Transcription
So yes, it is something of a barrage of dense ideas and a lecture format. I realize that's not to everyone's tastes. It is also a little bit a product of the system as much as anything, which is a whole other conversation. Let's leave that. If it's too much right now, just meditate. Just zone out. It's being recorded, so you can catch up. Even if you're eagerly listening to every word, I pretty much guarantee you that the second, third, fourth and fifth time you listen, you'll pick up other stuff. There are a lot of ideas coming, multilevelled, multidirectional, etc. So that's fine. If it's too much, just leave it, and then you can zone in and out.
Just to pick up where we left off: we're actually just pointing out something that already exists for us, is part of our relationship with the Dharma, is that fantasy imbues it -- fantasy of the Buddha, fantasy of what awakening is -- and that this isn't a problem. And more than that, that whatever the metaphysical assumptions are, what we think reality is and how the universe is, that actually constrains and directs what we think the Four Noble Truths mean. So that if I believe basically I am a biologically machine, my Four Noble Truths is limited by being a biological machine. All I can ever do is tweak the software, shift the hardware a little bit. That's it.
If I believe that the nature of everything, including biological machines and neurons and atoms, all is empty, my Four Noble Truths suddenly gets much bigger in what it means. If I believe an existentialist view, "These are the limitations," that's my Four Noble Truths. That's as far as it goes. And that's what dukkha means. So the meaning of liberation, the ending of suffering, what suffering, what dukkha actually means, the path, all of it is actually shaped and constrained by what my metaphysics is. And mostly it's unconscious. Sometimes it's unconscious.
So we could say the Four Noble Truths is actually a skeleton. It's a skeleton, meaning it's something that needs fleshing out -- fleshing out by a particular metaphysics and by a particular fantasy. In itself, it's nothing. It's nothing but a skeleton. Common language for Buddhists, but it's a skeleton. All of these different views, whether it's the biological machine, the existentialist Dharma, this or that, they will all try and claim reality, prove "We're basing our Dharma in reality." All struggle to prove it -- or just assume that it's real. And usually the ones that can just assume, how can I assume? It's usually because I just agree with the typical modernist assumptions of what the world is, and therefore I'm real, and I don't have to prove anything. So it's easy, easy to teach the Dharma when you agree with what is unquestioned, or when that Dharma agrees with that.
But again, from the point of view of modern physics, from more modern philosophy, deep emptiness practice, this typical modernist notion of the universe and what reality is, is actually not what everyone assumes. It's not the 'real thing,' so to speak.
Is it still Buddhism? We use the language in common, and we mean very different things. Or we could put that question aside. When a teacher comes -- so, I've come; I don't know who comes next, or who came before me, this or that teacher -- what am I communicating when I teach, or when any teacher comes? I mean, Tony's right: today I'm not saying that much in terms of techniques that will alleviate your suffering. If you know my teaching a lot, you know that it's full of that usually, and you can find hours and hours and hours of multiple techniques for reducing suffering, different perspectives, practices, etc. A teacher comes, whoever it is -- me or anyone else -- and is communicating, sure, ways of reducing suffering, which is classical, centrally Dharma. But is the teacher not also teaching and communicating a particular fantasy, a particular mythos, of what awakening is, of what the Dharma is, and also of what the cosmos is? Is that not part of what gets communicated? Oftentimes directly. More often not -- it's like a side thing that one's barely aware is going on. And that when you like this teacher and don't like that teacher, or like that teacher and don't like this teacher, part of it is not so much that this one is clearer at giving instructions to reduce suffering. Partly you're falling in love with a particular mythos about what the Dharma is, what awakening is, and what the cosmos is.
"In the Pali Canon it says," "The Buddha said this/that." I say it all the time. All the teachers, we all say it all the time. Partly it's just shoring up one's own message with a version of authority. But partly, also, there's what I would call a religious fantasy going on. We're communicating and we're wrapped up in a religious fantasy. What's common about religious fantasies is that they look backwards. The authority is in the past, and usually dead. The Buddha is the authority. There's a religious mythos here.
Yogi: Yeah, but before Buddha, there was Hindu.
Rob: Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but basically ...
Yogi: I mean, that also came from somewhere. Was that fantasy?
Rob: Well, people would say different things about that. Always when there's a mythos and religious fantasy, it always invokes past and present and future, and does certain things with that. Some people say, "No, the Buddha was an absolute break with anything that you're calling Hindu" (Vedantic, actually). They'd say, "No, he was a radically different thinker." Other people say, "No, he just arose out of that." But somehow, there's still a particular mythos, a fantasy, that's religious in that it's backward-looking to authority. Yeah? Contrast that with a scientific way of seeing: the authority is not in the past. You wouldn't say, "Let's get back to Copernicus! That's the real authority. We want to replicate that." It's a different mythos. Do you get the sense?
