Transcription
So as I mentioned earlier, I'm going to divide the teaching up over the day, so it's not a whole load at once. I think I'll speak a little bit more now before we meditate some more.
Let's pick up a little bit where we left off. So, inner critic is quite familiar territory. And maybe even some, at least some of what I suggested earlier as a possibility would be familiar to some of you. That way of engaging in the dialogue with a person or figure in the psyche is somewhat familiar for some of you. But as I said, let's take it, explore further possibilities.
Still with the inner critic, in fact, this is some years ago now: a man was also on retreat at Gaia House, and came in, and was, again, reporting inner critic. And he says, it's like the voice just said, "Whatever I do, I'm never good enough, and there's always this judging. It's the usual stuff." He was quite used to it. And so we talked about different possibilities, and the possibility of exploring it, turning towards it, and engaging in relationship with this figure.
So he went away, and did that, and came back, and reported that images of his parents came up. But then, he said, "Actually, if I'm really honest, they look like my parents, but they're not my parents." And he said, "My parents were much kinder than that." Now, again, we're not talking about denial. This person had worked through stuff with their childhood, etc. These are, if you like, realities of the psyche. These images are realities of the psyche. They're 'psychic realities,' so to speak. At least in what I'm presenting today, I want to be very careful not to literalize. "They look like that. They are not my parents," in this case. So I'll say more about this non-literalizing and non-reducing: "They are this." So not literalizing, not reducing, but actually engaging them as if they were people, as if they were persons with all that that involves.
And coupled with that, in the practice, and using his sensitivity (we talked about this) to the emotional responses that were coming up for him in relationship to them as he meditated in this way -- and I mean, they were mostly things like, "I'm fed up with this," and "I'm angry in response to this" -- working this way with the sense of respect, not literalizing, not reducing, the sensitivity to the emotionality. What happened was these two figures opened up. It's like they split and became a whole cast of characters. A whole pantheon, a whole host of persons opened up. And I can't remember -- he sort of gave them all different names, if you like. But all I remember is a few of them, and there was the 'good boy.' I think he had a 'naughty boy.' He had a 'frightened boy.' He had a hero figure. And he had a 'bad guy' who, interestingly, he thought at first was evil: "This is evil." But then he said, "Looking again, no, it's not evil. It's more" -- this is really important -- "it's more like an actor in a theatre. It's more like a style of existence. It's a style of personifying. It's not actually evil." That's quite important, because sometimes -- the reason I'm mentioning that is, sometimes, with this kind of work, a person worries about things like evil. I'll talk more about it this afternoon. [4:08]
So two things are really helpful, two aspects: one is mindfulness, mindfulness with an image. What is it to engage an image mindfully? I'm aware. I'm aware of all the responses, and all the feelings. I'm aware. And secondly, seeing it as an image. This is an image. So it has a more poetic quality rather than a literal quality. I'm aware that this is, if you like, expressing something -- yeah, as a poetic truth more than a literal truth. So mindfulness with the image, and seeing image as image -- both of those create a kind of safety when there can be, sometimes, some worry with this kind of area. But more than that, they do something really interesting. Seeing an image as image, and mindfulness with the image -- they empower these images, these persons of the psyche in certain ways. They give them power and life. They vivify them. And they, at the same time, disempower them, so that we're not in danger of them being acted out unconsciously, etc. So there's an empowerment. At the same time, there's a kind of disempowerment. All that's coming through is the mindfulness, and the awareness: this is image. It's poetry. It's not literal. Yeah?
Now, as he did this over a little time, what he found -- and I would say, what almost I would expect people to find -- was a few things. The more persons there were in this inner theatre, if you want to call it that, the more persons there were, and the more alive they became, the less the inner critic. The more persons, the less inner critic. There was a direct correspondence. What seemed like one oppressive thing then became two, then become many, and the whole sense of oppression just went out of the whole dynamic. So I would expect that for a start. It's like, when the self is conceived as singular, you'll get the inner critic. You'll tend to get the inner critic. The more we tend to conceive of the self as singular -- of course we do, in our culture -- that tends to constellate something else. The more plural, if you like, and fragmented the self, the less the inner critic. Interesting. So that's one thing.
