Dying, Death and the Bardo
Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
Tape 2
Side 1
Continuing from where we left off last night, we had finished looking at the stages of dissolution, the stages of dying, up through the first two of the three stages which precede the experience of the clear light, and these were appearance and increase. The third stage, what ensues upon or follows after increase is called "attainment." And attainment refers to the final shutdown or dissolving of the physical processes of the living body and this shut down or dissolution causes a corresponding set of experiences. The appearance is called utter blackness. However, Rinpoche said, in fact, it's not really the appearance of blackness, it's no appearance at all. Previously there was brilliant whiteness and then brilliant redness and now it's called utter blackness because it is the utter absence of such appearances and this is happening because the functions of the body and mind, which support or allow appearance are shutting down. The corresponding cognitive experience is that your cognition, your awareness, your mind, becomes like a butterlamp in a vase.
Now, a butterlamp that is placed in a vase may be lit and burning and therefore producing light, but none of the light will escape the vase. From outside it would appear to be just a dark vase. In the same way, there is a continued bare or mere lucidity of your cognition, but it is divorced from any kind of contact with any object such as an object that appears or an object that is cognitively apprehended. So it is a state of mere lucidity without the apprehension, either with the senses or with the cognition itself of any object. Because this is the state your cognition is in at this point in the shutdown or dissolution process, the final seven of the eighty types of thoughts stop. Previously we saw that the thoughts connected with anger, the varieties of anger, and the thoughts connected with desire, stopped. Now the last seven, which are the seven varieties of stupidity, or bewilderment, cease. And they don't cease or stop in any final sense. They are suppressed and become dormant. And as with the previous two states of suppression, the suppression is caused by the simple fact that the biological processes that support them, and enable them to arise in connection with their respective objects, are simply not functioning at the moment and therefore these thoughts stop, but they have not been purified; their tendency has not been in any way uprooted.
During this whole process of dissolution, there has been a gradual withdrawal of the cognitive faculties. And cognitive faculties here refers to the six main functions of consciousness: the apprehension by the eye consciousness of visible forms, the apprehension of sounds by the ear consciousness and in the same way, the apprehension of smells, of tastes, or tactile sensations, and of objects of mind.
These six functions of mind or consciousness have gradually dissolved and therefore all appearances, not only visual appearance, but also auditory and other appearances, have gradually, during this dissolution process, diminished in intensity, or clarity, and then finally disappeared altogether. This is something that we can often observe happening with the dying person. Sometimes, they will say, "Come closer, you're so far away," because they actually perceive you as being a greater distance away from them physically than you are, at the bedside, simply because of what's happening to their eye consciousness. Or they'll say, "Speak louder, I can't hear you." And again, it's a corresponding thing happening with the ear consciousness, and so on.
At this point, at the conclusion of the three-fold shutdown of appearance, increase and attainment, all of the elements of your conventional being, your body and mind, that is to say your aggregates, your physical elements and your senses, all of these have become dormant, and have temporarily, in the words of our text, entered the mandala of absolute truth. Which means that they are temporarily absent as obscuring factors. Again, they have not been purified or uprooted, they are merely dormant. However, because of their dormancy, because you are not seeing or hearing anything and so on, there can arise various hallucinations at this point. One sort of hallucination is that people who have led nasty lives, who have done bad things, will often have terrifying hallucinations of yamas or demonic beings, executioners and so on, coming to get them. People who have led predominantly virtuous lives, may have some experience of well-being, such as fleeting glimpses of very pleasant things: pleasant environments, pleasant people and so on at this point. Remember however that these appearances, because of the withdrawal of the consciousnesses, are entirely subjective like dreams. Because of their entire subjectivity, as is the case with dream images, they have no stability and can fluctuate, change from one thing to another, and in any case don't last very long.
At the end of all of this process of shutdown, the final events that constitute death occur. What keeps you alive, that is to say, what keeps your mind biologically seated in your physical body, is a wind or energy that is called the life wind. And the life wind abides within what is called the avadhuti or the central channel of your body. Now, the conditions for your becoming a biological being were the ovum from your mother and the sperm from your father, obviously. The original seeds, which led to you as a resultant physical, biological being, are still present within your body. They are held in place by the life wind. They also contain the life wind and keep it in the body and the way this works is as follows. What's called the red element, which is the remaining seed essence of the ovum, is present during your life, while you are alive, in the center of your body, below your navel. And what's called the white element, which is the seed essence of the sperm of your father, is present in the center of your body, at the very top of your head. These things are held in place, they're held apart, forced apart, as it were, by the life wind, which fills the central channel in between them, inflating it, the way, for example, Rinpoche said, something we inflate like a tire is held inflated by the air within it. Not only does the life wind hold these things at the upper and lower ends of the central channel, but these things trapped in those places, also contain the life wind between them, in other words, keep it from escaping.
