We have dark sides. We have good days. Are we our moods? Our reactions to unexpected obstacles? Whatever we may be, we’re all much too multifaceted to be fastened down. We contain multitudes. Parts of our self can be found; capturing the whole is like grabbing a handful of penumbra. Just as a globule magnified by microscope squirms with squiggles, each of us is a world crammed into a body, a divided society, a parliament of selves as fallible as any government.
The so-called self, akin to an atom, is constantly in motion. The only way to understand it is, as Niels Bohr once said of atoms, by changing our definition of the word understand. The self is like happiness, or perfection: something pursued, possibly perceived for moments. A quest for ever after, an infinitely receding goal, a turning point in a tale. Still, we speak of finding our self, or being true to our self, of expressing our self. But a self isn’t something we can pinpoint or grasp.
Once we realize the impossibility of knowing ourselves, we can begin to unknow ourselves, which paradoxically may be a way of getting closer to selfhood. The practice of meditation turns consciousness in on itself, preparing the mind for a form of nonrational enlightenment radically different from any reason-based approach. “To know yourself or study yourself is to forget yourself, and if you forget yourself, then you become enlightened by all things,” explained the Zen sage Dōgen.
Concepts such as nirvana, turiya, satori, chaturtha, and samadhi all describe the possibility of entering into “consciousness itself” through self-abandonment. This version of enlightenment is the realization that our body and mind are just an outpouring of the infinite source, that even though we will one day die, we will return to that source. As remote as enlightenment may feel, mindfulness practices such as yoga and meditation are a step toward calming the vortices of unquenchable thought.
Eastern philosophies speak of developing new forms of consciousness, of observing thought, of tapping into a headspace beyond all comprehension and time; but the notion of consciousness is not even recognized as something real in the scientific worldview. Forget knowledge of the knowable; Eastern enlightenment is about the wisdom of the unknowable. As the Mahabharata explains, “The greater aim of all is to know that Soul is one, uniform, perfected, not subject to birth, existing everywhere at once, undecaying, stable, eternally unspoiled, of true knowledge, and dissociated with illusions and false realities.” Not exactly Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene.
Western Enlightenment has to do with everyone everywhere soon being able to understand everything rationally. Its secular paradisification of life here on earth ascribes to the doctrines of progress, freedom, and scientific perfectability. If medicine hasn’t figured out how to overcome death by now, it will imminently. Or so many of us think.
In Eastern traditions, a perfected one is “a consummate logician and expert in all the sciences.” But this version of logic is very different from what most Westerners think of as logic. Eastern logicians use breathing and stretching exercises as a way to stop thinking, to get from thought to thoughtlessness. Yogic immortality, or jivan-mukti, means living in the eternal present. In Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, Mircea Eliade speaks of “instasis” as opposed to ecstasy, of something within rather than without, of immanence rather than transcendence. To learn more about being on the verge of something that can never be understood, I started going to meditate at a local Buddhist center in Montreal.
* * *
Pouring herself another cup of coffee, Ani Lodrö Palmo ventured a joke about the importance of being awake. Even shaved-headed Buddhist nuns of the Shambhala monastic order can use a caffeine jolt, especially on such a busy day. The predawn practice had earlier marked the official start to the Year of the Iron Hare. Preparations were now under way for the annual Elixir of Life ceremony, set to begin in half an hour. Palmo adjusted her maroon robe while rereading that morning’s verses of aspiration. The V-like collar on her saffron vest represented the jaws of death, a reminder that she, like all of us, could die anytime.
Celebrants started trickling into the center, a loftlike space on the fifth floor of an immense old downtown building. Bowing gently to greet Palmo, they helped themselves to croissants and coffee. In the small kitchen, a man in a tunic stood looking out the window. “Look at this weather,” he huffed, jovially, with a vaguely Eastern accent. “Snow-ice-rain-mud-sun! Like a Russian salad all mixed up, the whole year in one, summer-winter-spring, every season at the same time boom-bang!”