The second thing is, he said -- and again, this is what I would expect -- it's like, through doing this, he disidentified from his usual sense of self. So the usual sense of 'me' sort of was not where his identity was. It opened, and he said, "Looking at all these characters, they're all me, and they're all not me." But the usual sense of self was opened out, gone beyond. In the plurality that opened, 'me' was realized to be bigger than I thought, more, more interesting, more dynamic, more fragmented, more plural. So this way of working -- what I would expect -- is one way of, if you like, loosening and undermining the belief in a solid self. This is going back right to the beginning of the talk about the belief in a solid self, and how Buddhism and other traditions see that as a problem, this belief in a solid self. This is one alternative way of actually loosening and undermining that belief. We could, as alternatives, see the emptiness of this solid self. That's what most Buddhism tries to teach to some degree. And as I said, there are different levels of that -- so even seeing the process of the aggregates, there's a certain way of loosening and undermining the solidity of the self to a certain extent. In that way, we're kind of deconstructing the solidity of self. We're just seeing elements in a process. [8:20]
So that would be one way, loosening and undermining the belief in a solid self. Another way that can open for meditators, in these traditions or other traditions, is a more kind of mystical dissolution. Meditating, different practices, or in nature, or music, or something else -- the self dissolves. It feels like the self dissolves -- maybe into a kind of oceanic sense of love, cosmic sense of love pervading the entire universe. The fabric of being is love, or the fabric of being is a kind of oneness there. So these are mystical openings available for people committed to meditation, and quite common, actually. So either there's a kind of deconstruction, seeing the emptiness, or there's a kind of mystical dissolution. Those are both probably more standard ways of loosening and undermining the belief in the solid self. But there's also this other way that we're talking about today, this engaging of the psychic characters.
All those three are ways of looking, helpful ways of looking. None of them are ultimately true. So it's not true that the self is a process of aggregates. And it's not ultimately true that the fabric of things is love. Very, very helpful; a very deep degree of relative truth, but not the ultimate truth. So none of them are ultimately true. All of them are ways of looking.
This man also reported that, in his words, he was able then to access qualities or energies that were previously inaccessible to him, aspects of being that were previously inaccessible to him, unavailable to him. And again, I would expect that more from this way of working than from the others, because we're just not deconstructing the self. We're empowering, as I said, vivifying these persons and these figures -- these daemons, if you know the word. We're empowering them -- different than just deconstructing them.
Okay, so far we've just talked about or gone in with the example of the inner critic that most people are familiar with, saying you can work in different ways, and there's this other way of working that's possible. But sometimes, images come up for people that have nothing to do with the inner critic. Their origin is not in the inner critic. So a woman was on retreat, and she had this figure of -- she called him 'Grandpa.' It wasn't her grandpa. It wasn't anything like either of her grandpas, but he was in an armchair, a kind of rocking chair. And he would hold her and comfort her, and she would talk to him, and there was a dialogue, and there was care, a mutual flow of love back and forth. This became an enormous resource for her, something she could access in the meditation. Okay. That's all a very nice resource that's possible.
Another woman, also on retreat -- quite a different flavour of image possible. So she was practising, and suddenly -- her words -- this "huge voodoo guy" appeared in front of her, and plunged his hands into her chest, ripped out her heart, and bit into it, devoured it right there. And she said, "It was fantastic!" [laughter] "So what did it feel like?" "It was great!" She can't figure out: "What does it mean? Where does it come from? I don't know, just something about it feels wonderful and right. I don't understand." Quite a dramatic image.
