Things have been unsettled lately. Hairy, even. All internal, mental space. Externally little has changed, same as it ever was; sometimes the external acts up and is annoying or my body reminds me about aging, other times it's calm and behaves but it's a comfort that I know can only be temporary. It's the uncertainty and anxiety when the feeling arises that something has to happen, something has to change. I don't know if anything's going to change, despite the press that something is looming. The comfortable pattern has been that nothing changes, but the reality I'm well aware of is that's impossible to continue in perpetuity. These disturbances, I should note, are also a part of the repeating pattern, lulling me into thinking things'll be alright. And they will be alright. Until they're not.

The internal space has been characterized by turmoil, dynamic and surreal. I've been trying to deal with it by bringing everything back to practice; mindfulness practice as well as Vajrayana-inspired practices that I've developed from instinct, what resonates and makes sense to me. Part of the turmoil is that in the background is a doubt about it, what if it doesn't describe a reality of life and death? And it doesn't. Or at least that's totally the wrong question or approach. The only certainty is death itself. The only question is my attitude towards it and how I'm existing approaching it whenever and however it comes.

So many practices that without a teacher sanctioning them, I know I may be running risks. Or not. What risks? I imagine they would be risks on such a subtle level (karma or energy) I wouldn't even know about them. On a mundane, this-world level I'm not too concerned about risks. Those would be risks of harming myself or other people or psychological or spiritual damage. I'm not worried about those, the normative narratives that define those concerns just don't apply anymore. Take psychology, if I spoke with a psychiatrist, we wouldn't even be speaking the same language. I mean I'd find an English-speaking one in Taiwan, but the assumptions would all be completely different. I may say I'm suicidal, but there is no concept of harming myself anymore. The psychiatrist would write a prescription for antidepressants (which I've always thought would be convenient to overdose on). Harming other people is necessarily a this-world consideration, but I've done all I can to minimize that. Any harm I cause would be indirect and more about them than me, and I don't know who "them" are anyway. Who am I causing harm? Who's here?

Mandala practice, dakini practice, bardo practice. Practices that are not practices because they are not sanctioned and therefore considered risky. Considered risky by whom? Of course there's only me, but my doubts in calling them risky are also my fail-safe. Can't be arrogant or self-assured about them. Always leave room for just being plain wrong.

Apparently "bardo practice" is a real thing, and what I'm doing is not it, but very strangely when I read about the real thing, it reminded me of a "winter term" project I did way back in college. Despite all the reading I've done about Tibetan Buddhism and the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, I only came across a description of a "bardo retreat" in relatively recent years in a book by Reginald Ray called Secret of the Vajra World. It's described as a retreat that was done in confined cells or mountain caves of Tibet and considered very advanced and even "dangerous". It's done in complete darkness and effectively complete solitude over a number of weeks. The retreat is supposed to help get an experience of the after-death bardo states and the instructions received for the retreat is essentially the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

At Oberlin, we had a "winter term" which was the month of January between fall and spring semesters where students could do anything they wanted and get credit for it as long as they framed it in terms of a project and got a faculty member to sign off on it as academically valuable. As one faculty member described it, you could raise a cactus and get credit as long as you designed it as a project.

My idea for my first winter term started with "solitary confinement". Mind you, this is so way back far in my past I have no idea about the motivation behind it nor the psychology that certainly was at play. I'm just describing how I remember it. I lived in a dorm which had a wing of apartments that were intended for guest stays by short-term faculty. I discovered that one was vacant and asked if I could use it for a winter term project. The idea was to hole myself not just in the apartment, but in the bathroom, which had a bathtub, of the apartment for winter term. Ideally complete isolation, no lights, no books, no music, no external distractions. The curtains of the apartment would be drawn so light couldn't seep in. I arranged for a friend to bring me easy-to-prepare light meals three times a day, emphasis on the easy as I didn't want to be a burden, but mind you hermits and retreatants in mountain caves in Tibet often had benefactors or supporters with arrangements for supplies.

How to get a faculty member to sign off on it? Well, I was considering being an East Asian Studies major and had taken classes to that effect, and in one Japanese history class the concept of "wabi/sabi" was introduced. That concept was expounded upon much later in a "King of the Hill" episode, so I'm going to assume everyone knows about it without my explaining it. But I went to that professor, a most illustrious and revered Ronald DiCenzo (RIP), and proposed my winter term project as exploring the wabi/sabi concept as "Beauty in Isolation". He bought it, god bless his heart, and signed off on it. Some lucky cactus got a reprieve from being raised by my lack of green thumb.

Actual extant memories: I forget if the project was three weeks or four weeks, but I made it for most part until the last week. In that time I stayed in the bathroom, mostly lying in the bathtub with the lights off. I only opened the door to take in the plate of prepared vegetables and leave it out. It wasn't complete isolation as I could still tell day from night since it was impossible for the bathroom to be completely light-proof, and I could still feel and hear activity because this was still in a dorm on a college campus. In the last week, I ventured out into the apartment. That's all I remember. I spent time outside the bathroom in the last week. The only actual memory of the weeks inside the bathroom was singing through the entire double album of Genesis' "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", just because I could. I knew all the lyrics (but if I forgot any I had all the time in the world to recall them). And it was confirmed later by dorm residents telling me they could hear me warbling through the vents like a ghost (you can only imagine my embarrassment)! Was I going slightly mad in there? It's hard to argue otherwise.

Reading about the actual existence of a "bardo retreat" and relating it to that winter term project made me wonder where the hell did that idea come from? Could it be from past life resonances whereby I had undergone those bardo retreats? Another brick in the wall of evidence that reincarnation is a thing?

Back to present tension, what I'm calling "bardo practice" now has more to do with envisioning present life and reality as a bardo, equivalent in reality as the death bardos. The death bardos are described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and practicing living as if in a bardo state is treating it in the same way. In living reality, I'm being buffeted uncontrollably by the winds of reality like a bird in a gale. I seem to feel I'm in control of myself, that I make decisions of what to do at any given moment, but that's just illusion and delusion of being swept through the dire straits of the walk of living bardo. I'm actually in no more control of my fate, direction and destiny as I envision I would be as described in the death bardos.

In ways it's an extension of what I described before as my version of what I call "mandala practice". Both emerging more prominently in times of internal tumult and disturbance, working to melt away the habit of perceiving reality as concrete and actual. Even when we're able to accept and embrace the teachings of impermanence and the constantly changing nature of our lives, I think we still tend to treat that impermanent and constantly changing nature of our lives as reality, as actual. Somewhere along the line I got it in my head from the teachings that it all has to melt away, the experience of enlightenment is an experience of non-duality, no difference between this ego-conceived concept of me who is here and everything else sensed and perceived around me. It can't be striven for so I'm not striving for it, but I hope to work around the edges and challenging my perceived notions and concepts of reality. The easy targets are negativity and dysfunction and the effects of self-imposed isolation.