The Nature of Enchantment

Welcome, everybody. Welcome to this retreat, to this course, to those here in the room tonight or if you're listening at home to the teachings, the offerings. A very warm welcome. Both Catherine and I would like to each speak a little bit to introduce the retreat, to get our bearings and get the ball rolling. So I'd just like to speak a little bit now and really to cover four areas, to begin to go into four areas: the what -- what are we talking about when we talk about re-enchantment and the poetry of perception? What is meant by that? So I'll say a little bit tonight about these four areas, and they're also things that we'll come back to and fill out much more. Just touching on them tonight by way of introduction, but as the course goes on, we'll fill them out more.

(1) So what do we mean by re-enchantment? What are we talking about? What are we pointing to? (2) And secondly, why? Why is this important? Why offer a retreat like this and these kind of practices, these kind of teachings? (3) Thirdly, a little bit, just a little bit tonight about the context of the retreat, the context of these teachings, and also the bases, what forms the bases, what are the bases for these offerings, for these teachings. So what, why, context and bases. (4) And lastly, a little bit about just some pointers or maybe suggestions, offerings, about how to relate to this retreat, how to relate to the practices and the teachings. Like I said, we'll touch on this now, and these are themes that we'll return to, fill in, elaborate, as the week goes by.

And just a reminder, or a statement at least: the content of this retreat, both the themes and the practices and the orientations, in a way emerge for me organically, as an organic expression or extension, really, of teachings that both Catherine and I separately have been giving in the last few years. If you like, some of it is an elaboration of that, a further exploration of those things. Some of it is slowing aspects of those previous teachings down and filling them out a little more.

And as we hopefully have made clear, we're assuming a familiarity, for you, on your part. We're assuming a familiarity. This is what we asked for. And by 'familiarity,' I mean an understanding, a conceptual understanding, but also a meditative facility, like an ability, skill, art in the meditation. So we're assuming a familiarity with certainly all the usual Insight Meditation teachings that we're familiar with that are very common these days, but also with teachings and practices related to the imaginal, and also emptiness. By 'emptiness,' I mean quite a particular way of approaching it that has to do with the fundamentality of the concept of ways of looking, practising different ways of looking on the one hand, and also the concept of fabrication, and the fabrication of perception. So emptiness from that avenue, and going deeper and deeper into the richness and the fullness and the fruits of using those concepts of ways of looking and fabrication.

I'm assuming some understanding, at least, and some meditative facility with that. The deeper that understanding and skill, with emptiness in particular, the easier all this is, all this talk of imaginal and enchantment and cosmopoesis that we'll be going into. It follows naturally and very organically, and becomes, as I said, much more easy, much more obvious, in a way, much more accessible, the deeper our understanding and practice with emptiness is.

So assuming some familiarity with the imaginal, with emptiness practice, but also some meditative skill working with one's emotional life, both difficult and lovely. Some skill, too, with samādhi/samatha, the resource of well-being in the body and mind. And also with practices like mettā and loving-kindness. It's quite a lot we're assuming familiarity with. All of these, especially the last three, the skill with the emotions, the samatha and the mettā, again, we're orienting around those practices using the energy body as a kind of foundation, as a vehicle, if you like, for developing those skills and practices.

We're assuming all that. I don't know how much the material on this retreat will make sense without that familiarity. It may, to some people. But for others, it really may not. Personally, I'm not going to repeat much of those kind of teachings at all, because we've asked for those foundations to be there and that familiarity to be there. So on this retreat I won't be repeating much, except things or teachings or concepts or points that, in my experience teaching, actually tend not to land with people. People hear them, or actually don't hear them -- it just kind of goes in one ear and out the other. They don't seem to see the significance of them, or how radical they are, or how much they change the whole basis and the whole fabric, tenor, and orientation and possibilities of what's happening.

So those things, I might repeat. One example would be -- and this is something we'll touch on as time goes by -- what does it mean to have emptiness as a basis for the whole path? Not as a goal, not as some distant thing. Certainly not as some option later. But some understanding, some deepening understanding of emptiness, as the basis. Putting the whole path and the whole conception of anything to do with the Dharma on the basis of this understanding of the flexibility and availability of ways of looking, and the notion of fabrication of perception, those two interwoven concepts. Something that's so important, makes such a difference, and yet, (A) is extremely rare, and (B) it's quite often that people really don't hear that or seem to understand yet the significance of it. It doesn't really land as a sort of root and fundamental concept, a ground for what we're doing.

