Touching Enlightenment

by Reginald A Ray

  • We hear the call. Whatever karma arises brings with it a clear and powerful call to us to experience it fully and thoroughly, without reservations and without pulling back. That is the very nature of human experience itself—that it arrives with such a compelling call. Every human being, on some fundamental though usually implicit level, feels the imperative to fully feel and fully experience. When we descend into the body and find ourselves increasingly able to heed this primal call, it leaves us feeling empowered and fulfilled on some very basic level.

  • We trust the process. The more we understand the somatic work, the more confidence we have in the process it unlocks. We see that our body already holds everything we need for the journey: all our past that we need to work on, all the present wisdom that we need to connect with, and all our future possibility that needs to unfold. We simply need to be willing to give up the arrogant, ignorant, and all-controlling attitude of the ego and surrender to the guidance of the profound wisdom the body already holds. All that is required now is for us to move beyond the reactivity of hope and fear, in order to accept our life in its spontaneous totality. Realizing this, we can discover a deep sense of trust.

  • We trust the timing. Through repeated experience, we come to the concrete and personal insight that all karmic invitations are timely. The fruition of past karma arrives at just the moment when we need it in order to go further in our development. Past karma never comes to fruition too early or too late. Again, this instills a deep sense of confidence and an all trusting openness in our life and its unfolding.

  • We appreciate the opportunity. Astonishingly enough, we come to understand that each karmic invitation brings with it, always, the ultimate opportunity of our life. Through experiencing our life fully, as it is born moment by moment in our body, we not only feel the freedom of experiencing things completely and to their fullest extent, we begin to gain some basic understanding of the purpose of our human life. There is, in this, a profound sense of fulfillment.

  • We recognize that we are unfolding. Whatever arises now does so because of ground that we ourselves laid in the past. Like all sentient beings, in the past, we partly received and partly did not receive what was going on for us. What we were able to take in was based on our maturity at that point, and, in a similar way, we rejected what we rejected because we were not yet ready for that next step. In other words, we are and always have been moving along a path toward ultimate fulfillment, toward the person that we are needing to become; moreover, we make this journey according to our own impeccable timing.

  • We see that there is no problem. Within this perspective, we are able to take full responsibility for ourselves and to view everything that occurs in our lives, no matter how positive or how negative, as steps on the path toward our final realization. In a very real sense, we have never been separated from our self or alienated from who we truly are. There is not and never has been any mistake or any fundamental problem. This is what Trungpa Rinpoche once called the “ultimate positivity.”

  Understanding the karmic process within this somatic perspective has some important implications. For one thing, ultimately there are no victims. All of us, throughout our countless lives, have been “victimized” innumerable times. Difficult as the experience of “victimization” may be—whether it is at the hands of another person, a natural disaster, a disease, an accident, or some other life-altering circumstance—in every case, the experience is understood to have an ultimately positive meaning: it holds unique and irreplaceable opportunities for our own learning process and spiritual unfolding.

  This does not mean, of course, that we should not do everything in our power to alleviate the suffering and the victimization of other beings. The fact that, in the life of a “victim,” there are others willing, inspired, and able to help is critically important: it is part of the mitigating circumstances that may provide just the sense of compassion and literal assistance they need in order to understand and make the most of what they are going through. Our mere existence, and the fact that we are touched by another’s suffering and are able to help, are all part of his or her positive karma. We should never shrink from the obligation another’s victimization implies, even if, as is said over and over in the Mahayana, it costs us our life.

  The teachings on karma suggest that, in a very real and most empowering sense, we are the willing, creative agents of the trouble that we so often seem to find ourselves in. This is true of the smoker who gets lung cancer, the philandering husband whose marriage breaks up, the workaholic who comes down with chronic fatigue syndrome, the heavy eater who gets a heart attack, the person whose angry words create hurt and chaos in his or her personal relationships, the person who rushes to work and gets a speeding ticket, and so on. In each of these situations, on some level, we know we are flying in the red zone. We are setting ourselves and others up, so to speak, for something to happen that will engage our pained and perhaps remorseful attention. How often do we think, “He brought it on himself,” or even, “I brought that on myself”? We get into trouble on purpose, and we do it for our own good, for the learning process and the growth it leads to. In Goethe’s words, “People in their deepest, most primal urges, unerringly know their own best course.”

  So, in some sense, behind all our most meaningless and most senseless activity, and behind all the chaos we create for ourselves, there is something profoundly intelligent. There is a life purpose unfolding, a directionality to our lives. That directionality doesn’t come from an external deity but, somehow, from the very depths of our own human person, the most hidden recesses of our body. We could adapt Goethe’s phrase to read, “In the deepest, darkest mystery of their bodies, people discover their own salvation.”

