A Sacred Universe: Insight, Theophany, Cosmopoesis (Part 5)

Re-emphasizing a few general points that we've already mentioned, but just a slightly different direction on them regarding conceptions of divinity, in relation to the imaginal in particular. Let's see. One of the things I pointed out about concepts and conceiving, so important, is that it's always going on. By 'concepts,' I don't just mean big, conceptual structures and philosophies that need articulating in words. I also don't equate the word 'conceiving' with thinking. So by 'conceiving,' I mean the whole spectrum, all the way from big, complicated conceptual structures, like some of what we've been talking about, to include thinking, to include just the subtlest conceiving that's woven in with perception.

So the idea sometimes of bare attention or non-conceptual awareness, this kind of thing, it's often quite uninvestigated. Easily those concepts are very attractive. They sound very simple. But they betray a lack of fully exploring the nature of perception and of fabrication. Wherever there is perception -- and remember, I'm using the word 'perception' synonymously with experience and appearance; that means whenever there's any experience at all, any appearances at all -- there is subtle conceiving woven in with that. It doesn't necessarily mean, I don't mean walking around thinking or labelling everything all the time. I don't mean that at all. It doesn't need to be verbal. But it's wrapped up in perception itself. Conception/perception, conceiving/perceiving are wrapped up together inseparably. No conceiving, no perceiving. Any perceiving involves some conceiving. So that's one point.

Another point I really want to emphasize now has to do with vagueness of concepts. We might use words like 'sacred,' or 'not sacred,' or 'profane,' or whatever, and such words, it's important to realize, involve conceiving. Of course they do. And usually they involve conceiving in a vague way, or if it's not vague, it's at some level contradictory or circular or rests on assumptions, all of that. The point here is about vagueness. We might say 'sacred' or 'divine,' and what does that actually mean? Even having gone through all this for hours now, it's like, "Well, still, what does it mean?" It's hard, without being circular. It's hard to be really clear and defined, and arrive at some kind of final, polished, demarcated definition or conception.

The conception of divinity is vague, to a certain extent. It has a degree of nebulousness to it. But -- and this is what I want to add here, and really point out; this is important -- so does the conception of matter. So I say to you, "You might use the word 'matter' or 'materiality.' What does that mean?" Just as one might ask, hearing the word 'divine' or 'God' or 'gods,' "What does it mean?", we can turn round and ask the same question about matter. We touched on this before. Either through modern physics, going deeply, "But what do you mean by an electron? What is it? What do we mean when we use that?" If I'm talking about experience, do I mean solidity? A sense of solidity? What exactly do I mean? A perception? Through modern physics, when we go into "What do we mean by matter? What is matter?", just as we might go into this question of 'divine,' it ends up being really quite a vague concept. Mathematical equations, the most abstract mathematical equations, might describe behaviour of some matter, under certain conditions, when it's looked at in a certain way. It actually will describe probabilities of behaviour.

Basically, we feel, we take for granted, that our concept of matter -- we know what matter is. But actually, if we go into that, we see it's really quite vague. We can have, we do have, of course, an experience of matter, even though if we poke our concept of matter we quickly realize it's quite vague and not very deep at all, unless you've really studied a lot of physics or philosophy. But just as we have an experience of matter, undeniably, that we're familiar with, we can have experience of the divine, and the concept remains vague.

Implicit in all this is something I've said before. As well as involving conceiving and concepts, 'divine,' or 'sacred,' or 'not sacred,' or 'matter,' these are all perceptions. This is the important thing. What we're talking about when we say 'sacred' is a perception, or rather, a sensibility, a way of looking, and as such, the way of looking can be trained, developed. It can be refined, enlarged, deepened, intensified, empowered. This is what should occupy us, this training of perception. And regarding conceiving, we want enough manoeuvrability and flexibility with the conceiving, and enough conceptions and conceptual structures to sanction a sacred cosmopoesis, a seeing of sacredness in the world. Perception is the important thing, the training of perception. We need enough conception to allow that to grow and to support it. And we need to train the perceiving, the sensibility. That training of perceiving is what I would say, in a nutshell, what meditative training is. Meditation is a training of the flexibility of perception.

Let me say this: in the training of the perception, there is an opening of the range. We've talked about that so much on this retreat, emphasizing that. This is what we're wanting to do: open the range, for the sake of soulfulness, for the sake of the beauty of that discovery, for the sake of freedom, for the sake of investigation. The conceptual frameworks need to support that opening of the range, and the opening of the range of experience and perception then feeds back into the conceptual framework.

The range, then, by definition is multiple. We can have so many different experiences of the divine, especially when we're talking about the imaginal divine. So there is not one correct perception of God, so to speak -- which we might tend to think: "What's the right way that God is? What's the real way that God is?" We can talk about one sort of authentic experience, if that's even the right word, of the Unfabricated, of the Godhead, this Deus absconditus, if that's the right Latin, the hidden Godhead. But not of the faces, the expressions, the aspects of God, the dimensions of God, because in a way, they're infinite. It's about experience here, and there are infinite possibilities.

Sometimes in spiritual circles, it's very easy for people to latch on to and cling to and chase one kind of experience, and say, "Oh, that's it. That's it." Or the teacher says, "There. That's it. You had it." Or a person is aiming for, has a sense of one kind of ultimate experience of the divine: "I tasted it, and now I've lost it," or something like that. Yes, perhaps, a singularity when we talk about the Unfabricated. But not when we open it up into the realm of the imaginal and the fabricated.

So again, to quote the Kotzker Rebbe, but actually to take perhaps another spin on it, he said:

Where is God to be found? In the place where He is given entry.^[1]

So you could read that, "He's everywhere," and we don't see him everywhere, divinity everywhere. But it's also saying something about this infinite possibility of the expansion of the range of perception, of experience, into all the different faces of the divine and sacredness, and sacred cosmopoesis, etc.

