Transcription
I think I'm going to talk a little bit more now. Let me ask you a question, though: when I was talking earlier this morning, and then we basically stopped halfway through, and I asked you to just have a bit of quiet and reflect, was that helpful to have that little break? Yeah? Okay. I'll try and do that, because I know that for a lot of people it's difficult to just have a lot thrown at you.
Mostly when I teach this kind of stuff, imaginal stuff, it's usually one on one, and it comes from the student. Something comes to them as an image that feels -- this word that I was using earlier -- soulful, pregnant with something. It feels important; it's compelling. They maybe don't understand it, etc., but something about it feels like, "Oh, there's something here." And that feeling that they have gives them a sense of wanting to pursue this way of working in this realm, and also enough trust to be able to do so. And then part of my job is actually helping that trust and helping to see things in a different light than the usual way of relating to these kind of things.
But when, like today, you come and speak to a group, it lands in very different places. I'm quite aware of that. So I think some of that needs addressing, because some people -- even just the little bit, the examples we gave this morning -- some people will get nervous, or do get nervous, hearing about this kind of stuff, especially if "I'm not quite sure if I can relate to it," or "I've had an experience, but that was really troubling to me, because my mind got hold of it in a certain way." So I think it's worth us just talking a little bit about that nervousness that can arise for some people.
One of the nervousnesses is, "Well, won't this drive us crazy, doing this kind of thing? Isn't this what happens with mad people, that they get all this crazy imagery? Is this not the direction to madness?" I don't think so, or that's at least not my experience working with lots of people this way. Of course there are always exceptions; actually, any practice is dangerous, really, in different ways.
Psychological studies show that with children, when they have, for instance, imaginal characters or imaginal friends or whatever, they're actually 'psychologically healthy' -- which is a whole other thing, but -- psychologically healthy in all kinds of different ways. It's not making them unhealthy. It's making them healthy. And particularly their relationships with others are actually supported by their having an imaginal world, if you like.
Still, we might hear that and say, "Yes, yes, that's okay for children, but at a certain point we want to grow out of that, because heavens, we can't have adults walking around doing this kind of thing!" [laughter] Maybe there are some assumptions, and maybe some fears as well: "Will we maybe not be able to discern between what's real and what's imaginal?", and sort of confused about reality. Again, I think there's a lot of stuff underneath those kind of fears. Some of it's coming from certain psychological thinking, and some of it's coming from a lot of simplistic assumptions sometimes. When one works consciously*,* mindfully, and sensitively, attentively to this stuff, exploring it, aware of the conceptual frameworks as well, that problem of 'reality' discernment is just not there at all.
There's a psychologist called Mary Watkins. She's probably quite old now. Some of you may have heard of her. She used to do some work with the imaginal, so she probably still does; I don't know. She was saying that what's actually characteristic of people with a schizophrenic diagnosis -- that diagnosis shifts all the time, but -- what's characteristic of people with a schizophrenic diagnosis is that, when they have hallucinations, or what's diagnosed as that, they don't have a nuanced relationship at all with that imagined other. It's a vague sense of other, oppressing: "Vaguely, aliens want to infiltrate my brain," or "Vaguely, the CIA or whatever are after me." There's not a relationship there. We're talking about something very different. We're talking about actually turning towards, entering into, and really, with a lot of sensitivity, entering into multidimensional relationship, and feeling out the nuances -- opposite of what tends to happen with most schizophrenics.
There's also a book by Gregory Bateson. It's called Perceval's Narrative, and what it is is really a reprint of a guy who lived 100 or 200 years ago called Perceval, who had, over some years, a sort of prolonged psychotic episode, or went into schizophrenia, it was called. He emerged out of it after a couple of years, and then wrote this account of before, during, after. One of the things he said that took him out of this, actually healed the problem, was that he -- it's not that the imagery stopped, or the sense of hearing voices, etc., stopped, but he stopped taking it all literally. That was the difference. He was able to take what was heard and what was seen and what appeared more metaphorically, more poetically, rather than literally. Everything hinges on that. A metaphoric, a poetic sensibility. Again, I use the example of a holy war: there's no sense of metaphor or mythos or poetry there as well. 'Holy war' means 'war.' It means actual war. 'War on terror' or 'war on evil' means actual war. It's taken too literally. Whether it's at an individual level, or at a social/political level, where a whole culture gets sucked into a literalism, that may be more the problem.
