Advice On Dying

Well, I was hoping for something a little more exciting - like how to enjoy dying when you accidentally drive your car off a cliff, or how to enjoy a free fall when you get knocked out of a plane without a parachute above the Grand Canyon, or how to drown and enjoy it when you don't have any choice in the matter. That would have been a cool book.

Instead, I found this: ""Everyone dies, but no one is dead," goes the Tibetan saying. It is with these words that Advice on Dying takes flight. Using a seventeenth century poem written by a prominent scholar-practitioner, His Holiness the Dalai Lama draws from a wide range of traditions and beliefs to explore the stages we all go through when we die, which are the very same stages we experience in life when we go to sleep or faint.. The stages are described so vividly that we can imagine the process of traveling deeper into the mind, on the ultimate journey of transformation. In this way, His Holiness shows us how to prepare for that time and, in doing so, enrich our time on earth."

Right. So anyway, not a book worth reading. Not even for the fun of it.

Immediately we see something wrong when we realize that the Dalai Lama's main focus in "leading" his people is the fact that he wants to promote basic human values or secular ethics in the interest of human happiness and inter-religious harmony. Oops.

You forgot God.

We must be grounded and founded on God and Him alone. Nothing else is going to save us - absolutely nothing. Not good works, not being a "good" person, not spirituality, not church, not baptism, not anything that isn't Jesus Himself. Just following basic human values and trying to create religious harmony isn't going to get us anywhere. It all needs to start and end with the Creator of the Universe.

Ok, bunny trail ended. At least this counts as some sort of blog update!