Touching Enlightenment

by Reginald A Ray

  In each such encounter, the person emerges from the shadows, into the light of our experience, as an expression of our ripening karma, bringing with him- or herself some part of ourself that we need just now. In each encounter, we are meeting just that aspect of ourself that is clamoring to be received, experienced, and integrated with our conscious awareness just at this moment. How do we do this? As with our personal body, so with others, our interpersonal body: we do not withdraw from the immediacy and somatic intensity of their presence; we do not judge or come to conclusions about them on any level. Instead, we receive the totality of what they embody, what they are.

  Each encounter, each situation, however minor and insignificant it may seem, thus holds an aspect of our person in need of being unfolded, of being received and integrated. It is always the unrecognized aspects of our larger self that are coming, seeking us out at this moment. This is precisely what is meant in the Vajrayana when it is said that, in meeting the other openly and without barrier, we are meeting our larger self. When we look in our partner’s eyes, it is the larger self—our body, in the larger sense, as the body of reality—that is looking back. Every experience of life is an expression of wisdom, of our deeper nature calling us to recognize it and see it as who we truly are.

  FIFTY-TWO: Integrating Further Depths of the Shadow

  In exploring our somatic being, as we have seen, we learn more and more how to abide in the shadows of the body, amidst all its openness, its uncertainty, its mysteries, and its abundance of life. As our journey progresses, it is always a question of how much, how fully, we can allow ourselves to be. As we move beyond the need to have a rigid, consistent, continuous self-concept, we find our self more and more willing to allow our body to constantly call into question and disrupt our prevailing idea of who we are, and to give birth to a more open, porous, and flexible way of being. As we experience this ongoing process of death and rebirth, we find that our ability to accommodate who and what we are gradually increases. Where does this capacity to accommodate ourself in greater and greater measure come from? Clearly, it comes primarily from our evolving relationship with our body, from our ability to live on a more somatic, rather than a primarily conceptual, level.

  For example, at any point in our life, we are a certain age with a specific idea of who we are, a specific self-identity. As we experience our body ever more deeply, we to realize that, in fact, this is only a small fragment of who we are. We discover that we are capable of being, at any moment, any of the persons we have ever been, through all the ages and all the experiences that we have ever lived through. In a real sense, they are all in us.

  In a previous chapter, I recounted my own experience of finding myself as a baby in his crib, unattended, crying with hopelessness and despair, filled with immeasurable rage at a mother who would not come. In my somatic embodiment, I was not remembering that small child’s experience—I was being it. For a period of time, I was that tiny, abandoned child who had lost all hope, and I was nothing else. In fact, as the small child had been, I was nothing other than the feelings of despair and rage.

  It is the same with all the other ages and all the other beings we have ever been, along with all their experiences. Through our dreams, through feeling and emotional states that come suddenly upon us, and through the people we meet and situations we find ourself in, we discover not our current self, but an other—a person from a different time and place: an encounter with our parents in our childhood; meetings with friends and acquaintances we have not thought of in decades; awkward, intense anxiety of puberty; feeling the strange, heady, first intoxication of passion; a first moment of love for our newborn child; unbearable longing for a lost friend. Each of these embody, in some way, some person who we’ve been—baby, child, adolescent, young adult, new parent, etc. This is not a person corresponding to our current, somewhat removed memory, not with this intensity of feeling, this depth of pain, this all-consuming longing, this wild passion or joy. Or is this the self we were but just could not fully be until right now? Is it all other ages and selves we have ever been but could never fully be, which have been enfolded in our body until now, when we can finally live them fully and include them in our journey toward wholeness?

  One of the most interesting layers of unfolding that occurs for modern somatic practitioners involves areas of experience that stand outside of basic cultural expectations of what is real or possible. I am speaking here particularly of experiences that point to orders of reality that are sometimes dramatically different from the ones we usually inhabit as modern people. These might include encounters with the “natural world” that reveal supernatural dimensions; finding oneself in certain places that literally seem not of this world, but of another, sacred dimension; perceptions of a present but generally “unseen world,” that finds expression in the cosmologies and pantheons of the world’s religious traditions; having experiences of “magic” or “synchronicity” for which the “scientific worldview” has no explanation; or meeting animals that are more than animals and people that are more than people.

  The important point is that such experiences are not examples of dissociation, nor are they expressions of random fantasy or hallucination. They are, the body work shows us, already present at a very subtle level in our body, in our perceptions, in our somatic experience. There, they have been enfolded, repressed into the body, because our conscious, cultural orientation cannot accommodate them, not only denying that such things exist, but also denigrating and ostracizing anyone who reports experiencing them. Such realities make up a very large part of the unacknowledged shadow of contemporary culture, and, as we shall presently see, when we engage the body at its most subtle level, we meet them face-to-face.

