✦ Cracks in the Black Iron Prison: Bardos as Glitches in Samsara ✦
- dingirfecho
- Sep 4, 2025
- 4 min read
⛓️ Introduction
When Philip K. Dick wrote about the Black Iron Prison, he gave us a metaphor for existence that resonates far beyond science fiction. In his novel VALIS, Dick’s semi-fictional alter ego Horselover Fat suddenly perceives reality for what it is:
“Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.” (VALIS)
This is not unlike what the Buddha described as samsara: the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Samsara is a prison so totalizing, so immersive, that its inmates rarely notice the bars. It is a system maintained by ignorance, craving, and karma — but invisible to those it ensnares.
🏛️ The Empire That Never Ended
Dick expands this vision in a passage where time itself seems to collapse:
“Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison … you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant.” (VALIS)
Here, the Empire is Rome, but also California in the 1970s, and also every future dystopia. It is samsara across time — the endless replication of the same prison under different guises. As Dick put it elsewhere:
“During the interval … he had discerned … a Gestalt … Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.” (Exegesis)
✨ The prison is seamless — until it glitches.
⚡ Glitches and Bardos
Media theorist Rosa Menkman, in her essay The Glitch Moment(um), describes the glitch as:
“A rupture in the flow of information that makes the medium visible.”
A glitch interrupts the illusion of smoothness, forcing us to notice the system itself. This is exactly what Tibetan Buddhism means by bardo: an interval, a liminal state, where the continuity of ordinary reality breaks open.
🔮 The bardos are cracks: between waking and dreaming, between meditation and thought, between death and rebirth. In these thresholds the system falters, and for a moment we glimpse its constructedness.
🌌 Samsara as Illusion
Buddhist sutras describe samsara in language hauntingly close to Dick’s prison:
“Samsara is without beginning or end, a prison built by ignorance, maintained by craving, bound by karma.” (Samyutta Nikaya 15.1)
“Like a magician, one produces an apparition. When one sees that all dharmas are like illusions, one transcends sorrow.” (Samadhiraja Sutra)
“All conditioned things are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow. Like dew or lightning, thus should they be contemplated.” (Diamond Sutra)
📜 What Dick saw through visionary flashes, the Buddha systematized as a path of practice. Both point to the same truth: our world is fabricated, illusory, and — crucially — escapable.
🕉️ Bardo Yoga: Practicing the Glitch
In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo yoga is the art of using these liminal spaces as gateways to awakening. Each bardo is both a trap and an opening:
🌙 In dreams, lucidity reveals the mind’s power to fabricate worlds.
🧘 In meditation, deep concentration exposes the illusion of permanence.
💀 In death, the collapse of the body unveils the clear light.
🔄 In becoming, karmic winds show the force of conditioning.
To train in the bardos is to train in glitch recognition: learning to notice when the seamless flow breaks, and using that rupture as an opportunity for liberation.
✨ Every moment is a bardo. Which means every moment is an opportunity.
🔓 How Do We Break Out?
But as Philip K. Dick’s life also shows, seeing the prison is not the same as escaping it. Recognition can turn to despair unless one knows there is a way through. The Dharma offers not only diagnosis but jailbreak.
And crucially, it is not a solitary jailbreak. To escape the Black Iron Prison takes a band of rogues. The teacher provides the plan, the community distracts the jailer, and each practitioner plays a role in the great escape.
🗝️ The Ten Keys to Mastery
In our community we often speak of the Ten Keys to Mastery — practical foundations for living and practicing inside, and eventually beyond, the Black Iron Prison. They are:
Mindful Movement – Embody awareness.
Restorative Sleep – Honor the dream bardo.
Nourishing Nutrition – Free the body from compulsions.
Mindfulness Meditation – Sit with the glitch until it opens.
Growth Mindset – Transform setbacks into gates.
Emotional Regulation – See afflictions as appearances.
Empathic Listening – Break the prison of the self by listening deeply.
Authentic Communication – Speak truth as liberation.
Compassionate Action – Turn insight into service.
Integration with Courage – The ultimate key: walk through the crack without fear.
🔑 The Ten Keys are not an alternative to Dharma but a bridge — a way of living that aligns daily life with the jailbreak promised by the Buddha’s path.
🔥 Mara Roast: Practicing the Breakout Together
In our upcoming Mara Roast (September 29th – October 3rd, Portland and online), we’ll explore these practices together. The Mara Roast is our playful name for turning directly toward the forces that bind us — craving, aversion, ignorance — and roasting them with wisdom and humor.
One of the central teachings will be on bardo yoga: how to use dream, meditation, death, and becoming as opportunities for awakening. It is not enough to know the prison exists. We must practice seeing its seams, exploiting its faults, and moving beyond.
✦ The prison is samsara. The cracks are the bardos. The glitches are the moments of awareness. And Buddhism is the manual for breaking free.
This is why we gather: not just to name the Black Iron Prison, but to practice breaking out of it — together.
The Black Iron Prison is real — not as an external building but as the invisible system of samsara. Philip K. Dick saw it in visions. Rosa Menkman saw it in glitches. The Buddha saw it in every moment of conditioned existence.
The question is: will we recognize the cracks? And when we do, will we have the courage — and the companions — to step through?