Transcription
I think I'm going to talk a little bit more now. So I want to, as I said, divide the teaching up over the day. We're starting very familiar with the experience of the inner critic and some ways of working with it, which some of you will already be fairly familiar with. I want to take it a little bit further. Actually, quite a lot further eventually, but.
So another example, again, beginning with the inner critic. Someone -- this was a while ago -- was on retreat again, and came into interview, and again reporting this experience, as if someone was just telling him whatever he did was never good enough, however, whatever happened in meditation or elsewhere, it just wasn't good enough. This judging, he says, "Just the usual stuff, judging, judging, the usual stuff." And we talked about it. And then we were talking about the possibility of exploring it in this kind of way, entering into relationship with a person of the psyche, a psychic person. And he took that away and did it and came back. I can't even remember if it was over one interview or several. But first thing, when he went away and explored what was there, was he came back and said, "I had images of my parents that came up, from the inner critic. What was the inner critic became two, mum and dad." But then he said, "Actually, when I hung out there a little bit in the meditation and worked with it a little bit, actually, honestly, these images, they look like my parents; they're not my parents. The truth is my parents were kinder than these guys were."
Now, this was not the case of someone in denial about how difficult their childhood was and painting a rosy picture of an idealized, happy childhood when the reality was something different. It wasn't that at all. The person had done quite a lot of work. But first thing to say is these are what we call psychic realities, realities of the psyche. They're not to be taken literally. Just because they look like mum and dad doesn't mean they are mum and dad, or even internalized mums and dads. So one of the things I want to emphasize is non-literalism, not reducing, not reducing these persons that we might encounter and relate with to some more literal reality.
And then he went further, and beginning to work in meditation, with a lot of sensitivity. Can you actually use your mindfulness, and the sensitivity of the body, and sensitivity to your emotional responses to these figures? You're working in the relationship, mindful of what's coming up and the whole dynamics there. So, for example, fed up, angry at these two characters, amongst other emotions. When he did that, he found it sort of split again, it opened up even more richly, more complexly, and a whole host, a whole cast of persons, of characters opened up. And I actually don't remember all of them, I just wrote down a few. There was the 'good boy,' the 'naughty boy,' the 'frightened boy.' There was a hero. And there was some guy that he called the 'bad guy,' but that initially he thought was evil. So he was very nervous about this particular character; he's kind of dark or something. He called him the 'bad guy.' At first he thought it was evil, then recognized it was not. Not quite what it seems.
What we're talking about is an actor in a theatre, manifesting, expressing a certain style, rather than being evil. So this is theatre. It's theatre. But this -- and I'll pick this thread up as we go through the day -- if there is something we say, "Oh, this could be evil," or whatever it is, "or violent," or this or that, the mindfulness with the image, in relationship to the image, bringing mindfulness into that relationship -- that, the mindfulness, coupled with the fact of seeing an image as an image, knowing this is an image, knowing it's an image, seeing an image as an image, the mindfulness and seeing the image as the image, together create a kind of safety space, a safe space, a safety net, so that there isn't a kind of blind, unconscious acting out of certain images without even realizing what's going on.
What happens, if we enter more meditatively in this way, with the mindfulness, with that sensitivity to the emotions and the richness and the resonances of what's going on, is, curiously, the images, the persons, are empowered, they gain power, they're animated, at the same time as they're kind of disempowered or their capacity to act dangerously and unconsciously is disempowered. So they're empowered and disempowered in a helpful way at the same time. Now, what he found, and plenty of other people have found almost to -- we might say it might be a rule, almost, a rule of thumb -- is that as there are more persons in this theatre, as this landscape opens up to reveal more diversity, more plurality of characters, the more persons, the less the inner critic. What an interesting thing. And I wonder in our society sometimes if the very intense way we feel the singularity of the self, and that's centuries upon centuries of feeling a single, solid self, whether the more we feel that, the more it will constellate an inner critic. The more singular and solid the self, the more likely it is that an inner critic comes up in response to that. Once I start opening up and seeing there's more here than just Rob, more here than just me, the inner critic is somehow dissolved or disempowered or disappeared in all of that.
So that was one thing he found, and will be commonly found if you pursue this. The other thing, or another thing, is that he found as he did this that, in doing so, he felt that he disidentified from his usual sense of self. So usually, I feel this, and it's a very normal way of feeling, the way that I feel myself, and that sort of opened out, a very different sense going on of the self. Said, "disidentified from the usual me." And looking at all these persons, he said, "I can see they're all me, and none of them are me. They're all me, and none of them are me." Somehow in the plurality, the multiplicity of persons that open out, 'me' becomes much bigger than I thought originally, much bigger. The self has amplified, if you like, grown. It's gotten space. It's not so tightly, solidly bound.
