your fears,

suddenly you’ll find that you’ll fall through the roof of the building and end up on the top floor, the next floor below the roof.

If you are suddenly enticed and attracted by any of these things, the same thing will happen.

Whereas if you’re indifferent,

if rather than even noticing these things,

which are but shadows of your thought forms,

if instead you allow yourself

to be absorbed by that clear light of reality, that infinitely bright light,

if you don’t run away from the light

and towards the things that you desired

or away from the things that you feared,

if you can be neutral at that point,

then you’ll be absorbed in that light and become it.

And you’ll disappear

as a snowflake does when it falls into water.

And you’ll be absorbed in nirvana and you’ll no longer be reborn.

It’s a tricky moment.

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If you’re like most persons, however, you’ll fall through the roof down to the next floor.

And there, there’ll be another light, a different color light, a very bright and beautiful light. A greener blue light, but again it will be very strong.

Again you’ll be set face to face with your fears and desires.

This process will go on again and again.

You’ll drop from floor to floor.

Each time you’re either attracted or repulsed,

you’ll drop.

If you can maintain on any floor, that is to say,

as you are set face to face with these various visions,

the wrathful and beatific visions,

when you can accept them as your own self,

if you can do that on any of those levels,

then you will be reborn on those levels.

These are the higher worlds.

The higher lokas.

You could say that each time

you’re set face to face

with the various lights

of the different levels and bardos of existence,

if you can accept them,

then you’ll attain rebirth on that world.

You won’t have to go any lower

on the scale of consciousness.

If, however, you

become

confused and deluded,

if your spirit wanders aimlessly,

if you can’t meditate

and become perfectly still

and allow eternity to just move through you,

then you’ll sink all the way down

and be reborn.

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Now even if at that point things still haven’t gone well, you’ll have another opportunity.

You’ll experience what they call “the judgment.”

That is to say, at one point in your progress, before you reincarnate after your last death,

you will

suddenly

evaluate yourself.

The judgment is reflected in the Christian theology in Saint Peter waiting at the gate with the “Book of Life”,

examining both the good things you’ve done and the bad things that you’ve done,

and coming to some kind of a judgment.

And if you’ve done a lot of bad things

I guess they send you to hell,

and a lot of good things

you’ll get to go to heaven.

Well, the judgment is just a reflection of human consciousness.

At one point

you will review your life, or all of your lives,

( your spirit will )

and you’ll try to come to some kind of evaluation

of who and what you are.

If at that time when you go through that …

trial …

in the sense of a courtroom trial,

when you judge yourself,

if you can at that point

be neither attracted nor repulsed by the judgment,

your own self-judgment,

if you can feel that it really has nothing to do with you,

even though you watch a part of yourself going through this recollection process,

this measuring, “Am I good or am I bad?”

then at that point you can be liberated

and attain a higher birth.

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In other words, as one passes through the bardo

in between lifetimes,

there will be a number of opportunities for you

to select,

based upon the evolution of your consciousness.

This is your placement exam,

what world,

what level of existence

you will reincarnate in in your next life.

This is the Tibetan belief.

However, if you do terribly in the placement exam,

there’s still an opportunity

to get a relatively decent birth,

which has to do with the selection

of the family into which

you will reincarnate,

which again is a process that I shall not describe here, which,

if you are interested, is

outlined

in a kind of a convoluted form

in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

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The Book of the Dead, if you’ve never read it, is a very, extremely, difficult book to read.

Highly symbolic language.

Very repetitive.

And The Book of the Dead as we see it today is actually a corrupt form

of The Book of the Dead, which was never written down originally but memorized

and handed down from guru to student for many, many thousands of years.

The Book of the Dead was finally written down to preserve it

when the lineage was lost,

when the enlightened teacher did not produce an enlightened student

to pass on the true knowledge of the rebirth process.

It was written down so that others, as they came by the way,

might understand

part

of this doctrine

and be able to use it to their advantage.

