I'm not suggesting anything, but I'm finding that the so-called "Tibetan Book of the Dead" is the most important book for me to be reading at this point! Something just seems very natural about my reading it now, even though I've known about it for a long time. Death is a language and reality that I understand and relate to.

I really don't obsess about death or have a fixation on it. That our lives end in death has always had a profound impact on how I view life and the life-cycle. Death as the end of our lives didn't make much sense. So I think it was pretty early in my formulation of reality and existence that life isn't as finite or concrete as we tend to live it. It's one side of the coin, the trunk of the elephant (or the leg, or the body, or the tail), it's a cross-section under a microscope, it's one station on the radio dial.

I think perhaps my current lifetime is a meditation on the role of death in existence and the life-cycle, and the concept of self in death. That's why I'm drawn so strongly to suicide. Out of all the ways to die, how many focus so intently on the self?

It kinda fits – the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in brief, deals with the process upon dying and the Buddhist cosmology it fits in (although the techniques involved can be applied to any belief system), but it doesn't touch on getting to that point of dying. Much of my life has involved getting to that point.


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