BARDO: OUR JOURNEY

(How the internet helped me to understand)

In the terma discovered by Karma Lingpa, Guru Padmasambhava introduces six different bardos.

The first bardo begins when we take birth and endures as long as we live.

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

The second is the bardo of dreams.
(self-explanatory)


The third is the bardo of concentration or meditation.
...In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at...


The fourth occurs at the moment of death.
At the end of the Hentai Manga Alice in Sexland, it is revealed that Alice broke her neck while fleeing from her oppressors at the very start - the entire realm of Sexland is her afterlife. (And it's explicitly single-occupant - she's the only "real" person there besides the Queen of Hearts, and one of them needs to be reincarnated.) Given that the whole story up until then has been a cheerful sexual adventure vaguely mimicing Carroll's classic book, it's a rather unsettling twist of genre.
Or so you heard?
I think we're mature enough to acknowledge that we all enjoy porn. also, its not that the characters aside from Alice and the Queen aren't "real", they're more akin to nature spirits than souls. remember that Sexland is a Japanese story, and that the major religion of Japan is animistic.


The fifth is known as the bardo of the luminosity of the true nature.



The sixth is called the bardo of transmigration or karmic becoming