bardo_thodol unhinged ...."It is not necessary to suppose that all the dead in the Intermediate State experience the same phenomena, any more than all the living do in the human world, or in dreams. The Bardo Thodol is merely typical and suggestive of all after-death experiences. It merely describes in detail what is assumed will be the Bardo's visualizations of the consciousness-content of the ordinary devotee of the Red Hat School of Padma Sambhava. As a man is taught, so he believes. Thoughts being things, they may be planted like seeds in the mind of a child and completely dominate his mental content. Given the favourable soil of the will to believe, whether the seed-thoughts be sound or unsound, whether they be of pure superstition or of realizable truth, they take root and flourish, and make the man what he is mentally. Accordingly, for a Buddhist of some other School, as for a Hindu, or a Moslem, or a Christian, the Bardo experiences would be appropriately different: the Buddhist's or the Hindu's thought-forms, as in a dream state, would give rise to corresponding visions of the deities of the Buddhist or Hindu pantheon; a Moslem's, to visions of the Moslem Paradise; a Christian's, to visions of the Christian Heaven, or an American Indian's to visions of the Happy Hunting Ground. And, similarly, the materialist will experience after-death visions as negative and as empty and as deityless as any he ever dreamt while in the human body. Rationally considered, each person's after-death experiences, as the Bardo Thodol teaching implies, are entirely dependent upon his or her own mental content. In other words, as explained above, the after-death state is very much like a dream state, and its dreams are the children of the mentality of the dreamer..... It asserts repeatedly that what the percipient on the Bardo plane sees is due entirely to his own mental-content; that there are no visions of gods or of demons, of heavens or hells, other than those born of the hallucinatory karmic thought-forms constituting his personality, which is an impermanent product arising from the thirst for existence and from the will to live and believe." 010412 ... pilgrim I can imagine God appearing to each individual as the thing most repulsive to them. As a Black Woman to a Chauvanist Klansman for instance. Just to see if you have devloped a sense of Ironic Humor Yet, If not? Then back on the wheel till you do. 020302 what's it to you? who go blather from