I’d been to the meditation center on several occasions to learn about Buddhism, but I hadn’t been in the kitchen before and couldn’t tell if newbies such as myself had permission to partake in the orange pekoe. Putting down the kettle, I noticed a military-looking young man in a uniform watching me. This being my first time attending such a ceremonial event, I hadn’t yet encountered a Dorje Kasung—as these guards are known—so didn’t realize his role as protector of the dharma and bringer of wakefulness. In fact, I thought he was a security officer about to bust me for copping a tea bag.
“Good morning,” he intoned, powerfully.
“Hello,” I replied, nervously wrapping my hands around the mug.
A moment of silence.
“Are you the security here?” I ventured.
“You could put it that way.” He looked into my eyes, neutrally.
“Does this gathering really need protection?”
“Actually, I’m posted here with a specific mission: to make sure you all remember to be awake and conscious.”
“Well, this should help.” I smiled, tapping my cup.
“Namaste,” he said, mindfully bringing his hands together.
* * *
Shambhala is often described as Buddhism for Westerners. Its main aim is teaching meditation. Although Buddhism is certainly a religion, it can also be described as a philosophy or, as adherents prefer, a science of mind. Sitting in meditation calms the thinking brain, they say, allowing it to contact things as they truly are (rather than filtered through the ego). All Buddhists believe in impermanence—the idea that everything in life is fleeting. Whether it be the seasons or our bodies, everything changes. Buddhists see the desire for physical immortality as just another manifestation of our ego’s mistaken need for things not to change. Alas, permanence is not the nature of nature. Death, however, is.
Rather than turning away from the unpleasantness of death, Tibetan Buddhists try to focus on that unpleasantness, to meditate upon it, to lean into it. The Dalai Lama visualizes his own death every day. A basic precept of their teaching is that our attempts to avoid suffering do not actually eliminate suffering. The Buddha’s first noble truth, dukkha, is that suffering and discomfort are a real part of human life. And most suffering stems from our cravings and desires. The very things we do to escape suffering amplify our suffering.
Pema Chödrön, an esteemed American nun who is among the more recognized names in contemporary Buddhism, has often written about reframing the idea of hardship and struggle. Her book The Wisdom of No Escape explains that, by implementing the Buddha’s teachings and recognizing the first noble truth, we can become sensitized to an underlying energy behind all of existence. It is always circulating in and around us, coursing through everything. She speaks about it in the same terms Father Gervais did. “If something lives, it has life force, the quality of which is energy, a sense of spiritedness,” she writes. “Without that, we can’t lift our arms or open our mouths or open and shut our eyes.” This dynamo of impermanence is a basic creative essence we can come into contact with through the practice of meditation. But our daily life can also block out the life force’s light. “Why do we resist the life force that flows through us?” Chödrön wonders. “If you can realize the life energy that makes everything change and move and grow and die, then you won’t have any resentment or resistance.”
The life force can be enjoyable or challenging. It manifests in myriad oppositional ways: easy or hard, fun or excruciating, brilliance or despair. An aim of Buddhism is t
o realize that our sufferings and our discomforts are simply ways in which we feel the life force. Shambhala’s founder, the Tibetan monk Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939–1987), described obstacles as “adornments.” The goal is to attain a level of sensitivity, through meditation, in which both pain and contentment become ornaments we hang upon the tree of our lives. At a certain point, mortality becomes just another bit of tinsel.
* * *
In Shambhala, enlightenment is a youthful, playful state of being. Self-realization is like a second birth, Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, in which we rediscover our innocent, childlike curiosity with all things. This exploration of life situations is connected with a sense of eternity, he writes, with an understanding of how the impermanence of life is connected to the eternity of life: “the constant changing process of death and birth taking place all the time.” Trungpa Rinpoche called this the wisdom of eternity. In that state, “nothing threatens us at all; everything is an ornament. The greater the chaos, the more everything becomes an ornament.”
