Meditations on Living, Dying and Loss: Ancient Knowledge for a Modern World from the Tibetan Book of the Dead

O Lord of Loving Kindness, through the blessing of your compassion, Purify the obscurations generated by my past actions and dissonant mental states, And secure me in the presence of your mother-like loving kindness!

Wishing for happiness, we pass our human lives in suffering.

In my own fragile state, having been freshly born into this altered realm of bereavement, every aspect of the text took on an immediacy of meaning.

In this way a recognition of the natural purity of our own impure habitual tendencies is continuously cultivated and a perfected state of being and perception is aroused which encompasses all phenomena.

In other words, everything that we experience is conditioned by our own habitual mental tendencies generated in the past, and what we see and experience as being tangibly real is a projection manufactured by our mental habits and constructs.

Our experience is the product of our own mental constructs, it is we who choose how we interpret our own experience, and we do therefore have an extraordinary freedom and opportunity.

If through our own exploration we come to an understanding that our happiness and sorrow are determined by ourselves, by our own way of reacting to the events of our lives, an extraordinary creative potential is unleashed.

being enveloped by a clear, radiant luminosity, which, following the consciousness leaving the body, fills their field of vision. This stage is often described as being accompanied by a sense of timeless spaciousness, a feeling of completeness, and of being enveloped by a loving presence.

approach the moment of death with a mind filled with loving kindness and filled with the wish to abide, without distraction, in the experience of the horizonless radiance which she was about to enter.