Understanding Life and Death through the Bardo Thodol
When I was 10, I was admitted to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. As I lay on a trolley being rolled into the operating theatre, a committed atheist at time, I comforted myself amidst my fear by thinking, “at least if I die, I won’t know about it.
Now, too many years on to freely admit, I have a very different notion of life and death.
My gurus taught me that life and death are the same thing. They are both part of the Great Light, or the Clear Light of Reality. The interval between life and death is called the Bardo Thodol, and it is a time when anything can happen.
The Bardo is broken up into three events:
The Chikhai Bardo: This is when the symptoms of death first appear, and the Great Light emerges.
The Chonyid Bardo: This is when a person runs from the Clear Light out of fear and takes refuge in the karmic conditions of their false identity.
The Sidpa Bardo: This is when a person selects the rebirth of their new body.
The process of movement through the Bardos is the same for everyone, regardless of religion or culture. However, different cultural factors will produce different mental conditioning, which will affect the appearance of the Bardo.
The most important thing at the moment of death is to recognize what is occurring. Death, like life, is a highly complex subject, often shrouded in ignorance, superstition, fear, confusion, and emotional affliction. These lead to errors in judgment, both in life and at the moment of death.
In life, emotions such as peace, joy, pain, and hope come and go as if in a parade. We are often deluded into believing in the immortality of life and thinking, “Death is far away.” We immerse ourselves in activities, youth, family, and work, convincing ourselves that death is distant. Yet, inevitably, death comes, and its drama unfolds swiftly.
When death strikes, the separation of the mind from the body and the absorption of the individual being back into the ocean of existence happens quickly. It is a force of nature, unstoppable by prayers or wishes. This event is often unprepared for because our culture tends to keep death at a distance, fostering superstition and ignorance.
The spiritual solution taught by my gurus and the basic thesis of the Bardo Thodol is that life and death are the same—they are conditions rising within the Great Light. Therefore, life should be used to prepare for the contact with death. All spiritual training is training for this—the dying of all moments of our lives.
Meditation, breath study, and listening to the So Hum mantra help prepare for this. The vibration of SO represents creation, HUM represents the Clear Light, and the interval between breaths is the Thodol, where we come into contact with the Clear Light.
The mechanics of breath—the in-breath and out-breath—carry the life force and the five-fold pranas: descending energy, ascending energy, cyclical revolutionary energy, expanding and contracting energies, and the energy of infusion. These energies produce the mechanics and stable connection of the apparent creation.
The raising of Bodhicitta, the awakened mind, is the recognition that the nature of the mind is enlightenment. By actively expressing this enlightenment in our behaviors and activities, we impact the quality of our life and death.
Your life and death mirror each other. The SO HUM mantra dominates life, and as death begins, everything starts to dissolve. All components of life and death arise within your own thought. This understanding highlights why being good is inherently understood as good. We create our lives through the quality of our thoughts and the activity of our minds and hearts.
