The Theatre of Selves (Part Two)

For those of you who weren't here last week, over the course of a few weeks, starting last week, I wanted to make a beginning of exploring what is actually a huge subject, a very huge subject, a very rich subject, over a series of talks. So we had one last week, and this is the next one. Hopefully we'll be done in three talks, maybe four. And the theme is, well, the beginnings of what we're getting into is the imagination, the place of the imagination in practice, on the path, in our existence. I hope that this makes sense if you weren't here, what we're going to talk about today, and there is a cassette tape floating around of last week's talk if you feel like you are interested and you want to have that background.

But just to very briefly summarize and review some of what we said, the main thrust of what we said last time: we're going to approach imagination from one direction in particular. Many are possible. But we put it in a context, a much bigger context of what practice is, and we said that, actually, mindfulness, or so-called "being with what is," is not the goal of practice. It's not, in this conception at least, in my understanding of the Buddha's conception, it's not what practice is about -- being with what is, accepting what is, coping with what is, etc. Rather, seeing the emptiness of things is the direction, the goal, what we're most interested in, most fundamentally important in practice. And that's quite different.

And so one way of seeing what practice is, in the very broad sense, is that through different practices, this practice, that practice, another practice, what we're really doing is practising different ways of looking. And through practising different ways of looking, we see, we notice, as the practices go deeper, that we're actually adopting different perspectives. And through adopting different perspectives, what appears, the perception that appears is different. Not only that, a lot of what Dharma practices have in common is that they tend to unfabricate, to unbuild. And if one goes really deep into many practices, what happens is the whole world of appearances is less and less built.

So you see the different perspectives giving different perceptions. You see this whole world of appearances, self and world, unfabricate. And all that together tells one, shows one, none of this is real in the way that it seems to be. It is empty. It doesn't have an independent existence. And that seeing, that understanding is what brings freedom at the most radical level. So not just the self, but phenomena too. All phenomena, everything, is empty.

And just focusing on the self, we said okay, there are many possible ways of seeing the emptiness of self, many possibilities, and I ran through a bunch, but what we're focusing on for these set of talks is using the imagination, the world of images to expose that, [to] help, being part of exposing that emptiness of self. One possibility. And we talked about using images, for example in mettā and compassion practices. We talked about using the imagination in developing samādhi. And we talked quite a lot last time about the inner critic, and the possible place of the imagination working with that kind of inner constellation of the inner critic.

But if I'm willing to open to images and the imagination, using that, exploring that with mindfulness, with sensitivity, actually an enormous range of possibilities open up. Absolutely enormous. And like we said, I'm covering a lot of territory in these talks, and you could take just a little -- not even now; it could be years down the road -- you just take a little bit of what's being said. Or you could take quite a lot, or actually, this bus that we're on goes really quite far out in terms of the usual conceptions and views that we have. Some of you may want to stay on the bus. Some of you will want to get off it much earlier. Because part of what gets opened up is the whole way -- our whole set of values and concepts, that's part of what gets opened up, called into question.

So today I want to give a sense, a little bit of a taste of the range of possibilities, of possible manifestations of working with images, ways of practising. I want to focus on practice, as well, but also attitudes and possible directions. So quite a lot.

We mentioned how one can use the imagination in loving-kindness and compassion practice, for example with the bodhisattva of compassion, Kuan Yin or Avalokiteśvara. And someone was telling me a little while ago, earlier this year on retreat, the ways they were creatively working with this. So sometimes he would actually feel a devotion to her. And in steadying the mind in meditation with this sense of devotion to the bodhisattva of compassion, there's a resonance with those qualities of compassion, of love, of mercy. Something happens in the being, that it soaks up, accumulates those qualities, through the imaginal devotion. And sometimes, he said, he imagines her or senses her having a very mischievous kind of quality. She is pixie-like, and that gives a whole different flavour to her loving. Sometimes he finds or imagines her in others. Somehow she is there in you, in this other that I am looking at. And found himself, when that was the perception, when the image was like that, that there's devotion then to this other, this other human being, that the relationship with this other human being opens up in a very different way. A whole other level of possibility. But not just with compassion and that archetype of the bodhisattva of compassion; other archetypes can come in.

