How to Die

This teaching, especially during the pandemic, I believe, is fairly relevant: how to die, cuz you’re gonna. If the virus doesn’t kill you something else will. Know this for a fact.

There is no one who was ever born who has not died; unless they have not gotten around to it yet and they will.

You will. You will die and it’s gonna be the best orgasm you’ve ever had!

Dying is not scary. It’s scary because it feels unknown – strange. Once you’ve done it a few times, and all of us have done it many times, although not all of us remember. You realize what it is like. It ceases to be a scary unknown and becomes just one of those things you do.

However the instructions in “how to do it effectively,” are important.

The first and foremost for a practitioner, it is very important to know that they are dying when they’re dying.

Any of you who are around a practitioner who is dying, do not hold it secret from them. Tell them, “You are dying. It’s time now.”

In India, the Indian doctors don’t tell. I have had to be the one when someone’s discharged from the hospital terminal, so that they can die with their family, and given a whole lot of months worth of expensive medicine prescribed, the family has spent their grocery money on; thinking it will save the person, and they’re circling the drain, to have to tell the family.

“No he’s dying. You need to say goodbye. You need to make him comfortable. He’s not recovering from this.”

That cruelty (not telling the person they’re dying) has often really bothered me because they do it to the Yogi’s too. The number of Yogi’s that have had me come after they’re out of the hospital and say, “Am i dying? Can you tell? Here’s the (hospital) records. They won’t tell me anything.”

And I look at the MRIs and all the lab results and can pretty much tell them, in most cases, whether they should be preparing to recover or to go forth. That cruelty has often bothered me.

Some of you are doctors. You may have some patients who are not practitioners, who don’t want to know. And you will have to honor that in those circumstances. But for most people who have a chance to do it well – tell them. Don’t hide it. Family members the same – tell granny – she probably won’t mind. Most old folks have come to terms with the fact that they’re dying because they noticed the deterioration over years, and they know damn well it’s coming.

Most teenagers being crazy brave as one is with all those hormones running, don’t mind so much either.

It’s the people in their mid-life that are terrified. Most of you are there. Don’t be afraid. It’s actually quite fun. Let me take some of the mystery out of it.

Not just my past life memories and what I’ve read in text, but I have sat with and provided terminal care through the AIDS epidemic here in this country, and through a number of other epidemics out in India. I have sat with people dying, and the process is very clear. Everyone goes through this process although if you’re suddenly hit by a truck and your neck is snapped, or your brain is completely splushed; this process can happen so fast that you’re not going to notice until you hit the bardo.

However for most people who do not die immediately, you can kind of feel it happening even if you die by violence. Even if you get shot in the heart. You’ve got enough time to feel the elements absorbing, recognize what’s going on, and take steps accordingly.

You don’t control when. You don’t control the process – but, there are times within the process that you have choices, and you do control those.

The Process of Dying

First let me demystify the process of actually dying.

1. The Dissolving of the Earth Element

The first thing that happens is you lose physical strength. This can happen over days, or weeks, or hours, or minutes, or even seconds. You can barely lift your arm; you are weak, everything is heavy.

You know that feeling when you wake up in a nightmare, and you want to get up from a nightmare, and you want to get out of bed and do something, and you can’t move your body? Like that.

That’s the absorbing of the earth element, or rather the absorbing is not exactly right; that’s a common translation, but it’s more the dissipating, the dissolving of the element of Earth.

So your ability to move, leaves without that element functioning.

Now you’re still breathing. Involuntary muscles like heart and respiration are still going. But, it’s your striated muscle, the voluntary muscle, that you lose your control over so you can no longer change position, lift your arm. You feel heeaavvy.

When this is happening don’t fight it.
Don’t resist.
Relax your body.

As you feel it beginning, place yourself in a comfortable position; either sitting up and meditating with a good backrest, or lying down on your right side with your right hand under your head, And your left hand along your body, not curled up but fairly straight.

These two positions, either one that you may choose, will facilitate the ease of the process.

