The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon) / quote 8 of 18
Books of the dead treat death as illusion
The Book of Dead Philosophers is not a ‘Book of the Dead’, whether Egyptian or Tibetan. These exquisite ancient writings carefully describe the rituals necessary to prepare with certainty for the afterlife. The Egyptian Book of the Dead comprises 189 spells to ensure that the soul passes to an astral or solar afterlife. The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the death rituals necessary to break the illusory cycles of existence and achieve the Enlightenment (capital E) that allegedly comes with the realization of Nirvana. The influence of such approaches is vast, from the ‘Secret Doctrine’ of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth century, through Timothy Leary’s psychedelic 1960s version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead achieved with the help of LSD, to the contemporary obsession with ‘near-death’ or ‘out-of-the-body’ experiences spawned by Raymond Moody’s Life after Life, from 1976. Such is the position that Nietzsche called ‘European Buddhism’, although there is a good deal of American Buddhism around as well. The crucial point is that in both the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead and their contemporary epigones, death is an illusion. Existence is a cycle of rebirth that is only broken by a final passage to Enlightenment. It is thus a question of gaining access to the right Knowledge (capital K, once again) that will strip away what Schopenhauer saw as the illusory veils of Maya and allow the soul to free itself. This approach to death is encapsulated in the words of the influential Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.’