  FIFTY-THREE: The Cosmic Body I: Transcending the Scientific Worldview

  As experienced by the body, the external world—the cosmos in the largest sense—is inherently a sacred and magical realm. This cosmos is, moreover, not separate from the body, but is rather the body’s vast, extensive form.

  Many people remember early childhood perceptions of the world as a mysterious and magical place, quite different from later experience and far more meaningful. We may recall, for example, the timeless quality of the breeze whispering through pines by the sea; a brilliant blue sky that held the utter peace of a hot summer day; approaching thunderstorms bringing some kind of unknown, powerful abundance of life; a strangely shaped tree in our yard that seemed charged with a frightening, august presence; certain places in the woods that seemed filled with a kind of non-ordinary reality; or an old grandfather clock whose steady, rhythmic ticking held some ancient truth of comfort, security, and love.

  It is customary in modern culture to think of such experiences as “not really how the world is,” as “childish,” fanciful projections onto the world that need to be outgrown in adulthood. The “grown-up” way of perceiving the world as lifeless and meaningless is held to be more mature, more accurate, and truer to life. The popular idea of the “scientific” universe as simply the manifestation of dead matter interacting according to certain “laws” is held by most people to be definitive.

  Some of us may take an interest in past or present indigenous religious traditions of the world, such as those in Australia, Africa, or North or South America. What is striking about these religions, of course, is that they often articulate an experience of the world as mysterious and filled with meaning—an experience that has much in common with our own earliest perceptions. In those cultural traditions, certain animals may be experienced as non-ordinary beings bringing truth and reality to humans. Certain other aspects of nonhuman nature, such as trees, rocks, mountains, rivers, and bodies of water may be perceived as sacred presences with intelligence and intention toward humans. In the indigenous “earth-based” religions, communication with these presences is considered necessary to the ongoing project of becoming fully human and experiencing a life worth living.

  It is interesting that nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century anthropology typically discounted such perceptions as reflecting an immature state of human evolution. In explicit references to Western childhood experiences, it was often held that such indigenous ways of seeing the world were reflections of the “childhood of the human race,” the result of misunderstanding coming about through either erroneous conceptual thinking or dire emotional need. Since modern science had revealed the real world to be devoid of meaning, the experience of the “primitives,” as they were called, could be outgrown once and for all.

  During the past three quarters of a century, though, the question of what constitutes our most basic way of perceiving the world has been taken up again in some new and refreshing ways. Historians, philosophers, practitioners of the arts, psychologists, anthropologists, deep ecologists, phenomenologists, and others have been asking how, most fundamentally, we experience our world as human beings. What is it that marks our most basic human manner of perception? Some very interesting responses to this question have begun to emerge.

  When we are able to be aware of our most basic level of perception, we find that it does not at all conform to the small, limited, desacralized “scientific” world that most people assume to be “the way it really is.” In fact, our innate perceptual experience has no boundaries or limits at all: each perception has a kind of mysterious, boundless quality. Suppose we call to mind a particular tree that stands near where we live. When we do, a mental image of that tree immediately arises, perhaps including general shape, size, trunk and branches, the way it stands in the ground, its color, and its overall appearance. This mental image, then, has identifiable and recognizable features. However, our actual experience of that tree when we look at it from the viewpoint of our most fundamental level of awareness, from the depth of our body, is very different. It doesn’t have any of the features that we usually think of as belonging to it. It is a far more uncertain, powerful, and meaningful presence. This is how, at the most fundamental perceptual level, it actually reveals itself to human experience.

  When we see the tree in the dead way, we have distanced and removed ourself from our own primary somatic experience of it. We have withdrawn from our perception at the basic level of the body and retreated into our concepts. When we see the world in this dead, denatured way, it is really our own thoughts that we are experiencing, not the world as it initially and most fundamentally gives itself to us.

  Within the somatic perspectives being developed here, what has happened is that we have enfolded our actual experience of the world into the cosmic layer of our bodies, our alaya, covering it over with our “cosmic ego,” the solid, conceptualized image of the universe that we carry around with us as modern people. We have set the wall of our ego against our more primal perceptions as a kind of denial, which, like all aspects of the self-concept, requires ongoing reconsolidation and maintenance.

  It is quite interesting that the “scientific” manner of experiencing the world is not affirmative: it is arrived at by excluding a huge range of innate, experiential information (intuition, feeling, a sense of connectedness, the abundance of sensation, the immediate recognition of the value of the other, etc.) and by saying what the world is not—it is not really given to us in our feeling life, our intuitive impressions, our actual experiences; it is not powerful; it is not mysterious; it is not magical; it possesses no inherent meaning. What our world really is, is the abstract picture arrived at by the specialists.

