Mind Body

2025, December, Issue 179

Here we are without a body, without a body,

Flying madly through the death bardo,

not really knowing what is happening or

who we are becoming, or

what we should grasp next;

All our delusions evaporating,

Evaporating, are evaporating before our eyes,

before our mind’s eye, and

here we haven’t spent a second considering

who we really are or

just what is going on here or

how we can see without eyes or

how we can move without a body

Why didn’t we prepare for this!

We’re just flailing about

in this terrifying

tantalizing

oblivion that we never thought we’d

ever have to face, not prepared,

not prepared, opposed to reality,

clinging to fantastic beliefs,

useless beliefs

beliefs we thought would help us

somehow;

Here we are at last

in the death bardo, and

this mental body is something

we hadn’t considered,

wouldn’t consider,

had pretended was not there,

had thought we could presume

assuming it wouldn’t happen,

just like any reality,

all reality,

our fantasy world has ended!

And, there we go,

propelled into another inexplicable lifetime,

a lifetime we hadn’t considered,

won’t consider,

will not face with courage,

averse to reality once again in this,

another lifetime we’ll have to face

another farce without self!

A poem by Robert Aho © 2025

When we begin to look at mind, we soon discover that everything is mind, at least that is so for the serious Spiritual Practitioners who practice meditation every chance that they get. If we are deluded, we think that the outside world is real and that it is separate from us. We think self is real when we are deluded. We think we have something to defend, something outside of ourselves that we must acquire, battles that must be fought, wealth that must be accumulated, fame and praise for what we do. We’re easily deluded that way, utterly neglecting the only thing that can ever have any value, which is our own mind aspiring to awaken. Nothing else in life has even the slightest bit of value.

Western Behavioral Scientists, bless their souls, are really in the infancy of understanding what Buddhists have already known for thousands of years. Mind is not located in the brain. Mind does not need a physical body at all. When we die, the only thing that we have is carried through conscious awareness by mind, within the mind body, not the physical body. The nature of our mind body is unlimited, beyond any sort of reification. When we are transmigrating as this light of awareness, we might not realize that we are already aware, nor that we are not separate from Source. If that is so, then we continue forever, transmigrating from one birth to the next, utterly unaware that we fabricate a new self with each lifetime, unaware of our state of mind, that our transmigration is being propelled by our own delusional karma. It can be terrifying, if you have never delved into the reality of mind.

We in the West assume that mind is a material entity, part of our brain’s wiring, without actually investigating mind. That’s quite an assumption. When that assumption falls apart—and it will—the whole house of cards must come down. Science will need to deconstruct and reconstruct.

When we look at actual phenomena, not ideas which begin with an untested paradigm, we discover very quickly that our mind is energetic, not restricted to this lifetime or any lifetime, that we are part of a turbulent cycle that has very little to do with this notion of a material existence. If we want to find some basis for the examination of mind, we need to have some notion of what that actually is. The only way to discover what that is is to look within through very deep practices of meditation.

When we look at what people report after dying, we might start to see that something quite profound forms the basis of a reality that has eluded us from beginningless beginnings. We’re energy and we actually have a mental body that is energy. This energy is not easily understood nor perceived even slightly.

Now, shed this notion that we have a self. It won’t help you at all. We’re not actually separate from that ineffable bright condition of awareness. If I were to describe what we are when we are in a physical body, I would say that we are simply insane. How this insanity descended upon each and every sentient being is a mystery. How we somehow began believing that we are separate in the first place is as unfathomable as the deepest secret in the universe. For some reason, or for no reason at all, an infinite number of beings created themselves and don’t realize that they are trapped in a terrible cycle of unimaginable suffering. This is truly terrifying, when you begin to see just what is going on.

Despite it all, when I returned from the death bardo, I knew that I had to at least try to help people awaken. It’s rather frustrating, to say the least. Nearly every sentient being that I have encountered is adamantly opposed to awakening, not seeing the slightest reason to do so. And, they all suffer terribly.

Please awaken,

Rigdzin Robert Aho