A Sacred Universe: Insight, Theophany, Cosmopoesis (Part 3)

I want to explore a little bit what might be meant by words like 'God,' 'gods,' 'divine,' etc. I've been using them a fair amount on this retreat. And explore a little bit how we can relate to that, how we might relate to those words, ideas, what conceptions might make those kinds of ideas useful for us, fertile, enriching, opening.

I'm very, very aware, as I think I mentioned, that using words like 'God,' 'gods,' 'divine,' and other words like that, that for many people, hearing those words, reading those words, coming across those words, brings a reaction -- sometimes a very strong reaction. All kinds of reactions, in fact. Sometimes negative reactions, constricting and blocking, adverse and aversive reactions. Sometimes people just get nervous around those kind of words. They are, for many people, loaded words. We can tend to bring quite a bit of baggage to those words and those concepts and those ideas. A lot of that comes from our history, the cultural history, and perhaps upbringing and experiences when we were young. Some of that might include quite a bit of woundedness, in certain situations and contexts -- religious contexts or education or upbringing, ideas that were unhelpful.

So I'm aware of all this and, perhaps even more importantly, aware of how easy it is to bring assumptions and preconceptions, and even more so, really quite simplistic notions, unhelpful notions, to those words. When we hear them, we immediately think, "This is what is meant. That's what is meant." And a barrier comes up, and something constricts. People argue. It's rampant in the culture right now, this sort of so-called atheist, so-called religious debate. And the whole thing is taking place on a really quite literalized level. Literalized, simplistic notions sort of battering against each other. So people might entertain the idea of an old man with a beard, on a cloud, judging, as if that really exists. Or the creator of the universe and that sort of thing.

I'm aware of all the history, the possibility of woundedness that we might have. But it's really these assumptions, preconceptions, notions that I want to open up, hopefully, and render useful and creative a little bit in these talks. For some people, actually, the word 'divine' is a better word than 'God.' In Tibetan tantra, the word yidam is the deity, the tantric deity, and they talk a lot about seeing appearances as divine, knowing appearances, sensing appearances as divine. This is Tibetan tantric language. They talk about the primordial Buddha, primordial Buddhas, cosmic Buddhas, all this.

Again, the question: is it possible, or how might it be possible, to open up these words, really these concepts and ideas, so that they become again ideas, related to this word eidos, what we look through? How can we relate to such ideas that they become useful and fertile? Is that even possible? So I want to try -- emphasis on try [laughs] -- exploring, describing, elaborating on possible conceptions and experiences. Those two always go together, conception and experience -- always, always, always go together. Some of the possible conceptions and experiences of the divine, divinity, etc., that we might have in practice and in life, related mostly to what we've been talking about. There are many possibilities here, both for the conceptual frameworks and for the experiences. Many. This is something I really want to emphasize and probably come back to later, regarding the sort of infinite range and plurality of possibilities for the experiences of the divine and the conceptions of the divine. So I'm only going to talk, obviously, about some. And some of the ones I'm going to talk about can actually mix and infuse each other. Obviously, because we're constrained for time, I'm going to have to be brief. I'm going to try and explain as clearly as possible some of these ideas, some of these ways experience opens.

But some of what we're talking about now, the ideas and the experiences really depend on understanding, a deep understanding, of emptiness. Some of the experiences will also depend on deepening and deep experiences of emptiness in practice. For those of you who are not yet that familiar with that whole territory, it might be quite a leap. But it might not be. So I wouldn't assume either way.

But just as an aside, or related to that, I have been thinking -- I think I mentioned earlier in the retreat -- quite a lot about what a good idea it might be to think more in terms of a curriculum, in terms of Dharma teaching and Insight Meditation teaching, because it could make a lot more possible. It's like, "Okay, now you've understood this. Now you've got these, developed these skills in practice. You're able to experience this, you're able to open that way. You're able to have this or that kind of mystical experience, or this or that sense of well-being or dissolution of dukkha. And now, can we build on that? Now that you've got that understanding, can we deepen that? Can we open a further door? We've opened these doors before. Can we open other doors?"

Without a curriculum, sometimes what happens is teachings -- just the basic sort of teachings, at the same level -- get repeated. And it's hard to move on without people feeling like you're losing them, or feeling very uncomfortable, or judging themselves, etc. The fault is not so much in the person, or so much in the teacher or the way of teaching -- it's in the lack of curriculum, the lack of a sort of basis established, both in understanding and meditative art, that allows a further deepening and further building. So the whole thing, the whole teaching and the range of the teaching, gets quite constricted. So, hang in there. I said that in a couple of talks. Hang in there if it's a little bit difficult with the concepts; it may take a few listenings. Some of this may be something that fills out more as your understanding of emptiness and your practice with emptiness deepens.

By the way, and this is something I will emphasize again and again, when I talk about God and the divine, or that kind of thing, or gods, always, always, always, that God, a god, the divine, is empty. It has no inherent existence. I'm not postulating something having any kind of inherent or independent existence. Sometimes that's hard for people to understand; they just assume with that word that one is postulating that. But I'm not. We'll repeat that.

Now, we could ask, "Why bother, especially if some of this is going to be complicated and maybe difficult to understand and a little bit elaborate-sounding? Why bother talking about these concepts and conceptual frameworks?" Well, for a couple of reasons, at least. One is in terms of -- well, they're both in terms of soul and soulfulness -- but first is: there are aspects of soul that love ideas, that love conceptual frameworks, and it's part of the play of the soul. It feels almost like a necessity for some aspect of the soul, for its life, for its vitality and vivification.

Secondly, soul and soulfulness and soulmaking needs a conceptual framework or conceptual frameworks that allow it, allow for soulfulness, soulmaking, that enrich soulfulness and soulmaking, that nourish it, that actually are wide enough to give it space to grow. So the ideas, the conceptual frameworks, the logos that we are entertaining, needs to have enough space so that the soulfulness can grow, and also [to] allow experiences. So that's part of the soulfulness. The conceptual frameworks need to be wide enough to allow a range of experiences. We said this before. This is so crucial. So often people are living a life, and practising in a way, harbouring conceptual frameworks that are uninvestigated, or unarticulated, unconscious, and that perpetuates a very narrow range of experience, both in life and in meditation.

