Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute talk from November 1994, Ven Pende Hawter teaches the death dissolution meditation, a foundational practice in Tibetan Buddhism for understanding the physical and psychological stages of dying. He describes the four outer stages of physical dissolution—corresponding to the weakening of earth, water, fire, and wind elements—each marked by specific physical changes (loss of movement, drying of fluids, loss of body heat, cessation of breath) and associated inner visions (mirage, smoke, sparks, flickering light). After breathing stops, Hawter explains, four subtle inner stages continue as energies move toward the heart centre, culminating in the clear light of death: a state of perfect clarity, bliss, and luminosity free of conceptual thought. Throughout, he connects these classical teachings to modern medical observations of the dying process, near-death experiences, and practical guidance for those caring for the dying—including the sensitive question of pain medication and whether strong attachment from relatives can delay natural death. Suited for practitioners with some familiarity with Buddhist anatomy and meditation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 D and D 1994 11 12.mp3
UUID: 578d71ad-2d69-4c5b-9ebe-a97b7fe8954a
Teacher: Ven Pende Hawter
Collection: Death and Dying (Ven Pende Hawter)
Date: 1994-11-12
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.0 minutes
Words: ~6,378
The basic types of meditation. I’d like to say a little bit now about the second main type of death meditation, the death dissolution meditation. Again, some of you will be quite familiar with this, for others of you will be fairly new. It’s a very important meditation both for understanding what happens at the time of death and taking away the fear of that, But also it’s a very important meditation in the tantric teachings because one of the main well perhaps the main part of tantric path is to be able to take the ordinary birth intermediate state and rebirth into the path and transform them into the into what’s called the three bodies of the Buddha, Sambhogakāya and Nirmānakāya, the the three enlightened aspects of the Buddha. And so for that reason, this this teaching on the actual death dissolution is vitally important because it it can allow us by understanding it and by incorporating it into the into the tantric path, it can allow us to transform uncontrolled death and rebirth into the three bodies of a Buddha to actually become enlightened at the time of death.
And so I mentioned before the yogi sitting in meditation at the time of death. So by them doing this specific types of meditation, in particular the meditations on emptiness at the time of death, then they can actually achieve the state of liberation or enlightenment at the time of death. So it’s it’s very important for that reason. If it was easy, it would be useful to be able to set up the overhead. If it’s not easy, what we want because several of the overheads I have just make it a little bit easier to have something visual to look at as I talk.
That’s alright. You can either move or Don’t worry too much if you can’t see the the overheads. It’s really just as as an aid to the to the teaching. While I’ve got that slide up, I rather like this life because it sums up a lot of what I’ve been saying today and so it’s the it’s the Zen student saying to the master, master how do I prepare for death? And the teacher says learn to live and the student says then how shall I learn to live?
And the master says prepare yourself for death. So it really sums up really what we’re talking about this weekend that first with the interrelationship between life and death that you can’t separate the two, that as we’ve been saying that our whole life is a preparation for death and that to live fully we have to we have to, sorry. To prepare ourselves for death, we have to, learn to live. Anyway, to to I’m getting I’m getting mixed up. Basically, to to live fully, we have to prepare for our death is what it amounts to.
And also concept that we’re dying from the moment we’re born, but we’re also fully alive until the moment we die. In terms of this next meditation, if I just put up that I apologize to Joy and anyone else who went to the talk last night to have to go through all this again, but better to hear it twice than not at all. I’ll give you those three, Joy. If you put on the first some of those No. These are actually not on the handouts.
So you might need to get a copy of these sheets. If I just mention at this stage that in terms of this weekend’s content, the best general book is the book by Sogyal Rinpoche, which many of you know called the Tibetan book of living and dying. The the best reference for death intermediate state and rebirth is the book called death intermediate state and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism by Lati Rinpoche and Jeffrey Hopkins, which I can’t lay my hands on. And in terms of the Phowa teachings and the best book is this little one, brilliant little book by Lama Yeshe and teachings that he gave on transference of consciousness at the time of death, which I might have mentioned this morning. But that’s quite comprehensive about the general teachings.
