The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Since its first English translation in 1927, the Tibetan guide to spiritual and mental liberation called the Bardo Thodol has been known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The book has reappeared in several English-language versions since then, some based only loosely on the original. The text has thus lived several lives in English alone, appearing to be reborn time and again before new audiences, often with varying titles and content. Yet these recent lives are part of a much older cycle of rebirths. The original is believed to have been composed in the eighth century C.E. by the great master Padma Sambhava, then hidden away by its author for the salvation of future generations. The text was rediscovered six centuries later by Karma Lingpa, believed by some to be an incarnation of Padma Sambhava himself. Since the fourteenth century C.E. the text has occupied a central place in Tibetan Buddhism, giving birth to a large number of parallel, supplementary, and derivative texts.     

W. Y. Evans-Wentz coined the English title for the 1927 edition on the basis of analogies he perceived with the Egyptian funerary text The Book of Coming Forth By Day, known in the West as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Both the Tibetan and Egyptian Books discuss death and its aftermath. Yet their views of death are sufficiently different from the Judeo-Christian tradition that the English titles are quite misleading.
This is particularly so in the case of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Tibetan title, Bardo Thodol, does not refer to death as such. Thodol means "liberation through understanding." Bardo means a "between state," an interval or transition between two mental states, whether experienced in life or after death. Hence the work's Tibetan title (which might be translated more literally as Liberation through Understanding the Between ) alludes to bardo states that may be experienced at any point over the cycle of life, death and rebirth, yet the work itself overtly discusses only the bardo states experienced during death, offering explicit instruction on how to navigate them.
It is difficult to appreciate the significance of the work's overt content without a sense of its larger cultural context. The Bardo Thodol presupposes a cosmology of human experience in which existence is viewed as inherently fluid and impermanent, as involving a series of stages, of which death is merely one. The mind or soul continues to live after death, undergoing a series of experiences before rebirth. Human beings are believed to be able to guide themselves through the entire cycle by creating a more focused self-awareness through their powers of concentration, augmented, ideally, by means of meditation. The chief utility of meditation during life, or of the Bardo Thodol at the time of dying, lies in making the mind lucid enough to control its own passage over the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The larger goal of these practices is to seek liberation from the suffering associated with this cycle, both for oneself and for others.

The Bardo States

Six main bardo experiences are distinguished in Tibetan Buddhism: Three are encountered during life and three are encountered after death. A single life span is itself a bardo state, a transitional zone in a larger cycle of rebirths. Dreams are bardo states that occur within the daily round, in the interval between falling asleep and waking; feelings of uncertainty, paranoia, and delusion are sometimes grouped with dreams on a looser interpretation of this second bardo state. A meditative trance is a third type of bardo state, an intermediate zone between ordinary consciousness and enlightened awareness. These are the main bardo states of life.
Death involves bardo states as well. On the Tibetan view, death is not an instantaneous event but a process taking several days, involving a successive dissociation of mind from body, which is manifested in characteristic outward signs. During this process, the conscious mind experiences three main bardo states.
The first of these, called the Chikai Bardo, is the experience of the death point, the moment at which the soul loses consciousness of objects and becomes aware only of itself. The experience is described as a vivid formless light emanating from all sides. At this moment, enlightenment lies close at hand, although one's capacity to attain it depends on the extent to which one has achieved lucidity and detachment in one's previous existence. For most individuals the vision of light can only be sustained for a brief interval, after which the soul, caught in desire and delusion, regresses toward lower levels of existence.
In the second state, called the Chonyid Bardo, the soul has visions involving a succession of deities: a series of beatific Buddhas in the first seven days, a series of terrifying deities in the next seven. The text describes these visions as projections of the mind's own consciousness, often involving a tension within the mind itself. For example, the dazzling visions of the beatific deities are accompanied by duller visions of other beings that distract from the splendor of the former. To be thus distracted is to give in to anger, terror, pride, egotism, jealousy, and other weaknesses. In contrast, to ignore the minor visions and to embrace the more awe-inspiring deities is to attain spiritual salvation through the very act.
A mind that fails to overcome these weaknesses encounters the darker, more horrific deities of the latter seven days. Many of these visions are merely aspects of the Buddhas encountered in the first seven days, now made terrifying by the mind's own weakness. Liberation is still possible here simply by recognizing these beings for who they are. Yet the act is also more difficult now because terror forces the mind to flee rather than to examine its experiences.
A mind that has failed to free itself by this point enters the Sidpa Bardo, the third, most desperate stage. Here the mind faces a host of hallucinations, including visions of pursuit by demons and furies, of being devoured and hacked to pieces. A mind may linger here for many weeks—up to the forty-ninth day after death—depending on the faculties of the particular individual.
These experiences culminate in rebirth in some sentient form. Whether one is reborn as human or animal, or is relegated for a time to one of the many Tibetan hells, or whether one achieves liberation from the entire cycle of life and rebirth, thus attaining Buddahood, depends on one's success in overcoming weakness over the course of the cycle.
Although the Bardo Thodol is a guide to the bardo states experienced after death, it can only be read by the living. It may be read in preparation for one's own death, or at the deathbed of another. Because the weaknesses attributed to the dead are all experienced by the living as well, a person learning to traverse the bardo states of death will learn to navigate better the bardo experiences of life as well. In this sense the book is a guide to liberation across the entire cycle of human existence as conceived in Tibetan Buddhism.

