Transcription
Probably more than, what we might say, more typical or conventional approaches to practice, and conceptions of the path, and ways forward, more than the usual ways we might be familiar with, I think, we feel that this kind of way of working, what we're opening up here, the practices we're involved in, and what unfolds from that -- how would you say? -- unfolds more individually. There are certainly general principles, and we draw attention to these. But there's something quite individual about what arises, what kinds of things arise, what order things unfold in, and also differences in people's propensities, what they've done, what their natural tendencies are in this or that direction. So that sometimes someone needs to spend time developing this before this is available, or another person it's the other way round, or another person can move quickly through something that takes longer for someone else. All of this is just in the nature, I think, of the material that we're covering. So that again, in putting out these teachings, we're aware that it's a lot. Definitely for everyone, some of it will just be, "Later. I don't quite understand," or "Sounds good. I get it. But not right now." Some will feel very pertinent, and some will be stuff that "I know that," you know. So there's quite a discernment, I think. We could talk a lot about just discerning what to pick up, what to stay with, and what to just leave. It's being recorded, etc. So we're putting a lot out, and just to have that big-picture sense with that.
Let's say a few things in that spirit. One thing I mentioned, we're not so much emphasizing or having the direction, the priority, in this retreat, so much of focusing or concentration, so-called, as a goal. It's not so much what this retreat is about and this way of unfolding is about. Rather, I would say openness is, or different kinds of openness is more what we'd like to emphasize and encourage and support. So openness of mind, openness of view, openness of perception, openness of heart as well. Just to say a little bit about this. In this tradition, in our tradition, most of us are used to practising with the eyes closed, and there's an inward gaze. This can be really, really helpful. It's a little early on the retreat, maybe, but what about actually, if you feel inclined, experimenting with eyes open or eyes closed? In other words, there's no hierarchy here. As with everything else, we can experiment and find out what's helpful when. So you can start a sitting with the eyes open, and then maybe close at a certain point, or maybe they're closed and they open again. Careful if that movement isn't a movement of restlessness -- just like, "Something needs to change because I'm a bit bored or fidgety" or something. But really this question of sensitive discernment: what helps? So experimentation.
When the eyes are open, many people will still be able to see purely intrapsychic images (if we use that language, 'intrapsychic,' as if the psyche is something separate). Even though the eyes are open, I can still be sensitive to and in touch with an internal image while the eyes are open. When the eyes are open, too, there's the chance to perceive the world differently, perceive others and what's around me in some kind of what we're calling cosmopoesis. Eyes open may lend themselves more easily to that, and that's part of what we're wanting to explore. You might start a sitting with the eyes open, and actually notice that already there's something different in the way that I'm sensing what's around me. Then maybe dwell with that, with the eyes open. Maybe then see, "Oh, can I actually have that with the eyes closed, the same sensibility?" Not necessarily directly visual, for instance. But similarly with the eyes closed, we can still, as I said, have a different sense of the world around us. There can still be a cosmopoesis with the eyes closed. Comes through the other senses or the inner visual sense, etc.
Wrapped up in this, again, is this kind of experimenter's question: what makes this work or not work, if the eyes are open or eyes are closed? What makes it work sometimes and feel fruitful, and other times not? To me, these are really important questions for a practitioner, to begin to ask these kind of questions, especially once you've done a bit of practice. It's like, you want to be the person finding out and researching and discovering. What happens is not just random. We're not just receiving stuff out of nowhere. Things work or don't work or unfold in certain directions for reasons that we can begin to understand and explore and play with.
[6:24] In relation to whether, for instance, the eyes are open or closed, and whether that feels helpful or not, one of the things that makes a big difference is the relationship with what I'm seeing. That goes whether it's an internal image or hearing; 'seeing' is a broad word for 'what I'm perceiving.' But it's the relationship with the object. If I'm reifying what I see, and clinging to it as some kind of reality, or if I'm grasping in a gross way -- "I want that" or "I really need to get rid of that"; and this could be anything, something in the body, it could be a self-view, it could be a person -- the reifying and the grasping will affect, hugely, what is available. Another factor would be if I lose contact with my body space, the space of the energy, and I'm leaning out there, and I lose touch and sensitivity here. All those three things, even if that's subtle, you know, that kind of leaning and grasping, what will happen? The imaginal realm will fade. The cosmopoesis will fade. Something will dissolve of its potential and power. But we can experiment with being more open with the senses, if it feels okay, and see what happens.
