'The Holy Life' (Part 1)

I'd like to begin to open up a little more the exploration of, the question of, where eros is directed to in our lives and on the path, the whole exploration of eros on the path, eros for the path, and eros for awakening and soulmaking on the path, soulmaking in the path, the path as a path of soulmaking, to what extent and how, etc. So where does the eros, where does the soulmaking get to go in our lives? What are the possibilities there and the limitations that we might inadvertently create and sustain?

There's quite a lot to this, so we'll take it gradually. In the Pali Canon, the Buddha very clearly and very often puts forward as the aim of the path -- and intrinsically involved and wrapped up in the aim of awakening and enlightenment -- the ideal, the goal of knowing, reaching, experiencing the Unfabricated, what is beyond the perception of any kind of world. And so, in that sense, there's a real transcendent or transcendental thrust to the Pali Canon Buddhist teachings. Transcendent is trans + scandere in Latin. It means 'to climb beyond,' something like that. If we open the Pali Canon, this is kind of unavoidable, to meet this constant pointing towards that. It's as if the whole path is really aimed at that. There is this transcendental thrust, transcendent aim, or aim of transcendence. And so I could read many, many quotes of passages from the Pali Canon that refer to this, for instance.

Some of you will know these quotes, which, to me, are quite an important aspect of the path, but we'll touch on this. We'll fill it out more. So for example, in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, the Buddha says:

That sphere [or that dimension, we could say: āyatana] should be understood (veditabba; it's also should be 'known,' that sphere should be understood or known] where the eye ceases and perception of forms fades away. That sphere, that dimension should be understood and known where the ear ceases and the perception of sound fades away. That sphere should be understood, should be known where the nose ceases and the perception of smells, where the tongue ceases and the perception of taste, where the body ceases and the perception of tactile objects fades away. That sphere, that dimension should be understood, should be known where the mind ceases and the perception of mental phenomena fades away.^[1]

So, great stress on this. It's beyond any sense experience whatsoever. Sense experience here is fading, is not fabricated at that time. There's a movement beyond, a transcending of sense experience -- the whole world, in other words. Not just the creation of stories and complications based on sense experience, but actual sense experience is transcended. And this the Buddha calls 'the end of the world.' In a sort of slightly playful moment in another quote, he says:

I say that the end of the world cannot be known, seen, or reached by travelling, yet I also say that without reaching the end of the world there's no making an end to dukkha.^[2]

That's also from the Saṃyutta Nikāya. So again, this transcending of the senses, this going beyond the world, the fading of the world, the fading of the senses, and the opening to whatever we can call that which is beyond, that which transcends it -- this is central to the Buddha's project of awakening and ending dukkha. Without reaching the end of the world, there is no making an end to dukkha, and he's not talking about travelling, etc. Very clear.

So we can continue, just to stress, if you like, how central this is in the Pali Canon sort of set of teachings and what's laid out there. In the Majjhima Nikāya, the Middle Length Discourses, the Buddha says:

There is the inferior. There is the superior. And beyond, there is the giving up of this entire field of perception.^[3]

"There is the inferior," meaning ordinary perception of the ordinary world. "There is the superior," the perception of, if you like, higher worlds, the perception of what the Buddha called the fine material realm, the realm of jhānas, and the immaterial realms, the realm of the formless jhānas, the four higher jhānas, and the Brahma realms and these kind of things that may be attained through different meditations.

There is the inferior and there is the superior, and beyond both of these there is the giving up of this entire field of perception, the entire field of experience, of things, objects [etc.]

And again, tying it in to the end of suffering. It's not just like, "Oh, well, that's an interesting kind of experience that one can have if you want sometimes." He ties this in with the end of suffering. So he says, "Where nāmarūpa," which really means the whole movement and experience of mind and body, but in more detail it means attention, sensation, vedanā (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral), intention, contact, perception -- experience, in short,

Where nāmarūpa [experience] together with impingement and the perception of form cease without trace, it is there that the tangle is cut.^[4]

Okay? So nāmarūpa ceasing also means vedanā, sensation, is ceasing. There's the end in that experience, there's the end of sensation, of vedanā. It doesn't just mean the end of unpleasant vedanā or the end of pleasant vedanā to some kind of neutrality: everything's just kind of blank, blank in the sense of being neutral or not registering a vedanā. It means beyond even neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Sensation is, in a way, a more accurate translation for vedanā. It's beyond sensation.