So the conceptual frameworks can function -- or we want them to function -- like a fertile womb, a space that's actually fertile; things can grow and expand. Importantly, the conceptual framework itself can also grow and expand and stretch. So soulfulness, soulmaking, needs conceptual frameworks that support it. We could put that with the Greek terms: psyche needs logos. Psyche needs a logos or logoi (the plural) that support it, that enrich it, that deepen it, that allow it. If the logos, the conceptual framework, is too narrow, then the possibilities for soul and soulfulness and soulmaking are narrowed, are constricted. It's no longer fertile. There isn't the possibility of deepening, enrichening, widening, stretching the vistas of experience and of psyche.

So for example, probably the assumption or idea, conceptual framework, that images that appear to one are just the result of random neuronal firings in the brain -- that kind of idea, that kind of conceptual notion, is probably not very fertile to soulfulness and soulmaking. There are many other ways of explaining things that seem so attractive as truths, especially in modernist culture, that actually kill, stifle, constrict, soulfulness and soulmaking.

Okay, let's begin, and just for now, divide up four possibilities. As I said, a lot of these overlap and can infuse each other and mix. But let's delineate, at least, four possibilities for experiences of the divine that are possible for us.

(1) So the first, and I've mentioned it several times already on this retreat and elsewhere, is that it's possible for a person, much more possible for a meditator, to know, to realize, to experience, to open to -- actually, the language of how to put it breaks down, but -- to know, realize, experience, open to what is unfabricated, the Unfabricated. Where there is not the fabrication, usually through meditation, there is the cessation of the fabrication of any sense or perception of any object whatsoever, any thing or object whatsoever, or any oneness, totality of objects. No fabrication of the perception of object, no fabrication of the perception of any kind of subject, even the most subtle subject, or just a sort of bare moment of consciousness or vast awareness or something like that, embracing all things. No fabrication of the perception of objects, subjects, or time. Not the past, not the future, not the present. All those very fundamental -- the most fundamental structures of experience -- subject/object/time/space, all this, not being fabricated. So to speak, what is left, then, is the Unfabricated. It's not just a blank unconsciousness, like being in a coma. It's the Unfabricated.

We talked about other ways of putting that. We talked about Avicenna in the Islamic tradition. We talked about the Darkness that reigns forever. We talked about the Jewish mystics' Ayin, which translates as 'nothing.' We talked about the Neoplatonists' One. All these are actually pointing to the same thing, articulating this same transcendent experience, transcendent opening, unfabricating, transcendent reality, if you like, in different language, struggling to find the words there. It's there, definitely, in the Christian mysticism of Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross, people like that, and twentieth century theologians and philosophers. For example, Franz Rosenzweig talks about the "God that is before all relation, whether to the world or to Himself ... the seed-point of the actuality of God."^[1] He draws on the philosopher Schelling, and his notion of the "dark ground," etc. Different ways of talking about it.

In Buddhadharma, again, different, the Buddha describes it in different ways, uses different language -- perhaps the clearest is 'the Unfabricated.' It's a way of conceiving of the whole process that moves towards that, if you like; learning, as I said, through developing the art of meditation, and learning how to basically fabricate less perception, less appearance, less experience, gradually. Starting, probably for most people, at the levels of horrendous and painful solidification of self and other and issue that happens in papañca, and just learning, "Oh, through letting go of clinging, identification, certain gross clinging to conceptions, that can fade away. It can not be fabricated in a certain moment."

Then you say, "Oh, that's interesting. Let's take this, and develop the skill, basically, of learning to let go of clinging." And I'm using that word in the broadest possible sense, to include identification and subtle concepts, etc. Learning to let go of clinging more and more deeply, and at more and more deep and subtle levels -- not forever, but in a moment, as a practice of meditation, different ways. And as I do that, I see the world of appearances, self, object, and eventually time and space, all that gets fabricated less and less. Developing that skill, developing that art, in lots of different and beautiful ways, I go deeper in this journey of learning to fabricate less. Eventually, there is what I would call this realization, experience, opening to the Unfabricated.

So this is realizable, experienceable, if we use those words. They're not even quite the right words. We can open to that, we can know that, if we know how, if we develop the know-how to fabricate less in any moment. Not to live in a kind of Unfabricated, which is impossible anyway, but learning -- as what meditation is, or part of what meditation is, as we talked about on other talks, learning to fabricate less.

Now, this Unfabricated, and I mentioned this before, it's so transcendent and transcendent of concepts also that the Buddha describes it in three ways. Often, he just says you can't say anything about it, it's so transcendent: where all phenomena cease, all ways of speaking, all manner of speaking, ceases, he says, I think in the Sutta Nipāta.^[2] Other times, and probably most often, he talks about it -- as is so common in these mystical traditions that reach this level -- he talks about it in terms of negation: "It's not this, it's not that. There is the absence of this, the absence of space, the absence of time, the absence of things," what corresponds to the via negativa in Christian mystical teaching. It's the "not this, not that, neti, neti," if you know from the Vedanta teachings. The third way sometimes the Buddha talks about it is in a sort of positive affirmation, as a kind of consciousness different than our usual consciousness -- transcendent, and without object, and without support, and not of time, etc. Consciousness without attribute, without feature, as the Buddha describes.^[3]

Why am I wanting to call that divine? Well, almost I could say, "If that's not divine, I don't know what is." Utterly transcendent, utterly beyond time, timeless, and therefore deathless. So that's a word the Buddha uses at times, the Deathless. In many senses, there's this knowing that one has, really a profound, profound and utterly transformative knowing of what is divine. People talk about, in theological traditions, the Godhead -- God in his/her self. This is possible for an insight meditator to know, just knowing how to go about it, go on that journey. So there's the experience of that in a way that's utterly transcendent, totally beyond any appearance whatsoever of any subject at all, any object, any time.

(2) And then there's also the possibility -- either before one has fully opened to that, but more often afterwards -- of this Unfabricated, this Deathless, if you like, shining through appearances, shining through the appearances of this world in different ways. This sense of a timeless dimension to things, the sense of this transcendent Unfabricated, this Deathless, if you like, dimension (if you want to call it; the Buddha sometimes uses that word), we could say shining through appearances, and transforming the sense of this world, the sense of life and death, and self and other and all of it. So, so precious. Utterly, utterly precious, for a human being to know that and to taste that, to open to that. So that's a second possibility: there's a sort of pure, transcendent Unfabricated, no appearances whatsoever, utterly beyond all experiences of subject, object, and time, and the way that the authentic experience of that can kind of shine through the appearances of this world in different ways.

