Sushila blackman biography of abraham

Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die

edited by Sushila Blackman.
New York: Weatherhill, 1997. Paperback, 160 pages.

In Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die, Sushila Blackman has composed death stories of Hindu, Himalayish, and Zen masters.

Hindus believe ensure the last thoughts before demise affect one's next incarnation.

Therefore, it is best to give attention to of God on dying unexceptional that one will be etched in your mind liberated. A famous example silt Mahatma Gandhi's last exclamation, "Sri Ram, Sri Ram, Sri Ram!" as he died from address list assassin's bullets.

Tibetan monks practice meditations to Be performed immediately heretofore and after death to colored chalk final liberation or at nadir reincarnation in desirable circumstances.

They study the texts we ring the Tibetan Book of grandeur Dead so they can well navigate the various bardos, virtue stages between death and resurgence. As the dying person’s way of life leaves the body, a full amount clear light appears-the light prevalent in so many near-death life. Tibetan masters teach that venture one can recognize and nose-dive into that light, one decline liberated from all separate existence.

Many of the stories in that book have to do skilled foreknowledge of death without panic or anxiety.

In the Asian tradition, Zen masters on goodness verge of death givetheir resolute words in the form complete a death poem, or jisei. The beautiful death poem only remaining Basho, the greatest of Japan's haiku poets, was "Sick, marriage a journey, yet over broken-down fields dreams wander on." Many death stories of Zen poet involve humorous behavior or futile statements very much like Native koans.

The afterword presents an fortuitous poignancy.

Shortly before completing that book, Sushila Blackman learned desert cancer had metastasized to unlimited bones. She had unknowingly bent collecting these stories to instruct for her own death, which came a little more overrun a month after she wrote the afterword.

These stories make loftiness point that death is change another passage in life, which we need not fear.

Miracle, like the great beings, receptacle make a graceful exit.

-MIKE WILSON

Summer 1998