Touching Enlightenment

by Reginald A Ray

  At this point, we may turn to a spiritual discipline as a way to develop a healthy and creative relationship with the larger self, the complete person that the buddha nature holds out before us. It is through this developing relationship that the spiritual journey is able to unfold, that we are able to communicate with the unconscious and begin to integrate into our conscious awareness the infinitely vaster field of awareness that it represents.

  As we have seen, this integration can only happen by the assimilation of “information,” of aspects of our own relative truth, that have been locked up in the darkness of the body as the unconscious. Through integrating this information, our consciousness is educated, so to speak, gradually disabusing itself of what have now become inadequate notions of itself and its world, freeing the energy of awareness that had previously been locked up in the maintenance of its ignorance and delusion, and finding a much more extensive and porous sense of “self” emerging. This is experienced as our coming more and more into our true nature, increasingly becoming the person we need to be and ultimately are.

  Within the many modern spiritual paths and techniques that are offered in the service of this most profound and fundamental of all human projects, somatically based meditation stands front and center, uniquely so, I think, as perhaps the most simple, accessible, and efficacious in our modern world. By entering into the body, we temporarily surrender our conscious ego boundaries and open ourselves in a completely direct and naked manner to what our soma may have to communicate, what it may have to say to us just now. Through the body work, the long-sought-after voice of the universal unconscious, the alaya, may be heard. Whatever needs to come through to our conscious self is able to flow freely in an immediate and abundant way.

  It is interesting to contrast somatically based meditation with other methods for linking with our ultimate self or person. Traditional religious ritual, of course, can perform this function. However, it is so often mediated through institutionalized religion and so subjected to concrete interpretation that the necessity for completely personal and unique communication with what is ultimate can be blunted, diverted, or co-opted. In addition, conventional religions tend to locate the truth outside of the devotee, which ultimately leads to his or her disempowerment.

  Traditional meditation can be helpful in the individuation process described here, but, as noted, its typically disembodied application in the modern world can yield a disembodied result: we can touch the emptiness of our mind, but, in so doing, find ourself blocked from accessing the ever-expanding field of our relative, conditioned reality—our karmic situation—which is essential for genuine spiritual growth.

  Some modern methods are similarly most helpful in the integrative and maturation process, such as conventional psychotherapy or dream interpretation. But these are somewhat indirect methods, as they often do not address the patient’s disembodiment and rely on the mediation of a therapist and an accurate reading of dream material. The body work provides a contrast wherein we open ourself directly to the “unconscious” and place ourself in a straight line to receive its transformative information. In this respect, one is reminded of a comment Jung made late in his life: he no longer needed to work with his dreams as much, since the “unconscious” now spoke to him directly. In other words, he received the information of his body directly.

  Modern shamanic journeying and soul retrieval can likewise facilitate the integration of contents of the alaya, bringing aspects of our self into conscious awareness in a sometimes dramatic way. This is a specialized technique that is particularly useful when one is deeply “stuck” in one’s regular practice. However, it requires another person and is dependent on the skill and maturity of the mediator. It is accompanied by the additional task of “integrating” retrieved material, which can only happen in people willing to face their own habitual patterns and ego-bound relation to experience. As in the case of disembodied meditation, it may be quite difficult to bring about this kind of integration without a deep somatic grounding and without a “view” (the understanding of our basic openness or emptiness) that can accommodate rather than subvert the new information.

  Within the many techniques available in the traditional and modern world, somatically based meditation, then, may have a unique role to play. It is accessible to everyone; it involves a direct relation with one’s larger self; while benefitting from mentoring, it does not require external mediation, nor is it limited by one’s relationship to another person or other external authority; because it is one’s own body that is the teacher, the aptness and timeliness of what one receives need not be doubted; and it does not depend on religious belief or affiliation or, in fact, even on identifying oneself as a “religious” or “spiritual” person at all. At the same time, though, the various methods and techniques mentioned previously all have their particular gifts and may be useful to the somatic meditator at various points along the way to enhance or elaborate stages and discoveries on the path.

  FORTY-TWO: Ego, the Body, and the Journey

  The person gradually disclosed through the body work, the person that we most fundamentally are, is finally incomparable, unique, and without precedent. As we have seen, this person, our complete person, is present in the body as the buddha nature, though in a latent and unconscious way.

  Through the body work, we develop our relationship with this larger self. Like any relationship, we need to proceed gradually, step by step. Initially we are introduced; then we begin to get to know this larger self; then we become completely committed to it. Finally—at least theoretically—we attain union with it. Thus it is that our relationship with our deepest personhood develops, over a lifetime, in a process of stages.

