Transcription
We emphasized earlier how we're encouraging, on this retreat, the exploration of different, you could say, orientations or directions in practice, and how they can work together flexibly and synergistically, and we can move between them, those practices. So the orientation to samādhi, to cultivating that harmonization, that sense of well-being in the energy body, in the mind, the awareness, filling that out, and enjoying that, resting in that -- alive, bright, different qualities of energy there. We talked about a sort of development of sensitivity and skill in relation to the emotions in the moment, and using the energy body for that. Various possibilities there. And we also obviously are talking about imaginal practice, again anchored in the energy body, and the expansion of that into cosmopoesis, etc.
Just to say a bit more about various practices, and these directions, and fill that out a little bit more for practice. I'll start with something we touched on already. Oftentimes, that word, samādhi, gets translated as 'concentration,' and then has so much baggage with it, so much pressure and heaviness and sort of narrow-mindedness, really, in various ways. So often, a person, people who have been practising years, sometimes, something has happened, and when they sit down, the primary objective of their meditation is to try and have less thoughts. If they can ever have no thoughts, that would be fantastic. So the whole objective or thrust or direction, and also measurement of the meditation, is around how much thought there is, and the less, the better. With all that, unfortunately, can very easily go a whole frustration festering there with that idea, and a whole self-judgment coming in.
If I think of that, even if I don't quite realize that's what I'm doing, if that becomes the primary purpose or aim of my meditation -- to have less thought -- if that becomes the measure, this is a mistake. Even when I'm trying for samādhi practice, that's my orientation, that's what I'm cultivating in the moment, if that's how I'm thinking about it, it's a mistake. It's much more important the relation with thinking, the relationship with a thought in the moment. Not the presence or absence of thought, or even how thick and dense thoughts are, how much of a thicket in the mind of thoughts, you know. Not so much that, but the relationship with any thought that is present. Is the awareness hooked on to a thought? It sort of hooks into it and then gets dragged along with the thought. Actually, we're grasping at a thought. Even if it's a thought I don't like, I want to get rid of it, there's a kind of grasping. We're hooked and dragged. Is that what's happening? Is that the relationship? Or is there less hooking, so a thought can arise and pass? This is a spectrum, how much hooking, how little hooking, how tight is the hooking. But there are other aspects of the relationship with thought, to do with belief, what we believe of thoughts, etc. But it's the relationship that's primary, not so much the presence or the absence of thought.
Secondly, to make the reduction of thinking or even the absence of thinking a kind of holy grail that we're chasing would be a mistake for a number of reasons, actually, but there's a second reason which is -- I mentioned this already -- about we want to allow a subtlety of attention. Now, we're not making a hierarchy here; it's not only subtlety, or we're trying to be subtle all the time. There's no hierarchy. But what we don't want to do is we don't want to prevent subtlety of attention. Very often people are practising in ways, without realizing it, that are actually preventing the awareness to become more subtle. So it just stays at one level. Even the way they're breathing, or the way they're paying attention, the direction they're trying to pursue, or the way they're holding the effort -- many factors, but very often what happens is people prevent a deepening in subtlety in the moment.
By 'subtlety*,'* remember, I don't mean a microscopic focus of awareness. I don't mean being able to see all the atoms and moments of sensation very, very quickly, or very finely. All that's okay, and useful to a certain extent, to a limited extent. It has a downside in that it reinforces those certain perceptions. If I emphasize it too much, if I have a way of thinking about practice and the path that emphasizes those kind of perceptions too much, it will tend to reify those perceptions as a reality: "This is the basic reality." And also tend for the mind to keep seeing that way. We've touched on this. When I say 'subtlety' on this retreat, what I really mean -- as I've said already -- is subtler, more refined vibrations, energies, qualities, emotions, resonances, etc. They become available to consciousness, to notice, to feel all that, to discern between all that. A subtler attention is able to receive, perceive, and navigate all that.
[6:54] Now, when there is less thinking, at the times there is less thinking in meditation, there is the opportunity for an increase in subtlety. It's not a guarantee, because I still have to tune to that subtlety, tune to what is more subtle, more refined. We talked about this a little bit. When there is less thinking, there is the opportunity for a deepening, an increase, in the subtlety and the refinement of attention, and then what can be perceived that is more subtle.
