Liberation Between Death and Rebirth with Robert Thurman

Robert Thurman, PhD, is professor emeritus at Columbia University where was a teaching professor for 50 years on Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies. He was the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is author of many books, including Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the Whole World and Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within. He is author of his translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Liberation Through Understanding in the Between. His most recent book is Wisdom is Bliss: Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your Life. His website is bobthurman.com.

Robert describes how to become liberated from suffering through understanding in the between of death and rebirth, known as the bardo in the Tibetan language. He describes other in-betweens and how to attain instant liberation.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:36 Mistranslation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead
00:04:56 The betweens or bardos
00:10:42 Near-death and death experiences
00:23:31 Deathlessness
00:35:11 Stages of liberation
00:45:51 Attachment
00:57:07 Interconnection
01:19:24 Instant Liberation
01:21:02 Conclusion

Edited subtitles for this video are available in English, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, Swedish and Spanish.

New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is a licensed occupational therapist, intuitive healer, and health coach based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com/

(Recorded on November 15, 2023)

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Leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I’m Emmy Vadnais, co-host with Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is liberation between death and rebirth. My guest is Robert Thurman, who is professor emeritus at Columbia University, where he was a teaching professor for about 50 years on Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies.

He is a leading worldwide lecturer on Tibetan Buddhism, skilled translator of Tibetan Sanskrit Buddhist literature, and a passionate activist for the plight of the Tibetan people. He was a Tibetan Buddhist monk for a short time and became a Tibetan Buddhist late teacher. Robert is a close friend with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

He is co-founder and president of Tibet House U.S. Menla, the cultural center in service of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and the people of Tibet. He is host of Bob Thurman podcast, Buddhas Have More Fun. He is author of many books, including Why the Dalai Lama Matters, His Act of Truth as

A Salvation for China, Tibet, and the Whole World, and Infinite Life, Awakening to the Bliss Within. He is co-author of Man of Peace, the Illustrated Life Story of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, and Love Your Enemy, How to Break the Anger Habit and Be a Whole Lot Happier.

His most recent book is Wisdom is Bliss, Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your Life. Today we’ll be discussing his translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Liberation Through Understanding in the Between. Robert is located in the New York area. Now I’ll switch over to the internet video. Welcome Bob.

It’s a great pleasure to have you back with us on New Thinking Allowed today. Nice to be with you and me. The last time we met we talked about Wisdom is Bliss and how people can learn more about Buddhism with Four Friendly Fun Facts. Let me link to that interview in the upper

Right corner of your screen, and today we’re going to be discussing your translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and you share that actually that title is a mistranslation. Right, yes, it’s a book of natural liberation by learning something new during the between state or transition, you know, after death,

And the main between state they were thinking about is the three between states after death, and they’re not necessarily thinking about, and people don’t usually think about, the between states during life, which are also you can learn things during that time and then you can find the natural liberation.

Through connection to nature, that means, you know, natural means. What are we liberating from? Suffering. That’s the only thing we need to liberate from. Nobody needs to liberate from happiness. We have to enjoy it. Although there’s a kind of happiness that is unsatisfactory, because the person is not

Enjoying it really, because they’re thinking while they’re experiencing it, that it’s not good enough, it’s not going to last, et cetera, et cetera, you know, they’re worried about and anxious about the other things and their mind is not really open to letting it sort of carry them away.

And so that kind of happiness is, it’s good to be liberated from the happiness that really is what we call the suffering of change. And in other words, experiencing change as if it were suffering. And that’s no good. But the happiness that where you give yourself

To whatever it is, you give, you know, you get out of yourself, you enlarge yourself, you get, you expand yourself, you transcend your normal sense of self-enclosure. That kind of happiness is the one that you don’t need to be liberated from. But once you’re liberated, that’s the one you experience.

Can one be liberated during our incarnation as a human? Or is it more likely to be liberated in the between, which is also known as the bardo between death and rebirth? We can be liberated in our ordinary life as human because we are in a bardo now, according

To this teaching, to this, which is actually not really a religious teaching. It’s more like a scientific evaluation of life and what the bardo we’re in now is called the bardo of life. Where we’re constantly growing, changing and or decaying, changing, but we’re alive. And within that, there are two other betweens.

The second one is the dream between, which is between and the between means it’s a gap or a transition between deep sleep and becoming awake again. That’s the dream between. And then the other one is the meditation between where we get into an altered state by meditating.

And that’s a speech between normal waking consciousness and returning to normal waking consciousness, but now newly enhanced by having gone into an altered state through meditation. So those are the three life betweens that said then the death between the bardo that people normally think of as the bardo.

When Lincoln was talking to his departed son, Lincoln in the bardo, that recent popular book, which I haven’t read yet, I’ve been it’s on my list, but it’s very, I’m sure hard, very moving because believe me, I think about Lincoln all the time nowadays. He’s so he was so wonderful, so brave.

And anyway, so the three in the death are the death point between the first shock, you know, of changing bodies, of leaving this body. And then there’s what’s called the reality between which are looking at all heavenly realms and different possible destinations. And then the third one is called the procreation

Between when one comes decides to come back as a living being with some sort of parents, either in a womb for a mammal, in an egg for birds and reptiles and things or chickens, in by apparition in a heaven where you don’t need a womb or an egg, or in some very negative,

There’s some very negative states where there’s no question of wounds, like hellish type of states. And so that’s called the procreation between because that’s when that’s about to happen, so to speak, one comes back into the life between.

So in other words, it’s an endless cycle of six betweens is how it’s how it’s which is an evaluation of life, you know, we’re like them. So in your translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it seems to predominantly talk

About how when a person seemingly dies from this incarnation, right, that you can communicate with them and assist them to liberate while they’re in that state. Yes, absolutely. The view is that when you leave your body, in most cases, there are some might be some cases where you’re instantaneously elsewhere.

In most cases, when you leave your body, your subtle body, like sort of like the kind of body you have when you have a dream, you know, where you’re you’re not sure quite what your body is and but you’re certainly aware of your environment and so on.

But at first, you are very aware of where you were and even you’re you’re sort of, you know, they have movies where they show that there and it’s like the subtle body is looking at it at their body and say, why am I why am I over here? Why am I not there?

And so having an out of body experience and then they will try sometimes to go back into the body and which won’t work. And they also then try to like in that great movie Ghosts, Patrick Swayze and written by Bruce Rubin, you know, your loved ones and

You know, in his case, he knew his murderer and he was trying to influence things in the coarse body world, what they call the gross body world or coarse body world. But he was unable to because they didn’t know they couldn’t perceive him except for Whoopi.

You know, she she was a psychic and she some psychics can see them, you know, but most people can and and then you that’s how you discover that you have passed away because you go up and try to say, hey, is everything all right? What happened to your loved ones or your friends?

