Letting go, practiced early

In the eighth century a teacher named Padmasambhava brought Buddhism to Tibet and, the tradition says, hid texts to be found when the world was ready. One of them, found in the fourteenth century by a man named Karma Lingpa, is a guide to be read aloud to the dying and the dead, describing what the mind meets in the transition between lives. The West met it in 1927, when a scholar named Evans-Wentz published it as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Robert Thurman's 1994 translation is the one I'd read.

I hold this as the tradition's deepest teaching on letting go, whatever you believe about what follows death. The bardo, the in-between state, is described as a series of appearances, peaceful and terrifying, and the instruction, over and over, is the same: these are projections of your own mind; don't grasp, don't flee, recognize them and rest. The book's wager is that a person who has practiced recognizing the mind's projections during life will recognize them at death, and be free.

Here's why it's in Awareness and why I'd give it to anyone. Every day is full of small bardos. The moment after a job ends and before the next begins. The space between a diagnosis and a plan. The gap between one thought and the next. The Tibetans call these transitions, and they say the transitions are where freedom lives, because the old thing has let go and the new thing hasn't grabbed yet. Most of us rush through them in fear. The practice is to stay, notice, and not grasp.

The teaching also makes death a teacher instead of a terror, which every tradition on the 360 does in its own way. A person who has looked at their own ending clearly tends to live the middle with more care and less fear. That's not morbid. It's the most practical awareness there is.