  Karma, then, is the arrangement of our life so that we learn. It is not some impersonal mechanism that just lands on us. In this sense, we go through everything we go through because something very deep within us requires it, in order for us to become who we ultimately are and need to be. It is, always, the ultimate reality of the universe flowing through us, being us, and coming to its own fruition in and through us.

  This understanding of karma is able to emerge in a unique way through the body work. Through descending into the creative chaos of the body, through approaching the font from which our life constantly flows, we begin to see our own continually emerging karma “as in God’s eye it is,” to use G.M. Hopkins’ wonderful phrase. In other words, rather than being entirely wrapped up in and preoccupied with our reaction to our karma, we are in a position to fully receive and taste it and also to contemplate why and for what it may be. When we do, we begin to see that, in a certain way, everything that comes about in our life is bringing something very definite, utterly real, and extraordinarily helpful to us. This discovery leads us to feel that our life itself is an unending process of blessing and goodness for us.

  This understanding of karma also leads us to a place of genuine sympathy, compassion, appreciation, and deep respect toward others. We are sympathetic because we understand from the depths of our own being just how very difficult life is for all people. We feel compassion for others because we know very well how compelling is the reactivity we all engage in most of the time and also because we know it is not necessary. And we find much appreciation and deep respect for others because we can see that their trials, their suffering, and their struggles embody the very same path toward fulfillment and liberation that we find ourselves right now traveling.

  TWENTY-NINE: Impersonal and Individual

  As we arrive at a fuller understanding of karma and how it works, we find ourselves coming to understand our life as both less personal and more individual than we had thought.

  THE IMPERSONALITY OF OUR LIVES

  Before we learn how to engage the body fully and deeply, we tend to view our life in largely individualistic terms. We have a more or less governing concept of who we are—a concept that is finally individual to ourselves—and we tend to evaluate and judg
e everything that occurs from the vantage point of that centralized viewpoint.

  When we do the body work, however, we discover that the karmic fruition that arises as the occurrences of our life, the totality of experience that appears to the body moment by moment, has a fundamentally neutral character. The way we experience this neutrality is that our life has a quality of “givenness.” Things arise just as they do; they appear, independent of our personal expectations, judgments, or evaluations. Any questions of judgment or control come up strictly subsequent to the arising of experience. First, there is the totality in its givenness; second, there is how we may react to it.

  In this process, we become aware of the distance—which is a great and impassable divide—that separates our somatic experience, over which we have no control, and our personal assessment, which we construct after the fact. The more we become aware of this disjunction, the more what arises in our lives gains a feeling of inevitability. Conceptually, within the framework of Buddhist philosophy, our experience is inevitable, because it is the natural result of prior causes and conditions. But the important point is that we feel this inevitability as a quality—the most striking quality—of our experience.

  This experience of inevitability, just by its very nature, cuts off our usual, habitual stream of discursive judgments. So striking and “as it is” do we find our experience, that we literally do not know what to think and often do not care to think anything. And so our judging mind weakens and begins to dissolve. When our experience appears with this intense feeling of inevitability, it is as if we are viewing a brilliant and beautiful weather pattern that is so striking that all words and even all thoughts fail us.

  Because of this, we find ourselves very much more present to what is occurring. And, owing to this, we begin to find within our experience a meaning, a direction, and a reason for being. In other words, we begin to find that our experience—completely independent of what we think or want to think—has its own inbuilt character, meaning, and purpose.

  This purpose is discovered in the specific momentum and directionality of experience, its urge toward expression, and its impact on our environment, animate and inanimate, among which the human social environment is particularly prominent for us. We discover that, left alone, our experience will unfold according to its own inner nature. But we see more: our experience, left to follow its own course, has the most profound of all possible impacts on ourselves and others.

  At this point, we begin to sense that our experience, and thus our immediate life, is ultimately not about us nor is it for us. We begin to sense that we are vessels or vehicles for something that is much larger—in fact, reality itself, in all its vastness—and that our lives are unfolding rather completely independently of our own personal sense of “self,” with its various hopes and fears, its ambitions and agendas. We begin to realize, in other words, that our own life is ultimately not a personal phenomenon at all.

  THE BIRTH OF OUR INDIVIDUALITY

  Ironically enough, the realization that our life is not a personal phenomenon marks the birth of our true individuality. Our true individuality is quite the opposite of our life as personal. The reason for this is simple. To think of our life as personal, there must be some concept of a person or “self” in reference to which everything that occurs is viewed, understood, and evaluated. In other words, we can’t think of our life as personal unless we have some notion of a “self” or a coherent, centralized “me.”