And then they don’t they don’t react and you sort of walk through them or they walk through you, you know, and you’re suddenly, oh, this is not this is not my normal me, you know, that sort of phenomenon, they claim now the basis of the book is that the

Basis of the teaching in the book and it’s taught in many other books as well. But that’s the famous one. And the basis of it is people who developed a kind of more sophisticated and detailed self-awareness. So, for example, they became able to be lucid in a dream in dreams where they know

They’re dreaming, but they’re still stay in the dream and they, you know, they are more agile in moving around in their consciousness, you know, because they’ve been using that work, you know, they’ve been yogis or yoginis, as you would, if you will. And they are reporting is based on the reports

Of people who remember these transitions from having undergone them. And they like, you know, now we did nowadays, we have the literature of the near death experiences. And if you compile that, like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and some other people, they kind of have compiled those as more and more of them are.

And since they’re all more happy all the time and they have a kind of picture of it. And did I tell you when we talked before that about this doctor that I know, I just was getting to know a new friend who we were talking when we were first hanging out.

I told you that story. I think so, but go ahead. Well, his name is Alan, but I don’t want to say his whole name, he didn’t he didn’t authorize me to. But he and his wife were having dinner with me and my wife and we

Were just chatting, you know, getting to know each other. And since, you know, he knows I’m sort of interested in these things, he said, by the way, I’ve been wanting to tell you that I died when I was 16 and came back from that.

And then he described the experience and and it did it did seem to me to explain his sort of wonderful character and his persona, because it’s well known in those near death experienced people that when they have that happen, then they live life in a very

Different way because they are not scared of death anymore and so on. And what he said, well, he was he was leading a group in Guatemala as a 16 year old of kids on a hiking from it was a church program that he was a member of a evangelical church, quite orthodox one.

And so he volunteered that summer and he was leading a group of Guatemalan teenagers from the city out in the country and so on. And then he sort of got caught in a near volcano in a quicksand made of volcanic ash. His body was dragged under and died.

And they had to make quite an effort to get him out with cranes and they took time. And he was really quite dead, you know, when his body itself was dragged back to wherever and they were, you know, to campsite or something.

And some hours, you know, clearly he didn’t give me exact time, but obviously a long time. But he said, meanwhile, he wasn’t involved in any of that at all. He was he was flow floating down a river of luminous bliss, he said, happy as a

Clam in a way, and it was a no fear and no sense of loss or anything, grief of any kind. And then he came to a kind of like a station, like a subway station, because he was coming down a kind of tunnel which were flowing in this blissful energy.

And then who was in this space? But Jesus, of course, he was, you know, a faithful young Christian family and everything. And there was Jesus and Jesus said to him, so, gee, you know, you’re so young, you know, but, you know, that’s the way it is.

And, you know, unfortunately, and here you continue on this way and singled him sort of a new flow that was also looked very nice. And so he wasn’t scared or anything. And that was the thing. But then he said was he was kind of crossing that clearing

With were in the presence of Jesus. He had a regret, not fear and not pain, but just a regret. And so he expressed it and he said to Jesus, well, as you know, of course, I’m totally happy and I’m so thrilled to see you. And this is wonderful here.

But, you know, I was I didn’t get to do some number of things I had really planned to do back in life in my life. And I don’t know, is there is there is there any choice involved? You know, could I could I could I change my mind now or change the thing?

And then I don’t know why, but I when he said then Jesus sort of. Glanced, but for some reason I got he didn’t say that, but I got the impression like Jesus looked at his his his guest book or something, his iPad.

Well, it’s been quite a while, you know, meaning they’ve been out of the body. It might have happened to it. You know, some of it may be that it’s been a while. He said previously, he had said, well, it’s early, you know, because you’re young.

Because it is quite a while and then sort of hesitated. And then looked up at him and said, well, I guess so, if you want to go ahead and sort of zoop in, there was no back flow. He just was immediately revived up from his in his body.

It’s like instantly now that everybody there was scared because it’s been his cold body was cold, you know, had been gone for not breathing for hours. And but he revived. And so he just wanted to tell us that that, you know, because he was at our retreat center, Menla retreat center here in

Phoenicia, New York, where we have classes on spirituality type of things. You know, but it’s not a Buddhist center. It’s a health, healing, well-being spa. You know, we are from the Dalai Lama’s group, which does not where his cultural preservation organization and cultural sharing organization.

And under his theory that he doesn’t want in the modern period. Religions to compete with each other to convert people back and forth. He’s against that. So he’s asked us to represent what Tibetan culture is, because he wants it to be saved, of course, because the communists are destroying it

In Tibet have been for 70 years. So he wants to be saved, but he doesn’t want to convert. So we’re not teaching people to be Buddhist. In other words, we’re just teaching like like an interesting cultural thing. Like I said, because it changes things, you know, for example, at a funeral,

I was just at a funeral of a wonderful Mexican-American gentleman who had worked for that spa where we work for like washing dishes, actually, for about 20 years. And he had retired about four years ago. And but then and then he passed away.

And and then I discovered when we got the news that he had passed, Alcinccio, his name, discovered that we realized that his two, two out of his grandchildren, however many there are, were also working for us. And we knew we knew who they were. We didn’t realize they were his grandchildren.

And his wife and sister had worked for us also for quite a while for that spa, you know, Dalai Lama spa. And so we felt we went to the funeral. But and I told the wife, I said, well, I know you’re not a Buddhist

And you don’t have to agree with or believe that, but I just thought you might enjoy the idea that, you know, from our view, he’s fine. He was such a wonderful, he had the most beautiful smile. He was, of course, he was just washing dishes. He didn’t speak English much,

But he would newly probably newly arrived 20, 30 years ago. But he was a very wonderful person. And I realized when I went to the wake, there was like 80 people there. So he he was beloved by many people, much bigger than his family.

And so I was but when he was working there, he would come out to collect dishes or something in the dining hall. And he would smile and he would lift a room. You know, he was like that kind of person, although he didn’t speak English.

So so anyway, so I told her, you know, I’m sure he’s fine. Is, you know, his generosity and his happiness and his sharing of that with people and his whole family and all the people here. But you know, you know, you also think maybe he’s going to heaven.

And that’s fine, too. That’s great. That’s we all agree on that one. And she was smiling and happy about that. And so therefore, funerals in that culture, the most important person at a funeral is not the bereaved people, although they may be feeling deep grief and sadness. And that’s perfectly all right.

Of course, they have to face that. But that’s not the most important thing. And the immediate time after the transition, then the person who’s traveling is the main person. So, for example, in Tibet, if if a wife or a beloved or a child

Or a parent is tearing their hair and weeping and wailing and shrieking, you know, and freaking out, then they ask them to take a walk and, you know, take some deep breaths and and save that for a later time. After the person who’s traveling is no longer so closely associated

With the people she she or he used to know, because it might alarm them because they’re like in a dream. They’re emotionally very, very sensitive. So you want to make a very happy vibration, you know, like an Irish wake. People want to toast to the victims. So on. Right.

Anyway, that reminds me of another story. I don’t know if you want stories, but I think it’s fun. I was traveling with Sam Keen, who was sort of famous Sam Keen, you know, men’s movement, you know, the great Sam Keen, who was a theologian. He’s a Protestant theologian from Harvard Divinity originally.

