Transcription
[Editor's note on audio: on the Cambridge Day Retreats website, go to 53:53 of the second talk's audio for the beginning of part 2; otherwise it's prefaced by part 1 and the earlier guided meditation.]
Okay, so, like I said, we're going to divide the teaching up over the day. So let's have another little block now -- I hope less than half an hour, maybe almost half an hour.
We can pick up where we left off, with this inner critic, and different ways of approaching the inner critic, or a different way of approaching the inner critic. This is actually some years ago, but I remember reasonably well: a man was on retreat at Gaia House, and again, comes in for an interview, and reports manifestations of the inner critic -- this voice haranguing him. "You're never good enough," judging. He said it was the usual stuff. He was quite used to this kind of thing.
So we were talking about different ways, different possibilities of ways of working with it. And we talked about this possibility of actually engaging, exploring a relationship with. He went away to do that for a couple of days on a retreat. And he came back, and he reported that when he did that, he turned towards the voice, let it constellate as image -- actually, in this case, images, two images, his images of his parents -- he said, "Okay, images of my parents came." But then he said quickly, "Actually, honestly, these two images, they're not my parents. My parents were much kinder," he said. "Much more patient, etc." And again, we're not talking about denial here. We're talking about someone who was quite aware in the psychotherapeutic domain or whatever, had done that kind of work. But these images, "They're my parents, but they're not really my parents. My parents were not like that."
Again, just to differentiate here: we're talking about realities of the psyche, psychic realities. At least in what I'm trying to say today, we need to be careful not to literalize. They look a bit like my parents, or maybe exactly like my parents; they are not my parents. We don't want to literalize, at least in what I'm talking about today. We don't want to literalize or reduce: I reduce them to my parents, or anything else. This is something I'm going to come back to again, this idea of not reducing.
But it's possible, and what he did was, we were talking about how to practise with this, to actually use the sensitivity, use a sensitivity to his own emotional responses to these two images, and actually let that take the meditative practice, the meditative exploration deeper. How do I feel? In this case, fed up, angry, etc. And just tune into that emotional response, and let that awareness guide, be a guiding factor in the practice. What he found when he did that was that these two images fragmented, if you like, into a whole host of inner persons. I can't remember; he had a whole litany of characters in there. There was, I think, the good boy, the naughty boy, the frightened boy. There was a hero figure. There was some naughty boy or something -- or a bad guy, he was calling him, the bad guy.
This is actually quite important: at first he thought, "This is evil. This is evil, this bad guy." But actually, when he hung out -- again, instead of turning away and running away, hung out with that character, it wasn't evil as he first thought. He began to get this sense of the whole thing, as like they're actors in a theatre. They're certain styles, if you like, rather than concrete realities to be afraid of. This is something important here. If there is, in this kind of practice, if there's mindfulness with what's happening -- in other words, I am aware; I am aware of how I'm feeling, I'm aware of what's happening, I'm aware of the energetic responses, I'm aware of the thoughts, I'm aware of the assumptions -- if there's mindfulness with the image, and if I'm seeing image as image, and not as some kind of concretized reality, as taken literally, if there's mindfulness with the image and if I'm seeing image as image, it makes all this safe. Already probably some of you are thinking, "Maybe he's a little bit nuts." [laughter] "And maybe this is not safe." And it will get maybe even a little more later! But with mindfulness and seeing image as image, it keeps the whole thing safe. What it does is a strange double movement: it empowers these images, these persons of the psyche. It gives them power and life in certain ways, at the same time as it disempowers them so that they cannot take over in some kind of unconscious way. It empowers and disempowers.
What did he find? And what will, I think, anyone find if they want to explore this way? The more persons opened up, became available to consciousness, the more the multitude opened up, and the more alive they became, the less the inner critic. More persons, less inner critic. Less persons, more inner critic. Interesting. What happened to that inner critic that I started off with? Gone. Gone, an inner theatre opens up. That was one thing he found. And again, I would say this is what one will find.
Second thing, and very important: he said, "And it's like if I feel disidentified from the usual me, I feel, looking at this cast, I feel like they're all me, and none of them are me." There's this balance in the way of seeing them, and something's happening to the sense of self. The plurality that opens up -- 'me' is bigger than I thought. 'Me' is more than I thought. 'Me' is a multitude. There's a loosening, an undermining of a belief, the usual belief in the solidified sense of self. We take this sense of self, "I'm single, I'm solitary, I'm solid," and therein, a lot of our problems come. This is one way in of actually loosening that whole sense of self up.
