Transcription
I'm going to talk for a little bit longer now, and as I said, later there will be time for discussion and questions, etc. There's so much to say. I'm not repeating, because I came here last year and talked about imaginal stuff, but different stuff, and on the web there are other talks, etc. There's a lot to say about all this. There were quite a few questions. I said a lot of stuff last year; there's a lot of stuff on the internet now, talks I've given. Some stuff is not there, talks I've given in other places in different directions.
One piece I will throw out, because it came up in -- well, quite a lot came up in the little group, so this is not connected with what I want to say, but I will throw it out: when we did the guided meditation earlier, and we were talking about being aware of a sort of energy field, etc., and then you can use the imagination like that, I contrast that type of mindfulness of the body with the type of mindfulness of the body we just did when we were standing, or if you know the mindfulness course, when you eat the raisin. If I stub my toe, or knock my fingers on the floor, I can give a bare attention, mindfulness, to those sensations: sensations of pressure or throbbing or whatever it is, or the raisin taste in the mouth, right? It's like pitching the attention at a different frequency to pay attention to an energy field, which is different than a field of sensations flickering.
So if you stub your toe, you can pay attention to the pain, basically, the throbbing. When we did the guided meditation, which was a little bit of an experiment with the group, you can pay attention to the field of the body, but more as an energetic field as opposed to a field of tangible sensations that are the usual sets of sensations (taste and pressure and heat, etc.). So we could say it's all mindfulness of the body, but almost like you're pitching into, you're aiming at different frequencies. So one is a more energetic sense, if you like, and the other is more -- I don't know what the word would be, but more normal or tangible, perhaps. No, that's not quite the right word. More at the level of basic, normal sensation that most people can agree on.
Yogi: You used the word 'flickering.' And I found that really useful to describe what I was feeling, which was a whole bunch of sensations flickering from top to bottom. Is that what you mean?
Rob: Yeah. This is more complicated than I thought! Type one, usual mindfulness of the body, if I pay attention to the body with enough awareness, what usually reveals itself is a flickering of sensation. Even that throbbing when I stub my toe, I realize, "Oh, it's flickering." When I pay attention to the whole body, there are all kinds of bands and flickers. That's very normal. What we did in the guided meditation was a little bit different. It's more an energetic field. It will tend towards more of a homogeneity. Rather than flickering sensations, more a homogeneity of energy feeling.
So when we talk about working with images, it's that second one that we're after, this energetic field. Why? Three reasons, if I can remember from the group. (1) One is, if I'm in touch with that, I'm not daydreaming. Daydreaming means I'm not in touch with the body. I'm just lost, actually. So I'm anchored in the body; it's not daydreaming. (2) Second is, when an image is 'right,' if we use that word, meaning it gives rise to soulfulness or potentially can, something happens in the energy body. It feels more whole, more integrated, more aligned, more harmonized, and more energized. Even if the image doesn't fit my picture of what's psychologically healthy, or this or that, whatever, something works directly with the energy body that gives a sense. So I can use it as a compass, when I'm on the right track. Is that okay?
Yogi 2: I guess it just brings a slight question. In the example of the dark creature lying on the body, how do you know ...? It sounded like she didn't know it was a positive thing.
Rob: She didn't, which is also interesting, because she wasn't relating to it as imaginal practice. It was just something that was happening. She had no context for it. She wasn't working in that way. Let's say that image happened after she came to this day-long, and then knows, "Okay, right then, if I have enough presence of mind, I can actually check out the energy body." Now, the image itself might be weird, strange, completely have no bearings, etc., might be even grotesque or disturbing to the mind a little bit, but there's something -- I think I can make a rule out of this; it seems to be the case -- that if I feel into the energy body, although the mind is saying, "What is this?! This is weird," something aligns like that. We can say, "It's right. There's something here that's a treasure, that can be worked with, even if it doesn't fit the normal picture or idea I would have." Yeah?
(3) Third reason this is important, the energy body stuff, is like I said at the beginning, these images, or whatever we're going to call it, are full of resonance and an allusive quality. They subtly allude to this. All kinds of nuance, emotionally, energetically, etc. And sensitivity to the energy body will help me get in touch with that, help unfold it as an image.
Yogi 3: It puts me a little bit in mind of [?], Focusing.