  Initially, of course, such an abstraction doesn’t conform to anybody’s actual experience. But the valuation of the abstraction over what is actually seen and felt does send a strong message: “Your earliest and most basic perceptions of reality are not to be trusted; you cannot trust your experience. What you are taught by ‘modern culture’ to think about reality takes precedence.”’ Much of the burden of conventional preschool and primary education is to train people out of their preexisting way of sensing the world and into the meaningless, conceptual version established by the popular idea of “the scientific community” as the real one. Through this process, of course, we eventually become almost completely unaware of the non-conceptual stratum of the world and come to believe that our denatured and deadened concept is the actual reality, the only reality. We may continue to maintain contact with the (now) underworld of magic through dreams and through the work of visual artists, poets, and musicians; but rarely do we really consider that the world we find in these ways might be the real one.

  FIFTY-FOUR: The Cosmic Body II: The Earth as Our Body

  As we progress in exploring the body, there comes a point when it is apparent that our experience of the “external world” is undergoing a shift. We sense that what is out there is actually much bigger and also much more mysterious and open-ended than we had previously thought. The ordinary world of mundane perception gradually dissolves into an increasingly vast and expanding universe, a cosmos of unimaginable proportions bordering on infinity.

  When this experience occurs in the course of the body work, it does not come as a complete surprise. From the very beginning in working with the body, there have been moments when we had glimpses and even extended periods when we touched a universe that is very different from the more habitual one that we are used to.

  Over the course of meditating with the body, the focal length and configuration of our awareness have been undergoing an alteration. Rather than being preoccupied almost entirely with the world outside or tangled up inside in our thoughts or emotional states, we sense a space within ourself that is open and very vast, a kind of backdrop to all our experience. In the course of the body work, we have come upon this space in specific places that act as portals, such as the lower belly, the heart, the back of the palate, the top of the spine where the sphenoid and the atlas meet, the back of the head, and sometimes occasionally even the entire body bounded by our skin. Meeting and looking through, or dropping through, these portals, we have suddenly found ourself in space without conditions or limits and, perhaps, we have been able to explore a little of the boundlessness we have found there.

  This illimitable space that we discover in the various locales in our body—or perhaps through various locales—already has cosmic dimensions. It presents itself not only as without any limits, but also—experientially—as not having any “location” at all, including that of our body. This very specific experience leaves us with the questions “Is this space inside our body? Is it outside? Where is it? What is it?”

  At a fairly early stage of training in meditating with the body, the cosmic dimension of the body is touched: we deliberately begin to open our awareness beyond the limits of the apparently physical and personal body. Through the group of Earth Breathing practices (an example is given in the Appendix), we extend our awareness downward, below the surface of the ground we may be sitting or lying on. Initially, we meet our own concepts of what is under us. But through repeated practice, we discover that we can, abruptly, “look” down into the earth—and that what we find is open space. Beyond this, we can actually drop our entire awareness into the space of the earth under us.

  The exploration is gradual. Initially, we drop down just a foot under us, then two feet, and so on, down to ten feet. Then we go down 100 feet, 1000, 2000, 5000 feet, then a mile, two miles, ten miles, and beyond. As we become more familiar with these vistas, we find ourself able to enter the earth under us and fall as rapidly as we wish, with no apparent limit. On the way down, so to speak, our experience changes; the deeper we go, the more primordial the feeling of the space that we find.

  What we learn through this Earth Breathing technique is that while we may think of the earth as a solid mass of dense matter, the actual experience we have when we extend our awareness downward is entirely different. The earth is space, but it is a certain kind of space: it is empty but, at the same time, inviting, warm, and with the feeling of peace and equanimity. And it is incredibly grounding. Strange as it seems, the deeper we go down into the space of the earth, the more ope
n the universe seems to be and, at the same time, the more grounded we feel. None of this is anything that we might have anticipated. When we arise from our meditation, we find ourself there on the earth in a very simple and ordinary way; but, strangely, while in one way the feel of the earth under us is solid and supporting, in another way—which doesn’t contradict this feeling and, in fact, expresses it—the earth is unconditionally open, spacious, and accommodating.

  This feeling evolves in interesting ways. Initially, we simply find that the earth under us is space. But then a feeling tone begins to become evident—the warmth, peace, and equanimity just mentioned. As our experience becomes more subtle, we feel a call from the depths under us: it is as if we are being called back, called down to something incredibly important, to that which we have, in some way, been missing all our life. As we continue, along with the longing, we discover a growing feeling of contentment and security, as if we are approaching some kind of primal resting place.