Kamma and Rebirth | Ajahn Brahm

Kamma+Rebirth Summary Rebirth can happen into any realm or form, including those which are considered undesirable in human society. In deep meditation you can recall memories from your past lives. This can prove rebirth is a fact. Some people's character traits come from their past lives, which they can't remember. The law of karma and rebirth explains how people can come from different species in rebirth, and there's not that much difference between human beings and some of the other higher animals. In Buddhism, karma is the texture of our lives. The good karma we create in this life carries on to the next life. Karma is the result of your actions in past lives and it can be a source of suffering or happiness, depending on how you use it. Buddhism teaches that bad karma can be used to our advantage by turning it into beautiful flowers and fruit in our garden. Some people can remember their past lives spontaneously without meditation. These memories can be corroborated by other evidence such as similar circumstances in previous lives and recognition by family and friends. - Karma and rebirth is the belief that our actions in one life affect our next life. When we do good things, we create good karma, and when we do bad things, we create bad karma. Bad karma can hurt us and others, while good karma can help us and others. Transcription U1 0:00 Hello. Welcome, everybody, once again to this series of talks introductory to Buddhism. But I see many people here, members of our committee, old Buddhists. I think what happens is some of you is any excuse to have another talk, which is great. Why not? But the title of this evening's talk is going to be be aimed at people who have got hardly any understanding of what Buddhism is at all. That's what this series of talks is all about, about the buddhist teachings of karma and rebirths. And one of the reasons we included this topic in the series of four talks on introductory Buddhist teachings is because this is very much at the heart of the Buddhist teachings, the law of karma and rebirth. It's at the heart because in the story of the Buddha, under the boat tree, where he became enlightened, a bodhi tree, in Latin, it's called ficus Religiosis, which literally means, as you can probably understand, religious fig tree. And under that boat tree, when the Buddha became enlightened, there was the first thing which he understood was his previous lives, through the power of deep meditation to accessing. The fact that he'd lived before and reexperiencing some of the main events of that life, of those lives, rather and actually knowing that this was not the only life, there'd be many lives before, and also by examining the links between those lives, understanding how the law of karma worked. And this became part of Buddhism, the law of armor and rebirth. And it's a fundamental part of Buddhism which informs and changes the way that Buddhists actually look upon their world. You think you can understand that from a Buddhist perspective. If we realize we've lived many, many times and we'd also live after this birth, after this life, rather, then the death of a person is not important. But it's not so important when you realize you're going to live again. Many, many times the end of a person's life is not really a matter of life and death, as they say. This thing's more important. More important than dying is the quality of life. So these are important questions and important aspects which we Buddhism, we look at and we face. But when we start to talk about rebirth, first of all, many people come up with questions about rebirth. One of the first questions they often come up with is that how can there be rebirth? How can actually get reborn when there's probably more people alive today than they've ever been born in the whole of history? Where did everyone come from? There's not enough people who've died, actually, to make all the human beings which are alive today. And the answer from the this is not a new answer. The answer from the 2600 years ago when the Buddha started teaching, is that people actually go from various states of existence in rebirth, not just from human birth to human birth to human birth, but from animal realms to human realms to ghost realms to realms of the angels. What we call Davis. Davis is like a word for meaning, like radiant beings, beings of light. That's actually the word for a lamp in Sanskrit is the same word for a dava. And this is actually where we get deus in Latin theology. Zeus comes from actually the same Indian word, which is, like, for an angel being, a being of light. So there's all these different beings in the whole Buddhist cosmos, not just human realms, but many realms. And the reason why there's more people alive today than there's ever been human beings being alive is you can actually see that the animal realm has many species become extinct. The number of higher animals has got less and less and less. And that's where many human beings have come from in Buddhist ideas. Which is one of the reasons why many people behave like animals these days, because animals in the last life that's only a joke. Please don't take me seriously, but that going from one life to another or one species to another or one life form to another was central to the original buddhist teachings. So this actually explains why there are more human beings today than has ever been born before, because they've come from different realms of existence other than the human realm. And the next thing, which people sort of argue, saying, how can that happen? Aren't human beings so different than the animals? Or even these other realms of beings like coast and angels? What proof have you that such beings exist? But the first question is, how can sort of we get reborn from different species? As a scientist before I was a monk, I know quite a bit about science, and certainly in the. Differentiation of life forms on this planet. The person who invented the word species was a biologist called Linios. And when he decided to actually to classify all the known living beings on this planet, he worked out a system called species. And to be scientific, he worked out set of criteria, a set of tests which he would apply to every living being known at that time in order to put them in this box or that box, he was actually worked out the different species. But unfortunately, when he came to three classes of animals which were chimpanzees, gorillas and human beings, his criteria, which he applied without distinction or preference to all other beings, he could not apply it to those three animals because his science told him that those beings were one and the same species. Human beings, gorillas, chimpanzees are the same species according to the person who actually invented this. But he realized that at that time, europe would not allow human beings to be classed alongside gorillas and chimpanzees. And so he went against his science and created a completely artificial and separate species called human beings. As far as he was concerned, those beings are the same species. There is not that much difference what we're saying here between many of the animals, especially the higher animals and human beings. And so it's quite easy to see how rebirth can happen from one of those species to another. Sometimes people say that some of those animals haven't got the same intelligence as human beings. How can they go from one place to another? But again, modern research has shown many animals which have great degrees of intelligence, even having speech. You may have seen in documentaries. There was a gorilla in New York Zoo called Cocoa who was taught sign language, and that gorilla could actually communicate with human beings using sign language, which developed for people who couldn't speak. And what was most interesting that he was found in his cage on several occasions talking to himself. He was an intelligent gorilla who could actually use concepts intelligently. Also, there was a parrot called Alex. I saw a documentary and I've got a little write up in the magazines about Alex the parrot, who I'm not quite sure if he's still alive, but used to live in St. Louis in the United States, and he, as a young baby parrot, was trained by two psychologists who were experts in speech therapy. They used the same techniques as they used for infants who have some disabilities with speech use some of the same techniques to teach a parrot, who we all know can imitate human words, to teach a parrot a whole vocabulary. And the means to use that vocabulary intelligently. And it s one of the most spooky little videos I ve ever seen. If you close your eyes, you wouldn't imagine that was a bird speaking. You think it was a human being because it was using speech intelligently. They were asking questions, having a conversation with a parrot. And what really convinced me in this little document entry film was when these scientists, they were talking with this parrot and the parrot was answering questions, but simple questions like what it liked carrots or what it no little things like that. But when the carrot sort of said, I'm bored, turn around, and walked away, it was a parrot with attitude. And when actually saw that, you could see just the same emotions and intelligence as you see in human beings. There is not such a great difference between the animal realm and the human realm. That's why rebirth can happen between any of those realms. And also there are other realms. I'm not sure how many of you have seen ghosts. Ghosts are part of Buddhist cosmology, as are angels. Many people have seen those ghosts. Some people have even seen the angels. Beings of light. You may have seen those yourself. When a person dies very often, if you don't actually see them, you feel them or you can hear them. Many people have had those experiences. You talk to the people, they know they're real. When I was at Cambridge, I made a good friend of a fellow called Tony Cornell, who at that time, this was 30, 