Transcription
We're talking about, if you like, the exploration, from a certain angle, in a certain direction, a meditative exploration of imagination, particularly of some of the figures that can constellate persons, or figures that can constellate as aspects of the, or rather, for the psyche. This is interesting. Even just saying that much, that sentence that I just said, and we touched on this in the last period this morning, usually we are not so aware of the fantasies and, if you like, the myths that run through our lives, either as individuals or as collectives (whether that's a cultural collective or a sub-culture collective, like the Insight Meditation tradition or Buddhism or whatever). We're not so aware of the fantasies that are running through, or that they are fantasies. We don't tend to see things in that light. I'm going to come back to that at the end.
But equally, we're, you could say, again, within usual meditative practice, within this kind of tradition, usually, images that come up in meditation or at other times in one's life, we usually have a range of attitudes to them. I could kind of run through them, and I will. These are not necessarily separate, but just to give you an idea of the usual kinds of conception and attitude we have of imagery in meditation or in regard to practice. (1) One is: just ignore it. It has no value, and it's just daydreaming, basically. It's essentially pointless and a waste of time. Just ignore it. Come back to your breath, basically. (2) Or, occasionally, if there's a nice image, or an image that somehow fits very nicely a sort of sense of what Buddhism is or the Dharma is -- you might get a picture of a Buddha or something -- then that's okay. Maybe you can be with that a little bit.
(3) Or a little bit more exploration is allowed. A little bit; there's a range here. We might hear or get the sense: these are okay, these images. They're okay. Let them come up. Let them arise. Let them pass. They're part of the flotsam and jetsam of the mind. Let them arise, let them pass. (4) And that can be a little bit extended. Sometimes you hear, some of you may know a quite well-known poem by Thích Nhất Hạnh, "Please Call Me by My True Names." Does anyone know this? Yeah? Hard to describe what it is, but we could say there's an attitude to the kind of images that come up: don't judge them. Actually see these are parts of you, these are elements of yourself. So there's a kind of opening up of the self, and an allowing, an acceptance. But what's not happening there is that these images, these characters, they're not being empowered. It's different. Actually, they're disempowered through the opening up. There's less self. There's less of a solid self. There's more openness. There's less judgment. So that kind of attitude, "Just let them come, let them go." If you see a rageful demon in you, it's good you see you have that in you, so don't judge someone else. So it's good. It diminishes judging, opens up the sense of self. But the images themselves are not being empowered. These persons are not being empowered.
(5) Or, and/or (as I said, these are not separate), you can say, well, we tend very easily -- an image comes up or something -- we tend to say, "It's from my past history. It's something from my past," usually from my childhood or whatever, "and it's arising and constellating as an image that either represents a memory, a real memory, or re-presents a memory." (6) Or (I'm moving quite quickly through them, the conceptions), we say it's a compensation. I am very, let's say, I tend to give in a lot, and be quite weak, and don't show up with my strength, so I see this, I don't know, warrior image, and it's representing my strength, and it's compensating a one-sidedness in my personality. (7) Or, again, it's part of me. It represents some quality, like my strength or my kindness or my this or that, some factor, some psychological factor that's part of me. It's re-presenting it. It's basically, what it really is, is the factor -- like strength, or like kindness -- but it's kind of presented as a person. And my job is to integrate all that. So I integrate, for instance, my strength with my kindness, and my, I don't know, courage with humility, and these kinds of things. My job is to integrate all these disparate, diversity of characters and images, to balance them so that I'm not so one-sided. And I'm moving towards a kind of wholeness, a harmonious, integrated, larger self.
So there's all that range. These are the more typical ways we would have of regarding images that come up, the more typical conceptual frameworks and attitudes that we would engage them with, if we engage them at all. What's interesting to me is, I think it's virtually -- I mean, it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to prove any of that. Could we step away from a sense of 'right' or 'wrong,' 'true' or 'false' here? Could we actually have a whole different relationship with how we might look at this? And rather ask something which is a slightly different, subtly different, but significantly different way of approaching: not "Which is true? Which is false? What's the reality of these things?", but rather, "What conceptual framework, what way of looking at these phenomena, leads to what?" That's a different question. Subtly different, but importantly different. Because again, none of them are ultimately true, and I doubt whether anyone will ever be able to prove any of those other psychological theories. So I'm not saying they're wrong and this is right. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying: let's approach it differently. What way of conceiving, what way of looking, brings what? Where does it lead? This one will lead there, this one will lead there. Could we open that out, because we know that none of them are ultimately true?