In the Thai Forest tradition, there are two monks, Ajaan Mun and Ajaan Mahā Boowa, his student. Ajaan Mahā Boowa might be dead now, or very, very old; I'm not sure. And these are regarded as two very great masters of Thai Forest Buddhism in the twentieth century. And if you read their, what's actually transcribed talks, what you really hear is the warrior archetype coming through. They talk a lot about war with the defilements: "War. We're at war with greed, hatred, delusion. We're battling. There are many battles to be fought." The whole language, the ethos of it is shot through with that warrior archetype. And in their style of teaching, it also imbues this warrior. That's part of the teaching fantasy as well. The god of war, Ares, Mars, is running through there. That's what's behind that sensibility. It's not so much about mothering in that mode.

Now, in Western Buddhism, contemporary Western Buddhism, we don't have a lot of that. It's not often an archetype that you see a lot in terms of the way we do things. It's different. But one of the beauties and important aspects of all this talk about imagination and possibilities is exactly that, that it can open the being and the consciousness to a range or directions where it wouldn't usually open, when we start engaging imaginally.

So something, quite a lot, may be opened through the imagination that we wouldn't otherwise usually open to. A while ago, someone here on retreat was telling me, a woman was telling me, this huge voodoo guy appears in front of her, and he rips open her chest, pulls out her bloody heart, and devours it right there in front of her. And she was like, "It was fantastic!" [laughs] What's going on there? Something is opening outside of the usual range of seeing, of sensibility, through the imagination. Another woman was telling me she was on retreat -- this was a while ago -- sitting in the library. She was actually feeling quite lonely. She was on a long retreat, and there was quite a lot of pain and yearning. And sitting in the library, a naked goddess, a golden, naked goddess suddenly appeared in front of her and jumped on her. And there was a lot of eros there. It was very erotic between them. And this goddess started kissing her. And slowly, over a little time, it turned into that she was suckling at the breast of this goddess, drinking golden nectar, drinking down golden nectar. And there was incredibly deep nourishment in that. And this left her with this feeling of huge expansion and bliss, and an enormous love that seemed to pervade everything.

So yes, it healed the loneliness that she was feeling at that point, but it also opened up a lot of other things. Much was opened there. Included in what was opened was, "What is it that wants to come through? What wants to come through?" Not so much what I want to come through, but what wants to come through? Different spin on it. And in that case, what wanted to come through did not fit into the usual, classical Theravādan Buddhist archetypes. We don't really do erotic golden goddesses. And actually, that opened up a lot in terms of her practice and attitudes to practice and Saṅgha -- all kinds of stuff. I won't go into it right now.

When we start to open or inquire, or at least open to some possibilities, we begin to get the sense, or it's possible to get the sense that we're actually living in a world of images. This is a world of images. Images are everywhere, or you could say everything is an image. Or more accurately, it's possible that everything can be seen as an image, or anything can be seen as an image with this sense of depth and resonance and life to it. Everything, anything.

And sometimes in our life we see something or someone seems to concentrate or condense an archetype. You see it very -- it's as if they're just expressing this pure archetype. I've seen some footage of Jimi Hendrix, and something, you see -- well, my sense is -- that something is being constellated in his being, in the way he moves, in the way he plays, in the music, the way he dresses, everything. Something's coming through. I think he was aware of that, or had that sensibility. There's a little footage of him before he gets up on stage, and the guy's asking him (it's just ten seconds before), he says, "How shall I announce you?" And he says, "Tell them the big blue angel is coming." And he had this sense. Or Bob Dylan -- he's got this white make-up on his face, and he's dressed up like this trickster character with a crappy old top hat and everything, and he's singing this crazy, scornful Semitic song. He's embodying something. He's expressing something. It's in the image.

Now, none of this can be measured and none of it can be proven. It's not in that realm. We're not talking about even objectivities. That style of thinking is important in certain areas, but this is something different. It's more a sensibility. Is it over there, or is it over here? Or is it a sensibility between consciousness and image? A sensibility. Where is it? But what's possible is that we can meditate on these images and their resonances. We can let them resonate in the being. Because some humans are almost archetypal for us, or they are archetypal. They may be people we know, people in our lives. They may be people we don't know -- maybe historical figures or famous people we don't know.

Listen. This is a beautiful prose poem by Mary Oliver. It's about (so to speak) Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet, Romantic poet who died about the age of 29. He drowned. He was visiting a friend in Italy, and travelling -- well, he could have gone overland, it wasn't very far, and he went by sea, and the ship sank and he drowned in 1822. So she's writing this 175 years later.^[1]

[14:55 -- 16:20, poem]

I really read the whole thing just because it's so beautiful, but there's something about love here. And especially, listen to these lines: "I love this poet, which means nothing here or there, but is like a garden in my heart, so my love is a gift to myself." I'm going to come back to that.