So many of these things, the causality works both ways. There's a mutual dependency. When there is more subtlety, there tends to be less thinking. But that's a side benefit. The less thinking is a side benefit. Again, it's not the goal. I would say, especially for this retreat, and for a lot of the practices we're talking about, if it was a samādhi retreat, or a mettā retreat, or emptiness, or imaginal retreat, or whatever, it would be the subtlety that, as I said, we're wanting to allow that. Without a hierarchy, we don't want to be doing something that prevents that. But we need, as I said, to tune, to incline, to the subtlety sometimes of perceptions. But careful of the aim, because we don't want to replace subtlety as, "That's the goal. That's what I get frustrated about. My mind is so unsubtle. I'm so gross. Why can't I ..." We don't want to cling too tightly to whatever aim we have, whatever direction we have in practice. Careful of making too much of a hierarchy there, or any hierarchy, really. But if we put it this way, we want to have access to subtlety, as well as the not subtle, the gross, the obvious, and all that.
I said before, you know, 'concentration,' as in focus, is not our interest and our goal on this retreat. It has its place, to be able to keep the mind steady on something, to investigate it, to tune, etc. But it's not really the goal. What I'm more interested in is this kind of agility of the mind, to switch ways of looking, even for a few moments sometimes, and trusting that, wanting that to become more accessible in one's life, in the busyness of one's life, in a working life, in a life with lots of demands, on the street, in the city, etc. It's this agility and flexibility of the ways of looking that we talk so much about, rather than how much can I stick my mind to one object and keep it there with a minimum of thinking and movement. Yes, of course, that has its place. But it tends to get way overemphasized, as we've talked about, and secondly, on this retreat, we're interested in something [else]; that's not the primary interest.
Rather than focusing and closing down on something, in a way, we could say openness is a big part of what we're interested in on this retreat. There's a lot to say about that word, and also its relationship with samādhi, etc. I just want to touch on a couple of things here. We're interested in an openness of view, an openness of mind, an openness of perception. Is my range of ways of looking open? And also an openness of heart. This is something we'll come back to. The openness of heart is very important for what we're doing, and very important, obviously, in one's life and in practice in general.
We can also talk about open eyes. We tend, in this tradition, people tend to practise with the eyes closed. You sit down, you close your eyes in this tradition. In other traditions, they keep them open. If you want, experiment with this on this retreat -- eyes open, eyes closed. You might start a practice with the eyes open, because it might be that there's some kind of cosmopoesis there already and we don't notice it. If I just shut my eyes, I don't notice that already the world or the people around me, I'm sensing them differently. I'm sensing them through a cosmopoetic lens, some particular cosmopoetic lens. Then I open, I tune into that, I feel it, I enjoy it, I come into relationship with that and let that affect me. And then maybe I gradually close my eyes, see if I can take that in with my eyes closed, keep it going with my eyes closed.
Or the other way around: I start with my eyes closed. Something strong happens with an image or something like that, and then maybe I want to open my eyes and see what effect that has on my perception of the world. See if there's a cosmopoesis spilling over from the image, or the perception of the energy body or, often, similarly with the emptiness practices. This is very important. Here at the beginning of the retreat, we've got the open schedule, so people coming and going, and it might be just too much at the beginning of a sitting to start with the open eyes, if there's a lot of coming and going. But see what's helpful.
Careful, here, of restlessness: I'm opening eyes, and I'm closing them, and I'm opening them, and actually what's happening is just a movement of restlessness in the mind. So always the question, "What's helpful?" And the attitude, the stance of experimentation, and really seeing what helps, you know? If it's restlessness, it doesn't help to just act it out. It would be helpful to just choose one, eyes open or closed, and just stay with it for a while, let things settle a while.
When the eyes are open, it's still possible to have what we might call 'purely intrapsychic' images. My eyes are open, I see the room, but in my mind's eye, so to speak, I'm seeing something else. If I say 'intrapsychic,' it seems to imply a rigid belief in a division between the psyche and the world, and in a way, I'm really not implying that. I can't think of a better word. By now, 'intrapsychic,' I think you know what I mean, just within the mind. Even when my eyes are open, it's still possible to have intrapsychic images, and with my eyes open, of course, it's possible to see and sense others and the world in some kind of cosmopoesis, or through some kind of cosmopoetic lens. And closed eyes, just the same. In other words, both avenues are open whether the eyes are closed or not. With the eyes closed, of course, I can tune into an intrapsychic image, a purely intrapsychic image, but I can also sense the world around me. Okay, maybe not visually -- maybe I have an inner visual sense of it. But I might be hearing, and feeling in my body, or smelling, etc., and that sensing of the world may be a cosmopoetic sense, sensation, perception. So eyes open, eyes closed -- avenues are open here for what can happen either way.
