Silaratna's Testimony

Having read a few of the ‘testaments’ about insight arising in the lives of Aparimana, Tejananda and Padmayogini on the Upadesa Insight Exchange, consequent upon this, I have realised that I too need to ‘come out’ as a Buddhist practitioner/human being who also has had to address the matter of direct insights arising into his life. 

One characteristic that is very apparent when real insight arises is that I don’t ever really forget what that was like, nor can I deny the huge challenges that direct insight brings into the relative life I lead, and the consequent modifications and changes I inevitably face having to make from both the so called, ‘within’ subjective perspective, as well as absorbing consequences from the ‘world’ or ‘universe’ which actually came into being with ‘me’ when I was born - a perspective that is radically raised and considered by Dogen in his great life work, the Shobogenzo. 

There is always, at least in my limited experience of real insight, the matter of integrating these insights into the living of a conscious life karmically, the living out with interrelated others, hopefully compassionately, for however long this life and world persists. This is what in the Zen tradition is considered as the “actualising” the transformation of “peak experience”, to use a generic Maslow expression, into some kind of beneficial activity in the world. The insight always seems to have a ‘life’ of its own, it comes when it does, from who knows where or how, and seems to not be derived from ‘self’ experience. But the “actualising” of insight is where the actual challenges of insight occur, because while ‘reality’ is ‘whole’, and that is the felt sense I ‘get’ whenever ‘it’ arises, the “actualising” is about the way ‘it’ meets the way the universe has shaped and formed this unique impermanent expression of my frail human life, and the consequent ‘successes or failures’ that manifest in that expression. 

Then there are also the considerable difficulties with communicating real insight experiences into the interrelated social context of my life in relation to others, especially if there is a bias, which there has been in FWBO/Triratna in the past, away from acknowledging that such insights do happen to relatively ordinary people, not just the great masters and yogis. Again the language used to describe them, of openings, awakenings, enlightenings, all pale as conceptual placeholders for that that is essentially unexpressible due its ineffability, but nonetheless I know has arisen and occurred in the course of this life. 

These days I feel a congruency more with the language of “opening the Dharma eye”, “opening the hand of thought” (Kosho Uchiyama), and nowadays sense that the moments of insight that have occurred down through the years, are more akin to the way the Zen Buddhist tradition speaks of “kensho”. English is a very poor language to have to use to express the ineffable when it erupts or slips consciously into my life. Our use of emotionally loaded terminologies that we frame insight with, such as: pure, perfect, ultimate, absolute, truth, even reality itself, seem very misleading ways to describe what actual real insight is and can be like, and what the consequences of its arising can actually do, whether you like it or not, to a life. I have found over the years that I cannot tame those moments of insight. They always raise in my life strong contradictions between the clarity and luminosity of the actual insights, and then the actual way I live out my relative karmic life, ethically, morally, socially. Radical change, which can also be quite subtle, does occur consequent upon real insight ‘on’ or ‘in’ that relative level, but compared to the timeless way insight can manifest, the actualisation of that clarity, behaviorally, seems at times painfully slow and self consciously immature. 

So the following expressions of actual insightful events in my life are somewhat ‘cherry picked’, but they are the experiences, for want of a better term, that are most memorable. Once real insight manifests into my life, there often follows a period where the actual initial insight rolls out other smaller insights, rather like a large and strong earthquake can set off many smaller aftershocks. Then there can come the long periods of almost stagnation, where seemingly nothing Dharmically significant is happening. It’s during those periods that doubt and a melancholic dryness and even passing depression can arise and temporarily paralyze the creative energy that the initial insight released. It seems to me the real skill in Insight practice is in being able to maintain momentum through those periods without succumbing to indolence, inertia, cynicism or depression. 

Was that really a true insight? 

What might others think if I express myself as someone who has experienced true insight? How can I continue to relate to the ‘norms’ of collective practice that are expected because you are part of a certain spiritual tradition? 