So, could we approach all this whole area with an attitude of experimentation? Let's just see. Let's do this, and see what happens. Let's do this, and see what happens. Let's shift the perspectives, see what happens. Now, for that kind of experimentation in meditation, mindfulness is crucial. I need to show up as the experimenter, and see what happens, and feel what the difference is and what the response is. We're talking about a mindful, meditative investigation, exploration, experimentation in the realm of the psyche here. Mindfulness is necessary, but also, I would say, bodily and emotional sensitivity is necessary. It's crucial, in fact. So if one is going to engage, say, images, really feeling what happens in the body, what happens in the emotionality as I'm relating here, as that image comes. Really sensitive to that as much as possible. That's a training of mindfulness, in a particular direction. Because of course there's a difference between imaginal practice (if this is what we call it) and daydreaming. Daydreaming has none of that mindfulness. It has none of that sensitivity to the body. It's just lost. It's just gone. None of that resonance is being picked up on.
If I was interested in doing this, and if I dare to do it, I will probably, almost certainly, discover a number of things. One is that I will see that always my relationship in the moment with what is coming up in this image or whatever, always my relationship with it shapes and colours it, always. You can actually see this in dreams. When there's fear of the monster in the dream, the monster gets bigger and more intense. The chase becomes more intense. To the extent that the fear is relaxed, the monster tends to change or dissipate. We actually see that with all phenomena, not just imaginative or dream phenomena. With all phenomena, the relationship with it shapes, colours, fabricates what's happening. That's one of the first things that I'll notice if I want to explore this.
But if I can, as I say, really bring the mindfulness in, and the sensitivity of investigation, aware of the resonances, this wanderer that I'm looking at or this whatever-it-is, I'm aware of the resonances that stir in my being, in my body, in my heart, in my psyche with that image. I'm aware of the particular -- what could we call it? -- pathos of the image, the emotional tone and quality of it. I'm aware of the energies that move in the body, sometimes some of them quite subtle, or maybe strong. I'm aware of the meaningfulness of an image. Now, that's different than meaning. Very easily, we want to say, "This image, it means this. It means my strength, or it means my mother, or it means my whatever." That's different than meaningfulness. Meaningfulness is something we cannot exhaust and put in a box. Meaning is, you've got it tied up, fixed: "It means this. It relates to something other, and it's actually that." Meaningfulness is infinitely deep, infinitely rich. So all this can come and be part of the exploration. We're not reducing it.
And what if -- and some of this came up in the small group just before lunch -- what if we try not to judge an image by the nature of the image? So it might be a very peaceful, very sort of traditionally beautiful image that comes. It might be something that maybe seems violent, or bellicose, or strangely erotic, or just strange in some other way. But what if we just withhold judgment based on what it looks like? Because even a strange image, a grotesque image, a violent or erotic or whatever image, even an image that seems to transgress what we think of as right can still feel deeply right, profoundly right to the being. How will I know? What will tell me that it's right, apart from my immediate judgment of "That can't be right, because it's erotic or weird or whatever"? What will tell me? It's the body that tells me, as is so often the case in mindfulness practice. It's the body that tells me I'm on the right track. When there is an image that's deeply important for me, that's meaningful, no matter what the image is, when it's deeply important, something happens in what I call the subtle body energy, the sense of this field of energy, a bit similar to the breath practice we were doing first thing this morning. I can use that to discern if I'm on the right track. It comes to more openness. It comes to more energization. It comes to more settling, actually, more unification and more alignment of the energies. So not the image and what my sort of typical moral framework tells me of the image, but the body. Something in the wisdom of the energy of the body tells me I'm on the right track. All this I can notice if I explore this a little bit.
I'll also notice something that's even more fundamentally important. And again, this is wider than just what we're talking about today. Always, always the view that I have, the way of conceiving what comes up, my view of it, my conceptual framework that I put it in, always that makes a huge difference. And we can talk about really weird images and stuff like that, [but] what ends up being the most interesting thing is the conceptual framework that we tend to put these things in. Always that makes a difference. Always it determines what actually happens. Again, you can see this not just with imagery. You see it with emotions. The whole sense of, how often it can feel like catharsis is happening. Emotions are arising from the past, from my history of whatever, and it seems like, "Oh, that's obviously what's happening." Actually, that's a conceptual framework about what's happening, and that very conceptual framework can determine what happens. Really, really important general Dharma point. Always there's a view, and always it's a fabricating factor, colouring or shaping factor, whether we're talking about images, emotions, body sensations, you name it, our perceptions in the world. So there's a lot to discover here. But the view, the conception, is absolutely crucial. It's the most powerful thing, whether we realize it or not.
Related to that, we could make a point here. You might be listening -- I'm sure this is the case for even many people -- you might be [thinking], "Well, if my conception of what Dharma practice is, or what practice is, if my conception of that is it's just mindfulness," which actually translates as something like 'being with reality,' or 'being with something called life,' and I may give that Life a capital L or not, "if that's what my conception of practice is, then all this talk about images just sounds like a bunch of nonsense, just completely irrelevant." Why? Because the Dharma is this, in this other conception. The Dharma is meeting [claps hands] that. It's meeting solid reality, the so-called reality of something called life, and that's what it is. So everything that's not that -- the imagination and all the rest -- is just rubbish, as we said at the beginning. It's not life. We want life. This is huge. A lot of this will sound like just a complete waste of time.
