The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

THE UNIVERSAL PROCESS 345
Having been with you, my noble disciples, through all this time,
The joy of sharing the truth has filled me and satisfied me.
Now all the connections in this life between us are ending,
I am an aimless beggar who is going to die as he likes,
Do not feel sad for me, but go on fraying always.
These words are my heart talking, talking to help you;
Think of them as a cloud of lotus-blossoms, and you in your devotion
as bees plunging into them to suck from them their transcendent
joy.
Through the great good of these words
May the beings of all the realms of samsara,
In the ground of primordial perfection, attain nirvana.
These are unmistakably the words of someone who has
achieved the highest realization with all that it can bring: that
joy and fearlessness and freedom and understanding that are
the goal of the teachings and of human life. I think of masters
like Longchenpa, and my own masters Jamyang Kbyentse,
Dudjom Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and I imagine
beings who have their depth of realization as magnificent
mountain eagles, who soar above both life and death and see
them for what they are, in all their mysterious, intricate interrelation.
To see through the eyes of the mountain eagle, the view of
realization, is to look down on a landscape in which the
boundaries that we imagined existed between life and death
shade into each other and dissolve. The physicist David Bohm
has described reality as being "unbroken wholeness in flowing
movement." What is seen by the masters, then, seen directly
and with total understanding, is that flowing movement and
that unbroken wholeness. What we, in our ignorance, call
"life," and what we, in our ignorance, call "death", are merely
different aspects of that wholeness and that movement. This is
the vast and transforming vision opened up to us by the bardo
teachings, and embodied in the lives of the supreme masters.
THE REVELATION OF THE BARDOS
To see death, then, through realized eyes, is to see death in
the context of this wholeness, and as part, and only part, of
this beginningless and endless movement. The uniqueness and
power of the bardo teachings is that they reveal to us, by