Although the bardos are popularly understood as part of the after-death experience, the meaning of bardo thoroughly permeates everyday existence. This view opens a new and wider window of understanding. The bardos of existence (everyday life), dreams, the bardo of meditation, of dreams, the bardo of dying (physical dissolution of the dying process), the bardo of dharmata, also known as the bardo of reality, with its visions, benign or fearful, ultimately transition to the bardo of becoming, preceding rebirth. All of it could be described as a string of islands in the stream of existence, an archipelago of dream states, perpetual distractions from the realization which transcends both life and death.
Concurrent with the bardos are six realms of being, or transitional states represented as differing qualities of desire. These are also referred to by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche as realms of collective karma, like personality types (gods, jealous gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings) through which we cycle during life—or lives. While we will identify prominently with one realm in a single life, we may experience any of these states during life, or even during any day of life. There are many fine details distinguishing each of them. We are primarily anchored in one of them, but we can also learn to identify them and work our way through them toward greater clarity and freedom.
In navigating intense experiences, even daily challenges that come and go, we will invariably revert to one of these six realms. Finding ourselves in any one of them represents, like every bardo, an opportunity to awaken from the hallucinatory experience of life that repeatedly leads us through these transitional conditions. It’s like finding our way through a maze of captivating and confounding states of awareness—a carnival fun house—though not always fun. We may become temporarily transfixed or motivated by one of the dominant emotions of the six realms of being (anger/aggression, desire, ignorance, pride, envy, or distracting pleasure) and find ourselves encountering circumstances which can only be considered bardos because of the imperative they present to us by their extreme nature. While none of them are truly prisons, they can feel that way in the moment.
The clearest way to describe these passing conditions is to realize that each dominant state is transitional and includes the possibility of escape. We may cycle through a single realm for a lifetime, failing to comprehend the depth of our waking sleep, or multiple realms by the hour. But most likely we are in one or the other for limited periods except in the most extreme cases when we are so stuck in the confusion and dream-like delusions of a single realm that the possibility of escape is not apparent. The paranoia and envy of the jealous god realm or the anger and aggression of the hell realm may bring such suffering and blind entrapment that escape may never even occur to us. We can be truly stuck. We know that profound trauma is tenacious and can launch us into time travel at any moment. But we may also be equally blinded by the pride of the human realm or even the pleasures of the god realm such that we never recognize the flimsy delusions of these habitual mind states.
Each behavior type is a home base, a karmic predisposition, a personal preoccupation with a certain way of comprehending the world. The experience of each station is not so restricted to its intrinsic nature that one could never experience qualities or domains of other stations, but the primary station is the core karmic path. As I suggested previously in a discussion about karma, there is no real ontological basis for such a belief. How deeply we are captured by any single realm is strictly related to the depth of our mental fixation, the degree to which we are already predisposed to think and behave as separate beings. That is the sense in which we can say karma drives our fixations or forecloses the possibilities of awakening from the dream. Associated domains, the states we venture into outside our default domain, are more transient. So, while we may spend most of our time in one or another realm, we can still have affinities with others which become apparent in our relationships.
The word bardo can be interpreted as ‘in-between islands.’ Such ‘islands’, the archipelago of dream states, driving emotions that drive our decisions. They arrive as obstacles such as fear or aggression, or perhaps gross events or life-long dynamics arising from incomplete actions or unexpressed feelings related to trauma. Islands become obstacles when we get attached to them, distracting us from the possibility of the emotional freedom to respond to every episode of life. We set up residence and interpret the world through their narrow lens. The nature of the mainstream, the unimpeded river of consciousness, is natural mind, the pervasive awakened state. Natural mind remains free, uncaptured and undistracted, existing purely in the gaps of everyday experience, between Max Planck’s jumping quanta. They mostly go unrecognized. Since realization is an unconditioned and unchanging spaciousness without origin or cessation, that awakened condition, staying ‘in the stream,’ implies breaking free of all realms, all bardos, all ‘islands.’ A rare condition, indeed.
All ego identification is an island we encounter (or create) in the stream. We are constantly running into and climbing about in these distracting dreams and addictions diverting us from the unimpeded flow of experience, sometimes for short periods and sometimes with a profoundly anchored grasping nature that makes it extremely difficult to escape...or ever return to the free-flowing stream. How we move through realms and bardos that come with them implies we are perpetually jumping from one island to another, completely missing the stream. We are misinterpreting our experience and perpetually grasping for solutions to emotional or psychic conditions or our own making.
If we consider the spontaneous nature of phenomena, what I’ve been calling radical impermanence, then every consensus reality is an island and every ‘gap’ between arisings is a ‘window of possibility,’ a fleeting opportunity for true clarity. The offer to awaken is always implied, always present. Recognizing that gap may be a momentary escape from a particular realm, but most likely, since karma has something to say about it, any such ‘glimpse’ will stimulate an immediate descent into yet another antidote. Such grasping for some fleeting version of happiness provides only temporary relief and surely leads to repetition of the same pattern, in most cases all the way to the end of life. Perhaps even beyond.
As markers of ego, the entire archipelago is illusion. We can become entranced by any transient emotional state, any Story. We can cling to it, set up camp and live there--possibly for our entire lives. We experience pleasure and pain there, sometimes even misinterpreting what is pleasure and what is really pain. The way we relate to such islands is an indicator of the dominant realm we are operating in at the time, the way we are manifesting spiritual materialism.
