Touching Enlightenment

by Reginald A Ray

  An argument can be made for each of these two possibilities. Obviously, given our modern lifestyle, it is clear that the unpredictability and overpowering force of emotions are potential threats to the necessary routines of the kinds of lives we live. On the other hand, many trends in Western culture express a fundamental distrust of emotions that goes back a long way. Again, as Welwood points out, “From Plato on, the ‘passions’ have been viewed as our ‘lower nature.’”3 And popular Christianity has tended to view the emotions and the body from which they arise as “the devil’s domain,” as something uncontrollable, frightening, and potentially threatening to the strict moral requirements of the religious life.

  Be that as it may, many of the major realities and trends of modern life may be seen as attempts to override emotions and even eliminate them from human experience. The frenetic speed and “busyness” of modern culture—its reliance on work habits where there is literally no unstructured time as well as on entertainment by distraction, such as TV, videos, sports events, compulsive shopping, and so on—can be seen as attempts to keep emotions at a distance or even negate them completely. In a similar vein, the vast array of psychiatric medications seem designed to limit and control the emotional states that people go through, reflecting a medical environment in which any strong emotion is likely to be viewed as pathological and in need of “treatment.”

  Whatever the reasons, it is clear that many modern people view raw emotions with a mixture of distrust, anxiety, fear, and even loathing. Because emotions are known in and through the body, our strongly negative attitude toward them drives us further and further away from our bodies. And, leaving our bodies further and further behind, we become even more distrustful of our feeling life, which always seeks to pull us back into our embodiment. It is a vicious cycle, then, in which our fear of emotions and our physical disembodiment fuel, reinforce, and exacerbate one another.

  In the following chapters, we shall consider the way in which reclaiming our human embodiment enables us to reconnect with our emotions and reenter the warmth, richness, and subtlety of a full emotional life that many of us thought we had lost forever.

  (2) John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening (Boston: Shambhala, 2002), 182. back

  (3) Ibid back

  EIGHT: Some Historical Roots of Our Modern Disembodiment

  Our modern disembodiment, reflected in so much of our lives and our contemporary society, raises an all-important question. What might be the ultimate source of our alienation from the body? It is not uncommon for modern people to trace our physical disconnection back to the Christian heritage and to see its negative attitudes toward the body, the emotions, and sexuality as a primary cause. My own sense, and that of many historical anthropologists, historians of religion, paleontologists, human ecologists, ethnobiologists, and historians of culture, is that the roots of our disembodiment are far older and more general, and that Christian deprecations of the body are symptoms rather than the causes of our alienation.

  The appearance of agriculture some ten millennia ago marked a cataclysmic shift in how our species lived and experienced existence. Prior to that time, from the time our primate forebears descended from trees and began walking upright some five million years ago, our ancestors followed a lifestyle defined initially by foraging and scavenging, subsequently developing what we understand as a hunting-and-gathering way. The inception of agriculture and its gradual growth to dominance marked the slow but steady erosion of hunting and gathering as our primary means of livelihood. This had an enormous impact on the disembodiment of our species—the full effects of which we are seeing only today.

  From contemporary anthropological studies, we know that the sense of self of hunter-gatherers is fully embedded in the more bodily cognitive functions, including feeling and the sense perceptions, and that it is highly relational and interactive with the natural world. Hunter-gatherers roam the landscape on an annual cycle, reading with their feeling, senses, and intuition the ever-changing patterns of animals and vegetation, and the “inanimate” worlds of landscape, water, and weather. Through myth and ritual, they find connection, communion, and even identification with the concrete, physical world given to sensation, feeling, and intuition—a world experienced as filled with living energies, intelligence, and presence. Conceptual thinking plays an important role, but it is very much in balance with the more somatic functions, and also serves them—thinking is embedded in and is in service to the interpersonal and natural worlds accessed through sensation and feeling.

  The kinds of knowing predominant among hunter-gatherers were clearly a matter of survival. As Jungian psychoanalyst Esther Harding has pointed out, if you were walking through the jungle and didn’t see the poisonous snake lying under the leaves on the path in front of you or sense the danger of a boa constrictor about to drop out of the tree above, you didn’t live very long. The more you were rooted in your senses, your subtle feelings, and your intuitions, the more chance you had to survive. Those without such sensitivity and awareness were simply factored out of the genetic pool.

  But these kinds of knowing were not only a matter of survival; to be in dialogue with a world filled with intelligent, powerful presences—including not only the animal and vegetal worlds, but rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys, and the earth and sky themselves—was to discover one’s full humanity. Hence the importance of initiation ceremonies among hunting-and-gathering peoples, in which the entry into adulthood was marked by rituals introducing the cosmos as a living reality with which one needed to be in appropriate communication and within which one found the meaning of one’s life.

