From: Teachings on Phowa When a person is going to die, they need to work with themselves and become familiar with what is important for them in terms of spiritual practice. If you don’t do that, if you just practice verbally without a real inner connection to what you’re doing, then there will not be a lot of benefit. So you need to develop a deep feeling of your own spirituality, of your sense of commitment, and so on. With those factors in place, then you will actually accomplish something at the time of your death due to the power of your sincere prayersand practice. If you’ve only had a verbal type of spiritual practice then your ability to rely upon the transference of consciousness techniques will be rather weak.Regarding ourselves as western individuals, we of course would like to be able to do something with ourselves at the time of death, to be able to do something positive and constructive for ourselves. But you won’t be able to attain this ability without practice. What is said is that you need to receive the instruction and apply yourself for a certain period of time until you have what’s called the signs that you’ve accomplished the transference of consciousness. So if you do the practice over a period of days and then finally get the sign that indicatesthat you’ve been able to open the central channel, then at the time of your death all you need is to be reminded of this. Because you’ve already done the practice and have the familiarity of it, you will be able to get out of your body and you will be able to accomplish the transference of consciousness. Therefore it is necessary to receive the instruction, and to do the practice until you get the sign, a dream or something such as that, there are various signs. And when you’ve received the sign then you can put the practice aside until it is actually your time of death, then merely clarify it at that time and actualize it.
