The Love and Demands of the Imaginal (Part 2)

At the end of the first part of this talk, I quoted Henry Corbin when he wrote, "Not your individuation, but the angel's individuation." The individuation of the angel is your task. "Not your individuation, but the individuation of the angel is your task." We were presenting that as a framing, if you like, or an opening into a much more radical possibility of a way of looking at imaginal figures, a way of relating and conceiving them. A sort of reversal of, perhaps, what might be tempting to many, of the usual ways of seeing/relating/conceiving of imaginal figures and their relationship with the self.

Of course, Henry Corbin was, as I think I mentioned one time, writing about just certain streams of the Islamic mystical tradition, people like Ibn 'Arabi and Avicenna and Suhrawardi. So that phrase of Corbin really has its home in or originates from those streams, certain streams, very much a minority -- as far as I understood -- within the Islamic mystical tradition, or the range of that. So that is from or has its context in those traditions. We can actually fill out a little bit and elaborate a bit more about that, and then see how it might parallel with some more Dharmic traditions and Buddhist traditions.

But that perspective on the angel, on the daimon, on the imaginal figure, we can fill that out a little and put it into a larger context actually from looking briefly at the Hasidic tradition, or again, some of the streams of the Hasidic tradition, the Kabbalistic tradition in Jewish mysticism. We see something there that's filled out as a kind of philosophy and practice that gives more flesh around this phrase of Corbin's. So there they talk about, or it is taught, the encouragement and injunction of the practitioner to practise a twofold movement in relation to the divine. The first aspect of this twofold movement is a movement towards dissolving the being, dissolving the self, dissolving the consciousness in the Godhead. Transcending the world of self and other, and the world of appearances, in fact. Transcending and dissolving it in the Godhead. That Godhead, the essence of God, if you like, in this tradition, is also Ayin. Ayin is a Hebrew word. It means 'nothing' or 'nothingness,' Ayin. So there's this movement of dissolution of self/being/world in the essence of God, which is nothingness. Very much a transcendent dissolution there, of the world, of appearances, and everything that goes with that.

Now, I'm going to make some parallels here with Dharma teachings, classical Buddhist teachings. And right there -- as I'll explain shortly -- is a very classic teaching of the Buddha, about cessation of consciousness in what he would called the Unfabricated, etc. So that first of the twofold movement in the Hasidic teachings has really a clear parallel in Pali Canon Buddhism and the Buddha's teaching of the Deathless and the Unfabricated. I'll come back to that.

So this first movement of transcending and dissolving in the mystical nothingness, the pregnant, mystical nothingness of the Godhead. The second of the twofold movement is, in a way, a kind of opposite movement, a movement in the opposite direction. So there's what's regarded as a dissolution or a transcending upwards into the Godhead of the being, and then secondly a drawing down of the divine influx from God in order to spiritualize the material world. I think those words are from either Sanford Drob or Rachel Elior, who wrote about these teachings in the Hasidic tradition. "Draw down the divine influx in order to spiritualize the material word."^[1] In other words, there isn't just the dissolution in the transcendent, mystical nothingness, just the sort of disappearance of form into the Absolute, but there's the drawing down from God into the world and into, as I'll explain, the perception of the world, of the divine influx to spiritualize the material world. That's using a certain way of putting it. But included in that second aspect of the twofold movement is the idea and the fantasy of our, if you like, completing God. So our drawing down of the divine influx is part of what, if you like, completes God, or actualizes God, or -- in a manner of speaking -- creates God.

So this is a very sophisticated philosophy. It's bold enough to admit that the human being creates God in a sense. There's quite a lot I want to pull apart here and elaborate on and fill out, but just to draw attention to one aspect: what's possible then, with such a framework, such a conceptual framework, is the view, then, of practice and imaginal practice and the whole journey of practice and of life, that it's for God, rather than for the self. So it's possible to approach and conceive of one's practice, and imaginal practice, and one's whole journey, as not being for the self -- the completion, the actualization of the self, the individuation of the self and all that -- but for God. Again, quite a radical shift in view. In other words, we are drawing down this 'divine influx,' if we use those words, for God's sake, for the completion, actualization, creation of God.

Okay, now, I know for some of you just the word 'God' doesn't compute, or even one has aversion to it, etc. Is it possible to actually entertain such a radical view, hold it lightly, and still potently, in this kind of Middle Way understanding? Can I hold such a view without believing in the existence or the non-existence of God? This whole area about the divine and God, the first thing, most often, people jump to, is "Does God exist, or does God not exist?" And they quibble and quarrel over such notions. But is it possible either to just put aside such questions and not be so interested in questions of existence or non-existence, and just enter into holding lightly this way of seeing and way of relating, or actually to have more sophistication, more cunning philosophically, to see beyond such simplistic notions of existing and not existing? Can I have a potent and potentizing, a potentiating sense of God, view of God, playing with this? I'm playing with it. It's light, and I'm not getting sucked into having to believe or not the existence of something.

