The Gift and the Artifice of Self (Part 3)

If we're talking about enchantment of self, again, wrapped up with everything that we're saying, every element of what we're talking about connects with every other element, but the enchantment of self is integrally related to, integrally involves, the sense of meaningfulness that we have in our life. Enchantment brings meaningfulness; meaningfulness is an element of enchanting the self. Einstein, in some of his later writings, a book called The World As I See It, he wrote, "What is the meaning of human life, or [of] organic life altogether?" So he starts with this question: what is the meaning of human life, or organic life altogether? Then he continues, "To answer this question at all implies a religion." He's aware these are religious questions. Then he says, "Is there any sense then, you [may] ask, in putting it?" In other words, it's a matter of conception, belief, and not of so-called science. "Is there any sense then, you may ask, in putting it?" He continues, "I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not only unfortunate but almost disqualified for life."^[1] Not qualified for life.

Jung, in his view, also emphasized so much the necessity of meaningfulness, of finding or creating meaningfulness. He actually saw psychoneurosis, psychological suffering or neurotic suffering, as ultimately "the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning." Whereas meaning, he continues, "has an inherent curative power." So finding meaning in our lives has an inherent curative power. "Meaning," he writes, "makes a great many things endurable -- perhaps everything."^[2] Meaning, a sense of meaningfulness, makes a great many things in our lives, in our existence, endurable -- perhaps everything. So the question of meaningfulness is so integral to our well-being, to how we live our lives, obviously, but it's also integral to a sense of an enchanted self and enchanting life.

As I think I mentioned in another talk earlier on this retreat, when we talk about or when we open the goals and the aims and the directions of our practice to include meaningfulness, to include soulmaking and enchantment and beauty and the sense of sacredness, when these become the goals, then the aim becomes open-ended. The direction of travel, the avenues of the path, of practice, become open-ended. There's an open-endedness, as we said, of enchantment. The possibilities are open-ended. It's a range, but it doesn't stop at a certain point. Always somehow there's a sense of being able to move further into all this. There's an unachievability in actualizing all of this fully, completely -- ever fully, finally arriving at an end point of all possibilities for seeing sacredness or beauty or deepening that, of fully living out 100 per cent our individuation. We touched on this earlier.

There's a freedom that comes with all that, an expansion of freedom that comes with re-enchantment, from imaginal work and cosmopoesis. All kinds of freedom open up with that, and also duties. Images, cosmopoeses, as I said elsewhere earlier on the retreat, they seem to demand of us something, some kind of duty, some kind of embodiment (often, not always), some kind of action in life. A part of grounding, if you like, in relation to images, may well have to do with the duty that comes with an image. If we neglect that, we are actually ungrounded with the image, and the image becomes ineffectual for us. The enchantment, the cosmopoesis becomes ineffectual for us because it's not being grounded through embodiment -- in both senses, in the body sense, in the energy body, and embodiment in terms of duty, action, implication for life. This is subtle. It's so delicate, talking about all this stuff and walking around these areas.

Again, Carl Jung wrote, "Any content" -- meaning any image or experience; we talk about images or cosmopoetic experiences.

Any content that emerges from the unconscious into consciousness [that's his system talking] involves a spiritual or moral task, which if not accomplished, leads to misunderstandings, complications, suffering and illness. Without the corresponding spiritual work of assimilating and integrating the content[s] ... [the experiences, the image] the experience, however fascinating [however amazing or fascinating this image is, or this cosmopoesis, this enchantment] loses its value and its meaning.^[3]

In that instance, he was talking about drug experiences. People can have amazing images or cosmopoetic experiences on certain drugs, etc. But if it's not somehow integrated through embodiment, through translation, through the duty that's there, the follow-up work ... The duty may involve an acting in the world, and it may not involve an acting in the world. I've talked about this in other talks; I'm not going to repeat it here. I'm not implying that it always involves an action in the world, but some kind of duty in relation to this image, some kind of honouring of it, needs to be made manifest. That's part of it. There's a freedom and a duty. The duty is part of the meaningfulness. Sometimes it's clear what that is, and sometimes it's a lot more vague.

