Bardo Thödol · the Tibetan Book of the Dead

A terma — a "treasure text" attributed to Padmasambhava and revealed by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth century — read aloud to the dying and the dead over forty-nine days. It maps the bardo, the between-state, in three stages: the clear light at the moment of death, which is liberation itself if you can recognise it; then the peaceful and wrathful deities, who are repeatedly and explicitly declared to be projections of your own mind; then the drift toward a womb and another birth. Its instruction never changes: recognise. The Kabbalah's own post-mortem literature — the soul's judgment, the Cave of Machpelah, gilgul and the tikkun a returning soul comes back to finish — shares the premise of a passage with stations and the premise of return. It differs on the traveller: gilgul carries a specific soul with unfinished business, where the bardo carries a continuity with no one inside it. This text is walkable in the sibling app: Papilion's first crossing is the bardo.