A cartoon published in the newsletter of the American Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology shows twin fetuses side by side in their womb vessel prior to birth. One of them asks, “Is there life after birth?” The other one replies, “We don’t know. No one has come back to tell us.” The joke points to the paradoxical analogy between the experience of birth and death—an analogy that has become even more apparent through the research in pre- and perinatal psychology described in the previous chapter. This work has revealed that a human birth, like death, is not only a process of mammalian physiology but the subjective experience of a soul emerging into a radically new and unknown phase of its earthly existence.
Birth and death have always been the accepted and conventional boundary transitions framing a human life. The personal story of our existence in human society is told and remembered as lasting between the date of birth and date of death. What comes after death—“the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns”—has remained the great mystery, shadowed by feelings of fear and loss and grief. In this chapter we will discuss the findings of researchers in thanatology and near-death experience (NDE), as well as certain philosophical and spiritual teachings, that shed new light on death and dying. We can see that, as with birth, the physiological processes of bodily death are accompanied by the subjective experience of a soul going through a great phase transition from the known to the terrifyingly unknown.
Not only are birthing and dying phenomenologically similar transitions, they are intimately intermingled in both physiology and experience. As Stanislav Grof has written, “birth is a potential or actual life-threatening event. The delivery brutally terminates the intrauterine existence of the fetus. He or she ‘dies’ as an aquatic organism and is born as an air-breathing, physiologically and even anatomically different form of life” (Grof, 2000, p. 32).
Buddhist, Hindu, and other esoteric teachings of reincarnation and rebirth speak of a threefold sequence—death, an intermediate phase or afterlife, and then rebirth. Elaborate cartographies exist in many cultures, so-called Books of the Dead, describing the landscape of the afterlife. We can recognize here a convergence of the experience of birthing and dying: the passage through the birth canal is at once the death of the fetal self and the birth of a newborn human self. If the process of birthing is inevitably accompanied or preceded by a kind of dying, is it then also true that the process of dying is accompanied or followed by a kind of birth into a new and vastly expanded world?
Just such an idea can be found in the writings of the remarkable nineteenth-century German scientist, scholar, and philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887). Fechner is regarded in the history of psychology as one of the founders of experimental psychology. He was trained as a physicist, and taught and wrote on science, but had a mystical bent and a phenomenally broad range of interests. Fechner damaged his eyesight in experiments that involved looking at the sun, and had to spend almost a year in complete darkness. When he emerged from this accidental death-rebirth initiation, he was clairvoyant and wrote books on The Soul Life of Plants and The Comparative Anatomy of Angels.
In 1835, in response to a friend’s loss of a loved one, he wrote a short book called Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode (The Little Book of Life After Death). William James, who greatly admired Fechner, wrote an introduction to the English translation, which appeared in 1904. The book is remarkable, as much for its tone, which is visionary, almost oracular, as for the content, which is completely free of any religious terminology, yet formulates a sophisticated psycho-philosophical position about the reality of the afterlife and consciousness after death. The first of the nine brief chapters deals with the phenomenological parallels between death and birth. The following is my translation of the opening passages.
Man lives upon the Earth not once, but three times. The first phase is a continuous sleep, the second an alternation between sleeping and waking, and the third phase, a continuous waking. In the first phase we live alone, in darkness; in the second, we live among others but separate, and in a light which reflects the outer surface of things; in the third phase, our life is intertwined with that of other spirits, in the higher life of the Great Spirit, and we see into the ultimate reality of things.
In the first phase the body develops from the seed cell, and creates the equipment needed for the second phase; in the second phase the soul develops from its seed origin, and creates the tools for the third phase. In the third phase, the seed of the divine, which lies in every human soul, develops in what is for us a darkness—we may know of what lies beyond the human only through intuition, belief, feeling, or the instincts of genius; but for the Spirit in the third phase, it is as bright as daylight.
The transition from the first to the second phase we call birth; the transition from the second to the third phase we call death. The pathway from the second to the third phase is no more dark and obscure than the pathway from the first to the second. The one leads to outer perception of the world, the other to interior vision.
Just as the fetus (child) in the first phase is still blind and deaf to all the radiance and the music of life in the second phase; and as the birth from the warm body of the mother is hard and painful; and as there comes a time during the birthing when the destruction of its prior existence must feel like a dying, before the awakening to the new exterior way of being—so do we, in our present existence, in which our entire consciousness is still bound with the confining body, perceive nothing of the radiance and the music, the splendor and the freedom, of life in the third phase; and readily think of the dark and narrow passage which takes us there as a blind alley with no exit. But our death is only a second birth into a freer beingness, in which the soul breaks through and leaves behind its narrow sheath, just as the child did at the time of its birth.
