" O nobly-born, the time has now come for you to seek the path. Your breathing is about to cease. If you have had a teacher who has taught you about the Clear Light, this is the moment when you are about to experience it in its reality in the Bardo state, in which all things are like the empty, cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum without circumference or centre. At this moment, recognize yourself, and remain conscious of that state. I am telling you: what is called death has now come to you. Decide to meet it by saying: This is the hour of death. By taking advantage of this death, I will act, for the good of all sentient beings that inhabit the illimitable expanse of the universe, so as to reach the perfect liberation, by resolving on love and compassion towards them, and by directing my entire effort to the sole perfection.' Shaping your thoughts in this way, especially at this time, when the Dharma-Kāya of Clear Light after death can be realized for the benefit of all sentient beings, know that you are in that state; resolve to realize the best outcome of the state of the Great Symbol, in which you are, and even if you cannot realize it, you will experience this Bardo, and, should you master the great body of union in Bardo, will be appear in whatever shape will benefit all beings and serve all sentient beings, infinite in number as are the limits of the sky.' Keeping yourself unseparated from this resolution, you should try to remember whatever devotional practices you were accustomed to perform during your lifetime... NOW you are experiencing the radiance of the clear light of pure reality. Recognize it. Your present intellect, by its real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very reality, the compassionate. Your own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be considered as void in the sense of nothingness, is the intellect itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling, and blissful; it is the very consciousness, the compassionate Buddha of your own consciousness, not formed into anything, in reality void, and the intellect, shining and blissful,—these two are inseparable. Their union is the Dharma-Kāya state of perfect enlightenment. Your own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the great body of radiance, has no birth, no death, and is the immutable light, or Buddha Amitābha. Knowing this is sufficient. Recognizing the voidness of your own intellect to be Buddhahood, and recognizing it as being your own consciousness, is to keep yourself in the state of the divine mind of the Buddha. Do this and enlightenment will be certain.
"...The ultimate postmodern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when "European" technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide at the level of the "economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of "ideological superstructure" in the European space itself by New Age "Asiatic" thought, which, in its different guises ranging from "Western Buddhism" to different "Taos," is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.
There resides the highest speculative identity of opposites in today's global civilization: although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and 'Gelassenheit', it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. One should mention here the well-known concept of "future shock" that describes how people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany it. Things simply move too fast, and before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it has already been supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary "cognitive mapping."
The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of techno-logical progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination. One should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being. One is almost tempted to resuscitate the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement to terrestrial misery.
The "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.2 Western Buddhism" thus fits perfectly the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly "post-ideological" era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode in which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua "returns of the repressed," cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. The fetish is effectively a kind of symptom in reverse. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth.
"Western Buddhism" is such a fetish. It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always with-draw. In a further specification, one should note that the fetish can function in two opposite ways: either its role remains unconscious—as in the case of Shute's heroine who was unaware of the fetish-role of the dog—or you think that the fetish is that which really matters, as in the case of a Western Buddhist unaware that the "truth" of his existence is in fact the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere game. Nowhere is this fetishist logic more evident than apropos of Tibet, one of the central references of the post-Christian "spiritual" imaginary. Today, Tibet more and more plays the role of such a fantasmatic Thing, of a jewel which, when one approaches it too much, turns into the excremental object.
The lesson to our followers of Tibetan Wisdom is thus that if we want to be Tibetans, we should forget about Tibet and do it here. Therein resides the ultimate paradox: The more Europeans try to penetrate the "true" Tibet, the more the very form of their endeavor undermines their goal. We should appreciate the full scope of this paradox, especially with regard to "Eurocentrism." The Tibetans were extremely self-centered: "To them, Tibet was the center of the world, the heart of civilization."