I'll meet you in the next bardo...
Yesterday I found myself reaching for a book that has had a home with me for a number of years, ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’ by Sogyal Rinpoche.
It’s a guide to meditation in the Buddhist tradition and also an interpretation of the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’. Unlike its ancient forerunner, this newer book teaches us that death is not the only ‘bardo’.
A ‘bardo’ is a time of uncertainty when awakening to your true nature is possible, it has a feeling of suspension - it’s a between state, a transition. It brings to my mind a former caterpillar hanging upside down with a cocoon forming around its tender little body.
There are four ‘bardos’.
One
This Life, in a body - this life of ours is transient, ever changing, and relatively short. It is the essence of impermanence – and it’s also a chance to realise the truth of this. Rinpoche calls this a period of practical training in ‘the laboratory of change’. I love the idea of life being a place of discovery! And what we find is that the innermost essence of mind is unchanging pure ego-less awareness. It is untouched by change or death. It is the blue above the cloud layer. It is the space which has been called ‘God’ but it is only really the true nature of mind, and not a separate self.
This Life is a sacred opportunity to realise the true nature of mind and to come home to that. We do this with our tools of listening and hearing, contemplation and reflection, and meditation. This frees us from the fear of death, which is the cause of much grasping. What we see is not objectively real, but the result of the karma of lifetimes. All phenomena are illusory. As William Blake wrote ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed…everything would appear as it is…infinite’.
And I will add, within This Life there are many transitions, metamorphoses, which I have taken upon myself to guide visionary women through. You could think of these as mini-deaths in a way - as we die to each old ‘self’ on our way to becoming.
Two
Death - this includes the process of dying and also the moment of death - this moment that Tibetan Buddhists tell us is the greatest opportunity of all - when we leave our body behind). It’s like falling asleep, and then we Journey in death – a period where consciousness continues without the body where ‘Mind stands naked, revealed startlingly for what it always has been: the architect of our reality’. Let’s get clear here, we (in the modern global North and West) are terrified of death. So terrified. But I believe that the terror is caused by a long, long looking away from something that, if we were to admit it, is the only certainty we have. Ancient cultures were down and dirty with death. We hide it away, clean it up, veil it in shame and control. But what this awareness does for us, if we were to let it in, is that it teaches us the nature of life.
Three
The luminous – this is an after-death experience of the ‘clear light’ in the form of sound, colour and light. It is consciousness seeing itself, independent of the body.
Four
Karmic becoming – like dreaming, as if we were asleep, is the phase where we begin to karmically attach to a new life, based on who we are.
My rational humanist within will have none of this, and insists that it’s all just an ‘immortality project’ dreamed up by humans in the same way that they dreamed up God, to comfort them in their denial and dread. It is comforting, don’t you think, to know that we are part of a great cycle of becoming - far greater than this individual life. It’s very comforting to know that we might have another life ahead of us, which is also very appealing to our nagging sense that we are never enough. And also, we are sense-making beings and it makes sense to us to have meaning and even a map of where we are and were we are going.
As I edge towards my 64th year of This Life I choose to hold up the bardos as a beautiful possibility, if only because by facing up to the certain reality of impermanence - and our own eventual death as part of this - adds a perspective that is salutary.
It teaches us to hold each moment now as sacred, to know that the beliefs and opinions that swirl around our hyperactive brains are not real (just convenient) and it invites us to enter our true state (and possibly an eternal state) of pure awareness through meditation.