Touching Enlightenment

by Reginald A Ray

  (9) Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, 50. back

  THE THIRD WATCH

  In the third watch, Gautama’s remembering deepened once again, and he called to mind what further things he already knew, in the depths of his own unconditioned mind, but had previously been unable to acknowledge. He saw that “living beings wear themselves out in vain. Over and over again they are born, they age, die, pass on to a new life, and are reborn. What is more, greed and dark delusion obscure their sight, and they are blind from birth. Greatly apprehensive, they yet do not know how to get out of this great mass of ill.”10 Like all of us, Gautama already knew this on some deep, previously unacknowledged level; now it had risen right to the surface.

  (10) Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, 50. back

  THE FOURTH WATCH

  Gautama now remembered the ancient, inborn knowledge of karma that he had been blocking out: in the fourth watch, he saw how everything that occurs does so in accordance with the creation and ripening of beings’ actions, including all mental and physical phenomena, even those ideas of a substantial personal “self” that we take for granted, habitually carry around, and take for real. This realization led him to this liberating insight: “From the summit of the world downward he could detect no self anywhere.”11 He understood that all the struggles that make up samsaric existence, all presupposing of a “self” that needs to be protected and maintained, are groundless, fruitless, and without reality.

  Gautama’s prior spiritual training and practice had involved a process of progressive disembodiment, a movement away from his mundane, relative experience as a human being. His two primary teachers, Arada Kalama and Udraka Ramaputra, had each taught practices by which one ascends through ever more disembodied and ethereal trances, arriving first at the experience of nothing at all and then of neither perception nor non-perception. In his subsequent journey with five renunciant companions, Gautama sought to disembody in another way, by annihilating his body through extreme ascetic practices.

  Gautama, however, finally realized that all of this was going in the wrong direction. He saw that in abandoning the relative, he relinquished the ability to attain the realization he sought. Whether one is trying to use the relative for purposes of ordinary pleasure and security (as most beings do), or trying to push it away in search of some ideal spiritual state (as his teachers and ascetic companions had been doing), it is always the ego’s game, the same old game of forgetting, ignoring, repressing. He saw that only in remembering without limitation or reservation, only in identifying with the relative and embodying it fully, only in present awareness of the totality of relative reality, where ego has no foothold, may the ultimate awakening and freedom he longed for be found.

  So Gautama reversed his direction and remembered. He opened himself to the full truth and reality of his relative experience, finding intimacy with everything he was and ever had been, and with the infinite array of others’ experiences as well. The closer he drew to the concrete experiences of human life, and the more embodied he became in this way, the less room there was for any sense of a separate or discrete self. Finally, at the moment of enlightenment, there was no one at all, just experience itself fully displayed, free, complete, and beyond question. Truly, he realized himself as the world, as the process of reality unfolding in and as his human person.

  When the Buddha arose from the Bodhi tree, awakened, so present and naked was he to “what is,” and so at one was he with the experience of all beings—that he decided to share his discovery far and wide. With his person not being separate from others, his discovery of the liberation that alone comes from unreserved intimacy with relative reality was as much theirs as his. It was a human discovery for all. How could he not keep going, bringing the freedom he had found to others?

  It is within this context that we can understand the well-known “universalism” of the Buddha. On one level, this universalism is that his way was applicable to all beings, of whatever station or circumstance. His discovery was of the human spiritual capacity, as such. But more deeply, his universalism is the realization that there is no truth, no final reality, that can be separated out and extracted from the totality and set up as some kind of landmark, some kind of special domain.

  Conventional religion claims that “our truth, our reality, and our way are better than yours, so you should abandon yours and come over to ours.” But the Buddha saw that whatever our relative reality, openness and transparency to it, surrendering to the wisdom it embodies, is the preferred, the ideal, and the only path to full awakening for human beings. In other words, the path to enlightenment for every sentient being is already implied in the totality of his or her karmic situation, the entire array of his or her life experiences, which ultimately includes everything that is. To attain to the ultimate is to open to, make one’s peace with, and find resolution in being fully embodied in that way.

  (11) Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, 50. back

  IV: DYNAMICS OF THE PATH: PRINCIPLES, PRACTICES, AND EXPERIENCES

  THIRTY-TWO: Developing Peace: Somatic Shamatha

  Buddhist meditation is generally described as having two phases: first, mindfulness, and second, awareness. In the first phase, that of shamatha, or quieting the mind, we select an object of attention and, through directing our mind to it, aim to gradually diminish our inner turmoil and arrive at a state of mental stillness. In the second phase, out of the stillness developed in shamatha, we seek to develop awareness, or vipashyana, clear seeing. The somatic approach to meditation and its practices, in some respects, recapitulates this basic shamatha-vipashyana structure of all Buddhist meditation, but with some significant differences.

