Bardo in Life

I have recently encountered some experiences with regard to a certain pattern seen on the Path. I am not sure I have comprehended this correctly, and am just putting this forward tentatively.

The hint for it came via a particular experience I had while out in the mountains with LoneBear. I had received imagery, with a stream and a bird, which I needed to keep an eye open for. Of course, instead of merely keeping an eye open for it, I went ahead and actually grabbed at it. This created the experience for me in a minor form, but without the corresponding sense of connectivity or meaning to it – I saw a stream and a bird, and that’s about it. All I did get from that was “Wow, it happened!”

Subsequently, once I had got the hang of allowing things to occur in their time, I came across the same symbols again, this time with a certain meaning and guidance to it. It got me thinking later on, as even the first time, even though the essence of the event was drained from it, it still happened. So how was I to distinguish whether the same event was not happening again the second time, still constrained by the expectations? And what if most of the experiences occurred because they are created by us for ourselves? What, then, would constitute a dialogue with a consciousness far above ours, and what would constitute a dialogue with ourselves?

It looks like the way the situation is created is similar to the immediate after-death (bardo) state where events are created for us by the astral body which has its desires. The ego is dissolved in the after-death state and reconnected to another life, but following that the complex of likes and dislikes, as well as astral, is supposed to rise. The same pattern is seen in meditation, and in sleep, where after the initial disengagement of the ego, one has to wade through the network or desires, which, while being different from the ego, are still the expressions of thought or spirit. So it got me wondering if by shifting it out of the ego, I was just putting it into the realm of the astral, which would then stitch together a pattern for me in the physical.

The features of this occurrence would be that events would be synchronistic, as well as retain their symbolic character. In addition, they would be wholly consistent, as the mind would fill up the gaps from the vast reservoirs of experience every human would have. And with psi skills, that reservoir is even bigger. But they would not enable the person to affect the physical world, and he/she would transit in the astral world ONLY as a result!

Hence, these pattern-experiences can be of three kinds, those which are very clear and in-your-face, those which are encoded symbolically based on what we know, and those which we DO NOT KNOW. Let us assume for the moment that we are able to utilize the first two by working on them and integrating them on the Path.

However, when we encounter those which we do not know at all, there can again be a number of responses. One is that we forget about it, and it bounces off, redirected to the subconscious. The second way is to try to explain it with what we know, which is what happens when, upon the steadying the mind, we are then provided the closest fitting symbols to deal with it. The third way is to keep it in reserve consciously, and allow the information to act on us, so that a suitable response can be generated by growing oneself to that level.

More often than not, it is the first two that are done. Either one forgets about it in a while, and it goes to the unconscious storage, or one tries a little extra to make sense of it. Or in reverse… while one makes some sense of it with the existing symbols, it does not remain in the consciousness, as that is not the true meaning behind it. These would be the characteristics of peak experiences, or temporary experiences which we later wonder about, as only the experiential memory remains.

The thing is that the encoding of stuff which we do not know, with the stuff we do know, will lead us straight into the bardo state, while still alive! The astral self has no “I don’t know” aspect to its working, it is bipolar (either you accept or criticize). So experiences would occur, real in every sense, but without adequate recalibrating of our own perceptions, would lead us to create that world for ourselves with the existing meaning, via accepting it, or criticizing it. That would mean that a world would exist that is very similar to the physical existence, except that its food is the symbolic experience. So whenever we undergo a symbolic transformation, that world upgrades itself, which is the way one progresses through the vMemes. However, it would suffer from the same limitation that a physical body has… it is what it eats. In other words, the experiences get intermingled like food, changing from concept to concept as and when ingested, and this leads to the survival of “knowability”: that essentially, one way or the other, almost everything that has occurred makes sense at the present time. The truth is, sometimes it does NOT make sense, and one must stare at it for a long while, acknowledging that one does not understand anything, and not let it go into the subconscious, but instead see how to develop the senses needed to understand it.

So when one starts acknowledging that things are unknown, then naturally there is no need for things to make sense immediately, so there would be no criticism, howsoever subtle, of any event, or person or situation. Nor would there be a justification upon entering new knowledge realms (“Oh, I always knew that” or something similar). The question is, what prevented me from figuring out a certain thing for myself before this? Neither the Astral nor the ego is gripping the experience, only the spirit and thought can act on any situation to improve it.

This is probably one of the reasons the ancient civilizations encouraged initiates NOT to speak about their spiritual experiences, as the clothing of that which is unknown in the words of what is known (instead of upgrading the words themselves) would take one on the route where the Astral self keeps creating situations based on the food it receives, making one essentially a type of wanderer. To break that cycle, it is as simple as regulating the “urges” which prompt one to name things, accept or criticize things. One just needs to “hold on” and explore long enough to call an elephant an elephant.