239: The Tibetan Book of the Dead

on what happens next. And as I started getting deeper into this, I realized there was so much intrigue with the Tibetan Book of the Dead that I decided I wanted to narrow my focus on this, and maybe we could even expand more in later episodes about other systems of death in the afterlife, like maybe the Egyptian Book

of the Dead or the Book of Coming forth by day. Also, maybe we could look into like the Catholic model of death and purgatory and things like the Divine Comedy or popularly known as Dante's Inferno, because I think that's a very interesting story and we find in that, in my view, that there's a relation between specifically the Divine Comedy and the description of navigating the circles of hell and what it's like being in the layers of Bardo. According to

the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So as I got to digging into this topic, I thought it would be one episode, and I realized it could be many episodes talking about death and the transition of that passage into the afterlife. So I was like, oh, you know, let's just start here and see where it goes. And I also found I've actually been putting this off for a few months. Alex had an idea two or three maybe even three months ago that was like, we should do an episode on purgatory, and I was like, I don't

know if I'm ready for that. It's a great idea, but I just don't know how it fits right now. So I kept pushing it back and pushing it back and pushing it back. And I think, Alex, you wanted me to more or less at least acknowledge that we've been on a generational run since October. I believe where I haven't explicitly said this out loud on the show, but every topic we've done in the last however many months,

has been since October. I've very, very intentionally been pulling a thread going between these topics with a lot of thoughtful consideration. They've not been random like oftentimes in the past when we're like, what are we talk about this week? I don't know, Star Wars? You know what I mean. It's not been random, and it's actually been a very intentional thread of things that I've want to discuss that

I believe lead from one thing into the next. And that's why I kept pushing The after or the purgatory was how it was first presented, So I kept pushing that back for months, maybe since November. I was like, I'm just not ready for that. And then a few weeks ago I said, wait a minute, but we could expand that conversation. It could be about the afterlife more generally, and that includes purgatory. So I was thinking, yeah, so

I'll just focus on the afterlife. And then as I started investigating for the first time I ever mind you, I've never read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Once I read it today and then started diving it more into it, I realized, this is a profound It's every bit as profound as they say, but it's another thing entirely when you read it firsthand as always of course, and I realized, wow, this is perfectly on the thread. It's not an afterlife or a purgatory episode, but it's

deeper than that. It's yeah, yeah, So I guess I'll just get into it. But before we start the topic, I have a few things that I need to mention. Starting off with my friend Melissa Caine from Wisconsin. I'm not sure what city she lives in, but she is hosting and Delavan Wisconsin the Contact Modalities XPO. This year's theme is going to be Harmonic Ascension twenty twenty six. There's going to be thirty to forty presenters at the

very same location as last time. So folks who have been there and are in the know, you already know that it's this incredible, beautiful cabin resort on Lake Lawn. Is that right? That sounds right, Lake Lawn on lake something like that. There's fricking hundreds of lakes in Wisconsin and they're huge and they're amazing. But the conference is amazing.

There's going to be multiple sky watches, four to be exact, three of which can be accessed three purchasing a ticket, and then the fourth one we're going to be doing a giveaway, and this is a private VIP SkyWatch where the forty exclusive participants will be busted off location to a secret area to do a more intimate SkyWatch experience. So there's going to be up to four skywatches, with the first three being general public, and they handle tiers

of tickets to pay very careful attention. If you want to do the SkyWatch with my dad and with Alex and with my siblings, look at the ticket tiers and make sure that that benefit is on there. There's going to be some other amazing presenters in addition to my dad. Alex will be there, my siblings, but very good friends of mine and people that I love, like Megan solar Glow, She's been on the show. Dahlia Overgone and her daughter, they'll be there. Diane Hennessy Powell a friend of mine

and I'm a huge fan of hers. It goes multiple ways there how I consider her a friend, but I'll so I consider myself a fan, you know. So I'm just saying, these are people that you don't want to miss. And there's so many more with things like sound bowls, gong baths, DMT, psychedelic experts, chigong practitioners, remote viewing, mindsight with Dalia, telepathy with her daughter. It goes on and on. You don't want to miss this. Hit me with the website,

alex Contact Modalities, XPO dot com. Awesome, oh, honorable mention, spoon bending, dowsing. I'm a big fan of dowsing and pendulum. I'm also a big fan of pendulum. I like to use a pendulum for dowsing. Right, they're interchangeable. But anyway, and then the last few things I want to talk about here, I know is just that you know, we've got these things that we got to hit before we get on track.