A few months before he died in a plane crash, Dag Hammarskjöld wrote, in his diary -- he kept a diary, published posthumously -- just a few months before he suddenly died, he wrote:

I don't know Who -- or what -- put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone -- or Something -- and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.^[4]

There was no event that he remembered, person or image, that specific. Something was being asked of him, to which he said "yes." That constellated and created meaning for him, and there was a duty in that. He was in a dutiful relationship. He speaks of self-surrender, goal, meaningfulness, etc., wrapped up in that. When there's a deep meaningfulness or meaningfulnesses running through our lives, that brings the enchantment of the self, because the self is given this meaningfulness and trajectory. A part of that is that the meaningfulness feels like, or at least you could say we entertain again the conception, we're entertaining lightly this conception of the meaningfulness being asked of us by what is more than human. Can you hear that in what Hammarskjöld wrote? We entertain the idea that the duties we have, what we are responsible to, what gives us meaningfulness and therefore enchantment, enchantment and therefore meaningfulness, is asked of us by something bigger than we are, bigger than the human. We're entertaining this idea at the very same time that we need to see image as image and have equanimity in relationship to the sense of duty and embodiment and action.

[9:56] It's complex, tricky. But this question -- I wish we could have gone into it more on this retreat -- how do images get translated into life, or meet life? How do we see life as image? How do we navigate this relationship between the imaginal and life? Art. Complex. Takes a lot of skills. I can't remember who wrote it or said it, but there's a Latin phrase, Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit. That means, "Called or uncalled, the god will come." It's a certain view, actually. It's a certain conception that the gods, the more-than-human, are present in our life whether we ask for it or not. That's already a certain view. But in a way, we need to entertain that view and that perception. By 'view,' again, I mean conception and perception. Entertaining that creates the meaning. Meaningfulness and this enchantment of the self, or the aspect of it of meaningfulness, does not come without entertaining certain views and certain conceptions -- admitting, allowing, holding lightly, whatever.

So in all this, again, this ambivalence, this both/and. We are both creating -- I understand this -- and discovering meaning. I create meaning, and I discover my meaning, my meaningfulness, my duty. Some deep, mature insight is really holding those two together and acknowledging them. This is difficult, especially around meaningfulness. People who do a lot of work on emptiness, some of them go through a certain phase where, "Oh, it's all empty, therefore it's all meaningless. I see that I can create meaningfulness, but I'm only creating it." There's a kind of nihilism there that's a stage that needs to be moved through.

The recognition that I create meaningfulness, that meaningfulness is created for me, that will only lead to a certain puncturing of that meaningfulness, and a certain nihilism, if lurking in the background of my beliefs and ideation is the idea that there is some independent reality, which is that actually things are meaningless, therefore I have to create meaning, or therefore the only meaning that can exist is created. But really, independently of any creation or view, is the assumption that really they're meaningless. There's a very deep insight here into the emptiness of meaninglessness, so nihilism does not arise. It may be a stage that some people go through, but the fact that I acknowledge, that I recognize, that I'm open to, that from a certain perspective I create -- as much as I have a sense of discovering meaning and it being asked of me, I create that too. The psyche creates that. It takes mature insight to really not then actually view that in a kind of nihilistic way, that the real truth is meaninglessness.

There's a lot tied up in this re-enchantment of the self. I mentioned Chaim Vital, the Kabbalist, and his quote, "There is no soul which [doesn't have] endless roots."^[5] In other words, all souls have an infinite amount of roots in this infinite amount of co-existing worlds and levels of existence. So again, it's a metaphysical idea that we are taking more as a poetic idea, which is tremendously powerful. This is what practice is. It's converting an idea like that, holding it poetically, letting it have its power by moving it away from the purely intellectual to an actual way of looking. What would it be? How can I, can I practise seeing and feeling my self, seeing and feeling an other, as having an infinite amount of roots in an infinite amount of co-existing worlds? Even if it's not infinite, just other worlds, other roots. I have multiple roots in multiple worlds. When I look at the self, can I convert that idea, see it, feel it as a poetic idea, and in my art, the art of my living, the art of my practice, the art of my existence, the poetry of my perception, can I convert that poetic idea into something powerful, into a way of looking at self, at other, at world?

