Transcription
I'd like to talk a little more now, pick up this theme and take it further. This is a slightly bigger chunk of teaching. I'll probably talk for just under an hour, I imagine, so it's probably important to be relatively comfortable and still be awake as possible.
Okay. So we were talking earlier about using these words, 'image' and 'fantasy,' and in a way, they're the best I can find right now, but the many possibilities, possible ways that they might manifest, express themselves, be sensible in our lives and in our meditations.
Usually, in this kind of culture -- first of all in this society, and secondly in this kind of meditation culture, the Insight Meditation tradition -- we're not usually even aware of what fantasies are running through us. I don't mean just the sort of flotsam and jetsam of daydreams and nonsense. I mean the deeper currents of fantasy. We're not usually aware. We don't usually think that way. We don't usually feel the life of that, and how central it is, actually, to our whole sense of existence, and where we're going, and what we're doing -- even what we're doing in practice. So we're not usually aware of the fantasies that run, that are in our lives, and the fantasies that are in our practice -- as part of practice, as a good part of practice. When it comes to, actually, images that arise for us as objects -- this image or that image arises in the mind or whatever -- it's interesting to sort of survey a little bit of what the typical responses or attitudes are in, say, the Insight Meditation tradition, for example, or a little bit wider. Very often, we're just kind of given the message: "Ignore them. They have no value. They're kind of meaningless, and just ignore them. It's just daydreaming. It's just nonsense." And so that's very often what we're told, and that's very often what we practise, so that we become better and better at not giving them attention.
Or we might say, "Yeah, mostly ignore them, but if it's a nice one, or a kind of particularly Buddhist one, then that's okay, you can be with that a little bit. But still, it's a kind of -- it's not really the real thing," is the sense. Or they say, "Not so much ignore them, but notice what it is that arises. But just notice, and let it go. It's okay. Let it arise. Let it pass." And sometimes even that can be extended a little bit, so that there's a kind of attitude of, "Do you see what's inside of you? You see if something angry or violent or weird or whatever -- you see that that's inside of you." And so a little bit, the sense of the self is stretched, so that we don't judge these things in others.
Some of you will know that poem by Thích Nhất Hạnh, "Please Call Me By My True Names." So in a way, that's what he's saying: "Look at all this stuff that happens," and the snake that eats the frog, and this and that. And he said, "Actually, please call me by my true names. I am all of that." So it's nice. There's less judgment there when we see that in the world, and something is a little bit expanded. So they're allowed and accepted. But that's not where I want to stop today. We're going further out than what we mostly encounter, because in that way of relating to it, the images are not empowered. They're allowed for a moment, looked at, acknowledged, and let go of. They are not empowered.
Another common possibility is a person with a more sort of psychotherapeutic background will say, "Well, this is from my past history. This image is somehow representing or constellating something from my past," usually from early childhood or whatever. That's the idea of what it is and what it's doing. Or again, a psychological theory is that it's a compensation: "I tend not to be strong, so I'm having an image of strength or whatever. The psyche is trying to balance me, and compensate for my lack of something," or whatever other characteristic. Or a person says, "These are part of me. They are part of me. They're aspects of me." And that can have a few different ways that could be conceived of, but generally, they're part of me, and my job is somehow to integrate them, to bring them somehow, mix them together in some more consolidated self, or balance them, so that there's not an imbalance in the being, in the self, and to come to some kind of wholeness: "What's missing? So I need a bit of that, or I need a bit of that, or concentrate on that image to get a bit of that." Integration, balance, or wholeness.
And sometimes, the integration there, hidden under this word, 'integration,' comes more a sense of, there is a sort of chief executive self which gets to choose, and keep everything in line, and make sure nothing acts up or gets out of hand. It's kind of in charge there. That's sometimes what the word 'integration,' with the best of intentions, moves towards, unwittingly. These can be mixed, these possibilities. But sometimes we regard them as part of me. You know, maybe it's coming up as an image. Maybe it's this crazy animal or this dragon or whatever it is: "They're just representation. What they really are is factors or elements of mind. So it's coming up as image, but what it really is is strength, or courage, or loving-kindness, or compassion or something." So we put them in an abstract concept, an abstract psychological or spiritual concept. We put it in a box. And again, often then the orientation is to integrating, to balancing, and to moving towards a kind of wholeness. That's the sort of direction of aspiration. And as I said, all those could be mixed, but those are sort of the tendencies. [7:01]
It strikes me as -- maybe not -- almost impossible to prove any of that, almost impossible to prove any of it. They are theories. They are beliefs, theories, psychological theories. People take them as true and real and believe in them, but actually very difficult to prove. And I would again say, and drawing on deep Buddhist insights, I would say none of them are ultimately true. None of them are ultimately true, any of that we've just been through. So what then if I step back from the usual question of what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false, and actually not look in those terms of right/wrong, true/false? Which way would I look? How would I look? Maybe better to look, not in that way, but rather, what conceptual framework, or what way of looking, of regarding these images/fantasies that exist, what way of looking at them leads to what? So conceiving of them this way tends to open experience up in this direction and lead to this or that. Conceiving of them in a very different way actually unfolds a whole different sense of the experience and the direction in life. None of them are true. I'd venture to say almost impossible to prove any of that.