Now, going back to what we said at the beginning, we could do this loosening and undermining, which is such a central thrust of any Dharma practice, we could do it in a number of ways. One way would be to see the emptiness of the self. That's fine. And even, to go back to what we said at the beginning, one limited way of doing that is even seeing there's nothing here but a process of the aggregates, of the mental and physical aggregates. It's one way of deconstructing the self. So a certain way of loosening and undermining the self can come through emptiness, and a certain level of that through this aggregates/process business.
Or another way of loosening, undermining, opening, dissolving the self, the sense of belief in the self, is through more what I would call kind of mystical openings or dissolutions, mystical dissolutions. Some of you will know this from practice: there are times in meditation, or perhaps in nature, or when we're very touched, or sometimes even listening to music or something, the being opens up, the sense of consciousness opens up, and it's like the self dissolves. And what's there is infinite love. The cosmos is made, shot through, the fabric of the cosmos is an endless love, without end, without beginning. Or a oneness. It can have a lot of different flavours, but there's a kind of mystical dissolution, a mystical opening. That's another way of loosening, undermining this belief in the solid, single self.
So we can do it from lots of different directions. Whether it's this engaging with these persons of the psyche, whether it's seeing the emptiness of the self and deconstructing it to some degree into elements, or whether it's a more mystical dissolution and opening to something much vaster, they're all available. And there's no reason why a person can't explore all of them -- absolutely no reason. They are all ways of looking. None of them are ultimately true, none of them, and certainly not the single, solitary self that I believe in. None of this is ultimately true. All we have are ways of looking. And certain ways of looking either clamp things and constrict things and solidify things, or they open things out, and they loosen, they undermine.
We could put all this that we're talking about today in a certain context as just one way of opening, loosening, undermining the solid sense of self, the belief in a solid self. All of these three ways give different things. They open up slightly differently. The flavours and the openings and the perspectives they give will be slightly different. With this one, what was interesting, with this more what we're talking about today in terms of persons of the psyche, figures of the psyche, he also said, this gentleman, "I feel able to access" -- and I can't remember the words he used, but -- "qualities or aspects of the being that were unavailable before. It's like meeting this cast of characters and engaging them has actually opened up their characteristics for me in a very alive way."
So if we take the avenue of deconstructing the self, "It's just a process. It's just elements," that's all we're doing is we're deconstructing. This way, actually we're interested in empowering the other characters. We're empowering something. We're vivifying. We're giving life to these persons, these figures, not just deconstructing. Different. Different flavour, different emergence, different perspective emerges.
Now, we've talked just so far about inner critic, because it's quite familiar to people. But there are lots of other possibilities that have nothing to do with the inner critic -- lots of possibilities, infinite perhaps. Another woman a little while ago was saying, in her meditation, and there was some hurt and some sadness, and an image came to her of a figure in an armchair that she started calling 'Grandpa,' her Grandpa. But it wasn't her Grandpa. It looked nothing like him. But this figure was very, very loving, very accepting, very tender. She used that in the meditation, this engaging with the figure, and it was very, very healing for her. Very healing to come sit in his lap, to be held by him, to be talked to by him, to tell him stuff. Something's happening there.
But even still, so far, okay, there's a certain range in the imagery. It's possible it goes even beyond that. Another woman on retreat -- this is maybe a year or so ago; I can't remember -- suddenly, what she calls this huge (her words) voodoo guy appears, this huge guy, and thrusts his hands into her chest, rips her apart, and rips out her heart and eats it. She said, "It was fantastic!" [laughter] I said, "How did it feel?" And she said, "It felt great!" She didn't understand. Why did it feel great? What is that? What's going on? I don't know. It just felt really, really good. Something about it felt really right.
Another woman -- actually, a woman on a long retreat; this was some years ago. It was three or four years ago. She was on a long retreat at Gaia House, and was ambivalent about being there in the silence and the solitude, etc., and was feeling a lot of loneliness and a lot of yearning that she couldn't quite put her finger on what it was. She was sitting in the lounge or the library, I think, in one of those armchairs, if you know Gaia House. Just sitting there, and feeling these feelings, and then, suddenly (this is her description), a naked, golden goddess appeared, suddenly in front of her, and leapt on her -- very sort of erotic nature -- and started kissing her. Then that kissing turned into her suckling at the goddess's breasts. And she said, "Very strange, but it was like nectar." Like nectar -- deep, deep nourishment she felt. As she was doing it, she just went with it, and it began to turn to a feeling of bliss. Deep, deep bliss filling her body. And big love. Whole sense of vast love opening up. This was, for her, a very unusual experience. So yes, it healed the loneliness that she was feeling, certainly. But something even more than that: it opened something in her being. Something was being opened. What wants to come through? What wanted to come through that opening?
