This article is adapted from Dharma Ocean Podcast 211: Gateway to the Awakened State, a talk by Dr. Reggie Ray given at the Blazing Mountain Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado. Dr. Reginald “Reggie” Ray is the Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, dedicated to the evolution and flowering of the somatic teachings of the Practicing Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism
Within our state of being there is an open, endless field—a field of awareness. It doesn’t begin or end anywhere. And strangely enough, it’s the most fundamental dimension of who we are. When we know how to find the gate to this fundamental aspect of ourselves and enter into its infinite silence and space, we have found the elixir of life. The nature of this awareness, which we all have as the foundation of our being, is open. It’s bright, it’s vivid, and it permeates everything that we’re going to experience. At the same time, it’s empty and free.
To enter through that gate is to find the place where we can truly fly—for all of us were born to fly and fly within the realm of eternity. What’s interesting about the fundamental field, or open, endless territory of awareness, is that there is no time. Past, present, and future are things that we overlay.
There is a longing for this “primordial state” in all of us. Often we project our longing onto relative situations, places, and people. We long for experiences that we’ve had. But fundamentally, what we long for is to taste and enjoy and fly in the endless infinity of our own state of being, our own nature. We read about such freedom, which you could call the “spiritual dimension,” in a lot of books. The message of Tibetan Tantra, also called “Vajrayana,” is that this state of mind is what we call the awakened state. It is our absolute and complete fulfillment as humans.
Of course, the religions talk about this dimension. They characterize it as heaven or Nirvana or the Pure Land or whatever. But I think what has not always been fully understood is that the enlightened or heavenly domain that we seek and the transcendent places that are mentioned by the religions are not outside of us, they’re not somewhere else, and they’re not in some other time. This is not something that’s attained at the end of a journey. It already exists within us, right here and now. It is just that we do not see it because we are not paying attention; we are looking for fulfillment somewhere else, outside. And, most important, this is not a theoretical place. It’s completely accessible and experiential. All of us as humans are thus fully capable of experiencing our freedom and the tremendous joy that comes from that freedom. It’s available through spiritual practice.
We are often told by the major religions, sometimes including Buddhism itself, that in order to find true freedom and fulfillment, we have to sign up for a particular institutional configuration, or we have to become a member of a particular community and we have to follow a prescribed path that is outlined by a teacher. Zalman Schachter, who is one of the leaders of the Jewish Renewal Movement and a friend, said that the big lie is the idea that human freedom is only accessible through organized religion. It’s the big lie of both the modern and classical worlds. Human freedom is available to everybody. But, of course, we ourselves have to find the way in and apply effort to walk through the gate.
At this moment for most of us, it’s hidden, but as I say it’s available. We might ask ourselves, “What is the point of human freedom?” We long for it, but what does it have to do with our everyday life? What do we gain by making the journey to the radical openness and the freshness and the clarity and the limitless, boundless nature of our own basic being, this endless sky that beckons us and calls us? What does that have to do with our ordinary life? If we find the gate to that kind of freedom, is that going to mean that we no longer want to live? Does it mean that we won’t be able to function in our lives in the world? Some of the traditions that speak about this freedom or this fulfillment seem to indicate that we will become incapable of functioning; that somehow ordinary life is incompatible with spiritual realization. But the teaching of Tibetan Tantra is that it is only by abiding and entering the gate into our own infinity, our own boundless awareness, and learning how to fly there, that we can truly appreciate our lives in the world.
We can then appreciate our relationships. We can live our lives in the fullest possible way. If we don’t experience our own freedom, we load up our relative lives and ordinary pursuits with all of the longing for freedom and fulfillment that we have within us. But the problem is that we’re loading it onto the wrong donkey. This was the teaching of the Buddha. If we look to our relative lives for that kind of fulfillment, it’s never going to happen because relativity can’t fulfill that kind of thing. It is true that even in Buddhism, we often talk about the ultimate attainment of freedom and liberation as if it were something somewhere else, rather than the ground of our human life. In the Tantra, what is said is that you gain access to your own awakened state, your own freedom, your own fulfillment, through a “bottom-up” approach, through connecting with your body, your intuitive, somatic being, what is called in Tibetan your “wisdom body” (jnana-kaya).
