Buddhism Beyond Modernism

This talk is the second part of a talk in three parts. (Part 1 is "Questioning Awakening"; Part 3 is "In Praise of Restlessness".)

Okay, a little bit of context for this talk, this morning's talk, for those of you who weren't here a week ago when I gave a talk, and to repeat for those of you that were. Most of the talks that I give, I try to give really quite a lot of detail about deepening meditation into loveliness, and questions of technique and approach and balance, and things that one can try. Different kinds of meditation, many different kinds of meditation. That's one of the tasks of many Dharma talks. And/or, Dharma talks try and address a very wide range of what's involved for us in our life situations, inner and outer, in the emotions, in the psyche, in the mind, in the life situations that we're in, difficulties, challenges, facets of our being, all of that, and how to practise with that, perspectives and practices on all that. And/or, in a Dharma talk, I would try and explain the Dharma, or explain a take on the Dharma. So any and all of that is more regular for a talk. As I said last time, all that's in the library, and a lot of it's on the web as well.

So that's not what this is about this morning so much. Rather, what I want to do is, over (I hope) just three sessions, this being the second one, is look at, kind of shine a light on and open up the assumptions, the ideas and assumptions -- conscious and unconscious, explicitly presented and implicit -- that are woven into and underneath our whole notion of what on earth we are doing on the path and in practice. What is the notion and the assumptions underneath, the notion or the vague sense or the intuition of awakening or liberation, of the path, even of the Dharma? We could say Dharmas, because as we said last time, there are a whole range of Dharmas that now exist, teachings. Dharma looks very different depending on who is presenting it. So opening all that up and questioning it. Because a lot of these assumptions are so entrenched, if you like, and actually not obvious at first -- they're not that visible -- it would be better if these talks were maybe over twelve hours or something like that. As it is, it's really one talk trying to stay as close to three hours as possible, and I will probably spill over. We're kind of a little bit trying to cover a lot of material relatively quickly, and sometimes the best I can do is refer to previous talks that I may have given or something like that.

Also to say that the structure is not so linear. I tend to think a lot, give a lot of thought to how to structure talks, what's the best way of presenting things. In this case, after a lot of consideration, I don't think presenting it linearly is the best, for different reasons. So we're going to touch on things, touch on something else, return, come back to what we've previously touched on, and in this way, open out a whole field here. I hope if this is your first one it stands alone, all three stand alone. But I would probably guess that all of them could do with re-listening. There's a lot of material here. It's worth revisiting. If it's interesting to you, it's worth revisiting. So even if you were here last time, for the last talk, it's probably worth revisiting all of these talks if you're interested.

We're inquiring a little bit into ideas. By 'ideas,' I don't mean so much practical ideas like, "Oh, I've got a good idea how Gaia House could streamline its retreat booking procedure" or whatever. Sure, that's an idea, but it's a different kind of idea. By 'idea,' what we're talking about is really the kind of concepts that actually frame and direct and infuse our very looking. They come in, and they colour and shape our very sense of what we are and what existence is. That's what I mean by 'ideas.' The word 'idea' comes from a Greek word, eidos, which also means the way we look. So we look at the world, we look at ourselves, we look at each other through the lenses of ideas. So, all this about inquiring into ideas: "Oh, dear. Can I sneak out now?" It's not abstract. What we're talking about is not abstract, and I hope it's not dry. Ideas have the capability to open life, to bring liveliness. They are vital -- vita, life. They bring life. Or they close life down. They're also crucial, in the sense that we said last time, that word crux from Latin. This idea, having this idea, consciously or unconsciously, leads existence and leads perception and the sense of the world down this avenue from the crossroads. Having a different idea takes it down this one. So the inquiry into ideas is also crucial and vital in those senses. Not abstract at all, and not dry.

Also, last week, I was beginning to suggest a little bit that as well as ideas, mixed in with ideas, and complementing ideas that are presented in any Dharma presentation, are also what we could call -- there's a certain mythos. Each teacher or presentation or book or whatever it is has a kind of mythos of the Dharma, a certain fantasy or mystique that's woven in, presented, communicated, spun a little bit, by the teacher, but also by the student or whoever is listening. Those two are crucial and vital in the ways that we said before. Ideas, fantasies, mythos -- all this, wrapped up together. So really not abstract, because all these, the ideas and the fantasies, conscious and unconscious (and a lot of this is unconscious) that we have, they flavour and direct the sense and experience of what the Dharma is. They flavour, direct, shape, and actually circumscribe, limit, they limit what we think the Dharma is, whatever notion or dim sense we have of what awakening is, of what the path is, of what practice is, even of what life is, what existence is, and what the world that we live in is. All of this is massively influential in flavouring, directing, shaping and circumscribing all of that.

What moves us emotionally, deeply, as human beings, or much of what moves us emotionally as human beings, is actually wrapped up with ideas and fantasies. I don't know if you realize that. That's not wrong. What touches the heart, often very deeply, is actually given its support to be able to move us by being wrapped up with certain ideas or certain fantasies. Nothing wrong with that. It's just the way the psyche works, the way the heart works. But we need to realize it. We really need to realize it.

So an inquiry into all this. A person might say, "Oh, I'm not intellectual. I don't do all that." Or a person says, "I don't conceptualize." Always, always there are ideas. Someone said, "We are always in the grip of an idea." Always. Don't realize it, but we're always. And those ideas rest on assumptions. If all that's unconscious, it has all those effects that I said before, without us even realizing it. When we talk about inquiry, that's a huge subject, inquiry. Massive. There are many different flavours that inquiry can take, and styles. I'll come back to this. But you can have a very 'yang' kind of inquiry, as opposed to a kind of 'yin' style of inquiry. Maybe both are important. You can inquire in a way into something or other in quite a distant way, or in a very intimate way; in quite a cool way, there's a lot of coolness around, and one is looking at what's happening, or in a very hot way, a very fiery way. Inquiry is more than a form. Some of you will know a form where you sit opposite someone or two people, and they ask you a question, and either you just speak what comes to you for five or ten minutes, or just an answer, and they ask again. Inquiry is more than a form. Sometimes that will just be sharing; it's not inquiry. It's important. Inquiry probably needs to be more than just articulating to myself or to another what I already dimly know: "I have a vague sense, and that will help me crystallize it." That's good, but there's more to inquiry than that.

