For the commonalty, this is the normal process; but for those very exceptional minds, possessed of great yogic know- ledge and enlightenment, only the more spiritual stages of the Bardo of the first few days will be experienced ; the most enlightened of yogis may escape all of the Bardo, passing into a paradise realm, or else reincarnating in this world as soon as the human body has been discarded, maintaining all the while unbroken continuity of consciousness.’ As men think, so are they, both here and hereafter, thoughts being things, the parents of all actions, good and bad alike; and, as the sowing has been, so will the harvest be.
If escape from the Intermediate State is not achieved, through rebirth into some other state—that of Hell being possible for the very exceptional evil-doer, though not for the ordinary person, who expiates normal moral delinquencies upon beine reborn as a human being—within the symbolic period of Forty-nine Days, a period whose actual duration is determined by karma, the deceased remains subject to all the armic illusions of the Bardo, blissful or miserable as the case may be, and progress is impossible. Apart from liberation by gaining Mirvana after death—thus cutting asunder for ever the karmic bonds of worldly or sangsaric existence in an illusionary body of propensities—the only hope for the ordinary person of reaching Buddhahood lies in being reborn as a human being; for birth in any other than the human world causes delay for one desirous of reaching the Final Goal.
1 This is borne out in the Pali 77-Pitaka, which records several instances of high deva rebirth immediately after death on the human plane.’—Cassius A. Pereira.
The After-Death Psychology 31
Vill. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BARDO VISIONS
Definite psychological significance attaches to each of the deities appearing in the Bardo Thédol; but, in order to grasp it, the student must bear in mind that—as suggested above— the apparitional visions seen by the deceased in the Inter- mediate State are not visions of reality, but nothing more than the hallucinatory embodiments of the thought-forms born of the mental-content of the percipient; or, in other words, they are the intellectual impulses which have assumed personified form in the after-death dream-state.
Accordingly, the Peaceful Deities (Tib. Z’c-wa) are the personified forms of the sublimest human sentiments, which proceed from the psychic heart-centre. As such, they are represented as the first to dawn, because, psychologically speaking, the heart-born impulses precede the brain-born impulses. They come in peaceful aspect to control and to influence the deceased whose connexion with the human world has just been severed; the deceased has left relatives and friends behind, works unaccomplished, desires unsatisfied, and, in most cases, he possesses a strong yearning to recover the lost opportunity afforded by human embodiment for spiritual enlightenment. But, in all his impulses and yearn- ings, karma is all-masterful; and, unless it be his Larmzc lot to gain liberation in the first stages, he wanders downwards into the stages wherein the heart-impulses give way to prain- impulses.
Whereas the Peaceful Deities are the personifications of the feelings, the Wrathful Deities (Tib. Z’o-wo) are the personi- fications of the reasonings and proceed from the psychic brain-centre. Yet, just as impulses arising in the heart-centre may transform themselves into the reasonings of the brain- centre, so the Wrathful Deities are the Peaceful Deities in a changed aspect.
As the intellect comes into activity, after the sublime heart- born impulses subside, the deceased begins to realize more and more the state in which he is; and with the supernormal faculties of the Bardo-body which he begins to make use of—
32 Introduction
in much the same manner as an infant new-born in the human world begins to employ the human plane sense-faculties—he is enabled to think how he may win this or that state of exis- tence. Karma is, however, still his master, and defines his limitations. As on the human plane the sentimental impulses are most active in youth and often lost in mature life, wherein reason commonly takes the place of them, so on the after-death plane, called the Bardo, the first experiences are happier than the later experiences.
From another aspect, the chief deities themselves aye the embodiments of universal divine forces, with which the deceased is inseparably related, for through him, as being the microcosm of the macrocosm, penetrate all impulses and forces, good and bad alike. Samanta-Bhadra, the All-Good, thus personifies Reality, the Primordial Clear Light of the Unborn, Unshaped Dharma- Kaya (cf. p. 95). Vairochana is the Originator of all pheno- mena, the Cause of all Causes. As the Universal Father, Vairochana manifests or spreads forth as seed, or semen, all things; his skaktz, the Mother of Great Space, is the Universal Womb into which the seed falls and evolves as the world- systems. Vajra-Sattva symbolizes Immutability. Ratna- Sambhava is the Beautifier, the Source of all Beauty in the Universe. Amitabha is Infinite Compassion and Love Divine, the Christos. Amogha-Siddhi is the personification of Al- mighty Power or Omnipotence. And the minor dcities, heroes, dakinis (or ‘ fairies’), goddesses, lords of death, rak- shasas, demons, spirits, and all others, correspond to definite human thoughts, passions, and impulses, high and low, human and sub-human and superhuman, in karmic form, as they take shape from the seeds of thought forming the percipient’s consciousness-content (cf. p. 219).
As the Bardo Théodol text makes very clear by repeated assertions, none of all these deities or spiritual beings has any real individual existence any more than have human beings: ‘It is quite sufficient for thee [ie. the deceased percipient] to know that these apparitions are [the reflections of] thine own thought-forms’ (p. 104). They are merely the consciousness-content visualized, by karmic agency, as appari-
THE APTER-DEATH PSYCHOLOGY oo
tional appearances in the Intermediate State—airy nothings woven into dreams.
