A Tibetan Perspective of Conscious Living, Dying, and Rebirth

In this short essay we would like to bring our colleagues’ attention to two remarkable texts on the art and science of conscious living and dying:  Sogyal Rinpoche’s monumental Tibetan Book of Living & Dying, and Professor Robert Thurman’s lucid new translation and commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead.   Especially for people who have been inspired, but perhaps mislead, by early, incomplete and inaccurate translations of Tibetan, and so called “Tibetan”, teachings, these two books provide an authentic, inspiring, comprehensive, heart-opening and mind expanding glimpse of a profound tradition of conscious living and dying.   If you are interested in subtle energies, working with the dying, or conscious living and dying these books will be life-long companions.

This paper was initially written for publication in the Bridges Newsletter for the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM) and for workshops for the Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS).

> Read article  (This is the article we studied in our workshop.)

See also: 

Tong Len Meditation

Sogyal Rinpoche’s classic book Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Wangyal Rinpoche’s book Tibetan Book of Sleep and Dream Yoga

Leonard Cohen – Tibetan Book of Great Liberation (video)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCHh8xqMWeo

The Death Store on Maui – Inspiring!

Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine – an interesting article in Wired Magazine related to the topics posted on this page.

Meditation for the process of dissolution during death

From Robert Thurman

Tibetan Buddhism offers numerous practices designed to aid the individual in attaining enlightenment, a perfect state of wisdom, compassion and bliss, through an evolution that takes many lifetimes. The following meditation is based on a traditional Tibetan Buddhist method of preparing oneself to navigate the dying process in a calm and aware state.

It is thought that such preparation for deat h gives the dying person the greatest opportunity to maximize the potential for enlightenment while dying and to attain a positive rebirth so that one may continue to work towards enlightenment in future lives. The meditation is to be done during regular meditation sessions, and it can also be applied to the processes of falling asleep and wakening.
Complete the entire cycle in each meditation session – beginning with earth dissolving into water all the way to the clear light and then going backwards through the cycle to end up again at the earth element. For more detailed information on this process, please consult my translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. 
- Robert Thurman

Stage One: earth into water


Let’s get into meditative posture, nice and balanced and comfortable. Close your eyes. It’s ideal in the Buddhist meditation to leave them half open so that you have a half curtain window so you don’t make a duality between inside and outside. You don’t pay attention to either the inside or the outside but you withdraw your mental attention away from your visual field. Then just observe your breathing inward and outward and try to count your breaths to ten. If you lose your count by being distracted by thinking, go back to one. Count on the inhales.

Now imagine that you are dying and you are losing sight and memory of your town, your house or room, the people with you. Also your body starts to go numb, your breathing becomes labored and you lose track of who’s drawing breath. You forget to breathe. And then you enter first the realm of hallucination. You feel like a sort of fainting, melting sensation. There’s a visual swirl all around you but not in your eyes, you’re not seeing. It’s sort of in back of your eyes, in the center of your brain behind the eyes. It’s a swirling visionary state which is mirage like and illusion like. And you feel kind of a melting. This is the earth element dissolving into water. Don’t be frightened. Just let yourself go limp.

Stage Two: water into fire
Stage Three: fire into air
Stage Four: air into consciousness
And then you feel a little warm, kind of a blush of inner heat. Everything seems to be smoky around you like there was a fire somewhere nearby. Don’t be frightened of that because it’s just the water element dissolving into the fire element. This cools and it’s as if the embers are sort of sputtering or as if the blue green light of the fireflies, zillions of fire flies are swarming around you and within you really, because there is no in and out here and they are blinking their lights. Everything is blinking and swirling. And that is the fire element dissolving into the wind element. Then this swirling, flickering pale light solidifies and everything in your whole world becomes a single, still, candle flame. That is the wind element dissolving into consciousness or pure space.

Stage Five: consciousness into luminance
Stage Six: luminance into radiance
Stage Seven: radiance into imminence
Then this candle flame expands and expands and you feel your awareness expanding and expanding and it is no longer in a point but is now a vast realm or environment. And you enter into this state of luminance, into the infinite moonlit sky, white light everywhere and you as infinite, losing your sense of embodiment for the moment. Then this infinite white moonlit sky turns into an infinite sunlit sky, more reddish -orange, more hot and radiant. And you are that vastness of the sun. You feel more balanced in space. You resist retracting back into your body or trying to. When that stabilizes you then move deeper from the realm of radiance of sunlit sky into the realm of imminence, like a dark-lit sky. Everything is dark and you are very, very close to complete unawareness but still lucidly aware in the brilliant blackness, although now you’re aware that you are content to be unaware in a more loose way.

Stage Eight: imminence into transparency


Finally you come to the clear light. Everything becomes transparent. There is no sense of being in absolute space apart from things. Differentiated and interrelated things re-emerge within a sense of infinity of space, re-emerge to be experienced from all sides from within, not just from an observer’s perspective. Everything is transparent like glass and completely mutually interdependent. You feel very, very calm and peaceful and extremely alert and aware in a multi-dimensional and multi-perspectival way. This is the restful state in the universe, the most restorative, energizing, and liberating. It seems to be so subtle that it seems to be past in a split second. And since we do not feel balanced and content when we are not grasping onto any differentiation or any pattern or recognition, we revert right back into the dark light, and from there into the sun light, from there into the moon light, from there into the candle flame, from there into the firefly zone, from there into the smoke zone, from there into the hallucination zone and from there we go back into our ordinary bodies.
We dedicate the merit of this exploration to our eventual, complete conscious ability to traverse these stages or to be simultaneously aware of all of these levels at once even in our engagement in the ordinary world, which is a kind of definition of the state of perfect enlightenment. And we do this for the benefit of all beings.
These eight states – earth into water, water into fire, fire into air, air into consciousness, consciousness into luminance, luminance into radiance, radiance into imminence, imminence into transparency and then reversed — transparency to imminence, imminence to radiance, radiance to luminance, luminance to consciousness, consciousness to air, air to fire, fire to water and water to earth — if you familiarize yourselves with that process, as if it were an arpeggio or something, like a scale, it’s considered really, really useful.”

“Thus, the teachings on Buddha Nature do not mean that there is some nucleus of Buddhhood enclosed in sentient beings behind the temporary obscuring stains. Rather, our whole existence as sentient beings is in itself the sum of temporary stains that float like clouds in the infinite, bright sky of Buddha Nature, the luminous, open expanse of our mind that has no limits or boundaries. Once these clouds dissolve from the warm rays of the sun of wisdom shining in this space, nothing within sentient beings has been freed or developed, but there is just this radiant expanse without any reference points of cloud-like sentient beings or cloud-free Buddhas.” – Sthiramati was a 6th century Indian Buddhist scholar-monk