Once you can no longer move you will feel a sensation ; (it) feels like an earthquake but it’s inside.

You will experience a sound. Sounds like an earthquake, like rocks rubbing. Have you ever been in an earthquake that’s been loud enough to hear? There’s a sound which you don’t exactly hear with your ear drums but feel with your body.- That happens. When that happens you know that your earth element has dissolved.

2. The Dissolving of the Water Element

At this point the water element begins to dissolve.

If you’ve sat with dying people, you will notice that their lips dry out and crack. Again this can happen really slowly over days; the absorption of the elements. Or it can happen quite quickly. How long each element takes, it’s entirely dependent on individual karma and the circumstances of death and what you’re dying of.

To tell a dying friend who was a practitioner nobody told, she didn’t want to die. She was always afraid of it. When she was dying and trying to get the instructions in while she was on a ventilator half out of it half anesthetized. I don’t know how much she understood at that point, having refused to even look at it prior to that with terminal cancer.

Look at it now while you’re healthy, or while you’re dying.
Look at it.

Think about it and decide how it will be and what you will do at the different times of volition, and then practice.

This all happens as you’re falling asleep as well. Every night as you drift off to sleep, your body stops moving, your toes stop twitching, if you’re a toe twiddler, as you’re drifting off to sleep, as I am. They stop wanting to twiddle. You stop rolling about ,-
fixing your pillow, doing all those little things you do. And you start to feel heavy. When you go to sleep it all happens pretty quickly. Almost between one breath and the next, but it’s a good time to try to go slow enough to notice it. See how it feels. Get used to the experience.

Dream yoga can be used in preparing for the death process and I will talk about that further as we go on.

When the water element is dissolving, the body dries out, the mucous membranes dry out.

Before this happens , while you are dealing with the end of the earth element, you may want to close your eyes. It’s a little bit more comfortable. Although your eyeballs are going to dry out anyway, the tear ducts stop functioning.

There’s a vision, on a sunny day, if you were to go behind a wide waterfall and look outward at the sunlight .Shimmering sheet of water it looks like. Kind of sparkly. Those little Rika that you see in the sky, you see those there too. Sparkly, shimmery sheet of water.

There’s a feeling of falling through it. Try to go headfirst with a “Wheeeeeee.”.

Enter death — chin up, tits to the wind — “Wheeeeeeee!” rather than scrambling and crawling to avoid it once it’s unavoidable.

3. The Dissolving of the Fire Element

After the water element has dissolved, the fire element begins to dissolve.

The body cools from the edges in. If you’re with someone,this is normal in the death process. Don’t try to warm up their feet with a hot pad or their hands. Let them cool from the edges in. It’s normal and appropriate that lung has to withdraw from the edges of the body. The fire element has to withdraw and dissolve.

When the fire element is dissolving, you see a vision like on a dark night when you throw a log into a bonfire, and there’s these little sparks that go up and vanish. At first there’s a lot of them, and then less and less until the last spark goes out.

4. The Dissolving of the Air Element

You are still aware at this point as the fire element absorbs; but, as the air element absorbs you lose your ability to think.

By this time you should know what you’re doing, and relax into it.
Don’t fight it.
Go forward.

As the air element absorbs there are sensations of confusion as you’re thinking can no longer get stuck in a line or made linear. It’s just not working. Embrace the confusion.

There is a sound like a hurricane through tree branches. Big shushing, whooshing sounds. Goes on for what appears to be there a long time. Is quite overwhelming.

You often feel loss of gravity, a sensation of falling or being blown about, or twirling and whirling at that point. And the breath stops. The breathing stops usually before the heartbeat. The heartbeat continues on usually for a little while after breathing stops.

Lung is still moving sluggishly, but not really and only in the middle.

5. The Dissolving of the Space Element

At this point the space element absorbs. You’re no longer thinking. You’re barely aware. And the white Bodhicitta, the white tigle of the crown chakra, and the red sunyata, the red aliveness, brilliance of the womb chakra the lower red ascends ,the upper white descends. They meet in the heart. And there is nothing. Not even you are there.