But he’s a great guy. He’s a wonderful guy. And he was with me in Bhutan, and he interviewed a Jesuit priest who’d been there for 50 years, elderly gentleman, and he asked him how many people had he converted to Christianity? And Father, I’m not remember the name, but anyway,

Father Joseph, maybe Father Joe, he said proudly zero. And Sam was a little bit shocked, of course, he’s a Protestant, not a Catholic, but not a Jesuit. But he still was shocked that the guy was pleased with that. And he sort of it wasn’t thought of as a failure, you know.

And so they said, well, why not? Why didn’t you do that? And he said, well, they don’t need to be converted. He said, they’re already living with the Holy Ghost, the guy says. And then he was baffled by that Sam Keen.

So as was I, I was like, well, I don’t know, I don’t know. So as was I, I must admit, who is overhearing this? I wasn’t doing the interview, but I was a witness. So then he said, well, what do you mean?

And then to illustrate that, he told a story of near his chapel, you know, his mission. There was a village and he’d lived there for decades. And he was very friendly with the village elder. And the village elder sent him a message at some point saying, I’m departing soon because of my age.

I’m going to pass away soon. But I want you to come from my final supper, you know, and I want to host you for my final supper. So great. He’s preparing for that. And then he goes over to the village at the appointed time.

And to his amazement, the village elder has died already, but his body is propped up in his chair. And this plate has been served to him. And he’s got the seat of honor of the priest next to him. And is he’s and he’s supposed to eat his plate.

And everybody’s eating and celebrating and they’re drinking. They’re not. Buddhists are not supposed to drink, but they are drinking some rice, rice wine. And he’s just barley wine or something. And he’s just shocked, you know, by it. At the time, he said he’s telling a story. And he says, so that’s the thing.

He said the spiritual world and their world are totally interfused and they’re not scared of it. Although that means they are confident that this guy is going to going well because he was a very wonderful and beloved head man. He was a virtuous person, in other words, generous and tolerant

And not given to anger and and meanness and so on. So that was father’s and father. So that’s so it very much influenced the culture, in other words. This idea. And naturally, we we grieve losing a loved one and so on, especially the terrible thing, a parent losing a child, someone

Younger than you, who you expected to carry on. That’s the worst, of course, which does happen to people. And but in general, that’s and then it’s not that people are supposed to suppress that. But is that just that during the time close on, like it was for a few days,

You know, and especially like a funeral and memorial service, they think like 49 days. The person usually they have a sort of limit of when someone would remain in the immediate between the death point between, so to speak, not be sort of wandering the universe, looking for the different heavens,

Evaluating the new heavens. But they have that kind of thing. And then you can grieve and freak out and lament and face, you know, the sorrow, you know, but to hold it in for a few for a few weeks. I do. It sounds like there are, like you said, many betweens.

Can you share what death is then? Because really, we’re not truly dying in the sense that we go into oblivion. Yes. Well, that’s the thing. What I was used to say when I first published this book, after doing the study involved with it, which I hadn’t planned to do,

I only did it because my guru said I should years before I was asked, actually. And so I had kept the book and this way that someone said, please do that. Commission me. And that’s my for my most popular book. And I announced that the amazing thing I discovered people would ask me,

You know, doing a book tour like, what about what did you what did you learn doing this book? And I said, well, what I learned is there are no dead people. Nobody dies. Deathlessness is what I learned. And what death is, is it’s like,

OK, I’m in a room here in my house in my study. And if I want to go downstairs to see somebody or a visitor comes, I walk through a door. And when I get through the door, I’m in another room. And in a way, I’m never in the door.

Because because maybe you could say sort of I’m standing on the threshold. You can you might say I’m in the door, but I’m not in the door. I’m just going between the two. And as you know, the line between the two rooms has no width. You know, line is an abstraction.

And so you’re really never on the line. You know, you’re just you just move into the next room. And so death is moving into the next life. And just like birth, it could actually conception from the Buddhist point of view, which, of course, is interesting to discuss the whole Catholics

And the abortion and the whole thing. But anyway, conception is the rebirth, beginning of the rebirth in a mammal, in the case of a mammal. And so we’ve come from beginningless previous lives. And also the idea is that it’s beginningless and endless.

So it isn’t a matter of there’s no state you can’t enter nothingness because there’s no such thing. It’s not a place you can go. It’s not it’s not a dark space or something. Nothing. Nothing is nothing. All right. Dark space is space. So this is beginningless and endless continuum.

And the question then becomes how to be in a good continuum, in a good environment where you’re happy and you’re able to make other beings happy. And it’s not dog eat dog. It’s not war of all against all. It’s not human is considered among the very best,

Although it’s not as pleasure filled as or even it’s not as vast in awareness, maybe as some of the divine realms, the angel and divine realms. And there is no one super divine realm like ultimate absolute being, because all beings are relative. You know, anybody who’s a being is is being

Doing the being in relation to other beings. And so no one is sort of an absolute source. The whole idea of absolute producing a relative is a kind of meaningless idea, because absolute means it doesn’t relate and you couldn’t create something without relating to it.

So so in the in the in the view of Buddhist science, not not as a religious dogma, but in Buddhist science. I mean, and we have never all we ourselves, for example, have never experienced anything that isn’t a relative thing, because experiences are relating to the thing that we experience.

Except then you have abstractions like you get a point. When I say I’m going to make a point on this piece of paper, I make a dot and that’s X, Y, you know, in two planes or X, Y, Z and three planes, you know,

And and fourth plane in time at a certain moment. But actually, the dot I write right on the paper is not the point. The point is an abstraction and cannot have size to be precise. Right. Because if I make a dot, it has this right side, left side.

This is a small it’s a small circle. So those abstractions sort of seem to be absolute because in a way they’re not there relatedly. And so we only indirectly relate to them. Right. By a dot stands for that or the X, Y number stands for it.

We say, you know, so we can infer something absolutely because it’s the opposite of a relative thing. So we can make an imagination about it, but it actually cannot be related to to a real time. It’s not anywhere. Right. It’s actually not there, except in our concept.

So that absolute is sort of like that. And therefore, they are kind of our own creations and they’re inactive in Buddhist science and philosophy. OK, so anyway, that’s what I learned. There’s no dead people. And so and and actually the great liberation involved about that is that when we know that

We stop worrying about some state of sort of absolute terror, obliteration, whatever it is, we don’t worry about that. Instead, we worry about the quality of where we are, what we’re doing. And then we can because we know that if we’ve been happy all day, we’re unlikely to have a horrible nightmare.

You know, so we know that if where we are now, that we sort of know we are, if we treat it well, treating others well, treat the environment well, treat everything well, treat ourselves well, then it’s likely that if there’s

When we wake up, we can then pass out to go to sleep and we’ll wake up. Things will be OK in the morning. We won’t also maybe have too bad a dream. So we sort of know by experience that what you do in the present

Affects your future and we become more responsible for that. And then we reach past death with that. And it’s it gives us a larger horizon of decision making, you could say. And and that’s very considered practical and realistic. But it does. And it frees us from the sort of strange fear of death

Where it sort of lurks and we want to avoid it and we don’t want to think about it. We don’t talk about it. And we want to act like it’s not doesn’t happen. And then, you know, rich and powerful pharaohs and kings and people, they make huge monuments to themselves, you know,

To get a whole lot of talk about it, you know. And by meanwhile, they’ll have nothing to do with that. And probably next life, they’ll be born in a different country or even on even another planet from the point of view of Buddhist science.

