Logos in the Garden of Souls (Part 3)

I remember many years ago one of my music teachers saying that -- I think it was General Eisenhower, and I could have that wrong, but someone like that (and apologies to him and his memory if this is wrong; it actually doesn't matter who it was, for the point of what I'm relating) -- but General Eisenhower or someone said, proclaimed, "I only recognize two pieces of music. One is 'Yankee Doodle Dandy,' and the other isn't."^[1] I don't quite know the context, or even what he was getting at when he said that, and whether it's relevant that the tune he did recognize was [laughs], you know, a patriotic, nationalistic, militaristic thing, or not. But imagine someone or consider someone who has that kind of degree or extent of tone-deafness in relation to music. They're really quite unreceptive to music, and really quite unperceptive. So what they're perceiving, what they're getting from it is almost -- for some people, it would be staggeringly little.

Now, if such a person were to insist that there is just one tune, "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and the rest of it was just random noise, for instance, or the rest of it was all actually the same thing, or something to that effect, what would you say to such a person, if they absolutely insist that their perception there is reflective of reality? And probably in his case, he's surrounded from childhood with people who seem to be getting something from music, and schoolteachers, etc., who (hopefully kindly) explain to him that, you know, he is missing something there, etc. But what if only relatively few people, let's say, in the society got music, what would happen then? So there were only relatively few people who somehow music was very meaningful to them, full of all kinds of relationships that they could hear between sounds and themes and modulations of key, or pitches and harmonies and rhythms and textures. And they perceived a great deal of nuance of structure and shading and evolution and all that, and it had a huge effect on them, on their heart, on their psyche, on the body, on the soul, the meaningfulness.

Imagine if there were just a few people like that in a society where everyone else was more like General Eisenhower. Might it not be, then, that they were considered somehow a bit perhaps even pathological, maybe crazy? Maybe some people say, "Oh, they're just pretending. They're imagining something." And the claim of, "That's not real. What they're perceiving there, and what they feel there, seeing these relationships, these meanings, etc., it's not real." For me, this is quite an interesting reflection. It's like, is music and those relationships and the relationships between essentially just sounds, pitches, timbres, all that, are they real or not real? It's an interesting question. Is music -- and I don't just mean the fact that here's a pitch, a frequency of so many hertz, and this rhythm is twice the rapidity of this rhythm, or something like that; I mean the whole gestalt of it, including its sense of meaningfulness and beauty and soul and all that -- is that real or not real? Is that even the right question? Would we better ask, is it important?

Now, for some people, clearly it's not important, and for others it's extremely important, music, those relationships, the meaningfulness there, the soulfulness, the heartfulness, the effects on the body, all of that, moving into dance, or just touching the psyche to the core, stimulating. That's not a question of reality or not reality. It's important. And another question, rather than "Is it real or not real?", is "Is it soulmaking?" These questions of what's important and what's soulmaking, rather than what's real or not real, are more, if you like, important or relevant questions for certain areas of our experience -- actually, of quite a lot in life.

And it's also interesting to note -- and I know this as someone who was a musician and studied music, etc. -- that the sensitivity to music, the perceptivity, the receptivity, the understanding and the noticing and the picking up of all kinds of nuances of relationships, etc., between what is, at one level, just a sound, different kinds of sound, that is developable. So the perceptivity, the capacity of perception, the capacity of the subtleties, the nuance, the capacity of understanding concepts there and relationships, and even the degree of effect -- all of this is developable. It's trainable. What if we transfer that whole set of analogies there around music and receptivity, perceptivity, capacity of perception and conception in relation to music and soulfulness and importance, and transfer that to the perception of nature, and the perception of others in our lives, or things, or the cosmos?

Again, we can reduce it, just like you can reduce music to sort of the physics of sound: this pitch, that frequency, this timbre with this kind of wave on the oscilloscope or whatever, all that. We are missing something that's more important to us, whose perception we can deepen and deepen, and open, and refine, and enrich, etc. Maybe the same with nature. Maybe the same with perception of others, the imaginal perception that we're talking about, when there's an erotic relationship with music, with art, with nature, with another, with others, with a thing, an object, with the cosmos. So the whole real/not real question is a little misguided there, and yet you can see how much just what is acceptable or the dominant view within a culture can tend to really hold sway and gain an authority just because it's what most people are able to perceive, or it's not what most people are able to perceive.

Then again, you get the converse as well in history, of the authority of those who claim to perceive something, and the reality of what they perceive, over those who don't, etc. And oftentimes this is what you get. Apart from the political issues there, you get a clash of realisms, a clash of essentially fundamentalisms: "This is true. All reality is based on this," or "This is real." Someone describes something, a mystical perception, or a spiritual perception, imaginal perception: "That's rubbish. It doesn't exist." And the other person says, "They do exist. These stones really are talking to me, this ..." whatever it is. And both are kind of assuming -- even if they're not aware of it -- they're drawing on, basing on their arguments, if you like, an assumption of some kind of objective, independently existing reality, and "it doesn't exist like that" or "it does exist like that." But that's all that 'reality' kind of means. And it's a charged issue. I mean, certainly in certain circles, it's a charged issue. So some people who oppose any importance or place given to imaginal perception, mystical perception, spiritual perception, etc., there's a kind of secular crusade that some people try and wage. And probably vice versa in history, etc., or at present.