And so where does that leave us? Maybe it's even a more helpful way of conceiving, in a larger sense, to just say, "Well, which way of conceiving leads to what?" So that then leaves us with the possibility of experimenting. I can experiment with this. I'm no longer in this game of, "What's right? What's wrong? What's true? What's false?" Do I dare to experiment? How much do I dare to experiment? And if I'm going to experiment in this realm, mindfulness is necessary. That's my tool. I cannot experiment without sensitivity and mindfulness. By that, I mean particularly a bodily awareness, an awareness of what this feels like and how it changes with different images and emotions and reactions and resonances, the sensitivity and mindfulness to the body and the emotionality. That's absolutely crucial, because it's that that distinguishes all this from daydreaming. When we're daydreaming, there's none of that. We're lost. We're gone. We're not in touch here. So what makes this, we could say, imaginal practice versus daydreaming? It's that, partly.
With this sensitivity and mindfulness, now I can feel: what are the resonances, as I said earlier? What does this stir in me? How do I feel this image, and the depth of it, and what it resonates in itself and in me? And what are the particular emotions, the pathos that it stirs? What's the quality there emotionally? It might be quite complex. What are the energies that it opens in my body that I can feel because of the mindfulness, because of the sensitivity? And what's its particular sense of meaningfulness?
I'll make a distinction between that word 'meaningfulness' and the word 'meaning.' I don't know if this is correct English. But 'meaning,' I've reduced it: "It means this. It means courage. It means strength. It means whatever it is." Meaningfulness is something you can't really get to the bottom of. There's a sense of resonance, of meaningfulness. It's more like a poetic image. You can't arrive at the bottom of it. It does not reduce to something else. So all that is included in the mindfulness, in the sensitivity, if we're making a practice out of this and experimenting.
And what if, further, I don't judge immediately the image by its obvious nature? So I might have an image that is very beautiful in the traditional sense, very peaceful, very soft or white or whatever, very conventional in some sense. Or I might get an image that in some way is kind of strange, or grotesque, or perhaps violent in some way, or a weird kind of pathology in it, or strangely erotic or something. What if I don't judge the image by the content of the image? Because any or all of those, even strange, weird, violent, erotic, whatever, may be right. They may be important for us. So I have to stand back from my immediate inclination to judge it based on a usual framework of "What's good? What's bad? What's spiritual? What's not?"
How can I tell if an image is important for me? If it's right, so to speak, how can I tell? Well, that's why I say use the body, what I call the energy body, or the subtle body energy. It's like, this field here, I can feel resonances there. I can feel how the energies move, or come into alignment, or whatever. Through that awareness, I can discern whether I'm on a right track or a helpful track. No matter what the image, if it's right, I would say, something opens in the energy of the body. Something feels energized. Something actually feels calm, in a strange way, unified and aligned. And so the body, the sensitivity to the body -- not my typical moral framework -- the sensitivity to the body is telling me what's worth pursuing, staying with, exploring.
And I will see a few things. If we experiment, we're going to see a few things, undoubtedly. One is that the relationship I have with an image always shapes it and always colours it. So it's not independent of my relationship. You can see this in nightmares. The monster's chasing me in a nightmare, and if for some reason I turn towards it, and there's less fear, what happens to the monster, usually?
Yogi: It changes.
Rob: It changes. It's not independent of my relationship with it. That's true of nightmares. It's true of this image work, what I'm calling 'imaginal practice.' It's also true of any perception, actually. It's never, ever separate from the relationship that I have with it -- neither a body sensation of pain, a heartache, or whatever it is. Always my relationship is part of it. So I'm going to notice that, and it's important to realize that. But I notice something even more fundamental than that, actually. If I experiment, if I dare to experiment, I start to realize that the view that I have, the way of conceiving that I have, which I may not be conscious of, the view and the way of conceiving make more difference than anything else. Here's this image, and the conception of it that I have is the most -- in the end, it's the most powerful thing and the most interesting thing about all this. I could probably sit here all day and tell you the most weird and strange images that either I've experienced or people have reported to me. But in the end, it's not the nature of the image so much as the conception of it that is the really interesting and the really sort of fertile aspect of all this. But the view, the way of conceiving, it makes a difference, a huge difference. And it determines a lot of what comes up.
