Touching Enlightenment Read online

  Sometimes physical pain is so intense or distressing that, at our current level of practice, we are not able to carry out the first instruction to drop our awareness underneath the pain and view it strictly from the vantage point of the body. If this is the case, then we are offered a second instruction: take the intensity and vividness of the physical pain itself as the object of our meditation. We do this by just putting our awareness right on and into the pain itself. It is as if we are offering our entire being into the fire of the painful sensation. We just plunge into the interior of the pain, into its heart. When we do so, the fire of the pain has the effect of burning through whatever in us is resisting, judging, and trying to separate ourself from the pain as a “problem.” We continue going right to the pain and into its depths. As we do so, we find ourself able to abide simply within its intensity. At a certain moment, we can’t really feel it as pain anymore: it is just highly charged energy. At that point, there is no person watching the pain from the outside, no one to judge it and separate from it. There is just this manifestation within the body. When this occurs, we can be said to have found our complete and total embodiment, using our physical pain itself as a pathway.

  If we find ourself unable to follow the second instruction, then a third instruction is offered: use the pain in a more indirect way to bring us into full embodiment. This third instruction of Tibetan yoga reminds us that, as mentioned earlier, nothing occurs in our life without rhyme or reason. In other words, any relative experience appears with complete timeliness, accuracy, and appropriateness to our immediate karmic situation and its needs. The appearance of physical pain is no exception. When any of us experiences short-term or long-term physical pain, it always comes in appropriate measure to our particular situation. In this sense, it is possible for us to discover it to be a blessing. The arrival of pain cuts through the unique bondage of this moment, liberating us into the body’s own freedom and depth. At the moment of freedom, we see just how much expectation we’ve been having, how much we’ve been identifying with some relative situation or experience. Being cut through in this way can be experienced as horrific, humorous, frightening, sad, inspiring, and so on. But, in any case, it leaves us with an appreciation of the sacredness of the experience of pain as an incursion of helpful and even liberating wisdom into our life.

  Discovering pain as the open emptiness of our body (first instruction) and as its energetic aspect (second instruction) are practices that are initially developed on the meditation cushion. After we have trained in these practices in formal meditation, we can then apply them anytime and anywhere. Discovering physical pain as auspicious coincidence (third instruction) is a practice that can be engaged directly in the post-meditation state simply by looking, again from within the depths of the body, at the impact of the pain on our state of mind and our understanding of our life.

  When we approach physical pain through these instructions, we find that, far from being trapped and defeated by it, we are able to work with it in an increasingly open, fearless, and creative way. Our own increasing familiarity and skill in relating with our pain from the very deepest levels of our body can then lead us into and, as Tibetan yoga says, through the process of our own physical death.

  THIRTY-NINE: Some Fundamental Shifts

  As the body work continues to unfold, we discover some fundamental shifts in our state of being. The conscious mind, which previously was the engineer of our human existence, moves increasingly into the role of listener and helper. We realize that we’re in a relationship with something that holds our life journey. Through the work, we see that the body is continually communicating with us. It communicates initially through tension and release and then through shifts in our emotional life; images come up, feelings, subtle states of mind, memories, thoughts, inspirations, fear, anxiety. There is an entire, tremendously rich interior life of the body, which we feel and experience, but which also somehow remains shrouded in mystery. At a certain point, we aren’t entirely sure even how to think about or categorize what we are experiencing—whether it is emotion, energy, or physical sensation—and we begin to suspect that figuring it out is irrelevant and actually detrimental to the voyage of discovery we are making. We are learning different ways of feeling, sensing, and also thinking.

  You don’t know. And it begins to unfold. You find that you yourself are changing as a person, and you discover a way of being that’s much less solid and much less fixed. It’s almost as if your life is a river that is running through a forest, and that river is constantly flowing, bubbling, now having one demeanor, now another, one direction, then another. At that point, the so-called “self,” that relatively consistent type of person we have always been trying to be, becomes much less important, and there’s a willingness on the part of the meditator, or the body contemplator, to allow the self, the conscious sense of self, to dissolve and reform, over and over. At that point, your life really begins to happen in a different way.

  As we experience this shift from ego consciousness to somatic awareness, our life and practice begin to open in two interesting ways. For one thing, working with the body in meditation frees our experience of relative reality, liberating the concrete phenomena of our day-to-day lives. When we operate in a disembodied state, we tend to take the experiences of our life as being random, relatively insignificant, and boring. And, of course, we go to great lengths to try to find something interesting or significant in our existence. The more boring and gray everything gets, the more we look to sex or violence or mind-altering substances, or anything, frankly, that can give us some kind of rush—anything to break through the phenomenal boredom and general meaninglessness of our human existence. We may find ourselves thinking, “Next week, I’m going to this great restaurant where maybe I can have a meal I actually enjoy,” or “Next month, I’m going on vacation, and maybe then I will be in a place that will genuinely catch my attention and mean something,” and so on.

