Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 48-minute teaching, the Dalai Lama guides listeners through the Buddhist understanding of the dying process and the eight stages of dissolution that occur as consciousness separates from the body. He begins with the physiological basis—how the winds or energies associated with the earth, water, fire, and air elements progressively lose their capacity to support consciousness—and describes the corresponding physical and subjective signs each person experiences: a sense of sinking, visual appearances of smoke and fireflies, loss of sensory perception, cessation of breath, and finally the appearance of clear light. Beyond theory, he illustrates these stages with personal experience and addresses practical questions from practitioners: how alertness at death shapes rebirth, why remaining undisturbed after death matters for continued practice, the effects of violent versus gradual death, and ethical questions around suicide. He emphasizes that the sequence of eight dissolutions mirrors the stages of sleep, dreams, and awakening, making the science of death a window into the structure of present consciousness. Designed for serious students already familiar with Buddhist philosophy.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1983-07-30 – 1B – Jeff H Dth IS Reb – KR.mp3
UUID: 039f2a62-25d4-489d-8905-3304c2383f51
Teacher: HH Dalai Lama
Collection: Death and Rebirth
Date: 1983-07-30
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~5,061
But in any case, that sort of analogy, whether he’s right or not, doesn’t make any difference. Of elements of the body, parts of the body, being unable to serve as something that works together with consciousness. Therefore, some other part of it becoming more dominant, and therefore, the person undergoes a change of feeling. That’s oneself still that’s undergoing a change of feeling. It’s not somebody else.
Feeling of perception. So then in the first phase, the wind associated with the earth element is becoming weaker, and so it’s said that earth dissolves into water. And thus, due to this, the sense of being of sinking under, like say, mud or concrete. In the second phase, the water element is dissolving into the fire element. The capacity of the wind associated with the water element becomes less able to support consciousness, and the capacity of the wind associated with the fire element to support consciousness becomes stronger.
In any case, that’s the physiological explanation. The, what one is experiencing physically and mentally is that one’s fluid is drying up. Saliva, sweat, urine, blood, regenerative fluid, these dry greatly. So this could be confirmed again in the hospital. Is it after the phase, I mean the question can be put, is it after the phase of having the sense that you’re sinking under the earth that the person’s eyes, nose, and so forth begin to dry, the nose puckering some from, drying.
I’m drying. Now, in terms of our conscious experience, the body consciousness is able experiences pleasure, pain, and neutral feeling. And at this point, you can no longer experience these. I don’t know whether it would be here or later on where you could stick a pin, say, in the person’s foot, and, the person wouldn’t feel it anymore. That I hear some doctors and nurses do in hospitals.
There’s a lot of lore in hospitals about death and people knowing, oh, well, it’s going to be so many hours now. One is no longer mindful of the feelings accompanying the mental consciousness. Now in Buddhism, the term mental consciousness refers to the thinking consciousness, the consciousness that would meditate. And in general, for older Tibetans, it’s placed at the heart. The American Indians would place it at the solar plexus.
We place it because of our science of the importance of the brain, place it in the head. You know, we generally tend to think in the head. But if we asked in this group here today where you thought, there’d be many different places. Some would think back here, some down here, some behind the nose, some up in the forehead, some in the back over here. As a child, I thought in my throat, and my brother came home from school one day and reported that you were supposed to think in your head.
So I moved it from the throat up into the head. I’ve thought there ever since. Well, not ever since. Getting tuned into the fact that older Tibetans, the younger ones don’t anymore because they’ve heard about the brain and how important it is. The older ones are thinking the chest, you know, you can move it down there.
Then learning that the American Indians and so forth thought down. That’s why American Indians look the way they do. Right? Sort of, you know, they’re they don’t because we think in our heads, we draw energy up to this wind energy, air, that powers consciousness up into our eyes. And we sort of look bug eyed in ears, nose, tongue.
And so it’s like thirsting, these senses. Four out of five of the sense is located here. And so we’re like hungry. And that’s what that’s how Indians describe the white man. The problems of the white man, he thinks in his head or she thinks in her head.
So the mental consciousness is this thinking consciousness. It’s also the yogic consciousness, the meditator, of course, the meditating consciousness. We tend to think that it can only work through concepts and so forth, but in the Buddhist way, the mental consciousness can be used to understand topics like impermanence, emptiness, suffering, and so forth directly. I suppose some would recognize clairvoyance, which would be a case of the mental consciousness knowing various things directly. It’s interesting, this business about placing in the chest.
We have a sense of self that’s in the chest. You know, when you really get, you know, the feeling, don’t tell me, you point here. You don’t say, don’t tell me. But if you’re saying, well, I think, on such and such, you might, you know, go like so. But when it gets serious, it’s don’t tell me.