The complete recognition of this psychology by the deceased sets him free into Reality. Therefore is it that the Bardo Thodol, as the name implies, is The Great Doctrine of Libera- ‘tion by Hearing and by Seeing.
The deceased human being becomes the sole spectator of a marvellous panorama of hallucinatory visions; each seed of thought in his consciousness-content armically revives ; and he, like a wonder-struck child watching moving pictures cast upon a screen, looks on, unaware, unless previously an adept in yoga, of the non-reality of what he sees dawn and set.
At first, the happy and glorious visions born of the seeds of the impulses and aspirations of the higher or divine nature awe the uninitiated ; then, as they merge into the visions born of the corresponding mental elements of the lower or animal nature, they terrify him, and he wishes to flee from them; but, alas, as the text explains, they are inseparable from himself, and to whatsoever place he may wish to flee they will follow him.
It is not necessary to suppose that all the dead in the Inter- mediate State experience the same phenomena, any more than all the living do in the human world, or in dreams. The Bardo Thodol is merely typical and suggestive of all after. death experiences. It merely describes in detail what is assumed will be the Bardo visualizations of the consciousness- content of the ordinary devotee of the Red Hat School of Padma Sambhava. As a man is taught, so he believes. Thoughts being things, they may be planted like seeds in the mind of the child and completely dominate his mental content. Given the favourable soil of the will to believe, whether the seed-thoughts be sound or unsound, whether they be of pure superstition or of realizable truth, they take root and flourish, and make the man what he is mentally.
Accordingly, for a Buddhist of some other School, as for a Hindu, or a Moslem, or a Christian, the Bardo experiences would be appropriately different: the Buddhist’s or the Hindu’s thought-forms, as in a dream state, would give rise to corre- sponding visions of the deities of the Buddhist or Hindu
34 Introduction
pantheon; a Moslem’s, to visions of the Moslem Paradise ; a Christian’s, to visions of the Christian Heaven, or an American Indian’s to visions of the Happy Hunting Ground. And, similarly, the materialist will experience after-death visions as negative and as empty and as deityless as any he ever dreamt while in the human body. Rationally con- sidered, each person’s after-death experiences, as the Bardo Thodol teaching implies, are entirely dependent upon his or her own mental content. In other words, as explained above, the after-death state is very much like a dream state, and its dreams are the children of the mentality of the dreamer. This psychology scientifically explains why devout Christians, for example, have had—if we are to accept the testimony of Christian saints and seers—visions (in a trance or dream state, or in the after-death state) of God the Father seated on a throne in the New Jerusalem, and of the Son at His side, and of all the Biblical scenery and attributes of Heaven, or of the Virgin and Saints and Archangels, or of Purgatory and Hell.
In other words, the Bardo Thidol seems to be based upon verifiable data of human physiological and psychological experiences; and it views the problem of the after-death state as being purely a psycho-physical problem; and is, therefore, in the main, scientific. It asserts repeatedly that what the percipient on the Bardo plane sees is due entirely to his own mental-content ; that there are no visions of gods or of demons, of heavens or of hells, other than those born of the hallucinatory karmic thought-forms constituting his per- sonality, which is an impermanent product arising from the thirst for existence and from the will to live and to believe.
From day to day the Bardo visions change, concomitant with the eruption of the thought-forms of the percipient, until their karmic driving force exhausts itself; or, in other words, the thought-forms, born of habitual propensities, being mental records comparable as has already been suggested to records on a cinema-film, their reel running to its end, the after- death state ends, and the Dreamer, emerging from the womb, begins to experience anew the phenomena of the human world.
Pheapter-Death Psychology 35
The @zble of the Christians, like the Koran of the Moslems, never seems to consider that the spiritual experiences in the form of hallucinatory visions by prophet or devotee, reported therein, may, in the last analysis, not be real. But the Bardo Thodol is so sweeping in its assertions that it leaves its reader with the clear-cut impression that every vision, without any exception whatsoever, in which spiritual beings, gods or demons, or paradises or places of torment and purgation play a part, in a Bardo or any Bardo-like dream or ecstasy, is purely illusionary, being based upon sangsaric phenomena.
The whole aim of the Bardo Thodol teaching, as otherwise stated elsewhere, is to cause the Dreamer to awaken into Reality, freed from all the obscurations of karmic or sangsaric illusions, in a supramundane or Wirvdnic state, beyond all phenomenal paradises, heavens, hells, purgatories, or worlds of embodiment. In this way, then, it is purely Buddhistic and unlike any non-Buddhist book in the world, secular or religious.
Ix. the Judgement
The Judgement Scene as described in our text and that described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead seem so much alike in essentials as to suggest that common origin, at present unknown, to which we have already made reference. In the Tibetan version, Dharma-Raja (Tib. Shznje-chho-gyal) King of the Dead (commonly known to Theravadists as Yama- Raja), the Buddhist and Hindu Pluto, as a Judge of the Dead, corresponds to Osiris in the Egyptian version. In both versions alike there is the symbolical weighing: before Dharma-Raja there are placed on one side of the balance black pebbles and on the other side white pebbles, sym- bolizing evil and good deeds; and similarly, before Osiris, the heart and the feather (or else in place of the feather an image of the Goddess of Truth which it symbolizes) are weighed one against the other, the heart representing the conduct or conscience of the deceased and the feather righteousness or truth,
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the deceased, addressing his heart, says: ‘Raise not thyself in evidence against me.