But the idea of life on many earths, in many galaxies, in many solar systems, et cetera, is very obvious, actually, rather than a mysterious thing. What’s from thousands of years ago? They expected that to be the case. Because they saw the vastness. I mean, they looked out in them.

Why do we come here anyway, if there’s so much suffering? What is it that we can do here in the human form as opposed to these other in-betweens? Right. Well, then given the infinite frame of reference and the infinity of the future and the infinity of options,

Which doesn’t mean in a way it’s nothing concrete, but it just means we have to be open to possibilities. And given that, they reason that given infinite time, you can optimize everything. And the way you would optimize yourself would be if you could reach a state where you were completely satisfied yourself

Because of the way you just felt. And then you could share that with others with maximum effectiveness, although you couldn’t push them into the same state because each person is kind of free. And actually, that ultimate state is a free state.

So they have to, in a way, they have to do it themselves, but you can help them a lot. It’s like a coach, you know. Coach cannot get out and play every part in the soccer game and, you know, kick the ball himself, but he can coach the players how to do it

And then they can become very capable. And so the idea is the reason we are here is that we, and the reason that we suffer from Buddha’s point of view is not necessarily because of sin, although if we suffer really badly,

It’s because we did do negative things and we get blowback from that, you know, we harmed other beings, we destroyed things and we got to kind of live by the sword, die by the sword. Everybody kind of has that view, you know, you get like that. You know, you kill people,

Then you’re scared they’re going to come kill you, this kind of thing. And you become paranoid. And so that we know, but the goal then is that you can become perfectly happy yourself and you can discover the true nature of things. And then why Buddha is the person who became a Buddha,

Although there are many, actually, who didn’t give themselves that name, but the purpose who famously became a Buddha and made the beginning of that teaching 2,500 years ago. He discovered that reality itself is pure goodness. It’s like that guy was on that river of pure bliss

When she left his body because of his openness and his faith in the saving power of the ultimate. You know, even though Buddhists would disagree that that Jesus was the son of an absolute being, they would agree that there is such a divine, wonderful, kind being

Who as Jesus that they would certainly agree. They just want to make it an absolute thing, but it would be just a really great relational thing helping others. And so because he had that openness of mind and faith, he discovered an energy of goodness in the world.

And this is what in the Book of the Natural Liberation slash Book of the Dead, what they call the clear light of the void. Or by clear light, they don’t actually mean a bright light. They mean they mean he said luminous, you know, in his description.

My friend Alan, but it’s a transparency like crystal, you know, like a diamond doesn’t have an inner light bulb in it, but it transmits and intensifies light when it shines through it. And so it’s a transparent thing like that. It’s a crystal thing like that.

And then there are lights that are lesser lights like sunlight and moonlight, which can be quite powerful. But the original clear light is beyond the duality of light and dark. And what I always like to try to explain to people, you know, people think the materialists tell you

That when you die, you’re going to be nothing. And people in our country, maybe when they’re young and feeling good, they’re kind of scared of that. They feel like, oh, gee, that’s death and that’s obliterating. And I think subconsciously, they associate it with,

We, me too, we associate it with deep sleep in a dark room. So it’s like you’re just unconscious in a dark space, sort of. I think that that sort of seems to confirm that we’re going to be a final sleep. And all those cemeteries have heavenly rest and peaceful sleep and divine sleep,

You know, like they have names like that. That, of course, is irrational completely. And there’s because there’s no evidence that there’s such a thing as nothing that you can go to. A dark space is not nothing. And we’ve never seen nothing, therefore. So we can have no we don’t have any real solid

Expectation that there will be such a thing, even though we tend to think we have a word for something that it must refer to something. And so the idea is and the Buddhist science says that when you leave the body, you descend through a series of stages that

Are they call the eight stages in the Book of Natural Liberation. Some there are all the versions that have ten stages. You could probably have more if you wanted to make it too complicated, but eight main stages. And the bottoms, the five, six and seven of those

Are a moonlit space, a sunlit space and a dark space. And a midnight dark, you know, no sun, no moon, no stars, nothing, just total dark. And that that’s the threshold of clear light, which is so that in a way. Clear light is what we’re already made of, they say.

And therefore, we don’t see it as an object, but we kind of get it. We have a feeling of being immersed in it, which I think was what happened to Alan. But he was then feeling he was separate from it and enjoying it.

So he was really in one of those others like the moonlit stage, I would say, actually, really, rather than quite because clear light. He was in clear light while alive. We all are, according to their view. But we’re not aware of it. Yeah, there’s there’s in other words, what reality sustains

Us in reality and what sustains reality is a field of infinite energy, put it like that. That seems to make sense to us. And then if we stop to think, we think, oh, infinite energy then would not be doing anything on its own because it would feel everything was already fulfilled.

Everything was done. It was perfect, as is infinite energy. You know, there was it was no need. There’s no differential, like where there’s something low energy. So the high energy flows toward it. But on the other hand, if there’s a being who somehow doesn’t know about

That infinite energy and they feel whatever their sphere of experiences, they’re lacking a lot of energy or they’re lacking this or that, they can draw this inexhaustibly is the idea. So it is actually quite similar, you know, a deeply faithful monotheistic person who feels that God is love.

God is good. God is pure light, whatever different kinds of praise, you know, like adulatory expressions can be thought of. And a lot of them have been in a way they are thinking of clear light from a Buddhist perspective.

It’s just that they’re and when I say that, every time I said I know people are thinking religious percentage, but it’s not just a religious dogma. It’s what they discovered. They think they may be wrong, but that’s what they think. So it’s not something belonging to some other person than you.

You’re the same, actually. You’re all made of clear light, so to speak. And so we can kind of relax in a way. It gives a different notion of a default reality. We’re used to being when we fall asleep, we’re nervous. That is the door locked is quiet. You know, is it dark?

You know, I’ve got the covers warm, you know, nice, soft pillow. You know, we’re always careful and worried about things that might happen to us. But but in a way, the final home of us is this vast like divine or Buddha mind. You know, his idea sort of like what the Protestant theologians

Would call the pantheistic heresy where you feel you are God. You know what I mean? You’re got you’re immersed in God, which I think mystics have always had. And the more rigid type of monotheists has persecuted them for that, therefore, thinking

Of some sort of pride or they’re they’re off base or they make crazy or whatever, because they have this idea that there is a being that’s like a big judge or king that doles out a reward if you’re nice and punishes you violently if you’re not.

And that is sort of up to the other being. And you have no power to influence that. But if you feel you are that God, then in being God, how are you relating to those around you and so forth? You know, it then becomes more key to you rather

Than what you’re getting from someone, you know. So that’s so that’s the kind of vision. And I’m so excited. I love my new physicist who I haven’t met yet, but I hope I will soon, whose name is Carlo Rovelli, who just wrote a wonderful book called White Holes.

