Between-Life State

All sorts of names and conditions have been ascribed to the 'between-life state'

The popular conception of which is largely decreed by culture & custom

The Tibetan Book of the Dead / Bardol Thodol

THE TIBETAN BARDO STATE

Across the threshold of death lies a Realm beyond our conscious understanding, a fourth-dimensional commonwealth of Spirit in which the human entitity, released from bodily constraints, is steeped in the quintessence of being.Ancient Tibetans referred to this profoundly mysterious condition as the Bardo - the Plane of Consciousness between lives

In the 18th century, Tibetan scribes compiled and condensed the out-of-body journeyings of genereations into a guidebook mapping out the Psychic Territory to be negotiated once the body has perished.For centuries,the Bardol Thodol, better known to Westerners as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, has been recited into the ears of the dying and the deceased in hope of steering the liberated soul across the 'dangerous ambush' of the Bardo (literally, bar as 'in between' do as 'island') and away from the necessity of rebirth

According to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the experience that lies in wait at death ranges over a symbolic 49days, from blissful envelopment in 'Clear Light' to the most terrifying, gory hallucinations.If the Bardo traveller can only accept the absolute beauty and truth of the 'Clear Light' or, failing this, if he /she refuses to be intimidated by the evil visions which, after all, are only born of personal 'karmic thought froms', then it is possible to merge with the Godhead and escape 'the muddy swamp of samsara'

Most human souls, however, are unequal to this task and gradually descend from the gloriously intense brightness that greets them at death to conformation with their personal devils and, eventually, yet another earthly body.The 3 Bardo Stages in which self meets self in ever-degenerting encounters are Chikhai Bardo, Chonyid Bardo,Sidpa Bardo

*more info on the 3 Bardo Stages*

Until a few years ago, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, was regarded by many as an instructive yet essentially symbolic allegory, as quaint, moralistic and old world as a fairy tale.But a burst of medical research into (NDE(near-death and (OOBE)out-of-body experiences has justified a more literal interpretation of much of the Bardo Thodol, mainly because of testimony of modern accident victims and hospital patients who have come back from the dead bears near-identical witness to certain stages of the venerable Bardo State

Proof of Life After Life

Studies of NDE & OOBE

Studies by Dr.Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Dr, Raymond Moody, Dr. Kenneth Ring and others demonstrate that the after-death state is alive with commonly reproted phenomena, a powerful, welcoming Light, a sense of peace and timelessness, freedom of movement and the ability to travel through objects, increased clarity of perception, surprise at being out-of-body coupled with the capacity to see and hear people nearby, strange sounds, the granting of a rapid review of the life that has gone before, a loss of fear of death combined with a heightened sense of purpose and the inadequacy of words to describe the overall experience.How humbling it must be for medical scientists to accept that these dramatic findings had been set down on parchment in remote Tibet more that 11 centuries earlier

Dr.Moody marveled in his best selling account 'Life After Life' of near death research, that the correspondence between early stages of death related in The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the reports of his subjects to be drawn from this tallying of testimonies is that the survivors (OOBE) of out-of-body experiences have ventured part way into the between-life state, their reports reflecting the earliest, predominantly positive aspects of the Bardo. Dr.Ring commented that many of the witnesses seemed to have traveled far enough to become aware of the process of Reincarnaton

Testimonies of Near Death Experiences

A man who survived a serious car accident reported

'I got to see a movie of basically my life, of what had happened and what was happening.It was like I have a mission here to do, let's say, and I had a choice of what basically I call going on with the physical body or starting over again with a new one'

A woman who had the most profound near-death experience reported '

'I really believe that death is just part of a continuous cycle.Not an end at all.I know that whenever I have another grandchild, I look at him and think 'Could you be papa?Could you be mama?Who could you be? And it is very exciting

After a cardiac arrest left New York film maker Victor Solow clinically dead for 23min, he was revived by a medical team's final desperate effort.Formely skeptical of any life beyond the grave, Solow related his Bardo adventure as follows

'There was no time for fear, pain or thought....I was moving at high speed toward a net of great luminosity..The instant I made contact with it, the vibrant luminosity increased to a blinding intentisy which drained, absorbed and transformed me at the same time.There was no pain.The sensation was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but completely consuming...The grid was like a transformer, and energy converter transporting me through form and into formlessness, beyond time and space....This new 'I' was not I which I knew, but rather a distilled essence of it, yet something vaguely familiar, something I had always known buried under the superstructure of personal fears, hopes, wants and needs.This 'I' had no connection to ego.It was final, unchangeable, indivisible,indestrutible,pure spirit.While completely unique and individual as a fingerprint 'I' was, at the same time, part of some infinite,harmonious and ordered whole.I had been there before....

