THE GREAT WIDE OPEN
As the liberated current of awakened soma keeps coursing through your body, it takes you with it. It sweeps you along as it keeps moving, flowing, and pulsing—always and unerringly in the direction of your center, deep inside your body. Eventually it can lead you so deeply inside that you pass beyond yourself into a supplemental dimension of embodiment. As salubrious as it is for both body and mind, the second level of awakened soma is not an end in itself. It’s more a passageway leading you from an exclusive sense of self in which you feel separated from everything outside your body into a far more inclusive feeling presence that somehow commingles and conjoins with everything you formerly perceived as “other.”
Ordinarily we view ourselves as just one of the infinite number of discrete forms that exist in the universe, each one occupying its own personal space, eternally separate from all other forms. The separation of physical form is the primary reality of the world into which we’re born, so it makes sense to become adept in the ways and laws of that reality. There are, however, problems with accepting this vision of the world as representing the whole of reality and, by extension, the whole of who you are. While the world of forms is indisputably real, it’s also not all there is. This vision of how reality is constructed paints only half the picture while fallaciously asserting it to be the entire thing. As soma continues to blossom, a complementary vision of reality and a whole new dimension of felt experience are revealed. During a flowering of the fourth level of soma, a felt awareness of a substratum becomes apparent—one that somehow underlies and pervades the entire world of form and ties all the individual parts back into a single piece. This literally wholesome sense of felt union underlying the appearance of eternally separated forms is directly felt through your body.
The awakening to this alternative dimension of consciousness goes by many names. Christians call it the appearance of grace. Zen students refer to it as satori, a flashing moment of profound realization. Sufis view it as a melting down of everything that keeps you from merging with the larger whole that you are. I call it the Great Wide Open because it entails the unraveling of the bodily knots that secure the tight fixity of the egoic perspective. You feel yourself opening and expanding ever outward, intermingling freely with the equally wide-open substratum of the objects you formerly believed to be so separate from you. It’s during those moments that the claustrophobic compression of egoic self releases its hold and gets blown open—wide open. Your sense of self, the world you perceive through your senses, everything transforms.
This liberated quality of expansive space can feel every bit as real as the sensations soma first revealed to you. It’s not that this space inside you is similar to the equivalent space in all the other objects outside your body. Awakened soma suggests that it’s the same space that pervades everything, a unified ground state from which all the innumerable individual forms appear—not unlike how a single source of light can project innumerable holographic images. Awakened soma is the conduit that links your personal sense of self to the Great Wide Open. Too often scriptures can read like incredible fairy tales. Somatic awakening makes the scriptures real. It makes palpable the fanciful notion of a more evolved state beyond our normal conditioning. Riding on soma’s current, you glide back into the embrace of the Great Wide Open.
The Heart Sutra, one of the most revered texts of Mahayana Buddhism, tells us that everything belongs to two dimensions: a physical form and an underlying emptiness. One of the tenets of twentieth-century physics is that everything that exists is constructed of either particles or waves (which sounds a whole lot like form or emptiness) and can never be both. But experiments have definitively shown that light is a particle, not a wave, while others just as irrefutably prove that light is a wave, not a particle. So why not accept that everything has elements of both? That everything exists as solid form and wavelike space at the same time? Isn’t that what you are—a solid body living in a world of forms along with an open space that pervades that solid-looking body? Aren’t you form and emptiness both, just as the sutra suggests? Furthermore, if this is so for you, why wouldn’t it be so for every other object in the universe as well?
An easy way to wrap your head around this notion is to ask yourself the following simple questions: Doesn’t it strike you as at least peculiar that, while you recognize other people by their solid-looking faces and bodies, you don’t feel particularly solid yourself? That you feel more like a kind of strange, open space that permeates your body, especially your head? Aren’t “you” also this dimension of space that infuses what you conceive of as the solid, physical form of your body?
From the perspective of the world of form, space refers to a precise location in this vast universe in which we live. From the perspective of emptiness, space is the ground dimension from which all forms emerge. This sense of underlying emptiness or space makes its presence felt during those moments when soma is most awakened, when body goes vibrant and thought dissolves. Furthermore, this sense of wide-open space doesn’t feel exclusive to you but is inclusive of everything. It’s bigger than you. It binds you to everything else. Anatomists tell us that our bodies are mostly water; physicists tell us that they are composed of vast empty space between subatomic particles. But neither of these descriptions mean much unless you can actually experience them.
