A Mystical Kiss (...for Mystics, Anti-Mystics, Lovers, and Realists...)

A talk on Mysticism and the Nature of Perception. (This talk follows on from the one given two nights before it, entitled 'At Home in the Universe'.)

If you remember from the opening talk, we were saying that the instructions in the morning, and the meetings in the groups, and in the one-to-one interviews, are very much intended to meet you where you are, and address what's happening for you in the moment, the ways of working with that, of responding to that, holding that well, meeting it well and skilfully. And with the evening talks, or some of the evening talks, that we're looking at bigger-picture perspectives and questions and ideas, in fact. Sometimes, at first, with this bigger-picture level of things, one can tend to think, "Well, that's pretty abstract. It doesn't have much to do with this, what I'm dealing with right now, in front of my nose." But as we said a couple of nights ago, that's actually not the case. The big-picture perspective has a lot of impact on what happens in the moment, in my experience, what unfolds and where that goes.

Tonight I'd like to, in a way, pick up a thread that was in the talk from a couple of nights ago, and pursue it a little bit further, explore it a little bit further, which is mysticism, and the nature of reality, and the nature of perception. One could go about that kind of a talk in a certain kind of way. I could, for instance, read a lot of poems by Rumi and Hafiz. But I'm not going to do that. Rather, I would actually just like to reflect on the whole area a little bit, offer some reflections, and hopefully bring a little bit of insight into the whole question here, or questions here.

If one looks up 'mysticism' in a dictionary, this is what I found in the dictionary I have upstairs. Three definitions: **(1) '**belief in or experience of a reality surpassing normal human understanding [going beyond normal human understanding or experience], especially a reality perceived as essential to the nature of life.' And (2), kind of coming out of that, 'a system of contemplation, contemplative spirituality, aimed at achieving direct intuitive experience of the divine' or of this nature of things. Then there's a third definition, which is **(3) '**obscure or confused belief or thought.' [laughter]

Part, I think, of the big confusion around the whole debate around mysticism is that people conflate these meanings. They actually conflate the first two with the third, and it all gets mixed up. One assumes that it's all one thing, and they're not keeping them separate. Sometimes people say 'mystical' and you actually hear they're meaning it as a kind of insult, but also because they're mixing that third meaning with the first two. So that's quite important.

Now, when we talk about human experience, and meditative experience, and spiritual experience, the range of mystical experiences is enormous. Just enormous. As a teacher, it's such a privilege hearing from so many people, of course, in practice, and the range is enormous, from such things as visions of divine beings, etc., to things like extrasensory perception, and precognition, and synchronicity, and all that. What's more common in these kind of circles, with these kind of practices that we do, is things along the lines of a sense of oneness, a sense of all things being of one nature, that kind of thing. Or it could just have the flavour of a sense of deep connection, something like that.

In the Christian mystical tradition, they talk about the via negativa: the 'negative road,' or the 'way of negation.' What that really means is a way of meditative or spiritual experience opening out, unfolding, that is an emptying out of the sense of self, and experience, as well, gradually -- or suddenly, but usually gradually. In other words, the usual sense of self that we have, of solidity, of separateness, of substantiality here, and the usual sense of complexity, and substantiality, and separateness, and diversity in the world of things, that begins emptying out and kind of fading and dissolving.

That avenue of unfoldment of mystical perception, what they call the via negativa, brings with it what's sometimes called 'negative theology' -- in other words, God or ultimate truth is more of a negation. It's more of, "It's not this. It's not that. You can't point to it." So there's a kind of letting go of this, letting go of that, letting go, progressive and deeper and deeper letting go. They say in the Hindu tradition, neti neti: "Not this, not this. Whatever it is, it's not this. It's not this." And there's this letting go, letting go of everything, moving in this via negativa, emptying out the experience.

And then there are many mystical experiences and practices that melt both via positiva (in terms of positive visions and experiences of this or that) with the via negativa. So for example, Mother Teresa, if you know, had this practice of seeing all beings as Christ. What's going on? What does she mean when she says, "I try and see all beings as Christ"? Or in some Buddhist traditions, to see the Buddha-nature of all beings. What does that mean? There's actually, in there, a marriage, if you like, of this via positiva and via negativa.

But anyway, the range is enormous. We could ask, of all this range of different mystical experiences, what do they have in common? One piece, I think, is sanctification. They have in common a sanctification of something, or of existence, of life. Do you know what I mean when I say that? I mean making something holy, that mystical experiences, or these kind of experiences, tend to give a sense of holiness to existence or things. There's a sense of the blessedness of things somehow being made apparent, being revealed.

This urge or movement towards sanctifying, I think that's an irrepressible human urge. It's recurrent in human history. You can't stamp it out. There's something deep in us that has this urge to sanctify or resanctify existence. So you get, for example, the Christian Eucharist, where they're taking the body and the blood of Christ. The purpose is to sanctify -- sanctify otherwise normal, humdrum physical existence, and perceive a deeper sense in it, a deeper texture, reality, if you like. And in the Jewish tradition where you have what's called mitzvot, and you say blessings. By saying a blessing, one is actually blessing this thing or that thing. One is blessing life. And through my blessing life, life appears to me blessed.