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And the more I got into the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I realized that it was every bit as profound as the hype that I have been hearing over the years. And I've always been curious about Tibetan Buddhism, but not really having an idea of like where to begin and why it's so profound compare to like other versions of Buddhism. It's just so new to me and unfamiliar because I grew up from a very Western Christian lens without any sort of exposure to Eastern mystical practices

until my adult life. And then looking at that is like literally trying to learn another language. It's all words and you know, Sanskrit or Hindi or whatever other language that I'm like, I don't even know what any of this stuff means, but there's something about it that fascinates me.

Where do I begin? You know what I'm saying. It's like you need a Rosetta stone to translate all of these things to And then again it's like there's thousands of years of history that you don't really learn about there, and the creation of these systems and how they offshoot into other systems. Long story short, a very good friend and a mentor of mine distilled it to me in

a recent conversation. You know, if you want to expand upon your rule of life and up your meditation practice, something that you should look into is Vadrayana Buddhism or Tantra protocols or what is also known as jog chin the rainbow light body, the rainbow body, the light body, it's the same thing. I was like, Okay, yeah, these are things that I've always thought were interesting, but that

narrows my focus a bit. So I started diving into rabbit holes after that conversation last week, and it took me down the path to Shaivism, which I'm not going to at length talk about today. I want to do a whole other episode about that in Tantra and more specifically expand upon Tantra. But what I found very curious was this notion that there is a connection between Shivik Hinduism,

which is basically Shiva as the supreme being. So Shivik Hindu Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhist them all being systems of Tantric philosophy, either Tantric yoga as is discussed and uh Hinduism or Tantrik Buddhism. Right, So I'm like, Tantra, Tantra, Tantra, what the heck is this Tantra? So I've had a limited I, like many in the past, I used to think that tantra was just a sex thing. Right, that's

I mean, even me, I'm guilty of that. Like earlier in the show, I've made jokes about Tantra for shock value, because back then I was all about shock value. But I've made jokes about Tantra and and tried to you know, throw that out there, and and but now I understand that that's that's not the complete picture. That the sexual art of Tantra does exist, but it's actually a pretty small contained portion compared to the whole system and philosophy.

And then it even gets into the the the creation of like the right and the left hand paths of tantric uh Yoga and Buddhism, and it's like, oh my god, and it's just this. I started the notice this is getting more and more complex as I was investigating this over the last week. So let's narrow it back to to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

to really impress upon the viewer. I've talked about immanation theology several episodes back, right, So I've been pulling this thread from one episode to the next very intentionally. So why does the Tibetan Book of the Dead have anything to do with that?

mean that everything she said is wrong. I think some stuff she said, I'm like, I don't agree with that, But in general, a lot of her material is not created, and she's just doing work synthesizing older material. Right, a lot of the stuff she didn't create. So it's not right or accurate to say that everything she said is wrong. But there's a lot of stuff. I'm like, I don't really know if I agree with that, but you know, to get to the point. According to that tradition, Tibet

was the first. If you think of like, for example, if I was to say, right now, you know, the spirit of America, the spirit of America is still alive today, right, you would think like Frickin' bald Eagle, fireworks, Fourth of July, you know, guns in the air, the Civil War, the Pledge of Allegiance, marching. You know when I say the spirit of America, you know what I mean. You have a notion in your brain that there is more or

less some sort of cultural entity of this land. Well, okay, so the spirit of Atlantis, so to speak, after the fall according to the tradition of theosophy, moved to Tibet a long time ago. They say it as like Shangri La or Shambala or whatever. And then after so many years of it being spiritually Tibet being the center of the survival of Atlantean wisdom, at some point after that it moved to Egypt. That's a theory. I didn't make

that up. I'm just saying that it's been suggested that the spirit of Atlantis, at one point or another migrated after the Fall into Tibet, which is why there's so much profound wisdom and practicality to the Betan Buddhist system.

If that makes sense. And the deeper you pull this thread, you begin to realize that the philosophy and the cosmonology of Tibetan Buddhism is very similar to everything we've been discussing, like the alchemical model of reality, just the whole Western esoteric model, that there really is a synthesis between the two, and that reality is basically many different layers of thought, that reality is empty nothingness that exists within the mind,

and that the different layers of being are separated by bardos Right, bardos, what are Bardos actually wrote the definition down because a lot of these terms may seem foreign. Right, they did to me, so I'm like, okay, if they do to me, they might do somebody else. So a bardo is a key concept in Tibetan Buddhism, meaning intermediate state, gap, transition,