And again, you can see this with any experience, any perception, or dream experience or imaginal experience. You can see it in the realm of the emotions, how much the, let's say, catharsis, the catharsis of emotions from the past, so-called -- when I believe in that, it's a conceptual framework. And believing in that conceptual framework tends to trigger more of that stuff. When I actually bring some questioning in to that, it tends to not generate that process so much. What's going on? It's because it's not an ultimate truth, and it's not separate from the mind's conceiving.
Okay, so even now, or even by this point, if you are listening, and so far, from everything you've heard in your life, from Dharma things, and read, etc., and all your understanding, if the way of conceiving Dharma is basically, "Learn to calm down a little bit, to relax, calm down, even out a little bit. And learn how to be mindful, to meet something called 'life'" -- which is taken to be reality in some way -- if that's it, "Calm down. Be with experience," if that's what practice is, then probably a lot of what I've said so far, and certainly what I'm about to say, is going to sound completely nuts and just absolute nonsense, irrelevant. It doesn't make sense. It does not fit in the box, if that's the box. But that was not the Buddha's box necessarily. The Buddha's actually saying *not "*meet life" or "be with something called (what we tend to assume is) reality." He's saying, "Actually, see the emptiness of everything that we take to be real. See the illusory nature of everything we take to be real." And from that seeing comes a much deeper freedom. He doesn't say, "Be with life. Meet life, over and over again." That's a practice that serves something much deeper. He wants us to see the emptiness of everything. From that comes a deeper freedom.
For many people -- some of you will just relate to all this imaginal business anyway, but for some people it's that understanding of emptiness that then legitimizes the whole project. Because I'm not cutting off my sense of reality and putting it in the normal modernist box, then I can walk through a door that's actually a lot more open.
I could take the experiment further, and in fact a lot further, if I dare. And as I say, I'm not thrusting this on anyone. You can take just as much as feels useful. I can take the experiment further. Because reality is not fixed in this way, and because I cannot prove any of these frameworks and theories, and because I understand that the way of conceiving affects what happens, it determines what unfolds, because of all of that, I can take the experiment further, and I can begin to entertain certain ideas, just to see what happens.
That word 'idea,' the word 'idea' is from a Greek word, eidos. And it means Greek for 'idea,' but it also implies, in the ancient Greek, the way we look at things, so that we are always, whether we realize it or not, looking at ourselves and at the world and existence through the lenses of ideas. Most of the time we're not aware of it. But what if we entertain certain ideas or an eidos, and entertain, "Maybe these images or these things are more autonomous"? We just give them, grant them that they have a bit more autonomy, or a lot more autonomy than I would tend to assume. What if we entertain the idea that they want something? This or that image wants or even demands something of me.
T. S. Eliot wrote an essay once called On Poetry and Poets. And he wrote of how one can be "oppressed by the burden which he must bring to birth." Something is demanding or asking something of him. And again, I've shared my -- years ago -- the sense that something was coming through, say, someone like Jimi Hendrix. Something was being asked of him. Or that woman that I shared about earlier whose mother died, and how much she related to this idea that the dead mother was alive and asking something to come through. There's a demand there. So what if we entertain that kind of idea? And what if we entertain the idea of not integrating these things, not subordinating them to this chief executive self, not pressing them together in some kind of balance, wholeness, or aspiration of wholeness? What if we don't tame them, we don't try and tame them? What if we seek more to enliven them rather than tame them? What if we seek to enliven them, to enliven their power, to give them their power?
Listen to this. It's a wonderful poem by Rilke. It's a long poem, so I'll just read you a little bit of it. He starts the poem -- he's talking about -- he's looking out the window, and he can see a storm approaching, and he senses the power of that storm. And then he says -- listen to this in the light of what we're talking about.[1]
[20:32 -- 21:12, poem]
"What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. I mean the Angel." So what if we entertain these different ideas, and we see what that opens? What if we do not reduce them to this or that? They're not a result of my past -- what if we just entertain the idea that they are not the result of my past? That sacred prostitute -- that wasn't anything to do with her past and her upbringing and all that. The voodoo guy that devours the heart with blood all over his hands, nothing to do with her past or with some kind of socio-economic factors or something. It wasn't compensating for something in her life. So we're orienting towards opening up in a very different potential here. If I keep them as persons, as figures, as animated, as beings, then -- although I could say these are qualities, I could give them a psychological concept -- when I keep them as persons, they're always bigger than a concept. The person is always bigger than some kind of psychological label, an essential quality, or an aspect of being, or whatever. Bigger than a symbol, in the sense of a sign, of something reducing to something. The poet Auden, W. H. Auden said, "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand."