It's a huge area, massive. If we just draw out three aspects or levels, if you like, of inquiry:

(1) The first is noticing what is happening, noticing what is occurring. If we talk, just for now, in terms of the inner world, so to speak, it's noticing: what's the experience? What are the sensations? What are the feelings and emotions? What are the thoughts? So noticing what's happening.

(2) A second aspect or level of inquiry is the interpretation of why this is happening. This is usually done -- well, it's always done -- according to some system of concepts and assumptions. Again, sometimes we don't even realize that we're interpreting. It might be some psychoanalytic system: "This is like this. This is happening because of what happened to me when I was young, because of how my family was, etc." Or it might be a Buddhist system of concepts and assumptions that is framing the interpretation for why this is happening. Or some other system: Diamond Approach, or Ridhwan, whatever it is. We interpret why this is happening without realizing that it's an interpretation, mostly. Even if we're told at first, "Oh, this is a model. It's a certain interpretation, it's a certain framework," we forget so quickly that this is an interpretation. We forget and we don't realize: this is an interpretation of why this is happening. So there's noticing, and the interpretation, and the system of concepts interpreting.

(3) Thirdly, we can expose that interpretation and the system, expose it as a system, as an interpretation, and question it, and question the assumptions that it leans on, that it rests on. We could try alternative interpretations, alternative systems, and see what they open up for us, what they open in the being, in the sense of existence, in the perception. This third is probably the deepest and most radical compared to those other two. When I say 'assumptions,' I don't just mean personal: "I am like this. I am like that. This is what happened to me." I mean whole ideas about reality and the world we live in, etc., as I said before.

So this exposing and questioning is, if it's without being in touch with a noticing and being intimate with what's happening, it's just intellectual. But it's so important, because often we don't realize that the interpretation of what's happening actually creates what's happening. It has a huge place in creating what's happening. The interpretation feels like it's neutral and comes later, doesn't make any difference. It actually is causal. I'll come back to this. So there's all that, and there's also the capacity to just read and listen to different ideas, critiques of certain systems or assumptions. Sometimes as human beings, a lot of the time as human beings, when we hear new ideas, we tend to chop off what doesn't fit. We don't even realize we're doing it. We fit it into a box of what we already know. We shrink it into a system of what we already know, and we literally do not hear, or we change what we hear. So part of inquiry is actually opening that up, putting new stuff in, and trying not to shrink.

To me, this is so, so crucial, this whole area of inquiry. Einstein wrote, "The holy curiosity of inquiry." That's how he talks about it.

The holy curiosity of inquiry [he said]; this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation [it needs to be stimulated], stands mainly in need of freedom; without [freedom] it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.^[1]

As I said, I posed the question last week, we are free in principle, but are we really free to inquire? Free in principle, of course we are. But are we really free? I don't know how many of you notice the sign at the gate of Gaia House. It's been there as long as I've been coming to Gaia House. It says "Gaia House," there's some little design, and it's "Gaia House: Meditation, Inquiry, Compassion."^[2] I saw that the first time, many years ago, when I first came. That did it for me. There's something summed up very beautifully and very fully for me there. You will notice the absence of certain other words. To me, that's very much at the centre of what this is all about, and what Dharma practice is all about. That may not be a popular notion, even at Gaia House. My sister texted me this morning, "Oh, there's an article about Gaia House in Red magazine." Never heard of it, something like that. I don't know what it says. Upstairs in the director's office, and old director used to place on the wall there articles from newspapers when someone, a journalist had come, or done something or other. But they all had one thing in common: none of them mentioned inquiry, very few of them mentioned compassion, and the meditation was all about relaxing and de-stressing. Maybe that's important as a step, but for me, I think the possibility here is something much bigger.

This inquiry, to me, or the range of inquiry, needs to include an inquiry into or a questioning of contemporary culture -- the wider culture that we live in, but also the spiritual cultures that we move in, including Buddhist cultures, including Insight Meditation cultures. We need to be questioning that, we need to be inquiring into that, if we're going to have this vitality and this fire and this opening. The ethics that imbues Insight Meditation culture, as well as the ethics of the wider culture, the psychological assumptions (whether they're cognitive behavioural, or more psychoanalytic), the socio-economic frameworks and ideologies, the notion of reality (what's real and what is not real), the whole metaphysics of modernism. Metaphysics, if you remember from last time, it's like this question, or included in metaphysics is the question, "What is real? What is not real? How do I know anything? And how do I know what is real? How do I decide what is real and what is not real? And what is this world that I'm in? What is the order of the cosmos?" All that is part of metaphysics.

So questioning the metaphysics of modernism, of our modern culture. That includes materialism -- matter as what is primary and real. And it includes 'common sense': "It's just common sense. It's obvious." Is it? Is it true? Can we question it? In that, we may ask, in terms of inquiry, we may ask, "What is taboo?" What are we not allowed to question? What can we not approach in the inquiry? What does not get approached? What tends not to get approached? If we go back to medieval times, there were all kinds of heresies that were available. If you thought about God this way, well, you were in big trouble with certain people. If you thought about God in that way, you were also in big trouble. I'm not a historian of the medieval period, but it seems to me that no one was standing up and saying, "Well, maybe there is no God." It just wasn't thinkable. It was unimaginable, I think, as a kind of concept. It was incomprehensible. The way that people saw the world was imbued with God and reflecting of God and expressing of God. So what is taboo, and what even cannot enter the comprehensibility or the imagination as something to question or as a possibility of direction of question? Now, in our culture, and now, here, at Gaia House, in this hall, what is taboo? The mind doesn't even go there because it can't even think that way. It doesn't think out of a certain box or boxes.

I think there's quite a lot, actually, but one thing that I feel I bump into -- this is what is taboo, not whether it's right or wrong, but what's taboo to question; it's a different thing than saying it's right or wrong -- but the belief that my childhood or my family history causes my present difficulties, or is significantly causal there. How many close friends I have, and "trauma" trips off the tongue so easily as an explanation for someone's difficulty or someone's situation. "Trauma, trauma, trauma." It gets to explain everything, trauma, abandonment, etc., these ideas. Not saying right or wrong, true or false, just pointing out that questioning that, just questioning it, seems to be quite dangerous territory, and people get pretty upset with that. Why? And what else is either taboo or unimaginable to question?

