Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 9-minute talk, Ven Sanghy Khandro explains the final stages of death according to Tibetan Buddhist tantra. After the gross mind fades—sensory and conceptual experiences—consciousness enters three visionary phases: white light as energy winds move through the crown, reddish light as lower winds enter the central channel, and complete darkness as all winds gather at the heart. These lead to the eighth stage, clear light: a state of pristine consciousness free of thought, sensation, and the dualistic illusion of separation between observer and observed. Advanced practitioners trained in tantric meditation can recognize and sustain this state, using its clarity to realize the true nature of reality and achieve enlightenment during the dying process. Ordinary people experience it unaware.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 4.09 The Final Stages of Death.mp3
UUID: d5be01ce-4fc0-488a-b227-714f6c6e875f
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 9.0 minutes
Words: ~1,193
So after this after this fourth stage, one’s mind is no longer in a gross state. So in this explanation found in the Tantric tradition of Buddhism, it said that there are three levels of our mind, our consciousness, gross, subtle, and extremely subtle. The gross level of mind includes our sensory consciousnesses, sensory experiences such as seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. So those are gross experiences, the gross level of mind. And also included in the gross level of mind would be our ordinary thoughts, thoughts and conceptions.
So at this stage or after this stage, the person’s mind is no longer in a gross stage, and it starts to move to a subtler level of mind. So the next three stages of the death process, the mind is in a subtler state, having subtler experiences. The next stage, the fifth stage, is called the white appearance. This is characterized by the person having an inner vision or experience of us, like, space or sky, completely vast and clear and spacious and filled with whitish light like the light of a moon, a full bright autumn moon filling the sky with this this whitish light. And this vision or this experience occurs because of the movement of energy winds within the body.
The energy winds, which are within the upper part of the body, which means the above the heart. So these move to the crown chakra, the very top of the head, and enter the central channel. The central channel is a psychic channel that runs right through the center of our body from the crown of our head down to the base of the spine. So it’s not like a physical thing that doctors would find when they open up a body. It’s a psychic channel, a channel through which energy winds move.
So the energy winds in the upper part of the body enter the central channel at the crown chakra. And it’s because of that movement of energies that the person’s mind has this white appearance or white vision. And then the next stage, the sixth stage, involves a vision of redness, a kind of space or sky completely vast, clear, spacious, and filled with a kind of reddish light, which is said to be like that of the sky when the sun sets in certain times, in certain places, when the sun is setting like over the sea or in the desert, then there’s this copperish red color in the sky, this beautiful reddish light in the sky. So that’s similar to the vision that one has at this time, the experience that one has on this sixth stage. And this vision is caused by, again, movement of the energy winds within the body.
The energy winds which are in the lower part of the body, which means below the heart. They also move towards and enter into the central channel in the lower part of the body. So because of that, then there’s this experience of of space filled with reddish light. Then the seventh stage, which is known as the black appearance. The experience here is that of complete darkness, complete blackness.
They say it’s like the sky. When it’s totally dark, there’s no sun, no moon, no stars, no light at all. Just complete utter blackness. So that’s what one experiences at the beginning of this stage. And then that is followed by a momentary loss of consciousness, a momentary experience of total unconsciousness, like fainting.
So this dark black vision is caused by the energy winds that were in the central channel at the upper and lower parts of the body. They move to the heart chakra, the center of the chest. And there they become enclosed within a small sphere, like a like a little little case that’s closing them up. And that’s why there’s this experience of darkness. And that experience is followed by the eighth stage of the death process, which is called a clear light experience.
So the previous three stages, five, six, and seven, there the mind is in its subtle level. The eighth stage is when the mind reaches its most subtle level. The most deep, subtle level of the mind now becomes manifest, and that subtlest level of the mind is known as the clear light. And this experience or vision is described as space, completely clear, vast, empty space filled with clear colorless light. It’s said to be similar to the sky in the autumn or the spring when the when the sky is completely clear without any clouds or pollution just before the sun rises or just before the sun sets, there’s this glow in the sky, this clear colorless light in the sky.
So it’s said that the clear light experiences is similar to that. And this clear light experience occurs because the winds, the various energy winds, which have all gathered at the heart, they now dissolve into the most subtle energy wind, which is there at the heart, which resides there at the heart. And that enables the subtlest level of mind, the clear light mind, to become manifest. So this level of mind, the subtlest level of mind is said to be the most clear and pure experience of the mind that we could have. It’s very peaceful.
It’s it’s free of thoughts and conceptions, free of sensory experiences, free of our normal sense of separation of subject and object. Normally, when we experience things, there’s this sense of separateness, subject and object. The mind or consciousness experiencing the object and the object that is experienced seem to be totally separate and cut off and unrelated to each other. And that’s actually a mistaken appearance that things are not like that. There isn’t that separation of subject and object.
So that experience of separation, which is sometimes called duality, disappears. So this experience of the clear light mind is that of non duality, the non separateness, but rather the interdependence of subject and object. So everyone who dies goes through these stages and has this experience of clear light. And for people who are practicing the path, in particular, tantric practice, working for the attainment of enlightenment to help all living beings, they would have trained themselves in certain practices to be able to recognize the clear light experience when it takes place during the process of dying. They’re able to keep their mind in that state sometimes for hours or even days or even weeks.
And they’re meditating on truth or reality, the true nature of things. And because this mind is so clear and pure and undistracted, they’re able to gain a realization of the true nature of things, which we call emptiness, quite easily. And by this, they’re even able to achieve the state of enlightenment within this clear light experience during the process of dying. But ordinary people, even though they’re experiencing the clear light, they don’t recognize it. They don’t know how to keep their mind in it.
So they might just pass through it quite quickly and go on to the next experience.