What’s so important about experiencing the existence of underlying felt space? About realizing that what we conventionally call “reality” shares both the dimension of solid-looking forms and that of wide-open space? The simplest answer is that the existence of this deep wholesome space is what gets revealed through soma’s awakening. The awakening of the body’s felt sense of inner space reveals a complementary dimension to human being that its alternate, and far more common, manifestation as form can’t provide. There’s a whole other world here that’s invisible to the eye but equal to the visible world in heft and importance.
Which is essentially what the quantum physicist David Bohm concluded in the latter part of his life. He had come to the realization that science, in its obsessive focus on the worlds of form—both infinitesimally small and unimaginably large—was missing half the picture of how reality is actually constructed. For Bohm, much like the authors of the Heart Sutra, everything partakes of these same two dimensions: an explicate order that is the world of physical forms we’re so familiar with, and an implicate order that is a kind of underlying emptiness out of which the forms of the explicate order constantly emerge. Furthermore, Bohm suggested that everything, including us, moves back and forth between form and emptiness all the time, but at such a rapid speed that the apparent solidity of the world never comes into question.
Sensations are the medium linking unfelt physical form to sensed inner space. The posture continually asks you to keep trusting in the wisdom of wherever soma takes you, and awakened sensations take you into awakened space. Once you open a door and see what’s on the other side, you can never again pretend that you didn’t see what was there.
More to the point, when you can simultaneously experience yourself as felt form and open space, you just become more content, and isn’t this the promise that we want to believe the dharma makes to us? Body’s just happier in the Great Wide Open. It likes it better there. Tension dissolves as our bracing against the current of the life force lessens. Everything lightens. To experience the coterminous duality of form and space in a single moment of felt awareness is one of the real rewards of a deeply somatic approach to the dharma. It reveals both the shimmer of sensations and the deep space that pervades the shimmer.
Because we’re so identified with the speaker of mind’s monologue and dissociated from the felt reality of body, we project our sense of self out in front of our bodies, where a mask might fit. Often referred to as our persona, this sense of projected self becomes the image of the person we believe ourselves to be and want others to see us as. By mooring our sense of self just offshore from our bodies, we’re spared having to deal with the powerful sensations of soma. Instead we stay lost in the dream world of our thoughts. Identified with our mask, we become exclusively an “I” from which it’s easy to believe in the irrefutability of the eternal separation of objects.
But when you awaken soma, when you become aware of the patterns of tension and holding that create and mold the mask, then start softening and relaxing those tensions, you take a literal step backward behind the barrier of the mask that so effectively separates “I” from “other,” back into the mystery space of the body. You ride along the awakened currents of soma as they unravel blockages to their passage and lead you into the interior dimensions of wide open space. It’s this dimension of embodied space to which the posture ultimately and inevitably leads you.
Tilopa tells us not only to “do nothing with the body but relax” but also to “become like a hollow bamboo,” and this beautiful image comes close to describing what those moments feel like when the current of the life force, no longer impeded, can be felt to pass freely through the long conduit of the body.* From the outside looking in, the body looks very solid indeed. From the inside feeling out, the body feels shimmery, spacious, open. We begin our journey of somatic discovery from a place of relative numbness. Sensations, both pleasant and painful, gradually awaken. The sensations take us deeper into a felt interior space behind the mask where free-flowing energies pass easily through the upright length of the body like wind through hollow bamboo. No more thoughts. Just current, sensations, and space. Where there’s no place for thought, there’s also no place for “I,” the speaker of those thoughts. Who do you become when the tensions that support your “I” relax so deeply that the conventional you disappears? What do you disappear into? These are the questions that the dharma wants to help you answer.
Humans always seek to go beyond, to venture farther, exploring new and unfamiliar territories. Explorers go where people haven’t gone before on the land, in the depths of the sea, in the far reaches of outer space. Scientists probe the mystery of form from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large. Through constant examination of the reality of body and mind, meditators are the explorers of inner space, the scientists of Bohm’s implicate order. Following along the labyrinthine passageways of inquiry into sensation and inner space gives infeeling into the beautiful mystery that lies just behind the world of appearances.
You are the physical form of the body. You are the sensations of soma. You are also the underlying emptiness, the invisible counterpart to the world of visible appearance. How do you know this to be so? Soma shows it to you.
* Ken McLeod translates this phrase as, “Your body has no core, hollow like bamboo.” See Lee Kane, “Pith Instructions on Mahamudra from Mahasiddha Tilopa: The Ganges Mahamudra Upadesha,” Buddha Weekly, accessed March 9, 2020, https://buddhaweekly.com/pith-instructions-mahamudra-mahasiddha-tilopa-ganges-mahamudra-upadesha.