Modern accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs), in which someone dies in an accident or during surgery and then returns, have identified many of the same features found in traditional and mythic descriptions of this ultimate transition. They say there is a sense of sudden discontinuity, a lifting-off into an out-of-body (OBE) state and entering into an upward sloping tunnel of increasing brightness. This may then be followed by meeting with previously deceased parents or ancestors, accompanied by a sense of welcoming and homecoming. Some of the NDE accounts tell of meeting a spirit guide or angelic being and receiving divine wisdom and guidance before their return to physical life.
Of course, we have no way of knowing to what extent these very positive features reported in NDE accounts are also found in ordinary deaths that are not followed by a return to earthly existence. As with the subjective experience of being born, we can suppose and imagine an enormous variability, depending on the level of spiritual development and preparation of the individual soul. Some who die suddenly and unexpectedly, and without a worldview that accommodates any notion of an afterlife, may indeed find themselves hovering around their empty physical vehicle, a restless ghost in a disoriented limbo state, “neither here nor there.”
Traditional Eastern and contemporary descriptions converge for the situation when the dying occurs gradually and as expected, in the course of illness or old age. At the moment of expiration, the taking and releasing of the last few breaths, there occurs what Taoist texts call a “separation of the elements.” No longer held together by circulating spiritual life-force, the earth and water elements naturally sink downward, as the prone body becomes cold and clammy from the feet up. The Tibetan Book of the Dead calls this symptom “earth sinking into water,” and Taoist texts speak of the fluid ching energy of the pelvic cauldron naturally flowing downward and outward, when no longer circulated upward by the life-force (Metzner, 2011).
Air and fire elements naturally rise upward—as the electric chi energy radiating from the solar plexus center becomes faint, sensations of clammy coldness may be accompanied by feverish heat. According to the Taoists, the volatile shen energy of the throat and head disperses naturally upward, but during life is drawn down and circulated through the body with the breath. When the last breath of air is drawn and released, the shen escapes—we say the person has “expired” or “given up the ghost.”
There is, in the process of dying, a kind of physiological unwinding, a slowing down and progressive shutting off of vital functions, which may or may not be accompanied by cellular pathology and degeneration. The process at some point probably involves the release of endorphins, the body’s own pain-reducing chemicals, which may account for the often calm and peaceful demeanor of one who is on the final threshold. The subjective similarity of dying with going to sleep, our nightly instinctive release from the physical realm, is reflected in the Greek myth of Thanatos and Hypnos as twin brother deities—both robed and winged escorts for the out-of-body journey to the other side. Perhaps the sweetest exemplar of peaceful dying is to make the final transition while the body rests in sleep.
A sense of crossing a threshold and of departing on a long journey into an unknown future commonly accompanies the process, often with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. The journey of dying contains a paradox: we know for certain we are leaving on a journey with no return, but we don’t know where we’re going or what we will experience. The paradoxical indefiniteness is expressed in phrases such as “passing on,” “leaving form,” or passing to the “other side.” This acute and terrifying paradox probably accounts for the continuing fascination with the reports of NDEs—reports from travelers who have returned—that regularly land on best-seller lists.
My personal favorite of the metaphors for what comes after death is the hereafter. I once mentioned to Ram Dass that I thought his famous epigram Be Here Now could be extended, so to speak, by adding to it––and Hereafter. It would apply the practice of being here now to our after-death state. He chuckled appreciatively at the phrase—and then said that Be Here Now was sufficient, since it covered both realms. Being consciously in the here-now when in the after-death realms is in fact the essence of the Tibetan Buddhist bardo teachings.
Timothy Leary, in a filmed conversation with Ram Dass shortly before his death, expressed a sense of adventure and calm acceptance at the journey to come. He had arrived at this attitude after relinquishing his earlier project to freeze his brain through cryogenics for some potential future technological resuscitation. Before the modern era of heroic life-extending medical interventions, such an accepting attitude was perhaps more common in earlier generations. A woman in one of my workshops in Sweden related how her grandfather seemed to know when his time was coming. One evening he assembled his family, said a last good-night and good-bye to everyone, and laid down to sleep on his bed, keeping his clothes and shoes on. He wanted to be appropriately dressed for the long journey to come, as he said.
