| Life is born out of death. Socrates came into this intuitive realization before he was to embark upon his death by poison.
What and who am I? Why was I born in flesh and blood? To where am I going? Why do we have the birth and death?
These are the ultimate questions by human beings. All human beings cannot but give up their flesh and experience death.
Therefore, it is all the more important to have correct understanding about death.
Those who were taught modern science studies claim that- for the reason they simply cannot remember their own birth and death- the doctrine of incarnation is not a true one; therefore, cannot be proven scientifically. However, the province that can be conceived and felt by human beings is imprisoned in the extremely limited and narrow sphere. There are myriads of objects and colors that cannot be perceived by us. There are noises we cannot hear; the smells we cannot smell; tastes we cannot taste; feelings we cannot feel. And we tend to believe that the consciousness that we feel ordinarily is the only one there exists, but there are outer worlds of consciousness behind it. In these consciousness our forgotten past is recorded in a perfect form and we can retrieve this memory any time. And all of us who are incarnated here now are holding the past in common. In accordance with the Buddhist's point of view, life is the series of consciousness. This state of consciousness is completed from one stage to another. The first stage of consciousness is the one that occurs at birth and the last one is that of death. This last state of consciousness is reconnected to the first state of consciousness, and the intermediate stage is called "Bardo". The Bardo means interim state. In this interim state the "old" existence is discarded and is metamorphosed into a "new existence". A ceremony held on the 49th day after death is an important Buddhist ritual in that it guides us to the bright path to truth while we journey the interim stage (approximately 49 days, Bardo period) from death to incarnation. |