We enter the bardo, the intermediate state after # death , just as we enter dream after falling asleep. If our experience of # dream lacks clarity and is of confused emotional states and habitual reactivity, we will have trained ourselves to experience the processes of death in the same way.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that how we approach dreaming reflects our understanding of death and the afterlife.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche highlights the importance of clarity and awareness in our experiences, both in dreams and in the process of dying. He suggests that if we allow our dreams to be dictated by confusion and automatic reactions, we are likely to approach death with the same mindset, thereby emphasizing the need for mindfulness in both states to navigate the transitions more smoothly.
In practice
This quote could be shared in a meditation class to encourage mindfulness.
All experience and phenomena are understood to be a dream, this should not be just an intellectual understanding, but a vivid and lucid experience...Genuine integration of this point produces a profound change in the individual's response to the world. Grasping and aversion is greatly diminished, and the emotional tangles that once seemed so compelling are experienced as the tug of dream stories, and no more.
Ultimately we want to use dream to liberate ourselves from all relative conditions, not simply to improve them.
The natural purity of our mind is of no use to us if we are not aware of it, _x000D_ _x000D_ and if we do not integrate it with our moving mind. _x000D_ _x000D_ If we realize our innate purity, but only integrate with it from time to time, we are not totally awakened._x000D_ _x000D_ Being in total integration all the time is final realization
Dream, rather than let yourself be dreamt
From the body of the unborn essence arises the sphere of light, and from that sphere of light arises wisdom. From the wisdom arises the seed syllable and from the seed syllable arises the complete Mandala, the deity and the retinue.
One nation is to another what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other.
If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.
A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.
Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for.
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
Whatever the situation may be, in the recollection of death there is reward and merit. For even the man engrossed in the world benefits from it by acquiring an aversion to this world, since it spoils his contentment and the fullness of his pleasure; and everything which spoils for man his pleasures and his appetites is one of the means of deliverance.
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