Reality Rupture - Pema Khandro Rinpoche

The Tibetan term bardo, the "intermediate state" [or the
in-between state], is not just a reference to the afterlife.  It
also refers more generally to moments when gaps appear,
inter-ruptions to the continuity that we otherwise project onto
our lives.  The interruptions in our normal sense of certainty
are what is being referred to by the term bardo.  To be precise,
bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality

and it is no longer available to us. [there is no going back].  
There is a total rupture in our who-I-am-ness.

We have been holding onto the idea of an inherent continuity
in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves on
artificial ground.

Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it
means to be disrupted...  In these moments we lose our grip on
the old reality and yet have no sense what a new one might be
like.  There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point -
there is, in a sense, no rest.

There is rupture in our reality...

A direct experience of disruption felt a the core of our being,
and there is no longer any use manufacturing artificial security.

The bardo teachings are really about recognizing the value of 
giving up the game, which we play without even knowing it.
We hold pictures/images of our ideal self in an ideal world.  We
imagine that if we could only manipulate our circumstances or
other people enough, then that ideal self could be achieved, and
in the meantime we pretend to have it together... and pursue
reality as we think it should be...

When we suffer disruption. we find we just can't play the game
anymore.  Holding it all together is not an option.

Death and loss are great teachers, if we can open to the
experience of profound disruption.

Without some way of managing this experience, this unsettling
discontinuity, punctuated by occasional disruptions to the very
idea of our being, we never know if we are going to show up....

We contract with our wounded sense of self, and are dissociated
from our true nature, and make frantic efforts to create something
more ideal, more secure, more definite.

In a raw broken-open state, this place where we let go of all
games, there is actually a great sense of relief available to us,
a knowledge that we don't have to do it anymore - to *be* that;
and find way to disrupt our own habit of clinging to our
continuity story.

Emerging from the bardo, we reenter the flow of life with a
new sense of groundlessness: it is clear that "later" is not always
a luxury that will be available to us...  The perspective gained
in the bardo cuts through petty concerns.  It cuts through delusions
so that whatever we contact, we do so with raw presence, without
the denial of impermanence.  A new kind of openness becomes
available to us.

The rupture of the bardo inevitably leads to whatever is next and
appreciating the [losses] in our lives, and the bardo for what it is -
the pause - the end that clarifies what exactly we will now be
beginning...

Impermanence is not just an illuminator of loss.  It is the illuminator
of newness, the ever-unfolding moment and its creativity....

Pema Khandro Rinpoche

excerpts from
"Letting Go In the Bardo"

from Lion's Roar

[brackets mine]

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Thin Door - Lisa Marguerite Mora

Tell me about the passing of life,
its thin door which is as fragile as life itself.
I can hear the music on the other side,

and the shadows of bird flight
move under the door frame
with the tinkle of wind chimes.

Tell me about how life passes into life,
hope into beginnings.
There is no reward for having lived...

There is only continuity and re-emerging
from room to room and the love
that perfumes this place and the next.

Lisa Marguerite Mora

Originally published here

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

A Preponderance of Ponderings on Impermanence - Krishnamurti

 We have to understand another phenomenon in life, which is
 death: death from old age, or disease, and accidental death,
through disease, or naturally.  We grow old inevitably, and
that age is shown in the way we have lived our life, it shows
in our face...

So there is old age.  And there is this extraordinary thing called
death, of which most of us are dreadfully frightened.  If we are
not frightened, we have rationalized this phenomenon intellectually
and have accepted the edicts of the intellect.  But it is still there.
And obviously there is the ending of the organism, the body.
And we accept that naturally, because we see everything dying.

But what we do not accept is the psychological ending of the"me",
with family, with the house, with success, the things I have done,
and the things I have still to do, the fulfillments and the frustrations 
- and there is something more to do before I end!  And the
psychological entity, we're afraid that will come to an end -
the "me", the "I", the "soul", in various forms, words, that we give
to the center of our being.

Does it come to an end?  Does it have continuity?  The East 
has said it has a continuity: there is reincarnation, being born
better in the next life if you have lived rightly.  If you believe in
reincarnation, as the whole of Asia does, then in that idea is
implied, if you observe it very closely, that what you do now,
every day, matters tremendously.  Because in the next life you're
going to pay for it or be rewarded depending on how you have
lived.  So what matters is not what you believe will happen in
the next life, but what you are and how you live.  And that is
implied also when you talk about resurrection. Here (in the West)
you have symbolized it in one person and worship that person,
because you yourself don't know how to be reborn again in your
life now.

So what matters is how you live now - not what your beliefs are...
But we are also afraid that the center, called the "I", may come
to an end.  We ask:  Does it come to an end?

You have lived in thought; that is, you have given tremendous
importance to thinking.  But thinking is old; thinking is never new;
thinking is the continuation of memory.  If you have lived there,
obviously there is some kind of continuity.  And it is a continuity
that is over, finished.  It is something old; only that which ends
can have something new.  So dying is very important to understand;
to die; to die to everything that one knows. [believes]. 

  You know, one has collected so much, not only books, houses,
bank account, but inwardly. the memories of insults, the memories
of flattery, the memories of neurotic achievements, the memory of
holding onto your own particular experience, which gives you a
position.  To die to all that without argument, without discussion,
without any fear, just to give it up.  Do it psychologically - of course
we don't actually give up our wife/husband, our clothes, our children,
or our house, but inwardly, don't be attached to anything.  Love is
not attachment.  Where there is attachment, there is fear.  And fear
inevitably becomes authoritarian, possessive, oppressive, dominating.

But to die to everything within oneself! [attachments, ideas, concepts,
beliefs].  This  means that the mind, which is not of thought - the mind
becomes utterly quiet, silent, naturally, without any force, without
any discipline.  And in light of that silence all actions can take place,
the daily living, from that silence.  And if one were lucky enough to
have gone that far, then in that silence there is quite a different
movement, which is not of time, which is not of words, which is not
measurable by thought, because it is always new. It never dies.

J Krishnamurti
from talks in Europe 1968
Amsterdam
May 19, 1968

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

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Photo - Mystic Meandering
Ethereal Window

Why We Fear Death - J. Krishnamurti

Questioner: The fact that death stares everybody in the face,
yet its mystery is never solved.  Must it always be so?

Krishnamurti:  Why is there fear of death?
When we cling to continuity, there is the fear of death.

There is fear of death as long there is the desire for
continuity [of the] character, in action, in capacity, in the
name, and so on.  As long as there is action seeking a result,
there must be the thinker who is seeking continuity.  Fear comes
into being when this continuity is threatened through death.

So, there is fear of death as long as there is the desire for
continuity.

Death, the state of non-continuity, the state of rebirth, is the
unknown.  Death is the unknown.  The mind, which is the
result of continuity, cannot know the unknown.  It can only know
the known.  It can only act and have its being in the known,
which is continuous.  So the known is in fear of the unknown. 
The known can never know the unknown, and so death
remains the mystery.

Immortality is not the continuation of "me."  The me is of time,
the result of action towards an end.  So there is no relationship
between the me and that which is immortal, timeless.  We would
like to think there is a relationship, but this is an illusion.  That
which is immeasurable cannot be caught in the net of time. 

J. Krishnamurti
excerpt from a talk in Bombay in March 1948

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Photo - Mystic Meandering