Rest.
Let go.
Let it be.

Slowly, because of the innate vitality of existence, light emerges.

It doesn’t come from anywhere.
It doesn’t go anywhere.
And, you are not in it.
There’s no you at this state.

Only the pure clear transparent light.
Like the light at dawn, but, no object and no subject.
Duality has not yet arisen.

If you are able to have relaxed and gone forwards to this point, this is the first Bardo. And full enlightenment is possible, if you don’t grab anything. Grab existing, being a self, don’t do that.

Allow yourself to not be a thing.

This is where one sits Tudom.

The pulse has decreased to perhaps one beat every five minutes. Breathing has ceased. You’re dead but not quite. It is like a coma, but without breathing or any signs of life. Except just around the heart chakra where the red-and-white has come together, here’s a little bit of warmth; and, because of that occasional agonal beat of the heart, morbid lividity and rigor mortis do not set in. You are suspended between life and death here in the first Bardo.

This is where if you have had the teachings of Dzogchen, they are actualized. And, if you have the habit created in life – ‘cause remember you’re not thinking – you don’t have volition here, not really. It is the reemergence of the possibility of being that will end this.

So if you have become accustomed to resting in trekchö, without center or edge, without meditator or meditation or object of meditation, then you will be able to rest here for long and long.

Now it is possible for an Arhat to snuff themselves out at this point, but not for a bodhisattva. It is said in the Theravada tradition that at this point, an Arhat, with their full set of experience, a non-returner does not re-emerge. Bodhisattvas do, due to the Karma of their vow, to exist for the sake of others throughout time and space.

So instead of simply snuffing out their mindstream like a candle, there is emergence. I haven’t seen this state last more than 10 days, and that was with my own root teacher. Most of the Yogi’s 3 days – 5 days, which is considered quite good. A couple of Westerners – one made we think three days, two and a half and the other made the better part of a day. So how long this lasts will depend on your skill at meditation.

Family members do not say dead to anyone about the person. They are; it is called here in the West, when someone is in that state, the final coma of the death process. If you don’t call it that even though they are no longer breathing, there are rules and regulations about calling the coroner; but, they don’t come in on a terminal person who’s doing Hospice at home. These rules don’t come into effect until they’ve completed the death process. So recognize tudom when your friend or relative is in it and refer to it to others as was done with Norbu Rinpoche, as the final coma of the death process, rather than “he’s dead and in tudom” because they don’t understand that.

Eventually, whether due to your Bodhisattva vows, or your karma, a centerality emerges. A perceiver and a perceived. Suddenly at some point you perceive the clear light nature of mind. Not this total ,the clear light nature of mind being itself which is the first Bardo.

But this reemergence, the beginning reemergence of a personality. A sense of being in the middle of the clear light dawn arises. This is the end of tudom.

At this point the person in the body, the body will slump. Within an hour or so after it, you’ll see morbid lividity; rigor mortis will begin to set in. Sometimes out of one of the nostrils comes a drop of liquid of blood or other liquid. Not always. But there’s a palpable difference in the room while someone’s in tudom. If you can go there and sit and do your own trekchö with them, they can pull you into there by the intensity of that and you can experience very profound trekchö, under those circumstances. It’s a great blessing to all those around.

As the emergence begins, you begin to form an illusory body. Once you notice you are the perceiver of the perception, you begin to see stuff. You begin to have experiences, light. Since there is a perceiver, perceptions will arise. Light. Sound. Intense sensations. Feelings. This is the reemergence.

At this point you will emerge into an interesting state. You will not have energy channels, even the energy channels you form in the dream time. Not having energy channels, your karma is not active and yet you’re awake and aware.

At this point you have incredible abilities and volition. You’re thinking works. Your memory works. You are a specific, but you don’t exactly have form. Although, you may assume at this point that you have your previous form; the energy channel patterns in which karma is held have not reestablished themselves. There are very distinct sensations as they reestablish themselves.