Because real insight can whisk you very strongly away from any group mentality, even separate you from any desire for any form of collective spiritual practice. The consequences of real insight can often be not that pleasant or sociable. It’s at those points where good spiritual friends, sound psychological understanding and practice, as well as developed patience become necessary I've found. I’m not always successful in implementing what I just said. Some of the stupidest and most painful things I have ever done, can occur consequent upon a major insightful opening. 

But insight also brings with it a deepening tenacity to keep at it, to weather the relative karmic storms of my all too evident samskara’s, and remember what Dogen emphasizes, that there is not a hairsbreadth difference between insight, and what he terms "ceaseless practice”. The insight gives you the awareness that there are not really any other viable possibilities for living once you have experienced the undeniable reliance of a life, no longer based in ignorance, but based in insight. You just have to carry on Going for Refuge, for years and years and years. What else can you do when you know directly that, as Bhante expresses in his little aphorism in “Peace is a Fire” that: 

The culmination of wisdom is freedom from all views. You have nothing to say. When all the answers are in your being you have no need to keep them in your head.

Very early openings 

Dreams of the endless wall. 

These very vivid and lucid repetitious dreams took place over a period of a year or two in my early life, roughly conterminous with the emergence of fully conscious self awareness. I became aware of that gnawing need to seek and search intensively for a way to get past those endless walls. A bit like in the first Ox herding image. 

The 4/5 year old altar implements awakening 

My mother was part of a Christian young wives group, and occasionally she would bring the church’s brass altar implements home to clean them. One day as a young boy I was playing and found a box of these implements in a cupboard behind a curtain. I crept behind the curtain and set up a sort of shrine with the cups and the cross and began praying to, I know not who or what. I can recall this downrush of energy that poured for just a moment into my being, and frightened the living daylights out of me. But the energy seemed to want to draw me into it. It was probably my first direct experience of Shraddha and the divine. 

Near death experiences as a 6 year old 

Due to chronic and acute Asthma I had developed from when I was a year and a half, I became very close to dying on a few occasions. The peak of this trauma culminated when I vividly remember being visited by beings not of this world who were waiting to carry me off from this life. All it seemed I could do was to let go of any holding to life. Four days later I woke up from life support, in an oxygen tent, surprised I was still embodied and alive. Hence, I have always carried with me from that early age a strong experiential understanding of impermanence. 

During most of the 1960’s and very early 1970’s were my school years and so those early insights, while not forgotten, slipped into the background of my life, busy as I was with the relative challenges, perils, and pleasures of boyhood and then adolescence, and all that came with that period. 

Late 1970’s 

But around the mid 1970’s that atmosphere of insightfulness began to return. I took up surfing in 1973 and so would spend as much time as I could immersed in the ocean with my other surfing buddies riding the waves. That was when there entered into my life, the insightful impact of waking up to the wonder of the natural world, a kind of shamanic waking up, fueled by the sensations of being out in the Ocean, and also of strongly entering into what I would call a mythological awareness through imaginative living in the magical world

of the Lord of the Rings. Drugs also became a portal into strange altered states of mind. This period culminated when I came very close to drowning in large West Coast surf. Again an acute awareness arose of the fragility and dreamlike nature of the life I was leading which impressed itself directly into my being. 

As a result I turned painfully ‘inward’, took up a kind of self taught meditation practice and began to absorb myself into the lives of people such as Paramahansa Yogananda, Chogyam Trungpa, Lama Govinda and Tarthang Tulku through their books. I left my parental home early in 1978 while I was completing my final years training to become a Primary School teacher and began a period of inner and outer wandering to find my true self. 

At the end of 1978 I found myself up in Northland, New Zealand at a place called Ahipara where I had gone to stay with a Dutch family, whose daughter I was seriously in love with at the time, as well as to surf the classic point breaks of the area. One memorable day I went with friends up into the huge sand dunes of the area and ingested a large dose of a powerful hallucinogen called STP. It was during this trip that I lost any sense of grasping at an isolated and unrelated self, and became totally absorbed again into the sensations of the living, breathing natural world. Again the essentially insightful quality could be described as that of impermanence and death, which I witnessed directly because the whole world that included me, was dissolving inwardly and outwardly. I remember coming down from that trip, into a mild psychotic break, but with a whole new awareness of my life’s direction that seemed completely turned around from its previous direction. This led to a decisive going forth towards Buddhism. 

