Transcription
I don't think I mentioned earlier: most of the work that I've done teaching this has been one on one. It's actually something, rather than me even suggesting it to a student, or certainly not imposing it, it's more something arises for a student, and then we begin to explore possible different ways of working with it, but it's one on one. And because there is already an experience, for whoever that student is, of an image being alive, and this sense of, "This is somehow important." They feel it's important, not in a general sense but personally for them. There's a sense that they trust something happening. When I might talk about some of this stuff with more than one person, so it's not coming from the student so much, sometimes people get a bit nervous about the whole thing.
So I think it's worth addressing some of that. It's completely fine, but it's maybe worth looking at that: what makes us nervous around this? And there are quite a lot of pieces here. I think it's quite interesting. But one is: won't this make us crazy? If you're entertaining images, and some of the images are quite far out, and you're entertaining certain ideas about the images, their meaningfulness, etc., isn't that the road to craziness?
So, very understandable, given our culture and the kinds of assumptions we have. It's a very understandable nervousness on someone's part. Psychologically, I don't think it's valid, in fact, as a rule. It may be as an exception. But I'd say actually the opposite is true. And some studies have found with children that when their imaginations are working, they have imaginal friends and characters and all this business, they actually tend to be more psychologically healthy, in the broader sense of the word, and their relationships with other children and others tends to be more healthy.
Yogi: That's reassuring! [laughs]
Rob: Yeah! [laughs] Like I said, it's an important thing to address this, because I think in our culture we tend to assume the opposite of what is actually the case. It's partly to do with the culture, and partly the philosophy and a lot of other ideas at the bedrock of our modern culture. But yeah, so generally they tend to be healthier in all kinds of ways, psychologically and especially in terms of their relationships.
But then we might say, "Yes, yes, yes. That's all very well for children, but at a certain point, we want to have, 'Enough of that now. Now put your logical, scientific mind on.' We don't want to be relating to imaginal beings. We want to really make sure social relationships are important. And won't there be a problem of not being able to discern between what is real and what is imaginal?"
Again, very understandable fears, but there are assumptions lurking there that I don't feel bear out. Maybe there's something a bit too simplistic about if that assumption is operating for us. But it's understandable. It doesn't seem to be the case, at least in the people I work with, that there's any danger of not knowing what's real and what's not. None whatsoever.
There are a couple of other factors here. A psychologist called Mary Watkins -- some of you may have heard of her -- she did some work with imaginal stuff, and she was looking into what happens with people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Those diagnoses shift all the time. But we might feel, "Well, isn't this the sort of way, isn't this what schizophrenics do? They get lost in the imaginal, and they have these imaginal characters." Actually, what's characteristic of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia is that their imaginal others are vague: "Vaguely, aliens are ..." whatever. There's this relationship, one of oppression by a vague other or a set of others. What is not characteristic of those with schizophrenia, so-called schizophrenia, is a relational engagement -- certainly not a meditative engagement, but entering into all the nuances and actually having relationship. So it's actually the opposite. And when that's the case, something more healthy tends to unfold.
Having a sense of something like this, but turning away from it and not engaging, is actually more characteristic of what we call madness. There's also a book by a guy called Gregory Bateson. Some of you will know him. It's actually a reprint, or partly it's a reprint of what's called Perceval's Narrative. Perceval was this guy from -- I can't remember when; a hundred or so years ago -- who had a prolonged, of a few years, psychotic episode, so-called schizophrenia. He emerged out of it after a couple of years and wrote an account of the whole experience: before, going in, what happened, and then afterwards. And what this Perceval came to see was that what took him out of the mental illness, so to speak, was a different relationship with the images -- not putting them away, not getting on with life or whatever, or repressing it or something, but actually not taking them literally. That's the difference, understanding that these things are, if you like, mythic or metaphorical. That's the difference.
The danger is in the literalism, the concretization. I go back to the example of jihad and holy war, whether it's East/West, or anti-Islamic, or anti 'axis of evil' or whatever. There's a literalism there in relation to an image that we don't realize it's image, and we take it literally. That was characteristic of this very astute observation by Perceval that actually that was what was maddening, that was the problem -- not the images themselves, not the dialogues that happened, but the literalism, not seeing them more metaphorically, poetically, mythically. That was the problem.
