The Art of Perception

In the course of history, the predominant views or conceptions or relationships, ways of regarding the imagination, the human imagination, have changed. I mean, huge, huge shifts in the ways that the imaginal is conceived and thought about. Historically, certainly, say, 300 or 400 years ago, before that, and back before then, there were many people, and probably the dominant view (I don't know), was that something like an imaginal realm had an objective existence. There are still many, many people today -- they're a very small minority in relation to the dominant view, but there are still many people today who hold this view that the imaginal realm has an objective existence. It's just as real, if you like, as this world of materiality that appears to most of us like the only world. This imaginal realm, with objective existence -- with, some of them would say, more reality than this world of materiality -- it exists as a kind of matrix of meaning around our space and time dimensions. So the world of space, of time, etc., is kind of, if you like, enveloped by this imaginal realm, and this imaginal realm generates or infuses meaning for us, direction for us, kinds of identity for us, images, fantasies, and in that way, influences us, and influences, if you like, history because of that.

As I said, nowadays this is an extremely rare view. It's very tempting to think that "now we're smart," or "I'm smart, so I don't believe such a silly view. I can see through that very easily as something that's obviously not true." But just a moment or two of honest reflection will reveal, "Am I really so smart to have the view of a negative prejudice against the reality of the imaginal realm? Or is it just that I'm repeating, reiterating, the modern view, a view which I've been indoctrinated in, which saturates my culture? I haven't figured this out for myself or proven it to myself or thought through it; I'm just a product of indoctrination. It's not really that I'm so smart."

But there is this view, and there has been historically, in lots of different ways, lots of different forms and articulations and shades of emphasis, etc., of the objective existence of an imaginal realm -- a realm of images that is accessible to human beings, and especially accessible when the consciousness is, if you like, purified or trained, etc.

I can't remember if I said this in another talk on another retreat or not, but there's a theologian called Walter Wink, and he talks about this. In a way, he wants to point out the modern prejudice we have, and how rare that is in the course of human history. So he takes something like the ascension of Christ, or the resurrection of Christ, and says that this was a real event, a fact, but it was something that happened not in the realm of materiality (an actual, physical body going up to Heaven or whatever it was, or reappearing on earth), but it happened, the Ascension and the Resurrection, happened in the imaginal realm, in the psychic realm.

And even more than that, this happening, these happenings, in the imaginal realm, they changed God. So God, in this Christian mythic view, God as incarnating as Christ, God as reappearing in the Resurrection, but also God as ascending into Heaven to join his Father in Heaven, in that language, this ascending adds something to God. It adds a new dimension, a new aspect. It changes God.

So we're dealing now not with archetypes that are, if you like, fixed at one level in the original meaning, but archetypes that are actually plastic, malleable -- which, to me, is a more attractive idea. And yet, within that, as I've spoken about before in other places, there's also a kind of eternality. So this ascension, or this resurrection, is always happening. It's always happening, and it's always available -- not just, and not even primarily, as a matter of belief. So often, that's the emphasis in modern Christianity, especially after Protestantism: it's a matter of belief and faith. But it's actually always happening, always available, always accessible to us in the imaginal realm, as image, with all the potency of that.

Historically, and even a little bit today, there are these kind of ideas of the reality of the imaginal realm. But through history, things changed dramatically and radically. Some people would start the change in the twelfth century, and certainly made more emphatic starting from the seventeenth century, the rise of what we could call 'modernism,' this kind of view that is so normal, so unquestioned, so habitual and pervasive in our modern Western society.

So, for example, there was the elevation of the whole idea of reasoning, that what we know as human beings, knowledge, comes from reasoning. And 'knowledge' actually means something different than it used to mean. It used to mean something more like 'union with what is known.' That actually constituted knowledge, a union of the human being, of the human being's mind and heart and soul, with what is known, as opposed to knowledge as a result of reasoning and empirical deduction, etc., and all that. So that was one aspect.

Related to that very much was the whole change in relationship with study and reading. Again, before, and the whole idea of lectio divina, divine reading, study, studying something or reading something was a matter of sympathy -- the being, the soul, and the body, in fact, because people used to read out loud, animated by the breath. Anima also means 'soul' as well as 'life.' So reading was to come into sympathy with what we are reading. 'Sympathy' means 'sympathetic resonance,' so the whole being is resonating with what we're reading.

The Christian mystic, Hugh of Saint Victor, called this kind of reading an "ontologically remedial technique." Strange. You think, "What the hell is he talking about?", because the whole conception was very different: that the human soul and the human intelligence were not separate from the divine soul, the World Soul and the divine intelligence. Reading, Hugh of Saint Victor says, the light that comes from reading, from study, "Brings man," brings a human being, "to a glow," because the intelligence that's reading is not different from the divine intelligence, if you like, at the centre of the being.^[1] We're going to return to these ideas, I hope, later on the retreat a little bit.

[9:25] More generally speaking, historically, there was a sort of shift towards respecting and emphasizing more the teachings of Aristotle, through a medieval teacher called Averroes, over and above the teachings of Plato and a medieval teacher called Avicenna, and the kind of Neoplatonic teachings that were very pervasive in terms of the nature of God, and how God, if you like, permeated or informed, influenced, all aspects of creation through a kind of hierarchy of existence, if you like, a hierarchy of emanations from God.

So all these -- this elevation of reasoning; this idea of what it means to study, to read, to know; this shift towards Aristotelianism, away from the more mystical teachings of Plato -- all this is relevant to how we regard imaginal experiences: reasoning is more trustworthy than an imaginal experience; what constitutes knowledge is not something that comes through the imaginal; it's not a matter of sympathizing with a soul-image, etc. All of that and all the implied concepts and metaphysics that might be either believed or, in our view, entertained, all of this is relevant to how we view imaginal experiences, and how we hold them, and how much we respect or value them.

So there is, historically, as I said, this view of the reality of the imaginal realm, the more modern dominant view of "it's completely fictitious, rubbish, not real, does not constitute knowledge," etc. And we, now, especially the people that showed up on this retreat, might flip-flop back and forth between those two positions. We might have doubt. We move in and out of entertaining certain conceptual frameworks. This is our experience.

Actually, it's not that cut and dried, certainly not historically. You get a figure like Plotinus, sort of the father of Neoplatonism, who had really a very sophisticated philosophy. I don't mean sophisticated in terms of complicated, but sophisticated in terms of there was a lot of insight there that, to me, is similar to some interpretations of Buddhadharma, especially the teachings of emptiness as I would tend to want to frame them. If I try to put them into a sort of conceptual package, there are some similarities there.

