The tradition teaches that sleep and death pass through the same door. In sleep you go out and come back. In death the link with the body, which the books call the silver cord, is cut, and you do not come back to it.

What ends is the body. The elements that made it return to the earth. What goes on is you: your consciousness, and, the books say, the selves you carried. They go on together, much as they go on in a dream.

That is why the books say most of the dead do not know they have died. They wake into a world much like this one, as a sleeper wakes in a dream, and carry on with their habits. Fascinated, they never stop to ask where they are.

Seen this way, the practices of this part are also a preparation. Someone who has learned to wake in dreams can wake there too. Someone who has faced their fears at night will not meet them for the first time at the end.

None of this asks you to think about death gloomily. It asks the opposite. A life lived with its end in view is lived more simply and more fully. Small grudges do not survive one question: if this were the last time, how would I do it?