Glimpses of Luminosity

It is the basis of mind, the wisdom of ultimate peace and its luminosity.

We must prepare to recognize it when we see it nakedly at death.

Even if we cannot maintain it, the mere memory of the luminosity

Will ease much pain and confusion.

After we stop breathing, the true nature of the mind arises and we go through what is called the arising or passage of the ultimate nature.

This passage presents a number of significant opportunities to attain liberation, but to realize these opportunities, we need to be accomplished in advanced esoteric meditative training such as the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Dzogpa Chenpo (Dzogchen).

Ordinary people instead fall unconscious through part of the passage of ultimate nature and then awaken to gross concepts and emotions.

The Ultimate Nature Experienced at Death

For accomplished meditators, the passage of ultimate nature starts when the luminous nature of the basis, the true nature of the mind, arises as it is.

It ends with the dissolution of the spontaneously present visions.

In some traditions, the luminous nature of the basis is considered to be part of the passage of dying.

But in Dzogchen, it is considered to be a passage in its own right.

According to esoteric Buddhism, every being possesses buddha-nature or enlightenment in his or her true nature.

So when all concepts and emotions dissolve into the primordial purity at death, the luminosity of the innate wisdom shines forth for every being.

The mind of even the tiniest insect will experience, for at least a split second, its own innate awareness, the luminous nature, and its own spontaneous presence, the luminous visions.

If we are highly realized meditators on the ultimate nature of the mind, and if we are ready to attain enlightenment, we can realize and maintain the ultimate nature and its visions as they are, at any stage of this period.

When the true nature arises, for instance, if we can recognize it and perfect or maintain that realization, we will be liberated and enlightened right then.

The same applies to the arising of the luminous visions that follow – the lights, sounds, forms of peaceful or wrathful beings, and joyful or painful worlds.

If we can see them as self-appearing visions that spontaneously arise from the luminous nature, and if we can maintain that realization, we will attain enlightenment.

At whatever stage we recognize the truth and maintain that realization, we attain enlightenment, and there will thus be no need to travel any further through the bardo.

Although attaining enlightenment during the passage of ultimate nature requires advanced esoteric meditative training, even modest familiarity with the nature of the mind can help us during this passage.

We could have flickers of realizing the truth. Although this will not translate into liberation, the power of having even a brief experience of the true nature and its visions will greatly ease our fears and pains as we progress through the bardo. It will bring peace and joy, create meritorious karma, and lead us toward a better future life.

If we have very little or no meditative experience, however, we may not even notice when the true nature arises, as it may be too foreign, momentary, or invisible to us.

Or, if we do notice it, we may experience it for but the briefest moment.

So the ultimate nature flashes by without our recognizing it, and most of us fall into a deep unconsciousness.

When we regain consciousness, we start experiencing all kinds of visions, appearances, sounds, and feelings – some attractive and beautiful, others terrifying and ugly.

Without training in meditation, we grasp at our visions subjectively and objectively, see them as real, and become afraid or attracted.

If so, we are bound to continue through the whole cycle of the bardo, the transitional passage, and rebirth, as almost all of us do.

For realized meditators, Tibetan Buddhism presents a detailed portrait of the experiences and opportunities they can have in the passage of ultimate nature.

The particular sequence and shape of these experiences can vary from person to person, as delog stories show. This is because different people have different mental, emotional, and physical makeups.

But generally, the passage of the ultimate nature has two major stages:

(1) the pure luminous nature of the basis and

(2) the spontaneously present luminous visions.

—ooo000ooo—

In both the passage of dying and the arising of the ultimate nature, we witness various kinds of lights and phenomenal appearances.

Realized people see and feel them at a level of oneness, not in a subject-object mode of perception. They can see and experience hundreds of things simultaneously, not necessarily through their eyes and ears, but with totality, with everything vividly before their awareness at once.

All appearances are of peace, joy, oneness, and openness, whether they are in peaceful or wrathful forms.

There is no discrimination of good versus bad, no limits of this or that, no conflicts of wanting or hating, no pain or excitement.

The higher the realization, the more fully one can see things simultaneously.

By contrast, most ordinary people experience things with limitation, confusion, pain, and fear in these passages of death.

The length of time that ordinary people witness the various visions of the ultimate nature, if they do at all, depends entirely on their individual disposition and meditative experience.

Liberation by Hearing [sometimes called the Tibetan Book of the Dead] and other texts talk about the dying seeing the five buddhas families such as that of Akshobhya Buddha with retinues during the first night [or first week of death] and Ratnasambhava during the second night [or week]. Many people accept this as the ordinary cycle of day and night. In reality, however, seeing these buddhas is part of meditative absorption, and ordinary people will see them for only a moment.

When we read about light in these after-death descriptions, many of us might think, “Oh, yes, these must be beams of light or sunlight-like phenomena coming from somewhere.”

But in true realization we are not perceiving those lights as objects – the objects of eye-consciousness – or phenomena produced by a particular source or coming from somewhere else.

Light is clarity and luminosity, which is also peace, joy, bliss, openness, oneness, and all-knowing wisdom.

We are the light, and the light is us: all are one. This is the union of the spontaneously present wisdom, which is luminosity of the ultimate nature and of the spontaneously appearing luminous visions of the wisdom.

Thus, this light is also called wisdom-light. The extent of clarity, peace, openness, and omniscience of the wisdom-light that we experience depends on the degrees of our past virtuous karma and the depth of our realization.

This principle is the very basis from which esoteric Buddhism speaks of such concepts as nonduality, natural light, wisdom-light, clarity, spontaneous arising, self-arising, spontaneous presence, self-present, self-arisen, buddha and pure land, unborn state, and fully enlightened state.

We all have the potential to become enlightened during the passage of the ultimate nature if we can realize, perfect, and maintain the true nature of primordial purity – the union of openness nature and the spontaneously arisen appearances, the intrinsic light.

But to attain such realization will be impossible unless we have achieved it in our lifetime through meditation.

So the time is now, while we are alive, to prepare for our great journey.

Source: Based on Thondup, Tulku. Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth: A Tibetan Buddhist Guidebook. Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

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