There are a lot of people in the hall, and sometimes we're used to just, "Everyone shut up so I can do my meditation, and my concentration can get better." It can be quite common to hear noises from other people as disturbances and distractions from my project of meditation, etc. What's happened there? There's a pushing out, a trying to close in, and a pushing out of the sensorium, of the sense realms, versus an inclusion -- actually opening to include more. More than that, there's a view. I'm viewing this person, in a subtle way, as a nuisance: "Why don't they settle down? Why can't they be quieter?" Part of what we're interested in is playing with view. Here's this human being who strikes me as clumsy and insensitive and too noisy, etc., perhaps, even just subtly. Can I play with the view? Here is an angel. The sounds I'm hearing are the sounds of an angel. I'm shifting the view deliberately. And I don't just mean 'angel' as a metaphor, "Oh, they're so sweet." I mean it more than a metaphor, without a reification. Somewhere in between what that word, 'metaphor,' has come to mean -- a euphemism for just that they're a sweet, nice person, really -- somewhere in between that and this kind of solidification of the word 'angel.' This shift of view is not the same as, like, "Oh, I'm so judgmental. I should think this, or I should be able to see that." We're really talking about the realm of experimentation here. Playing with views, this agility or flexibility with view. It's something you can try and see what happens. This is the kind of thing that we're really emphasizing.
In the practice today, we have a little bit more flexibility between practices, like we mentioned as a possibility yesterday. So energy body very much, and as Catherine was talking about, there are different, if we like, frequencies of the experience of body. The solidity, the earthiness, the soil as an important frequency, and then sometimes it's much lighter and more sort of ethereal than that. All the spectrum is available, and ultimately where we're going is it's all divine. It all becomes divine. But the energy body is connected, whether we're working with the emotions, whether we're working with images, whether our direction is more in the way of samādhi. Today, you can start to allow more of the imaginal in, if you feel like. That could be very spontaneously, what arises, an image. Or it could be more deliberate, following on, for instance, from Catherine's meditation yesterday with the imaginal figure of love, or something that already works for you as an image and you draw it back deliberately. There can be a flexibility between these practices, the emotional awareness, the samādhi, and the imaginal, these intentional directions. Always the sensitivity to the body and the sense of what's helpful, what's soulmaking, is a central aspect, integral aspect.
Let me say a little bit more about this, and particularly in relation to imaginal practice. A while ago, few months ago I think it is now, Catherine told me she was having a conversation with a friend of hers who's a Jungian psychoanalyst. He was talking about what they call 'active imagination' in that tradition. There's quite a lot of similarity between that and what we're doing; not completely. He said to her, if I remember rightly, something like, "It's just a grace when that door opens, when you enter into active imagination. There's nothing you can do to bring that on. It just comes." I would say not necessarily at all. Yes, it can come spontaneously, but there's this question: what is it that feeds, what is it that nourishes, what is it that opens certain doors, and what is it that closes certain doors? In the way that we're presenting the imaginal, we can deliberately practise opening to the imaginal, opening that door, crossing the threshold, if you like, into the imaginal realm. We can deliberately practise cosmopoesis, etc. We're interested in what supports that. So we're including both spontaneous and deliberate. And what is it that allows us to enter the territory of soulmaking? What is it that helps shift the mode of being, the ways of looking, so that that opens up? I would say, part of that, four factors or aspects that are actually interrelated and kind of mutually dependent. If this sounds a little technical right now, it will make more sense as practice goes on. Some of it will definitely make sense right now.
