💐 What Goes Through the Bardos?: Pema Chödrön on dualistic consciousness, non-self, and everything in between

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Thought this to be a nice follow-up to some of Andrew’s recent online retreats:

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"still have pictures of myself as an infant and a toddler. If I try hard, I can pick out some ways that child looks similar to what I see today in the mirror. But I also know intellectually that not a single cell of my body has stayed the same. Even at present, every cell and every atom of my body is continuously changing.

I’ve tried long and hard to find a real me that stays the same from year to year—or even from moment to moment—but I’ve never had any success. (This is a worthwhile exercise, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the mysteries of life and death.) So where does this leave us in terms of the bardos?
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good read

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"If you spend enough time pondering this, you might understand it with your rational mind. But then you may still ask yourself, “Why do I experience myself as separate? Why don’t I experience each moment as fresh? Why do I feel so stuck?” The reason you feel this way is that you—like everyone else—have been under the sway of co-emergent unawareness for a very, very long time. Therefore, it takes a very, very long time to dismantle.
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bad habits die hard

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Thanks for sharing this article! Here are a few passages that stood out to me –

“But beyond this flow of moments, is there anything underlying them all that we could point to as “consciousness”? We can’t locate or describe any stable element that lives through all our experiences. So from this point of view, Ken said that another answer to “What goes through the bardos?” is “Nothing.” There are just individual moments, happening one after another. What we think of as “consciousness” is fluid, more like a verb than a noun.”

“First, there is open space, fluid and dynamic. There is no sense of duality, no sense of “me” separate from everything else. Then, from that ground, everything becomes manifest. If properly understood, the open space and the manifestation are not two separate things. They are like the sun and its rays.”

Also, there’s something interesting about watching the fluidity or lack of fixidity of experience itself during meditation, watching things come and go, seeing if there’s anything underlying these arisings that could be pointed to as consciousness 
 good practice reminder.

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Loved this quote as well, great metaphor.

I am still having trouble wraping my head around this simile:

"“What we think of as “consciousness” is fluid, more like a verb than a noun.””

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Thank you for sharing this. I am halfway through Pema’s ‘How We Live is How We Die’ it is SO good.

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