But the book by Lati Rinpoche and Jeffrey Hopkins covers all of this stuff in considerable detail. So the actual death dissolution, the actual death process is describing the dissolution of the twenty five psychophysical aggregates or elements that comprise our being and it gives a description, a step by step description of how those psychophysical aggregates dissolve or when it says dissolve, actually means to lose their ability to function, to operate or to function. And what basically happens is that I go back one step. In the tantric description, all of the different emotions in the body ride on certain winds or energies, and as those winds or energies lose their ability to function during the dying process, so the different minds that are associated with them lose their ability to function, and that’s what’s meant by dissolution. So for instance as the earth element as the wind on which the earth element rides normally weakens and loses its power, then the next element, the water element, and the emotional factors associated with that become more predominant.
So as each one loses its ability to function or weakens, the next one becomes more predominant and that’s what’s basically happening during the dying process. So classically, there’s twenty five of these and I won’t go into detail of what they are describing each one separately, they talk about the five aggregates, five basic wisdoms, the four elements, the six sources, and the five objects and these are described as I said in detail in Jeffrey Hopkins book, Lati Rinpoche and Jeffrey Hopkins book, but basically the dying process can be divided into four stages that are described, which is the physical part of the dying process, and then after the breath has stopped, there’s a psychological process of dissolution. The dying process continues after the breath has stopped for some time as we’ll talk more about shortly. And also associated with each of those stages of death, there is an internal vision or sign. The person has an internal vision or sign and I’ll describe those in a little more detail and these, as we talk about these, you can relate these for instance to the near death experience which many of you will be familiar with and you’ll see the similarities, and also by understanding these different stages of the dying process when you’re working with a dying person you can think in your mind what stage they might be at and that can help you actually to work with the dying by recognizing which stage they might be at.
So the nurses and those who work with the dying or work with a dying relative for instance can think in your mind about what stage the person might be at. For instance, last night one of the people at the PP PPCS talk came up to me afterwards and she’d been with was it a relative or I think it was a patient about eight months ago or some time ago and she said that some eight hours after the person has stopped breathing, they distinctly opened their eyes and then closed their eyes and and nothing more happened. And she was rather puzzled by this and was wondering what had actually occurred and the only the only explanation I could make for it was that the person had stopped breathing, had come somewhere into this part of the dissolution process and briefly reversed back here somewhere enough for the eyes to open and then it proceeded to go through the dying process. That can occur, it’s not a one way street if you like, so and of course people who have a near death experience where the breath has stopped, they’ve come somewhere into this part of the dying process and then come back.
One of the teachers said most often they probably only get to perhaps only up to about here and then they reverse, except of course many people talk about the dark tunnel and the light at the end of the tunnel which is some indication perhaps that they’ve actually gone very close to the final part of the death process and then been able to come back again. Well, like everything else, the reason just has to be put down to some sort of karmic cause. The only real reason that you can explain any of these things is due to particular causes. For instance, another one of the questions that someone asked me last night was that when someone is close to death, can you actually will them back to life? And that was a very interesting question and because and related to a specific example where this lady had been can’t remember the details, but it was to do with this lady who her mother was close to death and she had wanted the mother to keep living and she’d more or less been with her through the night and willed her said, mom, please don’t die, please, you know, and willed her back to life and the mother had continued to live this is some twelve months later the mother was still alive but the mother was having a very poor quality of life or had some irreversible brain damage or something and the lady was you know wondering whether she’d done the wrong thing by or the daughter was wondering whether she’d done the wrong thing by willing the mother back to life and that was an interesting question because in that case well my answer was that yes, I definitely thought that you could will somebody back to life because I think we see this fairly often when someone’s close to death that someone is sort of fading away and if someone really pleads with them, close friend or I can think of one fellow with AIDS and he was very close to death and his lover would come back to the room and stroke his head or his hand and talk to him and his breathing would get stronger and this went on for about a week.
Although in that case it seemed that the man was waiting for his son to come from somewhere, and he seemed to be at this point for about five days, the breath just breathing and absolutely skeletal and just kept going like that for about a week, and I’m sure Joy and others have seen this on different occasions. Other people seem to die quite quickly, so there can be many factors involved and I think one of the things that stops a person from dying is where there’s very strong attachment or clinging from the relatives and friends, and definitely a person can resist letting go if there’s that sort of clinging and that can be detrimental to the dying process. So the actual if we look at the process in a little bit more detail, and this information I’m drawing from from Jeffrey Hopkins book, Lati Rinpoche and Jeffrey Hopkins book, so you can read up on this later, but it talks about this first stage of the dying process where related to the earth element, and I could say here that these different elements relate different aspects of the physical dissolution or the dying process. So the earth element relates to the, for instance, the physical movement of the body, the ability to move the limbs, etc, and the water element relates to the fluid elements of the body, the saliva and blood and all the other fluids of the body.
