The Bardo in the Rubin Museum

I went with a friend to see the exhibition on the Bardo at the Rubin Museum of Art.

In Buddhist Art the religious symbols are not so much decorative as indicative of what may be encountered in the afterworld. There are kinds of flashcards which show you which entities you can expect to encounter in the afterworld and what to follow and not follow. In a sort of traffic directions of the afterlife there are descriptions of the types of lights you should follow when you encounter them in the Bardo and those you shouldn't And there are statues of deities which have both a peaceful and a wrathful face. There are depictions of the realms, the bardos. There are headphones you can wear and listen to the descriptions of the journey of the soul after death.
Art was apparently art was not considered to exist as we see it, but rather only to exist as a ceremonial object which interpreted the nature of reality.

The deities themselves represent aspects of your nature. Rather than having to deal with a terrible aspect of your nature alone, instead you call upon this deity to help you and project all of your problems upon it as well.

They also employ someone, whose jobs it is simply to start conversations with the visitors to the galleries. My friend and I ended up spending a lot of time talking to this lady about the art there.

I am not sure what I really make of the concept of the bardo. On one hand so much in Tibetan Buddhism, especially its relation to symbols, makes sense to me and I would like to have the afterlife be comparably sensible.It doesn't seem that far from the Catholic fear of hell. In some ways though, eternity scared me even more , than if not hell( because hell sounds pretty scary) then the concept of any form of suffering in the afterlife. I'm never sure how seriously to take it or how much to think it is just a symbol of this life we live now, which is really all we have.