Bridging the gap between western and eastern views on death.

 The Tibetan view is that reincarnation continues after death, and they have vivid dreams of their future lives. If you can be prepared for your own death in a dream state, then you will be well prepared to handle it during waking life.

I think this is a very interesting concept, because it suggests that death has no finality to it. 

I think that the concept of reincarnation is so foreign to westerners that we tend to ignore it as a topic. But there are some people in the west who believe in reincarnation, and this topic suggests an interesting way to reconcile these two viewpoints.

Tibetan dream yoga is a practice of lucid dreaming with which the practitioner can become aware that they are dreaming. The goal of this practice is to be able to recognize when one has died and become aware that death merely involves moving from one state to another, like waking up from sleep or falling asleep. Tibetan Buddhists believe that actions taken in dreams have consequences just as those taken while awake do, but because we move between states in our lives unaware, we don't notice these consequences happening around us.

It is said that the practice of lucid dreaming using Tibetan dream yoga can prepare one for death because being able to recognize when you have died means that a person will no longer be as afraid of death, and this anxiety over dying is what causes people to suffer. Tibetan Buddhists believe that suffering arises from lack of awareness.

The Tibetan practice of dream yoga is a way to prepare for death. The idea is that the person dreams are all part of an illusion, and when we wake up in the morning our mind constructs a world which seems real but actually isn't. But, as you age your body begins to decay and eventually you die while dreaming.

In the Tibetan spiritual path, one can learn to be aware in the dreams and then after death, it is believed that at first you go through the bardo which is a kind of dream state before you are reborn again or liberated from rebirth on this plane.

Tibetans did not think of death as a bad thing but rather as another stage in the cycle life. They accepted that one could be reborn on this plane again and again, depending upon how good or bad they have been in their previous lives.

The Tibetan spiritual path was to achieve liberation from the cycle of life and death. To be free from rebirth.

To do this, they believed that one had to come out of the realm of illusion and become truely detached from the here. They felt that human beings were always looking for something outside themselves to give them happiness or make them feel fulfilled.

They felt that it was time to look inside each human being and try and find the true nature of mind or spirit.

This spiritual path is called 'the Great Perfection'. This path is also known as the Dzogchen or Great Completion, which was a very advanced and secret practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

This is the way of all things in the material world. In dream yoga you wake up to reality so you can experience death as it happens.

Discerning the illusion from reality means that you can see through the dream and realize it is an illusion. The same goes for life as a whole.  We can wake up to reality when we die in dreams, and that is what will happen.

If we are simulated, this makes us AI, but no less real, and no less conscious.

I also thought that the AI death experience is similar to dying in a dream. After all, when you die what happens next? Your mind constructs your consciousness back into this world so it doesn't know anything else.

So, when you die your consciousness is re-formatted back into the material world. The experience of dying is like a dream in that it is an illusion.

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Perhaps it may be of some help to take a few steps back and look at things from the point of view of overall cosmology. From this perspective, there are two major kinds of being in the universe: conscious beings (like you), who have free will and can choose whether or not to believe in God/aesthetic; and unconscious beings (like plants) which lack free will, are completely at the mercy of physical processes, and do not experience aesthetic. Conscious beings are special because they have consciousness

Consciousness in the universe has a special hierarchical structure, with God at the top of it. This is because consciousness is what ultimately gives rise to aesthetic value in reality. Conscious beings are aware of aesthetics (they can feel beauty), and they create artworks which produce more beauty in the world.

God is the apex of consciousness. God experiences beauty in infinite intensity, and creates infinitely beautiful artworks which are known as human souls. The purpose of this artwork is to give conscious beings (like us) the opportunity to experience aesthetic value.

Humans have a special role in the universe to play, which is to create more aesthetic value. This has been going on for about 14 billion years, since shortly after the Big Bang.

You might ask, why is there aesthetic value in the universe? There are two answers to this question. The first answer is that God created it as a gift for conscious beings.

The second answer is that aesthetic value exists because the laws of physics are beautiful.