(7) Jackson, Roger R., Tantric Treasures: Three Collections of Mystical Verse from Buddhist India, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 80-81. back
TWENTY-SIX: The Moment of Greatest Alienation
The body, in its own wisdom and with its own impeccable timing, gives rise to some manifestation of unresolved karma in the form of a physical sensation, a release of energy, an injury, an illness, a dream, the powerful upsurge of emotion, a charged thought or memory, or, perhaps surprisingly, an event apparently from the “outside” world, such as a chance human encounter or a “natural” event. When some aspect of our unresolved karma surfaces in this way, when it comes into our awareness, it is said that that particular karmic trend is “coming to fruition.” It has come to fruition in the sense that it has now appeared along with an inevitable invitation, sometimes a demand, for us to receive it, experience it fully, and thereby resolve it.
According to Buddhism, such gifts arise from the darkness of the body where all our unresolved karma is held. In Buddhist philosophy, the “holding tank” that the body represents is called the alaya, the universal unconscious. As the unconscious, the body holds all the karmic seeds that we ourselves have sown and that must, on our journey to realization, eventually ripen into the light of consciousness to be fully engaged, felt, and thus worked through and completed.
Such “gifts” of the body arrive, for all of us, moment by moment throughout our lives. According to Buddhism, there are two very different ways in which we can relate to such arrivals. In the first, we do not accept the gift, which arrives in the awareness of our body; rather, we turn away from it into the avoidance, the escape represented by discursive thinking. As we have seen, in this case we create further karma, the choice that most of us make most of the time. This leads to what Buddhism considers the perpetuation and even deepening of samsara—of our habitual evasion of our experience through somatic disembodiment. In the second approach, in accord with genuine spirituality, we accept the gift fully; we abide in our bodies with the gift, allowing the experience to make its full journey through our lives. In that way, we resolve the karma it embodies.
As discussed, we short-circuit our experience somewhere in midstream. There are two ways by which we do this: repressing it or acting it out. In the example given earlier of my despair as an infant, I blocked out awareness of the threatening feelings; I repressed the memories of what had occurred and what I had felt, simply to avoid psychic annihilation. It was through the wisdom of my own state of being that these experiences were temporarily marginalized—because I was so small and with as-yet-undeveloped ego strength. At the same time, it is the mystery of our incarnation that nothing is ever lost—everything, as a manifestation of unresolved karma, must, in fact, be retained because we will eventually need it on the spiritual journey to full realization. And so the infant’s experiences were retained within my body for later attention and integration.
If I had been older—perhaps an adolescent—and had experienced the same kind of nearly lethal abandonment by my mother and felt the same kind of murderous rage, I might have attempted to manage the overwhelming emotion, to deal with its terrible intensity, through open rebellion against my mother, other authority figures, and society in general. Again, there is an accurate wisdom in such actions, because they defer the full intensity of experiences for which the time and opportunity of assimilation have not yet arrived. Though understandable and “wise” in its own way, each of these approaches—repressing the threatening feelings or attempting to get rid of them by acting them out—nevertheless clearly produce their own karmic results that can profoundly impact a person’s life and create additional obstacles.
According to Tibetan yoga, there is a more creative way—than either repressing or acting out—to relate with our karma as it comes to fruition. This alternative is shown by the ability, gained through embodied meditation, to experience openly and fully the unlived and unintegrated feelings and emotions from earlier times. With those tools came the ability for me to stay right in the middle of the inferno of the horrific experiences of the infant self, to stay there while the fire burned through its own fiercest intensity, and to continue to remain until it reached its own conclusion, died down, and finally abated.
It is not good enough to experience the surfacing karma at arm’s length, remaining at a safe distance from what is occurring. It will not work if, when the threatening contents arise, we step back and observe from the secure standpoint of our current self. If we remain removed, nothing fundamental is going to change. What we have to do is to become the damned—become that part of our self that has been rejected and cast out. We have to allow ourselves to enter whatever hell our despised experience has been cast into, taking on its full identity and reality, and its full human experience. Only when we are willing to do that is redemption possible.
This, I think, is one of the profound insights of Christian spirituality. The example of Jesus shows us that only when we allow ourselves to fully experience the criminal, the condemned, the utterly banished and exiled within us, only when we are actually willing to surrender to and identify with all that darkness and all that hell, can salvation occur. St. John of the Cross, always our mentor and our guide in these matters, tells us that the moment of the deepest, most complete alienation and separation from everything that is good and holy, from everything we know and trust, is none other than the moment of redemption. This is the only way; there is no other! In the body work, we must be willing to go even that far; otherwise, there can be no fundamental transformation. And the only way we can go that far is through our ever-increasing embodiment—the body work gives us the understanding, the methods, and, above all, the strength and confidence to do this.