Okay. But let's get into these four areas that I wanted to talk about. So the first is the what. What are we talking about here when we talk about re-enchantment and all that? I found an article in The Guardian newspaper a few months ago that might help us highlight some of what we're talking about, and also make some differentiations. It's written by a guy called David Ferguson. I don't know who he is, but it was in The Guardian a few months ago. I'm just going to read you some of that. It was an article about trees in cities. He says:

Scientists say that when human beings see the colour green and interact with nature, our bodies manifest chemical and psychological signs of reduced stress.... One Texas company is trying to quantify [to calculate] for cities the dollar amounts that trees are worth in their combined capacities as air-scrubbers, noise-pollution reducers, neighborhood beautifiers, and natural stress relievers.

"[Less] cortisol [which is a stress hormone] is given off when you see green," said i-Tree founder David Nowak [who continues], "We want to develop an index of how much green you can see from any given point in a city, how your body reacts to it, and what the economic value is."^[1]

Interesting. Then David Ferguson continues, and points out how trees make the climate cooler in the city. They cool the city down. They absorb pollution, so making it less polluted, so there are less respiratory problems for city dwellers, etc., commuters, all that. But then he says, David Ferguson says:

All of that aside, and as well-intentioned as Nowak may be, there is something absolutely unquantifiable about the benefits of living near trees. [He continues,] I love to visit New York City [and] London [and he names some other cities that he likes], but after about a week or so, all the noise and grimness and the gray concrete all start to get to me. I begin to ache to run loose in the woods like when I was a kid, in the long, free hours between the end of school and dinner.

It must be US school where they finish school much earlier than in the UK.

Back then I learned to tell time by the angle of sunlight slanting through the pines. I can still smell rain 24 hours before it comes, in the soil around their roots. [He goes on,] Maybe it's that trees live ... longer than we do. Maybe it's that nothing ever seems to bother them enough to make them yank up their roots and leave, but even now, as an adult, there are times when my thinking gets too sped-up and scrambled and I need to wander into the woods behind my house, shimmy up a tree and sit in its branches. Up there, I can slow down my ricocheting mind, breathe in that sweet, green smell and just think long, slow thoughts. [He finishes,] I challenge all the legions of bean-counting accountants in the world to put a dollar value to that. I don't think you can.

So why am I picking on this article, or picking this article to share? I really feel he makes some very necessary and good points, David Ferguson. I don't want to take anything away from what he wrote. But I want to ask both what is hidden within what he's saying, and what is missing. What is hidden within it, and what is missing from what he wrote? So this is not by way of criticism, but critique. 'Critique' means asking questions like that. What's hidden, what assumptions and orientations are hidden, and what is missing there? It's not about criticism; it's critique.

So first thing is, notice for him in the way he talks, both David Nowak and David Ferguson, the way he talks, there's a kind of recourse to basically modernist values and cosmologies. The values that he presents and that he highlights, and also the cosmologies -- the way of assuming or perceiving what the world is -- are quite modernist. We take them just completely for granted. They're part of our culture. So in terms of the values, there is an appeal in what he writes, in the kind of sweetness of it, there's an appeal to the idyllic memories of childhood, and both this need for and desire for less stress, for not working. There's a kind of idealization and nostalgia of childhood, and of not having time pressure, and the whole orientation of slowing down one's thoughts, etc., that he talks about. These are very familiar. They sound so familiar, and maybe they're so appealing, just because we're saturated with those kind of values in our society. They're very modernist values, if you like. They belong to our society at the moment.

But secondly, with the cosmology, notice the absolute absence of what we might call any dimensionality or depth to the whole perception and conception of nature, of trees or cosmos. In what David Ferguson writes about what's important to him, there's an appeal to what we could call the purely or the flatly sensual. Nowhere involved at all in what he says, or even hinted at, is any kind of sense of nature being anything more than material, and pleasantly sensual, or helpful. Depth and dimensionality -- and I'm going to speak a lot, hopefully, about what this might mean for us -- is just absent from the discourse of both Davids there. When, on this retreat, we talk about re-enchantment, re-enchantment needs to have that aspect. It needs to involve and invoke depth and dimensionality. We'll talk, as I said, more about what that means. So any kind of re-enchantment without depth and dimension cannot really be very full or deep at all, as far as what we're talking about is concerned.

