Tibetan Book Of The Dead: Bardo Of Clear Light

From the podcast Letting Grow: Buddhist teachings like the Tibetan Book of the Dead describe four transitions, called bardo states, that we pass through in the process of death and rebirth. The bardo of clear light is the one moment in our life-death-and-rebirth cycle when we naturally have a direct experience of our true nature. It’s a moment we can prepare for during this lifetime by getting in the habit of noticing and appreciating the glimpses we get of our deeper nature.

Transcript

Hi friends,

Welcome to today's episode of Letting Grow.

In this episode I want to talk a little bit about one of the most amazing teachings found in Tibetan Buddhism,

In my opinion,

Which is about the Bardo of Clear Light.

And that is when basically we come face to face with our own true nature.

And if we have been trying our entire lives through contemplative practice to realize our own nature,

This is when it just naturally happens.

And if we haven't been trying our whole lives to realize this,

It happens anyway.

So it's a really cool moment in the life and death and rebirth cycle.

And I think it has a lot of implications for how we live.

So thank you and I hope you enjoy today's episode.

Welcome to Letting Grow,

The podcast about one of the spiritual journey's most difficult and courageous moments,

Letting go of who we think we should be so we can grow into who we most deeply are.

I'm your host,

Claire Villareal,

And I appreciate your joining me today.

In the previous teaching episode,

Which was on the Bardo of death,

And of course Bardo just means in between state,

So these are all descriptions of moments in our life and death and rebirth cycle coming from Tibetan Buddhism,

When we go through big changes.

So at the end of the last teaching episode,

We talked about or I talked about and probably you listen to the way that the five elements,

Which the Tibetan tradition believes kind of compose our being our body,

Our energy,

And our mind,

Those five elements have all broken down at the end of the death process.

And just by way of review,

Those five elements are the earth element,

Water,

Fire,

Wind or air,

And then finally space.

So in that order,

They break down because that's the order from sort of grossest like most substantial,

Which is the earth element down to the least substantial,

Which is space.

Basically space is defined in this tradition as the lack of obstructive contact.

So that is very daggum subtle.

And as you may remember,

Last time we talked about these three different layers of our being,

Which I just quickly referred to,

Which is the physical body,

The energetic body,

And the mind.

And we talked about how all of those basically are driven by these five elements.

So in the Tibetan theory,

Which is coming out of Indian theory and probably influenced maybe by some further East Asian medical theory,

Basically,

If we're talking for instance about the earth element,

Then our body,

Like the bones and teeth and like the really solid,

Hard elements of our body are made of the earth element.

And then if we talk about our energy circulation,

This one's maybe a little bit harder to relate to for Westerners.

So I'll talk about it in terms of like emotions.

If we think about the earth element in our emotional system,

Then that would be when we're feeling grounded,

Stable,

We feel,

You know,

Replete with good qualities,

Or we feel like we're just we're just enough.

So that'd be like a balanced earth element in the way that it manifests in our emotional life.

And Tibetans would describe it more in energetic terms.

But if you're familiar with the tradition,

You probably already know that.

And if you're not familiar with the tradition,

It's maybe not super helpful for me to describe it that way.

And then the subtlest part of ourselves,

Our mind has its own like,

Very subtle aspect of the earth element,

Which again has to do with stability and the ability to rest the mind and not just have it blown everywhere.

So basically,

Our whole being is made up of these five elements.

And during the death process,

All of them have stopped circulating.

And what that means is that our ordinary way of knowing ourselves has stopped working.

Because these five elements are really what support our conventional our ordinary sense of self.

So basically,

At the end of the death process,

Everything that supports our ordinary sense of self is gone.

Our physical body has died,

Our energetic body,

The energy is no longer circulating,

It's died.

And our ordinary mind is also gone because our ordinary mind,

Of course,

Rests on this subtle form of the circulation of energy of the five elements.

And the thing about the ordinary mind dissolving at the end of the death process is that our five senses break down so we can no longer see we can no longer hear and smell etc.

So our way of knowing the external world is gone.

And at the same time,

Our ability to hold conceptual thoughts is also gone.

So if I just described that,

And you basically just thought,

Oh,

That sounds like everything that just sounds like me,

I am gone,

I am dead,

That's it,

Kaput,

Like finished,

What else could there be?

