(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - Thank you very much Padma Dhaka. So this talk's called The Sixth Bardo's. Oh, now, when the Bardo of life upon me is dawning, abandoning idleness, there being no time for idleness in this life. Entering the path undistractively, studying, reflecting and meditating, taking perceptual experience and the nature of mind as the path, may the tree kaya, the three bodies of the Buddha, be realized. Once that the human form has been attained, may there be no time or opportunity in which to idle it away. So these rather serious somber, sobering sounding words come from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They are in fact the first of what are called the root verses of the six bardos, the root verses of the six intermediate or the six in between states. And these six verses encapsulate, in a particularly pithy essential form, the teachings contained in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In Tibet, among the followers of the Ningma school, the school of the ancients, these verses are learnt by heart and they're regularly repeated, regularly meditated upon. And with our own order, within our own order, some order members regularly recite and meditate on these verses. I've done a fair bit of that myself back in the 1970s, Sankarachta, who founded our order, led a retreat where he led meditations on these six verses and a friend of mine who was on that particular retreat. So it was really quite strong sitting there, hearing Sankarachta read these verses repeatedly. He said he started to feel as if he was dead. So it was very strange. I realized that for some of you, the verse probably sounded a bit obscure, a bit technical. And I'll try later on in the talk towards the end of the talk. I'll try to unfold the meaning of the verse just a little bit. But I wanted to start off by giving you a little glimpse of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Just a taster, just a fragment of it, because we'll be drawing on this text a little throughout the coming days, throughout the retreat. So this afternoon, I want to look into the verse, I've just read. But before that, I want to say something about the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself. I want to say something about its history. I want to say something about what it's about. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is actually quite well known in the West. Recently, a new, complete translation of the whole cycle of texts that can be designated. The Tibetan Book of the Dead have been beautifully translated and published by Penguin Books, translated by a Scottish Nighmar Pa, Buddhist name Guo Mei Dorje, very beautifully done. And the books made a bit of a splash. I happened to switch on the Radio 3 arts program a few weeks ago. I think it was night waves. And I thought, God, they're talking about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And yes, they were. They were having a discussion about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It's been great hearing that on good old Radio 3. And the book got very favourable reviews in some of the Sunday papers. The Sunday Times review section. And in fact, its front cover was a full colour reproduction of a Tibetan tanker depicting the deities mentioned in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I think that's quite something, isn't it, that it should get such coverage, such a splash. Back in, I think, the 1980s, maybe a bit later than that, maybe the 90s. Longer Tokyo, Rinpoche, published his book, the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which I know many, many people found great inspiration from. And that included a lot of reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And there have been other translations in recent times by Francesca, Fremantle and Robert Thurman. So it's been around. The book first became known in the West in the 1920s when Dr. W.Y. Evans went, first published in the Oxford classics, I think, an edited version of a translation by a C.K. Measlama of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And his title, he was the first person to give the book, the title of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, because a few years previously, Wallis Budge published the Egyptian book of the Dead. His translation from Egyptian hieroglyphics. So it was Evans Wentz who gave it this term, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in fact, is quite a bit of influence on the West, among Buddhists and even beyond Buddhists. Carl Jung, the great psychologist, was very taken with the Tibetan Book of the Dead when it was published. He said that he wrote a commentary, a psychological commentary on the Book of the Dead, and said that it was a great guide for him in his life. It affected the whole psychedelic movement, if you can call it that, Timothy Leary, wrote a kind of psychedelic, trippy version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or used the Tibetan Book of the Dead to guide his acid trips, and so on and so forth. And I even heard from somebody that Ted Hughes had made a kind of poetic translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I don't know if that's available, it'd be very interesting to see what Ted Hughes made of it. That's a whole story in itself. The Tibetan Book of the Dead and its Western interpreters, it's fascinating area. Interestingly enough, the texts associated with the Tibetan Book of the Dead were used and applied only by particular sections of the Tibetan Buddhist community. This is very important to appreciate. Actually, comparatively quite small sections of the Tibetan Buddhist community. Most Tibetan Buddhists employed other material at the time of death. The Tibetan Book of the Dead gives it a kind of all Tibetans must follow it, but it's not quite like that. And we also need to observe that throughout the Buddhist world there's all kinds of approaches to death. There are different rituals and ceremonies and meditations and customs associated with the dead throughout the Buddhist world, so we mustn't think of this book called the Tibetan Book of the Dead as being the sort of definitive Buddhist work on death. And even the definitive Tibetan Buddhist approach to death. It's not a kind of Bible of the dead, carrying all sorts of authority. I think that's incredibly important because you get all these descriptions of the after-death state and so on and so forth. And people can start thinking, well, it must be like that. For all Buddhists, it must be like that. For everybody, it must be like that. Well, it's not like that. It's not like that. So we have to take care. Having said that, the book that we call the Tibetan Book of the Dead is an extraordinary synthesis of material concerning death. After-death, what's called the intermediate state and rebirth, rebirth, rebirth becoming. There's much material in the cycle of texts about life itself, how to practice within this life. And within this whole cycle of texts, I think we can say, quite definitely, that the spirit of Buddhism, the quintessential Buddhist attitudes to life, to death, to change, to re-becoming are presented in a very rich, a very detailed and a very profound way. During this retreat, we won't be going through the text in detail. There's no time to do that. And I'm not really equipped to do that. I want to just draw out some themes that have struck me. And there are three great themes I want us to look at. First of all, the theme of Bardo, or intermediate state. Secondly, the theme of the six realms of existence that make up the wheel of life. And thirdly, the mandalas of the five Buddha families. So I want to do this with one overriding purpose. The aim, the purpose, is that so that we all may live life more deeply and more meaningfully, here and now. From a Buddhist point of view, it means how we may follow the path to enlightenment, more deeply, more effectively. That's why we're doing this. That's why we're looking at this material. So today, I want to open up the meaning of the word Bardo. Try to do that. It's a particularly rich and interesting term, which I think probably could do with a few talks on it in itself. It's a fascinating term. But before that, I feel that I really must mention-- I want to mention-- the characters who have brought this teaching to us. They deserve, as it were, our recollection. As a literary document, what we call the Tibetan Book of the Dead emerges into the light of day in the 14th century in the region of Darkpo in southern Tibet, a region famous for its forests, its dense forests, its meadowlands, its rather jagged and fearsome-looking mountain ranges, and its traditions of malevolent spirits and traditions of kidnapping on wary travelers and so on and so forth, quite a strange region in some ways. And the text emerges from the spiritual genius named Rig'din Karama Lingpa. And Karama Lingpa was born into a nyngmar family. His father was a lama of that school of Tibetan Buddhism, the nyngmar, meaning the ancient ones, the old ones, who regarded themselves as being the followers of the great Guru Padmasambhava, the Lotus-born Guru and Guru Rinpoche, the greatly precious Guru, who for the nyngmar school was the central figure, who is the central figure, who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century, and who became for the nyngmar school a sort of archetypal spiritual force, a kind of archetypal guru, spiritual genius, who's a kind of constant sort of spiritual inspiration, too, especially those followers of the nyngmar school. That's a painting attempting to depict Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava. Now, very little is known about Rig'din Karama Lingpa. And one of Sanger Akshta's teachers, do John Rinpoche, describes him as, endowed with innumerable attributes and who dwelt as the very embodiment of unimpeded, supernormal cognitive power and enlightened activity. I don't give examples of that, but that's just what do John Rinpoche says. At the age of 15, just 15, Karama Lingpa discovered the teachings that we know is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, 15 years old. So he was pretty bright. And eventually, he transmitted these teachings that he discovered to his disciples, who were his family members and to others. So not very