Again, there's a flexibility in his teachings, in Plotinus. Sometimes he would say, "Only the transcendent Unfabricated is real. The imaginal realm, the World Soul, all that is not real," on one extreme. "There is only the real, the ultimate real, beyond anything you can say about it, beyond all experience." And at other times, in this flexibility of his teaching, of his approach, of his conception, there would be more this teaching that all appearances, all, if you like, levels of being, dimensions of appearance, of perception, all of that is divine, including the imaginal realm, including matter, all of it.

For me, and I think it's the platform that we're offering most on this retreat -- we've talked about this a lot, but it's so much worth repeating -- there's something about understanding emptiness, and more than that, putting emptiness, a radical emptiness, full, thorough, deep, comprehensive, a radical emptiness at the basis of the path, and really letting that bear its fruit in what unfolds in terms of experience, in terms of meditation, in terms of practice, in terms of what appears, in terms of conceptions.

What this does, for me, the deeper one's realization of emptiness, the more it allows and legitimizes this play, this playfulness with ways of looking and conceptual frameworks, an ability to play with and to entertain ideas, metaphysical ideas, even, without holding them and believing in them as true, or "this is reality," or whatever. So for a lot of people, this permission is gained through emptiness, some degree of realizing emptiness of everything. For some, it's through philosophy. For some, it's through philosophy of science, especially as science has moved on in the last hundred years or so with quantum physics and relativity, etc.

Niels Bohr, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and really one of the central father figures of quantum physics, very much central to his philosophy was the idea of complementarity. So a statement is, at the very same time, both true and false, or a statement that something is true means its opposite is also true. This, he said, became part of not only his life philosophy, but it emerged from a deep, deep questioning, mathematical questioning, but also philosophical questioning that came out of that beautiful time at the beginning of the twentieth century: this idea in relationship to truth that it's not quite as black and white, or as neatly packageable, or as single as the modernist view would have us believe. He also said regarding clarity, a clarity of truth (this is Bohr speaking), there's "a complementarity also between the clarity and the rightness of a statement." So there's a complementarity between the clarity on the one hand, and the rightness of a statement, "so much so that a statement which is too clear always contains something false."^[2]

[16:26] So the whole notion of truth, of knowledge, of what that is and what constitutes it, has changed. Also, we've talked about through modern philosophy, modern Western philosophy, this has all shifted. Whether it's through the emptiness, whether it's through philosophy, or science, modern science, or whether it's just through having the artistic kind of sensibility, personality, inclination, the more poetic attitude that some people just have, if you like, more than others, all of that allows us and opens up for us what I want to call the art of perception, the poetry of perception, and allows us to play with that. That's really what I want to talk about: what's involved in that, and what do I mean by all that?

So all this is complex. In terms of conceptual frameworks, it's complex, and reality and what is real and what is truth, and how do we know anything -- the epistemology, the ontology, all that. I've talked some, at least, in other talks about that, so I'm not going to go too much into that. But really to dwell on filling out what's involved in this art, in this poetry.

What I would like to emphasize more, again, is this, related to the emptiness thing, but this seeing image as image. We could also say seeing cosmopoesis as cosmopoesis, as poiesis, as art, poetry, as making, as fabrication. Central to our art, our poetry of perception, is seeing, recognizing, acknowledging, not forgetting: image is image. I am certainly open to the idea -- not only open; I feel very comfortable with the idea -- of extrasensory perception and all that, in some instances, when the mind is in a certain condition, etc. But for this retreat, for these teachings, and for us mostly, most of the time, it will be much more helpful not to think in terms of ESP and ghosts and all that kind of stuff. Seeing image as image, seeing image as metaphor, and cosmopoesis as cosmopoesis. I filled out what that means, but we'll come back to it again. So important. That's integral to our art.

Bonus of Ferrara, a fourteenth century alchemist, had a phrase, "Solutio (that's a Latin word) is the root of alchemy."^[3] In other words, making solutions, turning what is solid, what is concretized, what is believed in in a rigid way, in a fixed, solid, concretized way, making that a solution, making it liquid. Seeing image as image. Seeing cosmopoesis as cosmopoesis. It's not fixed, it's not literal, it's not concretized in the perception and in the conception. That's the root of alchemy. We'll see how we do with time on this retreat, but alchemy is another word for this poetry of perception, very much.

We're in the business, or in the art, of transforming -- actually, rather, transubstantiating, more accurately -- our notions and our perceptions, our sense, our very sense of matter, of the world, of the self (of course there's a transformation as well of the self in that), and also of divinity, and this idea, going back to Walter Wink's thing, of changing God, that God is not a fixed being, divinity is not fixed. There's something very deep in this. I've talked about it in other talks, and I'll maybe come back to that. But this is what we mean: this art is an alchemy, it's a transubstantiation, through perception. A poetry of perception, transforming all that.

As well as all that, integral to this art of cosmopoesis, of re-enchantment, we can list five other factors, good to bear in mind, to kind of check on. Most of them we've touched before, but I'll just list them now. Seeing image as image is one, and then five more.

(1) One is, integral to the art of cosmopoesis is the whole idea of playing with ways of looking. That's a part of re-enchanting the world, is the playing with ways of looking, the flexibility, the range, the way we're holding that.

(2) Implicit in that is a second aspect, which is when we're playing with ways of looking, we're also playing with -- and again, the lightness of that word 'play,' the openness of it, the adventure of it, the interest, the research, and also the seriousness -- we're playing with and entertaining conceptions, ideas, even large conceptual frameworks. That's implicit in playing with ways of looking. So to recognize that, and recognize it's integral to re-enchantment, it's integral to cosmopoesis, as we are using those words.

(3) Third, this is not a purely mental thing. It involves the body. This is why I put the emphasis on the energy body and that kind of awareness. This art of re-enchantment, this art and poetry of perception, needs to be in touch with, we need to keep it in touch with our body, our cultivating, developing, refining our body awareness and body sensitivity. And also our embodiment. So not only 'embodiment' in the sense of being in touch with the body and the resonances in the energy body, the openings, the contractions, the feeling of that as we're working imaginally, but also embodiment as action. The actions, how I am, and how I speak -- even right now, talking right now, there's a fantasy of that for me, and also for you. Especially if you're enjoying this, and if you love it, there are fantasies involved in the action of listening, or in the action of speaking, in the action that we do in the world. This art of perception spills over, not only into the way we see our actions, but also in what we actually do, what it issues in, in terms of our duties, our sense of duty, our sense of commitment, direction. We're going to come back to this.