That can create a kind of platform. I can go even further, and turn around the whole purpose of my practice: "Not for me, but for God." So I don't have to believe in existence or non-existence. Nor do I have to have a clear concept of what the divine is. Interesting that these kind of views are entertainable, without believing so rigidly in things like existence or non-existence. It's not a question of belief, or a question of having a clear concept of what divinity means and what God is. This is something I'm going to come back to later.

There's a possibility there of a radical shift in view. Let's fill this out a little bit more. This Ayin that we mentioned, this nothingness or nothing in the Kabbalistic and Hasidic traditions, has its parallels, as I mentioned briefly, very clearly in what the Buddha talked about in the Pali Canon: the Unfabricated, asaṅkhata, or the Deathless, the Unborn. Something he usually put in negative terms: beyond any attributes and any qualities, something that was utterly transcendent, without qualities, without attributes. I can give you many examples from the Pali Canon where he speaks in that way. For example, this is from Udāna (81): "There is that sphere, where there is neither earth nor water nor fire nor wind." In other words, no materiality. "Neither sphere of infinite space, nor sphere of infinite consciousness, nor sphere of nothingness, nor sphere of neither perception nor non-perception." It's beyond the kind of more mystical realms of perception. "Neither this world nor the next world, neither sun nor moon, and there I say, there is no coming and no going, no staying, no passing away, and no arising. It is without foundation, non-continuing, and objectless."

So he talked about practising and developing skill in practice, the Buddha, in the Pali Canon, as I would read it. And eventually that skill in practice is developed and culminates at a certain point where one is able to, if you like, enter into or open up to a cessation of perception, meaning a cessation of appearance. Not just a cessation of labelling of appearances and things, but cessation of perception of any kind of forming of anything -- any subject, any object, any time, any space. No appearances whatsoever. The Buddha talks about cessation of perception, the cessation of consciousness, the cessation of mind. That doesn't mean just the cessation of thinking; it means the cessation of all subtle conceptualities of space, of time, of thing, of subject, of object -- even in the most subtle way. Cessation of all appearances, as that description of the Udāna and many other descriptions in the Pali Canon point to. So sometimes he talks about cessation in very negative terms: "Not this, not that. This isn't there, that's not there." Occasionally he puts it in the positive, this transcendent Unfabricated, the parallel of what we're calling Ayin. Ayin as meaning 'nothing' in Hebrew is also a negation, a negative way of spinning it, this essence of the Ultimate, if you like.

Sometimes the Buddha puts it in the positive. For example, he talks about "consciousness without attribute." So there's a sense that there is some kind of consciousness there, it is some kind of consciousness, "without attribute, without object, without end, and luminous all around. Here water, earth, fire, and air have no footing. Here, long and short, subtle and gross, pleasant and unpleasant, and nāmarūpa" -- which means all the factors of mind and conceiving and perception -- "are all destroyed."^[2] It's a transcending and a going beyond all those appearances and materiality and measurement and perception and appearance.

"With the cessation of the six sense consciousnesses" -- of smelling, tasting, touching, seeing, hearing, and thinking -- "with the cessation of the six sense consciousnesses, here all is destroyed." All of these are destroyed, all these other perceptions are destroyed. There's just this consciousness without attribute. So sometimes this Unfabricated is given a positive description, if you like, as much as possible, by the Buddha. Most often it's given this negative, the sort of language of what in the Christian mystical tradition is called the via negativa: not this, not that, beyond, beyond, beyond, the Unborn, the Deathless. Occasionally the Buddha says, in fact, simply, neither putting it in the negative or the positive, he just says, "Where all phenomena are removed, all ways of speaking are removed as well."^[3] So when all appearances fade (phenomena means 'appearance,' actually, from the Greek), "Where all phenomena are removed, all ways of speaking are removed as well." In other words, there's nothing that you can really say about this transcendent Unfabricated, this Deathless, this Unborn. It's utterly beyond words and concepts in the usual sense, that tend more to base themselves on subject, object, thing, perception, space, time, etc. The whole fabric of conceptuality is based on that. This is beyond all that. Not just beyond thinking, but beyond perception, beyond consciousness in the usual sense, beyond all that. Beyond perception, beyond conception, beyond consciousness in the usual sense.

We can know this. We can know that transcendent Unfabricated through practice. It's a matter of practising in the right way. It's a matter of knowing: how is it, as I mentioned before, how is it that we move deeper into this unfabricating? How can I practise in a certain way that the mind does not just keep fabricating appearances, self, and the world, and the world of things, and the world of space and time? Through emptiness practices, there is a deeper and deeper unfabricating of the world of appearances. One can develop that. It's just a matter of finding those threads and following them, developing them in practice. We can taste this unfabricating. We can open to it. A whole different sense of existence comes out of that, of life and death, of being. It is available to us if we practise in a way that leads in that direction.