Love can be here, in this imaginal world, with these images and imaginal beings. Psyche, this world of images, and Eros, they're lovers, Psyche and Eros, in the myth. Something, we could say in the heart, or we could say in the soul, it needs to throw out and create images or colour people or things or situations. It needs to throw something out from itself onto an object, onto an image, to vivify it, to give it depth and resonance and life. Now, a lot of modern psychology thinks that's negative. It's 'projection,' and that word has a negative connotation even though it might be pleasant. We have a positive projection, it has a negative connotation -- it's not 'reality,' in inverted commas. Or we talk, people talk about transference. Something allegedly, which is speculation, from the past is stored inside and then transferred onto another. Maybe something needs to throw out, to colour, to inject, to make beautiful and deep. And through that, an aliveness. It does something, and maybe something is necessary there. It's necessary for the heart, for the soul.

So there is the possibility of a world of images. And not only persons and things, but a place can be an image. For a lot of people -- and maybe for some of you -- Gaia House exists as an imaginal place, as well: the ethos, the feeling, the sense, the resonances of Gaia House. For me, I had a teacher, one of my most important teachers, and he was a monk in Thailand for many years. He had so many stories, so many stories about life at the monastery, and the other monks and the nuns and the teacher and the practice there and the styles of practice. It's imbued in my psyche, imbued in my consciousness. And through that, it comes into my practice. So that place, that monastery in Thailand, where I've never been and don't even know what it looks like, exists for me in the psyche, you could say, and spills out into my practice, or has in the past, and makes it alive, imbues it with something -- resonances and meaningfulness and beauty. And through that, in my practice -- walking meditation, step by step, standing meditation -- it's actually there in the texture of things, so to speak, in the background, this fantasy. And it gives beauty and depth and aliveness to the practice, and I feel involved in a lineage there.

Now, of course, the self can be an image. Or rather, we can image the self in different ways. There are images of the self. A woman here a while ago told me about something that happened decades before, in her past, when she was perhaps in her late teens or early twenties -- I'm not sure. She and a friend were travelling in Spain, and they ran out of money. And they didn't know what to do, a slightly rebellious streak, and so they started to sleep with men for money. And at first it was just a one-off, but then it continued for a while. Continued for a while, until finally a kind Spanish man, after spending the night with them, realized what was happening, and actually drove them to the airport and put them on a plane back. There was a lot of shame with that, an enormous amount of shame carried over the decades. As we were talking, I had the words come into my head, 'sacred prostitute.' And I didn't want to say it, but I did eventually say it. And something in her really resonated with that. It made more sense than anything else. It did something to her whole relationship. It opened up her whole relationship with this very shameful period in her past. It's not the usual way of looking at things.

Now, it wasn't that the intellect was coming in and thinking, "Hmm, I wonder how we could spin this so there's less problem here," because actually there are many options intellectually; I could have said this or that. We're talking about an image -- something, in a way, bigger than she was -- and she wasn't conscious, and she was young and didn't know how to handle this immensity and majestic something that was coming through. And didn't realize -- and this is extremely important -- that images don't necessarily need to be taken literally or acted upon. It's a different thing. An image doesn't mean literal, and doesn't mean literal action, necessarily.

But something in recasting the story, and it actually felt more deeply authentic, and there was a lot of healing there, an immense amount of healing. We'll get back to stories maybe later or in another talk, but stories fade, and we talk about letting go of stories, but maybe that's too simplistic. We live in a world of stories. When appearances fade in deep meditation, and stories fade, that's only temporary. And then we're back in the world of stories. And then what? What's the relationship with the story, and how are we storying things? Maybe we have a need for story, or maybe better to say we have a need for images. But it might not be my story, the story of my life. Maybe I'm in a story. Not my story. We'll come back to that.

But if we talk about self-images and the way self can be imaged, I could say, speaking a soul-truth if you like, from a soul-perspective, I could say "I am," in inverted commas, "I am a lover. I am a mystic. I am a scholar. I am a preacher. I'm a theoretical physicist. I am a political revolutionary. I am a wild sexual beast who is definitely not monogamous. I am a researcher into consciousness. I am a jazz musician. I'm a crazy poet. I'm a serious composer. I'm just an ordinary guy. I'm a teacher. I'm a student. I'm a monk. I'm a clown. I'm a vampire. I'm a wild man. I'm a werewolf. I'm a healer and a shaman. I'm some kind of fugitive, some eternal wanderer, outcast. I'm the tramp on the outskirts of town. I'm a lone soldier in a forever war."