We're talking here about empty divine, again, imaginal divine, and the recognition that we're talking about a perception. We're never talking about anything other than perception. Everything, as I said, hinges on perception, and the fabrication of perception, and understanding that, and training that flexibility, training the sensibilities, the range, opening the range. And the conceptual frameworks support that. It's this reciprocal feeding, as we emphasized many times now. So that's one point.

A second thing, and again, I've touched on this before, but just to elaborate a little bit and give an example. It's very possible for an image to have a deeply powerful effect on the being, an image of the divine to have a deeply powerful effect on the being -- even when we don't believe that "This is real," or "This is true," and we concretize it and literalize it as a belief.

So I remember decades ago. I think I was in my twenties, late twenties. I lived in the States, and quite unexpectedly -- because I had not grown up at all in a Christian household or education or anything, and really, despite living in a culture where Christianity was, well, on the wane, but present in England, I had never really even understood the whole thing about Jesus and the Cross and Christ and all this. So I was kind of sheltered from that in my upbringing, to a certain extent. Quite unexpectedly in my early twenties, I fell in love with Jesus. Very unexpectedly. [laughs] And very beautifully, and the whole opening of the heart and the soul in devotion, touched so deeply.

I began to enter into that and to explore it. I would go -- it actually ended up being sometimes more than once a week -- to different churches in Boston, where I was living. I would usually just visit these different churches, and just sit and stand at the back in the services. I would be so moved, moved to tears. I'd be standing in the back. And sometimes it was the old parson or the priest, depending on the kind of church, and maybe some of these churches -- really on the wane, you know; there are three people there, and they're in their eighties or nineties. And then I would stand at the back, and just be sobbing; so, so moved by the hymns and by the sort of mythos of Jesus and of Christ and the parables and the stories and the healing stories.

Talking to people, people would say, after a time, getting a little bit involved in that world in different kinds of ways, "Why don't you get baptized?" But I never felt I could, because actually I could not credo, non-credo. I could not say, "I believe this." It was a barrier. There was something operating through the mythos, but it was not about belief. Yet it was extremely powerful, deeply powerful, this sense that emerged. The mythos of the divine, of God, in this case through a particular Christian mythos and Christ and all that. Deeply powerful and important, without any clear theology. So the belief wasn't there as a sort of literalized, concretized, grasped at, "I believe this to be true and real." And again, the theology, the conceptual framework, was not clear, was vague. The mythos was alive though. This is important.

It was interesting, too -- I can't remember at what point, but somewhere along the line, books came out following scholars' research. Scholars of Christianity formulated this document called Q. Some of you will know this, Q. They said, "These statements or these sentences, based on our scholastic and historical research, we can definitively say these statements Jesus actually said." And then there was a group of statements where I think it was sort of probable that he said or possible. And then there was a group of statements where he definitely didn't say this.

Then, following this sort of publishing of Q (I can't remember what year that was), there were several books. One of them, which moved me a lot, was Stephen Mitchell's book. I think it's called The Gospel According to Jesus. And other books too. But I also felt, in relation to that, personally, that there was this attempt to portray a historical Jesus, like "This guy really lived." And then oftentimes, with a lot of the books that came out, they were sort of saying, "Basically, this guy actually lived, and he was another kind of radical, free, liberated being. In fact, he was a lot like Lao Tzu, and a lot like so-and-so." So all these guys were kind of similar, and he lived with a great, open heart. I'm being a little flippant, because it actually did move me. But something in that way of casting the figure and the story of Jesus, that, to me, in a soul-sense, fell short somehow. It was not that interesting or powerful for the soul. In other words, he's a liberated human being. He's a guy who has realized something, and then living. He's not a god or the son of God.

That kind of storying -- so he's like any other liberated human being, and in fact all liberated human beings are pretty similar, or whatever -- that, attractive as it was, as a soul-story [it] fell short for me. It was not that interesting and powerful. Note, as well, that it's presented as literal and concrete, or at least probable historical fact -- i.e. that story itself of Jesus as purely human, a kind of liberated guy with a big heart, etc., like a lot of other liberated people with big hearts, is not portrayed as imaginal. It's not conceived or admitted as imaginal.

So there was that kind of angle or take or fantasy floating around, not admitting itself as imaginal, sort of portraying itself as humanist, if you like, in a certain sense. On the other hand, or at the same time, I was exposed to this sort of dogmatic Christology or basically theology that originated, I think, with Saint Paul, so Paulinian theology, this structure of the son of God and the Trinity. That, in its sort of overwhelmingness and its complexity and sort of arcane structures, was attractive to me, in that it offers itself to the imagination, that kind of structure, that kind of verticality of dimensions, and the rich, complex, multi-levelled and textured movement, as we're describing, of eros-psyche-logos that can enter into that and relate to it and enrich it. At the same time, that sort of dogmatic Christian theology was unattractive to me, especially if I felt I needed to sign up to believing it, and say a credo or whatever: "I believe this is true." But again, with that theology, again, it's presented just as the humanist version is presented -- as fact, truth, the credo that this is true, this Trinity and all the rest of it, and not as imaginal.

Something was operating in me, and very powerful. I did not want to go to one side or the other, really. And I could not articulate something back then. How I articulate it now (this is years later) is to say that what I realized perhaps intuitively then and could not articulate or realize fully consciously, how I'd say it now is that the Jesus that matters to the soul is not so much the Jesus of matter (in other words, the flesh-and-blood, so-called historical Jesus), but the imaginal Jesus, or the imaginal Christ. The Jesus that matters is not so much the Jesus of matter, the historical flesh-and-blood Jesus, but the imaginal Jesus, the imaginal Christ. I think perhaps something in me realized that, but not quite fully consciously enough. So I just dwelt in this in-between world, and it was lovely and beautiful. Again, to say: we are interested, I am interested, in the imaginal divine. That's what we're talking about, the imaginal divine.