In the Pali Canon, it's interesting, actually: in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the mindfulness sutta, in the full version of it, probably the longest bit of it is the contemplation on death. I don't know if you know that. It's not what we often talk about when we teach mindfulness, but it's actually the longest bit. Part of the way it's taught is you can go to a graveyard, and see rotting corpses, etc., which we don't tend to have in this culture, or it says imagine your own body doing that, as if it was.
So imagination's already a little bit there in the Pali Canon. There's also a practice called recollecting the Buddha. When your practice is not going very well, the mind is not settled, the Buddha says recollect me, bring me to mind, think of me, and it does something to the being as a teaching. He was recommending imagining him as a way of transforming the state of mind in the present. Of course, now, when we teach mettā practice, we very easily include, "Imagine the other if you can, maybe see them smiling, send them light." There are all kinds of possibilities. Imagination is very much a part of mettā practice.
But still, despite all that, it's quite common for people in our tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition, to be a little suspicious, understandably, about this kind of thing. They say, "But it's not being in the moment." I remember when mettā practice first came into being, people really didn't like that, for a lot of similar reasons: "It's not being in the moment. It's not being with what is, or reality, or life," or something. This is quite a big obstacle for some people, this whole idea of 'being in the moment,' 'meeting life,' 'being present with what is,' or whatever.
But why are we so attached to that particular idea, or that rhetoric of that? Why has that come to be so important, 'being in the moment'? What's going on there? Is it because we think that that's what the Buddha was teaching? That his whole teaching was about being in the moment, and that's what he really wanted us to do, be in the moment, that it was very important for him that we were in the moment? And/or, is it because we think that's what's real? "All this imaginal stuff is not real. We want to be with Life," with a capital L perhaps, "and that's what's real. We don't want to miss what's real. We don't want to miss life." So there's quite a lot, perhaps, wrapped up underneath, if we feel a little bit not sure about this.
Taking those two backwards, the reality thing first: there's a philosopher called Ed Casey. I think he might be retired now, but he was at Yale University. This whole what I said earlier, the whole notion of 'reality,' we tend to be a bit too simplistic about it these days. He talked about what if we have two ideas of reality: objective reality (which exists in some kind of independent way, socially agreed upon, publicly shared, etc.) as one, and experiential reality as another. And just acknowledge that there's a range here, or two modes, if you like. That, I think, is important.
But I would also say, I wonder if we can poke at this a little bit more. This might sound abstract for the next five minutes, but my point with it is exactly that it's not abstract. I'll explain what I mean. Around reality assumptions, we walk around with, we live with, and we practise with what I would call 'metaphysical assumptions.' So 'metaphysics' is a fancy word. It's hard to define. It's a philosophical term. It's a bit hard to define, but involved in metaphysics, or what that word means traditionally, are three more fancy words (bear with this): ontology, epistemology, and cosmology. I'll explain what this means.
Ontology is the philosophical study of what is real and what is not real: "This is real. That is not real. That is real, and this is not real." Over centuries, philosophers have argued about this, what's real and what's not. Epistemology is the study of how we know anything. It's the study of knowledge, including how do we know what's real and what's not real. How do we know anything, and what knowledge can we trust? That's the study of what's called 'epistemology.' Thirdly is cosmology, which means something more familiar: what is the structure of this world that I'm in, that we are in? What is the order of the cosmos? What kind of world are we in?
We walk around, as a culture but also individually, with these metaphysical assumptions operating. We believe -- often it's not conscious, unless you're really a philosopher -- about what's real and what's not real, about what knowledge is valid and what knowledge is not valid, and what kind of experiences are valid and what kind of experiences are invalid, and also about what is the nature of this universe and what is not the nature of this universe.
Now, some people say, "Well, blaaaahhgghh." [laughter] And elaborate, and they say either, "I don't do all that; I abide in non-conceptuality. That's what my practice does." What I would like to suggest is this level of conceiving goes on even when we are not thinking. It's intuitive and it's woven into the fabric of our very perception, all these. Some stand on ontology, epistemology, and cosmology is woven into our perception, even when we're not conceiving. Or a person says, "Pfft. I'm not an intellectual type. I don't even understand what you just said." Doesn't matter. It's still there. [laughter] Or a person is a little bit intellectual and says, "I don't do metaphysics," or "Buddhism doesn't do metaphysics." It's not true. There are always assumptions about ontology, epistemology, cosmology, and they are operating. Often they're not articulated, but they're there.