And so actors, actresses know to do this, you know. Have a when they say I, quite often, they immediately point here. In the Buddhist way, this is where the life begins and where it ends. At the, you wouldn’t say it’s not the physical heart, but at this central place here, the heart center. That with the semen and the egg, in their system it’s not egg but blood, in the mother’s womb, where that consciousness, you could say consciousness, spirit, or whatever enters.
That’s the place, that’s the heart center, and things form from there. Is there any analogy in in our knowledge now of how the body forms in the womb? Do things start at the heart? Is the heart central? Do you know?
Anyone know? And then finally, at death, everything, all of these energies and so forth and consciousnesses collapse at the heart again here. So it’s the beginning and end. And, you know, it’s just to due to our own hearing from really outmoded science now, and it’s old fashioned science, you know, that you’d have to think in your brain. Yeah.
Brain’s important to thought. No question. Doesn’t mean you have to think somewhere up there. So one is no longer mindful here in the second phase of the feelings accompanying the mental consciousness. It’s very interesting.
The feelings of the mental consciousness are very important right now, but there’ll be a time when we won’t be aware of those feelings. One no longer hears external or internal sounds, and the we call it ringing noise. They call it the sound in the ear stops. Like, it’s just sort of like, but it’s higher. Right?
The sound in the ears. That stops in the second phase. And one is a visual appearance. What do you say? The visual sense is of smoke.
This is described variously. I’ve seen it in, one book as like a chimney out of which smoke is coming, a lot of smoke, and within that, puffs. That’s what you see. They’re sitting there in the hospital, but what you see is a chimney and and, a lot of smoke coming out. I’ve never seen it anywhere that people feel, oh, there’s fire, you know, or they get worried about that.
I wonder. It’s one thing I wonder about. If you could, because of this appearance, suddenly feel all this fire and I’d have to get out of here and worry about it. In any case, the consciousness is becoming more subtle. Meditators specifically try to bring themselves through these states while they’re still alive because as one dies, one passes through these subtler states.
So the science of death is the science of present consciousness also, of the levels within present consciousness. And the same eight steps that we pass through in dying, we’re said to pass through as we go to sleep. And then take them in backwards order, eight through one, as we begin a dream. Then one through eight as we as that dream dies, dream ends. And then eight through one as we begin another dream.
One through eight, as that dream ends. Okay? And then if you’re going to wake up, again, eight through one. Or in sneezing, very quickly one is sometimes you see, stars, say. Do you say stars?
Yeah. When sneezing, in fact, that’s the next one, the next phase. So appearance of smoke. One description is of a chimney, a lot of smoke coming out of it and then puffs within it. So it sounds like, you know, quite active.
Another is that you see sort of like thin grayer smoke. Sometimes they use the word blue, but blue gray tend to mix, in their vocabulary throughout a room. So that’s thin light. So two different explanations. Maybe, you know, different types of people reporting their experience.
So that’s in the second phase. So the first phase is like sinking a sense of mirage. I don’t know if you sink and have the mirage sense at the same time. Frankly, I think not, but maybe. I don’t know.
I almost died once in India from, inhaling the fumes of charcoal. They use charcoal tin cans to put some charcoal in it to heat the room. They usually keep a window open or a door open at the same time because the fumes are are highly dangerous. Families all dying at the same time from closing up the room too much. I didn’t realize this.
I kept wondering why anybody would open a window when you turn, you know, you turn on a heater and open the window. What does it mean? Actually, what it means is what you want is just something that has a sense of heat in it in the room. Whether you open a window or not doesn’t make much difference. You have something that’s giving out heat rather than taking it in the room.
And, I, in fact, not only closed my windows and doors, but stuffed, cloth in the cracks. And this started actually, I got to what is I guess would be a not a full version, but partial version of state of the fifth cycle. And so, yeah, I really hadn’t passed to that level, but it was like a reflection like it. And I thought, I’m dying. And I thought, well, geez, is there some reason why I’m dying that I could prevent?
And I couldn’t think of anything. So, well, that’s it. So in the first phase so you see, the business about the sheet getting real heavy, that had that started. And then somewhere along the way, maybe it was just because I was going to sleep, the, fifth level did. But I woke up the next morning and I think I explained it to my servant, he said, oh, yes.
Oh, yes. The family died that way over there, down there. And such and such a llama, he was collapsed on the floor, and his helper came in. He collapsed on the floor. Somebody else came, saw them in there, and broke the window, and then was able to come in and relieve them.