One last thing on this point, and then we'll stop. I'll give you an example. Again, this has to do also with vagueness. I was sitting in meditation a little while ago, tuning into the felt sense of the whole energy body, as we've been emphasizing on this retreat. There was a little bit of samādhi around. Then suddenly I heard, quietly in the inner ear, so to speak, I heard the word tzedakah. Tzedakah is a word I knew from my childhood. It's a Hebrew word for 'charity.' I think it means 'charity,' or perhaps it can mean 'giving.' Perhaps it's equivalent to the word dāna. I don't know. But I heard that word, tzedakah, just that word arising, and then with that word, or sort of sparked by that word, was the subtle image, sense, and idea -- all wrapped into one, image/sense/idea -- of my being (the sense of my being was completely wrapped up with the sense of the energy body at that time), but the subtle image/sense/idea of my being as a gift from God.

So that word, and then my immediate knowing of the translation of it, and it just sparked a certain image-sense, a certain conception in the being. Very, very beautiful. Totally wrapped up with the energy body. My being as a gift from God. My being is a gift from God. And then correspondingly came a sense of giving my being to God as a reciprocal gift. So there's receiving the gift of being, and giving my being to God as a reciprocal gift. Very, very beautiful, and very subtle. I lost it several times, and then found it again. Actually, later in a meditation the same day -- I was on retreat at the time -- this sense arose again, but attached itself to a person. So there's again, the sense of the image spreading, but interestingly spreading from a more general sense of divinity to divinity through a person. Usually it's the other way round: we see a person in a certain imaginal or theophanic way, and that begins to spread to the surroundings in a cosmopoesis.

But just to say a few little things about that subtle imaginal sense or opening there. I'm mentioning it just because I want to draw out a few things. Some of them I mentioned before, when we were giving the instructions. Just to point out that that image didn't seem to involve any inner physical sense; rather, it was just a 'sense' in the other meaning of the word, as an intuitive way of knowing. It's just a sense of the being as a gift from God, and of giving one's being through God, to God. It's not really a kinaesthetic sense. It involves that. It involves the energy body. It certainly wasn't a particularly visual sense, although it also involved an awareness of nature that was around me. Nor was it really auditory. It was not an inner auditory sense. The word tzedakah that I heard was more a trigger, something that ignited. So spontaneously hearing that word inwardly functioned as what we called this poetic sort of spark.

Now, again, we've touched on this before, but just to spell it out in terms of instructions as well: when a spontaneous word arises in the mind, if I'm doing usual mindfulness meditation, I would just recognize it, note it, perhaps, and then let go of it and come back to the breath or come back to whatever else. Here, in this practice, in this kind of imaginal practice, or practising opening to at least the orientation and potential of cosmopoesis, some things that enter the mind can be taken up and function as keys that we can open, that open the being and the perception and the conception in certain ways. One can then tune to the mystical perception, the image, the mythos, the cosmopoesis that's coming from that.

So it wasn't, as I said, particularly in any physical sense. Nor was it particularly only in the affective, only a heart thing. The heart was involved. There was a beautiful, subtle emotionality involved in the heart. But that wasn't the primary thing either. And, more important for our purposes, for the points we want to make right now, is that the sense of God in that, as that opened, the sense of the divine was not located spatially, nor was it specifically defined. Again, really emphasizing this vagueness. What is this God or divinity that was so much central and part of this image/sense/idea? It was vague. There was not a worked-out, clear, demarcated philosophy or conception of God or divinity. Rather, it was open, amorphous, ambiguous.

When I, or in practice, when I might use the words "sense another as an angelic presence," or "see them as angel," "they appear to me as theophany, as angel," what does that mean? What does this word, 'angel,' mean? What exactly do I mean? What is an angel? Now, we've been through all this elaborate conceptual structure, but still, I don't know. I can be affected beautifully and opened, and the conception and the perceiving, too, opened by all that, but it's still an undefined meaning. Not less powerful for that being undefined or not clearly defined.

So perhaps characteristic of our -- I don't know; maybe it's different personalities, maybe it's our time in history, but we can tend to elevate specific, clear, or apparently clear, demarcated knowing of something that's defined, or at least definable, knowable. We tend to think, "This is better," if it's clear, demarcated, and definable, knowable, or defined preferably, or at least possibly definable, knowable. We tend to elevate that. That's good, that's what we like, that's what we feel comfortable with usually. But is there a necessary place for kinds of knowing that need to remain open and not very defined? So in other words, sometimes we have experiences, and wrapped up in those experiences are conceivings, and the knowing there is much more open and amorphous and less defined, and not clear, and not demarcated.

Also, just in terms of that example, again, in the practice of it, the attention was not really focused on a particular object or a particular sense. It was more global, or rather, general. This sense of divinity was everywhere. Different than vast awareness that seems divine in this universal way. This image-sense very much involved my personhood. The sense of God and the divine there was not very particular, but it definitely involved my personhood, my life, my being. Not just universal. It involved me. There was a sense of self there, and God, but God was more vague, though nonetheless powerful for that.

Again, if this isn't clear, we can tend so much in Buddhist circles to elevate experiences that are more dissolutions of self, or seeing the emptiness of self, etc., experience of no-self and all that. But knowing the emptiness of self thoroughly, we can then open the door for a whole other range and realm of dimensions of experience that do involve self, which is not taken literally and hardened into 'reality.' It's this is a whole range of experiences that involve personhood and particularities. So important.

Now I'm repeating what I said before, but despite it being not focused on a particular object or a particular sense, being global or general, the tuning in the meditation was very precise, very specific, even if it wasn't quite definable. It was, as we've talked about before, this tuning to a particular wavelength or sensibility. We talked about this in the instructions. But the image here is more a kind of mystical perception. It's an intuition. It's a sense. It's more vague, also, in terms of objects, but the precision in the meditative tuning and steadiness of the attention is on, if you like, this certain wavelength or this certain sense of things, sensibility.

