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The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thodol, could never have been produced
in Europe or America where our blindness to the influence of the “conception event”
allows it to become the unintended template of our scripture, liturgy and mythology.
Where the occident is blind, the orient is awake. The events and images
we are about to examine come from Mahāyāna Buddhism, and each stage, according to Tibetan belief, brings the individual
a step closer to conception in the womb.
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No one destined for birth
in the womb can resist the relentless drive toward conception. The single deity will be replaced over the next seven
days by a vision of the Five Dhyānī Buddhas, all arising from the original Adi Buddah.
From the primordial cell,
mitosis proceeds with an exponential increase in the number of cells within the zygote. Now two, then four, then eight.
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In the First Bardo, a transitional state of consciousness preceding
conception, the
soul encounters the Adi Buddha (left). The biologic
equivalance (right) is a fertilized cell in which the father's pronucleus is merging once and for all with the mother's pronucleus.
The constant increase continues and produces the morula, then, after
five days, a blastocyst containing about 100 cells.
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The Bardo's five Buddhas have proliferated to the Mandala of the
100 Peaceful and Wrathful Deities in a space of seven days--approximately the time it takes for the zygote to implant in the
wall of the uterus.
Life, said Sir John Woodroffe
in his foreword to the English translation of the Bardo Thodol, "consists of a series of successive states of consciousness.
The first is the Birth-consciousness; the last is the consciousness existing at the moment of death... The interval between
the two states of Consciousness, during which the transformation from the 'old' to a 'new' being is effected, is called the
Bardo or intermediate state..." What Western science cannot imagine, Tibet has taken for granted for 12 Centuries:
Conception is experienced. For the psychically gifted it is consciously recalled. As we have shown, those
who do not have this gift, are nevertheless subject to its influence as a memory which we do not acknowledge and which we
memorialize in a thousand disguises, each crying out for decipherment. In the 20th Century we traced the origin of neurosis
to an intrauterine existence. "Here Western reason reaches its limit, unfortunately," wrote Carl Jung in his psychological
commentary on the Bardo. "I say unfortunately, because one rather wishes that Freudian psychoanalysis could
have happily pursued these so-called intra-uterine experiences still further back... It is true that with the equipment of
our existing biological ideas such a venture would not have been crowned with success; it would have needed a wholly different
kind of philosophical preparation from that based on current scientific assumptions. But, had the journey back been
consistently pursued, it would undoubtedly have led to the postulate of a pre-uterine existence, a true Bardo life,
if only it had been possible to find at least some trace of an experiencing subject."
With zygomnesis, Jung's
ardent wish is answered; defering, for now, questions of re-incarnation and pre-uterine existence,
Zygomnesis provides an answer to Jung's wish for some trace of an experiencing subject.
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