This movement is so strong, this urge is so strong, so deep in human beings. Now, in a culture that's become -- certainly in England, and a lot of Europe, etc., and many parts of the world -- not really rooted in religious sense, art (as it has for a long time anyway) sometimes takes the place of what sanctifies, what blesses, what points to the sanctification. Sometimes we read poems in here, and the reason it's touching -- so much modern poetry is about sanctifying things, about showing the beauty and the holiness of things somehow. But it could be music, with the music that we're playing, or literature, whatever.

[9:14] Now, it's curious, if you look at the Pali Canon, which we've referred to several times, the original teachings of the Buddha, and if you approach that with as free a perspective as possible, what you find there is almost a complete absence of the sanctification of life. If you read it just as it is, there's a real sense there of wanting to kind of almost get rid of life, of life being something that's just there to be gotten beyond, to be transcended, getting off the wheel of saṃsāra, of rebirth, of life and death: "This is a problem, and something we don't really want. We want to transcend and go beyond to nirvāṇa," and it takes a lot of work, which, in kind of modern interpretations of the Dharma, we bring a very different sense, and so we try and read it through different lenses. But the honest truth is it's not really there; we're reading something else into it.

And then it's interesting, in the Buddhist tradition, some years went by, and then you get the tantric tradition growing up, which is very mystical and attempts to transform and deepen and open the perception we have of everyday life to make it divine. That's what the practice of tantra is. It's almost like it couldn't help but come back in.

All that's by the by historically, but I think interesting, what happens to us as human beings, and how easy it is for us as human beings to lose touch with this sanctity of existence, the sanctity of things and life and death. So easy to lose touch with that. It's easy to blame teachings of transcendence or teachings of emptiness, but that's really, I think, not to understand those teachings. Deep, deep understanding, penetration of transcendent teachings, deep understanding of emptiness, brings a sanctity. It implies a sanctity in things.

Now, modern interpretations of mindfulness, as well -- and they vary, and you get different traditions in Zen and all that; it's too complex to go into here -- but very often in modern interpretations of Dharma, it's like a sense of, "This is it. This experience, this right now, this is it. This is reality, this moment, this feeling, this sight, this sound. And can you be as close as you can to that? Because this is it." That, as an emphasis, is very interesting, because it could go both ways. There can be in the sense of 'this is it' the holiness of 'this.' There can also be the kind of meaninglessness of it, the unholiness, in a way.

So what does it involve, what does it include, to 'sanctify' life? What does that mean for us in our lives, in our practice? I think it includes -- just reflecting a little bit; it's such a huge subject, so I'm only touching on a few things here -- but respect. Sanctifying, sanctification, has to do also with respect, deep respect for existence. Sometimes it's so easy to pass through life, between birth and between death, and the decades and the years go by, and one almost is not in touch with a possible profound respect for existence. So easy to get caught up in this or that, this problem or that, or the self-view or whatever it is, and all this marvel of existence goes without deep respect. The word 'respect,' you may know, is from the Latin spectare, 'to look again.' Like 'spectacles*,' spectare.* And the 're-,' 'again': 'to look again.' To look again, to look deeper, to look more penetratingly. And in a way, that's exactly what meditation and the practice we're doing is about. Can I look closer, more deeply, more truly, you could say, at existence and experience and what presents itself?

So respect comes, it will come, from looking more deeply. The more deeply we penetrate with our gaze, the more respect comes. Perhaps sanctification also includes reverence. Again, that's also from Latin*. Vereri* means 'to be in awe of.' So to be in awe of once more, once more to be in awe of this magic show, this existence.

There's a Scottish poet, Iain Crichton Smith. He died some years ago, I think. He's reflecting on seeing a person, a homeless person who has moved to the city and been stripped of most of her anchor points. And he tries to see deeply and see the sacred in the person, seeing beyond just the appearance. He says:

Sometimes when I walk the streets of Glasgow I see old women passing by, bowed down with shopping bags, and I ask myself: "What force made this woman what she is? What is her history?" [He reflects:] It is the holiness of the person we have lost, the holiness of life itself, the inexplicable mystery and wonder of it, its strangeness, its tenderness.^[1]

So easily something goes out of our vision, something escapes us and becomes inaccessible, and we get used to that. We take that absence as a reality.

So questions, always questions. When there's an observation, there are questions. How is it that this reverence gets blocked? What blocks it? What blocks my heart from this sense of reverence? And the answers are many, many and complex. That's not an easy question at all for us. If the inner critic comes in and gets hold of that question, forget it, because it blocks the question. I can't ask questions like that when the inner critic is in control; it's just impossible. It's completely impossible. Somehow -- and Chris talked about this the first night -- somehow we have to find a way of disempowering this inner critic to be able to ask deep questions in life. Without that, I can't.

But what am I absorbing, what am I taking in from my environment that's perhaps blocking reverence and respect? What am I doing that might block it? What am I not doing that might block it? What ideas am I entertaining in my mind, consciously or unconsciously, that might prevent this? These are big questions, I think. And is it possible to reawaken this sense of sanctity, the sense of the holiness of life, the holiness of existence? Is it possible to reawaken that and keep that aflame? It's one of those things that if I don't tend to this flame, it goes out. It will go out. Without caring for that flame, it will go out. I have to tend it. I have to nourish it.