Hopefully it might be helpful to perhaps give a few more examples of theophany, and particularly of cosmopoesis, in imaginal practice, to illustrate what I'm trying to get at, what I'm trying to open, a field, a door, a window, a portal that we can move through -- a door, really, that we can move through, and a territory that can open up. So hopefully to illustrate and fill out a bit of what we've been talking about with a few more examples.

Actually, when it comes to theophany, and particularly when it comes to cosmopoesis, one of the most potent and rich and fertile classes of examples, if you like, of imaginal practice involves the erotic and eros, particularly pertaining to loving another and sexual feeling, and eros in the biggest sense of the word towards another -- whether that's a purely imaginal figure, or someone we know, seen through the lens of mythos, of image. There's something partly to do with what we talked about before, something about the eros that potentizes and opens things up in the imaginal, in a way that spills over. So I could actually give many, many examples where the erotic dimension, the erotic aspect, is foremost in relation to an imaginal figure, or a figure seen through the imaginal lens, so to speak. But I'm not going to, because it's such a huge subject in itself, and hopefully we'll be able to do that another time, another retreat, or another place.

To give some different examples -- there's eros in all of these, but in the less sort of sexual, romantic way that we tend to think of when we hear that word, 'erotic.' But eros pervades all of these anyway, as it does any deep work with the imaginal. It's part of the territory. It's what fertilizes it, as we talked about earlier. Many of these examples involve music, and I've talked about music and musicians, and given examples. So there's a connection between some of them. Rather than the erotic, there's a commonality of music here. It's not that significant; I just am picking these out to give some examples of cosmopoesis.

Some time ago, it just was dusk time, the evening coming at Gaia House, and the birdsong of the evening dusk, the birds singing as the evening draws in. Hearing that music as a cosmic music, the birdsong echoes and expresses a kind of cosmic music, suggestive of other cosmic levels. Again, there's that vertical dimension, implicit in the hearing, in the imaginal hearing, in the very sense somehow. Again, quite vague. But this sense, with all that, of music as cosmologically interwoven. That had a personal component for myself, remembering my life as a composer for some years, something I really gave myself to very fully, and the feeling, the sort of function of the composer, the soul-function of the composer, as kind of serving that connection between the more cosmic music and what comes through on a human level, or rather, seeing that there is a connection, and wanting to serve that, and seeing that they ideally reflect each other. So a lot of that is actually quite subtle. It was quite subtle and hard to put into words. I gave that other image much earlier in the retreat with "it's the music that matters," but 'music' in that sense was something more broad. Here it was still more broad than what we think of as music, but not as broad as it was in that other example.

A quite similar example: this is something, for myself, I get quite a lot, this particular sense of listening and sound, and hearing it as sacred music. I was sitting, reading in the vegetable garden at Gaia House. It was a beautiful, sunny spring day. I was sitting on the bench there, studying, reading. I actually heard music, meaning I physically heard music. At a certain point, I realized that it was the water pipe at the whole other end, perhaps a hundred yards away -- I don't know how long that garden is; fifty, a hundred yards -- at the other end. It was the tap, sort of old, probably fairly on its way out, the tap of water that was running because it was into a hose, watering the garden somewhere. So this music that I heard was actually the sound of the water through the tap and the pipe at the other end of the garden. But it really sounded so beautiful, like some very complex and skilful and exotic jazz, through a reed or a flute instrument, improvised. It reminded me of a musician I love, Dewey Redman. He died some time ago, and he used to play an instrument called 'musette,' a fairly rare instrument, but it sounds like some kind of Asian reed instrument. He was a master, playing very, very free and creative, in sort of subtle and complex ways there.

So the sound that I was hearing from this tap was really compelling as music. It sounded so creative and fantastic -- its sound, its structure, the kind of melodic fragments, etc. There were other sounds that seemed to accompany this. It went on for some minutes. Listening to that, opening to that, and the delight in that, and the beauty of it, through an actual sound -- the sound of the tap. Through that, then, listening and opening in this way, the whole garden, the whole veggie garden, became sacred. It became a theophany. The garden itself, the sight of it, the whole surrounding of it, became a theophany.

It was as if I was seeing it at a kind of more subtle level, seeing a more subtle dimension of the existence of the garden, the being of the garden. Of course, it was filled with light anyway, because it was a sunny day, but this sense of other levels of creation, a sense of other worlds, other dimensions of this world, present there. The sense, too, of this world, if we echo something Corbin said, this world "as the imagination of God." That was all kind of implicit in this hearing and then the whole senses opening to this 'other' garden, so to speak, in or behind or with or at a different level of the garden.

So there was not so much a transfiguring of the physical perception of the garden, as, we could say, a transubstantiation. It appeared to be of a different substance, at a different level. Really very beautiful, that kind of cosmopoesis, or opening a perception of a different dimension. It was heavenly, for sure, or divine. But again -- it should be obvious by now -- if I use words like that, or if we hear words like that in this context, because it felt like, "Oh, this is heaven, right here, this garden. It's perceived as a kind of heaven." But I'm not talking in a metaphorical term: "Oh, it's heavenly. It's simply divine." It was really a different sense of this 'more,' this vertical dimension, interfused with the physical, or perceivable in and through the physical.

Again, quite a similar example: I was doing standing meditation outside, near the big trees in the front garden. The morning sun was coming up. And again, for me, it was triggered by the birdsong, but really the whole scene, aware of the whole scene despite the fact that my eyes were mostly shut. There was an awareness of the nature around me, and obviously I know the scene and I knew what it looked like. But it seemed to me, very strongly, as if that whole world, that whole scene, and the birds and their song, this was angelic, an angelic world. Hard to describe, these kind of things. But the whole thing -- the nature there, the birdsong -- felt, was perceived as luminous, as diaphanous to something coming through; transparent, translucent to the divine light coming through, the divinities. The sacredness was pervading everything. There was a sense of everything praising. So I was certainly praising all that, and the different dimensions there, but the world itself and the birds and the light and the trees -- they were angels praising the divine. They were divine, faces of the divine, and they were praising.