[15:24] Following on from all that, notice the parallels. I'm not going to say much about this now, but just notice the parallels in both what the i-Tree founder, David Nowak, the sort of measurement party of the two, both what he says and also in the kind of claims of unquantifiability as far as David Ferguson took them. Notice the parallels between all that, and the way they speak and write, with the dominant paradigms, what have become the dominant paradigms in a lot of meditation circles and mindfulness teachings: health, less stress, slowing down thoughts, etc., the idealization of simplicity, all of that -- childhood simplicity, whatever, a kind of innocence of all that. Notice the parallels. I'm not going to say more about that at this point.

Again, related to all this, and again, something we'll return to periodically in the retreat, is what we could call the creep of, since the Scientific Revolution, the creep of what we might call 'scientism,' or what is called 'scientism.' Not science, but scientism. What's that? Scientism is a kind of religion, really, including the belief that science can eventually, or will eventually, explain everything. Everything there is to know about life will be or can be eventually explained, either already or eventually, by science. And that science is the truest, best, and most trustworthy explanation of anything. Also involved in this kind of religion of scientism, of scientistic belief, if you like, is that science deals with what is ultimately true, and deals in real entities, entities that are real. Again, part of scientism is that there's something very central about measurement, and including the measurement of value.

So actually a lot of what David Ferguson claims is not quantifiable, I think some scientists would say actually we can measure values now in different ways. But this measurement is very intrinsic to scientistic belief, the importance of measurement, the necessity of measurement. So measurement and value then get put together, so that something is actually only valued if it is measurable. And preferably if it's physical. Then it's taken as real. And preferably if it's physically measurable.

So scientists can measure values by giving people questionnaires about their values, about their feelings about things. But much better, from this point of view, is if we can find neuronal changes to measure, or biochemical measures to change, cortisol levels and all this, and those measurable benefits then constitute more scientific evidence. All this and more is wrapped up in scientism. And in a way, the article or the debate in the article really highlights, indirectly, some of that coming through.

Lastly, just about this: he doesn't mention re-enchantment. It's not really a notion that's in here, certainly the word, and the notion is not in the article. But what would it be, then, to re-enchant the city? Do we need, necessarily, a sort of return to nature? Do we need to kind of demolish or abolish cities? Or does the re-enchantment of the city come only by having more greenery and trees? So, central to our theme, what might re-enchantment mean and involve? When he points out in the article how he begins to feel a week or so after he's been in New York or London or whatever it is, he's actually expressing and sharing a kind of sensitivity of attention to his surroundings and to what he's perceiving. This is actually quite central to the practices and the orientations that we're going to be developing, because it's in developing a subtlety of awareness and attention, a sensitivity, that's so much a part, a dimension, an aspect, for me if I think about it, of developing, growing, and deepening in meditation practice. I'll say this again later and re-emphasize it, but subtlety and sensitivity are almost more than anything -- more than mindfulness or concentration, or this or that, or quietening the mind -- subtlety and sensitivity are really core and integral to developing, growing, and deepening in meditation practice.

So in relation to what he's talking about, can we notice more and more subtly the energetic, psychic and emotional effects, in the moment, of what we encounter in the world through the senses? As always with these things, there's a spectrum of subtlety pertaining to what we can notice of the effects on us, on our being -- more or less gross, relatively obvious or more subtle, in terms of what we can feel and observe in the effects that are palpable on the emotions, on the energy body, etc.