  According to the somatic teachings, the problem with our life does not lie in the individual circumstances or occurrences of our day-to-day existence. It’s not that they’re inherently meaningless and boring; the problem is that we make them meaningless and boring, because we are so disconnected and so invested in maintaining our own sense of “self” that we actually don’t relate to anything in a full and direct way. Unwilling to fully live the life that is arriving in our body moment by moment, we find ourself left with no real life at all. In our state of disembodied dissatisfaction, we may think, “I feel like I’m disconnected. Maybe I need to change my job, or change my relationship, maybe, maybe, maybe.” But the fact is, as we have seen, that the fullness of our human existence is already happening all the time. In fact, when we work with our body and begin to open up our awareness, when we allow the experience of the body to communicate with our conscious mind and to become known to us in some kind of direct way, we find, in the most mundane details of our life, intensity, meaning, fullness, and fulfillment.

  Second, through the somatic work, we begin to discover our body as a vast and multifaceted thing, a veritable expanding universe. The fact is that we have billions of cells in our body. And, as neuroscientist Candace Pert has suggested in her research, it seems possible that each cell is a center of intelligence, awareness, emotion, and experience.13 Each cell has thousands of receptors capable of different kinds of experience. This is our nature. We are not, again as mentioned, a single, unified entity. We are a universe, each part of which has its own independence, its own status as a living energy, and each of which is interconnected with everything else. We are a galaxy in which each of these things is happening simultaneously. What we see depends on where we look and when we look. At the same time, wherever and whenever we look, we touch the whole, because each part, each cell, is in relation with all the others. The body is thus billions of interconnected events, and the totality, at each moment, is different. The body thus infinitely transcends anything we could ever think about it. Obviously, what we th
ink our body is, or want to think it is, ends up being little more than a shield against the nearly infinite realm of the being of our body.

  Through the process of somatic meditation, we begin to discover this vastness that is our own state of being, and the inconceivable abundance, the plenitude of life, that is occurring as us, in each moment. And the experience is ever-changing. Sometimes we see empty space. Sometimes we see energy. And sometimes what meets us presents an absolute solidity like the mass before the Big Bang. If we pay attention, it is never the same. But it is always the display of us, whatever that may be. It is not very supportive of any concept of a real or continuous “I,” that is for certain. In the shift of attention brought about by the body work, we move from the part of our brain where we do all the thinking, planning, strategizing, and engineering, down into the tremendous, illimitable eventfulness of our actual life.

  (13) Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion (New York: Scribner, 1999). back

  V: THE BODY AND BECOMING A PERSON

  FORTY: The Body Is the Buddha Nature

  The term “buddha nature” is used in Buddhism to refer to our most fundamental nature. It is said that all human beings have buddha nature as the very foundation and core of their human personality. Our buddha nature has three main aspects. First, it is our open and empty awareness itself. In other words, the buddha nature is not intelligence in the sense of “IQ,” but rather the ability to see and experience things openly, clearly, and intelligently, entirely without bias. It is our primal intelligence that is always operating in us, whether we are conscious of it or not. In most of us, this primal or primary intelligence is covered over by our compulsive judging and thinking. We do not trust our self, the basic self of our buddha nature, and so we revert to our ideas and our concepts and our reference points about things.

  The second quality of the buddha nature is warmth and compassion. When we experience the world from the point of view of the openness of our basic nature, there is a natural warmth toward ourself, other people, and the world. The buddha nature, then, is inherently compassionate. It is only the judging, conceptualizing mind that covers over this warmth and breeds in us unhealthy anger, hostility, and aggression toward others.

  The third aspect of the buddha nature is an inner sense of well-being, strength, confidence, and joy in life. The Buddhist teachings say that these are an inherent part of our fundamental person. If we do not experience them as an ongoing feeling about life, it is because, again, our buddha nature is covered over and obscured by our compulsive “egoizing” of everything.

  In spite of being covered over in most of us and relatively invisible, the buddha nature is far from being inactive in our life. In fact, it has a directedness to it; it is an irresistible force that is always pushing us to grow and develop spiritually. In fact, as we shall see in this section, the buddha nature holds the stages of our own unfolding—of our spiritual maturation—that we must pass through if we are to fulfill our deepest human longing and find the fundamental purpose of our life. The precise directionality of our lives that each of us experiences arises as the momentum of all the unfulfilled karmic debts of our life. In this sense, the buddha nature holds the totality of the process of individuating, of becoming fully and completely who we are.

  The buddha nature is, thus, not an objectifiable entity or conceptual reality in any sense. Because who we ultimately are is an open, ongoing, and finally ineffable process, the buddha nature is described as “empty”: it does not possess any invariable, definable marks or characteristics. It is, we might say, the darkness or mystery that is continually unfolding as our life.

