Public Classes

One thing we know for sure is that life never stops moving. Change is the only certainty. Hear Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat speak on the subject of death, dying and what's next.  Our Transient Lives, Public Talk According to Buddhist philosophy and experience, death is a temporary end to a temporary process. In other words, death isn’t an end: it's a process. According to the ancient and classic Buddhist text the Abhidhamma (the Buddhist version of quantum physics), rebirth is instantaneous. How so? Because the nature of consciousness is to flow, like a stream. What we call “incarnation,” however, takes time. Like anything, the shaping or forming of consciousness needs time to coalesce. Buddhist philosophy and experience also describes the process that happens as we die. This form we know as our body dissolves, and we enter an in-between realm, called the bardo. It’s from here that the stream flows on and a new form emerges. The process of the streaming, and how form dissolves and reforms is driven by karma.This talk will describe the process of dissolution, the experiences one can expect along the way and the process of rebirth. You might ask, how do we know this? For experienced meditators, the rise and fall of phenomena, its appearing and disappearing during meditation goes through this same process. It is happening for all of us all the time, but normally we can’t perceive it because it is very, very subtle. Meditation allows us to get to know the […]