What happens at this point is that with the shutdown of everything, the last to shutdown is the life wind itself, which is the most basic factor of your being alive in the conventional sense. As it shuts down, it withdraws into the heart area. Now, what happens is similar to deflation except the central channel doesn't deflate, but the pressure within it is withdrawn. As a result, the red and white elements move for the first time. The red element rises up because there is nothing forcing it down. It rises up toward and eventually comes to rest in your heart. At the same time, the white element, that you have received from your father, descends, or falls down from the top of your head until it also reaches your heart. What ends up happening is that five things that form the essence of your being come together in one place. The most basic mind, the all-basis consciousness and the life wind, which previously filled the entire central channel and all of the potential cognitive functions, those three things, and the white and red elements, all of these five things come together at the very center of your heart, in the midst of the central channel. Because of this, when they come together you could call that the actual moment of death. When they come together, because of their doing so, because all possible types of thoughts or conceptuality are temporarily dormant or have ceased, you have an experience that is a cognitive experience, not a sensory experience, but that is in quality like the experience of boundless, clear or cloudless sky. And this is the experience of what is called the fundamental or ground clear light. What you experience at that moment, you experience not because of any meditation you may have done. You experience it because it is your true nature. Therefore it is not experienced only by people. It is experienced at this point in the death process, even by small insects. And it is experienced simply because all beings have buddha nature, and what you are experiencing at this point is buddha nature itself.
The reason you can experience it under those circumstances and the reason you don't normally experience it is that normally it is masked, or covered by thought. All thought has become dormant, has ceased at this point, therefore there is nothing masking the experience of buddha nature. That's the good news. The bad news is that unless you have trained yourself assiduously in the recognition of the clear light during the preceding life, you won't recognize it. Because everybody experiences it and obviously that isn't sufficient. What happens if you don't have any experience or have insufficient experience in its recognition is that you are kind of stunned by it. You are like a small child looking at the murals in a temple. When a child looks at a mural in a temple�Xand that's often a good analogy, here it's a bad analogy�Xthey see the same colors and shapes that an adult does, but they have no way to recognize these as depictions of one thing or another. They cannot make the judgements, "This is well painted, and this is ill painted." Nor can they think this is this deity, this is that deity and so on. They are completely ignorant of what they are seeing. In the same way, if you have not familiarized yourself with the clear light during the preceding life, through practice, although the ground clear light will appear to you as it does to each and every sentient being at the moment of death, it won't do you any good. It will appear, you will experience it, you will not recognize it and it will only last a moment. You will move from that experience to the next thing in a moment. Now, Rinpoche said, moment here doesn't necessarily mean a specific unit of time, like a fingersnap or something. Moment here means the duration of an action that is uninterrupted by any other action. So for the time that you are immersed in the experience, you remain immersed in it, but as soon as, failing to recognize it, your mind emerges and moves on to something else, it's finished.
So, what is necessary above and beyond all else, is to familiarize ourselves with the clear light, through hearing, through thinking or reflection and above all through meditation. Through understanding what will happen at death, the process that we will go through, and thereby being prepared to recognize it, through cultivating the faculties of recollection, and alertness, through meditation practice, especially through meditation practice that is based upon the profound instructions of one's guru, so that you become able, you develop the familiarity and the faculties of mindfulness and alertness that will enable you to recognize the ground clear light when it arises.
Now, you do this by meditating upon the traditions, which teach you how to meditate on the clear light: the Middle Way, the Mahamudra and the Great Perfection. In anyone of these you go through a sequence or series of practices that culminate in the ability to experience to some degree, in this life, the clear light. Now what you experience as a meditation practitioner is called the path clear light or the child clear light. It is something that is experienced through conscious and assiduous cultivation. Only through such cultivation, do you have a chance of recognizing the fundamental or natural or mother clear light at the time of death. But the aim of such cultivation, these meditation practices and these entire systems which culminate in these practices, the aim of the practice where you rest in a state free of all mental elaboration, in that way, is to gain such familiarity with the path or child clear light, that at the time of death, because you are familiar with it, you recognize the ground or fundamental clear light, the mother clear light, just as you recognize someone you had seen before.
