The Bardo of Waking Life

An avant-garde collection of improvisational essays, The Bardo of Waking Life by Richard Grossinger is a meditation on the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo—the transitional realm popularly understood as the state between death and rebirth. Rather than treating waking life as ultimate reality, Grossinger examines everyday existence, along with its history and language, as a kind of bardo state itself: a transitional, conditional realm through which consciousness moves. In doing so, the book seeks a deeper context for both life and dreams while engaging an expansive range of contemporary and philosophical subjects. Written with both playfulness and precision, the book moves fluidly between spiritual inquiry, cultural criticism, and speculative thought, addressing topics as varied as genetic theory, the Iraq War and the presidency of George W. Bush, North Korea, advertising, global warming, Prison Industrial Culture, childhood trauma, and even country western music. In these intellectually fearless field notes, Grossinger crosses quantum mechanics with totemic hexes, drawing transcendental insight from the fleeting space-time of ordinary experience while probing enduring questions of creation, destruction, and existence. If, as Tibetan cosmology suggests, all conditional realms are bardos, then the shared human condition may itself be nothing less than the bardo of waking life.