The embodiment of this ideal is Padmasambhava, the Indian sage who brought Buddhism to Tibet. Also known as the Lotus-Born, he is associated with eternal youth, inquisitiveness, and childish wonder. In images, he holds a vase of longevity filled with the nectar of deathless wisdom. “Padmasambhava still lives, literally,” Trungpa Rinpoche once declared. “The fact of physical bodies dissolving back into nature is not regarded as a big deal. So if we search for him, we might find him.”
Padmasambhava hid spiritual treasures so that later generations would discover them. These leavings, called termas, became revered sources of Buddhist transmission. The scrolls and secret teachings buried away within caves, forests, and lakes concealed lessons that only reveal themselves at the proper time—and to the right person. Trungpa Rinpoche himself stumbled across a number of them, adding to his mystique. He uncovered most of his treasures at the holy Tibetan mountain of Kyere Shelkar. He found his first scroll there as a teenager. Aged nineteen, he came across a block of marbled red stone studded with gemstones. According to eyewitnesses, as soon as he dislodged it from the cliff, “thunder clapped, it started raining, and a pleasant fragrance came from the sky. Everyone there was amazed and started crying uncontrollably.” They put the stone in a nearby temple and meditated around it for seven straight days. At that point, the casket opened and a small scroll unfurled, containing instructions, prophecies, and sadhanas composed over a thousand years earlier.
The most extraordinary of Padmasambhava’s termas is an eighth-century CE text found four or five centuries after he composed it, in the Gampo Hills of Tibet. The Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, as it came to be known, is an instructional manual for dead souls, and one of the key texts of Tibetan Buddhism.
Bardo means “interval,” or “liminal space.” It’s an in-between place, an intermediate state. Life itself, the period between birth and death, is considered to be a bardo. Meditation is a bardo, as is dreaming. Three bardos come after we die. Being in them is bewildering, something like being shipwrecked. “You’ve left the shore, but you haven’t arrived anywhere yet,” writes Pema Chödrön. “You don’t know where you’re going, and you’ve been out there at sea long enough that you only have a vague memory of where you came from. You’ve left home, you’ve become homeless, you long to go back, but there’s no way to go back.”
Jumping into the sea, at the moment of death, we are granted a dazzling vision of clear light. This illumination is an opportunity to realize that our consciousness is the radiance. The voidness of our dead mind turns out to be the shining reality of Buddhahood itself. Unfortunately, most of us cannot reconnect with the immutable light that both is and is not us, so we pass into the second bardo, which entails visions of deities who judge and tempt. Just as a dream can be so exhilarating we feel we’re living it, or so nightmarish it freaks us out well after we’ve woken, these karmic illusions are vividly real. They can be wondrous and peaceful or wrathful and terrifying.
We encounter the Five Dhyani Buddhas, each of which is a manifestation of Buddha. They proffer complicated ways of attaining liberation. We meet Akshobhya, the Buddha of seeing things as they truly are, of consciousness as an indestructible reality. As blue as the oceanic depths and as white as sunlight glinting on the sea, he embodies the ability to distinguish reality from illusion. He shows us the pure water of liberation, a radiant light that, again, is us. If we’re not worthy of the Dhyanis’ invitations, we end up confronted by “the fifty-eight blazing, blood-drinking wrathful ones.” For the rest of the interregnum, we move through a tormenting series of hallucinations back into reincarnation and the bardo of life starts all over again.
* * *
Before the Elixir of Life ceremony, when I reached out to interview Ani Lodrö Palmo about the bardo and other Buddhist views on immortality, she suggested I speak with Esther Rochon, a local science-fiction writer. “She would be a better resource than me,” Palmo informed me, by e-mail. “She has been studying this topic for many years.”
Esther and I met at the center on a quiet Friday afternoon. A soft-spoken, Joan Didion–esque woman with gray hair and a certain 1960s quality, Esther radiated calmness. She chose her words carefully, speaking with a precision befitting her university training in advanced mathematics.