Wrapped up in that, too, he continues, in his teaching, "In [each of these worlds], the Torah" -- that's the Hebrew word for the Bible, the sacred text -- "is read in accordance with [that world's] subtlety and spirituality." We've touched on this before: there's this teaching, very profound, radical teaching, that there are infinite interpretations of the sacred text, but more than that -- and this word, 'text,' can even be used more widely -- of any text, but also of nature, nature as so-called text. Infinite interpretations of nature, of self, of other, of existence, of cosmos. All these ideas are wrapped up together. All these ideas are vital, vitalizing in the re-enchantment of self, the possibilities of re-enchantment of self.

And all these ideas actually make possible something. I think I mentioned these Latin words, amor fati, the love of one's fate, the love of one's destiny. I think it was a phrase Nietzsche used; I can't remember. But all these ideas make that possible. All these ideas can make possible the love of one's self, the love of one's fate, because it becomes something sacred -- my life, the events of my life, the tragedies of my life, my suffering, my struggles, my perceptions, my openings, my vision, my work, my creativity, my difficulties, all that, amor fati. Not just bearing it, and this isn't a teaching of "accept what is." Included in all this, at least in how I would like to present it, is this understanding that there is no 'what is.' 'What is' is a kind of modern spiritual myth, in the worst sense of the word. It's empty. 'What is' is empty. What is available to us are empty ways of looking, this flexibility of interpretation.

So loving my fate actually becomes an art. It's open to multiple perspectives. 'What is' can be seen from so many different ways, and is coloured, shaped, and fabricated by so much that there is no independent 'what is.' So we're not talking about accepting what is; we're talking about loving what is -- loving our fate, loving our life, loving the self, amor fati. My self is not different to what befalls the self, including the sufferings, including the challenges, including the difficulties, including the pain, including my life and death, whenever they come. This knowledge that it's empty, this love of it, knowing that it's empty, knowing that it's art in how I see it. Again, recognizing that within that, we are sensitive to the dimensions of my self, of my existence, of my fate, and the divinity of all that. So yes, it's given. And yes, we create all of it through our perspectives, through the art of perception.

This loving it, again, to harp on a distinction that we're emphasizing on this retreat, it's not that I love it and it's all perfect because all is one, all is equally the same substance of God or oneness of awareness or love or whatever it is. That's included as a level within this understanding that I'm talking about when I use the phrase amor fati. It's included, but we want to add within that the inclusion of the personal, the particular, as necessary. All of it is relevant for my soul, the persona (per + sona), for my personhood, and also necessary for God, for the divine.

Nietzsche had this question of eternal recurrence. If you had to live every moment of your life again, over and over and over, your whole life in all its details without anything changing, over and over for all eternity -- so that means all the periods, all the moments of pain, of suffering, of struggle, confusion, even stagnation, and the durations of all those periods, and the timings, the order in which they come from, not changing any of that; the joys as well, not just the pains but all of it, and not smoothing the experience and the life out to being 'nice' -- how would you feel about that? It's only in this amor fati that you can recognize the sacredness of it -- what he was trying to get at -- that would make such an idea tolerable, and the test of your art of life is your response to that question. So again, so much about what we're talking about in this re-enchantment of self, but re-enchantment of existence and cosmos, is creative, is art. We're really emphasizing that, as we've said so many times.