(3) Thirdly, oftentimes what I hear from people -- less so, recently, but it used to be quite a lot in other circles -- is people use the language of 'the Deathless' quite a lot, or someone might say, describing their meditation, "I'm resting in the Unconditioned. All I do is rest in the Unfabricated," etc., and that kind of language. But really, what they're talking about is some other state. It's a state, an opening, a perception, a meditative perception, that is a lot less fabricated as perceptions go than normal, everyday, conventional perception that most people have most of the time. It's less fabricated than that, but it's not yet completely unfabricated. So it's not really the authentic Unfabricated or Deathless.

There are many, many possibilities there, way too many to describe now, all of them very beautiful and lovely. Again, some of them may be -- the senses completely close in some kind of jhānic way, and transcendent in that sense, transcendent of the senses. Some of them or the very same states have versions where the senses are more open, and again, there's this experience or feeling or perception of that dimension, that particular dimension, whatever it is, shining through -- this less fabricated dimension, of which there are many, shining through appearances. There are many.

Very, very common in our circles and related spiritual circles -- not just Buddhist -- would be the experience of one love, one kind of cosmic love or cosmic compassion pervading the universe, woven into the fabric of the universe. Oftentimes, people just doing a mettā retreat, or mettā and compassion, over some weeks, will eventually, organically, without even me suggesting it, open to that experience. In a way, I'm oftentimes kind of waiting for that to happen -- not as the be-all and end-all at all, but as one opening, one perception that's so beautiful, so enrichening, so supportive, and so helpful.

At that point, those people often start using theistic language. There's a flavour, a sense of divinity, that permeates that love. That love has the flavour, permeating the universe, surrounding one, holding. Everything has the flavour, the taste of divinity, even if the person has never used those kind of words before, never had that kind of experience before, never had that upbringing.

Another one, probably even more common in Insight Meditation circles, is a similar kind of thing, but what pervades the universe, or pervades all appearances, is awareness. This can come in lots of different flavours. I don't have time on this retreat to differentiate between them. But there's a kind of oneness of all things in one awareness. Sometimes people call it One Mind or Big Mind. There are lots of different versions, and this cosmic consciousness, sixth jhāna, different variations of the sixth jhāna. There are many, many things there. But the divinity is in the awareness, this awareness that is universal -- not just mine, not just in here, in my body, in my brain, looking out at the world, but everywhere. All things, if you like, are that awareness, or express that awareness. Or it can be just one physical substance, or one energy. A person senses the oneness of all things in terms of matter, physicality, substance. Also very beautiful, and a kind of holiness, a cosmic oneness that can be an experience or a level of an experience of the divine. All of [these], and many more.

All of these are beautiful and precious. Those that I've just described and what I'm talking about now are openings or levels of perception, levels of less fabrication, but they're not quite the authentic Unfabricated, because they still involve time. They still involve a sense of the present moment. They still involve a perception of space, and there's still a very subtle sense of subject and object. Still, there can be a sense, an experience, and also a conception there of divine/divinity. There's also a whole range of levels of experience of divine oneness that come from recognizing that everything shares in the nature of emptiness, in the nature of being empty. That understanding of being empty can be at lots of different levels, and bring with it different levels of a sense of oneness correspondingly.

So there's the transcendent Unfabricated, a sort of experience -- if we can even use that word, 'experience' -- of the divine beyond appearances. And then there are different ways that we can experience the divine through or in the appearances of the world, the appearances of others, etc. Different ways that that sense of the divine can shine through. These, also, we can split them into two camps. There's a kind of universal. In other words, the divine shines through in a universal way, and usually in an impersonal way. So, for example, when the Unfabricated shines through, it's universal, and it's shining through everything. It's impersonal. It may be easier to see it in some situations than others, often in nature, etc., but one gets the sense that we're talking about something universal and impersonal here. In a lot of those other states, for example one cosmic love or compassion pervading the universe, one awareness of which everything is the play, of which everything has the substance of awareness, these kinds of openings, these are also universal and impersonal.

(4) But there's a fourth possibility, which is what we're kind of leaning towards more on this retreat and emphasizing more: the sense of a divinity shining through a person or a thing as a particular theophany, a particular face of divinity, or of a particular divinity. So it may be an imaginal figure, or a person, or a thing, seen as image, seen through the lens experientially of mythos, of fantasy. But not universal; particular. And not impersonal, but personal, involving personhood.

So this is what I would like to hopefully unpack a little bit, or see what we can explore and give as possible support in terms of conceptual frameworks for. Is it possible to open and provide, or even begin offering, conceptual frameworks for a notion of divinity that can include and allow and support and nourish a whole wide variety of experiences of the divine that are not just of a transcendent divine or of a universal impersonal divine, but of particular theophanies, whether they're imaginal figures or the imaginal in and through persons and things? So my life, my personhood, your life, your personhood, or someone else's, seen as, experienced as, sensed as, and conceived of as the expression, the manifestation, or appearing as the manifestation, the expression of the divine, of particular, unique faces of divinity. Is that possible? This is really what I would like to explore.

Just to say, too, as we go into this, it seems important to me -- interesting, certainly, but also important: in trying to offer or inquire into or explore various conceptual frameworks that might support and deepen and have a place for this idea of divinity or an experience of divinity, experiences (plural) of divinity, it seems important in all that, for me, to tie it together with an understanding of emptiness, and as I said before, to put everything, the whole Dharma, on a basis of emptiness, thoroughly. So how, for instance, does the idea of the exploration of fabrication and seeing what's fabricated, seeing how perception is fabricated and the total way it's fabricated, exploring less fabrication until one opens to the Unfabricated -- how does that kind of teaching, that kind of way in to understanding of emptiness, tie together with some of these other ideas and conceptions, and tie together with the imaginal? And how does that experience of divinity as the Unfabricated tie in, or does it, or how does it relate to other experiences of divinity?

Some of that tying together and the relationship is actually very simple. It's really just a conception of the Dharma, as we've alluded to briefly and I've outlined in a lot of detail elsewhere, a conception of the Dharma as this exploration of fabrication, and different perceptions are experienced, perceived, appear, depending on how much fabrication there is. So an experience of cosmic love, so to speak, is an experience of much less fabrication than your everyday experience, where that's not present, and selves and things and others seem very separate and very solid. There is, if you like, a spectrum of fabrication that we can explore, and different experiences of the divine kind of take their place on that spectrum of fabrication. So the relationship is actually relatively simple once you get into exploring that. The cosmic consciousness is a relatively unfabricated experience compared to everyday experience. An experience of a lot of papañca, a lot of hindrances, a lot of self-building and other-building and issue-building is an experience of more fabrication, and almost certainly less sense of divinity there.

