September 16, 2021 Thursday Morning, Private Session
Aaron and the Tiger: Coming to the Place of Non-Self, Non-Separation, Non-Duality; Self as Useful Tool
Aaron and P had been speaking of spiritual bypassing and of the sambhogakaya bridge and moving down into the dark chasm beneath, with willingness to explore the darkness.
Aaron: You’ve heard me speak about my awakening experience, lying there, pinned down by a thorn tree in a heavy rain, face in the mud, big thorns just barely breaking the skin. The tiger was snarling around me, trying to figure out how to get my thorn tree armor to eat my body.
This was a place of darkness, no surprise! I saw how attached I was to that body, to staying alive.
But I had failed to see how attached the tiger was to her body and to her cubs’ bodies and keeping them all alive.
I first worked with fear, of course. And I had quite a bit of time; it was a long night, and her growls and frustration continued for hours.
Fear, contraction. Really going off into that dark abyss. Using my practice—and here was the spiritual bypassing—using the depth of practice that seemed to protect me, to avoid the experience of fear, of anger, of hopelessness. By offering metta I was able to bring myself into a place of more balance, less fear, but I was avoiding going into the place of non-existence, of death. And I was not truly afraid of death; I was angry because I t believed that I could and would awaken in that lifetime, and I felt it being stolen from me by the tiger who threatened to eat me.
I had to allow myself to be eaten by the tiger to let go of all resistance. To let go of any separation between her needs and my needs. To truly love her as I loved myself. And to realize if either of us died, she of starvation or me because of her eating me, we both died. I could not choose one above the other.
In other words, to come to that place, not of transcending fear, but of seeing fear truly as just arisen from conditions, and yet also seeing the release of fear as arising from conditions. To transcend both.
What is there when fear releases from wholesome conditions? It’s still releasing out of conditions.
The awakening human is constantly trying to abandon the unwholesome, cultivate the wholesome, but there’s still a doer.
This is where that “Who is doing this?” becomes important.
Watching this constant recreation of a self until there is a moment when we see what we’re doing, and that there never was a self in this picture, at all; that this is simply the outflow of the aggregates, no self. That’s the moment where it all pops open—awake!
The self then ceases to be a construct and simply becomes a useful tool that you can pick up when it’s useful and put down. Sometimes it’s useful; somebody has to take out the garbage.
But when we understand that we are opening into this construct of the self to use it for a specific reason— for example, if somebody is saying something very cruel— there can be response from a place of emptiness.
If I draw a little bit into the self and its memories of experiencing anger, I bring up a different kind of power that can respond on a human level, that the one who is doing the hurt might not be able to hear unless he hears it from the human. But I’m not caught up in it at all. I use the anger and put it down. There’s no—let me say this carefully—there is truth to it because there is the ability from emptiness to remember the idea of anger, to express that energy authentically, and never to carry it a step beyond where it has been spoken and released.
When anger is used in this way, it does not do harm because there’s no karmic being pushing the anger. The anger is really arisen from the conditions invited by the one who was pushing. This is the way Yeshua used anger.
I found myself lying there in the mud, tiger still snarling, having been feeling, “I should love her. I shouldn’t hate her for wanting to eat me. I shouldn’t feel afraid.”
And then moving on past “I should/I shouldn’t” to “I accept and open my heart to all of this. Whatever will happen, I trust it. It’s okay.”
The next step was feeling the true emptiness, where there was no more fear at all, no more need to control what might happen from an ego place. There was simply what seemed like a very wholesome decision, “No, I shall not die now,” which led me to be able to issue a LOUD ROAR back to the tiger. “NO!”
At that point, not my voice so much as the energy behind it just scared her away.
I’ve talked about the people who found me and helped me. But I asked the monks to ask villagers to go out into the forest to see if they could find the tiger and cubs, to find her den and leave some meat for her, some food so that she would not starve, so her cubs would not starve. By depriving the tiger of my body, I did not want her and her cubs to die.
This did not happen immediately. It’s possible that we did not find her den, just another tigress’ den. But the offering was made, “We are not saying no to deprive you of food.” But the people found some newly dead carrion and brought it close to the tiger’s den, left it there for her.
So, that is my experience.