Rob: Yeah, yes. It bears a similarity there. See if you want to ask that at the end or not, because to me, what ends up being the most interesting thing about this whole imaginal thing is how we conceive of it. I gave examples at the beginning, 'wow' image, like "Whoa, I never experienced anything like that!", compared to the most absolutely mundane, really wouldn't even raise an eyebrow, nothing. What ends up making it interesting or not is the conceptual framework that we put around it. Focusing comes with, like certain psychotherapies, they all come with a certain conceptual framework. That ends up being the most interesting thing about all this, that we can actually shift conceptual frameworks, and some of them open all this in directions that others just don't, and vice versa. There are similarities perhaps in some of the technical sides, but not so much in the conceptual -- although we have a range, and that's part of what I'm saying.
Okay, so that wasn't what I was planning to say, but let's talk a little. Is it okay to talk a little bit? All right. So we were saying earlier that where there's a sense of meaningfulness for us as human beings, in the world or with an image -- in the world, let's say, where there's meaningfulness, where there's soulfulness for us, where something is alive in that way for us, for the psyche, there, we could say, there is image/fantasy/mythos, whatever words we're using, there already. And where there's love, a part of the basis of that love is, if you like, image/fantasy. And our perception is imbued with fantasy, with image, with mythos, at times, all of that.
This goes back to something that Cathy said this morning. It's a little bit what we were talking about with Cathy. Here's an idea. I don't think it's provable. I mean, it may be, but I couldn't see how one would prove it. Here's an idea: what if we assume or entertain the possibility that images or fantasy or mythos, whatever, is actually primary? It's primary, okay? Now, by 'primary,' I don't mean first in a causal chain of some kind of neural network thing. I mean 'primary' as in central, fundamental (that's a difficult word), something that is as much as anything what drives us. It's an unusual idea. I'm not talking so much, as we said, about a big, dark, scary repository of unconscious material, 'the unconscious.' We don't have to go there to that. And we're not neglecting the observable fact that my awareness of an image, just as awareness of an emotion, my awareness of an image affects the unfolding of that image. My awareness of the emotion affects the unfolding of that emotion. My relationship with an emotion affects how that emotion unfolds. My relationship with an image affects how the image unfolds. So not neglecting all that, that dependent co-arising. But going away from our usual assumptions, just putting on hold our usual assumptions, that we are driven by biological factors or socio-economic factors or, in what's quite common in most psychotherapies these days, by the past and what happened to me or the conditions of my childhood, etc.
Not to say any of that's not true, or wrong, or right, but let's just say, what if we take this other idea, more unusual idea, and put that to the fore? What happens if we assume that, if we play with that, if we entertain that idea? What happens to what unfolds experientially for me and the experiences that I have? It's quite an unusual idea in this day and age, but notice something. I bet everyone in this room believes now that if there's an emotion operating in you that you're not aware of, that that emotion will still find a way to impel the mind, the body, and the speech, if it's a deep enough, strong enough emotion. And secondly, if there's an emotion that I'm not aware of, there's something, then, that it's not healthy to not be aware of an emotion, to be repressing it or unconscious about an emotion, and it's somehow not fully alive.
In circles like this, and probably even if you go out to Brighton high street or whatever, this is what most people would agree on nowadays. How many years do we have to go backwards when, if I said that to someone, they would say, "I say! That's a pretty strange idea"? It would not be the usual assumption, right? I don't know how many years back. Could it be something similar with images? They're also primary or central or drivers in the same way, fantasy, mythos, imagery, as we tend to think of emotions now. Can't prove it. But it's just interesting to note a parallel there.
Again, we're acknowledging that images do arise because of the past, and because of what's happening for me emotionally, etc., and from my life, but not only that. So images are not only a result; they're also causal in our life. So that as well as that, being a result of my past and my emotions and what I'm feeling right now, life and my emotions are driven by or the playing out of images, fantasies, mythos -- whether they're conscious, or whether they're not. We're saying both, and the causality, as always, is both ways. Almost everything in the inner world, the causality is both ways. But let's lean on that second one, because maybe that leaning will open things up in a more unexpected way, a different way, a different direction.