[14:53] Really to have an experimental approach to practice doesn't just mean flipping around between things. It means adding the question, "What makes this or that work right now? Or what is preventing this or that working?" This is a whole other level of question, actually understanding, if you like, the mechanisms of practice. If my eyes are open, and I'm trying to encourage a cosmopoetic perception, and it's not happening, do I understand why it's not happening? Sometimes it's not possible to understand these things, but oftentimes it is: "Oh, it's not happening because of this." Or if something is happening, and it is working well, what are the factors that are actually supporting that in the moment? There's a kind of meditative research going on that's really important. The Buddha talks about this in the Pali Canon when he talks about hindrances and those kind of things, factors of enlightenment. He's also talking about a real active, engaged interest in the experimentation, discovering what feeds what, to use his words, and what starves what. Same thing with all these more extended practices. There really can be this interest there in the question, "How come this works now? What's missing? What's needed? What helps?"
One of the things that's significant, that for instance makes an imaginal practice, or working with a particular image at any moment, or with a particular cosmopoesis, is the relationship with the object sensed. If, for example, my eyes are open, and I'm trying to gently encourage this cosmopoesis (or allow) that seems to be there, if I reify too much either the object in any way (what I'm looking at or sensing), taking it as real, taking this perception as real, or if I'm grasping at it -- "That's so attractive," or "It's repulsive" -- and there's too much gross grasping and pushing or trying to cling on, keep the experience, or chase after it, these will, reification and gross grasping, will tend to dissolve, destroy, inhibit the cosmopoesis, destabilize it. Or, again, if I'm, same thing, open eyes, looking at the world, sensing the world around me, trying to gently encourage a cosmopoesis, and I lose contact with the energy body, and lose the sensitivity with the energy body, again, it probably won't be helpful. If there's any kind of even subtle, so to speak, leaning towards whatever is, so to speak, out there, even subtle, that subtle leaning, it's a kind of grasping. The imaginal realm will fade, the cosmopoesis will fade, because of these factors. It's the relationship with what's being perceived.
[18:15] But we're interested in openness. Another kind of openness has to do with the sounds that surround us in the course of the day, in a meditation or whatever. So the sounds of others, humans making -- are they sounds, or are they noises, which often has a more negative connotation, that word? Are they seen as distractions from my meditation, my concentration? Again, something is shrunken in the whole view there. That whole view is quite tight, quite impoverished, actually.
In the course of what we're doing -- we'll talk about this more and more this week -- but, you know, here are the noises of human beings or whatever, around me, or far away, over the fields, or in the street, or whatever it is, and rather than try and exclude them to preserve my concentration, so one's in a battle with those sounds, is it possible to encourage this openness, to include the sounds? Now, there are all kinds of ways of doing that, but on this retreat, what we're focusing more on is this kind of imaginally based re-enchantment. Can I include them, but actually shift the view of them to hear, sense these sounds differently? So these human noises are the sounds of angels, or the sound of the divine speech, if you like, of mantra. Can I actually shift that view and include them?
Maybe that becomes, then, the focus of the meditation: this shift in view, this enchanted view of these sounds and of these people who [are] -- I might not even know who it is -- making these sounds. I'm seeing them, I'm sensing them, I'm playing with the conception and entertaining the idea that they are angels. What does that mean? I don't know. Does it matter? No. What matters is you can feel it come alive. You can feel it change the relationship, and the enchantment come in, and that beauty, and that sacredness, and the openness, and the softening, So there are all kinds of possibilities here. There are possibilities that don't have anything to do with the kind of enchantment we're talking about that are also very skilful. But there's something about the openness there, opening to include and opening the view -- or rather, shifting the view.
More generally speaking, there's a kind of openness, as we've already emphasized just in this talk, this flexibility of practices and flexibility between practices. So the energy body is always the kind of touch point, the aspect of things, the dimension of our being, that we don't want to really ever lose, we want to keep in touch with, whatever practice we're doing. But we can move between just focusing on the emotions in different ways, working skilfully with the emotions -- both the beautiful ones and the difficult ones, and even very subtle ones that are neither. We've talked about this in other talks that you've listened to already from the other retreats, but there are ways that just staying with the emotions, whatever is happening there, working skilfully with whatever is happening, gross, subtle, painful, difficult, whatever, can be a really fruitful practice in itself.