(1) The first is a lessening of fabrication. The fabrication of perception is less in the moment. In the moments when there's less creation of solidity and separateness and thing-ness to the things of perception, that's an important contributing factor to opening the door of the imaginal. So that's one factor. Now, how do we fabricate less? That's a whole thing. But basically, in a nutshell, it's when there's less clinging. When there's less clinging, craving, rejection, aversion, etc., there is less fabrication of self and perception. So all this practice, an integral part of it is the lessening of clinging, because that lessens fabrication. That loosens things, and we're in the realm of the loose and the alchemical solution. So that's the first one: the lessening of fabrication.
(2) The second is what I want to, for want of a better right now, call synaesthesia. Some of you will know this word. It's when people, for instance, their senses get mixed. Psychologists make it a sort of clinically pathological condition, but I'm just talking about a mixing of the senses. Sometimes it feels like I see sounds, or I feel colours in the body, or this kind of thing. As fabrication gets less in practice, six senses tend towards one sense. Some of you will be familiar with this. As the mind calms and gets deeper, what feel like six separate senses -- sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and the mind -- actually seem to kind of coalesce to everything as kind of one sense. It's all being received, if you like, in the same sense field. There's a continuum there to how separate the senses feel, or how they join together. This happens as fabrication gets less, anyway. As we let go of more clinging, the senses tend to go more towards oneness. And eventually, we go beyond the senses. There's a dissolution, a non-appearance of all sensory perception. But basically there's a spectrum there. Part of the opening of the imaginal realm is actually -- not always, but sometimes -- this mixing of the senses. There's more fluidity or blending of the senses. That's quite characteristic. That's the second. Lessening fabrication; this kind of synaesthesia.
(3) The third has to do with the heart, and the stance, or the position, or the posture of the heart. Receptivity, surrender, humility seem to me to actually be really important aspects, really necessary aspects. That's really important for the heart, to open this door of the imaginal realm. Right now, what is the posture, the attitude of the heart? That makes a big difference. I'm going to come back to this in a second.
(4) The fourth factor or aspect is the imaginal itself, and the way we're tuning and relating to the imaginal.
So these are all interdependent, but of those four, the first and the third are things we can actually do. We can actually learn, with practice, with skill, to cling less so that there's less fabrication, and the whole realm of perception gets less solid, more amorphous, more insubstantial, if you like. We learn to do that, and we learn to do it more easily as practice goes on. And also the opening of the heart, this moving into an attitude of heart that is receptive and has humility in it. Sometimes it feels like, "God, that's such a stretch. I don't know. I'm just locked into this tightness of heart." But as practice goes on, we get better at just shifting to an attitude of humility. It's something that comes and becomes easier with practice. Those movements (the lessening of the fabrication, this receptivity or humility of the heart), they're things that we can actually do, and they allow the opening of the imaginal in ways that affect the soul more deeply, that really go deep and are more soulmaking. And they allow a degree of synaesthesia, of this kind of mixing. As Catherine was saying, I think it was this morning, it's like different ways of knowing. We tend to only know through the mind, or thinking, or information, or I see it or hear it, but actually, other modes of knowing that don't really fit so well into the usual way we think of how the senses work, other modes of knowing become available through all this, and that's part of the cosmopoesis. It's part of the re-enchantment of both what the human being is and what the world is.
[19:45] For example, to illustrate all this, in relation to my illness right now -- say, over the last year -- and the possibility of dying and all that. You know, sometimes, if I'm practising, and I'm using the imaginal in relation to that, and I want to experiment a little bit, what seems important to unlock something -- or not to unlock so much as to bring it alive, but maybe both: unlock and bring it alive -- the first thing is this humility. I cannot cure myself. It's not in my power. Maybe the doctors can't. I don't know. But knowing that, or just that recognition, there's a humility. It's not in my power. I cannot do this on my own. It may or may not happen.