So he sort of is intimating that beyond the black holes, where it sort of fits with the idea of death as a black hole, you’re in there and you’re obliterated, you never get out. You’re imprisoned in some crushing situation, which sounds very hellish, really. But but but they turn into white holes.

So clear light is the ultimate white hole for black holes, maybe just part of a cycle of things being contracting and expanding. But even as massively contracted as they are, they’re still beneath that is this bed of infinite energy and are really permeating it as a bed of infinite energy.

And it’s just a compression of mass and so on. You know, Einstein also was close to that with his idea that the speed of light is an absolute only because the concept of speed no longer had meaning. The reason that it’s an absolute, he said, is

That its mass becomes infinite at that speed. So in a way, by thinking about a kind of a kind of threshold beyond which things are infinite, he was touching that. But because he was because of the Western Enlightenment, which I think is enlightenment, I love it.

But they got dogmatic about there not being spirit, soul and mind, which was that’s not enlightenment. That’s crippling their investigation of things by a dogma, which they tried to break away from the church’s dogma. But then they made a new dogma that there’s no mind and no

Spirit, just the brain is doing something, creating an illusion. And but by touching speed of light, sort of the absolute, because then it’s everywhere. So it doesn’t need to speed anywhere. He’s sort of getting close to the sort of paradoxical possibility of what we call clear

Light or transparency is what I like to call it, actually, because it’s more mysterious. And so that’s that’s the basis of the whole thing. The other thing is that in the in the Book of Natural Liberation, they keep telling you and you’ve been studying it wonderfully.

And they keep telling you, well, now, if you really open your mind and heart, you’re going to be liberated, which means you’re going to feel immersed in clear light. So you will stop worrying. You will stop fearing anything. You will feel completely satiated and satisfied, filled with

Energy, in other words, and good energy, which is peaceful energy. It’s powerful, but peaceful. You know, it doesn’t shake you up and stir you around in some way. And and and that’s liberated. But and it leaves people with the dualistic idea that that’s they sort of escaped from life.

That is there in the tradition in the sense that in teaching some people, the Buddha felt it was too much to tell them, well, you’re already clear, like everything is already fine, whatever. But it’s just that you don’t know that you are. And so you’re creating an artificial place of suffering for yourself.

But some people can cope with that, although it puts your mind into a funny situation. But but many can’t. And so especially very sensitive ones. So they so they have to feel they want to go to an absolute away and be absolutely free of pain.

You know, because they were but they’re not and they’re not thinking that a relative thing cannot experience an absolute. They can only theorize about it. But it’s because absolute means it’s not related. Yes. So therefore, there’s no way you can plunge into it and so forth.

The only way you can there can be an absolute loving energy, meaning completely giving energy would be if you’re already it. Actually, and then you’re running around feeling you need things because you don’t know that, you know, you’re immersed in it. It’s like the fish fish in the water doesn’t

Know that it’s in water or something. Yeah. So that’s so that’s that’s the idea. So I really loved it because it makes sense to me. And I think it is better science from my point of view, which is what I was looking for that I didn’t find in the West.

And I didn’t want to have blind faith in something that didn’t make sense to me. And I think there’s a difference between something that seems irrational and something that is maybe. Transcendence, a sense of being able to capture it with your thinking,

So sort of experience it like, for example, when you eat an apple. There’s no way you can fully a good, delicious one. You can’t describe every aspect of the experience. You can write a poem about it and you can do a chemical analysis of your taste

Buds and a neuroscientific analysis of the experience of eating an apple. None of it completely capture the amazing experience of eating an apple. So in a way that in itself, it isn’t just Nirvana is ineffable or undescribable. Life is indescribable. Finally, you know, but that’s it.

But it’s not irrational to eat an apple. You eat a poisoned apple. That would be irrational. Right. You have to experience it. And as you’re speaking, it makes me think about how people have attachments, right? We have attachments to our loved ones. We have attachments to our smartphones, our

Computers, (yes, we are Cyborgs) … being in nature. So I think when people think of death and when they have a loved one and then their body is not animated, they can’t communicate with them the same way. It’s very much a loss. So what does this natural book of liberation share about

How we can do we lose a connection to our loved ones? Do they does that remain? What happens with what we hold dear in our lives? Right. Well, the book of natural liberation does not doesn’t really. Develop its own underlying spiritual practice necessarily.

In other words, that one has to do with true love versus greed. In other words, true love, as defined by the Buddhist, is where you really will the happiness of the beloved. And it has no selfish element of you want to have it required.

You want the beloved to love you. That’s so that’s sort of more self-centered. So the idea is that you will be loving and you will enjoy your beloved when you and you can be still loving them, wanting them to be happy.

But the way your attachment is not the one where you want them to be in love with you and you want them to be your possession, so to speak. That’s that’s not you. You love them. And you know that you’re happy when you feel free. And so do they.

So the ideal of love is love no matter what to the beloved, you know, not not dependent or conditional upon them responding, you know. So so that already lessens the cleanliness about attachment and that and the mixed greed and domineering and insecurity thing. That’s what one is supposed to work on.

And precisely because the ideal is that reality itself is the free energy. And I always use it with people at arms in our wellness spa. We have a patented, but of course, it isn’t patented, sleeping yoga. We call it where I urge people to use the inference that when they’re tired at night,

You know, because they’ve been doing some practice all day or they’ve been working all day or they’ve been whatever they do all day and they’re happy to be unconscious. And then it’s almost like be nothing because I just couldn’t hold up the world anymore. I can’t keep pursuing it.

And then they feel better in the morning. So that means that they’re not lying in a dark space of nothing. That there’s some something that came in and filled up the cells, filled up their something, and they feel stronger. And I digested their food and kept cooking because

They’re breathing and they keep taking in oxygen. But somehow also other things they feel much better about. So someone is sharing energy with them when they sleep. And so that’s the but but the point is, they’re not really open to their supremely open to that

Sharing when they sleep because precisely they’re not thinking about guarding their boundaries. Once you collapse into your pillow and pull the covers up, it’s all quiet and don’t bug me and you are you’re everything is open. So you’re completely vulnerable, defenseless, but also sort of all your tubes, all your intakes are open.

And therefore that and then that infinite energy automatically then flows into somewhere where there’s a deficiency and effect, which is why we so much do need to sleep a third of our lifespan we’ve been sleeping because we’re in this boundary between that clear light.

And then when we try to carve off a space within it, that’s just for us, because we think that has to be because that’s more real. You know, and so and so that’s the thing, I think. So so we have the idea is precisely, for example, in the death point between

People in the book of the dead context or the book of natural liberation context. When you first go, you know, when your soul mind and by the soul has a little body like a subtle energy body, there’s always the physical support and the mental guide or, you know, the support ed in life.

And there’s a subtle level of that, which is the bridge between the brain and the senses and the course body. And then there’s a subtle body, which is central nervous system. Amazing thing that human beings have evolved. Totally amazing. And each individual human being has involved that over many lives.

