“ Yet, although set face to face so very often in that manner, one long habituated to strong propensities and lacking in familiarity with, and pure affection for, Wisdom, may be led backwards by the power of one's own evil inclinations despite these many introductions. The hook-rays of the light of grace may not be able to catch hold of one: one may still wander downwards because of one's begetting the feeling of awe and terror of the lights and rays. ”

“ Then—the after-death dream ending as the Intermediate State exhausts itself for the percipient, the thought-forms of his mental-content all having shown themselves to him like ghostly spectres in a nightmare—he passes on from the Intermediate State into the equally illusionary state called waking, or living, either in the human world or in one of the many mansions of existence, by being born there. And thus revolves the Wheel of Life, until the one who is bound on it breaks his own bonds through Enlightenment, and there comes, as the Buddha proclaims, the Ending of Sorrow. ”

“ What he has thought and what he has done become objective: thought-forms, having been consciously visualized and allowed to take root and grow and blossom and produce, now pass in a solemn and mighty panorama, as the consciousness-content of his personality. ”

“ Each universe, like a great cosmic egg, is enclosed within the iron-wall shell, which shuts in the light of the sun and moon and stars, the iron-wall shell being symbolical of the perpetual darkness separating one universe from another. All universes alike are under the domination of natural law, with which karma is commonly made synonymous; for, in the Buddhist view, there is no scientific necessity to affirm or to deny the existence of a supreme God-Creator, the Karmic Law furnishing a complete explanation of all phenomena and being of itself demonstrable. ”

“ Where no fall cometh, there is rest, and where rest is, there is no keen desire. Where keen desire is not, naught cometh or goeth; and where naught cometh or goeth there is no death, no birth. Where there is neither death nor birth, there neither is this world nor that, nor in between—it is the ending of sorrow. ”

“ As the translator explained, we need but look round us in the human world to find the bloodthirsty tiger-man, the murderer; the lustful swine-man; the deceitful fox-man; the thieving and imitating monkey-man; the grovelling worm-man; the industrious and oft-times miserly ant-man; the ephemeral—sometimes professedly aesthetic—butterfly-man; the strong ox-man; or the fearless lion-man. Human life is far richer in possibilities for the workings out of evil karma—no matter how animal-like the karma may be—than any sub-human species could possibly be. ”

“ Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, [37] in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good. [38]
Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as of the voidness of nothingness, but as being the intellect itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling, and blissful, is the very consciousness, [39] the All-good Buddha. ”

“ The doctrine of ‘Reincarnation’ on the one hand and of ‘Resurrection’ on the other is the chief difference between the four leading Religions—Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity, in its orthodox form, rejects the most ancient and widespread belief of the Kúklos geneseōn, or Sangsāra, or ‘Reincarnation’, and admits one universe only—this, the first and last—and two lives, one here in the natural body and one hereafter in the body of Resurrection. ”

“ At length the deceased passes out of the Bardo dream-world into a womb of flesh and blood, issuing thence once more into the waking state of earth-experience. This is what in English is called Re-incarnation, or Re-birth in the flesh. The Sanskrit term is Sangsāra, that is, ‘rising and rising again’ (Punariutpatti) in the worlds of birth and death. Nothing is permanent, but all is transitory. In life, the ‘soul-complex’ is never for two consecutive moments the same, but is, like the body, in constant change. ”

“ Thus to none of these Faiths is death an absolute ending, but to all it is only the separation of the Psyche from the gross body. The former then enters on a new life, whilst the latter, having lost its principle of animation, decays. As Dr. Evans-Wentz so concisely says, Death disincarnates the ‘soul-complex’, as Birth incarnates it. In other words, Death is itself only an initiation into another form of life than that of which it is the ending. ”

“ The late Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup, the translator, has left on record his own complementary opinion, as follows: ‘The forty-nine days of the Bardo symbolize ages either of evolution or of degeneration. Intellects able to grasp Truth do not fall into the lower conditions of existence.
‘The doctrine of the transmigration of the human to the sub-human may apply solely to the lower or purely brutish constituents of the human principle of consciousness; for the Knower itself neither incarnates nor re-incarnates—it is the Spectator. ”

“ It is, however, the aim in all schools of Indian and Tibetan Yoga alike—as in the Bardo Thödol—to outstrip this tedious process of normal evolution and win Freedom even now.
In the body of man as he is—in our present Fourth Round—there are four kingdoms of living creatures: (1) those of the Element Fire, (2) those of the Element Air, (3) those of the Element Water, and (4) those of the Element Earth. Over this collective life of innumerable myriads of lives man is king. ”

“ Dharma is that which upholds or supports the Universe, as also the individual. Dharma is in mankind Right Conduct, the result of True Knowledge. Truth according to Brāhmanism is the Brāhman, is Liberation—Moksha, Nirvāṇa. ”

“ After the Fifth Day the Bardo visions become less and less divine; the deceased sinks deeper and deeper into the morass of sangsāric hallucinations; the radiances of the higher nature fade into the lights of the lower nature. ”