In the Pali Canon, actually, the longest section of the mindfulness sutta, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, is a contemplation of death. And one of the instructions is either go to a cemetery, or imagine you're in a cemetery, imagine your corpse rotting. There's actually, you could say, a kind of imagination there. There's also a practice called recollecting the Buddha. When your meditation is not going very well, and you're struggling, you recollect the Buddha in the imagination, and something happens, something aligns in your being. Again, it's an imaginal practice. And certainly when we teach mettā practice these days, we talk about imagining the other, etc., or do it with light, do it with all kinds of things.
So imagination actually has its place in the tradition, or has had its place, even in the Theravādan tradition. But still, so often, a person feels, "Well, but all that imagination, surely it's not being in the moment. I don't want anything to do with this. It's not being in the moment, or it's not being with life, something called 'life.'" This, to me, is very interesting. What's happening for us? There's so much attachment to this idea of being in the moment, being present with something called 'what is' or 'Life' with a capital L or whatever, that that has become such a forceful rhetoric within the Dharma. What's going on? Why so much attachment and so much importance to 'being in the moment'? What's happening there?
Is it because we think that's what the Buddha said, that's what the Buddha was teaching? He was teaching us to be in the moment? That was what he wanted us to do, to be in the moment, as if that was the point? And/or is it because, "This is what's real, and everything else is not real. And certainly all this talk of imaginal is not real. This is what's real: the moment, and the experience, and the material reality that comes to me in my senses. And if I'm not with that, maybe I will miss the only thing that's real -- life"? What's going on for us with this nervousness that something might not be 'being in the moment' or 'being present with life' or whatever?
In a way, just wanting to unpack a little bit of the assumptions that are underneath and running through our usual ways of conceiving of what practice is, what the Dharma is, and where it's going. The philosopher Ed Casey -- I think he's at Yale University; he may have retired now, but anyway -- he made a distinction between two types of reality: what he was calling 'objective reality,' which is the reality that most people agree on, etc. (it's objective, independent of us), and then 'experiential reality.' So something like an image can be, as I said before, 'real' in an experiential way, but not in an objective way.
That distinction, I think, is important, but we could even go further than that, and poke a little more: what's hiding at the bottom of, well, the bottom of our Dharma practice, basically, but also the bottom of our relationship with life and existence? This might sound abstract the next few minutes. It might sound abstract. My whole point is that it's not abstract. It's not removed from our sense of what practice is and what's life. It might sound a bit, but it's not, and that's the whole point. I would say that we walk around with and we approach practice with a set of what we could call 'metaphysical assumptions.' That's a big word, 'metaphysics.' What does it mean? It's a philosophical word. People argue about what it means, but the thing I want to draw out, involved in that, is three more fancy-sounding words: ontological assumptions, epistemological assumptions, cosmological assumptions. I'll explain what I mean.
We walk around with this. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with what is real and what is not real, and the philosophical investigation of deciding, "This is real, and that's not real," or "That's real, and this is not real." Philosophers have argued over centuries about what's real and what's not, and how you establish that -- ontology. Epistemology is the study of how we know anything. How do we know? How do we know what's real and what's not real? How do we decide? What tells us? What tells us anything? What knowledge can we trust? Epistemology is the study of knowing. And cosmology means, what is this universe that we're in? How is it? What is it? How is it structured?
What I want to say here or suggest is that we might think, "Blah blah blah, all these fancy words. I just abide in my practice in non-conceptuality. I don't do any of that stuff." It operates below the level of thought. Metaphysics is unavoidable, and the assumptions, these assumptions about what's real and what's not real, about what knowledge is trustworthy and what knowledge isn't, and about how the universe is or is not, operates in us subliminally, below the level of language and thought, and it comes into most moments of consciousness. So I might say, "No, no, no, my practice abides in the non-conceptual. That's what I do in practice." This stuff is still going to be there. It's still there, not recognized. It's operating, and it has a huge effect. Or I might say, "Pff, I'm not an intellectual. I don't go in for all this philosophical ... I'm a very simple person" or whatever. Still there. Still there when you're not thinking. Or, if a person is a little bit more intellectual, they say things like, perhaps, "I don't indulge in metaphysics, because metaphysics has a little bit gone out of fashion," or at least it did a few hundred years ago. And so they say, "Oh, I don't involve metaphysics in my practice." But it's still there. It's still there. Or, "The Dharma is the letting go of metaphysics." It's still there. When we do our mindfulness practice, it's still there.
