he is deceased he still possesses a body like the body of flesh and blood. When he comes to realize that really he has no such body, he begins to develop an overmastering desire to possess one; and, seeking for one, the karmic predilection for sangsāric existence naturally becoming all-determining, he enters into the Third Bardo of seeking Rebirth, and eventually, with his rebirth in this or some other world, the after-death state comes to an end.
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.[1] As men think, so are they, both here and hereafter, thoughts being things, the parents of all actions, good and bad alike; and, as the sowing has been, so will the harvest be.
If escape from the Intermediate State is not achieved, through rebirth into some other state—that of Hell being possible for the very exceptional evil-doer, though not for the ordinary person, who expiates normal moral delinquencies upon being reborn as a human being—within the symbolic period of Forty-nine Days, a period whose actual duration is determined by karma, the deceased remains subject to all the karmic illusions of the Bardo, blissful or miserable as the case may be, and progress is impossible. Apart from liberation by gaining Nirvāṇa after death—thus cutting asunder for ever the karmic bonds of worldly or sangsāric existence in an illusionary body of propensities—the only hope for the ordinary person of reaching Buddhahood lies in being reborn as a human being; for birth in any other than the human world causes delay for one desirous of reaching the Final Goal.
- ↑ ‘This is borne out in the Pali Ti-Pitaka, which records several instances of high deva rebirth immediately after death on the human plane.’—Cassius A. Pereira.