But this transcendent Unfabricated, this Deathless or Unborn, as the Buddha put it, has parallels in all the mystical traditions. The great mystical traditions point to that. So in Neoplatonism they talk about the One, but in very similar terms -- being beyond attribute, beyond space, beyond time, transcendent. Very, very similar. To quote Plotinus, who is really the father of Neoplatonism -- Neoplatonism was probably one of the most influential philosophies and mystical philosophies that grew out of the classical era, the Greeks, etc., and pervaded Western thought in so many different ways, came in and shaped so much of Western mystical practice and religious thinking, and a whole host of other areas of Western thought and sensibility. Plotinus said, "Even being cannot be there." Even being cannot be in this Unfabricated, transcendent, this 'One,' what they called 'the One' in Neoplatonism. So it's even beyond being and non-being.

That also has echoes in the Pali Canon, where Sāriputta was explaining to another monk, it's beyond existing and not existing. You can't say there's something there with the cessation of consciousness, this total unfabricating of perception. You can't say there's something there, and you can't say there's something not there. You can't say there is both something there and not there, and you can't say there is neither something there nor not there. This is Sāriputta explaining.^[4]

Plotinus: "Even being cannot be." It's pointing to something really beyond the most basic, subtle, non-verbal conceptuality that we have of just existence and being. In Gnostic teaching, I'm not sure who exactly this came from, another stream within the Western spiritual tradition. Some people more modernly regard it as a separate stream. Gnosticism is more a collection of different streams within that. But talking about this transcendent aspect of God, this Unfabricated, "Nor is he" -- putting it as a 'he' -- "Nor is he something that exists that one could know. But he is something else that is better, whom one cannot know. He has non-being existence."^[5] You see he's struggling with the language here. There is something we can taste and we can know through practice, despite this "not something that we could know," meaning it's not a conventional perception in space, in time, in the framing of most perception of subject and object. It's not even oneness, a sense of everything as one. It's something beyond that.

The fourteenth century Jewish Kabbalist David ben Abraham ha-Lavan, again, this nothingness, this Ayin -- talking about the same thing here -- "Nothingness [this Ayin] is more existent than all the being[s] [in] the world."^[6] Again, that statement has its parallels very strongly in how I would read the Buddha's teaching of the Unfabricated and the Deathless. If we learn to practise in this way, where we're undoing grosser fabrication -- for example, papañca; this kind of crazy mind, crazy-making ego-proliferation -- if one learns how to untie that through mindfulness, through the skill of practices, one realizes, "Oh, that's a fabrication. That whole perception that was being experienced and entertained in that state of mind, papañca, that's fabrication." That's a very gross level of fabrication.

One picks up, as I said, the threads, through practice, of "Okay, can I unfabricate? Can there be even less fabrication? What else is fabricated in this world of appearances?" It's obvious, in hindsight, that papañca is a fabrication. That whole way I was seeing myself or another or a situation -- very constructed, fabricated. And I learn how to undo that, and I just go deeper and deeper, following this thread, learning how to unfabricate. Learning how the world of appearances, of self, other and the world are fabricated, and how to unfabricate them, or how they become unfabricated, basically through removing clinging of different kinds, and developing skill in that.

Eventually, it's possible, I see this is fabricated, and then I see, "Oh, that's fabricated as well. I thought it was real." And then even this more basic -- seemingly basic -- level, I see that's fabricated too. I understand, and I can go all the way to this Unfabricated. Not to live there. I can't live there; it's impossible. It's the realm of non-manifestation, non-appearance. But moving in that direction in practice, and understanding then, "Oh, this appearance is fabricated. That appearance is fabricated." Eventually even space, as a perception, as appearance, is fabricated. Time, self, other, world, solidity -- all is fabrication. So I can go all the way to the Unfabricated, and I understand, in a way, "Oh, all this other stuff is fabricated." We can talk about what's less fabricated, and what is unfabricated, and more real. So there's the parallel there, with this saying of David ben Abraham ha-Lavan: nothingness, this Ayin, this Unfabricated, is more existent than all the being in the world. In a way, why? Because it's unfabricated. It's more real, in a way.

So there are parallels there, very clear parallels in the great mystical traditions, of this first aspect of what I was presenting of the twofold movement in Hasidism, the transcending, the dissolution in the Godhead, the essence of the Godhead, in the mystical nothingness, the transcendent Unfabricated.

