We Tibetans have a reputation of being very spiritual, though we usually consider ourselves quite down-to-earth and practical. So we think of our systematic study and analysis of the human death process as a cautious and practical preparation for the inevitable. After all, there is not a single one of us who is not going to die, sooner or later. So how to prepare for death, how to undergo the death process with the least trauma, and what comes after death—these are matters of vital importance to every one of us. It would be impractical of us not to study these issues with the greatest of care and not to develop methods of dealing with death and dying in a skillful, compassionate, and humane way.

In the popular imagination developed by modern scientific education, death is most often supposed to be a terminal state, a nothingness, an oblivion, a void that destroys life, that swallows it up forever. It is aligned with sleep, darkness, and unconsciousness. It is feated by those who feel happy, or feel they should be happy. It is sought after by those who are in misery, filled with unbearable pain and anguish, as a blessed final anesthesia. But science should not neglect to question this picture. In fact, inner science begins with the analysis of nothingness. Nothing is after all just nothing. It cannot be a place that resembles the idea of nothingness. A place involves area, or extension. It is defined by coordinates and boundaries. It is not nothing. It is room. Nothing has no room, nor can anything be located within nothing. Nothing cannot have an inside or an outside. It cannot destroy, swallow, or terminate. As nothing, it can have no energy or effect. As nothing, it cannot be a thing, a realm, a state, or anything. It is absolutely nothing to fear. It is nothing to hope for.

Dream consciousness is an instance in normal life of mental consciousness operating independently of the gross physical senses. It is an important analogy or even precursor of the between-consciousness: The five gross senses cease operating in sleep, and mental consciousness continues more subtly. During most dream experiences, mental consciousness produces out of itself a simulation of the eyes and ears and even an environment, in order for the dream being to hear sounds and see sights and colors. The sense of having a body that sometimes emerges in a dream is an important analogue of the sense of self of a between-being. Normal people without special training rarely have such a sense. Many rarely remember dreams, almost none remember the first arisal of the dream or the dissolving out of the dream, and very few are capable of lucid dreaming–dreaming while being aware they are dreaming, without waking up. The development of such abilities is of primary importance in developing the ability to die lucidly, to remain self-aware of what and where one is during these transitional experiences.

You must look “nakedly” at yourself, reversing the aim of seeing back upon itself. You look for that fixed, independent, isolated self that feels like the kernel within you, out of which your drives and thoughts may emerge. But when you turn 180 degrees to look within the looking, you find nothing that has intrinsic status, nothing standing independent in its own right.

Even Descartes found that too: he found that he could find nothing at the point of origin of thought. He erroneously asserted that it was because a subject could not be an object. And he then went wild and said that this subject, this one thing he could not find, demonstrate, establish in any way, was the one thing he could be foundationally certain of! He could doubt everything, but he could not doubt that he doubted! So: I think, therefore I am. Only the laziest Buddhist philosopher would make such a statement.

Practice giving things away, not just things you don’t care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size of the gift, it is its quality and the amount of mental attachment you overcome that count. So don’t bankrupt yourself on a momentary positive impulse, only to regret it later. Give thought to giving. Give small things, carefully, and observe the mental processes going along with the act of releasing the little thing you liked.

This is where meditation is really needed: after you have a sound realization. This is where you realize how deep your instincts go. This is where you begin to desire a higher technology of deepening your realization and expanding your liberation. You decide you cannot bear to delay liberation for many lives. You want to complete the process in this one lifetime. You become determined to seek initiation in the Unexcelled Yoga Tantra, to recognize your life as the life between, to learn the art of reenvisioning your entire self and the world on the creation stage, and to learn the interior voyages of the trained psychonaut on the perfection stage. It is not that you seek a different teaching to provide a shortcut previously unavailable, for the wisdom aspect of these paths does not vary; whether view from an exoteric or an esoteric perspective, voidness is the same. But the method is different; the technique is accelerated, the art is more developed. You seek a way of accelerating your evolution, compressing the development achieved through many conscious deaths and many lives of practice into one life, death, and between, if possible; or at most a few.

As for exactly who Padma Sambhava was—was he really a spiritual Superman, is he still alive, and so on—we do not need to pass judgment on these articles of religious faith in order to study and use the text. Naturally, we moderns are not predisposed to expect such things to be true; though secretly, most of us are still hoping.

The “presence-habit” is the deepest level of misknowing conceptualization, which maintains the sense of “being here now” as something or someone finite, apart from the inconceivable Buddhaverse, supporting addictive and objective instincts of self-preservation, and blocking awareness of the primal bliss-wisdom indivisible of the eternal reality of enlightenment.

Hey! Now when the life between dawns upon me, I will abandon laziness, as life has no more time, Unwavering, enter the path of learning, thinking, and meditating, And taking perceptions and mind as path, I will realize the Three Bodies of Enlightenment! This onec that I have obtained the human body Is not the time to stay on the path of distractions.

Hey! Now when the dream between dawns upon me, I will give up corpselike sleeping in delusion, And mindfully enter the unwavering experience of reality. Conscious of dreaming, I will enjoy the changes as clear light. Not sleeping mindlessly like an animal, I will cherish the practice merging sleep and realization!

Hey! Now when the meditation between dawns upon me, I will abandon the host of distracting errors, FOcus in extreme-free experience, without releasing or controlling, And achieve stability in the creation and perfection stages! Giving up business, now one-pointed in meditation, I won’t surrender to the power of erroneous addictions!

Hey! Now when the death-point between dawns upon me, I will give up the preoccupations of the all-desiring mind, Enter unwavering the experience of the clarity of the precepts, And transmigrate into the birthless space of inner awareness; About to lose this created body of flesh and blood, I will realize it to be impermanent illusion!

