How to give an elevated birth to all beings

Monday, September 28, 2009 15:39 Lama Padma Samten

People are imprisoned, but when we see them imprisoned, we are the ones who are imprisoning them, for we give birth to them as people who are imprisoned. However, they are not actually imprisoned! They think they are and we also think they are, so we validate their condition. Because of that, we do not allow them to emerge free from that construction.

Therefore, the first step is to recite and see them as free beings. When we develop this view, we see the devastation of karma, because we generally look at other people and imprison them with the way we perceive them. We do not allow them to occupy different places; we do not give them birth in freedom, then we end up freezing them in our own perceptions.

When we begin to see that we can give a birth of freedom to the other, we see that our relationship with them can be completely different. We will realize that such view makes a big difference in relation to those who are our “ex-something”, for example. We give one step backwards and see that even the facial expression will change. We then analyze: "Under which authority have I imprisoned the other person as being my husband or wife?", "Even after he/she having left, I still demand things from him/her."

We find ourselves completely imprisoned in that circumstance and suffer for as long as that circumstance lasts – bringing suffering to the other, not allowing them any favorable emergence.

We can see the same thing in regards to our children as well. Eventually we do not give birth to our children in the world, we only give them birth within our home, glued to our hands. If the child wants to try anything out of our will, we cannot see them as free individuals to do so. That is, we do not give them birth: in our world view there are no possibilities for them to rise free. 

We then come to see what a devastation it is to give inferior birth to another person, and it is a devastation because we try to imprison the other in the way we see them, and when they try to move from that, we experience suffering in the midst of all that.

We see then how wonderful it is when we look at all people and give them an elevated birth. That means that we recognize that they all have qualities, they all have the nature of freedom, they can do different things from what they are currently doing. We have begun to believe in that too. Not only do we see the mental landscape, but in our minds we begin to reason in accordance to that and we even give suggestions and facilitate for that person to start manifesting the qualities we once believed they didn’t have.

Therefore, when we give this subtle birth from a mental landscape that includes the other as elevated beings, everything changes.