Touching Enlightenment Page 13

  But what else is there? Some might argue that there is nothing else, that everything we experience in the relative way is just our own distorted version—that there is nothing at all beyond that. Buddhist yoga, however, says that there is another kind of relative reality—standing apart from and beyond our self-absorbed version—that is the world itself, abiding in its own purity, power, and integrity. This is the relative reality known in and through the body, the somatic knowledge that is the basis of our spiritual path.

  The relative reality that is so central and essential to our journey is found in all those emotions, people, and events—before we interpret them—that seem to arrive from some unknown source, that crash in on us and throw our ideas about everything into disarray. We experience this “pure” relative reality as something that destabilizes us, drops us into a space of uncertainty, and disrupts plans and expectations. It is that which instigates chaos in our lives. This relative reality is what the body already and always knows and what we meet when we enter the body in our somatic work.

  It is the partner who announces one day, out of nowhere, that the relationship we had thought was so secure is, in fact, not working at all. It is the mysterious pain that turns out to be a life-threatening disease. It is the “ideal” job that suddenly turns sour and becomes unworkable. It is the “sure” investment that evaporates with a market shift. It is the flat tire on the way to an important meeting, the coffee spilled in the boss’ lap, the computer that crashes for the third time this week. It is the baby who wakes up early from his or her nap, just as we are about to sit down to practice, and the parent who falls ill and needs our help, just as we are about to go on retreat. All these things cause us simply to stop. We then find ourselves just abiding in the body, present to its somatic knowledge, with nothing to say or even think. We are back to square one, feeling freshly what our life is and how misguided our thinking about it has been. At that moment, we are abiding in the body’s knowledge and are in touch with the world as it is.

  The arrival of unexpected chaos also occurs with events that we would classify as positive: the “hopeless” relationship that abruptly becomes workable; a dead-end life that surprises us with an unanticipated burst of possibility; becoming pregnant after being told—and accepting—that it would never happen; financial disaster that turns around, leaving our depression and negative thinking nowhere to land; illness to which we have become habituated that resolves itself; the dull boring job that suddenly turns on a dime with new, open, and creative challenges. Again, what we have been thinking about our life—our mental picture—is suddenly revealed to be off-kilter and out-of-date; we have to let go of what we had thought, surrender to the complete and silent knowledge of the body. We need to go back to the beginning, reassess from the ground up—literally from the body upward—and see what’s what and who we are, now.

  It is these situations that represent our actual karma as it is known in and through the body. This knowledge of the body is quite apart from anything we may want or choose to think about it. Such situations are expressions of the body’s knowing and are real and concrete in a way that our wishful thinking and biased interpretations are not. When we are willing to relate to this somatic knowledge, when we are present to and able to engage our actual karma in this way, our journey can begin to unfold.

  The hallmark of the chaos brought about by meeting our actual karma is our emotional response. When things transcend the expected, we feel what we might call “open-ended” emotions, emotions that are somewhat out-of-control yet fundamentally somatic, felt in and through the body. The somatic emotions are very different from the disembodied ego emotions, which always contain an overriding mental overlay such as dullness, security, validation, self-satisfaction, arrogance, pride, certainty—more or less dead-end emotions that are limited in their role of ego self-congratulation, justification, and glorification, and have literally nowhere to go.

  But there are other emotions or feelings that arise in the body and abide in it, that are open-ended because they do not have any particular boundaries or limits; they are not subject to ego control. These include feelings such as angst, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, fear, groundlessness, and emptiness, and also feelings of boundlessness, inspiration, and joy. Meeting, seeing, or encountering our actual karmic situation always represents an invitation to grow further. This has two major aspects. In the first, there is a growing realization that the person who we have thought we were or have been trying to be is inauthentic, phony, shaky, and of no real substance. We feel what we identify as our very self dissolving, disintegrating, and dying; we are falling back into the body. In the second phase, we recognize the claustrophobia and restriction in our “self-image” and sense the relief and freedom that begins to arise in our bodies, even as we are dissolving. If this is a process we have become familiar with, as we are dying, we are able to connect with an expansive experience of openness of our person, and we feel a dawning inspiration and joy arising from within.

  In order to illustrate these points, it may be helpful to examine some of these emotions in more detail and to consider, in particular, the kind of sequential development they often hold.

  • Angst: Most of us live with a perpetual, underlying angst, a feeling that whatever may be going on in our surface life, underneath it all, things are not right; they are not secured, something is or is about to be awry or “off.” We may appear to “have our shit together,” but underneath, we know we don’t.

  • Anxiety: Beneath the angst, we may feel a more explicit kind of trembling of the soul, a strong, somatic sense that our foundation is shaky, our life is vulnerable, that really anything could happen at any moment. We often envy the security others appear to feel.

  • Fear: Beneath anxiety, we may sense the ego death that is impending or actually occurring, and we are desperately afraid of letting go.

