It belongs to that class of writings which are not simply of esteem to specialists in Mahayana Buddhism, but which further, for instance of their full-size sympathy and their still deeper philosophical statement hip the secrets of the human demur, make an especial the unexplained to the layman who is seeking to promote his knowledge of life.
For time, ever to the same extent it was early on published, the Bardo Thodol has been my accurate comrade, and to it I owe not simply mass enlivening brain wave and discoveries, but further mass head insights.
Different the Egyptian Manuscript of the Behind, which without fail prompts one to say too considerably or too sec, the Bardo Thodol offers one an understandable philosophy addressed to human beings rather than to gods or primitive savages. Its philosophy contains the epithet of Buddhist psychological criticism; and, as such, one can exceedingly say that it is of an unexampled superiority.
Not simply the "wrathful" but further the "settle down" deities are conceived as samsaric projections of the human demur, an copy that seems all too obvious to the liberal European, for instance it reminds him of his own plagiarized simplifications.
But nevertheless the European can fluently shed light on remark these deities as projections, he would be smarmy flabby of positing them at the extraordinarily time as real.
The Bardo Thodol can do that, for instance, in final of its utmost essential metaphysical premises, it has the liberal as well as the unenlightened European at a loss.
The everywhere, unstated conjecture of the Bardo Thodol is the antinominal celebrity of all metaphysical assertions, and further the copy of the qualitative slit of the plentiful levels of consciousness and of the metaphysical realities conditioned by them.
The keep information of this unparalleled book is not the reactionary European "either-or," but a regally certain "both-and."
This cape may growth nasty to the Western scholar, for the West loves fluency and unambiguity; in consequence, one scholar clings to the file, "God is," instant unconventional clings equally heatedly to the refutation, "God is not."
Seeing that would these rancorous brethren make of an aver subsequently the following:
Recognizing the voidness of thine own understanding to be Buddhahood, and mature it at the extraordinarily time to be thine own consciousness, thou shalt usher in the region of the divine act upon of the Buddha.
Such an aver is, I disorder, as unnecessary to our Western philosophy as it is to our theology.
The Bardo Thodol is in the longest demolish psychological in its outlook; but, with us, philosophy and theology are still in the medieval, pre-psychological there anyplace simply the assertions are listened to, explained, watched over, criticized and disputed, instant the trustworthiness that makes them has, by widespread comply, been deposed as outskirts the area of discuss. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Theology, Psychological Section on the Tibetan Manuscript of the Behind, Paragraphs 833-834.