in between, or liminal state. It refers to any transitional phase or interval between two states of existence wre things are neither fully one thing nor the other, a period of potential instability, opportunity, transformation. So mind to wake, body of sleep would be a bardo. Yeah between no, yes, yes, from wake to sleep yes, in between period yes, yes, that's exactly right. Transitional gaps where the familiar dissolves, creating

groundlessness and heightened potential. Karma, habitual patterns and mindfulness determine the outcome. There are three bardowes of the lot of the living, and then three bardowes of the dead, so there's six total comprising all of reality. We'll go into those, right. The most interesting part to me that really jumped out about this was in death when you move through those three bardowes at every level. So the Tibetan Book of the Dead was and it's an actual text that and

it's still used today. Not only did it have the this might be wrong to say, but like the cosmological model of death, right like the actual process of passing into death. But it's a funerary text in the sense that as someone is dying, Tibetan monks would read it to them to assist them in passing into the bardow,

into that first barrow of death. And if you get there after death, or you wait until after death, then the belief is that there are four days that the consciousness is still in this state where you're around the body.

So what a what A what's the word like a why's or a seasoned monk would do is they would take this text and they would get close to the ear and they would crouch down and they would recite the various prayers and mantras into the ear of the actual corpse so that the consciousness could hear it and be guided in the afterlife to where they need to go. So there are the first three bartos. I don't want to get ahead of myself. Before I get into that, I want to talk about the uh so let me

back it up just a little bit. I don't want to miss anything because I put a lot of detail down here right. Vadriyana or Tantrik Buddhism also known as Tibetan Buddhism, major branch of Mahayana Buddhism that developed in Tibet, incorporating elements from Indian Tantra. We already discussed that a little bit and earlier Buddhist schools and local bond traditions. I'm not sure what that means. Maybe I don't know.

this is illusion right, and are interdependent. Realizing this emptiness cuts through the root of suffering revealing the illusory nation of separation between self and other. We are not separate, right, and this opens up a whole lot of implications, like you know, the way of light, the christ Like model, right. Because we are not separate, we are one, and that is an illusion that we're separate, So we cannot act in illusion. We have to act with wisdom, compassion, and kindness.

This nondual view affirms that reality is beyond opposites, where individual and cosmic selves are one. Buddha nature is inherent in every sentient being, and you possess the innate potential for full enlightenment, described as the primordial radio consciousness, inseparable from all of the Buddhas. This is often linked to the clear light mind, which we will discuss in a bit, the subtlest mental continuum that serves as the basis for transformation.

Tantra views this as the source of all teachings, emphasizing the refinement of body, speech, and mind into their pure enlightened forms, the three kayas, the Dharma Kaya, the sambo Ga Kaya, and the Normana Kaya, and then the unity of wisdom and compassion. Enlightenment arises from uniting passive wisdom or voidness right, So that's the feminine. With upaya active

compassion or skillful means, that's the masculine. For the unification of those two opposite forces, the wisdom, the passive principle right, the experience, and then the active, skillful use of wisdom, kindness, compassion, love towards others brings enlightenment. This is symbolized in Tantric art and practice by the union of the male and female deities Yab and Yam, representing the integration of opposites

to achieve great bliss. The tradition venerates feminine energies, such as through the dakinis or the spiritual beings and the divine shock t that animates all reality. And I'm not going to expand too much on the shock Tea here because I want to do that further episode talking about Tantra in greater detail, about Shaivism being basically Shiva being known as the supreme God, the supreme mind right, and then shock t being the first manifest form that animates

the living, breathing world. Sound familiar. Shocked t is the feminine, by the way, karma is foundational, influencing rebirth and suffering in Samsara Tantra teaches that ordinary experiences, including desires and emotions, can be transformed into paths for spiritual growth rather than suppressed.

This left hand path uses intense methods to awaken energies and see the problem there is as the left hand and the right hand path is understood in Western esoteric tradition, it's basically the same, and it actually comes from Tantra. It's the first ever mention of this probably in human history, where it's understood that the right hand path is through enlightenment.

It's through kindness, achieving bliss, serenity, and the awakening of the psychic faculties through the way, the Way of light right, and then the left hand path is through things that are antinomian, which is a very bad thing. It means that you're seeking to get there quicker by breaking taboos. So that's where you get into explicit sexual stuff or you know, eating people or terrible things like that, blood magic,

all that dark stuff. That's the left hand path. And you see a lot of uh tantra just in general magic and religious paths being uh what's the word, I don't want to say overshadowed, but like being represented by this like people think magic, they think, you know, they're sacrificing chickens, they're they're you know, they're doing this horrible stuff that does happen. But that's not all of it.