So that's one avenue. That's one kind of practice. Imaginal practice, cosmopoetic practice, the direction of samādhi, all of that -- we can move flexibly and sensitively, and find out what's helpful at any time moving between these practices. Sometimes one of them is just the wrong thing, or rather, not a helpful thing to be trying to do. We're bashing our heads against a brick wall, or getting too tight with it or something or other, and actually it would be helpful to shift to one of the others. But at this point on the retreat, we can open up a little bit to allow more images, and then move flexibly between practices -- always noticing the energy body, and sensitive to the resonances, if we are working with images, sensitive to the soulmaking, the qualities of soulfulness, emotion, etc., particularly in and through the energy body, but also really in the whole psyche.
[23:03] A little bit about imaginal practice and cosmopoesis. A friend of Catherine's who is a Jungian analyst -- they were talking, Catherine related to me, and said that he had said to her that what they call the practice of active imagination -- which is somewhat similar to what I might call imaginal practice -- he said, if I remember rightly, that it's just a grace. It's a grace when that happens; it happens spontaneously. In other words, there's nothing we can do to kind of make that happen, this kind of entering into the imaginal realm, if you like. This is something that I don't agree with, and I'd like to encourage a different attitude to that.
Sure, images arise spontaneously, and we enter the imaginal realm, so to speak, spontaneously. Cosmopoesis can also arise spontaneously. But definitely also we can practise deliberately. We can engage imaginal practice deliberately, and cosmopoetic practice deliberately. We can incline the psyche and the perception, the way of looking, and there's the possibility of finding attitudes and factors and things that we can do that actually support the opening of the door, let's say, to the imaginal realm, the crossing of that threshold into the territory of soulmaking. We can actually support a shift in the mode of being, and a shift in the ways of looking, to open into imaginal practice and cosmopoesis. When I reflect on this, and kind of notice carefully what's going on, I see that there are -- we could talk about or highlight four aspects, or four factors that support and enable this more deliberate opening of the door of the imaginal and the cosmopoesis. They're not completely separate. As so often with these kind of things, they feed each other. They're mutually dependent. They're mutual dependent arisings. But it's helpful, I think, to separate them, and to say a little bit about each.
(1) So the first is fabricating less, a decrease, in the moment -- in other words, in that stretch of practice, for some period -- a decrease in the fabrication of perception in general. That can come out of samādhi practice, which, the way I would think about it, almost by definition involves some degree of less fabrication. That's not the way most people think about samādhi practice. It's not the way most people think about practice, period. We've touched on this. But it could come through mettā, it could come through emptiness, it could come through the imaginal. Basically, it comes from less clinging. I'm using 'clinging' in a broad sense here. When there's less clinging, there will be less fabrication of perception in that moment. That movement into [less] fabrication, it kind of, as we were saying, makes everything solutio, liquid. It loosens everything. And that loosening allows a number of other factors. So some degree of less fabricating is a factor involved in and supporting this opening the door of the imaginal realm and cosmopoesis. Some degree. So that's the first one.
(2) The second one is what I would like to call, very loosely, synaesthesia, which is a word some of you may know. I don't mean literal, clinical synaesthesia. What it really means is a kind of mixing and blending of the senses, so that it can sometimes seem like I see sounds, or I hear a bodily sensation, or I feel that in the body. There's a mixing of all or some of the senses. As it gets deeper, all the six senses -- mind, sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound, body sense -- all those six senses, they kind of gather more into one. It's almost like to think is to feel the thought in the body somehow. To hear a sound is somehow to see it. The six senses become one. You can't even separate between what one thinks and hears or sees or feels in the energy body field. This is a continuum, and gradually, this will happen anyway as fabrication gets less. Six senses that seem so separate, each with their own domains, sense fields, etc., gradually become more one in the same sense field. Eventually, when there's really very little fabricating, the senses do not arise. Sensation does not arise. There is the unfabricating of vedanā, sensation, and perception. But it also happens in imaginal practice, this synaesthesia, a little bit or a lot.
So first, lessening fabrication; second, a degree of synaesthesia, or what we might call synaesthesia.