[22:15] In many traditions, from ancient times unto the present, there's this idea of the possibility of becoming divine; the human being has the possibility to become divine. It's acknowledged that that's rare, that kind of development, but we can, if you like, become God, or a god, or divine. You get this in Plato, and Plotinus, and the Upanishads, in Buddhist Tantra, in Jung, and in many others as well. In Orthodox Christianity, it's called theosis, this teaching. Let me read you a little something from a theologian called Jonathan Jacobs. He's writing about this possibility in Eastern Orthodox teachings. This theosis, according to the Eastern church, "transforms the entire human person, including her sense perceptual capacities." This is very much congruent with what I've been talking about. It's like, the transformation is in the perception as well. "Hence the deified [the ones made divine] are those who see things as they truly are."^[6] There are some differences there, but let's elaborate this a little bit, following what he says.

So before this becoming divine, we don't see things, our sense faculties don't reveal things to us, as they truly are, he writes. That's so-called part of our fallen human nature in the Christian tradition. He makes an analogy there with autism. This is his analogy. It's not that before that, our perceptions are completely untrustworthy. He says, "Our current epistemic situation" -- our current situation of knowing through perception -- "is not unlike that of an autistic person. Autistic persons can perceive much in the world, and indeed often have a more finely tuned ability to perceive some things. But autistic persons do not have the sort of abilities others have when it comes to perceiving persons. They may be able to see facial expressions, for example, and describe them accurately in detail, but they cannot see them for what they truly are, expressions of emotion, say. Similarly, our fallen sense capacities need not be unreliable in general in what they deliver for them to be defective."

So clearly there's some acknowledgment that it's not like we don't perceive anything true. "It may be that we can see things in the world accurately, we just cannot see them for what they truly are." In this case, we could say we cannot see, for instance, the theophanies -- selves and things and events as faces of God. We are, like an autistic person, unable to see certain aspects of a person or a thing. We are unable to see them as theophanies, or less able. In Buddhism, there's the teaching of what's called 'authentic seeing.' It's one definition of what is ultimate wisdom in some Buddhist teachings. Authentic seeing is the way a Buddha sees experiences as divine and beings as deities, as Buddhas. That's actually authentic seeing. Anything less than that is inauthentic seeing.

Someone else writing about the Orthodox Christian tradition, the Eastern tradition, Panayiotis Nellas, talks about this idea, "made in the image of God," that human beings are made in the image of God. Really what that means is that we have the possibility to tend towards the archetypal image, related to what I said before about the angel out ahead, etc. We have the possibility of that tendency and the aim of serving as the effective instruments of the Christ. This is a gift given to us by the divine, but also a gift of our being, a gift of our selves, but also a destiny, or at least a goal, or at least a potential of our selves, of our being. He talks about a pledge. I'm not sure what he means. We pledge ourselves to that, or the divine, God, makes a pledge to us through making us in the divine image. The pledge becomes a marriage, a marriage of the human to the divine. He writes it's in the archetype that one finds one's true ontological meaning.^[7]

Again, we're back to the image and the archetype giving us the direction, pulling us, giving us the duty and the sense of meaning. What he's saying is the meaning of our being, the ontological meaning, it's through the archetype, through the image. Now, for most of us entrenched or saturated with modernism, these are strange ideas. Even if they're beautiful, we can almost hear them as quite dangerous, and if you know certain words about inflation and ungroundedness, and there's the possibility of lack of discernment and all this. But as I said, skills, capacities, wisdoms, cultivations need to come into all these ideas about becoming divine and manifesting the divine, that make these ideas not so dangerous. Through practice, we actually realize, we make real, the beauty of these ideas.

[29:00] So there's this idea, through many strands of history, historical strands, of becoming God, becoming divine. There's also the strand I've mentioned several times about both becoming God, but in that, and through our activities, creating God as well, creating the divine. You get this in different versions. We talked about Walter Wink talking about the Ascension and the Resurrection shaping, creating, influencing, changing God. You see it in Hegel's philosophy as well, that the human being and the consciousness of the human being and the evolution of that through time creates -- at least a level of God, let's say. More postmodern understandings, it's still very rare within postmodernist theories as a whole for this, even to talk about the divine in more than a dismissive manner.