Rinpoche said, a modern analogy that's even more apt is a photograph. There is a difference between the cultivated child clear light and the actual or ground mother clear light, just as there is a difference between someone's photograph and the person. But if you've seen a good photograph of someone, you can later recognize the person from having seen that photograph. In the same way, if you cultivate an authentic experience of the path clear light in this life, you can recognize the ground clear light at the moment of death.
In the cultivation of meditation practice during this life, meditative state is marked by three characteristics: well being, lucidity and no thought, nonconceptuality. But the way we normally experience these things during this life is quite imperfect. It is imperfect in that it is fleeting and it is imperfect in that it is to a certain degree and not beyond that. We experience some degree of well being, some degree of lucidity and some degree of freedom from conceptualization. The ground clear light, which is experienced at the moment of death, is endowed with these three characteristics to the ultimate degree. It is absolutely and perfectly blissful or endowed with well being. It is utter and pure lucidity, and it is totally and completely free of thought or conceptuality of any kind. In order to recognize it, because being endowed with these characteristics makes it so different from our normal state of mind, you must cultivate a meditative state endowed to some extent with these three characteristics in this life. So in this life you have to cultivate what's called a child luminosity that is a one-pointed samadhi or meditative absorption endowed with the characteristics of the ground clear light itself.
Now the ground clear light is called the ground or fundamental or basic clear light. It's called the mother clear light. It's called the natural clear light. It's called these three things because it is the true nature of all things. And it is, in and of itself, utterly and completely pure, and has been utterly and completely pure and perfect from the very beginning. In fact, it is utterly unchanging. It is indestructible. It is unaffected by anything. And it never has changed, never does change and never will change. The only change is whether or not it is experienced and whether or not it is recognized when experienced. If you have cultivated a familiarity with the child clear light during the preceding life, then what happens when the ground clear light appears is like a child recognizing his or her mother. And this is called the meeting of the mother and child clear lights. At that point because you experience the true and natural clear light, you recognize it based on your cultivated experience of the clear light and what you previously experienced and what you experience at that moment, mix together like water being poured into water and that is the best type of liberation. It's called the liberation at the moment of death, for those of the highest capacity. And although in a sense you could call this the beginning of the interval, because it's the first interval, it's also called "before the interval." It's the first opportunity for liberation and is liberation in dharmakaya, to be achieved by those who've familiarized themselves with the clear light.
It's important to understand that the type of liberation where someone recognizes the ground clear light at the moment of death is complete and full. It is actually the achievement of perfect awakening, or buddhahood at the moment of death. And this means that when someone achieves this, they achieve that buddhahood that has all of the qualities for which it is so renowned, not only the liberation of the person, him or herself, but the ensuing and permanent all-pervasive ability to be a consummate benefit to others in every possible way until each and every other being has likewise, achieved perfect awakening. Recognizing therefore, the value of attempting to achieve such a state of awakening and liberation through the recognition of the ground clear light at death, you should abandon all the distractions of this life. Distractions refer to all of the things with which we normally concern ourselves. Things which are either of no use whatsoever, immediately or in the long-term, or are actually destructive and negative, or at best, are of temporary and largely only physical benefit. Such things are distractions because involvement with them prevents you from engaging in the type of assiduous practice that is necessary in order to achieve this liberation and awakening. So in order to achieve it you have to abandon such distractions and abide in solitude, which means practicing in isolation, like for example, Jetsun Milarepa: remain in a state of three-fold stillness.
Three-fold stillness means that your body is utterly still. It is free from unnecessary movement of any kind and especially from unnecessary and meaningless physical activity. Stillness of speech means that you are silent. Your speech is still and undisturbed. Your faculty of speech is undisturbed by the meaningless babble of conventional speech. And stillness of mind means that your mind is in a state free of elaboration. This refers not merely to state of tranquility or shinay, but to a state of insight where your mind is withdrawn from all forms of conceptual elaboration or thought. In short, in order to experience and thereby be able to recognize the clear light, you have to cultivate a meditative state that is the conjunction of lucidity and emptiness without fixation.