Of course, as part of this third aspect of the five, it involves the senses. The senses are, if you like, the arenas of meeting of body and of world and of mind, if we even consider those three things separate. If we do, then the senses are really the arenas, the fields, in which those three, if you like, domains or aspects of existence meet -- body, mind, world; mind, heart, citta, really, soul. So of course when we say 'body' we're involving senses. We're talking about re-enchanting the cosmos and cosmopoesis and all that. Of course our senses are involved.

(4) So playing with ways of looking, entertaining conceptions/ideas, the involvement of the body integrally, but also the involvement of the heart and heartfulness. How absolutely essential that is to this work. We'll come back to this, but sometimes the heart functions as a kind of key. If it's closed, nothing can really happen imaginally. Conversely, the imaginal and the re-enchantment and the cosmopoesis can open the heart in different ways. But heart and heartfulness are integral to this art.

(5) And as we said right at the beginning, so is the imagination, or more accurately, the imaginal.

[25:33] All these five are included, need to be included. They're integral. And they're part of what we experiment with in this art. The art of perception means an experimenting, a playing with ways of looking, with ideas, with body awareness, with embodiment, in action, with how we relate to the senses, playing with the heart, encouraging the heart, and playing with the imagination. Experimenting with all that.

This art reaches out, covers, extends to and involves all areas of our being. There's nothing, in a way, necessarily, that's outside of it. Nothing at all. Self, other, world, the whole way we feel and conceive and experience the citta, the mind/heart, the soul, space even, the perception, the conception of space, of time. All this, these areas of being, these domains of being, or aspects or dimensions of our existence. Space, time, self, other, world, heart/mind, knowing, what it is to know, as I talked about before, communication, hearing (whether it's others, or nature, or whatever it is, music), gesture, communication in gesture, posture, movement, language and speech is part of communication, eating, seeing, smelling. All that, all the senses. All of these are, if you like, playing fields, playing fields for our research, playing fields in which we create -- we acknowledge that -- and in which we also discover. This create/discover dualism, or apparent dualism, is something we'll return to as well.

Within this art, within that playing, including all of that that I've just talked about, there might be generalities. Going back to earlier in the retreat, there are generalities of what's involved, all these factors I'm just enumerating now. But there's no specific, formulaic perception. Every piece of music, or every painting or sculpture, or whatever, it's going to be different, unless I'm deliberately trying to copy something, which is not what we're emphasizing so much on this retreat. We might start that way in terms of suggestions, but in terms of actual perceptions, there's no specific formulaic approach.

So this art of re-enchantment. If we consider, if we actually pull out one aspect of what I've just been talking about and consider it a bit more, if we think about disenchantment in the modernist sense, that disenchantment comes from a number of factors and historical reasons. But just to single out two right now, one is the rigidity and singularity of conception and view: "This way of understanding things, this way of framing things, this conception is the truth. Everything else is not." That's actually very characteristic of modernism, unlike what we might call postmodernism.

So that's something that's pervasive in the culture, that's contributed to disenchantment. We're not free to play. Playing is delegitimized. Playing with ways of looking and ideas and conceptions and metaphysics, it's all delegitimized. We might come back to that, but what I want to emphasize right now is also the devaluation in relationship to human imagination, but let's say the devaluation of the imaginal, and the devaluation of its epistemological value, meaning its validity as a way of knowing, that we can actually know through imagination, through the imaginal (which, today, for most people, would sound like a completely bizarre and even bonkers idea). I'm not saying it's simple as an idea, but something happened to devalue the imagination and the imaginal.

And again, I really want to spell this out to make it clear, because I have just come to realize that what might feel very clear and obvious to me actually takes time for people to digest as a sort of set of ideas and approaches. When I use the word, when we use the word 'imaginal,' implied in that word, or what constitutes the imaginal or imaginal practice, is not just that it involves the use of the imagination. That doesn't necessarily qualify something as imaginal. I'd just like to go through a list of seven aspects of the imaginal, as we're using that word -- if you like, the authentic imaginal, as we're using that term, 'imaginal.' These are connected, these seven, but to me, it's worth repeating them, even though you will have heard them before. They're not in any order, and they overlap and connect. Some of them imply each other. But it's important to spell them out.

(1) The first one is that the imaginal needs to involve and imply soulfulness and soulmaking. Even some use of the imagination in regard to something that has kind of mythic themes doesn't necessarily qualify as imaginal. I saw on TV the other day, there was an advertisement for some computer game. I can't remember what it's called. You can get it on your phone or whatever. It involved kings and dragons and rescuing princesses -- maybe not the princesses bit, but kings and dragons and wars and all that kind of stuff. Just because the themes are sort of typically mythic themes, it doesn't qualify as imaginal -- unless there's soulmaking.

Now, it could be soulmaking at times for certain people. Oftentimes, what it seems to me watching people who are involved in that kind of thing, it doesn't seem to be soulmaking. But also, a corollary point of that is usually when people are playing those kind of games, there's not mindfulness involved, mindfulness in relationship to images. In other words, I mean, there might be a keen awareness, especially if it's happening in real time and you've got to react and all that, but mindfulness in the sense that we're talking about: sensitivity to the emotions that are constituted, elicited, in relationship to the images; the soul-resonances, the soulfulness; what's happening in the energy body. All this is fundamental to what we might call imaginal practice. It usually is not there in relation to that kind of game. It could be, but usually it's not. So that's the first one, soulfulness and soulmaking.

(2) The second aspect -- again, all related, these seven -- is what we could call depth. I'm hesitant with that word a little bit, but let's call it depth, by which I mean two things. One is dimensionality. When it comes to images that are sort of mixed with perceptions of materiality and the world, if you like, like the cosmopoesis, the dimensionality, the depth means it's not just a kind of flatness, one-dimensionality of existence that the typical secular modernist view of scientific materialism would kind of hold and assume about the nature of what is real. So there's a sense wrapped up in the imaginal of dimensionality that way.

But there's also a sense of depth as a kind of inexhaustibility, a mystery, an impossibility to fully understand the image. There's always more to this image than I can quite understand or capture or put into a box or convey. If there's an image that we've fully understood, or if we believe that we've fully understood an image -- in other words, if we've put it in a box, summed it up, explained it in words, conveyed it to someone else, we can explain it ... I don't know if I've said already, that word, explain, ex + plain, to make plain, to make flat, as in a plane. It's to flatten something; again, to lose this depth of inexhaustibility, of mystery, of beyondness, if you like.