But again, if you go back to the Pali Canon, you don't really find this direction of practice or goal of practice as "meeting something called life, and that's reality." That's actually not what the Buddha was pointing at. You get practices, part of practices, that point in that direction. Really what he's saying is, what we want is to understand the emptiness of everything, the illusory nature of everything. We have certain practices that unfold that. Seeing that emptiness brings a radical freedom. So the point of any Dharma practice is seeing emptiness to know freedom. That's what brings the deepest freedom. The point of practice is not being with something called life, or being with something called reality. [knocks on something] We tend to think if we can all see it, if we can all kick it, and if hopefully we can measure it, then that's reality. That's not where the Buddha's coming from. It's not the thrust of his message. If I see that everything is empty, then actually it opens up a lot more possibilities, and for some people, that's what opens the door to everything that we're talking about today. But I don't know what will work for different people.
Having said all that, going back to what I said earlier this afternoon, it's like, I can't really prove any of this, and I can't really prove any of the other psychological theories. And I understand the point of practice is seeing that things are empty, which means they're flexible, which means they depend on how I'm looking. I say, "Okay, well, what then if I entertain certain ideas? Let's just entertain some ideas, without fixing them as 'reality' or concretizing them. Let's entertain some ideas in practice." Our English word, 'idea,' comes from a Greek word, eidos. And that actually is related to how we see, how we see things. So again, we're usually not aware of this, but we see ourselves, others, life, reality, through the lenses of ideas. Usually they're not conscious ideas. What happens if we entertain certain ideas, just because they might lead in different directions, they might open certain things up?
What is we entertain the idea that these persons of the psyche, these psychic persons, actually have a certain autonomy to them? They're, in some way, somewhat independent. And that maybe they even want or demand something of me. I'm not saying that's the truth. We're saying: what if we entertain that as an idea? What might happen? How might it change things? We're talking about a poetic perspective rather than a scientific perspective. A poetic approach to practice. Oftentimes the basis for a lot of this stuff, we draw on poets. T. S. Eliot wrote in an essay called "On Poetry and Poets," he wrote of how one can be (quote) "oppressed by the burden which he must bring to birth." Maybe some of these persons want something, they demand something of me. And sometimes it can feel like a burden. And again, you know, I particularly relate, or have related in my life, to someone like Hendrix. And you get the sense something is wanting to come through him. Something is being wanted to manifest and express in a certain way. Or the woman who I told you about this morning and her mother. She related very much to the idea that something wanted to come through, some person wanted to be expressed, psychic person.
What if we entertain the idea as well that we're not, our job is not to integrate these cast of characters, this disparate range? We're not aiming to integrate them into some unified, harmonious whole, called 'the Self' with a capital S, or anything else. We're not trying to tame them. Some of these characters might be quite wild -- wild animals or wild beings. Usually we say, "Oh, can I calm them down a little bit so I can integrate them somehow?" What if we say "No. No taming"? Rather, is it possible to enliven them and enliven their power? Not my power, their power.
Here's a poem, or part of a poem, actually, from Rilke. It's quite long. He's describing a storm. He's looking out the window, and he can see a storm coming, and he senses this storm coming.[1]
[21:03 -- 21:34, poem]
He goes on, "I mean the Angel," talking about the Angel. What if we turn this around? Not integrate, not tame. Give them their power. Enliven them. What if, as I said earlier, we don't reduce them, put them in a box and reduce them to something else? Not a result of my past. That voodoo guy that ripped out the woman's heart and devoured her heart? Nothing to do with her past. There's nothing in her past history or something or other that that was related to. Something else coming through. Not to do with socio-economic factors. It's not a compensation. Not reducing and make it small. Or even the sacred prostitute thing. It's nothing to do with her past and something, this or that. Something else coming through. Something bigger.
So, again, not about truth, but about perspectives, and how the perspective itself opens or closes certain avenues. If we keep with the idea of persons or figures, beings, then a person is always bigger than the qualities. We could say, "Let's just lose all this business about persons and just talk about qualities, factors of mind, factors of consciousness, essential aspects or whatever, as people talk about in certain traditions." But a person is bigger and has more autonomy and more independence and more dynamism. A person cannot be reduced to a box, a grid of factors. So we keep it big.
