Transcription
I'm going to talk some more. My guess is it's about an hour. It's still helpful, those little breaks? Yeah? Okay, so hopefully I'll throw in a few of those. So a couple of the central pieces we were saying this morning were that where there is meaningfulness for us in our life, or this word, 'soulfulness,' pregnant with resonance, where there is meaningfulness and soulfulness, there is already image and fantasy and mythos running for us. And it might be the case that where there is love, part of the basis or the support for that love is actually image/mythos/fantasy, and that in our perception of ourselves, of each other, of the world, etc., that that perception itself is imbued with fantasy and what we're calling imagination and mythos, at times.
So here's an idea, but I don't think it's a provable idea. It might be; I can't think of a way one would prove it. It's not a provable idea, but what if we entertain the idea or the possibility or the assumption that image and fantasy, what we're calling image and fantasy, is actually primary? By 'primary,' I don't mean first in a process or a neural sequence of events. I mean -- 'fundamental' is a dangerous word, but -- more fundamental, more primary in terms of what drives us, and what moves us, and what orients us in life, primary in giving meaningfulness to things.
This came up a little bit in the question and answer period earlier. We want to entertain a certain range of direction of ideas, possible ideas, in relationship to imagination. But we don't need to necessarily adopt the more common idea of 'the unconscious' as 'the repository of big, dark, dangerous, scary forces that we hope don't escape from this big, dark, scary place.' Don't necessarily have to adopt that as something that exists in and of itself. In fact, a little attention will show, or experimentation will show, that just like with emotions, the very awareness of an image changes the image. Once I'm aware of something, it does not have an independent existence. So just like emotions. Same is true of emotions. Or the kind of awareness, the kind of relationship that I have with something has an effect.
So it's not really that we're talking about something that has complete, independent existence at all. But entertaining or leaning a little bit more to the idea that there is something primary, or that they have a primary place, image and fantasy has a primary place, because what we usually tend to assume nowadays is that something like our biology has a primary place, our emergence from whatever the next stage up of millennia is, billions of years of evolution, and have as hardwired our biology, that that's what drives us. We tend to assume something like that. Or we tend to assume socio-economic factors drive us and are primary. Or we very commonly tend to assume that 'my past' drives me. That's a very common psychotherapeutic assumption, or more than psychotherapeutic. So how my childhood was, what happened to me, how the family was, etc. These are all very common modern assumptions about what drives us.
But in a way, just as an experiment, what happens if, not disregarding any of that, but what happens if I assume something different, and I assume that the image and the fantasy and the mythos is actually primary somehow, if I entertain that idea? Now, that might strike some of you as a very strange idea, and a very weird idea, maybe. But it'd be interesting to reflect, if we parallel it with emotions: in this room now, or even going down to wherever we are, Golders Green or wherever, and just how many people, how many of us now believe that if I am not aware of an emotion, that that lack of awareness of emotion, the emotion operates anyway to impel my mind and my body and my speech? And secondly, if I'm not aware of an emotion, that there's something not healthy about not being aware of what's operating for me emotionally. And also that I'm not alive fully if I'm not in touch with my emotions. These are very common assumptions nowadays. How far back in time? Not very far. How many years would I have to go back and say this idea about emotions, which most of us would take for granted, and someone back then, a few decades maybe, would say, "I say! That's a pretty strange idea"? [laughter] "Very weird." Could it be the same is true for images? What comes into fashion as an ideology?
So, you know, we can and do and should acknowledge that images that arise, etc., arise as a result and as an expression of my past and the emotions I'm feeling in the present. Images are a result. But we're also playing with the opposite: that my life, my emotions, are driven by or are the playing out of image/fantasy/mythos. Something else is what I called 'primary,' whether that's conscious or unconscious. Like so many things in the inner world, the causality works both ways: life leads to image, image leads to life. Let's lean on the one that we tend to lean on less: that image leads to life, that that's more primary.
But you might say, "These images are creations. They're fabrications." That's a whole big thing. Yes, they are, absolutely. One response one could give to that question is, "Show me something that's not a fabrication. Show me something that's not." We tend to assume, back to metaphysics, "This is real, that's not real." It's more complicated than that. In the early Jewish mysticism, there's a strange idea that God is mystically dependent on humanity's liturgical praise. So the praise itself creates God. Later, in the Zohar, the Jewish Kabbalah, there's a line that says, "Man can be said to create God." This wasn't seen as a destruction; it was part of the mystical mystery of what God was. Not a problem. But if I'm intent on this idea that there is a reality independent of my mind, etc., independent of what is fabricated, and I'm locked into certain, perhaps modernist, notions (ontology, epistemology, cosmology, etc.), they might get in the way of entertaining certain ideas.