I'll give some more examples. Let's see. I think I've touched on this one before. I think I mentioned this one before. Excuse me; I forget all the examples I've mentioned. But actually, I want to say it again, partly for instruction's sake, to give an indication of how these things might evolve, because someone might be listening and say, "Suddenly this thing happened," which sometimes is how it is. We talked about how we can set things up, and how we can really kind of relate to the flow of what arises in meditation with a different kind of responsiveness than we might in, say, other kinds of practice. So I want to go through briefly this example, to highlight the kind of ways that the imaginal experience, or in this case the cosmopoesis, unfolds, supported by or dependent on, helped by, the ways of responding and allowing what came up, the ways of seeing what arose spontaneously in meditation.

I had been reading a book on Jewish mysticism, in fact earlier in the day, or the day before or something. That had triggered what I can only describe as a sort of Jewish feeling. Which is not something I have a lot, but it's there in my psyche. I was raised Orthodox Jewish, and then put all that well behind me in different ways, as an atheist and then getting into Buddhism and things. But it's there in my psyche, the whole history and ethos. It's alive as a soul-world, a soul-image and all that. So a Jewish feeling. And the point I want to make right now is that I was conscious that it was triggered by just picking up a book on Jewish mysticism and reading a little bit. So that's fine. You say, "Oh, I dismiss that. It can't be my soul, because it was triggered by something I heard or something someone said or something I read." No problem.

So this Jewish feeling was there, and it's part of what I was just aware of and allowing and holding and feeling in the meditation. As I was doing that, a point of white light appeared at my solar plexus, like a star in the night sky. It appeared at my solar plexus. Just aware again of the whole energy body, and focusing a little bit on that white light, some samādhi came. That spread through the body, that energy of the samādhi, and it felt like a sense of the body and the energy body as a vessel, waiting to be filled. This Jewish feeling was still pervading, and a particular mythos that's alive within the umbrella or the soul-world of what 'Jewishness' might mean to me, from my past and from what I've read and in my soul-fantasies, the idea of a tzaddik. Tzaddik basically translates as 'a righteous person,' so someone like a bodhisattva, something like that, a Jewish version of a bodhisattva, wise and incredibly compassionate and pure and saintly and given to God.

So the resonances of that whole soul-image, what the word means for me, all the images that accrue to that, and the fantasies, and the mythos -- it was all quite vague, but very potent, very fertile in my psyche. With all that, allowing all that, feeling all that, aware of it as image, as mythos operating in the psyche at that time, connected with the energy body, with some degree of samādhi, again, the birdsong outside my window became, to me, beautiful. But beautiful like a sacred text. It was as if I heard the birdsong as a sacred text, and a text that was inexhaustible, inexhaustibly deep, inexhaustible in depth and beauty. That very idea of a sacred text and the inexhaustibility of the text, in terms of the depth of meanings that are possible, the infinite interpretations, that's also a Jewish idea, or it's an idea I picked up in part through my studies of Kabbalah, or reading about the Kabbalah, I should say.

So that whole image-sense, and the cosmopoesis involved, of the birdsong as sacred text. I did give this example or a related example before. It's not completely translatable, this text; it's not even in a specific language. The details are not important in that sense. But there is, again, the precision of the tuning to the reverberations, the echoing, the feeling, the mythos there, that's important. That image or fantasy, that cosmopoetic sense of the birdsong as beautiful, sacred text, inexhaustible, came, if you like, on the back of all those other micro-stages of the meditation, and relating to them in a certain way.

Had I shut down, or dismissed, or judged as unworthy or just a distraction or papañca some of those earlier stages -- the Jewish feeling, or this tzaddik thing or whatever, body as vessel -- it may be that that sense of the birdsong as sacred text would not have arisen; that a way, an opening was not made for it. So, again, in that sense, the image-sense of the birdsong is not visual. But it's subtle and rich and pervasive. It was auditory. But on opening my eyes, then the world around me -- and again, this is the spreading that we were talking about -- here's an image, here's a theophanic image, I'm focusing on that, and it has a certain boundary to it (in this case, the birdsong). But opening my eyes, the world around me, and my body, too, seems to be sacred text also, seemed to be sacred text. So there's the spreading of the theophany to a more cosmopoetic sense of everything. The whole world and my body, too, seemed to be sacred text.

Maybe a couple more examples. Some time ago, over a year ago, I had a day off. I spent it studying, mostly in my room. I was reading different things. Again, I might have mentioned this one before. Then I meditated, and I was exploring imaginal practice deliberately. But no images arose. This was quite a while ago. I was looking for, like, an image as something other than the world or my life -- something that appeared to me in meditation like that. No images arose. But then the image or memory, if you like, of the day spent studying. So me, sitting at the desk, studying. The sense of, in that, of pursuing what is meaningful to me, of trying to absorb, to learn, to open horizons and paradigms, to make connections. I mentioned this before. That was the image. That memory, that seeing of myself, that memory was the image, infused with a certain mythos and fantasy. The image or symbol, if you like, was me, studying, with all the richness imbued in that. That, too, had this sense of echoing higher levels -- again, this vertical dimension. This image of me studying felt like a theophany. It felt like it was expressing a face of the divine, in and through, in this case, the particularities of me, but also the particularities of a certain activity in life were expressing other levels, and the sense of theophany was through and in something very particular, certain activities of life and the self.