Or again, quite a dramatic one, a woman was sitting. This is years ago now, actually, many; I just remember it because it's so vivid. She was on a long retreat at Gaia House, and actually struggling quite a lot with the retreat form, and loneliness, and silence, and that kind of thing. And there was a lot of loneliness. There was a lot of yearning. She was sitting, I think, in the lounge at Gaia House, if you know, on some of the armchairs looking out the window, and she was just sitting there. And suddenly -- her words again -- "a naked, golden goddess" appeared in front of her, and leapt on her, and with a very sort of erotic kind of flavour to it, and started kissing her. And that kissing turned into, she was then suckling at the breast of this goddess. And she said it was like drinking nectar, like this deep sense of some kind of divine nourishment was flowing into her being. This surprised her enormously. [laughter] She had never had anything like this before. But she kind of went with it. Very deep nourishment, and then turned into quite profound bliss. And this huge sense of love opened up. A kind of cosmic love opened up. And yes, it did something to heal the loneliness, definitely did. But even more than that, it opened something in the being. Something for her, in her soul, if you like, was opened. But even more than that, something in her vision, her sense, her conceptual framework of what practice is, and what she was, and what wanted to come through -- something was opened in relation to what wanted to come through.
So people, like that gentleman with the inner critic, can have many images or characters come. There was a while ago, a few years ago, in fact I used to get this dragon, this very intense, seemingly violent sort of dragon. And actually, I realized it's not violent. It had this, you know, breathing fire, and swooping around. What's this? What does it want? What's its quality? But actually it was more voracious. It wasn't really aggressive. What does it want? What is this?
Or again, if I just share for me, I still get this character who's a soldier. And it's like his duty is to do battle. He does battle endlessly, and he is often solitary, fighting, or preparing to fight, or resting from fighting. Or another figure who's a wanderer, again quite solitary, just always wandering, often in the desert, often solitary. Maybe he's joined temporarily, or meets some people. Where's he going? He's not really going anywhere. He's wandering. He's an outcast. He's on the edge. Again, I can't quite put it into a box. It's not a particularly outlandish image, like a golden goddess or whatever, but there's something that feels necessary. Something resonates in the being. It feels important somehow, but I can't quite -- one can't quite put it in a box, or put one's finger on it. And it's not necessarily that dramatic, not necessarily that outlandish, but it seems deeply resonant. There's a deep resonance to it that I can't quite sum up, and deeply important to the being.
Now I know, almost definitely, some people will be listening, "Well, I don't get any images. I'm not that type." This is actually quite important. We could say a lot about that, why that is, and what to do in response to it. But just to say, what I really want to do is open up that sense of what I mean when I say the word 'image.' And I'm also still hunting for a better word. But I don't necessarily mean something visual.
So another woman was actually walking near Gaia House in the lanes, and actually just felt her body as if the body of a mountain lion. It was visceral. Some people hear. Some people see. It was visceral. The sense was, "I have become a mountain lion." And she saw a woman walking two little dogs, and this mountain lion just wanted to rip apart the dogs. [laughter] There wasn't anything unkind in that. It's just the nature of a mountain lion. [laughter] But even more than that, there could be -- another woman had a postcard of -- you know Michelangelo's statue, the Pietà, Jesus draped down from the Cross, dead, in the arms of the mother Mary? It's a phenomenal sculpture. So she had that, and she used to meditate on it. And of course, there's compassion there, and beauty. She wasn't Christian, but there was something for her embodied, in this case, in an artistic image, that spoke deeply to the soul. So it's visible that way in art, of course. But actually even more than that, we are surrounded by images. Our life is, again, saturated by images, and we don't often realize it. We don't often think that way. [17:22]
So this tradition, my root tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition, a lot of that was born, or one of the major influxes into that was from the Thai Forest tradition. Some of you will know that. And if you listen to, not the Westerners, but the actual Thai Ajaans, the teachers -- so most of them are dead now. In fact all of them are dead now. That's quite recently. You listen to them talk, or you read transcriptions of them talk -- they talk very, very differently than we talk. They use the language of 'war' and 'battle,' and they embody the warrior. They're doing battle with the defilements of greed, hatred, delusion. We can't so easily, in the West, use that language. It doesn't work for us, and people react to it. But the archetype -- what wants to come through, what they are expressing in their being, and in their rhetoric, and in their language, and in their teaching -- is 'warrior,' 'soldier.' And it has a nobility to it. It has a beauty to it. And a lot of people responded to it. It gave birth to a wonderful tradition.