If we do that with an image -- either there is a so-called image that is not inexhaustible and we end up exhausting it, or we believe that we've exhausted it because we've explained it and put it in a box -- then probably (well, not probably, but almost certainly) what will happen is the image no longer arises for us spontaneously. It's like it's lost its life. It's lost its vitality. And it actually won't arise. Either it's done its work because it was only going to explain that thing, whatever it was, but more accurately, because the image is a dependent arising, it depends on my idea of it, on the way that I'm conceiving it; on the image, if you like, the image that I have of the image -- the conception, the fantasy of images in general. Because of that, I've flattened it. I've explained it. I've limited its inexhaustibility. I've truncated it. It no longer has this depth. It's no longer being nourished by that idea and that sense of inexhaustibility, that conception of inexhaustibility, and so it's missing a whole dimension of vitality, a whole nourishment and vitality, and it dies. It dies for us.

Just by the way, this idea of inexhaustibility, or bigger than we can get our head around, also applies to ideas, and sometimes to the ideas that are mixed with images. This is something I want to talk about, perhaps on another retreat. There's something that happens when an idea or a concept or a metaphysic or a conceptual framework is actually bigger. I can't quite fully polish it off and put it in a box. It remains somehow bigger than me, and there's an element of mystery to it. Then the idea is actually very fertile. All this has to do with something, again, I've explained elsewhere about the soul-dynamic, the way that soulmaking happens through the mutual expansion, mutual insemination, nourishment, enrichment, deepening, opening, widening of psyche, of image, of logos (of conceptual framework), and also of eros, of the movement of eros. All of this is connected. I'm not going to repeat that now. So soulmaking, depth as dimensionality and inexhaustibility.

(3) The third aspect of the imaginal is the otherness and the autonomy of the image. There's a sense or a conception or a feeling of the image as if it has its roots or it originates not just in my personal human history -- again, as regarded from a typically humanist point of view. We're going to return to this. It's a delicate question about how our personal history fits in with all this and the genesis of images. But neither is it conceived of as arising just from my neurophysiology and neuronal network in my brain, etc. There's an otherness and an autonomy to images. We're granting them that. We're playing with the idea, we're entertaining the idea, of their otherness, their autonomy.

(4) Instead of that more reductionist explanation of how they arise, where they come from, there's a sense -- related to this otherness and autonomy -- of their divinity, that their roots, if you like, their origins, are in divinity. Or there is a dimension of the image, whether that's an image of the world in cosmopoesis, or an image of another person, or a self, or a purely intrapsychic image, there's a sense of the divinity, the roots in and the dimensions of divinity. That could be, as I said before, very vague, what that even means, what that involves. That's completely okay. That vagueness is okay. So that's a fourth aspect.

(5) A fifth aspect is that the image, the imaginal, brings and/or conveys meaningfulness to us. You can see how these overlap, because that's part of soulmaking, of course. It doesn't necessarily mean a meaning, again, that I can say, "It means X," or "It means Y." Meaningfulness is a fuller term, a richer term. Again, there's an inexhaustibility to it. It brings a sense or a dimension of personal meaningfulness. It impacts our lives. It impacts our commitments and direction, as I was saying earlier. That doesn't necessarily mean that I come up with a specific plan: "I'm going to travel to this place, and I'm going to do that there for X years." Meaningfulness, a sense of commitment and direction can be much more non-specific than that and non-planned. But meaningfulness has to do with what's really deeply important to us as human beings as well. All that, the imaginal carries, conveys to us, brings with it all that, those aspects, and the aliveness, the vitality of meaningfulness.

(6) The sixth is what we said before and keep emphasizing: image as image. Seeing image as image is part of what constitutes the imaginal in the way that we're talking about it. Also, what we said before, related to that, the conceptions that we're entertaining and the conceptual frameworks we're entertaining that are related to those images that we're perceiving and playing with, whether those concepts and frameworks are explicitly stated and articulated, or whether they're just implicit, we recognize that we're not holding them as truths. We're not believing in them. So that's the sixth aspect.

(7) The seventh aspect is that all these first six, all together, they mean that the imaginal is a realm of beauty, and images have a beauty to them and sacredness. Beauty and sacredness. I mean both those words very widely. So the beauty might not be apparent to us at first, in fact. It might feel completely the opposite: "This is a horrific image. It's disturbing. It's ugly," etc. But something usually happens in this way of working with such images that we come to see their beauty, or they transform, or we come to expand our sense of beauty just as our senses of sacredness are expanded. There's no prescription here. There's no narrow meaning of what 'beauty' and 'sacredness' mean. But the imaginal, characteristic of the imaginal, is beauty and sacredness.

[43:21] So when we talk about the kind of enchantment that we're emphasizing on this retreat, what we call, tentatively, mature imaginally based enchantment, it will involve all of this too. Because it involves the imaginal, it involves all of that. This is integral to this art of perception. Within all this, again, going into, "What does it mean if we're really going to view this and engage in this as an art, as art?" First of all, it involves a recognition that our lives and the perceptions of our lives already involve fantasy and image. They're already imbued and full of that, especially where we love, especially where there's meaningfulness for us, etc. To not recognize that, I would say, is psychologically naïve. I've talked about that in other talks. I'm not going to labour that right now. I want to read you, rather, a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche. Really it's his encouragement to engage in this art, in this kind of art.

He says, "Ultimately, man [human being] finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them." So there's a strong statement. Dependent arising, fabrication understanding right there. So much ahead of his time, such a radical, deep, insightful thinker. "Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them: the finding is called science, the importing [we call] art, religion, love, pride."^[4] So part of this art of perception is the idea that we're importing. We're realizing that. It's also part of what we might call the spiritual, religion. It's also there when we love, etc.

But then he goes on to say, and this is even more interesting, even more radical, "Even if this importing should be a piece of childishness, one should carry on with both, and be well-disposed towards both," both the finding and the importing, but also the importing that's coming from childishness, projection from childhood, we could say, and also other kinds of importing. This is him continuing: "Some should find. Others -- we others! -- should import."