I don't know if I've mentioned this earlier in the retreat, but sometimes I wonder, if we sense life more imaginally in that way, we have that sense of life as image, if you like, we have the sense of theophany and cosmopoesis in life, then it may be that sort of strange images don't need to arise so much. That's a conjecture, a thought, something I wonder about sometimes. It might be for some people that the literalization of life, really believing this or that so much, that clinging actually forces strange images on them in dreams and in meditation or just wherever, because there's an over-literalization. When life is seen more imaginally, then the imaginal comes through, and it's not squeezed out of life; there's a broader range for it to come through.

But again, in that image, there was a spreading in terms of the breadth of the image, because the surroundings started to be included in the image (in that case, my room that I was sitting in). The whole world of that started to be -- not just me, not just the activity, but the whole surroundings started to be filled with this sense of theophany, the sense of sacredness, and the different levels present, if you like, in the world, in and through the world, the different dimensions of the world.

I'll leave out the other example I was going to give, and just finish with one. It's actually, in a way, the most complex. Perhaps, for some, it may be the strangest. It may be quite hard to relate to. Again, it's musical, or has to do with music. I'm aware it might sound quite strange, especially for people who don't have a musical background. But I'm choosing it, partly, again, to illustrate something about meditative process, about picking up on cues, relating to them in certain ways, working with difficulties, and how that opens the theophanic sense, but also in this case the cosmopoetic sense in particular ways. Also, again, to illustrate when we use words like 'divine' and 'God,' etc., that it's really quite broad, infinite, in fact, the range of what might be meant there. It's not the narrow preconception that we might immediately assume when we hear those words, 'God' or 'divine.'

I had a teacher, I didn't have that much contact with him, years ago at the conservatory. He was a jazz saxophone player. Really, really amazing. I loved his playing. I didn't have that much contact with him; I had him for one or two classes, I think, over the years. On a whim, I googled him, and actually found -- among lots of other stuff -- a short article explaining the basics of a certain musical concept, a way of improvising. It's quite technical to explain. But it's quite a complex thing. Because I studied music, I could understand it. It's quite complex, to do with kind of advanced jazz improvisation. I read this article, and reading the article actually prompted my mind, then, to -- in moments where it wasn't busy, and even sometimes in meditation -- to improvise lines, informed by what I'd read in this article, and this sort of harmonic/melodic concept that he was describing in the article.

My mind was, if you like, doodling or daydreaming spontaneously music on the guitar, which was my instrument, in the imagination. And quite a lot. It was just coming and coming and coming. [laughs] I could have stopped it, I suppose. But it was really quite a lot, and I was interested -- there's something pushing that, if you like. And then I think it was that night or the night after, I can't remember, I dreamt of a jazz guitarist. This jazz guitarist was dressed in a sort of colourful jester's shirt, these big square patches of bright colours, kind of smart, but interesting, arty looking, very striking without being overly flamboyant. He was playing a guitar solo on a stage, and playing the most amazing, creative, original music. Very, very strong, very striking, with this powerful, clear sound. There were things about that that I noticed musically and stuff, not that important, about the guitar and other stuff. I don't see an audience or anyone else in the band, but he's definitely on a stage performing, is my sense.

In the morning I felt something emotionally, which visits me from time to time over the years since I gave up being a musician. It comes occasionally. It's actually a feeling of grief, of loss, of missing being a musician. Sometimes it's very specific: missing being a jazz musician, missing the trajectory of a jazz life. So sometimes it comes, just a whisper of it, and other times it comes and it's something that I get pulled into a little bit. It's difficult not to take it concretely and literally sometimes.

So it came that morning, and I feel like, "Hmm, I don't quite know ..." It was quite strong, subtle but it wouldn't go away. It was sticking a little bit. I didn't quite know how to handle it or approach it in practice. The question, as always: "What's needed? What would be helpful here?" Looking at it, exploring, investigating this constellation of an emotion, I realized it's not all jazz I miss. It's something to do with those two images, the image triggered by what I'd found from my teacher, and those kind of doodle daydream improvisations in my mind, in my imagination -- that image, and the image of the dream. There's something about the kind of loose, complex sophistication of that saxophonist's style, and also to do with his sound and way of articulating and certain harmonic things, that actually had a lot to do with being on the edges, playing in and out of the boundaries of, in this case, tonality, and being on the edge, being liminal.

So I recognized: that's characteristic of it, all of that. Then the other dream image was more a sense -- what was captivating, capturing for me there -- was more the sense of this almost otherworldly brilliance of intuitive or even channelled music, when it's improvised music, when it's just almost like it feels like it's from another world, as opposed to the sort of more loosely intellectual, mathematical component of the saxophonist's approach, although that's very fluid and edgy.

So really there were two images there, and they were drawing me. They were so attractive in my soul. Looking further, exploring further, I realized that a lot of the pull, or a lot of what was keeping this sadness, this grief, this sense of loss around, had to do with freedom of expression. This is interesting because -- I'm sharing quite personally now -- in teaching Dharma, or giving Dharma talks, or writing about Dharma, I feel I have a responsibility to be as clear as I can. I aim mostly for clarity, because I'm trying to instruct or teach or make things clear, for the most part. That aiming at clarity, the didactic aim, the teaching, it's like, I am responsible to you, in this case as a listener, and I'm responsible to the students, I'm responsible to the Dharma and all of that. That puts quite a lot of constraints on my freedom of expression. And also exploring, realizing also that there are constraints, quite a lot of constraints, that I feel because of the whole Dharma ethos, so to speak. There's a limit to how wild my expression can be. There's a limit to how much wildness can manifest or express when I'm giving a Dharma talk. It's actually very limited. [laughs] What can happen in the Dharma hall at Gaia House or another retreat centre or whatever, the whole ethos is quite constrained in terms of freedom of expression, and particularly in terms of wildness and intensity.