For example, at the more gross end, what happens, how does it affect us in the emotions, the energy body, the being, when we see directly, or in pictures, vast swaths of land devastated and polluted by tar sands, oil extraction? You feel the effect of that on the being. Or when we witness a great expanse of clearcut forest. Or just litter, everyday litter, whether it's in the city or in the countryside. Noticing these effects, some quite palpable, quite obvious. Or when we're in a place of more pristine nature, or even a photograph of more pristine nature, whatever it is -- grass, trees. Different effect on the being. Also the different effects of open spaces, deserts or plains or whatever it is, mountains, and more closed spaces like woods. And then more subtly, you know, possible perhaps to notice the different effects on us of different materials, for example in the city, that we see or encounter. So encountering concrete versus stone, versus steel, or plastic versus wood. This is happening all the time, of course, when we're moving around, the senses are open. But actually, there are noticeably different effects in the heart, in the resonances, in the soul, in the energy body. Part of this subtlety/sensitivity that we're developing, that can be developed, is to notice all that.

This is actually palpable, certainly on the gross level, but also on a very, very subtle level -- how the being is affected by what it perceives. It always is, and it has to be. But because of that, it opens up this possibility and recognition that how I'm affected also depends not just on the material of what I see, of the perception, but it actually depends on the way of looking, which opens up the door to the fact that re-enchanting the world is partly -- maybe even mostly; I don't know -- in the way of looking, in this flexibility of ways of looking, in the exercise of skill and the art and the poetry of ways of looking.

Let's explore some of this a bit more. When we use that word, 'enchantment,' you know, I'm aware -- Catherine and I talked about it before the retreat -- that word can have so many different meanings and implications for people. People use it in different ways, etc. So we were talking before, and we thought, well, we can at least delineate four kinds of enchantment -- at least for us right now; I'm sure there are more. [25:37]

(1) One we could call a kind of -- for want of a better term; there probably is a better term -- we could call immature enchantment. That's when we're a little bit obsessed with something, but also with the self in relationship to that something. We can tell an immature enchantment with something or someone because the mind and the being contract around that thing, or in reaction to that thing. There's clinging, a kind of gross level of clinging involved. Something closes in the psyche. You could say the psyche, the range of the psyche closes. Something is also reified, made real, okay? There's a kind of realist belief wrapped up in there. And the self is more important than the divine. Again, this is something we're going to come back to. The self and the intentionality, the orientation of the whole enchantment, in the orientation and intentionality of the enchantment, the self actually has more importance, and there's more focus on it than the divine. We'll fill that out. So that's a first kind of enchantment, immature enchantment.

(2) Second kind we might call cultural enchantment. This is, for instance, something like our enchantment with science and technology -- which, in themselves, of course, are extremely useful, but there's something in the way that we're a little bit blind, not just to the effects but also to the assumptions that are operating there. We don't realize that we're trapped in certain views, certain quite narrow views -- if you like, that we're kind of captive*.* Just as we are in a kind of immature enchantment, we're kind of captive within an enchantment.

Then there are two kinds of what we could call very positive enchantments:

(3) One is, if you like, a kind of spiritual enchantment, but that has a universal or impersonal orientation or basis. So for example, someone doing mettā practice, after a while, really deepening and opening, and they begin to experience a sense of kind of cosmic love or cosmic compassion. It's a quality that's woven into the fabric and the space of the cosmos, of the universe. There's a love of that. There's an enchantment with that perception, and also with the capability of opening to that perception. But that love is universal and impersonal. Also, in that, one's own personality, if you like, gets a little dissolved. As it goes deeper, we start to see, "I am not separate from this love. I am this love. It imbues me. It's my fabric as much as everything else's."

So everything -- self, other, world, things, nature -- their uniqueness, in a way, gets dissolved, because their true nature (in this perception) is universal love and impersonal universal love. The same thing could happen with awareness; a person doing different practices where awareness is kind of central, then there's this beautiful opening, mystical, precious openings to a universal awareness, given different names, and it comes in different flavours, etc. But again, there's a dissolution into the impersonal. There's an enchantment with that. Beautiful. Necessary, I think, on the path. Lovely, healing, all of that.

(4) But then there's a fourth kind of enchantment, and this is the one that we're mostly emphasizing and focusing on on this retreat. This is the one that we want to nourish and stoke the fires of on this retreat, partly because it's less talked about, less encouraged. That is, again, for want of better words, a kind of mature enchantment that involves the imaginal. So it involves images and the use of the imagination, but also implied in all that is the sense of what we are perceiving and what we are enchanted with, whether that's the whole of existence or some particular aspect of self or other or whatever, is not perceived and conceived as one-dimensional, as flat. There is a vertical dimensionality to it. There's a plurality of dimensions there, multidimensional. There are levels, if you like, to perception.

