breaking open and letting go

 

 

 

 

 

We are always experiencing births and deaths. 

We feel the death of loved ones most acutely—there is something radical about the change in our reality.

 We are not given options, there is no room for negotiation, and the situation cannot be rationalized

 away or covered up by pretense. There is a total rupture in our who-I-am-ness, 

and we are forced to undergo a great and difficult transformation.

In bereavement, we come to appreciate at the deepest, most felt level exactly what it means to die

 while we are still alive.   These are moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity

 that we otherwise project onto our lives. In American culture, we sometimes refer to this

 as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling ungrounded. 

 

These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty 

are that state in which we have lost our old reality

 and it is no longer available to us.

Anyone who has experienced this kind of loss knows what it means to be disrupted, 

to be entombed between death and rebirth. We often label that a state of shock.

 In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality and yet have no sense what a new one might be like.

 There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point—there is, in a sense, no rest. 

This has always been the entry point in our lives for religion, because in that radical state of unreality

 we need profound reasoning—not just logic, but something beyond logic,

 something that speaks to us in a timeless, nonconceptual way.

 The more we learn to recognize this sense of disruption, the more willing and able we will be

 to let go of this notion of an inherent reality and allow that which is precious to slip out of our hands. 

Rupture is taking place all the time, day to day and moment to moment; in fact,

 as soon as we see our life in terms of these successive changes, we dissolve the very idea 

of a solid self grasping onto an inherently real life. We start to see how conditional who-I-am-ness

 really is, how even that does not provide reliable ground upon which to stand.

At times like this, if we can gain freedom from the eternal grasping onto who I am and how things are—

our default mode—then we can get to the business of being. Until now, we have been holding on

 to the idea of an inherent continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves

 on artificial ground. By doing so, we have been missing the very flavor of what we are.

The cause of all suffering can be boiled down to grasping onto a fictional, contrived existence. 

But what does that mean? If we really come to understand, then there is no longer even a container

 to hold together our normal concepts, to make them coherent. The precious pot shatters,

 and all our valuables roll away like marbles on a table. Reality as we thought we knew it

 is disrupted; the game of contriving an ideal self is suddenly irrelevant.

When we suffer disruption, we find we just can’t play that game anymore. 

The teachings are really about recognizing the value of giving up the game,

 which we play without even giving it a second thought. But when we are severely ill

 or in hospice, and we have to cede control over our own bodily functions to strangers, 

holding it all together is not an option.

There are times like these in our lives—such as facing death or even giving birth —

when we are no longer able to manage our outer image, no longer able to suspend ourselves

 in pursuit of the ideal self. It’s just how it is—we’re only human beings, and in these times

 of crisis we just don’t have the energy to hold it all together. When things fall apart,

 we can only be as we are. Pretense and striving fall away, and life becomes starkly simple.

 

 The value of such moments is this: we are shown that the game can be given up 

and that when it is, the emptiness that we feared, emptiness of the void, is not what is there.

 What is there is the bare fact of being. Simple presence remains—breathing in and out, 

waking up and going to sleep. The inevitability of the circumstances at hand is 

compelling enough that for the moment, our complexity ceases. Our compulsive manufacturing

 of contrived existence stops. Perhaps in that ungrounded space, we are not even comforting ourselves,

 not even telling ourselves everything is okay; we may be too tired to do even that. 

It’s just total capitulation—we’re forced into non-grasping of inherent reality. 

The contrived self has been emptied out along with contrived existence and the tiring treadmill

 of image maintenance that goes along with it. What remains is a new moment 

spontaneously meeting us again and again.

There is an incredible reality that opens up to us in those gaps 

if we just do not reject rupture. In fact, if we have some reliable idea of what is happening

 in that intermediate, groundless space, rupture can become rapture.

 

 

 

 

~  Pema Khandro Rinpoche

excerpts from Breaking Open in the Bardo

with thanks to Lion's Roar