"What will you do in the bardo?"
On my long plane flight to the east coast I began devouring the book In Love with the World, a memoir by a Tibetan Buddhist tulku (reincarnated lama) who slipped out of his monastery one night and spent the next four years as a beggar on a wandering retreat. It has been a minute since I have read anything overtly spiritual, and this unassuming, highly engaging book is surprisingly full of “pointing out instructions.”
In the book, Mingyur Rinpoche explains how his father once responded to his older brother’s complaints about the trials he was facing living in a noisy city with the reproach, “What will you do in the bardo?” Meaning, if you can’t train your mind to serve you in times of minor adversity, what will you do after your death when your soul tries to find its way?
The implications on soul travel after death set aside, it is worth contemplating how we want to live the rest of this life, and possibly even be available to function as Agents of Evolution during transformative times – do we want to give our unexamined thoughts the power to yank us around, every time something happens we don’t like? Or do we want to develop some measure of equipoise?
Mingyur Rinpoche spells it out like this:
“What will you do . . . on a crowded, reeking train? Or in a terrorist attack, or in a war, or, or . . . in any one of life’s countless unwanted events: a diagnosis of ill health, a flat tire, a perception of being slighted, or disrespected, or rejected? What will you do when you experience your life as being interrupted by undesired circumstances? Will you maintain a steady mind that can accommodate what you don’t want, and actually be of benefit to yourself and others? Or will you implode through fear, anger, or loss of control? How do we act when we do not get what we want, or when we do not want what we have?”
We all know this tough spot conceptually. We know that giving in to anger, fear, desire, or any of the negative emotions takes us down a path that leads to feeling awful, and yet many times, we give in anyway.
But in order to be of service to our collective evolution, we cannot allow random thoughts to control our experience. We cannot indulge the very human tendency to shrink from adversity. We must train ourselves to stay present.* It is only our presence that can make any difference in a moment that matters.
I sense that we might see exciting, collective evolutionary movements, such as entirely new modes of perception, in our lifetimes. Yet before any of these advanced evolutionary movements have a chance to develop, this primary tenet of many of the eastern wisdom traditions must have gained enough of a foothold in the human experience that it “goes viral”:
See things as they are (and not through the stories the mind tells about them).*
*If this concept is new to you and you’d like to explore the possibility of training the mind but aren’t necessarily drawn to any particular eastern wisdom tradition, Byron Katie’s secular classic Loving What Is is a great, imminently practical place to start.
❤️