From that humility, then another, if you like, step -- maybe it's a short step -- from that humility an openness and a surrender to something bigger than me. Let's call it 'God,' and put that, if you like, in inverted commas. To a god. Whatever language we want to use, something that is numinous, something other, larger than me. This stance, this posture of the heart, needs to happen first, before any other -- it opens the door to the imaginal. Or rather, as I said, it's what allows the imaginal to then come alive. So then this figure of divinity comes alive because the humility and the openness and the surrender of the heart allow it to come alive. Without that, it does not come alive. It can still be there as an image, but something's not penetrating so deep.
There are many examples I could give, but some time ago, I was working with this. This movement happened, the opening, the receptivity, the surrender to the divine. I heard the birdsong outside, beautiful birdsong. And that birdsong was felt as blessing. Felt, with my whole soul, was felt, the birds were blessing. Their song was a blessing. In the blessing was a kind of healing. The birdsong itself was felt in my body -- and through listening, but also in the energy body -- as if the birdsong, the sound, the fragments of melody, was reweaving my energy body, restructuring. It was all one: the body, and the reweaving, and the sound, heard, felt. The synaesthesia was there. Through sound, in sound, the energy body was being rewoven. Very, very, very beautiful there. There was a synaesthesia between the sound and the body sense, with the sense of blessing, with the sense of the divine, with the sense of the humility, the surrender. These are, as I said, these are sometimes very subtle movements. Sometimes they're a big step, but sometimes they're just subtle movements. Something just, "Oh, yeah," and something is allowed.
Some of you will be familiar with different tantric practices, Vajrayāna practices, where you have a sort of prescribed deity -- it's Tārā, or it's this deity or that deity. It's called a yidam in the tradition. Again, if you're familiar with this, for those of you that are, again I would say maybe the devotion to this deity, the surrender, the openness, the humility, are really vital and indispensable parts of that practice. They might need to be first, you know, those things first. In the Tibetan tradition, in the tantric tradition, they talk about preliminaries and prerequisites. It's working on the heart, and the heart's relationship with all this, and the heart's relationship with being on the path, and divinity, and all that. And then that allows an opening. So there's reason for all that stuff in the Tibetan tradition. But this heart surrender, or devotion, or openness, humility, again, felt in the energy body. Brought alive as experience in the heart, in the energy body. It can unlock or bring alive. It opens a door, if you like. Otherwise, these things are just exercises in visualization or concentration. The heart and its attitude, its posture, if you like, the posture of the heart in any moment, is crucial to imaginal practice -- absolutely crucial.
[25:18] There's quite a lot to say about working with imaginal figures and building on what we did yesterday. But just a reminder: the imaginal figure may feel like it has an ethereal body of light, or it may be very solid. It may be a human being, it may have a certain colour, or it may be an animal. There's a real range there. It may be someone I know, it may be someone I don't know. Maybe historical figures. All kinds of possibilities. Maybe the features are clear, of the image, and maybe they're not. Maybe it's visual, and maybe it's not. But the character, the personality, the qualities of the presence of the imaginal figure, that's what we want to have clear. The visuals might not be clear, but it's the sense of, "This is a particular character." I somehow feel that character.
(1) There's a place for this stance of the heart, and some of it, at different times, might involve supplication, asking. If this other is some kind of divine, one kind of relationship with that is asking. That's how usually people think about prayer, which I'll speak about in a minute. It's asking for something. In my humility, I'm asking for something. That's really a part, let's say. (2) Then there can also be this receiving -- receiving of the love, for instance. Or just harmonizing the being in gazing at the imaginal figure and being gazed at. There's a harmonizing of the qualities. We're absorbing, if you like, almost by osmosis, just by being in contact with this imaginal figure. We're absorbing what it radiates, its love or compassion or power or whatever it is. So there's receiving and there's also a kind of harmonizing. (3) Sometimes there can be a kind of union. I think Mei-Wah said yesterday, there can actually be a union: me and the imaginal figure become one. There's a communion there. Me and this deity become one. Several people have already shared this kind of thing. Just a very natural part of the way these kind of practices can open up. We don't need to make a hierarchy between all that, supplication, receiving/harmonizing, union. They're just different dimensions of experience that can open up. Sometimes that union or that movement towards union can be erotic. It can be sexual. That's completely within what we would expect for these kind of practices. We don't usually include that in practice. Actually, yes, it's there. It's very normal. It doesn't need to happen, but it can be a very normal part of what happens here in working with these things.