That's one path, that's the left hand path, and then you have the right hand path, which is more like when we talk about on this show, what what Jesus was talking about, what the Rosicrucians are talking about in the Templars and the the Toltecs, we're talking about, right, we're talking about in the Tibetan monks. We're talking about the right hymn path, which is like the christ like path or the Buddha path. It's being kind, it's being of light.

the divine in the body and in everyday life. Now we're going to start getting into some weird stuff here, transcending delusions through direct experience. In Tibetan Buddhism, the universe is viewed as a manifestation of enlightened mind, rather than a separate material realm. The cosmosis scene is animated by the divine energies, with all things interconnected and arising from emptiness. Mandalas represent this as sacred diagrams of the universe, where

the practitioner's body mirrors the cosmic structure. So we have as above, so below right. We have the notion here that the actual body is a microcosm of the universe as a whole, which is to be separate from I can't remember the name of the Hindu tradition because just like in Buddhism, there's like multiple different types of Buddhism.

There's there's Mahayana, there's Vadreyana, and then there's Theravana. And then even in Christianity there's Catholicism, there's been a costal, there's you know, there's all these different sects that believe different things, but in one of the most popular forms of Hinduism, they've got it all wrong. They're like, you have to completely reject the body and the physical. It's it's bad, you know that, you know, it's the spirit

world that's the only real thing. And then in Shaivism or the equivalent being Vadriyana Tibetan Buddhism, they say, no, no, no, the body is not bad. It's a part of this whole story that the body is divine and it's actually a reflection of the divine, that it's the microcosm of

the supreme being and the universe. Right, So you're working with a lot of subtle body energy in tantra, doing meditations to transmute the energies of the subtle body as opposed to like rejecting the flesh and trying to be ancient and just you know, like empty your mind, empty your mind. There's there's benefit to that. But this isn't like that. It's it's more so like to me, it's more real. The body's not evil, it's it's it's created

in the image of the divine. It's the microcosm of of you know, the supreme.

of birth and death. According to this system, it's like you're just in an endless cycle of birth, death, birth death, birth death, and even after death, you're you're in cycles in the in the death worlds, and and then if you don't you can break the cycle. Here you can break the cycle. There the whole point of it, how do you do how do you escape samsara? How do

you achieve nirvana? Or I think they call it moksha as well, is you realize your true nature, which is you are pure mind, You're you're pure being of divine that that you are just here in the illusory world, and that you are infinite pure bliss. You realize that the mind is illusory, that everything is illusory, and it's even deeper than that. Right, So when you die, you go through the different layers of bardo. Like I said,

in life there's three. There's the place, but from from when you're born and you take your first breath until death. That's the first liminal space. That's the first bardo. The illusion, right, the life that you live while you're awake, that's the first illusion. The second one is when you dream, and they get into practices like dream yoga and learning to be awake and aware in the dreams, like the egypt all about hey, I'm probably more flexible in my dream. Well,

it doesn't have to be yoga. The point is, I mean the Gnostics practice practice this, the Egyptians practice this. It's all about lucid dreaming. It's all about learning to be awake in your dreams, right, Two, because even in your dreams you can awaken. And then the third one, I think is in the deep meditative state which you were talking about mind awake, body of sleep, that there's the third bardo in the in the living world, which is when you achieve certain higher states of consciousness, you

begin to realize that the world is illusory. And then when you pass into death, there's three more bordos.

the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But they would bring the Book of the Dead, and I think they even call it something else, right, but and and they would they would read it and they would flip through like, oh shit, there's fluid leaking out of his ears. He's at this stage, you know, seriously, it goes into all that, like down to when he takes his last breath. This

is what he's seeing in his mind's eye. And there's different that are to be read at the different stages, because at each of those stages, down to when you take your last breath and then your consciousness leaves the physical body you go into that you stay around the body for a while. And that's commonly believed in other systems too, like they say, you know, three days after death, you know, I felt their presence stuff like that, right, But in this system it's I think it's four days.

It's said that the body is the consciousness is near the body, and that it's there that even there it's able to awaken your it being your consciousness, that it's able to awaken, it's able to renounce the illusion. And then when you pass through into the next bardo. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself, but to summarize, it's like you enter into the pure state of the clear light of the mind. It's like a cloudless sky, and even there, at each of these bardoes. It's like a test, even

even in death. It's like a test, right, And it's like, what will you believe because now you're in the astral world, they say the Bardo. But I'm a Western guy, right, So you're in the astral world, so it's like you're not so bound to the laws of the physical universe. So you can think and you'll be there. You can pass through walls, you can you can uh, you can phase through, you can you can check on everybody that's

near your body, right. But for example, what they would do is if there was people in the room crying when you died a serious month, they would remove them because they know that when your consciousness has left the body that it might be very distressed and tempted by illusion. If like, for example, your mom is crying over your corpse, you might mess with your head, your astral head be like, oh God, this is I can't process you know what

