Retreating into the 'Jungle' of the Human Body

The following are excerpts from Touching Enlightenment by Reginald Ray PhD.  From my knowledge of the available literature on Buddhist yoga in western languages, there is no other book like this, not even Tarthang Tulkus series of publications on Kum Nye.  The Kum Nye books are manuals of instruction attempting to stay clear of all matters personal, in Touching Enlightenment Reggie Ray invites the reader to share his very intimate and very direct exploration of his life and practices as a Buddhist yogi.  As I said, it is personal, but in a way that Carl Jung's  memoirs, or Lama Govinda's Way of the White Clouds were 'personal' - inviting the reader to join the pilgrimage to greater knowing and penetrating insight: personal but not at all gossipy and overly anecdotal.  The main theme being that directly exploring our own bodies is the only ultimate retreat, the only 'jungle' left to us in the dawning of another insane century, this time the 21st (in no way more enlightened than the 20th, or any century before).

"In the Buddhist past, when questions have arisen about the authenticity of institutionalized, conventionalized Buddhist organizations, politics, beliefs and practices, practitioners have retired into the 'forest' (Skt: vana, aranya), the classical term for the uninhabited jungles of India.  The 'forest' was regarded as a place beyond the reach of conventional culture and institutionalized Buddhism, a place where the atmosphere was open and unobstructed.  The 'forest' was understood as a trackless waste, a place for all those 'others' standing outside of conventional culture,… and, most important, those spiritual practitioners who literally walked away from the conventionalized religious systems of India, seeking the 'origin of all things'."

"Within Indian culture, the 'forest' was considered the ideal place for spiritual practice because, in the forest, there are no rules and there are no presiding authorities.  The only authority is the chaos of the forest itself.  The only rule is what awaits there for each practitioner, unlikely, to discover.  Memories of the past and plans for the future, the psychic infrastructure of civilization, do not apply… The forest is about something else.  In the forest there is only the ever present possibility of events, encounters, and insights that emerge directly from reality itself, pure and unpolluted by human wants, expectations, and attitudes.  Uniquely in the forest, the most radical of all human journeys can take place, one which brings us into direct contact with primordial being.  Generally, the greatest saints of Buddhist tradition both in India and larger Asia were products, so to speak, of the forest…"

"Increasingly in our world, there is no longer any geographical forest for us practitioners to retire to.  It is not just that the places frequented by lonely meditators have been overrun by modern civilization… every manifestation of Buddhism, it now seems, must immediately demonstrate 'social engagement' and 'ethical impact'.  It is not that these are unimportant values.  But now, more and more, they have become a litmus test to determine which forms of Buddhism are acceptable, and which are not.  Thus the true 'forest' is quickly disappearing, perhaps forever, from our world."

"But there is a new wilderness, a new trackless waste, a new unknown and limitless territory, a new terrain of chaos, that calls us.  It is a territory - I do believe - that has not been, and cannot be, colonized and domesticated by human ambition and greed, that in its true extent cannot be mapped by human logic at all.  This is the 'forest' of the human body.    The body is now, I believe, our forest, our jungle, the 'outlandish' expanse in which we are invited to let go of everything we think, allow ourselves to be stripped down to our most irreducible person, to die in every experiential sense possible and se what, if anything, remains."

"In this, I am speaking not of the body we think we have, the body we conceptualize as part of our 'me' or my self-image.  Rather, I am talking about the body that we meet when we are willing to descend into it, to surrender into its darkness and its mysteries, and to explore it with our awareness.  As we shall see, this true, limitless body cannot even be entered until we are willing to leave our own thinking process behind - on the surface, so to speak.  It is similar to the deep-sea diver: while floating on the surface of the sea he knows little of what lies below, but when he descends into its depths, the limitless worlds of the ocean open to him.  It was of this ever unbounded and unknown body that the great

mahasiddha Saraha spoke when he said, 'There is no place of pilgrimages fabulous and as open as this body of mine, no place worth more exploring."

The Buddhist yoga that we are sharing here in Goa, occasionally, has no affiliation and nothing to do with any form or format that Reggie Ray may use for his own presentations in groups that are learning together with him 'how to meditate with the body', or 'touching enlightenment with the body'.  And yet, what he is saying in these few passages very much sounds like what is breaking forth through some us in our gatherings.  And naturally, I love his articulate way of saying what needs to be said to leave behind us this unfortunate artificial and fake tinkering with the body and the mind that many take for 'meditation'.  Really meditating with the body is actually quite different from any contrived effort to do so as a smart means for well defined ends.