This is interesting to me, his encouragement to engage in importing, to engage in this kind of bringing something deliberately to perception, to play with it, to engage in the art of it -- even when it is, in his words, childishness or based on pride (for example, when it involves what we call projections, based on one's childhood experience and hurts and wounds, etc.). This is strange. This is completely the opposite of what a lot of modern psychology would say: even when it's based on childishness and pride, engage in importing. We think, "Why?" Partly because of the necessity, in a way, the fundamental necessity of recognizing the more general and important principle of importing, that importing is going on. That recognition of that might be possible even through childish projections and pride, whatever, all that. It's not restricted to that; it's not that those are the only times we're importing, so to speak, in those kinds of instances. It's not as if sometimes we import, and there's the possibility of not importing, of a bare attention, of this so-called 'being with things as they are,' a phrase of the Buddha's that's basically misinterpreted, I think, of receiving purely the facts of reality. So recognize the fact of importing, and actually he's encouraging it. Quite a radical teaching.

Again, in the ideas that are underpinning and allowing and opening up this art for us, the art of perception, there's this recognition of the infinite possibilities of interpretation. This is interesting. I was listening to something, just a little thing by Glenn Mullin, who's another Buddhist teacher. He was saying how his teacher had said to him once that a lot of classical Buddhist teachers -- Nāgārjuna, and Asaṅga, and Atiśa, and people like this -- they deliberately wrote in a style that would be open to multiple interpretations. It goes back partly to the Niels Bohr thing. There's a different creative style, writing style. So, why would you do that? Well, to encourage the creativity of the seeker, of the student, etc., to encourage their exploration.

If you know a text like the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way by Nāgārjuna, it's an absolutely seminal, central text to all Mahāyāna Buddhism, certainly. And how, over the centuries, and still nowadays, contemporary Western teachers, how differently they interpret not just certain passages from the book, but the whole project, or the whole thrust of what Nāgārjuna even means by 'emptiness.' Such a range to the interpretation. In Buddhist tantra, as well, there are certain tantric texts, original tantras, that have many commentaries written on them. Some of the commentators give four levels of meaning to sometimes every word, or every sentence, or whatever it is. For example, the tantric Chandrakīrti, in his commentary on the Guhyasamāja, just enumerates, "There are four levels of meaning in this text."

Interestingly, also in Kabbalistic teachings, there are also four levels of meaning to every verse or word in the Bible. It's called PaRDeS. It's an acronym for the four levels. Pardes also is related to our word 'paradise' or 'garden.' So the entering into this openness, this multiplicity of meaning, and going into the meanings, making them lived and alive and soulful, is entering the garden. But in both the tantric commentaries and the Kabbalistic commentaries, all the meanings are valid. It's not one over the other; they're all valid.

[51:09] You know, the Bible, both the Old and New Testament are much easier to read in these kind of ways than, say, the Pali Canon -- because the Bible is, to me, clearly written in a kind of mythical language. It's amenable to, it's open to, that multiplicity of interpretation, because it's imaginal. It was only with the rise of Protestantism and the kind of literalism and the wanting to reduce the Bible to one singular meaning: everything just means one thing, and you're either right or wrong, and it's all very literal. But it's a little trickier with a text like the Pali Canon. If you know it, it's very hard to take most of it in any kind of mythical way. Yeah, some. But this multiplicity of interpretation, you also see it with Western philosophers. The diversions of opinion on what Kant really meant by something, or Hegel, or Nietzsche, or Heidegger, or Derrida ... And some of them, it's pretty clear that they're writing in an ambiguous style, in a way that's open to plurality. They're even acknowledging that -- for instance, Derrida. But for us, what all this means is, this infinite possibility of interpretation, it legitimizes and grounds and opens up for us this poetic/artistic attitude -- not just in regard to texts, Buddhist texts or whatever texts, but also to existence. This poetic attitude to existence. We were talking about alchemy before. It's really what that involves. Poetry and art, the poetry and art of perception.

William Blake, who was both an artist and a poet, wrote somewhere or other, "A double vision is always with me."^[5] Meaning yes, of course, I can see the things that we all agree on now in our post-Scientific Revolution/Western Enlightenment agreement on things; of course I can see all that. That's one of my visions. But I have another vision, a double vision. A second vision is always with me, and that's the imaginal vision. We could say a multiple vision is possible. It's interesting it's an artist and a poet, a mystic, but someone who had that sensibility, that kind of attitude, and broadened it to existence.

So yes, going right back to the beginning of the talk, there's the imaginal realm conceived of as something real, or at the completely other extreme, conceived of as completely non-real, completely invalid, completely a waste of time. My tendency and encouragement is more to view the imagination, the imaginal realm, not so much as something that's real but, if you like, more a mode of attention, a mode of awareness, a mode of being, if you like, which includes conceptual frameworks and ways of looking, playing with that, modes of conceiving, modes or ways of looking. That opens up the imaginal realm. The imaginal realm is really a mode of being, a mode of attention, a mode of awareness, ways of looking and conceiving.

William Blake wrote something even more radical, if you like, or strange-sounding to modernist ears. He said, "Imagination is the Saviour." Imagination is the Saviour, or imagination is the Christ. What does that mean? What is he on about, imagination is the Saviour, imagination is the Christ? And even within that, what does he mean when he says 'Christ'? Saving us from what? Imagination is saving us from what? The imaginal saves us from what? From the flatland, from single vision, what he calls "Newton's sleep," from an absence of soulmaking, and also from what Friedrich Nietzsche kept drawing attention to: the dead end of modernist nihilism. It's through this art and through the imaginal that the dead end of modernist nihilism can be transcended, gone through, and then gone beyond, and the meaninglessness that pervades existence, the valuelessness that pervades existence, as Nietzsche pointed out. It needs an art to go beyond that and not get stuck in a modernist nihilism.

There's more to this, "Imagination is the Saviour, is the Christ." If we think about the ways that we can conceive of or view or relate to perception, perceptions, one is a very sort of normal and, if you like, for us, obvious way: (1) perceptions are received. They're received from the reality of the world. They reflect or represent that reality. So this is a normal assumption, a normal mode of conceiving of perception as we move through the world. Maybe it's necessary at times, of course, we relate to perception that way. It's part of how we move in the world. So perception as something received.

(2) But secondly, it's possible to relate to perception -- this is more subtle -- as gift or grace from the divine, from God. This is also received, but it has a whole other dimensionality to it. My perception, even the simplest perception, is a gift or a grace from the divine. But because we investigate in meditation this flexibility of perception, and we investigate the dependent arising of perception, the fabrication and dependent arising of perception, we can also come to see -- through all that, through playing with all that in practice -- that perception can also be regarded in a third way: as opportunity. (3) Perception as opportunity. Through perceiving this way, through this cosmopoesis, through this image, through this fantasy of my self and other and what's happening, there is opportunity. 'Opportunity' is related to the word 'door,' porta, 'opportune.' Porta is 'door' in Latin.

