Addenda
These Addenda consist of seven sections, complementary to our Introduction and Commentary, concerning (1) Yoga, (2) Tantricism, (3) Mantras, or Words of Power, (4) the Guru and Shiṣḥya (or Chela) and Initiations, (5) Reality, (6) Northern and Southern Buddhism and Christianity, and (7) the Medieval Christian Judgement.
I. Yoga
The word Yoga (frequently appearing in our annotations to the Bardo Thödol text), derived from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning 'to join', closely allied with the English verb to yoke, implies a joining or yoking of the lower human nature to the higher or divine nature in such manner as to allow the higher to direct the lower;[1] and this condition—essential to the successful application of the Bardo doctrines—is to be brought about by control of the mental process. So long as the field of the mind is occupied by such thought-forms and thought-processes as arise from the false concept, universally dominating mankind, that phenomena and phenomenal appearances are real, a state of mental obscuration called ignorance, which prevents true knowledge, exists. It is only when all obscuring and erroneous concepts are totally inhibited and the field of the mind is swept clean of them that the primordial or unmodified condition of mind, which is ever devoid of these thought-formations and thought-processes arising from ignorance, is realizable; and, in its realization, there dawns IIlumination, symbolized in the Bardo Thödol as the Primal Clear Light of the Dharma-Kāya.
A mirror covered with a thick deposit of dust, or a crystal vase filled with muddied water, symbolize the mind of the normal human being darkened with the nescience arising from
- ↑ Some scholars question this generally accepted explanation and think that the term yoga probably means 'practice' as opposed to theory in religion. If so, it would then imply yogie practice such as will produce indomitable control over the mental processes and lead to realization of Reality. In this sense, yoga may be regarded as a system of applied psychology far more highly developed than any known to Western Science.