  The birth of agriculture marked a cataclysmic shift away from the hunting-and-gathering way. So great and, in some ways, so negative was its eventual impact on our species that Paul Shepard, a founder of human ecology, calls it “the single most catastrophic event ever to befall the human race.”4 Agriculture led to an increasing separation of human and world and, eventually, to our present disconnection and our personal, social, and ecological disembodiment. Agriculture gave rise to ownership of land, ever-increasing population growth, accumulation and unequal distribution of wealth, slavery, social hierarchies, armies, warfare, and patterns of physical disease and social dislocation previously unknown, all of which we now understand as coterminous with “civilization.” And it led to the increasing destruction of our earthly habitat, the effects of which we are seeing today. Most important in the present context, agriculture set in motion the development of a self-concept and way of relating to the body very different from that characteristic of hunter-gatherers.

  The agricultural person, in contrast to the hunter-gatherer, survives through the continual attempt to control the natural world. This continual effort at control, particularly as it has developed down to modern times, has involved the gradual loss of nature as an independent, freestanding “other” with whom one must be in intimate and respectful dialogue. The farmer not only has to control the natural world, but also all his property—which, at least for the elites, came increasingly to include wives and children, more and more people, wealth, and territory. While the senses, feeling, and intuition all have their roles to play for the agricultural person, the primary function through which this kind of management is achieved is the thinking function—conceptualizing what needs to be controlled, making plans, convincing others to align themselves with projects, evaluating what worked and didn’t work, keeping track of assets, and so on. You can’t really grow crops in a sustainable way without a lot of thinking and planning.

  It is often said that feeling unites while thinking separates. We can perhaps go further. Sensation brings us into intimate contact with the world around us; intuition opens us to our context in an instantaneous, non-thinking way; feeling reveals our deep connections with others—human, animal, and vegetal. These functions are immediate, often subtle, and largely non-conceptual; and they are essentially somatic, experienced in and through the body.

  Thi
nking, as we have already seen, tends toward disembodiment: it separates in that it involves a disengaged stance whereby—based on past experience—we abstract from the living and invaluable other, think him as an object, ignore him as an independent actor, conceptualize him, and consider how to manage our relation with him. It is cool, apart, and noncommittal—in other words, disembodied. Thinking, when it stands as the primary or sole function of interrelation with the other, leads us, in the words of philosopher Martin Buber, into an “I-it” rather than an “I-thou” relationship. The most important human cognitive function since the invention of agriculture, thinking has come to be more and more predominant, while the other functions or ways of knowing have, in many modern people, atrophied.

  This is not to say that hunter-gatherers did not attempt to control the conditions of their lives or that agricultural people did not engage in dialogue with their world. Rather, the invention of agriculture brought with it a shift in emphasis away from a modality characterized primarily by dialogue and a balance of cognitive functions. In agricultural times, the managerial function of thinking became more and more desired, from a survival standpoint. The agricultural lifestyle has provided a way for the human desire for security, comfort, control, and predictability—in short, for control of our environment—to fulfill itself to greater and greater degrees and to a level completely unimaginable in pre-agricultural times.

  To say this is not to idealize the hunting-and-gathering way. We know from modern anthropological studies that this way of life, while open, flexible, and adaptive, was also uncertain and could be painful and difficult on a physical level—serious physical injuries from the hunt, hunger from time to time, the ever-present reality of premature death when the small nomadic communities could not support the very young, the frail, and the old.

  In modern times, urban people have increasingly succeeded in creating an alternate reality: we spend our time in buildings—homes and workplaces—that shield and separate us from direct contact with the elements; we reside in cities, often at great remove from the natural world, that embody our collective human ideas and projects; we often have little direct relation to our food sources; and, mesmerized by the prospect of complete control over our lives, we regard even our bodies, as mentioned, as an object to be managed in the service of our ambitions.

  This move from the body to the head in terms of primary survival function is clear today—in contemporary societies, the vast majority of us get ahead not through the acuity of our sense perceptions, the subtlety of our feeling, or the farseeing-ness of our intuition (which, in modern contexts, are often seen as liabilities), but rather through a highly differentiated, conceptual type of intelligence. We do well in this modern world if we are able to function as disembodied brains—“brains on a stick,” in philosopher Ken Wilber’s evocative phrase—largely disregarding emotions, the sensory world, and the vast spaces opened up by intuition.

  All of this is understandable: In a corporate culture, emotions must be factored out as much as possible because they don’t run according to the time clock. Sense perceptions must be regarded as distractions. And intuition, which tends to bypass conceptual reasoning to arrive at its knowledge, to uniquely see into the future and to often call into question the status quo, must be written off as “wacky.” All these “other” ways of knowing are generally thought to be insufficiently “bottom-line oriented” and tangential to the “real concerns” of corporate culture. All these ways of knowing are—or so it is often thought—“unproductive.” Thus we arrive at the curious state of affairs in which the more disembodied we are, the more likely we are to survive and to gain social approval, success, and material wealth in our modern world.

  ***

  How fundamental or inevitable is our modern disembodiment? Is it something that can be addressed by us modern people with any realistic hope of remediation? When we reflect that our disconnection and alienation from our bodies reaches back beyond the origins of Christianity to the beginnings of settled agriculture itself, we might be inclined toward a pessimistic conclusion. Let me suggest an alternative view.