If I dare entertain this kind of way of relating to them, something opens and is undermined in the self-sense, the relationship with the central project of Buddhist practice. Something's undermined and opens in the self-sense: the self is not so prioritized then. With practice, and with exploring, I feel that this kind of way of orienting can also mature. It can grow and become more subtle. That's actually characteristic: it becomes more subtle, like all practices. So some of you will be familiar with shamanic journeying. Does anyone know that sort of thing? Yeah, a little bit? Or active imagination. Sometimes, with those kinds of practices, a person imagines themselves on a journey through a territory, through a landscape, and encountering, on that journey, different beings, or mythical beings, or whatever, and doing this, or doing that, having these encounters, and moving on, etc. So it's a lovely, lovely form of practice. But I want to make a distinction today -- again, just for the sake of, "Where would we not tend to take this kind of stuff?" -- a distinction between narrative image, and iconic or poetic image.
So narrative image, what I mean by that is, something moves through time. There's a story here, and a narrative, and it's unfolding. It comes to some resolution. The hero slashes away at the undergrowth, slays the dragon, climbs the castle walls, rescues the princess, and they live happily ever after. It's a resolution. It's a narrative image.
If you think about a poetic image in a poem, it just is. It doesn't go anywhere. There's not a story there. It's got a quality of eternality to it, and that is partly where it has deeper power. So when I narratively move through a landscape, and do all these adventures and stuff, and come to some resolution, it can -- not has to, but it can -- reinforce the ego, the ego making a journey. In a way, what we might be interested in is actually not that, not so much the ego and the heroic journey, but something else. So iconic or poetic images have this quality of 'always' to them, 'forever,' 'eternal.' That wanderer I mentioned this morning -- he's always wandering. He will never arrive. He is homeless. He will never find a home. It would be wrong to, say, introduce him to a nice woman: "Get married. Settle down. Here's a nice place you can live." Wrong, wrong, not right! The soldier is always doing battle, always. And if he's not doing battle, he's resting from battle in preparation for the next battle. An eternality of image here. So in meditation, if you want to, it's not so much a journey, so much as sitting with this thing, and kind of stewing with it, resonating with it. It's -- 'static' is the wrong word, but it's not going anywhere or evolving in that sense. And that brings a very different flavour and orientation and unfolding to the process itself in the meditation. [26:10]
So all this, we're saying, I dare to experiment with not reducing it, and not integrating and not taming them, and all of that -- granting them more autonomy, and giving them power. And what happens if I don't literalize them? "These are not my parents." I don't concretize this. I don't take it as a symbol -- although I can: "It symbolizes strength or whatever it is." I don't reduce it to my personal history. For myself, years, decades of interpreting everything through the psychotherapeutic lens of this, "I am like I am now because of what happened to me some decades ago, in my childhood, whatever, with family, da-da-da-da-da." Fine, very good, but sometimes a person might, after a while, "Isn't there another way of looking at things? Is that really completely true? Is it, at a certain point, even interesting any more as a way of looking?"
So we get locked into something, and it becomes almost unquestionable, taboo to question. But if I don't do all that -- don't literalize, I don't tame, I don't reduce, I don't say it's a symbol, "It equals this" -- then something opens out. It's not contained. There's an infinite depth here, an infinite depth of mystery. Something opens beyond the human, in the way that we nowadays usually think of what a human being is. There's mystery here; something, I would say, more religious than humanistic, beyond the purely human.