I'm saying. And the whole point was to help assist you through the illusion so that you wake up and you don't have to reincarnate. So here in a bit we'll go into that those layers of bardoes and what it's like.

personally assist them. I don't know. You know, Also, like you know, people die in battle or people have a heart attack and they're out in the field. This isn't always going to be I.

the ruoc. It's very The reason I'm so excited about this is because there are very, very minute parallels between the Western esoteric wisdom traditions and this system. It's like they are cognates of each other. The cosmology is more or less the same. It's emanation theology. It's the pan psychic idealism, it's panintheism. It's the same. The cosmic trinity is there, right, They just have a different way, in

different words and vocabulary to describe things. But everything is seen as interconnected and arising from emptiness or you could say zero point right, science science terminology. The mandalas represent the macrocosm and the microcosm. Texts like the color chakra, tantra detail the cosmology, the astrology, and the harmonization of the inner and the outer energies. So it's like you're

trying to unite the macrocosm and the microcosm. You're trying to realize the God would then completely awaken the faculties so that you can see through the illusion of the false world, the false realm right and be liberated. It's all about achieving liberation through enlightenment. What is enlightenment What you see through the illusion? What is the illusion? The physical world? The real world is permanent, it's eternal, it's infinite. You are immortal. You never truly die. Death is just

passage into a new world. It's a You're always in a liminal state of evolving until you wake up and realize you are immortal and you are one with all of the universe.

life and death, life and death, life and death. It's

all projecting from your mind like a hologram. And the way that you even navigate the state in death is things like demons and devils and horrifying images, or if you were a good man and you had good karma and angelic, blissful, beautiful beings, they all project as aspects of your psyche to confront you, and you see things like a review of your life and the horrible things that you've done to other people project themselves to you as demons in the second layer of the Bardo, or angels.

Like I said, it depends on your karma. So even this is designed to test you if you can see

through the illusion. And obviously in that state when you're being bombarded with the faces of horrifying demons because you know, you robbed people, or you were greedy, or you were a glutton and you had an addiction to just eating and eating and eating or whatever, vice it is that you dealt with in life that that reflects to you in the Bardo layer as an aspect of your psyche, and you have to recognize and not be afraid that

it is just an illusion of the mind. And as you progress through these layers at Bardo, it gets more and more challenging, and the level of alertness and awareness and probability you have of achieving enlightenment even in death gets slimmer and slimmer and slimmer as you pass through the bardoes to where eventually and that third layer, you start seeing the rotating images of parents mating and you begin the selection process of birth into your new life,

at which when you don't see through the illusion, then even you select the most favorable womb that you desire to be born in, and then your consciousness becomes fused with the physical body at the fertilization of the egg from the couple that you choose, whether it's human, whether

it's animals, what have you. And then once you fail at each level, realizing that it's all an illusion from your mind, eventually you complete that third step and then your consciousness is molded into a physical being and you're

reborn yet again failing to achieve enlightenment. But according to this, there's six realms you could be born in, and it's gods or buddhas, it's humans, animals, demi gods, even the hungry ghosts or the hell beings demons basically, And I think there's symbolism there that it's not literal that you know,

maybe it is. Maybe you do incarnate in the spirit world as a hungry ghost, and they describe them as grotesque, like having narrow necks, tiny mouths, and they're starving and they have bloated bellies but they can't eat, and they're constantly trying to eat food, but it passes through them because they have an astral body, and it makes them suffer more and feel feelings of like heat and pain, and they're just like wailing and desperate for food. And

they achieved that state because they were greedy. They caused suffering that caused harm to other people. The hell beings is like being in a complete total state of torment, and that was said to be achieved and experienced by people who had extreme anger and violence and were just horrible to people. So again I think that some of that is symbolic of the life you are reborn into based on your choices and your karma. I don't think it's that you'll literally be a demon. Will you be

a demonic disembodied spirit. I don't know if that's what it's saying. It could be esoteric, that's all I'm getting at. It could be symbolism. A lot of it is symbolism. A lot of it is literal, like the Bardo stuff what happens at each layer, and then a lot of it is symbolism, like seeing you know, uh. I think it was yab and Yama or whatever in a tantric

sexual position. Obviously that's not literal. It's archetypal projections of the mind, because the whole point of this all existence is the mind of the supreme Being, and we're like in a holographic projection of that mind in a little cycle and through our mind. We have to wake up to this and achieve enlightenment and escape the cycle. So it's all just different degrees of trying to see through the illusion in our minds and at every level of death,