Some of the relationship is quite simple, it's quite easy, and I mapped a lot of that out before. But in relation to the imaginal, and the idea of theophany, this imaginal figure or that person I love as theophany, the particularities and the personhood there -- the relationship is not so simple. In exploring some of this, and elaborating on it, and opening it out a little bit, I'm going to draw on different conceptual frameworks. Some are ones that I worked out for myself. Others belong or originate in other traditions, etc. Remember when you're listening to this that no conceptual framework can claim ultimate or complete validity or truth. They cannot claim to be the total truth or to be a true explanation of everything. Any conceptual framework, there will be some place where it either falls down, contradicts itself, or inevitably, with any conceptual framework, relies on some kind of assumption that's ultimately unprovable.

So rather than searching or trying to concoct some kind of complete or final system, metaphysical system or whatever, rather than that -- and that's something I would actually very much beware of if someone is claiming that or putting that forward, a system of ultimately true explanations or finally true explanations -- rather than that, and rather than seeking a conceptual framework that then is provable, rather than that, I'm interested in the idea of conceptual frameworks, a relationship with conceptual frameworks, as doorways, portals. The conceptual frameworks themselves as scaffoldings or structures that support our inquiry, our investigation, the fertilization and opening of our experience, of our practice, of our meditation. They nourish and support psyche and the sort of meditative adventure and all of that.

In what follows, I'm going to try to tie together a few different conceptual frameworks, but it's up to you. There is no obligation here to take any package. And certainly I'm not presenting some polished, complete product at all. You'll quickly realize that. You may gravitate towards one of these frameworks; you may tie them together in the way that I do (or I'm trying to at least), or in your own way; or you may have some other conceptual framework that you draw on to support the validity of and fertilize imaginal practice and the sense of the divine through imaginal practice.

Let's start with what we've already talked about, this notion of fabrication of perception and the learning, the possibility to learn the skill, the art, in meditation, of unfabricating to different degrees, fabricating less perception, and eventually to open to, realize, experience so to say, the Unfabricated, what is unfabricated, this transcendent dimension, if you like, beyond any subject, any object, any sense of time, including the present moment.

How does this unfabricating work? Earlier I said it's dependent on clinging, but we could also say it's dependent on delusion. In other words, to the degree that there is delusion operating in the mind at any moment, to that degree will there be the fabrication of perception. Perception is built up, solidified, made more separate, made more intense, to the degree of delusion. Out of delusion comes clinging and craving, as the Buddha pointed out. It's delusion, really, that's, if you like, the most important supporting condition for the fabrication of perception and appearances; that's why it's first in the twelve links of dependent arising that the Buddha outlines.

So when we look with delusion, when there's delusion in the citta, in the mind, in the heart, it fabricates more perception. A state of papañca is full of delusion, isn't it, and that's why there is more fabrication there -- more fabrication of self, more fabrication of issue, more fabrication of other, story, the whole structures of the fabrication of perception. As there's less delusion, less belief in an inherently existing self, less belief in any of the subtle concepts that operate in the mind, in the citta usually -- including belief in time, in space, in awareness, all kinds of possibilities -- then there's less clinging, and so the structure of appearances, the fabrication of appearances, begins to fade. They begin to be fabricated less and less, to the degree that the delusion is sort of not there -- or, we could say, to the degree that insight is there, there is less delusion. Insight and delusion are opposites, inversely proportionate or whatever the phrase is. Less insight, more delusion, more appearances; more insight, less delusion, in other words, less appearances, until eventually we see that, in any moment that delusion is really drained from the citta, at that moment, there will be this complete unfabricating of perception, of appearance, of experience, and one opens to the Unfabricated. We see the world of the fabricated is built on delusion, we could say. The housebuilder that the Buddha talks about is built on delusion. That's why at his awakening, he said, "Ah, I've understood. There's not the delusion any more. Housebuilder, you've been seen."

In that sense, the Unfabricated takes ontological precedence over the fabricated; it seems more real, because the fabricated, it seems, is a result of delusion. It also feels, and the sense very much is the holiness resides much more fully in the Unfabricated than in the fabricated. So actually, it's very deep experience we're talking about now, but a duality is created between the Unfabricated and the fabricated. One seems holy, so to speak, and the other just the product or primarily the product of delusion, fabricated through delusion, dependent on delusion, as the Buddha might say.

But the meditative journey into emptiness and understanding and insight doesn't stop there, hopefully. We begin to question and see deeper into the whole notion of fabrication, the whole structure of the teaching of fabrication, and actually see that, because time is empty, because what is fabricated is empty, fabrication itself is empty too. This is one way of dissolving the whole duality, collapsing the whole duality between the Unfabricated and the fabricated. Then there is not this sense of, "The Unfabricated is holy, and the fabricated is not holy," for instance. All can be seen as holy and divine, both so-called Unfabricated and so-called fabricated. It dissolves. It takes the understanding and the meditative seeing and the being in the world to a whole other level. In that seeing everything as equally holy, equally divine, there's actually a possibility there of seeing it all universally divine, or picking up this divinity through the personhood and the particular that we were talking about.

When, for instance, one employs a meditative way of looking for a time in a practice, or one sees in practice, deliberately practises a way of looking that delicately, skilfully holds the understanding, "This awareness right now, this moment of awareness, this mind right now, is not self, not me, not mine," as the Buddha says, and one holds that in awareness, and one sees that also this awareness, this mind, in the same moment it's not self, it's also not separate from the appearances that are its objects. The subject and object, the mind, and the objects of appearance -- not separate. And one also, in the same moment, holds lightly, skilfully, in the view, in the way of looking, that this awareness, this mind, is empty in itself -- perhaps, for instance, because it's beyond time, in the sense that time is empty. Anything that exists must exist in time, and time is empty; therefore, this awareness is empty.