So I mentioned the word 'prayer.' I think for a lot of people, wherever they stand on the religious or religions, they think of prayer as supplication, as asking. "I'm asking God for a favour. Help me out here." I want to say that's really fine, you know, as one dimension of what prayer can be. If that's part of it, I would just say, so much about this is about delicate balance and sensitivity. It's like, careful when one is in a supplicatory relationship that that doesn't too much come out of or end up feeding a quite contracted sense of self, a smaller, harder sense of self that wants something, and this kind of pushing for that. There's a difference between that. The actual supplication may actually contract and make hard the self, sometimes. It doesn't have to. There's a slight difference in that between what's a humble opening, opening out of the being to receive, to receive from something, someone that's bigger. There's a subtle difference there. But always it's like noticing what the effect is. Is it contracting more, or is it opening and softening more?
You know, when we use words like 'prayer,' that's such a big word with such a range. Yes, there is prayer as supplication. There's prayer as praise. Prayer as blessing. Even what those words mean -- what does 'blessing' mean? We say, "May you be peaceful. May you this or that." There's that level of blessing, which is beautiful. And there's also, it's almost like the word itself has no end to it, in what it can open to and what it can mean, to bless and to feel blessing. It's almost like the word itself dissolves, or goes into realms where it dissolves, and it's still palpable and powerful, blessing and prayer as blessing. All these dimensions are open.
All these things -- prayerfulness, devotion, surrender, love, compassion -- there's such a range of flavours and intensities that are available to us as human beings with all of that, such a range. With compassion, it can be very quivering in response, very tearful; we're really resonating with the suffering of whoever it is we're giving compassion to. That's one flavour of compassion. Other flavours of compassion are very kind of soothing, and they're much more buoyant, or bright, or quite spacious. There are all these different flavours, and they're all good. They've all available to us.
And all these qualities -- prayerfulness, compassion -- they're always composites. They're mixtures. They're never one thing. As practice grows, we can know and experience all these ranges, and actually discern the differences and the qualities differently. We don't always need to insist on intensity of the experience. Intensity is not always better or deeper, necessarily. But intensity of experience, of emotion, can be something that we're more and more able to accommodate. We have more and more capacity for intense, deep feelings. That grows. We can develop that, slowly, over time.
[32:55] Again, openness, openness of mind here, trying to discern what's helpful. Let me say one more thing: all this involves the body. We've been emphasizing that right from the beginning. You get a sense of how much the heart and the mind, the citta, affect the body, and how much the body affects the heart and the mind. It's two ways. Now, some of you will notice, or in the course of practice -- whether it's today or on this retreat or another time -- sometimes you're sitting with the energy body, and especially when the energy body starts to feel quite nice or harmonized, when there's a bit more well-being, sometimes you get the sense that the energy body wants to move in certain ways, or adopt a certain posture, or actually that it already is doing that: I'm sitting here still, the physical body is sitting here still, and inside, the energy body is dancing, or it's adopted a certain posture, or it's moving in a certain way or wants to move in a certain way. This is different than restlessness, if I'm just fidgety or a bit bored. Something is actually quite harmonized, and the energy body is moving or wanting to move.
This is something, you don't need to make it happen; it's not better or worse. It's just something that can happen. If it happens, it's something you can feel into. What does that feel like, this movement or this impulse to move? Sometimes we can deliberately, actively explore the movement, so let the body do what it has the impulse to do, actually enact it. There might be spontaneous movements. Usually they tend to be quite slow with this, but anything can happen. It might look a bit like tai chi, or some kind of dancing or something. It actually could be anything.
