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

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!

Our experience is the product of our own mental constructs, it is we who choose how we interpret our own experience, and we do therefore have an extraordinary freedom and opportunity.

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.

In the Buddhist view, what we perceive as our external reality is definitely not fixed and what we experience in ourselves is not anybody else’s responsibility. By accepting responsibility for our own way of perceiving, we can look into our minds and begin to understand how our own experience comes about — and then we can learn how to transform our

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.

Thus, recognising the role which the ego plays in creating and sustaining this perceptual realm is the key to unlocking our imprisonment created by our past discordant mental habits.

Wishing for happiness, we pass our human lives in suffering.

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

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