So this way of working is potentially, we could say, a loosener and an underminer of the belief in a solid self. A loosener and underminer of our typical, taken-for-granted belief in a solid self. Now, you could go about that other ways, certainly, loosening and undermining the self. For instance, by seeing the emptiness of things very deeply. Even by what we poked at a little bit this morning, that teaching of seeing just the five aggregates -- that will also, to a certain extent, loosen and undermine, deconstruct, in a way. You could also go about this loosening and undermining of the self, or it can come about, through more mystical openings in deep meditation. For instance, a person feels like the self just expands or dissolves into a kind of infinite love, or infinite oneness, or infinite awareness, or it can have different possibilities there for deep meditative openings, mystical openings. And the self is expanded and dissolved in that. Very beautiful, potentially very powerful experiences. So it could come about that way.
[9:18] So we could do it through this kind of theatre, through seeing the emptiness or deconstructing with the aggregates, or through these more mystical openings which certain practices can tend to open towards. Three possibilities. All of them are what I would call ways of looking. All of them are helpful ways of looking. None of them are ultimately true. None of them are ultimately true. It's not true that the self is the five aggregates. It's not true, ultimately speaking, that I am a oneness of infinite love. It's an extremely helpful, beautiful stepping-stone, and for many, many people, it's a really important stepping-stone, but it's not the ultimate truth yet. So we've got three things that are what I call ways of looking, that can be extremely helpful. None of them are ultimately true. And maybe they're all available to me.
And this person, staying with this example -- but again, it will be common to this way of working -- also found, also reported that, having worked this way, or in working this way, he was able, he said, "to access previously unavailable qualities or energies of being." So rather than just deconstruct the self, something else is happening in this approach, that certain characters, if you like, are animated, are given life, are empowered. These persons or figures of the psyche are empowered and given life. There's this Greek word, daemons -- I don't know how to say it [pronounces as day-mons and die-mons], d-a-e-m-o-n-s, or d-a-i-m-o-n-s. So we could call the characters that show up, that come to us, that knock on our door, that seem to want something, we could call them that. We could call them persons, figures, whatever. I just want to introduce that word.
Okay. So we started with the inner critic, but much of this can come up from many other directions. It doesn't have to be related to the inner critic at all. Someone was telling me just a few days ago how this character showed up, this person, that was like a grandpa. It wasn't her grandpa at all. She didn't even have a clear -- this is really important -- she didn't even have a clear visual image. But the real felt sense and the experience of relating and being held, almost rocked in the lap of this grandpa in an armchair, and relating to him, and seeing him helping her to see things through different eyes, with a different perspective, with a different affect, a different emotional resonance. That's a very nice image. You can relate and see, oh, yes, that has mettā in it, etc.
Some stuff that might come up might not fit into that kind of thing at all. A little while ago, a woman was telling me suddenly this, what she called this voodoo guy appears. A huge guy in front of her. And rips open her chest, reaches in, rips out her heart and devours it in front of her. She said, "It felt amazing!" [laughter] And she's saying this, and she can't quite put her finger on what was it that felt so good about that, and what was it that felt important about that. It wasn't just like, "Yeah, this weird thing ..." It was somehow -- there's something here that's important. Can't quite box it in or nail it down.
Another woman -- this was a while ago on retreat at Gaia House -- she was on a long retreat and struggling a little bit with the form and the sort of tenor of solitude and sort of containment there at Gaia House, and the style of practice. There was some loneliness there and yearning there. And she went into the library with a cup of tea one day, and was sitting in an armchair. And suddenly, she said, this naked golden goddess appeared in front of her, and pounced on her, jumped on her. And it had a lot of eros in it; it was very erotic. And started kissing her. And then that kissing slowly turned into a suckling, that she was suckling at the breast of this goddess. She said it was like drinking nectar, drinking, drinking, this deep nourishment. Something was going right to the heart, drinking there. And this went on for a little while, and it opened up into this extraordinary bliss that she was describing, and then a very big love, a big, expanding love. So quite an unusual experience in the scheme of things probably.
Now, yes, something like that, it healed her loneliness in the time -- it touched that loneliness, it addressed that. But even more important that, it opened quite a lot. It opened her heart, certainly, but more than that, it opened a sensibility, and also opened a direction of practice for her and a different way of starting to see [inaudible]. It's this opening to what wants to come, what wants to come through, what wants to come to me, what does it want. So practising this way or opening these doors can be quite different, and one may find many figures, many daimons there. I remember some years ago having this flying dragon, bellowing fire, and very restless and flying around, and seeming to disrupt everything. It wasn't quite clear -- it wasn't aggressive; after a while, that was clear. What does it want? Or this soldier character. He's in some endless war. There's an endless war going on, and he's somehow fighting, again and again, or getting ready for battle again and again, oftentimes on his own, or resting to prepare for the next battle. Why does it seem important? What is it? Somehow it seems important. I can't quite box it in, sum it up, put my finger on it.
