What happens to us at death?
Here are some words on this from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective from a workshop given by Christine Longaker (author of Facing Death and Finding Hope ):
“The extraordinary opportunity at death is the loss of personality.”
“Awareness of death can be our biggest gift. It helps us to live more fully.”
“Who we think we are wasn’t before birth and won’t be after death – it’s not our original nature.”
“The darkness at death is the loss of our cloudy nature, and our real self dawns – fully awake to our [real] nature.”
“The karmic seeds of our actions, words and thoughts – our habits and conditioning – will go on after death unless purified. The point of practice is to change our habits. Develop good habits, so they naturally come to us at the moment of death . . . and we can consciously direct ourselves towards the realization of our absolute nature.”
“Our state of mind or last thought at the moment of death becomes our next reality.”
“The moment of death is the crossroads of eternity. The crossroads is now. Waiting until the moment of death is too late.”
“The teaching for all the Bardos are: how do you use that particular Bardo, whether it’s this life, dying or the after-death state, to obtain enlightenment. . . . use that time to create an atmosphere of love, or peace, of non-grasping . . . use that time of the moment of death to practice to obtain enlightenment.”
Essential advice for the dying person: “Be free of attachment and aversion, keep your mind pure and unite your mind with Buddha.”
“In Buddhism, healing is purification, not necessarily getting well.”
“ . . . you start to get a new passport and a new set of credit cards and, before long you’ve constructed this whole new sense of self. But is it your real self? No. You didn’t know who you were, so you took on this new identity. And it’s temporary. It will go away. It wasn’t who you really were. So, at the time of death this temporary identity that we’ve taken on disintegrates.
All the passports go back. The credit cards go back. The family history goes back. It literally disintegrates at the time of death, at the time that the body dies. Because of that, there is the extraordinary opportunity to attain enlightenment because, when the clouds are finally blown apart after a big storm, the vastness and the radiance of the sky and sun are naturally and fully revealed. In that state, we get a glimpse of our enlightened essence of our being. It’s easier to attain enlightenment if we recognize it. And this is the key to the teachings . . . if we recognize it, or if we’ve ‘died’ already through spiritual practice in a very inspired state of devotion, compassion, or just heartfelt prayer – if we die with our mind and heart in a very good or positive state – there’s more possibility that we can use that moment of death to attain liberation, because the clouds are gone, the suffering, the sense of self, all that I normally thought was me, is – for a moment – gone.”