The Comic Book of the Dead

The Tibetan Book of the Dead,or Bardo Thodol, a funerary text intended to guide one through the experiences that the consciousness has after death, during the interval between death and the next rebirth, is now presented in easy to read comic book form!



There are two things I find highly interesting about this text. One is that the traditional western depictions of the afterlife, heaven hell, or the layered cake of Dante's "Inferno," are merely distractions from the state of either rebirth or liberation from the entire process, and they are fairly early distractions at that. Of course religions like Catholicism have been known to be fairly self-punishing.



Second, is that this journey through the afterlife, and all its wild "retinal circus" of visions, is highly reminiscent of the dreaming state, particularly when one is asked to realize in the afterlife that all the gods and demons are not only aspects of each other but aspects of one's own projections. In fact this recognition that after-world experiences are similar to the visions of sleep is but an aspect of tibetan dream yoga, where through practices of lucid dreaming and recognizing that all reality is a dream one can learn to wake up and achieve liberation in the "clear light."