long afterwards, he died. He died very shortly after he'd propagated the teachings. Some people say that he died under rather unpleasant circumstances. But anyway, that's a whole other story to do with the machinations, if you like, of Tibetan Buddhism. The teaching he discovered passed on to just a small number of people for a number of generations. And it took some time before it was more widely known. And eventually, it was widely disseminated in the Nungmar and the Karmakargu schools. Now, I've said throughout that Karama Lingpa discovered the teachings. We call the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He didn't regard himself as having composed them. He didn't regard himself as having made them up. He discovered them. He discovered them more over in the Gampodar Mountains, in the mountains near his home, in the mountain that is like a dancing god. He found the teachings hidden away in a cliffside, in a cave. So this all sounds very, very strange to us. But that's the tradition. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in other words, is what is known in Tibetan Buddhism as a turma. Turma means that which is taken out. In other words, it's a treasure. And the one who takes it out is a turftun, a treasure finder, or a treasure revealer. So Karama Lingpa is regarded as a turton, a takeer out a treasure. And these treasures, these termas, were hidden away. The tradition says, "By Guru Padmasamava in the eighth century." At that time, just before he left it, at the great Guru saw that new teachings would be needed, would be required for future times, for future places, for future men and women. So all over Tibet, it said, he hid things away. He hid texts, sacred objects, and so on and so forth. This is the tradition. It's rather more subtle and complex than him sort of burying big books away like that. It's not quite like that. There's all sorts of complexities here. And in fact, the term, the tradition of the Nemarex extraordinarily detailed and rich, what actually happened was that the great Guru transmitted the particular teachings he wanted to, for people to know in future generations, to his disciples directly, mind to mind, heart to heart. And the teaching as it were lays their dormant in the depths of the mind, dormant in the depths of pure awareness. Later, when the disciple is reborn in the future, a particular chain of events unfolds, maybe which includes, maybe, finding sacred objects or fragments of text, usually yellow scrolls inscribed with the script of the darkenies. These things that are found awaken the teaching, lodged in the depths of the mind, and the teaching sort of erupts, unfolds, is remembered and is then written out. It becomes text, becomes teaching, becomes practices. Kamalimpa, then, like other Turpans, is the reincarnation of a disciple of the great Guru Padmasambhava. He received the teachings we call the Tibetan Book of the Dead from his teacher, Guru Padmasambhava, and the texts that we call the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a remembering of the teaching, a bringing forth from the depths of the enlightened mind for the people of his time and his place and for the years to come, for those who are going to follow. So the tradition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, if you read translations of the introductory verses, it says, it's very clearly says, this is a teaching of Padmasambhava, hidden away and discovered, rediscovered, by Rigzing Kamalimpa. This is the way the material is presented. So these teachings are special teachings about death and the after-death state and about rebirth and teachings on how to live, how to practice now so that one may enter death well, use death as a place, as a time for spiritual practice, for spiritual breakthrough. Even teachings on how to enter rebirth consciously and clearly. Now I do realise that with our Western scientific perspective, the notion of teachings hidden in the depths of mind, reemerging in later centuries of people being reborn and remembering sounds far-fetched. Sounds very dubious indeed. And in fact, some Tibetans of other traditions of their doubts as well, lots of talk of fabrication and kind of invoking an authority, even some might regard as spurious authority, Padmasambhava. But for the Ningma school, this term of tradition is extraordinarily important and highly revered in that tradition. It's the basis for most people's, most Ningma bud is spiritual life, a very rich spiritual life. In fact, it's the basis for a very rich cultural life. It's very interesting, some of the turtans, some of the treasure finders are associated with real, you know, with whole cultures in Bhutan, for example, the great turtan pabmalinpa. He's generally regarded as being the person responsible for creating that culture. He says he just found all these different thing, images, swords, dances, et cetera, et cetera, texts, practices that were hidden by Padmasambhava. So I don't think we can just dismiss this term of tradition as fantasy. Whatever the truth of it, the term of tradition comes out of a profound vision of the nature of mind, of the nature of consciousness, of the nature of man. It comes out of the vision of the mind of man having extraordinary potential and possibility. Whatever the origins, whatever the explanations, as I've said before, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a wonderful synthesis of Buddhist teachings and there's much in it that we can learn, that we can make use of. In the Newmont tradition, it's associated with all kinds of esoteric tantric practices, but it's also regarded as an actual guidebook for the dead. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a guidebook for the dead and it's used in death rituals. The work we know as the Tibetan Book of the Dead is known in Tibetan as vadotodol, which means literally the great liberation through hearing in the intermediate state because the text is read to the dead. Alama or a brother in the Dharma reads the text to the dead person for 49 days after their death. So it's a guide for the dead and it's one of the main rituals in the Newmont school for the dead, for guiding the dead, for helping them through death, helping them through the intermediate state, helping them through rebirth. So this is the way the text is actually used among contemporary Ningmar Buddhists. And I know even Westerners who found the text a great source of support and of help of guidance and of guidance when a loved one has died. I know people have told me they just found it so helpful having that text, it helped them to orientate themselves in relation to the person who's died. They felt they could actually do something, it gave them something they could do in relation to the dead person. So traditionally the text is not known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it's vadotodol, the great liberation through hearing in the vadot. Vadot in this context, standing for death, the intermediate state between death and rebirth and rebirth itself. According to Buddhist tradition, most Buddhist traditions, you don't just die, you don't just die and then are immediately reborn. There is an intermediate state between death and rebirth and in that intermediate state, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the vadotodol, you undergo intense visionary experience. So the vadotodol then is a guide in particular to these states, it tells you how to be in these states, death, the intermediate state and rebirth and how to relate to them, how to practice within them, how even to gain enlightenment within them, how to avoid future suffering within these states. So this brings me at last to the theme of vadot. I want to go into this term vadot in some detail. So the term vadotodol literally means between two, between two and it refers, so it refers to something in between two other things. So it can be translated as in between or intermediate. Vadot is a Tibetan term and it's in fact, a Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit word unturabhava, unturabhava, which means the in-between existence. Unturabh means in-between or inside, bhava means existence or being. So unturabhava means that which is in-between existences, in-between two other states of being, two other states of existence. And this is an old early teaching of some of the early schools of Buddhism. So the teaching of unturabhava or vadot is pointing to those moments, those times in life, where one state or perhaps better one sequence of states, one kind of existence, one kind of being has ended. But the next kind of being, the next kind of existence, the next kind of sequence has not yet arisen. There's a gap, a space, an opening. And it's very important in life, in our spiritual life, to notice these gaps, these spaces. These spaces where the old order, the old tired habitual repetitive order is breaking down, has broken down, is ended or is disrupted because then there is a space, then there is a possibility, then there is a tremendous potential for something else, for something deeper, something more meaningful to arise. In a way, you could say, and this is said in the tradition, all experience is actually bardo. All experience is actually a creative space because, but this tradition says everything is impermanent, everything is in substantial. There is nothing fixed and final and stable anywhere internally or externally. So in that sense, everything is a space, everything is a possibility. But that's a bit, in a way, not easy to relate to. So traditionally, the NUMA tradition points to six bardos, six in between. So Pabmasambhava, Karambalingpa, point in particular to six bardos, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead points to six bardos, mentions six bardos that we need to pay particular attention to. So first of all, there's the bardo of life. Life is the space, the gap between birth and death. This life itself is a bardo, and I'll say more about that later when I comment on the verse that I read at the beginning. Secondly, there's the bardo of dream. Dream is a space. It's between two waking states. Dream is a space, a gap in which, in fact, we can make real spiritual progress. Sometimes we have what those North American Indians, Native Americans, describe as big dreams, rich archetypal dreams. We might even