To understand the teachings on the bardo or to give those teaching one needs to have thoroughly experienced Clear Light as it arises in meditations, before sleep, at dawn, during sexual union, at the moment of death and so forth. To wait until one dies to finally acknowledge or discover Clear Light is too late. For the Vajrayana practitioner, the focus is on the dissolution of the five skandhas, their corresponding elements, starting with earth and ending with space. Following that, one can fearlessly anticipate the ‘three empties,’ the experience of four lights are: white bodhicitta, red increase, black near attainment, and the base Clear Light of the dharmakaya, which permeates all beings. There are as many as six positive outcomes that keep one out of the bardo (the netherworld in Pali Canon) in the Sakya esoteric tradition. If one is not familiar with any of these practices, or has failed to sufficiently train in them, then once in the bardo—after forty-nine days—six realms await: god, demigod, human, animal, ghost, and hell realm.
According to the Pali tradition, informed by abhidhamma and sutta, if one’s continuum is in the paraloka, or nether world, it’s a gandhabbā.
“A gandhabbā is unable to taste solid food or experience physical touch. But they can see and hear very well. Thus their life is miserable since they can see normal humans engaging in ‘pleasurable activities’ That is what they crave too, but they are unable to experience them.” (puredamma.net)
Then one waits for a human or animal match-up with karmically connected, destined parents. Then, it is thought something like this may occur:
“When a zygote is created in a womb as a result of intercourse there are a huge number of gandhabbā waiting to “get hold of that zygote”.(puredamma.net)
One’s parents are referred to as gati—course of existence', destiny, or destination. In physics, however, it means momentum, which as karmic force makes sense. I’m reminded of a moto accident where the driver of a small moto clipped the rear end of a bigger one with two people on it. He himself was thin and light. The moto hit the pavement and anchored but the driver continued his forward motion, hydroplaning, so to speak, on the palms of his hands and stomach for a great distance toward me. Fortunately, he was relatively unscathed. The incident later spoke to me of death and the bardo, particularly as the Cambodian monks smote (chant/sing) about it. As an after death analogy, the moto which anchored to the road is like the body after it dies and it’s forward motion has terminated. But the driver of the moto is like the mind that keeps going forward through space and time—until it reached it appointed karmically matched arrival. This dimension it now travels through lacks embodiment and cannot be recognized in conventional reality. It takes place in the paraloka and is invisible to the conventional world. This is one’s ghost, which at death is ecstatic to be free of the body but then slowly comes to a sober recognition of its disembodied state and desires greatly to return back into the body. The Tirokuṭṭa Sutta (kp 7) is specifically about persons who died and have come back to “hang around” their formal homes. These could be gandhabbās or pretās (petās, Pali.)
As this reunion is not possible, the ghost begins to wander and associate with other disembodied consciousnesses. These of course are all hapless beings in various states of sevenfold intensification of their former senses. These senses are now strictly mental, egoistical in nature, and begin manifesting illusory embodiments of its emotional torment. So the bardo, or disembodied state becomes filled with people, places, and things reflecting their forward moving karmic thoughts. In a sense this new delusory reality is the same as the conventional one manifesting before death. However, as the future pretā or gandhabba have no power to act positively upon its desires it’s totally frustrated.
This torment drives the ghost karmic continuum towards the embodied objects of its desire until it can ‘weld’ itself to that seemingly more substantive reality. Hunger attempted to be satisfied through smells creates anguished frustration as nothing can be consumed. Imagery of hungry ghosts with large stomachs and small mouths arise. Sexual desire projects targets for consummation, genitalia looming large.
“There’s not a single womb of every kind all beings have not formerly crawled into,” taught the Buddha. Eventually, rebirth into one of the six realms is accomplished. According to the Tibetans, based on several key sutras, hell beings go directly to one of the Eight Hot, Eight Cold, or Four Neighboring, or four temporary hells. Beings born spontaneously (opapatika), are gods, hell beings, and hungry ghosts. The three other types of birth, womb, egg, and moisture. The number of beings born by any one of these latter three methods, at any given moment, is unfathomable. Yet even more unthinkable are the numbers waiting in the bardo for yet another body in an endless recycling of suffering rebirths.
The advantage of the Vajrayana practitioner of the Highest Yogatantra is that having trained in Creation and Perfecting practices—which includes a purification of the bardo state—is they recognize the dawning of the base Clear Light at death, the ‘mother’, and will be drawn as the ‘son’ to merge with it, so that no karmic rebirth takes place.
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