Sogyal Rinpoche: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

May, 2014

This book is giving you a sacred technology, by which you can transform not only your present life and not only your dying and your death, but also your future lives, and so the future of humanity. What my masters and I are hoping to inspire here is a major leap forward towards the conscious evolution of humanity. To learn how to live is to learn how to act not only in this life, but in the life to come. To transform yourself truly and learn how to be reborn as a transformed being to help others is really to help the world in the most powerful way of all. (TODO: page number – among the last paragraphs.)

Most of us are unprepared for death. In the Buddhist sense, this is much more that about being at peace with oneself and the world at the moment of death (although hugely important). In the process of death one’s soul goes through a series stages, the manner in which one faces these stages (along with one’s karma) determine the quality of one’s rebirth.

The person that is dying is pretty much the same person as they have lived: though the strength of habit, our reactions to event in death would be the same reactions to similar events while living. On this basis, the first part of the book describes the accumulated Buddhist wisdom of how life should be lived.