Through the image, all kinds of possibilities open for us, open for consciousness, for the heart, for the being, for the life, for meaningfulness, for soul -- all of that. So perception as opportunity, as door. Didn't Jesus say "I am the way"?^[6] Imagination, imaginal perception, as doors, as opportunities. "I am the way." You could say "I am a way," if you like. Opportunity.

(4) Related to that, a fourth way of conceiving or viewing perception is -- what about this? -- perception as redemptive work. Again, tying it back to Christ, Christ is the redeemer, right, if you know the lingo from Christianity. Perception as redemptive work. So re-enchantment as redemptive work, from the disenchantment that's so pervasive. Through the cosmopoesis, we're redeeming something, we're healing something, but it's through perception. Also the emphasis on work -- this is something that we can actively engage in, actively practise, actively play with, like art is work. We talk about "works of art."

So tantra can be viewed as redemptive work, redeeming the whole perception of self, other, world, matter, all of that. For those of you who are a little bit familiar with tantric teachings -- and I hope at some point in the future to talk more about this on another retreat -- we can regard the imaginal realm as what's called the saṃbhogakāya. It's one of the Buddha bodies of the Trikāya, the three bodies of the Buddha. So there are the aspects, if you like, of Buddha-nature, or dimensions of Buddha-nature, and Buddha-nature in this sense of a kind of divinity, really: all-pervasive, ultimate mind that is not separate from the world, from matter, etc. This realm of the imaginal, the imaginal realm, is the saṃbhogakāya. It's one of the bodies, if you like. And, again, notice the language: one of the bodies of the Buddha-nature, of the divinity and, again, the Christ. Tying all this together, there are similarities there. Imagination is the Christ, saṃbhogakāya is the realm of the imaginal, the realm of divine appearances, the appearances of tantric deities and maṇḍalas and Buddha-realms, etc. All that's saṃbhogakāya, and it's an aspect of Buddha-nature as ultimate reality, as the divinity, divine consciousness, if you like, and the way that pervades the whole world.

[1:01:57] More, still, about this art, and the art of perception. Some of you will be artists, or musicians, or write poetry seriously, etc. Don't you recognize that when we make a piece of art, or music, or compose music or a poem, how, in making it, it makes you, it shapes you? The work itself feeds back and influences and shapes, especially if one takes one's time and edits and revises and spends time with the work in the subtle shaping of it. We shape it, it shapes us. Similar with imaginal and the art of perception. We're acknowledging that we shape it. There's an art there. But it shapes us too.

And what I mentioned earlier: there's a recognition that we both are creating -- we create this work of art -- but somehow we also discover it. Again, sometimes you have this sense, as I think Michelangelo said, it's like I'm just chipping away at the marble to reveal the sculpture that's already underneath. That's how he thought of it. Sometimes there's a sense of, like, "I'm getting to something. I'm revealing, I'm uncovering something." We're discovering the piece of art that we're creating, and we recognize this both/and. Perception and imaginal perception, we can view them the same.

Tom Cheetham, I read a little passage by him where he says this word 'invention' -- so it's another word for 'creation,' right, 'invention' -- comes from the Latin invenire, which literally means 'to come upon' (in other words, to discover). So the original meaning of 'invention' was 'discovery.' It's only in the late sixteenth century with the rise of the whole modern sense and experience of self and subjectivity that the whole meaning of the word 'invent' came to mean 'to make something up.' It's flipped 180 degrees, what it actually means. But as I said, all this, this create/discover, this shaping and being shaped, we recognize that in relation to images. We recognize also this slip historically, the movement away from discovering images in the imaginal realm, as if they had some kind of objective reality, towards "They're just made up. It's just rubbish, isn't it?" And with that, correspondingly, the devaluing of the imaginal as ways of knowing, devaluing of the imaginal epistemologically.

So art, this notion of art, and our encouragement then, through these practices, meditation, really what I would like -- and I hope you can get this feeling on this retreat -- is that it extends to life. This whole notion of art extends to life, to the ways we feel and see our self, others, the whole of existence. Art as, you know, the usual way we think about art, then the art of meditation, and the art of playing with perception in meditation, that actually just becomes life. We think, "You have to sit in a certain posture, and it's all very formal. I have to go on retreat for X amount of time." It just becomes life. This is how we live, in the art of perception, or recognizing life, existence, as the art of perception.

Here's another little quote from Nietzsche. He writes:

We should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power [power of making things, making beauty, of arranging things, of interpretation, of recognizing the work of art as both created and discovered; all that that's involved for artists] usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life -- first of all, in the smallest, most everyday matters.^[7]

These little moments, little shifts, small, everyday matters. The imaginal comes and touches us on the arm. Something opens in the perception, just for a moment or two. These are important moments. We can go with them, open them, nourish them, explore them, capitalize on them, etc. And the encouragement to really do that deliberately, so that this art of perception extends to the whole of our existence.

If we regard and relate to the senses that we have, and the views, the perceptions that we have of the self, of the other, of the cosmos, if we regard and relate to these as works of art -- listen to the words there*, works of art* -- then, to me, that implies that we can never reduce or fully comprehend self, other, world. Again, we're back to this inexhaustibility. As works of art, they have an inexhaustibility. The very sense of them is something that has a beyondness to it. I can never fully reduce them to some explanation, or fully comprehend them even.

Part of the problem with scientism is that it tries to explain everything from a certain framework and point of view and assumption and reality base, from materialism and reductionism. But this simply will not do. It simply doesn't match or meet or extend, really, to the beauty of things, and the soul of things, and the meaningfulness of things. To always explain things in terms of neurology or biology, or biological evolutionism, or the reductionisms of materiality -- you know, analysing a great painting in terms of the molecular structure of the paint and the canvas, it might be interesting to a certain extent, it might explain something, but where is the art? It will explain nothing about the actual art. It will explain nothing about the meaning, or the meaningfulness that that painting has for us, and how it moves us, what moves us in it, and what's most important to us. The most important thing about this painting is what it does for the soul, so to speak. And a materialist explanation can do nothing to explain that. It almost does not go anywhere at all towards explaining that.