  Although the person we are in the process of becoming is unique, the stages of that becoming are not. In other words, the unfolding journey toward our own incomparable personhood passes through some common phases. Although these happen differently for each person, nevertheless, they seem to characterize the geography of the journey that is generally recognizable.

  The unfolding journey of our personhood, made through the body, is a reflection of the depth and integrity of the body work. The journey is the guarantee, so to speak, that our body work is actual—real and grounded—not just a collection of abstract ideas, wishful thinking, or fantasies. The journey is a reflection of the transformative power of the somatic work. When we do this work in a genuine way, over time, this is what happens.

  It is important that we understand the nature of this journey toward realization that we are undertaking. It is not a journey toward some external goal that we will one day obtain. Rather, the whole process is one of stripping away everything that is disingenuous, inauthentic, and false—everything that is not ultimately who we are. It is a process of unmasking, taking off the armor, becoming more and more nakedly ourselves.

  We could say that the entire journey is one of becoming more and more genuine as a human being. We are not trying to become someone else or to fulfill some idealized fantasy of who we could be. We are not living up to some high ideal. Rather, we are living down, so to speak, to who we already fundamentally are and always have been. The descent into the darkness of the body is a descent toward ourself in all our fullness and completion, toward our ultimate wholeness.

  On this journey, eventually all our attachment and clinging to conditioned identities and fixations must be surrendered. In the beginning, we find ourself letting go of our personal mask, our posturing, the pretense and hypocrisy with which we show a false image of ourself to our intimates, our friends, and the rest of the world, and, of course, to ourself. Much later, we find ourself challenged to surrender more collective identities, such as our identification with our family, friends, age, gender, and racial makeup; our national identity; and even our identity as a “modern” person, with the worldview and basic self-image that being “modern” entails.

  What we are letting go of often seems to be “us,” who and what we think we are, and it
does often feel as if we are falling apart, disintegrating, dying, or even going crazy. At the same time, as we have seen, it is important to realize that this is ultimately not a negative or destructive process. For, in letting go of all our identity fixations, we become able to touch the utter freedom that lies within us and to live our authentic, ineffable life. This brings the most complete fulfillment a human being can ever experience—that of being fully and completely oneself.

  Again, as we have seen, in order to maintain our current self-image, we turn away from areas of experience of ourself and of the world that are inconsistent with this image and that represent the great majority of what we sense and feel and go through. It would not be accurate to say that these areas are completely unknown to us—as the psychological concept of the unconscious might suggest. Rather, they exist within our body as experience, but experience in reaction against which we are continually advancing our self-image. This self-image, in its structure and its function, is thus a precise response to what already exists as experience, though on a subliminal, somatic level. In a certain sense, then, we are quite aware of everything that our self-conscious ego refuses to acknowledge, and that is why the self-image can be so effective: it knows exactly what it does not want to acknowledge before it enters into the business of ignoring it. So, in a way, the self-image is a kind of mirror or reactive reflection of these larger areas—of our totality, in fact.

  These larger areas, then, exist in the form of experience enfolded in the body. As we have seen, this enfolding is, in some sense, unnatural. All the experience that we receive somatically has a momentum toward awareness; it is the karmic backlog discussed earlier that calls to be discharged. It “wants” to be received within our consciousness; it “wants” to be integrated into it; it “wants” to bring about a self-image that is modified by the experience; and it “wants,” by this process, to be discharged of its burden, its purpose. When we resist the information of somatic experience—and it is the very nature of the modern self-image to resist—then a backlog is created and a pressure exists expressing the information that “wants” to break through.

  That pressure is experienced as neurosis: the attempt to maintain a view and experience of ourself that is inconsistent with the actual situation, that is in conflict with what our body already knows. We feel the pressure of what wants to break through in the form of various unpleasant and unwanted emotions, such as anxiety, dread, uneasiness, fear, impatience, paranoia, desolation, and so on. The First Noble Truth of suffering means that, simply because we are trying to maintain a sense of self, there is some kind of uneasiness or feeling of things being unsatisfactory or off-kilter all the time. In order to maintain our “self,” there is always something we are trying to ignore or deny, and that produces a kind of inescapable suffering, be it mild or intense.

  In the previous pages, we have talked about our “unlived experience,” our “unlived life,” that calls for attention. Why is it that we seem to be so called to live through—completely—everything that has ever occurred to us? We could say that it is an evolutionary exigency: that, for our survival as a species, all experience is valuable; everything that occurs must be received, processed, and integrated, if not now, then later, at some time later in this life when we are ready or, if incarnation is taken into account, in some future birth.