So it's interesting: what we tend to assume about mindfulness is that there's no belief involved. There's certainly no dogma. There's no belief. One is just experiencing actuality. But implicit in the mindfulness, implicit in moving around life, implicit in all of this is this predeciding what's real, what isn't, how we know, what knowledge we can trust, and what the universe is like, how it's structured.
Most of us -- it depends where you are and what circles you move in, but mostly or a lot, that unconscious metaphysics actually comes from the culture. It's the dominant cultural influx. It's what we could call 'modernism.' It started, let's say, in the seventeenth century, and grew and grew and grew, until it just becomes, "This is what everyone agrees on. This is how things are. This is what's real. That's not. This is how we know. That's not how we know. And the universe is like this. The universe is basically a machine." That was the model that Descartes and these other people -- it's a machine, little balls of atoms bouncing off each other randomly as a machine, just unfolding. Matter is the essential and only reality. Everything is basically reducible to matter. And you get even some Dharma -- on the train, was it a new Scientist or Scientific American, that big splash, the new one of the month? I didn't read it. "The Neuroscience of Meditation," or "The Neuroscience of Mindfulness." It's a big, big field now. Fine. It's lovely and it's really interesting. But sometimes lurking behind that and supported by it is this idea that everything is reducible to matter, to neurology, etc. Everything, if we can just reduce everything, we can reduce the whole of the Dharma to neuroscience. Everything gets reduced to matter, because matter is the essential and only reality. It could be lurking there: the universe is a machine, the knowledge that is authentic and real and trustworthy is rational, it's logical, and it's what they call 'empirical,' based on experiment. That's the epistemological assumption. That's the assumption.
So a lot of the time, we walk around, if not just believing all that unquestioningly, with a certain pressure, at the very least, because it's the dominant cultural view, what we call 'modernism.' There's a lot else involved, but we can just draw that out. Part of the problem with all that, part of the problem, is that if you just take physics, for example, in the last hundred or so years, it doesn't believe that any more! It does not believe so straightforwardly in that kind of universe as a machine. It doesn't believe that, in terms of epistemology, that we can know something independent. When you get down at the level of subatomic, it's no longer independent of the observer. That whole idea of knowing the universe as it is, independently, is no longer current. It hasn't been for over a hundred years. When we say, "Okay, matter is the real thing," we can say, "What is matter?" Well, you go down, down, down, and you get to something like an electron or whatever it is, and you say, "Okay, it's a little billiard ball." That's not how people think about it any more, or rather, physics does not show [that]. Matter is not what we think. It's not a billiard ball. It's not a wave of energy. It's not a little bundle of energy. It's not even here or there. It's not even then or now. It's not even at a certain speed. It's something that's not independent of the knowing, and it's not a thing in the way that we tend to think of things and naturally assume things are.
From the perspective of modern physics, this whole notion of subliminal philosophy is actually kind of out of date, in many respects. In philosophy, too, the epistemology, the study of how do we know and what do we know that we know, that also has evolved. So this modernism is, intellectually speaking, a little bit out of date, but culturally, it's absolutely the dominant voice. Now, all that may sound abstract. It may sound like, "Blimey. Okay. Whatever." But what I'm trying to say, or what I would like to say, is it's not abstract at all. It comes into how we feel our existence, and how we feel the self, and what we think we're moving in, this world and this cosmos that we're moving in. It absolutely saturates our sense of existence, and our sense of what practice is and what the Dharma is, because the metaphysics will shape and inform and direct not only the sense of life and self, but also the sense of Dharma. Does this make sense at all? [affirmative noises from yogis] Yeah? So it may sound abstract and highfalutin philosophy. It's not at all. The problem is that it feels intuitive -- that's the problem -- and it's actually something that needs a little looking at, or a lot.