So what can help? Gratitude and appreciation are hugely key as movements towards, and also results of, sanctification. The more I can feed gratitude and appreciation, the more it's just a little step, movement, towards a sense of sanctification in life. David Orr is an American environmentalist, actually an environmental educator, and he said gratitude is the single most important quality needed to address climate change. He said that's what's missing. "Only in such a spirit can we be freed from the loveless illusion of independence, and discover the sustaining truth of interdependence."^[2]

[17:52] There was a very famous rabbi. I think he lived in America in the twentieth century, a Jewish rabbi called Abraham Heschel. He said, "As civilization advances, the sense of wonder almost necessarily declines." Almost necessarily. It's not necessary, but it's almost necessary it declines. "[Human]kind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation."^[3] So, as I said right at the beginning, these questions are not abstract. They alter the very fabric of our sense of things, and in so doing, our choices, our behaviour, and the fabric of society, etc., all the rest of it, as we've been into several times on this retreat.

But the more gratitude and appreciation, the more it feeds sanctification. The more sanctification, the more it feeds gratitude and appreciation. They're mutually supportive, as is wonder. This physicist that I referred to the other night, John Wheeler, who I think is a hundred years old this year, he talks about the deep, happy mysteries, and the joy of contemplating these deep, happy mysteries of existence. He also said physicists -- well, research physicists, at least -- are essentially people who wonder at the universe, who are full of wonder at the universe. That's interesting, because they're wondering rationally about how it all works, but with wonder, it also involves a kind of non-rational element, and this intuitive sense of awe. Something else in the being is being touched, non-rational. And in a way, an understanding is happening through the intuition and not the rational. Both.

So again, what do these mystical experiences have in common? They have sanctification in common. And they also have something else in common, a second factor, which I would say is perceiving and understanding in ways that (a) call into question conventional appearances, perceptions, and understandings, and (b) (and this is also really important) bring with them a sense of freedom, of increased freedom -- usually of less sense of self, of the self being less central, solid, important, kind of dense, substantial; less separation; oftentimes more love. So they're changes in perception and understanding that bring with them that whole movement of the way that the perception unfolds.

So one thing that mystical experiences have in common is the sense of making things holy. The second thing they have in common is they bring about, or they are, changes in perception and understanding of reality, you could say, of what's real. Those changes in perception and understanding, they call into question conventional, taken-for-granted perceptions and appearances and understandings. And they also have in common that there's a sense of less solidity to the self, less reality to the self, less separateness, more freedom, and more love. Do you understand? So that's what differentiates a mystical, spiritual experience from something like a tormenting experience of insanity or something like that -- there's not the freedom, etc., there.

Okay. So far, so good ... hopefully. What I've noticed teaching so much is that basically -- very black and white, broadly speaking -- there are two personality types and two inclinations: the mystics and the kind of (what should we say?) anti-mystics. [laughter] This fascinates me. It absolutely fascinates me. I was talking not too long ago with a personal retreatant, and he said he had listened to a talk on a tape. I can't remember what. He said, "I don't like all this talk about flowers and moons. It's all so feminine." [laughter] But what was great was he was being honest, and he was conscious of his tendency. That I really appreciated. Someone else said to me a long time ago, "I had a Catholic upbringing, and so all this is very loaded for me. It wasn't easy, all that. There's a kind of mistrust there from my upbringing." But again, he was aware of what he was bringing there.

Oftentimes, what I notice is people bring an incredible pre-decision to this whole, "Is it real? Is it true? Is it rubbish? Is it da-da-da?" And with such force -- it's really interesting. Such force. It brings up so much, the whole question, for people. And oftentimes, they're not even aware that they're bringing a pre-decision, or how much energy there is behind it. So I remember a few years ago, two practitioners that I know, who were really good friends, heard a talk about what's called the Unconditioned, which the Buddha referred to sometimes. So everything is conditioned. All physical phenomena, mental phenomena, they are conditions and impermanent. They arise, and they fade, and they're dependent on other things. Then the Buddha talked about the Unconditioned, the Unfabricated. Now, there's a big debate on "Is that really what the Buddha said? What did he mean? Is it real?", etc. And these two practitioners, who were very good friends, got into this very heated argument about it. What was interesting was that neither of them, at that point, had anywhere near the meditative sort of depth or capability to answer the question for themselves. And yet: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. [laughter]

I started to cotton on to this slowly, and a couple of years ago -- I can't remember when it was -- I was teaching a much longer retreat, a month, and we were really getting into the deep end of things. It got to the point where we were talking about the Unfabricated, and I was giving a talk on it. I stopped at one point, and I said to them, "Now, I'm going to shut up for thirty seconds, and you have a think what you want me to say next. Do you want me to say it's real or not real?" [laughter] It was fascinating. I don't know if it was half and half, but there was a real split there. We need to be aware of this. We need to be aware of our preconceptions, predispositions, inclinations, personalities, because what happens, I see, is people pre-decide this whole question with a lot of force.

So this is interesting. Certainly you can see sometimes a person clinging to kind of superstitious, quasi-mystical beliefs about things. It's coming out of fear, and ungroundedness, and wishful thinking, and sloppy thinking -- all of that, sometimes. But equally you see the opposite, and a person says, "The Buddha was not a mystic." But what kind of person says that? What's their background? And what kind of person likes to hear that? What kind of person wants to hear that? Just an observation, but oftentimes, the people without mystical experiences like to hear that the Buddha wasn't a mystic, because it supports something. What's always important is integrity. Where am I leaning? What do I want? Really important.