I think anyone who listens enough will recognize there's quite a lot of intensity in some Dharma talks and some writings, etc., but it's still, I feel, constrained or held back or modulated, for the sake of the listener, and for the sake of respecting a certain restricted range of the ethos here and in the Dharma world. If you like, the permission of the stage as a Dharma teacher, when I sit at the front and give a talk or whatever it is, the permission of the stage is very different in what it allows and supports than the permission of a jazz musician on stage. Especially the jazz I was into was really very high-intensity, wild, what they call 'out there' and experimental, etc. So the permission of the stage is quite different. It has to do with freedom of expression. It has to do with intensity, with libido, with all these things.

I was exploring and realizing what's involved in why these feelings of grief, of loss were there, and interested in what was involved in it. The mind, you know -- it's subtle; it's not a huge, terrible emotion, but there was a degree at which the mind was a little bit churning with this, and throwing forward lots of jazz images, feeling the subtle pain of that. The question: how to de-literalize this? I'm taking these images too literally. Again, exploring and looking at the whole emotional constellation there, the constellation with the images. And I realized at times, coming in and out of all this, I feel a real gratitude for these images existing, and also for the actual musicians I love (I've talked about this before), and the music. Deep, deep, deep gratitude there, in my soul, in my heart.

This turned out to be key. Because then it turned into a kind of reverence, a devotion, a prayerfulness. That felt lovely, felt beautiful. Still a shade of pain, of grief, in it. So, with all that, letting that open. Then I started reflecting that actually this is image. Jazz musicians that I knew personally -- well, they were people, and people are not simple. [laughs] And they're disappointing. The image that I have, say, of the teacher or the dream guitarist who sort of reminded me of someone else, they don't actually exist in that way. In other words, the actual teacher is much more than, more complex, there are aspects of his being that I'm not too keen on, etc. So, "Oh, image. Don't get it too confused." Somehow, the reflections and the gratitude liberated just enough space around the images, without rendering them less powerful.

All this is quite subtle. It's not that I'm in a great contraction or sobbing or anything like that. We're talking about quite subtle things here, and working quite subtly with them in different ways. That's really what I want to illustrate in this long example. So there was more space around these images, but without rendering them less powerful.

Then, actually -- this is one of the really interesting pieces -- then they were able to be kind of absorbed. Those images, those two images of jazz and jazz musicians and jazz music and jazz life were somehow able to be absorbed. Because they were less constricted around, there was more space around them, they were able to be absorbed into the texture of my life, the image of my life, as it is now -- the actuality of my life, now, here, as a Dharma teacher, etc., and doing what I do, and all the different stuff that I do, which mostly is not music any more. Somehow, it's like the ethos, the image of that, of jazz, it's hard to put that in a nutshell, what that actually means. I've talked about this before. It means more than improvising, just how you improvise Dharma talks and you improvise in interviews. It means much more than that. But the whole mythos of that was able to be translated -- not, again, not in totally delineated ways; there's still a lot of vagueness there, but they absorbed into the texture of the image and the actuality of my life, the way of feeling and sensing and seeing my life.

So that was interesting. In terms of the cosmopoesis of that, this is the piece I wanted to emphasize. I found all this interesting. I go outside and I do some walking meditation. I'm interested in this whole question of cosmopoesis. So I'm pleased to notice, when I do the walking meditation, that subtly these images, these jazz music images and jazz musician images that I described, they do spill over and spread into a cosmopoesis, into a sense of the world around me and the nature and the walking and everything. It's absolutely beautiful. It's absolutely delightful. Joy comes with it.

Again, hard to describe, but it's like the world is music somehow. That was the sense of it, at another level, if you like, at another level of the vertical spectrum of the imaginal: the world is music, its nature is music, its essence is music. I know that we can hear that in different ways, and people talk about that in different ways. Certainly I can hear certain sounds as actual music, but it's more than that. All the senses were involved, so that what I see, and the forms that I see, the shapes, the colours, the sensations in my feet as I walk, the whole of nature and the whole structure of nature was music. Very hard to explain here, and also hard to form a clear, defined sense of. It's quite subtle, yet very wonderful, and very powerful. So again, there's the vagueness and the non-delineated and clear conceptual structure, yet still the depth and the potency of the opening, really another dimension to existence.

I was tuning into that, but then the mind loses it, the perception loses it. That happened many times. But what I found was just remembering those two images, of the jazz saxophonist and that whole harmonic/melodic approach that he described, very lightly the image of that, and the image of the dream guitarist playing, just remembering them, letting them be there very lightly for a second or two, then they started, again, to act as triggers to infuse the perceptions of the world somehow. Those two images might linger there, or one of them might linger very subtly in the background, while the foreground attention is on the cosmopoetic sense, the world as music. Or those initial images could disappear. Either way. But either way, I stayed tuned, I could stay tuned into the sense of nature as music, and hold that, tune into that, hold that steady in the attention, and open to that.

There are other parts of this I'll just mention briefly. This is all over a period of a day, in and out, where I had quite a lot of free time to be practising and pondering these things and working with that. Later, again, in the afternoon, the mind drifting repeatedly into this sort of imaginal doodling, along the lines of this harmonic/melodic approach on an imagined guitar in my imagination. I sensed then another image within all this. This one is much more personal: a being of blue light, a puer. Puer means 'boy,' I think, in Latin. It has a whole baggage associated it with it in Jungian psychology, but it's a young, eternally young boy, or a young man, let's put it that way -- so, say, teenager kind of thing. But what puer really means in archetypal terms is a whole confluence of things, but to do with enthusiasm and spirituality and vitality and eros, and many things there.