So let's be a little bit subtle here. I don't want to say, "Reality isn't that. It's this." I'm not saying that: "Let's just switch what we decide that reality is." What I want is a little bit more subtle to say: reality is not what we think it is, or rather, the whole question of what's real and true is a lot more sophisticated and subtle and complex, and maybe perhaps multilevelled, than we think it is. It's not replacing one simplistic model with another simplistic model. I just want to a little bit take out the assumptions that are underneath the usual notions of reality, intuitive notions of reality, because when, if, one tends to want to dismiss, for instance, now we're talking about imaginal stuff, but other stuff, too, it's usually because hiding behind that dismissal, or when we're in the mode of dismissal, there's a certain set of metaphysical, philosophical assumptions, that we probably are not even that aware of.
Yogi: Can I just say something? Is there not also quite a natural human fear of overwhelm, in terms of having some sense of the power and the mystery and depth of the unconscious and the collective unconscious?
Rob: Yeah.
Yogi: And the power of the energies we're in. You yourself said when you approach the mystery of the unconscious, be careful, even though the images are on your side, to be careful and approach with respect.
Rob: Sure. I will talk about it this afternoon, but I can say a bit now. So, yes. That model of the unconscious as a sort of big, dark bag of collective something that can come up and overpower, I kind of feel now that that's -- you know, it came from Jung and Freud, and to me it feels -- I don't know what to say -- to me it just feels out of date. I'm not sure people actually feel that way so much any more. What I would say, and I will come back to this this afternoon, is what's really key, and this invites more of a Dharma understanding into this whole area, rather than these things existing somehow independently of me and they might jump up and assault me, that I always find, like any experience I might have, that the relationship I have with it, and the way I have of conceiving of it in the moment, and the way of looking at it, always affects what's happening.
So there is a way that I might be -- say, let's take that black devil man; that would be an extreme example -- there's a way of conceiving of it and relating to it that actually makes it more overwhelming, more frightening, etc. But that's partly coming from the way of relating to it, and there's a way of relating to it that actually starts to soften it. So it's not an independent thing. And that's partly like, if we get into this as practice, that's partly what's really important, is just seeing how much we're not separate from this in the way of relating and conceiving, so that what seems like an overwhelming, dark force/enemy can actually be transformed. You see this in, if you've ever, in a nightmare, for instance -- the monster is chasing you, and you ever actually stop and turn towards it, it changes. Why? Because the relationship changes. It's actually the same thing if you have a knee pain. So this, to me, is a fundamental Dharma understanding. Nothing, nothing, nothing exists independently of the relationship with it. So this is one of the areas where I would say, you know, we can inject quite a lot of Dharma understanding into this whole area that actually changes it in ways that perhaps Jung wouldn't have anticipated so much. Does that ...?
Yogi: Yeah. I guess I'm actually trying to put forward that some people do indeed have a fear and a lack of freedom with being able to let anything emerge in their mind.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely.
Yogi: Because they're frightened of it, and it may well stem from their own lack of emotional nourishment in childhood or traumatic experiences. It's not actually from a metaphysical point of view or an assumptive point of view; it's from maybe a deeper bodily emotion or point of view as well. It's that, of having fear of one's own self, which is deeper than just thought.
Rob: Yeah. I really hear you. We're getting into some dialogue, which is fine. I would just question. To me, we could say, "Yes, that's true, and it's deeper." But to me, it's hard to prove something like that. And I would say that that's a perfectly valid conceptual framework of what's going on, but it doesn't mean that it's the truth. So what I've found quite interesting with a lot of this work is, again, if a person conceives of these things in a certain way, and it's subliminal conception, you know, it tends to unfold in a certain way. Now, that conceiving may not have its origins in the past and in early childhood. That would be a typical psychotherapeutic way of thinking about it, but that's different from saying "That's absolutely true."
So partly what I'm interested in saying, yeah, we can adopt that framework, and sometimes I will with someone; absolutely, I will. But other times, it's like, well, what if we don't adopt that framework? And this sense, "Okay, there is fear in relation to this, and there's all kinds of stuff," but actually we play with what I call the conceptual framework, the way of looking, and we don't go down that road -- we actually have another one. And then it all unfolds very differently, and that fear dissolves, and someone comes to trust something that actually transforms where they had that fear. To me, that's a very powerful whole set of concepts. It's the sort of more normal modern psychotherapeutic way of looking. I would just say it's one valid way among others. Personally, when I work with people, it would be all different, but I wouldn't land in that, "That's deeper by definition, or truer or whatever." They're just different. So really, if someone's in front of me, I would just see what's helpful. But oftentimes you can do quite a lot without assuming that.