We could go even further, if one wants to experiment. There was a scholar of Islamic mysticism in the twentieth century called Henry Corbin, a French scholar. And they have a branch of Islamic mysticism, quite interested in this sort of stuff -- not quite the same, but similar. And he said, "It's not your individuation" -- that word from Jung, if you know -- "not your individuation that is your task, but the angel's individuation. Not your individuation, but the individuation of the angel, that is your task."[2]
So I could conceive of this thing, it's not even about me and my growth, and my process, and getting it together, and being more balanced, and all that. And then something is turned around, and the question is not, "What can I get from this angel? What can it give me, this daemon, to balance, to grow, to whatever it is?" but "What do you want?" To the angel, to the daemon, "What do you want*?" -- that* becomes the question. And in a way, it's a much more powerful question. This is paraphrasing something from James Hillman. He said we can regard images this way, as highly intentional, as necessary, as presenting a claim, moral, erotic, intellectual, aesthetic, and demanding a response. It is an affecting presence -- meaning, affecting the heart. Images seem to bear an instinctive direction for destiny. Such images mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, and love us. 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 a very influential sort of thread of philosophy in the Western philosophical tradition and Western religions for many centuries -- recalls the Neoplatonic sense of images as daimones and angels. And the word 'angel' literally means 'message-bearer.'[3]
Very different orientation -- not viewing these images, these beings as 'me' or even 'part of me,' but what do they want of me and from me? They influence me. They exert their power on me and on my life. They need something. What do they need? They influence my perceptions. They influence my ideas, going back to that word eidos. They have a particular aesthetic style. There are different kinds of beauty associated with different kinds of beings, if you like, different kind of persons. They have their own style of morality or morals. You start to conceive or have the possibility of conceiving of existence in a very different way. Is that flying dragon, or that soldier, or that wanderer that I mentioned -- are they mirroring my life? Is it because I have certain experiences that these images arise, or is it equally, or perhaps even more the case, that my life mirrors those images? They are more the root of my being, if you like, in a certain sense, and my life expresses that flying dragon, that soldier, that wanderer, in different ways. It's the other way around. Maybe it's the other way around, can be looked at the other way around.
And then, go even further. What if I might ask, "Can I serve? Can I serve these persons? Can I see or conceive of the psyche as being bigger than the human? It's not in here somewhere. I am in something bigger." [32:04] Here's James Hillman again talking about this. If we entertain -- I'm paraphrasing -- if we entertain this kind of framework, this kind of eidos, 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. [Here he echoes 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]
That's a very, very different way of feeling and sensing and conceiving of existence.
So as I said, for me there's something more religious, bigger than the typical humanist way of being. And I feel, when I come to my deathbed, if I am still compos mentis, this is what will matter to me. These are the questions I will be asking. This is what will really matter. Have I done my duty to these daimons or angels that seem to be asking something from me, or (plural) asking some things from me? Have I done my duty to that? Have I carried that out? I don't care too much whether I'm comfortable, or had an easeful life, or whether people like me or don't like me. Something else is going to be the thing that really, really matters, when it comes to it. I don't feel 'me and my life,' on that level, is actually that important.
So there's a possibility of stretching something, and quite a different way of orienting to it. And we start to reconsider certain things, possibly. Desire -- we tend to think, especially from a Buddhist framework, desire is seeking to increase pleasant sensations or hold on to them, and decrease or get rid of unpleasant sensations. That's why there is desire, right? It's to increase the pleasant, decrease the unpleasant. And desire comes from the self. It's the self, the ego that has desire. Maybe that's a simplification. Maybe it's oversimplifying something. Maybe some desires, some depths of desires, come from the daimon and the angels. It's not the little self, and it's not just about getting what's more pleasant and avoiding the unpleasant. So that woman I said who can't stop partying, is it really the case that she's just like that because she's avoiding certain emotions? Is that really what's going on? I don't think, knowing her a little bit, that that's what's going on. Of course, that can sometimes be the case. Something else is going on, something richer, deeper, in a way more holy than that.
Okay. So if you're listening, and you might feel, "Well, this is pretty bonkers." And you might also feel, "This is pretty dangerous. It seems to feel, I don't know, it's pretty dangerous." So this is important. There are a few things to say about the aspect of possible danger. The first thing is to say -- as a more general thing, then get into specifics -- first thing is to say that any path, any technique, any practice, any view of the path, brings with it certain dangers. They're different depending on what you do and what you choose. But it's important to be conscious what they are. There's no such thing as a path or practice or technique or an approach without danger. The dangerous thing is if we think there is, and we're not aware -- "This is the practice I do. This is the path I agree with" -- and we don't see what the dangers of that particular path are. There are always particular dangers that go with particular paths.