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But the idea that simply hearing the words of The Book of the Dead will cause you to be liberated upon dying is absurd.

This is a corruption

of its intent and meaning.

The Book of the Dead constantly suggests that at the time of death

what you should do is meditate upon the guru, the teacher.

In other words, The Book of the Dead was not written for the general public.

It is a book of the secret doctrine

of Tibet,

which simply means

that the doctrine is secret,

not to hide it from others,

but that when a person hears the secret doctrine,

unless their consciousness is advanced enough,

they won’t understand what it means.

It’ll go in one chakra and out the other.

Because while you may hear what the words mean, in the Webster’s dictionary sense of the words,

the words actually suggest

states of being,

which you will only perceive if your consciousness is wide open.

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The Book of the Dead was intended

as an advanced spiritual guidebook

for persons who had reached the end of their evolutionary cycle

and who were ready to make the jump to light speed.

Who had practiced spiritual disciplines in hundreds and thousands of lifetimes

and now they were learning the very, very fine points of the rebirth process.

Who had spent their lives studying — their current life — with an enlightened teacher who would teach them these fine points.

ॐ

The Book of the Dead at that time was not a book of the dead.

They were the secret oral teachings

that were transmitted from enlightened teacher to student.

They were only written down when it was feared

that the way would be lost.

And so as a kind of gift to mankind they were written down.

With the thought that those who read them might never understand them. They might take them on the wrong level, in other words,

but there might be someone out there who did

or it might help reawaken one who had traversed these higher ranges in a previous lifetime.

And when that person reincarnated,

even though there might not be an enlightened teacher for them,

if there was not one on the planet at the time,

if they were drawn to The Book of the Dead,

reading it over, it would bring back

or help jar their past life realizations and awarenesses.

This is the intent of the author.

ॐ

It’s as if you were walking around in the world with amnesia

and suddenly you came upon a book,

somehow you were just psychically drawn to it,

and it was a book that talked about things that you used to know.

And as you read them over

they would perhaps trigger or jar your memory

and help you leave that amnesia

and remember …

What you once knew so well.

ॐ

So it is possible at the time of death

to use yoga

to attain a higher birth

or to go beyond the cycle of birth or death.

But it’s really like a final examination.

If you haven’t done any work all semester in school and suddenly the final exam’s the next day and you try and study all the material in one day, you won’t do well in the final exam, you won’t pass.

If you’ve done a very, very good job, if you’ve learned everything there is to learn, when the final exam comes you don’t really have to study at all. You might just brush up on one or two things, but you’ll go in and do a fine job on the exam.

So at the time of death, simply hearing The Book of the Dead isn’t really going to make a difference.

If you’ve worked on your consciousness all of your life,

if you’ve learned to meditate perfectly,

if you’ve learned to overcome your fears and attachments …

Then at the time of death

automatically your being will walk through the bardo

when you’re set face to face with the

clear light of reality.

In other words,

when you see God at the time of death,

rather than freaking out and running away

and ending up in a lower bardo …

Having seen this again and again in your own meditation every day,

it will come as no surprise or shock,

and you’ll just be absorbed.

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See, the real trick is not even to seek liberation,

from the technical point of view,

at the moment of death,

’cause that’s just another attraction.

It’s rather just to meditate

and be absorbed by the clear light of reality.

And if it is the will of the Infinite

that you should reincarnate

in any world,

you’re more than happy to accept that.

Be neither attracted nor repulsed.

Not even by liberation.

ॐ

But the real purpose of Tibetan yoga is not to counsel you at the time of your physical death.

Rather, it is to suggest

that the bardo is present now.

The Book of the Dead is really not simply a map of the

various dimensional states that you will pass through between death and rebirth.

Rather, it is a map of consciousness

that exists now.

And the idea is

that you

can reincarnate and have a higher birth without having to physically die.