The fire element relates to the heat in the body, so for instance as a person’s going through the dying process, you’ll observe usually that the peripheries become cold, the heat absorbs from the peripheries towards the heart, it’s a normal part of the dying process. I might add that there’s many variations on this theme and people seem to die many different ways and I can remember one man with AIDS who for a period had the Cheyne Stokes breathing, breathing stopping and coming back and I think his pulse became slow and and the breath weaker, perhaps some coldness of the hands, and then all of that reversed and he seemed to revert almost back to fairly normal pattern, and then three or four hours after that, just minutes before I checked his pulse and everything and it was quite strong and regular and then within about a minute the pulse just sort of just disappeared just in the space of a couple of minutes and he just died very quickly. So it seems to be many varieties and so this really is perhaps a little bit like Kubler Ross’s description of the grieving process or the stages of grief that it’s guidebook but it’s not something that you should expect to follow exactly like that.
There are different descriptions of the dying process and this is one that I think is fairly accurate and also can relate quite well to the normal stages that is physically observed with someone dying and also with the experiences of people who have had near-death experiences. So I think it’s a fairly accurate guideline but we see many variations in the way that people actually die. So anyway in this first stage of the dying process, as a typical example, it says the body becomes very thin, the limbs become loose, and the person has a sense that their body is sinking under the earth or like it’s being pressed down. The sheets feel very heavy, like being pressed down under a heavy weight, the first stage of the dying process, and I can remember one man who was starting to die and he had the sense that he was sort of slipping down, slipping away or slipping off the bed even though he wasn’t moving so there can be that sense of slipping or being pressed down upon etc. So the body becomes weak and powerless, the sight becomes unclear and dark.
Incidentally all of this stuff is in one of the articles that I’ve written, also a brief article that will be made available to anybody who wants after the course. The sight becomes unclear and dark. The person can no longer open or close their eyes. The luster or sort of, what is this sheen, the luster of the body diminishes. I guess they might start to get a grayish appearance or something, a dullish appearance rather than the normal luster of the body, the sheen of the body, and their whole sort of strength is consumed.
There’s just a sense of completely losing all energy, all strength, and at this stage of the dying process the person has the inner vision or appearance like a silver blue mirage, classically described as a silver blue mirage, a shimmering sort of appearance, and these different visions are associated with what’s happening physiologically as the different energies, as the winds on which those energies ride lose their ability to function, and so these different appearances arise as a result of those things. So then in the second stage of the dying process what happens is that the various as I mentioned the various fluids in the body start to dry up saliva, sweat, urine, blood, etc. They start to dry. So this stage for instance the person’s mouth would start to become very dry and often then they’d need some sort of fluid in the mouth, some ice cubes or whatever in the mouth because the mouth becomes very dry and they find it more difficult to speak. I said at the the second this is a very important point and interesting important in terms of pain control and giving people pain medication during the dying process.
But I said at the second stage of the dying process, the person loses their ability to discriminate between pleasurable and painful feelings or pleasurable neutral and painful feelings. So theoretically at this stage, after this stage, the person can no longer experience pain or experience pain as pain if you like, a painful stimulus as pain. So theoretically after this stage any pain medication can be greatly reduced or even stopped because the person is no longer experiencing pain. At Daw House yesterday I was talking to Professor Maddocks and the staff there and it’s well known, I haven’t read up greatly on it, but it’s well known in Care of the Terminally Ill, the concept of terminal restlessness that people become very restless or confused as they’re going through the dying process. And my experience is that very often this restlessness or confusion, agitation of the body is confused with the person having pain and often as a result the doctors and nurses will give sometimes I guess quite heavy doses of pain medication.
Now Professor Maddocks was saying that the complex thing about this is that the appearances of that restlessness is very similar to when a person actually does have pain. So it actually becomes quite a complex medical problem of do you give the pain medication or not because as a doctor or nurse there’s some obligation to relieve pain, and is the restlessness just part of the dying process or is it due to pain? I have seen and I think in Buddhist terms it’s detrimental. I have seen nurses giving quite well doses of morphine a short while before the person actually dies, and my observation also is that often that meditation is given more for the benefit of the relatives than for the dying person. There’s a few people nodding their heads as I say that.
