The Psychodynamics in Meditation (Part 3 - Dimensions of the Personal Journey)

With wisdom and sensitivity, we can learn to use both the view of emptiness and the view of self to bring a completeness to our unfolding liberation and to know the joy and openness of ongoing discovery.

Good morning, everyone. Probably a little bit not very sensible, probably today's talk should actually be about five talks. But I feel like I started something, and the retreat's ending, so. We'll see what we get to.

So we were going through these eight sort of principles or approaches to slightly different takes, different approaches, to working with our emotional life. I think we completed seven. So I want to finish that and move on in certain directions.

(8) The eighth one is flexibility. Flexibility of relationship with the emotion that's going on, and flexibility of view, meaning the way I am seeing it in the moment. Flexibility. So for those of you that were here right at the beginning of the retreat, we talked about vedanā, the feeling-tone -- pleasant, unpleasant, neutral -- that goes with any experience. I think I said during that talk: emotions have a vedanā -- actually, the vedanā moves in emotions. But when there's a complex emotion going on, very helpful at times to just come, for instance, to the heart centre, or maybe the throat, or some emotion is around the mouth, or somewhere along this central axis, and just very delicately and sensitively simplifying the attention to the vedanā level, and staying with the unfolding, moment to moment, of the vedanā at the kind of core of the emotion.

That's a very simple way of paying attention, and a very simplifying way of paying attention. It's not the only way -- we've been through all these other possibilities, but that's one. There's a kind of flexibility. We can do that. Remember, that level is available to us, that simplifying possibility is available to us no matter how crazy we feel we have become. No matter what shenanigans have unfolded in terms of papañca, etc. That simple level, there's always the level of vedanā, no matter what's going on. And to pay attention to the level of vedanā in a way that's just allowing it to unfold moment to moment, that is always available and usually always simplifying. It's not that we miss the moment of contact, or we miss the initial thought that's triggered all this madness -- that's not necessarily a problem at all. This level is available to us, two hours down the road or two months down the road.

So that's an option. To have these options means we're flexible. In any moment I can switch gears, I can switch directions, I can switch approaches. I could also play with different relationships with an emotion. Almost, you could say, tempering the mindfulness, tempering the attention that goes with or towards an emotional experience. So what is it to temper the mindfulness with warmth, or with compassion? Sometimes in other talks -- I've talked plenty about this, so I'm just going through quite quickly. There's the possibility of surrounding a difficult emotion in warmth, actually embracing it, encircling it in warmth, in compassion. What happens if I bring, for instance, an appreciation of self into the mix? Actually into that moment, while I'm with the emotion, I bring in a reflection or a holding, a sense of appreciation of myself. Another option.

What about something like the quality of determination? We talked about energizing the attention, and just kind of staring this thing down. Could be an emotion, could be a mind state. One is simply -- I'm sitting here determined to see the end of this. Also an option. It's almost the opposite, in a way, of this surrounding it in warmth. There's flexibility. To bring in spaciousness, to bring in curiosity -- there are many options. What happens if I explore the option of feeling more into my relationship with what is going on? Is there aversion there towards the emotion? Is there grasping, trying to keep hold of the emotion? Actually being more interested in the relationship. Is it possible to relax that aversion? This is a skill. This is a practice that we can develop, certainly develop over time. What would it be to be with something, but focusing more on relaxing the aversion or relaxing the grasping?

Sometimes, some of these options, as we said going back to the other talks, sometimes some of these options are in the field already. They're in the field of my experience, and I just need to widen a little bit and notice that they're there. Someone was saying there was fear around. The fear wasn't even the start; they had traced it down through some questioning, etc. But fear. And then broadening a little bit the awareness, noticed that alongside even that fear in the body, there was the presence of calm and peace -- unexpectedly -- in a way, around the fear, and that could then be used as a resource, as we said going back to the other talks. A vantage point -- this calmness, this peace then becomes a vantage point to look at the more difficult, turbulent energy of fear. Having that vantage point of calm and peace then softened the experience, and actually softened the fear.

As I said, we might not find that quality or that flexible option in the experience at the moment; we need to instigate it, create it a little bit, build it a little bit. No problem. With practice, going back to what I just mentioned earlier, with practice, this being able to put love around, to embrace, to hold a difficult emotion -- that becomes a really viable option. We get skilled at doing it. We get able to do that, to sort of pull that out and enable that.

It may be that we can play with the view, the way of seeing. Someone else was saying there was something difficult going on and they just decided to see it as perfect. This thing that was difficult, I will just see it as perfect, as just right, as just perfect. So we're playing with the view. You think, "That's impossible. It's not perfect. It's horrible." But actually there's a lot more flexibility and malleability in the way we look at things than we might imagine. Everything depends on the way we look at things. It's almost like playing a game. What if I just decide to see this experience that normally I would think is terrible, and just decide to see it as perfect -- it's just right, just perfect?