Yogi: Yeah.
Rob: And again, fantasy/mythos/image, not bad, not wrong. Only if I don't admit and realize, then it becomes problematic.
Here's a question for you: is it not that if you love the Dharma, there are people here who love the Dharma, that actually, after a while, it's not just that you're looking to reduce your suffering? It's not just that you're looking for techniques and a kind of meditative technology. This is asking you to look inside. That's part of it, of course. But is it not that you are in love with a kind of beauty, a particular kind of beauty? And that you're in love with the expressions of beauty, whether that's an expression of gentleness or love or renunciation or whatever? Some expression of beauty grabs your soul, speaks to your soul. And that that's as important at times, and at times more important, than letting go of suffering, or reducing suffering? That partly one is in love with the mythos, and that involves past and present, and tradition, and Dharma, and future, and the journey of the self, and the styles of existence? That's what we're in love with, as much as we just want to reduce suffering, which is supposedly the central theme of the Dharma. Teachers become mythological figures.
And that mythos that we fall in love with, if you love the Dharma, includes a mythos of the cosmos: what is this existence that we're living in? What is the world? How does it function? What's the ordering of the cosmos? And that we want also, we fall in love with, a myth to live by, a mythos to live by and to live in. Is that not part of what already is happening, and just we don't somehow fully acknowledge it?
So you could say the Dharma, and a whole other way of seeing what the Dharma is for us, maybe, anyway, is that it's a mythos. It forms a mythos, or we form a particular mythos, a particular version of Dharma, each individual. The Dharma is a mythos for beauty. It's for beauty and for soulfulness, going back to this word that I said before. That's what's happening here, if you love it. That's a shift in our whole way of understanding, our whole ground of what Dharma is. We're no longer grounded in the usual ways we would tend to ground what we think of what the Dharma is. We're grounding it in mythos and fantasy. Something seems like it's ungrounded. Very different understanding and conception of ground, of what is actually happening here.
In regard to the Four Noble Truths, which I think a lot of people in the Insight Meditation tradition would say that's the central thing, that's what makes a Buddhist, the Four Noble Truths -- "If you include that, then you're a Buddhist. Then it's Dharma. If you're not, then you're doing something else." So for a practitioner, what makes a practitioner? What makes a practitioner is relating to this moment, let's say, in terms of the Four Noble Truths. Here is some dis-ease, dukkha. It has causes. In other words, it's being supported by something that is amenable to shifting and doing something with -- ways of relating, ways of looking, responding, etc. There's dukkha, in the moment. I'm looking for it. I feel it. I relate to it differently. Or I see that it comes from causes. There's the possibility of easing it somewhat -- that's the Third Noble Truth. And then there are ways to do that -- Fourth Noble Truth.
So, very loosely, the Four Noble Truths are like how a Buddhist looks at things. And then there's the more complex Four Noble Truths, eightfold path and all that. We could say, when you get into the bigger version, it's kind of a skeleton, really. It needs fleshing out from the metaphysics and from the mythos, and it depends on the fantasy. How many people nowadays actually talk about ending suffering, ending all dukkha? And my experience teaching is that very few people are actually really interested in that, ending and eradicating all dukkha. Most people, if you're really honest with yourself, that's not what I'm really aiming for. I'm not. And someone just said to me the other day, "It's actually not what I'm interested in."
Yogi 2: But that sounds like an assumption that everyone will be not interested in ending suffering. I'm a bit confused by that statement.
Rob: No, I guess what I'm saying is very, very few people.
Yogi 2: That's what you're really saying.
Rob: Very, very few people are actually -- plus, the idea that "What does it even mean anyway?" And that will depend on the metaphysics and the cosmology and all that. To completely end all dukkha, it depends on what version of the cosmos I'm dealing with, and what I think dukkha is, and what I think liberation is. But generally speaking, very few people, eradicating completely all suffering is -- it's part of the language of Dharma, but very few people are really interested in that.