This is what we call the short path,

which is what I taught in my Tibetan incarnations.

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The short path means as follows …

It might take you ten thousand incarnations in this world to attain enlightenment.

Gradually,

from one incarnation to another,

you will grow, evolve, and develop.

In each lifetime

you learn a little bit and develop.

Each day, if you go out into the sunshine for a few minutes, you’ll get a little sun, a little radiation.

Gradually you’ll get a tan.

But if you can go out into the tropics, in one day, you can get a tan that might have taken you years to develop just a little bit at a time.

Needless to say, there’s a danger of burning.

It has to be done just right.

ॐ

So the short path, then,

is a way of going through …

thousands of incarnations in one lifetime.

You see the thing is, when you have to physically die

to radically change states of awareness,

it’s a real hassle.

Because when you die,

after you go through the bardo,

the little in-between zone

between

your death and your rebirth,

It’s very confusing!

And once you reenter this world you have to go through childhood again, adolescence …

And it may take you many, many, many years before you regain the evolution that you had in your last life,

or you may go through some lifetimes when you don’t even come back to where you were before.

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Some people ask, sometimes they say,

“Well, why should I be in such a hurry to attain enlightenment?

“And what’s the difference? Why not take a hundred thousand lifetimes since I have all the time in the world anyway.

“Why do it in twenty lifetimes?”

And there is no right or wrong in this matter. You have to just select what you feel is best.

The obvious advantage

to having fewer lifetimes,

from the point of the perceiver,

is that as you advance more quickly

you suffer less.

Some people are under the illusion that,

“Well, if I go through all my lifetimes really quickly, then I’ll just stop living.

“In other words, after I finish the cycle of lifetimes

“and I attain liberation,

“then I’ll be destroyed.

“I’ll be absorbed in nirvana and I won’t be anymore.

“I don’t want that to happen. I like life and I like living.

“So why not stretch out the incarnations as long as I can?”

It’s not like that.

At the time of liberation you don’t cease to be.

You don’t even necessarily stop reincarnating.

If you want to reincarnate you can reincarnate as long as you can and come back and aid others.

Or if you just want to be absorbed in eternity that can occur anyway.

You have choice, in other words, if you want choice.

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Rather, the advantage is

that as you even approach enlightenment,

you live in a state of bliss

instead of pain and suffering as most human beings do.

And also, the more advanced you are,

the more you can do for others.

So the primary motivation is either to get away from pain and suffering and frustration.

And compared to the bliss

of eternity …

Even the so-called happiest moments that most people ever experience

are suffering.

To go beyond suffering to joy and bliss and light

and/or

to be motivated by the fact that there are other people in the world who suffer.

If it will take you eight years to become a teacher

and instead you could do it in four,

if you become a teacher in four years, if you can learn the same amount,

then you can get out in the field sooner and help people

instead of just logging another four years, an additional four years,

to learn the same things.

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So the short path is available for those who want it,

to pass quickly to enlightenment,

and I teach the short path and the long path in this lifetime.

But my emphasis, of course, is the short path

as I have had that emphasis in other lifetimes.

To bring or cycle a person through hundreds of lifetimes

in one incarnation.

Which certainly doesn’t mean that you can bring everyone you work with to enlightenment, far from it,

but you can get them a lot closer.

It depends on how the individual accesses the teaching and training process.

The short path is for your serious student.

The long path is for your happy student.

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So in Tibetan yoga,

what we call the Tibetan rebirth process,

what we’re doing is really not teaching you how to get a better incarnation after this life ends,

but rather how, within this life,

to cycle through thousands of lifetimes

without physically dying and losing all that time and awareness in the confusion of the rebirth process, and hopefully to attain enlightenment in this lifetime or if not, to get so close that in your next lifetime or shortly thereafter you will attain enlightenment, as opposed to 5,000 lifetimes from now. Why go through 5,000 more lives of birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age; 5,000 lifetimes of pain, suffering, transitory joys? Certainly there’s much beauty in it. But since you’ve done it before, why keep seeing the same movie again and again? Why not make the jump? That’s the voice of the short path.