                                  

Bibliography

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., ed. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or he After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering. 1927. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Fremantle, Francesca, and Chögyam Trungpa. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo, by Guru Rinpoche according to Karma Lingpa. Berkeley, CA: Shambala Press, 1975.
Lauf, Detlef Ingo. Secret Doctrines of the Tibetan Books of the Dead. Boulder, CO: Shambala Press, 1977.
Leary, Timothy, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1976.
Rabjam, Longchen. The Practice of Dzogchen, edited by Harold Talbott and translated by Tulku Thondup. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1996.
Rinbochay, Lati, and Jeffrey Hopkins. Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism. Valois, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1979.
Rinpoche, Sogyal. The Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying. San Francisco: Harper, 1992.
Thurman, Robert, tr. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Liberation through Understanding in the Between, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama. New York: Bantam Books, 1994.

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Deathbed Phenomena

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Not to be confused with Near-death experience.

Deathbed phenomena refers to a range of paranormal experiences that occur to people who are dying. There are many examples of deathbed phenomena in both non-fiction and fictional literature, which suggests that these occurrences have been noted by cultures around the world for centuries, although scientific study of them is relatively recent. In scientific literature such experiences have been referred to as death-related sensory experiences (DRSE).^[1] Dying patients have reported to staff working in hospices they have experienced comforting visions.^[2][3]
The scientific community consider deathbed phenomena and visions to be hallucinations.^[4][5]

Contents

 [hide] 

• 1 Deathbed visions
• 2 Scientific evaluation
• 3 See also
• 4 References
• 5 External links

Deathbed visions[edit]

Deathbed visions have been described since ancient times, however the first systematic study was not conducted until the 20th century.^[6] They have also been referred to as veridical hallucinations, visions of the dying and predeath visions.^[1] The psychical researcher William Barrett author of the book Death-Bed Visions (1926) collected anecdotes of people who had claimed to have experienced visions of deceased friends and relatives, the sound of music and other deathbed phenomena.^[7] Barrett was a Christian spiritualist and believed the visions were evidence for spirit communication.^[8]
In a study conducted between 1959 and 1973 by the parapsychologists Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson they reported that 50% of the tens of thousands individuals they studied in the United States and India had experienced deathbed visions.^[6] Osis and Haraldsson and other parapsychologists such as Raymond Moody have interpreted the reports as evidence for an afterlife.^[9][10]
The neurologist Terence Hines has written the proponents of the afterlife interpretation grossly underestimate the variability among the reports. Hines also criticized their methodology of collecting the reports:

The way in which the reports are collected poses another serious problem for those who want to take them seriously as evidence of an afterlife. Osis and Haraldsson’s (1977) study was based on replies received from ten thousand questionnaires sent to doctors and nurses in the United States and India. Only 6.4 percent were returned. Since it was the doctors and nurses who were giving the reports, not the patients who had, presumably, actually had the experience, the reports were secondhand. This means they had passed through two highly fallible and constructive human memory systems (the doctor’s or nurse’s and the actual patient’s) before reaching Osis and Haraldsson. In other cases (i.e., Moody 1977) the reports were given by the patients themselves, months and years after the event. Such reports are hardly sufficient to argue for the reality of an afterlife.^[5]

The skeptical investigator Joe Nickell has written deathbed visions (DBVs) are based on anecdotal accounts that are unreliable. Nickell discovered contradictions and inconsistences in various DBVs reported by the paranormal author Carla Wills-Brandon.^[11]

Scientific evaluation[edit]

There is a high degree of similarity between deathbed visions and drug-induced hallucinations. Hallucinations caused by drugs frequently contain images of otherworldly beings and deceased friends and relatives.^[12] Scientists who have studied cases of deathbed phenomena have described the visual, auditory, and sensed presences of deceased relatives or angelic beings during the dying process as hallucinations. The hallucinations occur due to cerebral hypoxia. When the body is injured, or if the heart stops, even if only for a short period the brain is deprived of oxygen. A short period of cerebral hypoxia can result in the impairment of neuronal function.^[13][14]