40 years ago, had on his business card that on the ghost hunting council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He was one of the original ghostbusters, a real one, and he's still a close friend. And he spent his whole life invested gating ghosts. And very often in the newspapers, if there s some story about a haunting in UK, it's usually written by him or he s interviewed because he is the expert. He s a friend of mine and he s got so many stories of ghosts. Ghosts are real. Many of you have heard seen those things and to actually just say they re not is a bit sort of are unscientific. Too many people have seen them. People you may have known, people who aren't crazy, people who don't imagine these things, but people have actually seen them in the clear light of day. And so that these are other parts of the world where rebirth can happen from. So we've got this whole sort of cosmos of other beings apart from humans who also we can get reborn into and can gain rebirth from. Sometimes that in our history that we have struggled with racism. Thinking that one race is superior from another. We've usually or just about got over that. Recently, we've been struggling with genderism, thinking that one gender is superior to another. But I think the next phase of our development as a society is to get over species, ism thinking that human beings are so superior than, say, the animal kingdom, so much so that we can actually use animals for experiments, to exploit them, even kill them. There are many stories of animals who have clearly shown emotions, feelings, and intelligence, and I think that one of the reasons why we reject rebirths. I think it's untenable the reasons that why is it that human beings get reborn as, say, animals or ghosts or angels. Remember, these rebirths are only temporary. Then we get reborn back into other realms afterwards, going backwards and forwards throughout all these realms according to our karma. So that's actually what rebirth is. Now, actually, how rebirth happens is, according to one's, two things in Buddhism one's aspiration and one's accumulated karma. The aspiration is one's desire where one wants to get reborn. And secondly, the karma is like the wherewithal in the same way they say you want to go to say you want to go to Europe, go and visit Paris, say, you have to already want to go. Number one, you have to have the money for the air ticket. The wanting to go there is your aspiration, and the money for the air ticket is like your store of karma. If you have the two together, then you can go to those places. And it's amazing that some people actually would like to get reborn as a cat or a dog. Don't have to go to work in the morning. You get fed three meals a day, lays around all day. There might be, for some people that you might want to get reborn as an animal or a cat or a dog or a bird who can fly through the air. If you have that sort of karma, maybe you can actually do that. There's also the sense of that we do get attached to certain forms of existence, and this is why we do get reborn in those realms and stay there again and again and again. This is actually how rebirth and karma happens from many, many different realms. Sometimes people say, well, if you get reborn into unfortunate existences so you get reborn as, like, a slug or as the cockroach or something. Can that actually happen? And again, sometimes it can, but it's always because of some terrible deed which you've done. People do terrible deeds in this world. You only have to look at the newspapers and see tales of war crimes. They see tales of, was that lady who killed her children? Four kids in the newspapers today. People could do some horrendous things to each other because of the horrendous things we do to each other. Sometimes we have to live horrendous lives for a little while. But in Buddhism, the law of karma and rebirth is not looked upon so much as being a punishment but being like a learning experience. For example, that if one has been very selfish and stingy and hasn't been very generous us in this life, what better way to learn generosity than be reborn poor? Because a poor person who's living outside on the streets, who hasn't got enough food to eat. If you've lived like that for a while, then you carry the memory of what it's like to be hungry. You carry the imprint on your heart of what it's like to be cold and lonely. Which means that in a future time, you'd never be able to pass a person who's hungry without giving them something. You'd never be able to shun a person who is lonely without giving them some kindness. You'd never be able to shut out someone who's homeless without giving them warmth of a shelter for the night. You just couldn't do that because of your experience of having been there. In hunger, in cold, in loneliness. Because of that experience. There's something inside of you will always remember. You actually learn from those experiences. That s why sometimes I call the results of bad karma growing pains things we have to go through, actually to learn what it's like to be on the receiving end of things like loneliness, hunger or even violence. To learn from that so that we would never be violent again. Story I often tell is my own father, whose father, my paternal grandfather, was born in Liverpool and was a very violent man. A drunkard alcoholic. He was a plumber, so my father said. And after finishing work we go to the pub, get drunk, come home, take off his belt and beat any kid who came in his path for no reason and then start beating his wife. In those days, there was no remedy for domestic abuse. When my father was a victim of such abuse, instead of actually. Revisiting that abuse on his children, which was myself and my brother. He actually learned from that experience. Remember him telling me that when he saw that, saw how painful it was, he resolved that if ever he had children in the future, he would never be cool. Unkind, uncaring. That's why he s a very, very soft man and a very caring father to me. It my mother had disciplined us. My father just couldn't do it. There's an example of people learning from the bad experiences of life. And that's what karma really is all about. He gives us opportunities actually to learn. Sometimes those learning experiences are painful, but sometimes that's what we really need. We need to kick up the backside, as it were, to actually to learn what it's like to be on the receiving end of things. And so, as such, the people were born into difficult situations are those ones who really need to learn a lot. But the law of karma is not fatalistic. It's not as if that how I've been reborn in a poor state, how I been reborn without many talents, maybe not so beautiful, maybe not so smart, might be born in a poor country. Sometimes we need to actually to understand that the law of karma is not fatalistic, but is always giving us opportunities to learn and to grow. And a simile, which I always give to make this point very clearly is a simile of the two ladies baking a cake, two ladies are baking a cake. One has got very add ingredients. They've got white flour. Much of which has gone moldy. And they have to pick the green bits out of the flour. And to save the white flour, which is left, they ve got butter full of cholesterol cholesterol enriched butter for their oil. They ve got white sugar to sweeten their cake and even the white sugar their husband has dipped a coffee spoon in. And they have to take out the brown bits to use the white stuff. And the fruit which they have is just so hard. It's so old, it's like rocks. As hard as depleted uranium, which the American troops use. But that's all the fruit they've got. And the kitchen they've got to cook it in is pre War. That's not second world war. That's pre first world war. She's an old kitchen. They've got the very worst of ingredients to bake their cake. And the second group of people, or the second woman baking a cake, she's got the very best of ingredients. She's got this beautiful whole wheat, whole grain brown flour. Coming from a field where there's been no genetically modified crops within a thousand miles. She's got canola oil, which is free from Cholesterol miracle oil. And she's got this beautiful honey, healthy honey from Western Australia. And she's got this amazingly succulent fruit picked from her own garden the day before. And her kitchen is the most modern kitchen you could ever imagine. She's got the very, very best of ingredients to bake her cake. And the question is, which of those two women? The woman with the very worst ingredients or the woman with the best ingredients? Which woman bakes the best cake? And you've all worked out, I would hope it's not always a woman with the best ingredients bakes the best cake because the ingredients is not the whole story. It's what you do with those ingredients is very often the most crucial part in baking the cake. And sometimes the woman with the very poor ingredients because of the care, the love, the skill, the energy they put into baking their cake. They very often make the most delicious of cakes, whereas the person with the very best ingredients, because of being lazy, taking things for granted, not really caring their cake is not delicious at all, is what you put into baking your cake, not just the ingredients, which is crucial in that simulate. It's a metaphor. Some people, you know, are born into this life with bad karma from the past. Maybe not so intelligent. Maybe their parents are very not wealthy. Maybe they haven't even got any parents, but they've got some poor ingredients. Maybe they're physically deformed. They put so much effort and care into their lives. They work so hard and put so much love into it. That from such unpromising conditions they must make such a beautiful life for themselves. They're the heroes and heroines of our world. People who have been disadvantaged because of the efforts and care which they put in become wonderful people, inspirations to us all. There are others who are born