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.

If through our own exploration we come to an understanding that our happiness and sorrow are determined by ourselves, by our own way of reacting to the events of our lives, an extraordinary creative potential is unleashed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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