Last year, we came and talked about imaginal stuff, and particularly the thrust of last year's teachings were images and imaginal figures in relationship to the self, in relation to the self and the sense of the self. I'm not going to repeat much of that, but I'm going to kind of summarize a little bit of the threads there and move on, because I want to move on into other directions. It's there in different recordings if you're interested. Here, I want to say something: how okay do I feel, how okay do you feel, with moving conceptual frameworks, actually moving between conceptual frameworks? Adopting one, seeing what that does; adopting another, seeing what that does -- without being locked into dogma or believing, "This is real. Everything else is irrelevant, or not worth considering." This is an interesting one for me. Some personality types are really fine with that -- no problem, very flexible, fluid movement between conceptual frameworks. [They] enjoy the fluidity of it. For some people, it's really difficult.
There's much more we could say about that, but what I really want to get to for now -- because I've talked about that in other talks -- is that we can view images that arise, or one of the conceptual frameworks that's possible, is viewing them as archetypes, or in this old Greek word, daimons: something, in a way, bigger than the individual self, that visits the self, that comes through the life in that sense. This word 'soulfulness' that I was using earlier, that I've been using (and I said it briefly), it includes the sense, I think, of something bigger than what the ego wants. It's not a melting into an infinite oneness, that kind of happening of the self or dissolving of the self-sense. Here is something more universal, greater than the personal, but still personal. So that black devil man, or I shared some images last year about a warrior or wanderer or something -- universal, bigger than just me, but still very personal and very unique. It's a particular way of opening up the self.
Someone, John, was asking me in the earlier period -- we can use images and conceive them in different ways. Someone was asking me another day, let's say a Christian: "So when I feel bad, I can imagine Christ, and he comforts me or something. Or if I'm feeling stressed out, I imagine a beach scene and a little drink thing with the umbrella, and I feel relaxed." That's one way of using the imagination. It's basically in the service of the ego. As I said, in the range of conceptual frameworks, we can actually put it the other way round: that we may be in the service of something bigger -- which may not always fit the ego's wants. It stretches something.
So that also, and some of you may recognize this, the demand or the push of a daimon or one of these figures is not the same thing as the inner critic, but it can look like it from the outside: "He works so hard. He drives himself," or whatever, or pushing yourself, or "Why are you such a perfectionist?", "She's such a perfectionist," or whatever it is. It looks like the inner critic; it's nothing to do with that sometimes. It's not unkindness to oneself. It's not that the person is needing love and trying to get approval of others. It's not that they're trying to prove themselves. It's not that they don't think they're good enough. It's not any of that. Something else, the demand, the push of this 'other,' if you like, imaginal being, that can come through the personality.
Again, this is so interesting, because we tend to think of personality in quite a small range of ways: "My personality is genetically determined, or dependent on my upbringing, childhood, family, culture, etc." Of course. Okay. Very good. The word 'personality' is from the Latin persona, which is actually Latin for 'mask,' and literally translated it means 'through sounding.' So actors in ancient Greece used to all have masks, and what came through the masks was the personality of the daimon or whoever they were representing. So it literally means 'a mask through which sounds [persona] something transcendent to the human being,' in a loose sense of the word. It's a very different way of thinking about what our personality is.
Henry Corbin, I mentioned this last year, was a scholar of Islamic mysticism. He's dead now. But he talked about this. Building on a phrase of Jung's, a word of Jung's, 'individuation' -- your task is to individuate the self, and grow into sort of mature balance, expansive self, etc. -- he said:
Not your individuation is your task, but the angel's individuation is your task.[1]
Something very different in the conception there. It's not even any longer about me and my process, and how do I feel, and am I better or whatever. Whole different relationship with what's going on, a whole different way of seeing it that opens up differently. That black devil man that came to this woman I was talking about, as I said, it was a series. And after what I explained this morning, some months later, she was going through something -- I can't remember what it was; she was quite upset about something or having a difficult time -- and a friend said to her, "You should love the 5-year-old in you," or "Love the little girl in you that's feeling how you're feeling" (I can't remember what she was feeling). She heard this from her friend, and she said, "I can't do that any more. I've just done so much of that kind of way of thinking, it's not alive any more." Instead, she turned, and the black devil man was there in the imagination. She looked right into his eyes, and pow! She was shocked by how quick something happened. In a second or two, some kind of power entered her and dissolved what she was feeling. Very, very surprising to her.