Towards the end of 1979 I had been on a weeklong Tibetan Lam Rim retreat with the FPMT and had taken up a visualisation practice of the Buddha, which I kept up until inertia set in once again. A little later in that year I encountered my teacher Sangharakshita via meeting members of the Western Buddhist Order and becoming a mitra in Auckland. 

Early FWBO Openings 

Bhante’s Influence upon my life even before I actually met him was profound. I actually couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have encountered a real Buddhist teacher. I immersed myself in his tape lectures and felt the impact into my life of a kind of freedom, when I read the following in his “Survey of Buddhism”. 

Nature is not dead, but alive with many voices, and to the eye accustomed to see and to hear things that point beyond themselves even, 

An old pine tree is preaching wisdom 

And a wild bird crying out truth

These short lines propelled me into an experience of great clarity and released a powerful volitional sense that this was unadulterated truth that could be totally relied upon to dissolve confusion, doubt and uncertainty. At the end of 1980 I went, under the advice of my friend and early mentor Buddhadasa, on my first months solitary, where I followed to the letter his admonition to: read the Survey cover to cover, absorb myself fully into the world of the Vimalakirti Nirdesa by reading it and listening to the tape lectures, and to do four sessions of meditation each day and perform Sevenfold Puja every evening. 

So began a mostly successful period of following the “Path of Regular Steps”. But even with that momentum I couldn’t avoid the painful tensions of reconciling insight with actualisation. I remember that solitary was a constant too-ing and fro-ing between the Buddhist practices which I stuck to, and my sensuous wanderings in between formal sessions of practice, into the local area, skinny dipping in the local river while indulging fantasies about meetings that might occur with ‘woodland nymphs’ down at the river. 

Sometime during this period I read Bhante’s essay: “The Way of Emptiness” in the “Path of the Inner Life” and again I was confronted with that expansive spacious awareness that re-emerged, and that had the consequence of propelling me, initially to the community from which the first Sydney Buddhist Centre was formed, with me as its token mitra amidst the conflicting fun of the Order members, and eventually to the UK and my eventual ordination by Bhante as Silaratna. 

I had been introduced as that mitra in Sydney, by another Order member friend, into the Tara sadhana, which I practised reasonably regularly during my year in Australia in 1981, and also when I arrived in Britain before the 1982 Tuscany retreat. I kept that quiet of course, because I quickly became aware at Padmaloka that mitras were not supposed to do visualisation practices. I didn’t even tell Bhante when I finally met him, but during one early morning session in the shrine room in Lesingham House, when I was the last to leave the shrine room a bird sang outside the shrine room and in an instant that sense of self and other dissolved away and I found myself again in kensho, with all my senses awake and with there being no separation between that awareness of emptiness, and the myriad appearances of the formed world. 

During the time of insight which is surrounded by a calm and gentle aura, openness and appearance are inseparable. 

The six senses come forth, though appearance and voidness are inseparable; this is the real foundation, without which no means exists.

From Canto 103: The Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava. 

It was from this point that I began to experience some emerging tension between the insights I had experienced, and that I knew were real, and the way that the Ordination training process for the mitras took place on the pre Tuscany retreats and during the actual Tuscany course. I had some difficulties on the course with my order member study group leader, as I tried to express at times my direct experience of the Dharma, but lacking enough linguistic skills, I would flounder in the words, and be critically put in my place by him, with the accompanying admonitions to ignore all that so-called insight experience and firmly bed myself into just basic practice, which wasn’t on reflection, in retrospect, bad advice, as I probably needed some grounding, but at the same time that criticism of my experience, drove the direct truths I had experienced underground, rendering me unable to fully integrate them coherently into the social context of the collective practice on the course. 

