When you reach the threshold of death, the friends and relatives around you have no way of accompanying you any further. There is very little they can do to help you at all. Not even the richest magnate can take a penny of his wealth with him, and it would be in vain that even the most powerful of generals ordered his troops to keep death at bay — like everyone else, he will just have to surrender.
Your consciousness will leave your body and wander in the bardo. There, with an illusory mental body, you will find yourself alone in the shadows, lost and desperate, not knowing what to do, not knowing where to go. The hallucinations that torment most beings at that time are terrifying beyond description. Although they are no more than projections of the mind, they nevertheless have a powerful reality at the time.
The only possible source of comfort will be the experience you may have acquired through practicing the Dharma. That is why it is so important to make the effort to practice now. Even in times of peace, a nation foresees the eventuality of war and remains ready to respond. In the same way, stay on the alert, and prepare yourself for death by practicing the Dharma. Like an eternal harvest, it will keep you supplied with provisions for the life to come and will be the very basis of your future happiness.
After death, our mind doesn’t come to a complete stop – like water drying up or a flame going out. There is continuity. Just as wherever the body goes, the shadow comes along with it – similarly, wherever our mind goes, our karma comes along too. You must have an unshakably firm belief in this.
The Buddha taught us about the Eight Sufferings in life. Birth, Aging, Sickness and Death are the first four sufferings.
1. Birth
Isn’t it painful when a child is born? The suffering already begins even before birth, as the child is able to feel the physical sensation in the womb. When a mother drinks hot soup, the fetus will find it unbearably warm. When a mother eats ice cream, the fetus will find it similarly uncomfortable. Isn’t being born painful? This is the truth of birth.
2. Ageing
Isn’t aging uncomfortable? You might wish to head out, but your legs fail you. You might wish to eat something, but your teeth fail you. Isn’t growing older a form of suffering? You are unable to do anything you wish to do.
3. Sickness
Needless to say that sickness is a form of pain and suffering.
4. Death
Death is something that everyone is afraid of and involves even more suffering. Regardless of how much wealth and fame you possess, no one can escape birth, aging, sickness and death. It is very fair and that is why they are known as the four sufferings.
5. Having to leave the one you love
When you love someone deeply but you are forced to leave the person, isn’t that miserable? Just take a look at the train stations and airports. They are the prime examples of places of farewells; “Goodbye, when will you come back?”
6. Unattainable wish
The sixth suffering is being unable to get what you wish for. If you pray very hard for something in vain, isn’t that painful? This is the most painful experience. If your prayers are always unanswered, won’t you be suffering?
7. Being with the ones you detest
The next suffering is hatred and resentment. If you are forced to interact daily with someone you dislike at work, wouldn’t you be upset? Resentment is a form of karmic grievance while hatred can be understood in context as having to see a person you loathe every day. There is a traditional Chinese idiom that says, “Enemies often cross each other’s path”.
8. Ills of the Five Yin
Finally, there is the suffering of The Five Yin. There are five things that are Yin in nature. It is an invisible working of the mind involving form, feeling, perception, volition and consciousness. What goes on in the mind is unknown to others, including your desires, love and hate towards others. When these are blazing within you, they will burn just like a fire, causing you much suffering!
Source: Master Jun Hong Lu’s World Buddhist Fellowship Meeting Milan, Italy，25 September 2017
“It would be fine if death meant the end of everything, like a fire that is extinguished or water that is absorbed into dry soil. But it is not so. Even though we leave this body behind at death, consciousness wanders in the bardo, the intermediate state between this life and the next. The consciousness in the bardo is like a feather blown in the wind; it is like a naked man struggling on a dark, stormy night, unable to see even his outstretched hand in front of him, all alone and afraid.”