What about the second aspect? This "drawing down of the divine influx," and this idea of or fantasy of completing and creating God. To get this more fully fleshed out, we may need to look to Vajrayāna Buddhism, where the Ultimate is not so much regarded as this purely transcendent Unfabricated, without appearances, without qualities, without attributes. The Ultimate in Vajrayāna Buddhism is -- people use different vocabularies, but -- the Ultimate in some schools of Vajrayāna Buddhism is the Buddha-nature. And that is replete with qualities, full of qualities, of beautiful qualities. It's not devoid of manifestation or appearance or expression.

So this Vajrayāna Ultimate, the Buddha-nature, is a primordial wisdom awareness, this Buddha-nature. It is empty. But it's Ultimate because it's regarded as, "This is the way a Buddha sees." This is the way, this is the wisdom awareness of a Buddha. But it's primordial, it's cosmic, in a way. Our Buddha-nature, we possess it inside, if you like, or it's part of the deep down fabric of our being that's covered over, but it's understood that it is empty too.

What is it? Again, it's impossible to completely get one's head around it and put it into words or fit it into a neat concept. But we can say that it is a kind of awareness, it's a kind of seeing and knowing, if we use those words, a kind of awareness that sees everything as empty, but not just empty -- also as divine. So seeing all things, including oneself, and the selves of others, and objects, and the world, and the cosmos, as divine, as deities. It's an awareness, but it's also not separate from what is seen. So it's the awareness, the more subjective aspect, that's included in this primordial wisdom awareness, but it's also the objects that are seen, the divinities that are seen and manifested. It's the seeing, and the seen. The seeing of everything and everyone, including oneself, as empty divinity, and it's the objects seen. So the awareness is not separate; it's inseparable from the divinities and the objects seen and manifested. Tantric practice is then seen or regarded, in this view, as a kind of mimicking, a skilful mimicry of this Buddha-mind, this primordial wisdom awareness. Tantric practice is actually kind of entering into or pretending or supporting, for a period of time, that view -- seeing everything as empty divinity, and the seeing and the object seen are empty and divine. So the awareness is divine and empty, and what is seen -- the world and beings -- are also seen as empty and divine.

This is a quote from the second Dalai Lama. He wrote these mystical verses, these mystical poems, and one of the stanzas reads -- he's talking about tantric practice and this mimicry, and he said:

The experience of the yogi [the experience of the practitioner] is then this:

The world is seen as the mystical maṇḍala

And all living beings as tantric deities;

Everything that one eats and drinks

Becomes transformed into blissful ambrosia;

All of one's activities become spiritual,

Regardless of how they conventionally appear;

And every sound that one makes

Becomes part of a great vajra song.^[7]

So this is a tantric practice. It's given a certain framework in that way of approaching it. But again, to really stress that tantra and that whole philosophy of Vajrayāna Buddhism, and tantra as a practice, is predicated, it rests on an understanding of emptiness. This wisdom awareness is empty. Everything that one perceives, all material objects and space and time, are all understood to be empty. The deities that one perceives in the practice are also regarded as empty -- empty emanations, if you like, of this primordial wisdom awareness, which is also empty.

The whole thing rests on an understanding of emptiness, not a kind of concretized, reified view. Very important to understand that. Oftentimes people talk about tantra, or they think they're practising tantra, and they don't -- the view of emptiness is not really developed that well. In practice, it's emptiness meditation, it's meditation on emptiness and developing skill with emptiness meditation, deeper and deeper, wider and wider, more and more fully, and the understanding that comes out of emptiness meditations and developing the emptiness meditation skills, that allows this whole tantric practice more fully. It allows that view, that way of looking, or the ways of looking that form tantric practice, that constitute tantric practice. It allows them to be more fully explored and experienced as palpable experiences and perceptions.

So through the understanding of emptiness, through skill in emptiness practice and understanding that, the world of perception, of self and other and things and all that, becomes much more malleable. We understand it's empty; it's not independent of the way of looking. So we can play with the way of looking, and the world of self and other and appearances becomes much more malleable. And it can be seen as divine. Self, other, world, thing, etc., as those beautiful verses from the second Dalai Lama say, can be seen as divine. For most people, the more skill in emptiness practices one has, and the more understanding, deeply and widely, of the thorough emptiness of everything, the more the perception becomes malleable. And the more easy and natural, a natural outflow of that understanding, I would say, and skill in emptiness practice, is to see the world and the world of things and self and other, bodies and cosmos, as divine.

Now, that, too, has its parallels in other traditions in the Western mystical tradition. For example, Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezritch, a great Jewish mystic of the eighteenth century, said, "First [each thing] must arrive at the level of Ayin," the level of this mystical nothingness, this Unfabricated, this transcendent. "First [each thing] must arrive at the level of Ayin; only then can it become something else." In other words, when I see its emptiness, its equivalence with nothingness, if you like, its non-separation from this Unfabricated (we could put it like that), then it can become something else, because knowing its emptiness, the perception becomes malleable, and it can become divine in the perception.

