The “three yanas,” then, outline the general framework of stages according to which the journey of somatic meditation unfolds. Specifically, when understood from within the framework of embodied meditation practice, Hinayana primarily addresses our own physical body, what we may term the “personal body”; Mahayana speaks of the larger, interpersonal dimension of our somatic being, which we may designate the “interpersonal body”; and Vajrayana speaks about our body in its largest, most universal dimensions, which we may call the “cosmic body.”
The summary I offer here follows the one put forth by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.16 Among accounts of the path in Tibetan Buddhism, Rinpoche’s account is unusual for its experiential subtlety and accuracy in relation to the actual unfolding process. One may observe, both in the traditional Tibetan context and among contemporary teachers who represent the traditional point of view, that you can become a Buddhist in quite a conventionally religious way, reading about Buddhism, taking refuge, joining a Buddhist community, and doing a little meditation practice. Here, there is not necessarily any question of a fundamental existential crisis, or of entry into the dharma as a matter of life and death. Nor is there usually the level of meditation practice that is necessary for the authentic journey to unfold to its maximum extent. One of the reasons behind this conventional presentation to Western students may be that these people are typically viewed by Tibetan lamas as “laypeople,” for whom a more demanding approach would, within the traditional Tibetan framework, generally be considered inappropriate. Another, closely connected reason may be that Tibetans are simply uncertain—and, I think, with good reason—of what their Western students will do with the teaching they receive, and they often elect the safer, more conservative route.
Chögyam Trungpa’s presentation was far more daring and radical. In the early 1970s, he told his early students that he saw them not as ordinary laypeople, but rather as potential “householder yogins,” a type of serious practitioner in both ancient India and classical Tibetan Buddhism. These were people who, though often married, having children, and living “in the world,” practiced the dharma at the highest level, meditating in the contexts of daily life and in retreat. These practitioners received the most advanced instructions and were sometimes held to have attained complete realization. Some of them, in fact, founded lineages that survive today, including that taught by Chögyam Trungpa.
Rinpoche told us that he wanted to instruct us, not as ordinary laypeople, but as householder yogins, with the full range of the Tibetan meditation dharma, organized according to the “three yanas,” including the most advanced Vajrayana teachings. His expectation was that we would meet his generosity with our own openness and willingness to put the teachings we received into practice. Rinpoche expected that the “sitting practice of meditation,” as he called it, would be our primary life commitment.
In his presentation of Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana, Trungpa Rinpoche also used highly experiential language. He made it clear that this was not common in Tibetan tradition but that it was characteristic of those who practiced at the highest, most intense levels—the hermit yogins and the householder yogins. When the journey is, indeed, a matter of one’s very existence, what arises must be shared within the circle of teacher and disciples. When you are practicing at a profound level, unprecedented experience flows forth and this needs to be given voice. This is the ultimate meaning of sangha.
In this area, Rinpoche was innovative also in certain other respects. For one thing, cultural authorization to articulate one’s “practice experience” was often restricted to a minority of the elite, generally tulkus. In addition, one generally talked of practice experience only to one’s guru, one’s closest teacher. In Rinpoche’s case, he talked very openly about his experience with all of us and encouraged us to talk with him and to one another about what was “coming up” in our practice. The following experiential description of the “three yanas,” then, follows Trungpa Rinpoche’s lead.
Hinayana corresponds to that phase of the journey in which we unfold our “personal body,” the body we experience initially as separate from others and from the larger cosmos. In the Hinayana, we realize the inadequacy and, indeed, impossibility of trying to live our life exclusively within the restricted, small self of ego. As a response, we feel inspired to explore our situation openly; to discover a genuine path and commit ourselves to it; and to undertake the practice of meditation. The inspiration at this stage of the journey is to establish ourself in our meditation practice and to open ourself to the discoveries that emerge from that.
The Hinayana phase involves attending to our personal karma, allowing unresolved and—in somatic terms—unlived experience to continually make itself known to us for awareness and integration. This stage is very much confined to a process that seems mainly restricted to us alone, as indeed it must be as the foundation of our journey.
In the Mahayana, we begin to unfold our “interpersonal body,” the “body” that expresses itself in the interpersonal dimension, in an immediate and somatically felt connectedness with other people. As we unfold our interpersonal body, we begin to find emerging within ourself a profound and abiding inspiration to help others. We discover ourself deeply touched by the suffering of others and feel an irresistible urge to extend ourself to be with them and share their pain, to relieve their torment, and to consider how we might share with them whatever is sane and beneficial in us and our experience.