What if we don't reduce it to a symbol, "It means something else. It's a psychological concept. Or it relates to a psychological concept"? The poet W. H. Auden said, "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand."[2]
So, again, not saying this is the truth of things, but just: what happens if we do that, as opposed to some of the other ways we could relate to all this? Something opens in the being, deeply, widely, with a lot of life, and something opens and is undermined in the very sense of self, the very sense of how we feel the self. We're no longer prioritizing self. The whole thing is opening and shifting in a different way. Oftentimes when people hear about this stuff, they say, "Oh, yeah, that reminds me of shamanic journeying," or something like that. If you know about that, it's a lovely practice. I want to steer it even in a slightly different direction than that. When, in your imagination, you close the eyes, you go on a journey through a wooded path or a jungle, and you encounter this being and that being, and this happens, and that happens, wonderful. It's slightly different than what I want to offer as a possibility today, because the journeying can constellate the ego that journeys: "I am the journeyer." And it becomes just a way of making the self kind of stronger -- it can become; I should say that.
What if we don't conceive of this as the journey of a self towards wholeness or towards anything? Not the ego's journey. We can talk about narrative images, images that, if you like, narrate and move through time. And we can talk about poetic images or, if you like, iconic images. An image in a poem doesn't go anywhere. It's kind of eternal. There's no resolution of some story, like there is in a fairy tale: the knight goes through the forest, slashes his way through the thorns, climbs the ladder, slays the dragon, da-da-da, rescues the princess, they get married and they live happily ever after. Right? ... Are you guys still with me at all? [laughter] That's a narrative image. It moves through time, towards some resolution. Poetic or iconic images are beyond time. It's a snapshot, and it's just always like that. That wanderer that I was talking about, he's always wandering. He's never getting anywhere. He does not arrive. He will not find a nice home and a wife and settle down, etc. It's not like that.
So there's not this temporal factor. There's something else. That soldier is always either battling, or preparing for the next imminent battle, or resting from a battle in preparation. There is no end of his battling. And it's right. It's right. It's not, "Oh, let's introduce the wanderer to a nice person, and they can maybe make a home and settle down, and he can be a bit more peaceful." It's not. It has a deeper rightness that doesn't fit into the usual box. There's something eternal here, beyond time. And so not so much a narrative image, but sitting with an image, this particular image is not really going anywhere. I'm stewing with it. I'm resonating with it. I'm close to it. Like in alchemy, you just put the thing in the hermetic vessel. You let it stew. And it doesn't go somewhere so much. Or if there is a story, it's somehow all of the parts together. It's not really this and then that. It's all together.
Again, options, but not integrating, not taming, giving them power, regarding them as more autonomous, not reducing, more poetic than narrative image. What happens? What would this open up? If I don't concretize the image -- "That is my mother," or "It represents this from my past" -- or at least if I don't always reduce an image to the past and my personal history -- which we tend to do; it's become one of the dominant psychological perspectives that almost everyone on the street now takes for granted. "What happens comes as a result of my past. Therefore, I put it in that box. This causes that. The past causes the present. I have my problems because of what happened to me earlier." They're very normal assumptions. Not wrong or right. Just, what if we don't always do that? My guess is most people in this room are quite used to doing that. Personally, I had about 30 years of doing that. Very rich, wonderful. But is it the only possibility? I don't literalize. What if I don't literalize and concretize these images? What if I don't reduce them to my past history? What if I don't say it's a symbol for this psychological factor? Something opens with a sense of infinite depth to it, because I'm not boxing it in and limiting it and saying I understand it. Mystery, depth, unfathomableness. Something, if you like, bigger than we are, bigger than the human being, religious. I know a lot of people don't like that word. Something religious, because it's bigger than the human. The feeling can be with some of this that we have a sense of something religious, something bigger, deeper than we tend to take things to be.
We can even go further. What if I say all this is not about me and my growth and my process and my individuation, to borrow a word from Jung? As Henry Corbin, a scholar of Islamic mysticism, said, "Not your individuation, but the angel's individuation, that is your task." Not your individuation, but the angel's individuation -- turning the whole thing back to front. Not about me. It's about what's coming through. Not my growth. So then the question that comes in terms of practice is, "What do you want?", of this angel, image, demon, whatever. "What do you want?" Not "What do I want from you? What can you help me to succeed in or balance or integrate?", but "What do you want?" Very different. Very different question.