But this idea that we both become and create. As I mentioned, this is quite a common idea in a lot of Jewish Kabbalistic strands of teaching. Our prayer, and our voicing in prayer, and the breath that comes through us, and our intentionality in prayer, as much as our psychospiritual work, as much as our actions in life, in embodiment, all of this shapes and creates and influences and maintains God, the divine, the divine archetype. So yes, our actions in the world and our mental states and our work draw down what's called the divine influx. We draw that down into the world, we create it in the world, but also, in the so-called supernal realms, in the higher realms, all of this maintains, shapes, influences, creates the divine, or brings aspects of the divine together in erotic union, so it affects the intra-divine nature.

These are radical ideas that most people who think about religion and that kind of thing would never think would exist in that. The whole idea in the Jewish tradition of mitzvot, of commandments -- they have as many commandments as Buddhist monks do, actually more than Buddhist monks do. But both of those traditions have so many rules to follow, commandments to fulfil, ways of acting, ways of not acting, etc. But there are ways of seeing those very actions as seeming constrictions on one's behaviour: "Do this, don't do that. Do this little thing you don't even understand the reason for." And there are ways of seeing that that enchant existence, seeing those little actions, the blessing involved, and with that, those actions become the action of the divine intelligence. Again, this might just be in our kindness, in our acts of compassion, in our serving, in our creativity. Or maybe more prescribed in certain monastic orders, or in the laws of Judaism and Islam and all that. But they become the actions of the divine intelligence through the human, because the divine intelligence is innate there in the human. There's that idea, entertaining that idea.

So through our actions we express the divine, we manifest the divine, and we create and shape the divine, what's called in the Jewish tradition the Shekhinah, the feminine manifestation on earth of the divine. That, through our actions, through our prayer, through our cosmopoesis, through our images, through our psychospiritual work, all of that, that is brought into erotic union with other aspects of the divine. There's this idea in Hebrew of tzorekh gavoha, I think, 'the need on high' -- in other words, God's need, or rather, a certain level of God. A certain level of God is beyond all this, completely unaffected, transcendent, the Unfabricated, beyond anything that we can do or conceive, beyond anything that what we do affects, but also beyond anything we conceive. That level of God is unaffected, the Ein Sof, the infinite. But there are other, if you like, levels of God or aspects of God that have a need, a necessity, for your self, for your personhood, for the particularities of your personhood.

So become God, but also become and create God. This is quite a sophisticated notion, to be able to entertain that, and hold that, and have that as one of the ideas that one entertains, one of the conceptual frameworks, and the richness that that can bring, the possibilities. And quite a sophisticated concept to hold, to entertain, to hold lightly, to look through, to act through, to live through.

Nietzsche said, "God is dead." But it's so narrowly understood, what he meant by that, "God is dead." Certainly he was referring to a certain popular dominant view in Western Europe at that time, at the end of the nineteenth century, of what God is, sort of based on the popular Christian view. He's saying that view is dead. But really what he meant, more fully, was God as any truth, any supposedly independent, inherently existing thing. So a very radical thinker, and that idea, this idea, this notion or this belief that we have of independent truth, he said that's dead. When he said, "God is dead," that's what he meant was dead, of which a certain popularized version of Christianity, Christianity's version of God, is just one instance. He was pointing to something much more radical, much more challenging for people to even understand, and much more far-reaching in its consequences. Just as he said with the concept of soul, there may well be the concept of divinity. He said don't throw that out -- expand what it means, acknowledge the art there, that we create and discover both.

Again, as we've said so much right from the beginning of the retreat, all this that we're talking about in the re-enchantment of self, aspects of self, elements of self, dimensions, and of the whole of existence and the cosmos, all of it is allowed by the flexibility or the elasticity of our concepts, of our ideas; or to move between different concepts or stretch concepts; or that the conceptual framework we start with in the beginning is ample enough to include these ideas of creating God, becoming God. All this is ample enough, and the ways that we conceive the self, right to begin with, so our views, our ways of looking, and our practice, and our re-enchantment can kind of grow into a much bigger space. It has a much bigger space to grow into right from the beginning.