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The way that you follow the short path of Tibetan rebirth is to first and foremost declare to eternity what you want. You have to feel that the most important thing is to merge with eternity. That has to be your top priority. Then it’s necessary to find a teacher who teaches the short path, to find a bodhisattva, a liberated, enlightened person who lives in this world, who accepts students and who will accept you as a student. That teacher will then show you, map out for you, a course of study, which you will follow both inwardly and outwardly, and what I’d like to share with you now is not so much what that course of study is about, because that varies from individual to individual and if it’s your dharma to find out what that course of study is, that will happen, if it’s not, it will not, but rather to deal with some general principles that are applicable to everyone, some of the things you’d learn in that process, in other words. The specifics you will only learn from your individual teacher and only after you’ve studied for many years with that teacher and the teacher is certain that you are ready for them, the advanced steps, in other words.

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After you’ve studied for five or ten years with a teacher and done very well, exceedingly well, in all of your groundwork, your purity, humility, integrity, self-giving and so on, when you’ve really shaped yourself up, in other words, taken the teacher’s advice and so on, changed over and over again, then the teacher will see that you are ready. The teacher doesn’t hold back from you, but you can’t teach someone the advanced moves until they’ve learned the basic ones.

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Once you’ve mastered the basics, then your teacher, the enlightened teacher, if you have one, will one day show you some of the more advanced steps that will really help you go through all of those lifetimes so quickly, and of course a part of that is simply to be around or with an enlightened teacher because the field of energy that is generated by the living presence of such a teacher is so strong that being in it and meditating with that teacher, becoming absorbed in the light that comes through that teacher, escalates you through your lifetimes very, very quickly. But be that as it may, let’s consider for a few moments how consciousness works — that is to say, that the bardo is not something that you will have to wait for death to go through, but it’s here right now, and what that is all about and how it works.

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There is no time.

Time is a fixation in your mind.

This is the first principle of the Tibetan rebirth process. If you believe that there is time then you will be bound by it. If you are bound by time then you will feel that your body must occupy a causal space for a specific period of time. That is to say, since you’re here now in this lifetime you must experience what’s in this lifetime. How can you experience what was in another thousand lifetimes if time really exists? Time would bind you to the relative conditions of this world. You must see that there is no time.

ॐ

Time is an arbitrary invention on the part of the human race to try and clock and catalogue experiences. And it’s proper, it’s good to have time, it’s good to have calendars, it’s good to have a watch so you know what time it is, but when you move into the higher meditative states you see that that’s all just a way of looking at existence. It’s a useful template, but in actuality there is no time, which is why it’s possible for us to go through a thousand lifetimes in one lifetime. We can only do that if there’s no time. Time changes as you move through the different planes.

ॐ

At the time of death, physical death, the aggregates that are your collected self — in other words, all the strands and fibers that join together, that create your personality — dissolve. They go back into a variety of sheathes, they’re reabsorbed, they go back where they’ve come from. In order to bring you through the same number of experiences inwardly that you would have passed through in thousands of lifetimes, it’s necessary for us to dissolve your old self. Listen carefully, oh nobly born, you need to be set face to face with the clear light of reality now, because there is no tomorrow and there is no past, there is no future. All that exists is the clear light of reality. You are a drop of consciousness floating on that clear light of reality, blissfully asleep. Blissfully awaken and dissolve in the clear light of reality. Hear these words and be liberated from the bardo of suffering.

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It is necessary for your old self to die and after the time of death to be reborn into a higher self in this life. Then that higher self must die and you must be reborn again into a higher self. You must go through a thousand selves in this lifetime or however many it takes or however many you can, and experience inwardly, not necessarily outwardly, everything that you would have experienced in each of those lifetimes. You must enter into a different time cycle. There are three roads that lead to Los Angeles. Each of them has a different speed limit. You can be traveling in all three cars simultaneously. One car is doing 35 miles an hour, one 50, one 75. They will all not reach the destination at the same time. One will get there sooner. You can be in all three cars at once and each one will reach the destination at a different time.

