Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/36

xxx Pacific, by C. E. Fox). The function of a holed-stone in a Dolmen found there (reminiscent of the Dolmen à dalle percée common in the Marne district of Western Europe, in South Russia, and in Southern India) is ‘to allow the free passage to its natural seat, the head, of the dead man’s adaro, or “double” ’.

According to Hindu belief (see Pretakhanda of Garuda Purāna) there are nine apertures of the body which are the means of experience, and which, in the divine aspect, are the Lords (Nātha) or Gurus. A good exit is one which is above the navel. Of such exits the best is through the fissure on the top of the cranium called Brāhmarandhra. This is above the physical cerebrum and the Yoga centre called ‘Lotus of the Thousand Petals’ (Sahasrāra Padma), wherein Spirit is most manifest, since it is the seat of Consciousness. Because of this, the orthodox Hindu wears a crest-lock (Shikhā) at this spot; not, as some have absurdly supposed, so that he may thereby be gripped and taken to Heaven or Hell, but because the Shikhā is, as it were, a flag and its staff, raised before and in honour of the abode of the Supreme Lord, Who is Pure Consciousness itself. (The fancy-picture in a recent work by C. Lancelin, La Vie posthume, p. 96, does not show the aperture of exit, which is given in Plate 8 of the second edition of Arthur Avalon’s Serpent Power, p. 93.)

Whatever be the ground for the belief and practice of primitive peoples, according to Yoga doctrine, the head is the chief centre of consciousness, regulating other subordinate centres in the spinal column. By withdrawal of the vital current through the central or Sushumnā ‘nerve’ (nāḍī), the lower parts of the body are devitalized, and there is vivid concentrated functioning at the cerebral centre.

Exotericism speaks of the ‘Book of Judgement’. This is an objective symbol of the ‘Book’ of Memory. The ‘reading’ of that ‘Book’ is the recalling to mind by the dying man of the whole of his past life on earth before he passes from it.