So at this point for a while – again how long depends on your karma – you have volition, more volition than you’ve ever had in your whole life. You can go; it’s like astral projecting which you can sometimes manage on the cusp of dream, And actually get up out of your body and walk around. And go through things and reality is not solid there.

At this point you have the volition to choose where to go. To actually, consciously undertake the rebirth you choose; and this doesn’t last very long. Anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, depending again on the practitioner. You go wherever you think of. So make a habit of the Pureland of your choice.

This is where many Tulkus choose the country of their rebirth. They go there. Your sight is clear. The visions that arise in reforming the channels have not started yet. Dewachen is recommended because it’s the easiest one to get into.

In this state – you can recognize this state because it is twilightish; the light’s different. You can’t see the sun or the moon in the sky. It’s neither the bright of day nor the dark of night. It’s a diffuse light you see with the light of your mind rather than the light of your eyes.

So at this point, the reason why Dewachen is recommended – behind the sunset – which you won’t be able to find directly, so instead just grab the mantra OM AMI DEW HRIH. Or even just the seed syllable HRIH. An image, an idea of what Dewachen is like from a picture from a thangka – go google some thangka’s of it – and head there, because you don’t have to be an advanced practitioner. The mantra Om Mani Padme Hum will get you there too since Chenrezig is an aspect of Amitaba.

If you are a more advanced practitioner you have the option of choosing among several other pure lands – guru Rinpoche’s copper-colored mountain. The green northern forest of Tara. The richness of jeweled palaces and sensory delights of Ratnasambhava. These are pure lands because they do not contain suffering, but, nonetheless they contain opportunities for practice, and generally the ability to see the suffering outside of the Pure Land, to get up some motivation to practice.

So at this time you can do this or you can choose to be reborn in Iceland which has nice politics. Or Hawaii because you like the climate. As you will. Your choice won’t last that long. Not the conscious choice of rebirth that arises here. That allows you to imagine any place whatsoever under this sun or another. And by imagining it, go there, and take birth there. There are infinite places. Infinite choices.

But, trying to figure out what you want to do right then and there is a little bit dicey ‘cuz you can see your family, you’re gonna remember your old life, all of your attachments are still there. You’re really likely to grab on to something raw, that you shouldn’t be grabbing on to. A possession that mattered to you. Your house – welcome to ghosthood. Your lover, that’s got attendant problems, You’re likely to be their next pet cat. Which is not so bad but you kill a lot of mice and then it ends. Oops!

This gets faster and faster. In the beginning you have volition but the volition is confusing. How well do you control your thoughts? Because anything you think of, you’re there. Remember where you lived, you’re there. Remember where you went to school as a kid , you’re there.

Weeee hoooo, pop, pop, pop,- here you go — there, here, there. You get dizzy with it all; and in that swirling dizziness, you’re gonna grab something. So either choose right away when you find yourself in this state or try not to grab anything as it dissipates.

‘Cuz now you’re going to enter the Bardo of the Dhyani Buddhas. This is the reforming of a channel body in the Bardo. This is the creating of a Bardo body. You are building it; so the first thing to reform is space.

Before that happens there is a crescendo. The confusion of anywhere you think of you can go turns into an incredible set of confusing, overwhelming sensations. There’s an opportunity in this. If you didn’t choose and place your choice, and exceed your choice, then in the swirling of multitude of places it gets more and more intense. The light gets brighter. The sound gets louder. The taste gets more so. All of the six senses, whatever senses you had in your last body and others, so right now you’ve got sonar, and all sorts of other senses we have no name for. And they’re all being stimulated incredibly loudly, and it is so overwhelming that most people in an attempt to resist it, to grab, to solidify, lose consciousness and solidify, that sheer intensity.

If you can let go and allow it to dissolve your center, you’re being a center, you’re being a singularity, is the most amazing sensation.

For those few of you who like intensity, this is the fun part.

“Wheeeeee!” Big one.

After which the space element reforms; you begin to see specific visions relating to specific realms. This is all part of the Bardo of the Dhyana Buddha’s as you re-emerge from the clear light as a Bardo being.