passing through the layers of the Bardo. Everything that you experience when your consciousness leaves the body is a projection of your mind everything that's good and everything that's bad. If you're good, it's good. If you were bad, it's bad. That's the that's the complete, like synthesis of it. And

it's way more complex than that. And I find that very fascinating because that's pretty much exactly what the Monroe Institute teaches, based on their many thousands of times of experience with communicating with the dead through various programs and channelings and out of body states that it's essentially that you know when you die and you leave the physical that where you believe you're going to go is where you're going to go. What you believe you're going to

experience is what you're going to experience. That's pretty much exactly the same. And they have a whole program doing this assisting people crossing over into another place, because, if you know, a lot of people are trapped when they die and they become ghosts because they don't realize maybe they're dead, right, there's waiting around where is everybody. They don't know what happened. So they're trapped because they don't

know what happened. Because they don't know they're dead, they don't have the capacity to decide where to go or

what to do. So very interesting. I thought there was a fascinating parallel there between you know, what they talk about, what they experience, and then you know what Tibetan Buddhism discusses, and and then you know, we'll find later in the Egyptian Book of the Dead that it's also pretty similar, but instead of it being projections of the mind in the form of illusions, they talk about it more as like mythological gods, when you pass through the various planes

of existence after death. So we talked about the six the six realms and the six incarnations of being. Nirvana is not an escape, but the realization that these realms are illusory projections of the mind. Deities, Buddhas and wrathful figures embody cosmic forces aiding transformation, and for example, Vira Chauna represents the all knowing cosmic Buddha central to many other parallel traditions. And then there are the three bodies

of the Buddha. This is all the cosmological model of Tibetan Buddhism and Vadriana right or tantra, you could say, the dharma kaya or the truth body is the ultimate formuless reality, like the Vadradhara or the source of enlightenment. The sambo ga kaya or the enjoyment body manifests in the pure lands for advanced beings, and the normana kaya or the emanation body appears in the world like the

historical Buddhas, like Siddhartha. This is the trikaya system that reflects the emphasis on the different levels of reality or emanations from subtle mind to what like spirit world basically or astral too gross manifestations, meaning you know, the physical world. And now we're going to actually get into the Tibetan Book of the Dead, because that was all just kind of talking about it, right, but I pretty much hit the most of it, so I'll see if I can

move through this. But the big emphasis here and it even just like I read the book today, right, the

whole thing, and I took note. I was listening to it on audiobook, And what's interesting is I took note it was like maybe five times in the actual text that by word it basically says that if you were a practitioner of tantra in your daily life, that the passage into the Bardo will be easier and more pleasant that the practitioner of it also said, I'm pretty sure it said joke chin, which is light body.

themselves than to to work on this path. Uh, they have it very difficult in the next life because they don't have the faculties to uh notice the illusions of the mind, which presents itself as scary imagery right sometimes, And that's how to me like an anxious thought on the day to day basis, you know, I think about think about the skill of meditation and prayer because you could say that they're the same thing if you use it correctly. You know, think about how that can help

with anxiety. You see what I'm saying that there's a real benefit to implementing this practice.

it's not about that. It's it's it's not about that, it's a it's about when you realize the truth that every every level of existence is illusion, that you're always in a liminal state being rendered like a hologram in the present, whether you're in biological life or you're in spiritual life. Uh, you know, you're you're in a liminal state of transition to the next thing, and you're always progressing upwards on this uh evolutionary path of the mind.

And then of eventually you hit a certain level of realization where you don't need to be in this form anymore, that you become transcendent, that you return to that immortal state, whether it's you know, you have to reincarnate again because oh, you know, you were a thief in this life, so now next time you got to come back, maybe you

got to be robbed. Maybe you know what I'm saying, and that's simplifying it, But it's it's cycles of experiencing things from many different perspectives, feeling every emotion on the spectrum being dark, being light. You come back here and you experience everything till eventually you realize, all right, it's time to go home. I don't need this experience anymore. I've learned everything that I could learn from this place. Then you die and you go into the and then

it's like, well where do I go from here? Do I need to go back? I haven't seen through the greed of that life. That's why it's like you become hungry ghost if you were greedy in this life, and then you die, and you know, in that transitional state the bardos are, it's like purgatory basically.

you're we're gonna go to muscle memory. So even if you're believing one thing in death and you know in your maybe fortunate or unfortunate enough to know that you are dying, you are probably.

from your mind. They're not real demons trying to eat your soul or whatever that they're They're coming from you, and it's an illusion from that that place of uh, you know, am I going to wake up? Am I gonna pass the illusion? And that's so fascinating because if you've done anything like d MT or very heavy mushroom dose.