Now, sometimes a person who is leaning against mysticism, they feel that, "Well, it doesn't fit with our commonly-agreed, experienced perceptions of the world. That's not what everyone agrees on. For a start, it's counterintuitive, because the intuitive reality is what we perceive -- this sense, I'm over here and you're over there, and it's eight o'clock, etc., and this is all real, and that's what it is. It's material reality, unfolding as it does, in a very agreed-upon way." They'll say anything mystic is 'unscientific.'

But what's underpinning all that is a very, we could say, common-sense, modern, (what I would call) scientific materialist view of things, understanding of things, involving sensing and seeing the world as process. So we touched on this in the talk a couple nights ago, that there's a sense of an objective reality of things: "This microphone is objectively real, my emotion is objectively real, etc. Time, as Newton would have said, exists independently, just goes by itself no matter what is happening. Space exists just by itself, no matter what's in it."^[4] All this is the common-sense, intuitive, scientific materialist, so-called modern understanding. The self, a world of selves, a world of solid matter, all that, and we call that 'reality.' And that's the kind of 'consensus reality,' as someone referred to it. It's the consensus reality.

But as we were talking a couple of nights ago, the penetration of modern physics is showing that that's actually not as real as it seems to be at all. So Niels Bohr -- some of you will have heard of him. He was really at the centre of the revolution in physics in the first half of the twentieth century. There was an instance where a colleague of his called Harald Høffding -- they were discussing an experiment and how to interpret it. This colleague, Harald Høffding, asked Bohr, or was speaking out loud, "Where can the photon [the particle of light] be said to be?" And Bohr, who was known as a really deep philosophical thinker, paced up and down, pondering, smoking his pipe, and said, "To be? To be? What does it mean 'to be'?"^[5] He's asking very, very deep questions that came out of the experiments that they were looking at.

[29:01] So the very notion of 'being' and 'existing' that we assume, we intuit -- it's intuitive, the notion of 'being' -- are actually questioned both by quantum mechanics and by emptiness, and the teaching of emptiness, which we touched on briefly this morning. Then there was another instance, also with Bohr, when another physicist, famous physicist called Wolfgang Pauli, he came up with something called the 'exclusion principle' -- it's not important what it is. But he had this idea and he took it to Bohr. This is a report:

What struck [Bohr] about Pauli's proposal ... was its "complete insanity." Bohr always condemned new proposals with the words "interesting but not crazy enough." Saying that Pauli's [theory] was completely insane meant he thought it was most probably right.^[6]

So there's something, as we penetrate, whether it's meditative (as we talked about this morning a little bit), or whether it's in terms of modern physics, something counterintuitive about the nature of reality. It's not what it appears to be.

Again, John Wheeler: "Not machinery but magic may be ... the treasure that is waiting."^[7] This is a physicist whose career spans most of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. "Not machinery but magic may be ... the treasure that is waiting."

So this typical (what I'm calling) 'scientific materialist' sense of things, taken-for-granted, common sense, this idea of 'everything as process' is not ultimately real. It's real at one sense, obviously, but it's not ultimately real (Dharma would make the distinction) according to the teachings of emptiness and deep Dharma teachings, or according to modern physics. It's useful at a certain level. It's extremely useful. We need that. Of course we do. It's the level of conventional reality. It's also very helpful in understanding a lot of how we get into such a mess in life. I can see because of this thought, there was this contraction, and then that contraction caused this reactivity, and that reactivity caused this contraction, and then I saw things this way, and then I said this, and now, what a nightmare. [laughter] There's a process going on, and it's helpful. That kind of linear, process-oriented understanding of things can be really helpful at a certain level. But it's only at a certain level. In a way, I'm invoking the authority of science to undermine a little bit some of this intuitive misunderstanding, partial understanding.

Also in the Dharma (and you've probably heard, if you've been around these kind of circles for a while), we talk about 'being with things as they are,' 'things as they are.' Have you heard this phrase ever? 'Being with things as they are.' We talk about 'bare attention.' That's b-a-r-e, not b-e-a-r. [laughter] Bare attention: the idea that somehow I can take everything extraneous out of my attention, all the reactivity and all that, and somehow meet things nakedly, 'as they are'; I can 'be with what is,' the 'what is.' All these, I use them. It's like they're woven into how we teach the Dharma, also, and very much woven into how we think of mindfulness, and how we teach about mindfulness. We talk about "mindfulness is being with things as they are," or something like that.

But actually, that's completely impossible. It's impossible to be with things as they are. Bare attention is an impossibility. It's just not possible. We've talked about this. Always the way of looking is changing something, is creating it. Part of what I see is dependent on the way of looking. In fact, all of what I see is dependent on the way of looking. What I see and my looking are not two separate things: "I can take this aside, and I'm left with 'reality,' so to speak, a bare reality."

Sometimes people might -- coming out of all that, again, and very understandably -- tend to think the goal of practice is 'being with' things changing, or 'being with' the flow of things: "There's just a flow of things. Nothing is permanent. Everything is changing. Our job is to be with that -- let things change, and be with that flow." Important and true at a certain level. But sometimes, a person with a predisposition to want to get rid of more mystical perceptions like God or soul or something might just be using that to dismiss, say there's no soul because there's nothing permanent; there's no God because there's nothing permanent. And what's left is, you know, one has challenged all the mystical perceptions, but left unchallenged is the consensual reality: "Everything is just a process." One is missing out something there: that change also is not ultimately real. Change also is not ultimately real. Impermanence also is not ultimately real.