And the Because often you know if the person’s moving around in the bed and they’re restless then the relatives think oh you know my loved ones in pain please doctor or nurse give them something to stop the pain and often when I’ve been there I think well I don’t really think they’re in pain they don’t look like they’re in pain but there’s some sort of obligation because otherwise the relatives may think that you’ve acted in a neglectful way if you don’t give some medication. So it seems often that natural terminal restlessness as it’s called that the doctors and nurses do something to stop that as much as they can for the benefit of often I think of the relatives. Now the aim of a dying Buddhist is, and perhaps anybody who’s dying with a spiritual practice, well anybody who’s dying, is for the mind to be as aware and awake as possible at the time of death, the reasons which I’ll go into later. And so the minimum amount of medication that’s possible is ideal for the mind to be as aware as possible at the time of death. Now in terms of actual giving people medications, pain relief who are sick or dying, obviously, you know, terms of pain control, obviously if a person is in a lot of distress, if you don’t give them some pain medication they’re going to be totally consumed by the pain and they’re not going to be able to think of anything positive anyway.
All they’ll be able to think about is the pain. We know ourselves that if we just get a toothache or a stomachache or or something then we immediately forget all of our spiritual practices and we just think about our discomfort, and if we have severe if we’re dying and we have severe pain then certainly we’re not going to think about anything except our discomfort. So the aim I think is to give enough pain medication that relieves that distress but still allows that relieves the distress but still enough to allow the person to think about positive things or their spiritual practice. But importantly coming back to this the second stage that once the person has has passed that stage then probably they’re not going to be experiencing pain and they don’t need these large doses of medication. Now that’s also corroborated as I was saying last night by people who have near death experiences who can be in very severe pain, I know one of the ladies on one of the videos we have called Visions of Hope the Near Death Experience, and she describes the fact that she was in terrible pain and distress, and then you know she had a near death experience, breathing stopped, and next thing she found herself floating up on the ceiling looking down on her body and the doctors doing various procedures to it and totally free of pain and wondering what all the fuss was about, and then wanting to go on into the sort of the light or however she described it and then something telling her no you have to go back for the children for the sake of the children because I think her husband and her children were leaning over her body crying, and she felt no she had to go back, so she came back into her body and immediately she had all this terrible pain again and it took some months for her to recover, and that sort of in a sense backs up, although mind you she must have gone into this area here, but certainly at some stage of the dying process one no longer feels any pain, and the classical description as I said is that’s quite early in the dying process, process, but obviously people working in the area have to use their own judgment about about whether the person has pain or not, but at least have an open mind about the possibility that it can be quite early in the dying process that pain is no longer experienced.
So the second stage of the dying process, it said that a person no longer hears internal or external sound, so they lose their ability to hear. Now again, that slightly disagrees with common medical opinion. I think the last sense that goes is the sense of hearing, is that right? Doctors, nurses? So this is a little different to what is normally described in medicine, and again perhaps we need to keep an open mind about that.
But it says that this at the second this second stage of the dying process, we lose the ability to hear and the normal buzzing or whirring sound in the ears actually stops at the same time. But further on then they can Yes. That terminology comes from that. Okay. Now that’s that’s a very good point.
So what what Joy is saying was that her experience is that some people at at some stage of the dying process seem to have an expanded level of awareness and even deaf people can hear. And Elizabeth Kubler Ross did a study of people who had been clinically totally blind for at least ten years, and she said, you know, she said, I am a very straight Swiss psychiatrist. I do this very thoroughly, and so she selected these people very strictly, and they’d been clinically totally blind for ten years, and when they had a near death experience, they could describe in detail exactly what people were wearing or the doctors working on their body. And so I think Joy what Joy is saying is the same thing that there is a different level of consciousness and a different level of perception. And that even if we’re totally deaf or totally blind or lose the use of the gross senses, there is a subtle level of sensation where we can still experience.
And people describe this in the near death experience as something much greater and heightened sense of awareness more than they’ve ever experienced. Colors are brighter, sounds are more acute, and so on. Everything is very heightened more than they’ve ever experienced. So I think that’s a very good point Joy has made. There’s a different level of awareness that people experience.
So here the the gross ability to hear sounds etc. Is lost. And at the second stage of the dying process, it’s said that the person has the inner appearance of like a smoky or haze a smoke filled or hazy room, a sort of a hazy type of appearance. Now I should also say at this point that as this process is continuing, going through that the person’s mind is gradually becoming more and more subtle and more and more clear, and they’re going from a gross level of awareness to a much more subtle level of awareness until where they come to this point, say the clear light of death, where all conceptual thought has ceased and all that remains is a state of clear and luminous awareness free of all conceptual thought, which one of Sogyal Rinpoche’s teachers said that that state of mind was something like actually this isn’t true. On thinking about it he said that it was the Bardo being the intermediate state being whose mind was something like seven times more clear than the in ordinary waking state and therefore could be aware of the minds of relatives etc.