into wealth, who have got such talents and beauty. They're the people good karma from the past. But some of them misuse their promising ingredients. I've known some people from good families who went to Cambridge with me, got into drugs and wrecked their lives. People with very good ingredients who didn't bake a good cake at all. It's not just the ingredients of your life, but how you make use of them. The ingredients of your life is karma from the past. What you've got to work with, but it's how you make use of those is called the karma of the present which is the most important. The. And in Buddhism, you can make a great cake out of almost all ingredients. It's easy to make a good cake out of good ingredients, but you can even make a good cake, a delicious cake out of the very worst ingredients. So, sure, the karma from the past is giving you the ingredients which you have to work with. But it's a karma, the present which is crucial, it so what that karma actually points to is saying your happiness, your prosperity, your fulfillment is in your hands. And doesn't matter what you've got to deal with in life, you can always make something of it. And also, if you have suffering, disappointment in your life, there's no need to blame others. It's your karma. You've been heedless, you have been not paying attention, not putting effort, not putting care into what you're doing. Because my teacher in Thailand said about the law of karma if one things happen to you and you blame somebody else, you put the fault on somebody else. He said, it's like having an itch on your head and you scratch your bum. Blaming others is like having an itch on your head and scratching your bottom. You does the itch go away? No, because you're scratching in the wrong place. If you got an itch on your head, where should you scratch on your head? If you're suffering, that's where you've got to work. Stop blaming others. It's one's own karma. Sometimes we need a bit more wisdom to understand the workings of karma. Once, when was teaching in a jail, after many, many weeks, one of the prisoners came up to me and said to me, said, I want to speak with you in private. I gave him that chance to speak in private. And he said that ajam brahm. What I'm saying is not a lie. And. I may lie to others, but I will not lie to you. You're a monk, I respect you. And he said that he's been put in jail for a crime he didn't commit. He said he was innocent. He added that all the crims in jail will probably say this, but in this particular case he said it's absolutely true. I'm honest, I didn't do that crime. And the way he said it in the situation convinced me that he was actually telling the truth. I found out later he was telling the truth. He did commit that crime. And so after telling me that, I thought, what an injustice. When you actually injured, it's so hard to fight injustice. You haven't got the ways and means. So I thought, out of compassion, I should try and help that guy. Maybe I had some contacts, I could maybe get him a retrial or find him a Buddhist lawyer or something to work for him for free. While I was thinking this, of how I could remedy the injustice, this old criminal, he must have been in his 40s, gave me this big mischiefous smile. He said, but. I've committed so many other crimes I wasn't caught for. I think this is fair now. That's the law of karma. And he understood it better than I, because sometimes the law of karma caused an effect. It works in very slow ways. Sometimes we think it's unfair. Why did it happen to me? But if you look back on all the other times, you weren't caught. When you're not caught, do you ever think, it's not fair? Why wasn't I caught? Eventually it does become fair. What goes around comes around. That's a law of karma. Eventually you do get caught. Maybe you didn't actually do that crime. There's other crimes you got away with, and now you get caught for crime you didn't do. That's actually, the law of karma, how it works eventually comes round. That gives us a sense of, like, justice in the world. When I was growing up, I thought sometimes that if there's only one life, the world is very unjust. Because he's some people, really good people, kind people give so much to the world, to others who sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of others and sometimes they don't get any rewards, it seems. I see others being so selfish, mean and cruel seeming to get away with it. It didn't seem to be like justice in the world when I found out about the law of Carmen rebirth. You see how justice works. Eventually it is fair, eventually what goes around does come around. But you do need rebirth of many lives actually, to see that. And it also explains why some people seem to be so unfortunate in this life. Sometimes you wonder what have they done to deserve that? Sometimes little kids, what do they deserve to get cancer when only two or years of age? It gives an indication of maybe justice, where maybe that people were so cool in the previous life. Maybe they were heartless and not caring for others. They have to know what it's like to be sick. Because as I said earlier, when you know what it's like to be sick in pain, how can you walk past someone else who'sick and in pain, you have to go and help them. This is actually how we learn not from theories, but by experience. So this is explains about exactly what karma is and it gives people in Buddhism the understanding that they are the one responsible for their happiness and their suffering. So if you are happy, you deserve that happiness. You've worked for it, so celebrate it. But not just be heedless and celebrate it. Find out why you are happy, where the happiness came from, what you did to make yourself happy. If you're in a good relationship, why is a good relationship? Because if you don't work hard, that relationship will disappear. And falter happiness is a result of good karma. But that good karma wears out after a while. You always have to be making good work. Good karma always have to be working for your happiness. If. So when you're happy, find out why. When you're successful, find out why. When you're at peace, find out why. What you've done to create that, it doesn't come from other people, it comes from you. When you're suffering, when things go wrong, find out why. What you did, why you did that, so you understand that your happiness and your suffering is your concern. Pray to why the people asking for favors doesn't work. For example, that some years ago, a lady who was about to do her exams at UWA came to see the monks and she asked us, can you do some chanting so I could pass my exams? Thinking that somehow the monks can change the karma, we did some chanting just to give us some evidence. But she never came back again. We heard from her friends that she was going around purse saying that monks at this temple are no good because she failed her exam. The chanting didn't work, but their friends told her, don't worry about it. Wasn't your chanting. She's hardly ever gone to a lecture, missed most of her tutorial. She hasn't done any work. She was a party girl. She thought that universities was all about having parties, enjoying yourself. When it came to the exam, she hoped that somebody else, like the monks, could take care of that. And of course, it's your karma, your responsibility. If you want to pass your exams, it's a waste of time asking somebody else to fix it for you. You have to do it. So what the law of karma means is you're happy, is up to you. And if things go wrong, stop blaming somebody else. If you got an itch on your head, that's where you've got to scratch. If the pain is in you, that's where you've got to solve the problem. So it throws responsibility on the individual for your happiness and your suffering as well. So understanding that it becomes buddhism becomes like a personal religion, the religion of personal growth, of understanding just the ways of happiness and avoiding the ways of suffering. Little things like getting angry at others, one realizes, is bad karma. Why is it bad karma? Because it hurts you and hurts others. Simple as that. Forgiving is good karma. Why is it good karma? Because it frees others and it frees yourself. As simple as that. And so one understands, actually the ways of happiness and the ways of peace, the ways of suffering. If you're in a relationship with another person, it needs a lot of forgiveness, a lot of love. That's what love really is. As I say very often here, the meaning of love is to say to another person, whatever you've done in your life, whoever you are, the door of my heart's always open to you. It's like unconditional love. That is actually good karma. It's good karma because it frees the other person you when actually you say things I said this last Friday. That particular expression of love was taught to me by my father, the man who suffered gross physical abuse as a boy in Liverpool before the Second World War. And it was taught to me by him and it was practiced by him. And when I was only about 16 or 17 kids in my school in West London, it was one of the top schools in West London, they started getting into dope, into drugs. Even though my mates were taking marijuana, I refused to take it. And the one reason why I refuse is because was when my father said someone like that to me. I didn't want to hurt him. And I knew if he found out, he would really hurt him badly that his son was taking drugs. When he gave me that degree of trust and love, saying, no, son, whatever you do in your life, I'll always love you. The door of my heart will always be open to you. Because he said that there's no way in the world I would hurt him. And that was actually what kept me off drugs when I was young, until I got to university and started getting to Buddhism. Just because distrust for me. So this is why that sort of thing is good karma. If you can say that to your partner in life, to your parents, to your children, they will always respond in the best of ways. This is how we create