That's interesting in itself as a sort of anecdote, but what I want to draw out of that is, what do we tend to think, again, about 'real' here? Someone might say, "Well, the 5-year-old girl, the inner child or whatever, is not real." Or, "Maybe it is real." Or, "At least if it's not real, it has its roots in reality, because I was a 5-year-old once, and how the 5-year-old feels is probably rooted in how my actual 5-year-old [self] felt back in the family." Do you see what I mean? There's a subtle sense of, "That's more real than the black devil man; heaven knows where the hell that came from." [laughter] So just, again, to expose assumptions there.
Another line here is: how I am right now, how you are right now, the patterns that exist for you right now psychologically, etc., the difficulties, the obstacles we encounter and we stumble over, are caused, they have their cause, in the past. The past causes the present. Okay? That's important. A Dharma practitioner is also in the business of investigating not just how the past causes the present, but how the present causes the present. As we've said several times today, the relationship I have with the present moment inputs into the present moment to fabricate the experience. Past causes present, present causes present. That's part of dependent arising and fabrication.
But we could also play with the third possibility, strange as it might sound, that the future causes the present. I mean this very loosely. When Corbin talks about this angel, it's the imaginal being that's always beyond. I'm very much connected to it, but I can never really reach that. Something is calling me to shape my life, to move my life towards, and to move towards. There's a Greek word, telos, that has to do with causality. I mean, it has different interpretations, but it has to do with the future, if you like, causing the present, loosely speaking. We can play with that kind of idea.
Part of the reason for saying all this is because I wonder, or I have a hunch that, when we feel ourselves today -- when we feel self, me, what I am, self and personality -- that the way we feel it today intuitively is a lot more complex and rich than at the time of the Buddha. They lived in a very different culture. It wasn't as individualistic as our culture. I can't think of one instance in the Pali Canon of someone worrying about their self-expression, for instance. [laughter] Or beating themselves up with the inner critic. Somehow, because of the way they thought about self, these kind of things didn't arise. They were much more wedded into the community that they lived in, etc. We feel self and personality as much more complex, multidimensional, multifaceted. We can try and erase it, and just say, "It's empty. Personality is to be erased, or at least not very good or valuable." But maybe we need other ways to work with. And maybe this might offer something that, instead of trying to erase personality, it actually raises it up and respects it.
All of it is empty. Angel, daimon, self, whatever, all of it is empty. Emptiness means everything is empty. Sometimes people want to say that the emptiness of the self means there is this process that goes on in time of psychophysical phenomena, consciousness and bodily function, etc., and that's what really exists, but the personality is empty. No, the process is empty also. The elements that make up the process are empty. And the time is empty. That frees us to use certain words: aggregates, consciousness, attention, love, personality, self, angel, daimon. It's all empty. Maybe in slightly different ways, sure, but all empty.
Tantric practice is based -- should be based -- this visualization of deities should be based on absolutely knowing very well that self is empty and imaginal other is empty as well. The deity is empty. Absolutely, it's supposed to be based on that. Deep emptiness practice, which we're not talking about today, deep emptiness practice, or when things really fade, experience really fades, or deep samādhi practice with jhāna, etc., what it can do is make everything more malleable, so that the imaginal becomes much more possible. Life itself, self and life and cosmos, become more malleable to the perception. You get a little bit of hint of that in some of the Buddha's descriptions of people going very deep in meditation, and emerging, and doing certain things, and also in other traditions, like Islamic mysticism (again, Corbin [writes] about someone called Avicenna who lived in the twelfth century).
Some people don't need to understand emptiness at all to be able to go into the imaginal. They're just fine with it, and they don't take it too rigidly or too seriously. There's not a problem of identification. They've got a very loose relationship with it. In the alchemical tradition, the Western alchemical tradition, there's a teaching that says, "Do not proceed" -- with your alchemical procedure -- "do not proceed until everything is liquid." Don't proceed until everything is liquid. If there's solidity of self, solidity -- "I am that" or "this is that" -- don't proceed until everything is liquid. Somehow, in this imaginal practice, especially with self, we somehow have to find a relationship with it that's liquid, that's not solidified.
Time for a little pause? Yeah? Okay. So why don't we just have a bit of silence? This is a lot of stuff today. Maybe just to pick out one little strand, how do you feel, to reflect meditatively, how do you feel about the possibility of being flexible with conceptual frameworks? How does that sit with you? If it doesn't sit well, what does it bring up for you? And if it does [sit well], what does it bring up? So just exploring this whole idea of the possibility of being flexible with conceptual frameworks. No shoulds here. No pressure, despite what I'm saying. Just exploring. There's no sense of anything should be this way or that. It's just about you and your relationship right now with certain ideas, and respecting that.