Some of those I am or have been in my life conventionally. Some conventionally. All of them mythically. None of them really. None of them really. Some conventionally, all of them mythically, none of them really. And if I take any of them, even being a teacher, if I take any of them as a reality of who I am, that's where the ego-clinging comes in. And that's where a problem starts. Within each of them, I'm embedded in a whole set, a web of mythical relationships. So with my teacher at his monastery, I can feel, as I said, I can feel that lineage, and how it comes through from the past, tracing back and back through the centuries, the monks and the nuns and passing on the teachings, and the sense of the earth, and the connection with the earth, and the style of practice, and it comes through me into the present and into the future.

In relation with the whole circle of Einstein and Bohr and Heisenberg, I feel related to that. I'm in that relation imaginally. Or some kind of circle of dimly placed European Hasidic mystics in Eastern Europe. And my Jewish Kabbalist grandfather -- he died when I was young, and I couldn't really speak to him because I didn't know Arabic or Hebrew; he didn't speak English. And I feel a disciple of Jesus and his radicality in a very close way. It touches me to the core of my being. And I care for Beethoven deeply, and for John Coltrane, and for Nietzsche and his unbelievable loneliness of his quest. I want to be his friend. James Hillman and his battles. The Buddha, of course. Mipham, an amazing Tibetan rinpoche who died over a hundred years ago. And actually, I'm wrapped up in 2,500 years of messy Buddhist lineage in India and Tibet, and all the polemics and the arguing and the exploration, the evolution. And I too have offspring. I have offspring, persons and creations. Some one can point to, and some are more imaginal. Some are hard to see. They're wrapped up in the very texture of things, in communications and expressions. And some are purely imaginal.

Now, I could say, we could say, I could see myself, one can see oneself purely from a socio-economic point of view: I'm the product of such-and-such a society, and this family, and this class, and blah blah blah. I could also say yes, I'm a brother, and I'm an uncle, and I'm a son, and I'm a citizen. All of which is true, but the question is, which way of looking leads to what? And which way of looking brings this soulfulness, opens up this soulfulness, this depth of world, of beauty, of resonance?

So that wanderer, that vagrant on the edges, or that soldier, or that sacred prostitute, we could try to reduce that to being the result of, say, childhood circumstances, or socio-economic factors, or evolutionary biology. You could try. Something would be murdered, flattened in that. Which ways of looking lead to what? What do they open? And in this case, what ways of looking bring beauty, open up a whole other level of beauty? What ways of looking does something in us need? It needs to engage in these ways. Which ways of looking bring a sense of sacredness, open that up?

Now, you might say, hearing all that list that I went through, say, "Well, that's all right for you. You can do that because you've dissolved your inner critic. I couldn't. Those sound very inflated and sort of grandiose notions." But remember what we said last time, if you were here: that the more images, the less the inner critic. They're like this. And the more the inner critic, the harder it is for images, sure, but as we open up to more images, it's one way of dissolving the inner critic.

So yes, we can know the self and all things meditatively sometimes in deep meditation as impersonalities: I am love, I am compassion, I am consciousness, I am emptiness, whatever it is. And in a way, that's a possible stepping-stone that can come out of some of those practices I listed last time, the seven practices that we went through. But something different opens up when it's persons, when the world of persons in the psyche opens. It opens up in a different direction. So yes, it's possible to open up the self impersonally, but something different when it's personal, and I'll get back to that.

Now, one really important point here is it's not just, it's not only that we're saying, "Ah, we are multiple. You are not just one self. I am not just one self," as a way only to open up the self. It's not quite the same, if you know Thích Nhất Hạnh's poem, "Please Call Me By My True Names." It's not quite the same as that, where it's kind of saying, "It's okay, I'm that too. I'm him too, I'm her too." The thrust there, the movement is to let go of self, to open out the sense of self and not to judge. There are certain things we wouldn't want to encourage. This is a bit different: we want to enliven these persons, we want to enter them, and have them, so to speak, enter us. We want to be entered. Their power living through us. All the time, as I said last week, knowing, knowing, knowing image as image, fantasy as fantasy. Knowing that.

And if we hear that, you think, "Well, how do you know it, and yet still have the power and the aliveness and the fullness of that?" It sounds like a razor's edge. Once you get into it, it actually opens up. It's not so narrow like a razor's edge, to have that balance. It's actually very spacious.