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It is necessary to learn to dissolve your old self, that’s the first step. To dissolve your old self you must first want to. You have to sense the need for a higher rebirth. You’re willing to let your old personality wash away in the clear light of eternity. You don’t have to choose a new self. You see the trick of the reentry process, that is to say — let’s say you can meditate very, very well and go into salvikalpa samadhi. If you go into samadhi, at that time your old self will actually dissolve. Samadhi, that type of meditation, is such a powerful state of existence, your old self dissolves; it’s gone. Now, getting rid of your old self is the easy part, in my estimation. Again, that’s a great art just to be able to go into salvikalpa. But that’s the easy part. The tricky part is the reentry process.

ॐ

You sit down and you meditate and let’s say you go into salvikalpa samadhi. You’re absorbed in eternity. Bam! The old self goes away and you don’t exist for a while. It’s exactly the same as death. In other words, what I’m saying is that you can die in this lifetime without your body having to die and experience everything you would experience at death. I do that hundreds of times a day now. The tricky part is not that, but that suddenly there’ll be a new self born. It will be you. Oh, your memories and everything will still be swimming around, you’re not going to lose all that. I mean you’re not going to walk out into the world unable to function or anything, but the actual structure, the weave of your energies that hold you together, that make you what you are, will be loosened for a while in samadhi. Then they will reform. The trick is to let them reform by themselves. The mistake that most people make when they have a high spiritual experience is they are attracted back to their old lifestyle, their old habits, and their old ways.

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If I could give you kind of a mini-perspective on this, imagine that you go on a vacation. Let’s say that you want to make some big changes in your life. And it’s really hard to break through those old habits and routines, but you go on a vacation for two weeks, you go to another place. There you see life in a different way. You have different experiences, everything is new and shining. And you make a lot of good decisions about, “Well, when I get back I’m going to change my job and change my relationships and move to a new place, and I’m not going to get angry at people anymore and I’m not going to feel sorry for myself, and I really see now that I’ve kind of stepped out of the world that I’ve been living in, how I can really change and really put it together. While I was there, gosh, I was so caught up in everything, it was just enough to get through the day. But now I’ve gone over to Hawaii and I’ve climbed on the top of Haleakala, I’m up on top of the volcano and I just have a feeling of being above my life and the world. I’ve flown up in an airplane and looked down and my world, which seemed so important, my God, when I look down through the window of the jet, there are millions of people down there. Each one has a life as complex as mine. My life is not that important and I can see how I want to change it.”

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But the problem is when you go back in, with all your new resolves, you are attracted back to your old habits. These are the samskaras, the tendencies from your past lives or from this life. Great, sure you were all inspired to change that job, to move, but suddenly you get back and there’s a huge bunch of bills waiting for you. Suddenly you get depressed, suddenly you feel, “Oh gosh!” You start to doubt, “Maybe I shouldn’t change, maybe I should wait another month before I try for that new job.” In other words, your old habits and routines pull you back, your old desires. Because the reason that you didn’t change, the reason you were a fixed self, was that you made yourself that way by what you wanted.

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You see, the change in spiritual discovery doesn’t simply mean we’re going to become nicer or it doesn’t mean you have to give up the things in your life — your car, your house, your family, that has nothing to do with it. To change means that you have to dissolve. You as you’ve come to know yourself will go away. You have to let go of yourself and let yourself dissolve and reform in the white light of eternity. The trick, then, is not going away on vacation. I mean that’s a good trick to begin with. To get into samadhi is not easy. But the trick is coming back. That’s the art that the spiritual teacher teaches you. First the spiritual teacher teaches you how to go up, then how to come back, how to reenter and not be dragged back into your old self but to enter into a new one.