Luckily Bhante must have thought I was still ready to become ordained because that is what happened. One final direct opening took place for me on the course after the ordinations. One evening Bhante was leading a Padmasambhava puja and as I went up to the shrine and made my offerings I turned to offer Bhante a salutation and Bhante had disappeared for an instant, and in his place sat Padmasambhava. A half second later and Bhante re-emerged in his orange robes and blue shirt as if nothing had happened. Yet I knew what I had directly seen. When I returned to the UK after the Tuscany course I asked Bhante if I could take up the Padmasambava sadhana, having been given the Green Tara sadhana mantra, formally this time, during my private ordination. Bhante said to “go see Vessantara”, which I did, and I became a devotee of Padmasambhava, which I have remained to this day. 

After returning to Aotearoa/NZ in 1985 after a period of living and working with Prakasha and Devapriya, Gunapala and Khemapala, doing the initial major building renovations on Blaanddol house so it could become Vajrakuta, and after that concluded having three months pilgrimage of some of the main Buddhist sites in India, and meeting face to face with Dhardo Rimpoche up in Kalimpong, I returned to Aotearoa in mid 1985. 

There was however one startling opening that occurred for me while in India, when I was invited to speak as a visiting western order member at a TBMSG meeting somewhere in Pune one evening. I was schooled about what to say thoroughly by Ashvajit. I duly, nervously, delivered my stock standard talk through the translator, but when the talk had finished and I was just standing up there on the stage, I looked around and became aware of just how many people there were spread out in front of me, sitting or standing on the ground around the pandal. I looked up and realized also that there was a full moon shining down through the leaves of what I recognised was a Bodhi tree growing by the stage, and then the insight hit me and I was flooded by a breaking down of that separativeness between me and the world. Tears flooded my eyes, which I quickly wiped away, embarrassed that others would see me crying. For a moment, there was such a sense of open space it felt like I might just float away and dissolve into it. Then I was back in my body, doing the gassho’s and leaving the Pandal. 

Back in New Zealand, after a brief stint working with Gunapala and Khemapala in Sydney to recoup some financial resources, I settled in Wellington and began functioning as a busy order member teaching Dharma and interacting with others at the Wellington Buddhist Centre. I fell seriously in love with a woman who I met while on a climbing trip to the South Island with the Wellington Alpine club, which I had joined. Again that movement to the wilds in Aotearoa re-occured for me. Something I had lost touch with while in, what I called, the ‘trodden on’ history of life in the UK. 

There were two major kensho openings to reality during my time in Wellington. The first arose on a long weekend retreat up at a Boy Scout camp we used, called Ngati Awa, where many years before some of the first ordinations in Aotearoa were performed by Bhante in 1974 or was it 1978, I can’t remember, but it was before my time in the movement. 

This opening pretty much followed the aforementioned description by Padmasambhava in Canto 103. This opening confirmed one thing for me and that was that insights in my case, seem to occur only when I have my senses open and free to the world of appearances. In this case I had experienced prior to the opening a stable period in meditation in the first Dhyana. My Dhyanic experiences, down through the years, have never gone beyond the second Dhyana to the best of my understanding. Upon the meditation period ending, as I opened my eyes, (back then I always meditated with my eyes closed, this no longer is the way I meditate as I primarily meditate in a Shikantaza way now) the insight manifested in pretty much the way Padmasambhava described. “Appearance and voidness is inseparable” along with the “calm and gentle aura” surrounding it. 

The other kensho, which was far more impactful into my life, manifested in the context of an alpine tramping week up in the Southern Alps in Arthurs Pass National park with that same woman I had met earlier in the mountains. We had gone there to tramp the three passes trail over the alps to the West Coast. But due to increasing tensions in our relationship we never even crossed the first pass, as we became embroiled in an intense appraisal of our relationship up in the first alpine hut we arrived at. By now we were engaged to be married, but cracks were starting to appear. This trip was the unravelling point in our relationship, after which I left Aotearoa to live and work at Guhyaloka for two years, followed by six years of life at Aryaloka in New Hampshire USA. 