So what about practice? What possibilities are there with this, with practice? Like we said last time, we can be deliberate with our exploration here, with the world of images. So you could deliberately invoke or imagine a god or a goddess, as they do in tantric practice, like Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. You could also pick up and repeat deliberately an image that arose previously for you, and decide to go with that a little bit and explore it further, its resonances. You could pick up a dream image. Maybe if some image was strong in a dream, or disturbing or moving or something or other, pick up that dream figure and hold them in meditation. And actually, is it possible to enter into them, and enter into their perspective even? By meditating, sustaining the attention, you can do that in a few ways. You can almost become them, see the world through their eyes.

One way is if you just observe and feel in your body, their body. Feel their posture or their movement, feel it here in the so-called subtle body, in the feeling here, or maybe feel this body, the subtle body, mimicking their movements. Or if you just gaze into their eyes and really get the feel for their expression, something might happen; you might enter them. Or curiously, focusing on their backbone -- I've no idea why this works, but the base of the spine, just get a feel for that. And how do they, how does this person of the psyche see you? How do they see you? Not just how I see it, but how do they see you?

Anyway, we can do all this deliberately, and as I said last time, we can do it spontaneously. In other words, images might spontaneously erupt into the awareness. I noticed something quite interesting, which people would generally find, which is when there's quite a lot of samādhi, when the mind is unified and it's harmonized like that, if you just come out of that state a little bit, there's a lot of fluidity and insubstantiality to things, and it either lends itself to generating an image spontaneously, or one can work in that space because it's fluid and insubstantial. There's less fixedness or solidity to things. On the other extreme, when one is a little bit upset or a lot upset about something, there's enough energy in the upset to instigate an image, to constellate an image, from the very upset. The space in between, when there's neither quite very much samādhi nor quite upset, it can be hard to generate, or for images to be generated.

So like perception, like any perception of a thing in the world, there are relationships here that are important to be aware of and to explore. Always, always, always the relationship with the image, or like any perception, always the relationship with it shapes it and colours it. So you can see, for example, even in a dream, when there's fear of this monster in the dream, it makes the monster loom larger. It chases you more. And there will be more of a feeling of negativity. It will colour the whole thing with negativity. It's not separate from the way I'm looking at it, ever, just as ordinary, worldly perceptions are not.

Now, this implies that we really have to bring a lot of mindfulness to the whole exploration. Really bring in the mindfulness. And in particular, I really want to emphasize this: the body. Mindfulness of the body, meaning this feeling here, this space, this subtle body, the energies, the feeling. And the emotional sensitivity. What is here emotionally, in the image or here [the body or subtle body] or both? That's absolutely crucial, because there's a difference between imaginal practice and daydreaming. And the difference is exactly that: how much mindfulness is there, how much sensitivity, delicacy of attention, particularly in the body? When we're daydreaming, we're not there; we're lost.

So through this bodily and emotional sensitivity, there is a sense of the resonance. What are the resonances in the image, with the image? What's the pathos, the emotions that are around, the energies, the meanings perhaps? But here we have to be a bit careful; I'll come back to this. We could say the meaningfulness. That's probably better. I would be cautious about reducing any image to "it means X or Y." I'll come back to that.

But always the relationship is important and part of what we want to be aware of, part of what we want to include in the mindfulness. And always, just like all perception, mind state and perception, in this case mind state and image, are co-dependent and they co-influence each other, always, always, always. So when there is samādhi and that state of beauty, it tends, there will tend to generate, the kinds of images that come up are more likely to be luminous, peaceful, beautiful. And that luminosity, peacefulness, beauty tends to then feed back into the mind state. They reinforce each other. But also, it's possible one's working with a difficulty in one's life, and a feeling difficult, and the image that comes up is more of the warrior, let's say: something roaring, a lion with rage, or the warrior roaring, a body in flames, this outcast alone. And curiously, despite the sort of pathology in the image, something about it brings the being into a sense of alignment, peace, energization.

So here's a second really important rule of thumb: to use the body, and particularly what I'm calling the subtle body energy, the way this space feels, use that to discern, to sense when one is on the right track -- actually, like all meditation. Because when one is on the right track, this space here begins to feel more open, more calmed, more unified, more aligned.

Just touching on the body as well, again, sometimes the body, through this, will actually want to move, and people report all kinds of movements -- dancing, and sort of intuitive yoga, and the mouth opening to roar silently, all kinds of things. And sometimes that's okay, and sometimes you might just want to let, so to speak, the subtle body move. You can feel it, imagine it moving while the physical body's actually keeping quite still.