I was going to say that this state of mind may be seven times more clear than our ordinary state, but I think that this state of mind would be infinitely more clear than our normal waking state because there is no conceptual thought, there is no obstruction to the clarity of the mind, so I might just rethink what I was what I was going to say. And and so at this stage, the mind has in a sense gone totally internal to an extremely subtle state and extremely clear state. So the dying process is a state of increasing subtlety and clarity of mind. And so even though the person is losing their ability to relate to the outside world and the perception is that they’re lapsing into a state of unconsciousness, at the inner level it’s actually a state of heightened awareness as Joy was saying with the ability to you know even for deaf people to hear, blind people to see, etcetera. It’s it’s a different level of awareness.
I’m just wondering whether that clarity also starts before the person is actually dying in when some people say they can tell you when they’re going to die. Yes. Days, sometimes before. I think that’s true. I think Whether that’s all part of that same clarity or just intuition or?
Yes, I think it’s perhaps not part of this process, but perhaps just an indication that as a person is approaching death, that their external considerations drop away and they start thinking much more clearly about the dying process and what’s happening to them, and so the mind just becomes more concentrated and clear about the dying process. Now certainly those of us who work with the dying, one of the things that really draws us to this work is that when you’re with a dying person that very quickly you develop a very deep level of communication, that all of the superficial aspects of our normal communication fall away, and that you can you can very very quickly in a sense become quite intimate with the person who’s dying because well all of all of the superficial things that normally happen in our communication there’s no space for. Now that also can be threatening for people who get involved with someone who’s dying because it’s like you’re dealing often with a fairly luminous person who can see through you if you like and who knows quite quickly where you’re at and whether you’re where your mind is at and whether you’re comfortable or uncomfortable.
So there’s there’s no space if you like for intellect when you’re with a dying person because they quickly sort of recognize that you’re sort of not coming from a genuine space. And so the intellectual knowledge is not so well, it’s still useful. This sort of knowledge is useful, but to try and approach or work with a dying person coming from the from the head and not from the heart is never going to work. This where are we up to? We’re still only on the second stage.
So we come to the third stage of the dying process process where the heat of the body starts to absorb. So here you’ll observe that the heat is absorbing from the peripheries of the body. The hands and the feet start to become cold, perhaps the head region starts to become cold as well. And what’s happening physiologically or psychically if you like is that all of the energies in the body or these different winds and energies in the body and the very subtle channels of the body are starting to move towards the heart center, the heart chakra, the heart center, sort of situated midway between the nipples and about three fifths of the way back from the front of the chest, just in front of the spine is the physical situation of this heart center, and so the energies are starting to move towards that area. I’ll say a little bit more about that when I talk about the signs of the consciousness leaving the body.
If I forget that remind me afterwards. So one loses the at this stage one can no longer digest food or drink and here we see for instance very often what we’ll see is that the relatives that keep trying to to give food and drink to the person who’s dying but they can’t take it. And we had one sad case really of the lady who was still trying to feed her, still trying to give drinks to her dead husband two hours after he died. It just the just the shock of his death, she couldn’t accept the fact that he died. And I don’t know if you’ve seen this very often, Joy.
It’s it’s quite an unusual case and quite a sad case, really, that she she was just still so unaccepting of the fact that he was obviously dead. But at this stage there’s no point in a sense trying to force food or drink into the dying person because they’ve lost their ability to take it inwards. The body loses its heat, as I said, and at this stage, which can be one of the most distressing stages for relatives, loved ones, is that the person loses their ability to be aware of the activities or affairs of the people close to them and even at this stage can sometimes no longer remember their names or at this stage will lose their ability even to recognize their loved ones. This this can be one of the most distressing times, as I said, for those relatives and loved ones of someone who’s dying because the person they’ve always related to can no longer relate to them. And I mentioned last night the story of one of the ladies in one of our bereavement support groups who was extremely distressed one day when she visited her husband in hospital and she said they sort of had an intimate embrace.
