Transcription
Let's explore this whole thing about difficult emotions a little bit more. Difficult emotion -- and the nexus with energy and image -- difficult emotion has energy in it, but the energy is caught in a vortex, if you like, an unhelpful vortex. If that difficult emotion can give rise to an image, or an image can constellate there, in that or through that, then sometimes what happens is the image functions in a way that the energy that's caught up in the unhelpful vortex of the difficult emotion, the energy harmonizes. It's somehow allowed to flow, in this example -- actually, in all the examples I gave. It's allowed to flow, or it's channelled. The image kind of creates a channel, if you like, for the energy.
Afflictive or difficult emotions, they hold and they trap energy. We could say it like that. There's a lot of energy in them, but it's trapped; it's in the vortex, in some kind of vortex. That energy, I mean psychic energy. By the way, when I use the word 'psychic' on this retreat, I don't mean extrasensory perception, ESP and all that. I mean of the psyche. So energy of the psyche, psychic energy, is trapped by the afflictive emotion, in the afflictive emotion, and also the subtle physical energy of the energy body.
So let's look at this. Let's take, as an example, anger. It's quite interesting, just by way of example. Anger has a lot of energy in it. Let's make a differentiation right away: anger and ill-will, if I just use these words in two different ways. Anger is not necessarily the same as ill-will. Ill-will means the will, the wanting, the wishing for harm or suffering to befall another: I want them to suffer, I want them to hurt, I want them to be in pain or be humiliated or this or that. That's what I would call ill-will. Anger often does include ill-will, but it doesn't need to. It's something that can actually be freed from ill-will, and I'm going to explain this a little more in a minute. But anger has a lot of energy in it. Sometimes what happens is a person actually feels quite low energy, or a bit depressed or down, and actually what's going on there, sometimes, actually what's going on is anger is there, wrapped up or sort of down in the being, so to speak. Not ill-will, but anger. And it's blocking the energy, so to speak. It's there, and it needs recognizing and allowing.
What's happening is somehow a person is not allowing themselves to see that anger and feel it, and not allowing the flow of that anger. That's keeping the whole being in a kind of low energy, depressed state. When the anger is connected with, recognized and allowed as energy, then the energy body can actually expand. Instead of being contracted and down, it can actually expand, become big, or even very big, and the awareness expands with it.
Maybe there will be an image with that. For example, it could be an image of -- I don't know -- a wrathful deity, or a demon or something, or maybe it's without image. But that anger in the energy body is then, when it's felt and allowed and opened to, and allowed to open the energy body, it is at that point not an afflictive emotion any more. It's more like creative energy; it's something we can do something with, use to fuel a skilful response, etc.
That state of being low energy, or slightly depressed, or dull, for some people it becomes a default groove, for some people, much as for other people it's a state of more agitation that becomes a default groove, the habit of the energy system, of the psyche, of the being. Sometimes a person doesn't even realize that that's [going on]: "Oh, we're in a groove here." They become used to it over time, sometimes over years. They've got nothing much to compare it to. They don't feel depressed; it's just a kind of normal, literally depression of the energy.
Sometimes what's going on there is something -- for instance, anger, or libido, or eros, or some kind of psychic energy -- is not recognized, not felt and contacted and allowed to flow. And then the whole being is in this kind of low energy state, when actually there's a lot of energy potentially available. So a person thinks they have this kind of personality or whatever, and something else a little bit different is going on.
Let's stay with that example of anger. If an image constellates from the emotion, that image may be a very high energy image that correlates with and reflects the energy in the anger -- so for example, the image of a warrior or some other obviously energetic image. But it might arise from the feeling of anger, the energy of anger, or actually from feeling into the low energy, contracted state. I'm with this, and it doesn't feel like there's any energy at all, and suddenly this warrior image or this high energy image comes. Interesting.
