I came across a chapter by Anne Bruce in a book about hospice care, Religious Understandings of a Good Death, called "Welcoming an Old Friend." This chapter deals with how different strands of Buddhism treat hospice care, and the differences in styles of approach to death from a Buddhist perspective. Bruce talks about a term known in Tibetan Buddhism as 'bardo states', which traditionally refers to the 'in between period' between different states of consciousness that happens after one's death. Bruce interestingly positions the bardo state as something that could occur at any given point in everyday life. As Bruce remarks, "Bardos are seen as states of mind or realities characterized by deep uncertainty or groundlessness that arise in everyday experiences and in the transition of life." (p.61). Fremantle and Trungpa (1975, quoted in Bruce, p.61) even go so far as to suggest that bardo is part of one's basic psychological make-up. It consists of states where a person may not have an idea where they are going or what they are getting into. These authors stress that life consists of many 'mini' births and deaths, and death is not a stranger to the living. By couching these periods of uncertainty as groundless and perhaps even 'liminal' in nature, these authors suggest a way of framing the groundlessness as coming to terms with non-existence. Physical death and existential groundlessness of 'everyday' death become mirror images of one another. I even begin to wonder if the Tibetan Book of the Dead could be read as a metaphor for what goes on in the everyday on an unconscious level.
It's hard to quite characterize what the bardo state might mean as applied to daily life, but I think part of it has to do with a sense of not knowing why we are here in the particular incarnations we have. This uncertainty can create a great deal of doubt in terms of what a person can best do in certain situations. Imagine losing all the elements of your body and consciousness at death, how confusing that is going to be...and how much support one is going to need in that situation. Analogously, life is a whole lot of uncertainty with some support dropped in between to help people along the way. Education is there, and various communities are around to help people navigate the uncertainties they face in daily life, but none of this removes the uncertainty people face as they navigate change and dissolution. Even one's valued social roles or ties may not stay the same forever. But as long as I don't take these phenomena to be enduring and permanent, there is no particular need to panic or be afraid of it. Of course, this requires a lot of practice in not reacting to uncertainty as though it too were a permanent state of being.
At the same time, I believe that concepts like bardo can actually be quite useful as an interpersonal exploration. I am interested in the spaces where a person doesn't quite know where she or he fits into a group, or how to find an identity in a place where they don't feel their own existence in relation to others. Could the 'bardo'' concept be used to describe feelings of social invisibility, erasure, or even oppression? Perhaps I am stretching it a bit here. But the purpose of the analysis is to understand how people move between states of lucid existence and existential invisibility in different situations. Perhaps it's for further exploration, because I am a bit at sea with this concept at the moment.
Bruce, Anne, "Welcoming an Old Friend". From: Religious Understandings of a Good Death in Hospice Palliative Care (ed Harold Coward & Kelli I. Stajduar) (2012). New York: SUNY
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