So if you waste your life now on endless minor tasks, you can be sure that at the time of death, you will weep with regret and be stricken with intense anxiety, like a thief who has just been thrown into jail and anxiously anticipates his punishment. A person might find himself with nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, and no house to live in; but if his mind is filled with faith in his teacher and the Three Jewels, that person will both live and die with his heart always joyful and confident.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead – or the Bardo Thodol. Here is the complete English translation of the famous Tibetan death text, The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State. Bardo Thodol means “liberation by hearing on the after death plane”. The book was originally written in Tibetan and is meant to be a guide for those who have died as they transition from their former life to a new destination. The Tibetan Book of the Dead has been traditionally attributed to Padma-Sambhava, an Indian mystic who was said to have introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century. We have a range of more detailed works and commentaries on The Tibetan Book of Dead here on the site, do a search. From the book:
If the expiration is about to cease, turn the dying one over on the right side, which posture is called the ‘Lying Posture of a Lion’. The throbbing of the arteries [on the right and left side of the throat] is to be pressed. If the person dying be disposed to sleep, or if the sleeping state advances, that should be arrested, and the arteries pressed gently but firmly. Thereby the vital-force will not be able to return from the median-nerve and will be sure to pass out through the Brahmanic aperture. Now the real setting-faceto-face is to be applied. At this moment, the first [glimpsing] of the Bardo of the Clear Light of Reality, which is the Infallible Mind of the Dharma-Kāya, is experienced by all sentient beings.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead – or the Bardo Thodol is the English translation of the famous Tibetan death text, The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State.
Written by: Padma-Sambhava
Published by: Summum.us
Edition: English translation by Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup
[Audio Download] by Sogyal Rinpoche. (Author, Narrator). John Cleese (Narrator). Peri Eagleton (Narrator). Susan Skipper (Narrator).
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is a contemporary spiritual masterpiece and source of sacred inspiration that interprets Tibetan Buddhism for the West. Sogyal Rinpoche presents a radically new vision of living and dying. He shows how to go beyond our fear and denial of death to discover what it is in us that survives death and is changeless. Rinpoche explains simple yet powerful practices that listeners can use to transform their lives, prepare for death, and help the dying.
Though Western science has long rejected the idea of an immaterial self, modern research into near-death experiences, or NDEs, has now proven that many occur after the point of bodily death, and thus cannot be produced in the brain. Whether they are evidence of the soul or some other undiscovered phenomenon, NDEs have put Western materialist scientists on the defensive and led many researchers to embrace bold new theories of consciousness.
The bardo of death is a successive process. Our physical body is an aggregation of flesh, blood, etc., and deteriorates at death. Mind, on the other hand, does not die since it isn’t composed of particles. The physical components of our body are formed at birth and disintegrate at death. Our physical body only functions as long as it is sustained by our mind. Every physical body is dependent upon many causes and conditions and is only appropriated in dependence upon them. For this reason, our body is subject to decay and collapses in the absence of our mind, our consciousness. Mind, which isn’t an aggregation of particles, doesn’t cease when it leaves the body. Its nature is clarity and awareness.
Transcendent renunciation is developed by meditating on the preciousness of human life in terms of the ocean of evolutionary possibilities, the immediacy of death, the inexorability of evolutionary causality, and the sufferings of the ignorance-driven, involuntary life cycle. Renunciation automatically occurs when you come face-to-face with your real existential situation, and so develop a genuine sympathy for yourself, having given up pretending the prison of habitual emotions and confusions is just fine. Meditating on the teachings given on these themes in a systematic way enables you to generate quickly an ambition to gain full control of your body and mind in order at least to face death confidently, knowing you can navigate safely through the dangers of further journeys. Wasting time investing your life in purposes that “you cannot take with you” becomes ludicrous, and, when you radically shift your priorities, you feel a profound relief at unburdening yourself of a weight of worry over inconsequential things.
– Padmasambhava
from the book “The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between”
At present we perceive samsara as something we have to reject and nirvana as something we have to attain. Now while this is correct according to relative truth, according to absolute truth the nature of the afflictive emotions and actions that we are supposed to reject is nothing other than emptiness. When we realize the Dharmakaya, which is free from true existence, we will know that all perceptions are similar to a dream or an illusion and we will no longer crave these phenomena. As it is said, ‘While there is attachment, there is no view.’ And the absence of attachment is the supreme view.
The Bardo doesn’t come after our next death, we’re actually in the Bardo now and as a result the Bardo that we are manifesting, we think is “like a physical world” that we leave when the body dies, but in fact the Bardo is “this” world and it’s always the world of your current experience as your projection.
You are manifesting your Bardo in this moment and in every moment,while thinking it is some pre-bardo, “objectively real”, physical dimension.
Experience is always subjectively real… not objectively real. The “death of the body” is just another Bardo event occurring in the same Bardo.
Otherwise, there would be a dualism between objective “physical reality” and the subjective Bardo state.
Strive to accomplish the supreme unchanging goal. For life is passing, and there is no certainty about the time of death. Even if you should die tomorrow, you should have confidence and be without regret.
“Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?”
There is no reality in a dream but nevertheless
Zen Flash 
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