Touching Enlightenment Read online

  In a Western context, this might not sound like a bad thing. We talk about people taking responsibility for themselves: we have to have a life, have boundaries, proceed with our plans, become an adult, and so on. But if that is all that there is, then what often ends up happening on the meditation cushion is this: We have an ideal of what meditation is or should be, what we like about meditation, which might be some experience that we’ve had somewhere along the line. We then end up using our meditation as a way to recreate that particular, desired state of mind. Rather than being open to whatever needs to arise right now, we are basically trying to recreate the past, instead of stepping out of it, toward the future. To put the matter in bald terms, we end up using meditation as a method to perpetuate and, in many cases, increase our disembodiment, to separate ourselves even further from the call and the imperatives of our actual lives.

  This is what John Welwood calls “spiritual bypassing”: meditation becomes a way to perpetuate self-conscious agendas and avoid impending, perhaps painful or fearful, developmental tasks—always arising from the darkness of our bodies—that are nevertheless necessary for any significant spiritual growth. And this is what Trungpa Rinpoche called “spiritual materialism,” using spiritual practice to reinforce existing, neurotic ego strategies for sealing ourselves off from our actual lives in the pursuit of survival, comfort, and security. When we use meditation in such a way, we aren’t really going anywhere, just perpetuating and reinforcing the problems we already have. No wonder when we practice like this over a period of decades, we can end up feeling that nothing fundamental is really happening, because it isn’t.

  Consider, for example, the meditation technique that is so central in the texts and so often given to modern meditators: pay attention to the breath at the tip of the nose, feeling the in-breath and the out-breath. For a fully embodied person, this is an effective technique by which the practitioner can connect more deeply with the body and progressively open up his or her awareness. But the practice has a very different feel for someone who is somatically disconnected and habitually already abides almost entirely in his or her head. For such a person, using a technique that requires attention on the nose can easily reinforce the tendency to remain entirely invested in the head and continue to be unaware of the body. If we are already out of touch with our body, its sensations, its feeling, and its life, carrying out a practice that involves attending to the breath at the nostrils often continues and even strengthens our disconnection.

  Those of us meditating in such a way are locked into a cycle and genuinely trapped in a dysfunctional way of practicing. The more we analyze the situation, the more trapped we feel; the harder we work at our practice, the more we feel the whole thing closing in on us. We feel desperate, that we have to get out, but we can’t see how to do it. As in this previous example, the practices that we are using often just don’t provide the right key. If we don’t abandon the practice entirely, which is an all-too-common result these days, we know for certain that we need help; we need outside intervention. But where the help will come from is a big question.

  I would like to suggest that the help we are looking for may very well come from incorporating principles of the Tibetan yoga tradition into Western Buddhist practice. Though complex, esoteric, and often held in secrecy in their original context, I believe their basic principles and some of the more central practices can be taught to Western practitioners, even at a beginning level, with immediate and strongly positive results. Interestingly, very advanced practitioners can benefit from the same perspectives and practices as much or more. These practices, I believe, offer the best chance available for us modern people to reverse our disembodiment in a deep, thorough, and lasting way. The next chapter provides a brief summary of the somatic view and methodology of Tibetan yoga and the challenge it provides to our disembodied conceptions of meditation and the spiritual life.

  TEN: The Somatic Challenge of Tibetan Yoga

  The term “Tibetan yoga” refers to advanced, esoteric, somatic Vajrayana meditation practices traditionally carried out by men and women hermits spending much or all of their time in seclusion, in solitary retreat. Although this tradition is preserved within Buddhism, an organized, institutionalized (and thus an agricultural) religion, its roots and its essence are far older. In my Ph.D. study at the University of Chicago, my dissertation advisor, the internationally renowned scholar Mircea Eliade, contended that the Vajrayana, though nominally “Buddhist,” in fact represents a “survival” of the aboriginal spirituality of humankind, in other words, the pre-agricultural, paleolithic religious orientation of our forebears of perhaps a million years. It is quite interesting that Chögyam Trungpa in his Shambhala teachings said more or less the same thing: there is within each person, irrespective of his or her historical period, culture, tradition, or orientation, an inherent human spirituality that lies at the very heart of the human being as such. My own practice of Tibetan yoga (Vajrayana)—carried out in dialogue with the study of earth-based spiritualities, as mentioned—has confirmed this fact on an experiential and practical level.