  As we have seen, this concept of “self,” this self-conscious “me,” is an abstract mental construction that we have fashioned out of the various encounters and events of our life. In our search for the comfort and security of a definable and locatable identity, we attempt to maintain this self-concept in the face of our experience. To do this, as we have seen, we have to continually negate our actual experience. In this way, the attempt to maintain a personalistic interpretation of our life involves denying our experience. When we drop below our conceptual fantasia, as noted, we encounter a level of experience that offers itself as genuine, unique, and powerful. When we let go of what we think, we meet in our body a being or a kind of being that is informative, self-affirming, and satisfying.

  We experience this “being” that we meet in the body as completely and utterly unique. Of course, if we retreat to the level of concept, we can attach labels to what we experience and then compare and contrast it with our ideas about the experience of others, as the conceptual mind will do, and arrive at an assessment of what is the same and what is different. At that point, all uniqueness is lost. This is not because there was no uniqueness in our experience, but rather because the conceptual mind is, by its nature, unable to register the experience of uniqueness. Even to say “unique” is to identify what we have seen with our non-conceptual eye under a general rubric. As Kierkegaard noticed a long time ago, when we do this, we betray the very nature of reality.

  But when we stay within the domain of the body, the striking appearance of everything that arises is that it stands apart from, and resists, any kind of conceptual categorization. In its vividness and abundance, in its illimitable, empty, yet arresting, character, our experience discloses the fullness of its being. It is self-defining—any attempt to provide an external identification inevitably involves losing it. Only when we remain fully present to our experience, within the body, can we be said to know it as it is.

  If our experience arises as the fruition of past karma in accordance with causes and conditions, does that not negate our true individuality? When we understand karma fully, then we will see why every moment is and must be unique. Consider that the causes and conditions manifesting in each moment of experience of ourself and others are literally infinite, arising from all space and time, without beginning or limit. For this reason, no two moments of experience can ever be the same. This is the teaching of the Buddhist psychology (the Abhidharma), deepened in the most important and influential Mahayana Buddhist philosophical school, the “central philosophy of Buddhism,” the Madhyamaka. Each moment is a distinctive appearance, a distinctive fruition, of the life of the universe. In each moment, the universe delivers itself in a fresh, complete, and unprecedented way. This is the core teaching of one of the most important Buddhist texts in East Asia, the Avatamsaka Sutra.

  Again, when we abandon the idea that what we “really” are is a centralized self corresponding to our ideas, we discover ourself as the unceasing, ever-changing kaleidoscope of experience that arises as our life. So we discover that we are, in each moment, a truly individual phenomenon, not limited even (or especially) by any notion of a continuous or coherent “self.”

  As we have seen, these unique moments of our experience contain an inbuilt way, or Tao, an energy, intelligence, direction, and mission in the universe; and so it is that we find ourselves becoming—more and more effortlessly—the vehicles or conduits for this “intention” of our experience, of the universe, to fulfill itself. Amazing as it may seem to us, this intention—and we see this as it arises, as it finds expression, and as it impacts others—is utterly pure, untainted by any self-serving agendas or personal politics. We experience it as being in the service of, and as an expression of, reality or being itself.

  This realization, of course, can only occur when any self-conscious “I,” even any sense of “me” being me, has ceased, if only for a moment. When it does occur, this realization is accompanied by a very powerful and life-transforming awareness. Undeniably and astoundingly, we discover that, when life flows through us in such a pure and powerful way, utterly beyond any preconception or idea that we may have, we have found our true life. With an overwhelming sense of recognition, freedom, and gratitude, we feel, “This is why I was born. This is what my life is for. This moment shows me, finally and ultimately, why I am here.” This marks the realization of our true, incomparable individuality.

  THIRTY: The “Good News” of Chaos

  Our exploration of the somatic foundations of the spiritual life
leads us to an important discovery: The spiritual journey is not accomplished by disconnecting our self from the relative reality of our lives and “attaining” some “higher state.” Nor is the journey made by ignoring the actuality of our life and seeking a bypass, a passage around it, to some distant goal. The spiritual journey of the human person is made only by meeting our relative experience with absolute directness and complete nakedness, and by allowing relative reality to ground, inform, and guide us, and bring about the transformation we ultimately seek.

  But what is this relative reality that is so central to our journey? It is certainly not our self-conscious ego, with its inflated ideas of who we are and our place in the universe, and its agendas and strategies for self-perpetuation and self-aggrandizement. It is also not our preconceptions and concepts about the emotions we run into, the situations we encounter, or the people we meet. It is not our hopes, expectations, or fears. In short, this relative reality is not our version of things, things seen from our ego-centered point of view. When we stay mesmerized by our own versions and completely absorbed in trying to maintain those versions, we are avoiding our true relative reality, our karma. The more we avoid, the more we simply recycle our habitual patterns of avoidance and remain trapped in a lifeless and disembodied bardo, in which nothing can happen.