I mentioned this in some other talk, I can't remember. You get this idea of levels of soul. If we just talk about the concept of self or soul, you get this framework, quite sophisticated and ample, amply spaced, having a wide range, this idea in Plotinus and Neoplatonism, and apparently in the Upanishads*,* although I'm not sufficiently versed in them to know, and also in Buddhist Vajrayāna, these ideas of levels, of dimensions of being and also of worlds. But there's already there quite a lot of space for different views and a flexibility of views of what the self is -- all of which allows re-enchantment.

So conceptual frameworks that allow all this to happen in terms of the re-enchantment of the self. But these are not just intellectual. A conceptual framework needs to be translated to ways of looking, to seeing the aggregates as not just anattā, or not just self, but as divine, as Buddha-nature, seeing self as Buddha, seeing others as Buddha, as deity, and make that an actual, practical vision, sense, perception, way of looking, that we can practise and develop and move in and out of. When we talk in those terms, then we're talking about dimensions and levels of experience, not just conceptual levels of defining soul or whatever. Sometimes when you read this stuff, Plotinus and all that stuff, it seems so intellectually elaborate that you don't realize he's talking, I would say -- and for us, it's absolutely necessary -- we're talking about dimensions of experience. Yes, the conceptual framework needs to be translated to practice, to experience, levels and dimensions of experience.

So we see that, and I mentioned before, one aspect is, at a certain level, then timelessness is something that is included both in the sense of self and in the sense of other things. At other levels of conception and the practice and view and sense of self, it doesn't have that timelessness in it -- it's more locked into time. That has its validity as well. But experientially, we experience certain levels where timelessness, as an aspect of those dimensions, becomes just -- we can't not see it; it's integral to that perception. Whether it's the awareness or the consciousness that's regarded as Buddha-nature that's seen as timeless, the consciousness of this perception -- maybe I'm looking at a field in the sun, or the trees or whatever, and I get a felt sense that this knowing of that is timeless, this perception is timeless, this moment is eternal.

These are not just conceptions of self. They're perceptions, senses, available to us, and actually even frequently available with practice. We really get the sense of moving between levels of perception of self and the aspects of self, of dimensions of being, and also across a wide range as we talked about earlier. But we need, in relation to the self, conceptions or a conceptual framework that will allow this mutual opening, expansion, deepening, and enriching of eros, of psyche, and of logos. The very conceptual framework itself needs to be able to expand. And through this, which I've talked about in other talks, through that soulmaking movement, even the smallest act in our life -- the smallest, most seemingly insignificant act, has a sense of infinite ramifications, infinite resonances, infinite depths to it. It touches on the infinite. It moves into the infinite and towards the infinite. To quote a Kabbalist, it becomes "woven into the soul's garment of splendour." When I am able to view the smallest act of my life, the smallest instance of my self-manifestation, self-expression, self-acting, in certain ways that re-enchant, that allow this soulmaking, a seeing through a conception that allows this eros-psyche-logos mutual fertilization, then even that small act is woven into the soul's garment of splendour. Lovely language.

We need conceptions. I've said this so many times. And we need conceptions that will allow soulmaking, and will allow an infinite potential for that soulmaking, because it is open-ended. The pothos in the eros will continue to want more, deeper, fuller, wider connection. The psyche, the image of my self, of this other, of this thing that I love, of this object, of the cosmos needs to keep expanding. There's infinite potential, infinite space there for all that to expand, and with that, the logos, the conceptual framework as well. It's not that that infinite expansion and deepening happens without difficulty. We stagger, we stutter, we stall at times. But that's all part of it, because the suffering also is enchanted. It's not that this is all smooth and gleeful all the time. The conceptual framework needs to allow the soulmaking, the infinite potential of that dynamic of soulmaking. It needs to allow meaningfulness. It needs to allow enchantment for the self, for others, for things, for cosmos, all of this. It's necessary for all of that, for the re-enchantment of all of that, the ongoing and open-ended creation/discovery of senses of beauty, and senses of sacredness in all of it, in all of existence -- self, other, things, cosmos.