  As mentioned, the buddha nature is behind everything that happens, and needs to happen, on our journey. Whatever happens to us, and within us, is the expression of the buddha nature, pushing us forward in our own unfolding. There is nothing in our life or experience that is outside of it. The buddha nature thus may be referred to as the “totality.” As we progress along the path to our own self-discovery, our awakening and realization, our relationship with “our” buddha nature naturally develops and matures, and this relationship is ultimately “engineered” by the buddha nature itself.

  Traditional Buddhist texts see other religious designations of “the ultimate” as attempts to point to or posit the buddha nature. Frequently mentioned are Indian concepts such as the atman, the innermost self, the purusha, the final and ultimate “person,” and personifications of reality such as the deities Brahma or Shiva. They would, likewise, see the Judeo-Christian concept of “God” and the Muslim “Allah” as attempts to name the buddha nature. When we look at modern Western thought, there are also parallels. Jung’s notion of the “Self,” indicating our most fundamental being and embracing the totality, a concept at least partially inspired by Indian thought in the first place, is clearly pointing toward the buddha nature.

  It should be clear from the aforementioned, then, that the body itself is the buddha nature. In saying this, we are, of course, not speaking of the body as we normally might conceive of it, or even as we might think of it in increasingly more inclusive and appreciative ways along the path. We are speaking, rather, of the body as we discover it in and through the body work—as the mysterious, open-ended darkness out of which our life is continually emerging, involving personal, interpersonal, and cosmic dimensions.

  It is in the body that we meet the buddha nature in its most naked form. By entering ever more deeply into the body and receiving the unending flow of experience that arises when we do, we are in intimate relation with the buddha nature. In the body work, we learn how to let go of the fixed and rigid boundaries of our relatively self-contained, cut-off, isolated “self.” In so doing, we place ourself in a position of communication with the buddha nature, our deepest and our ultimate “self.”

  FORTY-ONE: The Journey Is Our Unfolding Relation with the Buddha Nature

  The body, the buddha nature, is called the alaya, “the universal unconscious.” As the unconscious—that is, everything we are but remain unaware of—the body is the place where we find both the awareness, warmth, and strength mentioned earlier, as well as the directionality that arises from and includes the totality of our karma, our past and present as well as our future possibility.

  In the formation of our conscious “self,” our “ego” in Buddhist terms, we have walled off the great majority of what we have been, what we are, and what we can be. There are three aspects to this walling off: first, we have established a more or less limited field of awareness; second, this limited awareness is structured and defined by the particular concept or self-image we have of ourselves; and, finally, it is maintained by the managerial aspect of the ego, whereby we act and react to whatever occurs in our never-ending efforts to establish, maintain, and secure our “place in the world.”

  Our self-concept is actually a bilateral one: it comprises both who I think I am—the subject—and also all the conceptualized objects in my world—who and what I think I am not. In other words, our “self” is actually a mental construct according to which everything we experience is separated into these two interdependent and reinforcing categories of subject and object.

  The subject category includes what I identify as my own “self,” my immediate personal ego, and its withdrawal from and reaction against my personal “body,” or reality. The object category includes two aspects: first, my concept of everybody else—what we might call the interpersonal ego—which is a withdrawal from and reaction against my larger somatic experience of the interpersonal reality; and, second, my conceptual construct of everything in the nonhuman, external world—what we might call the impersonal or cosmic ego, namely, the natural world, animate and inanimate—which is a withdrawal from and reaction against the totality of my somatic experience of the cosmos.

  The complex self-concept of “me” is composed of self, others, and world, not as they are in themselves, but as I have pulled back from and reacted against them, enfolded them in my body, and wal
led them off in my concepts of them. I maintain my belief in the reality of “me” by keeping everything in these subject-object domains enfolded in my body and maintaining my self-concept against it. The marked-off territory of our ego, then, leaves us with a highly restricted field that defines “me” and a vast reservoir, the “universal unconscious,” of which we are not currently aware, that is literally unlimited in scope and contents.

  The spiritual journey revolves around our developing relationship with the buddha nature. In childhood, our ego develops as the first stage on our path. This involves an inevitable separation from the totality of our being and the carving out of a coherent and relatively controllable “me” in contradistinction to the oceanic expanse of infanthood. At a certain point, usually later in life, the boundaries of the small “self” are experienced as too restricted. We feel we have lost touch with the wellsprings of our own life. The territory of ego begins to be felt as an arid desert in which nothing can flourish or even live. This separation and alienation is felt as a suffering that pervades all of our life, what the Buddha spoke of as the First Noble Truth.

  This growing awareness is developmental in nature, rather than a timeless truth about the ego that is now being revealed. In other words, up until this point, the development of the ego has been a healthy thing, a good and necessary expression of our unfolding spirituality. However, as we mature, the precise spiritual demands incumbent upon us undergo a change. At a certain point, the glory of the human ego begins to fade: we find that the suit of clothes it represents is too small for the person we are now needing to become.