A Yoga Of Transitions

By Christopher Michaels

© 2006

Death is the greatest transition we will all experience. What do we transition into? This is a puzzle many have spent enormous amounts of time and energy exploring. For some it is clear, there is an afterlife. Of these some believe it is permanent, others see it as a temporary stop over before returning to life. There are those who say there is nothing following death. To me none of these are as important as the role of death in our daily lives as a confrontation with our limitations, with the boundary of the Self. The fact that you are sitting where you are right now reading this means you had to take certain actions to be able to do it – learning a language which means being born into a particular cultural context, having certain tastes to want to read it, turning a page or using a computer, any number of things – is also an expression of this obvious reality but without the confronting difficulties of death.

We experience emotions as reflex responses that take us over before we think and choose. We feel some emotions are controllable, while others aren’t. Over time our responses change to situations. We experience the effects of insight, when we’ve felt one way about something then discover new information and our feelings change. How does that work? Until we learn how this process works we use discipline to control a disjunction between our feelings and our actions in response to them as a way of managing the social effects of these reflexes. This approach is like the cliché of the horse and the gate.

Everyday needs sleep. For most of us it is a form of temporary yet trustworthy death, the ultimate rest from living. We occasionally wake up with messages from it – dreams. If we pay attention then we can feel the process of sleep overtaking us. Many people just fall into it letting go. When it doesn’t come “naturally” (by which we usually mean without our control) at the time we expect it, we run for help from authority figures offering chemistry. Rather than seeking to understand its process so as to be able the choose sleep regardless of the state of mind/body we are in.

Change is the one dependable aspect of nature and life. We are continually adapting to it. In Cognitive Psychology there is a term “cognitive dissonance” which is the time and state we experience in adjusting when our expectations don’t match events, especially in the behaviours of other people and ourselves. In Buddhist the source of suffering is thought to have related sources in that it is the marriage of holding on to things or running from things, that is a problem or conflict between how we want them to and the way they are. The essence of which is our ignorance of the way things are and the mechanisms of our own participation in them.

A Yoga of Transitions is a process of exploring and developing insight and practices for understanding and affecting the way we participate in change. What in English is called “the Tibetan Book of the Dead” is better translated as “the Book of Transitions or Changes” because although it is used in funeral rituals it is more important as a training manual for developing your participation in death and therefore change. The word “bardo” in the original Tibetan title refers to transition states, or to simply states of being or mind, it is also sometimes used to refer to the soul or that part of our nature which is released from the body at death. In the desperation for consolation in the face of death most focus on the story as literal, which may or may not be true depending on your beliefs, when its deeper power is as a metaphor. Clearly in Tibet most take it literally, though many monks understand the deeper use when initiated, but that doesn’t mean we have to. In fact we need not take our participation in this book any further than as a pointer to the considerable insight that no matter what you believe death is an important experience worth understanding and preparing for; though its intensity and deep subjectivity and finality may mean that this last is practically impossible.

Even sceptical atheists should be willing to approach it with an open mind if they have the scientific attitude that ultimately knowledge is based on experience. Although the truth of these people’s beliefs, like so many of those they scoff at, is hypocritical because their knowledge is mostly based on the belief the reality is what can be shared with others through languages – including mathematics. They discount subjectivity and the feelings and experience we have that are hard to communicate and prove. If you face one of these people and they are in love ask them to how they prove it to themselves and their lovers.

Dying is such an enormous and deeply subjective experience that we will never be able to prove or communicate it to others in a way that is beyond doubt, though many will gloss over this by saying they have definite undeniable experiences as a basis for their beliefs about it. This is to avoid the power and wonder of mystery. Your beliefs about it must therefore be subjective and based on faith this being said it remains a metaphor of great importance and power for our relationship with and participation in life. Asking people what they believe about it can be insightful and help foster serious communication but can also quickly end the conversation because of people’s discomfort with the subject.