What happens when we're okay enough? If you practise, and you have enough of a tool kit of practices, and you understand a degree of emptiness, and cultivate some well-being, you're going to get to a point -- and it doesn't need to take that long, necessarily -- when you're really okay enough, or you feel in yourself, "To be honest, I'm okay enough." What happens then? People still practise. Why do they practise? Why am I practising when I'm okay enough? A person's okay where they are: "I still have suffering, but I'm okay with it. Comes and goes. Know how to work with it." What is it? It's actually the fantasy and the mythos of beauty, of soulfulness, of Dharma itself, of liberation -- that that's why we're practising. And that includes the fantasy or the mythos of the self on the journey, on the path, and of the cosmos. And that's what we want. Maybe we want, as much as we want to reduce our suffering, we want to be enchanted. We want to be enchanted. We want to be enchanted by the mythos that we're in and by the sense of the cosmos. Maybe that's what we want. Or maybe something in us wants that equally, a mythos of the cosmos and a mythos to live by.
One of the things about deep emptiness practice is -- and this isn't a talk about emptiness, but one of the things about deep emptiness practice is it gives you more choice. The world and the self become malleable, so one can live in different cosmoses. One can see the world very, very differently, and move between senses of this kind of cosmos, this kind of self, and others. So there is actually a whole other way of seeing the Four Noble Truths. Most people would regard the Four Noble Truths as, "I'm trying to live a life of non-clinging, because it's clinging and craving that give rise to suffering. So somehow I try and live or move towards a life of non-clinging." And does it work? And does it work as a lay person? And has anyone ever succeeded? How's it going, if you're trying that? How's it going? It doesn't work.
Or a different way of seeing the Four Noble Truths, which is seeing the Four Noble Truths as a key, as a kind of conceptual set, to begin to play with lessening clinging, and different experiences of letting go of craving, more and less and more and less, and seeing how perception of the world, of the self, of the cosmos, changes with more or less of the different kinds of clinging that there are. Then I understand: what I see, what I experience of the self and the cosmos, is dependent on clinging, dependent on perception. I'm understanding: this cosmos, this self, is empty. So the Four Noble Truths lead to emptiness, not to a life of non-clinging, which would be the traditional. And there are people in this hall, I know, they know, that it does not fit to try and live a life of non-clinging. So many people, "I'm failing," or "I'm trying to be in a relationship and not crave." It doesn't work. It's a little bit foolish, in fact.
Yogi 3: I came here today with partly wanting to kind of answer a question to myself, about the place of creativity and images. Ānāpānasati, the sutta, [?] about watching mental formations, and watching this, and watching that, and there's a kind of underlying expectation that you let it all go by.
Rob: Exactly.
Yogi 3: But yet my other, really deep experience is that there is a time for knowing and a transcendent knowing that comes from trusting the process of image that arises.
Rob: Yeah, precisely.
Yogi 3: And a sort of sense of "When do you follow? And when is it a distraction?" And the link that's come to me [?], it did sort of drop in and help, which is the thing about beauty. And in the sutta, where it says, "It's beautiful in the beginning, beautiful in the middle, beautiful at the end." For instance, when I'm on retreat, and I get very still with lots and lots of meditation, then I always write poetry, because that's what arises, because you fall in love with the world.
Rob: Yeah, yeah.
Yogi 3: You just see it in a completely different way. And part of me thinks, "Oh, I shouldn't be getting off on all these images! I should be sitting on my cushion, just staying with the bare attention." And yet, it is so compelling. But also it brings up so much greater understanding of the aesthetic place of [?] teaching in the world.
Rob: Yeah, exactly.
Yogi 3: And there is a real beauty. And I think maybe that's going to be a really useful link, that sort of the aesthetic appeal of it as well, that it all fits together so beautifully and skilfully.
Rob: Yeah, wonderful. And as I said, that's part of what we fall in love with. That's part of what we love. In terms of navigating, I go back to what I said earlier, this morning and at the beginning of this afternoon. What all this leaves us with in practice is like -- 'gears' is the wrong word, but we can have it all. That's the lovely thing. You can have it all. You can have a mode of meditation that really quietens the image. You just let everything go. Just breath, or just this moment of touching, the feet on the floor or whatever it is -- just simple mindfulness, and there are less images. Then you can get another mode which, in my language, fabricates even less: everything just goes, like becomes white light, or fades out or whatever. Both of those have less images. And then a third possibility is, as you said, let's open up to the aesthetics, the beauty, through the images. And there's no reason why you can't have all of that. Exactly when to move between them is ... pff. You know, I don't think there's a right and a wrong there, so much as one can play with this. I'll maybe come back to this at the end. But there's no reason why you can't have all of it. And then something more total gets included, yeah? That's very important. And there's something about beauty that's central, absolutely central, and just acknowledge it, because it's already there, as you were saying. It's already there. I'm not saying anything different than what's already going on. Yeah, lovely. Okay.
