I had the hiccups four times in one month. Doesn't sound like something to write home about, but if you've been around me long enough (and no one has been around me long enough), then you know my hiccups are serious business. They usually don't last for less than 24 hours, often lasting up to 48 hours, sometimes longer.

They're manageable, depending on your definition of manageable. Only a few times have I come close to totally losing it. You know, going ape-shit at myself. But even I consider that an overly extreme reaction to what is essentially just severe discomfort and annoyance.

But they wear you out. You get exhausted. And when they keep going it becomes like tunnel-vision. You can lose perspective.

But here's where I make it something weird.

In my most recent read-through of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, there's one chapter that talks about "consciousness transference". It's in one of the chapters that I read with a grain of salt. It's kind of esoteric and it doesn't resonate with my experience or understanding, but I do read it. It's not totally out there.

There are two or three chapters that I don't read at all for various reasons, the least of all for seeming too superstitious for me and anachronistic in light of modern medicine.

But this consciousness transference practice is something to be done in preparation for the time of death, and one component of this practice is something I never quite understood, which is performing "hi-ka" gasps, whereby internal energies are manipulated through body channels.

"Hi-ka" gasps? Hiccups? Anyway, one way I'm dealing with these incessant hiccups is marrying these two ideas. I don't know really about internal energies or body channels mentioned in Tibetan texts, but I just try to visualize them as something I might know, or should know.

Do I know about them? Am I trying to tell myself something? Maybe I wrote the damn chapter?! Like I've mentioned before, sometimes it seems that all my lifetimes are for exploring the death betweens.

I won't take this too far, but it rings uncanny the timing of the latest publication of the full cycle of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (now in paperback). I've known about this so-called "Tibetan Book of the Dead" for years, maybe since college, but for some reason I never picked it up, even though it seems exactly the topic matter I would pick up. Then just after I finally did get into it several years ago through the Thurman translation of Chapter 11, the full cycle is translated. Just for me!

Just for me?

Well, it's not like I can read Tibetan!