What sets this fundamental kind of crisis apart is not so much the apparent gravity of the precipitating event, but rather the impact of the event upon us, how we experience it. For Gautama Buddha, for example, it was brought on simply by seeing, one day, a sick man, an old, decrepit man, and a deceased man, commonplace experiences in his culture. But somehow, these ordinary things plunged him into a dark and inescapable despair: seeing that all life ends in old age, disease, and death,15 he realized that everything he had pinned his hopes on for his own fulfillment was empty and meaningless.
In our own modern life, a crisis becomes an irreversible existential collapse when our basic idea about ourself, our life, and our possible happiness is revealed to be false, without truth, merit, or substantial reality. We feel not only that we have lost any idea of who we are or what is real and unreal, but that the ground has literally fallen out from under our feet.
(15) Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, 39–40. back
INTERPRETING THE CRISIS
In the modern context, of course, this kind of ego crisis is often viewed as a pathological development in need of immediate, corrective intervention—whether psychotherapeutic, psychiatric, social, religious, or otherwise.
For Buddhism, though, it is seen as a positive development that, though possessing steep challenges and dangers, is the necessary first step without which a genuine spiritual journey is not possible. In this way, such a crisis is understood itself as an expression of the buddha nature, wherein the actual, stark truth of our human situation comes clearly into focus for the first time. We see that the struggle to attain comfort, security, and lasting happiness, which defines the life and activity of our “relative self,” is a hopeless task—that relative gains and satisfactions are unable to address the deep longing for fulfillment that all of us feel. This insight is critical to our spiritual unfolding because, as long as we feel that our basic satisfaction can be attained through modifications of our life brought about by our conditioned “self” in its current form, the genuine path—aiming at the dethroning of our conditioned “self” as the ultimate arbiter and authority of our existence—cannot be engaged.
An important dialectical relationship exists between this teaching and one’s experience of falling apart described previously. When individuals do not possess the view of the inherently limited nature of ego in relation to the deeper self, when they believe their ego perspective is the only possible one, it makes it much more difficult to allow themselves to fall into the kind of hopelessness that must accompany genuine and profound existential crisis and eventual transformation. Over the course of my teaching life, I have met many people suffering the kinds of crisis mentioned previously, including terminal illness, who still feel compelled to hold on to their “relative self” and to the belief that somehow its previous state of affairs will or can or might be restored.
I have pondered why the deeper possible message is not getting through, why the spiritual gate is not seen or entered. Might part of the answer not be this: that such folks have not possessed, within their intellectual repertoire, the notion that such experiences are not necessarily purely negative, but may offer the hope of genuine growth—that there is, so to speak, life beyond ego, or actual death? Perhaps it is that they do not possess, in other words, the view of the fundamental reality of the larger self, the view that relative loss may be nothing other than the breakthrough of the greater self, the source of all joy, freedom, and fulfillment. By contrast, those who have been exposed to the non-theistic view of Buddhism or of some other, similar spiritual tradition, seem to have a greater ability to see their breakdown as an at least potentially positive, if still extraordinarily painful, development. Such people seem to be able to allow in the full, desperate impact of what is happening to them and, somehow, to keep their mind and experience open, even within the darkness.
Through the profound existential crisis, the ego has been temporarily weakened, depotentiated in psychological terms. This depotentiation allows the larger, unbiased intelligence of our “true nature” to break through and be heard. Even perceiving our disrupted situation as a fundamental existential crisis with no apparent way out is, in itself, an expression of the buddha nature, of a primordial level of intelligence within us that is no longer distorted by the wishful thinking or self-absorption of the ego.
THE INVITATION
If we have the “view” of the buddha nature—or if we sense the universal goodness of life, which amounts to the same thing—such fundamental existential crises can be experienced as invitations to look into our existence in a fresh way, with new eyes. Once we have recovered from the initial shock of the collapse of our life, we may find our self left with curiosity about what is happening. With everything that we thought or imagined about ourself in a state of disarray and devastation, we may begin to wonder what is left: Now that our dreams have been shattered, who are we actually? Who may we be?
Like the full and unimpeded experience of our own collapse, this curiosity is an expression of our larger self, our buddha nature. To be able to turn and look, with curiosity and even wonder, at our ravaged hopes and dreams implies, again, an intelligence that stands apart from the restricted, ingrown consciousness bounded by the ego. It is our greater self coming toward us.
THE RESPONSE: COMMITTING OURSELVES TO A PATH
Thus it is that somatic meditation provides us with a way of looking at our life that can not only accommodate the most profound of existential crises, but also help us to have confidence in what is occurring and to discover within ourself an attitude of curiosity toward it. Beyond this, it also offers ways of acting on our curiosity. It provides a detailed set of perspectives, practices, and techniques enabling us to explore our collapse as well as to find out more about it and what it may mean for any future life we may have.
