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

THE UNIVERSAL PROCESS 345Having 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 devotionas bees plunging into them to suck from them their transcendentjoy.Through the great good of these wordsMay the beings of all the realms of samsara,In the ground of primordial perfection, attain nirvana.These are unmistakably the words of someone who hasachieved the highest realization with all that it can bring: thatjoy and fearlessness and freedom and understanding that arethe goal of the teachings and of human life. I think of masterslike Longchenpa, and my own masters Jamyang Kbyentse,Dudjom Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and I imaginebeings who have their depth of realization as magnificentmountain eagles, who soar above both life and death and seethem for what they are, in all their mysterious, intricate interrelation.To see through the eyes of the mountain eagle, the view ofrealization, is to look down on a landscape in which theboundaries that we imagined existed between life and deathshade into each other and dissolve. The physicist David Bohmhas described reality as being "unbroken wholeness in flowingmovement." What is seen by the masters, then, seen directlyand with total understanding, is that flowing movement andthat unbroken wholeness. What we, in our ignorance, call"life," and what we, in our ignorance, call "death", are merelydifferent aspects of that wholeness and that movement. This isthe vast and transforming vision opened up to us by the bardoteachings, and embodied in the lives of the supreme masters.THE REVELATION OF THE BARDOSTo see death, then, through realized eyes, is to see death inthe context of this wholeness, and as part, and only part, ofthis beginningless and endless movement. The uniqueness andpower of the bardo teachings is that they reveal to us, by