What is Necessary in Each Phase?

In general, the notion is it sometimes gets expressed very clearly in the various spiritual teachings. That each one of us obviously has a fleshly birth. Otherwise, we won't exist, but that each one of us needs to have a spiritual birth. In fact, Christ, especially in the third chapter in John's gospel, explicitly says that unless one has a spiritual birth, which is sometimes called to be born again, one cannot go to heaven. So that spiritual birth, usually what happens, it this is my personal impression that approximately from the ages of about 15 to 19, one is able to have a fleshly birth.

One can create a child. And for most human beings, usually after the age of 40, to 50, there is an inner call for a spiritual birth. Sadly, in the Western tradition, this gets called the midlife crisis, which is very peculiar. You never come across an expression like this in the Chinese tradition or in the Indian tradition, but or in the classical Greek tradition. But this has become now the modern version.

And then tragically, the so called midlife crisis, basically, those who have they send some nice beautiful girls to seduce them for a little while or get them fancy cars and so that they can get over their midlife crisis, which is really tragic. My personal impression is that what is being called at that time is a wish for spiritual birth. And with some people, you actually see that. Even you can actually look on the internet, if you like. Some people who have made a lot of money or a lot of position in the society.

They begin to wonder why am I still alive or what is going to happen to me? And then some of them wish to give away much of their money even or to undertake occasionally, somebody ends up going to a monastery, etcetera. So not very frequently, but it is possible. And certainly this is much more common in India than it is here. But partly because of the whole desire, to now have a spiritual birth. So my own impression is that there is certainly nothing wrong with the physical biological if you like ego birth.

Actually, if you don't mind, I give you a very specific example. Santong Rimpashire, who was the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile for eight years, and now he's retired. And, obviously, and he was ahead of the Sarnas Institute of Tibetan Studies. I'm talking about 02/2001. He and I were both invited to be the keynote speakers in the international conference of the philosophical society.

And the conference was in Sydney Australia. It takes me two days to get there, two days to come back and I'm supposed to be there for one hour talk. You can believe this. And so in any case, after he and I both finished our talks, they asked us to have a public exchange with each other. And as is a very common practice, he, again, mentioned something like this, how one needs to be get rid of the ego.

And I said to him, he was the head of the Sarnath Institute of Tibetan studies that they're hardly a negligible person. I said, Limpoche, if I had not had a strong ego, by which I did a PhD in Physics wrote some books. Do you think they'll invite me here? And if you did not have a strong ego and were not the head of the Institute of Sarnath Institute, do you think they will invite you here? Why be against the ego? The more important thing is to find the appropriate place of the ego.

And as you can well imagine, there was stunned silence. In fact, some people thought even that maybe I was being rude to him. Far from it. Actually afterwards, he and I became very good friends. In fact, on one occasion, several years later, I was in the Institute in, they are Chenai in the philosophical society.

Somebody knocks at my door. I turned out to be Sanangwyn which is saying, I had just discovered that you were here. I wanted to come and see you. So you see, we became obviously very good friend. Later on, he even invited me to Dharamshala.

I thought it was just a friendly visit person to person, but it ended up being like a state visit much to my complete surprise. So I say that that in a way when one actually points out the appropriate place of the ego, there is no reason to be against the ego. But the trouble is it tends to have take over. And therefore, the call is to begin to understand more and more deeply the quality of my own ego and to find its appropriate place, which is why I repeatedly come back to this. In my life, this has been a very helpful comment of Ravindra Salzman, ego is a good servant, but a bad master.

If Samang Reempoche and myself had not had enough development of our ego, they wouldn't invite us to come and speak there. You people won't invite me here if something or the other I had not done or I had written or whatever had interested you people. So there is absolutely no reason to be against the ego. But to find its appropriate place. Similarly, no reason to be against the body or the mind, but to find its appropriate place to assist the development or the evolution of the particle of the spirit in me, that's the call.