We started our discussion on the topic of the soul—a conceit that most Buddhists reject while simultaneously accepting the notion that some part of us gets reborn into a new body after death. “We do not speak of a permanent soul that survives forever after physical death,” Esther said. “But we do speak of mental processes that are ever-changing, and which continue after the body decomposes.”
Because the law of impermanence is so central to Buddhist thought, they have trouble with eternalism, the belief that a part of us lives forever in some static way. “Most of us are so into eternalism we need a cold shower of emptiness,” Esther explained. “Meditating on the present moment is an essential step to undoing that. It’s an antidote.”
“If you aren’t eternalists, then why does Buddhism speak of the bardos?” I asked.
“What might be called a ‘thought lineage’ or ‘mindstream’ does survive the death of the body. It’s not an eternal soul, but rather a chain of mental events.”
“That chain is what goes into the bardo realms?”
“Yes. Our bardo self, which is a voidness rather than a soul—a kind of astral body—is what goes there. It can get quite skittish because it doesn’t have a body and it wishes it were in a body, but its fear makes no sense because it can’t even have a body.”
“So it’s our tendencies that are reincarnated, our mental activity?”
“In a way, yes. But it’s not what you might call the ‘personality’ or ‘self’ that lives on. It’s a state of mind that we train ourselves to develop. A compassionate ‘part’ of the mind survives, but it’s not attached to us. It’s something that’s in all of us.”
“But essentially part of the mind goes on beyond death?”
“It depends on how you define part. The mind of enlightenment—the mind which is totally awakened—that may last. That potential is within us. It does not change. It is primordial and eternal. But it is not something you can touch with your finger.”
“So it’s a part of us that’s not a part of us? Sounds paradoxical.”
“It’s subtle but not contradictory. The teachings speak of it as a water. Your essential mind is like water in a glass. When you die, it pours out and returns to the source. It retains no memories of what it had been before. A Buddha is someone who is always in contact with the essential nature of their mind.”
As we were nearing the end of our conversation, I thanked Esther for taking the time to speak with me about Buddhist beliefs. She immediately corrected me: “Belief isn’t something important in Buddhism. Buddha said you have to test every teaching I’ve given. Rather than just believe in it, you have to work with it to see what your experience of it is, to see ho
w it works for you.”
“But there’s a human tendency to not see our beliefs as beliefs.”
“Yes, but Buddhism is a nontheistic faith, unlike religions which believe in a God. The practice of meditation doesn’t have anything to do with believing or not believing in God. It’s often said that Buddha discovered the truth precisely because he didn’t believe in God.”
“Yes, but isn’t the bardo a matter of belief? How can we really know what happens after death?”
“There are provisional teachings and then there are essential truths. Our stories and myths put people in a frame of mind where they can get at something really essential. The provisional stuff engages people’s intellects so they are able to understand. But the real heart of the matter is beyond logic.”
“So you can’t discuss the essential stuff.”
“Not at all. But the teachings allow people to see whether they are relevant for them or not.”
“Is Shambhala the same as other denominations of Buddhism?”
“Different schools have different teachings. The pedagogical approach may be different, but the main ideas are ultimately the same. The Four Noble Truths aren’t beliefs so much as categories of experience. Anyone can try them out. That’s the point.”
There’s a famous old Buddhist aphorism: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Many of their key texts caution against holding on to beliefs. As Pema Chödrön notes, in this regard, “You want something to hold on to, you want to say, ‘Finally I have found it. This is it, and now I feel confirmed and secure and righteous.’ Buddhism is not free of it either. This is a human thing.” It’s easy to judge others according to how their beliefs differ from our own. It’s much harder to question one’s beliefs, to let go of them, to transcend them. Still, we all interpret reality, and our beliefs help us do so. But Buddhism teaches that our interpretation of the noninterpretable is just that: an opinion rather than the Truth.
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