have dreams of budders or bodhisattvas or other very significant figures giving us teachings, giving us maybe initiations and so on. In a dream, we can be unimpeded. We are unimpeded. We can do anything. We can go anywhere when you become conscious in a dream, which happens if you develop mindfulness and awareness. You suddenly realize you can do anything. You can go anywhere. You can meet anyone, and you're encouraged to. Go to Pure Lands, go to Buddha Fields, go to Meet the Buddha to receive the teaching. I think some of my most significant experiences actually have happened in the dream state. Dreams, as well, can be extraordinarily vivid. When you're in them, it's reality, it's real. You really are being chased by a man with an axe who's going to cut you into pieces. And when you wake up, it's only a dream for you. You really do walk through a wonderful landscape of jewel-like colors, feeling incredibly happy, incredibly contented. You really do hear wonderful sounds and so on. And when you wake up, it was only a dream. Well, this kind of reality that you have in dreams, this reality that isn't reality, is to be meditated upon. Buddhist tradition says, well, learn from the dream state, because actually, waking experience is exactly the same. You need to learn to see how waking experience is like a dream. In waking life, we undergo all kinds of experiences, some very intense, very vivid experience. But they pass, they vanish, just like dreams vanish. What's the difference between our memories in waking life and our memories of our dreams? Is there any real difference? How do we know that we're not actually dreaming now? How do we know that we're not going to wake up in a minute? Think, oh, that was strange. I was in the shrine room listening to "Pairnavadra Gaming" at all. It was real. It was really real, man, you know? And I was dreaming. How do we know? Interesting reflection. If you have a tenuous hold on ordinary reality at the best of times, maybe you shouldn't go in for that too much. Just, though I am awake, but if you're a bit stolid and a bit sort of, sorry, that's unkind to somebody's story. But you know what I mean, if you're a little bit... Well, that may be kind of crude and gross. Well, then, you know, maybe reflect on that a bit more. Thirdly, there's the bar dough of meditation. Meditation is the space between thoughts. Our mind, most of the time, is just full of thoughts and feelings and moods or tumbling over one another in a great jumble. In meditation, we're creating space. We're creating an opening, a gap in this crowd. This is what happens in deep meditation. In deep meditation, there's no thought. It's not only an earth-blank state, but it's a fresh, deep, seemingly boundless awareness. Wide open. Or, it could be, depending on your temperament, a visionary space, a space in which you see visions of Buddhas, of Bodhisattvas, a space of insights and inspirations. So, in our meditation practice, we're learning to enter this bar dough of meditation, this gap, this space, this opening up to the deepest potentiality of life, learning to rest in that space for longer and longer periods. Fourthly, there's the bar dough of the moment of death. This state is the state between life and the visionary world between death and rebirth. In this bar dough, the physical body comes to its end. One by one, the sense is stop functioning. Sense experience just recedes, just goes back, as it were. Bodily functions cease. Breathing stops. You breathe in, you breathe out, and then you don't breathe in again. We lose our grounding. We lose our ground, our basic ground, our physical body. It's taken away from us. If you like, you could say it's taken back, as it were. One of the things that Buddhist tradition says generally, that our body is on loan. We're kind of borrowing it for a while, but it will go back to the elements. It will go, so it kind of goes back. And this, of course, is a very frightening prospect. Perhaps you've seen it in others. I've seen it in others who are going towards death. And I saw something I was very close to. I saw how frightening it was for them over a period of years, as their body just more and more sort of fell away. It was my father, actually, but seeing how his function just stopped working, I eventually lost his sight. And just seeing the fear each time something happened, I think he did manage to kind of relax into it as time went on. But I could see it was so frightening, as another thing happened on his journey. That refuge, that support, the body, was being taken away. It's very, very frightening. And perhaps we've felt this in ourselves. When something's gone wrong, you know, we're ill, maybe seriously ill, or something's happened. Just sort of notice what it does to you. It's so disruptive. And the other day, I got a bad leg. And I just noticed how, oh, I'm fed up of what's, you know, even feeling a bit depressed, you know, or is this something really serious, that sort of thing. But the tradition says that this falling of the way of the body, in fact, opens up a space. There's tremendous possibility here. The loss of the body, in fact, enables the clear, luminous light