Divination to Your Dying Day
To prepare yourself, find a quiet time and place and enter into a meditative space. Center awareness and identity in the Cave of the Heart, which is the whole chest cavity from the shoulders to the upper abdomen. Invoke the blessings and assistance of your teacher(s) and/or Spirit Guide(s). Ignite the purifying light-fire energy-sun in the Heart Center and concentrate on the presence of empathy and equanimity. Envision yourself walking on the road of your life, remembering the scenes of your youth and middle years, and coming, probably at some point in your elder years, to the place where you realize and accept without denial or reservation, but with equanimity and compassion, that this life of yours will end.
Some people may choose to ask at what age they will die and what will be the physical cause of their demise. I only suggest you tune in to your state of mind and body when you come to realize you are in the last year of your life. What is it like for you then? Where are you living? Who are you living with—your partner, your children, your grandchildren? How are you with your family? Then refocus the telescope of time (the chronoscope) and tune in to your state of mind and body in the last month of your life, when you will have disengaged more completely from all your earthly commitments and engagements. What is it like for you then—how would you like it to be—who would you like to be there with you? Will you ask to have a spiritual counselor or advisor? Will you be saying good-byes to close relatives and friends? And your last day—how will that be for you—as you embark on the great adventure?
The image of dying as the beginning of an adventurous journey may be conveyed to the living through dream-state communication from the departed. After my father Wolfgang had died, I dreamed that I met him on a mountain hiking trip in the Alps. He had often taken me and my brothers on such trips when we were young, and I cherished happy memories of those adventures. In the dream, I was with a group of friends in Switzerland (which corresponded to my waking life experience at the time) and we met Wolfgang in a small Alpine village with cobblestone streets. He looked hale and hearty, though he was carrying a heavy backpack, as was his custom when we had gone hiking. My friends and I talked with him for a while, delighted at the meeting. Then he said good-bye and walked slowly upward, on the cobblestone street of the village and beyond into the mountains. I watched him for a while as he climbed—and then I returned with my friends down into the valley.
A different, even opposite metaphor for the experience of dying is also found in some mediumistic and mythic accounts: that of taking off clothes or masks, of releasing or dropping our familiar form to enter into a completely new kind of existence. A contemporary medium channeling a spirit being called Bartholomew suggested that we think of the process of dying rather like taking off an old pair of shoes that have become ill-fitting and uncomfortable.
The metaphor of the removing of outer coverings or layers is also found in the epitaph that Benjamin Franklin, who was by trade a printer, wrote for himself. He imagined his body “like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out, stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here, food for worms.” Franklin wrote further, attesting to his belief in reincarnation, that “the work shall not be lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more, in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.”
Many indigenous and traditional cultures preserve the belief that in ordinary deaths the soul’s transition to the liberated state of the afterdeath world involves a three-day period of struggle and confusion. This is the basis for the custom, for example, among the Irish, of a three-day “wake,” in which the surviving relatives are requested to remain awake and conscious, perhaps to sing and to lament, but also to tell stories of the deceased and celebrate his or her life. The wakeful conscious state of the surviving relatives assists the departing traveler, to whom they are related by the bonds of family and friendship, as he or she negotiates the turbulent and frightening passage to the world beyond.
My teacher Russell Schofield explained that the reason for the traditional three-day wake has to do with the etheric matrix or double. This is the subtle body that is an exact duplicate form at the physical time-space dimension, but with slightly higher vibratory frequency, and hence normally invisible and weightless. This means it can pass through solid walls and it can fly. It accompanies us throughout life, maintains the integrity of the physical form in sickness and health, and leaves the physical vehicle nightly, parked in sleep. Though we may remember our soul journeys in other worlds and dimensions in the rich symbolic imagery of our dreams, the journeys of the etheric double in the ordinary time-space dimension of our world occur mostly unconsciously—except in lucid dreams of flying or in the out-of-body travels of advanced yogic practitioners, clairvoyant seers, and remote viewers.