Seeing that we cannot return to our previous status quo, that we cannot make our way back to our ego’s prior “business as usual” approach, we see that there is no choice but to go ahead, exploring the landscape of devastation that is our current life, to see what is there. This feeling of choicelessness about our course of action is also an expression of the buddha nature. Knowing we have no alternative, we clearly see that any attempts to turn our gaze in some other, more “hopeful” direction are just expressions of our own fear and hesitation. Again, witness the intelligence of the buddha nature. Understanding it, we determine to take up the practices of the path and proceed onward. Actually, we see that we have no choice but to commit ourself to this voyage of exploration, and that we need only the tools provided by tradition to make the journey.
FORTY-FOUR: Aspects of the Unfolding Process
As previously discussed, in the first stage of our life journey, our ego or “relative self” emerges within the totality of experience. Of course, for a fetus in utero or a newborn child, we are not talking about experience in quite the way we might usually understand it. Yet, clearly at these early levels there is a registering, an awareness that receives and, in some sense, remembers what is going on. We know this from our own and other people’s extraordinarily early memories.
Within our own totality, which is continually arising and being experienced in the body, whatever is deemed incompatible is “enfolded.” Of course, to talk about somatic “experience,” we are speaking of something that is initially subliminal, sensed but not clearly seen. Moreover, what appears in subliminal experience may come from the “inside,” arising as feelings, images, and so on. Equally, it may come from the “outside,” as an event, circumstance, or situation, once again calling for our attention and integration.
Whatever arises in and through the body does so, as we have seen, in accordance with the operation of karma. Karma holds our locked-up awareness, the larger buddha nature, of which we are only partially aware. Whatever of our karmic totality has not made its way into conscious awareness abides in the body. At any given time, a certain aspect of that totality begins to press toward consciousness; the
totality intends that this come to birth now.
It might not be pressing toward awareness until just now because, before this moment, it was not ready to do so, having been held at some deep level of enfoldment. Again, it may not have appeared in consciousness because, though ready to emerge at a certain moment as a step in our development, we have resisted it and pushed it back into the body. Either way, at a certain point, there is a pressure from the body toward consciousness, to communicate whatever, in the mysterious timing of our existence, is needed or appropriate.
If we resist what is appearing in the body, at the verge of our awareness—and most of us modern people do habitually resist in order to rigidly maintain ourselves—what is trying to arise is pushed back, denied, and again held at bay in the body. There it resides within the shadows of our somatic being, in an ever-increasing residue—as that which our consciousness is in the continual process of ignoring, resisting, and denying.
Residing in the shadows, all those aspects of our totality that are being denied admittance into conscious awareness continue to function in a powerful but unseen way, being reflected in the nature, structure, and activity of our ego.
This process roughly corresponds to the psychological concept of repression, but there are some important differences. For one thing, the activity of the ego in “repressing” experience is seen here as ultimately not negative, but dynamic and creative in function. In our life, the ego emerges out of the unconscious as the field of our conscious awareness, the immediate domain in which our experience can be received and integrated. At the same time, the ego moderates what it takes in, resisting that which it is unready and unable to receive.
There is much intelligence in this. An ego that is too rigid and frozen cannot accommodate the experience that is needed in order for us to grow. But an ego that is simply overwhelmed and pushed aside by experience cannot integrate the needed experience either. Spirituality, it would seem, depends on an ego—a field of consciousness—that can change and grow with the needs of our journey toward wholeness. Thus it is that spirituality is not about “getting rid of” or obliterating the ego, but rather about enabling the ego into a process of openness, increasing experience, death, and rebirth, as it integrates more and more of the buddha nature and itself becomes more aligned with and in service to our own totality. A buddha is not a person who has eliminated or wiped away his or her ego, but someone in whom the ego has integrated so much that there is no longer any room for individual identity at all.
Thus, we can see that neurosis is, in a real sense, an ultimately creative process. By initially resisting our totality, the ego is creating a backlog of “unlived experience.” This backlog is felt as an increasing pressure from the body, the “unconscious,” the buddha nature. New awareness is called for, and the more the pressure builds, the more struggle on the part of the ego is required to maintain the repression. This is not a situation that can be maintained indefinitely. The pressure mounts and, at a certain point, can no longer be resisted.
This is where the existential crises emerge into one’s life. Some people will respond by taking up and following a spiritual path, deliberately seeking a relationship with the source of the pressure, the momentum toward awareness. Others will devote themselves to rear-guard actions, trying to recapture the ego situation they have lost. Either way, the process continues and has its impact. The ego can’t win. In the long run, whether through conscious cooperation or by force of the unavoidable, the ego mechanism eventually begins to break down. Whether we like it or not, learning occurs. Buddhism takes a very long view: this process takes innumerable lifetimes, and whatever we may do or suffer in this life—whether we are conscious or unconscious of what is occurring—is part of that ultimately positive, creative process.