Okay. And again, it's quite a big theme, so it may be something you want to explore a bit more another time.
This business about image/fantasy in relationship to the self in particular, as I've said, I've talked about it on quite a number of other occasions. Some of those talks are on the web if you're interested. What I really want to do today is move in directions that are maybe not so obvious. If we are exposed to, let's say, the different portrayals of the Buddha in his time in India 2,500 years ago, and you read, for instance, Thích Nhất Hạnh's lovely -- it's very, very big, but lovely biography -- Old Path, White Clouds, or you read someone else's portrayal, whether it's a whole biography or just a snippet or whatever, you can't help being struck by the range of what we might call the fantasy of the Buddha.
The picture painted, the portrayal, the character painted, what he was, what he thought, what he did, how he was, what his central message was, etc., quite a large range to it. All we actually have is what he said, the collection of teachings of what he said, and actually, we don't really know how much of that he actually said. There are certain ideas. We have a collection of teachings, and we know he must have said some portion of that, but exactly what is not really certain at all. On top of that, we're not really certain what he meant when he said what he said, because there are all kinds of differences of opinions. So it gets interpreted, what he said, or the recordings of it get interpreted differently.
But you'll notice the so-called words of the Buddha get interpreted always according to the metaphysical inclinations of the interpreter, and according to the favoured mythos and fantasy and mythic involvement of the interpreter. Not a problem, in itself. Not a problem necessarily. But somehow, with that, we decide a priori, from the beginning, that the Buddha was the authority, and the Buddha is right. So there's something a little circular here. Do you get that? Who is the object of my veneration, if I venerate the Buddha? If I love the Buddha, who is this? If something in my heart -- who is it? Who am I devoted to? Am I not devoted to the imaginal Buddha, really, in some sense? Not a problem. Only a problem if I don't realize and I don't admit it. Again, these words 'image,' 'fantasy,' they tend to be very negatively charged for us. If I can just get a different sense ... The only problem is not realizing something.
Take it a step further: is it not the case that we also, if you're involved in Dharma and you love Dharma, that we also have a fantasy of what awakening is? Fantasies of what liberation looks like, and what a liberated person is like? What a fully awakened being does or doesn't do, engages in, doesn't engage in, how they are, how they speak, how they whatever? That cannot help imbuing the whole thing. Just very simplistic (and I've talked about this in other talks; I'm not going to dwell too much on it), is a fully liberated person equanimous, unentangled, a little bit allowing the world to do its thing, but they stay steady, unmoved, unperturbed? Or are they passionate, and on fire, and even angry at times with engagement? So just to point out one possibility.
There's a range of fantasy there, and it comes in. It cannot help but come in. If you love this stuff, it cannot help but come in. Add to that -- this goes back to the metaphysics thing -- the metaphysics and the assumptions that the metaphysics rest on, if you like. They delineate, they direct, shape and colour and flavour and circumscribe what the Four Noble Truths, the most central teaching of Buddhism, is. They create what the Four Noble Truths are.
Again, you listen to enough people, what is the Four Noble Truths actually talking about? It depends on the metaphysical assumptions that one is harbouring. If I really believe, let's say, that essentially all of us are biological machines, evolved over -- what is the word above millennia? Aeons? Okay, great, aeons. We're essentially a biological machine -- people may or may not use this; it's rare for someone to call you a biological machine, but -- you're essentially a biological machine, and meditation, you can reprogram the software. Maybe a little bit you can influence the hardware, so certain membranes in the brain grow or blood vessels or this or that. But if essentially you're a biological machine, then what the Third Noble Truth means, the range of that freedom, is constrained by this 'fact' or the 'reality' of being a biological machine in a universe that is essentially a machine as well.
If I adopt a slightly looser existential version of Buddhism -- again, I'm not aware of anyone that uses this language -- but essentially we are born, or to use Heidegger's phrase, "thrown into" a situation, an essentially meaningless situation, of cold, dead matter in this universe, finite life, all that, and the liberation then, the big thrust of the Third Noble Truth then, is bearing up and meeting that essential reality. There is no 'beyond' that. If the vision of metaphysics is that everything is empty, including matter, including all that, then the Third Noble Truth will get bigger. Do you get what I'm saying here? The sense of liberation. Have I lost you guys? [laughter] No? Okay. Did someone say yes? Did you say yes? [laughter]
Yogi: Can you repeat the last point?
