Emotions predetermine the next life
Recently I came across the ‘ Tibetan book of the dead ’ also called ‘ Bardo Thodol’ which changed my life instantly. It’s an instructional text meant to be read near the corpse or on the bed of someone recently deceased. It is the most respected guide for souls travelling through the defining realm in between reincarnations, called the bardo. This knowledge had been passed on orally from teacher to student over many centuries, exclusively and secretly in the circles of spiritual practitioners after it had been put on paper in the 8th century by the guru Padmasambhava. In 2005 it was translated for the first time fully into the English language and has enriched many people’s lives by opening up the truth behind the “circle of life”, a circle of endless reincarnation until we either rise out of the collective as perfected souls finding unity with the source, or we let ourselves be pulled into the “dirt” of this earthly existence leading to an endless suffering loosing our soul. If one seeks to find liberation one must put effort into understanding and implementing the wisdom contained in this guide urgently and steadily into their lives.
The urgency is firstly because it’s not like we know how much time’s left for us plus the fact that we are actually lucky enough to get this opportunity to achieve the highest state, having this book cross our path. Important to mention is that it is not solely about death or the death process. It’s not about “the end” because essentially there is no end. The whole point of this teaching is that THERE IS NO END. Our birth is not the beginning, our death is not the end. Birth is the continuation of the soul’s journey of previous lifetimes, and death is the continuation of the soul’s journey into its following experience. Everything is interconnected. Each action results in the following event. We exist in a constant CONTINUATION.
As Robert De Niro (playing Louis Cyphre -Lucifer) perfectly states in ‘Angel Heart’(1987): “ The flesh is weak, Johny. Only the soul is immortal.”
The main global issue is the duality of mind dwelling in societal human conditioning. In the West birth and death are often considered as opposites. One positive- the other negative. One being the beginning- the other the end, when truly it is a continuous journey. Planting the seed of this understanding can grow great many fruits in one’s life. The biggest one is consciousness expanding limitlessly as one understands that there are no limits to yourself. Internally you are eternal and your consciousness has the potential to grow infinitely. Acknowledging this and doing spiritual practice will open you up to receiving and digesting more and more knowledge over time, and you’ll be able to recognize the seed of wisdom in any seemingly ordinary experience. This is where the urgency lies, in achieving the state during your life where you can learn as much as possible to perfect your soul before the next reincarnation sweeps you off your feet. When your mind gets clearer in spiritual practice, so will your emotions and actions too. This is where we come to another interesting point.
Karma (or the effect of the cause) many think is created by immoral action, when in fact it is based in emotion.
Our scientific understanding of emotion according to Wikipedia is: “ Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioural responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure.” which basically says that our emotions are reactions of the nervous system.
All Vedic (ancient Indian) and Tibetan spiritual practices are being performed with the same goal of mastery over mind and senses. Total control of your body and its impulsive reactions in order to be able to dwell in the expansive freedom of your consciousness, rooted in calmness of mind.
Merriam-Webster’s definition of karma: “the force generated by a person’s actions held in Hinduism and Buddhism to perpetuate transmigration and in its ethical consequences to determine the nature of the person’s next existence.”
Because emotion fuels action, emotion is obviously the root issue. When someone kills another, the emotion that made him do this was a huge amount of anger. The killing was performed on the earthly plane, in the manifest existence of limited bodies that are of the material of this Earth. When you’re in the afterlife state, the bardo, there is no solid material as you’re in an unmanifest realm which is created and filled with “the colourful world of your mind”, the unmanifest part of you. The soul with its consciousness gets separated from the body during physical death, and then enters the bardo. The consciousness doesn’t change after death. It is in the same “state of mind” as it was just a few moments ago when it was attached to the body. The state of the consciousness is the only thing that determines from there on how and where it’s gonna go. Because your consciousness is the only thing that exists in the end. It’s like a particle of the great consciousness of this universe, being of its nature and containing the universal consciousness in itself which is going through different situations with the purpose of refinement. In afterlife the consciousness of the soul still has memories of the past life so in the bardo they say that you have the appearance of your past life’s body, you carry all of your emotions and you are of the same inner nature as you were when you were physically alive because you are attached to those things you identified with. Whatever emotion you dwelled in during life will match with your experience in the bardo as it is just a continuation of the journey of your consciousness.
The person who committed the killing was dominated by the emotion of anger during his life to such an extent that this emotion took over his actions in a fatal way. Then in the bardo which is a place showing your state of mind (like the dreams at night), not the mere act of killing will be the cause of suffering for the soul simply because it is considered as immoral. But the soul itsself will torture itsself because it’s own nature is in the state of torture, suffering, anger. The bardo magnifies and brings all that up to an overwhelming extent.
Then during the stages of the bardo the soul will naturally reject all of the paths of “brilliant light” of the divine and naturally gravitate to the realm of hell which is the realm connected to the emotion of anger.
There are 6 realms of existence in the “circle of life” and the only exit is liberation -the 7th option. Yet the exit is not accessible in certain realms like hell, the animal world, hungry ghosts and the jealous Gods where souls get trapped for a long time by their own reasoning emotions present during their human lifetime. When you are dominated by an emotion to such an extent that you lose control of yourself, you basically lose your soul to this emotion. Every emotion is of the energy of one of the 6 realms, as the 7th option which is liberation is the lack of emotion. For example ignorance leads to reincarnation as an animal, just as you chose to be a slave during your human life, you’ll become nature’s slave in her different manifest forms of animals where you won’t have the opportunity nor ability to comprehend sacred teachings of liberation.
So be aware of the emotion you choose to live in, as this emotion that you abide in while you’re alive is basically you already abiding and experiencing the correlating realm and adjusting your consciousness during your life to it, to then naturally be born into the realm which you have been living in internally, emotionally during your human experience.
I highly recommend Claire Nakti’s explorational video on this topic showing and exploring it in an entertaining and educational way. The YouTube video is called ‘Bharani Nakshatra: Death Defying Love, Soulmates and Reincarnation.’
Some of the popular films she presents this concept with are:
- ‘Soul’ (2020)
- ‘Enter The Void’ (2009) directed by Gaspar Noe whose filmography is very much based on the exploration of life and death, frequently shown by the literal process of giving birth and correlating symbology
- ‘What Dreams May Come’ (1998)
- ‘Flatliners’ (2017)
- ‘Lost Highway’ (1997)
- ‘Things Heard & Seen’ (2021)
Also I recommend ‘The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep’ book by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche who is one of the leading experts on dream yoga, lucid dreaming. As the awareness in our dreams shows exactly how aware we’d be in the afterlife state if it approached us now, dream yoga is closely correlated to the bardo and is similar in nature as both are showing the projection of mind and the state of consciousness. In this book he also explains the bardo and the connection of 6 realms with emotions. Good luck xo