What happens your ego completely breaks down because you become overwhelmed with thoughts, feelings, images that are so powerful and so intense that it completely just basically destroys your ego. And that's that's not a bad thing. It's it's basically it's humbling your consciousness. It's forcing you to address the aspects of your psyche and your soul that are challenging you, that that are controlling you, even that that you have

to overcome. And dare I say this, Okay, we know I don't like Alister Crowley, but even he says a similar thing. He talks about an entity I think he calls it Koranson, that you hit a certain point where it challenges you. And you know Steiner talks about this,

it's experienced in DMT. They talk about this. There's somewhere, oh in the Egyptian Book of the Dead that when you die, it's like you face demons basically Egyptian myth demons that are serving as guardians of the depth of the celestial heavenly realms to prevent the unworthy from passing into those places. And even in the Egyptian system. We'll talk more about this later, but it was so focused on the heart. They believed that your consciousness was not

in your brain, but it was in your heart. And they would take this metal thing and they would put it in an they would heat it up, and then they would put it up your nose, and they would melt and liquify your brain and extract it from your nose, and they would throw it in the trash, and they would preserve the heart in the body. They would mummify you with the heart, because they believed so profoundly in the magic of the heart and that it is the

seat of your soul and your consciousness. And they had all kinds of different rituals and initiation practices and spells. And in the Egyptian system it's known as heca, which is word magic. That's where the word hex comes from, right, the idea of a cursor, a spell with your mouth.

But they had systems to prepare your soul or your believe it's called the the co to turn into an ak which is a mortal celestial soul that would pass into the heavenly realms and become a star upon death, or another way that they would interpret it is your heart is weighed against an ostrich feather in the Hall of Maat, and if it's as light as the feather, then you would pass on to the paradise in the

field of breeds. But it was a similar system to where when you die, you're challenged by these scary, hellish demons, and it's to confront you from the sins that you lived in your past life. And then it starts over again. You come back, you come back. You know, there's the reincarnation element, So I think there's Oh. And then the other thing I wanted to say was the Gnostics. The

Gnostics talk about this many different times. And there's a really cool text called Zostrianos, which I intend to eventually do an episode on, or at least discuss in part. And in Zoustrianos, he uh he ascends through the through the layers of reality, seeking to communicate with the God above God, the true God. And I find z Austriano's extremely fascinating because he is allegedly he's either like a descendant of a Zoroastrian priest or he's a descendant of

Zoroastri It's something like that. But I find it really cool because it's another fascinating historical connection between the Persian magi and Jesus Christ and the you know, the Christian system. If you consider gnosticism part of the Christian system, it's part of the body of you know, texts about Jesus Christ.

Gnostics and multiple texts. They talk about having to like hide from these arconic forces and like bypass them to ascend through the heavenly realms. So there's some sort of thread here across all these different systems where there's like

this arconic or demonic imagery. Whether it's an illusion of your mind, maybe they have it right, whether it's some force I don't know, some external force I don't know, but there's there's some sort of there's some sort of importance to the way you live your life, karma and how you treat others, and how you project your thoughts into the world, and even the thoughts that you experience inside. There's an importance with all of that, and then how

you experience the spirit world. They are one. They cannot be separated. Your actions in the physical world have a consequence in the spiritual right. That's undeniable. Nihilism, hedonism, any sort of philosophy that doesn't encourage you in some way to be a better person. They're evil, they're illusion, they're false, they're destroying you. They are convincing you to do harm to the immortal part of your being, and in the long run, in the you know, however, many thousands or

millions of years. It takes. You'll eventually figure it out. So and the very high level non human perspective like, ah, you'll be fine, but really, I mean that's like, you know, do you want to experience the hard way, which is you know, trial and error and just stumbling through the dark and you know, being miserable in each incarnation. It's suffering, I.

they just appear that way to scare you. And then like in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it's like, hey, it's all an illusion of your mind and it's a test, and if you realize that, it changes and you become enlightened. And even in that state, you can become enlightened. It's okay. You know you're gonna be scared by scary demons. Don't let it fool you. Basically, so we talked about the

six bartows. I'm gonna kind of blow through this part, but we have birth to death, every day, waking existence, current life, your habitual patterns, your opportunities for practice, meditation, subtle transition into the different thoughts and emotional states. It's the most important borrow for spiritual training. You have the borrow of dreams, the state between falling asleep and waking up.

