Transcending Madness
The Experience of the Six Bardos
By Chögyam Trungpa
“Bardo is a Tibetan word: bar
means ‘in between’ or, you could say,
‘no-man’s land,’ and do is like a tower or
an island in that no-man’s land. It’s like a flowing river
which belongs neither to the other shore nor to this shore, but there
is a little island in the middle, in between. In other words, it is
present experience, the immediate experience of nowness—where
you are, where you’re at. That is the basic idea of
bardo.”
So begins Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s teaching on the six
bardos, the six realms of being, and their connections with
the five elemental emotions.
The bardo teachings are most commonly thought of as being primarily
connected with experience after death. The six realms—including
heaven and hell—are commonly considered to be physical places in
which one may take re-birth. In this book, Trungpa Rinpoche presents
the Dzogchen inner vision of the bardos and realms as
mind-states that occur moment-by-moment in everyday life as
well as in the after-death state. This discussion further develops
the presentation of these doctrines that he began in Cutting Through Spiritual
Materialism.
Our experience of the present moment is always coloured by one of
six mind-states: the god realm (bliss), the jealous god realm
(jealousy and lust for entertainment), the human realm (passion and
desire), the animal realm (ignorance), the hungry ghost realm (poverty
and possessiveness), and the hell realm (aggression and hatred). This
psychological categorisation opens up the possibility that we can
recognise, in every moment, in which realm we are operating.
Having done so, we can liberate the ‘madness’ of neurotic
emotions into their intrinsic non-dual nature. In
the heightened moment of each bardo, Dzogchen presents an
opportunity to liberate daily experience into freedom.
This is not an easy book – even though the actual language is
not difficult. However, for those who want to understand bardo and
re-birth as a practical means of altering life, it is essential.
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