Rinpoche Sogyal

In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a distinguished Buddhist teacher clarifies the majestic vision of life and death that underlies the Tibetan tradition - and shows us how we can use this knowledge to help us face death and understand life.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

hunter x hunter: “Human life is too long to devote to reproduction, yet too short to devote to learning, in the helix of time. Perhaps that is why humans succumb to desire and seek release. Despite the fact that life is complete with the sun, the land, and the poetry.” 

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

[…] the only truly serious goals in life are "learning to love other people and acquiring knowledge." 

Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realizations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind.

Underlying our whole outlook is a neurotic conviction of our own limitations.

Since the dawn of history, reincarnation and a firm faith in life after death have occupied an essential place in nearly all the world's religions. Belief in rebirth existed amidst Christians in the early history of Christianity, and persisted in various forms well into the Middle Ages. Origen, one of the most influential of the church fathers, believed in the "pre-existence of souls" and wrote in the third century: "Each soul comes to this world reinforced by the victories or enfeebled by the defeats of its previous lives."

[…] ways of improving themselves, but never taxing their brains, never confronting any complex or painful situation, never conscious of their true nature, and so anesthetized that they are never aware of what their condition really is. 

Many of the near-death experiencers reported out-of-the-body experiences, from which they were able to give surprisingly accurate detailed accounts of their surroundings and even, in some cases, of other rooms in the same hospital. This clearly shows the importance of talking positively and frequently to a dying person or to a person in a coma. Conscious, alert, and actively loving care for the dying person must go on until the last moments of his or her life, and as I will show, even beyond. 

Often nurses in busy hospitals rely on their intuition and many other factors, such as the behavior of doctors or members of the patient's family, or the state of mind of the dying person, to predict when someone might be dying. They also observe, but not at all in a systematic way, some physical signs, such as the change in skin color, a certain smell sometimes remarked on, and a noticeable change in breathing. Modern drugs, however, may well mask the signs that Tibetan teachings indicate, and there is as yet surprisingly little research in the West on this most important topic. Doesn't this show how little the process of dying is understood or respected? 

As Judy Tatelbaum says: Grief is a wound that needs attention in order to heal. To work through and complete grief means to face our feelings openly and honestly, to express and release our feelings fully and to tolerate and accept our feelings for however long it takes for the wound to heal. We fear that once acknowledged grief will bowl us over. The truth is that grief experienced does dissolve. Grief unexpressed is grief that lasts indefinitely.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying quotes

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