  • Groundlessness: We begin to feel that everything is dissolving. We can find nothing to hold on to to provide a feeling of security or a reliable reference point. We may feel as if we are falling down, down through empty space.

  • Depression: We feel some kind of strong inner pull—we are compelled inward and downward, into the darkness of the body, the darkness of the unconscious. We are approaching the totality of somatic knowledge, in which ordinary hopes and fears, ordinary judgments, have no footing and cannot survive. Of course, to our struggling ego mind, this feels terrible. We can no longer participate in life because we see how delusional and futile our own attempts at doing or accomplishing anything have been, how inauthentic our previous hopefulness toward life was. There can no longer be any emotional investment in the way we were and the way we saw life, because it is now seen to be empty and pointless. This descent into the body is a very powerful experience of ego death, though it is especially difficult for modern people because it is so stigmatized in the contemporary world and because it makes it difficult or impossible to participate in the “big lie” of modern culture and its materialistic values.

  • Emptiness of non-existence: Finally, if we are courageous enough to let go of even the quite subtle judgments and evaluations implied by depression (I am worthless; the others are making their lives work in a way I cannot), then we fall through the floor, even of the depressed mental state, into a space that is open and empty. Here, we arrive at an experience of complete embodiment, gained through descending deeper and deeper into the shadows and then the darkness of the body itself. We arrive at a place where there is no thought at all, just the total knowing of our soma.

  • Openness and boundlessness: Then we may feel our mind open into a much larger sense of being than the one we have been used to. This can be experienced with a great sense of shock, then a huge relief.

  • Inspiration: We may now sense something arising in our body—a kind of freshness, lightness, and possibility emerging quite of its own accord out of our openness.

  • Joy: At such transition points, we can feel an energy in
our bodies that can only be described as joy, at both the feeling of life within us and our own emerging being opening out before us.

  We can view this whole process as one of sacred descent, descent into the body. We begin with the subtle discomfort and apprehension of basic human angst, the surface of human life, and feel a call—which may be experienced as a pull—to descend into something deeper. As we do so—perhaps mostly unwillingly—we encounter the deeper feeling strata, finally falling into depression and through to non-being. This is the last stop in our somatic embodiment, and, fully embodied, we experience the spontaneous life that then begins to birth.

  This entire process unfolds from the initial experience of chaos, itself arising as somatic knowledge. When we are rigidly attached to our disembodied state, the advent of chaos is experienced as purely threatening. But when we have some understanding of the invitation that chaos brings, we can experience it as “good news.”

  ***

  When we try to meditate in a disembodied and disconnected state, we are unable to handle or relate with the chaos our body presents, and so we turn from it. While we may be able to arrive at some relative peace, the scope and depth of that peace is going to be severely restricted and limited. This is because, when we reject the chaos of somatic knowledge and exit into discursive thinking, we are turning our awareness against itself. We act, think, and feel as if the knowing of the body did not exist. In retreating into discursive thinking about something rather than just receiving it in its naked, somatic, and chaotic form, we have retreated from the experience; we interpose our discursive thinking—which is a kind of jammed-up awareness—as a buffer or screen to insulate ourselves from the direct experience. This, in effect, ties up our awareness in the ongoing efforts of resisting, pushing away, and walling off somatic knowledge.

  By contast, when we open ourselves to the “good news” of chaos, we are resolving or exhausting our karma and, in so doing, liberating our awareness into its natural, boundless condition. By fully experiencing what is here, without reservation, withdrawal, or repression, we are, in effect, dismantling the patterns of mental avoidance, resistance, and grasping that have characterized our relation to this aspect of our relative reality in the past. Through this process, we gradually release our preoccupation and investment in our thinking, and our awareness can return to its natural state.

  Until we are willing to receive the chaos of the body and live through some of the wealth of information and emotions that have been offered to us but rejected, our awareness remains imprisoned. According to Tibetan yoga, somatic meditation brings us in touch with the fire of direct experience, a fire of all the vivid and intense pain held by these previously rejected aspects of experience. That fire of experience gradually burns, burns, burns up the structure of our ego. It is a visceral inferno, one that is said to purify awareness, to make the field of awareness very, very bright. The more we do the work and enter the fire, the more our awareness actually opens up. According to the tradition, enlightenment itself is when there is no more residual karma left. Then awareness, no longer tied up in the evasionary tactics of ego, is set free and liberated to its fullest extent.

  THIRTY-ONE: The Body of the Buddha

  At this point, I would like to connect the previous discussion back into Buddhist history, with, in particular, Shakyamuni Buddha, who founded the tradition. Let us begin by considering what it is that makes a buddha. How might we define such a person? One very interesting definition given in the life stories of Gautama, the man who became Buddha Shakyamuni, is that a buddha is not someone who attains some ethereal and disembodied state. In particular, a buddha is a person who is fully embodied, one who is present to and remembers all his former lives, all his previous births. Not only does he remember them, but he feels and lives through them as if he were living them once again. In other words, to become a buddha, a fully awakened one, Gautama had to inhabit everything that he had ever been through, each event in every lifetime he had ever experienced. For a buddha, the unconscious, composed of all unremembered, unlived, unintegrated experience, must be brought to consciousness and thus exhausted. The bringing into awareness all the contents of the unconscious, the alaya, is what enlightenment is.