happiness and good karma. And when we create such good karma in this life, when we die, we know that things can't just stop, that goodness has to carry on. And this is actually where we understand just what propels our life from one existence to another existence is that karma, which is the texture of this thing we call the human mind. As a Buddhist, we understand this is not just theory, because we do a lot of meditation in Buddhism, and that meditation actually goes inside the body to the mind. In Buddhism, we have what's called six senses seeing, hearing, smell, taste, touch and mind. The mind is, as it were, underneath all these five senses. And what we do in meditation, we let go of all these five senses and. So the seeing stops. We close our eyes. We pay no attention to the sounds outside. No smell, no taste, and even let the body disappear. So we have no touches. We don't feel the body anymore. It disappears. We go to the realm of the mind in those deep meditations when there's no way that you can be contacted. People tap you on the shoulder. You can't feel it. They talk. You can't hear you're deep inside yourself in very ecstatic, peaceful states. But in those states, you discover one thing about the law of rebirth that when the body dies, this thing we call the bind, which are accessing in deep meditation. No way will that stop. So two weeks ago, I told those stories about people getting to Deep Meditation in Perth and taken to Sir Charles Gardner Hospital because their wife thought they were dead. They're just in very deep meditation and having the ECG and EEG put on them, ECG measuring the heartbeat. And the heart wasn't moving. It was still and. And the brain waves on the EEG, the brain was dead as well. Just the brain was just completely inactive. They were just in a deep meditation. They came out afterwards, the surprise and relief of the doctors and his wife, but actually shows you that there was a person brain dead during the time of the meditation. This is, as far as doctors were concerned, heart not beating, but their mind was still. Still. There a story I never told then for my teacher in Thailand, who the last few years was in a coma, but would always get into deep meditation. His particular story was because many of the monks were looking after him, that the monks wanted him just to die natural death. But because he was the famous monk in Thailand, the king of Thailand ordered the monks, no, just look after him, keep him going as long as possible. So the king paid for a nurse, a male nurse, to be with this great monk 24 hours a day on three shifts, three eight hour shifts from the local hospital. And the monks would also be on shifts looking after this monk, just to do all the chores for him. Now, one evening has happened quite often. My teacher, Ajanchar, stopped breathing, and the nurse on duty got very upset. He knew that one day this great monk would have to die. But he didn't want him to die on his shift. Another nurse's shift. Okay, but on his shift. So he wanted to resuscitate this great Monk, and the other Monk said, no, leave him alone. He s just going into deep meditation. And the nurse didn t believe this, so they came to a compromise that they would the nurse would leave him like that as long as he was allowed to take blood samples every few minutes just to make sure the blood was well oxygenated. Because that s all you need to keep the brain going to make sure there s oxygen in the blood. They agreed upon that. And it was One of these times when you could actually check what it's like when a Mic was in deep meditation. Even though he was at this day for Two Or 3 hours, not breathing at all, they found the blood was fully oxygenated throughout the whole period. The body was so still, it didn't need oxygen. He was in A deep meditation. The mind still perfectly alert, but so still metabolism had stopped. This is what happens in deep meditation. And one of the reasons why mindless and lay people get into that deep meditation, because they know that when the body stops, when you stop breathing, when the brain stops, the mind does not stop it. This is an experience which you have and that would actually prove to you that at the end of your life, when your body stops, when the heart stops once and for all and the brain stops, your brain dead, the mind still carries on. This by itself is proved to anyone in meditation. That what's going to happen to them when they die. That's why often say that deep meditation is like training in dying. We get sort of courses these days in marriage. Before we get married, we get courses. So we learn how to live with each other. You get courses before you actually start your career. You get training and all sorts of things. So in this place, in this joint, we teach people how to train, how to die. This is dying training. It's going to happen to you one day, you might as well train for it. Because here we're actually learning what happens. And so we can actually see these truths of reincarnation from our own experience in our deep meditation. But the other way of actually proving that rebirth actually is a fact is not just seeing the process. By knowing the mind know it will continue after death from one death, from one life to another. We also are understand just how. We have been reborn in the past, because in those deep states of meditation, we can actually remember our past births, our past lives. This is when the mind is very in deep meditation and becomes empowered. And you can just ask yourself simple questions like, what is my earliest memory? And you can recall early times of this life and even go further back and recall previous lives. And because many people doubt the existence of rebirth and say, well, you can't prove rebirth, how can you know rebirth when you haven't died yet? And the point is, you haven't died many times because you can't remember it. How many people can remember when they were born? Just because you can't remember it, does that mean it didn't happen? Of course you all were born, we just forgot. We can't remember it the same you have lived before, but we can't remember it. In meditation, you can actually recall those experiences. So you have to get quite deep in meditation, get a lot of happiness, a lot of peace. Coming up, you ask yourself this simple question what is my earliest memory? When you do this, it's fascinating what happens? I can't say, because one of our monastic rules about my own memories of previous lives, but I can say it's the first time I was trying this, when I recalled an early event of this life and gives you an indication of what actually happens when you start to search your previous lives. When I did this, after a good meditation, a smear came in my nose, which I recognized immediately as a smell of my baby's prab. And as soon as I recognized the smell, it was as if I was back in my pram again as a what, a three or four week old baby. The next thing which I remembered was this little brew toy which I always had in my pram porky the pig even remember its name. Remember how it used to rattle and how my mother used to walk it just hadn't had two little legs and used to walk it backwards and forwards to make me laugh. And that was a memory. I must have been about 30 something years of age. A memory of my first couple of weeks of life in my baby's pram. I never knew too much about biology. I was a physicist at the university. But I did ask somebody afterwards, and they commented that the first few weeks of your life it that you recognize things like your mother, like your familiar surroundings, by smell. That's one of the first senses which develop in a human being when they're born. It was fascinating. That's how I recognized that memory. Through its smell, the familiar smell of my baby s pam little Porky the pig and my mother. And these are memories which come up which are very different than what we normally call memories. These are reexperiencing the past. And if you go deeper and ask an earlier memory, please, you get memories in your mother s womb. It if you go earlier, people say babies don't feel. You actually know you feel because you're back there re experiencing a time many years ago. And one of the interesting things which come with these memories comes a certainty that was you. In the same way that you know what you did this morning. You never imagined that that was you. You with the same degree of certainty. Actually, even more than that, you know that was you a previous time. Then you ask yourself the question earlier, please, and get back to times before you were born. Previous lives. Many Buddhists do that. Because they do that, they actually can check out for themselves that rebirth actually is a fact. Also, people these days who can remember their past lives spontaneously without meditation. People who, for one reason or another, are born in similar situations and recognize people from the past. A good example is one friend in Sydney. He was a very devout Buddhist. And when he had an auntie who was a very successful businesswoman and very wealthy too, and when his auntie was working out her will, she only left a piddance to this particular nephew. The reason was that his auntie, being a successful businesswoman, had two things she hated more than anything else in the world. One was paying taxes. The other thing she hated was religion. And so that when she worked out her will, knowing that this one nephew was the only religious person in the whole family, he was a Buddhist, she decided if she left him sufficient money, he would just give it to the Buddhist temples and she would not be happy with that. So she just left this one particular nephew just a very, very small amount of money, much less than the harder relations. That's all he got when she died. But what happened later, which is a good teaching of karma and also rebirth a little while after she died, his wife became pregnant. After nine months, she gave birth to a beautiful daughter who actually they called by the name Dhana. He