And it’s a little bit different from Darwin, which is which all relates to the species involving it. So intelligent and yet vulnerable and sensitive and so on. And and that’s the bridge to the soul, super subtle soul mind and soul body,

Which is the one that then rises in a dream and even in the process of life and also rises from the body death. But the first moment when the when the soul that soul mind is not working through the central

Nervous system and not working through the five senses and the mental sense that coordinates them, then it certainly feels vastness. And then it was attached to that body. So then people struggle. They want to get back into it because they thought that was a secure

Way to be if they were living without relatively without pain. They’re not calling Jack Kevorkian. It’s what they do when they’re in terrible pain. They don’t want to get back in. But otherwise, they feel very. So then they’re trying to urge in the Book of the

Natural Liberation, don’t freak out this clear light. This vast, infinite vastness is your mother. And, you know, your awareness of it is your is your is the father of your further existence. So you’re connected to the mother and the father, you know, and you’re in you’re in their lap.

You’re kind of in their embrace. You’re in in a feeling of deepest love. And and that’s and they want you to reach where you you are just wide open to the love of the they want you to trust to have confidence, to have faith and to be embraced by their loving universe.

Just as just as the really, truly deep, mystical monotheist feels. Well, there’s all this story about you have to if you’re bad, you get punished. Dante’s Inferno and blah, blah, blah. And I’m so scared and all this, but the really deeply know God loves

Me, you know, and then Jesus or Krishna or they’re all these sort of bodhisattva symbols of angels mediating between the idea of the universe being the more powerful thing. Yours is the love. So that’s a good side. That’s why Dalai Lama likes monotheism.

But he doesn’t like it when because he doesn’t like the aspect for some people by attributing omniscient omnipotence and omnipotence to some other being. And then they become authoritarian and then they think if they recite the name of that being, they can go and kill everybody who doesn’t

Agree with that name and do a horrible thing, which are completely not what that ultimate reality wants, because that ultimate reality is sustaining the sweetness of connection and life and interconnectedness. And that’s what it likes. You know, doesn’t like the pure good energy of the real life doesn’t want beings to suffer.

It’s not a person that dislikes anything. It’s pure love. In that sense, if love means whatever the beloved wants to make them happy, that’s what they should have. If that’s what it means, then that’s what reality wants. If you make it something that wants, it wants everybody to share its infinite energy.

In your book, you share that the pure land is in your heart, within the four directions and its center. The wisdom inside you, they do not come from anywhere else. Yes, that’s really that’s nice. That’s like the quantum people have a concept of nonlocality.

That things are not located here and not there at some deep, subtle level. But they’re there. There’s kind of cruising around this area because because if you examine reality, including the subtle layers of mental reality and you can I dare say spiritual soul reality,

Then you everybody finds the same things because that’s what’s real. And the scientists are right on the brink because of quantum. Before that, the attachment to the attachment to materiality was very absolutist, connecting to imperialism, that you want to own all the little state, you want to control everything.

You have omnipotent. God is on my side, you know, this kind of thing. That part is has caused problems, hasn’t it? Said for about 5000 years, we’ve had patriarchal, militarized, violence dominated societies based on the idea that there was a violent, very absolute that is pushing us to do that.

And Buddha was a rebel against that and all the mystics of all the world traditions, I think, pretty much did very often they were they were executed for that in many and many more rigid cultures, more orthodox cultures. But in but India, see, India had yoga and India has all happy things.

When Christianity has also brought happy things, Moses also brought happy things, Mohammed did. Their traditions have been distorted on and off, as have the Asian ones by kings, usually some high priests who are in league with kings to frighten people that they needed somebody else protecting them.

The reality is really dangerous and it could be bad. You don’t know, you know. So then that’s when people get really scared. And then the materialists dominated actually now trying to move beyond that in a way by saying everybody becomes nothing.

But then it has a negative side there is that, well, then nothing matters. So I can do whatever I feel like and I can hurt anybody, grab anything, just grab for the immediate activity. And that’s just not turning well. Well, now doesn’t like it. And from a Buddhist perspective, we’re all interconnected.

Yes. And so for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. It does. Today is such a sad it’s such a sad time, you know, everybody wants the Russians to be happy, the Ukrainians to be happy, the Palestinians to be happy, the Israelis to be happy. No reason why they can’t be.

I think I think we really have to get past these people who desire omnipotence themselves, which are these either dictators or wannabe dictators who want to just do whatever they want no matter who gets hurt. And they’re and basically they are one group.

And they are to be very pitied even because they’re so doing is causing so much damage that that’s why I think really democracy is really the right thing. We have to hand that to the Athenians and actually in a lesser extent to Buddha and to Jesus,

The idea that everybody everybody kind of has a divine right to be free and people shouldn’t enslave each other, harm each other, dominate each other. And then people in history who want to conquer everything in these conquest cultures and these violent things are no longer tolerable.

Now that we we have discovered so much about reality that our weapons are so powerful, you know, it’s not just some people that a knife fight outside of a bar is like nuclear weapon fights. You know, they should have woken up to that fact.

And so, therefore, there have to be safeguards, guardrails where one loony person cannot dominate the lives and harm so many people, these pyramidal social structures with a with a with a top, you know, pharaoh, divine, practically divine right of king’s dictator sitting on top of it.

You know, and we know who they are. I don’t have to mention any names. And they’re on every side. And they they they need each other. They like each other because the enemy gives them a way of trying to persuade their

People to let them to to dislike their enemy and not dislike the dominating dictator. You know, like like until they won’t stop their war because they know if they stop, they’ll be thrown out. So actually, when we say we’re for them all, that means it’s like, you know,

Helping Ukrainians is helping the Russians because the Russians are not driving, except for a few oligarchs. They are not driving under the dictatorial thing. In fact, they live there. They’re very if you look at the number of hospitals, the number of schools, their economic situation of the regular people, the creative people,

It’s terrible in the last 30 years since it was bad already. That’s why the Soviet Union collapsed. And then there was an opening. And then they then the same domineering people got all the wealth and still use the same crushing power, you know, and they crushed the democracy within 12 years.

And it’s not the Russian people are genius, brilliant people. Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, they’re wonderful people. And and there’s no reason for them to be so intolerant of other people having a cheery time in the European Union. Perhaps they need a few more. Well, maybe hopefully not too many, but possibly reincarnations or it

Demonstrates some of their are a lot of their attachments, perhaps. That’s the thing. See, the reincarnation thing also is if someone dies in a violent way, say someone dies because they’re bombed with their family. So they die seeing their children, their beloved wife, their beloved

Parents, their beloved brothers and sisters dying at the same time. They’re going to die with tremendous anger against whoever dropped out. So there is a real likelihood that they’ll be reborn as the child of the dictator who pulled the trigger, the grandchild.