Rob: What I'm really saying is that we tend to think, "Oh, we're all Buddhists," if you do. And so, "Okay, we all believe in the Four Noble Truths." What I want to say is the Four Noble Truths are like a skeleton. They're actually a skeleton, and they need fleshing out. How do they get fleshed out? They get fleshed out by the metaphysical assumptions, because that determines what I think liberation is, and what I'm actually talking about when I say dukkha. What do I mean when I say dukkha? Is it all appearance? Is it just this or that or whatever? Then that correspondingly affects the second truth, what causes dukkha, and the path to release it. If I'm ending rebirth, if that's the vision of the Third Noble Truth, that's tied into a whole cosmology and a sense of metaphysics.
All these versions, all of them, they say, "This is the truth," or try to say this is the truth, or struggle to claim or prove this is the truth or this is reality. Some don't even bother to do that, because they just assume it's true or real. Mostly that's the case if the metaphysics is just the one that's the common cultural one, the dominant modernism. Then I don't even bother to have to try and prove anything or work very hard, because it's all just what we all take for granted. But again, there is the thrust of modern physics, and the thrust of modern philosophy, and also you could say of some Dharma, emptiness, seeing more pervasive emptiness. I mean, one might ask: is it still Buddhism? If we're just using the same labels, is it all Buddhism? That's a side question.
Some of you come to these things regularly. Is it not the case, when a teacher comes, that the teacher is teaching and communicating, verbally and non-verbally, not just techniques to reduce suffering as in the Four Noble Truths, but also, at the same time, they're communicating a certain fantasy, their fantasy, their mythos, of what awakening is, of what the Dharma is, and also of what the cosmos is? That gets communicated, directly and indirectly. You or me, as an individual, I like certain, I resonate with certain mythoses. Is it mythoi? [laughter] Whatever! That's actually, as much as anything, what's attracting me: "I don't like that one. I like that one, that mythos, that fantasy of what awakening is, of what the Dharma is, of what the cosmos is." Not just the reduction, the technology of reducing suffering.
We all say, probably, "In the Pali Canon, it says this," or "The Buddha said that." It's a way of shoring up one's own position, of course, and garnering some authority. Fine. No problem. But in all of it, there is what I would call a religious fantasy. I might call it secular; people call me a secular Buddhist or whatever. I might call it secular. It's still a religious fantasy. What I mean by that is what's characteristic of a religious fantasy or mythos is that it looks backwards in time for the truth: the Buddha had the truth, he made the discovery, and we're essentially replicating his discovery. Science doesn't do that. Science moves forward. Art does something very different. So there's a religious fantasy of looking backward that's wrapped up here, even if I'm secular. Please: fantasy, not bad, not wrong. Not wrong; inevitable, and I would say beautiful. It's only not admitting it or not realizing it that's a problem.
Here's a question for you: is it not the case that if you love the Dharma -- some of you may be so new that you're not even sure if you love the Dharma yet, but whatever. But if you love the Dharma, is it really the case that, after a while, it's not that you're just looking for ways of reducing suffering? Certainly that's part of it. Of course it's part of it. But is it not the case that you're also loving the particular kinds of beauty that speak to you? Is that not also what's going on? That there's a lot more about beauty here that's already going on? The expressions of beauty that touch you, whether it's gentleness, a certain style of gentleness or kindness, or renunciation, whatever.
And the mythos -- that there's a mythos that has to do with the past and the tradition, running into the present and perhaps into the future; the self on a journey. It's a mythos, all that, the styles of existence and teachings. All of that creates a mythos, and certain beauties, which is part of what we love when we love the Dharma. That includes, if you like, a kind of cosmos, a kind of cosmological sensibility or thinking. In a way, what we want is a myth of the cosmos and a myth to live by and to live in. I'm actually trying to say this is already going on. I'm just saying let's be a bit more aware. The Dharma as a mythos for beauty, and for soulfulness. Going back to the poet John Keats: soulmaking. Dharma as a mythos for soulmaking -- not only, or even sometimes primarily, for the reduction of suffering. That's a shift in understanding and conception of what is the ground of the Dharma.
Let's explore this a little bit, regarding the Four Noble Truths, which are the central Buddhist teaching. For insight meditators, it's a central teaching of the Buddha. You can see it in a very shorthand version, which means, as a practitioner, I'm on the lookout for dis-ease, discomfort, dissatisfaction, dukkha. When I feel it, when I recognize it, I know it's being supported by something. And the mind is part of supporting that. That's the second truth. There's the possibility of freedom, the third truth, some degree of freedom. And then, what can I do to create some alleviation of dukkha, that's the fourth truth. That's a shorthand version, and it's very central in the teaching.
