Meditations on Living, Dying and Loss: Ancient Knowledge for a Modern World from the Tibetan Book of the Dead

In other words, everything that we experience is conditioned by our own habitual mental tendencies generated in the past, and what we see and experience as being tangibly real is a projection manufactured by our mental habits and constructs.

everything we experience comes through, and is dependent on, our own mind.

O Lord of Loving Kindness, through the blessing of your compassion, Purify the obscurations generated by my past actions and dissonant mental states, And secure me in the presence of your mother-like loving kindness!

approach the moment of death with a mind filled with loving kindness and filled with the wish to abide, without distraction, in the experience of the horizonless radiance which she was about to enter.

In my own fragile state, having been freshly born into this altered realm of bereavement, every aspect of the text took on an immediacy of meaning.

Based on this understanding, since death is the state when all the gross levels of energy and consciousness have been dissolved, and only the subtle energies and consciousnesses remain, it is possible for an advanced yogin to meditatively induce a state which is almost identical to the actual experience of death.

being enveloped by a clear, radiant luminosity, which, following the consciousness leaving the body, fills their field of vision. This stage is often described as being accompanied by a sense of timeless spaciousness, a feeling of completeness, and of being enveloped by a loving presence.

In this way a recognition of the natural purity of our own impure habitual tendencies is continuously cultivated and a perfected state of being and perception is aroused which encompasses all phenomena.

The mind in its ultimate nature is understood to be a combination of awareness and the subtle energies on which awareness rides.