The Bardo Thodol – The Art of Beautiful Dying and Fearless Living

The Bardo Thodol (Tibetan: bar do thos grol chen mo, literally “The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate State”) corresponds to a section of a broader Tibetan Buddhist text titled Zab chos zhi khro dgongs pa rang grol (literally, “The Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation through the Mind of the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities”). It is a gter ma text, meaning a “hidden treasure” of the Nyingma school (8th-9th century), discovered in the 14th century by Karma Lingpa (1326–1386).

The text symbolically and initiatically describes the experiences that the soul undergoes after death or, more precisely, in the interval of time that, according to Himalayan Buddhist culture, exists between death and rebirth. This interval is called bardo in Tibetan. The book also includes chapters concerning death symbols, rituals to undertake when death approaches, or when it has already occurred.

Death is a topic that has fascinated me since childhood—to the great delight of educators and relatives, as you can well imagine—not for a predisposition to the macabre, but rather for a certain openness and attraction to mystery, the invisible, emptiness, and silence. The study of the Bardo, the practices of crossing the Great Threshold, and more generally the Yoga of the Colophon, have represented the answer to an unspoken question, to an undefined yet always vibrant inner sensation within me: death has finally unfolded to my awareness as a contemporary, intrinsic event, not separate from life, but rather as a life-enhancing ally, a teacher of Beauty, Freedom, and thus Love.

I believe death is a fundamental topic to bring to light and make “speakable” not only on an individual level but also socially, and I would even dare to say politically (in the etymological sense of the term). This is to rescue it from the systematic and structured suppression that turns it into a submerged enemy, a taboo subject to avoid, the great end-level monster (as one of my video game enthusiast students curiously but effectively described it). Yung argued that when an inner fact is not made conscious, it eventually resolves itself and manifests as destiny, as events: the suppression of death (and inevitably, with it, the invisible and the mystery) paralyzes life, poisons it with terror, and makes it a premature corpse. The more distant and unspeakable death is, the more insipid and stagnant is the life that pretends to be eternal—of that cold and immobile eternity of the Abrahamic god to whose image we more or less consciously believe ourselves to resemble—making it impossible to grasp its essence of sacred impermanence and unrepeatable uniqueness. But, as we well know, the impossible is merely the foundation for building infinite possibilities.
The society we live in and to whose existence and configuration we actively contribute is increasingly violent in its imposition of theories and moral values, in the invention—built time and again on the political or social event of the moment (one of the most recently striking examples being a pandemic)—of good and evil, right and wrong. The conscious crossing of the Great Threshold—as well as the ability to consciously navigate every transition, every change—is, in this sense, a powerful tool, capable of revealing the illusion of consciousness (chitta maya) that separates visible and invisible, life and death, that makes objective and material what is, instead, pure possibility.
The Bardo Thodol invites us to live change without fear, with presence and clarity, urging us to remember who we truly are, beyond the conditioning of the ordinary mind that separates and opposes, that imposes itself on reality based on an instance of power; that wants to control, govern, make measurable and predictable what it fears and of which it inevitably becomes a victim. The act of civilization, which is an act of human arrogance over nature, is an act against nature, Pasolini said when interviewed by Ungaretti.
Starting from a rationalistic view, dominated by the sense of self, death is interpreted and reduced to an event that happens at the end of life: the dying person separates from everything that has accompanied them until their last breath, losing what they “possessed.” This conception centers on attachment to one’s identity and the earthly world, forgetting that everything that vanishes is related to the Whole. Death does not presuppose an end, but a transformation. It is a constant becoming, and what continuously vanishes into something else becomes immortal. Death, in fact, does not exist in the natural state (Where is it, in fact, when a tree ends?), precisely because everything in nature transforms, everything is impermanent, and impermanence is Beauty, which is the way Love, the sacred (sacrum facere, the giving of oneself, the offering of oneself) manifests in nature.
The practices of Shinrin Yoku, the Japanese art of consciously immersing oneself in Nature, are equally enlightening in this sense. One of the traditional ideals of Japanese aesthetics is “mono no aware,” the pathos of vanishing things, the beauty of impermanence. According to this principle, everything is an image and images are impermanent because they are soul. The soul, on the other hand, is invisibility. If things in nature did not continually vanish (note: in this perspective, vanishing is not disappearing, but giving oneself to something else, to another possibility), they would not have the pathos, the aesthetic emotion that is peculiar to them: to die, in this sense, means to offer oneself to the invisible.