I might also bring in past insights. So actually the same person was saying they'd had an experience or a period of time in their practice before when they were exploring their relationship with thought and the thinking mind, and really beginning to realize, "I don't have to believe my thoughts. I don't have to believe the thoughts that are there." This was quite a big thing: "I don't have to believe them." Now, a week later, two weeks later, I can pluck out that old insight and plug it in again, and just remember that I don't have to believe my thoughts, and encourage a certain view that I've already established a little bit through old practice. I'm using old insights, resurrecting old insights. There are many, many, many of these. When we have an insight, we want to use it; we want to make it part of our life. It can't just be something that comes and then we let it go.

To go back to something I said a few minutes ago: if, for instance, I learn, I develop the skill over time of really learning to relax the aversion in relationship to something difficult, really learning to develop my ability to relax grasping on to something, I begin to notice something very curious. I mentioned this in the vedanā talk as well. An emotion or a phenomenon itself actually turns out to be dependent on my aversion or my grasping. When I relax that, the thing itself begins to fade, to disappear. Very, very curious phenomenon.

The conclusion from that is that this emotion, this difficulty that I'm going through, is actually built, it's constructed, partly through my very relationship with it. It's a very counterintuitive understanding. I also begin to see, taking another track, that if I'm identified with this emotion -- "It means something about me. This is happening to me. This is mine," etc. -- when there's that identification, that, too, is a builder. It's a builder of experience. I'm talking about very deep level insights now. So I can use that, and eventually, when I really have absorbed those insights, I can look at things and I can say, "I know you're built. I know you're constructed. I know you're fabricated." That makes a huge difference in terms of opening up freedom, because we've seen something, we've been convinced of something, that undermines the oppressive reality, or seeming reality of things.

Insight meditation, and I think I said this in one talk, to me, insight meditation is practising ways of seeing, ways of relating, that bring freedom. That's what it is. That's what we're doing. It may not seem obvious at first. We're practising ways of seeing and ways of relating to experience that bring freedom. Usually, unfortunately, we practise the opposite.

So partly coming out of this notion, we begin to get the sense how things are kind of constructed, through ignorance, through grasping, through aversion. The Buddha says they're fabricated, saṅkhata. They're fabricated. Another way of saying that, what comes out of that, they're actually empty. They don't exist independently of my mind. Phenomena do not exist independently of my mind. I can see emotions are like that, the object or thing or situation that I might be upset about or clinging to or excited about is also like that. It's also empty. And also the self is empty. All of it is empty. When we see that things are empty -- this is not a talk about emptiness, actually. I'm moving quite quickly through all this! [laughs] It's definitely not a talk about emptiness. When we see that things are empty, through that view, everything is empty, and that brings an equality to everything. Everything is equal, because everything is empty. It's okay if it's there. It's okay if it's not there. Everything has the equality of emptiness. Something very, very profound and beautiful in that.

I came across this song from Milarepa, who was a very wonderful and beloved Tibetan yogi, I think in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, perhaps:

In a solitary place like this

I, the yogi Milarepa

am feeling clear light well

meditating on emptiness of mind

When I get a lot of stuff coming up

I feel extremely well

When the highs [roll] into lows

feels even better still

When confusion gets complicated

I feel extremely well

Fearsome visions getting worse and worse

feels even better still

With the bullies getting worse and worse

I feel extremely well

The suffering being bliss

feels so good that feeling bad feels good^[1]

[laughter] I just -- this is not a talk about emptiness, but I wanted to give you a sense of -- it's the most powerful thing. Hands down, the most powerful thing is understanding emptiness, getting that view in the heart, in the eyes, and then being able to look at experience. You may, I don't know what you felt hearing Milarepa there, but maybe there's a sense of possibility there, that sometimes in the most difficult things there's a whole other way of seeing it, a whole other way of seeing it that takes the problem out of it. A different view is possible. Even if -- and I'm not really explaining fully what I mean by 'emptiness' today, and you say, "I don't really understand" -- a different sense of things is possible. I've talked a lot elsewhere about emptiness, so I'm not going to go into it, because what I want to go into is something completely different. [laughs]

Okay, so that's the eight, and remember they're not separate. They're just slightly different angles than we might usually offer. Let's take this principle of flexibility of view. Flexibility of view is absolutely key. And then kind of expand it to really look at the big picture of what we're doing here, what we're doing in our life, what we're doing in our practice, what the path is. Let's start big-picture view. The Dharma. The Buddha comes along and he says, "There is dukkha." There is suffering, dissatisfaction, discontent, etc. There is dukkha; we have that in life. And "There is freedom from it." He says, "Why is there dukkha and how is it possible to be free?" So this is the Four Noble Truths now. Why is there dukkha and how is it possible to be free?