But even in the bigger version -- eightfold path and dependent origination, all that -- we're saying maybe it's a skeleton. The Four Noble Truths are actually a skeleton. It needs fleshing out. It's dependent on the metaphysics and dependent on the fantasy. How many people these days even talk about ending suffering? Ending suffering, completely eradicating all dukkha? Certainly in these circles, it's very, very rare. How many practitioners are really interested in completely eradicating suffering? I would say very few, and that's the norm. Someone told me just the other day, "It's not what I'm really interested in." It's okay.
What happens when we're okay enough? Through practice, and all the techniques and the practices and the perspectives that are available to us through practice, you can get to a point, absolutely, through practice, you're just okay enough. You feel okay. People tell me this all the time: "I've reached a place where I'm really okay. All that crusted suffering in my life, it's just mostly dissolved." You feel okay enough. Then what? Then why practise? What is it that's drawing a person to still practise after that?
This is what I want to say: isn't it already the case that the fantasy, the mythos of beauty, of soulfulness, the fantasy of Dharma, the fantasy of what liberation is, and the fantasy of the self and the cosmos, are already part of what's galvanizing your practice? Do you see what I'm getting at? Maybe it's the case that as human beings we want and need enchantment as much as we want and need to reduce our suffering at times. There's something in us that wants to be enchanted. We want that equally. We want to be enchanted by the mythos, a mythos of the cosmos, and a mythos to live by. Deep emptiness practice allows more choice; as I said, there's a malleability to what kind of cosmos one perceives, and what kind of self.
This is a bit of an aside, but there's actually another way of seeing the Four Noble Truths. We tend to see the Four Noble Truths -- we've heard about it, craving/clinging is the cause of suffering, the Second Noble Truth, and then people are trying to live a life of non-clinging. Trying to live a life of non-clinging. How's it going? [laughter] It doesn't work, does it? Not only does it not work, it doesn't fit. There is another possibility, which is using the Four Noble Truths as actually a kind of framework for investigating perception -- actually seeing: where is there clinging right now, and how does that affect perception? More clinging, I perceive self and the world in a certain way. Less clinging, less and less and less, and learning how to play with all that. And what does it tell me about my perception of self and the world and the cosmos? I understand it's dependent on clinging. We're not going to get into this, but I'm understanding something about perception. It tells me of the emptiness of everything. And that opens up possibilities. That's a different way of seeing what the Four Noble Truths are, as opposed to trying to live a life of non-clinging. There is still metaphysics involved in that route. There are still metaphysical assumptions. I can't get away from some assumptions.
Maybe at times ending suffering is not really what it's about. And even reducing suffering, reducing dukkha for us is not really primary. But the mythos, the fantasy of the cosmos, of the self, of the Dharma, is what's primary. Even what I was calling the existentialist version of the Dharma, I would say there's actually an enchantment there for whoever has that picture of the Dharma. One is enchanted by, if you like, the task or the journey of the self to bear up and to face the reality of the existential limitations, the finiteness, the meaninglessness, etc. One is enchanted by what would be a fairly grim and basic-looking cosmos and self and Dharma. But again, sometimes that cosmos is based on a certain idea (subliminally, often) of what matter is, which is not really tenable, etc., and one way of knowing reality, which again is a bit out of date, the idea that you can only know reality one way. Nowadays, philosophers acknowledge that there are multiple perspectives, multiple ways of knowing, and they're all important and have their place.
So, fine if one is enchanted by that version of existential Dharma. Absolutely fine. Just, I don't know that one can stamp a claim of truth or reality: "This is the truth. This is right." No. But if it enchants you, fine. The problem with it is that part of the enchantment rests on, "This is true. This is absolutely true, and I'm facing the truth." Again: the myth of no myth.
I think it's time for a short break. Do you want to stand up? Do we need a bit of energy? Yeah, and just let your body stretch, but bring the mindfulness to the stretching or moving or whatever you need to do. Be really present in the body, just as much as you can to the sensations, and let the body do what it needs to do, move how it needs to move. When you're ready, coming back into the sitting posture.
[45:18] So, last bit of the segment. Regarding imaginal work, or imaginal practice, and the reduction of suffering, this is quite interesting. Again, we said there are so many possible conceptual frameworks we can have of images, and what they are, and what their reality is, and what their relationship with self is, and to me -- I said this when John asked a question earlier in the Q & A -- to me that ends up being the most interesting thing about all this, about imaginal work, is actually the conceptual frameworks that one plays with, rather than the images themselves.