was the Buddhist, like a gift. And little Darna, when she was born, when all the family members came round, they all remarked, oh, that really looks like your aunt's. And that was just the start of a lot of similarities, which eventually became so strong that all the family recognized that I was the aunt reborn. Little things he said, like driving down the freeway close to her mansion, when she would, in her father's words, go ballistic. Daddy, daddy. My mansion's over there. Take me to my home. Or when he came into the front room with a cup of coffee. One of the few things he did inherit was his auntie's crockery. Not the best stuff, just the stuff she'd used for every day coming in with a coffee mug. A child. Daddy. Daddy. That's my cup. Give me my cup back. So many recognitions of past life because she didn't like religion. She had to endure poverty as a young child because she didn't give much money to her future father. That's karma, but also just the karma, the inclinations which we carry, the character traits which we carry from one life to another. He told me that once when they were going down the M one freeway out of Sydney they passed a billboard erected by the New South Wales government. It was concerning tax. This little two year old asked Daddy, Daddy, what does the word tax mean? And Daddy replied and. When you get some money, like I'll give you pocket money later on, you have to give some of that to the government. Trying to explain to a two year old child what tax means, and his two year old child said straight away, daddy, when I get any money, I'm giving nothing to no government. Her hatred of paying taxes was still there as a two year old child. There are many people remember their past lives, and this is the other piece of evidence which we have, that people actually were there in the past. Sometimes we see documentaries of this. One of the famous documentaries which I remember was done on channel Seven called Reincarnation about ten or twelve years ago, where a person regressed a lot of his patients, and some of them recalled events from the past so long ago. They were past lives, and some were in a land in Europe and. Of people who'd never left Australia. It could be ascertained with great ease from the passport office that these people had never been to those lands before. One of the most impressive cases was of a lady in Sydney never left Australia who remembered in a previous life being a man, a doctor in a small town called Blagari in Scotland. I'd been walking in Scotland as a young man growing up. I knew Scotland quite well, but I never knew that town. It was not a famous town. She remembered her past life as Dr. James Archibald Burns, a blagari in Scotland. James is a common name and so is Burns. But Archibald was very uncommon. What be the chances that in the times which he said in the 1850s that the doctor in this town there only be one doctor in such a town in such a such a time, what were the chances of finding in the ancient records the doctor at that time was a person called Dr. James Archibald Burns? So Channel Seven paid for this psychologist and all of these people to go over to Europe, paid for this lady to go with the camera team to Scotland, to Brigari, to the local library to see if there was any records. In those days, doctors were important people in the community on several committees. So in the records of those committees you saw in attendance. So and so and so and so. James Archibald Burns, MD. Many records of his contribution to the community. Because Dr. James Archibald Burns was a doctor at that time in Blagari in Scotland. She remembered the medical school in Aberdeen completely. And, you know, the British are always eccentric. There was one person, Aberdeen, whose hobby was the old architecture of the medical school in Aberdeen. He was the expert. He had all the old plans and checked her out to see if she realized and understood what the medical school looked like in the 1850s. In the end, on this documentary, he said, this lady knows more than I do. She knew exactly what it was like. Very, very convincing for somebody who, through regression, recalled so many events of her past life and. Events which couldn't have been imagined, facts which couldn't have been got from other places. There's many books, articles, documentaries of people who remembered their past. So this is actually the Buddhist idea of rebirth and karma and how it works. When we take on that, we understand that it's not just from year. All the Greek philosophers from Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, all of those taught and believed in rebirth, it was part of Western culture, it was part of the early Christian culture. It was only in the Nicene councils, whereas voted out of Christianity and only by a majority vote, it was not in Animus. So this is actually part of Western culture, original Western culture, as well as Asian culture. And with rebirth comes the law of karma. Karma and rebirth. So in Buddhism, we don't have a God. Who punishes people or forgives people. There's a stronger sense of justice there that it's up to us. We are the ones who create our future, our happiness or our suffering. And if we have done some bad deeds, we can actually dilute those deeds but we cannot actually abandon them. It because that would be unfair if somebody because we pray or give a big donation to some church or temple. It seems unfair to me. Like bribery, like bribing the judge. We have to learn from our mistakes which is what karma is all about. Not as a punishment, but as a way of learning to become better people so we don't make those mistakes ever again. That in brief, is a law of karma and rebirth in Buddhism. And that's the hour. So now is the opportunity for questions and answers about what I've just been talking about and to encourage questions. This is also part of karma and rebirth. The burda wants thought why it is that some people what the karmic causes of like being wealthy your next life is. Why some people are born into poverty. He taught why some people are born beautiful while others are born ugly. And in particular, in one of the Buddhist teachings, he taught why some people are born intelligent in the next life, while others are reborn stupid. The Karmic cause for being reborn stupid in your next life is not asking questions in this one. So does anyone want to ask a question about carbon refund? This is your chance to be smart in your next life. You're going to be dummies if you don't ask questions. 12s Okay? This is a Buddhist ceremony where when especially if somebody dies or if somebody's died some time ago, that people do little ceremonies when they they dedicate, they share or transfer good karma to them. And actually how that happens is as follows. That if you in this life see somebody doing a good act, a good deed, a kind act of kindness, if you rejoice in that act of kindness, if you celebrate along with them, then that's good karma for you. Just in rejoicing and saying, that what a wonderful thing this is. It's good karma because you're inspiring yourself. You're sharing in that goodness. You're delighting in goodness. That to karma is not just by body and by speech, but also by mind as well. When you delight in a good act of karma, that is your good karma. So sometimes we have ceremonies in Buddhism when somebody comes and gives an offering to either the monks or the temple. You see, sometimes it's actually passed down the line and everybody touches it and says sardar, which is like, I rejoice. This is good, because that way they share in the offering and. So you don't need to be actually a rich person to make good karma. Sometimes people come to the temple, they give an enormous gift and they want everyone to share in the good karma. So everyone touches that gift, even poor people, penniless people, they say sadhu and they share in that gift because they rejoice and feel happy that such a thing is happening in rejoicing in somebody else's good karma. That is your good karma. And so when we do an act of the sharing of merit, we do something good and kind and we invite our relations to rejoice in that good karma. Deceased relations don't just disappear. They are still around, as I saying, on Friday night, that sometimes we feel our relations, our loved ones, people who are close to us, even though it may be a long distance away, if they're in trouble, we feel that something is wrong. Do. If they've had an accident, do we know it? If it's your children, say, are in problem and strife and having an accident, you know that something's wrong. As a mother, we actually do connect with our loved ones. So if you think of a loved one who's passed away, you can connect with them in the same way wherever they are, whether they've been reborn, and you can invite them to rejoice in this act of good calm, which you're doing in their name. And if they could feel what you were doing, if they knew what you were doing, they would rejoice that you're remembering them and doing goodness in their name. When they rejoice in your act of goodness, then that is their good karma. And that is actually how the good karma goes from one person to another. It's not as if your good karma is put in a package and sent to them. It's your good karma inspires them to rejoice, which is their good karma. Does that make sense to you? So anyone who actually stops somebody doing something good, if somebody's, like going to give a donation to some great charity and you say, don't do that, that's a stupid thing to do, that's your bad karma. First stop is someone being good. So this is why karma is what we do and what we courage other people to do. Do you understand that? What part don't you understand? The way of rejoicing. Do you understand actually, in this life, if the lady sitting next to you does something good and you rejoice in that, do you understand how that's good come for you? Okay. Another way of explaining any good karma is anything which gives you happiness and well