The Tibetan Book of the Dead has the most comprehensive step-by-step description of the dying process of both the body and the mind. The book describes the signs of impending death in the final stages of death. The process of the dying body is called outer dissolution, and when this process enters the stages of dissolution it is the sign that death is near. This ancient description is being used in hospice work today as a guide for the dying and can tell us the signs of a person approaching death.
The text reveals how the elements of our body dissolve and how this is felt through our senses. According to Buddhism and Eastern religion, our body is made up of the five elements: earth, water, fire, air and space. As each element dissolves, there is an accompanying sensory experience: “The five internal elements of flesh, blood, body heat, space, and consciousness depend on the five external elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and sky. At the moment of death, the five internal elements gradually dissolve into each other.”
The final stages of death and dissolution occur in the following order:
“The earth element, which corresponds to the flesh of the body, dissolves into water. At this time the body becomes very heavy and we feel that we cannot move. The water element, which corresponds to the blood of the body, dissolves into fire. or heat. At this time we feel very dry because the water in the body is evaporating… The fire element, which corresponds to body heat, dissolves into air or breath. At this time the heat leaves the body and we feel cold. … The wind or air element, which corresponds to space, dissolves into consciousness. At this time we can no longer inhale or exhale, we can no longer breathe.”
When the first earth dissolves in water, the experience weakens as the body melts. Visual acuity deteriorates and everything looks like a mirage of water. Then the water dissolves into fire and the body fluids dry up with a feeling of numbness. With this numbness, hearing acuity disappears, you no longer hear well and you have the feeling of being surrounded by smoke.
Then the fire dissolves into wind. Inhalation weakens and the sense of smell disappears. One feels cold and surrounded by a burst of sparks. Then the wind dissolves into space and the breath stops. This is where the gross consciousness dissolves, and it is the end of the gross experience of mind and body.
The connection between the mind and the dissolution of the elements is deep and profound, since the elements are created from the mind. In Soygal Rinpoche’s book The Tibetan Book of Life and Death, Kalu Rinpoche reveals that “it is from the mind, which embodies the five elemental qualities, that the physical body develops.”[iv] This means that as the body dissolves into the mind, this is where we feel the sensations of this dissolution, and therefore this is the most important part of dying: the inner dissolution.
This inner dissolution is the psychological experience of the final stage of death. The inner dissolution of the mind is from the gross to the subtle, where the gross mind of confusion dissolves into the subtle mind of your own true nature. This dissolution is a powerful transformation of consciousness, which happens when the consciousness that identifies with the elements that make up the body is transformed into an awareness of the true nature of the mind.
This transformation also includes the powerful experience of leaving the body. The experience of leaving our body is an unusual experience, and in the near-death experience, Raymond Moody notes that many people describe being confused. For me, it was an extremely powerful feeling as if I was in free fall as my body dissolved in an internal explosion. Leaving the body and meeting the light is an intensely emotional feeling that the near-death experiencer cannot find words to describe.
It is then that we discover that we have left our body. When the body is alive, it supports our consciousness, but when we die, the body can no longer support our consciousness. Leaving the body is therefore described as the experience of falling, as there is no longer any feeling of weight attached to our consciousness.
As our consciousness leaves the body, the gross mind dissolves with the elements and we find ourselves in the subtle mind of our true nature. The reality that we perceive through our senses is manifested by our senses, and these senses are made of the elements that make up our body. The reason we see reality as it is in this physical dimension is that our senses depend on the elements that make them up. When the elements dissolve, the senses and the consciousness connected to the senses also dissolve and our mind awakens to a new reality.
This new reality dawns at the moment when the two elements meet: the gross mind and the subtle mind. The gross mind is the terrain of confusion as it is connected with our senses and our relative world. But the subtle mind is the basis of liberation because the true nature of reality arises from experiencing it.
The gross mind, which we can also call the conceptual mind, gives birth to the enlightened mind; “What remains when all these states of thought have ceased, is simply the unreconstructed nature of the mind…it is naked consciousness itself.”
The Buddhist tradition calls this awakening to naked consciousness the meeting of mother and child. The mother is the clear light of naked awareness (emptiness), and “this is the fundamental and inherent nature of everything, which underlies all of our experience, and which manifests itself in all its glory at the moment of death.”
When some people ask what heaven is like, they expect to find a physical place similar to something we know in this dimension. However, what we can learn both from the Buddhist tradition and from NDE accounts is that ‘heaven’ is a non-physical dimension with consciousness at the center of the experience. The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us that the fundamental nature of everything is, in fact, naked consciousness, what Buddhism calls clear light and what near-death experiencers call “the Light.”