198 - Between What Was and What Will Be
Secular Buddhism
Noah Rasheta
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
In this episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast, Noah Rasheta explores the Tibetan Buddhist concept of bardos, traditionally understood as transitional states between life, death, and rebirth. Taking a secular approach, Noah reinterprets bardos as a framework for understanding all of life’s transitions, both big and small.
Life is constantly shifting—between moments, relationships, jobs, emotions, and even identities. Each transition, whether minor or major, offers an opportunity to pause, reflect, and make intentional choices about what we bring forward and what we leave behind. Noah discusses the six bardos in Tibetan Buddhism and reimagines them in an everyday context, showing how they can help us navigate change with mindfulness and presence.
Through personal stories and practical reflections, this episode encourages listeners to embrace the space between what was and what will be—not as something to fear, but as a fertile ground for growth, renewal, and greater self-awareness.
Tune in to explore how recognizing bardos in daily life can help you move through transitions with clarity, resilience, and wisdom.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism podcast. This is episode number |
| 0:08.1 | 198. I am your host, Noah Rushetta. Today I want to talk about a concept that comes from |
| 0:16.5 | Tibetan Buddhism, and this is the teaching of the Bardos and how we can apply this idea or this |
| 0:24.3 | concept to help us live more mindfully through all of life's transitions. As always, keep in |
| 0:31.0 | mind that you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. You can use what |
| 0:35.3 | you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are. |
| 0:39.3 | Remember, Buddhist teachings and concepts often invite us to think differently about life. |
| 0:45.2 | They challenge us to question the stories that we've come to believe about ourselves and about |
| 0:50.9 | reality, and the teaching of the bardos certainly does that for me. |
| 0:55.8 | So what are the bardos? The word bardo comes from Tibetan Buddhism and literally means |
| 1:02.4 | intermediate state or transitional state. You might have heard of the book, the Tibetan Book of the |
| 1:09.3 | Dead. If you haven't, it's a really good book. |
| 1:12.5 | I would recommend it. It was an impactful read. For me, it's a traditional text that is meant to |
| 1:19.5 | discuss the process of guiding people through the bardos of death and rebirth. In traditional Tibetan Buddhism, there are six |
| 1:31.4 | bardos that encompass the entirety of existence. They are the barto of this life, the barto of dreaming, |
| 1:39.2 | the barto of meditation, the barto of dying, the barto of the moment of death, and the barto of becoming. |
| 1:47.9 | Now, if you're like me, when you approach Buddhism from a more secular perspective, |
| 1:52.3 | you might be wondering, what do these teachings have to do with ordinary everyday life? |
| 1:57.9 | I want to explore a more secular interpretation of the teaching of the |
| 2:03.3 | bardos, not just as something that happens when we die, but as something that's actually |
| 2:08.6 | happening right now. This is where I think we can extract something really valuable. What if we |
| 2:14.4 | look at the bardos as a framework for understanding all the transitions we experience in our ordinary lives? |
... |
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