Bardo^2025-2026

“Bardo is a Tibetan word meaning ‘gap.’ It refers to the intermediate realm of forty-nine days between death and rebirth. Death is an awakening from a dream. …People dream a long dream called life. At the end of that dream, they awaken from it through death. Then they pass through a door, enter another womb, and are born once more into another dreamworld. If people could remain fully awake between these two dreams, they would conquer death. That is why we must remember the bardo[1].”

Short-form content[2] leads us into a state of selfless absorption (無我之境). Short-form content is the most stimulating dream and simulation of reality. On its treadmill of infinite scrolling, we forget ourselves and cannot decide when to set foot back in reality. In this sense, the cyclical structure of short-form content resembles the Buddhist notion of samsara. Samsara means ‘turning in succession’: those who have not reached liberation are reborn into this world again and again until they attain that awakening, that state, or salvation. Life, then, is a dream dreamed over and over by those not yet liberated, and the endless content of short-form media is a repetitive virtual reality experienced by those of us who have lost control.

I am interested in how the selfless absorption offered by media differs from the selflessness of enlightenment, or from an optimal experience of immersion. Does short-form content lead us into a safe state of rapture? The Buddhist doctrine of non-self holds that one can escape the wheel of samsara by realizing that the self has no substance. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, meanwhile, argues that even when we lose ourselves in a desirable optimal experience (Flow), our sense of self afterward becomes fuller. What matters here is not ‘the illusion of being in control’ but a genuine sense of control[3].

What one suddenly reaches in the middle of infinite scrolling is the border between virtual reality–rapture and reality–self-awareness. Encountering liminal content that seems to follow the grammar of short-form yet slips past it — AI-generated videos, a person staring blankly at the comment section with a bank account number written out — the viewer senses an absence of social presence and begins to perceive reality and the self. They grow suspicious, checking the source and purpose of a video and whether anyone has responded to it; they come to question the reality of the media producer behind the anonymized, objectified short-form creator; and they grow anxious that they may have become so addicted as to exhaust a feed they believed to be infinite. Even so, the viewer keeps scrolling. With its brevity, short-form content gives viewers a sense that they could stop at any moment, but its addictiveness has already maximized their dependence on media.

What matters, then, is not to sink deeper into the dream but to perceive its border and remain awake. The liminal space-time of short-form content shares its context with the bardo of samsara. Short-form media seems to lead our consciousness into rapture, yet it fails to guide us to true immersion or enlightenment, leaving us hesitating in the gap at the border. Viewers scroll endlessly, drifting through an infinite simulation, and instead of realizing the impermanence of the self, they are trapped on the wheel of samsara, forgetting and recognizing the self over and over. Bardo proposes a new form of meditation — ‘perceiving the border’ — for those drifting between reality and dream.

[1] Words of Venerable Hyunjang, director of the Tibet Museum, quoted in Lee Seongsim, “Tibetans Who Practice the Teachings of the Bardo,” Won-Buddhism Newspaper, July 27, 2012.

[2] Short video content under three minutes, represented by TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.

[3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (Korean edition), Hanullim, 2004 (2024), p.129

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