"Truly, Madly, Deeply captures the essence of what Sogyal Rinpocne refers to as the still-revolutionary insight of Buddhism that 'life and death are in the mind and nowhere else. Mind is revealed as the universal basis of experience — the creator of happiness and the creator of suffering, the creator of what we call life and what we call death.' Only innate ignorance, our desire to see things other than they are, can build the barriers between life and death. Jamie's cold, sometimes callous behavior toward Nina can be seen clearly as acts of compassion exercised as 'emptiness with a thousand new disguises.' Grief is itself a bardo. It is a state in between the life you had with the deceased person and whatever your next life is going to be. To speak, or even think, ill of the dead is considered bad form. This convention produces an idealization of the deceased that, in a way, distorts grief. Nina holds onto that idealization until Jamie's mission of compassion moves her from it. Ultimately, to live truly, madly, and deeply, we all must surrender our grief. As Dale Borglum of the Living/Dying Project concisely puts it, 'As long as we live with unresolved grief in our hearts, grief that has not been transformed into compassion, our lives are lived only partially and death comes too soon. We are all grieving until we no longer feel separate — separate from those we care about, separate from our own true selves, separate from God.' "