Right at the beginning of the Mahāyāna teachings in Buddhism, a few hundred years after the Buddha died, there was a great teacher called Nāgārjuna. He wrote a very seminal text. Almost everyone in the Buddhist world reveres this text. In the second chapter he proves just, actually, the whole idea of change and impermanence, it doesn't really hold water as a concept. It seems so obvious; it doesn't really hold water. In the very beginning of the whole text: anirodham anutpādam anucchedam aśāśvatam. It means, "Not ceasing. All things are without ceasing, without arising, not destroyed, but not eternal."^[8] Things don't end, and they don't arise, but they're not eternal. That's the true nature of things. It's pointing to something very, very deep here.

Impermanence is not an ultimate reality. The flow of things is not an ultimate reality. To say that things are not impermanent, we automatically think, "Well, they must be permanent." But they're not permanent, either. Something completely radical and profound is being pointed to. So what assumptions am I bringing to all this, as a human being, as a practitioner?

The word 'religion' is also from Latin, religio. We get our word 'ligament' from it. It means 'to tie something.' So what view, what assumptions am I being tied to, over and over? Whether it's about myself, as we've been exploring, assumptions about what this emotion means or whatever, or more pervasive assumptions about the nature of reality. Some people want to pooh-pooh religion, but are actually just tied -- religio -- over and over again to an unquestioned view of scientific materialism or consensus reality.

So very common nowadays to say, "The self is just a process. Everything is just a process." Actually, the Buddha never said that. He never said that. There's not one passage where he says the nature of the self is that it's a process, or the nature of all things is a process. It doesn't say that. It's very popular as a notion nowadays, and sometimes it gets passed off as something that the Buddha said, but actually he never said that. It's popular partly because the consensus, taken-for-granted view of the society right now is the Newtonian view of scientific materialism. And also we're big into computers, the age of computers, where everything is a process. So the whole idea of process just fits very nicely right into our usual way of understanding things, and it seems, "Oh, well, that's real, and I can understand that."

In a way, it's too easy to say everything is a process. It's not that hard to see that everything is a process. I just need to look a little carefully, and I start to see: everything is a process. In a way, it's kind of obvious that everything is a process; we just need to look a bit. And when something's obvious, it might really need re-examining, because sometimes the obvious is exactly what's not true completely. It needs more penetrative looking.

[38:11] Now, a person might say, "Ah, yeah, but when people have mystical experiences -- whatever they are, that whole range of religious and spiritual and meditative experience -- they're always interpreting those mystical experiences depending on what religion they're from. Christian people tend to see Christ, and da-da-da, and all this, whatever." And that's absolutely true. It's true that that goes on, to a large extent. But is it also true that we're actually interpreting ordinary experience all the time? We're always interpreting experience. And we're interpreting it where? Into the consensus view, into the unquestioned. So oftentimes this consensus view is clung to despite modern physics saying this, despite sages and mystics, etc., saying whatever.

There's something about more mystical experience, if it's not so dogmatically clung to, whatever it is -- an experience of oneness, let's say, or the space opens out, and it feels like there's love in it. It feels like it's infused with love. There's love everywhere. That's a very common mystical experience, and some of you have been reporting it on this retreat, or different variations on oneness. If I don't dogmatically cling to that -- "Now that's my new view of reality, and that's ultimately real" -- too tightly (I might need to cling to it a little bit, actually, but if I don't cling too tightly), there's a chance, there's a good chance, that the mystical experience can unfold and evolve. It goes on a journey.

Now, anyway, Buddhist understanding, Dharma understanding, it's not so much seeking experience. What we are seeking is an understanding of the nature of perception. I'll explain more what I mean as we go on. It's not that we're chasing experience. We're understanding something about the nature of perception. We're on a journey to that understanding, and that's different -- not chasing an experience. But that understanding of perception, of experience, brings freedom. That's what brings freedom, not a particular experience.

So with all this, it's like we need a kind of intellectual and meditative depth and honesty and rigour -- all of that. It really needs to be there. Again, I'm just talking about the anti-mystic side at the moment, but a person might say, "All that mystical stuff, it's not real." They say very commonly, "It's not real." And then they might say, "What we want now is to let go of all that foreign stuff and the Eastern stuff, and kind of let that go and be with things as they are." But that's assuming a couple of things. That quote I read to you the other day from Yukio Mishima, "To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious to its style."^[9] I say, "I'll get rid of all this Eastern stuff, all those bodhisattvas and all this weird stuff," and what I'm coming back to is the view of the culture that I'm in, and I'm blind to it because I'm in it. It's the air I breathe.

[41:37] And to say the mystic isn't real has usually in it a kind of assumption that there's something else that is real, and that's, basically, there is a basic reality, or the reality of scientific materialism, or this what's called 'naïve realism,' just 'things are as they appear to be.' Now, this is a little bit of a subtle point I want to get into: maybe all that is completely missing the point. Maybe it's completely missing the point to say something like that. It's completely missing the point of what's going on. It's completely sending the argument and the debate in the wrong direction, and not a helpful direction. It's not possible to get rid of a way of looking. There are ways of looking. There is always a way of looking at something. I cannot be without a way of looking at something, which we got also from the quantum stuff the other night. So there is no 'basic reality,' because I'm always looking in some way. I cannot perceive anything at all, no matter how simple, without a way of looking at it.