People say, "Well, yeah, but we're fabricating these images. We're creating them." Yes, it's true, or you could say that. You could respond, "Show me something that's not fabricated." If we go to a deep Dharma understanding, show me something that's not fabricated. But even more than that, in the early Jewish mysticism, they talk about God being mystically dependent on humanity's liturgical praise. There's something about praising God that creates God. Not a problem. It wasn't regarded as, "Oh, that doesn't really work, does it?" It was just included as part of the mystery of what God was. And later, in the Zohar (the Jewish mystical tradition evolved into the Kabbalah), there's a sentence which says, "Man can be said to create God." And that's completely fine. It's part of the mystical nature of what we're dealing with. Again, if we're a little bit indoctrinated or enclosed in certain modernist notions, we want some reality that's independent of the mind, or some meaning that's independent or something. And that gets in the way of how we can conceive of this stuff.
So last year -- some of you were here last year -- and in other places, I've talked about, or we investigated a little bit about, fantasies and images and myths in relation to the self, primarily in relation to the self. So I'm not going to repeat a lot of that, because why repeat? It's there if people are interested. You can find it. But I'll just summarize some of that.
There's something here about being able to move, have flexibility between conceptual frameworks. This is an interesting one. Some people are very comfortable just adopting different conceptual frameworks about what the self is, what an image is, how it relates to the self, what reality is. Some people are really not comfortable with that. But perhaps some of what we're talking about today is actually asking for that, is asking for this sense of fluidity and being able to move between different conceptual frameworks.
And one conceptual framework we can move into that's, again, not that normal nowadays, is that we can view these images that appear -- that bluebird, that phoenix, or that black devil man or whatever -- as archetypes, or what in old Greek language used to be called daimons, almost as if they have an independent reality, and they're coming to this being. I'm not talking about ghosts or anything like that. They're coming to this being with something, something bigger than the self, and a demand, and a sense of flowing through the life, so that this (what we said earlier) soulfulness, this word that's so hard to define, actually includes a sense of something is bigger here than just what my ego wants. So I can imagine -- I'm feeling stressed, I imagine a beach scene and whatever. That's what the ego wants, because it feels stressed. We're not quite talking about [that], or we can extend it beyond that, to what comes to me -- Christ may come to me and comfort me, but Christ may also come to me with a demand that's not what the ego wants. So we're not putting this in the service of the ego.
That's one of the big shifts here. That's a massive shift. And yet, beyond the ego, and not melting into oneness or emptiness. There's a difference there. Something is universal, bigger than the personal, but still personal and still unique. So it's a different way of opening up the self. And sometimes some of these images and some of these daimons or characters, they push the self. They make a demand: create something, do something, speak up when it's scary, whatever it is. And it can look, to the outside, it looks like the inner critic. It looks like the superego. It looks like this person is being unkind with themselves, or they're really doing it because they need love, or they want to prove themselves, or they feel like they're not good enough. And it's got nothing to do with any of that, nothing to do with it. Something, a force is operating in the psyche, pushing, and maybe it's a lot of work or a lot of pressure, a lot of something, a lot of demand, but it's nothing to do with inner critic, nothing at all to do with the inner critic, or not feeling good enough or whatever.
Again, we can play with: how do we see our personality? Is our personality a result of our past? Is it a result of genetics? Is it a result of family conditioning, social conditioning? What? All valid, all different perspectives. The word 'personality' comes from the Latin persona, which is from ancient Greek. In the theatre, they wore masks. All the actors wore masks, and the mask was the persona. It literally means per, 'through,' sona, 'sound.' Something is sounding through the mask. Something transcendent to the human being is sounding through. And maybe that's what our personality is. Not a result of my childhood, not da-da-da -- although all valid. We're just shifting conceptual frameworks. But my personality, my personalities, plural, is/are the soundings through, in this world, of something beyond. Different way of conceiving, and it opens up a sense of existence, of self, of journey, of psychology, of experience, differently.
Henry Corbin was a scholar of Islamic mysticism. He talked about angels that appear to one, and he said -- it's a classic phrase:
Not your individuation ['individuation' is a term from Jung about your own process and growing into a mature self, if you like], but the angel's individuation is your task.[1]
Can you hear that? It's a complete flip. Not your individuation, but the angel's individuation is your task. It's no longer about me and my process. Sure, of course that's involved, but something else.
Going back to the black devil man, this was a series, and a little time later, this person was struggling with something -- I can't remember what -- and feeling a little down about something. Either an idea came to her, or a friend said something: "Why don't you love the 5-year-old in you, the little girl in you that's feeling (however she was feeling)?" And this person felt like, in that instant, "I cannot. I cannot any more. It does not work for me. I've done a lot in that modality, in that way of thinking about it before. It doesn't work any more." And instead, looked into the eyes of the black devil man, and boom. Two seconds, and something shifted. The whole thing shifted. There was some kind of power transmitted through the eyes, and something just dropped, shattered, shifted.
