The cosmic order of experience is possible for any of us at any time, whether we are in the wilderness or in rural or urban environments. Insofar as there is a perceivable world, the cosmic dimension is ever available. When we see the city streets wet and steaming in the summer sunshine after a sudden downpour, we may find ourself touching eternity. The scream of sirens in the night tells of the care and love that bind us all. The tension, anxiety, and stress on the human faces we pass on a crowded street reveal the universal tenderness and pain of the human person. We may even find in the city itself a living, breathing, transcendent presence underlying, animating, and holding it all.
The preceding helps us understand the full meaning of the Buddhist teaching on egolessness: we see that our “ego,” the tiny self-concept we have constructed as “me,” is a dream without reality, and, in this realization, far from recognizing our fundamental state of being as nothing, we grow into the recognition that it is everything. Unlocking our unconditioned awareness further and further through the “relative” experiences first of our immediate body, then of our interpersonal body, and finally of the cosmos itself, we discover that we are not, and never have been, anything but the totality, and that our human body and our human life are nothing more than a means for the recognition of this and for sharing it with others. All of this we gain once we enter the gateway of the body fully and completely.
This discovery of our final and ultimate state of being has many, many important implications for potential impact, not only on our individual and collective lives as human beings, but also on the global crisis we all now face. For example, the foregoing suggests that the basis of contemporary deep ecology can be nothing other than such full somatic awakening and awareness. It is not good enough—because it is too indirect and ineffectual—to know only intellectually that we are inseparable from the world around us and that each creature and each natural reality has its own reason for being and its own place in the cosmic order. Rather, we must experience how, at the deepest level, our being is actually the being of the world. There is ultimately no separation; at the deepest level, we are all this life, all this reality. This kind of immediate, direct, and intimate experiential knowledge may make people crazy in relation to prevailing conventional values and mores, but it makes them sane when seen from the largest viewpoint of humanity and its possible future on this earth.
FIFTY-SEVEN: Who Am I?
It the very core of our human person is a single question: “Who am I?” Somehow, throughout all of our life, we are haunted by this question. “Who am I? What is the meaning of my human existence? Why am I here and what am I to do with my life?”
No matter how much the struggle to survive may take up our attention, no matter how compelling our day-to-day challenges and circumstances, irrespective of the intensity of our mundane hopes and fears, this question is always there, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground.
Of course, religions, philosophies, and psychologies all propose answers to this question. Yet, few of us seem to feel completely satisfied by answers that are merely conceptual or intellectual or that are provided by others, be they people, institutions, or larger cultures. At least for many modern people, the answers proposed by some individual or some tradition, no matter how logically coherent or sophisticated, feel insufficient and inadequate, and we are left with our question.
Human beings seek a direct, tangible experience of who they ultimately are. Without this direct experience, we feel like a person dying of thirst in the middle of a desert, just hearing about water. Most of us long, from the depths of our being, to actually drink in the fresh, life-giving water of our deepest nature, experiencing the full depth of our personhood and knowing, in a direct and non-conceptual way, who we ultimately are. When we work deeply with the body, as we have seen, we make a series of discoveries that bear directly on this question, “Who am I?”
The first and most important discovery is that the “unknown” is the very center of our somatic being and the core of our personality. This center of the “unknown”—which we experience directly in the body through the Earth Breathing and other somatic exercises—is open, empty space. As discussed, it is a field of awareness that is simply clear and unobstructed. As we are able to surrender more and more fully into it, again as we have seen, we discover that this ultimate space of the body has no boundaries or limits and, in fact, is absent of any reference points at all. In touching it, we experience a moment of being utterly lost: we completely lose any sense of “self,” even of anyone watching. At the moment of “meeting,” as mentioned, there is quite literally no one observing and nothing being observed.
This is truly the unknown—not as a concept, but as a direct experience—precisely because it cannot be known in any kind of dualistic way. In other words, we cannot stand back and observe it as a perceiving, thinking, and judging subject, because when we do step back, it is gone. Only in the moment of touching this state of being in our body, of touching enlightenment—for that is ultimately what it is—is there the true knowing of our fundamental nature: simply awareness knowing itself.
Although we experience this primordial state of our body as completely sufficient and beyond any kind of causality, nevertheless, it is not passive, disconnected, inert, or without implications for our relative lives, our karmic situations and engagements.
For one thing, we notice that this state of being, which is so utterly “beyond” or transcendent, nevertheless has an immediate and powerful impact on our usual ego activity—the incessant conceptual activity of thinking, judging, hoping and fearing. When we touch our basic nature, in that moment, all our fearful, reactive, restrictive conceptual posturing ceases. In that moment of knowing, the vast sky of our own basic being is, so to speak, clear of clouds or atmospheric phenomena of any kind. The experience of this most primal stratum of our own nature cuts through all discursive activity, on the spot, completely eliminating it.