being, which produces happiness and well being in you is called good karma. If it produces happiness and well being in somebody else is good karma. Like healing their sickness, like as a doctor or as a nurse, healing their pain as a good friend, that's good karma. You're giving them happiness or giving yourself happiness is good karma. Giving other people pain, harming them, hurting them, or hurting yourself is called bad karma. In a nutshell, it's the difference between good and bad karma. Whatever hurts yourself or hurts another is bad karma. Whether it brings happiness to others is called good karma. So if you do something good which brings happiness to your parents, that's good karma. It brings happiness to yourself. It's good. Comer. It doesn't have to be by deed, even by thought. You can make good comer. So if you rejoice in seeing a good act performed, that is your happiness. It's brought happiness to you. It's good. Comer. You celebrated goodness, kindness. So that's why when you do an act of good karma, of goodness, of kindness, of generosity, for example, was that some years ago, there was a boy in Perth who was cycling down on his someplay in south of the river. Cycling down, he saw two boys that actually caught a wild rabbit and were actually teasing it, hurting even torturing it. He told those two kids, Stop doing that. Of course, they wouldn't listen. He said, look, if you give me the rabbit, I'll give you my bike. And the two boys said, Deal it's on. So the little boy got this rabbit and then released it while the two boys got his bike. When he went home and his mother said, Where's your bike? He said, Well, I saw these two boys, they called a wild rabbit, and they were torturing it and hurting it. So I said, I'll give you your bike if you give me the rabbit. And they accept him so I could save the rabbit and release it back into its home. She told the newspaper it was on the front page the next day. By that evening, he had three BMX bikes, new ones. And see? Just a good karma. Not only that, but he inspired many people. It was a delightful story to read about a kid doing something good to save a small little bunny rabbit. And I got lot of happiness out of that. I rejoiced in that boy's good karma, as many other people did. It was an inspiring story. So we actually, by rejoicing in other people's goodness, that is our good karma. If you're cynical and say, yeah, no, that doesn't always happen. Just the ones which get in in newspapers, that's the time it happens. So it probably didn't happen at all. It's just all made up. Their cynicism is bad karma because it doesn't make us happy at all. It makes us depressed. Another question. Yeah. Is rebirth is rebirth instant? It is instant because even if one is like a ghost afterwards, it's one changes one's being from being a human being into the ghost realm. It's not that much different. So, yes, instant rebirth is into the ghost realm for a few days until one gets a proper rebirth. So it's all sort of instantaneous this in that way. And is there a soul, what we take to be a soul now, I called it the mind earlier. If you look much more deeper, it's actually much more complex than that. It's like looking at the beach. We go down the cottesburg, look at the beach, it looks like a continuous stretch of sand. But that's why they call it like a like a they call it a stretch of sand. But if you look closely, you'll find that it's just made out of individual grains of silicon or silica rather. That's what sand is. If you look even closer under a big microscope, you find even those grains of sand aren't even touching. There's a lot of emptiness in between them. So it really depends on how deep you look. But for the sake of this introductory talk on rebirth, you can say just like call it the stream of consciousness, going from one life to another, because that's how it seems when you die. It's not that much different than when you're alive. That's why when some people die, they don't know they did. It's one of the things we have to do. Monks are great ghostbusters. When all else fails, they usually call the monks in, like one of the stories in one of the head monk in Kuala Lumpur, when somebody died in the house, there's lots of hauntings there. They called in the Christians. Nothing worked. They called in the Muslims, didn't work the Hindus. And last of all, they called in the Buddhist monks. So this monk went into the house, did the ceremonies of chanting. They worked. The ghost went. Unfortunately, though, that all the neighbors came to complain because they just pushed the ghost out from one house into next door and. It so he had to do the charting and all the houses in the district actually to get the ghosts to go completely away. It's a true story. So the mugs are great. Ghostbusters and again, one of the things you have to do is actually tell the ghosts they're dead. They're not in that body anymore. They got to leave. And because sometimes when you die, you don't know you're dead at first because it feels so much the same. Especially if it's been like a sudden death, like an accident or like a heart attack. There's one house in purse owned by a Thai couple when they moved in. The real estate agent never told them the person. When they moved out moving some furniture, some heavy furniture right in front of the door actually died. Had a heart attack in front of the front door. And he's still there. At least he was a few years ago because I saw him quite a few times. And the worst thing, he was always trying to get back in the house and. He was always ringing the doorbell. This is a true story. Always ringing the doorbell. And so they rushed to the door. No one was there. They thought first of all, it might be some kid playing a childish game in the doorbell or going hide behind the bushes. But sometimes it was so close to the doorbell, they opened it straight away. No kid there. They realized it was a ghost. So the owner of the house had this very bright idea. It let's take the battery out of the doorbell. But that doesn't stop a ghost. The ghost can still make the doorbell ring without any battery. Must carry their own power supply. So they got this doorbell with no battery, and we still rings. There's another ghost. People tell me they're ghost stories. Another ghost in Perth there's, who likes watching the TV. So the TV is off and it suddenly switches on by itself. And sometimes, if it's not switched off by itself, sometimes they're watching the TV and the channel changes and. So they sort of switch it back and the channel changes again this ghost doesn't need a remote it's got its own sort of automatic remote so it doesn? T like the channel, the ghost changes it. So it's very frustrating sometimes because the ghost doesn't like the movies or the programs they like. It s another ghost toy. You can actually change a TV channels. Like watching TV. Go on. Yes. Get another TV. One for the ghost, one for you can get the bugs in to do some time. You can do it yourself. Spread loving kindness and make the Golf ghost feel at ease. And now number two reminder goes it's dead share merits in other words transfer some merits. So trying to make the ghost rejoice in happiness because that is way of it gets more happiness and more good karma so it gets enough good karma it can actually go away from that realm. 9s That's right, because you need two things, actually, to get a new rebirth, needs the aspiration to do better for itself than being a ghost realm and then realizing it's dead. My goodness, I'm a ghost. I better do something about this. And also giving it extra good karma. So the aspiration and the karma is what gives you the fuel for rebirth. Goes in a house. Yeah. You tell the ghost to behave there's. One of the monks in Thailand he described, he lives over in Rollestone. Now, he was in one of these monks monasteries in Thailand, which was famous for its ghosts. And when he was meditating, meditating all day, sometimes you get bit tired. So he leaned back against the wall of the heart, pull his feet out just to stretch his legs, and he was dozing off when literally he felt his leg being pulled and. And he thought it was like a heavenly being helping him. So he woke up and he sort of started meditating again. But that was the first instance it started happening again and again, not just when he was leaning against water, he was meditating and something would pull him or poke him and after a while it happened so often, it started to be associated with a very bad smell. Come into his room. It was one of the ghosts playing around with him. The way he sort of settled the issue, they got so sort of irritating. This ghost was always disturbing him. So one day he smelt it coming in and he said, right, you sit down here, meditate. Behave yourself or get out. And that's the last time the ghost ever bothered him. He actually sent the ghost out. It was by firmness and sometimes that's what the monks do. Stop messing around with polyam. Out. If you're going to stay here, behave yourself. It goes somewhere else and goes next door and bothers next door instead of. Because you're no fun anymore. Go on. In the back. Yeah. The feeling of the deja vu. Deja vu. Sometimes deja vu is actually from the past, but sometimes it's you never been to that place before and it's a new place. You couldn't have been reborn there at all. But there are times, especially very good stories, because I was born and brought up in England. There was a comic at that time who was he was on the television a lot and he had he had his own show for a little while. Never became a top comic. Not international, but a guy called Roy HUD. Does anyone remember Roy HUD? Yeah. You remember him in one day he was in London. He brought this story up in a little book or magazine. He was going through London and he got lost. He got a wrong turn. He went down a side street. And he had a huge deja vu. He knew he d been in that street before a long time ago. Now, in London, if there's been any famous people living in London, they put these blue circle, blue plates on the house saying, like, Winston Churchill lived here. Also, Francis Drake lived in this house. And he went to this house, and there was a blue circle there. There's an old musical comedian called Dan Leno, and he was one of the most famous musical comedians of the time. And when he saw that house and that sign, he knew who he was in a previous life. He was that musical comedian. He was a comedian in the 19th century, early 20th century, and after his death, he been reborn and became a comedian in this life as well. He knocked on the door of the house, and, of course, people actually recognized him. What are you doing here? He took the residents around the house, telling them what it was like in his day and. It's very rare. You get like a well known person who remembers a well known life. But that was actually Roy HUD remembered when he was a musical comedian. That was a deja vu, which also came because of that sign there that just triggered all the memories of his past life. He knew who he was in a previous life. Sometimes deja vu's are like that. It that's why sometimes we have love at first sight. When you meet someone in this life, you know you've met them before somewhere. You get on together so well. Why does that happen? Because you have known them before. Another time, another place. It's not love at first sight, it's love again. It sometimes that's also a deja vu feeling. You've known this person before. