ABSTRACT

Although we usually conceive of death as the final moment of life, there is an important sense in which death, as an aspect of change and renewal, is ever-present throughout life: each passing moment ‘dies’ as it becomes past experience; each newly experienced moment is immediately ‘born’ as the future becomes present. From moment to moment, beginnings and endings perpetually coincide. At a less abstract level, we also meet with another form of death-a counterpart to our familiar conception: our habitual patterns of expectation and reaction to circumstances often produce a deathlike stagnation and unanimated redundancy within our experience. As a release from this benighted condition, there remains the permanent possibility of experiencing a liberating transformation of character and a ‘rebirth’ of personality. The implicit and explicit means to achieve such a personal transformation within our lives, as described in The Tibetan Book for the Dead,2 is the subject of this essay. My aim is to recall and reemphasize some of the affinities between the text’s therapeutic and liberating intentions and the goals of psychotherapy, in recognition of its practical, socially all-encompassing message. In the course of this enquiry, I will discuss how some authoritative commentators on the text, namely, Carl Jung and Lama Anagarika Govinda, have drawn our attention away from the text’s more pragmatic and existential value as a handbook for more insightful living.