As my teacher explained, although the etheric double can disengage easily enough for the nightly out-of-body journeys of sleep and dreams, the more complete disengagement called for at the time of the death of the physical vehicle takes longer. Particularly the disentanglement from the brain, because of the multilayered complexity of neural circuits and conditioned thought-feeling memory patterns, ordinarily takes about three days—and is likely to be experienced as subjectively confusing and frightening. We can see how the mindful and even celebratory wakefulness of loving companions would be a valuable source of clarity and comfort during this complex maneuver. The difficulties are likely to be compounded if the death occurs suddenly and unexpectedly. Yet, as traditional spiritual teachings have averred, ministering helpers from the other side and angelic guides are always present to help ease the pain of a difficult and unexpected transition.
Even such a very high-level adept as the Master Jesus of Nazareth was apparently subject to (or perhaps chose to undergo) the three-day period of disentangling from the low-frequency conditioned earth elements of the physical body. This is probably the meaning of the phrase in the Apostolic Creed—descendit ad infernos (“he descended to the lower regions”), and after three days and nights returned to Earth, met with some of the disciples, and then ascended to the higher celestial realms. This Biblical story has caused theological discomfort among certain Christian denominations, who can’t fathom how or why Jesus would descend to “hell,” as it is usually, and erroneously, translated. But it makes perfect sense when we think of it as his intentional and conscious exemplary modeling of the usual human experience of bodily death and purification.
The underworld of classical mythology, like the lower world of worldwide shamanic traditions, is not at all like the hell of the early Christian writers—a place of unending pain and punishment. The lower world or underworld is the place souls go to first, temporarily, right at or after the death of the physical body, when the subjective experience is often dominated by anguish, grief, denial, and negativity. The soul is disentangling itself from the densest, heaviest parts of the mortal vehicle, loaded with the residues of illusory and distorted self-images acquired in the human life that just ended. The Master Jesus, as a highly advanced adept, did not need to pass through the infernal region when his body died—but apparently used the occasion to visit this world and give aid and comfort to the disoriented and troubled souls hovering there.
A near-death experience (NDE) can be understood as an altered state of consciousness in which the catalyst or trigger is the perception that the vital functions of the physical body, particularly the heart, have actually stopped. The clock-time of the typical NDE (established after the fact) can vary from a few minutes to a half hour or more. Subjectively, the time-space dimension is completely transcended, as the experiences remembered and reported seem to occur in a timeless and dimensionless realm. The sense of being in a different timestream is one of the strongest indications of a profoundly altered state of consciousness.
Although the dilation and transcendence of time and space is also characteristic of high-intensity psychedelic experiences, in other respects the so-called “ego-death” experiences of drug-induced or holotropic states is quite different. In such states, a person may subjectively feel as if they are dying and indeed struggle for a long period of time resisting dying, when there is actually no objective indication of physiological death or even nearness to death. My good friend and mentor, the late Leo Zeff, told me of an experience he had with ayahuasca in which he felt he was being devoured by a giant serpent, struggling, heaving, and twisting for six hours—until he finally gave up resisting, let himself be devoured, and was instantly released into an ecstatic, liberated state.
Over the past forty years, I have collected, compiled, and published several collections of accounts of psychedelic experiences—with LSD, MDMA, ayahuasca, and psilocybe mushrooms—which cover a wide range of ecstatic and heavenly as well as agonizing, hellish experiences. However, psychedelic experiences rarely, if ever, involve the features of classic near-death experience—such as looking down on one’s dead body from above (OBE) or meeting deceased relatives and angelic escorts. I suspect that the crucial distinguishing feature that occurs in NDEs and not in psychedelic “ego-death” experiences is the perception, at some level, that the heart has actually stopped.
In addition to complete transcendence of time and space, positive psychedelic experiences typically involve feelings of ecstatic liberation or blissful dissolution of illusory boundaries between self and other, and between self and world. There may be fleeting thoughts or perceptions of bodily death in such an experience, or none at all. Indeed, all the usual conceptions of physical form or existence may be transcended and considered completely irrelevant.
On the other hand, negative, hellish, or “bad trip” psychedelic experiences may indeed involve the person’s fear that he or she is dying or has died, accompanied by the delusion that perhaps one has taken a toxic overdose, as well as the belief that one has now done irreparable brain damage or gone permanently insane. Such fears may exist in spite of it being abundantly evident to others that all physiological signs in the individual are entirely normal. In such terrifying “bad trip” situations, as well as in dealing with the anxiety that naturally accompanies the amplified transcendence of our normal conceptions of reality, it is clear that the wise counsel recorded in the world’s spiritual traditions on preparing for death could be supremely valuable.
