1
00:00:00,875 --> 00:00:05,079
I dreamt about my great-grandmother dying and going into a light and moaning.

2
00:00:05,720 --> 00:00:11,967
I had no idea she was dying as I was sleeping, and I only found out she had died a week after I had the dream.

3
00:00:13,048 --> 00:00:15,070
Does Buddhism have a view on things like this?

4
00:00:19,655 --> 00:00:20,256
Not really.

5
00:00:21,757 --> 00:00:24,520
Remember Buddhism is

6
00:00:25,765 --> 00:00:28,241
primarily a practice.

7
00:00:29,147 --> 00:00:32,468
So ask yourself, is this practical?

8
00:00:33,832 --> 00:00:35,474
and no it's not.

9
00:00:35,494 --> 00:00:39,519
It fits in with the idea of cultivating magical powers.

10
00:00:40,300 --> 00:00:47,508
And so insofar as Buddhism deals with the cultivation of magical powers, it is related.

11
00:00:47,588 --> 00:00:49,290
Buddhism has a view on this.

12
00:00:49,551 --> 00:00:56,539
It's lumped in there with supernatural occurrences which can be cultivated.

13
00:00:56,980 --> 00:00:58,101
So you can have

14
00:00:58,081 --> 00:01:03,088
more than just this accidental or circumstantial experience.

15
00:01:03,689 --> 00:01:07,555
You can actually watch people die and be born and so on.

16
00:01:08,096 --> 00:01:27,565
You can contact spirits, ghosts, angels, people far away, that kind of thing through the cultivation of magical powers which are not essential and not really

17
00:01:29,452 --> 00:01:55,948
not an essential part of the path anyway they're a byproduct a beneficial not a beneficial a positive byproduct in a worldly sense of the practice and have in the end no clear purpose the best they could do is help to open up one's mind to to the idea of the importance of the mind and

18
00:01:57,278 --> 00:02:01,635
The idea of the survival of the mind after the physical death, that kind of thing.

19
00:02:04,433 --> 00:02:12,263
But I have some thoughts on this, especially because it's prevalent, it's common.

20
00:02:13,244 --> 00:02:16,429
It's hard to find people who haven't heard such stories.

21
00:02:16,509 --> 00:02:30,627
Many people have themselves experienced these sorts of things, and when they're told it's whatever, some kind of confabulation or wishful thinking or so on, it just doesn't

22
00:02:31,855 --> 00:02:40,539
I was even told when I was talking about my experience, someone just said, well, you're lying, or I think you're lying, which doesn't help me at all because I know I'm not lying.

23
00:02:41,161 --> 00:02:46,877
And then when you have thousands or hundreds and thousands of these stories,

24
00:02:46,857 --> 00:02:50,921
near-death experiences, experiences of people who have died or dying.

25
00:02:50,981 --> 00:03:03,674
It's common and quite common for it to be the case where the person who's having the experience had no idea that the person was dying, didn't even know the person was sick in some cases.

26
00:03:05,096 --> 00:03:15,987
Lots of strange things of this sort and to just disregard them I think is a symptom of

27
00:03:17,266 --> 00:03:20,634
Closed mindedness, bigotry and scientism.

28
00:03:20,695 --> 00:03:31,562
Scientism means clinging to that which is known.

29
00:03:33,010 --> 00:03:35,640
That which is believed, in a sense.

30
00:03:35,660 --> 00:03:38,029
That which is accepted as known.

31
00:03:39,254 --> 00:03:43,710
Clinging to accepted theories and ideas, like materialism, for the most part.

32
00:03:43,771 --> 00:03:47,786
The idea that everything is physical and therefore these sorts of things can't happen.

33
00:03:49,793 --> 00:03:50,135
That's it.

34
00:03:50,195 --> 00:03:52,403
But Buddhism, not really, because it's not that practical.