So that's interesting in itself, but it's also interesting because what we tend to habitually assume about what's real -- we think, "That black devil man is not real"; the little girl, we say, "Maybe it's not real, but maybe there really is a part of us that's young, because it seems to be connected with the reality of the past and the family, etc. She's representative of how I was when I was 5. I really was that little girl. These are the real feelings, based on the real ..." There are reality assumptions tied in with how we usually think about this.
Another possibility here, related: we tend to think the present, meaning how I am right now, the difficulties that I encounter right now, the patterns I keep bumping into and stumbling over, the present, my present is a result of my past. Very normal way of thinking, and true to a certain [extent]. A Dharma practitioner needs to understand something in addition to that, which is the present is caused not only by the past, but also by the present. In other words, we go back to what we were saying somewhat earlier: that what arises for me in the present, whether it's imaginal or physical or whatever, also depends on how I'm relating to it in the present. So the present is fed by the past and the present. Past causes present, present causes present.
Now we can actually play with another idea, which has long gone out of fashion, that the future causes the present, in the sense it reveals itself to me as image. One way of looking at it is it's something that I'm, if you like, moving towards but will never reach. It's always going to be beyond. There's what they call telos in some philosophical circles. It's this sense of goal actually influencing the present. I am drawn or pulled or impelled towards something from, if you like, the future.
So these are just ideas that we can play with. And I don't know -- is it possible for you to play with ideas without saying, "I believe, credo in unum" whatever? It's like, not credo in unum anything, credo in multiplicitas, or whatever the Latin would be. I believe in lots, or I don't believe anything -- I'm just playing with ideas. That's quite a sophisticated thing to do, but a lot of this is dependent on that, our ability to move conceptual frameworks.
I wonder whether, or I sometimes think that the notion, the feeling we have of self today is very different than the self that existed in the time of the Buddha, where society was simpler. They had a much less individualistic society. So self, and the way we feel and sense and think of the self today, is psychologically much more complex, much more independent, maybe much richer in some senses, than the self at the time of the Buddha, and personalities, etc. So maybe we need, then, other ways of opening it out. It's like, we're not going to erase that. You're not going to erase the sense of complexity and necessity of the personality in the modern era. Maybe we need ways of respecting that and entering into it in different ways. Maybe.
All of it is empty. I'm not saying, "This is a real thing, and that's not a real thing." All of it is unreal -- I mean, maybe in slightly different ways, and that's complex philosophically to work out, but all of it is empty. I'm not positing any real entities anywhere. All of it is empty. Emptiness, to me, doesn't mean that the personality is an illusion, and all that exists is a sort of process of unfolding psychophysical phenomena, which is how some people look at it. Emptiness means more than that. That process, too, is empty, is illusory. The things that make up the process are empty. Everything is empty. And in a way, that frees us up to look in very different ways.
So we can use language like 'consciousness,' 'process,' 'perception,' 'attention,' mettā, 'angel,' 'daimon,' 'image,' whatever, and all of it is empty. It's not like some of it is real, and we better only use that language. All of it's empty. It allows us to use the language of things that are empty.
In tantric practice, people teach it very differently, but it's supposed to be based on knowing that this is empty. This self is totally, thoroughly empty, and so is that image or that deity that I'm contemplating. It's supposed to be based on really knowing that both are empty. The kinds of meditation where there is a deep emptying out, and the self-construction really fades, and appearances fade, whether it's samādhi, or through mettā practice or emptiness practice, what's characteristic is when one emerges from those kind of states (it's a whole range of states), with either an understanding of emptiness or just the experiences, the experience becomes much more malleable, much more open to playing with the imaginal. And in a way, again, you can see some of that in the Pali Canon, when the Buddha talks about options for a practitioner coming out of samādhi or coming out of seeing deep emptiness, and a lot of it sounds like imaginal practice. I'm not saying it is. It just sounds like it. And again, in some Sufi and Islamic mystic teachings. Some people, quite a lot of people, I don't know what proportion, are okay playing with all this imaginal stuff without needing to see emptiness first. They're just fine with it. They're at home with it.