Listen to this. This is James Hillman (I'll paraphrase) talking about this different relationship with this. You can, we can, regard these kind of images as, he says, "highly intentional." They have their own intentions. And they're necessary. An image like this presents a claim, moral, erotic (meaning to do with love), intellectual, aesthetic. Presents some kind of claim on us and demands a response. It's an 'affecting presence.' It means it moves the heart. "It seems to bear an instinctive direction for a destiny. Such images mean well for us. They back us up. They urge us on. They understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves. They expand our sensuousness and our spirit, and they love us." He goes on to add (I'm paraphrasing again), this message-bearing experience of the image, and the feeling of blessing that an image can bring, recalls the Neoplatonic sense of images. Neoplatonism was actually a very influential current in Western philosophy over many centuries. Recalls the Neoplatonic sense of images as daimons or daemons, daimons and angels. 'Angel' actually means 'message-bearer.' It recalls this sense of images as demons and message-bearers.[3]
So not viewing it as me or part of me, but what do they want from me. These images, these persons, influence me. They exert power in my life. They can. They have needs, perhaps. Perhaps they have needs. They shape and colour my perceptions of self, of the world, of others. They bring ideas. Again, eidos. We look through the ideas that we have. I don't mean, "Oh, it's a good idea if we do this." I mean the ideas, the conceptual frameworks with which we relate to existence. They inform, our ideas are informed by these persons. And they bring their own aesthetic style and their own style of morality, their own ethos and values. Different persons have different values, different morality ranges, if you like, or frameworks, perspectives.
So that flying dragon I told you about, so voraciously hungry and intense, that solider, that wanderer I told you about, is it that they are mirroring my life, so it comes up and expresses what's going on in my life? Or is it, perhaps, as much as that, or even a little bit more, that my life mirrors those images? That somehow they are primary in the psyche and in the shaping and the directing of the currents in our life? Other way around.
And again, just how far can we go here? Going right back to the beginning, you don't have to take all of it. I'm just saying we can go quite far out from the usual ways of thinking here, and you can take just as little as you like. We could go further: what if there's such a thing as serving these beings, these persons in the psyche, these demons, these angels? That my life is in service to those, to them? That the psyche is actually bigger than the human? It's not they are in me, but somehow I am in them, I am in all this, in this presenced reality.
And again, from James Hillman, talking about this. Again, I'm paraphrasing: if we entertain that kind of framework or this kind of eidos, these kind of ideas, then, he says,
our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. [Now he's echoing Corbin.] It is not my individuation, but the daimon's; not my fate that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for the soul.[4]
Very, very different point of view. Again, it's somehow beyond what we've usually come to tend to think of as human. It's wider than that, deeper.
I'm just sharing with you personally now. I feel -- obviously I wouldn't be talking about it [if not] -- I feel I can relate to this a lot. And I feel, more than that, that when it comes time for me to die, this will be the important question to me, more than anything else: have I done my duty? Have I done my duty in relation to these persons of the psyche? Have I done my duty? Have I done what they were asking from me? Have I served them? Have I allowed what they are asking to come through? Have I helped to give birth to, have I honoured them? I don't feel it's me and my life that's important. I don't particularly care that much whether I'm comfortable or well off or this or that or whatever. That's actually not so important. Something else feels much more important. It's another level. Now, obviously these images, these persons, they're not separate from my life. They're completely integrated.
This, again, it's really a stretching of our usual perspectives on things. But then we can turn that around, and again, see: "Well, okay." And then we look back at some of the usual assumptions we have about all kinds of things, including practice, and we can start to ask questions like, "Does desire, is desire always a case of trying to maximize pleasant sensation, or aggrandize the self in some way, and minimize unpleasant sensation?" Again, some strands of Buddhist thinking can lead that to a sense of, "Basically, what desire is is a movement to increase pleasant sensations and decrease unpleasant sensations." Or it's somehow for the self: the self desires something, and desires to be pumped up or whatever.
That can be really, really helpful. But maybe it's an oversimplification. It narrows something. Because maybe desire can also come from the demon, the daimon. Maybe from the angel. It wants something. Maybe it's not just me and my pleasantness that I'm after here. Something else, something deeper. So that woman I was telling you about earlier, who has been meditating over the years, she still keeps going to the parties and really that kind of lifestyle. Is it really that she's just doing all that to avoid certain emotions that she doesn't want to feel or whatever? I mean, I personally don't think so. Something else is going on there. Something else is behind the desire for that.
So again, this, you may be thinking, "Oof. I don't know." Some of this came up earlier in the group. We could say, and you should be thinking, or I think it would be wise to think, "A lot of what we've been saying sounds a little dangerous," maybe you're thinking. So there are a few things to say about that. First thing is a general thing: any path we choose, any practice we choose, any technique, any approach within a path, brings a certain danger. There is no such thing as a practice or a path or a tradition or a technique without a danger that's particular to it, or at least one. And the question is, can we recognize what they are, and just be aware of that, rather than always seeing the dangers in someone else's path or teaching or whatever? So that's a general thing.
But if we're entertaining some of what we're talking about today, we need to be a little bit careful, for sure. This is not to be 'believed,' in the sense of a concrete, fundamentalist kind of take on truth and reality. We're talking about, as I said, more a poetic perspective on psychic phenomena; more, if you like, a mythic perspective. It's not concretized. As I said, we're having the notion that we can entertain certain ideas, and they become ways of looking, and those ways of looking lead in certain directions. Different ideas, different ways of looking, lead in different directions. That's all we're doing. We're not saying, "This is the truth," or "That's the truth," or blah blah blah. So really, it's not a question of belief here. We're side-stepping that a little bit, for now at least.