As human beings, we have tendencies -- this is natural as human beings -- we have tendencies to limit our inquiry, unconsciously, in certain ways, determined by whatever paradigm or framework or tradition we're from. So we force the world, and we force the world of things and experiences, into certain conceptual boxes. Usually we don't realize we're doing this. So about fifty years ago, a guy called Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It was a very influential book in certain circles. He talked about this in the realm of science. He was actually a physicist and a philosopher of science and a historian of science.

I'm going to read a few passages, but translate this to the Dharma world. Translate this to just the everyday world of how we move through existence. He talks about the education. He talks, actually, to just explain, he talks about 'normal' science. "This is how science works and the whole thing works," and then at certain junctures, there's a kind of revolution. It shatters. It all falls apart. And people have to come up with some very different notion of where we're going in the quest for truth. So normal science, and revolutions. He is not, in this book, anti-science in any way. He is a scientist. But he's pointing out certain things about scientific inquiry, and I think a lot of what he says is relevant to Dharma inquiry or Ridhwan inquiry or any other inquiry. So if you've been on this retreat, you are educated in a certain way. You're educated through the talks, and other talks that you've heard, and what you've read, etc.

Thomas Kuhn. He's talking about science: "Because that education is both rigorous and rigid" -- he's talking about graduating scientists; these answers that have arrived or been given about what is reality, what is fundamental, what are the basic building blocks of existence, what are the questions worth asking, how do we proceed, what is valid practice, what is the right way of doing things, all these questions

come to exert a deep hold on the scientific mind. That they can do so does much to account both for the peculiar efficiency of the normal research activity [that's why meditation and all this works] and for the direction in which it proceeds at any given time. Examining normal science, we want, finally, to describe that research as a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.^[3]

Is that not true for the Dharma in some instances, minus the 'strenuous' bit?

Normal science is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties, because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. [Because the student scientists graduating, the Dharma practitioner evolving in their understanding, etc., joins other graduated scientists, etc.,] who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models, his [excuse the gender-biased language] subsequent practice will seldom evoke disagreements over fundamentals.

When he talks about "the paradigm has not emerged yet," and there are different competing theories, he talks about how each of them draw on a different metaphysics, a different idea about reality and what the cosmos is like, to try and shore up their position.

When we come to the Dharma, we have this Four Noble Truths as something that's very central. We talked about this last time. And in a way, there's a kind of shorthand version of that: there is suffering. I feel it. I notice it. I entertain the possibility that there is the possibility to be free of this suffering that I'm feeling right now. This is a shorthand version of the Four Noble Truths. There is suffering. I know that freedom is possible somehow. Let me look: what is supporting this suffering? That's the second truth. "I know that freedom is possible" is the third truth. And "What does it need? What do I need to shift -- the way of looking, the way of approaching? What do I need to cultivate, let go of, etc.?" is the Fourth Noble Truth, to arrive at that release of suffering. That could be a framework, shorthand framework, for the whole of the Dharma right there. Brilliant on the Buddha's part. Absolutely brilliant, and very simplifying. But as always, there are problems that come out of it.

What happens to ethics, for example, when the primary concern is with my suffering, and with simplifying my perspective on things? What happens to ethics in a globalized world, a complex ethics? What happens when I'm just thinking in terms of suffering and the reduction of my suffering? I'm thinking then about stress reduction. What happens to the inquiry into truth?

Now, all this is good and well. You say the Four Noble Truths are pragmatic, it's about practice, and therein lies their genius: they're pragmatic teachings. But -- and this relates to what we were saying in the last talk -- the version of the Four Noble Truths (and now there are many different versions), the version of the Four Noble Truths will be formed by the particular metaphysics and the particular fantasy that is underneath them. The particular metaphysics about what's real, what world we live in, how do we know, and the particular mythos and fantasy shapes, informs, directs, colours, etc., the Four Noble Truths, the version that we end up with.

One could use the Four Noble Truths in a different way, as actually a framework for inquiry into perception, in what philosophers call phenomenological inquiry. One could use it that way. Then it becomes something a little bit different (it still rests on assumptions), rather than having this idea or trying to live a life of non-clinging, a life free of craving, regarding the Four Noble Truths, "I'm trying to have this life that's free of craving, just letting go." Actually, that turns out in the modern world, for lay people, to be a bit ridiculous, a bit impossible. It does not fit. It's a clash of ideas and myths.

So this guy, Thomas Kuhn, goes on:

That enterprise [this scientific inquiry] seems an attempt [he's talking about normal science, so normal practice of meditation] to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed, those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. [Not seen. We just don't see what doesn't fit.] Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they're often intolerant of those invented by others.

He gives lots of examples of areas where people doing experiments just didn't take anything from the results, although from hindsight, stuff was staring them in the face. Or they literally didn't report this, or didn't notice this or that, in magnetism, electricity. Because the results didn't fit, they were ignored or just literally not seen. We don't see, we don't pay attention to, because of the paradigm, because of certain rules of what's right, what's wrong, how we proceed, how we approach things; because of certain practices, or range of practices; because of this commitment to lessening suffering; and because of our metaphysical commitments, which shape, direct, and limit the inquiry.

I could give you lots of examples within the Dharma. I don't have time, so I'll just mention one. A few years ago, I felt like I sort of stumbled on something in relationship to desire. A different way of relating to desire: not just being with it, not letting it go, not just being mindful of it and accepting that it was there, but entering into it, celebrating it more fully, allowing its power to move through the being, opening to it more fully. If you're interested, that's in a couple of talks; I think I gave some of them here, and it's the third one. There are two talks, and it's the third one that I'm talking about now.^[4]

According to Buddhist theory, it should not go like that. There's a way of holding desire, opening to desire, giving over to desire more in a way that opens freedom. That should not work. It should not work, according to Buddhist theory. This, for me, was extremely intriguing, very interesting. With a few students, etc., I led them through this, and always this opening, always this freedom that came through, with the desire. Not by letting it go, not by watching it -- through/with the desire. In a couple of instances, two teachers, I was working with them, going through some difficult stuff, and again, this opening, the beauty and the freedom that opened. In both instances, they were so taken with the beauty and the freedom that opened as a result that they did not notice how they got there. They did not notice that it was through the desire that they got there. It does not fit the paradigm, therefore we don't notice. We don't see and we don't give it attention. I could give you many more examples, but we don't have time.