Now the lucidity spoken of here is your mind's defining characteristic. Your mind is defined by the fact that you can cognize. You can experience. You are aware. So therefore we would say that the defining characteristic of your mind is cognitive lucidity. But your mind is not just mere lucidity, because it is not a substantial brilliance like that of the sun or the moon or something like that. The mind is, while lucid, utterly insubstantial. It is empty of any kind of substantial characteristic or entity whatsoever. Furthermore this lucidity and this emptiness are not two different things. They are inseparable. So resting in a state where you experience, just as it is, your mind, the union of lucidity and emptiness, and do so without any kind of fixation, which means without any kind of fixated or conceptualized apprehension, is called a state of "great even-placement." In general even-placement can refer to either the perfect meditation of tranquility or that of insight. Here it refers to that of insight. It is more than a state of tranquility because it is a state where the mind is resting completely and utterly within a direct experience of its own nature. It is therefore called "great even-placement."
Remaining within that state, you are practicing what is called, "the conduct of extreme simplicity." Conduct of supreme simplicity refers to a mode of life where you are free from the elaborations or complexities of not only mundane activities, distractions and disturbances, but even conceptual functions of mind and thinking itself. So the aspiration you make at this point, is to perfect this practice�Xthe conduct of extreme simplicity�Xso as to be able to achieve the supreme liberation, liberation in the dharmakaya and perfect awakening at the very moment of death.
Now, another thing about this liberation that you must understand is that this is not something that is purely legendary. It is not the case that when we speak of this liberation we say, in the good old days, people used to achieve this, but nowadays it doesn't happen. It does happen. In fact, it happens all the time. Rinpoche said, "In my lifetime, and even to be more specific, since I left Tibet, there have been several instances of this in my ?????? [end of side one; something got lost]
Side 2
[cont.]...at the refuge camp in Buxa where we were all living. Having died he remained in state of meditative absorption for three days. Now, in order to understand what happened to him and to his body, you need to understand that he had been very sick before he died and feeble. But at the end of his life, just before his death, he sat up perfectly straight, seemed completely comfortable and at ease, dismissed his attendants, those who were helping them, said, "You all go outside and play." Asking merely for his outer robe and his meditation hat to be brought to him, he put these on and he started to do his daily practice book. He chanted the first half of it and left the second half undone and in that state, he passed away.
This was happening at a time when it was extremely hot in Buxa. And as you know, dead bodies rot and stink very quickly in hot weather. But his did not. For the three days of his samadhi, he remained seated upright, without the slightest appearance of decay, either visible or olfactory, and in fact it wasn't just the heat of the time and place, because people were offering butterlamps, as many as a hundred in the room, in which his body was left, and the double heat of that still didn't cause any kind of scent of decay. And as far as how he looked, generally speaking when someone dies, to say the least, his or her complexion is no longer rosy. But his complexion actually improved. And he looked more florid, more lively after death, than he had while he was alive.
These indications, specifically the lack of decay, the florid complexion, in other words the appearance of circulation and so on, are considered definite signs that someone has achieved liberation in the dharmakaya, and in fact, perfect buddhahood at the moment of death. Another example of this was a retreat master that I knew who in the same way passed away and he also remained seated with the same signs for the same period of three days. There was also a lama called Karma Norbu who had done a retreat at Palpung Monastery and was also a disciple of Chatrul Rinpoche. He lived in an isolated place in a small house where water was scarce, causing disputes between him and his neighbors in Nepal and yet when he died multi-colored light, like the light of a rainbow, started to emerge from his body and from his house, filling the surrounding area. It was also noticed that his body was getting a little bit smaller as time went on. His neighbors of course recognized this as what it was and felt somewhat regretful about their having fought with him in the past and they prostrated to his remains and they venerated him properly.
A lama who lived for sometime in the West, Lama Ganga, who passed away at Thrangu Monastery, after his death, remained seated in samadhi, in meditative absorption for no less than five days, and I saw that, Rinpoche said, myself, because I was there when he died. My point is that there are many instances up to the present day, of people achieving perfect awakening, through these means. And in fact, this happens so commonly that in a sense, people are so used to it that they don't even bother to report it all time. They simply say, well that's what happens if you practice dharma, that's dharma's blessing. But we shouldn't be that casual about it, because when you consider what it is, it is definite and irrefutable proof of the possibility of perfect awakening at the moment of death.