There's a saying in alchemy, in the alchemical tradition, "Don't proceed with your alchemical procedure until everything has become liquid." We tend to solidify things. I solidify myself: I am this, I am that, that image is this. It solidifies. "Don't proceed until everything is liquid." It's not solidified. We're not talking about realities and identities here. That's the alchemical way of putting it. There's something very, very important there.
Okay. That was all a little bit of an aside. Just saying, there are plenty of possibilities working with the self and the way the self relates to these images. I've talked about it elsewhere, so I'm not going to repeat today. I want to go in slightly different directions. If you read, if we read or come across the -- what could we call them? -- biographies of the Buddha, one of the things that strikes us nowadays is just the range of portrayals there. If you've read Thích Nhất Hạnh's lovely book, Old Path, White Clouds, it paints a certain portrait of the Buddha that would be very different from, say, Stephen Batchelor's portrait, or we could mention many people. The range of, if you like, fantasies of the Buddha, and how he was, and what he did, and what he was about, and what his character was, and what his central message was, is actually quite enormous.
What we actually have is only what he said, and even then, there's a certain amount of uncertainty about which bits he actually said and which bits were accrued later or whatever. We're not even quite sure, no one can say definitively, "This is what he meant." We all try and say, "This is what he meant when he said this." But basically, we have: he must have said some of this. We have what I think or he thinks or she thinks he meant. And that interpretation of the meaning you will notice, we will notice, is usually made according to the metaphysical inclinations of the interpreter, is it not? Right? And there's also, wrapped up in the narrative, in the biography, a fantasy, the mythos as well. So there are metaphysical inclinations, and the mythos. They go together. They're mixed.
But somehow, with all that, we decide a priori, from the beginning, we decide that the Buddha is right, and he's the authority. There's some kind of circularity there, right? Who is the object of my veneration when I venerate the Buddha? Who is the object of my veneration? Who is the object of my love, if I love the Buddha? Am I not devoted, in part at least, to an imaginal Buddha? Am I not? No problem with this. No problem. It's the way the psyche works. A problem if we don't admit it: "Da-da-da-da! This is true!" No problem; let's just admit it and open things up, and explore what happens when we just say, "Let's admit it. Walk through that door and see what that does."
Is there not, as well, as a fantasy of the Buddha, a fantasy or fantasies, a plurality, a range of fantasies of what awakening is, and what it looks like, full awakening, or even partial awakening? We could spend all day just talking about that. In a lot of Buddhist traditions, the fantasy that's wrapped up with awakening is one of equanimity, of undisturbed non-entanglement. That's the Buddha sitting there. Contrast that with a fantasy of awakening of passionate engagement, and sometimes perhaps even anger. It's a different fantasy of what awakening, what we are moving towards. This is operating. It has all kinds of actual effects on how we, where we go in our path, and what we do -- massive.
If we go back to the metaphysical assumptions and what we were saying before about what's real, what's not, ontology, how do we know, what's knowledge that's valid, and what's knowledge that's not really valid, and what this world is -- is it just meaningless matter and molecules bumping off each other according to Newton's laws of physics? Is that what the cosmos is? Or is it something different than that? The metaphysical assumptions that are operating for us (and there are always some, can't get away from this), they shape and constrain and create what the Four Noble Truths come to be for us. Third Noble Truth, awakening, full liberation, cessation of suffering -- the definition of it will be according to the metaphysics. If I believe, for example, "This is a world of meaningless matter. We are thrown into it," to borrow Heidegger's phrase, "thrown into it, and there's the neurology, etc., and limited by our existential situation, which is that, that's the truth," then my awakening will be in relationship and as far as that.
Some people, even more, "Basically, you are a biological machine, evolved over millennia" -- not millennia; countless years. "Your hardware is set pretty much, but you can tweak the software through mindfulness if you work at it, and meditation. And sometimes, even, mindfulness, they say now (in that article I saw), shows that some of the hardware shifts a little bit. Little membranes get thicker, and blood vessels grow and whatnot. But essentially you're a biological machine in a meaningless universe." Then the range of your awakening is the tweaking of that biological machine so that it functions more efficiently to minimize the unnecessary suffering involved in being a biological machine in a meaningless universe.
James Hillman cites statements similar to this as from Corbin in two of his [Hillman's] works: Mythical Figures: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 6.1 (Thompson, CT: Spring Publications, 2007), 196, and (with Michael Ventura) We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy -- And the World's Getting Worse (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 62. ↩︎