Someone might try and say something like, "Science shows that these things don't exist," but actually this person has not understood science and the whole scientific project. Does it show that these things do not exist? What is the range of science, what science even purports or is qualified or equipped to investigate? And what is the range of the scientific method? The very structure of the scientific method is to leave out deliberately a whole slew of aspects of our being, because it's just determined that's not what we're doing in the scientific method. We're paring that away. Something similar goes on with mindfulness as well: one is amputating, chopping off a whole range of other dimensions of our being, of our experience, of our ways of knowing, etc.

So a person who says something like that would do well, I think, to investigate a little bit of philosophy of science over the centuries, and especially more recently, and to question even what science says about basic realities -- for example, the electron, a subatomic particle. No one's ever seen an electron. The reality given to an electron is not the reality of a little tiny billiard ball. That's a model of it. And even that model is not really the model of modern quantum mechanics and science. It has no where, no when, specifically, objectively, independently existing. The electron is no place, and it doesn't occur at any time. It has no particular velocity or mass, etc. It's not really even a 'thing,' as Niels Bohr said. Does it even have existence? So don't assume that what you learnt in high school, and what you kind of surmised about science, and what it proves, or what it asserts, is actually the reality of what someone at the frontiers of science -- let's say, a particle physicist, etc. -- who is really at the edge, and actually doing creative research there, would actually hold.

And what, anyway, is the difference between the scientific method -- "I will deliberately put aside feelings. I will deliberately put aside imagination. I will deliberately put aside even ethical values, aesthetic values." That's the ideal of the scientific method. And it's a method. It's a methodology. It's not a fact about reality. So what started as a scientific methodology in the Scientific Revolution and with the Western Enlightenment actually became, somehow, over several hundred years, entrenched as an unquestioned fact about reality and existence. Strictly speaking, it's a methodology. It's one way of knowing.

Someone a little bit more sophisticated, say, who is keen to not give much place to imaginal perceptions, either intrapsychically, or in and of the world, mystical states of consciousness and perception, would say perhaps something like, would know that the notion of 'truth' is no longer philosophically respectable, and if you go using words like 'truth,' etc., it tends to raise eyebrows in certain circles, of disapproval and questioning, supercilious questioning. Which is fine.

But then oftentimes they avoid that word, perhaps deliberately, and perhaps make a noise about avoiding that word, but underneath, they're assuming some kind of basic existential reality or 'facticity' (to borrow a fancy, fashionable word from modern philosophy) of our situation: "This is our situation. We live in a meaningless, material universe of which we are emergent. Our consciousness and our being and our complexity over the aeons of evolution is amazing, evolution out of matter, and consciousness is an epiphenomenon. Essentially the world is material. There are no other dimensions really. And it's finite. We are finite. We are faced by our death and the extinction of all that," and that "You're trying to pump up the imaginal, or mystical perception, or things that happen in meditation and all that, or ideas about ultimate transcendence -- something transcendent that we can open to beyond the senses, etc., and all that, beyond materiality, all that. This is just your attempt at a kind of consolation because you can't handle the fact, the truth of our existential situation." Of course, they don't use the word 'truth.' They might use this word 'facticity' or something. Or just the accusation of consolation-seeking already assumes that this is the truth: the existential fact is what you seek consolation with respect to.

So it might not use the language of 'truth*.'* Might hide it. But it's functioning there. And there's the clash of realism so often in these kind of conversations. And a person who is drawn to investigating, and opening up, and exploring the imaginal and mystical states of consciousness and perception, and questioning the whole assumptions about reality, etc., that are so pervasive in our modernist and materialist and physicalist culture, can very easily embark on that kind of investigation with all their enthusiasm and openness, and very easily be shaken into doubt or, if you like, pressed into doubt, just because of the pervasiveness of the dominant view in our culture. Or they might hear a talk, or read a book by someone who's presenting the case for erasing and eradicating mystical perceptions and mystical notions and any place for the imaginal -- in a talk, or in a book; could be in a secular context; could be in a secular Dharma context; could be here at Gaia House; could be wherever. And it's very easy now for a person to be buffeted this way and that by all the opinions flying around this way and that in the community, whether it's a smaller community or the larger community of the culture.

So a person wanting to explore, and having experiences, and being really touched by certain experiences, imaginal openings and perceptions, or meditative openings and experiences, etc., all differing kinds -- experiences which potentially can be really fertilizing and fertile as seeds in the psyche, in the consciousness, in the life -- can very easily, because of all these different opinions, because of what's dominant in the culture, and because of a lot of the aggression that often goes with that -- which itself is very interesting. Why is there so much aggression bound up with this question?