Yogi: Yes, I suppose, just to finish, that I think it's actually an achievement to be able to let go of the assumptions and be free enough and courageous enough to allow different, completely different paradigms to arise, and for some people, they may not be in a grounded or safe enough place to let go and look at it differently.
Rob: Sure, and then it's a question of, "Okay, do they need to anyway?", you know. I'm not saying everyone has to do this at all. But if you feel like, or if they feel like it would be helpful, then what ways will there be of gently opening, that they do feel more trust? When I work one on one with people, a lot of what I'm doing in this work is actually -- well, sometimes it does get to talk about metaphysics, because it's almost like it's coming from them. It's like, "Hold on, what's happening here?" But more often, it's validating something that hasn't previously been validated, or seeing the beauty in something that one would have tended to either dismiss or have been afraid of. What I'm really doing is, it's not so much intellectual as just kind of helping create an environment where something is valued that wasn't previously, but valued deeply. There are different ways you can do that, but more it's just -- yeah, it's not so intellectual. That creates a space where a person starts, "Oh, hold on. Maybe I can relate to this very differently," and then it starts unfolding very differently, and they start to get confident. But yeah, how to actually tread there is really interesting, and I don't think so formulaic. Thank you, yeah.
Okay, so the other piece here -- there's this piece that Cathy just raised. There's the piece that I was saying about metaphysics that comes in. And at some point, I think, everyone bumps into this metaphysics thing, or feels like they need to address it somehow. But there's a third piece of why we might be a bit cautious, and that has to do with -- and I touched on this earlier -- not realizing or admitting that actually our perception is imbued with imagination a lot anyway. We live fantasies and myths, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong. It's something that is necessary in our life, and beauty-making, as I said, soulfulness-making. But somehow we don't tend to admit it so much, or we regard it as something negative.
So a person might say, "Well, how come the Buddha didn't talk about this in the Pali Canon, the original set of teachings, and it's not in the four foundations of mindfulness?", although that bit about death is, the death contemplation. There's a lot about meeting angels. If you know, the deva comes, and the Buddha, you know. So you could say that's their way of interpreting what happened. You could say that. But let's just agree that it's not, although it is. [laughter] Let's just agree that it is not in the Pali Canon. Why isn't it in the Pali Canon? Is it because, the Buddha did not talk about this because it's not real, and what the Buddha was interested in was [pounds on something] reality, like that? Is that the reason? I don't think so, and again, it's like, a careful reading of the Pali Canon, what's the sort of whole message there? I know not everyone agrees with this, but I would actually say the Pali Canon, in its movement, is basically a movement towards ending rebirth. It's not a popular way of seeing it nowadays, and a lot of us teachers tend to just ignore that bit. But basically, the movement of the Buddha's wanting, the ending of suffering is the ending of rebirth, the ending of being in this world of appearances and saṃsāra. And in order to do that, one needs to (very loose language) 'dissolve' in the Unfabricated. Consciousness dissolves in what is not fabricated, that which is transcendent, beyond space, time, beyond all experience, beyond any notion of subject or object, or any subjects or any objects. Nothing appears at all.
So the whole thrust of the Pali Canon is a transcendent one, a movement towards the Unfabricated, ways of fabricating less and less in terms of self and also experience. And in so doing, with enough practice, one is not reborn into the world of appearances, and that's final nirvāṇa. The thrust of the Pali Canon is not so much that the Buddha's saying he wants us to finally, as an arrival point, be with life, this life thing. It doesn't appear. That kind of talk doesn't appear at all in the Pali Canon. Mindfulness or a life of presence is certainly not the goal, being in the moment and being freshly with the appearance of things. That's just not there.
Mindfulness in the Pali Canon is a support for fabricating less, for actually learning how to undo the fabrication of self and the fabrication of experience. So mindfulness has its place on the road to the Unfabricated, on the road to this transcendent, beyond all experience. What happened historically is, with the Mahāyāna and the Vajrayāna, they started to say, "Well, hold on. There's now a big duality between this world, or life, appearance, the fabricated, and this transcendent Unfabricated. There's duality there. Let's see all of it is empty and make it completely non-dual." So saṃsāra, the world of appearance, and nirvāṇa, this beyond, are seen as completely non-dual. Saṃsāra is nirvāṇa; nirvāṇa is saṃsāra. This was an understanding that came several hundred years after the Buddha, in the Mahāyāna and in the tantra.
