Another morning of back-end insomnia. I set the timer on my electric fan to turn off after three hours. When I awoke, the fan was still on and I wondered why, and then it dawned on me that three hours hadn't passed. I looked at the clock and estimated that it was just about to shut off and it did within five minutes.

I hardly even tried to get back to sleep. I listened to one of my mix CDs then got to sitting.

I've begun a recitation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, focusing on RiSe and EunB.

I used to, as part of practice, loop read the Tibetan Book of the Dead cycle. I don't know how many times I've read the thing trying to make sense of it in light of my scientific faith, which allows for quasi-logical spirituality (or quasi-spiritual logic) that hard science can't touch.

The last time I tried to do a recitation with a specific focus was in April after the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. It was less than a week through when I got a very bad feeling about it, purely intuitive. I felt that what I was doing could spiritually be doing more harm than good and I stopped. Maybe it was that I had no idea about the energies I was dealing with on such a massive scale.

On the first day for RiSe and EunB, just as I started there was a roar of thunder and rain started pouring down at a time of day that was totally unusual for recent weather patterns. I took that as a good sign.

I don't think I'm seriously reciting the book for them, I remind myself the recitation is for myself. If there is any efficacy in helping them, it's beyond my knowledge, figuring or belief. It is solely within my hope.

It's been a long time since I've written anything about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and anything I've written before may be outdated by my constantly evolving thoughts on it. Or it may remain valid if it was at all valid in the first place, who knows?

The basic framework of the book, specifically the Natural Liberation Through Hearing chapter, is that after death, the mind separates from the body. The body is dead, and what is released is the unenlightened karmic energy "habits" of the deceased. The habits are primarily the ego, the sense of "I" and identity of who we were in the form of a naturally existing cosmic energy, something that pervades the universe.

This basic energy is what carries a being to their next re-birth as a cycle of nature. More specific in the energy is imprinted the strongest psychological baggage from previous lives. My favorite example to explain it is fear of spiders.

My theory being that my fear of spiders is from past lives of being bugs getting caught in spiders' webs and being eaten. Imagine yourself as a bug and getting caught in a web, and then imagine a spider relative to your size (the thing can be eight feet in size) coming at you to wrap you up in its web and sucking the life out of you

Bugs don't have the emotions that humans do, they don't have the analytical capability that we do. But when they're flailing in the web with that huge spider coming at them, there is something in their reaction. It's still energy, and that energy is karma that carries over. It's what we call terrifying and is strongly imprinted.

Lifetime after lifetime of evolution until reaching the level of acquiring a human body, that imprint is still there for the experiencing and analyzing. My brother hates cockroaches; so maybe he was a cockroach in previous lives and the imprint was something unpleasant. I think cockroaches are disgusting, but I don't react to them as viscerally as he does. On the other hand, I have an affection for cats, possibly indicating lifetimes as cats that were pleasant.

Getting back on track to what I was talking about, the physical body dies and the mind-energy is separated and released from it and enters a state of being the Tibetan Book of the Dead refers to as the intermediate states, the bardos.

The description of the experience in the bardos is like being in a storm, but without solid reality and an identifiable ego body, it's extremely disorienting and confusing. My recitation is a calling out to the energies of RiSe and EunB, but it's a call into a hurricane an ocean away.

Theoretically, having no exposure to this sort of practice or spirituality and being nominally Christian in this life, there's only a small chance that my call would reach them. Rather they would be buffeted by their previous habitual tendencies, experience and attachments and aversions within the storm of the bardos.

The hope is that my small voice does attract their attention. Tibetans describe the disembodied energy body of those deceased as experiencing a highly clarified reality. If my voice can cut through the storm, with no barriers of form or language, it's possible to hook them and bring them to my recitation. And if they can be just slightly touched by teachings of compassion, it might do worlds of good for them. That's the hope.

It's not an affront to whatever closely-held Christian beliefs they may have had. Personally, I think the Tibetan version as metaphorical, describing archetypes. There is the Buddhistic language and imagery, but they are just archetypes.

My metaphor is of a multicultural, multilingual nation living in a land bordered by a mountain range. No one thinks of crossing the range to see what's on the other side. But then one person decides to try and accomplishes it and sends back directions on how to cross the mountain range. But only people who understand that language can follow the directions. Anyone who speaks another language can't.

So it may have been that the "psychonauts" (a Robert Thurman term) of Tibetan spirituality investigated the death process and through reincarnations subsequently described the process. But the process is in Tibetan Buddhistic terms. It doesn't mean the experience is just for Tibetan Buddhists. It's just described in subjective terms. It's unclear what Padmasambhava, credited for authoring the Tibetan Book of the Dead, knew about other spiritual paradigms.

So so far I'm comfortable doing this recitation for RiSe and EunB. Through my days I try to remain positive and in times that I think of their deaths and that they're gone and start to feel sad, I try to transform the feeling into joy. Just something positive for them, that their memory doesn't lead to sadness but to joy. Joy that they existed and chased their dream and brought joy and entertainment to their fans and their industry.