When, through practice -- this is very, very deep practice I'm talking about -- one holds these insights very lightly, delicately, like an art, and looks and meditates on the present moment, "This awareness, not self. This awareness, not separate from appearances. This awareness, in a sense, is beyond time, is empty, and the time that it exists in is empty," then that awareness at that time has a lot of insight in it, and very little delusion. It's really cutting, dissolving delusion at a very fundamental level. We've seen that objects are empty. Now we can include that objects are empty and the subject is empty. And then there will be an unfabricating to quite a deep degree. The awareness, if we still talk in terms of awareness, it moves towards, completely or to a large degree, towards this consciousness without attribute that the Buddha sometimes uses as a phrase to describe the Unfabricated. But it unfabricates. There's an unfabricated awareness or consciousness there, very different than our usual consciousness, and not the kind of vast awareness that I've mentioned at other times.

So one possibility there of holding all that insight, for a meditator who has really practised and developed gradually this art of unfabricating. It's one possibility. It unfabricates and it opens to this unfabricated awareness. Another possibility, though, and even more artful, is that one can actually play with and modulate the degree of the fading and unfabricating of experience. It's like you're taking your foot just lightly off the pedal there, so that you're holding all this understanding of emptiness very, very lightly in the mind -- it's not a great deal of thinking. But that insight is there. It's imbuing the awareness. Yet you're not letting it completely fade, because you're not leaning on the insight too heavily. It's a very light touch. So appearances are around, but they're imbued with, the whole sense of subject, object, awareness, appearances is imbued with the deep understanding of the emptiness of all of it -- radical, deep, total emptiness.

It's possible, then, to play. Because appearances are still around, it's possible to play with tantric practice, which essentially is a mimicking of a Buddha's -- I'm going to use the word 'gnosis,' just as a translation of the Tibetan word ye shes, particularly so that we don't get confused with words like 'insight' or 'awareness' or 'wisdom.' Using all these words, sometimes the vocabulary gets so confused, people using different words or not realizing there's a difference. The practice of tantra is this mimicking of a Buddha's gnosis, a Buddha's -- let's call it ultimate wisdom awareness, as another translation of the word 'gnosis.' That's one way of understanding what tantra is. In this sense, the word 'ultimate' actually means 'ultimate' because it's what a Buddha has, like a fully developed being. So we've touched a little bit on this before, that in the Vajrayāna, in the tantric teachings, the word 'ultimate' is used in different ways. Sometimes it's used to refer to emptiness. Sometimes 'ultimate' means what a Buddha enjoys or what is characteristic of a Buddha. Again, there's all kinds of confusion and slipperiness with vocabulary.

Sometimes in tantric teachings and Vajrayāna teachings -- now I'm going to draw particularly on someone like Mipham from the Nyingma tradition. He died in, I think it was 1912. A brilliant mystic and scholar from the Tibetan tradition, the Nyingma Tibetan tradition. He would use the same words, like 'emptiness' or 'suchness' or 'ultimate,' in different ways at different times. But in their sort of deepest meaning, when he used them in their deepest meaning, they all kind of referred to the same thing, and another word is 'Buddha-nature.' It's this ultimate sort of gnosis of a Buddha. It's a Buddha's perspective. So this Buddha-nature, this ultimate, actually in his way of presenting what Buddha-nature means, it includes both the subjective and the objective aspects of this Buddha-mind, this Buddha-gnosis. And that subjective is this ye shes, this gnosis, this awareness that is empty and that knows emptiness.

This is an aside now: sometimes people use the word 'pure awareness,' but awareness always has some degree of insight or delusion in it. It's always mixed with other inclinations, some degree of clinging, etc., some degree of conceiving. But this idea of the ye shes, the gnosis, the Buddha-gnosis, is an empty awareness. It has no inherent existence, but it's a gnosis, it's an awareness that knows the emptiness of everything, including itself, space, time, all objects, all subjects, everything. That's what ye shes is from the subjective aspect, and this subjective aspect of the Buddha-nature perceives the objective aspect of the Buddha-nature, which is a world of divine appearances. Not just universally, like all imbued with divinity in a kind of universal way, but also particulars, particular deities, particular manifestations, and particular deities manifesting through particular objects or places or beings in the conventional sense. So all of that, together, the subjective aspect (the ye shes, the wisdom awareness, the empty awareness that knows the emptiness of all things) and the objective aspect (the perceptions of the divinity and the particular divinity, of divine appearances), all that is Buddha-nature in Mipham's framework. And all of it is the Ultimate.

Not to confuse things, but there is a parallel here between some of what we've just been talking about and also the teachings of Isaac Luria who was a sixteenth century Kabbalist living in Safed in Palestine. He elaborated a kind of mythic metaphor, if you like, or mythic metaphors, for the aspects of the divine, for the nature of the divine. This is not to be taken literally, certainly. It's also not to be taken temporally. But in that sense, the Godhead -- the sort of innermost, transcendent aspect of God, the light of God, the wisdom, the ye shes, the gnosis, if we translate between systems, or this unfabricated ... actually, let's put it in the other system. The unfabricated awareness exists, so to speak. And then within that light of God's wisdom, there's a withdrawing from a certain, if you like, region. Again, this is mythic. It's not literal. It's not even temporal. There's a certain withdrawing of God's own light from a portion of that light, so to speak. That withdrawing creates a space in which the creation of the world happens.

So you can actually see, I don't know if you can hear in that -- that withdrawing is called Tzimtzum in Hebrew. You can actually hear in that something akin to the teachings of fabrication and unfabrication. If we translate 'creation' as 'the dependent origination of appearances,' then you could hear it or read it as, "There is this unfabricated awareness. When there's insight and wisdom there to a total degree, if I, so to speak, withdraw some of that insight, or don't lean on it so much, or if I allow it to be not so complete, then appearances can be fabricated. It allows fabrication." So there are real parallels I find interesting between that and the teaching of the dependent origination of appearances, once one has understood that teaching at a deep enough level, and can hear in a different way these other -- which to us sound very strange theistic systems, often, depending on your background.

Then the question would be, "Why would God withdraw some of the light of that insight?" There are different answers there in this mythic system. Partly because God's nature is infinite. Being infinite, God includes not just the transcendent aspect that's beyond appearances, beyond form, beyond manifestation, but also includes the whole realm of manifestation -- indeed, all manifestation, because God is infinite in nature. It's Ein Sof ('without end') in the Hebrew. That's one part of the answer. And another part of the answer, which, in a way, is also very beautiful, is because of God's desire. You may have heard this: God desired to know himself, to know herself, through appearance, through manifestation. So there's this desire to not remain completely transcendent, unfabricated, without form, without manifestation, without all of that. Again, not to stretch it too much, but we can see the desire there and the relation between how clinging and craving work to fabricate appearance in the wheel of dependent origination.