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes you come across people and you feel really, really uncomfortable in their presence. That's because you've known them before and hasn't been pleasant. But there's other deja vu's which are very, very strange. And these are when you go to places you've never been there before, and you couldn't have been there in your past life, but again, you've been there before. Those are very difficult to explain. It's almost like seeing the future. But seeing the future is actually very, very rare. And you only see actually short while into the future, because the further you see into the future, the more uncertain it becomes. That's why, sort of in Buddhism, we don't really believe in fortune telling or even, like, dreams of the future. One of the stories we actually tell is of this person in purse who in us a couple of years ago had this dream. Like, you have these very, very strong dreams of he had this dream of a horse race. No, so not a horse race. He had this dream of some angels, five angels, and each of these angels had five big pots of gold. And he was just giving them this five big pots of gold. In this dream, he was worth a fortune. And just as he received the last pot of gold, he woke up. And when he woke up, he was in his bedroom early in the morning. There were no angels, and worse, no pots of gold. It was only a dream. It was one of those dreams which we all have from time to time, which you remember when you wake up him. When he went down for his breakfast, he found his wife. He didn't know why had made him five pieces of toast and five boiled eggs, five angels, five be pots of gold, five boiled eggs and five pieces of toast. When he looked to the newspaper, he couldn't believe his eyes. He remembered it was the 5 May. May the fifth month. Just the number five was staring at him. So he opened up the back pages of the newspaper, the sports section, the horse racing. In Ascot. Ascot. Five letters. He couldn't believe his eyes when in race number five horse number five was called Five Angels. That was enough. Too much of a coincidence for him. So he decided to take the afternoon off work. At lunchtime he went to the bank to keep the lucky number five. He took $5,000 out of his bank account. He didn't tell his wife, if you're going to win, you might as well win big. He went to the racetrack. He chose the fifth bookmaker in line to keep the lucky number five and put $5,000 on horse number five. Race number five. Five angels. You know what happened? It came in number five. 19s So what we mean by that is that sometimes if actually you do get a prophetic dream, you don't really know what it means. Sometimes it's not just what it means on face value. Yes. The question over there. Interesting. Past lives. Yeah, it's fascinating. Get you to past lives, I can't tell you what they are want to know actually don't tell the other monks. But if you ask other monks, it's one of our rules. We can't tell about our own sort of abilities in that field. But many monks can remember their past lives. It's interesting because when we get to like rebirth, reincarnation, or any actually religious food, people want to actually not just to believe, but actually to find out for themselves. Even if I did tell, yeah, this was my past life, would that really make any difference to you? It wouldn't. You have to remember your past lives to make the difference. So which is why that people these days, they won't believe what monks, priests say. They won't believe what the scriptures say, which is fine, it's good. You're not supposed to believe those things, but you're supposed to find out for yourself. This is why we sort of try and teach these ways of meditation, to find out for oneself. Because when you actually find out for yourself, that's why I'm interested. I was interested because you want to find out, is this true? Is this not true? Doesn't matter if your best friend says, yeah, I know my past lives, you want to find out for yourself. So this is actually a way of doing it. Obviously you will find out when you die, but that's a bit late. Then you want to find out now, so you find out now if you can remember some of your past lives, where you've been before, and explain some of your character traits, why you are who you are. Because really, all your character kind of just come from this life. People like Mozart being able to write symphonies of four and no way you can actually learn that in one life in just four years, and all you are is a sum total of loads and loads of events, not just in this life, but many lives. It's interesting to find out, why am I like this? Why do I do these things? And. Like, for example, for myself. Why the heck am I a Buddhist? I was born born in London. I didn't even know how to spell the word when I was at school. None of my relations were Buddhists. My father was an atheist. My rest of my family were sort of nominal Christians. I became a Buddhist not even knowing so anybody in the whole world who was a Buddhist. Little characters like that, character mystics like that, you know, sort of where did they come from? Has to be sort of previous lives. Yeah. Which, in a sense yeah, sometimes we choose well, sometimes we choose stupidly. For example, that when I was young, sort of sometimes go out to the pub with my mates. We always knew there's so many pubs in London. You always knew if you want to get a quiet drink, you go to these pubs. There are some pubs or some sort of like, dance places that always be a fight afterwards. You knew there's going to be a fight there and so why not? Does somebody actually go those places when you know you're going to get into trouble? But people actually I couldn't believe they chose to go to those places. They wanted to have fights. So sometimes you say, why do people choose sort of very unfortunate rebirths, I think sometimes because of stupidity. And why do people actually choose to play sort of footy when they get beaten up and they get blown all over them? It's much better to watch. Maybe not watch, but go do something else. Why do people just choose to do those things? Why do people choose to take drugs or choose to say, join motorbike gangs? So sometimes you see, sometimes the stupidity, we think that's fun and exciting or right thing to do. So sometimes, yeah, we do use our lifestyles. We have inclinations to it. Sometimes it's not done, clearly. It's almost like we incline towards that. We sort of get pulled towards that, not knowing why, but. So in a sense, there's a choosing, but it's more like a bending towards a particular type of lifestyle. That makes sense. Yeah, we always have some aspiration. There sometimes it's aspiration to have more of the same what you've had before, and it's the same if it example. If you can't get the first class ticket, you get sort of business class. If you can't afford business, you get economy. If you can't afford economy, you're on standby, you got to go somewhere. So if you take the best seat available, no matter what it is, and if it's a very worst seat, then you'd be in trouble. So you always have some aspiration there and you always have some karma. So at the end of life, I mean, there you are floating around and you're sort of basically inclined to what you're accustomed to. That's why I mean, there's one rebirth story. I remember this boy was born in Burma just after British left, and he always wanted to have no, he didn't like rice and curries, he just wanted to have bread and butter and cups of tea and. In his early years. It was one of the cases which was investigated. If anyone's interested in people who remember spontaneously their past lives, look into the work of Professor Ian Stevenson. He was a professor at the University of Virginia and he spent his whole life researching people who had spontaneous memories of past lives. One of the interesting parts of his life story that his sponsor, the firm who actually paid for much of his research was none other than Xerox Corporation, the firm who specialized in photocopying with a firm who were researching reincarnation. That's true. And he wrote many, many books on the subjects. And those books are in libraries. Professor Ian Stevenson, he was not a nut. He was professional academic who put rebirth studies on a sound footing. One of his books was written as a visiting fellow of Morton College in Oxford. So he was an academic, a good professor. He does one of the stories. A boy in Burma who remembered his past life. He. As a British soldier died in Burma and went into the womb of a burbisco. Got reborn there and he had the inclinations. He didn't like rice and curry. He wanted bread and butter and cups of tea until he became about 16 or 17. And then his memories of the past disappeared and he subsided to like rice and curry, which is what usually happens. People spoil tanus memories when they get to their adolescence is so far in the past they change and become just in that particular country. Then he became like fully Burmese like rice and curry again. So sometimes that's your aspiration sort of nearest possibility to have a rebirth if you happen to be traveling overseas. And I'd be wonderful if people can remember their past lives. I really want Mrs. Pauline Hansen to remember she was an Asian in her past life. Get Mr. Howe to remember he was an Aboriginal. Mr. Said mr. Bush to remember he was actually in Iraq in the past life or something and. