¹The fear, terror, and awe (or fascination)—on the part of the deceased onbeholding the deities—arise only in the case of the ordinary devotee, who, asthe text explains, has not had adequate yoglc training, ere death, to enable himto recognize the Bardo as such, immediately upon dying, and pass beyond it.For the adept in yoga, who can take the Bardo ‘by the forelock’, as the textputs it (p. 100), mastering Death, and who knows that all apparitional appearances are unreal and powerless, both in this world and in all other worlds,there is no Bardo to experience; his goal is either an immediate and consciousrebirth among men or in one of the paradise realms, or, if he be really ripened—which would be an exceedingly rare circumstance —Nirvana.

²No sooner does one radiance cease than another dawns; the deceased nothaving a moment of distraction, his intellect becomes concenlratedly (i.e. one—point edly) alert.

³The blood symbolizes sangsäric existence ; the blood—drinking, the thirstingfor, the drinking of, and the quenching of the thirst for, sangsäric existence. For the devotee who—even at this stage—can be made to realize that these deities are thus but the kartnic personifications of his own propensities, born from having lived and drunken life, and who has, in addition, the supreme power to face them unwaveringly (as in Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni the Neophyte to succeed must face the ‘Dweller on the Threshold’), meeting them like old acquaintances, and then losing his personality in them, enlightenment as to the true nature of sangsäric existence dawns, and, with it, the All—Perfect Illumination called Buddhahood.