But if we go into this nexus of emotion/energy/image a little bit more, and actually point out something: images, they hold many shades of emotion. So actually, if you like, there's more to them, generally, than an emotion. One image can hold, at the same time, different qualities, even seemingly contradictory emotions or different shades. It's quite a complex, rich thing, an image. There's a lot of, so to speak, 'information' in it (I don't know if that's a very good word). They hold quite a lot by way of emotion and shades of emotion. And an image also holds more, and I'll talk more about this as we go on in the retreat. It can also hold, for example, a sense of duty. So when that liquid was poured in, what came with that was a sense of duty, and the energy for that duty. So it's more than just an emotion; there's some other meaningfulness and beauty and depth that can be tied up, that is usually tied up, in an image. There are many shades of emotion, perhaps, not just one emotion, and actually more than just emotion. There's the aspect of soulfulness, which is more than emotion. It's more than heartfulness. As well as emotion, it includes the psychic resonances, the meaningfulness, the sense of depth, different kinds of beauty. All of this is one way of saying that an image is, if you like, a richer, more multidimensional, more complex, multi-aspected phenomenon than an emotion. Image is very rich.
I mentioned in the introductory talk that part of what we're interested in is expanding the range, psychologically for ourselves, but also expanding our range emotionally, and also our range of images that are meaningful and beautiful to us. So expanding the range of emotion, image. This is, for me, an important aspect of imaginal practice.
It's interesting, as an example of where we can get quite limited in our vision, in our conception regarding emotion and image, John Coltrane, the great jazz saxophone player in the fifties and sixties, in his late period -- I mean, all his life, it was very high energy, intense music, but in his very last period before he died, it was ultra-intense. I mean, I think the jazz world probably hadn't quite experienced anything like that. That's not quite true, but it was really, really intense music.
He was friends by that point with the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar, and they would meet, and they would listen to each other's music and study a little bit. I think John Coltrane was more studying some Indian music. But Ravi Shankar said to him at one point, "I'm disturbed by this, what I hear in your playing. All the anger, it disturbs me." And John Coltrane was quite, "I'm not angry." And it wasn't that John Coltrane was out of touch with his anger; it was just that that intensity, that shrieking through the saxophone, the screaming, the roaring, it was not anger in that sense. It wasn't ill-will. It wasn't what Ravi Shankar thought it was. So Ravi Shankar's view or vision of emotional range was much smaller, and his image of what's beautiful, and what's possible, and what's okay or even holy, was smaller in this case than John Coltrane's.
There's a distinction here, and it's important to make. Usually with anger, when we feel angry, there are two aspects: (1) we're lost in the object. All the attention is on who or what we're angry at, judging this person or hating them. And we're not so aware of ourselves and our energy. (2) Secondly, usually, unfortunately, the case is when there's anger, there's ill-will. We wish, in some way, harm, or that this person suffers in some way.
But in imaginal practice, there can be a kind of anger, a kind of rage even, but one notices with imaginal practice that there isn't the same concern with the object or whoever I'm angry at. There can be a warrior image, a raging warrior fighting, but the enemy is not even seen in the image. It's not even so important. There is no ill-will, so to speak. The attention, the relationship with the image, is more on the imaginal figure itself, entering into that -- for example, that warrior image -- and not so much with "who I want to suffer" and "who I want to kill." I don't know what would be a better word here, because I'm not talking about identifying with that, or literalizing the warrior image, or identifying or being tightly identified with that, but there's a kind of entering into. Those qualities, and that person of the imaginal figure, in this case the warrior, is tuned into, and not so much the object of the anger or the enemy.
There's a second aspect here in relation to all this, which is sort of alluded to in that example with John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar. So there can be a sense with an image that it gives a rightness, it gives a place, and even a kind of holiness, a kind of divinity or archetypal necessity, we could say, to what one is going through, to the image and the way the image then shapes what one is going through. That's different than an ego-justification. I feel usually when I'm angry, "I'm completely right, and this person is wrong," and the ego finds ways of wanting to justify itself and its stance and its actions or its obnoxiousness or whatever. This is different. This is more subtle. Through an image that's alive and soulful and meaningful, meaningfulness and place are given to something that we're going through emotionally.