Wrapped up with that, there's a sense of divinity. Somehow there's a sense of the divinity of what we are enchanted with. I'm going to come back to this, because I know it's a loaded concept for some people. And then also there's a wisdom aspect to this, that we -- I've used this phrase before -- see image as image: "This is an image," and with everything that that means and that implies. We're not reifying. We're not lost in the image that way. All these aspects are necessary: the imaginal, the non-flatness, the multidimensionality, the verticality, the divinity, and the wisdom that sees image as image. All that is necessary to this kind of enchantment that we're emphasizing on this retreat. It's mature, if you like, but involving the imaginal.

Actually, in experience, in practice, these four kinds, they arise in mixtures. I might have a mature enchantment involving the imaginal going on, but there's some, perhaps, immature enchantment wrapped up in that -- I'm not quite free of the clinging or the contraction that goes with a certain amount of reification or belief or whatever, or it's wrapped up with the cultural enchantment, or the more spiritual enchantment of universality, etc. So really, we could talk about a continuum of degrees of involvement of these different kinds of enchantment.

But all of them, or at least the last two, what we're calling the positive ones, they lead to different kinds and directions of opening. That's why I'm highlighting this, partly. Different kinds of opening to beauty, different kinds of beauty, different kinds of meaningfulness, different kinds of sense of sacredness, different kinds and directions of soulmaking. So the kind of enchantment leads and opens up in different directions. And these lead to and bring with them different kinds of freedom. So freedom is not a simple sort of monolith. There are different kinds of freedom. Each kind of enchantment, direction of enchantment, brings different kinds of freedom, and also different kinds of knowing are made available. These are concepts we're going to come back to.

[33:54] Just a brief example. Someone was asking me, with my health situation right now, and being very ill, and the possibility of a death, an early death, not too far away, possible, you know. Asking me about that, because I'd said something or written something about how even that was perfect. So this idea of perfection, as an illustration of what I was just talking about. Something like that, a circumstance like that, can be felt and seen and perceived as perfect from one perspective, which is that all is one. All is one cosmic awareness, or all is one cosmic love, or whatever. So even this illness and even this death, it is one. But there is, if you like, the spiritual perception there, which sees the universality. So everything, no matter whether it's good, bad, ugly, beautiful, it all has the one taste, the characteristic of this one. Its truer nature is this one, whatever the 'one' is. You can have different kinds of 'one' dependent on your perception. That's beautiful, and so helpful, you know, as a perception that's available and cultivatable through practice, mystical, spiritual perception that's available through practice.

James Hillman talks about distinguishing spirit from soul. I'm not too keen on that, making them separate things, but we could call that more spiritual, in contradistinction to what we might call a soul*-*knowing that has more to do with amor fati, the love of one's fate or one's destiny -- in and including all the particulars of the events that happen to me, the way they happen, all the particulars of my unique personhood, of my life. So in this soul-knowing, in this soul-perception that opens up, that's possible, there's a kind of, let's call it perception, but you could say recognition, of, if you like, my soul's coherence with divinity, or rather with a divine intelligence, with the World Soul, in and through the events and the particularities and the uniqueness of my personhood and my life. It's important to differentiate these kinds, but I don't want to separate them as Hillman tended to do, this spiritual and soul. But it's an important differentiation there.

So again, just to recap what I said before about what's essential, if you like, and integral to the kinds of enchantment that we want to feed on this retreat and talk about on this retreat. So there's this non-flatness to the perception, to the sense and the conception of things. The idea that's so prevalent in modernist conception and perception, "everything is just matter," so whatever arises, [it] arises from the interaction and combination of atoms or whatever, and eventually gives rise to consciousness and human beings, etc., but essentially everything is just matter. That would be the typical modernist, let's say, sense and conception of things.

