The Six Bardos Include This Very Moment

This moment is a bardo.

Bardo is usually translated as “intermediate state” and associated exclusively with the post-death period. This is a partial translation of a richer teaching. In the Vajrayana understanding, all experience is intermediate: every moment arises in the space between what came before and what comes after, and the quality of attention brought to the arising is the practice.

The first bardo is the bardo of this life — the kyene bardo, the “bardo of birth and habitation.” It extends from birth to the onset of dying. It is the longest bardo and, paradoxically, the one most often lived through without presence. The practitioner has more time here than anywhere else. The teaching on the other bardos is preparation for the experiences in those bardos — but preparation that takes place in this bardo, in ordinary moments, in the daily life that the practitioner is living right now.

The method for the bardo of this life is the practices that cultivate presence: shamatha, vipashyana, the Mahamudra and Dzogchen pointing-out instructions. These practices are preparation for death in the specific sense that they train the quality of awareness that will be needed then. They are also, more immediately, the transformation of the bardo of this life from unconscious habit into conscious presence.

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The second bardo is the bardo of dream.

Every night, the practitioner has an opportunity. The dream state is, according to the Vajrayana analysis, structurally identical to the post-death bardo: the physical body is released, the consciousness moves freely through a landscape that is the display of its own mental tendencies, and what determines the quality of the experience is the quality of the awareness brought to it.

Dream yoga — the practice of maintaining awareness through the transition into sleep and throughout the dream — is one of the Six Yogas of Naropa. It is difficult. The ordinary mind’s reflex is to identify with the dream’s contents rather than recognize the dream as a dream. This is exactly the reflex that causes problems in the post-death bardo: the consciousness identifies with the visions rather than recognizing them as its own mind’s display.

The practitioner who learns to recognize the dream within the dream — to know “this is a dream” while the dream is happening — has practiced the recognition that will be needed at death. The bardo of dream is the training ground for the bardo of death.

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The third bardo is the bardo of meditation — samten bardo.

This is the interval of intensive practice, the period of retreat or the sustained practice session in which the practitioner has temporarily released ordinary activity. It is an intermediate state between ordinary waking consciousness and the deeper states accessible through practice. What makes it a bardo is the same quality that makes all bardos bardos: it is a threshold, a space between conditions, where the ordinary habits of mind are loosened and something else becomes possible.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth bardos belong to the dying process: the bardo of dying, the bardo of the nature of reality (the Dharmata), and the bardo of becoming (the search for a new birth). These are the bardos described in the Bardo Thodol. They receive the most literary attention because they are the most foreign to ordinary experience. But the teaching is clear about the sequence: the practitioner who has been present in the first three bardos — who has practiced presence in waking life, in dreams, and in meditation — arrives at the bardo of dying already trained.

Every moment of this life is practice for the moment of death. Every dream is a rehearsal. Every meditation session is a preview. The continuum of awareness that practices through the first three bardos is the same continuum that will navigate the last three. There is no separate preparation for death. There is only the quality of presence in this moment, and in this moment, and in this.