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Now, you do not actually have to wait until you can individually go into samadhi to do this. That’s the advantage of the enlightened teacher. The reason that they say you should have an enlightened teacher is, of course, not just because the teacher can point things out, but the teacher has a power. When you meditate with an enlightened person, even though you are not capable of going into samadhi yourself, if you’re a good meditator and if you’ve taken the teacher’s advice and swept the island of your being and put yourself together and made yourself lucid and pliable and eager and inspired and happy and balanced, when you’ve gone through the basic years of self-discovery and not just walked through them but done well with them, then when you meditate with a teacher, if you have a self-realized teacher, the teacher’s meditation can be so powerful that it actually dissolves your self. Then for a period of about a week — it depends how powerful the teacher is, but usually for about a week maximum — the glue that holds together your personal form will become loose and then it is possible for you to reenter.

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Instead of taking another hundred incarnations of spiritual practice to be able to go into samadhi by yourself, if you can be accepted by and work with an enlightened teacher, and if you’re really gung ho, the teacher can give you that experience in this life. The advantage to having that experience in this life is not just that the experience of samadhi is enjoyable, but it allows you to make that big step, and the teacher doesn’t do that with you once but again and again and again. The teacher can just lift up the curtain of immortality so you can peek under and get a view, but then you have to put yourself back together.

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Now, the way you reenter, which is the tricky part, is by not trying. If you try too hard to rebuild yourself it won’t work because any image you can project or think of will be limited. Rather than following an image you project, you let God work through you, to select for you. Rather, in other words, than having to do, you just have to stay out of the way. The river knows exactly how to flow. Your job is simply, during that period of time, to neither be attracted nor repulsed by any ideas, not to seek your old ways nor to shun them, but just to allow eternity to reorder your being.

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And this will be tricky. Let me give you an example. I recently took about 350 of my students out to the desert and when I was out there I meditated on them very intensely, and I brought them all through the bardo — in other words, I melted the glue that held them together and put them into a very fluid, pure state of awareness whereby they could make a tremendous transition, what I call an epiphany. Now, about a week has gone by since our journey and now the glue has reformed. During this week, each of them had an opportunity to make a tremendous transition. However, at the same time during the week they would be confronted by all of their attachments, all the things they want or they thought they wanted, that their old self wanted or their old selves from past lives wanted. And also all the things they feared would appear before them and if they ran towards the things that they had wanted previously, then they would want them again and they would lock into that personality that wants things like that. If they ran away from their fears then they would become the person who is afraid of those things. You see, all a person is, as we define person aside from an aggregate of memories, is a formation of attractions and repulsions.

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What makes one person different than another — aside from physical shape and coloration and so on — in terms of personality and structure? Imagine that a person is a circle. Everybody is the same circle. My circle is no different than your circle, but what makes us different then? What creates character? What creates it, in terms of consciousness, are the areas within the circle. You can segment the circle, right? You can draw lots of lines through it and cut it into little pieces. There will be many areas within the circle and you can color each one a different way. Those colorations, the things that make you what you are, are your desires, your ideas of yourself, the way the ego works and sees itself and the things that you are afraid of, the things that you are repulsed by.

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If you were to look at yourself in terms of a circle you would be filled with all kinds of lines and shadings. If you were to look at me as a circle you would see that there are no lines drawn within the circle, and that the circle sometimes isn’t even there. Sometimes the outer circumference of the circle dissolves and occasionally it reforms. This is, if you are familiar with Zen and the “Searching for the Ox” pictures, the shorter set of pictures, where in each of the succeeding pictures the ox gets whiter and then finally self-alone, the ox is gone and the person who seeks the ox is gone. It’s the same principle that is espoused in Zen, but just through a different symbology than in Tibetan form.

