The Deathless and the Dying. London 2026.
The Deathless and the Dying
James Low
Talk given at the invitation of the Shang Shung Institute, Lekdanling Tibetan Cultural Centre, London, UK on 9th November 2025.
Transcribed by Jennie Lewis
Edited by Barbara Terris
Read the edited transcript here.
Contents
The Aspiration of Samantabhadra – Kunzung Monlam_ 2
The Potential of the Ground_ 3
Five Qualities of the Ground 4
Levels of unawareness 10
What Dies? 13
Coming and going_ 15
Letting go into death_ 16
Usefulness of practising the Guru Yoga of the White A_ 17
Letting go into life_ 19
How the self is constructed_ 20
The Deathless 22
Excerpts
The ego-self is a delusion. We believe in something quite false. Since we were born we have had streams of experience, experiences that have come and gone and come and gone. We have been a lot of different people. We have inhabited very different forms but each of them is stamped with our name which gives us a false sense of continuity. “Oh, I’ve always been like this”… Not true. We have changed radically, in our molecular structure, in the kind of thoughts we have, the things we do. We are a potential which manifests in diverse forms…
This body will die. The mind itself, awareness, rigpa which is inseparable from the ground, doesn’t die. The deathless is the truth of your mind. The one who dies is the confusion of identification with transient patterns arising in the mind…
Samantabhadra is naked. He has no pockets. We, however have a lot of pockets. We’re storing bits of our past, what we like, what we don’t like. Just let it go. It’s gone anyway. Then you’re naked. You don’t have anywhere to hide anything. “But who would I be without my thoughts?” You are not your thoughts. Thoughts are the energy; they are the wind moving in the sky creating this ceaseless patterning and re-patterning of clouds. Your life, your moods, your hopes, your fears are changing, changing and vanishing. So many of your identities have already vanished. All the people you’ve been, the hopes and experiences you’ve had, and so on… You’ve been through all kind of events and yet you haven’t found the truth of your life because it’s not a thing to be found. The truth of your life is to be present in experience as it vanishes, because it will always vanish…
We’re meditating for death, not for any other reason…
You can watch the video recording here.