The kensho manifested early one morning, when I awoke from a dream into the silence of the tramping hut, the only sound being that of the rushing of the water nearby in the big river of the Waimakariri valley on our way out from Barker Hut where we had been staying up in the higher mountains. I recall crying with such intensity that I had awakened my partner, with shouts that were,“I cannot keep anything out”. All of life and its suffering was pouring into my heart space, which was trying to expand to accommodate that life. It was quite scary and all I could do was ride it out until the intensity of it subsided after about an hour, leaving me in a state of such bliss that was overwhelming. It took me an hour or so more to return to planet earth, my partner understandably shaken by what had occurred to me. I tried to put it all into words, but all I could really do was pack up our things, and with her, pick our way back down the valley in order to meet the Transalpine train in time, which took us back to Christchurch.

There have been other openings since then, probably more numerous than I realise, but thankfully not quite so intense. The only other one worth mentioning though arose several years back while I was on a mixed retreat at Sudharshanaloka led by Viveka. It was ostensibly supposed to be a retreat based on the “Seven Point Mind Training” but which actually morphed into an intensive introduction to Mahamudra practice. It was on this retreat that I learned to meditate with my eyes open, which in itself was a revelation. Towards the end of the retreat which had been steadily intensifying, one morning while we were all meditating, I interrupted my onepointedness to reflect on how much time had passed in my life and the lives of all of us on the retreat. It turned into a kind of time based metta practice. My gaze eventually arrived on an elderly Dharmacharini friend of long standing, with whom, along with Navachitta in 1980, I had had my mitra ceremony. At that point it seemed like the world shifted on its axis, the tears started to flow and my heart burst open similar to how it had in Arthurs Pass, but this time I was able to experience a greater steadiness in absorbing all the life and its dukkha as it poured in. I had to leave the shrine room so my crying did not disturb the others' meditations. I sat outside the shrine room, under the trees, again absorbed in a deep bliss, which in a way has never really left me since, even though it gets submerged from time to time through the vicissitudes of life. But in the right conditions, like for instance occurred last year when I visited Japan with my married partner and I reconnected strongly with that bliss in all the beauty of the temples we visited, and our encounters with the wonderful Japanese people we met, precipitated by another heart rending opening to emptiness and appearance, life and its dukkha while standing on the Sanjo bridge in Kyoto admiring the Kamo river passing underneath. 

Conclusion 

I’ve never been, as a Buddhist, particularly interested in, what I might call, the technical side of insight, or how to manipulate conditions to supposedly create the possibility for insight to arise. Which fetters might have been broken, which haven’t? Have I entered the stream or become a once returner or not? It all seems, in a way, quite irrelevant. It’s a bit like the bardo teachings, they are interesting, even fascinating, but whether what the Tibetan Book of the Dead says might be how “it” is like is besides the point. Insight has a lot more to do with the moment, because it’s in one or other of those that I become aware of it manifesting or arising if you like. It’s like in a koan encounter, the only answer that carries any credence is the one you are able to express fully with your whole being in that actual moment, not the stock phrases gathered into koan collections to laboriously work your way through. So an insight’s only value when you are in the midst of “it” is because that's the only place that you, in that moment, are wholly within reality. A moment later and you are back with Dogen’s “ceaseless” practice, the year after year, even lifetime after lifetime, actualising expression of that one moment of clear reality. Even a Buddha has to move on in some kind of way we cannot even fathom, continuing to function in what Bhante has pointed to as the “progressive trend” of the Dharma niyama. 

I’ve always been fascinated by that moment that Shakyamuni decided to stand up under the Bodhi tree and step back into his "ceaseless practice” after his enlightenment. I once drew a picture of that moment on a solitary at Sudharshanaloka. In some ways, for me, that was more significant than what occurred when he glimpsed the morning star; or that other famous Zen moment when Shakyamuni held up that flower and Mahākāśyapa smiled his moment of recognition. That’s what I understand by the Zen phrase of transmission. In any moment of insight there is a transmission, from the reality of the universe expressing itself, into a human heart, and then I have to make of that what I can or cannot actualise in my fragile human life. 

I could write more, but I think I’ll leave it there, to hang incomplete. 

Silaratna