To put this in general terms, the way to resolve karma is to experience what is arising—whether it’s from the inside or from the outside—fully and completely, with no reservation, judgment, or hangover. For example, in the previously mentioned example of my leaving for work in a rush, being short with my wife, and then walking out with no further words, we can see that I am not relating with my experience in a complete way and that this is creating further karma. I am simply not present to the totality of my situation, of my feelings and my interactions with my wife. When I “rush,” I have disengaged; I am in a disembodied state. I am running from the painful feelings of my situation—of having gotten up late, not having left enough time to get ready, fearing being late for work—and from being with my wife, who looks for some basic level of decency and emotional presence from me. In my disembodied state, though the anxiety is coursing through my body, I am only dimly aware of feeling it. The anxiety has me by the throat, and I am trying to deal with it by ignoring it and everything it reflects. I do this by going faster and faster, as if I could outrun the situation and outrun my anxiety. So, driven by my fear, I am skimming the surface of my life, dropping my tube of toothpaste, leaving my pajamas on the floor (for my wife to pick up), stubbing my foot on the bedroom door, spilling my coffee, all capped off by being short with my wife. I am in a state of complete disembodiment and in such a mind of confusion that I am unconsciously acting as if being on time is of more consequence than respecting the tender and open feelings of my wife, my life partner and truest friend.
At that climactic moment, if I had really let myself abide in my body and feel the anxiety and aggression toward this person whom I deeply care for, I would simply have stopped, looked at her, been present to myself, and opened to the uncertain future of what might be needed right now. And maybe I would have burst out laughing or found myself tearful. But, no: completely ignoring the somatic knowledge that was right there on the verge, I just kept going. Hence the creation of new karma—of additional karmic debt and additional karmic pressure, additional (if subliminal) guilt, and twisted feelings and compromised relationship. All this new karma, most likely, is going to be more painful and more difficult to resolve later than if I had just stopped at some point and begun to b
e fully somatically present to what was going on. We can generalize this approach to everything we do in life. Because we always have some agenda that we are engaged in trying to fulfill, we are never really there, never fully present in our bodies and to our lives, to its situations and our emotions, its people and its events. And not only do we resist the opportunities to resolve past karma that the situation offers, but, by resisting, we also create more and more karma, more and more unfinished business.
From the Buddhist standpoint, what is arising in our lives is never random, no matter how “out of the blue” it may seem; it is always the expression of unresolved karma. This means that everything that ever happens to any of us in our human lives, however “religious” or “mundane” it may seem, whatever our religious commitments or lack thereof, is thoroughly and profoundly spiritual.
It is also important to realize that the surfacing of karma calling for resolution is always experienced as a challenge to our current self-concept. This is because, in the past, we have sought to maintain our idea of our self by refusing to experience what is now surfacing. So the karma that is coming up calls us now to live through it fully, let go of the self-concept that has refused it admission, and become something else and something more.
This is the deeper meaning of the Buddha’s teaching on the First Noble Truth, that life is suffering. Life is not inherently suffering. However, when we try to maintain a solid sense of “self” and to keep at bay the backlog of the karma we have accumulated, we experience stress, anxiety, and pressure from “the other side,” from the unconscious, from the body. When we continue to wall off the karma arising in each moment, calling us to open, assimilate, and change, we are going to experience a constant struggle with life—a constant conflict with whatever is occurring and a continual war with our own bodies.
It is literally as if we are locked in a room with someone we have mistreated all our life and, though this person is trying to tell us how bad they feel, we refuse to listen. The pain of trying to shut out what is true about us and our life, which our body already knows in depth and in full, is what the First Noble Truth points to. When we actually open and listen, then an entirely different relationship to life comes into being. Life continues to unfold as before, but because there is no one resisting it and no one turning away from it, there is no suffering, only the experience of openness, freedom, and joy—the experience of full embodiment.
TWENTY-SEVEN: Beyond the Reactivity of Ego
When we do the body work, we drop down below our thinking process, meet the body in its own space, and explore what is there. Through this process, we find out a lot of things. First, we uncover the actual experience of having or being a body—the physical sensations; the currents of energy; the aches, pains, and positive feelings; places where we feel open and others where we sense constriction; areas of density and areas that are more porous and transparent; regions of coherence and regions where we feel in pieces; and so on. The discoveries are very literal, and they are endless.
Through this work, we also find out more about who we are as this specific human being. It is not that we uncover information in the usual, conceptual sense, to somehow enhance our mental image of our self. Rather, through what can only be called non-conceptual knowing, we begin to tap into a process that feels as if it lies very close to who—or what—we are.
