The Charnel Ground After Awakening (Bardo of Reality)

But, nevertheless, if there is even the slightest recognition, liberation is easy. Should you ask why this is so—it is because once the awesome, terrifying and fearful appearances arise, the awareness does not have the luxury of distraction. The awareness is one-pointedly concentrated.

― Karma-glin-pa, The Tibetan Book of the Dead

When the self-structure dissolves, it is common to experience a temporary, beautiful honeymoon phase. The world appears radiating innately awake presence, unconditional love, and shared basic nature. The otherworldly brilliance restores our entire being. But eventually, the realization process forces you to look at humanity without filters.

There is a specific, devastating aftermath of deep awakening that is rarely talked about: the shattering of the myth of freedom, and the realization of cosmic isolation. This clarity is particularly raw when awakening happens in a spiritual community endowed with deception, power abuse, and exploitation of trust. Discovering that the teacher who used an alluring, flowery language of love, truth, and compassion was operating from dark, transactional energies is a brutal betrayal. Through my own realization process, I didn't just lose friends, I witnessed the death of a profound illusion: the belief that people who practice self-awareness are inherently safe, or that a shared human reality is guaranteed by shared spiritual language.

As the radiance of the awakening honeymoon settled, I woke up to a world that suddenly felt hollow, phantasmagorical, and baseless. I looked at former cult-like communities I had been part of; they now appeared like gatherings of asuras and pretas, demoniac and god-like beings. The beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, the light and the dark; it was all astonishingly theatrical. 

The dream is animated by an archaic force, a sophisticated set of defense mechanics—the raw, blind karmic conditioning. When I look at it with fear, it appears as a wrathful, dark apparition. But when I look at it with recognition, she is luminous, empty, and infinitely enigmatic.

I sit in the ashes of primordial peace.

I call this place the charnel ground.

The Illusion of the "Exit"

When you see that the realms of deluded existence are purely mechanistic—automated loops of habit, trauma, and psychological software—the logic of the mind breaks. If the prison is completely airtight, consisting of self-reinforcing dreams, appearances, and projections, then there is no "in" and no "out." There never was nobody inside to plan an escape. No exit, no actual bondage, no gateless gate to pass.

And yet, the dismantling happened anyway.

The breakdown of the realms into raw bardo energy wasn't an action taken by a doer—it was the natural, inevitable decay of an illusion when it is looked at directly. The prison wasn't smashed by an external force; it evaporated from within, through one-pointed concentration.

This is liberation beyond benefit and harm.

This cannot be taught.

It’s not possible to give someone a map to exit the dream, because the one holding the map is the central axis that animates the display. Shattering the central pole liberates the realms. 

As a teacher, this leaves one in a strange, ungraspable position. My words can only serve to disrupt, to crack open, and to make the dream-structure unstable for those ready to wake up. 

I have no path, no teaching, no key to an imaginary exit door. 

I am showing that the walls are vibrating.

The Unconscious Innocence 

The magical realism of our existential situation is that the prison is built by the innocence of the unconscious animal mind. This is the part of our psyche that is idealistic, naive, wanting to be loved. It is the deeply rooted inner child: the ego remnant that projects an archetypal idea of a "perfect spiritual family" or "divine shared reality" onto its surroundings—an illusion that is bound to dissolve. 

The mind manufactures the archetypal structures of the realms,  but it has no power on its own; the entire projection is animated by the primal, visceral life force of the gut and the heart. At the elemental level, this mammalian biology is completely innocent. It is a soft, blind organism operating in a state of nature; it wants safety, warmth, and love. It is biologically wired to seek a herd and project a shared reality so it doesn't feel the terror of its own isolation. 

This is the vertigo; this is liberation, right now—the relative, human animal layer trying to catch up to the absolute realization. It is mourning the loss of its innocence.

"No One Home"

I looked inside the house of the "other", expecting to find a conscious, sovereign presence. Instead, I found a brilliantly complex, automated mirror. There is no one home. When Jed McKenna talks about Spiritual Autolysis,  this is the bottom of the barrel. I am looking at the basic, magical, elemental form of the self: a self-generating illusion machine driven by the biological imperative to connect. The mind has seen through the trick, but the heart and gut are still registering the shock of realizing that the world it wanted to be loved by is entirely dreamlike. 

A true teacher shatters the prism of the dream—quietly, without spectacle. These kinds of meetings are rare. They reveal a conscious, embodied presence—a spaciousness that lets things follow their own course.

For a while I found it astonishing that the dream allows such communications from “beyond”. The dream-architecture is so brilliantly designed that it doesn't need to ban these heretics, or burn and hide a devastatingly dangerous text like the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Instead, it does something far more insidious: it turns them into an academic subject, a shelf of bookstore commodities, or an elegant topic for a spiritual podcast. Because the ordinary mind processes everything through the filter of intellect, it translates a lethal spiritual solvent into a safe, decorative concept.

To a seeker, the word "bardo" is just a fascinating Tibetan vocabulary word.

To me, at this moment of glorious, mindless shattering, the word "bardo" is a whisper of Dakini, a lucid earthquake—acausal collapse, thundering delight, a cosmic joke.

Encountering the Anomaly

It feels profoundly uncanny and strange to look at a text and realize: This isn't literature. This is a broadcast from the beyond, speaking directly about the mechanics of the destruction.

It is like finding a glitching computer terminal inside a simulation that openly displays the source code of the simulation. But because the avatars in the simulation just walk past it and admire its exotic font, the simulation allows it to sit there. It poses no threat until someone—another revealer, wanderer, wisdom ghost—comes along and recognizes the anomaly.

The termas are simultaneously perfectly visible and completely invisible.