This basic, somatic nature of ours—the emptiness or unknown—also has another kind of impact: it gives birth. In other words, the more we can touch and abide within the endless, unconditioned space—the utter peace—of our true body, the more we find a kind of upsurge arising from within it. This upsurge comes in the form of energy of all sorts—flashes of perception, insights, sharpness, inspirations, sudden emotions such as sadness, compassion, tenderness, and so on.
We experience what arises in this fashion in a certain kind of way: what surges up does not have the usual feeling of restriction or limitation, nor does it carry the mark of claustrophobia or taint that comes with ego-centered perceptions, ideas, and strategies. Rather, to our direct experience, the phenomena arising from the depths of our body feel free of taint or contamination. They feel real, they feel true, and their calling card is purity and integrity.
Moreover, what arises comes with an inbuilt injunction, even an imperative: experiencing it, we feel an overriding need to express or to act according to the upsurges, the egoless insights and inspirations, the selfless warmth and compassion, born out of the unknown. When we generate some idea or project from the hope and fear of ego, we always have an expectation driving us and an assessment to make: “Should I do this or should I not? Will I experience more of what I want by doing this, or am I likely to experience more difficulties?” We sense the taint of ego and, working very much from ego designs and ambition, we have to evaluate and judge everything.
However, when an insight or an inspiration arises directly from the depth of our soma, it bypasses the entire mechanism of ego’s constant hesitation and strategizing, its continual weighing of hope against fear. What arises from our primal nature presents itself in an utterly compelling way. Perhaps we are called upon simply to take in an insight or a perception, letting it change our way of seeing things, or perhaps we will find ourself called upon to express what has arisen or even to act upon it. As often as not—perhaps, in a way, always—we experience what arises as the “call” as uncomf
ortable, inconvenient, or even threatening to our ego stance and status. In this context, I think frequently of the prophets of ancient Israel and what the great unknown, Yahweh, required of them. And I call to mind the example of Jesus and his agony in Gethsemane, just prior to his crucifixion, when he realized what was being asked of him. He may have been culturally and religiously Jewish and he may be considered the founder of Christianity, but his willingness to heed the call coming from the deepest places no matter what the cost expresses and ennobles something profoundly and universally human.
When we do the body work, we realize in a most direct, immediate, and tangible way, the answer to the question “Who am I?” We discover that who “I” am is an open, ever-unknown, and ever-unfolding situation. Who I am is, ultimately, the great mystery at the very core of my being, as well as what arises out of that and what I have to do about it. Since what arises from our basic nature is always unanticipated and surprising, it is always without precedent. All of this is the great unknown and its natural, spontaneous expression.
When we inhabit our body fully, then, we realize that the answer to our question can never be reduced to a fixed and enduring concept or idea. There is no definitive answer that can ever be given to the question “Who am I?” Or, to put it another way, one can speak of definitive answers, but only as the somatic fullness and finality of each moment. Such an answer is valid only for the moment in which it arises; then it dissolves in the face of the next moment of our unimpeded, unfolding experience, which, in its turn, provides a momentary answer to the question “Who am I?” Such answers are nothing less or more than the basic mystery of our being, in its emptiness and its expression. We are what we are in each unique moment of our life—and there is nothing else.
When we live out of the body as our basic nature, our life is always occurring beyond ourself, beyond the limit of what we can grasp or understand: of all the mysteries of the universe, the greatest one is the mystery of our own being—not because we cannot experience its ultimate truth, but because we can.
We might ask, how can we speak of this deeply somatic way of experiencing our life as an “answer” to the question “Who am I?” It is an answer because the experience of it carries certain marks of its own ultimacy. For one thing, we experience it as self-validating: it appears as true, real, and incontrovertible, just as when we stand outside in a downpour, there isn’t much question in our mind that it is raining. In addition, our experience of ourself in this way brings a sense of freedom, truth, and understanding. Further, we observe that this “answer” is utterly other-centered: it yields an unending tenderness, compassion, and selfless action for all that live and suffer, for all that is. And, finally, it fills us and fulfills us utterly. We see that nothing more has ever been needed or wanted. Everything is and always has been right here.
When we experience ourself in this way, we feel that all our questions have been answered, not only about ourself but about all other things as well. In this, no external validation is needed; the increasing sense of spontaneous creativity, of caring about others, and the openness and flexibility that our life increasingly manifests suggests the basic integrity of what is occurring.
Throughout this process, of course, the body work is the key, the “path to immortality,” if you will. By enabling us to descend beneath the confusion and noisy tumult of our compulsive and competitive discursiveness, it puts us in touch with the empty ground of our being. It gives us a method to stay close to what is born from that “groundless ground.” And it offers a sense of somatic confidence from which we can hold, express, or act in harmony with what stands beyond time.