And in relation to what we talked about -- yeah, have to be a little bit careful here. So we're not talking about belief. I'm not talking about believing something. We're talking more poetically, or mythically, if you like. Myths aren't supposed to be believed, at least not in our age. And poems are not supposed to be believed. But we can talk about poetic truth or mythic truth. It's a different kind of truth. So it's not about believing, it's about entertaining certain ideas or eidos, a way of looking at something. And what happens when I do that? What does it open, what possibility, what different sense of things? So that's a good question: what does it open? What will it bring? Will it make me happy, if I do this? Some of it will, tremendous joy. But that's not really the whole of it. Some of it won't make me happy. Will it bring freedom? That's the more standard Buddhist question. Will it bring freedom? And I would say yes, a radical level of freedom. A freedom beyond even what we typically conceive of as freedom, which we tend to put in a box. Beyond even that. It's a radical freedom.
But even that is not quite all that it is, because I've talked about duty, and the beautiful duty, and serving, and the burden. So even the freedom is not quite completely what we might assume it to be. 'Fulfilment' might be a better word. Something is fulfilled deep in the being through this way of approaching things. If I introduce a word, 'soulfulness,' that's a word we don't often hear at all -- well, we don't hear it in the Insight Meditation tradition much. What do I mean by that? It's hard to put it into words, actually. But I mean something about the sense of resonance, of meaningfulness, of kinds of beauty, of something that speaks to the soul, something that has seemingly very much to do with my death, and my life, and what I'm expressing, and how I sense existence. It's as if there are other dimensions of existence. Sometimes our practice can flatten existence down to one dimension. Maybe there are others, other aspects of the being that need the space to be given life and explore. Soulfulness.
Socrates -- this is actually from Norman O. Brown, but he 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, or the gods. Our real choice is between holy and unholy madness.[5] Maybe something in us needs that. Some of you will be listening and "I don't relate to this at all," and actually there are, I'd say, typically, a couple of reasons why "I don't like this at all." But some of you will be relating, and even some of you very new to meditation will say, "I get it. It speaks to me." For some people, there's a soul-necessity here. There's a calling to relating and to seeing things this way. We feel called.
Now, I'm using that word, 'soul,' and I don't mean by it an entity or a thing. I do not mean that. I mean more a way of looking, and at the risk of sounding circular, a way of looking that gives rise to soulfulness (meaning everything that I said before). Just like I can use the word 'self.' And as a Buddhist of long practice, etc., I know that the self is illusory, is empty, but I can use that language, and I can look and relate in terms of self. And I can use the language of the 'inner critic' and know that it's not something real. I can use the language of 'angel' or 'daimon' -- empty, but we can talk that way, and we can relate and see that way.
Okay, second thing, still about the danger. So, "Won't I act out if I start getting into this, and not just sort of ignoring them? Won't I end up being dangerous, crazy? Isn't this the kind of thing that terrorists believe, doing all this crazy stuff? What are the implications for ethics?" Really important question. Knowing image as image -- and I said that this morning. What happens is, images are alive for us and not realized to be images, to have poetic truth. They're taken as literal truth. So the holy war, the holy jihad is not seen as an image, as a poetic image. It's taken literally, and all kinds of mayhem ensues -- flying planes into buildings, and then very shortly afterwards, George W. Bush declares a war on evil. Is that not an image? In both cases, not alive to image as image, fantasy as fantasy. Completely literalizing a poetic image. That's the problem. The images themselves, the fantasies themselves, are not the problem. It's the conception of them; that's the problem. So as I say, knowing image as image empowers them in certain ways, and disempowers them in other ways, makes it safe.
But also, as I mentioned earlier, and in relation to a couple of the examples, sometimes you get the sense that this imaginal person or being is asking me, or demanding me, for something. It needs to manifest in life. I need to speak these words. I need to express this. I need to materialize something. And sometimes not -- sometimes it's just a sense of something is needing honouring, without obvious expression at all. It's just, I need to acknowledge and sense a kind of beauty or holiness there. It does not need -- no one else need know anything. There's a soulfulness that comes from it, through feeling its necessity and beauty, and not necessarily expressing it.
Sometimes I talk to people, and when talking, it sounds a little bit similar, but I get a little nervous when they're talking. I feel a little uneasy, because it sounds a bit pompous, what they're saying. And it's as if -- what's going on there? There's a solidification of the whole thing, and an identification. The ego has identified with "I am a healer," and "I am this," and "I am that." And it's all very solid, and a bit too serious, and a bit too -- I don't know, just too solid. Problem there. The whole thing has not been seen as poetry, as more imaginal.