But such a person, such a meditator, or a yogi, or a person exploring this way, can then be, as I said, assailed by doubt, even paralysed. Had these experiences, been touched by them, feel drawn to them, want to open to them. Something happens. I hear so-and-so give a talk, or I read a few pages of a book or whatever it is, and somehow it goes into a kind of freeze. Something gets paralysed. Or they just dismiss, or they're ashamed, or they keep it to themselves, and then it withers or something. And especially when what they read or hear is quite aggressive. And the person who is being dismissive, and perhaps being aggressive or polemical in their crusade against these kind of openings of perception, openings of ways of looking, etc., doesn't need to even say anything particularly brilliant or radically incisive or particularly even new as an idea or an insight. Oftentimes, all they need to do is just slowly and clearly, and take their time, just basically essentially repeat the dominant unquestioned view of the culture, to which we have all been exposed over years in our culture. Even if you grew up in a religious setting, you're still exposed to what I would call the dominant view of modernism, of physicalism, etc., of meaninglessness and all that, of what the reality of our existential situation is.

So a person can grow up buffeted by different views oftentimes. Maybe that characterizes our society. But this physicalist -- what should we call it? -- flat world-view of secular modernism is something we've all been kind of subject to pervasively, and from all different sides, loudly and implicitly. A lot of these messages are really not even that obvious for years. All the person has to do is just slowly and clearly repeat what you've already heard, what some part of you already understands and knows, without actually making explicit the assumptions underneath that, and the historical context of that, etc. In a way, the power of that argument comes from the fact that it's a repetition, and it's a hearing of what one already has heard before and knows and been indoctrinated with, and a power, if you like, from the solidarity, to borrow a word from Richard Rorty -- just the fact that so many people either buy into it completely, or buy into it at least partially, in this kind of cognitive dissonance between that and their more spiritual beliefs or whatever.

Because it's a repetition of what you've already been saturated in, and because everyone else seems to agree, it makes that position actually quite easy. I don't have to say anything or write anything particularly incisive or new or whatever. Or often what happens is a kind of straw man gets set up as an opposition who is an easy target -- someone like an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist, or someone like that, or some of the corruption in the papacy, or something or someone who is clearly ridiculously holding on to something out of a desperate fear of their perceived existentialist situation, and wanting consolation, etc. It's a straw man. It's an easy target.

Why am I saying all this? Just to make the point again that, you know, a grasp of -- and I use that word carefully, a 'grasp' of -- a rootedness in, of a carefully thought-out, structured, supportive and generative conceptual framework, one that's, to some degree, reliable and robust and sophisticated and well-conceived enough; a grasp of that, a rootedness in that, a consideration of that and -- what's the word? -- an internalization, even, of that, an active use of that in navigation, in orientation, will provide stability in that kind of culture, which is the culture we are in now, buffeted by different opinions, often quite aggressive, etc., being exposed to certain points of view incredibly pervasively. We're literally inundated by that view, so that we don't even consider it a dogma because it's so pervasive. It's like a fish not recognizing water, the water that it's swimming in.

But a grasping at, a grasp of, if you like, a rootedness in, a use of, an implementation of, an incorporation of a careful, supportive, and generative conceptual framework brings, allows, a degree of stability, a degree of clarity, orientation. It gives a kind of foundation, as I think I said already, and actually will open up experiences further. So those experiences that are potentially fertilizing as seeds can actually be that. They can actually fertilize the psyche, the mind, the heart, the being, the body, all of that, for the soul that wants soulfulness, that wants soulmaking. And admittedly -- and I'll come back to this -- we want that. Human beings seem to want that to different degrees. This is partly why a conceptual framework is really important, the entertaining of concepts and conceptual frameworks, deliberately, consciously, rigorously even.

We've said part of a conceptual framework that I would say is needed, a part of what must be included, is this whole unpacking, if you like, or explanation of the process of soulmaking -- based on, as I said, the phenomenologically noticing, "Oh, yeah," and delineating different kinds of movement of desire, and so drawing out this distinction of eros and what's involved with that and where it goes, just from observation of what is involved for us, for the psyche, for the citta, as human beings, in our life, and then exploring and explaining the dynamics of that soulmaking process, eros-psyche-logos, in its expansion, because of the pothos, etc., that we've talked about. Some way or another, part of the conceptual framework needs to kind of draw that out and give it a conceptual grounding and structuring that's fertile.

And another aspect of the conceptual framework needs to be this non-separation of the citta -- which includes the soul, what we're calling 'soul' -- non-separation of the mind/heart/soul/consciousness (citta, let's call it), non-separation of the citta and whatever we sense of reality or whatever reality is. There's a non-separation of citta and reality. And implied in that, or included with that, is the emptiness of all things, and the whole notion of ways of looking. So a way of looking is an aspect or a mode of being of the citta, if you like, at any time. All that -- this non-separation of citta and (quote) 'reality,' and the emptiness of all things, and the notion of diversity of ways of looking that are available to us -- all that needs to be an aspect, an element woven into the conceptual framework, which we said already.

