Navigating the bardo states

The Tibetan bardo (བར་དོ་, literally "between two") names any intermediate state — the gap between death and rebirth, but also, in the fuller Nyingma teaching, the gaps within waking life, dream, and meditation. The classic text, the Bar do thos grol, describes three sequential bardos: the Chikhai Bardo of the moment of death, when the clear light of reality dawns most nakedly; the Chönyid Bardo of experiencing reality through the visions of peaceful and wrathful deities; and the Sidpa Bardo of rebirth-seeking, when consciousness, blown by the winds of karma, moves toward a new womb. As Jung summarizes:

The first part, called Chikhai Bardo, describes the psychic happenings at the moment of death. The second part, or Chönyid Bardo, deals with the dream-state which supervenes immediately after death, and with what are called "karmic illusions." The third part, or Sidpa Bardo, concerns the onset of the birth-instinct and of prenatal events.

The text's structural logic is a descending one: supreme illumination is available at the first moment, and the opportunity diminishes as consciousness moves further from death and closer to rebirth. The lights grow "ever fainter and more multifarious, and the visions more and more terrifying." Navigation, in the text's own terms, means recognition — thos grol, liberation through hearing. The lama reads the instructions aloud to the dying or dead person precisely because the soul, confronted with the clear light or with the mandala of peaceful deities, tends to flinch and flee toward familiar, dimmer lights. The wrathful deities of the second bardo are not enemies but the same energies as the peaceful ones, seen through the distorting lens of unrecognized projection.

Jung's reading of the text reverses its direction deliberately. Where the Tibetan tradition moves forward from death toward rebirth, Jung reads it backward — as a map of the unconscious encountered in analysis, moving from the instinctual Freudian basement (the Sidpa Bardo's sexual fantasies and womb-seeking) upward toward the deeper strata of the collective psyche. He was candid that Western psychoanalysis had only penetrated the lowest register:

Freudian psychoanalysis, in all essential aspects, never went beyond the experiences of the Sidpa Bardo; that is, it was unable to extricate itself from sexual fantasies and similar "incompatible" tendencies which cause anxiety and other affective states.

This is not a dismissal of Freud but a topographical claim: the Sidpa Bardo is the realm of instinct and personal history, and it is sealed against the deeper registers by "an intense striving downwards, towards the animal sphere." To navigate further requires what Jung calls a "great reversal of standpoint" — the recognition that the psyche is not a byproduct of the material world but its precondition.

What does navigation actually require? The text's answer is preparation — the practices of Tibetan Buddhism that simulate the stages of death before death arrives, so that recognition becomes possible when the clear light dawns. Jung's psychological translation of this is the analytic encounter with the unconscious: the willingness to face the "dangerous uncertainty of psychic transformation," to allow the authority of the ego to be sacrificed, to meet the terrifying figures — the Eight Wrathful Ones — without fleeing into the comfortable dimness of instinctual rebirth. As Clarke notes of Jung's reading, "No one who strives for selfhood (individuation) is spared this dangerous passage" (Jung, CW 11, §849, cited in Clarke 1994).

The pneumatic temptation here is worth naming directly. The bardo teachings have been absorbed into Western spiritual culture largely as a map of ascent — a guide to achieving the clear light, to liberation, to the higher self. Evans-Wentz himself read the text through a Theosophical lens, importing rhetoric about breaking through the illusion of Māyā that is "largely absent in the Tibetan texts." The soul running this logic — if I am spiritual enough, I will not suffer — will find the bardo teachings confirming its bypass. Jung's correction is structural: the text must be read backward, beginning in the mess of the Sidpa Bardo, not leaping to the clear light. The peaceful deities are encountered only after the instinctual basement has been honestly inhabited. Recognition is not transcendence; it is the capacity to see what is already present without fleeing it.

The alchemical parallel is instructive. The nigredo — the blackening, the putrefaction, the mortification — is the bardo's Sidpa register rendered in materia. Hillman observes that "depression, fixations, obsessions, and a general blackening of mood and vision may first bring a person to therapy," and that these conditions indicate "the soul is already engaged in its opus" (Hillman 2010). The psychological initiation begins before any formal practice. The wrathful deities are already present in the symptom, the dream, the compulsion that will not resolve. Navigation is not a technique applied to these contents from outside; it is the willingness to remain in them long enough for recognition to occur.

  • katabasis — the deliberate descent into the underworld as the structural grammar of transformation
  • nigredo, albedo, rubedo — the alchemical color-stages as the phenomenological skeleton of psychic change
  • nekyia — the Greek rite of summoning the dead, and Jung's appropriation of it as the analytic act
  • James Hillman — portrait of the archetypal psychologist who most rigorously theorized descent as the soul's native movement

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1958, Psychology and Religion: West and East
  • Clarke, J.J., 1994, Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient
  • Evans-Wentz, W.Y., 1927, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition)
  • Hillman, James, 2010, Alchemical Psychology