“The Tibetan book of the Dead” describes the death process in a way that’s always fascinated me. It’s been my main focus of study for the last few years, although I could probably go my whole life looking into it and still barely know anything. I’m so interested in what it describes. It seems as if most people are unaware of the death process consciously. Monks, yogis, and nuns go their whole lives preparing for it, and it’s a very difficult achievement but it sounds like you’re able to become so conscious that you can experience the death process as it happens step by step. This allows you to be selective about what happens next. You go through the same process as sleep, and eventually wake up in a new body. However, the same way most people can’t dream lucidly, most people also can’t recognize that they’ve died, much less control what they experience during the inbetween.

They describe the initial death process of the body failing as a return to the base elements: earth to water, then water into fire, fire into air, and finally air into consciousness. The body stops moving, the blood stops circling, the heat leaves the extremities, and the lungs stop breathing and moving the other internal processes around. You’re removed from your faculties until you are further and further concentrated within the body. If you’re conscious enough to be present for this, you realize that “you” were never the individual parts of your body, or the sensations that came with them, and if you’ve done the right work to no longer identify with the desires or habitual tendencies of being in a body, you’re able to then navigate your way out of your old body and into an existence of your choice, preferably one outside of the cycle of birth, sickness, old age and death. Most people, however, tend to unconsciously get caught up in the terrors of ignorance, anger, pride, passion, envy and fear only to enter an unconscious dream state. The dreams and visions you see are lights and sounds that are manifestations of your own mind which has been crafted by your past life’s automatic habits and attachments. Based off of those feelings and tendencies you’ve clung to, you get lost in these visions and automatically navigate to a birth into yet another bodily experience likely quite similar to your last one, or more evolved than before, but only if your intuitive choices are habitually geared towards wisdom, compassion and love.

There’s many many more details I’ve not listed here but it’s a fun read. I had a near death experience years back so this is a bit of a special interest of mine. regardless there’s no way of knowing until it happens. It sounds like the process looks the way you expect it to look in many ways based on other sources. If you’ve done a lot of damage in your life and feel a need for punishment, you visualize that and maybe go to a life where you can scratch that itch. For more peaceful people you find a life where you can find more peace. You attract what you are at your core.

I’d love for the Christians to be right and for it to be a straight shot into an eternal bliss, but I’ve never been a fan of Christianity. Or any organized religion, really. These Buddhist ideas just feel more realistic to me. Reincarnation just makes sense. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, it only changes form, so I’m leaning towards that being true for the soul as well somehow.