So the shorthand answer for "Why is there dukkha?", he says, "There's dukkha because there's craving." It's craving that gives rise to dukkha. But that's only the shorthand answer. When he expands on that, he says, "Why is there craving? Well, there's craving because there's delusion." So the fundamental root of dukkha, of suffering, discontent, dis-ease, dissatisfaction, etc., the fundamental root is delusion.

What does 'delusion' mean? 'Delusion' means this taking to be real everything that we habitually take to be real. This self, these other selves, these objects, these emotions, these inner experiences, these outer experiences, these walls, this space, this time, this awareness -- all of that, the Buddha is saying, it seems so real, and it's not real in the way that it seems to be. Delusion is not knowing that, not understanding that in the heart deeply. Not seeing, not knowing, understanding in our being, the emptiness of things. That's delusion, and that is the root cause of dukkha.

So the fourth Noble Truth -- again, this is the shorthand version -- but basically, how do we overcome dukkha? There's a path that leads to that complete understanding, piercing this seeming reality of things. That's, to me, the Dharma in a nutshell. It's a curious feature of the Insight Meditation tradition that we don't say that upfront. That has benefits and definite pitfalls. Other Buddhist traditions just say it upfront: this is where we're going. Side issue, but.

So it turns out, as someone was saying the other day, that seeing emptiness is the kind of trump card. It's the trump card. There's nothing that will beat it. There you go, emptiness. [laughter] It's, by far, by a long shot, it's the most powerful tool in the toolbox. No question about it. And it's actually very rare for someone to have absorbed it deeply and filled out the depth and the comprehensiveness of what that means. It's, unfortunately, sadly, quite rare for someone even to pursue it that much, and there are different reasons for that. I'm not going to go into that.

But we don't actually need all that all the time. So if we -- a little less complete, a little less deep: this self, there's nothing that I can find, there's nothing that I can point to, that is this self or belongs to this self. Existentially, this self is empty. I am not my body. I am not my feelings. I am not my emotions. I am not my perceptions. I am not my thoughts and my mind states and my movements of mind. I am not even awareness. At the most fundamental level, there's nothing I can point to as 'me' or 'mine.' It's anattā. And there's a lot of freedom that comes out of that. It's not quite the total emptiness thing yet, but there's a lot of freedom.

But again, sometimes we don't even need all that much. Sometimes, and especially more in the earlier years of practice -- not for everyone, because it's not linear, how it unfolds, but -- it might be that we see, just this personality that I take myself to be, "I am like this," "I am this kind of person," "I am a grumpy old da-da-da," "I am angry," "I am this," "I am that," we have these tight self-definitions of the personality. Practice comes in, and I begin to see that that's not actually true. We begin to see it's not true all the time. It's not actually the whole reality. So we say the personality level is also empty, it's also anattā, it's not-self.

And sometimes even a self-view is completely right and completely appropriate, completely. I want to give you mettā. I am developing this or that quality. I need this or that in my life. You and I have a difficulty, an argument or whatever -- we need to talk about it as two selves. So what you get is a spectrum of views, all of which can be very helpful, and actually -- used wrongly -- all of which can be unhelpful. Flexibility of view, flexibility of view.

So meeting a lot of people, and talking with a lot of people, hearing, etc., in the West, in our kind of sub-culture even within the West, a lot of suffering -- I don't even know if it's most suffering -- but a lot of suffering is actually with respect to the personality. It's actually with respect to the personality and the personality level. When, if we say, given the requisites -- meaning food and warmth and shelter and clothing, if all that is there -- given relatively okay health, and given that death is not kind of barking in our face, a lot of the suffering that one encounters when all that's okay is actually in relationship to the personality. By which I mean, how am I feeling about myself? How am I seeing and relating to my personality, these different aspects of my being and what I take myself to be? My sense of my journey through life. What's right for me now? Directions, choices, decisions. What do I want to express -- I want to express, as I move through life? That and more, I mean the 'personality level.'

A lot of the suffering, certainly that I see as I talk with people -- I'm not saying all of it by any means -- but a lot of it is at that level. Now, if the inner critic is strong, if it's very strong, it's often the case that its personality identity has become very negative. The view of our own personality when the inner critic is strong is negative: "Don't like this about myself." Defining myself too tightly and too negatively. Very, very helpful, in those cases, to find ways of exposing the untruth of those views. The untruth. And seeing these negative self-definitions are not true. They're not, certainly, the complete truth. You puncture that, and loosening the tightness of the self-definition. We box ourselves in with these definitions.

