NeuroVIZR & Liberation through Sensory Encounters
Garnet Dupuis
July 14, 2021
Introduction
Throughout the history of humanity, there have been many traditions that have sought a deeper understanding and experience of multi-dimensional consciousness.
There have been yogis, priestesses, seers, sadhus, shamans, mystics, gurus, witches, rishis, hermits and monks in every time and place.
The “appetite” has been the same whether the urge has been characterized as enlightenment, liberation, salvation or the perfect high.
One such tradition is Vajrayana Buddhism, better known worldwide as Tibetan Buddhism.
The tradition is an evolved amalgam of two major streams of consciousness exploration emerging from India – Hindu Tantra and Mahayana Buddhism.
This paper investigates insights in Vajrayana Buddhism as they relate to the principle of “liberation”, sensory experience and First Language encounters using the NeuroVIZR device.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Before entering into a deeper look at the principle of “Liberation through Sensory Encounters”, it is useful to consider the most well-known portal on the subject for those not schooled in Vajrayana Buddhism – The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The text is more accurately known as the Bardo Thodol, translated as “Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State”.
The text describes and is intended to guide one through experiences that consciousness encounters after death, in the bardo, the interval between death and the next rebirth.
It also includes chapters on the signs of death and rituals to undertake when death is approaching or has taken place.
However, while this common description may be factually accurate, it can also limit the broader meaning of the subject.
This paper explores the possibility that “liberation” practices extend beyond the limited application at death and may also be found within common daily experiences.
It also reaches beyond the limitation of “hearing” to include a surprising range of Sensory Encounters offering the potential of “liberation”.
What Is Meant by “Liberation”?
Language is symbolic and metaphoric.
As the famous instruction states – “Do not mistake the finger that points to the moon as being the moon”.
William James, Father of Western Psychology and explorer of The Varieties of Religious Experience, listed “ineffable” as one of the cardinal aspects of actual mystical experience.
We should therefore avoid attempting too rigid a definition of the term “liberation”.
Every spoken language also has its own list of overlapping words for similar experiences, creating one of the major challenges in translating such terms across cultures and time.
For the sake of simplicity, in this paper let us consider “liberation” as something like the direct and actual realization of one’s true nature and being.
We will avoid extended ideas and beliefs regarding the afterlife, reincarnation, heaven and hell, God or gods, soul and other related concepts.
Liberation Through Sensory Encounters
There is a major contribution of Hindu Tantra that is central to this concept.
Hindu Tantra can be considered as either an “evolution” or “revolution” in the quest for spiritual experience and “liberation”.
Set at a time in Indian history and culture when spiritual practices were fused into the restrictive caste system, brahmic rituals and gender bias, tantric views were considered controversial to the point of heresy.
Practitioners were often denigrated and reviled.
At the core of the Tantric perspective was the insight that the physical human body offered a complete set of potential features that could be useful in the pursuit of “liberation”.
In this light, one useful interpretation of “tantra” is that of “continuum”, meaning that there is no sharp division or distinction between the physical and non-physical, or between the visible and invisible.
Within this perspective, the physical senses take on a new and valued utility.
The senses are no longer considered secondary and illusory, but instead become potential avenues of “liberating” experiences.
The contemporary systems of “yoga” practiced today are rooted in this tantric approach.
These tantric factors were seamlessly integrated into Mahayana Buddhist philosophies and practices, first in northern India and later further refined and elaborated as the practices migrated into Tibet.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead – A Deeper Look
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a Western term for a text translated into English as Liberation through Hearing while in the Intermediate State.
So what is the “Intermediate State”?
The Tibetan term for “Intermediate State” is “bardo”.
The concept of bardo is complex and potentially controversial.
In this immediate context, the bardo describes the conditions of passage from being physically alive into physical death.
It is an “in between” state or perhaps a transitional experience.
In principle, this bardo state exposes consciousness to core qualities of awareness associated with “liberation”.
The experience of dying, in this view, loosens habitual physical and psychological restraints that normally obscure our experience of reality.
However, restricting the concept of bardo to the transition of physical death limits the broader potential of “liberation” through sensory experience.
The Bardo Thodol is only one section of a much larger corpus, The Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones.
The larger work presents a much broader insight into the energetic and psycho-physiology of the human being.
More About the Bardo
A deeper understanding of the principle of “bardo” provides a more dynamic perspective.
Essentially, a bardo is a set of conditions in which a person has heightened access to “liberating” qualities of consciousness.
The experiences of yogic practitioners offer a broader understanding than one in which the bardo presents only during the transition at physical death.
There are six types or aspects of bardo states:
- Kyenay bardo – the bardo of birth and life, beginning at conception and continuing until the last breath.
- Milam bardo – the bardo of the dream state.
- Samten bardo – the bardo of meditation.
- Chikhai bardo – the bardo of the moment of death.
- Chönyi bardo – the bardo of the luminosity of true nature, associated with visions, auditory phenomena and profound awareness.