And all I thought was, you’re the one who’s brought the charcoal to me day after day. Why didn’t you tell me? But sometimes you can’t think to you can’t get it out. I did notice that whenever he came to the door, had flapped the door to, like, air the room. And I would feel, oh, you know, don’t make my room cold.
And I was getting very dumb. I had a sort of headache right here. I was getting very dumb over about a week or ten days. So I almost went into the real dumbness. So at the time the sheet was getting very heavy, I don’t remember mirage, but of even seeing this heaviness of the sheep.
Anyway, whatever the case, heaviness, mirage associated with the first cycle and the second cycle the appearance of smoke. Whether it be some puffs of smoke coming out of a chimney within a lot of smoke coming out, or whether it’s like light smoke in the room. Then in the third phase, it’s fireflies or sparks, or as we say, seeing stars, appears from within the smoke. Usually, when you see stars though, you see them in from sneezing. You don’t see them within smoke.
You see them in blackness. Right? Now I understand that there aren’t fireflies in Australia. Is that true? No fireflies?
That’s you don’t have then this marvelous example of what it’s like, but all of us have seen stars from sneezing too hard. With fireflies, it’s just dark outside and you see like sparks all over the place. You don’t see any bug, you just see sparks. And you see a lot of them, because there are a lot of those flies out there. If you get up real close and like put one in your hand, then you can see the bug, and it’s got, its rear end is sort of it’s blinking.
I mean, it is. So just it’s amazing. I think there are some underwater animals that do this too, aren’t there? That have their own life. Another example is of, which is quite limited.
I don’t know, you may have seen it. In Tibetan culture, see it a lot. They it’s the sparks that appear on the bottom of a pan, like a fry pan or some other pan that’s in a fire. The this black what do you call it? I don’t know.
Black stuff. Soot forms on the bottom of the pan, and then that’ll fire, and you’ll get red spot sparks on the bottom of the pan. Tibetans, parch barley in such pans. Take something that’s like a wok and put sand in the bottom so the sand heats, the barley’s on top of that, and that makes the barley pop. Then they have to separate the barley from the sand, of course, before they can grind it and eat it.
It must separate easily. So on the bottom of such a pan, that’s where I’ve seen it in their culture because you have to heat the sand for a long time, I guess, and that’s why, or maybe it’s because you you, use the same pan for a long time so a lot of soot forms on the bottom. So during this third cycle, you can no longer digest food or drink. And what’s interesting to me is this next one of you’re no longer mindful of the affairs of close persons. You know, what they’re doing and so forth.
Our friends are very important to us now, but there’s a time when we wouldn’t even be able to think about what they are doing. This is not to say that one can’t have a clear, aware consciousness at this time. It’s just that you’re no longer mindful of friends and so forth, of their affairs. You can no longer remember the names of close persons. You know, they come to your bedside and, you know, it’s so and so that you’ve been married to for thirty or forty years and that’s just They say, you don’t know who it is?
Do you know who I am? And in terms of breathing, your inhalation is weak and your exhalation is strong and lengthy. Long exhalation. Weak inhalation, and you can’t smell. And as I was saying, the visual sense then is of fireflies or sparks within smoke, it says.
Then in the next phase, cycle number four, your inhalation and exhalation cease. So you stop breathing. Does anyone know, have any general idea on the time between, this level of death and brain death? Anyone know? Says one cannot perform physical actions.
Well, that seems pretty obvious at this point. You’re no longer mindful of external worldly activities, purposes, and so forth. Your tongue becomes thick and short. That’s something that could be confirmed. The root of your tongue turns blue, and they make the obvious statement, one cannot experience taste or experience smoothness or roughness.
In part of how they set up these phases, they’re seeking us a symmetry and wanting symmetry, it seems occasionally at the expense of how it might actually be experienced. Then visually, you see you’ve passed from mirage to smoke to fireflies within the smoke, and then things are calming down more and more. One has a sense of a like a candle that was about to go out. You know, when the candle burns up almost all of its wax, there’s some, sputtering at the end. So these four levels are said to be due to the dissolving of earth into water, water into fire, fire into wind.
Specifically meaning the wind or energy that’s associated with earth losing its capacity to serve as a basis of consciousness and that capacity that’s with the liquid elements increasing, and then that capacity diminishing, and the similar capacity that’s with the, heat elements increasing, and then that capacity decreasing and the capacity that’s with the wind or air elements to serve as basis of consciousness becoming more manifest, more pronounced. Then with the dissolution of these coarse winds, it’s said that the various levels of consciousness now are the main factors, various subtler levels of consciousness consciousness are are the the main main factors factors that that are are dissolving. Dissolving. With them also, various levels of of wind or energy must dissolve at the same time. Because as said before, wind oh, sorry.