So again, I've gone into all of this many times in different talks. I'm not going to dwell too much on that. But also, meditatively -- and sometimes the meditation goes quite deep, perhaps -- we begin to see the personality go quiet. All this that we take ourselves to be at the personality level, the quietening of thinking and sometimes the quietening of the emotional life, more spaciousness, more peace, more equanimity, the personality goes quiet. And who am I then? Who am I, in the kind of quietening -- you could say the absence of the personality? The personality is what I took myself to be. When I begin to see, going in and out of more deep states in meditation, the personality comes and goes, and I begin to see beyond the personality, and I begin to see that I am not my personality, I am not the personality -- that is hugely important, and hugely freeing, massive.

But that's not what I want to talk about. [laughter]

Typically, in the Insight Meditation tradition, we kind of have an attitude of letting go of the personality, because of what I've just said. Let go of the personality. It's actually not so important, the personality -- it's not really where it's at. In extreme strands of the Insight Meditation tradition, you even get a model, sometimes spoken, usually more unspoken, kind of presented, that what we're aiming to try and do is erase the personality. Actually somehow wipe it out, and liberation looks like everyone kind of looking devoid of personality, that somehow that's the problem, and if you kind of suck that out and put it in the garbage somewhere, that's what liberation and awakening looks like.

Is that the aim? Is that an aim that you feel comfortable with? You may or may not conceive of the path like that, or what we're doing like that. You may not even think about liberation. But even if you don't think about it, if a person doesn't think about liberation, there's still a relationship with the concept of liberation -- you cannot get away from it. Assumptions, etc., are still operating there. You may not conceive that way, but in the Buddhist tradition, crept in somewhat, there is either explicitly or implicitly that kind of message. It's in there, and it's kind of informing the teaching in a way, and the practice, the path, or how we see it -- sometimes just by absence of talking about personality.

So I have a question. If I only let go of the personality, if I only see the emptiness of the personality -- this is a question -- is it possible that I am, perhaps, blocking a fulfilment of my being? A fulfilment in my life that might happen through, through, the personality level? And that that fulfilment might be as important, equally important in its way, as seeing the emptiness of the personality? That's a question.

Just to say: the assumptions we have about big-picture stuff like that, it's a big-picture question, the assumptions that I carry about that, that we all carry about that, they are there. We cannot pretend that they're not there. We might not be aware of what they are, but they're there. Those assumptions regarding the big picture influence the day-to-day and moment-to-moment attitudes and decisions of my life and my practice. So I'm kind of saying it out loud now; this is something maybe one wants to ponder. Another question or with that question: could there be such a thing as a self-view, a kind of self-view, a kind of identifying, even, with the personality, that might be not just kind of okay conventionally and necessary from time to time -- "Yeah, I'm here and you're there" -- not just kind of okay at times, but actually deeply helpful, deeply growthful, and deeply liberating?

In the other talks, the last two talks, there were lots of examples, and now I'm talking about bigger concepts. I know talking abstractly is sometimes hard for people, but to give a little bit of example. I gave that example of when I was using the idea of working with imagery and saying for myself, "Ah, seeing right now a certain thing going on, a certain strand going on for me." That was actually really important, really helpful to see my self -- those are the operative words -- to see my self as fully free to inquire, and having a full freedom of inquiry. That seeing myself, that's a helpful personality view. It's different. I could have chosen an emptiness view. But it's different, involving seeing my self a certain way. For now, right now, this is a certain way of seeing my self that's very helpful.

What's a person's relationship with their own journey of insight and journey of exploration? How do I see my self, as this process of meditation and insight unfolds? How do I feel my self? Sometimes we dismiss even the possibility that I could get any insight or get anywhere, or move towards something called 'liberation,' or that it will ever amount to anything. That's actually a personality view operating there. With that can be despair. If I'm constantly dismissing my own insights, etc., it will lead to despair.

So how I'm seeing my self, how I'm feeling my self. What about sexuality, and the sexual expression? Our expression, the way we express sexuality. This is whether we're celibate or not celibate. It's still something we feel for ourselves. We feel our sexuality. We have a relationship with our sexuality, and we express it. Whether we're active sexually or not, we're expressing it in different ways. That, in a way, is part of the personality journey. It's part of the personality picture. In a way, it's a pretty fundamental aspect of who we are. The Buddha says precious little about it. What he does is not very ... [laughs] encouraging.