There is a second way in which the traditional concept of repression is inadequate in the context of meditating with the body. The idea of repression generally assumes that the objects of repression recede into the “unconscious,” where we are unaware of them. In the theory of somatic meditation, as mentioned, we come to see that we are not entirely unconscious of these shadowy aspects, but “sense” them in the body and react to them there. And, as we have seen, they are actually part of our functioning ego itself, as that which it is continually resisting.
Through descending into the darkness of the body, we no longer remain enclosed within the boundaries of consciousness implied by the ego. In this work, we are opening our awareness into the enfolded domains of our experience themselves. When we do so, the messages of the body, the messages of our enfolded or our “unconscious” experience, communicate themselves directly to our awareness. Then, returning to the surface, so to speak, we go through a process of integrating what we have touched into our consciousness, enlarging our self-concept and bounded awareness.
As we have seen, the body itself has its own timetable. Messages come through, information comes through in the nature of insight—we simply see things about ourself and about our world that we had not seen before. Again, this information may be the result of recent repression, or it may simply be utterly new, something that has never before sought to make itself known to us. This information may come in the form of bodily sensations, feelings, images, memories, intuitions, vague, almost imperceptible feeling tones, thoughts, and so on. But in each case, it is the expression of the unfolding process: no longer walled off outside the domain of consciousness, our body begins to deliver information that it has been holding for us and that it needs to deliver now, at this precise moment.
It is important to understand the intent of our basic being, our fundamental self, the buddha nature. It is not quite, as the Jungians might say, that “we” become whole, that “we” attain a completion of personality, or that “we” embody the totality. From the somatic point of view, this kind of language, while helpful up to a certain point, carries forward too much the notion of an “I” that attains wholeness. There is too much the notion of an “I” that survives the process and that is the experiencer of the wholeness.
The somatic lineage proposes a slightly different way of framing the matter: the intention of the buddha nature is for the boundaries to the totality—not our totality but the totality—to be dissolved. This dissolution, which is accomplished only through a long process of gradual development, is classically said to be for the ultimate benefit of both ourself and others. It benefits ourself because our ultimate and final freedom and fulfillment are only attainable when we recognize that we are not and that only the totality, in and of itself, is. We could say that we recognize that “we” are nothing other than an expression of the totality itself, except in the final realization, any kind of separate “we” disappears. We—or something—ultimately arrives at wholeness in and of itself. This wholeness is, in and of itself, the nature of awareness. The “end point,” then, is wholeness aware of itself. Only here can the journey be felt to have been completed. If there is any sense of ultimate freedom and fulfillment, this is it.
This realization is also for the ultimate benefit of others because the totality, known as the dharmadhatu, exists solely as a fount of compassion directed toward suffering beings. When the boundaries walling off the totality dissolve, the full flood of the compassion of reality itself can issue forth, through the incarnated being we are, through our mind, our words, and everything we do. Without human beings performing this role of being utterly nothing in this way, the compassion of the universe is unable to express itself fully and freely. Such is the ultimate benevolence of the human person. Such is the mystery of the human incarnation.
When we are deeply immersed in our body, when the avenues of communication between our body, the buddha nature, and our conscious ego are open, the process of our own unfolding carries forward in a continuous, unabated way. This doesn’t mean that there will not be starts, stops, sudden openings, or periods when we feel hopelessly bogged down. But all of these will be part of the actual process itself with which we are deeply a
nd intimately connected.
FORTY-FIVE: A Tibetan View of the Major Stages of Unfolding
Earlier in this section, I said that there are major stages of unfolding that are shared or held in common among those meditators who make the spiritual journey. This raises the question as to what those major stages are and how we may talk about them. A very helpful and, I think, generally applicable formulation of these stages is provided by Tibetan yoga. This tradition describes three yanas, or “vehicles,” three progressive stages of development: Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Hinayana is the “small” or “limited” vehicle; Mahayana, the “great” or “expansive” vehicle; and Vajrayana, the “adamantine” or “indestructible” vehicle.
It is important to emphasize that these three vehicles do not refer to historically existing schools but to stages of the spiritual path and corresponding levels of spiritual maturation as conceived within Tibetan Buddhism. Thus, Hinayana does not, as is sometimes wrongly supposed, refer to Southern or Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana does not refer to Ch’an, Zen, and Pure Land Buddhism of East Asia. There has, admittedly, been confusion in the past on this important point, because traditional Tibetan teachers have lacked an accurate understanding of Buddhist historical development and have consequently conflated their developmental model with living historical schools—schools of which they had little or no direct knowledge. The “three vehicles” represent stages of spiritual development that potentially apply to any spiritual practitioner, whether they follow the Theravada, Zen, Pure Land, or Tibetan Buddhist path, or some other tradition, including those of the other “high religions” and of the indigenous traditions.
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