How Dying Goes

Nothing here is medical advice; the people caring for your body will tell you what is true for you. This is what the old masters say is happening underneath.

The settling

Dying is a settling. Everything that was held up comes gradually to rest.

First the strength goes. The body becomes heavy, and it is hard to lift the head or the hand. Then the fluids settle: the mouth dries, the eyes may feel dry. Then the warmth draws inward. Hands and feet grow cool, then the limbs, and the heat gathers toward the heart. Then the breath changes. It becomes shallow, or slow, or comes in a rhythm that does not look like breathing. And then the last out-breath, which Longchenpa says goes out with a soft “ha” and does not come back in.

That is what a doctor calls death. There is a quieter inner stopping still to come, a short time later, when whatever was keeping body and mind bound together comes to rest too:

The outer breath stops, and consciousness dissolves into luminosity.
The inner breath stops, and body and mind part.
The body is left there. Wisdom dawns in the open expanse.

— Longchenpa

What dawns

When the body finally lets go of the mind, something is uncovered. All our lives, awareness has been wrapped in the body’s business, the senses, the breath, the constant work of thinking and planning and fearing. When all of that settles, awareness is left as it actually is, like an autumn sky after the clouds have gone: vast, clear, luminous, at peace. It is what remains when there is nothing left to cover it.

It dawns for everyone. Longchenpa says it flatly: even without any training at all, the luminosity of the ground appears at death. The person who never sat still for a minute, the person who did not believe in anything, the person who died afraid. The clouds settle and the sky is there, because the sky was always there.

What differs is not whether it dawns but whether we recognize it. Most people meet that open clarity and do not know it as their own, and the mind’s old habits reassemble. With even a little familiarity, it is a homecoming.

A mother and a child

Recognition is not a test. The image for it is a small child who sees her mother across a room full of strangers. The running has already started, and then she is in the lap and both of them are laughing.

The awareness that dawns at death is called the mother. Every glimpse of it in this life, every quiet minute of resting, every time you looked for the one who was afraid and found only open looking, is called the child. And the two were never two. Jigme Lingpa gives the instruction for that moment in two images:

Like meeting someone you have long known, trust what appears without a flicker of doubt.
Like an arrow that has flown far and cannot turn back, rest without moving, and you are free.

— Jigme Lingpa

When you cannot do anything

A particular fear visits people who take this seriously: that when the time comes they will be in too much pain, or too drugged, or too tired, or too confused, and will miss it.

Recognition is not something you do. The luminosity dawns unasked, when everything else, including your ability to do things, has come to rest. Whatever state your mind was in, sedated or sharp, is part of what settles. It is not what dawns. And familiarity is not a performance. Half asleep, feverish, distracted, you still know the voice of someone you love. A child in pain still knows her mother, and an exhausted child goes to her more surely, not less.

For the long days before that, when you are conscious and cannot do anything formal, three things remain, and each is enough on its own. Rest once in the pause at the end of an out-breath, and let the next breath come by itself. Keep one line, from your own faith or from the words to keep near, and say it when the mind is too scattered for anything else. And let someone sit quietly near you, or read to you softly. The words spoken gently near a dying person are heard, even when nothing can be answered.

You were never going to do it. It was always going to be done, the way falling asleep is done, by letting go of doing.