So that mindfulness is not and does not expose 'reality as it is,' 'things as they are.' It does not expose 'what is.' Mindfulness does not bring us into an encounter with something called 'life,' as someone put it, 'exorcised of the tumour of metaphysics.' Uh-uh. Mindfulness is just one way of looking, wrapped up with a certain conceptual -- well, actually quite a lot of concepts wrapped up in mindfulness, in the experience even of bare attention. It's one way of knowing. Great. It's fantastic, wonderful. It's one way of knowing. Probably it's more than that; really implicit in what the Buddha meant by 'mindfulness' is already a range of ways of knowing. But what we want, what we need, what the conceptual framework needs is to open -- open the ways of looking with this different, more sophisticated idea of reality, and the non-separation of the citta (including the soul) and reality, the emptiness of all things, and the ways of looking, all kind of implicit together in that.

So an idea that I already mentioned, an idea like participation -- this is a concept. It's also a perception that I can have. It's an experience. If you like, it's an imaginal perception. But where does imaginal perception shade into what we wouldn't consider imaginal perception, [what] we would just consider perception? But an idea like participation -- for instance, that this mind, my mind in its depths, is, if you like, rooted in or participates in the mind of the cosmos. Not that it's just 'one with,' but it participates in the mind of the cosmos. It expresses the mind of the cosmos, the divine mind. Or that my imaginal faculty, the images that come to me, the images I perceive, either (so-called) intrapsychically or of the world, these, too, are the imagination of the divine, or the Buddha-nature, or whatever. So I participate in the Buddha-nature through my imaginal perception. Or again, the eros that I feel, and all that whole range, and all the directions of my eros (we said this a few times), I have the sense that I'm participating in the divine eros, in the eros of the Buddha with his consort, the consort with the Buddha. However we frame it, there's some sense of this, of what I experience at one level as mine, is, in another level, mirroring, echoing, rooted in, originating in, and participating in the divine eros, the divine imaginal faculty, the divine imagination, the divine mind.

So that idea of participation, or the set of ideas that we might call 'participation,' is an idea or set of ideas that actually supports and stimulates soulmaking. It brings more eros, more psyche, more image. It gives imaginal dimension, opens imaginal dimension, and a stretching and a complicating of the logos, of the idea, so we get ideas that actually support and fertilize the soulmaking process. And therefore, it is a valuable idea. Why? Because it stimulates soulmaking. It supports and stimulates and gives more dimensionality, etc., to the soulmaking movement and dynamic. Therefore it is valuable, and therefore it is valid. It's valid because it's valuable. Those words are actually related etymologically. It's valid because it's valuable, and its value is that it stimulates what the soul loves: soulmaking. It stimulates that beauty, that richness, that opening, that fertility, that creativity, that discovery, all of that, and the multidimensionality of that.

This set of ideas called 'participation' is part of a larger set of ideas which forms our conceptual framework or may be part of our conceptual framework. But participation, as a set of ideas, also includes the understanding that we're not dealing with anything that has an independent existence. So we participate in perception. We participate in the world that's perceived, in the very perception of it. We participate in the divinity. We participate in actually anything. Inherent, intrinsic to the very idea of participation, is the realization that things are empty, that there are ways of looking, that our ways of looking are actually participatory. So what is seen, the way it appears, and the way of looking -- there's no independent existence implied in that.

If I say, "This idea of participation in the divine, are you saying that's ultimately true?" First of all, it's not necessary to the soulmaking that we believe it's ultimately true. This is sometimes very hard for people to understand. I think it's intrinsic to a certain depth of soulmaking. Because we realize image as image, we can actually also realize, if you like, idea as idea. I don't need to [say], "This is ultimately true!" in order for something to have its power, its efficacy, its capability and potency to open and to seed and fertilize our experience, our perception, our understanding, our heart, our soul, our minds, all of that, and our lives. Actually, if you go into this whole question of the whole meaning or exploration of participation, the very question, "Is it ultimately true?", crumbles because of what the idea is in itself. If we turn it the other way round, to claim the independent existence, the separate existence, separate from the way of looking, independent of the way of looking -- so I'm not just talking about, "Yeah, you know, everything is physically connected to everything else"; independent of the way of looking, independent of the citta, if you like, separate from the citta -- to claim anything as independent in that way from the way of looking, separate from the citta, is actually, I would say, definitely not true. Any attempt at doing that so far in the history of humanity has been pretty seriously questioned, and what one finds is it's actually very hard to construct a coherent conceptual framework on a ground of solidity, on a ground of independent existence, of something that's claimed to be independently existent.

The attempt, for example, in physics to derive everything from the basic building blocks of matter just comes round again, or so far has just come round again, to questioning the reality of those, the independent reality, independent of the way of looking, of those basic building blocks. We can't find them as independently existing things, independent of the way of looking. And Nāgārjuna showed this, even relative to Buddhist atomism. Brilliant critique exposing the impossibility of constructing a coherent conceptual framework on realist grounds. And again in modern Western philosophy in recent years. So from different directions, it's almost like to have a grounding in a conceptual framework that's solid -- in terms of it gives a foundation, like it has the effect of solidity -- our ground actually needs to be not solid. Can't get away with claiming the independent, separate existence of anything, claiming that that's a truth, that things, anything, exists independent, separate from the way of looking.