I mention all of this and comment on it at length because it's important that you understand that as bad as the times are, dharma is not affected or diminished by it in any way. We do indeed live in an age of decadence. But the dharma is not decadent. Dharma is the same as it always was. For example, the land of Tibet has suffered greatly throughout the preceding century, and yet all of the things that have happened there, while they have caused great suffering to the people and great diminishment of resources of practice, have not affected the power or authenticity of dharma in any way. The compassion of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, their blessing, these things are utterly unaffected by the circumstances of the times we live in. Therefore, dharma is always effective. It will always work. You simply have to do it. I say this because I am completely confidant that if someone practices these things properly, they will definitely achieve this result of which we are speaking. It is infallible. And I want to leave you with and inspire you with this confidence, this same knowledge that, "If I practice this, I will achieve this."
It is that simple, and it is that infallible because our basic nature is the ground clear light. That is our true being. Therefore the only other thing that is necessary for us to achieve awakening, is to familiarize ourselves with that nature through meditation on the path clear light. Now, this of course is the big question: the difference is made entirely through whether someone does or does not meditate assiduously on the path clear light during their life. That in turn obviously depends upon being taught how to do so and that in turn obviously depends on having access to a spiritual friend. If someone has no access to a spiritual friend and receives no instruction, they will not do any meditation and therefore they will not achieve liberation and awakening. But once you have access to the spiritual friend, once you have access to instruction on how to cultivate familiarity through meditation with the path clear light, you simply have to do it and if you do it assiduously enough, the achievement of liberation and awakening at the moment of death is a certainty.
If you have not achieved sufficient familiarity with the clear light during the immediately preceding life, then you won't recognize the ground clear light. And the moment after it appears, you'll move on to the second part of the interval of possibility. And the second part of the interval of possibility is the main part of the interval. It is again what people think of when they use term bardo or interval. Previously, at the moment of death, your all-basis consciousness and the remnant of the life wind and the potential for other cognitive functions and the white and red drops, all collected together at one place in the center of your heart; if you don't recognize the ground clear light, then they separate again. And two of them , the basic consciousness and the life wind together, the basic consciousness mixed with or riding the life wind, leave your body. They leave your body through one or another of nine apertures: the navel, between the eyebrows, the aperture at the very top of your head, the nose or ears, the mouth or eyes, the anus or urethra. From anyone of these, the consciousness, riding this wind, will leave your body. And once the consciousness has left the body, then it's not going back in. It is as soon as the consciousness leaves your body, that the appearances of the interval proper start to arise.
Now, in our text it says, "Starting from that point onward, you have the appearance of your subsequent body." Rinpoche said this is actually put this way because the text is after all very brief. In more detail, what is usually explained is that for the first half of the period of the interval, you will appear to yourself to have the body you had in the preceding life. For the second half you will appear to have the body you're going to have in the subsequent life. The reason for this is that this appearance is a purely mental body. It is therefore made from habit. You initially have the appearance of your preceding body because you have the habit of having that body. That's what you're used to. That's what you expect. On the other hand, the karma that put you in that preceding life and kept you in that life is exhausted. It was used up; that's why you died. So therefore the karmically bound habit of that life is also going to lose momentum, or diminish during the period in the interval. So therefore what happens is that initially you have a very vivid impression of having the same body you had. So in other words, you think of yourself as the person you thought you were before. Rinpoche said, for example, I would think of myself as Karthar. I would think, "I have Karthar's body," and so on. So you have that at the beginning but it starts to gets vaguer and less distinct as the interval continues and then after the middle of the interval (so if the interval is going to last for 49 days which is the usual period of time), then for the first half of that, after that first half has finished, you will start to have an initially vague and then more and more vivid impression of having your subsequent or future body.
In either case, whichever body you appear to possess, the body has certain characteristics. Don't forget it is utterly illusory. It is like a magical illusion. A hypnotic or other hallucination. It is therefore independent. The body is independent in a sense that it is independent of physical causes. It didn't grow; it wasn't produced by anything, so it is independent of any kind of physical origin. Therefore it is independent of most physical conditions. It is also different from your present body in that whatever is particularly wrong with or defective in your present body will appear to have been restored. So for example, if one or more of your senses is malfunctioning, for example if you only have one working eye, or you can't hear out of one of your ears, or one of your legs has been removed or doesn't work and so on, you will appear, in the bardo, to have gotten that back.