So one of his disciples, I don't know his name, one of the Maggid's disciples said, "When one attains the level of gazing at Ayin" -- gazing at this mystical unfabricated nothing, the essence of the Godhead -- "When one attains the level of gazing at Ayin, one's" -- let's use a Buddhist word, actually, one's citta -- "is annihilated."^[8] The translation I have from the Hebrew -- I don't know what the original Hebrew is -- is one's 'intellect' is annihilated. Let's use the word citta. And again, what that means, in that moment of seeing the Unfabricated, seeing, metaphorically, the Unfabricated, knowing it, dissolving in it, the mind is annihilated, he says. The intellect, the mind, the citta is annihilated. But that doesn't mean just a quietening of thinking. It means, as I said before, the whole of conventional cognition: any perception, any appearance, any typical consciousness, even beyond all the jhānas, all the eight jhānas. All that is annihilated. All the subtle conceptuality, non-verbal, non-thinking, all the conceptuality that goes on as part of what fabricates perception and appearance -- all of that is quietened.

Buddhist practice, through this skill in unfabricating, it's a bit like that game, Kerplunk, or I've forgotten the other names of it, where you have those sticks -- or a house of cards. Instead of pulling out one card and hoping that the house of cards remains, you're actually pulling out this and that stick or card, and then, at some point, the whole thing collapses. The whole edifice of appearances collapses, and there is a transcending of the whole world of appearances. So the Maggid's disciple: "When one attains the level of gazing at Ayin, one's citta is annihilated." One's whole cognition and perception and conceptuality, even the subtle, is annihilated. Afterwards, when one returns to the citta -- to the whole realm of perception, of conception, mind, and the perception that comes out of subtle conceptuality -- afterwards, when one returns to the citta, it is "filled with divine emanation." So again, this mirrors what should be the platform and the support of tantric practice, that there's this deep understanding of fabrication and emptiness, and one, if you like, plunges into that, that emptying. Then, on emerging, the mind is flooded, if you like, with this knowing of the emptiness of all things. There's a malleability, and it's possible to see everything as divine -- actually, that will be the natural outflow of that.

In Buddhist practice, this developing skill in unfabricating, and understanding the implications, that it's not just about the experience of this Unfabricated, it's about understanding what that implies about the fabrication of appearances, or in other Buddhist language, the dependent arising of appearances, understanding that they're empty. That opens up a door, if you like, or a realm, of the malleability of perception, of appearance, the possibility of a range of appearances, as we've said, and the ability for a sense of the divine to be part of the perception in all kinds of ways. In the more theistic framework of, say, the Abrahamic religions, God is regarded as infinite. Because God is infinite, his aspects are infinite. They're inexhaustible. So not just transcendent; actually the aspects, the manifestations, the expressions, the faces of God, are infinite, inexhaustible.

When we frame it this way, all this has to do with perception, perception, perception. Everything hinges on perception. I said several times on the retreat, one possibility is actually relating to the whole teaching of the Four Noble Truths and this teaching of clinging as a key to unlock, if you like, the secrets and the doors of perception and appearance, and recognize emptiness, and then see, "Now what's possible? Now that I know that everything is empty, to the degree that I see that everything is empty, what does it free up in terms of perception?"

Of course, practically speaking, the advantage of putting all this -- whether it's tantric practice or imaginal practice or whatever, or these practices from the Jewish mystical tradition, or the Islamic tradition, whatever, whether one uses the word 'emptiness' or not, or seeing image as image, whatever it is, whatever language one uses -- the advantage of that, practically, is that one can play with perception this way, play with this perception of divinity. Even the divinity coming through one, through one's personhood, not just that one's fabric is the same stuff as everyone else's fabric and everything else's fabric in the great oneness of things; not just that kind of divinity. I'll say more about this tomorrow hopefully. But the ability to perceive that divinity, knowing it's all empty, knowing self and other and all things are empty, and this appearance, too, this divinity, too, is empty. It's understood. That way there is much less danger of a kind of, what Jung would call 'inflation,' or the ego getting grandiose ideas, puffing itself up and all that.

To return to the Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalistic tradition, particularly the Lurianic Kabbalah, of Isaac Luria and what came out of that. They talk about, they have this beautiful concept: tikkun olam. It translates to something like 'the healing of the world.' And the movement, the encouragement, the injunction, as part of practice, to heal the world. What does that mean? Dāna, and loving-kindness, and all that, of course, part of that and the -- what does it mean, the healing of the world, the healing of our planet, the care for the other species, the care for the fate of this world? But even wider than that, what does it mean to heal the world, heal the cosmos? It's a beautiful, rich, deep, fertile concept that's there in the Lurianic Kabbalah, and elsewhere in Jewish mysticism. But this movement of tikkun olam, of healing the world, is actually regarded, in the Lurianic Kabbalah, as part of God. It's an aspect of God. It's a human movement, but it's part of God. It's part of the Ein Sof, which means 'without end,' 'the endless,' 'the infinite.' So the tikkun olam, the human healing of the world, is part of God, of the infinity of God.