Last time we talked about dialoguing, dialoguing with the inner critic, and we were trying to open up that word, dia + logos, logos meaning different perspectives, different views, different ways of thinking. So me and this image, this image is opening me to different perspectives and ways of thinking, different values even. The word 'conversation,' con + versare, means, the roots are, 'to turn with.' So I look at everything from this perspective, and through conversing, dialoguing, I am turned. My perspective is, can be turned; I'm not so fixed.

But it's not necessarily verbal, any of this. It doesn't have to be at all, and in fact often it's not at all verbal. The image is the message. That image that comes is the message. It's not that it needs to say anything. The word 'angel' is from the Greek angelos which means 'messenger,' messenger from the gods. But here, actually the image is the message oftentimes.

It's possible, if one's open to this and wants to play with it in practice, it's possible you can have many different relationships with this angel. For example, you can feel like it's not you, but you see this angel. Or it might be that you identify with this angel, you become, or you see that angel as you. Or it might be that you feel seen by this angel. All good, all important. Might be some combination of two or three of those. Some of the images, the figures that arise are purely one-off. They come once and that's it. Some will be there for a period of time, mirroring something you're going through in life, or perhaps your life is mirroring the image. And some might be there for the whole of our lives. They're friends for the whole of our lives. But the relationship with them is open. It's not static. It's open, open. So there may be dialogue. There may be struggle. But often there is love, if one is willing to play with this a little bit and open to it and explore with courage and open-mindedness. There's often love there. Very often there's love there.

And what I find very interesting is there are different kinds of love. Just like in the physical world, there are different kinds of love. So it might be that some being, angel, image, comes, and healingly, tenderly kisses you on the heart, ministers to you with great tenderness. Or it might be there's an erotic exchange. Maybe you have a sexual union or intercourse, or make love with an image. Would you dare? And you think, "Well, why would you want to do that?" Or "Why would you not want to do that? Why would you be suspicious of that?" Underneath, behind this 'why' or 'why not' are all kinds of assumptions and all kinds of conceptions which we must, we will get to at some point. But there's that possibility there, and there can be great beauty in that.

And different kinds of love. In a cave somewhere underground, some crazy, old, long-haired, half-naked master and his apprentices are creating something, some statue. There's a furnace. There's all this work into some kind of artistic creation. Work, work, work. And most of the people above ground don't care. They won't even appreciate it. And it's work, and it's endless work, and it's hot, and it's pressured. And that master loves the apprentice, but it's a stern kind of love. It's a different kind of love. But it's there and it's palpable.

So in exploring this, there's actually an invitation to sensitivity, to the exploration of the different kinds of love. And imaginal love, like any love, involves deep appreciation. Sympathy, sym + pathy -- feeling together, intimacy, dearness. A strange mixture of both familiarity and otherness, when we love, when we're in love. So familiar and yet so other. And somehow the other can have this transcendent, almost elusive in their otherness. And again, the sense of beauty can be transcendent and elusive. But the love can be mutual.

One can have, as I said earlier, an image of oneself, and one might find images of oneself arising spontaneously. One could also, it's possible to deliberately imagine oneself, and sometimes people want to do this almost, "Let me imagine myself somehow better. A better me, or a more successful me, or a more whole me, or a more integrated me, or a more balanced me. Or let me imagine myself with this quality that I think I need to develop, or I'm lacking in, or I never kind of express." And sure, that's possible. It's possible to do that, and maybe something comes of that. But there's a different conception behind doing it that way. It's more ego-driven.

And it might be that spontaneously something comes up, an image of oneself. And it's sort of oneself, it's sort of not. It's somehow the spirit in oneself. Plato talks about a daimon within a being. Other people, Henry Corbin talks about the angel or the divine counterpart. Something wants to express through you, or maybe it feels like something I'm travelling towards. That image of me, I'm travelling towards it. It's calling me. It's coming through me.

And images may not involve self at all. So an animal, a bird, a tree, all can be seen as angelic beings. It's not that they're coming to give me a guiding message, or a direction, or this or that, or "Move to Albuquerque and become a postman" or whatever. It's something else. Some other sensibility that's opening up. And through all of this, meditatively to tune in, to touch in, to be sensitive to the resonances. That's where a lot of this works, the delicacy and the beauty of that kind of practice.