(3) Third is a stance and posture, if you like, of the heart. This is, again, involved in and supports -- so it's a factor of, but it's also a contributing factor of -- imaginal practice and cosmopoesis. A posture, an attitude of the heart of, I would say, receptivity, but also some kind of humility and even surrender. I'm going to say more about this, but this heart aspect is very important. Heart is not soul. Soul, if you like, includes heart. That's what I'm saying here: soul needs to include heart, but heart doesn't always mean soul or soulmaking. Sometimes people ask, "What do I really want?" And they come up with the answer, "Love" or something. What do you mean? Do you mean just a heart quality? Or do you actually ...? Because we're not used to thinking in this way, we don't think, "Actually, what I also want is soul." When I say "love," I probably don't just mean a heart quality. I mean a soul-element of that love as well. I've talked about that elsewhere, so I'm not going to come back to it. But the third factor here, third aspect, is an attitude or a state or stance of the heart.
(4) The fourth is imaginal perception itself, and tuning to imaginal perceptions, which I've talked about in other talks, other retreats.
[30:52] So these four aspects. Now, of these four, the first and the third are things that we can do. We can actively trigger them, engage them, move in that direction. That might, for some of you, sound like too much of a pipe dream, or something that's not accessible now. So let's say we can learn, as we develop practice, to do these, to fabricate less and less. We learn that skill, if you like, and similarly, we learn how to open the heart in the moment, just shifting something so that the heart opens, so that there is humility, surrender, receptivity, openness, that posture of the heart. Those two movements of fabricating less and opening the heart in the moment become easier for us as we develop in practice. Some of you will know that, and for others, it's something to realize, take it on faith or whatever that that's the case.
These movements, fabricating less and opening the heart, if you like, in receptivity and in humility, we can do these, and that doing of those two allows the opening of the imaginal, the fourth factor, in ways that affect the soul more deeply, that are more soulmaking. In other words, if there's too rigid a fabrication being clung to, and if the heart isn't open, the imaginal won't open so deeply and won't affect us so deeply. But these two factors, the lessening fabrication and the opening of the heart, also will -- especially the lessening fabrication -- will allow some degree of synaesthesia, what I'm calling synaesthesia, this mixing and interrelating, almost blending and communication of the senses, if you like. That so-called synaesthesia functions then at that time as a different mode of knowing. In other words, the modes of knowing that we know are the six senses. We figure something out through thinking, or we intuit it or whatever, or we see it, or we know it through hearing because we've heard it, or whatever. In a way, when there's a synaesthesia, we can talk about a different mode of knowing.
Just to give an example, with being so ill, and most of the doctors giving not a very good prognosis at all for my situation. I have this illness, I have this cancer, and I'm sometimes going to practise, and sitting or whatever. Sometimes it's like actually starting with an attitude of humility -- if I'm practising something in relation to my illness, maybe I'm not feeling well or something that day, and somehow my illness is part of my meditation theme -- and actually starting with a felt, deep acknowledgment, in the soul, of humility, or a stance of humility. I recognize that I cannot cure myself of cancer. It's possible the doctors can't either. Very possible. There's a sense of, "I cannot do it. I cannot do it on my own. It's not something in my power." In that, there's a recognition. There's a recognition of humility. I cannot do this on my own.
And with that, from that, a step further is then, if I'm doing imaginal practice, it's like from that humility of openness and surrender to, let's call it a 'God' (I'll put it in inverted commas, if you prefer), openness and surrender to a 'God' -- and in a way, it's in inverted commas because there is this seeing image as image, and this looseness, if you like, and non-fixation, non-reification on any idea of divinity, as we're talking about a lot on this retreat. Out of the humility, then there's a further movement of the gesture, of the psychic attitude of openness and surrender to, let's call it a God or angel or deity, whatever, something that is numinous and other, some imaginal figure. This needs to happen first, before that image or that sense of that deity or figure comes alive.
This openness and surrender to the deity that I'm talking about, that includes and involves a deep, deep acceptance of, a surrender to, what will be -- to their will, if you like, to use a certain language. It's not a kind of technique to try and fix or guarantee some kind of deal to get what I want. It's more about an opening, a profound opening of the entire being, the heart and the soul, to that deity, and to the way that permeates my being and affects my life, the events of my life, and my death.