But it's interesting. If you were to get into this stuff, we're kind of asked a little bit to discern, well, what is just ego nonsense? Do you know this word, papañca? Some of you? It's like proliferation, or the mind just creating a storm or whole issue of something. What is ego or papañca, and what is coming from the daimon? What is actually what John Keats, the poet, called 'soulmaking'? We're actually asked to discern here. It's not necessarily that easy. One way of noticing a difference is, what is ego and papañca goes around in loops, and it feels very petty. It has a quality of pettiness to it, the ego. This other stuff we're talking about, actually, as I said, it tends to bring the heart and the body and the energies into alignment, to empower something, to open, expand the energies.
So we're asked for some sensitivity here. Things are not quite as simple as we would sometimes like them to be -- we just dismiss all of this stuff, and be really simple with something called 'life' or 'reality' in a bare way. Sometimes, something in papañca, right in this vortex of craziness that seems like just a lot of nonsense, something right in the middle of that -- not all of it, but something in it needs respecting, maybe, sometimes. It's difficult. Even in our lives or looking around us, very easily, we tend to judge a lot of this as just ego stuff. So you might see someone, and maybe she's wearing, she's dressed a certain way, and we think, "Oh, she just wants attention." We quickly put it into a box that has to do with the demands of the ego.
Or actually, speaking about Hendrix -- I don't know where I found this; there was a series of his correspondence when he was quite young still, and touring with other bands as a sort of side -- what do you call it? Sideman? And still learning his trade. He was still developing his powers as a musician. He wrote these postcards back to his younger brother and his father, and in some way, we could read it as complete arrogance. He said, "I played the blues like you've never heard!" And we say, "What's this? It's ego." Or Picasso, speaking about Matisse: "Oh, what's Matisse? It's just a splash of red. It's nothing." And you think, "What an unpleasant little man. It's just his ego." Is it? Or is something else going on there?
Did any of you see the film Senna? [affirmative noises from audience] I decided to see that one partly because of this. I'm not at all interested in racing, in Formula One. It doesn't interest me at all. What was interesting, going to see the film -- so he was, for those of you who don't know, a Brazilian Formula One racing driver who actually died in a car crash, in a race. And he was world champion. So very easily, I would have thought of that, "It's like, that's just ego. Bunch of guys, racing cars, burning a lot of carbon, as they do, racing their cars, 'Who can be number one?', and big puffed-up ego in this competition." When you go and actually pay more open attention, you see there's something that's coming through him. There's a poetic nature to what's going on there. It's not just ego. There's something actually incredibly beautiful about what was coming through him. And yet it is somehow wrapped up in being number one, in being world champion. It's not just ego though.
Even in the Buddhist tradition, if you know Chandrakīrti, one of the -- probably, let's say, the third most influential Buddhist teacher of all time, after the Buddha and Nāgārjuna. And he, as was characteristic, talks about other teachers and their books, and says, "This guy is a nincompoop, an utter fraud. He makes mistake after mistake." He writes this, and this is the way of expressing oneself. And again, it's like, "I thought he's supposed to be enlightened. Surely he wouldn't have that kind of ego!" Or if you know the Tibetan tradition -- actually the late Indian tradition of Buddhism and the Tibetan tradition -- the degree of polemic there, and name-calling, and cutting people down, and dismissing, and puffing up: "I'm the only one who knows the truth. You can look for the truth in all these other teachers, but you will only find it here." You think, "What on earth is going on? These people are supposed to be enlightened."
And listen to the Buddha shortly after his enlightenment. So I'm talking about the things we usually would dismiss as ego, and questioning whether it's really the ego. This is what the Buddha said to someone. He met this person shortly after his enlightenment. The person goes, "Wow, you are radiant. Tell me who your teacher is." And the Buddha answers, "Having fully known on my own, to whom should I point to as a teacher, as my teacher? I have no teacher, and one like me can't be found in the world with its da-da-da-da -- in the world with its priests and royalty and common people. One like me can't be found. I have no counterpart," he says. "I am an arahant." One of the translations of arahant is 'defeater of all.' "I am an unexcelled teacher," he said. You think, "Oh, maybe he wasn't enlightened." [laughter] What are we going to say? What are we going to do with that?
There's, to me, a myth that speaks very, very beautifully and deeply. Some of you will know it: the myth of Horus. He's the falcon son of the goddess Isis in Egyptian mythology. And Isis is getting ready to give birth to him, and she becomes aware that it's a falcon. She says, "Stand back, everybody, it's a falcon." [laughter] Out he sort of roars. The first thing he does is, he just takes off on this supersonic flight, and he flies. And he just flies straight out. And he flies, and he says, "I have flown further than any of the gods." Again, this sounds like an ego, but there's part of his -- what's intrinsic to the myth is the far-outness, the directness, the speed and the proclamation of that. And also what's powerful about Horus is the eyes. The eyes are very powerful. He has this enemy called Seth, and they fight. Seth scratches his eyes and wounds his eyes, and he finds an old sage who heals his eyes with gazelle's milk. It's a beautiful story.