Bardo beings, interval beings, never seem to have defective senses. They appear�Xof course they don't have physical sense organs at all, which is why this is the case�Xthey appear to themselves and to other interval beings to have a full set of the senses of their particular species. Because it is a mental body, you can pass through solid matter the way flies can pass through a beam of sunlight. Flies will fly through, buzz their way through a beam of sunlight without being in any way impeded by it. In the same way, an interval being can fly through solid matter, even the hardest rock. It's not that they actually have miraculous powers; it's simply that they are a purely mental body, and your mind can go anywhere, do anything. It doesn't require physical or verbal effort or exertion. So therefore an interval being will actually find themselves instantly in any place they think of.
From one point of view you could say this is miraculous, but don't forget it is impulsive; it is spontaneous in the negative sense of the word. It is not under control. They are driven about by whatever occurs to them. And there is no physical body to prevent them immediately being driven to that place. Having no physical body, interval beings cannot use clothing and cannot eat food. They do however, have the habit of hunger and thirst and suffer from it, but they can't eat and drink. The only thing that they can consume is scents or smells. And they cannot be nourished by just any smell. The only smells that they can actually consume and experience as nourishment are the smells of substances consecrated to them. The best way to do this is therefore to burn consecrated herbs and other substances and edible substances together and specifically dedicate them to beings in the interval. And this is why as a regular, daily observance, and especially so, or more elaborately when dealing with a recently deceased person, we perform what's called the singed offering in the evening. And this consists of the singing of consecrated substances and other edibles and the dedication of this to interval beings and to others.
Who can see these beings? They can see themselves and they can see one another. And a being in the interval can see other interval beings. We cannot, normally. The exception to that are individuals who have achieved the divine eye through meditative prowess and interval beings themselves also have a limited form of this. They have a certain type of supercognition that is not necessarily as good as it sounds, because again it is compulsive and impulsive. For example, they might know that something is going on such as a dharma teaching by a teacher and so on, and they might go there, but their response to it is not necessarily going to be positive.
Once beings have been in the interval long enough that they're starting to assume the appearance of their subsequent, rather than their previous body, there are clues, aside from their appearance, in other words, what species they appear to be, but also their position, their spatial position. There are clues as to where they are going to be born. Beings who are going to be reborn in a higher state, as humans, devas or asuras, will generally be facing upward, so the head is facing toward the sky rather than the ground and will be moving upward. Beings that are going to be reborn in a lower state, as animals, as pretas, or as hell-beings will generally be facing downward and moving downward. Because interval beings have no physical bodies and therefore do not have the basis for the perception of physical light, they do not see sun and moon. They can experience an environment similar to ours and appear to be in a place, but they will see no light from the sun and moon. And their bodies cast no shadows.
Now it is at this point, once the consciousness of the deceased person has emerged from their body, after they have failed to recognize the ground clear light, and once what is called the intermediate existence has begun, that the pure appearances of dharmata will arise. And the pure appearances of dharmata will consist especially of the appearances of the peaceful and wrathful deities. The forty-two peaceful deities, the fifty-eight wrathful deities and the pure vidyadharas. And these appear because the person's consciousness has left their body. They appear emerging from the body. Now, the way they appear to the person, although they are part of the person him or herself, they appear in front of or external to the person, as though the person and they have separated as they left the body.
They appear as magnificent deities, samboghakayas or bodies of complete enjoyment, with their respective appearances, peaceful and wrathful, very bright, brilliant and surrounded by intolerably bright light of many colors. In fact, the reason why we don't achieve liberation upon their appearance in general is the intolerable brilliance of their light. Because at the same time, five other types of light are appearing. And these five other types of light are the pathways to the five types of rebirth. The five are the six states, but in this case, because they are types of birth rather than species, the asura, or jealous gods are divided into the two beings of which they can consist in terms of species, which are in some cases devas and sometimes animals.