Isaac Luria goes even further, because all this -- that kind of mythic metaphor or structure, conceptual structure of the nature of God -- all that, this idea of God withdrawing from a portion of his divine light, withdrawing, creating a region of less light, that whole idea is from the perspective of the human only. From God's perspective, there is no withdrawing of light, there is no Tzimtzum. So, again, if you can feel into this a little bit and actually see, "Oh, that's similar to this or has parallels with this further stage of the teaching around fabrication, actually understanding both fabrication and unfabrication are empty, that there's no duality there." So the teaching of fabrication and unfabricating is all from a certain perspective. At another level, it's all, in Tibetan Dharma language, it's all equality. It's all empty. There is no duality there. So it's a teaching from a certain level of perspective. In Luria's words, "This is all from the perspective of the human only." It's not God's perspective. It's not an ultimate truth.

Now, when I, let's say, practise, and get a sense -- if I develop the art of my practice, of my meditative practice, and my skill with emptiness, and playing with fabrication and appearance and unfabricating -- when I do that and develop that, then I can ask, at a certain point (at any point, perhaps): whose mind is this? Whose awareness is this? Whose wisdom is this? Because I can see it is not self. It is not my awareness. There's a real developed perception possible: this awareness is not self. Really important practice to cultivate. At the same time, it's not separate from appearances, and if I'm practising in a certain way, it's not separate from the divine appearances that I sense.

I sense, too: whose mind is this? Because it's not self, it's not separate from appearances or divine appearances, it's beyond time, it's empty. Whose mind is that? I'll get the sense in asking that as a meditative question that both conceptually and experientially, we could say, I see this mind, so-called 'my' mind, is not separate from this Buddha-nature. It's not separate from the cosmic Buddha or the Ultimate as Mipham described it. It's not separate from this Ultimate mind, or God, the mind, the awareness of God or the divine. So not just conceptually, but experientially, I can open up that sense. Why is that important? First of all, it's a very beautiful, very freeing experience of the divine. But it gives a sense of my being, my citta, participating in the divine at the deepest level. This is actually a hinge point. This idea of participation in the divine is a hinge point in terms of trying to create or offer conceptual frameworks that support a sense of divinity.

There are many, many possible flavours of participation. You know, the other day, the other week, my friend took me to a beautiful stretch of the river, the River Dart. I'd never been there before. There was a bend in the river, and there was no one there. We were there alone. It was a cold day, beautiful day, beautiful autumn day. There was a sort of steep cliffside on the other side of the river, and trees, full of trees, sort of wooded. Really, really gorgeous. The colours of autumn, and the leaves falling on the water. I was sitting there, opening to the whole scene, and taking it in, and the beauty of it. Into my mind suddenly came a line, or a fragment, even, from Thomas Merton: "Day unto day uttereth speech."^[4] That's what I remembered. I can't even remember if that's the right thing, or if it's half a sentence, or what the context was. I think it's the beginning of a passage of writing. Whether he's quoting someone else or what, I don't know. Wasn't even sure if I was remembering it right. But, "Day unto day uttereth speech."

Had no idea what it meant, or what he meant by it, or what the original thing meant. But it was something that ignited something in me, in my heart and mind and soul and in the perception, as I was looking at the river, the autumn scene, and the beauty there. I didn't quite know what it meant. But that poetic phrase came into the perception, and shaped and opened the perception in a certain way. It's actually quite difficult to describe.

So here I am sitting by the river, beautiful spot, everything that's there, and as always, there are many ways of looking. It's only a lack of meditative skill or, as I said, conceptual frameworks that are too constraining, whether we realize it or not, that limit our ways of looking. So, very possible in that situation to see that scene only sensually, in the sense of, "Oh, pretty colours of autumn, yellow and red and gold," and how they reflect in the water. One is just, really, if you like, responding or tuning in at the level of purely sensual pleasure, if such a thing exists, the pretty colours there. That's one way of looking. Or, of course, it being autumn, one could be filled with a sense of impermanence, and reflect on impermanence. The leaves are falling onto the river, swept gently along by the current. That could be what one is sort of tuning into and what colours and shapes the perception. Or a different variation: that whole process of nature moving, the river flowing, the decay, the growth and then the decay, the whole cycle, the process. One could tune into that. That would be a way of seeing, a way of looking, supported by the conceptual framework of process, etc.

But what was there for me was somehow triggered by this "Day unto day uttereth speech," this fragment of writing, these poetic words whose meaning I couldn't really say. There was really a beautiful and very difficult to describe sense of participation. A kind of cosmology -- or cosmopoesis, actually, if we use that word -- was there, was opened for me. In other words, the whole cosmos, including myself and the whole scene there, the whole of nature, was seen in a particular way, was felt in a particular way, that involved participation, and particularly the echoes of those words, somehow, as if the trees were speaking, or the cosmos was speaking -- maybe that's a better way of putting it: the cosmos was speaking (but obviously using the word 'speaking' poetically). So there was this poetic sense of speech, the cosmos as divine speech, and of my being participating in that. I could describe more, but it's not that important.

Part of what I want to draw attention to is, one may say, a person might say, "I sense, I feel, I am participating in something large or vast." In other words, the kinds of sense of participation we can have in terms of the way we sense the cosmos are varied. Many people might say, "I sense, feel, that I am participating in something large or vast," but what was characteristic about this sense was that it did not only refer to the fact that I was aware of or thinking of a vast web or a vast net of physical objects or, more dynamically, physical events or processes in which I participate: my body breathing back and forth the autumn air, even slight sweat coming from my body into the air, or how this body arose out of the earth and the elements. That kind of level is a horizontal level of participation.

That kind of participation, which sometimes people sense or want to emphasize, is what I would call participation at a horizontal level -- the level of, say, physicality. But here the sense of participation also involved levels other than the physical, the material, in the ways that we usually construe physicality and materiality in the modernist culture. I don't know -- spiritual, soulful, mental, divine, really. And divine in both a transcendent and an immanent aspect.