  In the somatic lineage, the body itself becomes the object of mindfulness. Through attending to the body as a whole, or to some part or domain of the body, our mind gradually slows down, deepens, and enters a state of peace. Someone familiar with Buddhist meditation might say, “Okay, that is shamatha.”

  This would be true, but with one most important difference. As we have seen, it is possible to practice shamatha, by attending to the breath at the tip of the nose, for example, and to bring the mind into a relative state of non-thought, seen as stillness, and yet continue to be completely disconnected from the body, from our karma, and from our journey. Again, as noted, it was exactly this type of shamatha that the Buddha learned from his first meditation teachers and found to be leading him in the wrong direction.

  The problem with this somatically ungrounded type of shamatha, and the “peace” that it leads to, is that it is not full, complete, genuine peace. Rather, it is a kind of hard, brittle, and cold peace that includes a subtle effort to hold the body at bay. The warmth of the body, and its complex sensory and feeling life—the embodied totality of its experience—are walled off. Enfolded within the hard edge held against the body by this type of shamatha are the classic three poisons in an active, but extremely subtle form: grasping at a “peace” that is easy and uncomplicated; aggression against the abundance, turmoil, and chaos of the body’s life; and ignorance of the vast world the body knows and also of the meditator’s own ego-driven “spiritual” agenda.

  The practice of somatic meditation, on the other hand, does bring us into a state of peace, but it is a profoundly somatic peace—one that is inseparable from deep relaxation—which permeates the body like a deeply satisfying, spreading, golden glow. We feel the peace, not in a primarily mental way, but more in a fully physical way. It is not our mind that is at peace, but rather our body that is deeply peaceful, relaxed, and at extraordinarily deep ease. Shamatha, when practiced in a somatic way, can lead to a deep sense of inner well-being and even bliss.

  It is helpful to observe the process through which we arrive at this state of fully grounded and connected relaxation, peace, and well-being. In some respects, this process is quite different from, and far more spontaneous than, the more usual practice of shamatha. Again, take as an example the most common instruction given to shamatha practitioners: to atten
d to the breath at the tip of the nose. They are often instructed to focus on the breath, factoring out and even ignoring any thoughts, perceptions, and feelings that may arise. The ego ambition of the practitioner to attain this peaceful state is what occupies the focus of intention and drives the practice.

  As mentioned, modern people, owing to their habitual disembodiment, already have great difficulty with somatic aspects of sensation, feeling, and emotion. Because of this, perhaps without realizing it, they tend to conceive of the “peace” they are striving for as a state without sensation, feeling, emotion, or even any content at all. When they attend to the breath at the tip of the nose, they are trying to achieve a peace that is disembodied. Sensitive people often find this approach overly aggressive, and rightly so. Many report that it only further increases their sense of disconnection from their sensory and feeling life and further alienates them from any sense of authentic existence. The result is often the feeling of a “hard heart,” vacancy, or numbness.

  When we practice attention to the whole body, we are instructed to use one of the methods of simple somatic awareness or one of the many body-oriented breathing techniques, such as those described in the Appendix. “Just carry out the practice with an open mind and open heart, but let go of any attempts to achieve anything.” We are instructed not to set up any conceptual ideal, such as that of peace or stillness. We are simply attending to the body, with gentleness and curiosity, to see what it brings.

  What happens is that the body, through the processes described above, begins to wake up. As it does, we gain a sense of being physically present and grounded in our bodies. We feel we are inhabiting our bodies more and more fully; we begin to include all the experiences of sensation, feeling, and memory that come along with that waking up. In these practices, in a real sense, we are removing the aggression of the ego’s conceptual impositions and overlay on the body. We are taking away the heavy lid of preconceptions and agendas under which the body’s life had been going on, pushed down, repressed and depressed, rejected and unseen.

  Will Johnson comments that uncontrollable discursive thinking is largely the result of energy that is unable to flow freely through the body. Dammed up in the body, it manifests in the pathological form of the compulsive thinking that is the bane of so many modern meditators. Because the energy of the body is denied, it escapes in the only ego-acceptable form it can, as rampant thinking. The more the conscious mind sets itself against the body and its life, the more out of control our thoughts will be. By the same token, though, when we begin to remove the ego blockage, when we surrender our awareness into the body, then the body’s natural process begins to unfold in an open and unobstructed way. The body relaxes, our awareness pervades the body, discursive thought naturally and spontaneously subsides, and we enter a state of true, very deep somatic peacefulness and relaxation. We have finally begun to take the body seriously and listen to it, and our body—knowing exactly what is going on—responds by bringing us a very great gift: the joy and bliss of our simple physical existence.

  THIRTY-THREE: Are We Willing to See? Somatic Vipashyana

  The profound relaxation that comes through the somatic shamatha work, the sense of physical peace and well-being, is deeply satisfying. Our experience here is so compelling and brings such contentment that we might think, “This is it. This is what these practices are for. What more could one want?”

