Just like twilight divides night and day, there is an in-between state between life and death that Tibetan Buddhist teaching describes as ‘bardo’. It is derived from the word ‘gap’ or ‘transition’.
In the West, they call what I went through a ‘near-death experience’, and many have written about a painless bliss with a bright light beckoning from the end of a long tunnel. For me, though, it was an emotional reminder of impermanence and attachment.
Every year on my birthday on 1 October, I feel a tinge of regret. It is an annual reminder of work unfinished and goals unattained. Birthdays just added a heavy burden on me to achieve those goals.
Three days before my birthday this year on 27 September, I was standing on a stool trying to drive a nail into the wall to hang a picture when I sensed what seemed like a blast of wind on my right temple. I got down and rested for a bit, thinking it was a hunger-driven dizzy spell.
Still, I was worried enough to video call my wife who had gone for Indra Jatra. She screamed on the phone: “What happened to your face? Go to the hospital immediately.”
In the mirror, my face looked contorted. My speech was slurred. Arriving at the hospital that night, I was wheeled into the ICU where there were many who were in worse shape than me, struggling between life and death.
The harsh glare of lights and bare white walls gave the room a sterile, impersonal look. The whirring and beeping of machines indicated beating hearts and breathing lungs. Nurses and doctors came and went, briefing each other on the condition of their patients. No visitors were allowed, and it felt like a maximum security prison.
The next morning, they shaved my head and prepared to take me in for tests at the cath lab. They poked electrodes into me. In the lab I observed everything from a low angle, and the photojournalist in me instinctively started thinking of composition and negative space. The equipment covered half the room. Four doctors were huddled over an 80-inch monitor, masked nurses in blue hovered about.
It was a scary sight. But a strange calm overcame me. I went into a meditative trance even before the anaesthesia started taking effect. In that state between consciousness and unconsciousness, I was mentally reciting mantras the guru had taught me.
What I remember is a blissful sense of resignation enveloping me like a comforting blanket. Later, I described the experience to my spiritual guru. He explained: “Congratulations, what you experienced was the state of bardo.”
CROSSROADS
It was at the crossroads of life and death. One path led towards rebirth, and the other back to my present existence. I returned to my existing state. As I came to, it was as if I had returned from a great adventure through eternity. Proximity to mortality had a purifying effect on my soul.