of reality to shine. Clear and bright and dazzling. Pure, non-dual, enlightened awareness shines in its nakedness. The loss of the body is only one side of the story. Actually, that loss, that death, enables reality to shine in a glorious effulgence. Most people are utterly overwhelmed by this, by this clear light, and they're just shy away. They swoon when the light shines forth. And they go on into the intermediate state and on towards rebirth. But if you've trained, if you've practiced meditation deeply, if you've entered the bar do of meditation, the space of meditation, that boundless mind I spoke about, you're not so caught up with the body and its concern. So when the body goes, you can start opening up to the clear light. Maybe you've even had glimpses of the clear light in this life. You even recognize it if you're really well-trained as an old friend. You recognize it as your deepest nature. And you transfer to it directly. You sort of dissolve into it directly. You gain enlightenment itself at the time of death. So interesting, Sanger actually once had one of his aphorism is death is a state of enforced meditation. You're going to have to meditate at the time of death. The senses will recede. So get training now so that you can-- so it's not so enforced, if you like. But what an incredible vision of life. What a vision of the mind these teachings give us. They're saying deep down, we are in touch with reality. We are in touch with clear, radiant awareness. Boundless, radiant, loving awareness. We are in touch with something sublime, something extraordinary. That is a possibility for us to experience. So it's an incredibly positive and hopeful and optimistic vision of life. At the same time, the teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead have a really gritty realism to them. OK, that might be there. That might well be a possibility. But you need to train yourself to see it and to be in touch with it. You need to work on yourself. You need to change things. You need to renounce things, especially. You need to renounce your attachment and clinging in order to see and to welcome the reality, to welcome the radiance in. Otherwise, it's overwhelming. It's terrifying. We can't take it in. We shrink from it. The bardo to dole tells us that we spoon. We lose consciousness when we encounter the radiant light. And when we come to, as it were again, we're in the next bardo, the next intermediate state. So this is the fifth bardo. This is called the bardo of Dalmatar, the bardo of reality-ness, the bardo of reality itself. In the bardo of the moment of death, reality shone forth nakedly. This vast, luminous emptiness can believe the undifferentiated beyond subject and object. But we can't take it. And we spoon away. But then it shows itself again. It shows itself in the form of visionary forms of the buddhas. Visionary forms of enlightenment, in particular, first of all, the five buddhas, a white buddha, a blue buddha, a yellow buddha, a red buddha, a green buddha. I won't go into all these now because that's the-- I'll be going into them a bit later. So they come with their retinues. And lights, radiant lights shine from them towards your heart. And if you respond, if you welcome these lights in, you dissolve into those buddhas. You gain liberation. You gain enlightenment. But the same time that those lights shine dull lights from each of the six realms of the wheel of life, states of imprisonment, of suffering, they shine. And they look very attractive. The bright lights, too much, too strong. But these dull lights look kind of comfy and cozy. So we're attracted to them. So if we don't respond to the buddhas, the buddha to dull says they come again. They come in a different form. In fact, they come in a wrathful form. They come as the five blood-drinking harakas who are utterly terrifying, shouting all sorts of powerful mantras. Even here, we can gain liberation. If we recognize that it's all just, all these are just the productions of our mind, just the productions of our consciousness, of our awareness. If we recognize they're just our thought forms and the reader of the pardo to dull, the lama reading it, we're reminding the dead person all the time throughout all this. And I'm paraphrasing, look, it's rough. It's frightening. Things are getting heavy. But you can do something. Think of the buddhas. You've got a feeling for the buddhas. Think of them. Think of Abhala Kateshra, the Bodhisattva of compassion. Think of your teacher. Think of your friends, the spiritual friend. Recognize, think of the good deeds you've done. Think of yourself and what you've done. Recognize that all these terrors are not external. They're your mind. They're your awareness. This is a great message of this book, the bardo to dull, throughout the book. No matter what's happening, no matter how heavy things get, you're told you can do something. You can always do something. You can, in traditional terms, go for refuge to the buddha dharma and sanga. You can turn your mind to the dharma. You can turn your mind to good things. And there will be a response if you do that. There will be a response. Again, there's this kind