  THE FIRST WATCH OF THE NIGHT

  On the night of his enlightenment, during the four watches of the night, Gautama brought to awareness the knowledge held in his body at ever deeper levels. In the first watch, in the words of the Buddhacarita, the earliest full-length biography of the Buddha, he reflected, ‘There was I so and so; that was my name; deceased from there I came here’—in this way he remembers thousands of births, as though living them over again.”8 Gautama’s path to enlightenment, then, involved bringing the buried memories of his present and former births into awareness in a complete form, as though he were “living them all over again.”

  Why was it so important for Gautama to remember? According to Buddhism, in their full, uncensored form, experiences are inherently nothing other than pristine awareness. In Tibetan tradition, the matter is described thusly: “Whatever occurs is the expression of the awakened state.” This is a traditional way of saying that experience, in and of itself, in its untrammeled form, is nothing other than the display of wisdom. When, however, we choose to forget all but those small fragments of our experience that are consistent with our concept of our “self,” then—as we have seen—the energy of that wisdom is turned against itself; in opposition to itself, it produces ignorance, and we lose touch with the vastness and freedom of the awakened intelligence within.

  To attain enlightenment, Gautama had, therefore, to remember in this specific sense: he had to relive everything that he had ever gone through. In a very real sense, he gained a fullness of experience of his own history that he had never before had. He experienced something that had already occurred, yet he did so as if it were the first time; in a way, it was the first time, because his previous experience had been incomplete and left a residue in the form of karma. Now, he had to return to those long-lost worlds of his past with an openness to the totality of what he had gone through. His journey to enlightenment, then, represented an ever-increasing transparency to the most ordinary, mundane, and painful aspects of his previous existence, all those things that before he had managed to forget. He had to surrender to what had been, whatever had been, and give in to the devastating (from the ego’s viewpoint) truth and reality of everything that had ever happened to him and his uncensored experience of it.

  According to the Buddhacarita, Gautama’s emotional openness and his intimacy with his own life experience had two profound impacts on him. For one thing, they obliterated any notion of a continuous, substantial self. The more he remembered, the more he saw that “he” had been so many different things at different times, that any idea of a coherent, ongoing identity made no sense at all. This “totality” that was his experience was all so vast, so chaotic, so intense, so contradictory, so overwhelming, so fathomless, and so endless that any attempt to make sense of it, to fin any single and coherent “person,” was futile. The Buddha’s story shows the rest of us why we must forget so much in our struggling to stay in samsara; to do otherwise would shatter the very self-identity that we are trying so frantically to maintain.

  In addition, the more Gautama remembered, the more he lost any sense of his difference or separation from other suffering beings. Over his countless births, he had, as the text tells us, been through everything that every human who has ever lived has gone through. He remembered—in the sense of bringing it all to present awareness—that we are all awash in a cosmic sea of ever-changing experiences, with no hope ever of finding any definitive footing, any dry land of a “self.” The more Gautama remembered, the more he saw that he and others shared the very same joys and sorrows, the same life conditions, the same confusion, as well as the same hopelessness of resolving or coming to closure about any of it. The pain they felt—all of it—was pain that he knew, directly, right at that moment, as his own. T
his realization marked the birth of unbounded love, empathy, and compassion toward others.

  From this, even more profound levels of remembering unfolded for Gautama. According to Buddhism—in both early biographical and also later tradition, particularly the Avatamsaka Sutra—we are all so thoroughly interconnected with one another that what any of the others experience is known to us in deep and subtle ways. We may remain oblivious to our intimate interconnections and interrelations only by ignoring, forgetting, and repressing this knowledge. And yet the information of what others experience is held within us, in our bodies; though implicit and unacknowledged, it is still alive, active, and impinging on us.

  (8) Edward Conze, Buddhist Scriptures (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 49. back

  THE SECOND WATCH

  On the path to enlightenment, though, this kind of ignorance must be overcome. The enlightenment story makes this point vividly clear. In the second watch of the night, Gautama looked into his own heart (citta) and saw the world “appear to him as though reflected in a spotless mirror.”9 He saw how beings endure the continual flux of death and rebirth, all in accordance with their karmic actions, and that nowhere can any of them find respite. He saw directly and in his own heart, in his own body, that nowhere, from the top of samsara to the bottom, is there any resting place, any security, or any escape from ever-present impermanence, from ever-present suffering and death. This served to confirm in Gautama just how futile and fruitless the pursuit of lasting or satisfying samsaric happiness is. And this insight, in turn, roused further the spontaneous compassion he was feeling toward all the suffering beings in his sight.