So this is a good moment,

Maybe for me to mention that in the Tibetan description of mind,

There are two layers of mind.

And if you're coming from sort of a traditional Western education,

We basically only talk about one which is the conventional layer of the mind.

And that is our all of our sense perceptions and our thoughts and our ordinary way of cognition.

And that is exactly what dies during the death process.

But the thing that's really cool about this description of a human person coming from the Indian and Tibetan traditions is it actually talks in kind of a lot of detail about a deeper level of who we always are.

It's just this deeper level is usually obscured by our ordinary mind and our ordinary sense of self.

So this deeper level is our ultimate mind,

It's our ultimate self,

Which is not going to dissolve at the time of death,

Because there's nothing substantial about it to dissolve.

So I'm basically talking now about Buddha nature.

And the way this is described is that Buddha nature or ultimate mind is beyond thought.

It's beyond duality.

It's beyond anything basically we can conceive of with an ordinary mind.

There's actually a famous verse in the Bodhicharya vatara,

The guide to the bodhisattvas way of life,

That states that basically,

Ultimate mind is beyond the grasp of conventional mind.

So while we are coming from a place of this embodied mind,

Unless we're like enlightened or whatever,

In which case you're probably not listening to this podcast.

So like for the rest of us,

If we're coming from a state of ordinary mind,

There's no way we can understand even like teachings on ultimate mind.

Like if the teachings were completely accurate,

Which they couldn't be in human words,

Because it's beyond words.

So it's kind of hard to talk about Buddha nature actually.

But that's why we have meditation practice because you cannot convey in words or in any other conceptual symbols,

What Buddha nature is,

You actually just have to experience it.

And that is what the Buddhist path is really all about from its earliest stages when you're learning about the cycle of death and rebirth called samsara,

Or you're learning about karma,

Like all these basic,

All these basic ideas are there to help us progress down the path so that sooner or later,

We can sort of stumble across an experience of reality as it is for ourselves,

Because no one can give that to us.

No one can describe it to us in language is going to be accurate.

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Now let's get back to the good stuff.

And that's part of what is so cool about the Bardo of clear light.

This is a time in our life and death and rebirth cycle when we naturally have immediate direct access to our own Buddha nature,

Which like from a Buddhist perspective is the coolest thing in the entire world because we might train an entire lifetime or a series of lifetimes just hoping to get a glimpse of our true nature and it happens automatically when we die.

So why isn't everyone enlightened?

Well the downside of the teachings on the Bardo of clear light is that if you haven't trained to recognize your true nature while you're alive,

It's not super likely that you're going to recognize it during the death process because it won't be familiar.

The way the tradition describes the Bardo of clear light,

It's sort of like a moment.

If we haven't recognized our own true nature,

Haven't even really tried to identify with our ultimate nature instead of our conventional nature,

Like during our entire life,

Then it just passes like a moment.

We don't get to rest in it.

We don't get to experience it.

It's just some kind of weird overwhelming thing that happens and if we don't recognize it,

It's like we pass out and then when we wake up into the Bardo of becoming,

Which is what the next teaching episode will be on,

We don't even remember that we had this experience of like being non dually present to ours ultimate nature.

So that's kind of tragic honestly to think that if we're not prepared for this,

Not only do we not get the full benefit of it,

But we don't even remember that we had that moment as we pass through this Bardo of clear light.

So what I've just described is a pretty condensed account of the Bardo of clear light.

If you want a much more detailed,

Much more traditional account of this,

I highly recommend reading the chapter about the Bardo of clear light in Mind Beyond Death by Dzogchen Pounleprompiche.

It's a really great book and it'll get you much deeper into a description of this process.

So let's say that you've gone through the Bardo of clear light and you haven't like realized that this is in fact your own nature,

Which would make you basically a Buddha.

You'd be enlightened like game over,

No more Bartos.

You're just like,

I don't know,

Enlightened.

So if you haven't had that experience,

Then you kind of black out,

You wake up,

You're in the next Bardo state.

This topic of the Bardo of clear light,

Our Buddha nature,

The ways that we can really maximize our passage through this Bardo state,

These are some really important teachings in the Tibetan presentation of the Bardo state of the death process.

And I know for me,

It's easy to feel like these teachings really are oriented toward pretty advanced practitioners because they are.