  While the actual practice of Tibetan yoga in its more esoteric aspects requires much preparation, it is nevertheless important in the present context for two reasons. First, it presents a thorough challenge to any and all notions that meditation can be practiced in a disembodied state or in any kind of separation from the body. In fact, Tibetan yoga holds the opposite point of view: to attain realization, we have to practice in such a way that we become fully and completely embodied. This is why, in Tibetan yoga, virtually every practice is aimed at recovering the body. This book and the somatic practices it describes are specific responses to Tibetan yoga and especially to its viewpoint that realization is the result of greater and greater embodiment. Second, Tibetan yoga is important in this context also because it provides me with many of the specific insights, gates of entry into the body, and methods for exploring the body that make up the body work on which this book is based. For these reasons, it may be useful to provide a brief summary of some of the primary perspectives and practices that characterize this ancient, esoteric, “primordial” tradition upon which I am drawing here.

  The journey that one makes through the practice of Tibetan yoga unfolds according to a series of stages. In the first, one learns how to identify and abandon the myriad body concepts that we all carry around. In other words, each one of us has a package of mental images of our own body that make up what we think our body is. The first step on the Tibetan yoga path is to progressively strip away everything we think about what our body is. Eventually, we arrive at a point where we have no mental picture left and we actually know nothing of what or how the body may be. Now we are ready to take a look and see what our body actually is, as revealed to the eye of direct experience.

  In the second phase, when we turn our awareness to the body to see what it is, we notice various things occurring. There are moments of what we might call sensation: intensities of warmth and coolness, hot and cold; flashes of energy; strands of moods that flow gracefully through; upsurges of energy, pleasure, and pain; waves of light and chasms of darkness; and so on. Two things are particularly interesting about what we notice when we look within the body. First, every experience is, in some very real sense, unique. There is no naming it; no idea or concept seems adequate. Second, there is nothing permanent in our experience of the body: everything is ever-changing and fleeting.

  In the third phase, we learn how to abide for longer and longer periods of time within the fundamental emptiness of the body (the fact that we have no idea what it is) and the continual patterns of energy that arise within the body (phase two). Rather than touch these experiences of the body and then quickly (and anxiously) exit back into our conscious thinking process as a way of escape, we simply learn to abide in the body.

  In phase four, we learn to “read” the manifestations of the body, to understand in a nonverbal way the energy that is occurring within us. And, in the
fifth phase, we discover within what we see as imperatives to action. In other words, we discover that the life that we need to live is actually being born, moment by moment, within the emptiness of the body (phase one), as the energy that arises (phase two), which we can abide with (phase three) and eventually learn to understand (phase four). In this way, the spontaneous life of the body becomes the source of our actions and engagements in the world. These are, according to Tibetan yoga, nothing less than expressions of the great compassion of a realized person.

  At each stage, we find ourselves continually running up against what we have been thinking about our body and being challenged to let go of our ideas in order to see more nakedly and directly, in order to go deeper. As we let go, we are gradually dismantling all the presuppositions and conceptual overlays that are getting in between us and our full, complete, and naked experience of our body.

  These stages all involve attending more and more closely to our body, feeling into it, sensing and discovering what it is really like. As we progress, we are becoming more and more identified with our actual body, the body we meet in our actual experience; we are becoming more embodied. The more we progress along this path of profound embodiment, the more we realize that our actual experience of our body is, in fact, the experience of enlightenment. As we become more and more embodied, we find ourselves approaching the awakened state.5

  It is sometimes said that the intent of the Vajrayana is to redeem matter, redeem the most gross, physical, ordinary, down-to-earth aspects of our human situation. It might be better to say that the Vajrayana invites us to explore what our bodies, our physical existence, and the earth are really and truly like, when we look directly at them and see them nakedly, with the eye of non-conceptual wisdom. When we do so, it is proposed—as we may read, for example, in the classic Samdhinirmocana Sutra—that we will see that every aspect of our world, our life, and ourselves is and always has been a free, liberated, and completely pure expression of enlightenment. In this sense, we have not redeemed matter, but we have redeemed ourselves from the terrible error of thinking that matter is ultimately not spiritual, that somehow realization is found somewhere else.

  The challenge of Tibetan yoga to modern practitioners of meditation is thus simple. Consider the possibility that true spirituality is not a matter of distancing ourselves from our bodies, from all the aspects of our physical life, or from the earth itself. Consider the possibility that our true and ultimate realization actually lies in and through matter, in and through the body, in and through the earth, and that, to discover, to attain our own enlightenment, we simply have to allow ourselves to be fully and completely embodied.