And then this idea, or set of ideas, what we're calling 'participation,' it also intrinsically implies this observation or acknowledgment that we made, that the way of looking both discovers and, at the same time, we could say grants sacredness to something or other. I don't just discover it; we grant it. The way of looking grants it, or, if you like, we create it, whether it's an image or eros or whatever. That whole admission and observation is not a problem within the idea of participation. To me, there's a more sophisticated ontology, and epistemology, and cosmology, in fact -- metaphysics, if you like -- wrapped up in something like the idea of participation, which can sound at first like just abstract metaphysics with no grounding in anything real at all. So we go into these things, and actually really question, dare to question.

There's a kind of pragmatism here, which again, is quite a popular word in modern philosophy, that essentially states, "Well, you can kind of believe what works for you." There's a pragmatism of approach and of conceptuality here, but it's one that opens possibilities, possible new ways of looking, or the possibility of new ways of looking, and actually implements them, opens orientations, opens experiences, opens the living, and opens the field of life for us, the field of our existence, the sense of existence, in ways that we actually move through. Sometimes what you get is a sort of what's called 'pragmatist philosophy,' but all it does is, as I said before, revert, almost by default, back to whatever was the default concept or ideation of ontology, epistemology, cosmology -- basically, the default, hidden metaphysics there. Can we have something that's pragmatic, meaning it's really practical? It's an idea or a set of ideas that is really actually practical, that we actually live, that opens -- opens the perception, opens the experience, opens the ideation, opens the heart, opens all that, soul.

I would say what is needed is some kind of conceptual framework, which means some set of connected ideas, that supports an ongoingness, a potential ongoingness of exploration, inquiry. It supports the opening of frontiers, creativity, and discovery in all domains and in all aspects of our being, and even those domains and those aspects of being can also get opened up and increase. In other words, we discover domains, and we discover aspects of being, or we create them, or both. They are opened for us, where before we had no sense that there was even that domain of being and that aspect of our existence. Some conceptual frameworks, some set of connected ideas that will support this fecundity of exploration, expansion, opening, this infinity of domains and dimensions and aspects of being, of existence -- not just the intellect, certainly not; not just the heart; not just the body; you know, the artistic, all of this, the soul. "Soul? What do you mean, soul?" It's a domain of the being. The way these open up, like what the body can be, what the heart can be, what the intellect can be -- in other words, how it can be conceived, not just the range of experiences there.

And opening up, also, with all that, a kind of potential infinitude of interpretations. Back to this hermeneutics: that existence, life, world, cosmos, being, humanity, body, all of this, materiality -- there's an infinitude of potential interpretations there. It's not constrained. It's not constricted. Through the participation itself, creating/discovering interpretations. That is, if you like, the nature of existence, the nature of the cosmos. It's not limited. An infinitude of interpretations, the garden of infinite interpretations, the orchard of infinite interpretations. 'Infinite interpretations,' by the way, doesn't mean that any interpretation goes, or that any interpretation is just as good as any other one. I don't know if you know your mathematics of infinity; there are different kinds of infinity. You can still have infinite interpretations, you can explore infinite interpretations (theoretically, at least), and still, at the same time, not explore a whole other infinite set. It's the nature of infinity, right? In other words -- I don't want to labour this, but -- there are infinite even numbers, and there are infinite odd numbers, so you can have infinite soulmaking interpretations and helpful interpretations, and infinite unhelpful interpretations.

But to my way of thinking at the moment, certainly, only that kind of conceptual framework would be philosophically viable and kind of legitimate or defendable, but more importantly, only that kind of conceptual framework can satisfy soul. Only that kind of conceptual framework that's that fertile, that supports this ongoing expansion, complication, dimensionalizing, etc., creativity/discovery, interpretation -- only that kind of conceptual framework that can support that, only a conceptual framework that can support that will satisfy soul.

What if we play with the idea of placing soulmaking (this movement of eros to stimulate the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, expansion, complication, widening, deepening, enrichment, all of that), what if that soulmaking, actually we take that as a kind of conception that can form a base for other explanations of all kinds of things? In other words, we take soulmaking as something kind of basic, just simply saying the soul wants (it has erotic desire for, in other words) soulmaking. It wants soulmaking. It wants the expansion of soulmaking, the growth of soulmaking, the movement of soulmaking in all directions and domains, potentially infinitely, eventually. In other words, there's a movement in time here; there's a becoming. So it may happen in fits and starts, or with blocks and then explosions, and walls crumbling, or just gradual expansion or whatever. But just say it's something basic. It sounds really simple: the soul wants, has an erotic desire for, the expansion of soulmaking in all directions and domains eventually, or eventually in all directions and domains.

So that, you know, the soulmaking in regard to the self, in regard to the beloved other or others, in regard to the world, becomes or is potentially equalized. Because the soul wants that soulmaking expansion in all directions and domains, this is its natural organic movement. So as imaginal and erotic objects, the other, the self, and the world are kind of equalized, balanced. They're all filled out. The soulmaking movement is happening in all those directions. But also in the domains or directions of body, heart, mind, etc. All these are expanded, too, or the soul wants all these to be expanded: what the body is, how it can be perceived, what it means, what it can do, what it can feel, what it can sense, its ways of knowing -- the heart, the mind, all of this. Not that one is blocked or stuck or cramped; that would be a blocking, a stopping, or a cramping of the whole eros-psyche-logos process, the whole soulmaking movement, as we talked about earlier.

