OF THE SIX Dharmas of Naropa, two are for the daytime (tummo/chandali and illusory form, or gyulu), two are for the night (milam, or dream dharma and osel, luminosity yoga), and two are for death and beyond (bardo yoga and phowa). Phowa and bardo yoga are supplemental practices. If you accomplish the four root dharmas of the day and night, you don’t need the death yogas. Phowa and bardo are insurance dharma. And I’m an insurance salesman. It’s good to have this protection policy, because things don’t always go as planned at the end of life.
Bardo yoga is more contemplation than meditation. Contemplating death is a cold plunge for your psyche, a wake-up call. The purpose is to become familiar with the stages of the bardos during life, so you’ll recognize them in death. The practitioner engages in contemplations and visualizations that transform the three death bardos (the painful bardo of dying, the luminous bardo of dharmata [Sanskrit; the true nature of phenomenal existence], and the karmic bardo of becoming) into the three kayas (or “three bodies of the Buddha”—the dharmakaya [body of absolute truth], the sambhogakaya [body of enjoyment], and the nirmanakaya [body of emanation]). Bardo yoga downloads a psychic GPS that helps you find your way through an otherwise bewildering death experience. You’re essentially installing pop-ups into your unconscious mind that will ping into your consciousness just when you need them the most.
Bardo yoga is designed both to wake you up to the fact that you’re in the bardo, and to help you attain lucidity, or awareness, in what the Tibetans call “the dream at the end of time.” The practice is allied to dream yoga in this regard. If you don’t wake up and take control in a dream, what does? Your unconscious