So a person might feel, perhaps in a certain community or group, some alienation or isolation because of some difference or something. And out of that, there may be some loneliness. That's the emotion, this emotion of loneliness. Feeling into that, perhaps a different image arises. Maybe it's a wanderer, a solitary wanderer. And that wanderer, in the image, is alone, maybe even has a degree of loneliness, but somehow the emotion is transformed, or shaded, or given a whole other level of depth, a level of meaningfulness and place, through the image. It's no longer just dukkha, just simple dukkha and alienation. It's given something. It's given a kind of beauty. In the words of James Hillman, "A pain has found its god," has found its archetype, he really means. "A pain has found its god." Through the image, we find what its place is psychically, and it's given this depth and meaningfulness. Or again, in that image of the liquid being poured in through the crown of my head, that did not lead to just a kind of, "Let go of this situation. Drop your view, Rob, of this situation." But actually what came was a kind of poise, a firmness, a resolve, an increase in energy, without taking away the difficulty of the situation and the pain of it. It wasn't just, "Let go, drop it, be peaceful." Something else.
So we said we can have the intention of the direction of the samādhi, and through that, sometimes, what's difficult energetically or emotionally dissolves or gets gradually turned into pleasant. That's one possibility. We can also just focus on the emotions, skilfully work with a skilful focus on the emotions and the way they reflect in the energy body, and sometimes that can gradually dissolve what is difficult, what's stuck or painful in the midline, if we're working there, of the energy body. Sometimes, as I said, that becomes more subtle before it dissolves. Sometimes what happens is the emotion stays, gets maybe a little bit more subtle, but there's a sweetness that pervades around it, the sweetness of connection, the sweetness of that pain, that difficulty, being held. Very, very important. That's a possibility. And sometimes being with an emotion more loosely can give rise to an image spontaneously. Of course, we said we can deliberately bring an image in relation to a difficulty, a helpful image in relation to a difficulty. But that image, whether it's spontaneous or deliberate, can also dissolve the difficulty, transform what's difficult in the emotions or the energy body. So this is interesting.
One thing just to highlight, and maybe a little bit of inquiry for you, is the reactions that we might have to these transformations might reveal attitudes and assumptions we have regarding emotions and our emotional life. So I see in different ways, I do this and the emotion dissolves, or I do that and it slowly dissolves, or it gets sweeter or turns pleasant, or this image comes, and it dissolves, and a difficulty transforms and becomes lovely, or something like that. Maybe I think, "Oh, that can't be right," or "That's wrong." What's going on there? Or maybe I have the opposite attitude, and I think, "I'm trying to meditate. I'm trying to do my samādhi, and this emotion is a nuisance." But the reactions to the transformations reveal a lot about our attitudes to and assumptions about emotions, whether emotions are a nuisance and in the way, or just papañca, or whether, on the other extreme, we can assume that an emotion is kind of sacrosanct -- it's something primary in the being, basic, and there's a truth to it, and we need always to respect it, and not try and change it, and be with it, etc. So as we meditate in different ways, and we see different unfoldings of our experience, and when we notice our reactions to those different unfoldings, that can tell us a lot about our attitudes and our assumptions, and also noticing what we're willing to try, and what we steer away from in practice.
So we can be attached to certain views regarding emotion and energy and all that. We might also be attached to always somehow wanting to know why a difficult emotion is there. So I feel sad, and I want to know why. Of course, sometimes it's helpful, and sometimes we can know why. But sometimes we don't know why this sadness or whatever is there. It's not so obvious. Sometimes sadness is there; it's just actually a result of being physically low energy, or something out of balance in the energy and the physical energy. Sometimes it's even possible that we pick up others' sadness. It's not mine, and I'm hunting for a cause for it in my psychology and my experience or my past.
