consciousness, in the case of the ordinary person deceased, is believed to be thus in a sleep or trance-state, unaware, as a rule, that it has been separated from the human-plane body. This period is the First Bardo, called the Chikhai Bardo (Tib. Hchi-khahi Bar-do), or ‘Transitional State of the Moment of Death’, wherein dawns the Clear Light, first in primordial purity, then the percipient, being unable to recognize it, that is to say, to hold on to and remain in the transcendental state of the unmodified mind concomitant with it, perceives it karmically obscured, which is its secondary aspect. When the First Bardo ends, the Knower, awakening to the fact that death has occurred, begins to experience the Second Bardo, called the Chönyid Bardo (Tib. Chös-nyid Bar-do), or ‘Transitional State of [the Experiencing or Glimpsing of] Reality’; and this merges into the Third Bardo, called the Sidpa (or Sidpai) Bardo (Tib. Srid-pahi Bar-do), or ‘Transitional State of [or while seeking] Rebirth’, which ends when the principle of consciousness has taken rebirth in the human or some other world, or in one of the paradise realms.
As explained in Section III, above, the passing from one Bardo to another is analogous to the process of birth; the Knower wakes up out of one swoon or trance state and then another, until the Third Bardo ends. On his awakening in the Second Bardo, there dawn upon him in symbolic visions, one by one, the hallucinations created by the karmic reflexes of actions done by him in the earth-plane body. What he has thought and what he has done become objective: thought-forms, having been consciously visualized and allowed to take root and grow and blossom and produce, now pass in a solemn and mighty panorama, as the consciousness-content of his personality.[1]
In the Second Bardo, the deceased is, unless otherwise enlightened, more or less under the delusion that although
- ↑ Some of the more learned lāmas—chiefly of the Gelugpa, or Yellow-Hat Sect—believe that the highly symbolic visions of the one hundred and ten principal deities of the Chönyid Bardo are seen only by devotees of some spiritual advancement who have studied Tantricism; and that the ordinary person when deceased will have visions more like those described in the Sidpa Bardo.