Or something like artistic creativity. I was talking the other day with someone about that. For some people, that's a really important movement at the personality level. It's a very important expression of something. Again, the Buddha says nothing, and what he does say is quite scathing. So what would it be, what would that be, going back to this question -- is it possible that there is a kind of self-view, a kind of identifying with the personality, that's more than just okay? That's actually deeply helpful? What would that be? What would that view, that approach, be? What would it involve (generally speaking, not so much specifically), to include the personality level much, much more?

I don't mean, I don't just mean in terms of healing psychologically -- for instance, in most therapies, to kind of reclaim an aspect that might have been trodden on or cramped or distorted earlier in our life. I don't just mean that. I mean going beyond even that. There's something that can manifest and unfold through the personality, in an ongoing, lifelong way. An ongoing, lifelong discovery and unfoldment. That might, then, involve actually -- if it's ongoing and lifelong -- much more than just ordinarily what we might call the personality. Whole dimensions of experience, dimensions of feeling ourselves and experiencing ourselves, our being. If that is the case, then just as we talked about a kind of dynamism, a healthy dynamism that might be there with our emotions, like a plant wanting to move towards the light, a larger dynamism might be there with our whole personality and the aspects and the unfolding of our personality. Then the question is, if that's a possibility, how does that get locked down, that dynamism, and how might we unlock it?

So I want to go into this. How do we unlock it -- how do we lock it first, and how do we unlock it? Much of this, these questions, to me they were woven into a lot of what I was saying in the last two talks. That's why I'm talking about it now. I'm teasing a lot of this out of that. Because oftentimes, unconsciously, we shut out aspects of our being for different reasons. We touched on that in the last two talks. Perhaps because it doesn't fit an image of who I think I am or who I think I should be. I gave that example of this acquaintance of mine who was in meditation with the glaring, angry face that then said -- do you remember that? Yeah? Something doesn't fit the image, I shut it out; I'm shutting out aspects of myself. Or there are unconsciously operating limiting beliefs, conditionings from the past, from childhood, from education, from society, karma, whatever you want to call it. Conditionings. Fear. All this causes us to unconsciously shut out aspects of the being. Or we just, as I was saying in the last talks, we just don't assume that they're relevant; it just doesn't seem relevant.

But they may well be. They may well be deep resources, deep strengths possibly, deep gifts. Gifts of whatever you want to call it to ourselves, of ourselves to ourselves. Parts of us. Necessary aspects to be integrated. To the degree that we can do that, it allows a fullness of the being. A fullness, an aliveness to this unfoldment. It allows something to unfold at that level that I'm calling the personality level, through that dimension that I'm calling the personality. There can be, with that, as we begin to acknowledge, integrate, open, re-view -- meaning look at all that stuff differently, find the gifts in it -- a sense of the deep dynamism of the personal journey. The very difficulties become kind of threads to follow, and as we follow, those threads turn golden. It seems yucky, and as I follow it, it turns golden and becomes a gift. So that's one possibility.

Another possibility, the way we lock down this potential, this unfoldment, this dynamism, is that we don't believe there's much more to discover about ourselves on the personality level or the self-level. Especially when you get to a certain age, you think, "Well, I know myself now. There's not much more there. I know my personality. I know myself." We tend to conceive of the self as a kind of static thing, not imagining -- we don't imagine that maybe there's something inexhaustible here, in what we're calling our personality, at that level. There's something inexhaustible. Unique treasures there, that will very probably surprise us well into the autumn of our lives. Aspects that we perhaps haven't uncovered or allowed to unfold.

Maybe this self thing or the personality is not a final destination. It's not that we're kind of clearing away something to arrive at an authentic, real self. Maybe it's more that it's actually in the ongoingness, in the ongoing unfolding, in the discovery, in the revelation, that that movement is more accurately what the self is. It's not a static thing, "I am like this. I am like that," but something in a thread that we follow.

And just like when we were talking about with the emotions and the big premise I started with in regard to the emotional life, just like that dynamism in relation to the emotions, when that unfoldment at the personality level is allowed and energized -- rather, I should say this: we allow it more or less at times. We block it, we allow it partially. That's moving all the time. But dependent on how much we can allow it and allow it to be energized -- that depends on fear, beliefs; fear and beliefs will inhibit, tie up, distort and stagnate unfoldment. But if I can allow it, unlock its power -- there's an immense power here that it's probably quite rare for a human being to be fully in touch with. But if I can allow and unlock that power, really know it and really feel it, feel that current, something very beautiful there, very powerful, very empowering, alive, thrilling even. Thrilling. The journey of discovery of our selves in a way, of the very personality, becomes thrilling. And it actually involves -- this is where it's very curious -- it actually involves a kind of identification with the self and the personality. It also involves less clinging, because I have to see it as an open, ongoing current of unfoldment, and not a fixed "I am this, or I am that." I'll come back to that.