Being open to learning distinguishes humans from the animal realm, the narcissism of the jealous gods or the anger and aggression of hell beings. When pride, indulgence and the pursuit of peak experience and spiritual ‘attainment’ are the primary drivers, we, like religious fanatics, create our own prison and can easily become confined to the jealous god realm. Another illusion. All of it is suffering. Meanwhile, the river never stops flowing. Emptiness and impermanence are the only truths. The nature of mind never changes. Whether we are peeking through the gaps between every arising, navigating reified encounters, generating more suffering, or engaged in our perpetual wrestling match with ego, all of it is an encounter with karma, distracting us from the unimpeded spontaneously creative character of natural mind.
Going more deeply into the meaning of bardo and in relating the bardos to the six realms is a radically different way of presenting the entire proposition. We are transfixed by what appear to be permanent conditions like birth, life, death, and rebirth. But to truly know bardos is to understand the ‘stream,’ to realize none of these ‘conditions’ is permanent at all. They are all dreams. Everything we regard as solid, any demarcation we may identify, its beginning, middle or end, and everything in between, is no more solid than any dream. The idea of waking up within a bardo and being able to manipulate events in that dream is so foreign to the average person and seemingly such a remote possibility that it never occurs to us that we are already living in a dream. We imagine in our ‘waking’ state that we can manipulate events. Even the very idea of events is a manifestation of the dream. So, exercising will seems entirely natural, but only in the delusional state of sleep.
It is always the function of ego to reify every aspect of existence, reinforcing the illusion of identity. But by identifying everything as bardo, it all becomes transitional. Every moment is bardo infused with the shifting attention of ego trying to create some purchase on life where there is nothing whatsoever to grasp or control. Clinging to or reacting to every island with its various seductive opportunities for comfort or safety is all strictly ego indulgence.
Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth
All is returned to you, beyond the cause
And effect: the oak tree
In the garden, chirp of crickets
Inside and out, aching knees
On a dusty mat. Without knowing it
We have wandered into a circle
Of wonder, where our confusion
Shines more
Outside the seeming errors and the search.
Wake up to your sleep
And sleep more wakefully!©Zachary Horvitz, 2022
The dream space of sleep is a mirror of waking space, a perpetual transit through illusion in which, at least in sleep, the mind operates at subliminal levels, throwing images and stories before us over which, by practicing dream yoga, one might eventually gain some control. The capacity to ‘awaken’ in the dream and even the capacity to write a new story in the dream is not only the story of dream yoga. It’s the reality of our so-called waking condition. Just as in dreams we do not recognize we are sleeping, so also in waking we do not recognize we are in a dream.
The identity of the dream state, the waking meditative state, and especially the immediate states experienced in the physical process of dying all present an identical opportunity. To cultivate an awakening is to distinguish clearly between illusion and reality, to recognize the activity of mind for what it is and to meet every island appearing in the stream as an island without becoming transfixed. This is the context in which these interpretations of bardo imply that every act, every moment in life, just as it is depicted in after-death experience, is an opportunity to realize natural mind, not merely as a rehearsal for the post-death experience, but as an affirmation of the identical nature of both life and death. In this sense, every waking moment is a preparation for the end of life.
Those who are familiar with bardo teachings or practices or any meditative practice, may take pride in accomplishment as we mark our progress. And we can attain a good deal of pleasure in practice. The pride of the human realm always sneaks in the side door whenever one believes one has arrived, when one imagines having achieved meditative absorption or true equanimity, even for a moment. That is when one wishes to preserve it, to extend it, to own it or become it. But all of this is about hope and fear, hope that we can reproduce the experience and fear that we will not. This is spiritual materialism. This is a departure from the present moment. In the extreme, this is the realm of the jealous gods, who seek pleasures in every form, claiming them like notches on a belt.
And at some point, every fabricated edifice of attainment will dissolve into frustration and backsliding, becoming the opposite of pleasure and devolve into forms of recrimination. All that attainment is impermanent! This is the bardo experience. This sort of confusion is identical to the character of post-death experience, perhaps even the luminous bardo of Dharmata, in which any hint of noticing the nature of mind turns into such striving that we are instantly drawn back into deeper confusion and even anger, the anger of the human realm or something even more toxic, the anger of a hell being.
So, there we are, cycling and recycling in the whirlpool of samsara, confronting our own karma, particularly acute at moments of being so neurotically lost, so swept along in one or the other realm that we become deaf and dumb—we can’t hear or obey anything except ego. Lather, rinse, repeat. My own existence trends along an axis between the human and the hungry ghost realms. There is certainly a desire to learn, an openness to what is new and even a willingness to let go of my personal monastery of achievement. I am largely free of the obsessive pursuits of the jealous god realm, the paranoia of the asuras, or the fanaticism and anger of the hell realm. But at times I may descend into the hungry ghost realm in which I fail to relinquish anything, and nothing is ever quite enough. There is a striving for something perceived to be absent.
This a form of aggression—an act of aggression upon the self. ‘I am not enough. I do not have enough. I am not good enough.’ Blah, blah, blah. This hungry aggression is fundamentally materialistic. It is also a powerful and deep and pervasive character of humanity. The evolutionary path of humanity is to realize and confront this aggression and to allow it to die--or at least transform it into its true nature. Aggression also operates in meditative practice. There are more different meditation practices than we can count. Many of them are beneficial because they develop capacities which we might otherwise never know. But at the bottom of all practice, we must let go of the striving, of the need to manifest something, to fix something, to find something or even give up something. In life, you can be anything---or you can detach from needing to be something. If there is an object of practice, it is to stop trying to be something, to unwrap the most subtle layers unmasking the operation and direction of the CEO, the games, identities, directives and assumed capacities of ego, until there is nothing left but living in the stream, free of all bardos. This is authentic non-meditation.