Hey! Now when the reality between dawns upon me, I will let go of the hallucinations of instinctive terror, Enter the recognition of all objects as my mind’s own visions, And understand this as the pattern of perception in the between; Come to this moment, arrived at this most critical cessation, I will not fear my own visions of deities mild and fierce!

Hey! Now when the existence between dawns upon me, I will hold my will with mind one-pointed, And increase forcefully the impulse of positive evolution; Blocking the womb door, I will remember to be revulsed. Now courage and positive perception are essential; I will give up envy, and contemplate all couples As my Spiritual Mentor, Father and Mother.

“With mind distracted, never thinking, ‘Death is coming,’ To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life, And then to come out empty–it is a tragic error. Recognition of necessity is the holy teaching of the gods, So won’t you live this divine truth from now on?” These are the words of the great adepts. If you don’t put the Mentor’s precepts in your mind, Won’t you be the one who deceives yourself?

The ordinary person here means one who has no systematic practice of either visualization or transformation into altered states of physical energies or consciousness. However, her participation in a culture is itself a visualization and transformation process, a routinization of imagination and perception. If she is religious, her long-term familiarity with a particular god, goddess, savior, or prophet will make that being into an archetype deity for her. If she is not religious, her familiarity with specific political leaders, celebrities, national symbols, or other persons or places will have turned them into archetypes or mandalas for her. The text invokes the Lord of Great Compassion, the archangelic Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the Savior figure for any participant in Tibetan culture, a powerful deity who looks out for all living creatures, helping them avoid suffering and discover happiness. You may prefer to invoke Jesus here, or Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, or Wakan Tanka, Odin, Zeus, or the Great Mother in any of her myriad forms. Any archetype of sacredness, any compassionate personification of representation of ultimate reality, here serves to make the soul’s consciousness feel secure and integrated with the gracious presence of sacred ultimacy. This is necessary for her not to fear any hallucinations or startling happenings, and to move toward positive destinies. It is also considered that the imagined figure of any of these great saviors serves as an icon to focus awareness to make the soul receptive to the active compassion of those beings themselves.

If the deceased is still not liberated, it is then called the “third between phase.” The reality between dawns. This becomes the third between, in which the evolutionary hallucinations dawn. Therefore it is crucial to read this great orientation to the reality between at that time, with its very great power and benefits. At that time, her loved ones will weep and wail, her share of food is no longer served, her clothes are stripped off, her bed is broken. She can see them, but they cannot see her. She can hear them calling her, but they cannot hear when she calls them. So she must depart, her heart sinking in despair. Perceptions arise of sounds, lights, and rays, and she feels faint with fear, terror, and panic. Then you must use this great description of the reality between.

Since enlightened Buddhas have boundless lives in response to the needs of beings, this does not mean that after liberation, one will never live again. It only means that one is not compelled to live an unenlightened life of suffering, driven by confusion and addictive emotions.

Thus through the instructions of the spiritual teacher, when you recognize these deities as your own visions, the creations of your own awareness, then you will be liberated, just as you become free from fear when you recognize that a frightening lion is only stuffed.

If a clairvoyant were forced to perceive all between-beings around, she would have no time to see anything else. Infinite numbers of beings of all species are dying and traversing the between all the time, and their subtle embodiments can effortlessly penetrate solid objects, or coexist in the same coarse space with other things. Therefore, they are everywhere evident to one with clairvoyant abilities, whether natural or developed. What many cultures refer to as “ghosts” clearly fit the description of the between-state wanderer (which is why the pretan, who has become reborn in that horrid form, should not be translated as “hungry ghost”). Indeed, the hero in the recent film Ghost is presented as having many of the characteristics of the between-being.

“Truth-status” is the state of something’s existing by virtue of its intrinsic reality. If things were not empty, if they existed by virtue of a fixed, absolute, real core, then that core would be discovered by truth-seeking scientific awareness and those things would be acknowledged as possessing “truth-status”. The involuntary habit of all beings is to assume that things do have such a status. When we see a thing, it seems to us to exist in its own right, as an independently established thing-in-itself. This habitual perception is called our “truth-habit.” It is equivalent to our misknowledge, the root of our delusionary existence. The Buddha’s key liberative insight is that all things lack such a truth-status, and that therefore our truth-habits are misguided. Our experience of this is called wisdom, and is the antidote for delusionary grasping at life. Freedom from truth-habits does not mean that our consciousness is annihilated, only that it is less grapsing, less dominating, allowing things to be the relative, fleeting, dreamlike, fluid things that they are, and not insisting that they conform rigidly to our set of preconceived categories. This is the most advanced teaching of all. Though it is not complicated, it is emotionally challenging, as releasing the habitual perception of truth-status in things can be frightening, can feel like succumbing to annihilation.

Above all, we should heed the Book of Natural Liberation and try not to become morbid when we consider or encounter death. If our loved one dies, we should channel our grief into helpful activity, remaining joyous and cheerful, not indulging in weeping and wailing either just because we feel like it (which feeling is after all a culturally determined, conventional reaction), to convince others (including the departed) that we care, to assuage our own sense of guilt at surviving, or to avoid facing our new aloneness. We can accept the testimony of the Book of Natural Liberation that we will only frighten and annoy the soul of the departed and distract her from optimally navigating the between. She is the most important guest at a death and funeral, she is in the most momentous transition point of her life cycle, and positive or negative influences will affect her for years and lives to come. So in dealing with death let us honor the spirit of the Book of Natural Liberation at least by trying to do the right thing by having a good time! May all enjoy happiness and the best of luck!