Other Cases of

Spontaneous Past-Life Memory

Chemically Activated

Documented evidence from medical after-care is not all that points to the verity of the Bardo State.In a study of 127 cases of spontaneous past-life memory reported in the book 'Lifetimes', Prof.Frederic Lenz noted that the occasional between-life remembrances of his subjects not only contained common phenomena in exactly the same sequence but were also 'strikingly similar' to the death and rebirth process protrayed by 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead'. The LSD experiments of Dr.Stanislav Grof, show that many of his subjects experience vivid and profound rebirth visions much like those described in the Bardo Thodol

Grof wrote: 'The human unconsious, activated chemically, actually tends to enact spontaneously a powerful confrontation with death that can result in transcendence.' With a little help from lysergic acid diethylamide, volunteers have sat through the most shattering hallucinations, seeing themselves wallowing in exrement,drowning in cesspools, crawling in rotting offal or slurping blood.Visions of murders, torture,mutilations,sadomasochistic orgies and cruelty of all kinds are commonplace.But there are also psychedelic blasts of brilliant white or golden light during which the subjects feel absolutely purified as they glide in a timeless, indesbribably beautiful universe

Varieties of transpersonal experience, which Dr.Stanislav Grof defines as an expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the usual ego boundaries and the limitations of time and space, are also brought on by the hallucinogenics mescalin (and active ingredient of the peyote cactus) and psilocybin, derived from a mushroom,sacred to Mexican Indians - called 'teonanactl'

The anaesthetic ketamine hydrochloride has the power to transport its users into a bright world totally dissociated from the body. It's impossible to describe, said a medical doctor who has experimented with ketamine.The 'you' that you know is not there.You forget your name and identity.There's only experiences - and it can be terrifying if you're unprepared

According to anaesthetist Dr.Howard Alltounain, who conducted ketamine experiments with his late wife, Marcia Moore, the drug opens up the mind to the larger designs of the Universe - we see the reasons for which we came to birth, why we had to die, and why we decided to be born again - and we know these reasons to be good

Clinical work on Schizophrenics

Clinical work with schizophrenics has led psychiatrists to conclude that their patients' visions ofter represent, not denial of death or wishful fantasy, but unadorned experiential reality

Biblical Prophets

In the Bible the actions of Old Testament prophets.Ezekiel sometimes remained in a trance for days and Daniel spoke of his visions throwing him to the ground and making him physically sick

Yogis of the East

Advanced Yogis of the East also tesitfy to communion with this state of being ,and have demonstrated their ability to leave their bodies at will, to exit for weeks without food and even to merge with water and flame

Monks in Extreme Isolation

Prisoners and monks confined to solitary cells, explorers subsisting in conditions of extreme isolation and sufferers of epilepsy, which the Greeks called 'the sacred disease' for its capacity to inspire body-free timelessness, have all experienced comparative states of higher awareness.The are all dippping into various levels of the Bardo to be rejuvenated by the knowledge that rebirth proceeds from the very jaws of annihilation

Different Belief Systems & Customs on Life After Life

THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

They spoke of sensitive souls passing through the gate of the gods into the 'amenthe' where they delt in continuous pleasure until descending once more to animate a new body

THE HEBREWS OF OLD

The Hebrews of old envisaged a spell in 'pardish' or paradise- the place where fruit ripens and is gathered or, esoterically, where the spirits matures from seed sown in earthly incarnations.Souls whose time in 'pardish' has nearly expired are given instructions for the next life, explains the Zohar , before being sent out 'sorrowing in exile' to a place where there is no true happiness because only in the presence of God can this state be attained

KABALISTS

According to the Kabalists,forgetfulness of the previous life, happens in the 'between-life state', when the night angel Layela' gives the hovering soul a little pinch on the nose, while applying light pressure to the upper lip.So it is said that we all bear the mark of the angel's finger on our lips

SHOLEM ASCH

He writes in 'The Nazarene', that our senses are haunted by fragmentary recollections of another life when the Angel of Forgetfulness, forgets his mission.These recollections ' drift like torn clouds above the hills and valleys of the mind and weave themselves into the incidents or our current existence. They assert themselves, clothed with reality, in the form of nightmares which visit our beds.Then the effect is exactly the same as when, listening to a concert broadcast through the air, we suddenly hear a strange voice break in, carried from afar on another ether-wave and charged with another melody