If you say, "Well, what would happen if I entertain these ideas, and if I entertain these ways of looking?" Good question. "Will it make me happy?" Well, yeah. Or rather, a lot of joy will come from this. But some of this won't lead to happiness. It won't. It doesn't only lead to happiness. "Will it lead to freedom?" That's probably a better question. Will it lead to freedom? I would say this whole way of doing things can lead to a radical freedom, a really different, whole other level of freedom than we maybe even have conceived of what freedom is. There's a whole other level here. I'll come back to that soon.
But even that, freedom, if we go back to what I was telling you about the woman whose mother died, we talked about her duty, her beautiful duty to that image. And we can talk about serving the angel, serving the demon. Then there's still a sense of serving, and the burden of service, the burden of duty. Even freedom isn't quite the whole picture. Could we say and introduce a word that's not at all in vogue in these circles? Could we say that entertaining this kind of approach will bring soulfulness? 'Soulfulness' -- what does that mean? Hard to define. But a sense of deep meaningfulness, resonance, importance, necessity, beauty. Everything that I've said today has to do fundamentally with beauty and different kinds of beauty. Something to do, in the soulfulness, with my death, and my life in relationship to my death. And I'm not talking about rebirth, and I'm not talking about going to heaven and all that. I'm talking about something else.
Do we have other dimensions of our being that need something else, other than to be simplified and to be flattened and calmed and made equanimous? [yogi chuckles] I'll take that as a 'yes.' [laughter] Again, I'm not trying to thrust anything on anyone. For some people, it suits their being to simplify everything. Basically, the monk archetype suits them. But maybe not everyone. And do we have other dimensions of the being, other dimensions of the psyche, imaginal levels of the being? The imagination is a part of my being, not just a redundant kind of idiocy. Maybe there's something important in there.
Soulfulness, fulfilment -- maybe something in engaging this way brings a kind of, we could say, fulfilment. I don't know a better word. Socrates, actually quoted through N. O. Brown, says our greatest blessings, says Socrates in The Phaedrus, come to us by way of madness, provided, he adds, that the madness comes from the god. Our real choice is between holy and unholy madness.[5] Some of you will be listening and relating very much to what I'm talking about. You get it, okay? And for some people with this, there's almost like, what we could call, using a certain language, a soul-necessity. Something in expanding things this way feels like it's calling to you. It fits. Trying to squeeze it into a smaller box does not fit. Something feels wrong, always wrong, always bouncing off the edges of that box: "What's wrong with me? Why don't I fit? Why can't I calm down or be more flat or whatever it is?", in nice words. But other people will feel there's something calling here. There's something that feels necessary to the soul here.
Now, when I use that word, 'soul,' I'm not talking about a thing and entity. I'm not meaning it that way. Again, I'm talking about a way of looking, a way of looking that opens up the psyche in a certain way, and gives certain freedoms, certain resonances, certain depth to experience. Just like we can talk about self without it being real -- so we use the word 'self' a lot, but it's not a real thing; we use the word 'inner critic,' it's not a real thing -- we can use the words 'angel,' 'demon.' They're not real. They've become ways of looking. They're empty, but we can talk and we can see in those terms.
So not believing. But also, if a person's [thinking], "Well, this sounds a bit dangerous to me. What about, isn't there a danger of acting out some of this stuff? If some of these images are not so contained in terms of our usual moral framework, won't I then act out in the world whatever it is, sexually, or violently, or this or that? What about the ethics? And isn't this kind of thing the sort of thing that suicide bombers do? They think this way that you're talking about." Well, I'm not so sure it's that simple. Again, I would say, or you could say, that we always have image and fantasy. What we're not always aware of -- in fact, we're usually not aware of -- is the fact of their existence. So a suicide bomber or terrorist or whatever it is is possessed by certain images, but takes them as concrete reality. George W. responds with a war on evil. Now, if that isn't some kind of mythic fantasy image, I don't know what is. [laughter] Does not see it in those terms; sees it as reality. And however many million people say, "Great, a war on evil. That's what we've got to do." And it's real and it's concrete. Do not see -- neither side sees image as image, sees the operation of fantasies, sees the metaphoric level and necessity of what's going on. That's the danger, not seeing image as image, not knowing fantasy. That's the danger: not the image, the not understanding what it is and that it's operating. And as I said earlier, when I see that way, it empowers them in certain ways, and disempowers their kind of unconsciousness, or the possibility of acting unconsciously.