Sometimes it's just in the hands. If you know this word, mudrā, one of the meanings is 'hand posture.' Again, it might happen spontaneously, or you allow the body, the hands, to adopt a certain posture. Some people sit like this, and it's a very open posture, but there are all kinds of other things you can just feel into. This is a mudrā, this añjali, prayer. There are subtle differences. [showing prayer mudrā in different positions] That feels different, emotionally and energetically, to the hands being at the heart centre, to being at the head centre, or even at the mouth. Even just a little bit up and down. With the hands forward, it feels different. It's very subtle, how it affects the energy body and how it affects the heart. These are the sort of things, if you want to, you can let the body experiment with and feel. What is it to touch the earth, the mudrā of the hand touching the earth? What's alive for that, imaginally and in the soul and the heart? That's a famous Buddha posture. I can't quite see from here -- is he doing that? He is? There's a whole archetypal resonance of that. Or what is it to bow on the earth, and let the forehead touch the earth? So how does it feel? How does it feel to let the body do some of this stuff? And how does it feel to just keep the physical body still and allow the imaginal-energetic body to do it? There are two different avenues there.
Sometimes meditation feels stuck. For instance, with this mudrā, with the hand posture, it's quite interesting -- sometimes just a little shift of the mudrā, the hand posture, and something's unstuck. The citta and the body are that connected that sometimes just a shift of the body, even the hands into some different thing like that, and something's unstuck. The emotional, the heart opens, the energy body opens, the perception opens, the possibilities open. Really quite subtle, it can be. So you don't need to get sort of obsessed with all this or whatever, but if it's something that feels like it's fruitful to explore, let yourself explore it a little bit. There's quite some richness here. Sometimes very subtle changes can have a lot of effect.
Okay, so practice-wise, if you want to, you can include this today. In the walking meditation, again, energy body. Sometimes, as Catherine was saying this morning, it's just about solidity and the contact, but energy body. If you want, the walking meditation can start to include some of this more -- how does the energy body want to move? Maybe it's not walking. Maybe I'm standing there and doing what looks like tai chi or some kind of dance thing. Or I just want to adopt a posture, and I'm still. Again, it could be actual physical enactment that the body is doing. It could be that I look stock-still, the physical body, but inside there's this movement going on or this certain posture. Let yourself explore, if you want to. You can explore that at times if you want.
Everything affects everything else. Like I said, the energy body, the heart, the emotions, the body. It's all this mutually dependent web, beautiful web. Everything touches and shape-shifts everything else. When there's this energy body movement -- either the inner imaginal movement, or the actual movement -- sometimes that in itself will open up, as I said, the perception. It will bring an image, or open up a cosmopoesis or a shift in the way of looking. And sometimes the other way round: you're working with an image, and it seems like because of this working with the image or because of this cosmopoesis, the body wants to adopt a certain posture, or move, or the hands, or something like that. So often the causality is both ways: this causes that, and that causes this. What that means for practice is to notice. If you play with this stuff, and as you do or as much as you do, can we notice the energy body, the emotion, the feeling and all that, but also what's happening in perception, in the sense of self, the sense of the world, the way of looking, the sense of the body, of other, of environment?
Last thing. With all this, sometimes it's more helpful to enact things -- for instance, prostrations, or actual chanting, actual sounds. It brings the being alive. It moves the energy, and something comes alive, and we get more sensitive. And sometimes the being wants not to do that. It's actually stock-still, and I'm just letting it -- the bowing is happening. No one can see it, but inside I'm bowing. Sometimes the being needs that kind of more subtle manifestation, and sometimes it needs the actual, "No, actually bend the body," and [laughs] do that prostration, chant, vocalize. Again, this is part of the complexity and discernment in all this. When does one bring me alive, and when, curiously, does one just shut me off and not bring the sensitivity alive? It's not a rule. It's not always one or the other. So it's part of the play of all this, to be sensitive to this.
Okay. Good. Let's have just a little bit of silence together. Really this encouragement, just take what's useful. If something just doesn't feel relevant right now, leave it. Just leave it.