But choosing that perhaps more far-out conceptual framework, or adopting a kind of work with images at times at least, that includes the view of them having a kind of archetypal or bigger than the self, bigger than this small psyche, significance of daimons, if you like, that they are more primary, or image as epiphany ('epiphany' means the appearance of a god, of any divine luminousness). Image as epiphany, or to quote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and philosopher:
The essential mark of the image [he uses the word 'symbol'; sometimes people use those words] is the reflection of the eternal in and through the temporal.[2]
This is loose poetic language here, but it influences the whole way things unfold or don't unfold.
Yogi: Can you just quote that again, please?
Rob: "The essential mark of the image is the reflection of the eternal in and through the temporal."
'Temporal' -- what is of time. So he used the word 'symbol.' There's a problem with vocabulary here, but he's talking about the same thing.
Using images that way actually will tend -- my experience, working with people, is it will tend to help see the emptiness of self, help dissolve the solidity of the ego, and also reduce suffering in all kinds of ways. That kind of image-work dissolves the concretization of self and ego, and also of world. In one way of thinking about what the Dharma is, that's part of deep liberation. That's exactly what's part of deep liberation, this de-concretization of self and world.
So it can do all that, and we can see it that way and use it that way. And/or we can use it with another objective: not to end suffering. It's not in the service of ending suffering. Not even thinking of that. Not having a goal in regards to the images that come of trying to balance them: "I balance the virgin with the mother, and the warrior with the monk or whatever, and the child with the old sage figure, and have this balance." They're subordinated to the self, to the ego. 'Integrated' a lot of the time ends up meaning 'subordinated': some chief executive officer here of the self. And not using them in a sense of a narrative, of this moving towards some happy ending necessarily, and engineering the images to go towards some happy ending or what the ego thinks is a nice thing.
But rather, the objective being, again, to quote John Keats, soulmaking, soulfulness-making. It's a different way of relating to the whole thing that we're doing. Why, or why do we need images to do that? Well, because partly they may be what I'm calling primary, but also because they hold so much, going back to what I said at the beginning of the day. There's something about the image that constellates in a very powerful, condensed way so much, and so much that unfolds beauty, or presents beauty, opens beauty, and fulfilment, which is a different thing than ending suffering. How many people are parents? Has parenting reduced your suffering? [laughter] You don't have to answer this, but would you, if you went back in time, choose not to be a parent? No? Why? Because it's given you something. What's that something? What's the word for it?
Yogi: Love.
Rob: Yeah, okay. But something that's beyond not suffering. Fulfilment is the word I was looking for, but yeah, love/fulfilment. There's something else apart from reducing suffering that's important to us as human beings. Images constellate that very powerfully: beauty, fulfilment, rightness, if you like, for the psyche, soulfulness. These things are important to us as human beings. As I said, after a certain amount -- which, really, you may be new to this, and you may feel, "I've been struggling with the same things. I've been meditating for years." It is possible to really reach a place of real, deep okayness through practice. It's a matter of practising, finding the right ways of practice. This is available. It totally is available. But after a certain amount of reducing suffering in one's life, or even just at times, maybe what I'm calling 'soulfulness' can be the compass. It's not about reducing suffering; it's about soulfulness, maybe, at times. And maybe at times that's already operating.
Is there healing through using images? Yes, you bet. There's lots of healing, all kinds of healing. And sometimes working with an image -- and some people in here know this already -- the image, through repetition, through emotional contact with it, and meditative sort of work with it in the cauldron of meditation, it's like producing a tincture: this thing gets condensed, and gets very powerful. So a little bit of it, like the black devil woman -- she just saw it for a couple of seconds and something went, like a powerful tincture. So definitely possible. But who is healed? What is healed? There's a possibility of opening up bigger questions.
But in relation to the reduction of suffering, using image-work in this way is probably roughly equal to a lot of other Dharma practice, in terms of the way it reduces suffering. And in regard to ending suffering, well, a lot of people barely think about that anyway. A lot of people, it's not even on the radar as part of the mythos, ending suffering, ending dukkha.
Three thoughts to leave you with, as sort of open-ended possibility thoughts, to end.
