Apart from dreamless sleep, which I mentioned already, there is one
other involuntary portal. It opens up briefly at the time of physical
death. Even if you have missed all the other opportunities for spiritual
realization during your lifetime, one last portal will open up for you
immediately after the body has died.
There are countless accounts by people who had a visual impression
of this portal as radiant light and then returned from what is
commonly known as a near-death experience. Many of them also
spoke of a sense of blissful serenity and deep peace. In the Tibetan
Book of the Dead, it is described as “the luminous splendor of the
colorless light of Emptiness,” which it says is “your own true self.” This
portal opens up only very briefly, and unless you have already
encountered the dimension of the Unmanifested in your lifetime, you
will likely miss it. Most people carry too much residual resistance, too
much fear, too much attachment to sensory experience, too much
identification with the manifested world. So they see the portal, turn
away in fear, and then lose consciousness. Most of what happens
after that is involuntary and automatic. Eventually, there will be
another round of birth and death. Their presence wasn’t strong
enough yet for conscious immortality.
So going through this portal does not mean annihilation?
As with all the other portals, your radiant true nature remains, but not
the personality. In any case, whatever is real or of true value in your
personality is your true nature shining through. This is never lost.
Nothing that is of value, nothing that is real, is ever lost.
Approaching death and death itself, the dissolution of the physical
form, is always a great opportunity for spiritual realization. This
opportunity is tragically missed most of the time, since we live in a
culture that is almost totally ignorant of death, as it is almost totally
ignorant of anything that truly matters.
Every portal is a portal of death, the death of the false self. When you
go through it, you cease to derive your identity from your
psychological, mind-made form. You then realize that death is an
illusion, just as your identification with form was an illusion. The end
of illusion — that’s all that death is. It is painful only as long as you
cling to illusion.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ENLIGHTENED
RELATIONSHIPS