Then there is also what kind of body we get. We may get a body that is healthy and long lived, brings joy and is popular, or we may get one that is sick and not functional is short lived and has many problems. And the third thing is the tendencies we have, that is if we naturally like to share, if we like to be good with others, if we like to benefit others, or if we like to put others down and stand on them and suppress them.

What after that next life when we die the whole inner roulette starts again. The outer impressions disappear then once again we get into new states. Buddha tells us is that there is no beginning to all this. He says that mind is like space and space has no beginning. Mind has been timelessly been playing with itself, expressing its qualities, experiencing, producing situations inside and outside. And there are many more births in states of pain and suffering than in states of joy and bliss. Even when we are born here as human beings as we are now in a nice country, healthy and so on still when we were born we didn't smile when we came out of our mothers, we screamed because it hurt. Some day we will get old, sick and die.

While we are here in our best years like we are today, we are always trying to get things we like and avoid things we don't like. We try to hold onto what we have and arrange ourselves with things we can't avoid. In all conditioned states no matter where we are there is either the suffering of everything collapsing and landing on our heads or there the suffering of things being impermanent and changing and being unable to hold them, or there is the suffering of being ignorant, of simply not knowing, of hardly remembering yesterday and having no idea about tomorrow.

That is why Buddha is always advising us to shift our values from the bank that gives less and less interest because out life is getting shorter and we cannot take things along, to the bank that gives more and more. To shift our values from things that change and disappear, that are born and die, that come and go and shift them into something which is timeless and cannot disappear, something which is more joyful, more happy, more powerful, more compassionate. And that basically means shifting our values from the thoughts and feelings and projections of the mind into the open feeling of the space of the mind itself. It means to try to rest in our awareness and doing that, see the one who sees and not just do the things that are seen, trying to be aware of the one who is aware.

We will see three things that will make us very joyful. First we will see that that which is aware is not a thing. That is, it has no colour weight smell or size, it really like space. And recognising that it is like space we do become fearless, I mean really fearless. Nothing can disturb us. Nothing can hurt us again. Being fearless we can see that everything is interesting because it happens, because it shows the qualities and the abilities and the richness of the mind. Finally we can see that other beings are like us. They want happiness, want to avoid suffering, and that their mind is like clear space. And then we become loving and kind. So actually all these different qualities, all these different mental tendencies are really important. We actually saw quite a few of them demonstrated by a red-headed policeman on our way into Canberra. He stopped us for doing 90 kilometres per hour in a 60 zone, and he was actually completely happy that while he had to book us to keep up his quota we were going to leave the country and nobody would suffer. This feeling of sharing and being with us was a really wonderful human reaction. These tendencies exist everywhere in everybody and everybody can bring them out. There is something seeing and there is something being seen. There is a mirror there.