From the point of view of life, death is the greatest change we will face. Seeing it as a transition is a very positive way of looking at it, even if you are focusing only on the physical transformation of your body into manure. So change’s great metaphor is death. Regardless of what you might think and believe about what happens after death understanding your responses to suffering, loss and grief, the unknown and the unexpected is what death can teach us who remain alive. Because when you lose someone who is important to you, a family member, a lover, a close friend, you die with them in the sense that you have to create a new life, a new you, with their absence. Your destiny you fantasized worked and planned for changes. Some might say the death was part of your destiny but that is to try to escape the feelings you have with rationalisations pointing to a very cruel world that has consciously set you up for suffering.

Daily life is in a state of continuous change thankfully it follows patterns which can help us avoid focussing on it. Most of the time the patterns are clear enough that we can trust our knowledge coming out of past experience, thoughts and analysis. Life is really the process of adjusting to, taking advantage of the moments when complexity causes unexpected and even unpredictable events. These represent opportunities for insight. You can explore your reactions and why they are what they are.

Simply focus on perceiving change first and foremost. Watching, feeling, listening, smelling it then there are the changes in your thoughts as they flow, and the feelings that result and give birth to them. Feelings are when thoughts and perceptions become whole states that often result in action or the need to not act though you want to resulting in inner conflict and an examination of your values. At some point your role in the experiences, your choices and the limits on them, your affect on the change will become clear. The most intense emotional experiences in which you feel your choice is minimised – such as when you lose a Beloved either by death or say divorce or something similar – will push you to really understand death and its deepest meanings for life.

Seeing such important experiences as lessons can present a danger that goes unnoticed by so many, it is the danger of dissociation, disconnection and avoidance. Suffering is part of life, it is natural. Allowing it to be part of passion, of deeply experiencing living, changes the way you place yourself in life and your relationship with it. The complexity arises when you realise that avoiding suffering is also natural and reasonable but breathing into it, allowing it, accepting it as a measure of your love, of how much they are part of you, their importance to you, that they deserve your suffering and the future you participate in and create as a tribute to them.

A Yoga of Transitions is about learning the way you transition through what you think, the sensual details of how you think, the way that thought and feeling interact to create each other, noticing their conflicts, their interrelationships, their sources in the past, in fear, in desire, in your need for status and in your sense of an identity, a self separate from your world, the way your choice/will operates in these processes and its limits. It uses the techniques of traditions that offer insights.

It offers a different experience of and definition of self, being. If you are not your thoughts, emotions and states, rather you have, use, choose and are chosen by them then who are you, where are you, how do you experience you, who is making the choices or non-choices? Can any word(s) come close to the experience? Do you answer it quickly and easily with a cliché of your beliefs, shorthand like the soul for example, which can help you avoid actually experiencing it by sitting with uncertainty, with the dissociation and loss of not knowing, of infinity? Nirvana is the ultimate transition, it can be the ultimate death – the death of the soul as it gives up its separate identity for reunion. The atheist idea of no God, no soul, of death as a material reunion with a physical universe isn’t that far from it though it doesn’t address the existence of consciousness as a special state of existence, which it may not be.

A central exercise is to imagine your death, the process of dissolution including and focusing on the physical decay that horrifies us so that it is a taboo across the world. Many of us want to escape this experience by keeping our attention solidly on the spiritual rationales that protect us from the limits of life. We can use this as part of the process of sleeping, which for some will give them nightmares because if you can get beyond them then you can use the transition to sleep with it vivid hypnagogic experiences explore the possibilities deeply. We can practice bring daylight consciousness into the night time world of dreams – a daily experience of profound transition through different states which are highly sensual but not always materialistic. As a great Buddhist writer wrote 1500 years ago a dream apple is different to a physical apple though in the dream we may not notice. So how can we tell when we are dreaming? Transcendence is not the rising above the muck and mire of life as many would have it rather it is a side ways step to an experience of both up and down and waking and sleeping so that you get that intense experience of lucid dreaming, or astral dreaming, being awake in asleep.