  Powerful as the experience of this fully grounded peace is, though, it is only the first of the two stages of practice mentioned in the previous chapter. Out of the experience of fully relaxed and embodied ease, we find ourself faced with the challenge of looking at what now begins to arise and trying to take it in fully.

  Shamatha, the stillness practice, creates an environment, a staging area. It creates a situation in which we will be better able to see. And seeing is the goal of body work, for it is only through seeing that we are able to change, to experience the fundamental human transformation that we seek. Shamatha is like stilling the agitated surface of a pond, so that it is utterly calm and clear. As we gaze at the surface of the pond, now that its wavelets, its eddies, and its ripples have been stilled, we begin to see—down into its depths—and we begin to observe what wonders are there: fish of all shapes and sizes, tadpoles, turtles, and other beings swimming in it, the plant life growing up from below, and the rugged, colorful bottom itself.

  The more we look through the still surface into the depths, the more we realize that our body is inviting us into a process of more and more intimate communication and even communion. As we proceed, we sense that we are engaged in a never-ending process, one that unfolds ever more deeply. First, our body invites us to approach it. Then we are called to make contact. Next, we feel our self drawn to deeper and deeper levels of quietude, harmony, and tranquility. And then, quite spontaneously, we find ourself drawn even deeper to see. Again, shamatha, the cultivation of peace and relaxation, doesn’t change us; it is the seeing—vipashyana—that brings the transformation, and that is what we are looking for, why we are here. Seeing is the main point.

  But to see in what way? This question cannot be answered in any specific sense. We can say that the body is calling us to see or to know more—more about it, more about our self, more about life and reality. And this is an understanding—not an intellectual understanding, but a preconceptual, stripped-down, somatic sense that comes from being present to what is being shown. It is like the knowing that happens when we wake up in the morning and feel the presence of our beloved lying beside us—it is that simple, immediate, embodied, and direct.

  What needs to come upon us from the body cannot be anticipated; it can only be known when it arrives. We feel it arising in our body, and the more deeply we relax, the more we find ourself being visited by somatic emissaries, so to speak, arriving as guests, bringing offerings and gifts of all sorts.

  What do they bring? We can say they bring what we did not previously feel or sense or know. This is not something that we did not know in the sense of missing information; they are not adding to our inventory of facts, filling the boxes and cubbyholes already existing in our mind. It is not something lateral or horizontal that they bring, as if they are just amplifying our already known world.

  What we did not previously know, which they deliver, is more a way of existing. The body is not interested in our acquiring additional information; it is only interested in our growing into a deeper, more complete, embodied, and authentic way of being. So the knowledge that is brought really involves a shift to a different, now vertical dimension, one that is more inclusive, subtle, and profound.

  When this new “somatic information” arrives, the only way we can really meet it is by letting go of the old, releasing our previous life. And this is where the process becomes extremely personal, very challenging, and sometimes quite painful. The more relaxed our body, the more open our awareness; the clearer our vision, the more we are going to see. So the question that faces all of us is this: Are we willing to see what is beginning to arrive, however much it may put us through? Do we have that much longing, confidence, and devotion to our life, to reality, to the unknown that undergirds our existence?

  THIRTY-FOUR: Falling Apart

  When we engage in somatic shamatha and somatic vipashyana, then, as mentioned, our experience begins to open up in new and often surprising ways. While it is not possible to generalize much about this process, in the somatic lineage, this much is said: in the work, our body doesn’t care what our personality may have to go through. This is an ironic way of saying that our ego’s agenda is one thing and our body’s agenda is another. Our ego is generally bound up in trying to hold everything together. Holding everything together really boils down to holding “me” together by staying disconnected from the body.

  Our body, however, has something quite different in mind, so to speak. It invites us to let go of what we are trying to maintain and to drop down into a deeper and fuller way of being. The body has no interest in
our keeping things together and, in fact, inherently undermines our attempt to do so. This is why so many people strenuously ignore and tune out their bodies: they are unwilling to surrender their ambition of focusing exclusively on the “me” and its survival. But the body, once we begin to pay attention to it, leads us into a space where we begin to “fall apart,” to lose control of our ego project of tightly managing our experience and remaining in a state of ignorance and disconnection. Ego distress naturally accompanies this process; hence, the comment that whatever the conditioned personality may have to go through on the journey is not something that worries the body in the least. And so, as we do the body work, we do indeed begin to fall apart.

  Falling apart has been discussed as part of the meditative path by a number of Buddhist teachers, and practitioners are advised to go along with the process and trust it. In most discussions of the topic, however, two things have not been sufficiently emphasized. First, falling apart is a necessary part of the journey, not just something that happens to some people. It is an inevitable part of entering through the gate into larger being.