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have all the men remember the time when there were women? All the women remember the time there were men? So, you know, racism, genderism disappears. So who are you in your past life? Interesting question. Because sometimes that you look at your inclinations, just who you are. Can you really explain that all from your parents? Because you're not sort of a carbon copy of your mum and dad, or a combination of two? There's some things your mum and dad never had. Where did they come from? Your inclinations, your goals, aspirations in life. No. That gives you an indication of where you've come from in the past. It why is it there might be some you may be born in Australia, but you really like some types of Asian food. Why is that? I mean, you really like them. Why is it that some things in life which you really aspire towards? And where does that all come from? Very often it's from previous lives. So if you are going to live again, make sure you make lots and lots of good karma. So if you are going to live again, you live a good life. You don't get reborn in Iraq or in Palestine or a rotten country where there's so much suffering it so make lots of good karma, be a good person and then it's called superannuation for your future life, good investment sure return and you're helping society. I mean, doing good is for this life and for other people's lives, for your future and other people's future. That's why, as Buddhists, we always encourage people to never stop yourself doing good things. If it's a charity, go and give some money for it. If I want to do some service, always help other people. Spend time being kind, being compassionate not only it helps you, but it helps other people as well. If there is rebirth, then you win twice. You help other people now and you help yourself in the future. If there's no rebirth, at least you help people now. That's worthwhile. So good karma is always worth doing. It also means don't go around blaming other people if you are in some strife. If you blame others, it's well, is it each on the head and scratching a bum. Always remember that. Any other questions? One more question, then we can finish off. Yeah, 11s it learn from it. Yeah. So if you've done some bad carb in the past I shouldn't have done that. I really made a mess of that. Learn from it. It's not so much a punishment, but a learning experience. So make sure you never make those mistakes again. You know, for example, you may have sort of hurt your children, said some stupid things, and your children sort of leave you and go their own ways, or they're not as kind to again. Then just learn from that. You made a big mistake. It's hurt yourself, it's hurt others. It's painful. Yeah, but please learn from that saying, okay, what have I done? Why did I do that? And you make sure of a more kind, compassionate person afterwards. Then your children come back and you don't make the same mistake again. When your sort of learning time is over, then it all finishes and you're back with your kids again. So whatever it is, happens in life. It's all learning experiences. Sometimes you may get a disease, and it's just so painful and so difficult. What's that teaching you? Teaching you to be too compassionate to other people who are sick in this world. You sometimes we just shut the sick people into hospitals or nursing homes. We don't see them, and we don't think they're there. We don't see sickness in our society. But when you're sick, you realize, yeah, there's people out there who are suffering in pain even as I speak. You can't just forget them when you've been like that and. Now your imperative in life is to help others who are the same people who have cancer. Those people who recover from their cancer feel the necessity to go and help other people. To helping cancer support associations and cancer foundations other places. Because you know what it's like at the time. You might think it's bad karma, but it's a learning experience. You always be become a better person if you make use of the learning experiences. To other people it looks like it's terrible karma but to people actually in it who learn from it sometimes they say I've never given up that wonderful experience of having cancer for three years. It taught me so much. And that's actually how we make use of the painful experiences of life. In Buddhism we have a simile of the truckloads of dung. The simulate truckloads of dung is calm and how to make use of it. And it works like this. You come to a nice center like this on a Saturday evening. You have a wonderful time. Enjoy yourself. When you go back home, you find that somebody has dumped a whole truckload of dung in front of your door. Him. And there's two things about the smelly, offensive truckload of dung. Number one, you didn't order it. It's not your fault. Number two, nobody saw it coming. So you're climbing up somebody to tell them to take it away. You're stuck with it. And there's two things which people do with a truckload of dung. First of all, truckload of dung stands for the very unpleasant experiences you have to deal with in life. You tragedies, disappointments, and sometimes those are very, very difficult to deal with. Maybe death in the family so tragic, and you're stuck with it. You say, why me? But no one can take it away from you. You're stuck with it. The truckload of dung. There's two things which people do with dung. The first type of person puts it in their pocket, up their shirt, down their skirt. They carry it around with them. When you carry dung around, you find you lose a lot of friends in that symptom. What that means is you become very negative, very angry, sort of very grumpy about what's happened to you. You become depressed and fed up. Your friends actually stay around for a while, but it's natural. Nobody likes to be around someone who's always pressed and negative and grumpy all the time. You lose a lot of friends that way. But there's another way of dealing with a dung. The first person carries a dung around with them. The second person gets out the wheelbarrow and the spade take it round the back and dig it into their garden. That's very, very hard work, but you can do it. Maybe only half a barrow a day is all you can manage if you keep on going day after day, month after month, sometimes many years. The day eventually comes when all the dung in front of your door has completely disappeared and gone. You've moved it all where it belongs, in your garden. And you find in your garden your flowers are more beautiful and more fragrant than any flowers in your street. It's not only you enjoy them, but the beautiful scent. Wasps right down street even passes by. You can actually smell the fragrance of your flowers and your fruit trees. It has got so much fruit and it's just so sweet. That you not only do enjoy it with your own family, you give it to everybody else as well. They also share the sweetness of your fruit in that simile. The fruit, the flowers are the wisdom and the compassion which you've grown in your heart as your garden because of all the unpleasant experiences, the tragedies of your life. You've dug that bad karma in like the woman with the bad ingredients making a beautiful cake. And your flowers are more fragrant and your fruit is more sweet because of the dunk. You find that you can make use of bad karma to make you a more beautiful, compassionate, wise being. It's hard work, but that's the only thing to do with unpleasant experiences in life. The dung is a result of bad karma. Some heedlessness. But you can turn it to your advantage by people with cancer that become such wonderful people. Such kind of compassionate persons whose total priorities in life change. Things like family, living just every day in kindness, compassion and love becomes the most important, rather than making money or becoming famous or having big houses. So what happens when people get through their cancers? They dig into the garden. They become such wonderful people to be around. It's an example of how we make use of the bad karma and turn it into the fruit or turn it into the fertilizer for our compassionate wisdom. Does that make sense to you? Okay, so thank you all for coming to these sessions on Introduction to Buddhism. Try to keep them just on the basic levels of common rebirth about the mind, basic Buddhism, and history of Buddhism. I hope you've enjoyed some of these talks on basic teachings of Buddhism. And if you want more, every Friday evening there's always a talk on, so you can always come along and the talks are free. You don't have to leave your names anywhere. We don't send you anything to ask for money or to try and get you in. This is not a cult, so you can come along. You can always sit next to the door. If you don't like it, you can always go out again afterwards. So every Friday evening is always a talk here and thank you for coming and I hope you enjoyed these four sessions of Introduction to Buddhism. So all the best. And there's always a cup of tea available next door. Drink and I wish you all happiness and well being. Take candy sauce.