So the five types of rebirths are those of devas, humans, animals, pretas and hell-beings. And the lights that are the pathways to those rebirths are white, red, yellow, blue and very, very dark blue, very, very dim blue--almost non-existent, almost darkness, respectively. I asked Rinpoche is this designation of one to one in that order consistent? He said, "That's what it says here." It's not always absolutely consistent. The point is, the worst the realm, the less brilliant the light. And the reason for this is the light of the pure appearances, which can be of any color: white, yellow, red, blue green--is very, very bright. It's intolerably bright, so that we run from it. We perceive it as threatening, dangerous, destructive. The light of the six realms, the five lights of the paths of these types of rebirths, is all very soothing in appearance. They are muted and it is because we find them soothing and the light of the wisdom irritating and terrifying that we choose the soothing light of one of the six states. In fact, even worse than that, the lights of the lower states are more soothing than the lights of the higher states. That's why beings predominantly�XI mean the reason we find them soothing is because of karma and so on, but that's the condition for the predominance of rebirth in lower states over rebirth in higher states. So, what you want to do if you have gotten to this part of the interval, which is like the first part of the second part, is choose the threatening, brilliant, vivid lights, over the soothing, muted ones. And, in order to do this you need to prepare for this by thinking of this during this life, that the really, really bright scary lights, the brilliant ones, are the wisdom ones, and the soothing, muted ones, are going to lead to samsara and probably to lower states.
Initially, in fact, you will probably just see the rays of brilliant lights and not the deities. So the rays themselves, and their brilliance and their sharpness will seem to be like weapons to you. It's important to prepare for that experience. If you choose the paths of the wisdom lights, you achieve liberation in the respective realm. And if you choose the path of one of the samsaric lights, as we all evidently did, you know what happens.
In general, at this point, because you have a mental body that seems to be the body you had in your last life�Xnow it may have restored senses and so on, but you won't immediately recognize that it's that different�Xit's important to prepare yourself to recognize the signs that indicate that you're dead. Now why is that important? Because in order to choose what to do in the interval the first prerequisite obviously is knowing that you're in the interval. If you don't know that you're in the interval, you're not going to make the right choices. So what are the signs that you are in the interval? Generally it's that the signs of the interval are the appearance of sounds and forms that are utterly unfamiliar. Most of these are pretty scary and they get scarier and scarier as it goes on and you become more and more agitated, which means the chance of liberation tends to decrease over the period.
Scary sounds like a billion thunderclaps at once and forms of different sorts of beings, not just wisdom deities but also different sorts of terrifying beings, the size of huge mountains, and so on�Xall sorts of scary things. And all sorts of different things that you've never seen before. So the point at this point in the interval, is first of all, to recognize that you are in the interval. And in order to be able to do so, you need to cultivate a familiarity with what the signs are of being in the interval. Having recognized that, to make the right choice, to choose the path of the five wisdoms, one of the lights of the five wisdoms and not the paths of the five types of samsaric rebirth. If you don't know that you're in the interval, you won't make the correct choice and you'll just go with instinct, which will lead you towards the soothing lights and so on.
Now, at this point, as the interval experience continues, time is passing with you in a mental body. Not being in any way restrained or governed by the solidity of a physical body, your mind becomes more and more anxious and agitated. And as in life, you respond to anxiety with kleshas. Your kleshas therefore grow in intensity as the interval continues. They came become like a blazing fire that totally possesses you. You are, don't forget, blown about by the wind of your previous actions, which arise in the form of impulsive thoughts which send you from one place to another without your control. As your anxiety and kleshas increase, this becomes more and more turbulent, worse and worse. And you have less and less leisure to think about anything. You become more and more frightened and more and more saddened and the hallucinations degenerate. You start to become more and more frightened, see more and more frightening things, respond to them more and more with anxiety and kleshas and so on. You have no control whatsoever at this point, unless you have cultivated a preparation and familiarity with what's going to happen, you're simply unprepared to deal with this and you have no control over what's happening. You're just blown about and there is nothing really to help you. So it is important to familiarize yourself with and thereby prepare yourself for the experiences of this part of the interval as well.
We are going to stop here for this morning. Understand however, that this is the point when we talk about the liberation through hearing in the bardo or interval. It is that the opportunities for liberation in the interval which occur can only be taken advantage of by someone who has heard about them and familiarized themselves with them. By hearing about all of this and by growing familiar with this, you do have the opportunity of making the right choices in the interval, which specifically means choosing the lights of the five wisdoms over the muted lights of the five types of samsaric rebirth and by making these choices, achieving liberation. So please dedicate the virtue of this session, to the achievement by all beings by such familiarity and their subsequence entrance into the paths of wisdom and achievement of liberation.
Donden Chojin Association
Copyright 2010
Affiliations: Help Without Borders