>>509297194I'm actually re-reading it, last time I read it was when I was in high school. It's very... Logical. Probably good to read a version with commentary/explanation. But it's a very cohesive view of how it all happens.
It also is interesting because it explores the idea of death/transformation of the state of consciousness not as a singular moment that happens at the end of "life", but as something that happens to us regularly as we grow and change.
The "Bardo state" (death) basically means "gap" or "transition in between", and the Buddhist argument is that as a conscious human, we go through many different Bardo "deaths" great and small throughout our lives, and that the big Bardo when our body dies is similarly dependent on where our conscious focus is primarily attuned.
Someone in a video I was watching said that if our consciousness is music, that the state of death in between bodily rebirths is a changing of the instrument/sound, but that the general mood and melody of the song continues.
The book is supposed to be read by a monk to the dying/deceased person over a period of several weeks, as they believe that the consciousness/spirit kind of hangs around its anchor point for several weeks before it starts getting drawn to solidification in a new bodily existence-- and that reading this book to them helps them to remember what to focus on so that they can be reborn in a body/existence well-suited to enlightenment and liberation from rebirth cycles
Interesting book overall.