  But there seems to be more to it than that. It would appear that there is a force within us—we could call it spiritual—that wants us to be whole. There is a continual pressure of reality against the boundaries of our self-image, at the very least making clear the inadequacy of the self-image, its lack of self-sufficiency and control over its world.

  If we heed the call and descend into the body, then we find that information comes through at a rapid rate, information that is literally emerging from the recesses of the body, dissolving, correcting, enlarging, and nourishing our concept of ourself. There is some basic force in our life that wants us to be whole, that will not rest with a self-image that is partial and walls off the rest of us.

  Our whole journey is about accommodating more and more of the buddha nature, so that our ego increasingly exists in conscious relation with it, feels devotion for it, and becomes transparent to it. The more we integrate of our larger self, the more stable and open our self-concept becomes. According to Buddhism, there eventually comes a day when the self-concept is barely visible at all, a kind of faint mirage, of no use to ourself whatsoever, but helpful in our relations with those we are trying to help.

  The body work provides the way by which this entire process unfolds. The body’s aim, as the buddha nature, is always to fill us out, round us out, bring us to our own completion.

  FORTY-THREE: The First Stages of the Journey

  Once we enter into spiritual practice, we find the path unfolding according to the series of sequential stages referred to in the previous chapter. In this and the next few chapters, we will examine these spiritual developmental stages in some detail. The first stages, discussed in the present chapter, include some kind of profound existential crisis entering our life; the process of understanding this crisis as an essentially spiritual one; the need for our own response to what we have understood; and, finally, committing ourself to a path of transformative spiritual practice.

  The journey that unfolds through somatically grounded meditation implies an ego that is functional enough to receive the information arising from the body. We are not talking here about a truly “healthy” ego because few, if anyone, in modern societies can claim to be in this category. Since the journey depends on a “functional-enough ego,” it would be accurate to say that the first phase on the path involves the more or less adequate development of such a relative “self.” This process begins, obviously, at birth, extending through childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and beyond.14 When we enter a spiritual path, if not before, many of us discover that our own sense of self is damaged and dysfunctional in various ways that impede our ability to engage spiritual practice in an effective way. Many of us find ourselves turning to psychotherapy and other methodologies to work on stages of ego development that have been missed or were inadequately completed. It is quite interesting, in fact, that the body work described here seems, in a natural and apt way, to address whatever level of development an individual may be in need of, and to provide avenues of healing.

  (14) This initial, all-important phase of the journey is generally not explicitly discussed in pre-modern Asian Buddhist texts. There are probably a number of related reasons for this. For one thing, because traditional Asian Buddhism tended to focus on the later, upper levels of spiritual development, the developmental stages of the “self” never occupied sustained attention. In addition, the development of a wholesome sense of self may not have been the thorny issue for traditional practitioners that it is in the contemporary modern world. Perhaps these cultures themselves possessed childrearing perspectives and methods that were sufficiently effective to stand practitioners in adequate stead. It may also be that the problems that did exist were addressed by cultural mechanisms that stood apart from explicit Buddhist tradition. Further, it does appear that people with serious psychological dysfunction tended to be ignored, at least by institutionalized Buddhism, and to be relegated, within their societies, to low and relatively static stations within the social order. Underlying all of this was the emphasis on “non-self” within elite Asian Buddhism and the fact that the maturation of the human personality (as opposed to the “ego”) was not generally articulated as a value or focus of the spiritual life. back

  THE CRISIS

  For a long time, perhaps, we are able to exist in the illusion that we can live out our life within the framework of our current ego structure. This illusion is maintained by hope and by wishful thinking that the current unsatisfactoriness of our life is temporary and that by fulfilling our personal ego agendas, suddenly our life will change, our pain will disappear, and everything will be satisfactory.

  At a
certain point, however, we may begin to sense that the pain, the aridity, and the struggle inherent in attempts to live within the restricted ego domain are not going to go away. We begin to suspect that this is just the way things are and that, if we are going to address the situation with any hope of forward movement, we need to do something other than just to try harder in the same old way.

  This dawning realization arrives as something of a crisis. Some crises that we experience in life do not seem terribly serious and do not call for fundamental transformation. They appear as a rupture in the fabric of our existence, but one that seems temporary, something that can be addressed and repaired. This kind of crisis generally leaves no unalterable mark upon us. But there is another kind of crisis that is experienced as much more fundamental and inescapable. This basic, existential crisis often comes with a dramatic personal catastrophe: the end of an important relationship; the collapse of a life’s work; cataclysmic upheaval in one’s social world; the death of a loved one; the sudden eruption of debilitating feelings, such as intense anxiety or fear, or deep depression; or the onset of chronic or terminal illness.