Moving Bardo

When you're in transition rather a lot of what you experience is pure mind projection. I'd say it was about 99%. So you have to be a little bit aware of that—the trouble is, because of phenomenological sincerity, you can't block it by being aware of it—because you will never be able to tell whether being aware of your projection is also part of your projection...you have to let go into it, a bit, and just let it happen.

For instance, right now I'm looking at a very wealthy surgeon slurping his coffee in the hotel restaurant. The urge to give him a slap is overwhelming, yet I'm just kind of watching my mind as it goes through disgust, outrage, contempt...If you have that much money, you really shouldn't slurp like that: people in glass houses shouldn't slurp stones or whatever that is.

I think that after I die it's going to be like rubbernecking the disaster of my karma in slow motion until I'm reborn somehow. It's going to be ugly! It might have moments of bizarre beauty, and total sadness, as well.

Anyway, you're dead, and you're scouting around for a place to land, another life. So you come across this beautiful house and you say Wow, that's where I'm going to live. And the other houses are nowhere near as good. But then you find another beautiful house; it's like a beautiful orange, and you were just looking at a beautiful apple. It's beautiful on its own terms. Now you have a problem.

Do you prefer apples or oranges? That level of apple is pretty incredible; and so is the orange level. What about what others will think? Will I be sweating like a pig if I try to walk from the orange to Rice? Is the apple neighborhood too funky? What about five years from now? Ten?

If only this blasted guy would stop slurping his coffee. What gave him the right?