And they will be very angry. Then somehow they’ll be destructive in that society. It was the one that dominated them. I’m very likely maybe there’ll be a strong drive to do that. They may fail, but there’ll be a strong drive. So so they have in the Indian literature, they have, well,

You kill your enemy and then he’s after your next life. It comes back to life. There’s no place of an absolute ending. You know, I get out of my universe. No, it doesn’t work like that. Nobody does. And if you’re really harmful to others, they’ll get after you sooner or later.

Yeah. And as as people continue to liberate through different in-betweens or reincarnations, then what happens? What happens when we? Yeah, well, what happens, you know, I know, I don’t know. Well, I met about 25 years ago, Hungarian journalists when Hungary was opening and happy. And he said that we Americans didn’t realize in

The sort of Eastern Europe tribal thing, you know, that that with the nuclear in the Cold War, with nuclear power, superpowers and all that, there hadn’t been another nuclear war since 1945. We didn’t realize that was something miraculous because everybody’s you know, the males have to have wars every spring in Eastern Europe.

You know, there’s a boundaries, you know, they they’ve been battling for many centuries. And even the European Union, therefore, is kind of miracle French and Germans, you know, David added and English and French, you know, Henry the fifth, you know, once more to the breach. So it’s very much like that.

And the Asian ones actually have been a little less so, in fact, in history, the recent history, because precisely there is this different spirituality there. More and more. The mystics weren’t killed off, you know, as much as in the West, the mystics were more sent out their vibe.

So but the point it was wonderful modern time that we’re in now where we can see everybody, we can see their faces. And when people are about to kill other people, they start looking really ugly. They have a snarling kind of expression. And that’s what we consider that anybody considers

That kind of angry face ugly and smiling, happy, genuinely, internally happy smiling face is going to be not harmful. We there can be a deceiving smiling face. Yes. But mostly smiling face is different. And we see that. So so you know, the the Hitler types are not hiding in bunkers.

They’re on TV all the time. And there and there is the presumption that really people should have a say in what they do. You know, and then if they’re either corrupting the democracy or they or they or they were pretending that it doesn’t, for example, the empire, the dictator of China right now,

And the communist party, they’re depending they’re pretending that Chinese have always like dictators. The emperor was a big dictator. He was not. That’s a distortion of Chinese history. The first bad dictator in China, the one who built the wall, was a paranoiac called the

Yellow Emperor. But he burned every single book of Confucius. All the Confucian books he burned. And that was before Indian Buddhism came and helped support Confucianism, which then they helped for two thousand years. So the way the emperor thing was defined, it was sort of like like King Charles in England.

Was for all his difficulties in bopping and bipping at his coronation. It’s not really a rock and roll type of guy. He could not declare war on France and march over there at the head of an army. He’s he’s just a symbol.

But that day. So so the English had made a lot of wars. But but it’s not like, oh, that’s a Western thing. They discovered democracy. Because, you know, they still got a king there. But he’s just an ornament. He’s like a movie star. You know, and that’s what the Tibetan Chinese

Was for hundreds and hundreds of years. They were sort of ceremonies and he was like a priest or something, you know, in China. The emperor, he couldn’t hear their own ministers. There was a huge bureaucracy that decided what to do, you know, that was based on knowledge and reading Confucius.

And Confucius was not into killing people. Which is why he didn’t have a good job with it. At the end of time, he didn’t get tenure because the local local king that he advised, you know, he was like the sage, but he wouldn’t the king wouldn’t listen to him when the king

Wanted to have a little fight or get some more territory or do do whatever he wanted to do. He wouldn’t want to listen to Confucius. So it’s not true that the whole fake idea of civilizational cultures and societies and Western democracies is like a colonial export. And by the way, that’s totally fake.

People everywhere want to be free, and especially they don’t want a structure where one person in a bad mood and whose paranoid can mobilize huge destruction within their own country and their neighbors countries. And at this point, the whole planet, they are destroying the oil industry, the petropaths,

I call them, they are destroying the entire planet with pollution and by filling the air with carbon and the and then if they went into war, they have their hydrogen bombs and they will destroy everything, you know. So, Bob, how do we? Well, we’d be happy.

The way we do it is by being happy, being active, actively happy. The lady in the Zoloft commercial, you know, and but we don’t take that. We don’t have to take Zoloft, although there might be sometimes all of them can be helpful. Something like that. But some medicine can be helpful.

But what the medicine is, is love and being happy and counting our blessings and being grateful to those who are kind and being kind to others. And kindness is the medicine and kindness. You also have, like, you know, tough love, fierce compassion when someone’s alcoholic

Or something, you don’t just give them another bottle of vodka. You know, you get them to stop. So they’re, you know, being loving. That means sometimes you have to be strategic, you know, but you don’t destroy. Point is, you know, my fantasy would be, you

Know, if I if an alien came to me with a big, great spaceship and with beaming ability to transport transporter being, I would just fly around and I would transporter the lead dictators in all these societies that are that are sending in troops and bombing civilians and killing them with missiles.

And I would just beam them up. And then when they would be beamed up, they would go to a wellness spa. But they would be required to stay there until they actually really felt well without destroying anybody. You know, punishment and solitary confinement, sorts of things.

No way. Massage therapy, you know, acupuncture, good food, good food. That’s right. And friendly people, you know, bring up if their grandchild or granddaughter or daughter or ex-wife had tried to talk sense into them in the past, they didn’t listen with their power obsession.

And those people would be enlisted to come and cheer them up. And they have to listen, though. They would have to listen. That’s my fantasy way. I think, you know, with the mass media and although they are abusing the social media to to to enforce craziness and spread anger,

Basically it doesn’t work because nobody wants to see anger, really. Very small minority, maybe try to fit 20 percent are still hung up or so scared that they feel safe when they’re shouting and screaming about somebody. But nobody wants those shouters and screamers. And and any media that promote them by giving

Them too much airtime, they are blamable as as NBC exec, former executive, who was eventually thrown out for misbehavior with women. But he I won’t mention his name, L.M. or his initials. And he said that all the airtime he gave to some of the shouting and

Screaming on NBC was good for NBC, but bad for America, he said. Yeah, they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t do that. And there’s some control of that. And we will see to it. I know we will. All the nice people. You know, thinking people will do that. Well, in the Buddhist deities that you mention

In your book, maybe we can help mobilize them to that end and that all beings really do for them and Christian deities, the the Muslim deities, the Hindu deities, the Jewish deities, they’re all the same thing. And none of them actually, they all none of them really want, you know, there’s a wonderful

Sutra not not famous in Tibet, but they know about it, but it’s famous in other Buddhist countries. They have the sutra in Tibet, but it’s not an important one for them. But anyway, they know the story where one yogi learns to travel psychically to heavenly

Planes and they go to the Brahma, who is considered the god who create the creator by in general, the society at the time, Buddhist time, although Buddha and Brahma says, by the way, after some amusing exchange, Brahma says to him, go on earth to see that guy

Called Buddha and ask him some of these questions. He’ll give you good answers and then do me a favor and ask him from me to tell people that I’m not omnipotent. And therefore, when horrible things happen to them not to blame me, when good things happen to them, they can say, oh, thanks.