William Blake said, "Emotions are divine influxes." That's quite a different view. Sometimes something else is coming through us. It's not so much about another person, but something from, you could say, another level of being, and it's an influx flowing in and manifesting as an emotion. So sometimes we're attached to knowing why. Sometimes we're looking for a kind of reason, or demanding a memory if there's an afflictive emotion. Demanding this grief or this fear that I can't seem to put on something in the present -- I look for a memory. And that can be very helpful at times, and sometimes we discover things. Sometimes we discover that we're making something up. But to always seek a reason or demand a memory is putting too much pressure on the emotional and the energetic life, and it betrays a kind of set of assumptions there.
Around the nexus of emotion/energy/image, a yogi on retreat -- this is quite a while ago, but she reported a dream to me. I can't remember if the dream was ages before, but it was quite a comic dream. It was a row of naked men, standing there in a line in the dream, and masturbating at the same time, and then ejaculating simultaneously. And there was something quite, a little bit comic in that. But afterwards, she was talking about it, and she said, "Oh, it's just life energy." I said, "Well, hold on. If you just say that, then actually what's happening is you say, 'Oh, that's just life energy. It's just an expression of life energy, that image,' what's happening is in that kind of interpretation, it's too broad. We're losing a lot of the subtlety, a lot of the particularities of that image," which was sexual, it's male, there's something comic about it. It's very, very particular. Even it's more particular than whatever words we might put on it, like 'sexual' or 'male' or this or that. There's something utterly irreducible about an image. In terms of reducing an image to energy, in this case just a vague energy, careful of that, because we lose a lot of the subtlety and distinction that images contain so naturally to them.
Sometimes we feel -- we're practising, or just in our life -- there's an emotion, a strong emotion, and then out of that emotion comes an image, as I mentioned before. And I might have even used the language "the emotion constellates the image." We tend to think, again, or what a person can think is, "The emotion is what's primary." But it doesn't actually necessarily imply that the emotion is what's primary, and the image is what's secondary, or what comes out of the image as an expression of it or just a re-presentation of that emotion. Not necessarily. It's not necessarily the case that the emotion causes the image or constellates the image, even though I might use that language sometimes, or that the psychic energy causes the image.
It may be that an emotional upset indicates that an image is operating in the psyche, but we're not yet conscious of it, and the energy of the image is trapped in this vortex, because the image is not quite conscious. So the energy is coming from the image. That's a different way around: instead of emotion being primary, we can see the image as being primary. Instead of the energy being primary, we can see the image as being primary. Maybe the image is primary and what gives rise to emotion and energy.
So in relation to these three (energy, emotion, image), what's the truth? Which is the cause there? Which is the one that's primary? Well, like so many of these things, they all influence each other. They all, in Dharma language, dependently co-arise. Or we could say they influence each other, they have an effect on each other. In some ways, we could say they're not really that separate.
And to bring in this other piece that I mentioned at the start of this talk, the views that we have are also part of all that. So views, the views that I have of this image, the relationship with it, the views that I have of emotion, of energy, of the image, affect what happens. Now, this is true generally for our perceptions and our experience, but in this case, even more. Particularly the view of which of these is primary (whether it's energy, emotion, or image), how I'm conceiving of that in the moment affects how things unfold. The view that I have of what is primary affects how things unfold. I can experiment and see that for myself in practice. It's very interesting. As I realize that, it opens up a possibility: can I play with different views? And can I play with different views of what is primary here? This becomes part of navigating imaginal practice. We'll talk about this more later. Really a big part of what we're doing, as I'll come back to in a later talk, is we're playing with the conception, the view, that image is primary, that fantasy and mythos are primary. We're playing with that view and seeing what that does.