And I would also add to this that great art -- if we can use such a word without sounding pompous -- great art is never going to be fully understood. There's always something that's beyond even what the artists can sometimes get their heads around, or intended. It's only whatever the opposite of great art is -- poor art -- that can be kind of summed up and explained and fully understood. There's this inexhaustibility. To me, good art repays what we bring to it in terms of our attention. It will repay us, it will nourish us, it will delight us, and open to us, and reveal more and more of itself, we will discover more and more and dimensions -- to the degree and dependent on the energy and the quality of the attention we bring to it, the openness and the fullness of our receptivity, our sensitivity, the aliveness of the energy and the attention that we bring to it. To that degree, it keeps repaying. There's a fertility, as well, to really great pieces of art. They can be approached in different ways. Something like Hamlet, how many different ways of doing that play? Or a Beethoven symphony, you can interpret it this way, that way. All this is connected to, is relevant to, the art of perception, and what we perceive, self, other, world. There's this inexhaustibility there, if we really regard them as works of art.

[1:12:12] But we recognize, too, again, filling out the parallels here, we recognize the dependent arising. Especially the art aspect -- the beauty, the meaning and the meaningfulness, the emotions that a piece of art, a work of art, elicits for us -- we recognize both in the realm of conventional art and in the realm of this art of perception, we recognize the dependent arising. In the realm of conventional art, the beauty, the meaning, the meaningfulness, the emotions, all of that is a dependent arising that comes out of the conflux of the aliveness of the interaction of the artist, of the art piece, of the audience or the spectator or whatever, the context, information we have. Others' views about this piece influence what happens for us, others' views about art in general or about life, life in general, existential views. Even reports of the artist's views come and affect how we view this art. Of course they do. Or generally, other authorities, people we give authority and whose views we give authority to. Or just the authority of the dominant culture, just because it's pervasive and popular.

All this, all these mix together in the dependent arising. The things that are important to us in the art are recognized to be dependent arising out of all that. All this, too, we recognize it's the same, just as for art, it's just the same for the imaginal, for cosmopoesis, for enchantment. So many parallels there with art.

We can even state one more: sometimes a person is working with the imaginal, or these ideas of cosmopoesis, and thinks, "This is nuts, this is completely crazy." Or this doubt about reality, and unsureness about that that we've touched on. Very normal, very understandable, maybe an important part of this process nowadays. But again, putting it into parallel with the artistic process or our relationship with art, you probably don't consider art that you love, you don't consider it nuts. It's art. It's not nuts. It's not about reality. It doesn't come in there like that. Even more than that, we can be deeply moved by some piece of art, in whatever media it is, and moved not just emotionally and not just in ways that we can understand or reductively explain: "Oh, it's a piece about impermanence. It's a poem about my childhood," or whatever. The ways that it moves us are beyond even what we can kind of understand, or how it's moving us or what's being moved. There's an unfathomability, a complexity, a mystery of the very resonances for the soul, in the emotions, in the body, in the perceptions.

That unfathomability also and the resonance is deeply important. It's moving to us, it has its effects -- all of which are functioning without an idea that "this is reality," because we know it's art, or it's a movie, or it's a novel, or whatever. Without a notion that this is reality, yet still it does something powerful to the soul. Same thing with images, same thing with seeing an image as image, with cosmopoesis. It's not hampered by qualms about reality. It doesn't need to be even a realist art, or even related, this art, this painting or whatever it is, or music, it doesn't have to have any relation to anything recognizable in my life or in anyone's life. An abstract painting -- why is it that Rothko is so moving, so deeply moving to so many people, and in so many different ways? Or Howard Hodgkin or whatever it is. Or music that has no words to it. Can't say it's about anything you could put into words. It's not translatable. It's not reducible.

Even more than this, in terms of this relationship with reality, when we view something as art, it liberates it from this kind of tight, literalistic relationship with reality. It can do its soul-work for us. It can do its transformative work. It can open up something without this hampering, or these kind of qualms regarding realism.

As a slightly different point, I think it was Oscar Wilde, I can't remember, but I recognize this for myself: he said something like, I can't remember the exact words, something about how much it broke his heart as much as any person, any event to do with an actual person in his life, what happened to -- I think it was someone in a novel by Balzac. And I recognize this, too, with certain characters in novels, for instance, or certain historical figures that mean a lot to me, that I've never met, and they're dead now, and I never will meet them, but I somehow care for them, I love them, as Oscar Wilde said also. I care for them and I love them as much as real people. We think, "How strange."

Now, of course, if we're locked into this kind of dogma that goes sometimes with certain mindfulness teachings or certain insight meditation teachings that 'being with' the so-called 'real' is what's important, then this whole idea of really loving a character in a novel, or a fictional character that's a product of art, loving and caring for them as much as we do for the so-called 'real' people in our life, this totally taboo direction would strike a person as a bit mad. Or quickly one wants to interpret it; it's like, "Oh, yes, it's because they represent a factor of your heart, like your compassion or whatever." Even with the real people in our life -- the flesh-and-blood friends, and relatives, and family, and loved ones, and whatever it is, lovers -- maybe what we love about them is their divine dimensions, what we might call their divine dimensions. This is what moves us; this is what we care about. It's not taking away anything from the human. It's actually just expanding what is involved in what the human being is, or how we see human beings. So both as subject and object. When I love someone, it's because I am sensitive to and resonating to and moved by, if you like, the divine dimensions of their being. Now, that could involve the whole of their being, but it's a way of seeing.

[1:20:22] Often, people want to think that beliefs and also the creation of beauty in one's life, aesthetics and things, are for the purpose of consolation. Because of our existential situation, and maybe not being able to face up to that, people believe certain things, so the idea goes, and sometimes even the creation of beauty is to soften the sort of brute horrors of existence and the facts of our existence. But if we question that, and if we translate the idea of believing to this idea of the flexibility of a range of conceivings, of views, of ways of looking that we're entertaining, and we're holding them lightly and not as true, and if we're also holding this idea of the otherness and the autonomy of an image, that means that its beauty is not just created but also discovered, because there's this otherness, this autonomy.

So these two ideas together -- belief becomes a flexible range of conceptions, ways of looking, and otherness grants that we discover beauty, and not just create it for our own purposes. Then the whole idea of belief and beauty being for the purpose of consolation in our life, of reassurance, that crumbles a little bit. It opens up in a different direction. Belief and beauty -- or, if you like, conceptions entertained, and beauty created and discovered -- they're aspects of the creative act of perceiving and perception. That means they're aspects of being, because our being is perception, if you like. That also includes, as I said, the beauty of embodied action, in creativity, in kindness, in ethics. But beauty, creation of beauty, discovery of beauty, and also this playing with -- you could say playing with beliefs, but let's say playing with conceptions and views, ways of looking, they become fields of play, fields of opportunity. Soulmaking. That becomes the point, rather than consolation -- soulmaking.