Or someone like Nelson Mandela -- and again, this is interesting, because for me, he is someone who exists in my psyche as something very beautiful. I can't put him in a box, but he speaks to me -- his life, his dedication, his sacrifice, his single-mindedness, his purity of spirit. So he is an image for me. And he's also a real person. I've read his biography. You can deconstruct that and say, "Well, he made a lot of political mistakes, he wasn't da-da-da-da." Of course you can do that. But the fact is that, for the psyche, he is still alive and resonant as an image for me. There are probably people in this room right now that that's also true for. When he died, I cried. There are probably people in this room who that is not true for. So the imagistic sense of him, in this case, Nelson Mandela, is somewhere in between object and the subject. It's not either completely there or completely here. Something arises [claps hands] in that.
But I think of Einstein -- for me, he's another classic example. For many people, he embodies something. Again, for me, he speaks very deeply to me, that kind of -- or Niels Bohr, or these kind of people. Something about them, about what they expressed in their life, it was running through their life, speaks from one soul to the other and ignites something. It has a beauty to it, and a necessity, and something to be honoured, and respected, and even felt as holy in some sense. But again, that might not be for everyone. It almost certainly is not for everyone. You just think, "Well, he was a kind of absent-minded nincompoop with a very big brain." It just completely flattens the sense of it. That's fine. [20:08]
Again, if I share, just personally, Jimi Hendrix, when I was much younger, really alive to me. Something was coming through there, some kind of -- I don't know what to call it -- demonic force, angelic force. I think he was aware of it, because I remember seeing this clip, before he went on stage, a big thing, some outdoor festival. And the guy comes up to him and says, "Well, how should I introduce you?" And he just says, "Oh, tell them the big blue angel is coming." And he had this sense -- and it's not just show business; something, he had this sense of something. Or Dylan or something, dressed all white paint, and this crazy hat, and he's playing the joker, the trickster. And it's a game, but he knows something is coming through too. And some people resonate with that. It's not just a silly guy on stage doing silly stuff. There's something else going on.
So see it in meditation, or spontaneously as images, feel it as images, see it in art, see them in art, feel them in art, see them in others. [Others] exist for us as psychic images, real persons existing as images for the soul, the psyche. And also see it in our own lives, my own life, your own life, as image. And what's wanting to come through, and what is being expressed, and who is wanting to come through, and who is expressing? Who is my life expressing? Not just me.
Some of these, either that we see outside, or that we feel a sense come through, do not fit into a nice sort of image of what we imagine Buddhist Dharma should be. They do not fit. The Hendrix, the wild -- it does not fit. Even the naked goddess doesn't really fit. Certainly in the Insight Meditation tradition, we don't really go for naked erotic goddesses, generally speaking. [22:01]
And then what can happen? Then very easily we judge, either someone outside, or we judge this that's wanting to come through. It doesn't fit in the box. There's a problem. So I know a woman, I've known her -- actually quite well, but I've known her over some years, and she cannot stop partying. She thinks she should, because she's a Buddhist, and she meditates, and da-da-da. Why can you not stop partying? And we can judge that: "Get it together!" Or is it something else wants to come through? We talk classically -- it's the Dionysian god, the god Dionysus wants to come through. It's different. It will not fit.
