Step 2:
Dying Preparation:
Spiritual Considerations
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost.
Let us awaken. Do not squander your life.
—zen night chant
Dying is not the end of your life. All the major spiritual traditions indicate that death is just the doorway for a continuation of life. You surrender your physical body, but your loving awareness continues. All the religious and spiritual traditions indicate that a spiritual practice will heighten your mental and emotional freedom at the moment of death. When you have a spiritual practice, you gain clarity, a deepened awareness, and a strengthened response to each situation in life, including your suffering. Your practice may not follow a religious or spiritual tradition. It may be connected to beauty, music, nature, or some other positive consideration that brings love and peace to you. The key is to develop a personal practice in order to be open and to merge with whatever you consider represents the mystery that is beyond death.
How we prepare to die includes spiritual preparation—however you relate to “spiritual.” In this chapter, we will also consider religious traditions and practical preparations as you look ahead to your time of dying. These preparations would include what kinds of music are played, books read to you, and environment that surrounds you as you are in the dying process.
At the moment of death, the relationship you have developed with God, the Cosmos, Essence, or some indescribable Presence (by whatever name you give it) can give you strength to go through this transition. As you prepare for the hour of death, ask for the mystery or Presence of Life to help you and ask for your own guidance and courage to let go into the vast mystery you are entering.
If you don’t connect to some Presence but have some type of spiritual practice such as meditation, visualizations, chanting, prayers, or other spiritual practices, you can be assured that these practices will give you strength, balance, and confidence. Your spiritual practice at this stage of dying opens within you a level of trust and faith that is rooted in both your beliefs and previous inner experience.
Part of your spiritual preparation is to take the opportunity to make peace with yourself, with others, and with the larger mystery that you may call the Infinite, the Universe, Source, God, or Presence. In this preparation, it is time to forgive yourself as soon as you feel remorse for what you have done or experienced in your life. Individuals describe as they come to this stage in dying that a Presence is always there, has always been present in their lives. This is your expanded self.
Asking for forgiveness and opening consciously to this Presence can make you more aware of what has always been within you. I speak of an intimacy between you and a Presence only because many of those who have had near-death experiences describe a Presence coming to them. Most of our religious traditions and mystics also describe this intimacy.
The best way to prepare for death is to have gained through your spiritual practice a stability of mind. At the moment of death, you don’t want your mind to be broken or distracted by fear or remorse. You want it to remain in an even awareness that grows into and through the doorway of your death. As the luminosity or light of reality shines in your mind, you will recognize it as the Infinite, the Source, the Presence, the unfathomable mystery by whatever name and naturally merge into it and then rest in it.
Religious Traditions Preparation
The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said, “What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. ... The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.” 26 In different religious traditions, preparation for death takes on similar messages. Christ prayed that through his death he might be able to take on the suffering and purify the sins of all beings to transcend death together. The Christian traditions have prayers said at the bed of the dying offering devotion, trust, mercy, and love.
In the Jewish tradition, many prayers and psalms are said during the dying. Often these prayers are in praise of God’s goodness and mercy. Also, they encourage the dying to examine their life, to acknowledge and atone for any harm they have done, and to extend forgiveness to anyone who may have harmed them.
In Islam Sufism, the prayers at death are for the person to be in the pure light and experience the way of the heart. The essence of the path to God is to know yourself. The Sufi saying is “Know yourself, Know your Lord.”
In the Buddhist tradition, the path to God is to offer up from your ego state and all things you are attached to, such as your body, health, physical appearance, possessions, jobs, talents, family, friends, fears, pain of dying, feelings of responsibility, physical control, or being abandoned. His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, fourteenth Dalai Lama, suggests that “The purpose of all major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts.” 27
All of our religious traditions come from some form of ancient indigenous shamanism that still exists around the world. In the shamanistic worldview, only the natural world exists. This view includes the visible and the invisible worlds as well as the world of spirits. In indigenous cultures, a person had two or more souls. One soul was to die and be buried in this world and another soul was to fly to the spirit world and travel to the ancestors and beyond into the vast mystery. In this tradition, it was important to prepare each soul for the journey of death.