Consciously experiencing transit means developing the ability to enter the great middle ground, what Hillman called the imaginal. The word “imagination,” widely misunderstood today, has its origins in the Sufi term “himma,” meaning “the creative power of the heart.” The imaginal is the liminal threshold, the boundary between life and death, conscious and unconscious, man and soul, visible and invisible. It is in this “no man’s land” that all the images and myths governing our psyche and, consequently, our existence are formed. Accessing the Imaginal means having the opportunity to understand and deprogram unconscious automatisms; it means discovering ourselves as “dreamers of the dream,” co-creators and not victims of events. Our current behaviors are not simply caused by childhood events, our history, compensatory constraints inherited from our ancestors, or karma acquired from past lives, but by something even more remote and universal that we call myth. Each of us enacts a myth through living: a myth that changes or evolves throughout existence. The Yoga of the Bardo is a powerful tool for understanding the myth we are enacting by living (and which changes and evolves throughout existence) and for unveiling the illusions and false beliefs—founded on moral discriminations—that limit our potential for realization and our freedom. Indeed, for me, shamanic death and rebirth rituals have, with every practice, been opportunities for small/large awakenings to new dimensions of consciousness: not through analytical, causal, logical paths, but intuitive, effective, experiential ones.
One of the most surprising shifts in perspective in this sense has been regarding the act of eating: when we eat something, we perform an extraordinary gesture, we ferry a life from the visible to the invisible world, and we ourselves simultaneously undertake a journey. Yet, we are not at all amazed by this transit; we lack awareness of it. It is fear, the instance of control that wants everything we experience to be objective and substantial—thus measurable, predictable, governable—that makes food a material object and nothing more, a conglomerate of sugars and proteins, rather than an extraordinary event, an opportunity to “make soul.”

The first of the so-called secret keys to the art of dying (which, in a non-dualistic, non-separative view, are also the secret keys to the art of living) according to the Bardo Thodol tradition is precisely not to be afraid of the experience of transit. Transit is not only the passage between life and death, between death and subsequent rebirth, but an experience that occurs countless times in the context—for example—of our ordinary day. It is a transit, a crossing of the Threshold, that which we experience at the end of an exhalation, before the next inhalation, between one heartbeat and the next; it is falling asleep, moving from a waking state to a sleeping state, and waking up likewise; it is the act of cooking and eating, undoing forms to make them available energy; it is the passage from one inner state to another, from one mood to another; it is falling ill and healing; falling in love and falling out of love; and isn’t every choice, however small and insignificant, the death of one possibility of ourselves in favor of another?
Therefore, do not be afraid at the moment of crossing, because fear throws us into the pit of unawareness, makes us “forget,” lose clarity and vigilance; be fully present in the moment, the only one that truly exists, and recompose opposites—life and death, visible and invisible—into a single act of supreme awareness. This is freedom and immortality.
The first key to the art of dying is closely interconnected with the second, the so-called reabsorption of reality or withdrawal of projections. Fear vanishes when I recognize myself as the eternal unborn, never created, never real, never unreal; when I realize that everything I have experienced was only “as if it were true”: it was a dream, however vivid, an imagination, a projection through which I re-recognized myself. Not even by traversing the nine empty universes will I find something capable of harming me, since a reflection can never harm the light that generates it.
In the various worlds of transit, the dying person must recognize all appearances, both seemingly pleasant and dark and disturbed, as their own; dissolving any sense of guilt—and thus fear, which in the final analysis is always fear of punishment—and fully resuming responsibility for the images projected in life, beyond good and evil. By transcending the ego, the rationalizing mind, and personality (from the Etruscan persu, mask)—which fuel the sense of separation—we perceive our true nature. Death—like any consciously lived transit—involves the disintegration of the ego’s fictitious structures: he who is subservient, completely identified with his ego, is afraid, and he who is afraid is governable, predictable, and measurable; he who, on the other hand, is capable of transcending fear does not close the doors of his senses, does not hide in his ego, does not close himself off from subtle vision, does not constrict perceptual channels, but is able to integrate the visible and the invisible and know the true nature of all things.
Consequently, we arrive at the third key to the art of dying, which is the key to taking rebirth: equanimity or sameness, the art of being precisely beyond good and evil, of transcending attraction and repulsion for everything one experiences. According to the Bardo tradition, at the moment of rebirth, the winds of karma blow powerfully, shaping innumerable images, and it is necessary to be as neutral as possible regarding what one sees and experiences, otherwise one will be reactively attracted or propelled into a matrix, a womb, and will be reborn unconsciously. If, however, in the face of what we see—worlds, places, possibilities, parents coupling violently or lovingly—we manage to maintain equanimity, the winds of karma subside and it is possible to make a choice. A choice oriented towards the highest degree of potential evolution and therefore moved by Love.