So there's something in inquiry, whether it's Dharma or life or whatever -- I mean meditation or life in the larger sense -- we do need to build frameworks or take on frameworks given to us by others. We need to understand, we need to get used to those frameworks, and learn how to use them. This is good. Thomas Kuhn is a supporter of that. But it brings problems and limitations. So included in this inquiry is an inquiry into the background or underpinning metaphysics, like we said. They form the context of my path: where am I practising? Where am I meditating? Where does my path unfold? It unfolds in a certain world, in a certain context, given to me by the metaphysics that I am entertaining, that I am believing in. Not only that, but these background, underground metaphysical assumptions, as I keep saying, they shape, they direct, flavour, and limit the whole unfolding of our meditation, of our practice, of our notion of awakening, our sense of existence.

There are dominant cultural assumptions. We talk about modernism -- what does that mean? It's complicated to say what that means. The dominant cultural way of seeing things. It's hard to sum that up. This is from a wonderful book called The Passion of the Western Mind by a guy called Richard Tarnas. Really recommend it. He talks a lot about -- well, a bit of it, because it's a historical thing, is about modernism. Just to paraphrase some of what he said: in contrast to, let's say, the medieval world-view, the universe is now seen as an impersonal phenomenon. It's completely lacking any personhood. "An impersonal phenomenon, governed by regular natural laws, and understandable in exclusively physical and mathematical terms."^[5]

That means eventually we can reduce everything to physics and the mathematics, the physics of matter, neurons and all that, and what governs that. And discoverable by rationality, by logical thinking, and empiricism, experimentation. Man -- and this is gender-biased language, and feminist critique actually says this is part of the problem -- man is regarded as the highest intelligence, and the material world is the essential or only reality. Those two ideas bring secular humanism and scientific materialism. Man is the highest intelligence; material world is the essential, only reality.^[6] Other aspects of human nature -- the emotional, the aesthetic, the erotic, the relational, the ethical, the imaginative, the epiphanic (the opening to the coming and the experience of the gods) -- all that is generally regarded as irrelevant or distortional for an objective understanding of the world. The physical world possesses no intrinsic, deeper meaning; it's opaquely material. There's nothing here but material. And it's not the visible expression of spiritual realities. This, too briefly, sums up modernism.

One thing to draw out from that is the singular view of truth: there is one truth, or one way of approaching truth, and that is the objective, the attempt at objective, scientific, direct seeing. But implicit in all that, again, is a metaphysics -- ontology (what's real, what isn't real), epistemology (how do I know, what's the way to know things and what isn't), and cosmology (what is this world, what is the order of the cosmos) -- woven into all that, with this idea that we can know things objectively and independently. But, as we mentioned last time, this began falling apart over 100 years ago -- actually more. It began falling apart. So this is Heisenberg, the physicist:

Looking back to the different sets of concepts that have been formed in the past or may possibly be formed in the future in the attempt to find our way through the world by means of science, we see that they appear ordered by the increasing part played by the subjective element in the set. Classical physics [modernism] can be considered as that idealization in which we speak about the world as entirely separated from ourselves [that there is an objective, independently existing world, and we can know it purely, directly, unveiled, and undistorted].^[7]

In quantum theory, more recent physics,

man as the subject of science is brought in [you can't get away from the subject] through the questions which are put to nature [we frame things through the questioning] in the a priori terms of human science [depending on what your paradigm is]. Quantum theory does not allow a completely objective description of nature.

That's Heisenberg. Einstein was the last of the old school -- he was actually on the cusp, but the last of the old school of physicists. He really, really struggled. It caused him so much pain, this new way, this new level of understanding. For him, he said physics is like someone looking at a watch and trying to come up with a conception of what happens inside the watch, what mechanism operates inside the watch, and coming up with a conception to explain the hands and the dial moving and all that. But you can never be certain, Einstein said. He also said -- this is Einstein talking now:

[The physicist] may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.^[8]

So he still believed in that. There's an, I found, very touching book by James Gleick on another physicist, Richard Feynman, who was after Einstein. He's talking about all this, and he said of Einstein's time, "It was a simpler time." Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist for his work on quantum electrodynamics.

In Feynman's era, knowledge advanced, but the ideal of objective truth receded deeper into the haze beyond the vision of science. Quantum theory had left an impossible question dangling in the air.^[9]

Most physicists nowadays, or since the last 100 years, have actually given up on the philosophical questions of the reality of their models. They've actually just, "Let's just not go there." There's a phrase in modern physics that's been around for more than fifty years: "Shut up and calculate." [laughter] They have equations that can predict with unbelievable accuracy what might happen, or they can build stuff. What's actually happening? "Shut up and calculate." We don't go there. We can't go there. It was left to the philosophers, some philosophers, to try and enter into this differently opened realm of what 'truth' and 'reality' is.

That whole period of quantum physics in history, the first twenty-five years of the last century (skipping traditions now) could be seen as an instance of what in the tradition of the Jewish Kabbalah, some Kabbalah, is called 'the breaking of the vessels.' The vessels, the structures that held the whole idea of scientific progress, etc., or the way the world was, really -- not so much scientific progress, but the way the world was -- they broke, they shattered. It was an enormous crisis, an enormous, heart-wrenching crisis for those people that were involved. Breaking of the vessels. This is a metaphor from the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, a sixteenth century Kabbalist, and I got most of it from the writing of a guy called Sanford Drob.

The metaphor -- it's a metaphor, okay? -- the metaphor is this: in the creation of the universe, God's divine light poured forth, so to speak (metaphor, metaphor), poured forth and crystallized into containers called Sefirot. These held the divine energy. There were ten of them. I can't remember them all, but wisdom, knowledge, love, power, beauty, etc. They were aspects, if you like, of the divine. But the divine energy was too divine, too forceful, if you like, to be held within these structures. The structures, the vessels, shattered. They were broken. The shards fell through the void, scattered, fragmented, little shards of divine light wrapped up with the broken fragments of the vessels. Then we can restructure, recreate, new vessels to hold the energy of the divine.