This process unfolds as a succession of contents. Feelings, images, emotions, thoughts, sense perceptions, memories, hopes and fears, begin to flow through us. Sometimes the flow is relatively unimpeded; at other times, something will come up that catches our attention, catches us, for a period of time—a particular memory, a certain person, something of which we are especially hopeful or fearful, some impending event, and so on.
What is it that governs what arises for us in the body work? Again, what we meet is determined by the unique totality of unresolved karma held in our bodies. We owe a debt to the past, and this debt makes itself known in the form of some present experience expressing the burden of the past and needing to be attended to just now. As mentioned, all people, whether they are “spiritual practitioners” or not, and whether or not they work with the body, experience this very same process.
As we have seen, the arising of situations based on past karma is always more or less unexpected, because it contains at least something of what we have previously been evading or been unwilling to experience fully. Thus, for Buddhism, all experiences are, to some extent, unanticipated, unwanted, and, in fact, potentially, if not overtly, threatening. We didn’t experience them fully in the past because they were threatening to our self-concept, so now here they are again.
According to Tibetan yoga, each moment of our experience appears initially as the abrupt appearance that is literally outside of the mind; at least it is outside of our conceptualizing mind. When experience initially appears, there is something there, but it first arises in the body as somatic knowledge that has not yet been “processed” by the thinking mind; it has not yet been “recognized” as one thing as opposed to another, and it does not have a label or a story attached to it. There is a feeling of totality to it, and accompanying it is also the experience of a mind that doesn’t know what to think.
For example, the next time you hear a loud noise that you were not expecting, pay very close attention to your mind. You may notice that, at the moment of the noise, first there is this big thing that happened and instantly your mind just falls completely open. Startled, you find yourself momentarily lost. You aren’t thinking anything—your mind is just empty. Very shortly, though, a succession of mental images and thoughts arises as you try to regain your orientation. Thus, you might first realize that what startled you was a noise. Then you may briefly scramble for where the noise came from: “Oh, the kitchen.” Then you try to know what it was: “Oh, the flowers I put by the open window must have blown over.” Then finally it’s, “Oh no, I bet my beautiful vase broke.” All our experience arises in the same way. Initially, in the first instant, there is no ground, no thing to be recognized, not even an observer. Each moment of our experience, in its first appearance, arrives as nothing we can know in a conceptual way; it is too much and we are too empty.
Thus it is that when something first arises, it appears from outside of our existing framework, and we have no idea whatsoever of what to think. So, for a moment, we don’t think anything; we experience just a completely open and receptive state of being. This is known in Buddhism as the “pre-thought moment,” a moment of experience that is empty (in terms of our mind) but, at the same time, fully embodied; that is, it is being received by our body before “we” think or do anything with it or about it.
Our ego—paranoid, fragile, and reactive as it is—immediately responds with panic, with fear of the unbounded experience that has suddenly presented itself to us. In Trungpa Rinpoche’s experientially precise and accurate description, we recoil from the experience of this undefined “something,” and we try to figure out what it is and where it fits into our mental inventory. We begin to size up this experience, to develop attitudes toward it, label it, fit it into our own ego narrative, and weave it into our existing self-concept. The important point is that we have literally created the bounded and definable “thingness” that we eventually arrive at out of the seemingly limitless totality of what our body initially received.
For most of us, this process happens so quickly we don’t even notice it. All we see is our own process of reaffirming me, me, me. We don’t see the totality against which we are constantly reacting when we continually reaffirm ourselves in this way; the basic experience of our body, our preconceptual, somatic awareness, is lost. In fact, for most people, only the most catastrophic event, such as a car crash, sudden news of the death of someone we love, coming to the boundary of death ourselves, or a serious psychological breakdown can slow our ego process enough for us to notice, in any sustained way, the somatic awareness that underlies our incessant “egoizing” of everything. Such exper
iences, however, when they do occur, have the potential to alter one’s life direction forever.
One thing about receiving experience as our body knows it, as a kind of totality, is that we discover that our experience itself is, in and of itself, actually neither “for” nor “against” us. It is inherently neither desirable nor undesirable. It is so vast and limitless, so complete and ungraspable, that we can, in fact, form no attitudes about it at all. This discovery enables us to receive and appreciate the karmic fruition of our lives in a much fuller and more complete way. At this point, we no longer avoid our karma. We no longer meet our karmic fruition with reactivity, selectively appropriating and rejecting it, and thereby leaving unpaid the karmic debt that our experiences hold or sowing karmic seeds productive of future suffering. In meeting our karma in the body, where it arises, we have, in a very real sense, turned our life around.
TWENTY-EIGHT: Empowerment
The ability to meet our karma in the body, where it arises, is extraordinarily empowering for people. According to Tibetan yoga, there are several important aspects to this empowerment:
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