A third option of the way we lock it, we lock this unfoldment, is that -- and this goes back to something I said earlier -- we reduce the personality to an irrelevance, spiritually. It's empty, like I said. It's empty, and so ... The danger, in Dharma circles, is that if it's empty, we reach a kind of okayness in relationship to the personality and with the personality. It's kind of okay; I've seen to enough degree that it's empty, and so it's kind of okay. I can let it just be kind of okay. Or I can actually just ignore it for the rest of my life: "It's just the personality." That happens. Every path has pitfalls, and one of the pitfalls of this is that might happen. It doesn't seem to fit so well in with the Buddhadharma.

Sometimes in the Dharma, they say, "The self is a process. There is something unfolding." They talk about the five aggregates -- so form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations (thoughts, and moods, and mind states, and movements of the mind, intentions), and consciousness. And that these aggregates kind of move in a process, moment to moment, but other than that, there's nothing there, and that is the self. It's this movement of these moments of these little building blocks, but there's nothing other than that. If I say that's what the self is, how does that feel to you? Did it make you happy? [laughter] It might make some people happy! Some people are shaking their heads definitely not.

To me, it's a very reductionist view. It's also not what the Buddha said, as far as my understanding. It's definitely not what the Buddha said; absolutely not. It's also reductionistic. What it is is a helpful way of looking, going back to what we said. You can plug that in, shift the car into that gear, and look at your experience moment to moment in that way. And that is very helpful. But it's not a statement of reality. It's only a way of looking, which can be very helpful at times. It's only a way of looking. But that way of looking, that sense of process, doesn't give a sense of what I'm trying to talk about today, which is of something much richer, not reductionistic, not kind of almost -- not almost; actually more than almost -- with the flavour of nihilism in it. Something very rich, a very rich thread unfolding, a journey of unfoldment, unique to me. It's not a mechanistic process, like the aggregates unfolding. It's not a mechanistic; it's actually a deeply, deeply creative process, creative, something unfolding.

So again, we're talking about an unfolding. It's not just kind of being okay with the personality and how it is. It's not just healing the personality from childhood, in terms of psychotherapeutically, etc. I'm talking about something much bigger and more powerful. A lifelong, thrilling journey of discovery is possible. A danger of that is that it can be a bit self-obsessed: "Me and my wonderful personality unfoldment!" That is a danger there, that one becomes a bit self-obsessed. Everything has its danger.

We said, "What locks it?" Those are some options, and there are others. What if we turn that around and say, "What unlocks this? What might unlock this unfoldment?" What might unlock for us this dynamism of the personality, not just emotionally, but of the whole being, so that we really feel there is something electric moving through the life in terms of the journey of discovery at that level? Okay, so I've got another list. It's got six things on it. I'm going to be very, very brief, because each could be a talk. I'm just moving through this very quickly. This points to something bigger. It's kind of an overview of something.

(1) The first one we've actually thankfully already been through. It's all the eight principles and approaches I talked about in the last two talks. Those kinds of ways of relating to my emotional experience. But here I want to expand it not just to emotional experience, but to all experience. Everything I said in relationship to emotions can apply to any experience that I find myself in or going through. If I can bring some of that flexibility, some of those careful ways of working, again, it will tend to unlock something in the unfoldment, in the manifestation of what occurs.

(2) But just to pick out one in particular of those eight, for right now. That is the relationship to questioning. It seems especially important, because sometimes we don't ask. We don't ask the questions that are really going to be helpful, that are really going to unlock something or shift something. I touched on this in the last talk. We're with our experience, we can be with it, we're witnessing it, we can tolerate it, we can be with it, we can describe it very well perhaps even to someone else or to ourselves, but somehow that questioning isn't there. We're not asking in ways that unlock.

Or sometimes we're not asking kind of boldly enough. Our questioning -- and this could be a whole talk -- but sometimes we're a little bit timid in the questions that we ask of our experience, of ourselves, of our existence. For some reasons -- lots of reasons, I'm not going to go into it now -- we don't have the confidence to be bold in our questioning. Or we only tend to ask small questions, and not, for instance, really big-picture questions. Or sometimes the whole relationship for someone to questioning, the questioning seems to be intellectual -- the experience seems to be what's primary, and the questioning seems it can only function in an intellectual way. Is there a way of making our self-questioning process something very alive and not just intellectual? That's the second one. I just pulled that out from the list of eight in particular.