Interestingly, too (and I'll maybe come back to this, in terms of knowing), epistemology always rests on assumptions. It's a funny thing. I was reading Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist. He actually said that even science rests on assumptions. You come to a place where you just have to make assumptions. There is no full knowledge of anything. You have to make some assumptions, and build something on that. We'll come back to this.
So this is actually quite important. We assume that this isn't going on. Often we assume it's not going on. Often we assume it doesn't make much difference. But it does make a lot of difference, a huge amount of difference, to our sense of life, to our sense of self, existence, and to our practice, and what is kosher or not in our practice. We can very easily assume that when we're being mindful, we're cutting all of that: "When I'm mindful, there is no belief operating. I'm entering into a mode where there's no belief." That's actually not true, for the most part. There's still some belief. What beliefs are operating? What implicit metaphysics is operating, even when we are mindful? So-called 'bare attention' -- which is not a word the Buddha ever used -- still right there is an implicit ontology, epistemology, cosmology. Maybe not articulated.
Now, oftentimes, the metaphysics that we walk around with, live our life with, and practise through, if you like -- or the metaphysics that constrains, or limits, or guides, or directs, shapes and colours our practice -- is actually the metaphysics of the dominant culture. We haven't really thought about this and figured it all out for ourselves. We're just like, "This is what people believe in our culture," the paradigm of what we might call 'modernism.' This might sound complex. What is modernism? It's the sort of thing that began to arise with, say, Descartes and Francis Bacon, the Scientific Revolution, those kind of thinkers and philosophers. Wonderful emergence in humanity. But part of it is, or there's a gradual emergence and it has come to be more dominant: it's like matter is the essential and only reality. That's often a view that's lurking there as part of modernism.
People have different stances on this, but taken to its extreme -- as I was taking the train up, there was a new Scientific American or new Scientist or whatever. I didn't buy it, but on the front cover, big splash, "The Neuroscience of Meditation." For some people, they believe, "Okay, we can reduce everything to matter. Just map out everything neuronally and down, etc., until everything is matter, everything emerges from matter. Consciousness, and the whole of human experience, etc., and the whole cosmos is material in essence, and that's its only reality," sometimes. But wrapped up in the notions of modernism is also the universe, then, as a world of dead matter, if you like, mostly, and just sort of set up with certain physical rules, and bouncing off each other, little billiard balls and forces à la Newton, etc. The universe is a big machine, basically. This was an idea that really took hold in the so-called Western Enlightenment, and really gathered force, the universe as a machine, and in terms of epistemology, knowing, that the knowledge we can really trust, the only knowledge that we can really trust, is a knowledge that's independent, that has removed the subject from the object, and is rational, hopefully, logical, and also empirical (means what I said before) and experimentally verifiable.
Part of the problem with all that -- part of the problem -- is that, for instance, modern physics, over the last 100 years, has actually gone beyond those kind of beliefs. If you say to someone who knows about modern physics, "When you say 'matter,' what do you mean by 'matter'? What is this matter?" And they take you down, down, down to atoms, and then electrons. "Okay, electrons. What is an electron?" It turns out an electron is not anything like matter as we tend to think of it. It's not anything like it. It's certainly not a billiard ball, a little billiard ball. [laughter] It's certainly not a wave either. Nor is it a little packet of a wave that sort of moves. It's not any of those things in itself. Nor does it exist here or there in itself, or at a certain time in itself, or with a certain velocity, or a certain energy. It's not independent of the process of observing it. There's something fundamentally very non-material, in a way, about an electron, or about matter. Matter is not what we tend to think it is. So the whole modernism, which is the dominant culture, is actually a little bit out of date. It's also out of date philosophically, in terms of the way people, anthropologists and philosophers, have explored this, "What is involved in knowing, and what is valid knowledge?" So the idea of, "It's just rational and just scientific," etc., that's actually quite an old idea.
A subtle thing here: I don't want to say, "Okay, that's not reality, what we would call this modernism package, this package of modernism. This is reality." I don't want to replace one set with another set. That's not what I'm trying to do. Rather, to say that what we tend to think of as reality is not. Not actually replace it. There's a subtle difference there.
Going back to what is this thing about 'being in the moment,' and 'being with what's real,' and 'missing life': what's wrapped up under the surface, usually, with that? That's what I'm getting at. Can you hear that I'm using all this philosophical language, but it's actually not abstract? It's not abstract. This matters, all puns intended, in our life.