So part of what was mixed in there was the sense of the Unfabricated shining through. But that was only part of it. There was a kind of vague cosmopoesis. I'll come back to this word, 'vague,' because it's actually important to realize that a lot of the experiences we have are tied into conceptual frameworks that are quite vague, and that does not matter. I'll return to that. But there was a kind of vague poetic sense of the cosmos, very much involving this multi-levelled participation, a participation in the sense or at levels that were beyond the physical, that involved my mind, my awareness, the roots of that, and the sense of the root of that in the Unfabricated, if you like, etc.

I know many people, or some people, would say, just as a philosophical point, "Well, you can't prove that that's there, these other levels." And that's absolutely right. I alluded to this before. We're talking here about realms of experience or dimensions of experience and conceptual frameworks that are not in the realm of verifiability as it is scientifically defined. We're not actually in the business of proving, nor are we in the realm of what's provable, verifiable, according to the paradigms as defined by science. But so what? So what? We're talking about experience, perception, deep, life-changing, important, these kinds of things that matter to us deeply. And so what if it's not in the realm of the provable or the scientifically verifiable?

I wonder sometimes whether that kind of perception -- I know I only described it vaguely, but I wonder whether that kind of perception, that sense of participation at other levels, the sense of a kind of vague cosmopoesis, or cosmopoesis that involves that kind of thing that I described, I wonder whether it's not available to most people. I wonder if it's gone out of fashion in some ways, meaning that it's not really supported as a perception for people these days, because people don't read so much about that sort of thing, or don't talk about it or hear about it. And because of that, it's not supported as an actual experience that can open. Or I wonder whether people do experience that, but are kind of clumsy in trying to communicate it or express it, or limited because they don't have the conceptual frameworks or the vocabulary, or a little lazy, or shy. So I wonder about all this stuff in the imaginal and the cosmopoesis, whether it's more prevalent than one might assume, or whether there are reasons why it's not prevalent, because it's not supported because of not being talked about, not being shared, not being given conceptual structures that support it.

So that, what I was describing by the river, in a way mixes a sense of the Unfabricated shining through, and also a kind of cosmopoesis or theophany, the divine speech coming through nature. That was more than what we usually mean when we sort of think of poetic metaphors. It wasn't that I heard any words; it wasn't that literal. But it was something that was palpable, that made a very deep impression, more than just a way of speaking about something. This was a mixture of the Unfabricated shining through and a kind of cosmopoetic theophany there.

As I said, there are, we could say, three possibilities of the divine appearing through appearance:

(1) The Unfabricated shining through; the authentic Unfabricated.

(2) There's the sort of universal awareness or universal love, other kind of more common senses of the divine in a universal, impersonal way, shining through.

(3) And then there's the third possibility, or range of possibilities, that involve the imaginal and theophany and the cosmopoetic. So the divine coming through in particular ways, particular appearances, through the particularities of a person and their personhood, etc., and the particular face of the divine in that way.

Again, just a philosophical point: a person may say, "Well, yes, okay, you had such an experience," or this, or many of the other experiences that I described that people have had or I shared with you. And the person may say, "But it may be that it turns out not to be true," or "It's not true." This is such an idea -- I wonder whether it falls into kind of a tight and narrow and not fully opened up conception of truth, that either it is or it isn't true. That's a way of regarding truth and reality that's very understandable given how we've been taught to conceive and think of things. But maybe it doesn't have to be in that tight camp, where it either is true or it is not true. As I said several times on this retreat, the whole notion of reality and truth needs opening out, filling out the range. We need to be a little more sophisticated with what we're talking about. Here, in these kind of experiences, we're concerned with perception, meaning experience, and also meaningfulness. It's important to realize: this is what matters to us as human beings. Perception and experience of course matter; our experience matters to us. And meaningfulness matters to us as human beings. They matter to us deeply, deeply. It's not so much, "Can I prove this or that?" But experience matters, the range and the kinds of experience, the depths of experience, and our sense and taste of meaningfulness, and the depth of meaningfulness.

We need to realize this is what matters to us. And these are constructed. Perception, experience, appearance -- these are constructed and fabricated, inevitably, so that subjectivity, my subjectivity is involved. So right there, there's an opening up of the whole tight way of regarding truth, because we're dealing with perception and meaningfulness there, and we're acknowledging that they're constructed. Inevitably, they involve the subject. We're not simply talking about something that's independently, so-called objectively real. Meaningfulness, meaning, and meaninglessness, can never be purely objective. Can never be. Actually, neither perception, etc. So perception and certainly meaningfulness are participatory, constructed and fabricated through the way of looking, through the conception, etc., anyway.

That insight is shared by postmodern understandings. Many people have written about this. I feel sometimes with postmodern writers, or writers about postmodernism, in that sort of tradition, if you like, if you can even call it a tradition, or that direction, that thrust, in a way are limited through not having meditative experience. So the participation that they're talking about, that they're pointing out, the construction of perspective that they're talking about is usually to do with texts and words and quite a gross level of perceptions.

Even some of the people like Heidegger and others, all these people really lacked a depth of meditation that would have enabled them to really enter deeply into the subtleties of what's involved in participating in experience and constructing and fabricating; all the subtle conceptuality that's involved there, way more subtle than language or words or thought as they so often pointed to. When one has that degree, then, of understanding, and learns to move between multiple perspectives, realizing that none are true, it's quite different from just an intellectual, philosophical understanding of, say, post-structuralism, postmodernism, that just deconstructs this or that perspective, or this or that understanding, or this or that piece of writing or philosophy or whatever it is, and kind of pulls it down or points out how it's constructed at a certain level. Oftentimes what happens then is it just veers towards a kind of nihilism, as if recognizing that all perspectives are not true, if you like, or constructed, but there isn't then enough meditative skill, because one hasn't developed that meditation, to actually then realize, "Oh, these are all constructed at a much more subtle and deep level, all these perspectives. I can realize that and then enter into multiple perspectives."

Rather than just deconstructing and being left with a kind of cold, barren nihilism, or an intellectual game that leads nowhere, I can actually enter into different perspectives, as we've talked about so much on this retreat, and play with that meditatively, moving between different perspectives, different ways of looking, opening up different senses of the cosmos, different soul-worlds, different ways of seeing, engaging cosmopoesis -- all of it without clinging to it as real, as ultimately real, or "this is true," in that kind of tight way. It gives me real, practical, lived fluidity, and this increased range in which I can experience beauty of different perspectives. Doors open, worlds open.