But again, the humility and then the openness and surrender to the figure need to come first. They give it the aliveness -- not always, but often. And then all kinds of things are possible, from that openness of the heart, the stance of the heart, and the imaginal has come alive, and then maybe the synaesthesia comes. There are many, many examples I could give here, but for example, I hear the birdsong outside, and I hear this birdsong, the heart, the soul, hears it as a blessing, blessing the cosmos in all kinds of ways. We'll talk a lot, hopefully, on this retreat, about what does even that word mean, 'blessing.' But an element of the blessing is they are healing me. The birdsong is some kind of divine or angelic, has an angelic function as healing. And it's as if the sound, the beautiful sound of the birdsong, I'm open to it, and it somehow feels with the synaesthesia that this sound, the fragments of melody, etc., are reweaving or restructuring, through sound, they're restructuring my energy body. I'm hearing it, but I'm also feeling that. I'm feeling it as healing. I'm feeling some kind of resculpting, or rewiring, or reshaping, reweaving of this energy body, and opening to that, and the beauty of that, and the blessing of that, and the divinity of it, and the preciousness of it. There's a kind of synaesthesia, then, between the sound and the body sense. They almost feel the same thing -- the sound is the reweaving of the energy body. Something very beautiful. There are many examples one could give.
[39:14] Similarly, some of you will be familiar with tantric practices, or have been taught these kind of things in other traditions, etc., with the yidam, with a tantric deity, Tārā or whoever it is that you're practising with. It's a similar thing. I would say the devotion, the surrender, the openness, the humility, are vital and indispensable aspects, factors, in that practice, if you're practising with a tantric deity. Usually they need to be there first, these qualities of the heart. It's like that's what I need to take care of first -- not always, but often. And I need to actually feel them, feel what that feels like, the devotion, the openness, the surrender in the heart, in the energy body. Then a door opens. That's part of opening the door.
In the Tibetan tradition, they talk a lot about preliminaries or prerequisites. It's a similar thing here. We're talking about something in the heart actually needs to open, soften, shift, whatever we might say. Without that, a door into the imaginal as something alive will not open. Without that, without that genuine aliveness that comes from the heart opening, those kind of practices just become exercises in visualization, or exercises in concentration and focusing the mind on the visual image or something. They're quite dry, barren, and actually unproductive. So the heart and its attitude or posture in the moment is crucial. In that moment, it's crucial, literally. It will take the practice this way or that way -- 'crucial' from crux, 'cross.'
So the same applies, all this applies, to working with the imaginal figure of love as we did in the meditation the other day, or some imaginal figure that's loving you, that you're receiving love from, any flavour of love there, any character of love. Remember, you know, the appearance of that imaginal figure may be very ethereal -- it may have a body of light, or a particular coloured body, red or blue or whatever -- or it could be very human in its appearance, or it could be animal, could be a deity, it could be very solid as opposed to a body of light. It could be someone I even know, a friend or lover or whatever, or someone I don't know, if it's human. Maybe the features in the image are clear. Maybe they're more vague. But what's clear -- even if it's not, it could be not visual at all, remember, could be just a sense -- but what's clear is the character, the qualities of presence that this particular imaginal figure has, their being, their particularity. Their personhood is sensed, even if the features are not clear visually. That's what characterizes imaginal practice, the sort of uniqueness of personhood, of character, if you like, in the image.
If these four aspects, four factors, are there -- the lessening fabrication, what I'm calling synaesthesia, the attitude of heart, and the imaginal perception and tuning -- if that's all there, then a lot is possible. All kinds of avenues of experience, directions, become possible in imaginal practice, cosmopoesis, tantric practice, whatever. In repeating a mantra, for example, or working with tantric deity yoga, or any kind of imaginal figure as we've been talking about, or a cosmopoesis practice, we could kind of delineate three gradations, if you like. I'm cautious of this word, 'hierarchy.' Let's say three. Let's discern three possibilities there.
(1) There can be, in the mantra that one's reciting or chanting, or in the relationship with the imaginal figure or the tantric deity, there's a kind of invocation that is a supplication, as I'll talk about in a minute, what that means, this asking. There's a kind of praying, an opening to the other, opening to this other that's bigger than me, surrendering to what is, yes, larger than me, more powerful. There's a humility there. There is the beauty of that invocation, supplication, opening to what's larger.
