For thousands of years, human beings have asked the same questions.
What happens when we die?
Who are we beyond the body?
Does consciousness come to an end, or does it continue?
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thödol, is one of the world’s great spiritual classics.
This booklet offers a gentle comparison between the Bardo Thödol and A Course in Miracles, inviting us to explore both teachings with an open mind and an open heart.
Let these timeless teachings inspire your own direct exploration of consciousness, fear, identity and the possibility of awakening.
Perhaps, in the end, every authentic spiritual path is less concerned with giving us new beliefs than with helping us recognize what has always been true.
The deepest message of the text is surprisingly simple:
What consciousness experiences during and after death arises from its own mind.
The Clear Light, the peaceful appearances, the terrifying deities, the sounds, colours and visions are ultimately not to be understood as external powers. Rather, they are manifestations of one’s own nature, one’s own karma, and one’s own mind.
For this reason, the deceased is addressed again and again with words that, in essence, say:
"Do not be afraid. Recognize what appears. It arises from your own consciousness."
This is the thread running throughout the entire text. The greatest opportunity for liberation does not arise because someone reaches the right place, but because he or she recognizes.
Fear makes the experience appear solid and real. Recognition brings liberation.
A bardo is an intermediate state—a transition in which the old form has passed away while the new one has not yet fully arisen.
In the West, the word is usually associated with the period between death and rebirth. Within Tibetan Buddhism, however, there are several bardos: the ordinary waking state, dreaming, meditation, the process of dying, the experience of one’s true nature, and the movement toward a new birth.
For this reason, the book is not merely a guide for what happens after death. It is really about every moment in which our familiar reality begins to fall apart:
In a broader sense, all of these can be understood as bardos. Our familiar identity loses its grip. And precisely there, where fear may arise, an opening may also appear.
If the Clear Light is not fully recognized, the text tells us that the Bardo of Reality, or the Bardo of Dharmata, begins.
Consciousness encounters radiant, peaceful Buddha forms, intense colours, rays of light, symbols and sacred sounds. These appearances represent different qualities of awakened consciousness, such as wisdom, compassion, purity and fearlessness. They are extraordinarily powerful and magnificent. At the same time, softer and less intense lights appear, corresponding to the various realms in which rebirth is possible.
Consciousness often feels more attracted to the gentle and familiar light than to the brilliant light of wisdom. The Clear Light asks for the complete surrender of the separate self, whereas the softer light still offers something in which that separate self can continue to exist.
Once again, the instruction is repeated: Do not be afraid of the radiant Light. Recognize it as your own consciousness.
This bears a striking resemblance to the choice between the voice of the ego and the Voice of the Holy Spirit.
Truth is simple, complete and uncompromising. It tells us that separation has never truly occurred. The ego, on the other hand, offers a gentler and more familiar alternative. It says that you may continue to exist as a separate self, provided you are willing to accept the price of fear, guilt and conflict.
We often do not turn away from Truth because it is painful, but because it appears too absolute. It leaves nothing of our carefully constructed identity untouched.
The ego might almost whisper: "The Light is beautiful… but wouldn’t you rather return to something familiar? A name… a past… and perhaps even an opinion about the neighbours?"
A Course in Miracles teaches that fear is not proof that something is truly dangerous. Fear simply reveals that we have given something a meaning that does not come from Love. The answer, therefore, is not to fight the appearance itself, but to allow our interpretation of it to be corrected.
After the peaceful appearances, the text describes the emergence of powerful wrathful deities. They may appear fierce, demonic and threatening. There are flames, weapons, thunderous sounds, blood, and terrifying faces.
Yet the text makes it clear that these appearances are not enemies from outside ourselves. They are the very same wisdom that appeared earlier as the peaceful deities, but they are now experienced by a consciousness that has become afraid.
What would be recognized as love, power or wisdom in a state of clarity now appears as something frightening because it is being seen through the eyes of fear.
The peaceful and the wrathful appearances are therefore not two different realities. They are one and the same reality, perceived in two different ways. One mind beholds its own energy without fear; the other sees that same energy through the lens of guilt and defensiveness.
When we fail to recognize our own mind, it seems to confront us as something outside ourselves.
Here we come very close to one of the central principles of A Course in Miracles: Projection makes perception.
What we refuse to recognize within our own mind is projected outward and is then experienced as something that threatens us. The terrifying deity becomes the equivalent of an enemy, an illness, a punishment, a hostile world, or someone we hold responsible for our suffering.
According to ACIM, beneath every fearful perception lies the hidden belief in sin, guilt and punishment. These belong to the ego’s thought system, not to God’s Creation.
Where the Tibetan Book of the Dead says: "This appearance is your own mind."