I saw this thing on YouTube. It was a band. I'm not particularly into this band or whatever. There was a background vocalist, and she comes to the front, and she sings a one and a half minute solo, lead vocals, and it's amazing. It totally blew me away. And I'm not even really crazy about that music. But there was something that was in the way she was doing it. She was kind of goofy, even, but there was something coming through. And then meditating on that afterwards, and tuning into that resonance and sustaining the attention, and actually that, whatever it is, that goddess coming through, whatever you want to call it, those qualities, it starts to imbue the surroundings. And it's almost like one can receive her, receive that and those qualities from everything -- from sounds, from others, from the physical environment. Something's opening up in the whole sense of things. Very different. In the tantric tradition they have the instruction: hear all sounds as mantra, as divine sound. See your surroundings as a maṇḍala, or as a palace of a divine being, of a deity.

So, what do we mean when we say 'images'? That actually needs some opening up, because it's not necessarily only a visual object -- I see this thing, that thing as a visual object. It can come more through the body. It's the sense of something. A retreatant was out walking. She said, "I felt like, my body felt like I was a cougar. A cougar was in my body, and it felt that way." It's coming more through the body, and less as a visual object image.

I don't really have the word here, but what I really mean when I say the word 'image' -- and maybe there's a better word; I'm sure there is a better word, but I don't know what it is -- is really all of it. Not just an object, but the whole web of resonances, the feeling, and the very way of looking itself, the way of entertaining it and the relationship with it. All of that I mean by 'image.'

And to play with this, to open to this, to explore this. It's not necessarily the case that outlandish images are better at all. Sometimes some people are more prone to that than others. A friend was here on retreat a while ago, and she wrote to me, and described two very beautiful images. I'll just read, share their beauty:

"A few days into the retreat I had [what she's calling] a dream vision [she was wide awake] of Mary Magdalene, who came towards me with her arms outstretched." Now, she already had a connection with Mary Magdalene. "And as she came closer to embrace me, I saw that her hands were bleeding from the stigmata, the wounds from the Crucifixion, the wounds of the Christ. And a voice said, 'She bore the wounds of her beloved,' and this was very moving."

And then another day in the retreat, "A white hand came towards me out of darkness in a mudrā like you see on some Buddhas with thumb and forefinger together and the remaining fingers held up. I wasn't sure if this was Yeshua, Miriam, Mary the Mother, Kuan Yin, or who. And from the palm of this hand emerged one drop of blood in a perfect droplet, like a tear. It was a feminine, delicate hand, and this tear came down my throat and into my body and was healing." And then she goes on to say how that stimulated her to practise in a certain way that was very helpful.

So those are, for most people, those would be quite outlandish, strange kind of images. It's not necessarily that they're better. They're beautiful images. What matters more is the relationship with. She had a very good relationship with her images. The relationship matters, not the actual image itself, and the sensitivity to the emotion, the energetics, the opening, the resonances, as I said. Not taking them literally. This doesn't mean, you know, "Careful when you put up that self-assembly shelves next week with the hammer and the nails." It's not a literal message there. And not to reduce. Careful of reduction. Always the conceptual framework in play is important, and we're going to get back to that.

I could be wrong, but I feel for myself that over some years playing with this and exploring this, there's been a kind of maturation, so that the way I do it now is different than, say, a few years ago. It feels more mature. One distinction I want to make, that I feel is quite important, if we talk about what is an image and what are we talking about here, there's a difference between what we might call 'narrative' images and what we might call 'poetic' or even 'iconic' images.

Some ways of engaging the imagination are great, for instance shamanic journeying or something. They're wonderful, but they move in a slightly different direction than what I want to pay attention to. Because if I go on a journey in my imagination, it tends to reinforce the self, the ego going on this journey and meeting this and meeting that. That's a more narrative image -- a slightly different feel, and it opens up very differently from what I'm calling more iconic or poetic: an image that just stays there. It's not necessarily going anywhere. It's not really temporal. It's not leading to, a story is not leading to a resolution: "I cut through the thorny thicket, I battle the dragon, slay the dragon, enter the castle, kiss the princess, she wakes up, we get married and live happily ever after."

It's not moving towards, a narrative moving towards a happy ending/resolution, necessarily. That soldier is always donning his armour ready for battle. Or he's always battling. Or he's always resting, but only resting just enough to prepare for the next skirmish, the next battle. That vagrant, that wanderer is always wandering, mostly alone, not wandering to some final arrival place. There's something eternal, atemporal. Different. One image, and resonating with that. It's repeating. One's kind of stewing, like in an alchemical vessel. It's sealed, and the substances inside, they just stay and they stew, and it takes time. Or all aspects of a narrative are together. It's not this and then this and then this finally; they're all somehow together. The heroism, the woundedness, the healing, all together.

