The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Take Control of Your Life”
These are important teachings. The Buddha taught us that yes, we will live many times and we will die many times. It’s so important to think of this particular life as one increment in a great long inconceivable span of lifetimes. Lord Buddha taught that we have been born again and again and again in cyclic existence in so many forms and so many times that, literally, every being that we meet must have been our kind mother or father in some past incarnation. So we should think of all beings—including dogs and cats and worms and iguanas and creatures that perhaps we have very little emotional connection with, but even those—if we have the opportunity to meet them or even be stung by one of them, like a bee, that in some past life, some ancient life, we have had definitely some intimate connection with them.
We had another good lesson recently. We watched the death of the woman with brain damage, Terri Schiavo What an amazing karma played out right out in front of us. Amazing karma! If you just step back away from the emotions and look, it’s so easy to see that this is some ancient, profound, terrible karma playing out between these people—the husband, the family and the woman herself. Amazingly, her death was brought about by a deprivation of food, and yet the very cause of this terrible fate of hers was practicing bulimia. So you see a kind of instant karma playing out, and then you see it hooking into this devastating ancient karma with the other people, with the family that she lived with. How amazing! What a study that was!
I found myself this past week, between His Holiness the Pope and this Schiavo woman dying, I found myself fascinated by these two things. Watching everything the Buddha has taught us playing out right in front of us for those of us that could see. My students, my attendants, the people that are close to me say, “Jetsunma, what should they do? Should they feed her or not feed her?” Well, my advice would have been to allow the entire karma to play out, completely unscathed. Let it play out exactly without any kind of interference, exactly the way it would in the world, because this karma between them is so profound. Better that she, in this relatively unconscious condition, can go through this terrible karma and live it down, finish it, end it, rather than to have to come back and finish it, because it perhaps wasn’t finished. So from a wisdom point of view, to watch this karma is a blessing. Because we understand how it is with us, we can get a much deeper understanding; and yet to watch this karma is gut wrenching. It’s heart breaking because we see how samsara is. We see how we can mistakenly think that loving concern is just that—loving concern—when sometimes it’s power. We can see also that sometimes when we feel the most powerful, powerful love, that often its basis is very self-oriented, very selfish. Not meaning to be selfish. We think we’re thinking of the other, and yet it’s really about how we feel.
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