Practice Controls Where You Go After Death

Lucid Dreaming, Dream Control, Self-Liberation, the Bardo Thödol

When you can control your dreams — this is called turning the thought, turning the dream — you qualify to choose the direction of your next rebirth.If you cannot turn your dreams, you simply run along with them like a sleepwalker: if someone chases to kill you, you get killed; that decides where you go for rebirth.Someone threatens you, you panic and bolt.You run until you see a house and dive inside to hide — and that house is the entrance to your next birth.You duck in, and bang, you are reborn.Some people see a house, jump in — oops, it is a pigsty, and when they come to, they have become a piglet.

To practice is to train so that inside the dream I can recognize: this is a dream.I dream a ghost is chasing me — I recite mantra.That is practice.

A practitioner who cannot turn his dreams is a fraud.Death is exactly like dreaming: you cannot control the dream, you cannot control the rounds of the bardo, you cannot control where your soul-light goes.You are afraid to die, and when the karmic debts come to collect, many people, right before they die, scream and panic — that is being hunted down.

If you have practice, at that moment you yourself go to liberate those karmic creditors, confess to them, or recite mantra for them.From the day a person is born they are waiting to die — why not practice how to die?

At the moment of death you sometimes see your own mother coming to meet you, you dream of relatives.In fact that is all dream.

Sometimes you should read Guru Padmasambhava's Bardo Thödol, which tells you: within 49 days, where you walk in the first week, what you will meet in the second, which light you may enter and which you must not in the third — that is what people encounter after death.So you should practice for a person before the breath has stopped, not wait until after death.Practice done before death still has light to guide them; practice done afterwards is much harder.

So learn some Dharma to liberate yourself.If you cannot liberate yourself, whom can you liberate?You must have the right view, and you must listen to the master teach — only then do you realize, oh, so that is how it is.

Look inside a columbarium: old, young, children, the beautiful, the ugly — they are all there.Every one of them also believed they would live to a hundred, planning to do this and that.Who knew impermanence would come, and in an instant it was all gone.Grasp every day.Nobody knows which day they will die.Live as if you were going to die tomorrow — that is enough.The great matter of life and death: while you are alive, you have to think about how you will die.Will you die happy, or in great pain?

Excerpted from a teaching by Master Urgyen Topden Rinpoche on 2018-02-01