Rather than the kind of nihilism, barrenness, that might come out of a purely intellectual postmodernism, I'm really interested, as I said, in opening up the realm of experience, perception, that's possible for us as human beings. Also, I'm really interested, rather than that kind of result of nihilism, I'm interested in keeping meaningfulness alive, and keeping the possibilities for meaningfulness alive, keeping them as viable options for us at times. I'm interested in conceptual structures and practices that support a deep and rich and enriching sense of meaningfulness in our lives. Not to cling to a sense of meaningfulness out of some kind of fear of our real existential situation -- not to cling to it at all. It's an option. At times, there are different kinds of sense of meaningfulness that we can have, sense of that deep meaningfulness to our lives, and at times it's not there and it's not needed.

For instance, if there's a perception of the Unfabricated shining through everything, that's beyond meaningfulness. It's an experience of the divine, but in a way, it dissolves any sense of or need for meaningfulness at that time. And yet there are other dimensions of the being, the soul, the psyche, that need meaningfulness, of which meaningfulness is actually an integral part. So I'm interested in that, as I said, not to cling to it all the time, cling to a certain idea or cling to a certain experience of meaningfulness, but to have it as a viable option, something we move in and out of, and in rich and wide and deep ways, alive ways, that that is opened.

Of course we can deconstruct meaningfulness in many ways. But not only do that. If I talk about meaningfulness -- I'm going to come back to this, in relation to all this question of the divine, but -- meaningfulness, we can realize, has no inherent existence. It's not independent of the subject, of my mind, of the conception. Of course not. But again, we fall so easily into this polarized or dualistic thinking, that either it's real in some kind of purely objective way, in the way I understand objects as being different, separate from the subjects, from me and my consciousness -- either it's real in that way, the meaningfulness of my life, or this aspect of meaningfulness -- or I'm just making it up, and therefore it's unreal in the way that I narrowly conceive of 'real.' You can see all this is -- it's so easy for us to assume that: either the cosmos or life or my life is meaningful in a real way, which somehow means an independent, objective way, or I'm making it up; it's either one or the other. But can I see: actually, no, it has no inherent existence. It's not independent of the consciousness. And yet it still has validity. We're not falling into that separation of subject and object, subject and world/cosmos, that whole conceptual framework, ideology, and lack of understanding, if you like.

So I'm really interested in this dimension of meaningfulness, and the experience of meaningfulness in our lives. I'll revisit this later, but that comes through the personal divine, rather than the universal divine or the impersonal divine. So it's through the experience of images, as we have been talking about them, with this sense of being rooted in archetypes and daimons and other levels that want something from me in my life. This meaningfulness is through those kind of experiences of the divine, in images and in seeing my life or my person, or another person's life, another person's personhood, as reflecting or rooted in or mirroring, originated in archetypes, daimons, some other level, that's retaining of the personal and the particular.

So I'm going to revisit that, but part of what's implied there is how then to tie this understanding of emptiness and the Unfabricated with this sense of the more personal divine, because that's where the experience, if you like, of meaningfulness is possible. So we still have to tie them together, or rather, we're interested in tying them together.

For someone like Henry Corbin, he was working from a Platonic or Neoplatonic sort of conceptual structure or philosophy, or variations on that. I'm not going to go into details of that and describe that; we don't have time. But he was working in that kind of framework, and in that kind of framework or that kind of theology there is this ultimate reality, which is very akin to the Unfabricated, the Neoplatonists' One. In Latin sometimes they call it the Deus absconditus, the hidden God. It's inaccessible to the senses or to any manifestation in form or image; a hidden God or Godhead beyond, if you like, human accessibility.

And when there is that as a sort of theological construct, then the human being needs angels to span the sort of chasm, the abyss between the Godhead and the human. They are, if you like, images of God, as we talked about, theophanies. For Corbin, he actually held that it was impossible to have an experience of this Deus absconditus, and he held any such experience to be a sort of self-delusion, if I read him right. But then again, he almost certainly was never given or taught the kind of meditative tools and arts that I've been describing in terms of unfabricating, that would actually help him to move towards that and have that kind of experience. But in that system, there's a kind of transcendent God, and one needs the images to be the theophanies, to have the experience of God, because I cannot have an experience of this inaccessible, transcendent God in that kind of thinking.

So in that system, the angels are -- I mean, it's quite an elaborate system, but they are tied together; they span this chasm, if you like, the imaginal figures. But he also, staying with Corbin for a minute, he also, for him, would hold the human imagination and would regard it as distinct from the divine imagination, but actually kind of continuous with it. In other words, we're back to what I was describing earlier, this realization that we can have, or this perspective that we can have, in a very palpable way -- yes, it's a concept, but it's also a kind of experience that comes out of that concept and out of the meditative playing and meditative seeing -- that my mind, my awareness, that includes my imagination, is not separate from God's imagination, God's mind. Especially when we tend towards gnosis, when there's a lot of emptiness, and the malleability in the seeing when there's very little clinging, when there's a lot of insight around and we're playing in that kind of tantric way, then we really sense then, or can sense that the imagination is not separate from God's imagination, so to speak. God's imagination is manifesting through my imagination; my imagination is a manifestation of God's imagination.

So even for Corbin, there's a kind of theological structure there. I'm quoting someone called Thomas Cheetham, who writes a lot about Corbin. He said the human imagination for Corbin is distinct from, but continuous with, the divine imagination. You can see how that parallels very much what I was talking about earlier: "Whose mind is this?", being that it's not self, it's not separate from divine appearances, it's beyond time and it's empty. I can sense, I can conceive of it as not separate. This mind, this awareness, this imagination, is not separate from God, God's mind, from the ultimate mind, from the Buddha-nature, etc.

This experience that I would say is inevitable for someone practising, doing imaginal practice after a while, and practising deeply with imaginal, you have a sense of, "Yes, creating an image, but also discovering an image." So creating what may be a soul-world or a cosmopoetic cosmos, this sense of the cosmos or this image that comes, but also discovering it. So yes, it's my mind creating it. I can have that sense of it and I can acknowledge that. We've touched on this a little bit before. But I also have the sense of somehow it has some kind of autonomous existence -- we could say because it's in the mind of God, it's in the divine mind, it's part of the Buddha-nature, the potential of the Buddha-nature. Let's stop there and pick up a little further later on.