death consciousness
The Mind and Life Institute: How a Monk, a Scientist, and a Lawyer Created Contemplative Science
In October 1987, in the private audience hall of the Dalai Lama's residence in Dharamsala, India, five scientists sat in a semicircle across from the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Between them, on a low table, sat a small model of a neuron.
The Medicine Wheel, the Four Archetypes, and the Death Rites in Villoldo's Teaching
In Alberto Villoldo's teaching, the Medicine Wheel is not a static symbol but a living map of consciousness that describes four fundamental ways of perceiving and engaging with reality. Adapted from the wisdom traditions of the Q'ero shamans of Peru and the jungle healers of the Amazon, Villoldo...
Indigenous Dream Traditions: Dreamtime, Dream Yoga, and the Living Dream
Long before neuroscience discovered that dreams serve essential functions in memory consolidation, emotional processing, and threat simulation, indigenous cultures worldwide had developed sophisticated systems for understanding, cultivating, and utilizing dream experience. These traditions are...
The Conscious Dying Protocol: A Synthesis of Hospice Medicine and Sacred Death Rites
Every culture in human history, except modern Western secular culture, has had a protocol for conscious dying — a structured approach to the death transition that integrates physical care, psychological preparation, spiritual practice, and community support. The Tibetan Buddhists have the Bardo...
Death Meditation: Phowa, Zen Death Poems, and the Art of Conscious Dying
Every contemplative tradition that has seriously investigated consciousness has concluded that death is not the end of awareness but a transition — and that this transition can be navigated consciously, skillfully, and even joyfully. The preparation for conscious dying is not a peripheral...
Shared Death Experiences: Consciousness as a Field Phenomenon
A woman sits at her husband's bedside in the final hours of his life. He has been unconscious for two days, breathing shallowly, his body shutting down.
Reincarnation Research: Ian Stevenson's Scientific Investigation of Past-Life Memories
For four decades, Ian Stevenson — a psychiatrist, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and holder of the Carlson Professorship of Psychiatry — conducted the most methodologically rigorous investigation of reincarnation claims ever attempted. Between 1960 and his...
The Tibetan Book of the Dead Meets Neuroscience: Ancient Map, Modern Territory
In the 8th century CE, the Indian Buddhist master Padmasambhava composed a text called the Bardo Thodol — "Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State" — known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The text is a manual for dying.
Cultural Death Practices and Healing
Every human culture has developed elaborate rituals, beliefs, and practices surrounding death — not as mere superstition, but as sophisticated psychosocial technologies for processing loss, maintaining community cohesion, and addressing the existential crisis that death presents. These...
Spiritual Perspectives on Death
Every wisdom tradition humanity has produced has placed the question of death at its center. Not as a problem to be solved but as a mystery to be encountered — the threshold experience that defines the boundary of ordinary consciousness and, according to virtually every spiritual tradition,...
Conception and the Entry of Consciousness: Where Biology Meets Spirit
When does consciousness enter the body? The question stands at the intersection of biology, philosophy, theology, and indigenous wisdom — and it has no answer that all traditions agree upon.
Stanislav Grof's Perinatal Matrices: How Birth Imprints the Architecture of Consciousness
Stanislav Grof is arguably the most important consciousness researcher of the twentieth century, and certainly the most controversial. A Czech-born psychiatrist who conducted over 4,000 LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions between 1956 and 1967 (when LSD was still a legal research tool) at the...
Prenatal Consciousness: The Awareness That Exists Before Birth
When does consciousness begin? The question is among the most fundamental in philosophy, neuroscience, and spirituality — and the answer has shifted dramatically as research has revealed that the fetus is not the blank slate that twentieth-century medicine assumed.
Sacred Sexuality Traditions Worldwide: How Diverse Cultures Independently Engineered Consciousness Through Sexual Practice
The most striking thing about sacred sexuality traditions is not their exoticism or their antiquity. It is their convergence.
Death, Dying, and Conscious Transition
Death is the most reliable teacher available to a human being and the one most consistently refused. Every spiritual tradition places death at the center of its curriculum.
Meaning-Making and Existential Psychology
Viktor Frankl was thirty-nine years old when the Nazis deported him to Auschwitz. His father had already died at Theresienstadt.
Dying Practices and Bardo Navigation: The Art of Conscious Death
Every spiritual tradition agrees on one thing: how you die matters. Not in a moral sense — not heaven for the good and hell for the wicked — but in a practical sense.