As I mentioned, I think, in another talk, part of this tikkun olam, part of the healing of the world, happens through, in the Jewish mystical tradition, particularly this Lurianic Kabbalah and others, partly it happens through the interpretation of, in that case, the holy text of the Bible and the Zohar and other holy texts. In other words, the healing, the tikkun olam, which is part of God, happens through the interpretation of what is holy, but also the interpretation of the world -- the reading, if you like, of the text of the world, if we use kind of postmodern language.

That human interpretation is part of this movement of God. Why? Because God and the soul and the human are not separate, in the same way that the Buddha-nature, as that empty primordial wisdom awareness, is not separate from us -- it's, so to speak, in us, part of the fabric of our being. We are not separate from our Buddha-nature. So that when we interpret, in the Jewish mystical tradition, interpret a sacred text that way, we interpret, so to speak, the world that way, that's actually God. It's part of the movement of God, so to speak, seeing through your eyes. But more than seeing through your eyes -- shaping perception, seeing in a certain way. Not just seeing in general. We could say that. But seeing in certain ways, through one's eyes. Seeing this or that, that way or this way. Seeing imaginally.

For Corbin, he conceived of the faculty of the imagination, the imaginal, as not just a human faculty, but actually, in some ways, continuous with, if you like, God's imagination, God's creativity. Images, in the sense that we've been using that word, are regarded as influxes, as part of the divine influx. They're not just me and my imagination. They're something divine. They have their roots, in some way, in the divine, or they mirror or echo divinity.

This word, 'interpretation,' we really stretch it to become 'perception.' Everything hinges on perception. This drawing down of the divine that I mentioned as the second aspect of this Hasidic teaching of the twofold movement -- one is the transcendence, and the other is the drawing down of the divine in order to spiritualize the material world -- I would read that as it happens certainly through acts and what we do in the world, in the generosity and the kindness and what we manifest. But it also happens through interpretation -- in other words, through perception. How do I perceive this world? My perceiving of it, in this way or that way, my perceiving of it as holy, my seeing this person as a theophany, as a face of God or an angel, my seeing of the world and the sacredness of it and its non-separateness from God, and its particular manifestation as a particular aspect of God (so not losing the particular there), these ways of perceiving are part of the divine drawing down, drawing down of the divine.

That includes the imagination, as Corbin was saying. The fantasies and the images, when they're alive for us in this soulful way, there's also this -- we could see it as a drawing down of the divine. That's part of it, through the imagination. What I've been stressing again and again, this opening up of the range of perception, is part of this drawing down of the divine, because, in this other language, God is infinite, and the aspects of God are infinite and inexhaustible. The range of perception can open up infinitely, our perception. That's part of the, if you like, expanding of God. So this tikkun olam, healing of the world, is also, in a way, the completion of God, the filling out of God, the actualization of God, through our acts, and more importantly, through our perceptions, and through the marrying or -- what word would I say there? -- the flowing together, the imbuing of the perception with the imagination. The imagination coming into, like water mixing with water, imagination and perception. And this opening out is part of the divine drawing down, is part of the healing, the completion, the actualization of God. We could say the healing of the world, tikkun olam, is actually the healing of God, if we use that language.

Again, I want to put this in this more radical view. There are a lot of pieces to this, and I appreciate that it might be difficult to follow all the threads and how they fit together. Coming back to something I said earlier, when I see things this way, then the whole practice with images and imaginal practice, my whole practice and my whole life even, can be seen for God. It's for the sake of God, not for the sake of myself, because this expansion of the perception is part of the drawing down of the divine. It's also part of the tantric seeing. So it's for the sake of this, if you like, primordial wisdom awareness, or, if you like, the tantric deities that are perceived in that way, the divinities. There's something radical in the shift. I'm seeing all this, I'm conceiving of it, I'm sensing it as for God's sake, not for the sake of self, my journey, etc.

When one begins to open to this kind of way of conceiving, if it attracts one, or if one is attracted by it, one also then begins to realize that, with regard to the demands of imaginal figures, or the sense of the demands they make on us, we could say that God or the gods, however we're going to put it, they're always going to be bigger than me because they're infinite. They're bigger than my life's possibilities. There's a kind of infinitude here. Again, I've talked in other talks and other retreats about this pothos, this aspect of eros, this kind of infinite longing. There's always more. There's always something on the horizon, or beyond the horizon, that one is moving towards. This way of conceiving in relation to imaginal figures also incorporates that, or opens to that sense. So I might feel this or that demand from images, and I realize I cannot possibly manifest all this in my life. God is always bigger, the gods are always bigger -- because they're infinite -- than my life and its possibilities. That's good. Because in a way, what it also means is that there is no end to soulmaking. There's no end to this eros and psyche opening each other and deepening each other. The imaginal sense expands, the sense of the divine expands, and there's more love, and that love, that eros, expands the psyche further, and the logos with it. That process doesn't end, this expansion, and penetrating deeper, and opening, and growth, insemination, fertilization of eros, psyche, and logos. There's no end to that. No end to soulmaking, as I mentioned the other day.