Space reforms. You are aware of space, distance, time; because of that, form arises.

As form arises, it becomes richer and more complex and richer in texture. As it becomes richer – visions – well the space when just space arises visions of the God realms arise. Brightness, overwhelming bright sound admantine and soft dim pastel.

Don’t go hide in the soft dim stuff. The brighter, more intense stuff is to what you want. Let it absorb you.

Space arises as form, smokey, shifting, swirling, shades, bright, sharp, primary colors.

It’s easy to be offended by the brightness and the sharpness of the primary colors, and drift into the soft smokey clouds and fall into the hell realms. Your Karma’s coming back.

Form itself continues to complexity itself. This is the richness of texture of phenomena. It relates to the human realm. The vision is something utterly complex. Utterly, oh how would I say this, multiplicity in all its complexity. Bright. Brilliant. Loud. And structure, the multiplicity is too complex to be fathomable or understandable to have a structure imposed on it.

And then there’s the nice safe solid bit of structure, don’t grab the structure. Head for the chaos. The chaos of complexity, unfathomability. Feel it. Relax into it.

From here, feelings become active emotions, and there is a bright brilliant intensity of emotion. Good. Bad. Pain. Pleasure. Everything. Bright. Loud. Head for that. Not into what looks like gentleness. Don’t grab gentleness now. Oh don’t. Go for the intensity. Go through the wild, intense, incredibly intense feelings. Not the soft ones. We all like soft. Don’t grab.

At this point volition returns and doing is possible. You can do stuff. As volition arises there is arising with it an urge to do something practical. Don’t. Release it into playfulness. Go for the bright. This is all seen also visually as symbolic lights. Heard as symbolic sound. Tasted as intensity of taste. All senses are stimulated by that.

Do not be practical here.
Do not try to get it to do something as volition comes back.
Allow the innate playfulness of phenomena to assert itself.
Relax into that.
This comes to a crescendo, all of it together, brilliant.
And now your dream body, your Bardo body, forms its heart and you see something indescribably bright made of light. Tibetans describe it as 42 peaceful archetypes from the heart chakra because they are familiar with those shapes.

When you see something that you have never seen before it will look like something to you. An interesting pattern might look to you like a basket and you will think of it as a basket. A rope might look to you like a snake in an unexpected place, and you will think of it as a snake.

Things will look to you like something when there’s dragons in the sky they look to you like cloud formations. So you don’t name them dragons. When there are certain cloud formations in the sky they look to a Tibetan like a dragon so they name them dragon. What’s really in the sky and the thunderstorm, a cloud formation? Cumulonimbus? Or dragons dancing?

Your perception will differ according to your inherent cultural matrix. Since your most recent life experiences are freshest, these interpretations will be placed on this intensity experience. This experience is intense involving all sense organs. It’s complex. Don’t run away from it.

You notice there’s a refrain that runs through everything from the moment you know you’re about to die, to now?

Don’t run.
Don’t grab.
Chin up — tits to the wind.

Wheeeeeee!

That’s how you do it!

Here, also, go at it. At each point, at any point here, these are opportunities for realization if you don’t run, and you don’t grab the hidey-holes, and you don’t crawl in on yourself like a salted snail in its shell but stand naked in the wind and rain.

These are the basic instructions.

After that, this vision which is so unshakably there, that it is fearsome. So intense that it is fearsome. It gets more fearsome. In the beginning it looks like it’s admantine love and you couldn’t possibly deserve it. Now it starts looking like it might not like you all that much. So it’s even more likely that you’re going to run, instead of not give a shit and move towards it.

That’s the formation of the speech chakra – volition.

Then the brain chakra forms and at that point the vision looks really scary monsters, big teeth, drinking blood, holding weapons, looking like it’s about to attack you. Can you stand still and not fight?

You see it’s easier in the beginning. As the visions arise it gets harder and harder because you’re more solid and more solid. If you run from the monsters instead of going “Oh cool monsters!” and go in towards them with an, “Ah , let’s see what this is…” Which is possible, but not really likely for most personalities.