of optimism and realism going on. Eventually, after the five raffle buddhas, there's a kind of explosion of visions. The whole of space just explodes into a showing of these terrifying animal-headed deities. I won't even mention any of them. Well, I'll mention Yama, the lord of the dead. Yama Dharmaraja with a slate on which he's kind of looking, ticking off good deeds and bad deeds. And the whole thing is filling space. And there's sounds louder than a thousand thunderclaps. And the whole thing is utterly overwhelming. But even here, if you can recognize that all this is mind, these are your productions of mind. You will be liberated. You will gain enlightenment. If you don't gain liberation here, you arrive at the next bardo, the bardo of taking rebirth. The visions become even more terrifying. Terrifying deities shall kill and slay. You feel that you're being chased by hordes of people who want to do you harm. It really is a nightmare. You're driven along by black winds. You're trying to sort of stop, but the winds are blowing you on. You're crushed between mountains. Or you're just lost in a weird space in dense fox. And you're looking all the time for safety. You're looking in hovels in the ground, in desolate landscapes, just for somewhere to be safe. Anything to get away from, the overwhelming threat that's all around you. You're being blown along the Texas. And this is very expressive by the winds of karma. The winds of your habitual actions. They're blowing you along. You're falling back, if you like, on all your old habits and responses. And they're just blowing you along. Even here, you can still do something. The reader of the text will tell you to call to mind the Buddha, to call to mind your teacher, to call to mind the compassionate presence of Avalokitesra. You call to mind what's benign. Or if you can just see, this is all empty. You can see it as always if it's a dream. You can, you know, it will all dissolve your game liberation. And above all, the person reading the text will be telling you, don't go to those dark places. They're not safe. They may look safe, but actually they're places that could lead to a painful rebirth. So don't go there. Bring to mind, especially your good deeds. Bring to mind the good in you, the good that you've done. Bring to mind your spiritual aspiration. Eventually, as you're driven along, you see a man and woman copulating. And you'll experience intense jealousy and aversion towards one of them. Attraction to one, jealousy and aversion to the other. If your jealousy and your aversion is to your father, you're going to be reborn as a man. If your jealousy or your aversion is to your mother, you'll be reborn as a woman. So very Freudian here. You look at them and your syntax desire arises in you. And you just want to get between them. So you try to impose yourself driven by your craving, driven by your jealousy. It's amazing, isn't it? Even here, you're told, you can do something. The lama reading the text will say, look, see that couple differently. This is all going on in us. This is not real. This is all an apparition. See them as your teacher in spiritual union with his wisdom consort. See that couple as Avalokitesra, the Bodhisattva, in union with his consort. Make effort, develop love, develop pure perception. But don't go there. But if you can't do that, if you do go in between them, you swoon. You're reborn, you're conceived, and life, the cycle of life, begins anew. So these are the six bardos. So giving you a very quick overview, a very brief, very cursory overview. But I think, even with such a brief look at it, it's a quite extraordinary vision. It's quite a drama we're being presented with. I don't know if it's true. I've got no recollection myself of having gone through all this, so I'm not gonna be dogmatic about it, get into arguments about it. All I can say is it touches me very deeply. It resonates with me very deeply. Somehow it doesn't seem fantastic. It touches deep chords within me. Whatever it may be, the descriptions of the six bardos, tell us think very vividly what the bardo principle is. Bardo's are those moments, those times in our lives. When something dies away, and a kind of open space, a more flexible space is created. And in that space, when you first enter it, it can feel threatening. It could be that something very, very bad is going to happen. So it can feel threatening, frightening. But we could also feel at the same time, exhilaration, because something amazing could happen. It could be the entrance into spiritual transformation. Bardo's, I think, can open up in all kinds of ways. They can open up for us when there's the death of a loved one, somebody we love very much. We're very close to, and they die. You can't relate to things in the same way. When that happens, when it first happens, you do feel as though the ground has been kicked away. Life seems very, very different. It can happen when a longstanding relationship ends. Someone leaves us. Someone, we didn't realise how much we'd relied upon them. They've sort of become a part of us. We've made them a kind of refuge. And the earth seems to sort of shake. We don't know