One of the best preparations for the bardos is learning about them.

Study the map and you will recognize the territory. Studying the bardos is like installing a psychic GPS.

After death, you will know where you are and what you need to do.

Learning about the bardos establishes the proper view. This view allows you to see your way through the darkness of death and to eliminate fear.

It also inspires you to do the meditation that prepares you for death, to go beyond understanding into direct experience.

The confidence born from view and meditation then leads to the fruition of action. With a stable mind cultivated by view and meditation, we can benefit ourselves and others because now we know what to do.

This trilogy of view, meditation, and action is a central teaching for how to progress along the spiritual path.

The Tibetan word for meditation is gom, which means “to become familiar with” – the central theme of this book, Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition.

Meditation is about becoming familiar with every aspect of your mind.

This is important because, as we have seen, the journey through the bardos is really a journey of the mind. It is a journey through the mind, through both its wisdom and confusion.

Learning to face death is therefore learning how to face ourselves.

By becoming familiar with the bardos through study, we’re becoming familiar with our mind. And by becoming familiar with our mind through meditation, we’re becoming familiar with the bardos.

Death is never the enemy. Ignorance and unfamiliarity are the only enemies. Practice and study defeat this enemy.

The confused aspects of our mind die during the bardo of dying, the wisdom aspects are revealed during the bardo of dharmata, and the confused aspects are reborn in the bardo of becoming. This is why people experience the bardos differently.

[Note: In the first phase of the bardo of dharmata, when the nature of mind is laid bare, Buddhism asserts that what is revealed is the same for everyone, but it is not experienced the same way. The nature of mind is the experience of emptiness, which means that the experience is empty of any surface structures. It is formless. There is nothing but formless awareness, raw and naked mind itself, before any conceptual or cultural clothing is placed upon it. No-thing is obscuring the nature of mind. For most people, this no-thingness (emptiness), even though it is revealed, is actually not experienced. Unless you have some familiarity with emptiness before you die, it is “experienced” as no experience, i.e., you black out. It’s the same thing that happens when we fall into deep dreamless sleep, which for most people is simply unconsciousness. It’s only when the mind moves away from its naked, empty, and formless nature and starts to put on the clothes of habitual pattern that experience becomes conscious. This is where the difference between consciousness and wisdom is important. Dualistic consciousness (ego) is always dualistic; it always perceives something “other.” Wisdom is non-dualistic. The reason we go unconscious in dreamless sleep and death is because these domains are non-dualistic – there is literally no-thing to experience. Formless awareness either recognizes itself, which is wisdom, or it does not. Dualistic consciousness (ego) goes blank when non-dualistic wisdom is revealed.]

And this is why we should never let any map, no matter how sophisticated, constrict the experience of the territory.

When the mind is liberated from the body, it is seven to nine times clearer. This opaque statement in the bardo literature is clarified in Thrangu Rinpoche’s comments below. It suggests that instructions heard now can be recalled after death.

Thrangu Rinpoche says:

“Having heard these [bardo] instructions will have placed a certain habit or imprint in your mind and you will recall this imprint when you reach that phase of the bardo. For example, when you find yourself in the bardo of becoming, you will notice what is happening and you will think, ‘Oh, wait a second, I have heard about this; let’s see, I’m supposed to do such and such when such and such happens.’

And that will obviously benefit you tremendously … [Bardo instructions] are particularly helpful to you at that time when you are in the most danger and are undergoing the most stress and terror – in other words, when you need them the most.” [Thrangu Rinpoche. Journey of the Mind: Putting the Teachings on the Bardo into Effective Practice. Vancouver, B.C.: Karme Thekchen Choling, 1997.]

You may not feel that you’ll be able to remember these instructions in the bardo and resign yourself to a difficult journey, but, Rinpoche continues,

“[since] you have no corporeal body, your mind is the most powerful thing in your experience; therefore, virtuous states of mind and states of meditative absorption and so on have much more power in the bardo than in our ordinary lives. … All of these types of meditation will have much more power and be much clearer in the bardo. …”

Fear is always associated with the unknown and the unfamiliar. Fear and ignorance are virtually synonymous.

Through our study and practice, we remove the darkness of ignorance that surrounds death and transform fear into fearlessness.

This is the job of Manjushri, the deity of wisdom. His wrathful manifestation is called Yamantaka, the “destroyer of Yama.” Yama is the embodiment of death.

So Yamantaka, uncompromising and almost wrathful wisdom, is how we can conquer death. In other words, we conquer and transform death by becoming familiar with it.

One of the reasons it’s difficult to leave this world is because we’re so familiar with it. It’s all we know. Even though it’s samsara, we feel snug and secure in its ways, and these ways are hard to abandon. Conversely, one of the reasons it’s difficult to enter the next world is because it’s so unfamiliar. We don’t know it at all.

Even though it presents great opportunities for enlightenment, we’re afraid to step into the unknown. So too much familiarity with this world, and not enough with the next, is what makes this transition difficult.

In other words, too much familiarity with our superficial confusion and not enough familiarity with our innate wisdom – both of which are revealed in the bardos – is the basis for a rough journey after death.

This lack of familiarity is what shoots us out of the bardo of dharmata and into the bardo of becoming – and therefore back into samsara. It’s the basis of reincarnation.

Do we choose wisdom, which is brilliant and unfamiliar, and wake up?

Or confusion, which is cozy and familiar, and fall back asleep?

Learning about the bardos is also more than just learning about death. They are a condensation of the entire path.

This means that a concordant experience of the bardos occurs in a microcosmic form every night when we “die” into sleep and are “reborn” the next morning; it also occurs between the birth and death of every thought. Studying the bardos helps us not only to have a good death but to lead a good life.

Source: Based on Holecek, Andrew. Preparing to Die. Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

by