And the second piece is that we don't realize, as I was trying to show earlier with the examples, we don't realize that what I was calling image/fantasy/mythos actually imbues, imagination imbues our perception quite a lot of the time. It's not a bad thing, but it's something we need to wake up to perhaps.
[20:46] Let's take a minute break now, okay, and have a bit of quiet time. Maybe just see where that lands in you. Maybe ask yourself a question: if and what reality assumptions are at the basis of your life, but also of your practice. See if you can just get a little glimpse even. You might notice how it feels to you to even ask yourself this question. Don't exclude the heart and the emotions.
Okay. So that's maybe something you want to take away with you and explore a bit more.
If I could continue a little bit now: again, I'm really trying to address some of the nervousness that some people feel sometimes. A person might say, "Well, why did the Buddha not talk about this more, the imaginal side of practice?" (at least the Buddha of the Pali Canon, because in later Buddhism it's very, very rich with imaginal practice). "Why did the Buddha of the Pali Canon not talk about it? Why is it not in the four foundations of mindfulness?", although it is, potentially at least, in the death reflection, the death contemplation. And you might say it's in the Pali Canon in lots of instances. There are instances of recordings of the Buddha talking to devas, angelic beings. Maybe that was their interpretation. Maybe not.
But let's say it's not in the Pali Canon. Let's just agree, although it is. [laughter] Let's agree that it's not. Why is it not? Is it because it's not 'real,' and the Buddha was really concerned with what's 'real?' That the whole thrust of his teaching was being with life and meeting life, etc.? That's one way of reading the Pali Canon. But if you're familiar with the whole of the Pali Canon, there's very little support for that kind of notion, that that's the thrust of what the Buddha was getting at. Very little support. This is my reading of the Pali Canon, my preferred reading of the Pali Canon, and this is something I'll come back to in terms of readings, etc. But my reading of the Pali Canon is that it's essentially a transcendent thrust. To the Buddha, full awakening is not being reborn again into this world of appearances, ending rebirth. It's a transcendent thrust, away from the world of appearances, away from life -- capital L or no capital L.
What the Buddha teaches is practices that, in a certain language, fabricate less -- fabricate less of the self-sense, less of this self, and fabricate less of the world of appearances. Meditatively, he's teaching powerful practices, and a powerful avenue of practice, that fabricates less and less. Eventually, fabricating less, one contacts the Unfabricated, the Deathless, something that is transcendent to all experience and all appearances -- no sense of self, no thing, no appearances, no space, no time, no subject, no object; the Unfabricated. And -- very loose language -- dissolving in that, the arahant, the fully enlightened being, is not reborn again into the world of appearances.
Very little language about being with life, and very little language about mindfulness or a life of presence as the goal of the teaching. Mindfulness is more a support to fabricate less. Mindfulness, in itself, fabricates a little bit less. You know this word papañca? Like when you get crazy with something, and you're really causing a storm, and the mind is getting obsessed, all this ego is being built, and you're really struggling with this issue and blowing it up. Do you recognize that? [laughter] Yeah? Okay. There's a word for it: papañca. Part of what mindfulness does is it cuts a certain level of fabrication. That kind of crazy-making papañca, it cuts it. Mindfulness in itself is fabricating less. It's also a support to fabricating even less.
But there's a whole bunch of practices, more than simple mindfulness, that fabricate powerfully even less, and even less, and even less -- eventually, fabricating not at all, into the Unfabricated, a transcendent Unfabricated. What happened historically was the Mahāyāna teachings arose a few hundred years later, and eventually the Vajrayāna, and they said, "Well, hold on, hold on. That's making a really severe duality between the fabricated and the Unfabricated. Can you not see that actually they're both empty? There's a non-duality of this world of appearance and the transcendent, the fabricated and the Unfabricated, a non-duality between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa." That was the sort of higher vision of what awakening was. Then, with that understanding, fabrication became not a problem. It wasn't something to be got rid of; it had its place, it had its beauty, it had its necessity. Thus arose tantric practice, through that understanding: "Fabrication's not bad. We can actually fabricate, create deities and imaginal realms of maṇḍalas and palaces, etc." It's based on quite a deep understanding of emptiness, in fact. What that leaves us with in practical terms, as practitioners, is, loosely speaking, three possibilities -- two possibilities that try to diminish or set aside the imagination, and one possibility that respects it:
(1) The first possibility is simple mindfulness practice, which I think everyone is a little bit familiar with. Simply -- again, 'bare attention,' it's not a word the Buddha ever used; it's a bit of a red herring, but anyway -- mindfulness, being with simple experience as we talk about. When you're doing that, you're shaving off a lot of the imagination. Very good, very important, really has its place -- still metaphysics wrapped up in it, never mind. [laughter] It's valuable. Don't get me wrong here. It's valuable. It's really valuable.