I'm just throwing this out as a bit of an aside: a different way of understanding the Four Noble Truths, not trying to live a life of non-clinging, but trying to use the Four Noble Truths as a way of opening up understanding of the emptiness of things -- that still rests on metaphysics, that way of doing it. It still rests on epistemological assumptions. Can't get away from that.
So what have we got here? It's like, maybe saying something like: at times, at the minimum, let's say, at times, it is not ending suffering that we're interested in. It's not even reducing suffering that we're interested in at times. But it's this mythos and this fantasy, or whatever they are, of the self, of the cosmos, of Dharma itself. It's interesting. I go back to -- I don't think anyone actually calls their version of Dharma 'existentialist Dharma,' but let's call something like that, which is more like, "This material reality is what there is, and one is limited, in a finite being, born in a meaningless universe, will die at a certain point, and one has to sort of bear up and confront and bear with that existential reality."
It's quite a popular version of the Dharma nowadays. It's way too simple to say. But is there not also, the person who espouses that, are they not also enchanted with that? Is there not also, grim as it might sound, they're actually also quite enchanted with that fantasy? It's the fantasy of dealing with reality, and bearing up, and being in the truth. There's a fantasy of the self as the one who can bear it and is courageously staring reality in the face, the fantasy of the Dharma that gets formed, and the fantasy of the cosmos there. But again, invoking more modern physics and more modern philosophy, it's questionable, and there's not just one way of knowing reality, which is the rational and the empirical. So the truth claim of that kind of Dharma, I think, is a little bit undermined if you poke at it enough. Unfortunately, it bases its enchantment on the fact that it's true, and again, you get this 'myth of no myth' thing. But there is an enchantment there as well. Even that person is enchanted by that vision of the cosmos.
If we talk about decreasing suffering, reducing suffering, and working with images -- and again, most of this I've talked about in other talks, and I didn't want to repeat today -- but working with images, particularly with a certain conceptual relationship with them which gives them more of an archetypal significance, or more this sense of something bigger, something perhaps even holy, numinous, image as epiphany. 'Epiphany' means 'the appearance of a God,' the sudden appearance of something divine. Image as epiphany and primary. Or Coleridge, the poet and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, said:
The essential mark [he uses the word 'symbol'] of the image is the reflection of the eternal in and through the temporal.[1]
That kind of loose idea, working with images that way, my experience working with people is it will actually open up a sense of the emptiness of self, a sense of the illusory nature of the ego, and also reduce suffering. It has a very direct, almost classically Dharmic result. Working with images in that way tends to deconcretize our sense of the self and sense of the world, lessen the solidity of things there. And that lessening of the solidity is part of what I would say, or in one view, is part of deep liberation: things get less solidified. But it's just one view.
So it can work in a classically Dharmic way, or it can work in quite a different way, which is, as I said, not even trying to head toward the end of suffering. I'm not making a goal of balancing these different images: "I balance the virgin with the mother, and the warrior with the monk, and make sure none of them get too out of hand, and that sense of balancing all these archetypes within me." Not even that. Not trying to subordinate the images to some central executive self in the name of integration, keep them all in balance. Not following a narrative image -- so the warrior will fight his battle, win the war, hang up his spear, meet the woman of his dreams, settle down, build a nice house, and become a farmer, and be very peaceful. It's not a narrative sequence in time. There's something timeless in these images. They don't go anywhere. We're not moving a narrative towards more ease and more normal okayness, towards some happy ending. Not for the ego, but for the sake of soulmaking, what John Keats would call 'soulmaking.' That kind of way of seeing images is very different, and not really in the service of ending suffering in the usual way that we think about it.
But the image, as I said before, holds a lot. It holds beauty, and it holds a sense of something is being fulfilled through image. Something is being fulfilled, and that's not the same as ending or even reducing suffering. Something in the soul is being fulfilled, something in the psyche. Something is right, and soulful-bringing, if we use that word.
So that after a certain amount of reducing suffering through the path, or just at times, this soulfulness becomes the compass. That's how I'm moving in the world, is in the direction of and for the sake of soulfulness. That's different than trying to reduce suffering. Healing? Yes, plenty of healing, plenty. That story of the black devil man, and seeing him suddenly, and then the suffering just going in two seconds? The image had become powerful through its use. It's like a tincture, when you boil the stuff, and then you cool it and boil it and spin it. Through working with the image, it becomes powerful like a tincture. So there is healing. But who is healed, and what is healed? It's actually more complex.