THE DRUSES OF LEBANON

.A reincarnation formula of recognition was adopted by the Druses of Syria,Lebanon and Jordan during the early Middle Ages. Modern-day Druses are thought to be the descendents of mystics from various nations who took refuge in the mountains of Syria, when the Early Christian Church turned vengeful against nonconformists. The Druses, deny the 'Bardo State of Life-Between Lives' and believe that at death, a peron's soul passes immediately into the body of a baby born at the same instant

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH - THE EMPEROR JUSTINIAN

In the sixth century he issued 'anathemas' condemning the idea of reincarnation.The Christian Church has shunned the doctrine of rebirth ever since

THE INDIAN CASE SYSTEM

The Indian caste system is a reflection of rebirth belief at its most unenlightened.Regarded as the direct result of the previous life, the caste into which a person is born cannot be changed.This has led to accusations that the system fosters social stagnation,resignation,callousness,pain and depression.Hope of any improvement in the current life is virtually annihilated for millions of natives.Only a person' status in the next life is variable and said to be determined largely by how faithfully caste duties and prohibitions are obeyed

SHAMANISM

Shamanism, a primitive religious practice of the Ural Altaic peoples of Northern Asia, has long incorporated a profound rite of annihilation and rebirth at the core of its initiation trials. Novice Shamans, willing themselves into trance, lie alone and close to death for between 3-7days.In this state, they suffer the most hellish visions, including personal dismemberment and the scraping of flesh from their bones, before receiving new flesh and blood, spiritual enlightenment and rapturous transport to the heavenly realms.The Shaman's vision, to quote from Joseph Campbell's 'The Mask of God', reveals ' that sense of an immortal inhabitant within the individual which is announced nin every mystical tradition' This obscure dweller-in-the-body, neither dies nor is born, but simply passes back and forth, as it were thought a veil, appearing in bodies and departing.There's substantial evidence that hallucinatory drugs have been used for millenia to encourage the onset of Shamanistic perception

INDIA'S - THE RIG-VEDA

The Rig-Veda, India's earliest religious document, glorifies a psychedelic mushroom called soma and , during excavations of a Shaman's grave at the New Stone Age Settlement of Catal Huyuk in Turkey, pollen analysis revealed that psychedelic plants had been placed beside the medicine man's corpse

ANCIENT MYSTERIES OFTHE OLD CIVILIZED WORLD

The ancient Mysteries of the old civilized world were rife with death and rebirth rituals, and myth and fable from around the globe is coloured with tales of that free-floating state after death where the human spirit has yet to shed the thoughts and appetites of the Earth, but most do without the satisfaction afforded by the physical body

THE JAINS OF INDIA

They also deny the 'Bardo State', but assert that the soul joins the new bodily vehicle at the moment of conception

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES Of QUEENSLAND'S PENNEFATHER RIVER

Believe that between incarnations the spirit resides in the haunts of Anjea,a mythical being who causes women to conceive by putting mud babies in their bodies

OKINAWANS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC

To them the interim kingdom is galled 'gusho' to be entered on the forty-ninth day after death by spirits who, though fleeing their dead bodies, remain in their homes until this time.There's an intriguing parallel here with the Tibetan Bardo State's forty-nine stations of planetary existence.The Okinawans believe that the entity returns to earth within seven generations in the form of an individual closely resembling the previous incarnation.Not mind,but spirit reincarnates, the mind being inherited from ancestors.Some spirits, nevertheless, remain in 'gusho' indefinitely to act as hosts and tour guides for new arrivals

MADAME HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY - THE THEOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT

More than one hundred years ago the Russiand Noblewoman Madame Helena Blavatsky and her Theosophical movement, rifled Eastern mysticism for two terms to describe the after death state; kama loka, meaning 'the plane of desire' and devachan, a Tibetan word meaning 'the blissful'. According to Theosophy, kama loka is the Astral Region penetrating and surrounding the Earth - where the soul is purged of its impurities before rising to the unalloyed spiritual joys of devachan where it rests - for up to 15 centuries, according to Madame Blavatsky, until being drawn back to the chores of earthly existence demanded by the ceaseless, Universal law of Karma