Just to finish. Recognizing the fact of fantasy and image in our lives, in our perceptions, and also the understanding of emptiness -- these things, these two recognitions allow this art of perception. They open it up, they form its ground, they legitimize it. It's very different from realist, concretizing views. The dominant view of secular modernity, the kind of existentialist views that permeate a lot of our culture, a lot of philosophy, a lot of psychology, and more and more, a lot of Dharma and secular Buddhism, really are formed on, take off from, have their basis on realist assumptions -- oftentimes without completely being honest about it. For example, the now-popular replacement of the word 'truths' in the Four Noble Truths by 'tasks.' As I said before, it seems like an important move, but still underpinning all that is a whole assumption about what is true and what is real materially and existentially, and what's not true and not real. That's all functioning, with all kinds of limiting effects, and without being acknowledged as a perspective of realism.

It's questioning myths and assumptions that opens all this up. Questioning, questioning, questioning. Again, if we share a passage from Nietzsche, he says:

What is familiar is what we are used to [he's talking about assumptions and views and conceptions and what seems so obvious], and what we are used to is most difficult to 'know' -- that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange and distant, outside us.^[8]

In other words, these ideas that imbue our culture, as I said before, we're indoctrinated by them. We just assume that they're true, and we don't even realize that they're operating. It's very hard to realize what is actually operating for us as views. Some of them we don't ever even articulate explicitly, or everyone agrees on them and we never question them. But this questioning, questioning the assumptions and the myths that run through our views and our sense of reality -- this questioning is a massive part of what opens things up.

For instance, Charles Taylor, a contemporary philosopher -- he's very old now -- wrote this massive tome, A Secular Age, on secularism. He talks right at the beginning of that about what he calls "subtraction stories." It's the idea that our current view of things -- the view of modernity or secularity or whatever -- what we've done is really shake off or expose as unreal all the superstitions. We've subtracted all the superstitions and all the nonsense and all the misapprehensions and rubbish that people before us used to believe. Now we are, if not the generation, the period in history following the Scientific Revolution and the Western Enlightenment, now we are the ones who see things nakedly and truly and as they are, because we've subtracted all that other rubbish. You see this, as well, in fantasies of secular Buddhism as subtracting all the spiritual, mystical, metaphysical gobbledygook, and being left with the 'real thing.'

One of the things Charles Taylor points out over more than one of his books is how this modernist view and secularist view is just as constructed as any other view in history. It results from new inventions, new technologies, from certain shifts in self-view, and other ideas from the history of ideas, all of that. It's constructed and conditioned. It's not a naked, objective, existential reality that we're dealing with. The myth of subtraction stories, he points out. He says "I'm devoted to exposing the falsity" of those kind of stories, so popular, so easy to swallow, so seemingly convincing.

The philosopher Michel Foucault says something similar, and in quite strong language. Sometimes he talked about his work as a kind of archaeology -- in other words, digging down into the historical roots of any particular philosophy or position, or social structure, or idea, or convention or whatever. In that archaeology, he says we will ask them, we will ask these ideas or philosophies or whatever it is (in this case, we're talking about questioning the assumptions and the myths that we just take for granted, and they seem so much a part of what is real, what is generally unquestioned), "We will ask them," he says, "where they come from." We might say here, in relation to "where they come from," some people would say, "Well, it comes from the Pali Canon." But that, as I've pointed out elsewhere, that, too, is a historical fantasy. There's a fantasy of the Buddha. There's a fantasy of origins. There's a fantasy wrapped up in that with the claim, the belief, and the assumptions that shape certain interpretations of texts, or certain historical claims, as being absolute, naked, "as it was," "as it was intended to be."

Foucault says, "We will ask them where they come from, towards what historical destination they are moving without being aware of it."^[9] In other words, these assumptions that we have and these views that we have, there's a lot of unawareness in them, to echo Nietzsche. Then he continues, "What naïvety blinds them to the condition that makes them possible." Again, echoing Charles Taylor: how did this thing even come about? Is it really a naked reality, or is it also conditioned, constructed, though history?

Lastly, Foucault says, "And what metaphysical enclosure encloses their rudimentary positivism." In other words, again, this idea, so popular, so seemingly convincing and appealing, that we can really be just empirically with things "as they are" and strip away all this so-called metaphysics and gobbledygook, but actually there's metaphysics involved in that. I've talked about this in other talks. As Foucault says, it's an enclosure. It limits and it encloses what seems to be a radicalism, 'rudimentary' being another word for 'basic,' and 'positivism,' just "these are the facts, we're stripping everything down to facts." Are you really*?* Are you really doing that? Or is there metaphysics and enclosure and all kinds of unquestioned assumptions wrapped up in that? It's fundamental questioning. It's so important for me, so important for a practitioner, so important for our culture nowadays, so important to liberate this art.

There's another quote I'd like to just read a little bit, from Northrop Frye, just to finish. Essentially, what he's calling 'criticism,' this kind of questioning, what I called 'critique' at the beginning of the retreat, "what criticism [or critique] can do," according to Northrop Frye, "is awaken students to successive levels of awareness of the mythology that lies behind the ideology in which their society indoctrinates them." This questioning "grants students an emancipatory distance," a liberating distance, "from their own society, and gives them a vision of a higher human state. Ultimately, this transforms their experience," he goes on, "so that the poetic model" -- he's saying something very similar to what we're saying in the talk now -- "so that the poetic model becomes a model to live by," in what he terms a kerygmatic mode.^[10] It's a Greek word, but he's really talking about this mode, this art of perception, being in the mode of being of the imaginal, the art of perception, the cosmopoesis. "Myths become myths to live by, and metaphors become metaphors to live in, which not only work for us but constantly expand our horizons."

That relates to the soulmaking and the expansion of eros-psyche-logos that I've talked about elsewhere. Through all this, entering the world of kerygma or transformative power, the soulmaking, this re-enchantment. But it's the questioning and the insight, whether it's philosophical insight, meditative insight into dependent arising and emptiness, psychological insight recognizing how fantasy and image imbue or lives and our perceptions. All of that, it's the questioning and the insights that will liberate the possibility and the range of this art of perception. Liberate, also, the depths to which it can be soulmaking for us, nourishing, and re-enchant. So questioning and insight liberate it. They also ground it. So important.