Later still in our development, our unfolding begins to include the larger world itself and to take on an increasingly more extensive scope. In the Vajrayana, we thus unfold a level of our own somatic being that is cosmic in its dimensions. We become aware that there is a pattern to the way the world works, the way relative truth operates. This is a pattern that exists beyond the realm of concept or ego, beyond the realm of our personal or even interpersonal karma. Rather, it is a realm that includes them all. This largest reality is also one that can and must be directly and personally experienced. We begin to find, in our own experience, what traditional religions have meant when they talk about deities, forces, and energies as expressions of a sacred, cosmic order.
These three phases build upon one another. Thus, the Hinayana stage of working with our ever-unfolding personal karma is the basis of our spiritual journey throughout life. As our unfolding becomes more subtle, we begin to engage the interpersonal aspect, “the interpersonal body.” This, again, now becomes an ongoing part of our work and our journey. On the basis of these two, at a certain point, our unfolding becomes even more subtle, and we find ourself relating to the larger, “the cosmic body.” From this point onward, we are practicing Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana simultaneously: working on ourself, helping others, and finding connection with the “self-existing mandala (pattern) of reality,” as it is called.
These general categories are extremely helpful in providing an overview of the most basic stages of the journey. However, they are very general and give us only the most fundamental transition points along the way. Questions still remain as to what more, and more specific, might be said about the stages of the journey.
(16) For example, see Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1973). back
FORTY-SIX: The Body as Guide on the Journey
Clearly, there are many stages and levels to this journey. Initially, the body may be leading us toward a more stable, healthy, wholesome sense of self, helping us fill out and complete developmental stages that have been missed along the way. As we continue, we may sense our clinging to our self-concept softening and admitting greater relaxation and our self-image becoming more open, porous, and flexible. Further along still, we may find ourself holding our self-concept more loosely and even experience periods of time when it is not functioning much at all. At this time, we may discover our experience of reality, of the information delivered by our body, flowing in a quite free, open, unrestricted way. Each of these general leve
ls of maturation has its own challenge provided, as always, by the body, for the body is the one that calls into question our current image of ourself, however we may be holding it, and invites us to go further. Even though these levels unfold in a graduated and stage-by-stage fashion, even beginning practitioners may have glimpses of stages far ahead of their immediate level of experience and understanding.
At each stage, whether near the beginning, in the middle of the journey, or near the end, there is always the challenge of letting go, surrendering, and giving in to the dissolution of our current self-concept. And there is always the challenge of rebirth of our self-concept. It is important to realize that coming to rebirth holds its own kind of pain. Death and letting go, painful though they are, land us in a space that is open and filled with ease. But then, we find ourself needing to “come back,” so to speak, to reappear. The movement from non-existence back to existence as a “self,” even if it is a porus and flexible one, can be felt as extraordinarily painful for the restriction it involves. This will be the case until we are well advanced on the journey, where the “self” that rearises from the ashes is felt to be quite insubstantial and unreal, little more than a transparent expression of the emptiness from which it is born.
In all of this, the body is a kind, gentle, and most compassionate guide and mentor. In contrast to the rather frightening and off-putting notions of spiritual practice as getting rid of our “self” altogether, the body guides us to let go of our current idea of who we are—yes, to suffer the pain and loss of the letting go and the dissolution, but then to find ourself reborn, this time with another, more inclusive, more realistic, far more generous (to both ourself and others) sense of self. In this way, the path is incremental, but it is continuous and the journey goes on and on and on.
It must be incremental, because—although we may have moments of glimpsing reality itself—our ability to experience, to mediate to others, and finally to dissolve into the totality itself can only develop incrementally. As we have seen, through the surfacing of more and more of our “unconscious,” the unlived experience stored in our body, our awareness opens, deepens, and becomes increasingly vast and inclusive. Concomitant with this, our ego, in its progressive rebirth, comes into increasing harmony with the endless worlds beyond, more easily open and receptive to the totality of reality, of the buddha nature, its intentions for us and its movement toward us. Eventually, our “self-concept” is nothing but the totality itself, beyond any and all conceptualizing. At this point, as mentioned, the “ego” has grown so vast and has included so much that it no longer stands in opposition to anything. At this point, it has become everything and is therefore nothing.
In one sense, the notion of being utterly without any “self” is an end point that is perhaps never reached, a far-off goal that keeps us heading in the right direction and guides us along the way. In another sense, though, each time the information delivered by the body is truly heard, we suffer an ego death, and in the moment of dissolution, we have a glimpse of the utter nonexistence of “me.”
