How Can One Skillfully Utilize One's Own Thinking?

Question: When a person dies, do all the sentient beings within the body leave? After death, are there still sentient beings in the body, especially formless sentient beings?

Answer: To resolve this question, one must first understand why sentient beings attach themselves to another person's body and what they hope to achieve by using someone else's body. Then one should contemplate what happens to the body after a person dies, and whether it is still of any use to sentient beings. Following this order of contemplation, once everything has been contemplated clearly, one will understand whether various kinds of sentient beings still remain in the body after death.

When facing all kinds of questions, we must have a clear line of thinking, and our contemplation must be logical, going far beyond merely solving the problem itself. If one's contemplation lacks logic and one's thinking is unclear, then even if one can solve one problem, other problems will remain unsolved, and one will have to rely on others to solve them. But relying on anyone is not as good as relying on oneself—self-reliance is the foundation. If one's own contemplation lacks logic and one's thinking is always unclear, then one must analyze why this is so, what causes one's contemplative power to be inadequate, and then find ways to resolve that cause, so as to give oneself a very powerful mind capable of solving many problems—whether crucial problems or simple, basic ones.