Traversing The Bardo
Mankind’s Search For The Timeless
And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away — Percy Bysshe Shelley
As profound technological changes sweep the globe, this article searches for the philosophical side of technology by looking at Eastern and Western philosophy for answers. It tries to capture different thoughts. Metaphorically, it appears we are all blind men trying to figure out the proverbial elephant.
The word ‘antarabhāva’ is a Sanskrit word that means a transitional or intermediate state between death and rebirth. In Buddhist schools of thought, the word Bardo means a stage where life is suspended between an end and rebirth. A state of suspended animation. If the world operates in cycles, life is traversing the Bardo and our attempts at recreating everything we know from atoms to bits is a timeless search for universal truths. Only the methods differ.
Traditionally, Eastern philosophy has focused on rebirth while Western…