DEATH is certain but the exact time is not. The coffin does not only belong to the old. Since our present human form is more precious than a trillion wishing gems, to use this life frivolously would be much greater loss than to waste a trillion such gems. there could be no greater loss, no greater ignorance, no greater deception. Thus, if we are to accomplish anything meaningful, we must begin to exert ourselves right now. The reason is two-fold : death is certain and because the exact time it will come is not. None of us can be sure that next year at this time we will still be here as human beings. Perhaps we will have taken birth as animals, our bodies covered with furs and and topped with horns. Or we have taken rebirth as a hungry ghosts, unable to find even a single drop of water as nourishment. We may even have taken birth in one of the hells and be suffering intense heat or cold, or any of various tortures such as being boiled or fried. Following death, the mental continuum does not just come to an end. We must take birth again and that can only in one of two places, the higher states or lower states. The higher states are those of a god, a demigod(asuras), or a human; the lower states those of an animal, ghost or a hell being. If we are born in Aivici hell (the most severe of eight hot hells), our body will be indistinguisable from the fire in which we are enveloped. Even in Samjiva (the least painful of hot hells, we would be tormented daily by having to die and be revived a hundred times, along with many other miseries. We might think of the lower states as some faraway place, but all that separates us from them is this coming and going of breath. In the absent of mindfulness and contemplation , there is tendency to assume that we probably wont go to the lower states in our next life. Closer look, will reveal we are not free to decide whether or not we will go to the lower states; this is something that depends on our karma. While our mental continuum contains a mixture of virtuous and non virtuous karmic seeds, it is the most powerful, we will find it to be those of a nonvirtuous nature. Therefore we must liberate ourselves from this condition and we must do it with our present human body. Most of us place our hopes in future lives, thinking there is nothing we can accomplish in this one. With our present life, though, we can accomplish much. A human endowed with leisure and fortune is an extraordinary physical basis for practicing dharma. We must use this unique occasion to strive for liberation by every means possible. Tthus, you are correcting your motivation with the stages of the path for persons of great capacity when you generate enlightenment mind by reflecting on its two central concerns of purpose and goal as follows : For the sake of all sentient beings, I shall attain the state of complete and unsurpassed enlightenment by every means possible. When a practitioner can elicit effortlessly the proper experiential state associated with the above two concerns just mentioned, he has generate the genuine enlightenment mind.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 13:05:47 +0000
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