And oftentimes these images -- I'm going to give you some quite -- I could give you hundreds of examples, quite colourful examples sometimes -- but oftentimes they're not that dramatic, they're not that outlandish, they're not that sort of "Wow!" They're maybe more ordinary, but they seem to have something, something that captivates me, something that seems to be speaking to me, even if I can't quite figure it out. Another one I have is this character who's just wandering. He's just wandering, eternally wandering, usually almost always alone. He might meet this person or that person and have an interaction, but he's wandering. It's often in the desert. An outcast. He's on the outskirts of town, alone, wandering, wandering always. There's something about, when you encounter these characters, these daimons, something seems important, seems like it's resonating there. Now, they're not necessarily clearly visual. They're not necessarily visual at all. A woman was describing that she was walking in the lane near Gaia House and she felt her body like a cougar, like a mountain lion. And the image, so to speak, was kinaesthetic. It was in the body.
Now, some people will say, "But I don't have those kind of experiences. I don't even have a visual imagination." I would say -- and this is one thing I want to impress upon you today, is that images are everywhere. They're everywhere and they're speaking to us all the time. We are pulled and pushed and inspired and prodded by images all the time. So a woman spoke to me, she came in to an interview with a picture of the Pietà by Michelangelo. You know the beautiful, amazing sculpture of Mary, the Virgin Mary, with the dead Christ in her arms. Amazing. And for her -- you know, that's an image; it's an artistic image, but she found so much resonance and pathos, and it spoke to her so much and inspired her and opened stuff in her. That was her image. Not something self-generated. It's in the culture, and she used it to meditate on.
Sometimes we see people that we know, maybe we know very well, or people that we don't know, are images, mythic persons for us. So, you know, was it two nights ago, Nelson Mandela died. And it touched me so deeply. Thinking back on his life and what he did. But there's a kind of mythos there. He's become, for me, as I'm sure for many people in this world, he's a mythic figure. You understand? [affirmative noises] That's not, "Oh, that's rubbish, fabrication." We need that. The heart needs to throw out and colour and inject life and mythos into persons and things, etc., because we need it. There's something important there. It's something that comes through from doing that. So Nelson Mandela is like that. Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix, same -- something is going on there, at least in the way I see him. [laughter] Einstein. Albert Einstein. Again, maybe it's just me, but there's something almost mythic about him and the way he was and the whole being there, the person, the image. Now, some people -- also teachers, if you have a close relationship with a teacher. So I'm aware as a teacher that I have imagistic resonances for the student when there's a close, alive relationship. And that's good, and it's important, and it's alive, and it's rich, and it's beautiful. It also needs care.
[19:54] But, you know, it's interesting in the realm of teaching. So we tend, maybe not so much today, but we tend to teach this style with a sort of -- what would you say? -- it's got a lot of affinities with the mothering archetype. There's a lot of holding and gentleness. Lovely. Very important maybe for this culture. This tradition has a lot of its roots in the Thai Forest tradition of the twentieth century, and the sort of fathers of that tradition -- Ajaan Mun and Ajaan Mahā Boowa -- these were fierce, fearsome teachers. Their style is the warrior. It's not the mother at all. You see them expressing a different kind of archetypal person coming through. And when they talk about teaching, it's in the language of war and battle -- we're battling the defilements, the kilesas of greed, hatred, and delusion. And that's the language, that's the mythos that's there. And they exist, again, as almost iconic images, potentially, for us.
So the images are everywhere. We see them. We also -- and sometimes we don't realize this, that our life also expresses images. We ourselves express persons or some mythic style is coming through us, and oftentimes we don't see that. And then some of what may want to come through, or who may want to come through, may well not fit into the image, the fantasy, the box that I have of the Buddhadharma. I think, "That's what Buddhadharma looks like or should make you look like," and then this other thing seems to keep wanting to come through. This person who has so many years of practising and listening to teachings and hearing what they're supposed to cultivate, and somehow can't quite let go of the partying, and the chasing of the highs, and the romances, and the this and the that, and the surfing, and where's the next great wave. The inner critic very easily comes in -- it doesn't fit the picture, doesn't fit the image. The image coming through, the person coming through, does not fit the image of the Dharma.