Just to finish, to put that, again, in a larger context, which I mentioned yesterday: the larger context is a vision of the Dharma, an understanding of the Dharma, as exactly that -- as playing with views, with ways of looking, That's what the Dharma is. That's what practice is. We're practising, through lots of different practices, we're practising a flexibility of view and of ways of looking. And through that, it's opening the range of our experience and our perception. Those two words I'm using as synonyms. 'Experience' and 'perception,' 'appearance,' these all mean the same thing. Through practising flexibility and moving between different views and ways of looking, I see that it opens up the range of experience, and I see, "Ah, this way of looking, things appear that way. This other way of looking, they appear a different way."
So meditation itself is the practice of different ways of looking, and seeing how appearances/experiences/perception changes with different ways of looking. Through that, I understand the emptiness of any perception: "It's not really like this. It looks like that. It seems like that. It appears like that. The perception, the experience is like this because I'm looking in this way." And understanding the emptiness of that thing, of things, of perceptions, of experiences, allows even more flexibility. It allows me to practise even more flexibility with ways of looking because things are empty, because perceptions are empty. So this flexibility is both the path and a part of the goal.
Again, this is already something I said last night, but just to end. It's so important: we can conceive of the Dharma in different ways. We're free to do that. There's not, for a lot of it, really a right or wrong; it's hard to prove it. So, very common nowadays, it may be that we conceive, that we've kind of heard over and over and formed a conception of the Dharma, very loosely, that it's "try to always be present because this is it, this is life, this what we're with, this breeze on the cheek, this raisin in the mouth, this footstep," whatever. "Try to always be present. You don't want to miss this reality of this moment. This is all there is, this sense experience." And as well as that, "Try not to cling. Try to let go because everything's impermanent, everything is flowing and changing. So try not to cling, and try to let go." And then, "Try to be kind." And that may be, those three aspects, might be our sort of loose conception of the Dharma. Or we might have a different conception, as I mentioned, that's more influenced by streams like the Advaita tradition, where the goal is always to be in a sense of oneness, "all is one," or "there is no self," "no self is occurring."
Or, as I said, what I would favour, what I want to encourage more, a vision on this retreat, is that these, all of those -- being present, being in a sense of oneness, the perception of oneness -- all of these are modes. They're modes of awareness, modes of sensitivity. They're ways of looking. They're temporary options. And we have a flexibility to move between them, and many, many more than that. Dharma, as I said, is the practice of this flexibility of modes of awareness, of modes of sensitivity, of ways of looking, so that a multiplicity, a range of perception, of experience, is available to us as a sense. Not as an intellectual idea; we actually sense all the different possibilities for us. We see them. We witness them. We experience them.
Included in this range of these modes, of ways of sensitivity, of awareness, this range of ways of looking, included in that, as part of that range, a subset, if you like, are types and modes and degrees of less clinging. So less clinging in this way or that way, to this degree, to that degree, very deeply, that's included in that. All this together opens up the possibilities of perception, the perceptual possibilities. And all of it shows us the emptiness of what we perceive, the emptiness of things, selves and things.
That brings more and more freedom, to the degree that we understand that emptiness in the heart, in the being. And it opens up, it allows us even more flexibility with the perceptual possibilities, the way we perceive the self, the way we perceive others, the way we perceive things and the world and the cosmos. In a way, there's a kind of infinite range to that.
So this whole central teaching of the Buddha's, of not clinging, of clinging being a cause of suffering being central in the Four Noble Truths, it's not so much that that's a way of living, trying to live without clinging. But non-clinging, what it really offers us is a range of ways of looking. There are lots of different ways of not clinging, lots of different modes of that.
So in the range of ways of looking, it includes going with the flow, being present, resting in awareness, if you know people that talk about that. Many, many more, many ways of looking. Here, on this retreat, we're practising this flexibility, this malleability, this multiplicity and extension of the range of ways of looking, modes of awareness -- not just one approach, one track. Part of that, included in that flexibility, as I said, is playing with the very view and the conception regarding images. That's a central thread or possibility of a way of looking, or what forms ways of looking in imaginal practice.