  (5) In Tibetan yoga, this process takes us through many stages and levels of increasing realization. Toward the end, so we are told, we make the astounding discovery that even the appearance of physicality that our body has for other people is itself dependent on our own incomplete embodiment, our inability to identify fully with our body’s ultimate experiential truth. When we do finally let go of any and all ideas of our body as something that is solid and conceptually identifiable, so it is said, our body simply dissolves into light, the famed “rainbow body” described in Dzogchen. Many are the accounts of reliable witnesses reporting, even in modern times, their experiences of advanced practitioners who took this final step on the journey and whose bodies dissolved into the empty, clear radiance of a rainbow. back

  II: ENGAGING THE PROCESS: MEDITATING WITH THE BODY

  ELEVEN: The Call to Return

  For some of us meditators, our disembodiment reaches excruciatingly painful and completely unacceptable proportions. It is almost as if our practice itself and the sensitivity it develops have brought us to a level of awareness in relation to our somatic situation that is unbearable. We feel out of touch with our body, our emotions, our sense perceptions, even the basic experience of being alive. Perhaps this awareness has been slowly growing over many years; perhaps it happens upon us one day, rather abruptly. We realize that we are not really living our life, not really going through our relationships and our experiences in anything but a numb and mechanical way. Although everything may seem fine with us from the outside, inwardly these experiences, just in and of themselves, plunge us into the midst of a profound personal crisis. We really feel lost. Perhaps without even knowing exactly what is wrong, we begin looking for ways back into our body, our world, and our life. The sense of personal crisis is, itself, the call of the body to return, our inspiration to try to find a way to recover our embodiment.

  For others of us, the body calls us back through the fortuitous intervention of an external event or circumstance: injury, illness, extreme fatigue, impending old age, sometimes emotions, feelings, anxiety, anguish, or dread that we don’t understand and can’t handle. Depression is one of the most powerful ways the body calls us back—a terrible darkness, an unbearable hopelessness and despair that settles over us, wherein we are so pulled down that we barely have the energy to think a single thought, let alone rise to do anything or engage anyone.

  Either way, we hear the call of the body and feel an inexorable pull toward it. It is pulling us down, one way or the other, sometimes with a terrifying crash. After a period that perhaps feels like death, which can go on for years, something in us, some new life, begins to stir.

  For those of us with knowledge of meditation, it is natural that we eventually attempt to see what or how meditation may bear on the intensely somatic call that we are hearing. Whether we are injured or ill, encountering debilitating psychological states of mind, or despairing over a life that is slipping by us, it is likely that we will initially be extremely tentative in bringing meditation to our situation. Perhaps we will take a few moments now and then to let our mind relax, rest, and open to our feelings and our situation. If we do, we may find that there is some kind of shift—not necessarily in the content of what we are experiencing, but in our relationship toward it.

  Generally, in experiences such as those described above, there is an underlying feeling of “problem,” an ongoing anxiety, and a resistance toward what is happening. When we open our minds in meditation, though, we suddenly find our “problem” becomes the focus of our meditation. Without even thinking about it, we find our body’s call to be the subject of our attention. Our meditation is naturally turned toward the body. Without even knowing, we are receiving our first lessons in “meditating with the body.”

  As we turn our meditation toward the body, as we open our awareness to it, we will find that the frozen-up quality around our physical or psychological problem, or our general feeling of disconnection, suddenly has more space; moreover, it begins to communicate itself to us in a way that could only be described as “active.” At this point, we are likely to find ourselves receiving healing and transformative information that we had not previously noticed or even thought possible. This can be extraordinarily subtle at first, perhaps just barely sensed. But at some point, we perceive that something new is coming toward us. We begin to gain increasing clarity, recognizing that our debilitation, when viewed from the point of meditation, is a learning situation for us with great possibilities. We sense that our meditation has become an invitation for the body to begin showing us things. At this point, we are “meditating with the body.”

  Thus it is that we find that we have a partner on the spiritual path that we didn’t know about—our own body. In our meditation and in our surrounding lives, the body becomes a teacher, one that does not communicate in words but tends to speak out of the shadows through sensations, feelings, images, and somatic memories. No longer able to force the body to adapt to our conscious ideas and intentions, we find that we have to begin to learn the language that the body itself naturally speaks. Having thought we knew what was going on, we discover, over and over, that we have completely missed the point. And, having supposed that we were completely confused, we come to see that we have understood something far more profound and far-reaching that anything we could have
thought. It is all very puzzling, but, with the body as our guide, we begin to feel, perhaps for the first time in our lives, that with our body, we are in the presence of a force and intelligence that is filled with wisdom, that is loving, flawlessly reliable, and, strange to say, worthy of our deepest devotion.

  TWELVE: How Do We Proceed?

  As we engage our somatic crisis, whatever it may be, we realize that embodied meditation is a very different and far more fruitful way to practice than the disembodied path we had been following. But this leaves us wondering just how to carry out our meditation in an embodied manner and inhabit our body in practice. Most fundamentally, meditating with the body involves paying attention to the body in a direct and non-conceptual way. This calls for very focused work and requires regularity, steadiness, and an ongoing commitment. In fact, I would say that once we “catch on” to what meditating with the body is all about, we enter a path that will unfold as long as there is life. At the same time, the experiential impact of the work is immediately felt, so there is confirmation of the rightness of what we are doing and an evolving natural trust in the process that is beginning to unfold.