I'll tell you a story. A few years ago, on a long retreat at Gaia House, I was working with a woman in her early fifties. And we had built up quite a lot of trust through working, and she said, "I want to tell you something." She said, when she was in her late teens, 18 or 19 or something like that, more than thirty years ago, she said, "I was travelling with a friend in Spain, a girlfriend in Spain. And we ran out of money, and then we didn't know what to do. And so we decided we would sleep with men for money. 'We're just going to do this once to get the money.'" So they did it. But then they continued doing it. And then they were in Spain for, actually, I think, some months, living in this way. And she said there was so much shame for her. She was telling me this. This was decades later. This thread of shame had run through her life back from that period. And I was listening, and listening, she's telling me the story, and she's telling me, and as she's speaking, I heard in the back of my mind: 'sacred prostitute.' And I thought, "I can't say that. I can't say that." But it was honestly what was coming for me, and I did say it in the end. And she completely resonated with it. Now, me saying it, it wasn't me thinking, "Now, how can I make her feel better? How can I put a different spin on this?", because I could have said lots of other stuff. I could have talked about conditions, or this or that, lots of more conventional ways of putting a perspective on it that would release some of the suffering. But I actually decided and went with it, and she completely resonated with it. [24:28]
The key word there is 'sacred.' What was going on back then when she was young was that she wasn't conscious of that. She was young. She didn't know how to handle this thing that wanted to express through her, the beauty of it, the grandeur of it, the depth of it. She didn't know how to handle it. She also -- and this is really key -- she did not realize that images that come up or images that are alive for us in this kind of way do not necessarily need to be taken literally and acted out literally. Some do, or in some way, or in some very subtle form, and some don't. I'm going to return to that this afternoon. She didn't realize that.
So, many possibilities here. What images and what fantasies ...? That word usually has a negative connotation in insight meditation circles, and I want to give it a positive connotation, a connotation of depth, and beauty, and necessity, resonance. What images and what fantasies speak to me, call me, give me a sense of meaningfulness, resonance, poetry? And what images and fantasies run through my life? Maybe push and pull and direct me in my life? Impel me, draw me on, galvanize me, and drive me? Big question. So it's not just meditative images. Even if I don't get any images like that at all -- again, I could talk all about why -- there's another level here. What's running through my life? But in terms of practice, there are many possibilities. As I said, we're not going to do too much practice, but I'll just throw a few things out.
Mindfulness. What is it to bring mindfulness to this whole area? If there is a sense of some figure, or an image, or even an external image, like Einstein, or Mandela, or whoever it is -- what is it to focus on that with mindfulness and with sensitivity, aware of the resonances and emotions, aware of the body and what stirs for me in resonance with that? Is it possible to dialogue? Might John Coltrane have something to say to me? He does. He has. Or whoever.
So one could do this spontaneously -- they just arise -- or more deliberately. Might be, one had a dream that feels pertinent or charged or moves one, and there's a character in that dream that one brings deliberately back into the meditation and meditates on this character, and perhaps dialogue. So there's relationship and resonance, and maybe one can just look and behold, feel this character, and feel what that stirs inside.
Maybe one gets a sense of how they are seeing me. So not just how I am seeing them or what I feel, but how do they behold me? What is the tone of their sight? How are they looking at me? Oftentimes, there is love there, and you can feel this character is looking at me with love. It's a particular kind of love, a flavour unique to them. I could even enter into this character, enter into their body and their experience and look at the world through their eyes. Feel what that feels like to almost become this character. All of this in meditation.
There are actually many possibilities, but what I've found -- and I almost want to universalize it; I have a sense that it's universal -- is when we are upset, when there's emotional upset, there's enough energy in that emotional upset to give birth to an image. Something you feel, "Can't settle the mind. Trying to concentrate. It's not working," or "Something's going on," there's often enough in that vortex, if you like, enough energy to give rise to, to constellate an image.
On the other side of the spectrum, when there's really a lot of settledness of mind, what we call samādhi (some of you know that word), when the energies and the mind really unify and deepen, and everything very settled and aligned, harmonious -- when that's the case, also it becomes easier to give rise to images, and to work with images. It's the middle ground that's a little bit tricky, when we're neither particularly upset nor particularly deep in the meditation. And then, I'm not sure, but I'm tempted to say -- I think this is a generality -- that that's a little bit more difficult to contact and to work with images. But one can still do it deliberately, actually.
Okay, I think I'm going to stop there, actually, for now, and pick up again this afternoon. Let's see. Why don't we do a meditation?