At this point you have reformed. You have a body that feels just like the one you had before. Looks just like you at the one you had before; and it walks through what feels like a sort of a dream time of this reality. You wander about. You see things , your house. You still can pass through walls and things happen but your interpretations are personal. There’s no meat. You interact with stuff; it’s dream time. There’s no meat to hold you back. No solidity. Even though you feel solid to yourself and you fear and you hope and you want and you do. But what you are perceiving is not necessarily a common reality as you perceived when you were wearing a meat body.

There’s a film that portrayed this aspect of the Bardo incredibly well. Flatliners. It was about people who had discovered a way and were investigating death by killing themselves, you know in a medical situation and then getting revived. Only after a while it became unclear those who had been revived whether they were really revived or just thought they were. But the way this film was done was an incredibly accurate depiction of what it feels like in the Bardo.

The thing is there is no ground here. No solidity of meat. So this is why it’s called the Bardo of becoming. There’s nothing to hold your personality stable like a genotype. So yeah change, and over a period of time which averages to maybe be around 49 days. Maybe kinda-sorta. But might be less and might be more. You change and you change and you change.

You die and are reborn, die and are reborn in the dream. Different, until by the end of it you don’t even look like you used to. You can barely remember who you were.

Actually this happens in daily life. You change and you change and you change. But because you have genetics and meat and certain channel patterns, the changing is more subtle. It is less extreme.

So there, you’re gonna lose your personality anyway. You’re gonna get a new one, and another and another and you see you’re changed by what you interact with; but what you interact with, there is your own projections. Not exactly an external reality although you overlap with it sometimes.

So every time you have a set of experiences, it changes you and without a meat solidity to hold you back, according to your karma, you keep changing into something else quite all together. Your personality, compared to your last life, there’s a lot of differences. Go back three or four lives and there’s even more differences.

You’ll get worn into a genotype according to your karma, and it has hair trigger adrenals. I got stuck with that this time. Last time I didn’t have that at all. Man adjusting to that was hard! Managed. But oh doggies that was a surprise. See I didn’t startle easily in my last life. Was very naturally mellow. In this life anything will startle me physiologically. This can be annoying. You get startled a lot as a baby.

You will change.

So, to go back to the how-to of this: get familiar with the process, the different stages. Imagine them as you are going to sleep at night. Walk yourself through it so that the experience is familiar rather than scary, rather than the great unknown. Unless you’re somebody that jumps Wheeeee! into the great unknown and then have at it!

But it’s nice to know which are the points you’ve got a bit of steerage and what to steer for in those points.

You don’t want to end up in a dung heap, in a third-world country as a bug. There are much nicer places to be bugs, if you must be a bug.

See if you can catch this process which happens exactly like this as you’re falling asleep. See if you can do the recommended choices in the dream time.

This is your practice.

From Q & A: How to practice this as falling asleep.

As you are tired and falling asleep, lie down on your right side in the position Buddha lay in while dying. If you sleep in a gom-tri, sit up comfortably, in the position that you meditate in, which is probably for a gom-tri either a full lotus or a half lotus. Feel the earth element absorbing as your body gets heavy. Feel that your mouth no longer runs with so much saliva. As the water element goes, imagine the visions that will be seen. Allow the fire element to dissipate, don’t try to warm your toes, leave them be. Imagine the sparks, and the winds of the air element– and here you are going to stop thinking because as you drift off to sleep. The red and white won’t come together here. There will be a brief moment of darkness; and, a flash of being and then the dream body forms. You may be able to be aware on this point, you will see pictures. But pictures will become more and more complex. You will begin to experience emotions about the pictures. And you will find yourself in there, in the dream with volition; and you know you’re dreaming. At this point head for your pureland choice.

It is hard to slow down enough, to catch all the stages. But, just as you go to sleep, imagine you are dying and relax into it with a wheeee. Like that.

Transcribed by: Ian Marshall
Reviewed by: Ibu Nooney