Hello everybody. I'm gonna give a little talk here in honor of my 80th birthday. So since it's a sort of momentous moment, I thought that I would talk about, um, , nice, cheerful subject, but actually, uh, I really wanna talk about death because so many people fear it and it's really not something that needs to be feared.

And the same with aging actually. So suppose you're 20 years old and you're listening to this and you think, who needs to hear about this? But actually the younger you are, the better. I'm gonna talk about it as something that you can prepare for, um, throughout your whole life. So I was introduced to this idea a long time ago by my principal teacher Cho Trump Che, and he, he gave a seminar that was entitled Death in Everyday Life.

And in that seminary seminar he talked about, uh, that every. Is a small birth and death that birth and death are taking place moment by moment by moment. And I remember when I heard this, my first reaction was actually a sort of feeling of panic because there was something about, I think I really got it.

That, uh, that everything is changing and shifting all the time. Born dies, born die. And so it left me with this feeling of immense groundlessness. That was my first reaction to this little teaching. And so in retrospect, I think that was really great because that's what you wanna get in touch with. If in, in fact you want to prepare for death Now, even if you are, uh, 18, 19, 20 16, However old you are up to, you know, 90, 95, uh, you, this is very valuable, uh, teachings because it's teaching you not to just be, uh, preparing for your death, the kind of death of this body, death of this particular incarnation, this particular, in my case, Pema children.

Um, But it's preparing you for, uh, fear of groundlessness throughout your entire life and overcoming or relating with that fear of groundlessness. So moment by moment, I've been training for many, many, many years in relaxing, uh, with that feeling of groundlessness, uh, but really taking it seriously. Um, I was reading recently about life being as brief as a do drop on a blade of grass, which is such a beautiful expression.

And you know, at my age it definitely feels like that. It feels like our life. , uh, is incredibly short and you've heard, I'm sure about that people die and they have like a life review where they remember their entire life. Well, that's already sort of starting to happen to me, uh, at 80 years old that, uh, my whole life feels like that gone, you know, just in a finger stamp and all those many, many adventures and dramas, all heavy duty dramas of my life and everything just.

Download Transcript