See also[edit]

• After-death communication
• Ghost
• Near-death experience
• Out-of-body experience
• Spirit

References[edit]

1. ^ ^{a b} Ethier, A. (2005). Death-related sensory experiences. Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 22: 104-111.
2. ^ Brayne S, Farnham C, Fenwick P. (2006). Deathbed phenomena and their effect on a palliative care team: a pilot study. American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine 23: 17-24.
3. ^ Lawrence M, Repede E. (2013). The incidence of deathbed communications and their impact on the dying process. American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care 30: 632-639.
4. ^ Houran, J. & Lange, R. (1997). Hallucinations that comfort: contextual mediation of deathbed visions. Perceptual and Motor Skills 84: 1491-1504.
5. ^ ^{a b} Hines, Terence (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. p. 102. ISBN 978-1573929790
6. ^ ^{a b} Blom, Jan. (2009). A Dictionary of Hallucinations. Springer. pp. 131-132. ISBN 978-1441912220
7. ^ Barrett, William. (1926). Death-Bed Visions. Methuen & Company Limited. ISBN 978-0850305203
8. ^ Oppenheim, Janet. (1985). The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914. Cambridge University Press. p. 365. ISBN 978-0521265058
9. ^ Moody, Raymond. (1975). Life After Life. Mockingbird Books. ISBN 978-0553122206
10. ^ Osis, K. and Haraldsson, E. (1977). At The Hour of Death. Avon. ISBN 978-0380018024
11. ^ Nickell, Joe. (2002). “Visitations”: After-Death Contacts. Skeptical Inquirer. Volume 12. Retrieved November 6, 2013.
12. ^ Siegel, R. (1980). The Psychology of Life after Death. American Psychologist 35: 911–31.
13. ^ Brierley, J. and D. Graham. (1984). Hypoxia and Vascular Disorders of the Central Nervous System. In Greenfield’s Neuropathology edited by J. Adams, J. Corsellis, and L. Duchen. 4th edition. New York: Wiley. pp. 125–207.
14. ^ French, C. (2009). Near-death experiences and the brain. In Craig Murray, ed. Psychological scientific perspectives on out-of-body and death-near experiences. New York: Nova Science Publishers, pp. 187-203. ISBN 978-1607417057

External links[edit]

• Near-Death Experiences and the Brain by Chris French
• Deathbed Phenomena: Real or Imagined?

[hide] v t e Parapsychology Topics Apparitional experience Astral projection Aura (paranormal) Clairvoyance Deathbed visions Energy (esotericism) Extrasensory perception Ganzfeld experiment Mediumship Near-death experience Past life regression Plant perception (paranormal) Precognition Psychic Psychic reading Psychokinesis Psychometry Retrocognition Remote viewing Telepathy Organizations American Society for Psychical Research International Association for Near-Death Studies Koestler Parapsychology Unit National Laboratory of Psychical Research Parapsychological Association Parapsychology Foundation Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory Society for Psychical Research People Loyd Auerbach Daryl Bem Hans Bender Susan Blackmore Stephen E. Braude Etzel Cardeña Whately Carington Hereward Carrington Théodore Flournoy Nandor Fodor Randall Fontes Leonard George László Harasztosi Alister Hardy Hans Holzer Charles Honorton James H. Hyslop Thomson Jay Hudson Alexander Imich Robert G. Jahn Brian David Josephson Stanley Krippner Lawrence LeShan Rufus Osgood Mason R. A. McConnell James Hewat McKenzie Michel Moine Raymond Moody Robert L. Morris Thelma Moss Gardner Murphy Frederic William Henry Myers Andrew Nichols Ciarán O'Keeffe Tommaso Palamidessi Joseph Gaither Pratt Dean Radin James Randi Konstantīns Raudive Carl Reichenbach Joseph Banks Rhine Kenneth Ring D. Scott Rogo William G. Roll Rupert Sheldrake Henry Sidgwick Matthew Smith Ian Stevenson Ingo Swann Russell Targ Charles Tart Michael Thalbourne Rudolf Tischner Jim B. Tucker Jessica Utts René Warcollier Karl Zener Publications Extrasensory Perception Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century Journal of Consciousness Studies Journal of Near-Death Studies Journal of Parapsychology Journal of Scientific Exploration Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence For Past Lives Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind The Roots of Coincidence Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation Varieties of Anomalous Experience Category Commons

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