An excerpt from a teaching called How Buddhists Think by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo
Until we attain Enlightment, we are blinded to our own Nature, fixated on the belief in self-nature as inherently real. We walk through an experiential field that is based on this false supposition, and all desire and compulsion arise from it. We experience death and rebirth in an endless cycle. We may feel relatively stable now, but soon we will die and be reborn. You may think, “Great! It’s an endless adventure. It goes on and on.” Well, here’s the problem: you don’t know where you’re going next.
When you die, you go through what we call the Bardo or intermediate state, in which you experience the content of your mind in an externalized form––almost as if flashed on a screen in front of you. If you have much hatred and anger in your mind, you will see what looks like demons. If you have much virtue and loving kindness in your mind, you will have what seems to you a very beautiful and seductive experience.
Hidden beneath that kind of event is the truer experience which occurs to everyone as the elements that bind us dissolve and the consciouness becomes more fluid. What we experience at that time is our own Nature; however, if we are deluded and fixated, we won’t experience it as such. We won’t recognize the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, though we are in their presence.
But if, in the Bardo, your mindstream is free enough to experience the vision of these Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as inseparable from your own mind, it will be overwhelming. The intense connection will be as strong as that of a child and its mother. You will run into the arms of Enlightenment! If you have accomplished the causes I’ve just described, that very experience is possible in the after-death state.
© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo
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