So, hmm. What to do with that? Maybe, maybe the whole question, the whole debate, and the whole exploration and understanding gets transformed, and it's rather that we start to use ways of looking. That's different. The whole question becomes pragmatic rather than reificationist. In other words, it becomes, "What does this particular way of looking unfold in the being, and for the heart, and for the freedom, and for the love, or the release from suffering?" Not "Is this real, or is that real?" Do you understand the distinction?

Different ways of looking bring different openings, bring different unfoldings, bring different perceptions and different possibilities. So, in a way, maybe taking the whole thing much more lightly and much less literally is actually a much wiser thing to do. Even the scientific materialists -- as I said before, it's very helpful; it's a certain perspective, the perspective of process. It gives many things to the mind and many things to the heart which are very helpful. But so, for example, do the perspectives of mystical tantra teachings, where there are deities and bodhisattvas and all that kind of stuff. That gives something else. It opens something else out.

Some people nowadays are very interested in neurobiology, the biology of the nervous system and the brain, and the interface of that with meditation, and how meditation is affecting the brain, etc., which is great, and it's using the scientific materialist perspective, and using it with the meditative understanding. What excites me -- I'm just sharing; you've probably guessed where my leanings are by this point, but what excites me more is, for instance, Schrödinger's wave equation. What it is is an equation describing the reality that you can't find anything anywhere, the reality that this so-called particle is really just a probability of existing somewhere. It exists in a kind of abstract mathematical space. It's pointing to something. I actually have it on my wall. It's a little embarrassing, but ... [laughter] It really does speak to my heart. It's reminding me of something about the nature of reality.

[45:33] So is it necessary that I need to literally believe in this or that? Do I literally need to believe? Is that what it's about? Or is it that we enter certain myths and certain ways of looking that we can use, we can go into, and that opens something? So the scientific materialist notion of separate existence and process, that's a way of looking. It's really helpful. Oneness, the perception of oneness -- some of you have described, as the meditation opens, at times there's a sense of oneness in different ways. Oneness, too, is a way of looking. What is not a way of looking? Is there anything that is not a way of looking? Is liberation a way of looking?

To say something is a way of looking or only a way of looking is not to denigrate it, because there's nothing else. It's not to denigrate it. It's to point to a magic. We can say a way of looking is also a way of fabricating, a way of building something. You can see this with the work we're doing with the emotions: I look at the emotion a certain way, with judgment, or, like we said, can I just see it as perfect, or with a lot of allowing, or with a lot of aversion. The way of looking is the way of fabricating. Dependent on how I look is what I build, and what gets built as an experience in that moment as a reality for me.

Maybe they're all useful. But having said that, we don't want to get lazy with this. So I need to actually use them. It's not like I'm just forgetting about the whole question of truth and all that and it's just, "Yeah, yeah, everything's good." [dramatic yawn] You can tell that's the case when there's no energy in how a person is saying that. But if you pick this up, it's incredibly energizing. It brings this quickness to the consciousness, and a sense of possibility and freedom. So we use all these ways of looking, including the interpretations. You can use them to lead, to unfold different things, as stepping-stones that move on.

Not too long, a few months ago, I was in Paris and sitting in Notre-Dame Cathedral. Amazing cathedral, if you've ever been there. Absolutely beautiful. Interesting -- very crowded, lots of people there, but there was plenty of space to sit. Mix of people in there: some just tourists, whatever, and then some really devout Catholics, [for whom] it was clearly a kind of pilgrimage to be there. This place has such a history and such beauty to it. And then this real sense of the mythologizing that goes on, that we do as human beings, the kind of fantasy of Christ, or the whole church, and all this stuff -- that makes things holy, going back to what we said at the beginning. It's a sanctification. This way of seeing, this whole thing that one enters into, makes things holy.

I was sitting there and I was actually feeling this and wondering about it. And I had the sense also, the very sort of mythologizing, and entering into what's a construct, in some senses -- to say Christ, Jesus, was the son of God, what does it mean, you know? That entering into and that mythologizing, that fantasizing, that is itself a kind of holy mystery of being. The fact of doing that, the doing of it, is something holy. Not a mistake. It's something holy. It's something that being does, the being needs to do. It's what awareness does. You could say it's what minds do. And the question is, which ones are we picking up, and where are they leading us? That, to me, it felt holy. That very doing of that, rather than a problem or a craziness, it's holy.

So the problem is actually entrenchment in a view, and maybe particularly entrenchment in the view of "This is it, this meaningless reality of materiality and process," etc. Entrenchment in that may be a problem. Let's take Buddhism: you look at, say, the Mahāyāna teachings, and there are a lot of devotional practices. It's tempting to look at that and think, "The teachings on emptiness and all that, that's really good. But all this devotional stuff, we can kind of get rid of that, because that's a bit of soggy stuff that we don't really need." But actually one begins to look. Those teachings on devotion, those heart teachings and devotional practices, they're embedded in a whole kind of framework of other practices: compassion, and ritual, and the cultivation of concentration, and other beautiful qualities of heart, loving-kindness, generosity, equanimity, insight into emptiness. And all those practices work together in a certain direction, synergistically, feeding off each other, supporting each other. They're interwoven, and they're simultaneous.

