Facing Monsters And Demons In The Gap
‘Bardo’ means gap, and literally translates as in-between state or interval.
It is the space between the end of one moment and the beginning of the next.
While Westerners most commonly associate the term bardo with the gap between death and rebirth, bardos happen at every single moment of our lives. Any time we experience a gap where our usual habits, routines or certainties break down, we are in a bardo.
In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the terrifying, wrathful deities and monstrous illusions that appear are not external, malicious entities. They are the personification of our own unrefined karma, suppressed fears, attachments and mental habits.
If we don’t recognise them as aspects of our own projections, we flee from them in terror, which instinctively drives us into the next moment, or another cycle of rebirth (samsara).
However, if we can look directly at a wrathful illusion and realise, “This is nothing but my own mind”, the illusion dissolves, and liberation is achieved on the spot.
Whether it’s viewed as a literal afterlife experience or a profound metaphor for an emotional experience, the lesson of the bardo remains identical: the only way through the monster is to stop treating it like a stranger.