A little while ago in an interview, a woman told me -- and I knew her fairly well at this point -- and she told me of something that happened, occurred decades before, while she was a young woman, I don't know, in her maybe very late teens or early twenties. She was travelling in Spain with a girlfriend. They were young and travelling, and they ran out of money. And they -- "What are we going to do?" And they started spending the night with men for money. At first it was just a one-off just to get money, and then they repeated it, and it just went on, and it went on, and it kept going for a while. Finally, one man who spent the night with them, they were talking, and he found out what was going on, and he very kindly drove them, both of them, and put them on a plane back. And she was telling me this, and there was a -- this was decades before -- and there was a lot of shame for her around it. I was listening, and I did know her quite well. I was listening, and I kept, these words kept coming into my mind: sacred prostitute. It was like, "I can't say that!" [laughter] And it kept coming, and then finally, sort of tentatively, I put it out there. And it really resonated for her. It really -- it recasts the story. The stories that we have of our life, they are not fixed. There are different perspectives. What's coming through? What is it that's speaking through me? What is it that's acting through me, pulling me, pushing me?
Now, that really, really resonated, and opened up the whole thing in a very different way, that there was not the shame. Very different relationship with it. And it continues to be something that she relates to in a very beautiful way. So I wasn't sitting there thinking, "I wonder how I could spin this so she feels a bit better and less ashamed." It was something that was alive, that was already, so to speak, in the field, if you use the language.
The thing was, she was young, and she wasn't conscious of this, she wasn't conscious of what it was, of the power and actually the beauty and the bigness, the largeness, the magnificence of what was coming through. She didn't know how to handle that. She didn't know how to relate to it. And most importantly, and I really want to emphasize this today, she didn't realize that what is an image and what comes and knocks on our door, a person or this demon, daimon, it doesn't have to be necessarily acted on literally, taken literally, or acted on. An image is an image, what I said before. It doesn't mean that it's literal or that it needs acting on. It's a metaphorical, theatrical relationship with this. It's different. It opens up space. She was young; she didn't understand that.
So all these images, they're everywhere. These images are everywhere. These persons can be seen, felt, everywhere. And then the question might become, what images, what fantasies are there in my life? What is already there, and which ones speak to me? Which ones are knocking on my door, asking for something, demanding something, pushing and directing me, turning things in a certain direction? So that becomes a question that we might ask. And all of this, what we're getting into, starts to suggest practice possibilities, possibilities for practice. So that's the key word: practice, meaning what is it to bring mindfulness to this area or these possibilities, to really be there and explore relating, seeing, with a lot of sensitivity, aware of the resonances, the emotional, the resonances of meaning, aware of how the body feels? You know when we did that breath meditation before, and working in this kind of -- what I call the subtle body or the energy body. It's like, that, this feeling here, this space, reflects a lot emotionally, energetically, etc. Can I be in relationship with an image or whatever and be sensitive to this, bring the mindfulness and sensitivity here, and feel, feel the resonances, feel what's reflected and what feels helpful, etc.? So you use this. This is my instrument; I'm using that. And maybe there's a dialogue. There doesn't have to be. But maybe that's part of it, that one engages in a dialogue with the being.
So, it could be, like in some of these examples, that something arises spontaneously, unexpected. It could be that a lot of what seems like flotsam and jetsam flowing through the mind is actually something quite important, maybe, in meditation. So it could arise spontaneously, or you could do it more deliberately. Maybe you had a dream last night and there was some character in the dream that seemed charged, or touched you, or seemed troublesome or something. Bring that dream image, that dream character, into the meditation, and start engaging, start relating with this mindfulness, with this sensitivity. You can look at that person and feel the resonances, feel their qualities, feel them out. You can also sometimes, so to speak, feel them looking at you. Feel how they look at you. There's a relationship here. Sometimes it's even possible to enter into them and feel as if you've become them to a certain extent. Sometimes if you just hold their eyes, if it's visual, and you look into their eyes and the expression in their eyes, you can actually enter and then see yourself through their eyes. Or you can feel in your subtle body space their movement or their body, and that can also have a feeling of inhabiting, create a feeling of inhabiting. Sometimes -- this is a very weird one -- if you put your attention on where their backbone is, down here, you can also somehow enter them; I don't know why that works.
So there's a possibility for relating in different ways, and really bringing a real sensitivity there to the resonances. I will say one thing. I notice, and other people notice, too, that when we're quite upset about something, it's as if there's a lot of energy in the emotional upset, and that energy in the emotional upset can be enough to constellate, throw up, an image. It's as if there's energy there that can condense an image. Do you see what I mean? So when we're quite upset, we might think, "Oh, it's hopeless to meditate." Actually right there is the energy that we need. It's the raw creative energy that can spin, conjure an image. But the other end of the extreme, when we're really quite settled, and the mind and the body are quite unified and harmonized in what we call a state of samādhi, everything becomes quite open, and you can come a little bit out of that state, and things are very insubstantial, very fluid, very malleable, and that's also quite a good space to work in this way. The middle territory is a little more difficult: I'm not particularly upset, nor am I particularly unified and harmonized in some samādhi, and it doesn't tend to generate that much. Still, there are possibilities.
So there are many, many possibilities. Let's stop there for now. That's enough talking.