Just to say before: Dharma as mythos, Dharma as fantasy, or as fantasies, or mythoi, plural, possibilities. What a strange way of looking at it, perhaps. And maybe it sounds catastrophically disappointing -- maybe; I don't know -- from a certain perspective. It probably will sound catastrophically disappointing if I'm assuming a concrete 'real' in relation to which fantasy is less than. If there is no longer this investment in a belief in a concrete 'real,' it opens up fantasy as something equal and available and valuable. That gives a different ground, a very different ground, grounding the Dharma in imagination. It's very different ground, and it opens up certain possibilities. There's a whole thing here that I don't have time to get to today, but the whole fantasy of awakening that I touched on, and whether awakening is an arrival point or an open-ended thing, or what does it mean, and the plurality of that. We can't get to that. But three thoughts, three possibilities, to leave you with before I stop:
(1) If, at least at times, the Dharma, our practice, is not primarily for ending suffering, but rather for beauty, for enchantment, for enchanting the cosmos and the sense of existence, and if there's a certain leeway in regarding the mythos and the fantasy that's available to us -- of the self, of the Dharma, of the cosmos, etc. -- then Dharma and practice become a little bit more like writing poetry, or a little bit more, let's say, like art. Art, Dharma as art. When we hear that, we can tend to think, "Oh, yes, the art of calming down," or "the art of equanimity," or "the art of samādhi," or "the art of reducing suffering." But what if we don't say "the art of," and we just say "art"? The art of enchantment, partly. Dharma as art. Not "what is art for?" We could give a lot of answers, and we wouldn't exhaust the possibilities of what art is for, and that's partly the whole point. When we say Dharma as art, it opens something up. That's one notion.
(2) The second, and this is something I've said before on several occasions -- I might have said it last year; I think I did say it in different words -- is it the case then that Buddhism and the Dharma, especially Theravādan Dharma, has actually constrained to one narrow and small range the image and fantasies of what awakening is and looks like, as I touched on earlier? So, "An awakened being is like this. They do this. They don't do that. They are like this," whatever. And in that, certain emotions get elevated, given more value: equanimity, non-erotic love, non-entanglement. These kind of things are elevated over certainly their opposites, but also a lot of other stuff. The other stuff is regarded, at best, with suspicion. Something happens to the whole navigation system then if we constrain the range of fantasy of awakening. Is it possible we can open it out, and actually include other archetypes, if we use that language, broadening the images and the fantasies of what awakening is and looks like?
Historically, there are reasons why the Vajrayāna, the tantric practices that use a lot of imagination -- they actually came a hundred years later, and we could look at a lot of things there. Some of it has to do with the understanding of emptiness evolving, but it might also be that it was a psychological necessity in the Dharma, that people felt it too constrained, and so it needed the erotic imagery, it needed the imagery of the wrathful deity. There wasn't room for it, so it had to burst forth, had to be incorporated somehow. Could be. And if we broaden it, could we say that sometimes some of what we're broadening it to may increase the suffering a little bit? It may not be that comfortable. It may not be peaceful and undisturbed. That's a second thought.
(3) Last thought. Actually, I have to say something a little bit more general before this, which is: working with imaginal figures in general, one finds that they do want to flow into the life in some way or other. They interface with our existence, our everyday being in the world, and our relationships, and our sense of life and work and what we do. Very much they want to be expressed. But they very rarely need to be expressed literally. I go back to the holy war thing. Very rarely do they need to be expressed literally. Sometimes the expression is really quite subtle. So I have a warrior. I have no intention ever of joining the army or anything like that. And I've never harmed anyone physically in my life, and I doubt I -- well, I may, but ... [laughter] It doesn't seem to be a part of the way that gets expressed. It gets expressed in much more subtle ways.
So there's that. And these figures, sometimes it's as if they demand service. They demand an expression in our life. But also, as well as that, it might be that they just matter -- and again, the pun there, 'matter.' They matter for and in the psyche, if you like, on their own level, and don't need the expression. There are other dimensions to our being, if we use a certain language. There are other dimensions to the being that don't need to always flow into every day. We talk about "meditation for life, everyday life." It's very much "life, life, life, life, life, this, every day." Of course it's important that the Dharma flows in and influences and makes an impact on our everyday life. If we have a slightly different view, Dharma as art, it doesn't always only need to do that. It exists on its own thing, for itself, in itself. There's a part of us that it fulfils and satisfies, and sings to, and speaks to, and gives something to, and is a necessity to. It doesn't always need to flow, all of it, into everyday life.
Shall we have a couple of quiet moments together?
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. ↩︎
Paraphrasing Samuel Coleridge Taylor, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Aids to Reflection, Vol I (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884), 437. ↩︎