When the individual recovers or returns from such a painful ego-death experience, there may indeed also be a sense of being reborn—into a new and larger life-world. The literature of psychedelic experiences is filled with such dramatic death-rebirth epiphanies. Just as actual birth is an expansion of awareness following the death of the fetal ego, so does spiritual rebirth and renewal follow the death or transcendence of the old ego-self.
In our 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience, Leary, Alpert, and I, following a suggestion from Aldous Huxley, had adapted The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a paradigm for a spiritually oriented psychedelic experience. With appropriate preparation and orientation, so we proposed, psychedelic travelers could be guided, or guide themselves, to release their ego-attachments and illusory self-images, the way a Tibetan Buddhist lama would guide a dying man or woman to relinquish their attachments while noting the physical signs of the death of the body. In the years since that publication, I (and my coauthors) have received numerous letters expressing the grateful appreciation of readers who used it to prepare themselves for spiritually transcendent psychedelic experiences.
In the course of experiencing and confronting the fears of transcending the physical body, they could recognize they were significantly reducing their fears of dying and coming to a peaceful acceptance of their mortality. Indeed, experiencing the transcendence of your physical identification, with the certain knowledge that your essence, your spiritual core, your soul, persists beyond the boundary of bodily death is without doubt the most precious gift that psychedelic experiences can provide.
This was the gift vouchsafed in the mystery religions of ancient civilizations, where initiates went through an experience of death and rebirth, in which they were provided a vision of the reality of the spiritual worlds beyond. We do not know the details of what was involved in these religions, since initiates were sworn to secrecy. However, in the case of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which was for two thousand years the fountain-head of Western spirituality, the scholarly and pharmacological researches related by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck in their book The Road to Eleusis have demonstrated with high probability that the ingestion of an LSD-like ergot derivative was involved (Wasson et al., 1978).
The relevance of spiritually oriented and guided psychedelic experiences in alleviating death anxiety and helping prepare people for the ultimate transition has found modern expression and application in medical-psychiatric research. Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax, in their book The Human Encounter with Death, described the work they did using the tryptamine DPT, with patients suffering from terminal cancer (Grof and Halifax, 1977). More recently, psychiatrist Charles Grob, working at UCLA, has done studies using psilocybin (the active ingredient in the visionary mushroom of ancient Mexico) with people with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. It is a significant expansion of the accepted medico-scientific worldview that a medicine can be approved that has not been shown to effect a cure of an illness—but rather to alleviate normal human end-of-life anxiety (Grob, 2007).
A woman with end-stage cancer who participated in this study related in a filmed interview how all her fears about death, her guilt and worries about surviving family members, congealed into a kind of mass that pressed on her chest, squeezing her life-force—and then, as the psilocybin medicine came on, simply dissolved. At that exact moment she had the insight that all her fears and worries were about a future that had not yet happened. She realized that she could choose instead to focus her attention on the life she still had, with its love of family, the beauty and pleasure afforded by her garden, and even a renewed devotion to improving her well-being through yoga.
Studies such as this have led visionary physicians and scientists of consciousness to consider the far-reaching possibilities of future care for the dying, involving selective use of entheogenic medicines. While the growth of the hospice movement, involving palliative in-home pain management, is an encouraging sign, the mainstream medical establishment still tends to regard death as an outcome to be aggressively delayed and prevented. With an expanded spiritual worldview that recognizes the continuity of life after death and the possibilities of communication with the spirits of the dead, one can envision centers, in beautiful natural environments, in which meditative practices with guided psychedelic amplification could be offered for those in the final stage of life as well as their relatives.
Just such centers for preparation for the dying were envisioned by Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) in his last utopian novel Island. Huxley, who had done so much to first bring psychedelics to the attention of the larger culture, described how this utopian community used what they called a moksha medicine. Moksha is a Sanskrit term meaning “liberation,” as the goal of yogic practices. The psychedelic moksha medicine was used in this utopian community during transition rituals for adolescents, for adults in transition crises, and for preparation for the dying.
The aged philosopher put his vision into practice when he was dying, of throat cancer, on the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated—November 22, 1963. His wife Laura, who was a professional musician, has related how at a certain point, suffering from extreme debilitating discomfort, he seemed to know his time was coming and he asked her to give him an injection of 100 micrograms (mcg) of LSD. A second dose of 100 mcg was given a short while later. While the Dallas murder drama was unfolding on a TV set in another room, she described how his breathing, which had been labored, became easy; his expression, which had been agitated, became serene and peaceful. Her soothing voice guided him into a deeper and deeper meditative state, urging him to release all struggle and attachment into ultimate peace. The following is an extract from a letter Laura Huxley wrote to Aldous’s brother Julian, his wife, and a couple of close confidants. It has been published on the Erowid website, as part of the Myron Stolaroff collection.