Then that means that actually fabrication is okay, because everything is fabricated. Not a problem. Fabrication, rather than being something negative, something to escape from, all this world of fabrication and fabricated things, fabrication is lovely. It's an avenue. It's equally holy, so to speak. Not a bad thing. And then out of that came the evolution of tantric practice, deliberate fabrication using the imagination.
Okay, so what does all that mean for our practice, or potentially what can that mean? We could say there are, broadly speaking, three possibilities.
(1) I can practise, you can practise, two ways of imagining less, letting go of imagination and fantasy. One is just simple mindfulness, just simple presence, or 'bare attention,' that idea of bare attention. When you do that, we're, if you like, draining out a certain level of fantasy and imagination. There's still the metaphysics wrapped up, even when you're not thinking, but that's one way of practising, very important.
(2) Second way is actually more powerful practices, because that mindfulness just gets rid of a degree of fabrication, a degree of -- do you know this word, papañca? It's like crazy-making nonsense stuff that we get into. Mindfulness cuts that. So a degree of fabrication is cut, but there are way more powerful practices -- even less fabrication, less and less and less and less, and more powerful unfabricating practices. And one moves towards the Unfabricated, this transcendent, beyond all experience. In doing so, one learns how the world, the experience of self and the experience of the world is fabricated, or, we say, is 'empty.' It's empty. It's illusory. That way of unfolding practice still rests on what we're calling epistemological assumptions. I cannot get away from metaphysical assumptions -- none of it, not psychotherapy, psychologies, philosophies, Dharma practices, whichever kind of Dharma practices. There's always some metaphysical assumption. I can't get away from it, which is an interesting thing. I'm going to come back to that. So two ways of getting away from imagination.
(3) And a third way that's available to us actually says, "Let's enter into the imagination. Let's honour it. Let's recognize its necessity and its place and include it more."
So all that is available to us: imagination, and different ways of less imagination. For some people, the more they get a firsthand understanding of emptiness, the more the whole imaginal opens up for them, and there's freedom there to imagine. And also the opposite: some people don't know anything about emptiness, they get more into the imaginal stuff, and it opens up a sense of the emptiness of things. [yogi in background asks Rob to repeat] For some people, they don't know anything about emptiness, very little, and they start working with imaginal stuff, and actually, it unfolds a kind of understanding of the emptiness of self and the sort of illusory nature of ego, etc., so it comes more from the imaginal than from the classically Dharmic stuff.
But a second thing about the Pali Canon and about early Buddhism is that, isn't it the case that outside of meditation, the imagination is present, fantasy is alive? Even back then for those monks and nuns. In the meditation, either everything fades out towards this Unfabricated, or just being with bare attention, and then I get up, and I see the holy Buddha, and I see the monks and nuns in their robes. Can you feel how that is imbued with a sense of fantasy? The purity, the appearance of the Buddha, the Saṅgha as the holy ones, the enlightened ones. Do you get what I'm talking about? [affirmative noises from yogis]
Yogi 2: I find it difficult when you use the word 'fantasy,' because the language is obviously based in the culture, and the word 'fantasy' is, in some [?], it's the opposite of reality.
Rob: Yeah.
Yogi 2: So when you use that word, it sort of jars.
Rob: There are two things there. With this word, 'fantasy,' it is exactly -- especially in Dharma circles, we tend to think it's absolutely the wrong thing. It's completely what we don't want. We want mindfulness, not fantasy. We want presence, not being lost in a daydream or fantasy. And we also want reality, which goes back to the metaphysics.
Yogi 2: Yeah, but even the wider culture, 'fantasy' means ...
Rob: Yeah, sure.
Yogi 2: It's [?] with reality.
Rob: Exactly. So in a way, I'm just using that word and saying, can we just at least entertain the possibility that it's not something negative? What makes it negative is a certain relationship with it. I can be lost in daydreaming without any mindfulness, and then it's just daydreaming rubbish. But what I want to say is -- and again, I don't think I've found the right word: image, fantasy, mythos, something.