And so there are problems when one of these directions or domains or aspects of being, of existence, when one is blocked as an avenue of soulmaking, or there's a stuckness there, or it's cramped, something or other -- the logos or the image or whatever is rigidified. That's when problems happen. Or there's an imbalance because one side is blocked, or one direction is blocked, one aspect/ domain is blocked. For example, the self is not equal -- either there's not the inclusion of the self as being filled out by the imaginal perception; or there's a preoccupation with the self and then not filling out, not attending to the other as imaginal object, erotic object; or the world is not included. What happens to our relationship with nature when we lose the eros and the sense of dimensionality of the natural world? What happens when we objectify another? In other words, where they lose that dimensionality, we lose the eros there. Maybe there's still mettā. We talked about this before. But somehow I've objectified them. What happens?

As I said, what happens, for example, if our notion of flesh or materiality or the body, the soulmaking erotic involvement with flesh, with body, is not allowed in some way or another? So that actually our sense and our concept and our perception, then, of flesh and body is stuck at one level -- maybe of one-dimensionality, maybe of whatever it is: "It is this. It's good for that. It's not good for this. It's this or that." And to me, this is a really interesting exploration, just to play with the idea or the notion, or entertain and experiment a little bit with placing soulmaking as a really fundamental or kind of fundamental idea or movement in the whole of our way of thinking about psychology and spirituality and path and all that. So for instance, it's quite interesting for me to think about, to reconsider, human developmental psychology. I won't go into this a lot. I'll just mention something, just as a start, in case someone at some point wants to pick this up.

Freud regarded pleasure-seeking essentially as the fundamental drive of the human being, and that's, if you like, what eros meant to him. And problems arose when there was a conflict between those drives for pleasure, which were often sexual, etc., and gratification of sense pleasure were blocked or inhibited by or needed to be inhibited by culture and society and parenting and whatnot. So there was a whole developmental psychology that actually placed what he called 'eros,' which is the pleasure-seeking, at the fundament.

Half a century or so later, W. R. D. Fairbairn, a Scottish psychoanalyst in the Freudian lineage, loosely speaking, in what's called the British object relations school, he actually said the fundamental movement is object-seeking. His word for that was libido, rather than eros. This is what the infant, the baby, seeks: an object, the other. And really what's fundamental, the fundamental drive, is to connect with others. So not, as Freud says, sense pleasure, gratification of sense pleasures, or the reduction of the tension in the drives towards sense pleasure, etc. Fairbairn proposed this, what he was calling libidinal drive, this connecting with others. That was the primary thing. And then there was an anti-libidinal -- I'm going to come back to this later on in the retreat -- anti-libidinal drive that got kind of constellated there to protect one from the disappointment or pain of rejection by the object that we sought or the unavailability of that object. These can get internalized as well -- the object and the libidinal drives, etc., in his theory. But what's fundamental is the connection with others.

Or nowadays, it's quite popular to consider, "Oh, you know, in the womb, there was a state of oneness and wholeness, non-differentiation from the mother in that environment, sort of oceanic state of oneness and bliss and non-separation. And then at birth, there's the trauma of the separation into differentiated being in the world, and the trauma of separation from the oneness, which is a great shock to the system. And the whole production of the self-sense, the construction of the self-sense, is really a force for coherence, for delimitation -- 'I stop here' -- for boundaries whose function is to protect against, if you like, a dissolution into oneness. You're actually creating boundaries because the memory of oneness is full of this sense of trauma at the birth separation." And then for others, for instance the Kohut sort of ego psychology, is really, in developmental psychology, what it sets out to achieve is exactly this well-boundaried self. A kind of coherent, well-boundaried self -- that's the fundamental achievement of psychological health and maturity.

And there are more. But it's interesting to me, like, what if we conceived of eros as we've been speaking about it, and soulmaking as the fundamental drive, not pleasure-seeking? That's connected. We mean more than pleasure-seeking, which is Freud's thing. We would mean also more than the object as Fairbairn would have it -- which sounds very like ours: "Oh, connecting with others. Isn't that what we defined eros with? The connection, this wanting more connection?" But there are differences there, because the other, the object-seeking, the object that Fairbairn's child or theoretical child infant seeks, is automatically assumed to be a kind of fixed, well-defined, stable, limited object/person -- admittedly complex; we recognize that -- but not infinite, not full of other dimensions, possibly infinite, and imaginal dimensions, and potentially divine, and all that.

In our way we've been talking on this retreat, eros is not equivalent to a movement or force towards oneness, and dissolution in oneness, which somehow needs to be protected against. Actually, eros, as we've said, organically creates and retains an otherness, some degree of separation of self and other and distinction between self and other. So Kohut's idea of achieving the well-boundaried self needn't be fundamental either; it's just what happens in the soulmaking process. Eros will kind of create some sense of division there, some sense of boundary of self. I'm just touching on this, really, to open something up for future investigation. I don't know how this sounds. The distinction is subtle, but I would say quite significant. We're so used to thinking about developmental psychology in other terms that become almost entrenched for psychologists, but I just wonder what would happen if we thought about eros in the way that we're talking about it, and soulmaking in the way that we're talking about it, as really the fundamental drive, if you like. What would that imply with respect to a construction of a developmental psychology? And how would we think about various pathologies that human beings have, whatever it is, in relation to that, in relation to that framework?