(2) Second option is these practices, as I said, the whole range of practices much more powerful than simple mindfulness, in that they fabricate even less, even less self-construction, and then less than that, even less construction of a world of things and time and space and all that, on the way to transcending all experience. Through that process, learning that this world of self, this self, this world of appearance, is fabricated. It's fabricated, and therefore it's empty. There are still metaphysical assumptions involved in that. You can't get away from epistemological assumptions. You can't. There's no such thing. So even that one, which I may say this is a really important thing, it's still resting on assumptions. Can't get away from it.
(3) Third possibility: respecting, honouring, validating, seeing the inevitability and the necessity of fantasy/image/mythos, etc.
All of these three, I would say, are necessary and important. Maybe that's too strong to say. They're available to us. That's the least I would say is they're available to us. I would say they're important, all of them. I'm not going to talk much about emptiness, but the more insight into emptiness, the more, for some people, it actually opens up the possibility of imaginal practice. It's like it loosens something and gives a validation to something. But, and I talked about this last year, for many people, working with images actually opens up a sense of the emptiness of the self and eventually the world. I'll come back to that.
Last thing for now: there's all this metaphysics that I said was involved. There's a set of assumptions about what the path is and what the Buddha taught, etc. But is it not the case that image and fantasy and mythos were already present at the time of the Buddha, for the monks and the nuns when they got up out of their meditation? Maybe they were practising the basic mindfulness; maybe they were fabricating less and going deep into jhāna and samādhi or whatever it was, or emptiness. But when you get up, when the monk or nun got up, and saw the holy Buddha, and the robes, and the appearance in this world, the rare appearance in this world of a Buddha, and the beauty of that, and the preciousness of that, and the holy Saṅgha, and the whole notion of purity, and the tradition, etc. -- and even now, for us -- is there not mythos imbued in all of that? Do you see that? It's unavoidable. It's not a problem, but it's unavoidable.
In the Insight Meditation tradition, two things that take us away from seeing this. One is the way we teach. We emphasize so much about bare attention and being with the bare actuality. Almost we say, "Try and live in bare attention," as if one could, and as if that would be a good idea. "Try and live meeting life just simply as it is." That's a big part of or a thrust within the message. Secondly, the teachers -- me, and others -- look, we dress really ordinarily. I have no fancy hats. [laughter] And I don't have any robes. And I'm not waving magical wands and stuff like that. Ordinary here. No costume. These two things, if you like, take us away from mythos, or seem to take us away. Actually, it's the myth of no myth. [laughter] It's the myth of no myth. That's the style of Insight Meditation: the myth of no myth.
Where there's meaningfulness for us in our lives, where there's meaningfulness, where there's soulfulness -- if I use this pregnantly full word, soulfulness -- where there's meaningfulness and soulfulness, already there is image/fantasy/mythos for us, I would say. And as I touched on earlier this morning, maybe image/fantasy/mythos is part of the basis of love. Where we love, all the different kinds of things and traditions or people or whatever, where we love, image/mythos/fantasy is actually part of the love.
That may be opposite to a lot of sort of the dominant contemporary psychological thing, which says you fall in love with someone, you meet someone, you fall in love, and for about three months, or if you're lucky, six months, you're kind of bonkers, and you're projecting a lot onto the other person. It's okay, and we like it, but basically there's something fundamentally unhealthy about it, and what we want is to get over the projection, see the person as they are, and be in relationship to them as they are, without the projection, and that's loving this person, and healthy relationship, and not being in love. But maybe sustaining a loving relationship with anything needs enough amplitude in the way that I'm seeing the object of love, whether that's a person or not, that actually it can fill out with mythos, that there's fantasy. And as I said, this couple, they and the whole thing is filled with fantasy. And if I can't, the love doesn't -- there's not enough juice there; there's not enough amplitude for it to resonate.
Where there's meaningfulness and soulfulness, there's already mythos. Maybe it's a part of the basis of love. And it imbues our perception at times anyway. If I begin to realize that, or even admit it, or admit that it might be possible, and I start to explore it a little bit, all kinds of interesting things open up. All kinds of interesting discoveries. That's what I want to get to this afternoon. Let's stop now.