It's a metaphor, but it's a metaphor that works at a lot of different levels and in a lot of different domains. What structures are created for us, or do we create, in our life, to support and contain our life energy and our psychic energy and support our life? They might be ideas. They are ideas. They might be values, morals. They might be socio-economic. They might be relationships or loves. All of that. They come, a lot of them, from the culture and cultures. Are they large enough? Are they flexible enough? Is it not that a crisis comes, crises come, or inquiry comes, and shatters vessels, shatters containers, shatters structures? That shattering is a crisis, but it's also an opportunity. Are any immune? In Isaac Luria's Kabbalah, it's interesting, because nothing, even the notion of God, and God creating man, and all that stuff, even those notions are not immune from the shattering. They're shattered, too, rebuilt, new ones; those are shattered. Are any immune for us, any ideas, any values? What do you think is immune? Is it really?

So we can also talk, with all this, about styles of inquiry, whether it's into the metaphysics underneath everything, and how that affects the path, the Dharma, the notion of the Dharma or whatever, or, for example, images. This is something I've been interested in recently, the place of the imagination and images. Okay, so you've got extrasensory perception as a possibility; you've got what we might call the imaginal; you've got daydreaming; you've got material things; you've got something like the number five -- not five apples, but just the number five. What's the reality status of any of them? How do you differentiate? These are actually important questions. And how does all this work with the imagination and images fit with the Four Noble Truths? Does it fit, or does it go beyond? Important questions.

In terms of styles of inquiry, we can, again, jumping traditions very quickly here, we could say there's an Apollonic style, the style of the archetype, the god, Apollo: rational, neat, ordered system of objective truth. "This is how things are. Let's put it into a neat system, a category, everything neatly categorized, and come up with that for objective truth" kind of philosophy. Or a Dionysian style. Dionysus, as a god, was dismembered, ripped apart in ecstasy. The ecstasy of dismembering. Something in the inquiry, with a kind of ecstasy, is actually pulling, destroying. As Jung said, "There's no creativity without destruction." Or maybe there is the style of the god Hermes, who has a much more playful relationship with the notion of truth. He's the god of boundaries, of communicating between different gods and different styles and different perspectives. He's playful. He doesn't stand for one truth. He has a very different relationship with that whole idea. This shattering, this breaking of the vessels, repeats. Again, build something new, build new structures; repeats. We could say, like some philosophers like Hegel said, "No, eventually we get to the final thing, the absolute, the unshatterable." What if we don't hold that idea? There's something about construction, destruction, construction, destruction -- more than just saying 'impermanence.'

So styles of inquiry. Here's a philosopher. His name is Simon Critchley. I'll paraphrase. He's talking about a certain movement within philosophy, much of the continental tradition of philosophy:

Philosophy is a means to criticize the present, to promote a reflective awareness of the present as being in crisis.^[10]

He gives a whole lot of examples: crisis of faith in Kierkegaard, of the European sciences in Husserl, of the human sciences, Foucault, of morals, etc., Nietzsche, bourgeois capitalist society, Marx, etc., dominance of nature in Adorno and Horkheimer, etc.

Philosophy as an acute reflection upon history, culture, and society leads to the awakening of critical consciousness [poking at what's called sedimented tradition, poking at sedimented tradition]. The responsibility of the philosopher ... is the production of crisis, disturbing the slow accumulation of the deadening sediment of tradition [opening up freedoms -- plural, freedoms]. For a philosopher, the real crisis would be a situation where crisis was not recognized.

This is about the present. It's easy to look at the past and say, "Those ignorant medievals! Those ignorant Indians in the Vedantic times," etc. Easy to do that. Present, now, here -- that's what we need to poke at. You recognize in that this Dionysian element. Paul Williams, a professor of Buddhism, I think at Bristol University, said, "The history of philosophy is the history of more or less interesting mistakes."^[11] Now, we could take from that, you could say, "Don't even try. You shouldn't even try and construct any system of concepts. Don't even try." But is there not, for us as human beings, something in the reaching, the groping, the seeking, the opening, the penetrating, in trying to understand, trying to formulate, trying to create conceptual structures, and destroying them? Is there not something of eros in there, something of beautiful longing, something of beauty? Something that stimulates deep creativity and the depth of our humanity? Something that vitalizes in there, that enhances and enchants something?

You might say, again, reading Paul Williams, "The history of philosophy is the history of more or less interesting mistakes" -- it's not what he means, "therefore don't conceptualize." It's not saying that either. Again, this so prevalent idea in the Dharma world, 'bare attention': "Don't conceptualize. Just be with things as they are." It's naïve. It's, if you like, an equivalent of the modernist idea that there's just one singular way to see truth. Bare attention is the meditator's equivalent of that singularism of modernism. It's not possible. You cannot -- the impossibility of being with things as they are. It's not possible. It's okay as a notion for a beginner, but it's actually not possible. I've talked about that in lots of other talks.

The philosopher W. V. O. Quine [said] all raw data, so-called raw data, are already theory-laden. We've already got loads of concepts filling all that, including the existentialist idea of the world that we visited last week. Already theory-laden. Even if I believe in the idea or the possibility of bare attention, I cannot live there. You cannot live there. It's impossible. It would be silly. The monks and nuns and the Buddha in the time of the Buddha did not live a life of bare attention. Enter into a meditation, there's a certain level where there seems to be a kind of bare attention, and then one goes deeper, much deeper than that -- there's an unfabricating. Come out of meditation, and wherever there's meaningfulness and beauty and aliveness and purpose, there is a cosmology. Those monks and nuns and the Buddha had their cosmology, which involved the appearance of the Buddha, the holy Buddha, in our midst, and the path to not be reborn into this world, and the whole texture and beauty and ethos and mythos of all that. There is always cosmology, metaphysics, mythos, fantasy, woven in wherever there is meaningfulness, beauty, purpose. I cannot live with bare attention.