This puer of blue light appears as an image, and it sort of mixed with me, or it is me at, say, 17, discovering those kind of harmonic/melodic possibilities -- which wasn't the case at that age. Exploring them, knowing how to develop them and practise them, and the excitement of that, the endless puer enthusiasm. 'Enthusiasm,' the word, comes from entheos -- theos meaning 'God' or 'divine,' and en, the entering of the divine into the being. So again, what's characteristic of puer is this kind of enthusiasm, and the eagerness, and the sense of -- in this image, partly of a being of blue light, partly it was me, partly me at 17, all kind of fused together, and the enthusiasm of discovery and creativity and exploring in this jazz world, and developing things, and the sense of the infinity and the open-endedness of possibilities. So all that as a kind of gestalt, a constellation, was there as image, in relation to the same or triggered by the same daydreaming and the initial images. With that, not getting lost in all that, but actually a lot of bliss, much happiness in the energy body, sukha filling the energy body, and the sense of this light and blue light.

One option at that point, certainly, would have been to veer into, steer into, some samādhi, focusing in on the happiness in the energy body, letting that fill and absorbing into that. Certainly that would have been possible at that point. But there's the whole imaginal constellation there, going from a cosmopoetic sense at one point, into something more personal again, but liberated from the kind of contraction of a tight relationship with my personal history and the actuality of my life, and "This happened," and all that. There's a more imaginal sense of one's life. It even transcended time; I'm certainly not 17 any more, and that didn't happen when I was that age. I wasn't into jazz at that age. But there it is moving from the cosmopoetic to the imaginal personal, if you like, but in a liberated and liberating way.

Again, even later in the day, this sense of praise arose, for the endless sort of fountain, the cornucopia of music from the psyche. Not just my psyche, but the psyche, the soul, gives rise to music; humanity giving rise to music, endless in its possibilities, like a fountain out of the deep soul, the deep mind. So the sense of praise for that, the human aspect, if you like, and also the praise for this other dimension, this other level, the music that is the cosmos, the cosmos that is music. All the time, knowing that that sense of the world/cosmos, and that perception of it, is not separate from the mind. All the time, knowing that.

Just to finish. Talking about cosmopoesis now, the impulse towards cosmopoesis, the idea of cosmopoesis. We recognize or, in a way, I'm sort of stating as an axiom, that the soul wants poetry and enchantment. These are essential to soulmaking and soulfulness, to say in different words what we said much earlier in the retreat. We or the soul wants to live, to know, to see, to experience poetically, and the enchantment of poetic existence, poetry to existence.

So in terms of cosmopoesis, really what we're talking about with cosmopoesis is, again, this sense of range. We're not saying, "The cosmos is like this." We could take cosmology as defined by modern science, current modern science or whatever, and say that's how the cosmos is. That's fine, and actually, to me, very enchanting, very beautiful -- as one vision, one knowing, one sensing of the cosmos. I love what modern physics and modern cosmology uncovers, as much as I can understand it. But something in the soul, to say in different words what we said before, wants and needs an endlessness of creativity, a range of ways of feeling, sensing, knowing, seeing, living and sensing ourselves, others, and the world, the cosmopoesis. There's something about that, the psyche wants to expand, the imaginal world wants to expand, the eros wants to expand -- as we said, this movement of fertilizing, expanding tendency of eros-psyche-logos together, fertilizing each other, the whole thing growing, expanding, going deeper, opening up other levels, other visions, other experiences.

Holding all this lightly, it's not then that one would want to say, "This cosmos is real, and that one is not; or that one is real, and this one is not." That would be falling into clinging too tightly and concretely and literally to either one view or another, or scientific reductionist materialism versus some other New Agey view or whatever. This idea the cosmos is music is a poetic idea, it's a poetic sense of the cosmos. This is not, as I said, not even a metaphor in the way that we commonly use that word, 'metaphor.' And it's certainly not a literalism. Because we, because the soul, because eros and psyche want to see, to feel, to know, to live poetically, this expanding, this movement of cosmopoesis, this opening up of the range of the perception of self, other, and particularly of world, it's necessary to the soul, because eros wants to expand psyche and soulfulness, and the psyche wants to be expanded. Soulfulness wants to deepen and be enriched and nourished. Soulmaking needs to happen. It's important for our soul that soulmaking happens.

Soul needs images, in all kinds of ways -- many, and a whole range, an infinity: images of life, of self, of others. It needs images that pertain to life. And it may well need images that seem to have nothing to do with life, what James Hillman calls "the underworld." They're away from life; they seem to have no bearing, and yet they're important for the soul. So there are the images that we have of life, and the many and plural, the range of the images of life. And there are images away from life. But soul also needs this sense of other dimensions, this vertical spectrum of the imaginal. This is how, this is what happens, when soulfulness is enriched, when soulmaking happens. That vertical dimension opens, and also the spreading into the world in cosmopoesis, the ensouling of the world. To repeat what we said earlier, soul needs multiple seeing. To quote William Blake again, "God help us or God save us from single vision." We feel it as we live more deeply, we feel it as a necessity of the soul, as something that fertilizes our life, our soul, our experience, our sense of being, this multiplicity. And it's what happens when there is the fertilization of that.

A lot of what I'm emphasizing is this wanting to open doors, to expand the range. Through these examples, and through these talks, and through this retreat, that's what I want to give some possibility, to open doors, to support possibilities, to suggest possibilities. But it's really possibilities of perception, of experience, of sensibility, supported by the conceiving, supported by the practice. So we're opening the range, as I said much earlier in the retreat, opening the range of perception, of experience, of sensibility. That's the thrust, the movement, that is, I think, so important, because in that opening up, that meditative journey of opening up the range of perception or vision, if you like, experience, we are opening the soul, the psyche. This opening of the soul, the psyche, is what the psyche wants and needs. It is soulmaking, as we said. We're also opening up the range of possibility of practice and of adventure. More fundamentally, we're opening up through that exploration the sense of existence itself, the range of the sense of existence, sense of being, of what we are, what the world is, what another is. Self, other, world, the whole sense of that, the whole experience of that, has much more range, so we're not living in a world that's constrained, constricted. And with all that, we're opening up, as I said much earlier in the retreat, the range of our sense of beauty, a deep beauty, and the possibilities of beauty.