SOME NIGHTS I am pulled awake before morning light by a rising wave of queasy sensations, which implode my reasonably coherent sense of self into a vortex of struggling pieces. While I worry about many elements of my personal life, I have come to associate my night monster with a leap of awareness regarding our terrifying global situation. A warming biosphere and the ubiquitous signs of a world tipping toward catastrophe, confirmed by scientific facts, have chained my waking life to a new and increasingly radical curriculum. It is a syllabus in which words like “resilience” and “revolution” are markers.
God’s Hands from “How to be Happy” Eleanor Davis / www.doing-fine.com
The irony that I teach meditation but am reduced to night sweats is not lost on me. While meditation generates calm, well-being, and the perspective of insight, the actual process of awakening from the dross of apathy, resistance, and delusion is a struggle. It would be naïve to think otherwise. The depiction of the Buddha-to-be, Siddhartha Gautama, on the cusp of his enlightenment sums it up. Arrayed against him are the forces of Mara, the personification of the great power that serves illusion, ignorance, and division. Mara is similar to the Satan of Abrahamic religions: an adversarial tempter who accuses and seduces. Today these forces are the voices that dull our awareness of climate crisis, undermine our courage to combat it, and put us back to sleep.
The Struggle to Enlightenment
The Buddha’s enlightenment arose from a momentous struggle. Siddhartha began his journey by departing from a life of excessive pleasure, which he rejected; then, influenced by the religious metaphor of his time, he perfected refined states of meditation. However, he inevitably felt trapped by the coarse realities of the body. Thinking the body was the problem, he tried to crush it while removing himself from all contact with the world. This period is known as his six years of extreme asceticism. Such was the severity of his determination that he pushed himself to the edge of death.
As Siddhartha underwent his life-denying practices, a woman called Sujata observed him from a distance. One day she decided to intervene. She made some milk rice and brought it to him. Gaining some strength, Siddhartha realized the utter uselessness of the path of pain to which he had committed. He recognized the need to embrace what he had been denying. The problem was not the world; the problem was his rejection of it. It was a moment of softening and opening.
This symbolic moment of Siddhartha receiving Sujata’s milk rice portrays the archetypal warrior, and his attempts to control life, yielding to the life-giving energy of the archetypal lover. Instead of conquering his body and preferencing subtle realms of consciousness, Siddhartha felt reverence for the mysterious world of forms of which he was a part. He saw the beauty of the natural world around him and allowed himself to be nourished by the food offered to him. Sujata’s gift, as a symbol of the deep feminine, was critical for the new awakening Siddhartha would bring to the world: he thought, “Is there another way?”
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