MysticBliss: Book of Living & Dying

Kuan Yin in front of a Marcy painting.

Is anyone reading Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book right now? I'm loving it!

Appropriate to this weekend, some wisdom from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

From the section The Heartbeat of Death:

There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulse, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.

So let us then work with these changes now, in life: that is the real way to prepare for death. Life may be full of pain, suffering and difficulty, but all of these are opportunities handed to us to help us move toward an emotional acceptance of death. It is only when we believe things to be permanent that we shut off the possibility of learning from change.

If we shut off this possibility, we become closed and we become grasping. Grasping is the source of all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go. (Emphasis the author's.)