But anyway, sort of paralleling usual Dharma stuff, working with images this way is about the same in terms of reducing suffering, etc. And the ending suffering? Most people are not actually that engaged with it anyway, and some people, it's not even there as part of their Dharma myth. There is no 'ending suffering' as part of the myth of the Dharma that's alive for them.
So three thoughts to conclude with or to leave you with, three sort of openings, really. If I begin to entertain this sense of Dharma as mythos, there's a whole question of awakening, and different myths of awakening, and whether awakening needs to be a finality or is open-ended. We can't get to that today; it's too big. But that's connected. But if I entertain this, Dharma as mythos, that might sound catastrophically disappointing. I don't know where it lands right now. But it only will sound disappointing if I really believe in a concrete reality, because then, in relation to this 'real,' this is a fantasy. If I begin to see that actually there's always fantasy, it just depends on the direction, then it's not. Something else opens up in the whole sense of what's going on here. A different ground for the Dharma, and different possibilities opening up. Three to end with:
(1) If, at times, the Dharma is not primarily for ending suffering, but for beauty and enchantment of existence and of the cosmos, and if there's a certain leeway in the mythos and in the fantasy of the self and of the cosmos and of the Dharma and of liberation, then doesn't the Dharma actually become and practice become more like poetry, or like writing poetry? It is itself like writing poetry, or like art. Let's say it's like art. The Dharma itself is more like art than anything else. And not 'the art of calming down.' And not 'the art of concentration.' And not 'the art of equanimity.' And not 'the art of reducing suffering.' Just art. Just art. What is art for? What's art for? Art is just for art. You can never box in what art is for. It's always going to be more than whatever definition we come to. It's just Dharma as art.
Yogi 4: [?] something that hasn't happened yet.
Rob: That could be part of it. It could be. But there's also, in art, the whole idea of past masters and replicating and being able to mimic them and the tradition. There's quite a lot there, but that's part of it, absolutely. Yeah. But a way of seeing it more as art, that could be one possibility, which is a whole different conception. Not 'the art of,' but just art, like writing poetry.
(2) Second thought, and I've said this before: is Buddhism and is the Dharma currently constrained to one small and narrow range of mythos, fantasy, image, of what awakening looks like (especially in the Theravāda)? In, through which, we elevate certain emotions: equanimity, love (as long as it's non-erotic). Non-erotic love, equanimity, non-entanglement -- these are elevated, and their opposites or other emotions are regarded at best with suspicion. So through the fantasy, it gets narrowed: this is what awakening looks like, this is what an awakened person does or doesn't do, how they behave, how they speak, what they engage in, what they don't. And certain emotions are given value or devalued. Is it then possible, if we have a new, a different ground for the Dharma, that actually all that gets opened up, and there's a much wider range, say, if we use the language, including other archetypes, of what awakening can look like? The image, the fantasy of awakening is broadened, can be broadened.
It's interesting historically: why did tantra arise? Partly, it may be psychologically, the Dharma wasn't wide enough, and so you needed erotic-images and wrathful deities and all this. There are other reasons, too, to do with emptiness. And maybe some of those images don't reduce suffering. Maybe they actually create suffering to a certain degree.
(3) Third and final thing, and then I'll finish. Let's say something general. When you're working with images and figures -- so the black devil man, the phoenix, whatever it is -- they come through in the life. They begin to come through. There's an interface. They flow into the life -- maybe not directly, but indirectly, sometimes very subtly, but not literally. So an image I have of a warrior, but I never would join the army or hurt anyone physically. It comes through non-literally. And so there's a service, that our life pays service to these images that come to us. And so they're reflected in the life, in everyday life, but maybe they also matter in themselves, at their own level; they don't need to be reflected in the life. "Meditation for life, Dharma for life, everyday life" -- maybe there's a level of our psyche that, "Who cares about life? Who cares?" There's another level, and it doesn't matter. It matters for the psyche, so to speak, in and of itself. There are other dimensions of our being. Similarly with Dharma and with practice as something that's more like an art. Of course it spills over. It needs to spill over into our everyday life and our relationships and our work and our ethics. Of course. But maybe there's another level of Dharma that just doesn't need to. It can just be like art and like some of these images, just its own stratum. It doesn't need to spill into everyday life. It's both.
Okay. Shall we have a bit of quiet together?
Paraphrasing Samuel Coleridge Taylor, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Aids to Reflection, Vol I (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884), 437. ↩︎
