Bardo 3 – Experiencing a New State of Being

From “Mind Beyond Death” – Dzogchen Ponlop 

Now we enter the luminous bardo of dharmata, (the primordial nature of reality) which is the beginning of reaching the destination known as our next life. 

According to different traditions, this bardo arises in two stages. In the first stage we experience the “ground luminosity,” or the “luminosity of no appearance.” In the second stage we experience the “spontaneously arising luminosity,” or the “luminosity of appearance.” It is in the second stage that the various displays of forms, sounds and lights are experienced.

Our life experiences to the world in which we find ourselves, shapes our whole experience after death, acting as a filter.  For example, if you are in India and you are too scared to leave your hotel, then you will not see India. You will see only the Holiday Inn in New Delhi before going back home. And hence your perception of India will be based on what you experienced. 

At the end of the bardo of dying, when all of the elements of the physical body and mind consciousness have dissolved, we leave the bardo of this life and enter the bardo of dharmata. This experience arises for us after our consciousness has dissolved into space, and space has dissolved into luminosity, into the buddha wisdom, or buddha jnana, at our heart center.

This is liken the moment that we hit the “off” button of our television set—there is a flash of light and the screen goes dark.

Because absolute nature is buddha nature, our experience in this moment is a vivid experience of being an enlightened mind. Even if we did not “get” the nature of mind in our lifetime, it manifests so powerfully now that we have a much greater opportunity to recognize it.

This experience of manifests unfailingly for all beings.

While alive, we tend to fail to recognize “our own face,” the wisdom that is our original and true nature—our buddha nature. Instead, we take ourselves to be the ongoing stream of thoughts and emotions that arise moment to moment from a storehouse of consciousness we carry. 

The whole purpose of the path (ie: living) is to correct this misperception and uncover our self-existing wisdom. At the time of death, with the dissolving of consciousness into space, and space into luminosity, nothing of this stream remains to obscure mind’s empty radiance. 

Meeting Of Mother And Child Luminosities 

That “Aha!” experience is what we call the meeting of the mother and child luminosities. The motherlike luminosity is the ground luminosity, the basic reality of all phenomena. The childlike luminosity is our individual experience of that nature. In reality, these two are not separate; they are separated only by our perception of being apart. When the two meet and then merge into one, we have a nondual experience of luminosity.

We can only measure the time we have rested in a nondual state if our resting is short and unstable. Then when we come out of that resting state, we can look back on it. We can say it was five minutes, ten minutes, one hour or two hours.

When the mother and child luminosities meet, it is not like the meeting of two separate and unrelated people. There is a powerful and instantaneous recognition of connection. When a child meets its mother, it knows, “This is my mom.”

Motherlike luminosity is the wisdom, or prajna, element—the empty aspect—of buddha wisdom.

It is the “basis of all” wisdom and the source and heart of our sacred world.

Then, when we practice resting in the nature of mind, we have various hopes and fears about whether or not we can accomplish the state of nonthought, or nonconceptual wakefulness. However, whatever glimpse of realization we successfully generate on the path is the childlike luminosity, the immature awareness that nevertheless will recognize its mother, its source, with which it has a heart connection. As our realization matures, it becomes progressively less conceptual.

The Second Phase of the Bardo - Sight and Sound

As we enter the second phase of the bardo of dharmata, the clarity aspect of the dharmakaya luminosity begins to become more vivid. The luminosity that arises now from the ground nature of mind is the luminosity of appearance. It is called spontaneously arising luminosity or the luminosity of spontaneous presence. It is self-arising wisdom expressed in an elaborate variety of appearances. This occurs when luminosity dissolves into unity. Unity, here, refers to the unity of appearance and emptiness. 

Even when they arise in particular forms, our experience of those forms is a personal one. We may think that we all see in the same way, but actually we do not. For example, when several people look at the same object at the same time, the way in which each person sees it is completely individual. Why? Our experience is unique to our makeup because everything is mind, and mind has no absolute existence; therefore it has no fixed way of appearing.

The deities that appear now are the basic truth, or intrinsic nature, of our mind. They are the reflection in space of the enlightened qualities that are inseparable from the primordial wisdom that is the actual nature of our mind.

The symbolic forms of the deities become a potent means of communicating the aspects of buddha wisdom they embody.

At the time of the appearance of the deities, we also experience forms that are perceived as sounds. It is said that these sounds are extremely intense and powerful, like the sound of a thousand thunderbolts simultaneously resounding through space. The Tibetan term for this translates as “dragon sound.” Of course, since these are all symbolic teachings, the sounds you hear may not be exactly like that. However, at this time all perceptions are heightened and intensified. Sounds, too, may be so overwhelmingly sharp and clear that they inspire a sense of anxiety or dread.

 The absolute deity that appears at this time is one’s own nature of mind, brilliant, luminous and totally empty.

In the bardo of dharmata, the peaceful and wrathful aspects of the buddhas are nothing other than the wisdom energy of our own mind, doing the job of waking us up. 

Such a manifestation can be stunning in its brilliance and overpowering in its intensity. It can appear so bright that we feel our senses cannot withstand it.

Usually, when we talk about things like luminosity, clarity, or clear light, it is very conceptual and abstract. In the end, we are still wondering what luminosity really means. However, it is nothing other than what we experience as these strong emotions. 

We may talk about “light” and its “brightness,” or we can use words such as “emptiness” and “sacredness,” but the actual experience is beyond anything we can grasp intellectually through listening to teachings or reading books. The actual experience can be known only when it is present in our hearts.

All the appearances of the deities and mandalas, of the sounds and lights, arise from the basic nature of our own mind. Mind’s basic nature manifests in the form of clarity-emptiness, sound-emptiness and awareness-emptiness. There is nothing external, nothing outside of us.

When we can rest our mind in its natural state, we can feel the luminosity, we can feel the emptiness and egolessness; it is not an abstract experience. It is like an experience of taste—you know what something is when you have tasted it. There is no doubt. You know. It is that kind of knowing that we are talking about here as actual experience—even if it is only a glimpse.