- Sidpa bardo – the bardo of becoming or transmigration.
It is only the fourth bardo, Chikhai, that relates directly to the common Tibetan Book of the Dead perspective of the intermediate state associated with physical death.
Perhaps even more provocative is the first bardo, Kyenay, which defines the entire period from birth until death as a bardo.
In other words, the entirety of one’s life may possess characteristics of an “intermediate state”.
If a bardo state offers the potential for a more direct experience of one’s true nature and reality, then the bardo of physical life demands serious attention.
Apart from the special subsets of dreams and meditation, even common or mundane life experiences may hold the potential potency of bardo dynamics.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead interpretation therefore opens the door to a much larger exploration.
Self-Liberation
The title of the larger corpus, The Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones, contains an important concept: “self-liberation”.
The term can easily be misunderstood.
It should not necessarily be understood as the idea that “I, me, myself” can use will and determination to manipulate an experience and liberate myself.
This interpretation misses the core principle.
The experience itself has the innate capacity to dissolve illusion and obscuration by its very nature—if one does not inhibit it.
This is simple in principle but difficult to actualize because of our deeply established mental habits of attempting to manipulate experience toward an imagined goal.
Liberation Through Sensory Encounters
The principle of self-liberation becomes especially important when considering sensory experience.
The senses can provide direct encounters with experience before the mind has time to interpret, judge or manipulate what is happening.
In these moments, the sensory encounter itself may contain the potential for liberation.
Rather than trying to escape sensory experience, the Vajrayana approach recognizes that sensory phenomena can become a path toward direct awareness.
Light, sound, movement and other sensory experiences may therefore become opportunities for encountering the nature of consciousness directly.
The key is not necessarily to create a particular belief or interpretation about the experience.
Instead, the possibility lies in allowing the experience to arise and recognizing its qualities without immediately attempting to control or transform it.
Sensory Encounters and First Language
This perspective has a natural relationship with the principle of First Language.
First Language describes Light and Sound as deeply rooted forms of communication that can be experienced before higher cognitive interpretation.
A sensory encounter may therefore communicate directly with the organism without requiring the experience to first be translated into conventional language or intellectual concepts.
This direct encounter can create an experience of “knowing without thinking”.
The experience may arrive before explanation.
Music provides a familiar example.
A musical composition can create powerful emotional and experiential states without requiring logical analysis.
Light may also possess this capacity for direct sensory communication.
When Light and Sound are experienced together, they may create a rich sensory environment capable of engaging consciousness in ways that extend beyond ordinary conceptual thinking.
The NeuroVIZR Experience
The NeuroVIZR provides a contemporary environment for exploring this principle through Light and Sound.
The device presents carefully designed sensory compositions that can create changing patterns of stimulation and attention.
Rather than attempting to tell the user what to think or what a particular experience should mean, the experience offers sensory encounters that can be explored directly.
In this sense, the NeuroVIZR experience may be understood as an opportunity for sensory engagement, consciousness exploration and the possibility of self-liberating encounters.
The Light and Sound compositions do not provide liberation as an external object or achievement.
Instead, they create an environment in which the individual may encounter experience more directly and discover what emerges when habitual patterns of attention and interpretation are temporarily loosened.
Liberation in Everyday Experience
If the entire experience of life can be understood as a form of bardo, then the potential for liberating experience is not limited to meditation, dreams or the moment of death.
Everyday sensory encounters may also contain this potential.
A sound, a visual experience, movement, music or a moment of unexpected awareness may interrupt habitual patterns and create a brief opening into a more direct experience of the present moment.
These moments do not necessarily need to be dramatic.
The possibility of liberation may exist in the simple recognition of experience before it becomes covered by interpretation, expectation or habitual thought.
From this perspective, sensory experience is not an obstacle to consciousness.
It can become one of the pathways through which consciousness encounters itself.
Conclusion
The traditions of Vajrayana Buddhism offer a powerful perspective on the relationship between sensory experience and liberation.
Rather than rejecting the body and the senses, tantric and Vajrayana approaches recognize sensory experience as a potential path toward direct awareness.
The concept of bardo expands this possibility even further.
If life itself can be understood as an intermediate state, then opportunities for “liberating” experiences may exist throughout our ordinary lives.
The principle of self-liberation suggests that experience itself may possess the capacity to reveal its nature when we do not immediately attempt to manipulate or control it.
Through sensory encounters, we may occasionally move beyond habitual patterns of thought and experience a more direct relationship with awareness.
The NeuroVIZR provides a contemporary way of exploring these possibilities through Light and Sound.
Its sensory compositions create opportunities for Brain Engagement, First Language communication and direct sensory encounters.
Whether understood as consciousness exploration, creative experience or simply healthy entertainment, these encounters invite us to reconsider the potential of the senses.
Perhaps liberation is not always something distant that must be achieved.
Perhaps it can occasionally be encountered directly—through the simple experience of seeing, hearing and being fully present.