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Is there anything we can do in this life to guarantee that we will meet the Dhamma again in our next life?

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Well, simply being close to the Dhamma.

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Our minds tend, it's not entirely sufficient, but our minds tend towards the sorts of things that we are engaged in.

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So there's just so many factors that you can never really be sure.

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But what you can be sure is if your mind is not in line with the Dhamma, then it doesn't matter whether you meet with the Dhamma or not.

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So in fact, it's important to meet with the Dhamma, but it's far more important to be ready to meet with it.

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And that's, I think, something that is much more under our control than whether we actually meet with a Dhamma.

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So you can't say what your next life is going to be like.

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All of the factors are just so hard to predict and there's so many things involved with the chance of where you're going to be born.

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But you can affect

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affect where your mind is at that time.

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So in some cases, like in the case of Sumana the gardener, who I talked about in the last Dhammapada video,

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He met with a Buddha, and he listened to the Buddha's teaching, I think.

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He paid great respect to the Buddha, but the Buddha's prediction was that he would never become enlightened under a Buddha, that eventually he would become enlightened by himself.

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He would become self-enlightened as a Pacheco Buddha, a private Buddha, sometime in the future.

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It's a reminder that actually meeting with the Dhamma, in the sense of meeting with the passed on teachings, is not the most important thing.

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The most important thing is getting your mind in line with the Dhamma, which most likely will cause you to meet with the Dhamma.

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It's just not certain.

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But as I said, what is certain is, if you're in a bad place, if your mind is in a bad place, it doesn't matter if you meet with a Dhamma.

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Because you'll never meet with the Dhamma, the truth.

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The Dhamma is on different levels.

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There's the teachings, and then there's the truth, which the teachings provide or help one realize.

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So, someone can realize the truth without having been taught.

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It's much more difficult, of course, but

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The worst is if your mind is not ready to understand it, then it doesn't matter whether you receive the teachings or not.

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You'll never become enlightened.

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So the best we can do is to be ready for the teachings, to purify our minds and have our minds in a good place.

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Of course the best we can do is now that we

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have met with the teachings as to realize the Dhamma in this life.

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Obviously that's the best and thinking about the next life is a really bad place to focus our attentions but a side product of that is first of all we'll be ready for the teachings and second of all provided our mind is involved enough with the teachings and involved with people

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who are meditating and so maybe helping out at a meditation center or teaching meditation or helping your other people learn the Dhamma.

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For example, when you teach the Dhamma, you would think that that puts you in a position to learn the Dhamma in the future.

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That if karma is really all that it's cracked up to be, that the best way to receive teachings is to give them.

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Even in this life you can see the best way to learn something is to teach it.

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Many people will verify.

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so obviously practicing the Dhamma is the best way but just remember that the most important thing is to be ready for it rather than to simply meet with it though not to put down the chance of meeting with the Dhamma it's a rare opportunity and it's a wonderful thing that we have it's just that I would say it's not entirely certain even if you are a practitioner because

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There's just so many variables involved with karma.

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It's something that we can't really understand and can't really predict unless we're fully enlightened Buddhas.