  Consider that the seemingly long period of time since the inception of settled agriculture has little significance from an evolutionary standpoint. It represents a miniscule fraction of our history as a species, which has been in recognizable evolution for five million years. If we take as a benchmark the inception of stone tools over two and a half million years ago, the period of time since the discovery of agriculture represents .04 percent of our evolutionary history. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is a very small period of time, a tiny fraction of the blink of the evolutionary eye. While our human genome has continued to evolve throughout this long period, in its most fundamental aspects, it remains the same. From an evolutionary perspective, then, we modern people are genetically and biologically still the hunter-gatherers we were when agriculture arose, and the full embodiment of our essential being remains as incumbent on us as on any of our forebears. Because our basic makeup is so little different from theirs, full embodiment, while obscured in modern people, is entirely accessible and recoverable. In our genes and in our cells, it is ultimately who we are.

  It is my belief that we modern people can arrive at the full embodiment that has always been a possibility for our species. The impact and the implications of such a recovery are nothing less than revolutionary. For to recover our original or primary body as our own involves experiencing the totality of oneself, without judgment; living with a directness that is not filtered or distorted by the thinking mind; rediscovering ourselves within the network of relations with others; coming to awareness again of the primordiality of the natural world as a subject; and, perhaps most surprising, beginning to sense and see what has been called the “unseen world,” the “other world,” the world of “others” who, while not flesh and blood, are nevertheless living presences around us and with us, to inspire, guide, and protect. Recovering our basic, inborn body has, then, profound implications for healing the self, mending our broken relationships, restoring a healthy relationship to our world, seen and unseen, and healing the planet. All that we need is a method to enable us to reclaim our original body, the body that is our most basic being at this moment, but that we cannot clearly feel or see. That method is offered to us in the body work introduced in this book, the somatic practices of Buddhist meditation.

  (4) Michael Thoms, New Dimensions, radio interview. back

  NINE: Meditating without the Body

  The Buddha lived in northeast India at a time of increasing agriculturalization, urbanization, and political centralization. Accompanying these changes, people were already becoming increasingly disembodied and were coming to view spirituality as a process of overcoming, dominating, and subduing “nature” and the human body. The Buddha saw himself as turning back to an earlier mode of being, declaring, “I follow the ancient way.” He left aside the compelling social changes around him and retired to the jungle, which—as mentioned—was thought of as the nonhuman locale where the primordial might be discovered. When the Buddha affirmed the importance of nourishing and caring for his body as essential to his spiritual development, and when he touched the larger body of the earth as evidence of the legitimacy of his path, he separated himself decisively from the increasing disembodiment sought by so many spiritual teachers and traditions of his day, including his own previous meditation masters and the dominant Samkhya-Yoga system. Having renounced spiritual paths that involved the renunciation of the body and their goal of separation from “the material,” the Buddha discovered and followed the way back to full embodiment.

  The method that the Buddha discovered was meditation, but, at least according to the tradition, it was unlike any other kind of meditation being taught in his day. The meditation taught by the Buddha and practiced in subsequent Buddhist history is deeply somatic—fully grounded in sensations, sensory experience, feeling, emotions, and so on. Even thoughts are related to as somatic—as burs
ts of energy experienced in the body, rather than nonphysical phenomena that disconnect us from our soma. In its most ancient form, Buddhist meditation is a technique for letting go of the objectifying tendency of thought and entering deeply and fully into communion with our embodied nature. And hence it leads to “touching enlightenment with the body” or to “touching enlightenment in and through the body.”

  It is quite surprising, then, that among many of us modern people, the somatic teachings of Buddhism have not crossed the cultural divide that separates Asia and the West. This lack of transmission may be due to our own extremely disembodied state, in which we are literally unable to hear the call to embodiment present within traditional Buddhist practice. It may also be traceable to the fact that our Asian teachers, who come from very different and much more physically grounded cultural situations, do not always understand the full extent of our own somatic alienation or the tremendous limitations it imposes on our ability to meditate and pursue the path. Perhaps again, this lack of transmission is partly due to the classical Buddhist texts, which, at least as we tend to read them, do not always provide a clear, direct, and effective remedy to our disconnected situation either.

  Whatever the reasons may be, in the West, meditation is often practiced as a kind of conceptual exercise, a mental gymnastic. We often approach it as a way to fulfill yet another agenda or project—that of attempting to become “spiritual,” according to whatever we happen to think that is. We may try to use meditation to become peaceful, less confused, sharper and more clear, more “sane,” more effective in our lives, even more conceptually adroit. The problem with this is that we are, once again, attempting to be managers, to supersede what is given, to control the “other.” In this case, the “other” is ourselves, our bodies, and our own experience. Ultimately, in our meditation practice, it is often our own somatic experience of reality that we are trying to override in the attempt to fulfill, once again, our ego aim.