Consciousness runs on wind. Just as a rider, moves about on a horse, consciousness, and the horse is wind. Consciousness, which is defined as that which is luminous and cognitive or knowing is sort of it is run by or runs on wind, this physical element that is light and moving. So in a more subtle way, wind is body and consciousness is mind. And these two always working together.
No matter what kind of consciousness it is, no matter how subtle it is, there being a level of wind or energy associated with it. So as now what’s the level of consciousness that dissolves at this point? It’s the level of conceptual consciousnesses, one’s conceptions, desire, hatred, and so forth. These begin to to dissolve at this point. In other words, the conceptual mental consciousness being more subtle than the eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, and body consciousness, the conceptual consciousness dissolves after the sense consciousnesses.
That level of consciousness dissolves after the sense consciousnesses dissolved. You know, as we’re going through in the first four levels, one could no longer see, hear, smell, and so forth, taste, feel. Those consciousnesses were dissolving or ceasing. Now the capacity of conceptuality ceases. So with this, that one had a sense of a sputtering butter lamp.
Now one has a sense of a flame. In Tibet, you see they take, well, one of these bowls, and, you put a wick in the middle and fill it with clarified butter. Just means you burned out the boiled out the water. And use the butter as the fuel for the lamp. So butter lamp with a candle.
So you see this flame of a candle that is now in a breezeless place, as if in a breezeless place, steady. Whereas before it was sputtering, now it’s steady. Some people also say what you see is not the flame, but is like the reddish sort of orangish reddish light that’s cast above such a flame. It’s probably either of those. Then there’s a radical change in one’s type of consciousness.
One now then when the conceptual level of consciousness dissolves, ceases, one has the sense that everywhere there’s just white light. Not white light shining from like the source of the moon filling the sky, but that everything is just composed of white light. And there’s just white light. You don’t have buildings. That may be misleading.
You you don’t have a sense of buildings composed of white light or like the earth composed of white light, but a sense of just a like a sky filled with white light. That white light is one’s own consciousness. There still is some dualism, but we would experience it as a very nondual state. There is some dualism. So one doesn’t have a sense of one’s body, or other bodies or other people.
Back in probably 1962, ’63, the beginning of ’63, I was talking with a friend of mine about the stages of death. And, that night, he said he woke up during the night, and everything was composed of orange light. Very interesting. Now in that case, everything was composed of the room like rather than being composed of having a sense of being composed of matter or something solid, it had the sense that it was composed of orange light, which seems to be a reflection of one of these deeper states. It’s not the actual deeper state, but a reflection of it.
And he didn’t wake up actually. He felt he was awake. In other words, the consciousness was so vivid that he thought he was awake, which is interesting. You know, people practice sleep yoga or dream yoga trying as one passes through these eight states as you go to sleep to catch one of them. If you caught one of them, you would have the sense that you were awake, not that you were asleep.
And so if you felt, oh, this couldn’t be the state because I’m not asleep, then you’d probably lose it. Maybe we should stop right at this point. We’re at the fifth cycle and ask if there are any questions or discussion points and go on from here in the afternoon. Yes. Have I had reaction from the medical profession?
No, really only indirectly. Nurses have told me that people do pass through. They are able to observe some of these states. One of my lamas, this original one from the Kalmyk Mongolian died this year and showed externally some of these signs. No.
It’s still I mean, I’m I’m waiting for the right right contact. It’s not that easy to develop contacts because doctors in general, you know, their concern their concern has stopped a good deal before. You know, they I mean, they’ve left you. I mean, you’re lying in bed and you get the sense, uh-huh. They’re no longer gonna give me those injections.
You know? Feel there’s no more need. Yes? The it’s very important, it’s said, to try to be as alert as alert as possible as long as possible. And within that alertness, even engage in whatever practice one knows.
But the fact that you will become alert during one of them would not mean that you would necessarily be alert during the next one. But to try to be as alert as possible and aware as possible, oh, this is the, you know, stage of the appearance of smoke. Following this will you know, prior to this, there was there had to have been the stage of mirage. And following it will be an appearance of fireflies within smoke, maintaining alertness. And then if one has practiced love or compassion or, you know, realization of emptiness or whatever, trying within that state despite what’s appearing to to alert remain on that as much as possible.
In Buddhist way, the type of mind attitude that you die with will affect your next rebirth greatly, much as often the kind of attitude that we go to sleep in affects some of our dreams. Yeah. Yes. The Dalai Lama has advised, this is in a book that I’m yet to bring out, that people not take mind dulling drugs. Now, that I don’t that doesn’t seem to exclude non mind dulling drugs because it would it affects one’s ability to be alert.