Thanks, Brahma. Thanks, God. Thank God. When horrible things happen, you know, horrible diseases, children being killed, war, pestilence, famine, et cetera. I don’t like them blaming me because I would just stop it if I could. So they have their own responsibilities. We’re all working together.

It gets them. We all get out of balance. We get cycles of violence and vengeance. And that’s not my wish for anybody. So I would like Buddha to tell them that. Don’t blame God. Yeah, we have our own free will. Yes, we do. And even a small thing we can choose.

So, you know, for example, blaming God for the Holocaust, like some famous people did, then I’m sure God didn’t like it. I feel very sympathetic to Yahweh. I like him. He’s doing his best. You know, he’s not asking to bomb babies, though. It’s not his especially they believe in the same one.

That makes no sense at all. They can’t share their space. They believe the same thing, really, basically. There’s no religious difference between Buddhist, Christians and Muslims at all, except something that made a difference by rulers to conquer each other and have crusades and things. That’s all. But there’s no difference in the message.

The message is be here now and be happy like Baba Ram does. Yes, yes. Back to love. When people pass, there’s been reports of loved ones being there, waiting for them. Have you found that that is the case, that a deceased, a previously deceased loved one can be there? Very definitely possible. Absolutely.

I mean, I have actually had a few former life memories, but not so vivid. My wife has many more, and she’s much more psychic than me, even though I meditate and all this. But I haven’t. I didn’t. I’m too much. I’ve been too much of professoring for all these years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and I’m not that deep. But I’m sure I mean, I’ve remembered enough to be definitely sure that it happens. And definitely. So there’s another wonderful set of books that I would recommend to people on this one that my wife always recommends,

Which is not the Tibetan book of natural liberation or a book of the dead. It’s an American one by Michael Newton called Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls. He wrote two books, as far as I know, he may have written more. But I know I read those two.

And at first I was grumbling because they’re a little different from the Tibetan because they’re not, you know, because it’s in a Western cultural context. And, you know, like my other friends saw Jesus. When I was younger, I was a little too like, you know, closed about other things.

But I really like that now. And I think that shows that people come from somewhere. They come with a mission and a purpose in this life. And another thing which my wife always underlines is very good, which is that we as beings are bigger than our one consciousness in our brain.

And so we can be fully incarnated somewhere and yet also still be in some sort of celestial zone with sort of different and not just maybe one soulmate, but some soulmates, like a pod, like a pod of porpoises or something, dolphins or whales, you know.

And then we keep being born and reborn in relation to each other and also other people. And it’s not absolutely fixed and eternal and blah, blah, blah. And of course, when you Buddha, the whole all life is your pod.

You know, when you become enlightened, you do expand the amount of beings when you fall in love with the universe as a whole, which is one way of defining, attaining enlightenment. So I think those are very useful to Western people. The book I did, you know, what I’m most proud of in that

Book of natural liberation is actually not the translation, but it’s the study of the death process and the way the Buddhist science presents it. And then the prayers are good for Buddhists. But, you know, and I tried in the translation, you know, when you might meet Buddha so and so

Or such and such a bodhisattva, you know, when the after death state after you left the body, you might meet these and be scared of those and love these and don’t be scared of those, you know, those kind of instruction. I try to say, well, meet Jesus. You’re not going to meet Avalokiteshvara.

You’re not going to meet some being you’re completely unfamiliar with. The loving nature of the universe will present you with someone from your own culture who has symbolized total love and total saving ability and total dedication and protective protection ability. And so like that person in this part of the of the

Of the practice, you know, for yourself, you know. So I think that’s really I could do that much more. I think I should, you know, but I actually do a much fuller one that would use the but I expect people will in other traditions like they’ll have Krishna meeting.

Some guy would be who died at 16 in India somewhere helping some people and he would meet Krishna in the clearing there before finishing the River of Bliss, I imagine. So then they make a book of the dead where a book of the National Liberation, where

You meet Krishna afterwards, just because that’s what he would expect to meet. You know, meanwhile, the loving energy is the infinite of multifaceted and God is omnipotent. If God is close to omnipotent, Brahma is powerful. And if they’re close to powerful, they can manifest different

Personalities for the benefit of different people, whatever someone needs. And so so that’s what an ideal book of the natural liberation would be open ended for people of whatever cultural persuasion to help look for the saving, the loving, the point of goodness.

And my wisdom is bliss book point of that is that reality is bliss. That’s that’s the beginning to change things. You know, even if you don’t get this acre of territory and that river and this of this million metric tons of water, you don’t have to kill a bunch of

People to try to do that because you can manage with whatever else you have, you know, because that finally thing ever there’s enough for everybody. It’s an abundant universe. Right. Absolutely. And what we do to to one, we do to ourselves. Yeah. Imagine if all those oligarchs in Russia or many

Billionaires, I think there’s 37 trillionaires practically. If they spent that money on the hospitals, on the universities, on the things and then live for a couple of million, that’d be fine. Couple million rubles, they can get along 50 million limit and then let the people have a share.

Then there’s no that’s a huge country with rich resources. There’s no plenty of room also. They could have like 200 million Chinese living there and farming and there’d be even more vegetables. You know, it’s huge.

Yeah. I also like how at the end of your book, you mention how if people engage in these certain mantras or prayers that upon passing what you mentioned earlier, that people can attain liberation in this lifetime, but upon what we perceive as death, they can instantly be liberated as well. Definitely, definitely.

And we all do attain liberation in life. We graduate from school, we’re liberated from school and then we’re free to be more active in the world with others. Exactly. We’re liberated from our bad temper, from our bad habits, we’re liberated from our addictions with medicine, we’re liberated from our diseases with medicine, etc.

But, you know, materialism is, you know, is too much making us rely only on material medicines and surgery. We have to make a medical system that more preventive because it cleans up the food system, the soil. And especially we have to stop the carbon pollution in the air. We really do.

And and we know everyone knows it really. And the greedy people don’t want to do it because they think they’re making money as is. And that’s it. That’s all we care about. Meanwhile, what are they going to do with that money when the when the when the typhoon hits their gated community?

You know, and the mudslide is completely wipes out all their fancy furniture. This is useless to them, right? So therefore, you know, everybody will figure it out. We’re just really getting a little bit last minute as well. Yeah. OK, thank you so much.

Yes, Bob, thank you so much for being with me again for your dedication. With helping people to be liberated and be more happy, loving and kind to themselves and each other. Thank you so much for being with me. Well, I’m so grateful myself in that I was one

Of these driven wasp, you know, high achievement. Got to get this kind of wind that got to do the other and not bothering to smell the roses, not listening to them or gentle, nice people and so forth. And slowly I was able to discover and get a little

Bit less irritable, a little bit less selfish. And liberating from those things to even a small degree is liberation. Believe me, I know you know that actually yourself. Of course, I’m preaching to the converted. I know that. OK, thank you so much.

Yes. And for those of you listening or watching, thank you for being with us. You are the reason that we are here. I imagine that by now many of you already realize that in conjunction with White Crow Books, we’ve just launched the new Thinking Allowed Dialogues book imprint and our first title is,

Is There Life After Death?