suddenly who we are anymore. They've gone, gone out of our lives. We can't get them back. We're in this new space without them. Sometimes a Bardo can be precipitated by the eruption of some deep spiritual experience. Some how or other, we have some sort of experience. And the world changes. We can't go on as we did before. We just can't do that. There's a space created by what has happened. It might happen through the encounter with a spiritual teacher, a spiritual friend. It might happen through illness, illness and the prospect of death. We've been going along in good health, you know, living our life. And then suddenly health is taken away. That creates a new space with all sorts of new things to relate to. Bardo's can open up because of the effects of steady spiritual practice over the years. It could be that a retreat works as a Bardo. The familiar is kicked away. We're in a different place. We're different people. We're different things being spoken about with a different routine, doing different practices, intensely concentrating on the dharma, on meditation, a new kind of space opens up. But one of the effects is this loss of ground, the loss of fixity. Anything could happen in this space. Spiritual life is about noticing Bardo's. Noticing them and entering into them creatively. Usually when the ground goes, we fall back on habitual patterns. We're going to see this quite vividly over the next few days. We fall back on habitual patterns. Our greed reasserts itself, our fear, our craving, our attachments, our confusion, reassert themselves so that we don't have to live with that open space. But we could use these Bardo's as moments of spaces where our deepest spiritual potential, where our Buddha potential, can find unhindered expression. At the beginning of this talk, I read the first of the root verses of the six Bardo's. And that verse described the Bardo of life. This human life itself is a Bardo. It's a space. It's an opening. This precious human life, this precious human existence is regarded in Buddhist tradition as something wonderful and rare and precious. We are human beings, conscious and aware. We can think, we can reflect, we can feel very fine feelings. We can talk, we can communicate. This is so extraordinary, but this tradition says. This is a very good condition, a perfect condition for spiritual life, for a creative life, a meaningful life. So the verse says, don't waste it. Don't be idle. Don't fritter your life away on meaningless activity. Don't fritter it away on consuming, on moaning, on complaining, on resentment, on deferring. Don't have a great future behind you, as Sanger actually once said. Do something meaningful with your life. You can do amazing things with this human life. You can enter the path, undistractively. You can follow the path of spiritual development, undistractively. Your deepest nature is your Buddha nature, your potential for enlightenment. So bring it forth. Develop it by following the path of study, reflection, and meditation. Study the Buddha's teachings. Study them. Reflect upon them. Turn them over in your mind. Follow them. Practice the ethical precepts. Practice meditation. And make the Buddha's teachings an actual living experience. In particular, begin to see the true nature of all experience, both inside and outside. See and know in your being the profound impermanence of all things. See how everything changes, how everything flows, how everything is a flow of ever-changing conditions, how nothing is fixed, how everything is insubstantial. See the emptiness of all things, which isn't a blank, not a nothing. See that everything is like an extraordinary vision. Realize enlightenment itself in its fullness. Realize the tree kaya, the three bodies, or better, the three dimensions of Buddhahood. Realize the dharma kaya, the emptiness of all things. Realize the sambhoga kaya, the luminosity of all things. Realize the nirmana kaya, the all-pervading compassion within all things. Realize these in unity as the true nature of experience. Of course, all this has to be worked for. We need to devote our lives as much as we can to continue a spiritual practice to realize this. We are all now in the bardo of life. Our lives are a space of extraordinary potential. So let's activate this space. Let's activate this potential for the benefit of everyone. If we do, we'll enter all bardos, the bardos of meditation, of dream, of death, of reality, of rebirth in the best possible way. We'll enter them without fear, but with confidence, with inspiration. We'll open up to whatever opens up. So I'll just read to conclude that verse on the bardo of life. Oh, now, when the bardo of life upon me is dawning, abandoning idleness, there being no time for idleness in this life, entering the path undistractively, studying, reflecting, and meditating, taking perception, experience, and the nature of mind as the path. May the tree chia be realized. Once that the human form has been attained, may there be no time or opportunity in which to idlet away. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freeputus.io.com/donate. And thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] You