After half an hour, the expression on his face began to change a little, and I asked him if he felt the effect of LSD, and he indicated no. Yet, I think that something had taken place already…the expression of his face was beginning to look as it did every time that he had the moksha medicine, when this immense expression of complete bliss and love would come over him…He was very quiet now; he was very quiet and his legs were getting colder; higher and higher I could see purple areas of cyanosis. Then I began to talk to him, saying “light and free.” Some of these thing I told him at night in these last few weeks before he would go to sleep, and now I said it more convincingly, more intensely—“go, go, let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light. Willing and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully; you are doing this so beautifully—you are going toward the light; you are going toward a greater love; you are going forward and up. It is so easy; it is so beautiful. You are doing it so beautifully, so easily. Light and free. Forward and up. You are going toward Maria’s love with my love. You are going toward a greater love than you have ever known. You are going toward the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully.”
I was very, very near his ears, and I hope I spoke clearly and understandingly. Once I asked him, “Do you hear me?” He squeezed my hand. He was hearing me…Later on I asked the same question, but the hand didn’t move anymore. Now from two o’clock until the time he died, which was five-twenty, there was complete peace except for once. That must have been about three-thirty or four, when I saw the beginning of struggle in his lower lip. His lower lip began to move as if it were going to be a struggle for air. Then I gave the direction even more forcefully…The twitching of the lower lip lasted only a little bit, and it seemed to respond completely to what I was saying…The twitching stopped, the breathing became slower and slower, and there was absolutely not the slightest indication of contraction, of struggle. It was just that the breathing became slower—and slower—and slower, and at five-twenty the breathing stopped.
I had been warned in the morning that there might be some up-setting convulsions toward the end, or some sort of contraction of the lungs, and noises. People had been trying to prepare me for some horrible physical reaction that would probably occur. None of this happened; actually the ceasing of the breathing was not a drama at all, because it was done so slowly, so gently, like a piece of music just finishing sempre piu piano dolcemente…There was not the feeling that with the last breath, the spirit left. It had just been gently leaving for the last four hours…These five people all said that this was the most serene, the most beautiful death. Both doctors and nurse said they had never seen a person in similar physical condition going off so completely without pain and without struggle (excerpt from https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/huxley_laura/huxley_laura_article1.shtml).
The mythology of most cultures know a figure variously known as the guide of souls (Gk: psychopompos) or angel of death, who comes from the spirit world to assist and guide the soul on this ultimate journey into the unknown. This figure sometimes takes on the fearful associations of the dying process itself, as in the folkloric image of the “grim reaper,” mercilessly cutting down human lives, regardless of status, beauty, or wealth. In shamanistic cultures, the living shaman may invoke his or her special spirit animals, be it Raven, Wolf, or another, when it comes time to escort someone to the otherworld. Especially the owl, with its superior nighttime vision, was regarded as an excellent guide—as related in the novel of Kwakiutl life by Margaret Craven, I Heard the Owl Call My Name.
The gifted psychic Kurt Leland, in his book The Unanswered Question, which is a kind of ecology of the afterlife realm, distinguishes between spirits he calls facilitators, who are “taking a break from the incarnational cycle” to guide us through the afterdeath zone; and those he calls overseers, who “are no longer focused on the human life cycle and guide us in our spiritual evolution” (Leland, 2002). These overseers are probably equivalent to what other writings call ascended masters or bodhisattvas.
The medieval Jewish mystical tradition speaks of the angel Lailah, whose name means “Night,” who is both the midwife of souls destined to be conceived and born, and also the escort for souls that are dying and returning to the heavenly home from which they originated. According to the midrashim, “Lailah is a guardian angel who watches over us all of our days. And when the time has come to take leave of this world, it is Lailah who leads us to the World to Come” (Schwartz, 2005). Another mythic figure associated with dying is Azrael, who is revered as an Angel of Death in Islamic mysticism but also known in the Hebrew biblical traditions, where he has more fearful and negative associations.
