People in Tibet do a little experiment called bardo. It is a very valuable experiment, carried out only at the time of death. When someone is about to die, people who know gather around him and make him do Bardo. But only he who has meditated in his life can be made to go through Bardo — not otherwise. In the experiment of Bardo, as soon as a person dies, instructions are given from the outside that he should remain fully awake. He is told to keep watching whatever follows next, because in that state, many times things happen which the dying person can never understand. New phenomena are not so easy to follow right away.
If a person can stay conscious after death, for a while he will not know that he is dead. When people carry his dead body and start burning it at the cremation ground only then will he come to know for certain that he is dead — because nothing actually dies inside, just a distance is created. In life, this distance has never been experienced before. The experience is so novel it cannot be grasped through conventional definition. The person merely feels that something has separated. But something has died, and that he only understands when people all around him start weeping and crying, falling over his body in grief, getting ready to carry the body away for cremation.
There is a reason why the body is brought for cremation so soon. The reason for burning or cremating the body as soon as possible is to assure the soul that the body is dead, that it is burned to ashes. But this a man can know only if he has died in awareness; a man dying in an unconscious state cannot know this. So in order for a man to see his body burning in Bardo, he is prompted, “Take a good look at your burning body. Don’t run or move away in haste. When people bring your body for cremation, make sure you accompany them and be present there. Watch your body being cremated with perfect attention, so that next time you do not get attached to the physical body.”
Once you see something burning to ashes, your attachment for it disappears. Others will, of course, see your body being cremated, but if you also see it, you will lose all your attachment for it. Normally, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, the man is unconscious at the time of death; he has no knowledge of it. On the one occasion when he is conscious, he moves away from watching his burning body; he escapes from the cremation ground. So in Bardo he is told, “Look, don’t miss this opportunity. Watch your body being cremated; just watch it once and for all. Watch that which you have been identifying your self with all along being destroyed totally. Watch it being reduced to ashes for certain, so that you may remember in your next birth who you are.”
As soon as a person dies he enters into a new world, one we know nothing about. That world can be scary and frightening to us because it is neither like nor unlike any of our experiences. In fact it has no connection with life on earth whatsoever. Facing this new world is more frightening than it would be if a man were to find himself in a strange country where everyone was a stranger to him, where he was unacquainted with their language, with their ways of living. He would obviously be very perturbed and confused .
The world we live in is a world of physical bodies. As we leave this world the incorporeal world begins — a world we have never experienced. It is even more frightening, because in our world, no matter how strange the place, how different its people and their ways of living, there is still a bond between us and them: it is a realm of human beings. Entering into the world of bodiless spirits can be an experience frightening beyond imagination.
Ordinarily, we pass through it in an unconscious state, and so we don’t notice it. But one who goes through it in a conscious state gets into great difficulty. So in Bardo there is an attempt to explain to the person what kind of a world it will be, what will happen there, what kind of beings he will come across. Only those who have been through deep meditation can be taken through this experiment — not otherwise.
Lately, I have often felt that those friends who are practicing meditation can be taken into the Bardo experiment in some form or other. But this is possible only when they have gone through deep meditation; otherwise, they would not even be able to hear what is being said to them. They would not be able to hear what is being said at the moment of death, or follow what is being told to them. In order to follow what is being said, a very silent and empty mind is needed. As the consciousness begins to fade and disappear, and as all earthly ties start being severed, only a very silent mind can hear messages given from this world; they cannot be heard otherwise.
Remember, it can be done only in respect to death, if anything; nothing can be done with respect to birth. But whatsoever we do with death, it consequently affects our birth as well. We are born in the same state in which we die.