We can talk about -- well, they do talk about in modern philosophy 'closed economy of thought' and 'open economies of thought.' What does this mean? It means wherever there's dogma or a rigidity of ideas -- and that rigidity, that dogma, could be from the unconscious ideas of modernism; it could be even the dogma of Buddhism. Buddhists think we're not dogmatic, and maybe that's part of the dogma, that we believe we're not dogmatic. It's a hidden dogma. Wherever there's dogma or rigidity of ideas, or a constriction in the experience, in the emotions, in also the behaviour, this is a kind of closed economy. Trying to reduce everything to neuroscience, trying to reduce everything, for example, to explain it through evolutionary biology. Or trying to explain something in particular through sexuality, reduce it to that evolutionary biology needed it for survival. Reduce it to chasing pleasant sensations -- that would be a very narrow, classically Dharmic explanation. Or reduce it to seeking love. Can you contain what sexuality really is, fully is, by even all those three put together? Evolutionary biology, seeking of pleasant sensations, seeking love? Is it not much, much more than that, infinitely more than that, infinitely more mysterious? Closed economy. Where does closed economy creep in? When are we in a closed economy without even realizing it? Are the different Buddhisms that exist, the different Dharmas that exist, for us, have they become closed economies? We say, "Dogma? That's for religious people. We're secular. We don't do dogma." Really? Really?

Actually, we cannot close, even if we try. No system of thought, or a system of non-thought, can assume or declare that it's complete, can assume or say that it's immune to critique or to be interpreted differently in the future. Nietzsche said, "God is dead." Very famous statement. He also said, "There are no facts. There are only interpretations." That was probably a much wiser statement. Any idea, any statement, any term -- God, liberation, Four Noble Truths, matter -- any of all of that is open to multiple interpretations. And we don't know how that unfolds in the future, what people will mean by those terms, Four Noble Truths, matter even, etc.

We could say that some Dharmas nowadays are what we could call 'modernist' Dharmas, believing in the primacy, the essential reality being material, believing impermanence as an ultimate truth, and believing a process interpretation of things (the self is a process, impermanent), and believing that's ultimately true. We may not use the word 'ultimate,' but that's the implication. Of course, of course that's popular. Why? Because it's the modernist idea of things right there. It's the modernist Weltanschauung, the world-view. Historically, in Western disciplines and philosophies, there's what's called 'postmodernism.' I don't want to get into that, because it's a charged word with lots of different, kind of nebulous meanings. It goes in and out of favour. But the whole ideas of modernism came under a lot of critique, have come under a lot of critique. The idea that there's a single perspective on truth kind of shattered as an idea. So what kind of Dharma does that give us, could that give us? A Dharma where the notion of matter being the essential reality, a Dharma where the notion of impermanence as being ultimately true, is not regarded as ultimately true. Impermanence is not an ultimate truth. Process view of things is not ultimately true.

This other Dharma might have, or another Dharma might have, just there are ways of looking and ways of conceiving that are available to us, and they unfold different existences. They unfold different cosmologies. That's, maybe, a central insight. A friend was telling me she read the book written by her teacher's teacher, an Asian nun, reporting all kinds of images and crazy visions of Buddhas and bodhisattvas and stuff. She said, "Well, this isn't what you teach. You don't teach this crazy stuff. She was your teacher. What's going on? You speak very highly of her." She replied, "Well, she had a medieval mind. She lived in Asia, and she had a medieval mind. We have a modern mind, so we can't do all that."

But maybe we need not any longer to have a modern mind. Maybe a modern mind is a thing of the past. It's old. Modernism is out of date, in a way, and so a modernist Dharma will also be out of date -- the metaphysics, the tenets, the assumptions that "Only this is real. Only this is true," whatever this is, X (usually, as we said last week, material, measurable, publicly shared, secular, socially agreed upon, etc.), only that's true; this is not true. And then, again, if we tie that to working with images, just as an example: nonsense, just random neuronal firings. They don't refer to anything real, or we reduce them to something. The hidden assumptions exposed -- always resting on assumptions, the metaphysics; always resting on assumptions. The newer understanding realizes that multiple views, multiple conceptual frameworks, are needed, and are therefore given legitimacy. The idea of singleness of vision is broken. William Blake, to paraphrase, [said] something like, "God help us from singleness of vision."^[12]

[59:03, shuffles papers] Guys, this is hopeless. [laughter] Shall we put it to the vote? What should we do? [student in background] You're welcome to leave. I actually don't mind. I'm going to finish ...[laughter] Is that okay? I realize it's a lot. I realize it's an unusual kind of talk and all that, so really fine. If you want to leave, just quietly, it's really no problem.

Inquiry into truth. What does truth become? It does not become, then, some fixed and final objective as an arrival point, and it's not arrived at singularly. One alternative Dharma could include that. One possibility could include that. Realizing everything is empty, everything is empty -- this is one alternative. Everything is empty. I realize, in that seeing, that to a great extent, what we perceive, how we feel life, how we sense it and how we sense existence, is dependent on the way of looking. It's dependent on the conceptual framework, to a great extent. I realize that. In realizing that, then I see, "Hmm, interesting. Let's see, when this way of looking, what happens? When this way of looking, what happens? What unfolds?" Careful what's being said here. We're not deconstructing truth and all that to a level where we can say it's equally true to say that you are a banana. Not being ridiculous like that, but what we are saying is, I cannot claim that truth is singular and arrived at singularly, and I certainly cannot claim that something like a materialist philosophy encompasses truth.

So again, using images as an example, just because it's something I've been exploring recently: people say, "But that's not real. It bothers me. That's not real. What are you doing? It's nonsense." It's a good question: what is the reality status, the ontological status, of this image? A warrior appears as an image for someone, has great power, starts to shift things in the being and the way of sensing existence. Cannot, does not, feel like it's reduced to my past, and what happened to me when I was young, etc., my history. What is it referring to, this warrior image that one has? What is the reality status of its referent? This is an important question. It's not a simple question. It's not at all a simple question.

