Transcending Madness : The Experience of the Six Bardos (Dharma Ocean Series)

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Summary: Ramblings
Review: I'll make this brief. I bought this with high hopes and couldn't even finish it. I couldn't really follow much of a logical thread in what trunpa was saying. It just seemed like a bunch of ramblings to me. Believe me, if I would have gotten ANY THING out of this mish-mash I would have finished the book, if only to recoup the money I'd spent on it. I find a lot of his books like this--just kind of a weird stream of consciousness not really tied to anything and not really going toward any ultimate point I can discern. Of course, they say he was alchoholic and died of sirosis of the liver, maybe this is just what he sounded like. Other than the fact that he was one of the very first Tibetans in the west and he went to Oxford, what do they see in this guy? Somebody please tell me!

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Summary: Paradoxes of the "In-Between" - Tibetan Buddhist psychology
Review: This is a very special book about the psychology of bardo experience in Tibetan Buddhism. If you are new to these bardo teachings, then this is probably not the best book to start. However, it is indispensible for further reading on the human psychology of the bardo experiences.

In his book, Trungpa Rinpoche describes what is traditionally known in Tibetan Buddhism as the "six realms", or worlds that we create as the projections of such powerful energies as anger, greed, ignorance, lust, envy, and pride. Having disowned the power of our emotions and projected that power onto the world outside, we find ourselves trapped in a variety of ways and see no hope of escape.

But it is within these projected realms, that the bardo experience arises as the heightened experience of that realm.
Now this heightened experience may go either way: Either we become (further) stuck in complete confusion of entrapment, or we open up to the possibility of sudden transformation of solidity into freedom - thus utilizing the bardo as a turning-point to freedom.

Bardo is a peak experience of "being in-between", "being in no-man's-land", neither belonging "here" nor "there". It belongs to situations in which we have emerged from the past and have not yet formulated the future, but strangely enough, we happen to be "somewhere."
It is at once "as if" being complete confused (to the point of being on the verge of madness) "and yet" being on the verge of awakening by resolving the confusion. You are not quite certain whether you have completely gone mad or you are just about to receive something. It is at once sanity/insanity.
This happens because even within the most solidified and seemingly hopeless accomplishment of ego's domain, the possibility of awakening is ever-present.

So the bardo experience provides turning-points in our awareness, if we would only know how to handle the experience. The book provides lively presentations, in which the author tries to convey to the reader - in his characteristic style - the sense of how the various bardos are actually experienced, and resolved:

projected realm -- paradoxical (confused) bardo experience -- potential bardo solution:

god realm -- "fearful hope/hopeful fear" -- "clear-light"
jealous gods' realm -- "getting somewhere/going too far" -- "giving birth"
human realm -- "reality /hallucination" -- "illusory body"
animal realm -- "holding on/giving in" -- "dream"
hungry ghoast realm -- "wanting to get it/getting to want -- "becoming"
hell realm -- "destructive creativity/creative destruction" -- "death"

(This table is gathered from the material in the book, but shows only a few aspects.)

No matter what, it will probly take a long time to digest the subject matter of this book, due to its profound nature. But I think it's a marvelous book, opening psychological perspectives that are nowhere else in "dharma literature" explained from such a point of view, in such detail. A must-read for those interested.