If we enter this, and going back again to the big concept of Dharma and what the Dharma is, if we enter this more as 'way of looking,' if it's a way of looking, then we're not taking these things so literally. And yes, there is the whole realm of ESP, and who knows, past lives and all that, sure. I don't know anyone who's mapped all of this, sure. But there's something interesting that happens if we take it as a way of looking, and not literally, and take an image not as a symbol (and again, there are some vocabulary problems here). So I mean not as something that represents, re-presents, for instance, some other concept or some psychological factor. In other words, "This, whatever it is, really is my will, or my loving-kindness, or my strength or whatever. And I could do it any other way, but it really is reducible to this concept." Sure, we could do that, but to me, something more interesting and more powerful happens if we don't reduce it. It's not just a symbol, a re-presentation.

And what if also we don't so much reduce images to, or explain them ('explain' means 'make flat' -- ex + plain, 'to make flat'), if we don't so much always [reduce] to my personal history? "This image is arising because of this in my past." Now, of course that's important, and of course that is the case sometimes. But some of you in this room, some of you listening, like myself, have probably spent decades thinking and looking and exploring and healing in that way. Decades thinking and working and viewing about the past and the wounds, and how that comes into the present and is catharted and healed in the present. Yes, of course that has its place, and it's important. But sometimes one begins to get the sense: how true? Is this all really true? And is it even necessary to see things that way? Is it real cause and effect? That happened in the past, and this is happening now -- is it therefore cause and effect? Or is that just one way of seeing things? And are there other ways that might open things out in a different way? A whole different way of seeing, a whole different opening.

So if one wants to enter into this and not reduce so much, then something happens. Rather than being reducible, there's a mystery. Images, some images can have a mystery to them. It's like they're infinitely deep. You'll never get to the bottom of them. You'll never sum it up, conclude "it's this," tie it, put it in a category. They're infinitely rich and infinitely deep, infinitely reverberating, echoes like a musical note has resonances in the harmonic series. Infinitely reverberating. And if I don't squeeze it so much into the personal and so much into this or that factor of my mind, then actually something opens up, and it has more, we could say, a religious aspect to it. It's opening up beyond the purely human, and beyond the purely humanistic, beyond the purely personalistic history. And there is, there can be, this atemporal, eternal quality. And what is it to see my life almost from the perspective of beyond death? My life as images. My life as icons. A whole different sense of what one's existence is or can be.

And all this together, it's not only, as I said, an image as a visual object in meditation, but you begin to get a sense of a world of images and imaginings that's actually very important, very rich for us. Maybe we have a need for it, a very deep need. Then the question is, "How am I fantasizing the present? What fantasy of the present, of this situation, of my life, is happening?"

Someone on retreat here, when the wind blows, she talks about, "The wind of enlightenment is blowing. The wind of enlightenment is blowing around Gaia House." Beautiful. So self and surroundings as images. Knowing image as image, sensing life imaginally. The events, the situations, the predicaments, the struggles, not representing something. This butterfly fluttering in the sunlight-filled garden in its overabundance in summer, it doesn't represent anything. But there are resonances, infinitely deep resonances of image there. Life as theatre. Something gets animated. And this, more than an object in meditation -- that's just an entry point for some other whole different sense of existence, and that's most important.

So I'm going to stop there, but just to point out something which may have already occurred to you: that in the different practices, as I go through, I say you can do this, you can do that, or it can open up this way or whatever in what I'm outlining, but also in your reactions that you had as I was talking and as you were listening, in both what I was outlining and in your reactions, they point to different assumptions and concepts. Some of the practices point in certain directions in terms of assumptions and concepts. Some of your reactions will also be coming from certain assumptions and concepts. Always, always, always. Inevitable. And always, certainly in relation to all this, certainly in relation to practice and the path, and certainly in relation to existence, there are always concepts operating. Always. Assumptions and concepts always. We cannot live without them. We need to look at what they are, because they have a tremendous power. It makes all the difference. And that's what I want to go into next time. It's like, what are the different ways of conceiving, the different ways of assuming, that run with images, or might open up in this direction or that direction, or block this direction or that opening or whatever? Because that's always there with any practice, with any path, with our very existence. Always.

Okay, let's have a quiet minute together.