And after that, he looked at her and said, who are you? And I mean, you can imagine the shock that would induce in your mind when your loved one didn’t even recognize you after such a thing. And so for the relatives, a very difficult time. At this stage, it’s said the in breath becomes weak and the out breath becomes stronger and longer, and one loses one’s ability to sense of smell, and then inwardly one has the inner appearance of like a sparks coming up from a fire or sort of like fireflies in space, this sort of a vision appears to the mind. So that’s the third stage, then the dying process is continuing.
We’re coming up to this fourth stage of the physical dissolution where the what’s called the wind element loses its ability to function. And so here in this fourth stage, we totally lose our ability or the person totally loses their ability to move at all, so can’t even in a sense move their eyelashes or fingers or any part of their body, totally now unaware at the gross level of anything that’s going on around them in the world. This stage associated with this fourth stage is that the tongue becomes thick and short and the root of the tongue becomes blue. A person loses their ability to taste and they can’t distinguish between roughness and smoothness. And at this stage the breathing stops completely And there’s the inner vision of like classically described as like a a flickering candle that’s about to go out.
I didn’t see that, Natalie. No. I understand. I’d be totally asleep now at this time usually. The benefit of teaching is that it keeps you awake after lunch.
Those who are sleepy, if you wanna take it in turn, then it might keep you awake a little longer till we get to tea. So this flickering sort of candle said to have the appearance of like a flickering candle. So at this stage, breathing stops completely and the person would normally be pronounced dead because the breathing stopped the heart would have stopped and the person is normally pronounced dead. But very importantly is that, Joe, would you like to move that up a bit now so that we that’s good. So very importantly is that the dying process is actually still occurring, but it’s occurring now in an inner subtle or psychological level, and there’s still another four stages described, and classically these stages, the fifth stage is where the energies from the upper part of the body, the subtle energies absorbed to the central channel and moved to the very subtle or indestructible drop at the heart, the sixth stage is where the energies from the lower part of the body come into the central channel and the subtle channel and come again to the indestructible drop at the heart.
The seventh stage is where these two lots of energies come together and close together, and the eighth stage is where that separates and the very subtle mind is sort of released at that time or it comes out of that indestructible drop at that time. And so associated with these, I’ve just described there, the absorption of winds in the very subtle channels to the indestructible wind of the heart. And so for instance, as the in that sixth fifth stage, there’s the appearance of like classically described, I don’t know if it’s very good description, of being like a moonlit night or a night pervaded by the light of a full moon. Now I don’t that’s never struck me as being terribly white, a dark night pervaded by the moon, but anyway the concept of a sort of a sky pervaded by whiteness is the description, then that will change at the next stage as the lower energies come up to what’s described as a like a red vision, classically described as being like an autumn sky at dawn, so like an expansive sky pervaded by redness, like you would see this morning sky or the sky pervaded by redness perhaps at dawn or sunset, then at the seventh stage. And here we can liken these stages to the near death experience where the people might talk about going through a dark tunnel and then seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.
And there’s one video we have, it’s an American video, can’t remember the name, but it’s about near death experiences and on the video it shows several paintings from the middle centuries of what looks so much like a description of near death experiences, and it shows this huge sort of tunnel going to a bright light in the distance and several beings at different points of that tunnel, and I don’t know it wasn’t specifically I don’t think a drawing of the near death experience, but it just so closely resembled people’s modern day descriptions of the near death experience, and this was drawn in the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, some of these drawings and woodcuts. So this this knowledge has been around for a long time. I didn’t actually think to bring bring any of it those these videos because you might have find those quite interesting, like, to watch this evening or something. So fine, so for a while we have the vision, the person has the vision of of blackness and it’s as if falling unconscious, this total blackness, like a totally dark sky, and then that changes into what’s described as the clear light of death.
Now as I said, this clear light of death is a mind that’s totally free of all conceptual thought, it’s totally clear and luminous and expansive and blissful, and it’s like the ultimate mind if you like, it’s a mind of absolute peace and stillness and clarity and bliss. And we’ll do this in a meditation a little later. And so what because it is such an extraordinarily subtle and clear mind that meditators, tantric meditators will try and actually simulate this mind during their life, and there’s a particular yogic method of doing that of bringing the energies into the very subtle internal channel, subtle channel running down in front of the spine, and by doing that and releasing the blockages in that channel then they can actually simulate all these stages of the dying process and experience this clear light nature of mind, and so that’s some particular yogic techniques that they can do that, and when they attain that, that’s called the son clear light, and this natural clear light we experience at death, and normally only at death is called the mother clear light.