(3) The third one, again, it could be at least a whole talk. I'm just going to say it very, very briefly. As human beings, we have needs for comfort. We need to be comfortable. It's a little cold in here today; we need to be warm, for instance. We need to be comfortable. We need a certain amount of physical comfort in our life. We need, also, a certain amount of pleasure at the sensual level. It's very hard to have no sensual pleasure in one's life. I don't know if we have a need, but we have something in us that desires things to be convenient. We have a need -- needs, actually -- for security. Security comes in lots of different -- very different range of targets for where we try to get security from: money, house, relationship, lots of things, social esteem, power over others. Some of those ways we get security are really important and they're necessary; we need a certain amount of security. We also need a certain amount of social contact, of affection, of support from others.

All of that, all of that is a necessary part of our life. But very easily for a human being, without a person maybe even realizing it, they can become the most powerful drives, the most powerful drives in the life. One doesn't even realize it, that the drives, the needs for comfort, convenience, sense pleasures, different kinds of security, affection, etc. -- without realizing it, they have usurped other drives (perhaps, we could say, deeper and more necessary), and they're in the driving seat, and we don't even realize it.

It's actually extremely rare for our drives and motivations not to be mixed in life. It takes a lot of honesty, a lot of openness and willingness to investigate: when are these kind of drives powerful, and when is something else able to be more powerful? It's okay that they're there; we do need all this stuff. But are they in the driving seat? That makes a huge difference to every aspect of our path, every aspect. Because to the degree that they're in the driving seat, our unfoldment of our path on the personality level -- on any level, any level -- will be limited. So they're needs, they're necessary, they're part of us. We need to acknowledge them. We need to take care of ourselves there. But we actually really need to check that they're not the most powerful thing. If they are, then I have to go into that a little bit. That's a whole other talk.

Okay, there are three more. And again, these could each be talks. They're, in a way, slightly unusual. We're asking the bigger question: "What is it that unlocks this unfoldment, the full potential of this unfoldment, this dynamism?"

(4) This fourth one is desire. The movement of desire in the being. Again, for a Dharma practitioner, that might sound like that doesn't quite fit. The movement of desire in the being actually holds gold in it. It holds liquid gold in it. But not when it's fixed or too fixed on this or that object, and getting this or that thing. If -- and this is a practice; this is something that we can discover -- in careful, subtle working with this, one will actually notice something very, very interesting. I'm being very brief here, but if one can allow the current of desire -- not chasing this or that -- the current of the desire, and allow that, and feel that, and let that fill the being and what it's moving towards without fixing on some thing to get in the future, then that current allows an access into this greater current, more powerful current of unfolding.

Something in the very movement of desire is part of this movement of a plant moving towards the sun. It's the opposite of what we tend to think in the Dharma. Something hidden -- I don't know if it's all desires; I'm not sure -- something hidden in desire. If I can find my relationship with desires, find my way in -- it's quite subtle, but if I can find my way in, it can access that larger, more powerful unfoldment, that more powerful current, and the flowering of the being. Sometimes, if I find the right relationship with desire, as they're happening in the moment, I trace it down and I allow it to fill, it actually can seem like the desires are bigger than I am. They're bigger than me, in a way. Very curious. The movement of desire feels like it's bigger than I am, deeper than me, and deeper and wider than the box and the definition that I usually have of myself. But we block, again, we block this, by fears, by narrow beliefs, by self-definitions, and particularly, with desire, by the desire landing on some thing and then getting locked there and not being able to give us its gift. That could be at least one whole other talk. I just want to mention that.

(5) In a way, that leads on to the fifth one. How do we unlock this? I need to actually trust that there is something -- like if you garden at all, which I don't, but if you garden, you put a seed in the soil, and then there's trust. There's trust. You do what you can, but one trusts what it is in plants that moves towards the sun. So part of unlocking this unfoldment is actually trusting that there's something there that is deeply beautiful and healthy; that there's something worth trusting. Trusting this movement of being, these movements of being, trusting the movements of desire, even, trusting the dynamism in the being.

There's this word, kilesa, and many of you probably know it. It means something like 'defilement' or 'impurity.' The Buddha says there are three kilesas, and they have their root and are deep in us: greed, aversion, and delusion. Sometimes with desire, the manifestation of desire, the manifestation of greed, the manifestation of aversion, this or that, hatred, even, sometimes -- I'm not sure what the percentage is here; it might be quite a lot larger than one might think -- sometimes that's actually the distorted expression of this healthy movement towards the light. I can see it as a kilesa, or I can find the relationship with it that actually something beautiful is trying to work its way up through the cracks in the pavement. Someone says, "This is laziness. It's a kilesa." Maybe. Maybe it's how I'm relating to it. There's something, that the laziness has something beautiful there. Or blame -- I notice all this blame of my parents or hatred or this or that, whatever. Maybe there's something beautiful coming through that. This has a lot to do about the assumptions about who and how we are, deep down in the being, what we are deep down.

