Death practices

Some people believe that if you can develop the habit of prayer, then at death, in the midst of all the confusion and agony, you might spontaneously start praying and find yourself invoking the mind-states of angels. And then, from that nice, familiar space, you die.

Or a Pure Land Buddhist might pray, “namo amida butsu” all their life so that when the important time comes, that great mantra, (which is best translated as “Hello Amida Buddha!” ) will find their lips and reverberate across their consciousness. Then suddenly, Amida will arive, just as they imagined he would—a red-skinned, half naked, sexy Japanese man with blue hair. Amida will arrive to take the mind away to his heavenly realm Dewachen, where a river of Infinite Life flows into a crystal clear lake of Light, filled with lotus buds. Each bud incubats a baby bodhisattva. You curl up inside one of those warm flower buds, beneath a warm blanket of light coming in through the petals, and then from there you die.

Or, if you practice Tibetan p’howa, at the moment of death you imagine yourself as a tiny ball of consciousness floating in your heart space. Suddenly, with the final out breath, you imagine yourself soaring upwards and out the top of your head where, like a grain of salt diving into the ocean, you are released into the nondual mirror mind of All Space. And then from there you die.


Or you pray for Jesus to come. When he doesn’t you pray for you lover, and your children, and your mother. And then you think of how lonely this is, and how this is the end, and you don't want to say goodbye to music, and to mountains, and to your children and lovers and life. And why does it have to hurt so much, and oh god I wasted it, I wasted my life, and oh no, how horrible!, and then, from there, you die.

Or you forget to pray for anything at all, and instead just fall into a dream state confused and unclear, and then from there you die.

Not to say you can’t have all those kinds of deaths. I personally believe (with my Elizabeth Kubler Ross books at my side) that we will definitely all go through stages of grief. Frightened thoughts and confusion will cloud the mind at death like the coloring of leaves in fall. It’s all very natural, and can be good indicators that the brain is starting to die.

But if you are lucid enough to be free as the space or clear mind in which those thoughts and feelings and confusions arise, then you can have enough calm lucidity to also, alongside the stages of grief, experience the stages of enlightenment. This is one reason to start a dream yoga practice of some kind.