(2) And then, as one stays with that, perhaps, with that image, with that cosmopoesis even, or with the mantra, there can be a harmonizing. This is particularly the case with devotional yoga to an imaginal figure, or a tantric deity. There can be a harmonizing of one's being in that moment with the qualities of the deity invoked. For example, Avalokiteśvara, one harmonizes with the compassion that that imaginal figure embodies and emanates and radiates, etc. Just by holding them in one's imaginal gaze, one starts to harmonize; one's energy body, one's emotional body, starts to harmonize with those qualities. We absorb them through a harmony that comes about through the sustained imaginal perceiving and sensing. Or it might be, if we're talking in terms of traditional Buddhist tantric deities, Yamāntaka has this sort of fearless power to destroy what must be destroyed, whether that's illusion or certain unhelpful structures, or fear or whatever, and actually, in the end, death, the destruction of death, so the knowing of the Deathless, of the timeless. In meditating on Yamāntaka, it's the fearlessness, and the power, and the creative destruction, if you like. These are the qualities that we harmonize with, and the being, our being, gathers and comes into relationship with the deity and with those qualities, and harmonizes with those qualities. There's a kind of sympathetic resonance going on.
(3) Even, if you like, fuller or more complete or deeper than that, there's a kind of -- a real sense of fusion or union with or becoming the deity, the imaginal figure, so that we experience our body as divine. We look at others and look at the world through the eyes of that divinity, through the eyes of that imaginal other. We see and know and sense with their vision, with their perception, with their sensibility, and hear things as they hear. We feel and know as that deity. Because the deity sees, in a way, lives in a different world, meaning they perceive a different world, through that, we actually transform the cosmos. In doing so, it turns into a cosmopoesis, or reinforces that cosmopoesis that may be already happening. Practices of imagining yourself as a deity, etc., they ultimately involve more than just imagining that you have a red body, or imagining that you're powerful or whatever. One actually feels that one becomes that deity, one enters into that deity's experience of body, of world, of matter, of time, of other, all of that.
So all of this is possible when these factors are there. All these doors are possible, and in many different directions, as well -- not just levels but also directions. It can happen in many different ways. For example, when there are all these four factors happening -- less fabrication, synaesthesia, the heart stance, the open, humble, receptive heart, and the imaginal perception and tuning -- and in all that, it's implicit that we're with the energy body and the whole space of the energy body, that will, in becoming less fabricated as the first factor, the energy body may become lighter or more kind of liquid, if you like, and sometimes in this imaginal opening can actually become one with the deity or the qualities or the energy or the essence of that imaginal figure, or even one with the theophany of the cosmos around you, one with the cosmopoesis.
It's as if there's a communion, if we borrow that word, a communion, an influx of those energies and essences so that it becomes one. The body and the being, if you like, merge with that cosmopoesis, very particular, or with that imaginal figure. Often that happens just spontaneously when these four factors are present, with the energy body awareness, one is opening and tuning to the imaginal. One of the things that can happen is this kind of, if you like, communion or union. Sometimes that can happen very suddenly, in a flash -- something is transformed or opens out into this union in what feels like a split second. Other times it can happen much more gradually: one is transitioning into this more merged state, or state of communion with the cosmopoesis or the figure. So either way.
As I said, in doing that, either becoming one with the imaginal figure or one with the cosmopoesis, there is this transubstantiation that happens. Through our perception, the world, the cosmos, feels, is sensed, to be different. We have an altered image of that. I'm thinking actually now about Holy Communion, or the Eucharist. These are, in the Catholic churches and some of the other churches, this is regarded as a transubstantiation of matter. It becomes divine. This bread, this wine, becomes divine. What we're saying, we're putting that in the realm of perception, but there is a holy communion with that imaginal figure, and also with the cosmos made divine in the perception, just as in something like the Eucharist or other rituals. Transubstantiation through communion is happening through imaginal practice when we take care of these aspects and factors that feed that practice. It's one of the possibilities that can open for us. Very beautiful.
So please, just to make clear, we don't have to grasp at any of these experiences that I'm talking about, or so-called stages or levels, or force them to happen. I'm, in a way, just mapping territory. If we just practise and open, all kinds of wonderful things will happen. We don't need to grasp particularly at this or that, I don't think. Take care of the conditions, and the path, in its fullness, in its wideness, its breadth and its depths, will open for us. All kinds of surprises, I think, in imaginal practice. We don't really have to engineer this or that experience. Do this for a little while and you will be very surprised, and very pleasantly surprised. It's not easy to predict exactly what will happen, but there are things we can delineate and point out as part of a map.