A Course in Miracles might respond: "This fearful world is the projection of a thought that is asking to be corrected."
Seen through the vision of the Holy Spirit, the world becomes a classroom in which every experience offers another opportunity to choose Love instead of fear.
When recognition once again fails to arise, consciousness becomes increasingly drawn along by its karmic tendencies. Memories, actions, desires and fears gain tremendous force. In some descriptions, a symbolic judgment appears, in which wholesome and harmful actions seem to be weighed or reflected.
From the Tibetan perspective, however, this judgment is not necessarily carried out by an external God who rewards or punishes. Rather, consciousness can no longer hide its own life from itself.
Karma is not a cosmic accountant keeping score with a stern expression. It is the natural unfolding of causes, habits and deeply rooted tendencies of the mind. Someone who has practiced mindfulness, compassion and non-attachment throughout life will be more likely to recognize what appears. Someone deeply entangled in fear, anger and attachment will more easily be carried away by those very forces.
A Course in Miracles does not present karma as a system of reward and punishment. According to the Course, God does not keep a record of our mistakes, nor does He assign us a future based upon them. Guilt belongs to the dream, not to God.
Yet there is an interesting parallel: both teachings suggest that what we believe determines what we experience. A guilty mind expects punishment; a peaceful mind recognizes opportunities for forgiveness. In that sense, it is not an objective world that travels with us, but our own thought system.
Seen from the perspective of ACIM, liberation is not found by creating a better future, whether in this life or another. It is found through the recognition that our true Identity has never entered the dream at all.
If consciousness still fails to recognize its true nature, the Bardo of Becoming begins. The former physical identity has disappeared, yet the longing for a new form remains.
According to the text, consciousness now experiences vivid images of places, people, landscapes and possible parents. Attraction, aversion, desire and fear begin to shape the movement toward a new birth. The mind seeks another body because a body appears to provide a place in which the separate "I" can once again exist.
The text offers practical guidance for interrupting this movement toward rebirth:
From the perspective of A Course in Miracles, the longing for a new birth can be understood symbolically as the continual choice to reinforce the belief in a separate identity. This does not have to occur only after physical death.
Every moment we identify once again with the ego, we are, in a sense, born into the same dream. When we think:
"This happened to me."
"Someone else has taken away my peace."
"My past determines who I am."
"My body tells me what I am."
—we have entered the dream once again. Forgiveness gently interrupts this cycle by refusing to make the past real again.
A Course in Miracles does not describe resurrection as the reanimation of a body. Rather, resurrection is the awakening from the belief in death itself. It is the restoration of the knowledge that Life is not dependent upon form.
Popular summaries often state that the bardo lasts for a maximum of forty-nine days. During this period, traditional rituals include reading the text aloud and offering prayers for the deceased.
The number forty-nine, however, need not be understood solely as ordinary chronological time. It also belongs to the symbolic and spiritual structure of the teaching. The deceased is addressed again and again because every stage offers another opportunity for recognition. Even if the first opportunity is missed, nothing is truly lost.
To me, this is one of the most compassionate aspects of the entire book. Consciousness is never abandoned. Again and again the text seems to whisper:
"Look once more. Do not be afraid. This is not what you think it is."
It is difficult not to hear an echo here of the gentle Voice of the Holy Spirit in A Course in Miracles.
Although the Bardo Thödol is traditionally read to those who are dying or who have already died, its real preparation takes place during life itself.
If we do not learn now to recognize our thoughts, our projections and our fears, it is unlikely that we will suddenly find it easier during one of life’s most profound transitions. In a very real sense, we practice for the bardo every day:
Seen in this light, the book is less about what we should do after death than about how we may learn, here and now, to die to what we are not.
A Course in Miracles would express the same idea somewhat differently: It is not the body that must be overcome, but our identification with it. It is not the world that must disappear, but our mistaken interpretation of it. It is not death that brings liberation, but forgiveness.
Having explored both the Bardo Thödol and A Course in Miracles, one question naturally arises: Are they teaching the same Truth?
The answer is both yes and no.
Yes, because both teachings point beyond the separate self. Both invite us to look beyond fear. Both encourage us to recognize that what appears to be outside us is intimately connected with the state of our own mind. And both suggest that liberation does not come through changing the world, but through a profound change in the way we perceive it.
Yet the differences are just as important:
"Perhaps every genuine spiritual path is like a finger pointing toward the moon. The fingers differ... To argue about the finger is to miss the moon entirely."
Truth itself has never belonged to a single book, a single religion, or a single tradition. Truth is not owned. It is recognized. And perhaps that recognition is the deepest meaning of every true spiritual path.
With love and light,
Gonny