In Greek myth, different figures personify the benign spiritual and the horrible physical aspects of death. Hermes the divine messenger was the guide who stood by the souls as they embarked on the river crossing to the Underworld of Hades, showing them the way. Thanatos was the dark-robed daimon who personified the release from the body, like his twin brother Hypnos, sleep. And Kharon (or Charon) was the rough and unkempt ferryman, with fiercely flashing eyes, who pushed and beat reluctant passengers onto his boat to cross the foul and murky waters of the river Styx (whose name means “pain”). Souls had to be prepared to pay the ferryman for this river crossing—and hence it was a funerary custom to place a coin on the deceased person’s mouth, or two coins on the eyelids. Souls that couldn’t pay for the passage—that is, who died unattended or unprepared—were likely to wander listlessly about before being able to complete the crossing to the other side.
The crossing of the river Styx, as well as sometimes the swampy river called Acheron (whose name means “sorrow”), was only the first phase of the journey. Then, at the entrance to the gates of Hades, souls would encounter the ferocious, three-headed dog Cerberus (or Kerberos), who eats only live flesh. Thus, once the human souls no longer have their fleshly body, they cannot return to their former life. Perhaps the flesh-eating, three-headed Kerberos symbolizes how the ravages of old age, disease, or fatal wounds may devour the upper, middle, and lower parts of the body at the time of dying.
In the Egyptian myth of the underworld passage, called Dwat, a somewhat similar role to that of the dog Kerberos is played by Ammit, the crocodile-dog. Portrayed in numerous temple paintings, he sits by the throne of Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, and waits while the goddess Maat weighs each human heart against her feather of truth. Souls that answer truthfully to the questions posed by the Forty-Two Assessors, can pass on to the higher regions, but the hearts weighed down with falsehoods are devoured by Ammit, and those souls go into some kind of purgatorial or rehabilitation program. The difference between the two mythic death-dogs is that the Graeco-Roman Cerberus symbolizes more the devouring destruction of the physical body, while the Egyptian Ammit is focused on the elimination of the persona masks based on false pretenses, deceit, and lies.
The original Bardo Thödol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, is attributed to the legendary eighth-century Indian Buddhist adept Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhism to Tibet. There are three bardo states described in the Bardo Thödol as occurring between death and rebirth; and there are three additional bardo states, mentioned in appended Root Verses, that occur between birth and death—the bardos of waking life, dreaming, and meditating. 3
The Bardo Thödol concerns itself with providing guidance for the dying person on how to find their way through the afterdeath bardo states, giving detailed and explicit instructions how people can be helped to make the most favorable kind of rebirth possible. According to Tibetan Buddhism, both yogic practitioners and ordinary people with no particular yogic aptitude, can be helped to find their way through the confusing and terrifying afterlife states.
The Book of Liberation Through Understanding the Bardo States (as it is literally called) teaches that liberation from the samsaric round of conditioned existence can occur in, or from, any of the bardo states, if we recognize the bardo state we are in, and choose the most enlightened conscious option available to us. It is for this reason that Buddhist teachers refer to it not only as a book of preparation for dying, but also a profound guidebook for both living and dying (Metzner, 2015).
The teachings of the Bardo Thödol, in outline, are that immediately at death, in the bardo of the moment of dying, the dying person is urged to maintain one-pointed concentration on the “clear light,” also referred to as “the uncreated.” In the Root Verses appended to the Bardo Thödol the essential teaching related to each of the bardo states is summarized. Here is (my version of) the Root Verse for the bardo of dying, which emphasizes paying attention to releasing one’s attachments to the physical body and world:
Now as the bardo of dying dawns upon me,
I will abandon desires and cravings for worldly objects.
Entering without distraction into the clarity of the teachings,
I will merge my awareness into the space of the uncreated.
The time has come to let go this body of flesh and blood—
It is merely a temporary and illusory shell.
We are told that most people are not able to concentrate, get caught in fear and confusion, and enter then into the second phase, called the bardo of the experiencing of reality, in which there are heavenly and hellish visions of “peaceful and wrathful deities.” The deceased is repeatedly reminded, by the attendant lama-priests, not to be overwhelmed by either the heavenly or the hellish visions, but to remember that they are all projections of one’s own mind. Due to lack of training or preparation on the part of most ordinary people, the bardo-traveling soul, after repeatedly lapsing into unconsciousness, then finds itself in the third phase, the bardo of seeking rebirth, in which he or she wanders about seeking to orient again to ordinary existence and find a family to be born into. We shall return to a discussion of the second and third bardo phases in the following pages.