This is the paradox. Strangely enough, when you do that, you find that’s what you’ve always been looking for and that’s your ultimate home. Within that fully embodied space, every desire is fulfilled. And sometimes when we sit down in meditation and open into that space, we feel we could fly forever and we feel that we never want to come back. We want to soar up to the sun and feel its brightness or feel the coolness and beauty of the moon. We want to fly to distant galaxies and circle around them and explore them. All of the realms of being are open to us in that space. At first, we thought it was in the body, but we soon discover that it is everywhere and the body was just the gate. We feel that when we’re there, we would never want to come back into a more relative state of mind. There’s a kind of cycle that goes with us as spiritual practitioners, which is that we open, we let go, and we fly.
Then we find ourselves on our flight coming back and entering back into our life. And strangely enough, because of the fulfillment of our entry into our own basic nature, our own basic awareness, where we fundamentally don’t need anything, suddenly our life opens up. We begin to look at the situations of our life from an entirely new perspective. And we realize that all of the moments of our life are epiphanies. They come with incredible power. They come with a very profound meaning. And they come with great beauty. We may be in situations that, from a conventional viewpoint, might be regarded as negative, but from our point of view, negativity has its place. A scowling face, a child who’s going through a very hard time—we begin to appreciate what reality is. And we see that everybody’s on a journey. And every moment of the journey of self and others is dignified and, in its own way, very beautiful.
So far from alienating us from our lives, the more we can experience our own freedom, liberation, and fulfillment, the more passion and love we have for this particular life that we lead. So many of us spend so much time in wishful thinking, wanting our life to be different, wanting people to be different, wanting situations to change, wanting to find a different location in the universe to carry out this human existence. But once we have tasted the openness of our basic nature, when we return to life, we begin to suspect that the exact life that we’re living is precisely the greatest blessing we could ever have. Life itself becomes liberated and redeemed. We realize that all of the struggles and issues are the blessing of the universe and the love of the universe for us, for this person in this body with this karma at this time in this place.
Tibetan Tantra builds on earlier Buddhism in a certain way, meaning that the early Buddhist traditions teach us to renounce grasping after ordinary life. Grasping after life, thirsting and clinging and attaching to aspects of our life, and wanting to wring some kind of pleasure or security out of that piece of our life is not going to work; it always leads to suffering. Early Buddhism and basic meditation show us we can let go of our clinging to ordinary life. We don’t have to grasp and cling. And when we do let go, then we are in a place, a much better place to actually conduct whatever goes on within human existence.
The Mahayana traditions such as Zen, Chan, and the Tibetan Mahayana teachings, tell us that there’s an open state of mind that we can access through meditation. We can begin to experience a larger awareness than we’re used to. And sometimes we think that’s it. Sometimes we think that we’ve arrived and achieved what we need to achieve.
And what Tantra brings into it is that experiencing a sort of relaxed, open, peaceful state of mind is just the beginning of the journey. That’s the gate where the journey begins. And the journey unfolds in the relativity of our own life. In the Tantra we are constantly working on our meditation; we’re constantly developing a sense of peace and openness and relaxation, but that’s the beginning, and the juice of our spiritual journey begins to be found in the relative situations of our life. The more we let go, the more the relative aspects of life appear to us as something interesting and compelling. Ultimately we begin to discover that’s actually where we change—it’s in relating to the life that we have from a point of view of openness. So, that’s the basic view of Tibetan Tantra.
About Dharma Ocean Foundation
Dharma Ocean is a non-profit global educational foundation that focuses on somatic meditation as the way to help students – of any secular or religious discipline, by teaching them the importance of embodiment in both meditation and their daily lives as taught in the “practicing lineage” of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The foundation was established in 2005 by scholar, author, and teacher Dr. Reggie Ray, and is located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Southern Colorado.
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