|
3 TALKS CDMS DEATH
(Audience comments)
(Speaker) Death and fear. (Audience laughter)
(Speaker) Which comes first?
(Audience comments)
(Speaker) Are you sure? (Audience affirmative.)
Maybe you didn’t have any fear until your first death. Every
one of you will survive your death. That’s got nothing to do
with it. You already survived many deaths but you don’t know
anything about it and you’re still in the same condition you
have been in for, you can’t even describe it in terms of
time.
How much have you learned in this life? You have
adapted to a lot of circumstances, learned some facts and
some active abilities, ways of using yourself. How much have
you truly learned that makes a difference that makes this
circumstance unnecessary. Most of what you do simply
reinforces this circumstance.
It’s a play upon it because you never realize a
higher position. You are always realizing the same position;
indulging yourself, being consoled, playing it, never
becoming the master of it and so this life is followed by
another life and that is absolutely so. Everyone survives.
When you get over the elation of really knowing that, then
you begin to see really what it’s all about because there’s
nothing consoling about survival at all, merely
survival.
It always seems consoling to you when you view it
over against the pleasure, the attachment that you have to
things in life. But what if you are perpetually reincarnated
a mosquito (audience laughter) with a three hour life span.
You couldn’t be so damned interested in coming back could
you and some of you may require such a lesson. And if you
really became sensitive to what your life amounts to you
would see that you are something like a perpetually
reincarnated mosquito.
(Music) Last evening I watched a film that was made
in the fifties probably with James Stewart playing
Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh. The movie was just about that
period in his life, I think 1927, in which he flew across
the Atlantic to Paris. Well that was an interesting ordeal
in itself. That’s what made an interesting movie out of it.
We all enjoyed watching it and so on.
But I know something else about the man’s life, the
future. His child was kidnapped and murdered. He suffered
all kinds of public abuse and shame, harassment, defamation,
had to survive all of that, and eventually died. That’s his
whole life and I just capsulized it. You know when you watch
him flying across the Atlantic, lucky Lindy. It’s human
fulfillment somehow, minimal suffering.
Big applause at the airport. Now you’re famous.
You’re all functioning as if that’s the goal of your efforts
that that fulfills existence and you can just sort of be
famous or happy or sexy, whatever your personal motives may
be whereby you try to fulfill yourself, and that that goes
on forever.
You see, part of this whole immortal philosophy
that you are involved in suggests you are going to live for
a long time. Maybe you’re going to die, but you’ve going to
live for a long time and by the time you get to be really
old, everything you like now will be so weird and ugly
looking you won’t care about it anymore.
Your husbands and wives, they’ll be sick and maybe
dead or ugly and what not. You won’t be holding onto it so
hard. You just carry on with your plan and eventually you’ll
get to the point that even though you may die you’ll be like
an overripe fruit and you won’t be concerned about it. It
won’t bother you. And then maybe you’ll just go to sleep or
something.
No way. All the things that you are cherishing now,
embracing now, serving now, clinging to now, can be ripped
off in an instant, will be, not just can be, inevitably will
be and it can happen a lot before the time when you think
you may be prepared for it.
(Music) You know, in our religious language we talk
about what could happen to you after death. You can go to
heaven. You can go to purgatory and get cleaned up or you
can go to hell. (Laughter from audience.) And then perhaps
having gone to purgatory or a temporary hell you will be
lucky enough to be born as a human being and devote yourself
to the spiritual process. Put that another way. You could
say that birth is a hell. This is one of the hells. This is
a domain of unhappiness. What else is hell?
A place of self-obsession, bewildered, without
release, this is a tormented place, not tormented by
constant fires and people gnawing on your skull (laughter
from audience). All these things happen. But the nature of
this hell is that we are self-possessed.We are born in
unhappiness and we do not transcend this unhappiness readily
and we constantly pursue happiness by all kinds of
incredibly complex means and never attain it.
And in the entire history of this mortal gathering
there have been occasional individuals who have actually
realized the nature of existence, the condition, the
reality, the divine nature and domain not simply as a form
of belief, fully, bodily, utterly, transcendentally. They
become a mechanism in nature that serves the possibility of
awakening on the part of others.
If those who had fulfilled the way did not turn
about and teach this would be truly a hell instead of being
a biker hell (laughter). It would be truly a hell if there
were no possibility of enlightenment, if there were no
teaching, no dharma, no adepts, no sacred way, no sacred
community, no capacity for understanding self-transcendence.
(Music at end.)
END 10:05
|