But anyway, the thing I really want to say is about this: "I have flown further than all the gods." And the Buddha says, "Who can equal me?" And the Tibetan teachers say, "I'm the" -- you know, what's going on? Is it just ego, or is it more that we have oversimplified the whole notion of self and ego? Is that really the problem? Something's oversimplified in our way of thinking about all this, in our assumptions about all this. And similarly, something might be oversimplified in our notion of what repression is. So usually, nowadays in the sort of psychotherapeutically informed culture, we tend to assume what's repressed is what's from the past: the experiences, the wounds, the traumas from my childhood, etc. Could it not be, rather, that it's not the past that's repressed, but it's these angels and these daimons? And it's these that are repressed, because they don't fit our view any more. There's no room for them, and we just assume they're ego, or they're some kind of weird pathological structure.
Okay, so I want to wrap up now, but I don't know. There's a good chance that to experiment in the way that I'm talking about, to entertain some of the ideas that we've been discussing, it may be it needs a relatively deep freedom already, that once one feels a looseness with the self, and a relative ease from a lot of stuff, that one's actually free enough to experiment with this kind of thing. Maybe that's true for some people. For other people, not yet free, still caught up in the usual stuff, still suffering, still bumping into the same old stuff, but they'll listen, they'll hear something, and something, as I say, in the soul feels a calling. There's a necessity there. So maybe one, maybe the other, maybe both. Maybe it takes a certain freedom, but I would also say it brings a certain freedom, as I said earlier -- a kind of radical freedom, freedom even beyond what we usually conceive of as freedom. Part of the reason for that, part of the freedom, is because the image and the fantasy we have of awakening and freedom and what that looks like is actually quite small, so that we find ourselves expressing certain things in our life, and it doesn't fit, and it has no room, and it's not to be given life.
Maybe, though, that begins to be broken through and expanded. We tend to think, "Enlightenment looks that way," and holiness and beauty and divinity, if we use those words, "They're expressed like that. They have that character." But maybe there are other gods, and maybe there are other archetypes that have their divinity, their holiness, and we're just not used to seeing holiness, divinity, beauty that way. We've locked it all into certain images and fantasies, without even realizing what the images and fantasies are. So it's not always the typically Christian presentation of purity or divinity or whatever it is, or the typically Buddhist. The typically Buddhist ones are usually calm, and equanimous, and sober, and chaste. This is the typical Buddhist vision of what's beautiful and noble and enlightened. That's what it looks like. That word, 'daimon' or 'daemon*,'* which used to have this sense of holiness to it, kinds of holiness, kinds of necessity, kinds of depth -- it became our word 'demon,' and became -- all of that that didn't fit into the Christian kind of presentation of divinity got shunted into 'demonic equals satanic, equals evil.'
So for example, there were shrines and temples of Aphrodite, a goddess, a divinity of a certain kind of love and eros and sensuality and beauty. The Christians took over, and that became, she became a demon, a useless whore -- I've forgotten the language they used -- a slut, a hussy, and not divine at all. So it happened in Christianity. But has it happened in Buddhism in a different way too? This is going on. We don't tend to think in terms of gods, but in some way, is it also characteristic of the evolution of Buddhism? There's a question there.
Last thing: one can practise with all this in all kinds of ways, all kinds of possibilities. I'm only skimming the surface, as I said today. But one of the, if you like, most significant things is actually beginning to realize that images and fantasies exist for us anyway, very powerfully. They are in our lives, and they have power in our lives. And that's a big and important insight. It's a deep insight. Especially where there's a sense of meaningfulness or resonance, there an image or fantasy is usually alive -- where there's a sense of beauty, meaningfulness, resonance, power. So can I see that? Can I explore? Can I practise with this? Can I practise entertaining certain ideas and see what happens?
If we do, there's a possibility -- and I've only hinted at some things -- but there's a possibility of opening to a whole other sense, a whole other kind of freedom. Let's put it that way: a whole other kind of freedom, a whole other level of freedom, and a whole other way of conceiving and sensing of existence. A whole other way of feeling our existence is possible.
Why don't we have a quiet moment together?
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. ↩︎
Similar statements are attributed to Corbin in James Hillman, Mythical Figures: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 6.1 (Thompson, CT: Spring Publications, 2007), 196, and in James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy -- And the World's Getting Worse (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 62. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