(6) Okay, last one. If I go back to something I said earlier in the talk: insight meditation, to me, is learning to see things differently. Learning to see things in a way that brings freedom, to relate to things in a way that brings freedom. We could say freedom comes from seeing this or that differently -- whatever this or that is. Freedom comes from seeing this or that in a way that brings freedom into that relationship. So what about the self? What about the self?

Practice involves seeing my self differently. Traditionally, we have this practice of anattā -- attā means 'self,' an- is a negative, so seeing not-self, seeing no-self, seeing the emptiness of self. I've talked about this a lot before in other talks, but just to say, that's a way of practising where we're regarding all phenomena and all experience as not-self, not me, not mine. It's something we really develop as a practice -- sitting, walking, and everything that comes up, everything that I take myself to be, 'not me, not mine, not me, not mine.' Beautiful, powerful, deep, deep way of practising you can really develop.

But for what we're talking about today, maybe is there a different way of seeing my self that actually involves a kind of claiming, claiming aspects of my self as my self? It actually involves a kind of identifying -- lightly, and a kind of. I use that word. So claiming the qualities, the dimensions that emerge -- as me, in a way. Finding a way to do that. Back to the question, I said, "Is there a way of doing that?" And again, rather than this or that being me, it's actually the thread of unfoldment that more accurately is better to regard as me, if I'm going to identify with anything.

This thread is unique to me. It's unique to me. I don't know if it's hard -- if there's a lot of inner critic around, it might be hard to hear this. I'm not sure. Because then, if we feel a lot of judgment of the personality, then the whole idea that the personality may unfold such riches or have such treasure in it might be quite difficult to hear. I don't know.

So yes, reclaiming playfulness, perhaps. Reclaiming vulnerability, perhaps. Maybe these qualities were there in our childhood, or early, maybe even earlier than we remember. The vulnerability, the softness, the openness, the strength of being, joy -- reclaiming all of that. But as I said before, I'm not just talking about reclaiming and regaining what was there. All of these are open-ended avenues or threads or avenues of manifestation. What's the end to that? What's the end to that unfoldment? Is there an end to it? All these aspects are kind of natural manifestations when we're not blocking them. Perhaps it's possible to discover dimensions of the being through this level that we wouldn't have imagined. So this particular unique expression of these qualities is 'mine,' in inverted commas, that thread of unfoldment. Somehow, for that, it's not just 'not me, not mine, not me, not mine.' Somehow I need to find a way of engaging and somehow kind of claiming, somehow kind of following that thread, somehow kind of desiring something.

Okay. I don't know where that lands. It probably lands in quite different places with a lot of people in the room. But this is, like always, there's no point talking about stuff if it's not actually available to us. This is available. Just as much as the incredible, incredible, radical power of, say, seeing emptiness, is available to us -- it really is available to us -- so also this other, I don't know what you'd call it, dimension or whatever, is available to us.

And what I'm calling this personality level, this fullness of being of personality, you know, that, too, is also just a way of looking. It's just a way of looking. But because something is just a way of looking doesn't make it worthless. It's very helpful, can be very helpful. It may be helpful in different ways, in different areas, than sometimes the emptiness piece is. Maybe they're complementary. I don't know. Maybe they're complementary. It feels that way to me. They're complementary.

We have the possibility of seeing this kind of very radical re-understanding of existence that comes through emptiness and the totality of that, the depth of that, and seeing everything as 'not me, not mine,' can't find a self. And we have the possibility of this personality level journey, the dimensions of the personal journey. Both are possible. Sometimes people emphasize just the personal, and they just kind of give a lip service to the emptiness piece: "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, and everything is empty." It's quite something to really take on board both, and the fullness of what both might mean. But both are kind of there for us.

I wanted to say something. Some of you are working on emptiness, and some of you are working on concentration. Some of you are working -- in fact, everyone here is working very, very beautifully, at least certainly the people I've met. Please do not abandon the emptiness thing because of what I was saying today. [laughs] It's just something to put in your pipe and kind of ponder for later. It was near the end of the retreat, it felt like it was coming out of a lot of the stuff I was talking about anyway. But if you are exploring emptiness, particularly, please continue to do that, because you're working very beautifully. Don't get derailed by what I've said today. In fact, for everyone. I'm just putting it out there. I'm aware it might land in different places. You can do or not do whatever you want about it whenever you want. In a way, I'm sharing with you a questioning -- that's all.

Shall we have some quiet time together?