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The way to a successful rebirth, then, is by not doing, not trying, which doesn’t mean that you’re not active in the world and at your job and working. It means internally, not what you’re doing physically. Physically we drive our cars and go places and so on, but while that show is going on there’s an inner show going on. Your mind is talking, thoughts and emotions are passing through you and the trick is not to hook on to any of them while you’re in this very fragile intermediate state, and just not be afraid of the light.

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Now, some of my students after their last journey have been kind of very disassociated all week. In other words, their consciousness finally reached the point they’ve always wanted it to. We worked all trimester with a lot of meditations to bring them up to a certain point and then with our trip to the desert and an evening meditation before that, each of them was given an opportunity to move into this higher state. The glue was melted, but some of them, then, during the next week felt very disassociated. They weren’t themselves anymore and that was absolutely correct — they weren’t themselves anymore. They weren’t any self and some of them thought, “Well, my God, here I am in this negative state and I just don’t seem to have a center.” You see, they became afraid; that’s one of the fears again that you have to deal with, not only in this process but when you physically die.

Again you’re trying to find,

“Oh God, I’m out there on my own, I’m alone, I need a fireplace, a family, comfort, a roof, identity. Identity! I have to have identity! My God, I’m drifting alone in the void! I’m dissolving! What’ll I do?”

You see, that sort of feeling.

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Now, there’s nothing to be afraid of; the void is nothing but light, your real self. It’s not empty, but your mind will create and project these various fears with which you try and hold yourself back from enlightenment and absorption. The trick is not to be afraid, but when your worst fears appear before you, just to smile at them, and you’ll find there’s never anything to be afraid of, that dissolution and creation are only ideas. Rather, you just embrace your fears and smile at them and say, “Hi! Oh, you’re my worst fear? Well, come on in, sit down, let’s have a bite to eat.” You’ll find that that fear will dissolve and that there was never anything to be afraid of, there was only light and perfection and God.

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And you don’t chase the things that you always wanted. If you’re supposed to have something in your life, it will come, or just trust that you’ll always do what’s right, but don’t be attracted. Just watch your desires pass by you. You see, Tibetan yoga is the art of perceiving. It’s the art of just sitting and watching the world go by, being active in it, working, doing whatever is right and normal for your life situation, but just watching the world go by in inner terms. That is to say, sitting at a point of distance inside yourself and pleasantly observing everything happening, enjoying what comes to you, not being afraid to enjoy, not feeling the need to run after. But at the same time being detached, just living in that pure light of God which is bliss itself.

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Tibetan yoga, the rebirth process, the short path. Not meaning that at the time of death it should be practiced — it can be — but rather practicing in life, seeing that life is death and that death is life, that there’s really no difference; to learn not to be afraid of anything because there’s nothing to be afraid of. Everything is your self. All your worst fears — the Tibetans, of course, symbolize all the fears with these awful five-headed, fire-breathing, snake form monsters or something [Rama laughs]. They like to personify things or they personify the beatific states of awareness, the formless ecstasies and beautiful goddesses and angels and stuff like that. They don’t have to have a form, that’s just their symbolic way of trying to represent them and what they’re saying is, don’t be afraid of anything. The worst thing you can imagine is still part of yourself, since you’re one with God and all is God. It’s only your fears and your foolish attractions that prevent you from seeing the perfection that exists in all things.

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Embrace without embracing, love without loving, fear without fearing. Don’t mind what you go through in life, just don’t get hung up in it, and the only way you can do this, of course, is by meditating. You can hear the ideas but not practice. You must meditate to get that power and that distance, that absorption, to be capable of making the jump to light speed, of going into the higher consciousness and watching the old self dissolve and enjoying it, just as you throw your old clothes away and then go out and buy some new clothes. But not the same kind — something nicer, more refined, more beautiful. And by changing your outfits again and again and again, until finally you wear the most beautiful clothes or nothing at all, and then you merge with eternity.

The Tibetan rebirth process.