So there's that. There's also the question, if you get into this, you'll see -- for instance, relating to the sacred prostitute example -- a lot of images, a lot of these persons, don't actually want me to act out in life, either at all, or certainly not in the literal, obvious way. So I have that soldier image, that warrior. It's very, very alive for me as one of the persons. I have never hit anyone in my life. I have no interest in harming anyone physically. I'm certainly not going to join the army or anything like that. It's not on that level. It's on a different level. It's on a metaphoric level. And sometimes the images are just asking to be honoured, to be seen, to be felt. They're asking that some other kind of beauty opens up. It's not about acting out in life. It's about this soulfulness, this sense of the soul.
Sometimes people are talking to me and using similar language, and I get nervous, because something sounds pompous or a little bit like they're over-identified with what's going on. Something's gone a bit off there. It's off balance. So this is something we have to take care of, or take care with. And sometimes it's asking for a lot of discernment. What is the difference between an ego-storm -- do you know this word, papañca? Do some of you know this word? It means, like, ego-proliferation, crazy vortex thinking, gone a bit bonkers for a while, catastrophizing, etc. What's the difference between that, or how to discern that, differentiate that, from something, what we could call more demonic coming through, more necessary, what John Keats, the poet, would call soulmaking? They can look quite similar actually. Something needs differentiating there.
How do I tell? One of the ways, again, is the body. Papañca, this kind of proliferation, just goes round in loops, and nothing opens, and it feels petty. There's something cheap in it. It does not feel deep. It feels petty and cheap. The heart and the body, the energy body, is not in alignment. It does not open. That's one of the ways of differentiating, steering them in different directions. But even then, some sensitivity is needed. Sometimes right in the middle of this crazy vortex of papañca spinning, sometimes right in the middle, something needs respecting, because something deeper is coming through, and it's got caught in a whirlpool, and it's spinning in an unhelpful way.
Very often, what comes up for us, we dismiss and we label negatively: "It's just the ego. It's just the self," or in another person, "They're doing that because of this." There are a lot of assumptions there that don't maybe take into account another way of seeing the psyche and psychic phenomena. So you might see someone dressed a certain way: "Why does she need to ...? She just wants attention," or "She's da-da-da," or whatever it is. We put her and that behaviour in a box. Maybe something else is coming through. Maybe something else. It has a certain necessity to present itself in a certain way. Maybe that's part of it.
Back to Hendrix again: there was a postcard or series -- when he was young and just kind of learning his trade, if you like, he was on tour with different blues bands before he went solo, made it to his own thing. And he wrote back to his younger brother, and some of the postcards are really quite interesting. At some point he says -- and he's miles away -- "I play the blues like you never heard now!" And you think, "Well, how arrogant." But is it just arrogance? Is it just ego? Or is there something more endemic -- is that the right word? -- inherent, intrinsic to the archetype there that's coming through, that expresses in that way? We see this kind of thing a lot. Did you see that movie, Senna? Did anyone see the movie Senna? No one. [laughter] Oh, someone. Okay. I'd never heard -- well, I vaguely heard the name. He was a Formula One racing driver, a Brazilian Formula One racing driver. I'd vaguely heard the name. But I went to see the movie, weirdly enough, as I'm not really interested in Formula One either. But really interesting. And again, you could say, "Why does this guy need to be number one? Why does he need to be world champion? He's obviously got some issues. It's all about ego-aggrandizement, competition between macho men." It's putting it in a box and not seeing, actually, there's a beauty of an archetype that's coming through him. It has a certain necessity, and a certain kind of beauty to it. If I put it in that box and dismiss it, I'm looking at it from a certain perspective, and not seeing something else in it.
And again, you see this everywhere. Picasso talking about Matisse: "Matisse, pff. What is Matisse?" He says, "He's just a little splash of red." [laughter] And you think, "What an arrogant jerk." But is there something else? I mean, it probably was partly that. [laughter] But is there something else coming through? If you're familiar, there's a whole library, libraries full of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, and the level of polemic and invective sort of name-calling that goes on -- unbelievable! You think, "Well, these guys are supposed to be enlightened. Why are they calling each other names?" It started with the Indians, actually. Chandrakīrti is a famous, great Indian Buddhist teacher. He says of another one, Bhāviveka, "This guy makes mistake after mistake. He's a nincompoop, a fool." It's in his text. It's like, what's going on here?
Actually, listen to this from the Buddha. And you may know this story: shortly after his awakening, he got up, out of the tree, and he goes wandering to find his ascetics. He bumps into some guy whose name I can't remember, and the guy goes, "Wow! You are radiant! Look at you! Who's your teacher?" And the Buddha responds, "Having fully known on my own, to whom should I point as my teacher? I have no teacher, and one like me can't be found in the world with its angels," etc. "I have no counterpart. I am an arahant," which literally means 'a defeater of all.' "I am the unexcelled teacher."[6] Now, the guy goes, "Ugh. Great. Okay. See ya." [laughter] And clearly that guy also thinks, "This guy's got a problem. He's arrogant, he's da-da-da. I don't want to ..." And we think, "Oh, now you think maybe the Buddha wasn't quite enlightened, because otherwise he wouldn't have had that ego stuff." Or is it something else, something else that we tend to put in a box?
