C. G. Jung felt that the greatest discovery of modern times in the field of psychology was what he called “the reality of the psyche.”

Gaining insight into The Tibetan Book of the Dead can help us deepen our understanding of what Jung meant. Though on the surface a supposed guidebook for the deceased, this book has an esoteric aspect, as it is teaching us—the living—about the psychic nature of our moment-to-moment experience while being alive.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead envisions the recently deceased person’s consciousness as being in a dream world of sorts in which—just like a dream—they inhabit a body that is mind-created. The dreamlike world they are inhabiting (“the bardo,” a Tibetan word meaning a gap, an in-between state) is filled with their mind’s own projections, be they beneficent deities or seeming demons. The whole point of the instructions of this sacred text is to help the dead person to recognize that what they are experiencing in the after-death state is—like a dream—nothing other than their mind’s own projections, their own energy externalized into and as an ever-changing dreamscape. What The Tibetan Book of the Dead is reflecting isn’t just the deceased person’s experience, but maps onto describing the nature of our own experience in the waking dream called life.

The teachings in The Tibetan Book of the Dead are based on the reality of the psyche—the idea that our thought-forms are imbued with a seeming autonomy, of a living reality all their own. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, with its hosts of mind-created deities is based on and pointing out, in Jung’s words, “the primacy of the psyche [in creating our experience],” not just in the after-death state, but in life itself. Jung comments, “our whole experience of so-called reality is psychic”—hence his term “the reality of the psyche.” Jung thinks of humanity as psychic beings, as our psychic totality is not limited by or dependent on—and reaches beyond—the barrier of time and space.

Do Drugs Impart “Real” Visions?

Contemplating the teachings of The Tibetan Book of the Dead reminds me of an experience I had when I was in high school in the early seventies. At that time in the culture wars, marijuana was seen as something bad (“why do you think they call it dope?”), even being seen as akin to the devil by the adults who subscribed to the mainstream propagandized point of view (the “war on drugs” was full-blown at the time). Of course, younger people (like myself) were happily experimenting with it, but our parents, having been programmed to think in a certain way by the powers that be, typically saw pot as something that would lead to harder drugs, ruining people’s lives in the process. However my best friend’s father—let’s call him “MB,” a bit of an adventurous spirit—one day secretly got stoned and afterwards told me about his experience. While high on cannabis, MB (who was Jewish) had an overwhelming visionary experience of Jesus!

As he was telling me the story, he made the point that after a little while of having his mind blown and basking in the son of God’s sublime grace-waves, he realized that what he was experiencing was nothing other than an unreal projection of his mind and his potentially life-transforming visionary experience immediately ended, reduced to an imaginary fictitious illusion by the powers of his rational mind. Like a rubber band that had stretched too far, his mind, which had gotten too far out (from the point of view of mainstream conventional reality), had snapped back into (the consensually agreed upon) shape.

In telling me the story, MB thought of himself as a modern, rational and sophisticated person who wasn’t going to be tricked by his mind’s own projections (unlike “primitives,” who, I imagine him thinking, live in a self-created magical world filled their own projections). It is ironic that by enthroning his rational intellect as the supreme maker of meaning and interpreter of the validity of his experience, however, he is potentially putting himself under a spell of his own making. It was as if something in his unconscious was threatened by and wanted to shut down his experience of the light and took the form of his rationality to do so. In our modern age, Jung writes, “all the powers of the underworld now hide behind reason and intellect.”

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