So the range of possibilities here is actually enormous, like I said. And one person can have a multitude, as we said before, a multitude of -- we could call them inner persons, but persons of the psyche, figures, imaginal figures coming. I remember (this is quite some years ago) having a period where I kept -- this dragon, this flying dragon used to come. It had a lot of energy and a lot of intensity. But after a while, it took me a while to realize: it's not aggressive, and actually it's not frightening. But it has a real voracious kind of appetite to it. I couldn't figure out: what does it mean? What does it want? It's not obvious. It's not too easily literalized. Or another image, of a solider who is in some kind of eternal war. It never ends. He's always either fighting, or going out to battle, or resting from one battle in preparation for the next. He's just an eternal soldier. And he has some kind of duty to be fighting. Another character is a wanderer. He's always wandering in the desert. Usually he's alone. Maybe he has a dog or something. Maybe he encounters certain people for a while. And then he wanders. He never gets anywhere. He's not Odysseus on his way back to Ithaca, no wife waiting in Ithaca. He's not going to reach somewhere and finally set up a house and be okay and be not alone. There's some solitary, endless wandering there.
So the images don't have to be outlandish and dramatic, like golden goddesses kissing you. They can be actually quite relatively mundane. But something about some of these images: it's like they touch us. If I'm open to it, I can feel touched. I feel there's some resonance there. I can't quite box them in, but they seem deeply important. They don't have to be visual either. One woman was saying her body felt like a mountain lion, like a cougar. It's not a visual image; it's a bodily sense. And there was that woman earlier, so it's more a voice. A lot of people say, "Well, I don't have images. Maybe some people do, but I don't get images." And that's a whole other subject that we can talk about maybe later. But they don't have to be visual. They don't have to be dramatic.
Images are also surrounding us, and perhaps that's the most important thing I want to say today. It's less dramatic to say that, but it's actually more fundamentally important: images surround us. One woman actually had a postcard of Michelangelo's Pietà, the statue with the Mother Mary with Jesus, the dead Jesus's body in her arms. Really amazing statue by Michelangelo. She had a photo of that. And for her, she would meditate on the photo, and there was something in what was expressed so brilliantly in the sculpture, something about compassion, but something that she couldn't also just put into words. So the image was in the art. And a lot of images come to us through art or literature or whatever it is.
And we see them also expressed, or we are surrounded by images in the sense that our life and the people, some of the people in our life, are images to us. They exist for the psyche in terms of charged psychic [inaudible] as images. Sometimes you see this -- for example, Nelson Mandela. You can see him as a historical figure. Of course he was human and everything. But I don't know; I felt very moved by his life and his journey and his whole process and his death. Very, very touched by that. He exists for me, and probably he exists for some people in this room, even though he's dead, as an image. He's somehow constellating something, expressing something for the psyche. It's not like, "That person has to equal an image for everyone." No, it's quite individual. But you also get the sense that certain person, in their life, something is actually coming through them.
So Einstein was another one, something like that. There's something coming through in that spirit that is alive for me in the psyche. It's somehow in between subject and object. Certain artists or musicians. If I think about Jimi Hendrix or something, you think, "Well, he's just some crazy guy that obviously had psychological problems, and a drug addict, and blah blah blah." You could say that, but you could see something on the stage there, and the wildness, and the clothes, and the way he was, and the way he moved, and the way he played music. Something is there, constellating as a very alive psychic image for some people. And he was aware of that. I remember seeing this shot of him just before he went on stage, and the guy comes up to him and says, "How shall I announce you?" And he said, "Tell them the big blue angel is coming." He's playing on this. In other footage of Dylan, he's got white paint and this crazy hat, and he's dressed like, "I'm a trickster. I'm a joker."
This is alive for us if we look for it. I mean, this is a whole big subject, but what's interesting sometimes about Buddhist Dharma, Insight Meditation tradition, is that we tend to (I'll come more to this this afternoon) not value any of this. We tend to brush it aside, and either dismiss all potency of images or interest in images, or reduce them to just one. But if you know this tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition, a lot of its roots are in what's called the Thai Forest tradition. It's monks and nuns who lived wildly in the forests, the jungles of Thailand. A lot of it came from that. And if you listen to some of those teachers, they manifest the quality of warrior, the warrior, and the language they use is war language: battling the defilements (greed, hatred, delusion), the war against this. The whole imagery, the whole fantasy running through and supporting what practice is and what the Dharma is is constellated in a warrior image. For the most part, in modern Western Insight Meditation, we've got rid of that.
So they're around us. We can see them psychically. We can see them around us. They may come bodily. We may notice that our lives express some of this, that some of this comes through me, comes through me in my life. Some image, some inner person is being expressed, or persons (plural). If I can look that way, I might get a different feeling of this. Some of them don't fit, though, into nice Buddhist boxes, like "This is what a Dharma thing looks like." And then we might have a problem. So I look at my life, and I see, "Well, I don't look like Buddhists are supposed to look," calm and kind of serene and sober and well-scrubbed or whatever it is. [laughter] And then what? Something is coming through, and it has this vital force, and it doesn't fit in the box of Buddhist or modern Western Dharma image or fantasy. Then either we judge it in others or we judge ourselves.
