The ever-present gap
Reality is not composed of separate independent realms, but exists as a continuous spectrum with subtle thresholds between different states of being. The Tibetan term for this interval (which has entered the parlance of the West) is bardo. Literally meaning “in-between,” it is the liminal space that both separates and connects different orders of reality.
This gap or interface is a fundamental principle of the outer world, inner space and consciousness itself. The threshold between shoreline and sea, twilight that is neither day nor night, the shadowland between night and day. It is present during deep creative flow when you are simultaneously most yourself, yet least confined by your usual identity. It is there in the instant of recognition when seeing a face, but before naming who it is. It is the space between inhale and exhale in meditation. If you “listen” hard enough, you will catch in the strange caesura in movement from silence to a note of music. It is even there in the subtle pause before making a decision and the shift between roles that we assume throughout your day. Although we seldom truly notice these in-between moments that we inhabit time and again, we will feel that they are different than the routine of life—distinctive, charged with potential, and both unsettling and revelatory. Indeed, they are suspended at the meeting point of multiple worlds, interfaces between different realms of meaning that are yet part of a single unity.
Dream
There is a bardo that is consistently with us every day. You know it as that moment before sleep, when thoughts give way to images, logic dissolves into dreams, and the mind is suspended between worlds. Tibetan Buddhism has developed sophisticated techniques for what they called waking dream consciousness. Yet very similar methods are well documented in Sufic, Daoist, and many other cultures in the ancient world. And today, lucid dreaming has become part of a larger field of meditation, mindfulness, and modern self-development in general.
Maintaining awareness of both ordinary and non ordinary perception simultaneously, one can perceive imaginal forms while remaining fully awake in sensory awareness. Hypnagogia is that threshold state between wakefulness and sleep, where self consciousness and action seem to merge. Here we glimpse the interfacing films that exist between such states. Symbols and symbolic thinking takes over from concrete representations, a realm where pure meaning and sensory form overlap.
Thus dreams represent the most universal bardo state of consciousness. While certain kinds of dreams are simply mundane, a jumble of subconscious processing, it is also a shift in the mode of perception that allows access to another realm. In dreams, the mind partially detaches from sensory preoccupation, allowing it to perceive the intermediate world where meanings appear as forms. No matter their content, dreams are an inherent threshold between ordinary and non-ordinary perception. Maintaining awareness of both ordinary and non-ordinary perception simultaneously, there is the potential for individual identity to be transcended, allowing participation in pure consciousness. These bardo states are not escapes from reality, but deeper engagements with its multidimensional nature.
Everyday living
The bardo perspective also offers a framework for integrating contradictory aspects of the human condition in general. We navigate between seemingly incompatible areas of life: professional versus personal, intellectual versus emotional, individual versus communal. Integration comes not from resolving all these potential conflicts but from developing the capacity to stand at the threshold between different dimensions of experience with full awareness.
Thus bardo is not only a mystical concept, but highly practical. It allows one to develop the capacity to navigate complexity without reducing it to a false kind of simplicity. Indeed, such skill is a birthright of human consciousness itself. Human nature is thus simultaneously finite and infinite, particular and universal, form and essence. Becoming comfortable within between states rather than seeking resolution in one direction or another is the way of open mind, open being. The one who knows reality stands at the isthmus, embracing apparent contradictions without forcing them into premature unity. These practices are ways of aligning human consciousness with the fundamental structure of reality, even as described by modern physics
We are the bardo
Most strikingly, it appears that human being-ness is itself the quintessential bardo, existing at the intersection of spiritual and material realms, embodying qualities of both. We are spiritually amphibious, able to live in both the ocean of spirit and on the land of matter. This is the span between necessity and possibility, between absolute and relative, between eternity and time. Our identity is not a fixed entity, but a dynamic threshold where different orders of reality meet and interact. By realizing our own bardo nature, we come into harmony with the essential nature of reality. Modern humans already suffer from fragmenting reality into irreconcilable opposites, mind versus body, science versus spirituality, individual versus community. The bardo perspective offers integration without reducing the uniqueness of each pole.
Bardo teachings point toward a way of being that embraces threshold consciousness as our natural state, rather than an exceptional condition. Not somewhere we occasionally visit, but where we always already exist. To know oneself as this threshold is the beginning of wisdom. This perspective transforms spiritual development from a journey toward some distant goal into an increasing awareness of what we inhabit by necessity: conscious meeting points where different dimensions of reality converge and communicate.
As we cultivate awareness of these thresholds, we discover what the ancient wisdom has always taught. Intermediary realms are not merely transitions between real places, but constitute the most fertile ground of reality itself. The bardo is not a boundary to cross, but a place to stand. And ultimately to recognize as our truest home.
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