And there is some very,

You know,

Esoteric tantric teachings and teachings in the Dzogchen tradition and other traditions about what you can do in terms of practice during your lifetime so that during this Bardo state,

You have the best possible chance of recognizing your true nature and achieving Buddhahood.

But for the rest of us,

If we're not going to be doing super esoteric practices anytime soon,

It turns out that plain old ordinary meditation,

Like we might already be doing,

Actually can be a really great gateway into beginning to notice moments of our experience,

Moments of our mind when we are closer to ultimate mind,

And we have a little bit less obscuration from conventional mind.

One thing that surprised me as I was reading back through Mind Beyond Death,

This most recent time,

It's a book I keep going back to,

Is that Dzogchen Punlamp Rinpoche really talks in different places in the book about how some of the basic skills of meditation,

Like mindfulness,

The ability to rest the mind on an object,

The ability to cultivate special insight or vipassana,

Like all of those can be really helpful actually going through the entire death and rebirth process.

And this bardo is no different if we practice even something simple like calm abiding meditation,

The ability to rest the mind on an object,

We will have moments,

Maybe in between thoughts you could say.

So our conventional mind is less activated,

It's less sort of front and center in our experience and that opens a little more space for us to notice something deeper,

Something more profound,

For us to really have little tiny glimpses of something more like our ultimate nature.

And I know that that's important in a meditation practice in general.

And it can feel really wonderful to begin to have those little glimpses or to notice even the moments we've always had since we were a little kid like to notice,

Oh,

Right,

I think that's what they're talking about when they say like the mind in between thoughts.

Those moments feel great as part of a meditation practice.

But what I didn't fully grasp until I was rereading Mind Beyond Death this time is that those moments are also if we take them this way,

They can also be preparation for the death and rebirth process.

So if you're doing your meditation,

Just,

You know,

Five minutes of mindfulness meditation and you have a moment when you are settled and calm and it just feels more real than most daily experience,

It's just less muddled than like trying to check things off our to-do list for the day.

It's actually really helpful not to underestimate that,

To recognize that we're seeing something that is real within ourselves and to be able to honor that and to stay with it as long as it naturally lasts and to not turn away from it because it happens,

Say,

Outside of a meditation session or,

You know,

Just in the middle of doing something else.

If we can recognize those moments more often in daily life,

We are more likely to recognize them when we are dead.

Or I mean,

I guess you're not dead if you're like going through the death and rebirth process.

There's still obviously something there,

But like to recognize them in a state as disorienting as the bardo of clear light when nothing familiar from our previous lifetime is there to orient us.

So I just want to underscore the importance of these practices that we may already be doing and not to discount them because they're not these super esoteric practices and like oh,

I have no preparation for the death process.

Actually being able to bring your mind back to what's happening and not freak out is really important for the death and rebirth process according to traditional teachings.

So there are two main points that I hope you can take away from this episode and just experiment with them in your life.

See what happens when you approach life and contemplative practice in this way.

And the first one is that there in fact is a deeper layer to us than just our ordinary sense of self,

Our ordinary mind,

Our body.

I recognize especially for Westerners,

It can be hard to take this in.

But if we had grown up in a different culture,

This would just be so obvious we wouldn't even have to say it.

Like of course we have,

You know,

An energy system.

Of course we have Buddha nature within us.

And of course we can access that.

So that's the first thing.

If you have these intimations that there's more to you,

Go with it.

Like trust your experience because there is.

And the second key takeaway is not to underestimate so-called basic practices by thinking that only like the really advanced secret practices are going to help us at the time of death and rebirth.

Because in fact,

Any practice that we've done is really helpful.

And to broaden it out too,

It's not like we're just practicing for the time of death.

Like any practice we do.

And especially the more we can recognize that like deep sacred aspect of ourselves,

It just pays huge dividends for this lifetime too.

I mean,

There's no guarantee that anything happens after this.

So really shouldn't we be focused on the benefits that we're getting out of practice in this lifetime?

But we can also be holding in mind that larger context and making aspirations for the death and rebirth process.

And I think even having that aspiration for our literal death and rebirth process,

If that's a thing that makes sense to you,

Can make it that much easier to then face the big transitions in life because often our reluctance to face those comes from the fear of death at some deep level.

You found this episode helpful,

Please share it.

Now you have something to think about and reflect on and see if it adds some value to your life during this upcoming week.

And I hope it does.

And I hope you enjoyed this episode.

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