“ To one after another of these divine attributes, or principles, innate in every human being, the deceased is introduced, as though in a symbolic drama of initiation, to test him and discover whether or not any part of his divine (or bodhic) nature has been developed. Full development in all the bodhic powers of the Five Dhyānī Buddhas, who are the personifications of them, leads to Liberation, to Buddhahood. Partial development leads to birth in one of the happier states: deva-loka, the world of the devas or gods; asura-loka, the world of the asuras or titans; nara-loka, the world of mankind. ”

“ Like a man of clear vision, sitting between two houses, each with six doors, He beholds all who come and go; the one house symbolizing the Bardo or state of disembodied existence, the other the embodied state of existence, and the twelve doors the six entrances and the six exits of the six lokas. Then, after explaining the manner in which karma governs all states of existence, the Buddha describes how the evil-doer is brought before the King of Death and questioned about the Five Messengers of Death. ”

“ Normally, however, rebirth is of the lower or ordinary sort, unendowed—because of the lack of enlightenment of the one undergoing it—with consciousness of the process. Even as a child knowing not the higher mathematics cannot measure the velocity of light, so the animal-man cannot profit by the higher law governing the rebirth of the divine-man; and, drinking of the River of Forgetfulness, he enters the door of the womb and is reborn, direct from the desire-world called the Bardo. ”

“ That the Goal is and can only be Emancipation from the Sangsāra;
18. That such Emancipation comes from the Realization of Nirvāṇa;
19. That Nirvāṇa is non-sangsāric, being beyond all paradises, heavens, hells, and worlds;
20. That it is the Ending of Sorrow;
21. That it is Reality.
He who realized Nirvāṇa, the Buddha Gautama Himself, has spoken of it to His own disciples thus:
‘There is, disciples, a Realm devoid of earth and water, fire and air. It is not endless space, nor infinite thought, nor nothingness, neither ideas nor non-ideas. Not this world nor that is it. ”

“ They are not something apart from us. We are one with all that is, in every state of sentient existence, from the lowest worlds of suffering to the highest states of bliss and Perfect Enlightenment. In this esoteric sense, the Lotus Order of Deities represent the deified principles of the vocal functions in ourselves; the Peaceful represent the deified principles of the heart or functions of feeling; the Wrathful represent, in the same way, the functions of our mentality—such as thinking or reasoning, and imagination or memory—centred in the brain.—Lāma Kazi Dawa Samdup. ”

“ Its human-plane body of the moment of death disintegrating, the constituents went to form the bodies of animals and plants, transmigrating from one to another during the three thousand years. At the end of that period the soul gathers together the identical particles of matter which had thus been continually transmigrating and which had constituted its former earth-plane body of the moment of death, and from them rebuilds, through habit, as a bird its nest, a new body and is reborn in it as a human being. ”

“ If, on the Plane of Uncertainty, the influence of innate or karmic propensities of desire for the grosser sensations of sangsāric existence, such as govern life in a human body, can be dominated through the exercise of the more powerful influence of Right Knowledge, that part of the consciousness-principle capable of realizing Buddahood triumphs, and the deceased, instead of being obsessed with the frightful hallucinatory spectres of his lower or animal nature, passes the interval between human death and rebirth in one of the paradise realms instead of in the Bardo. ”

“ And, just as a babe must wake up in this world and learn by experience the nature of this world, so, likewise, a person at death must wake up in the Bardo world and become familiar with its own peculiar conditions. The Bardo body, formed of matter in an invisible or ethereal-like state, is an exact duplicate of the human body, from which it is separated in the process of death, Retained in the Bardo body are the consciousness-principle and the psychic nerve-system (the counterpart, for the psychic or Bardo body, of the physical nerve-system of the human body) . ”

“ The death process is the reverse of the birth process, birth being the incarnating, death the discarnating of the consciousness-principle ; but, in both alike, there is a passing from one state of consciousness into another. ”

“ For the commonalty, this is the normal process; but for those very exceptional minds, possessed of great yogīc knowledge and enlightenment, only the more spiritual stages of the Bardo of the first few days will be experienced; the most enlightened of yogīs may escape all of the Bardo, passing into a paradise realm, or else reincarnating in this world as soon as the human body has been discarded, maintaining all the while unbroken continuity of consciousness. [28] As men think, so are they, both here and hereafter, thoughts being things, the parents of all actions, good and bad alike ”

“ The third messenger, a person confined by illness, rolling in his own filth, unable to rise or to lie down without the aid of an attendant, brings the message that disease, too, is inevitable, even as death. The fourth messenger, a thief undergoing most terrible punishment, bears the message that the punishment for evil-doing in this world is as nothing compared to the punishment which karma inflicts after death. The fifth messenger, to emphasize the same message of death and the corruptibility of the body, is a corpse, swollen, discoloured, and putrid. ”

“ Degeneration, in a highly developed flowering plant, or apple, or vegetable, or wheat, or animal, is, of course, concomitant with cultural neglect; but within this creation period—at least so far as the physical vision of science has penetrated therein—the flowering plant does not degenerate into the apple, nor into the corn, nor one species of animals into another, nor does man degenerate into anything but the savage man—never into a sub-human creature. ”