What we want is not that kind of flatness, not that kind of unidimensionality of "Everything is matter. Things only differ in the hierarchy of the complexity of the organization of that matter." Not flat. An unflattening. Wrapped up in that, or with that, is some sense of divinity, and some conception of divinity, even -- and this is, again, something we'll come back to -- even if that sense and conception is very vague, very nebulous, of what 'divinity' means. But it has to be there, because in an imaginal-based enchantment, the imaginal -- at least what I mean by 'imaginal' -- already needs to include a sense of depth and divinity to the images and the fantasies, and to their origins*.* In other words, we recognize somehow, or we conceive somehow, of their origins, that these images have their origins and roots in divinity.

[38:53] But none of this is a matter of belief. We don't want you to believe anything. I don't want to sell this to you as a belief, and certainly not as a dogma. So what are we talking about when we talk about enchantment without belief? We're talking, if you like, about a poetic state, what we could call a poetic state: a state, a stance, an attitude of poiesis, which means a creative making, an artistic creation. An attitude of artistic creation with respect to the self, to others, to the cosmos, to the citta, the mind, the heart, the psyche, the soul, to being and existence itself.

So this enchantment really means, enchanting really means a poetic state*,* inhabiting a poetic state, a state, an attitude of poiesis. It's dynamic, open, creative. We're not talking about something static, and it's not formulaic. There are not prescriptions here, apart from the most general ones that we talked about just now. It's more like an art. That's something we're going to come back to, this idea of the art of it all. That word, 'cosmos,' actually is a Greek word, and it's related to our word 'cosmetic,' which indicates really the connotations of the word originally, as opposed to 'universe.' It has an aesthetic connotation, this word, 'cosmos,' originally, to do with ordering and forming and fashioning, to do with ornaments and decoration. In other words, it's creative. It's artistic. It has to do with beauty. In our practice, what we're endeavouring to do is to move in and out of this poetic state, whether it's deliberately moving in and out, or spontaneously. So there's a movement in and out of this state of poiesis, or states of poiesis.

Now, in relation to all that, doubt arises. Almost certainly for everyone, or most people, at least, doubt arises regarding notions of reality; regarding the status and the trustworthiness of images; regarding the whole idea of having conceptual frameworks that are non-realist, that are not assuming reality or truth about what they conceive or perceive; doubts about employing ways of looking that are not scientifically endorsed -- or even worse, ways of knowing, if we use that. We know things in ways that are not scientifically respectable at the moment.

So doubt around all these things, I would expect it, that it comes up for you. And actually, I would say it's a good sign. It shows that the being is, if you like, engaged with all this, with these ideas, with these practices. It shows that you're not just believing something in a kind of naïve way or, as is actually somewhat popular, trying to return to a kind of primitivism, as if the solution to all our crises now is to just have everyone go back to living in some kind of prehistoric way. That primitivism, it's not ours. After modernity, after the Western Enlightenment, after the Scientific Revolution, after this emphasis on or belief in being able to know objectively, "The knowing must be removed. The known must be independent of the knower," after all that, and our culture is so saturated in all that, we can't just turn the clock back. Somehow we have to absorb all that and move beyond it, forwards. But doubt is going to be a part of that process. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people. That's fine, and it's important.

Related to all that and the teachings, to say something also which is maybe a little bit different from probably what many of us are used to in teaching and hearing teachings and reading teachings: a lot of the way we will use words, we're using them more poetically. So words like 'soul,' or 'divine,' or 'God,' or even 'enchantment,' and other words like that, we're using them poetically, if you like. It's a different way of using words. We're using them primarily to stimulate soulmaking and stimulate cosmopoesis, this creative transformation in the perception of the world, this cosmopoesis. We're using words in order to stimulate soulmaking and cosmopoesis -- not just for you, but also for us, for Catherine and I.

We're not just using words in this kind of clarificatory capacity. Here, in this kind of teaching, we don't gain that much, really -- in a lot of cases, we don't gain anything -- from tight, neat definitions. Certain differentiations will be absolutely necessary. They are necessary. We might at times say, "When I use that word, I definitely don't mean this*,* or I don't mean that*,"* to kind of steer us away from certain well-trodden and not-so-helpful paths in this context. And certainly we might make certain suggestions of what a word might open up in experience and concept.