If you know, there's a, I find, beautiful myth: Horus. It's an Egyptian myth. He's the son, the falcon son of Isis, the goddess Isis. She says, in giving him birth, "Whoa, stand back. A falcon is coming." And he shoots out, literally, and the first thing he does is he flies. A falcon is the fastest bird, and he flies, and he goes out of the solar system, and he says, "I have flown further, my flight goes further than all the gods have ever gone." There's a whole myth with that, and he fights with an enemy, and his eyes get wounded. But there's something inherent in a myth there to sound egotistical and arrogant, and maybe it's not quite so simple. Going back to what I said before, are we oversimplifying our view of the self and the ego? Have we somehow gotten into a whole way of looking at the whole self/ego thing that oversimplifies what's going on?
And related to that, we talk a lot, or some people talk a lot, about repression. Actually, could we open that word up now, and say: is it past that's repressed, feelings or memories or whatever from the past? Or is it certain of these persons that are repressed? Are we repressing them because they don't fit? Maybe it's that, too, sometimes.
I just want to finish now: maybe -- I don't know -- or rather, for some people, it will feel like it needs a certain depth of freedom to even begin going a little bit where I've been talking about. Can't even go there until I feel relatively free. That's fair enough. Other people will feel called. There's something that's calling them, something that's asking for this expansion. There's a necessity there. So maybe it takes a certain freedom; I'm not sure. But also it will bring, this kind of approach will bring a freedom, as I said, a radical level of freedom. Part of the freedom, just part of the freedom that comes, is partly because we have, as I said, an image or images and fantasies of what freedom looks like, and what awakening looks like, and what awakening or enlightened people look like, or what we're moving towards, and we don't realize it. So part comes because that gets expanded. We might notice something in ourselves or another and feel, "That's not okay. That's somehow to be gotten rid of," or "When I'm better at meditation or further on, that will be gone, or I wouldn't be doing that kind of thing," or whatever it is. We have image, fantasy, of what awakening, enlightenment, freedom, even, looks like. We have image and fantasy of what is beautiful and what is not beautiful, of what is holy or divine. And this operates, and oftentimes we're not really conscious of it.
But maybe there are, so to speak, other gods and other archetypes, apart from the usual, say, Christian version of what purity looks like, or what holiness or divinity looks like, or the usual Buddhist version of what awakening looks like. Not just calm and equanimous and sober and chaste. That's one version. That's one archetype, one god, if you like. So that word, our word 'demon,' which is in the title of the talk, the theme today, that word actually comes from the other word, 'daimon.' Everything that was a daimon in pre-Christian civilization became a demon. In other words, because it doesn't fit into the picture of what a sort of pure Christ/God image looks like, it's demon. For example, all the temples to Aphrodite got labelled, "These are devil worship temples." They became demonic. The whole aesthetic, the whole sense of ethos, a lot gets shunted to the side. It gets shrunk down to something. Is it possible that the same thing has happened in Buddhism? Just as happened in Christian culture, the same thing has happened in Buddhism. And what might happen if we dare to open that up?
One thing I've said a couple of times -- this is just to finish now. If I start thinking this way and exploring this way, I start to realize: oh, we are imagining and fantasizing anyway. It's not necessarily obvious, but it's there as a current. Our life, our perception, our thoughts, our relationships, our sense of existence is permeated by fantasy and image, most of the time. That's a really important insight. It's a really, really important insight. Especially where there's a sense of meaningfulness to me, or a sense of beauty, a sense of resonance, that's where I can look and find: what's the image that's speaking to me here? What's the current of fantasy that's operating here? And I'm not using 'fantasy' in a derogatory sense, which is the usual way it would get used in Insight Meditation circles.
Can I see this, that it's everywhere, that my life is in image, is image, images? That my life is fantasy to some extent? Existence is, our existence is. And can I explore that, and open up and explore this eidos, we could say? And if one does that, I would say, as I said before, there's a whole other level of freedom here, a whole other level beyond even what we tend to think of as freedom, a whole other, radical level, a whole other way of feeling and sensing, conceiving of existence. That's there. It's like a door that can open to that.
Okay. We're going to stop there. Let's have a bit of quiet together, just a minute or something.
Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Man Watching," News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness, tr. Robert Bly (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2015), 112--3. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20170809190749/http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2015/06/05/rainer-maria-rilke-the-man-watching/, accessed 2 Nov. 2020. ↩︎
W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, "In Memory of Ernst Toller," ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 148. ↩︎
James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 1997), 14. ↩︎
James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 175. ↩︎
Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 1--2. ↩︎
MN 26. ↩︎