Okay? Now, I don’t know specifically on your question. It’s very well phrased that in the beginning, because you were taking mind dulling drugs, you’re not aware of what’s going on, but would you become so dissociated with those parts of the body that are affected by the mind dulling drugs that when the basis of consciousness becomes other factors, might you then revive consciousness? I would not, you know, maybe your chances would be less because of not being so alert prior, having a continuum of alertness prior to that. But I would think, it’s just my own guess, that you could become alert at any time, but that it would be more helpful if you were in a condition of being alert all along.
That’s my guess. Yes. Yes. In in violent death going very quickly, being shot or motor accident or guillotine or what are they trying to revive in England now? Death by hanging?
I don’t know how quick that is. I wonder It’s very slow. It is? It’s better now. It’s said that the stages, will happen very quickly, and so you lose the opportunity for practice.
So you have a double problem. You lost your, you know, your good life on one hand and the other you didn’t get a chance to die slowly and become alert during some of these phases. And then also, if the body was disturbed, say at the fourth stage when you ceased breathing, then and, you know, you’re taken to mortuary or to be cremated or to be what do you call it? When you’re prepared for viewing and all that, your body is embalmed, that this would cause the remaining stages to pass quickly. For a person who wants to practice, who has gotten used to these stages and wants to practice, very bad to be moved, you know, because you lose then the chance.
So like with this old lama, Kalmyk Mongolian lama, they were trying to make sure to leave him as long as they had to. And so they’re very carefully watching the signs. It said that when the consciousness finally exits, there’ll be a change in posture. So the person sitting somewhat like so, and there’s, you know, some change or some blood coming out of the nose. In in his case, they found blood on the tongue at that point.
And some, semen or some fluid like that coming out of the sexual sexual organ. And probably in the Buddhist description, both male and female have something that would be used, that could translate for the male as semen. Well, just as a male has a fluid in the midst of desire, so females do too. If you look into that fluid, you know, investigate it, it seems both for male and female mainly to be composed of various types of proteins. The male has all these, you know, sperm swimming around in it, but, these, obviously, that sort of thing was not known, in the ancient Buddhist culture.
But there’s both the female fluid, which is called smegma. It took me a long time to even get a name for it. Even in hospitals, these are topics that are sort of like, shouldn’t be looking into that. Mainly composed of proteins and various fluids, say, in the male, is it four or five that mix and come out? And where what I want to know is where they come from in the body, because that’ll have something to say, I think, about the tantric physiology.
It’d be interesting. So in any case, probably for both male and female, there would be some sort of, emission from the sexual organ, something coming out. And then at that point, it said the body can begin decomposing, smelling. So you see, I would think a practitioner, no matter what religion it was, should be able to buy the right for the body to be left until it starts until this happens. Because it’s not going to smell before that.
If it starts stinking, of course, nobody wants it in the hospital. And you can put the body back somewhere near when it starts, get get rid of the body. I would think that that right could be bought. Now that we have the right and and that one could pay for it. Of course, if your relatives are cheap, they could pretend they were going to do it and then say, oh, wow, he’s gone.
Yes. Yes. So it’s Yeah. Seems you should make friends with the doctor so that like with this old lama, there was one of his students who was a doctor. And so he said, I’m not going to the hospital.
I know I’m going to die. It was cancer of the liver and, the doctor just stayed with him during that period. So you had the official there who could place the time of death in the the Buddhist way. Yeah. Well, it’s 11:30.
So yes? Yes. Excuse me? Committing suicide. Yes.
Yes. Well they sort of Yeah. It’s said that the even if the particular problem you see when the mind gets deep enough, those problems can’t be there anymore anyway. But it’s like going to sleep at night, before going to sleep you think tomorrow morning I want to get up at 06:30 and I want to do such and such. There are at least such some people who can do this.
And even though you go to sleep and a whole lot happens that has nothing to do with remembering that I want to get up at 06:30 and do such and such, when 06:30 comes, you get up and do such and such. So you go into the death with a distorted mind, and that really directs your rebirth, really. And so It’s having an influence over your mind. It’s not like you could do this and that be wiped out and not have it have an influence. Thus, it being, you know, extremely detrimental to commit suicide because you’re interfering.
You see, it’s said that as you die, you’re the types of thoughts that you have and so forth are going to be what set up the intermediate state to the next lifetime and thereby the next lifetime. So you’re making a lot of trouble for yourself. It’s like you’re trying to get out of one type of trouble, but you’re making it, much worse. So we’re up to the fifth state, and this afternoon we’ll go on with the fifth state.