So rather than it's like, "Devotional practices are kind of for baby people, and when you're grown up you can get on to the emptiness thing or the real hardcore 'being with what is' or whatever ... if you're good." [laughter] We're misunderstanding something about what's actually going on there in the whole process. And if you look at who are the teachers who are suggesting all these devotional practices, they're not these kind of sentimentalist, wishy-washy -- they're really hardcore logicians, and hardcore meditator adepts, rigorous scholars: Nāgārjuna, Chandrakīrti, Śāntideva, Vasubandhu. These are famous names in the Mahāyāna tradition. So it's tempting to think: "Devotional practices, it's because a human being, we need to feel comforted, we need to feel that God loves us, or there are Buddhas that are looking after us, and we have a frailty as human beings until we can kind of grow out of that and meet the grim reality of meaninglessness," or whatever. We tend to think: "We need this, so let's give it to ourselves. It's okay. But it's not the real thing."

But actually they're part of this whole system of practices that are doing something together. And what that something is is deconstructing reification, meaning unpicking this taken-for-granted way of solidified perception that everyone believes in. All those practices together, that's where they're going, and that's their main purpose. They have secondary purposes, too, but that's their main purpose. The problem, in the Buddha's view, is that we believe something about reality that's wrong, and out of that comes all our suffering. So all these practices, the heart practices, devotion, insight, logical, whatever it is, it's all deconstructing this false reality we give to the world of appearances. It seems to be in appearance and perception. We take it for granted. It seems "Of course, this is obviously real." It takes a lot to deconstruct that, to open up that view.

If one practises a while, it's possible that one will notice a pattern, because there are patterns here. A person has this or that experience in meditation, or outside of meditation, whatever, but they're not random. I can basically just throw out a law of consciousness right now, which is: the more we let go in this moment, the more letting go there is, or the more love there is, or the more insight into emptiness there is in the mind, in the heart at any moment, at that time, to the degree there's letting go, insight into emptiness, love, etc., to that degree, the sense of self will be diminished.

That simple. The sense of separation will be diminished. The sense of oneness will be more visible, more prominent, more obvious, will arise, that perception of oneness. The sense of love, too. Sometimes it can go beyond love, as well. But all that. In a way, basically, the more I let go in different ways, whatever they are -- the more I love, the more I have insight into emptiness -- the more mystical becomes my perception. It's just like, you do this; this is what happens; you get this perception. If I do the opposite, I get conventional perception. If I get really tight, you know what kind of perception you get. You kind of get a very solidified, tight, enclosed perception with a lot of separateness, a lot of sense of self, etc. Where am I on that scale? The more of this, the more the perception opens up.

[55:27] So one will see, then, if there is, in that moment, more letting go, etc., in whatever ways -- through the practices we've been doing, through whatever -- one will see the sense of self, the sense of things, the sense of others, the sense of the world, the sense of time, also, eventually, the sense of existence, etc., it will not appear ordinary. It will not appear ordinary, because we're not fabricating and supporting that ordinary perception. This is just a law. It's just how it goes. It's understanding perception.

You could say, "Well, no. Maybe something weird is going on in your brain when you meditate. There's some kind of chemical that makes things a bit funny." But actually, if we're really honest, all that's happening is we're clinging less. With presence, with awareness, clinging less, the perception opens out, changes. You could say when wisdom, when love, when non-clinging are present, perception changes. It de-coagulates, and that seems and feels what we call 'mystical.' We're not building such a solid, rigid reality in that moment. Then we come back, and then it goes again in different ways. I need to understand the nature of perception. I need to understand something about perception. There's something radical going on here.

So there is, as I said, this spectrum of building, of fabricating. What am I fabricating? How much? The more I wrestle with experience, not let go, cling, aversion, identify, all the rest of it, have certain beliefs, the more solid and built up is this fabrication. The more I let go, the more all that solidity and substantiality and separateness fades, it dissolves -- I'm not constructing it. And this is going into the via negativa, this emptying out, because I'm not building it.

Eventually, it fades so much in very deep meditation that what one is perceiving is beyond -- it can no longer be contained by the conventional conceptual designations of words like 'now,' even, or 'then,' or 'this,' or 'that,' or 'here,' or 'space,' or 'time,' or 'me,' or 'you,' or anything. It goes beyond that. And then what's there? There isn't a word for it.

If, in approaching this whole question of mysticism and what's real, I'm clinging to my concepts, my everyday concepts, that's limiting my investigation. We can say, "Which is more real, then? This everyday, or that one when I let go and things open up? Which is more real?" This one hurts if I stub my toe. It hurts, but I also see somehow I'm fabricating it. This is very subtle. I'm aware of putting out a lot, and it's difficult to understand. Subtle ideas. And actually I'm playing on a razor's edge here. I'm flirting with self-contradiction (as maybe one must; I don't know).

The Dharma says, the Buddhist Dharma says emptiness, this emptiness, this not existing independent of the way of looking, not existing independent of the mind, and the mind also not existing by itself, this emptiness is the ultimate truth of all things. That's basically what the Buddha was saying from day one. Emptiness is the ultimate truth of all things. To me, that's a mystical understanding. If that isn't a mystical understanding, I don't know what is. It's very mystical. And so, therefore, the Buddha was a mystic, but ... [laughter]

What he didn't support was the statements that this or that mystical perception was an ultimate truth. There's a subtle distinction here. So a perception of the Ātman or Brahman -- he says that's not the ultimate truth, because emptiness is the ultimate truth. Subtle. But he said, famous words, sarvam idam māyam -- "all this, all this world, everything, is illusion," it means. Sarvam idam māyam, "all this is illusion." And he talked about what's called the five aggregates -- the body, the feelings, the perceptions, the thoughts and the emotions, and the consciousness, also. He said they're all illusory. They're all empty. They all are lacking in substance.^[10] None of this. It's not a process of "This real moment, and this real feeling, and there's no self, but there's a real process." These ingredients of the process -- there are no building blocks of a process, and there's no time in which it happens.