Again, we could say the same thing of matter. When we talk about [taps on something], "But it's obvious! I can kick it!", what are you referring to? The sensations of solidity? "No, no, no, I mean the atoms." What do you mean by atoms? "Well, a proton and electron." What do you mean by electron? Keep going. What's the ontological status? We went into some of this last week and a little bit today with the Heisenberg. Of material things and matter, the same question about reality. Not simple. More recent thinking in a lot of traditions, philosophy, anthropology, art, etc., acknowledges actually that imagination is part of our perception; it's woven into our perception. Woven in, it's part of the way we understand the world. We can no longer only understand the world in one way. Imagination is a way of understanding the world, a way of knowing, epistemological.

So something widening, opening up the constrictions of the beliefs about what we can know (epistemology). Modernism, whether it's existentialism or scientism or whatever it is, modernism believes its ideology is truth. In that, it tends to narrow down the possible narratives and the possible myths of existence, of being human. It tends to narrow it to one or two -- the narrative of evolutionary biology. Existence gets narrowed to one myth. What other ideologies narrow the myths and the fantasies of being human? What other ideologies narrow the myths and the fantasies? Now, already, by using words like 'myth,' 'fantasy,' 'mythos,' I'm already suggesting different ways of knowing, different ways of sensing existence. There is the opening to what is not literal, not concrete, not singular. Different notion, different sensibility opened up just using those words.

In terms of this idea of the styles of inquiry, I mentioned there's the style of Hermes, the god Hermes, a hermetic style, we may say. Maybe this, as I suggested, this style, may be much more at home in a more fluid way of moving. It can move between different ideas, different frameworks, different eidos, ideas of the ways we see -- entertains ideas and conceptual frameworks, without so much believing X or Y. Hermes is not interested in believing X is true or Y is not true. If he believes anything, he believes in the necessity of the multiplicity of ideas and conceptual frameworks, and the multiplicity of fantasies. Again, just because it so needs repeating: we assume that with mindfulness we are 'being with things as they are,' with this bare attention, that there is no belief coming into it, that we're just experiencing. Implicit in this so-called bare attention, all kinds of conceptions -- all kinds. Hunt them out! Find out what they are. Is it possible to entertain different ones? And then what happens to experience? Bare attention is the myth of no myth, the concept of no concept. It's an illusion.

Hermetic -- this idea, it doesn't sit comfortably with some people: "I don't like that. I want to know what's what." Deep understanding of emptiness helps. It helps liberate that as a possibility. Certain personalities will just gravitate towards it more easily. But also it helps -- it's why I mentioned some of what happened in physics, the revolutions in physics, and the revolutions in philosophy that happened, because they're also part of opening up a different way of understanding, different ways of knowing, different way of moving in the world, so that we can entertain ideas, conceptual frameworks, etc., without insisting "this is the only truth or the ultimate truth," without even any idea needing to be provable. And some ideas are not provable. Some assumptions that eventually you reach, they're not provable. Hermes is not interested in arriving at some final or complete or neat system of things. There's an open-endedness here, discovery, flexibility.

But in doing that, one notices something (this is really key; I mentioned it before): that the conceptual framework, the theory that I have of anything, has an effect. It is causal. This is absolutely huge and fundamental. The conceptual framework, often unconscious, a theory often unconscious, is causal. So one area you can see this is with the whole idea of emotional catharsis, that I have stored in me emotions, wounds, from the past, and they can come up, stuff can come up in meditation or psychotherapy or whatever. That's a theory. The theory gives rise to certain results. I can play with turning that on and off as a theory, adopting different theories, seeing what happens. Is it ultimately true, or is the theory itself part of what, as I said, unfolds certain experience?

Again, touching on images, if I say, "Well, that's just random neuronal firings," the images will tend to die out. We're not interested. It's just rubbish, just refuse. If I say the images are coming -- a typical psychotherapeutic understanding -- coming because of a result of my past and my childhood, they're representing stuff that happened to me in the past, that will also limit the images that come up. It will send them down a certain tunnel, and also limit the range of what comes up. If I have a very different philosophy -- let's say, I don't know, Neoplatonic, an old philosophy from the Western tradition -- the cosmos is ensouled. There is a soul; divinity permeates the cosmos. The cosmos, the things of the world, are multilevelled in their being imbued with the divinity or divinities, the different kinds of divinities. Angelic presences are imbued in everything. It's a completely different idea. In that, we can perceive some of that through the imagination. Utterly different idea. That idea opens up the imagination in a very different way, and the experience of imagination.

So in this more hermetic way, we're interested in all this, and it's not so much about dogma or belief (including modernist secular dogmas or beliefs). But it's more about entertaining different ideas, conceptual frameworks and, if you like, modes of being, or myths, fantasies of existence. That opens up different worlds. Different spiritual universes open up. The philosopher Jacques Derrida has this phrase, "Marginalizing by the dominant discourse." What he means is some set of ideas comes to be predominant, and everything else gets kind of shoved to the side as inferior or ridiculous or rubbish. You see that through history. A long time ago, it was traditional religion that shoved everything else aside, and then that got flipped with modernism, so that a lot of people regard religious thought as being utterly ridiculous. It got flipped. But it starts to take all this apart, and actually no set of ideas can claim that it's some kind of super-discourse, super set of ideas, that is superior to all other accounts of human experience.

This is not being nice. It's not saying, "Oh, it's okay, everyone can ..." It's actually critiquing the idea that you can sum it up and say, "This is how it is." I think one of his students called Mark Taylor said actually in the history of philosophy, you get these opposite kind of ideas, what he calls 'binary opposites' or 'dualities.' It's interesting to trace it through history. Something like God and the world -- for a long time, God was what was really real and important, and the world was actually illusion and not important. With modernism, that got flipped: God is illusion and pretty unimportant, and the world is what's really real and important, and success, secular achievement, etc. Or what's permanent and what's changing: the permanent was what's real, what's changing is illusory. That also got reversed: there's nothing permanent, it's illusion, and what's real is changing.

More modern thinking actually doesn't just reverse these notions. It used to be what's sacred versus what's profane, or religious versus secular, and then that gets flipped: the secular is more important or more significant or more real than the religious, or sanity/madness, these kind of ideas. Actually not to just keep flipping them through history, but start to look. These dualities, these opposites, are not separate in the way that we think they are. They're actually tied into each other. They imply each other. They're spilling into each other. You pull the rug out from underneath that. You critique that. Not maintaining this idea of opposites, not separating them, and privileging this and then privileging that.