The art of withdrawing projections, on the other hand, is also the art of realizing emptiness as the fundamental nature of all things: emptiness understood not as non-existence but as a condition of infinite possibility for every phenomenon to manifest.
“Here, O Sariputra, form is emptiness and emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness; whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same applies to sensations, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness.” (Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdaya Sūtra III 9-16).
At the moment of death, following the disintegration of the elements Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, which return to their source, the dying person sees the shining clear light of “primary existence,” emptiness, Love, the desire to manifest. Although we will all have the spontaneous experience of fundamental luminosity, the Bardo tells us that most of us simply will not have the means to recognize it, having not developed, in life, any familiarity with them. Consequently, we will tend to react based on our old fears and habits, according to past reflexes, attachments, and conditioning. It will be necessary not to yield to the call of the small lights of the world. Although negative emotions must have dissolved for primary luminosity to manifest, habits acquired during life—and previous lives—will persist in exercising a pull, hidden behind the scenes of the ordinary mind, and will instigate us to withdraw and cling to our dualistic perception, instead of opening ourselves to luminosity and abandoning ourselves to it, preventing us from taking advantage of this crucial opportunity for liberation. This makes it indispensable to exercise, in life, awareness of one’s mental contents, the dissolution of beliefs that magnetically guide thoughts and behaviors, as well as to familiarize oneself with an expanded state of consciousness, of ecstasy, of supra-mental vision, to recognize what we truly are (Self-remembering, according to Gurdjieff), beyond the egoic precipitation into a person, into a story, into a magma of reactivity and automatisms. We are not stories, we are complex images where the whole is in the part and the part in the whole: dying and living (the living and the dead do not exist, except in the crystallization of a mental conviction that sees death as an event that happens at the end of life) continuously and equally give themselves to each other, and if this is consciously realized, communication between the two aspects of us is a source of invaluable information, insights, creativity.
Then, says the Bardo, wisdom will dissolve into the light of spontaneous presence and reality will present itself to us in a single extraordinary unfolding. First arises the state of primordial purity, similar to a clear and cloudless sky. Then appear the peaceful and wrathful deities, followed by the pure lands of the buddhas, beneath which appear the six realms of samsaric existence. The immensity of this vision is entirely beyond all imagination. All possibilities are present. The individual capable of dying without attachments or fears can, in death, encounter the sacred, the sacrum facere, the giving of oneself for Love, and this, in the Bardo tradition, leads to Nirvana, to final liberation in which all phenomenal appearance, the illusory cycle of lives, deaths, and rebirths, the so-called wheel of samsara, dissolves.

Knowing the Bardo, practicing awareness in states of transit, performing death and rebirth rituals—the Yoga of the Colophon (Colophon is the typographic note impressed in the last part of a volume, and in Shamanic Yoga it indicates the transit from one dimension to another)—allows one to experience the expansion of the state of consciousness, to “burn” karma, to dissolve crystallizations accumulated in reaction to the most impressive events of our life (samskaras), to deprogram limiting automatic behaviors, and to be reborn in harmony and balance with nature and the universal will that wanted us on this planet, in this body, in this life, for a purpose, a “telos,” an anmic mission that must be known and vibrated.

In conclusion, the teachings of the Bardo represent Immortality as the ability to vanish, to end, to “give oneself.” It is the capacity to die to oneself of the subsequent Advaita Vedanta tradition. This capacity preserves us from fear, which, in turn, generates ignorance. Linear time is an invention of the mind that wants to exert power over events and pretends to insert them into the trajectory of before and after, of the mechanistic logic of cause and effect, so as to delude itself into being able to predict, calculate, measure, in a word, “govern” existence. Death and life are, in truth, simultaneous; they are states of consciousness. Everything happens now, right now. Knowing how to die, therefore, is the key to a life of realization and fullness.