I know a woman practising for years, but she can't stop partying. Something else is coming through her that is attracted to a different kind of ethos, a different lifestyle. This is, I can't remember when, maybe a year and a half ago, I think, on retreat: a woman who's in her early fifties, and I'd been working with her for a while, so I knew her fairly well, and there was quite a lot of trust there. She said, "I want to tell you something." Some decades ago, when she was I think in her late teens or early twenties (I can't remember), so really about three decades ago, "I was with a friend, travelling in Spain," she said, "and we ran out of money, and we didn't know what to do. So we started sleeping with men for money." She said, "First it was just one night, just to get some money. And then we just kept doing it." And there was a lot of shame. There was a lot of pain around that period. I mean, she had long stopped that, but there was a lot of pain around that period in her life. Eventually what happened is they went to bed with one guy who actually talked to them, found out what their situation was, drove them to the airport with some money, put them on a plane back to England.
There was a lot of shame over decades with this. We were talking, and she was telling me. And as she was talking, I heard this in the back of my [mind]. I heard 'sacred prostitute.' I was like, "I can't say that!" But at some point, I did. I did say that. And she really, really resonated with it. It was something that resonated extremely deeply with her. And not just that period in her life, but more her whole sense of herself. What was happening there was not me, sitting, "Yikes. What am I going to say to make her feel better? How can I spin this in a way that makes her ...?" Because I could have spun it in lots of ways. Could, again, deconstruct that situation many, many different ways. But something was there that she really resonated with, deeply, profoundly. When she was young, she was not so aware of that character in her, if you like. She didn't know how to handle that coming through, and the sort of power of that, the magnificence, the depth, the beauty of that. And most importantly, she didn't realize that something that comes or exists as a fantasy or an image, with a lot of power, does absolutely not necessarily need to be taken literally or acted on in a literalized way. So she can have a sense of 'sacred prostitute' as something sacred in her life, and then what does that mean? And does it really mean sleeping with men for money? Or can it actually exist in some very beautiful way, very potent way, very opening way, and with a sense of something deeply important to the psyche but does not need acting on necessarily? So not literal.
All this that we're talking about today can manifest in many different ways, as inner meditative images, as feelings in the body, as we see other people, as fantasies that operate, through art. What are the images and the fantasies that run through my life, your life? And they are there. They are there. And perhaps that's the most important thing today. What are they? Do I dare admit that they are there and give them life, without necessarily taking them literally? What is it that speaks to me? Usually what speaks to me deepest has a fantasy, an image running through it. Where the meaning is, there the fantasy and the image are. So what are the images? What are the fantasies that run through my life, that support my life, that give my life life, psychic life, power, energy, water, vitality, meaning, depth, resonance?
I'm going to stop in a minute, but practice-wise, lots of possibilities here, lots. And we don't have time really to expand on it too much today. But lots of possibilities. The key thing is, as always, awareness, sensitivity. If one wants to explore this kind of more imaginal practice, then mindfulness is necessary, sensitivity is necessary, feeling the resonance. [audio cuts out]
Maybe there was a dream, and something in a dream was strong, so I bring it into the meditation deliberately, and I enter into a relationship with that image, perhaps. Or it could be one of these figures in my life, or in some piece of art that's very alive for me. It speaks to me in some way that I can't quite get to the bottom of, unfathomably deep. I can bring it in deliberately and explore it. I can explore the relationship with and the resonances. Staying steady with an image, mindfully, and aware of the body, what resonances happen here? What is stimulated in my being? I can just look and meditate on an image. I can feel how that image is looking at me. Perhaps some of them love us in some deeply important and touching and opening way. Perhaps I can enter that image and become that. What is it to feel the existence from that perspective, from inside another character? Or literally enter that character, and look at myself through their eyes? There are many, many possibilities here.
Last thing to say for now: what I've noticed is that when you're quite upset, there's enough energy in the upset, in the emotion of the upset, to actually constellate an image. When you're really, really quite calm, in what we call the samādhi, the gathering of the energies in the being is quite strong, and there's a kind of harmony and alignment of the energies, when that's quite strong, it's also quite easy, or easier, to contact some images. So when things are difficult, when things are really quiet. The middle ground is a little bit more tricky. But if you want to explore some of this in practice, those are some good periods to work it.
Okay? Enough talking for now. Let's sit again. If you want to stretch, maybe just thirty seconds and then we can sit.
