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Dear Sangha,
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We're very privileged.
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We have an opportunity
to practice sitting meditation.
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Maybe the practice of sitting
meditation is very, very ancient.
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We don't know when it began,
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but it's said that Buddha Vipaśyin
who lived 91 kalpas away ...
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That is a long time.
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One kalpa is 3.2 billion years,
so you can't imagine that 91 kalpas;
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very long time.
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But, he also practiced sitting meditation,
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and maybe, in the place
where you are sitting now,
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all those millions of years ago,
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somebody else was sitting
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and practicing meditation
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and maybe they made the
deep aspiration, that in
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millions of years to come
somebody else would be
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sitting there and practicing
meditation
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so if you like you can
make that aspiration now
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and this will ensure that in the
future people also have a
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chance to site in meditation,
whether its in this lifetime of the planet
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or whether its in another lifetime
of the planet.
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In the Buddhist teachings, we are
able to
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to expand our perception of
time, so that it becomes very, very
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very large.
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Now days when people talk about
the planet Earth, they talk in
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terms of 4.5 billion years.
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That is the time that the Earth
is said to have been in existence.
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We know that this is not exactly
correct because that is the time
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when the Earth manifested.
But before that it had been
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in existence, in different forms,
it came together for that manifestation.
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But, anywhere that is what we learn
in school that the Earth is 4.5 Billion
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years old.
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And, we also learn that if
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all the causes and conditions
were good, the Earth will be there
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for another 7.5 billion years.
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That seems very little when
you compare with 91 kalpas
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of Buddha Vipaśyin