This Precious Human Life. Who Are You Becoming? - A Mindful Approach to Dementia & Psychedelics
I have just been introduced to the inspiring The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo. I find it interesting that his very first entry is a common refrain from His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama: that our life, this human life, is a precious life. It takes billions of reincarnations, according to Tibetan Buddhists, to be in human form, with a consciousness, an awareness, a potential unlike any other sentient being. Do not waste this precious human life, I have heard His Holiness say, and even in person on several occasions.
My husband became my greatest teacher in these days and hours during the dying process and even the hours after passing. From the early hours past midnight, when he left his physical body, until the break of dawn, an energy was held in deep awe, as if held in a sacred, holy safety net of our bubble. For me, it was an experience beyond anything I had ever known. Not only did I feel the essential nature of my husband’s being transmute into me, similar to a transmission within the Tibetan Buddhist culture — the closest thing I can reference — or, for that matter, on a mushroom experience where I have felt the mushroom imprint its nature into me. I lay suspended. I was not asleep, but I cannot claim I was in a fully wakeful state. I felt suspended within the two. During those hours, which held no time reference for me, two more waves of experience moved me in ways words cannot describe. What I do know is that it is a potentially sublime time for blessings, sacredness, transformation, perhaps transmutation. I have forever been changed and know this blessed experience lives on in me. Death has the potential to change lives, and not just the one who is leaving physical form.
Having lived in India, where my two daughters grew up, honored to be around saints, teachers, rinpoches, and other great teachers from many lineages, we were familiar with the potential diksha or energy transfer that is possible upon sacred moments or special blessings. The experience was familiar. Your energy matters. Who you have become — not in action and deed, though positive ones always support the essence of who we are in positive ways — but the energy that is you — call it the manifested form of your essential nature mixed with intentionality — even before thought, word, or deed, DOES MATTER. These are the imprints, becoming samskaras over lifetimes or can be thought of as karmic imprints. Who we are becoming in and of itself is the point. The three of us have been forever moved in the sacred hours when these imprints became palpable in the room. I felt this force actually move through me and be embedded in me. My daughters felt it too.
Imprints — the earth below the forest floor, the ice melting in glacial waters, the river’s water, the whispers of ancient roots, mycelial networks, indigenous prayers and healings. The stream of consciousness that can be understood as your spirit is always in a state of becoming. Who you are becoming right now, in this very moment, matters. Your life matters. And it manifests through each living breath.
I can feel my husband’s nature in the room where he spent the last days and the hours after his physical death. In fact, even before the dying process, in the days and even hours before, or for that matter, years before, the imprints of thousands of hours of meditation, prayer, breath practice, and contemplation imbibed the space with a peace every person could feel upon entering. We don’t need to wait until we die for our essential nature of love and wisdom to exude from our deepest places hidden within. Instead, let them shine out through every intention, thought, word, and deed. We can make these ways living habits in the way we are in the world, the way we move forward with every step, in the nature of our very being.
My husband was a man of deep peace. The tributes pouring in from around the globe all point to how people instantly paused, quieted down, connected to a peace within whenever they came into Henry’s very presence. He did not need to do or say anything, though his words were always carefully chosen, his voice soft-spoken, his heart always open. His very presence could be felt — the grounded peace of a stillness within.
Meditation, breath work, being with nature, and other ways of bringing stillness to our lives are all practices that help cultivate that stillness of deep peace within. Though Henry did these practices, he simply was a deeply grounded, peaceful person with a nature stemming from a silent stillness within. He didn’t have to try or practice loving from the soft ground of being. I am grateful for the forty-five years in which his peacefulness softened my own heart into more ease of being, a deeper trust of life, an openness to move from the heart and mind of mindfulness.
Consider this: if the physical body could be understood as all the elements, as Joan Halifax explains in Being With Dying — earth, water, fire, air, and space/ether — then as the dying process unfolds, there is a natural dissolution of each element. Having been trained by Roshi Joan years ago in hospice training, understanding and witnessing this elemental dissolution process as a person dies is quite a sacred process.
Within the Tibetan tradition, a phenomenon known as the rainbow body is the ultimate expression of a potential that lies within. It is said that one of the last rainbow bodies that was seen was from a simple man who lived a rural life in Tibet. He was not a monk, a teacher, nor a high rinpoche — just a simple man unknown outside his clan or village. Yet he attained — what Western minds would consider — a miracle upon his dying process: a rainbow body witnessed by hundreds and reported.
The concept and phenomenon of a rainbow body, understood by Tibetans over centuries, exemplify a human potential that what is manifested as a physical body has the possibility of dissolving into light. Light, as we know, is made up of different colors: the colors of the rainbow. The possibility that a body can become a rainbow may sound unbelievable; however, within Tibetan culture, there have been reports over the centuries of just such a feat. Achieving a rainbow body upon dying represents the final, luminous manifestation of Buddha nature.
Those who have achieved rainbow bodies leave behind just nails and hair. Through certain Tibetan Buddhist practices within the Dzogchen tradition, these few human beings have demonstrated complete mastery of the physical, skillfully releasing the elements of form and matter. They have essentially mastered mind over matter to reach one of our greatest human potentials.
In the first hours after Henry’s physical form had died, the colors dappled the pre-dawn sky before the sun came over the mountains. In this time, the most ethereal, subliminal, luminous time of day, off to the northeast a small but visible dot in the sky caught my attention. There was something there that is never seen. As I gazed closer to this spot just above another snowy contour of the Vermont hills, a visible rainbow color was clearly there. I have seen thousands of sunrises, but never with a rainbow-colored appearance in a place far from where the sun was coming into the skyscape.
Later that day, a close friend sent me a photo. The photo was the exact same rainbow-colored light that I had seen. She was miles down the road, but her son stopped her to look at what he was seeing. He insisted his mom stop the car and take a photo, which is the image of this blog. “A tinglé,” she said to me. That’s when I realized that is exactly what appeared in the dawn’s early light. In Tibetan Buddhism, a tinglé is considered a dot, drop, or sphere of light: a luminous drop of awareness, often visualized as rainbow light spheres.
It is said, and people have witnessed, rainbows in the sky when great masters travel. For instance, when His Holiness the XVII Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje visits the North American seat of his lineage in Woodstock, NY, rainbows have been seen. In fact, during his 2008 visit, double rainbows were seen over the sky where he was. Rainbow light can be understood as the ground of reality — our true nature.
So Henry has moved into the Light. Perhaps he even became rainbow light. A quiet, private inner dwelling that may have manifested into a tinglé made visible to me and others. I invite you to consider ourselves, or at least invite in the contemplation, of what a rainbow body or a tinglé signifies: the light of Awareness, Consciousness, Love, human potential, our essential nature.
- Lauren Alderfer, PhD.