If, with an imaginal figure -- or an angel or daimon, however we're going to talk about it, with this sense of God or gods, whatever words we use -- we're entertaining this sense of telos, this sense of the god or the angel or the daimon drawing me towards something. They're, as Corbin talks about, "The angel out ahead." But it's open-ended. That angel is always out ahead. I never really, if you like, merge with it or finish it. It always is out ahead. I remember when I was very young and learning to swim in the sea in Italy. My father would stand, I don't know, 5 yards away, and face me, and say, "Come, swim towards me." And I would start paddling as best I could. I was sure he was moving backwards [laughs], just imperceptibly stepping backwards to get me to keep swimming. And I would protest that, "You're moving backwards!" He would say, "No, no, no. I'm not." [laughs] I think he was. But that's the angel out ahead. It's not a static figure that we, at some point, reach. There's this open-endedness to the telos. There's a direction, a drawing towards, a beckoning towards, a glimpse of something we're moving towards, the telos, this Greek word for 'end' or 'goal.' But it's open-ended. The soulmaking never ends, because the psyche, the image, keeps expanding, getting deeper, getting richer, getting broader. The eros, the movement towards that, grows with that. This telos, this part of where we're headed, or the sense of goal or end there, it's part of meaningfulness in all this. Part of the meaningfulness.

Nietzsche, I think it's in Twilight of the Idols, writes, at one point, "If we possess our 'why' in life, we can put up with almost any 'how.'" No matter how difficult or challenging something is for us in our life, whatever it is, in any realm of the being -- if we have a 'why,' if we possess our 'why' in life, if our 'why' in this context is serving something greater, if our 'why' in Corbin's words is the 'individuation of the angel,' if this path and this practice and my life is for God and not myself, then that's a big 'why.' It's a big part of the telos and the meaningfulness, and then all kinds of things are possible. We can put up with almost any 'how,' he says, Nietzsche.

I'll come back to what I threw out earlier, in the earlier talk: what does 'healing' mean then? When we open up the framework this way, this kind of way -- and I hope this make sense; I realize it's quite maybe difficult to understand, especially if you're new to all this and talking about emptiness and things -- but what, then, if we open up this kind of conceptual framework (as a loose conceptual framework, not a belief, not a rigidity, but a loose conceptual framework to be entertained), what then does 'healing' mean? Who is getting healed here? Is it me? Is it the angel? Is it the soul? Is it God? Is it the healing of perception and cosmology? Healing them from being conceived of as individual and inflexible? Healing them by allowing a flexibility into perception and opening of the perception, a flexibility into cosmology, an opening of that, rather than this rigid narrowness of, "This is true. This, what I perceive, is true. This one, not that one. Not anything else." Who is getting healed here? What does healing mean? Me, the angel, soul, God, perception, cosmology, all of those? Are they even separate?

Just to finish. We can feel, in relation to demands, and the demands that we sometimes sense or feel from an imaginal figure, from an angel or daimon, we can feel a kind of individual demand particular to that daimon; it's quite unique. But in a way, coming out of all this, we could also highlight or draw attention to three more general demands that come out of imaginal practice. They're connected; they're not really separate. But let's just highlight them.

(1) Now, one is actually just the demand to open the psyche to the imaginal realm, to open the consciousness to that realm, the realm of the imaginal, and to value it. The more we practise with images, the more we sense that, in a way, there's that kind of -- I'm using the word loosely now -- demand to open the consciousness to that realm and to value it. Wrapped up in that is -- again, loosely using that word -- a demand to open up the consciousness and the sense of value beyond a sort of narrow singularity of view, of conceptual framework, of logos.

Through practising with the imaginal, and in the kind of ways that we've been talking about, there's a kind of demand. There's a kind of invitation to open up beyond a narrow rigidity of view, any view, but especially the kind of dominant cultural view nowadays, which is a sort of simplistic materialism, a flattening of everything, into "Everything is just matter. Consciousness emerges as an epiphenomenon of matter. If you leave matter alone long enough, it will eventually form primeval swamp soups, and out of that, life will come. Out of that, life, consciousness will come. There's nothing but matter. Everything can be reduced to the movements of matter in space and time." That's what neurology is, if you like, or neuroscience, as an attempt to explain everything about our human existence, and the sort of assumption there that everything can be explained in purely neurological terms, neuroscientific terms, as just the movement of matter: "We can just find the right neural networks, and what gets fired, and that will explain everything. Everything can be reduced to that, and through that, to just matter." I'll have more to say about this tomorrow. I mean, it's very potent as a view, and all kinds of wonderful things have come out of that. But it's limited and it's limiting. And secondly for now, it's a singularity of view. It's that singularity of view -- I've talked about this on other retreats -- that's problematic, the singularity of conceptual framework. Something problematic there.