The preceding suggests, then, that the ultimate goal of “meditating with the body” is the ability to be entirely who we are, in all our emptiness and what is born from it. This goal involves the complete liberation and fulfillment of ourself and unreserved and resourceful compassion for the world, for its suffering beings, and for all that is. This exalted goal, like that of any spiritual discipline, is an end point that is probably never fully attainable, at least not in this life, and so the journey toward it continues in a kind of endless way. Nevertheless, at whatever our stage of maturation, it hangs like a distant star in our sky—and sometimes not so very distant at all—guiding us and helping us sail a steady course.
CONCLUSION
FIFTY-EIGHT: Becoming Who We Are
The term “dharma” refers to the deepest truths and realities of human experience. These truths and realities are hardly dead and lifeless, nor are they static. In fact, they are the very essence of brimming and abundant life itself, ever-new, ever-changing, ever leading to new vistas of being. As we have seen, for us humans, such unfolding truths and realities always come with a call and an imperative. Buddhism, as a tradition, exists to provide access to that abundant life which is reality itself, to show us how to uncover it in ourselves and how to live it fully.
Sometimes modern people misunderstand Buddhism’s focus on the individual human journey as well as its injunction to people to find out who they are and to seek their own ultimate fulfillment. With our Western suspicions of meditation, of looking within—and, frankly, our fear of being alone—not infrequently, we tend to reject the inward looking of Buddhism as somehow disconnected from the social context and disloyal to it.
If Buddhism were a static tradition with an unchanging interpretation of what people are and of how they need to engage their world, such suspicions would have some merit. But Buddhism is nothing other than a set of practices to open up the mysteries of the human heart and the deepest realities of our human experience as those exist, uniquely in us, right at this moment. And, as we have seen, the human heart is not personal: the more we fathom our own hearts, the more we find there the being of others and, beyond that, the very heart of the world itself.
It is undeniable that others and the larger world, so beleaguered at this moment in history, need everything that we have to give. But what to give is the problem. It seems finally clear that we cannot find out what to do simply by thinking about it. We need to gain our inspiration and our direction from much deeper sources. But what are they and where are they to be found?
At least according to Buddhism, those resources lie fully ready at hand; they lie in the depths of our own bodies and our own hearts, in the secret precincts of our own lives. Rather than thinking endlessly about what might work and trying this and trying that, in a kind of trial-and-error method, perhaps we should try looking into the depths. If we do, I suggest that we will find not what we as individuals think; rather, we will come face-to-face with what the other suffering beings need, and we will uncover what the natural world itself knows is wanted and required for life on this planet to continue. But the ego must be dethroned, its arrogance must be dismantled, and we must begin, before it is too late, to listen to the ensuing silence. All of this is about becoming who we are in the deepest sense and about surrendering to what creation is asking of us and needing from us just now.
The particular ability of modern people to hear and heed the call of dharma, to become fully who they are for the benefit of all, may be unique in the history of Buddhism. To understand this, let us recall that, over time, Buddhism has found itself in the custody of some very conservative cultures, ones in which the change, creativity, and individuality that were occasionally able to emerge from intensive practice were often unwelcome. More often than we may want to think, “the dharma” has been identified with the traditionalist status quo of Asian agrarian cultures and assimilated to their patriarchal, conformist, and collectivist ways of thinking.
At the same time, as we have seen, Buddhism is an inherently radical tradition. Through referring deeply to human experience as the final spiritual authority and through its willingness to call into question accepted norms and values, Buddhism—at least in its more meditative forms—has always been somewhat at odds with the cultures in which it has flourished. And, particularly in its meditative lineages, it has alwa
ys given birth to a few heroic souls who followed the path to its end and did realize the kind of incomparable life first proclaimed by the Buddha. Thus, the lineage of authentic spirituality has been kept alive.
What is different in the modern setting is that the “lonely journey” can no longer be for a tiny minority. Now, because of the collapse of traditional cultures and the rampant proliferation of the “non-culture” of consumerism and materialism, modern spiritual seekers find themselves in a cul-de-sac. They can no longer fall back on the tried-and-true amalgamations of culture and religion that have existed for thousands of years, because they no longer have a culture of their own that can amalgamate. Nor can they simply adopt the versions of spirituality of other cultures because such traditional approaches too often strike modern people as unthinking, rigid, and closed-minded. The freshness of experience modern people seek, and the affirmation of the sacredness of their own selves and world, too often just aren’t there.
Thus it is that there seems to be no other choice for most of us except to enter into the heroic quest for what is deepest and most true in ourselves, our lives, and our world. It would seem that we find ourselves with no other alternative but to recover our full embodiment and our full, individuated personhood. To do so, we will need to abandon, once and for all, discursive thinking—disembodiment—as our primary way of orienting ourselves in the world. Perhaps we can do this because our disembodiment has reached such insane proportions, such an extreme and experientially unacceptable state, that we will feel literally compelled and even forced, as our only alternative, to engage a world where we are living out of the full, unique embodiment that is possible for us.
Touching Enlightenment Page 25