FORTY-SEVEN: Encountering the Shadow
Modern therapeutic psychology makes frequent reference to the “shadow,” the assemblage of qualities and attributes that are being denied entrance into our awareness because they are, at present, too inconsistent with the self-concept we are trying to maintain. The notion of the shadow, first made popular by Jung, points to “our ‘other side,’ our ‘dark brother,’ who is an invisible part of our psychic totality ... It is a part of the individual, a split-off portion of his being.” It holds the “unlived” parts of ourself, “qualities the ego does not need or cannot use.”17 The shadow develops along with the ego: the more the ego gains in shape, definition and stability, the more consolidated the shadow becomes. In people’s lives and especially in therapy, the shadow makes itself known through manifestations of the inner life, such as illnesses, emotional upheavals, memories, visions, and dreams, and also of the outer life, through people and situations, especially those to which we have intense emotional reactions.
This concept of the shadow is helpful in understanding the spiritual unfolding that occurs through meditating with the body, but it does need to be redefined, generalized, and also broadened. Within the perspective of Tibetan yoga, as we have seen, everything that is not ready to be received by our conscious mind at this time, everything that is denied admittance to our consciousness, abides in darkness. As we have seen, the totality of the darkness exists in the body in an enfolded state: the conscious mind not being ready to receive the information it holds, it abides in a highly condensed, impacted state in our body, out of sight. There it waits, impending, until the moment in the spiritual journey arrives when—as karmic fruition, out of the darkness—it approaches our consciousness to be received, experienced, and integrated with our conscious awareness.
The term “shadow” is commonly used to refer to everything that is not the ego, the totality of the “not-I” world that the ego holds at bay. While using the term in the same way in this book to refer to the totality of the “not-I,” it will be useful to divide this “shadow” into two parts. First are those aspects of our shadow that lie in complete darkness and are not ready to approach consciousness for admission. They are the illimitable inhabitants of the alaya, those aspects of our unlived experience whose moment of karmic fruition has not arrived and may not arrive for years or lifetimes.
Second, are those aspects of our “shadow” that do not lie in complete darkness, but reside in a kind of shadowy half-dark between the inaccessible darkness and the full light of our consciousness. These “shadowy” aspects are beginning to approach consciousness. They are those parts of our unlived experience whose time has come to appear as karmic fruition requiring our response. As these contents approach our consciousness, we often sense them—sometimes days, weeks, or even months ahead of time. When we are engaged in our somatic practice, we may discover a brooding, impending quality in our body, a feeling that something is about to emerge from the half-dark. It is no longer in the completely unknown darkness, but what it is can not yet be discerned—it lies in the shadowy no-man’s land, again, between the black depths of the alaya and our consciousness.
This can be a mainly somatic experience—a kind of sense of something coming—and it can also arrive in the more specific form of feelings felt in the body, such as anxiety, foreboding, anticipation, excitement, and even dread or terror. In addition, it sometimes announces itself through dreams, comments others make that strike us strangely, even small events in our life that seem to carry some out-of-proportion weight.
In contrast to the deep darkness, what lies in the shadows always has a quality of directionality toward consciousness—it wants to be known now and integrated with conscious awareness. As we have seen, this is a reflection of the natural operation of the buddha nature, of the maturation process by which we humans are called to fulfill our inborn fate or destiny. The accumulation of unlived experience is, as we have seen, part of our process as humans, part of the operation of the buddha nature. But the willingness of our buddha nature to tolerate—to “put up with”—experience that remains unlived is only temporary. Unlived experience, by its very nature, is always awaiting the moment when it can be lived through, deliver itself into awareness, and fulfill its own destiny within human existence.
Whether or not anything significant is about to appear, we always sense the subtle pressure of the directionality of the shadow toward consciousness in the form of our own resistance. This may be felt internally as physical tension, pain, or emotional distress, or externally in our slight hostility, impatience, or fear in relation to events in our life. However, because the information of the shadow is always threatening in one way or another to our conscious status quo, because by its nature it “does not go along” with what we want to think of ourself and the world, or want to accomplish, we ignore and push away its information as much as possible, focusing our attention in other directions. And
what we aren’t willing to look at, we convince ourself we don’t see.
But, of course, in order to advance on our spiritual journey, we need what the shadow holds. It is interesting that, in a way, while we resist the information contained in the shadow, there is something in us that longs for it at the same time. There is something in us that longs for the half-light and the darkness of the shadowlands, longs for the mystery and the unknown reaches of our being. This “something” is our awareness; just as unlived experience wants to be received and lived, at the same time, our own awareness wants the same thing. It wants to receive that life fully.
We have seen the way in which parts of our larger awareness become tied up and preoccupied with keeping the unwanted contents of the body, the shadow, the alaya, at bay. Tied up in this way and suffering the resultant restriction, awareness itself wants to liberate itself into its own boundless, unconditioned state. Many people come to meditation because they feel a compelling need to open and free themselves, whatever may be the cost to their ego.
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