Video: The Intermediary State. || Read Part 1 Here
By James Curcio
When this film first entered my brain, I was young and had no awareness of the Bardo, or of Gnostic concepts of death and transcendence. I simply had a semi-conscious feeling, a mixture of dread, anxiety, and elation, that occasionally lurked close to the surface. What was it that? That I might already be dead, or dying, and that I was going through a process not unlike what Jacob was experiencing. Again and again he is told “you are already dead,” and he denies his impending condition, and then in the process of clinging, is tortured by the things that once brought him joy. So I was moved, though I say again in an only semi-conscious way, by a sort of wonderment that someone else had felt this way. I had never articulated it to anyone else, or been able to articulate it. It was through this movie that I first came upon the Bardo.
“As the world around us becomes more turbulent, so our lives become more fragmented. Out of touch and disconnected from ourselves, we are anxious, restless, and often paranoid. A tiny crisis pricks the balloon of the strategies we hide behind. To live in the modern world is to live in what is clearly a Bardo realm; you don’t have to die to experience one. … Because life is nothing but a perpetual fluctuation of birth, death, and transition, so Bardo experiences are happening to us all the time and are a basic part of our psychological makeup.” (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche.)
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