Dreams are seen as illusory projections of the mind. Obviously, that's like, nobody's disputing that, and you have an opportunity here to even become awake in your dreams Samadi right. Or the bartow of meditation. This is the state that you enter during deep meditation when the ordinary conceptual mind dissolves and then pure awareness can shine through. So there's again we already went on and on about that, that

was pretty obvious. There's the bardow of dying, which is the Cheekai bardow step one, that's the first layer of bardow after death, and it's the actual process of death itself. It's when you're dying and you're passing from the physical body to the afterlife, down to the dissolution of your consciousness and to the clear light and the moment that you take your final breath and your heart stops speeding.

This is the greatest So according to the after death burdows, this is like the most potential for liberation and enlightenment can be achieved in this stage. Somebody who spent their whole life being a monk die and they will get to this stage and they'll say, oh, I'm dead all right, time, you know, time to move on, and they would be fine.

Somebody whose consciousness is riddled with guilt and fear and negativity, you know, they would struggle here just like they struggled everywhere else in life because they were always miserable, and they would struggle through the next few phases and they would I mean, they could in theory figured it out, but they probably have to come back uh the Bordo layer two after death of Darmata, the luminous visionary phase after death were the peaceful and wrathful deities, which are

the projections of one own one's own mind appear, and this the whole point of this is to recognize them as illusion right that they are. They are parts of you. It's your karma and your psyche uh or as they would say, your scan does, which is the bundles of being that constitute your being and personality.

basically choose the womb and you're reborn. So the first bardo after death is pretty cool because it talks about this is when the monk would be reading the passages and he'd be saying in your ear and there's like dozens of prayers that they would choose based on a certain condition, and they're reading them to you so that your consciousness won't be scared and confused on the passage of death and that maybe you would hear this and you would realize, oh, I'm dying, Okay, I have to

wake up. I can't be tricked by the illusion. But when you pass into this first bardo, you enter in a place that's like a cloudless, clear blue sky and it's serene and it's peaceful, and it's just like beautiful light. It's the luminosity and the emptiness of the mind. You enter into the clear void of the mind, which is this He's full bliss and stillness. And here either you're like, Okay, I'm dead, this is it, or you're like, what's happening? What's happening? And if you don't wake up, then you

move to the next one. Right, what's the next one? This is where uh, stuff starts getting scary. It's where they basically the demons like I've talked about over and over and the heavenly beings. If you were good, they start popping out at you. And this is where you're freed from your physical form, at the point where the consciousness has fully left the body. So they have levels of time like days, but it's subjective because they're in days spent in the bardow like in the astral world,

so obviously they're not real Earth days. So they say it's like x number of days than in this state. And you could basically perceive yourself as a luminous thought form uh. And wherever you think you go, and the more negative your karma, the more wrathful and terrifying the entities, and some of them even can look like uh. I mean some of the images that were described in the

Book of the Dead were kind of scary. It was like it was it was like, uh, I don't even know how to say it, dude, like flesh like like

chainsaw massacre stuff, you know what I mean. Like if you're a really bad person, like you're gonna be tormented from your own psyche by you know, horrifying visions, things just like pots of blood and just like there was some really dark visions, and there's peaceful ones too, of angels and you know, these godly that there's Ami Taba, which is this We've talked about Ami Taba really briefly one time on the show before, but it's like one of the highest buddhas love compassion. So really it just

depends how you were in life. It can appear as sounds and a great thundering clouds, and you know it's it's all illusion, and the point of all of it is for you to recognize that. And then there's that final version. I kind of covered a lot of this before I got here in my notes, so I'm just kind of wrapping it up now. But the final version is you know, the one where you pick your life and you see like vignettes.

or it's like devils. And depending on what you see and are attracted to, is the realm you'll be born in, whether it's the human realm, the demon realm, the god realm. You know what I'm saying, Like, what you see is where you're gonna go, but you're not aware of that in the moment. You're an illusion. You know you're you're dead, You're like, if you're at this point, you're still under

the illusion, you're like kind of hypnotized. Basically, I forgot to mention that in the second realm, that it's the one. It's like you begin to see a smoke. It's like a smoke that appears. I thought this was interesting too. And if you see like a white, radiant smoke, you have a good karma and you're gonna move into a positive destination. But if you see this like dark, scary, fuzzy smoke, move into like a negative dimension. But I think I've hit it pretty hard. That about wraps it up.

the opportunity. Cool. All right, Well, we love you guys, thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this one. I hope it wasn't too off the wall, and uh, you know we appreciate you. We couldn't do it without you, guys, and we'll see you next week. Weird things happen in the backyard to let the houses.