Yogi: Yeah, mythos!
Rob: Okay, all right. But something, whatever that word is, that word encompasses all this, what I'm talking about. And I'm saying not only is it there more than we think it is, it's actually a necessary and beautiful part of the human psyche, and part of what we need. If I go into it, beautiful things can open from it. And some of our dismissal of it is based on a lot of what I was calling metaphysical assumptions, exactly about that -- about what's real and what's not. But most of the time, our perception is imbued with fantasy. Now, whenever there's love, and whenever there's meaningfulness, like there was for us now in relationship to the Dharma -- if you love the Dharma, and maybe some of you in this room feel like, "I love the Dharma. I'm not just kind of, 'Mindfulness is a good tool,' but I love the Dharma" -- then there's fantasy. I'll come back to this. There's fantasy involved. When those monks and nuns in the time of the Buddha, when he was alive or shortly afterwards, out of the meditation, fantasy. It was imbued with fantasy. It's not a problem. It's just not what we usually think.
Yogi 2: I think I feel like you're hobbled by the language. It's like trying to find the word for what you mean. It's hard. If you find that word, it will all come together.
Rob: [laughs] Okay! Is it partly just because of the associations you have with the word 'fantasy'?
Yogi 2: Well, words have a meaning, they have a shared meaning.
Rob: True!
Yogi 2: It's like you're trying to change the meaning of the word 'fantasy.'
Rob: I am, yeah. Okay. If I say mythos ...
Yogi 2: It works better for me, but I'm just ...
Rob: As I go through the day, I'll use three words interchangeably: mythos, image, and fantasy. And I kind of mean ... something. Is that okay? You could just substitute 'mythos' when you hear me say 'fantasy.'
Yogi 2: Okay! [laughs]
Rob: Is that okay? Yeah. But you've got a real point, yeah, absolutely. So there was mythos there, and there is alive for us now, if we love the Dharma, mythos. It's saturated in mythos. To the degree that we love it, to that degree it's saturated in mythos. It's not something we usually think about or realize. And it depends what your background tradition is, but if you're in the Insight Meditation tradition (it's like my root tradition, Gaia House, etc., mostly that), it's also the case that the teacher's style is very -- we talk a lot about being with actuality and being with life. We don't talk a lot about imagination. We talk about something called bare attention, which is something the Buddha never mentioned, and almost as if trying to live in a life of bare attention, as if that's the direction we want to go in.
And secondly, generally speaking, we dress very ordinary and very plain. There's no costume here. I do have a hat on today, but generally we don't wear fancy hats and robes. [laughter] It's almost like we're presenting, "There's no myth here. There's no fantasy. It's all ordinary, and just plain, and real actuality." So there is, in the Insight Meditation tradition, I would say there is the myth of no myth -- sorry, Nick -- the fantasy of no fantasy. [laughs] It's interesting. Where there is meaningfulness for us, there is fa... mythos. [laughter] Again, where there's soulfulness for us, there's mythos already, already, already. And I wonder -- I keep this as an open question, but I wonder if fantasy, mythos, etc., as I said in that example earlier, is actually part of, not the totality, but part of the basis of loving. Where there is love, there is that, too, whatever the kind of love, whether we're talking about loving a tradition, or a path, or a person, or a this or a that. That's opposite of what we tend to think. Like falling in love, those however many months when you fall in love, we tend to think there's all this projection, and if you can make it through that, see through the projection, and get to how they really are, then you love them, and you're not just in the madness of being in love. That's the traditional sort of more popular psychological way of looking. Maybe that's not quite right. Maybe we stay loving someone if there's enough depth to the relationship that actually there can be ... not so much 'projection,' because that has a very negative connotation, but that there's mythos imbuing the relationship. It's the opposite of what we -- I don't know, but I wonder very seriously.
The point is, fantasy/image/mythos imbues our perception at times. Not at all a problem. The only problem is not realizing it. It's actually something necessary and beautiful. Now, exploring that opens up all kinds of interesting stuff. Realizing, admitting, and exploring can open up all kinds of interesting directions. That's what I want to get into, a little bit of that this afternoon.