It is for you and me to prepare for this journey, both physically and spiritually into the vast mystery of light. Alberto Villoldo, who was trained in the Andean shamanic tradition, describes one indigenous view of death with: “When a dying person retains his awareness after death, he enters the light easily. My mentor compared this light to the dawn breaking on a cloudless morning, a state of primordial purity—immense and vast, defying description. The blackness of death, caused by the collapse of the senses, recedes and is dispelled by the light of Spirit.” 28
Exercise: Preparation for Letting Go
This is a meditation to begin to prepare for releasing and letting go of your physical, mental, emotional, and relationship lives. Again, record this meditation or have a friend or family member read it to you. Be sure to pause between instructions so you can absorb each part of the meditation.
• Close your eyes. Take a moment to breathe deeply, relax your body, and remember how precious is the human life you experience.
• Remember the people who have helped you and how you have brought joy to others.
• Remember that even through the difficult times you have learned and opened to life.
• In this relaxed state, take a look at your mind. Every thought and feeling you’ve had over the years has changed you in one way or another. Everything in this world changes; your body is also changing and one day it will die. Impermanence is real. Let your mind and heart feel this truth.
• In this moment of relaxation, notice what has made you happy in your life. You may have worked hard for many things, had a good relationship, a nice house, or a satisfying job; or you’ve had a really difficult life perhaps with illness, loss, financial challenges, or loneliness. Yet, sooner or later, you will lose all the good and bad of your life and that which caused you happiness and joy as well as pain and fear. Notice what it would be like to live without fear. Can you feel a moment in your life when there was no fear?
• Challenge yourself: Can you release your grasping of this life you’ve had and open to whatever arises next in your mind? Can you let go of the reference points of solidity, identity, and separateness? Can you accept this very moment no matter what you are feeling? This begins the letting go of your identity and connection to this life. Explore these letting-go feelings.
• Let yourself rest in this contemplation and know that, as in the indigenous traditions, you have two souls. One soul that will be left here to be honored and loved by those who still live and remember you, and the other soul that is moving toward a vast mystery of experience that will take you into and beyond the light of existence.
• After a time of resting in this inner awareness, begin to move your body and open your eyes.
• Record your reflections in your notebook. If in a group, share your experience.
Exercise: Affirmations for Letting Go and Preparing for Death
It is helpful to change your thought patterns. First, find a comfortable position, relax, and take a few deep breaths to settle your mind and body. Then, silently or out loud, say the following affirmative phrases as you read them. Use these phrases anytime you think of your dying. Select at least one to memorize.
• I open to forgiveness and to my love flowing boundlessly in me.
• I find the inner resources to be able to let go of my body.
• I find the inner resources to let go of my emotions and my mind.
• Death is not my enemy. Death is a doorway of continuing life.
• My life is changing and I am open to my death.
• I accept things as they are and I am free of fear.
Exercise: Practical Preparation—
What to Listen to in the Dying Process
As you move deeper into your dying, hearing becomes one of the most accessible experiences of your surroundings. Write in your notebook from the following list what you would like to hear as you move through your dying process.
• Recorded meditations and/or prayers you will do and others will do for you and with you.
• Music such as instrumentals, songs, chants, etc., playing in the background for you.
• Recorded teachings played at your bedside for inspiration.
• Books read to you.
• Friends playing music or singing for and with you.
• Friends and family telling you stories about your life and your life with them.
• Recorded nature sounds: ocean waves, birds, rain, etc.
• Other things that come to mind for you.
26. C. G. Jung, Selected Letters of C. G. Jung, 1909–1961, edited by Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Legacy Library, 1984), 53.
27. Dalai Lama, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus, edited by Robert Kiely (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1996, 2016), 34.
28. Alberto Villoldo, Shaman, Healer, Sage (New York: Harmony Books, 2000), 209.