But this kind of teaching and the way of approach is not Abhidhamma, if you know those teachings. Sometimes people get so pleased and self-congratulatory when they can kind of define things very neatly and tightly. There's a kind of illusion, really, of understanding something: "Okay, I've put everything in a box." But how helpful is that? Occasionally it's helpful. I think I've understood, and it's all very neat and great. But really, how often is that actually just an illusion, that something has been understood and that something is helpful? It's quite a rare wisdom in regard to practice to actually know -- to have a nose for, to sense, to intuit -- what is actually helpful. In all this availability of teachings and information and concepts and practices, what is actually helpful, what is really important, and what is very much secondary? What leads where? This is quite a big thing, a huge chunk of wisdom, and it's actually quite a rare one. So we're using words, as I said, poetically, to encourage certain kinds of opening. We're not basing it like Abhidhamma on a kind of realist assumption: "This is this, and that's that. That's really this, and that's really that," etc. These things, we're not dealing in the realm of truth or reality. We're dealing in the realm of poetry.

Now, with or within that state of poiesis that we talked about, integral to that, unavoidably within that, we are entertaining and experimenting with ideas, conceptions -- some of which are actually theologies, if you like, if you want to use that word, and those kinds of things. But the conceptual framework (or the 'logos'; I'll be using that word), the conceptual framework or the logos that we entertain is dynamic. It's elastic. It can stretch. Again, this is something we're not really used to in our way of approaching things and our way of thinking. So sometimes the concepts will be making very fine discriminations, very subtle discriminations between different aspects or dimensions, or this or that, directions. Sometimes the conceptual framework will be much more nebulous, much more kind of cloudy and vague. Sometimes it will be very logical, and sometimes much more poetic. Sometimes it will precisely circumscribe a certain area, and other times it will be much more open -- almost like, "I can't really find the edge of this concept."

But always, always, always, the conceptual framework, the logos, will be, needs to be and will be, connected with experience, and connected with what we might call phenomenological investigations -- our investigations, and our experimenting with, our practising with experience and different ways of looking. Always the ideas and the concepts are connected to that. We're not talking as abstract philosophy, 'abstract' meaning removed from experience, removed from the possibility of actual investigation. We're not talking about theoretics that's removed. Sometimes when people have very tight conceptual frameworks that either explicitly or implicitly, even if they don't use the word 'truth,' explicitly or implicitly are claimed as truths (which is almost all conceptual frameworks that you'll find in the Dharma or in philosophy, etc.), poke enough at that, whatever that conceptual framework is, and you will uncover contradictions, or unjustified, unjustifiable assumptions. What happens when the whole way of holding ideas in relation to practice is looser, as I said, more elastic? Not so-called 'truth-based'?

[50:03] In all this, in this poiesis and the art of it all, there are infinite possibilities. There is not a limit on the possibilities of experience of the kinds of cosmos that we live in, of the experience, the perception and the sense, of self, of the divine, of other, of the world, etc. Sure, we might make suggestions -- we will make suggestions for different ideas -- but really, the idea is not to follow that too rigidly. This is not prescriptive, as I said. It's not formulaic, except, as I said generally before, that this kind of imaginal enchantment involves the imaginal, is not flat, it's more than the usual modernist perception of things, it invokes and involves divinity (whatever that might mean, all the possibilities that might mean), and it also has the wisdom of seeing image as image.

But except for those generalities, there are infinite possibilities. Rather, within the circumscription of those generalities, there are infinite possibilities available to us as experience, as life-changing, being-opening experience. I think it's from the Jewish Kabbalah -- I'm not sure exactly who said it, but there's a dictum that says, "In the Messianic aeon," when the Messiah comes, "each and every person will have her own perception of God."^[2] But implicit in that, in that statement, and implicit even in the traditional Kabbalistic teachings, the Messianic aeon is really -- I feel, implicit in those teachings -- the Messianic aeon, what they're calling that, is really an opening, a shifting and an opening of ways of looking. Shifting of the way of looking now, here. That is the Messianic aeon. It's something that happens in the heart, in the consciousness, in the soul. And then each and every person will have our own perception of God. I would actually make that plural: we have our own perceptions of God. There is this infinite possibility for all of us. So there's what's usually considered a traditional religion, with all its dogma, etc., actually having a level of teaching in it that's completely radical in its openness, very postmodern, if you like, not at all dogmatic.