So, again, drawing on the Kabbalistic tradition, where many of the streams -- not all of them, but many of the streams -- point to the infinitely interpretable nature. There's an infinite interpretability to teachings and sacred texts. They don't mean one thing. They're infinitely interpretable, as we've said a few times. But also the world and everything in the world is infinitely interpretable. There's a stretching. Rather than just a singularity of conceptual framework and perception, there's an opening to different possibilities for conceptual frameworks -- not regarding any of them as just 'the truth.' With that, the opening of perception, and the range of perception, the malleability of perception, the availability of different ways of perceiving.

The Zen teacher Joan Halifax actually wrote a book on shamanism many years ago, and she explained that in shamanistic rituals -- I'm actually quoting a guy called Roberts Avens now, writing about Joan Halifax, what she wrote:

In shamanistic rituals, the neophyte ['neophyte' means 'novice'] becomes a soft man-being, [a kind of] androgyne [in some way not male and not female] whose essential mission is to be an intermediary between the cosmological planes of earth and sky."^[9]

Can you see how that parallels what we're talking about? "Essential mission to be an intermediary between the cosmological planes of earth and sky."

It is said that the effort to incorporate the paradox here [between those cosmological planes of earth and sky] involves the shaman in the constant practice of transformation, as if moving from one point of view to another provides the experimental ground of understanding, of wisdom, of true perspective.

That's what I want to highlight for now. "Moving from one point of view to another," from one way of looking, from one conceptual framework, one perception. "As if moving from one point of view to another provides the experimental" -- meaning the practice, the practical -- "ground of understanding, of wisdom, of true perspective." So that's, in a way, that's part of the demand more generally. It's one of the demands or invitations of imaginal practice, more generally.

(2) A second -- and very related, not separate from that -- is the invitation, the demand to open to the multiplicity of images and mythoi and fantasies, rather than being locked into one. How easily as human beings, without even realizing it, we're just buying into one fantasy or one image or one myth, and not seeing, "Oh, that's -- I don't have to be locked into that one." And being locked into it and taking it literally creates problems, all kinds of problems. There's no freedom there.

In classical mythology, Orpheus was actually torn to pieces by the maenads, who were sort of wild disciples of Dionysus. Orpheus was torn to pieces by the maenads for his sole worship of Apollo. In other words, because he just worshipped one god, one archetype, if you like, one image, they tore him to pieces. You can see the fragmenting there, tearing apart. Or Jung was fond of saying, "The gods have become diseases." When we don't open to the range and the multiplicity of gods or archetypes or myths or fantasies or images, when it's either in terms of the self or in terms of awakening or anything else, that limits. Particularly in regard to the self, the gods that we have neglected, if you like, the archetypes that we have neglected to honour, to recognize, to give place to, will manifest as some kind of psychological disease, or organic disease sometimes, Jung was saying. Maybe it's not just self and humans. Maybe traditions, also, can have that shrinking of archetypal range within them, shrinking of the sense of what is divine, and then how that limits and causes problems. I've talked about that elsewhere. So opening to the multiplicity of images, that's also one of the general demands or invitations of imaginal practice.

(3) Thirdly, again, connected -- and I have mentioned this one before as well -- is just the invitation or the encouragement, demand, that comes out of imaginal practice, to begin to realize, to recognize, to acknowledge that image/fantasy/mythos saturate life already. Our life is saturated by image/fantasy/mythos. Wherever there is love, wherever there is meaningfulness, wherever there is that richness and sense of soulfulness, there there is image/fantasy/mythos. It saturates life. We could go further and say that not realizing that is a kind of ignorance. If I don't realize the presence already of image/fantasy/mythos in my life, there's a kind of ignorance there. When I start to realize, "Oh, that's actually part of how I see the Dharma and how I relate to the Dharma and awakening," etc., then maybe my whole conception of what ignorance is, and awakening -- because awakening is the end of ignorance -- that needs to be broadened to include this realization, that image/fantasy/mythos saturate life, saturate everything, including my idea of the Dharma, my idea of myself, of awakening. I've talked about that elsewhere; I don't want to elaborate too much right now. But that gives, this realization, it gives a different ground to our being. We realize that, actually, in a way, we're grounded in imagination. We're grounded in mythos, in some way. Our whole life has a different ground when we realize this, or we come to feel it have a different ground, very different. The Dharma has a different ground when we realize that.

So all these, these are more general demands or invitations that come through imaginal practice.