The way that we're kind of conceiving of the object that is sought is different that what Fairbairn would think, and the sense of the self also is certainly different that what Kohut would kind of regard as the achievement. And implicit in what we're saying is this recognition of image as image. All that is a natural part of the soulmaking dynamic. The question is, which one of these (and how) get blocked, and at what point, and in what direction? The soulmaking movement, as I said, doesn't lead to a dissolution of the self, or a reification of the self: "It's really important to have a sense of a real self before you can let go of it." It's almost like a dogma. Is that really the problem? It doesn't reify self or object, but that might be a stage in the soulmaking process. These aspects of the other, a sort of object conceived just less dimensionally, less imaginally pregnant, if you like, might just be a stage. And Kohut's stage of the achievement of the psychologically boundaried, coherent self, that's just a stage of the soulmaking process, maybe.

Again, I'm just playing with something, but to me, it's quite an interesting thing to start thinking about if you're interested in these kind of things. And again, so much of what we consider, or what a lot of a modern psychology considers the self -- which there is quite a range in that ideation and concept -- but, you know, just to see how relative it is to Western modernist culture, as I said before. Ernst Cassirer, who wrote a whole series of books -- The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I think, is the big title -- he talks about the Bataks of Sumatra. For them, the self was sort of in relationship with a spirit particular, peculiar to that self. I think it was called a [?], but I can't remember. And it's sort of within the person, but not really. And it's separate from their ego. It's separate from their 'I.' There can be all kinds of conflicts, so this is not the coherent, unfragmented self of Kohut, etc. This was regarded as actually, "This is normal. This is what a person involves." So there's the person, and there's this spirit that's kind of in relationship with them, and there can be conflict: the person wants one thing, the ego wants one thing, and the spirit wants another. But there's something of a power that this spirit has in determining the character and even the future of that person. Certain notions of what's healthy, etc., are just actually products of modernist Western culture, which we take for reality and don't question often.

What would it be also, if we consider developmental psychology -- and I've touched on this in other talks in the past -- it's like we tend to think the past causes the present, and causality just runs from the past. We look for the first causes, and we look for the conditions and the environment or the trauma or this and that, and it's moving that way, from the past to present. What if causality actually opens? A whole sense of causality that doesn't just come from the past, that in some way we are called to something in the future, and it also comes from the present and dependent origination. And what's causal is not simply what manifests on a material level, in a kind of simply human dimension -- in other words, this notion that the Bataks have in Sumatra of some non-material entity, if you like, being actually quite causative. What is served, and what is not served and in fact lost, when we constrain our notions of causality? Not just the notions of self, but the notions of causality as well. "This is healthy, and this is healthy thinking, and this is what a healthy self is, and this is how the self should be," etc.

So then, considering, thinking about, certain pathologies or the various kinds of pathology, the range of pathologies that can occur for human beings -- which, of course, is related to developmental psychology: we tend to think of pathology (oftentimes, not always) as related to development and child psychology, and what may be arrested or incomplete development in some way or another. But beginning to think about that -- and really, this is just an opening. I'm sort of pointing at a direction, as I said, but I think it can be quite fruitful. But beginning to think about pathologies (we've touched on this already), what happens if the imaginal dimension is available to be opened in a certain direction -- for instance, in relation to other but not in relation to self, or in relation to self but not in relation to other -- and there's a kind of lopsidedness to the soulmaking opening and movement there? What would that cause? What causes that, for a start, but also what would that then result in, that kind of lopsidedness? What would it result in in the child psychology, in the developmental psychology? What kind of pathologies, if it becomes a long-term kind of habitual mode of being, of seeing, to be lopsided in that way, or blocked in a certain direction of imaginal filling out?

Or again, as we've mentioned, all this, we can see it mirrored in our moment-to-moment meditative explorations, but what if this gets repeated and becomes a kind of a way of being in the world, not seeing image as image, not understanding, "This is image. I see it as image, and it is image"? What happens if there's that kind of reification? Of course, that's actually quite common, but we don't tend to realize that, so that in the culture and education there's this real push: "Make sure the child knows what reality is," and a fear of the imagination, that it lingers too much except in very contained directions (perhaps in art class or whatever, or theatre at school, or something like that). But this real almost fear of the imagination, so kind of squash the imagination and really emphasize something called 'reality.' Maybe healthy psychology, or even a situation as we've been talking about, the imaginal dimension needs to be allowed more, amplified more, explored more, opened to and opened.

Again, it's a very different way of thinking about psychology, developmental psychology, pathology, etc. And I wonder, do children, does an infant, does a child really believe her or his images and confuse them with reality? When children are playing, this does not seem to me to be the case. There's a fear about that, as if we need to prevent the imaginal growing. I wonder if actually we can trust the human psyche to see image as image, to understand the image is image. In its natural development, that will be part of what it understands, if it is allowed to, if it's supported to, unless it's subject to some kind of pressure of fundamentalist dogma -- and that can be what seems to us to be a very obvious fundamentalist dogma (whatever it is -- of some kind of religious fundamentalism of not seeing an image as image), or much more hard to see for us because it's totally woven into our culture, and we don't even see it.