The between-life process, argue the Theosophists, is remedial, restful and beneficial, as vital to the spirit as sleep is to the mortals.Were the adoption of another body to follow immediately upon death, hte soul, being thus deprived of the necessary opportunity for reflection and consequent of its higher nature, would soon become utterly exhausted

RUDOLF STEINER - ANTHROPOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Steiner headed headed the German section of the Theosophical Society before founding the Anthroposophical Society based on his own Metaphysical researches. He also spoke of 'kamaloca' and 'devachan' as both essential and complementary to physical existence.For evolution to proceed, the body must be repeatedly eliminated. In Steiner's words; 'In order to sustain consciousness and to keep it active, we have been continualy destroying our corporeal sheath' In 'kamaloca' (recognizable, thought most inaccurately presented, as the Roman Catholic purgatory,says Steiner) the soul weans itself of all desires, appetites and passions.Here, every past-life deed commited in relation to a fellow human being is re-experienced as if the acting individual were that other person.Simultaneously, the soul is drenced in the 'spiritual rain' of the sympathies and antipathies of higher beings who pass judgement on these deeds.All the while, the entity is passing through the planetary spheres where a vision is presented of all its previous earthly incarnations spread out in a tablea

Work then begins on the creation of the next physical body in exact accordance with the experience, lessons, and karmic propensities assimilated from the past life. According to Steiner 'nothing that you can ever do on earth, can be as great and manifold as what you have to do when from the starry worlds you build this temple of the gods, the human body'

Before the spiritual seed of the physical body descends to the parents who have been chosen to receive it, the soul is granted a vision of the life to come. Steiner says that sometimes, this preview is so shocking that the self draws back in horror. Should this happen, the soul might never truly incarnate in the body it prepares for itself, an eventuality which can lead either to so-called prenatal defects or to epilepsy, which reveals lack of full control over the organism

ALLAN KARDEC (1804-1869)

Kardec is the father of Spiritism in France.His philosophy, expounded in The Book of the Spirits, was based on the tenet that Spiritual Progress is effected by a series of compulsory Reincarnations

RENOWNED HISTORICAL FIGURES

A number ofrenowned Historical figures, Cicero & Virgil among them, have written glowingly (OOBE) out-0f-body experiences.Cicero, having rejoined his frame with renewed vigor, wrote 'We at last possess reasosns why we should lvie, and we are not only eager to live, but we cherish a better hope in death

PLATO - THE LEGEND OF ER

Plato in the 10th book of the Republic, recounts the legend of Er, who, 12days after being killed in battle, returned to life as he lay on a funeral pyre to tell of his adventures in the 'other world'. Er observed how after undergoing judgement, each soul was granted the opportunity to choose the form of its next incarnation, a selection process determined by the individual's wisdom, or lack of it.Plato writes 'Most curious was the spectacle - sad and laughable and strange, for the choice of the souls was on most cases based on their own experience of a previous life.' The choice being made, the souls drank of the River Lethe (Greek for forgetfulness) which erased all conscious memory in readisness for the next incarnation.Such enforced oblivion crops up again and again as a between-life theme

THE LORD JESUS CHRIST

The Lord Jesus Christ in the Pistis Sophia speaks of the soul drinking from a cup 'filled with the water of fogetfulness

CHINESE BUDDHISM

In Chinese Buddhism, Meng P'o, the presiding goddess of the underworld, ensures that souls quaff a bitter-sweet broth to drown all memory of their previous existence before returning to earth

PLOTINUS - GREEK PHILOSOPHER

The Greek philosopher Plotinus wrote 'Body' is the true River of Lethe, for souls plunged into it, forget all

MODERN MEDICINE - HORMONE OXYTOCIN

Modern medicine might have discovered an explanation for this amnesia in a hormone called oxytocin, which controls the pregnant woman's rate of labor contractions.Research studies have established that large quantities of oxytocin produce loss of memory in laboratory animals and caused even well-trained animals to lose their ability to perform known tasks.Because a woman's oxytocin floods her child's system, it is not unreasonable to suppose that this natural drug flushes away memories of former incarnations along with conscious remembrance of birth.Not that smearing of the slate of memory doesn't occur in life outside the womb.The inability of keen-minded adults to remember their earliest years and the frequent loss of recall among the elderly is, perhaps, nature's way of imparting the relative insignificance of conscious memory

info source

Joe Fisher-The Case for Reincarnation-Preface by The Dalai Lama