Bardo and Transition
Craving stability in our living arrangements, our food sources, our political and governing state as well as our personal security is a natural enough thing, truly. As babies, this is something we are instinctually driven to do, find food, find our mother’s voice, her smell, her face, her love.
The problem with this is that any stability, any security, is an illusion.
If you open your eyes to this, then you should take the next step and understand how best to view the state of being that is non-stability – transition.
The Buddhists, being the deep thinkers that they have been these past 2,600 years, have a name for the state of transition – Bardo or antarabhava in Sanskrit.
Just as the Inuit, who live in a world of cold, ice, and snow, have many names for snow and ice, Buddhists – who live in a world of honesty relating to our illusions and how we relate to illusion and “reality” and transition – have broken down transitional states into six different types.
- Shinay bardo (Tibetan) – birth and life
- Milam bardo (T) – the dream state
- Samten bardo (T) – meditation
- Chikkhai bardo (T) – the moment of death
- Chönyid bardo (T) – the luminosity of the true nature which commences after the final ‘inner breath’ (available to those who have practiced meditation)
- Sidpai bardo (T) – becoming or transmigration (time between last breath and first breath in next life)
Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede at the Rochester Zen Center (Philip Kapleau’s lineage and home center) did a fantastic teisho on bardo and our present transition time in his December 8th, 2008 podcast that you can listen to at this link (iTunes).
To me the deeply important lesson we must learn is that surviving and thriving through transition requires us to avoid attachment, attachment that will force our ego to hold onto the old even though it has slipped from it’s grasp.
Once it has passed away, the ego is left with illusion and maintaining that illusion is deeply harmful for the growth of the ego to a less suffering state of being.
We Americans are ALL about attachment – it is how a capitalistic individualistic system works, how it thrives. Just because this is the way we have been aculturated, doesn’t mean that this is the best thing for us. It is exactly the wrong worldview for the hard work ahead as we are all forced to power down in a carbon-reduced world.
Quite the opposite. We have traveled just about as far as we can on this fossil fuel bonanza of orgiastic consumerism and debt dollars. Without these things, our way of life will become an illusion that is no longer possible.
Make no mistake, recognition that our worldview makes us blind to the perils of our age doesn’t mean we will magically escape those perils and not suffer.
I know that I am quite deeply attached to many people and to my homestead. I also know that there are many unperceived or dimly perceived attachments that surround me and my family.
I have stood in my garden on warm sunny days in the midst of the abundance, the fruits of so many months of labor and have tried to imagine doing the same in some post-apocalyptic time where chaos has come to distant cities and relatives. Even if we had some how magically survived those times largely intact, our home wired for solar, water well managed, food in abundance, a local economy that provided us with off-homestead things – would I be able to release everything that defined “America” even though those things were never really something I aspired to? (great wealth, vacations, huge houses, second homes, fantastically expensive educations, high paying stressful jobs, excessive power consumption, etc).
Its a continuum, a process. I would prefer to do this on deep levels as well as in the outer world so that I am not coping with surprise even as I cope with loss. I fear that surprise will always be a part of it, expect it.
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