Okay. So, one big idea, one big idea that it's possible to entertain is the idea that images and fantasies, and what I call mythos or mythoi, that that is primary. I don't mean 'primary' being first in a sort of neurological framework. That's a whole other idea. I mean 'primary' as being what's deepest and most important, most central in guiding us, in directing us, in giving us a sense of meaningfulness, direction, purpose, beauty, etc., in life. Images and fantasies are primary. That's a big idea to entertain.

I've talked about it in other talks, so I'm not going to elaborate too much here. It's a dangerous idea. There are people sitting in the hall right now who have played with this and can testify: this is a dangerous idea. It might not sound it. It will lead to a shattering of the vessels, this breaking of the vessels. It will lead to this more hermetic style of inquiry, of consciousness. It will lead to realizing that actually when we talk about the Buddha, we're talking about a fantasy of the Buddha. Where there's meaningfulness, where there's beauty, where there's purpose, there is fantasy operating for us. You only need to open up a few histories or documents of the Buddha. Thích Nhất Hạnh's Buddha, Stephen Batchelor's Buddha, etc. -- fantasy. Can you not see it written there? It's very different Buddhas there, Buddha created in one's own image sometimes. There's fantasy of the Buddha, a fantasy of what an awakened person looks like, and does or doesn't do, or how they are more generally, a fantasy of awakening.

There's fantasy of the Buddha, and with that, a fantasy operates of his authority. A fantasy of the authority of the Buddha. Taboo to trace this back. Taboo to question the authority of the Buddha. Taboo to question. So everything is framed, through 2,500 years of history and still today, it's framed not as questioning the Buddha, but in the style of, "This is what he said," or "This is what he meant when he said this." Nāgārjuna, the whole Mahāyāna tradition that came several hundred years after the Buddha, said, "This was hidden teaching that the Buddha gave, that he only gave to certain disciples." The Vajrayāna that came, the tantric teachings that came several hundred years later, this was very hidden teaching that he only gave to certain people. No one says, "This was an advance. The Buddha got so far, and now the Mahāyāna was an advance. Nāgārjuna, Mahāyāna, Asaṅga, was an advance on his teaching." No one frames it like that, all through the history of Buddhism: "The tantric teachings are an advance, are building on the Buddha's teaching and then taking it a step further, filling out its implications more fully, exploring more fully." Always it's presented as history. Always looking to the past.

And then you have the question, "Is it what the Buddha said, or what the Buddha meant, or is it not?" Never met the Buddha. Never met him. None of these people ever met him. None of the people who even wrote the Pali Canon down probably ever met him, because it was at least 100 years after he died. Never met the Buddha. Some of these people for sure wouldn't like the Buddha, because he's such a different personality. [laughs] His words recorded, obviously a wide range of interpretations there -- just look around us, even just at Gaia House. Wide range of interpretations, plural. The interpretations usually seem to fit the personality and the metaphysical inclinations and the favoured mythos of the interpreter.

What are we dealing with here? It's not saying there wasn't a historical Buddha; I'm not saying that at all. But fantasy imbues this, and there's nothing wrong with that. The only wrong is not realizing it. Fantasy imbues what we love, what gives us meaning, what gives us purpose, direction. Any attempt at a Buddhism that returns to the authority of the Pali Canon, the original teachings, weaves a fantasy of the Buddha, and does not question or admit its own metaphysics or the assumptions that that metaphysics rests on, any kind of Buddhism or attempt at Buddhism that does that is what I would call a religious fantasy. It might call itself 'secular.' It's a religious fantasy. Religio, 'to tie again to the old.' To tie again to the old, religio, like 'ligament.' Religious fantasy. No matter what we call it, it's a religious fantasy. I'm going to end ... soon. [laughter] I promise.

Okay. Whoa, where have we got to? See if you can grasp this. All this, everything, what I've said so far in these two talks, does it not imply that the very notion of liberation, what liberation is and what it involves, is always tied up with metaphysics, with views about reality, about knowing, and about a kind of cosmology, the order of the cosmos? And some of that eventually rests on assumptions, some of which you just cannot get below -- you have to assume something. All of it, what we think of as liberation, whatever notion, whether it's a clear one or a dim one, the notion of liberation, what it is and what it involves, is always tied up with metaphysics and metaphysical assumptions. So that implies that delusion -- the opposite of liberation, if you like -- delusion must always include not realizing this. Do you get that? Delusion includes not realizing that liberation, what the notion of liberation is, involves metaphysical assumptions.

The notion of liberation -- again, heart notion, intellectual notion, the vague notion, clear notion -- the notion of liberation also involves fantasy and image, mythos, of liberation. We have a fantasy, an image, a mythos, and that's partly what fills it out. Does an awakened person partake in civil disobedience about, say, the government's inaction on climate change? Or do they not? Do they sit calmly and accept what's happening? What's the fantasy of an awakened person, what they do and don't do, what their style is, how they think, etc.? It's not a bad thing. Fantasy has such a bad rap in Dharma teaching. I don't think it's a bad thing. It's a beautiful thing. It's a necessary thing. But it's delusion not to realize that metaphysics and fantasy are woven into it all, including being woven into what our notion of liberation is.

So there's fantasy of awakening. There are fantasies. It's all plural. That's the thing: it's all plural. That's where we started, if you remember back to the first talk, with the plurality of all this, the range. Fantasy of awakening, fantasy of the path, fantasy of the past, the tradition, and all of that affects the style of inquiry. The calm sage clarifying, clearly saying, "This is how it is. This is the structure of the aggregates ..." The calm sage. There's a certain fantasy of a style. The simple, the natural person, the natural man/woman -- no questions, no concepts, "I am simple." That fantasy of awakening. Is there a Dionysian fantasy of awakening? Could there be a hermetic fantasy that involves that different style? The ideas that we're talking about in the big sense, and the fantasies, intertwine. They're mixed. Maybe there should be one word for the whole thing, but they intertwine. They feed each other.

Now what? Where does this lead us? What door opens, and to where? That's the end of part two. [yogi exclaims, laughter] We'll see. Let's have a bit of quiet. It's been very long.