That's interesting too: not seeing an image as an image is regarded as relatively okay if most people around me agree to see it that way, and agree to see it, "This is reality. It's not an image." So if my whole community is not seeing this image [as image], shares some image and doesn't see this image as an image, it's somehow deemed psychologically okay. From outside of that community, it looks really pathological, bonkers, dangerous, etc. But I wonder if there's this, as I said, natural, organic movement of the psyche to understand the imaginal and to see it as image, if it's allowed to, if it's supported to, if it's not subject to the pressures of fundamentalism, or some kind of logos or whatever that doesn't allow that.

Again, when we think of pathology -- and I'm just kind of stating on a bigger scale what we've explored in the kind of moment-to-moment meditative questions a little bit, meditative navigation, you know -- if we think about the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, expansion, mutual fertilization, etc., where can that get blocked or out of balance? Is it the logos? Is it the image getting stuck somewhere, or rigidly identified, not seeing image as image? Is it in the direction of the self, of the other, of the world, of the eros itself, of the love, or of something like the body, so the body is related to in a way that doesn't get imaginally filled out? Might be all kinds of belief in an image of the body, or an idea of the body, or the eros has got stuck in relation to the body. Something's imbalanced. Something's blocked. In that whole kind of circular maṇḍala where everything wants to move in all directions, something gets blocked in the eros, in the psyche, in the logos, in the image of the self, the other, the world, the eros, the body, whatever it is, not seeing image as image, and there comes the pathologies out of that. There comes the incomplete or arrested development out of that perhaps. As I said, just some ideas to throw out, I think interesting to reflect on and maybe fruitful.

Okay, and lastly, just to touch on something, just to say again something I've touched on before. To my mind, we want, and perhaps in the kinds of concepts that we're talking about, in the conceptual framework that we're unfolding here with the soulmaking, and the explanation of the soulmaking dynamic and what's involved there, we need and perhaps we have a conceptual framework that implies -- already implicit in it, it insists, if you like, that eros and soulmaking will always elude a final understanding. They're always more than we can ever understand. Why? Because the eros, because of the pothos in the eros, always wants more of whatever it comes into relationship with as an erotic object, and stimulates the eros-psyche-logos dynamic to create/discover more, always more. So expanding, opening, stretching, breaking the boundaries of anything it comes into contact with in creating and discovering more of that thing -- including not just psyche and soul, but eros itself, and whatever logos or idea is involved with the notion of psyche or the notion of eros. Whatever idea of it, those boundaries -- and ideas, as I think I said before, are delineations; they make boundaries -- but they also will be broken open, expanded, stretched, etc., just because of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic; will eventually move in the direction of eros and the direction of soul itself. Rather, it will include them in its whole kind of expanding vortex of movement, of involvement, of digestion, of transformation, transubstantiation, creation/discovery.

In a way, this whole idea of the eros-psyche-logos movement and process and involvement means that any logos, any idea, will expand or break in time. In time, it will crack. And to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, "There's a crack in everything, and that's where the light comes in." So we might think of that in terms of our broken heart, or our imperfections, but we can also just as much apply it to the ideas, to logoi, to conceptual frameworks. Implicit in the way that we're talking about the soulmaking dynamic and eros-psyche-logos and all that is this idea, the Kabbalistic idea of the breaking of the vessels, as I mentioned before -- the Shevirat ha-Kelim. It will break. And the crack is a blessing. The light comes in. In other words, there's an illumination. There's a further expansion. Something of the divine, if we amplify that: the light of the divine comes in via the crack. We will reach a point with any idea, with any concept or framework, where it won't be able to contain or account for our experience or new ideas or whatever, new observations -- the very idea of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, maybe that too. It's interesting as an idea, though, because it includes within it this idea of the breaking of the vessels, of the cracks, because of what it implies about expansion.

And actually, I mean, there are already cracks, if you like, in this idea -- or, let's say, structural weaknesses, circularities -- as there must be with any conceptual framework. Is that a problem? Maybe theory, conceptual framework, theory, is more theatre. Theory is theatre, more than reality or truth. Theory is theatre. I don't actually think those words are etymologically related, but let's put them together imaginally: theory is theatre. What does that mean? It's theatre. 'Theatre,' etymologically, has to do with the gods -- theos, I think. I'm not sure, but that would be interesting too. Theory is part of divine theatre. The question is not about its reality and truth, but what is it serving? What is it serving, a theory, a conceptual framework? We've already said soulmaking, serving soulmaking. And the theory itself is part of soul. The logos is part of what we're calling 'soul' and 'soulmaking.' So in a way, we discover a conceptual framework based on our observations and deductions from that. But we create it. You could say we forge it, with the double implication of what that word means. We forge a conceptual framework. We are forging a conceptual framework. And theory is theatre. This is, to me, a whole notion of concept that's soulmaking, that's fertile. To me, beautiful as well.