Ruptured Reality - Pema Khandro Rinpoche

We are always experiencing births and deaths [and other significant losses].  There is something radical about these changes in our reality.  There is a total rupture in our 'who-am-I-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 the moments when gaps [or in-between states] appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives.  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 [or fracture].  In those moments, we lose our grip on the old reality and yet have no sense of what a new one might be like.  There is no ground, no certainty, and no reference point - there is, in a sense, no rest.  In that radical state of unreality we need - not just logic, but something beyond logic, something that speaks to us in a timeless, non-conceptual 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 precious pot 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 successive changes, we dissolve the 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...  By doing so, we have been missing the very flavor of what we are.

The cause of suffering can be boiled down to grasping onto [or believing in] 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.

Reality as we thought we knew it is disrupted; the game of contriving an ideal self is suddenly irrelevant.  We experience a disrupted reality, a direct experience of disruption felt at the core of our being.

When we suffer disruption, we find we just can't play that game anymore.  It's 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, and we have to cede control over our own body to strangers, holding it all together is not an option.

There are times like these in our lives - such as facing death [or other losses] - when we are no longer able to manage an outer image, no longer able to suspend ourselves in pursuit of the ideal self.  It's just how it is.  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 who 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.  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.

But what's underneath our experience of rupture?  If here is no inherent existence to hold on to, then what is the ultimate reality?  This unanswered question drives a lot of us.  If we don't know the answer, then life becomes a primordial anxiety...  The extent to which we know [experience] what's underlying everything - is the extent to which life becomes bearable.

In the raw, broken-open state, this place where we let go of all the games, there is actually a great sense of relief, a knowledge that we don't have to do that anymore, to be that.  There can be a feeling of getting to the heart of things, a juxtaposition [a reorientation] of real and unreal.  That's the beauty of not grasping onto inherent reality.  If we can find ways to disrupt our own habit of clinging to our continuity story, to just strip it all down, then what we find in any bare moment is creative, instantaneous playfulness.

Emerging from the [in-between state], we re-enter the flow of life...  A new kind of openness becomes available to us.  We have lost our delusions of our contrived self image and a secure and solid state of reality and value the pause of the [in-between] as it makes apparent the Silence that underlies everything - that makes all sounds more vivid, and clarifies the end that we will now be beginning...

Pema Khandro Rinpoche
Excerpt from - "Breaking Open in the Bardo"
article in Lion's Roar

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

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Photo - Mystic Meandering
(color digitally inverted)