“Bardo is a Tibetan word that simply means a ‘transition’ or a gap between the completion of one situation and the onset of another…

One of the central characteristics of the bardos is that they are periods of deep uncertainty. Take this life as a prime example. As the world around us becomes more turbulent, so our lives become more fragmented. Out of touch and disconnected from ourselves, we are anxious, restless, and often paranoid. A tiny crisis pricks the balloon of the strategies we hind behind. A single moment of panic shows us how precarious and unstable everything is…

Anyone looking honestly at life will see that we live in a constant state of suspense and ambiguity. Our minds are perpetually shifting in and out of confusion and clarity. If only we were confused all the time, that would at least make for some kind of clarity. What is really baffling about life is that sometimes, despite all our confusion, we can also be really wise! This shows us what the bardo is: a continuous, unnerving oscillation between clarity and confusion, bewilderment and insight, certainty and uncertainty, sanity and insanity. In our minds, as we are now, wisdom and confusion arise simultaneously, or as we say, are ‘co-emergent.’ This means that we face a continuous state of choice between the two, and that everything depends on which we will choose.

This constant state of uncertainty may make everything seem bleak and almost hopeless; but if you look more deeply at it, you will see that its very nature creates gaps, spaces in which profound chances and opportunities for transformation are continuously flowering— if, that is, they can be seen and seized… “~from The Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

Having discovered the gap between thoughts, simply rest there. This is the ground of being… The space from which all possibilities emerge. The point of meditation— that is to say, what the practice is pointing at— is this space, and resting in this space is the Meditation.

Click here for instructions in the practice of Buddhist Meditation.

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