When we say everything is empty, that includes this level (what could we say?) of the multiplicity of perspectives that I was talking about earlier. So you can look at it this way, you can look at it that way, and dependent on how I look, it will open up different things.

Multiplicity of perspectives, as we said earlier. There's a concept from the medieval Western alchemical tradition: gloria duplex. It means the glory of these contradictory ways of seeing, gloria duplex, 'double': see it from this angle, see it from that angle. Bohr, again, this physicist, he was, I guess, knighted in Denmark, where he was from. They asked him, "What do you want on your coat of arms?" And he put the inscription, "Opposites are complementary." In the late sixties, there was a theory in modern physics called the bootstrap theory. It was popular for a while, and then I think what happened is they ran into mathematical difficulties or something. I don't know exactly. Recently, I just found out, it's come back into popularity. They figured some stuff out -- they'll explore it for a while, and it'll go again, and whatever. But the point is, it's probably the closest to both this sense of emptiness in the Buddhist tradition but also this sense of multiplicity of perspectives being completely valid.

[1:03:26] So one of the leading researchers into it is a guy called Geoffrey Chew, and he said, "A physicist who is able to view any number of different partially successful models [of reality, or particles, or whatever] without [frustration] is automatically a bootstrapper."^[11] This was coming up in terms of emotions, as well, in some of the groups today. We could say, "Such-and-such happened to me when I was young, and this pain lives in me. It's there. Sometimes I'm in contact with it. Sometimes I'm not. Sometimes it comes up. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I'm pushing it away and in denial." That's a valid perspective: "This is something that happened. This is a real feeling that exists already complete in me." It's a valid perspective, and there can be a lot of healing and helpfulness come from that perspective.

But, as we were talking this morning, and as people were beginning to report, you also see that take away the aversion, and where is this emotion? It doesn't constellate in the present, which means it doesn't exist as a thing in itself, independent of me having some aversion in the moment, or grasping, or whatever it is. Both, both -- can I hold both? Do I have this freedom, and this breadth of view, and this fluidity of perspective? John Wheeler worked several times in his life with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen at what's called the Bohr Institute. It was a gathering place and really a hothouse for very at-the-edge thinking and research in quantum physics. He said, reporting on that time, actually the central idea of the Bohr Institute was "No progress without [a] paradox."^[12] There's something about being able to see from different sides, and it applies to our emotions as much as it applies to everything else.

So to be tolerant of this multiplicity of perspectives. Doesn't mean to be lazy, to be tolerant. Seeing differently, employing different ways of looking, different perspectives, it does something to us. When I look with less clinging, with more love, with more allowing, with whatever it is, when I look differently, it does something to the being. And if I do that regularly, it does something very strong to the being, very strong.

I remember giving a talk years ago here, and afterwards a friend said to me -- it touched on mystical experience a little bit in that talk, and she said to me (I don't know what the figures were exactly), "Apparently 85 per cent of people have had mystical experiences." So in some questionnaire or something. What was interesting was only 5 per cent of that 85 per cent wanted to repeat them, which I found really curious. I was wondering, why is that? I don't know the answer. But I wonder if it's because, as I said, when we see differently, it does something to us, and it may come with a responsibility. Because if I see repeatedly my non-separateness, what's my responsibility then? If I see repeatedly that this thing that I take for granted is not quite real, what's my responsibility out of that? What does it imply for my life? Where does it issue?

So it's complex, and it's subtle. But some understanding here, you could say, is calling us, calling us in life. Some movement of the understanding, some deepening, some opening of the understanding is calling us, and is actually available to us. Rumi says we may worry about death, but what hurts the soul more is "to live without tasting the water of its own essence."^[13] Again, one can hear that, and so quickly the inner critic comes in: "Oh, but I haven't had ... And maybe other people, and I hear in groups and ..." It can be so painful. But I would also say, as I said before, it's not about experiences. We want to understand something about perception, and that's different.

Someone -- I don't know who -- this is a lovely quote; I'm not sure who said it: "The voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."^[14] [someone speaks in background] Proust? Lovely. Beautiful. Learning to see differently, learning to have new eyes. And as I said right in the opening talk, that's what meditation is, I would say, to me. Learning to have new eyes, and to see in ways that free, to see in ways that open up things.

So the understanding opens the eyes, but also the practices. The practices that we're doing are ways of seeing, ways of relating, ways of having new eyes. And they open both the via negativa, and in some cases, the via positiva. Usually it's gradual, this kind of opening and understanding. Usually it's gradual, but one begins to get a sense -- it's not even about via negativa or via positiva. One begins to get a sense of an understanding of the way things are and this emptiness that infuses, that infuses existence. So the presence of things, whether they're lovely or unlovely, it can't obscure that, and the absence of things, it doesn't prevent its song. It's, in some senses, beyond things and experiences, and in some senses it's in and through things and experiences. There's something we can understand as human beings that brings freedom, something that brings profound freedom, profound just whole different sense of existence. And this sanctification, this bowing, deep bowing to life, to existence, to the well of life, the inexhaustible, infinite well of life.

Shall we have some quiet time together?