4 Jhanas and the Tibetan Book of the Dead

Authors note: I AM NOT A PRACTICING BUDDHIST. This excerpt is the product of a youtube video essay rabbit hole I fell through a few years ago as well as a childhood passion for uncovering some mysteries of the universe. Sounds heavy huh hahahaha, trust me I know, nobody wants to hang out with the kid who thinks about death as often as I have. It’s cool because religion and spiritual experience can often be held apart, we believe God is in this conceptual transcendent space, on some astral plane somewhere. Sufism and Buddhism notably ground God in creation as immanent as well as transcendent. That God is within and without the Universe if you give creds where creds are always due. Final note, since I got these from secondary sources, please proceed with criticality.

4 Jhanas 

1. Base of boundless space 

2. Base of boundless consciousness 

3. Base of nothingness 

4. Base of neither perception-nor-non-perception 

In the 8th century in Tibet, the 38th Tibetan Emperor Trison Detsen directed a Buddhist Monk named Padmasambhava to bring his teachings on the transitionary stage between Life and Death, to Tibet. The text, much like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, describes under the original title of Bardo Thodol, that consciousness lingers then undergoes a sort of trial to determine whether the soul will undergo another karmic cycle in Samsāra, or move on into Dharmanirvana. The text isn’t considered Buddhist scripture at the same level of centrality to Buddhist traditions as the sutras, it’s considered a terma, a “hidden treasure”. Originally the text was read to Tibetans who had recently passed to help guide their consciousness through its trials, but it was later translated for the first time by W.Y. Evans Wentz in 1927. The current Dalai Lama vouches that the guide is great guidance for a life lived with Death in mind. Fun fact it inspired Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. The book conceives of consciousness as the central point of entangled energy that composes our unique signature of Being. Capital B, the type of abstract ‘Being’ we’re talking about here has most faithfully been described as a light of sorts. It shines on dark crevices of our inner life to illuminate them with awareness, it struggles to catch a glimpse of itself without a mirror. Being in the sense of consciousness is the diffusion of the clear and singular Light of Reality into the different colors of our expression in the corporeal and multiplicitous world.

The Book considers this spirit inside our bodily machines as energy that can neither be self-created, self-sustained, nor destroyed, only borrowed. So in death as well, this energy is written to break and float free from the body. A peculiar phrase in Buddhism is that “in life you make the mind. In death, the mind makes you.” In death, consciousness is freed from physical anchors, from the limitations of a body stuck in space and the experience of linear time. While it's a well-known property of light not to experience distance or time, it is relevant to ask whether light can fold time in on itself in a way that would deviate from the temporal arrow of a universe with increasing entropy. Anyways, your spirit, finally loose from its body, your consciousness can now fulfill its desires without spatio-temporal restrictions. In this dream realm, your environment responds to your perceptive reality, your soul has two things on its mind, where have I been now that I can’t go anywhere and all the selves that I’ve inhabited caught up to me in one single expression of being; and secondly, where do I go next? 

Buddhists strive for the purification of the heart and mind while still anchored to the body capable of change and causally significant action. Alternatively, this dream state can be occupied by the inescapable truths of our existence on Earth, the shame, guilt, fears, the time we offered to the bodily pursuits that we can never bring with us to the other side, the pleasures of greed, power, whatever else sells an upward climb for a corporeal carrot at its peak. Instead, Buddhists focus their being on gratitude, compassion, kindness, love and the recognition of the living fabric of self-conciousness that binds us all. The experience of our deaths reflects the kind of life we lived on earth. The repeated thoughts, the patterns of being that extended over our lives are called Bardos, and they each hold a certain karmic weight. The Book seeks to guide us through these Bardos and untangle them, a process which helps us realize the unreality of these patterns as they seek to distract us from the illuminating, primordial, and some argue shared no-thingness from which we rose from, the same no-thingness we return to. It’s important to note here, that in contrast to Western traditions who view ‘nothingness’ as void, Eastern traditions understand “no-thingness” to be productive and active.

Each consciousness undergoes trials personal to their experience of life, and will challenge their attachments to their physical reality, as well as the purity of their hearts and minds. After 49 days, the consciousness is either reborn into a new body, or breaks free from Samsāra. Samsāra ends when one attains moksha over their several lifetimes, or recognizes the lived truth of their non-being and thus their being with everything. The book is divided into the Bardo of Life, the Bardo of Dying, and the bardo of Dharmanirvana. The Bardo of living is the present moment and the collection of all your lived experiences. The bardo of dying tracks the inner experience of death as consciousness departs the body, and the outward experience of death as it engages with its after-death reality. The bardo of Dharmanirvana finds the soul presented with Death as the ultimate existence, the Clear Light of Reality and the Ground Luminosity. These stages may happen at any time during the process of dying, death or rebirth, they’re not linear. 

Inward Sub-bardo 

• Peacefulness and clarity, lightness 

• Visions of deities, ancestors, loved ones who passed 

• Detachment from physical reality and body 

Outward Sub-bardo 

• Chaotic, escaping the gravitational well of physical reality 

• Heat, pain, cold, pressure 

• Disorienting, sounds, sensations of being pulled out. 

Bardo of Dharmanirvana 

• Clear Light of Reality 

• Pure unmodified consciousness, a great big Light that seems to resolve the traditional hiccups and paradoxes of three-dimensional and singular minds. The collection of all the fragments of consciousness, the unifying stream between them 

• A sense of unity with all of existence 

• Ground Luminosity 

• The original primordial insight into the groundworks of existence 

• Visions of deities and celestial realms 

Every person’s experience of Bardo will differ. The greatest chance of moksha happens at the bardo of Dharmavirvana. There is no physical barrier to the all-encompassing inescapable truth of our existence, we can’t cheat ourselves any more than we can hide in our selves from ourselves, or hide from the natural and universal fabric of irradiant consciousness that holds us in contextual place. We can’t lie to ourselves or our trial in death. If the soul can accept the Clear Light as the ultimate existence, it may stay and break free from the cycle of death and rebirth. The sense of a self that is separate from creation or even the Light of Reality is revealed to be a temporary and illusory construction.