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To be awake, to be enlightened, is to be fully and completely embodied. To be fully embodied means to be at one with who we are, in every respect, including our physical being, our emotions, and the totality of our karmic situation. It is to be entirely present to who we are and to the journey of our own becoming. It is to inhabit, completely, our relative reality, with no speck of ourselves left over, no external observer waiting for something else or something better. In this sense, this book explores what it might mean to be fully embodied and, as such, what it might mean to be an enlightened or completely realized being, for they are one and the same.
Also nourishing and deepening my understanding of the body as a spiritual reality has been the exploration of several Western modalities (the Alexander technique, Rolfing), fruitful studies with several Zen teachers, and contact with the Theravadin tradition.
These include the native traditions of both North and South America and, most impactfully, several years of intensive work with my friend and heart brother Malidoma Somé, the gifted African spiritual teacher. Of particular impact in my study with Malidoma was an all-night “earth burial,” which, through its initiatory death and rebirth process, allowed my life to crumble and then arise in a way that established the earth and the “body work,” once and for all, as the core of my spiritual life.
As Thrangu Rinpoche once said in another context, surely it cannot be wrong to encourage people, however we may do so, to meet their uttermost depths, their ultimate self.
It was of this ever unbounded and unknown body that the great siddha Saraha spoke when he said, “There is no place of pilgrimage as fabulous and as open as this body of mine, no place more worth exploring.”
According to the teachings of buddha nature, each of us possesses, at our very root and core, a profound and irresistible longing. This is nothing other than a longing to become fully and completely who we are, to experience ourselves and our lives, fully and freely, without doubt, reservation, or holding back. This final realization of ourselves is described as all-loving and powerful—we discover ourselves as everything that we need to be and, because of that, we become completely available to the world and its suffering beings, and discover utter trust and confidence in life.
Buddhism, in its most subtle and sophisticated expression, is not a tradition that seeks to provide answers to life’s questions or to dispense “wisdom” to allay our fundamental angst. Rather, it challenges us to look beyond any and all answers that we may have found along the way, to meet ourselves in a naked, direct, and fearless fashion.
In fact, it challenges us to question everything that we think and feel about ourselves and our reality—all our most basic beliefs, all our assumptions and preconceptions, even the way we habitually see, hear, and sense the world. We must be willing to let go of everything we have believed—every answer that we have come up with down to this moment—in order to find out the final truth of who we are.
In this, Buddhism invites us to take seriously our entire human existence, to take everything in our life “as the path.” It proposes that everything that ever happens to us is part of our journey toward realization. There is finally nothing that leads us away, no possibility of true regression, no actual mistake; everything is learning, opening, and moving forward, even when the opposite seems to be the case. This leads to a kind of fundamental and boundless optimism about what human life is and why we are here, and an underlying trust that runs through life’s most difficult circumstances.
The journey to ourselves is truly a journey into the unknown, a setting forth onto a sea that has never before been sailed and never before been fathomed or mapped.
AI Summary
Touching Enlightenment by Reginald A. Ray PhD. presents key insights from the Tibetan Buddhism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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