And, if we continue, the Buddha says -- this is quite a famous quote from a collection called the Udāna, the inspired utterances, again from the Pali Canon. He's talking to a group of monks, and he says:

There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated. If there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated, no leaving behind of the born, become, made, fabricated would be discerned. But because there is indeed an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated, a leaving behind of the born, become, made, fabricated is discerned.^[5]

A leaving behind, a transcending of what is born, what is become, what is made, what is fabricated. All this world of creation, all this world of sense experience, is left behind. There is that possibility. There's a possibility of transcending that. And again, the text around that is implicitly pointing -- this is intrinsically wrapped up -- knowing this, this leaving behind, is intrinsically wrapped up in what it means to awaken, what it means to be free, what it means to end rebirth, essentially, in full awakening. It's wrapped up in that.

And we could continue. Also from a different text in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, the Buddha says [this]. Again, he's pointing, he's saying there is something that we can know beyond the senses, beyond the body, beyond sensation, beyond perception and experience, beyond all the movements of the mind, beyond consciousness, really. He says, again, as an instruction:

You should smash, destroy, and demolish form. You should smash, destroy, and demolish vedanā (sensation); smash, destroy, and demolish perception; smash, destroy, and demolish saṅkhārā (mental formations). You should smash, destroy, and demolish consciousness.^[6]

It's not often you hear that quote in modern Dharma teachings. Very strong language. He's pointing. What's he pointing to? He's pointing to a meditative technique. In other words, you should learn to unfabricate this whole world of apparent forms, apparent body, apparent sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Smash it, destroy it, demolish it.

What is the Buddha saying in relationship to life? Because 'life,' what is life as we consider it, without sense perception and the five aggregates (form, vedanā, perception, saṅkhārā, consciousness)? The Pali Canon Buddha, what is his orientation? How is he orienting the path and the goal of awakening in relation to life? What is the place of life in the longing for awakening? How does life and the end of rebirth, how does life and the vision, the experience of the transcendent -- what's the relationship there?

It should be clear also by all this that the Buddha is not just talking about a state of concentration. It's not just that this experience of the transcendent is just some ultra-super-duper concentrated state where there's no impingement of the senses because you're so glued to whatever your object is -- the tip of your nose or something. All these quotes, all these passages make it very clear: no, there's something about this that's intrinsically wrapped up in the whole moment of liberation, or moments of liberation, the whole liberating process, the ending of rebirth and what awakening means -- awakening to what?

I could actually just give a few more, to round off these passages, selection of passages. The Buddha in another passage refers to this transcendent or Unfabricated. Mostly he refers to it in negative terms because it's so transcendent to what we can usually -- what we perceive, our experience. If it's transcendent to the senses, transcendent to the aggregates, all that, it's also transcendent to what we can usually conceive, therefore, because conception is based on subject, object, time, experience, and all that. So usually he talks about it in the negative: "It's not this. It's not that. There's no this. There's no that there," etc. Very occasionally, he talks about it in a positive. There's one passage in the Dīgha Nikāya, the set of longer discourses, and he talks about going beyond the senses, or the six senses ceasing (the sixth sense in Pali Canon Buddhism is the mind, and the other usual five senses that we're familiar with). Going beyond those six senses, or those six senses ceasing, not being fabricated, and opening to what remains then with that cessation of the six senses and the six sense consciousnesses.

What remains is, in more positive terms, consciousness without attribute, viññāṇaṃ anidassanaṃ. We can also translate that as something like "consciousness that does not look at anything, or point anything out, or indicate anything." In other words, a consciousness without an object.

Consciousness without attribute [this is another way of translating], without end, luminous all around. Here water, earth, fire, and air have no footing. Here long and short, subtle and gross, pleasant and unpleasant, and nāmarūpa [all that experience of mind and body, and the movements of mind and body, the elements of mind and body] all are destroyed with the cessation of consciousness [meaning the six sense consciousnesses].^[7]

"Here each of these is destroyed." All of that: earth, air, water, fire, long and short, subtle and gross, any kind of distinction, any kind of experience, pleasant and unpleasant, nāmarūpa, all destroyed. But it's not a complete nothing. So this is not annihilation. This is not total erasure, okay?

Lastly, again, it's one more quote from the Udāna, the inspired utterances. It's also, I think, in the Itivuttaka, another set of discourses from the Pali Canon. The Buddha says:

There is that sphere [there is that dimension] where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither sphere of infinite space, nor sphere of infinite consciousness, nor sphere of nothingness, nor sphere of neither perception nor non-perception [those are the four immaterial jhānas, realms]; neither this world, nor the next world, neither sun nor moon. And there, I say, there is no coming and no going, no staying, no passing away, and no arising. It is without foundation, non-continuing, and objectless.^[8]

So something quite beyond the jhānas, quite beyond any sense of materiality or perception, of this or that or anything. Quite beyond either impermanence or permanence. It's beyond time. No coming and going, no staying, no passing away, no arising, non-continuing. This is really talking about utterly transcendent there, and not just a state of concentration.

Clearly, these passages are not pointing to a state of 'being in the moment.' It's beyond a sense of the moment, beyond a sense of being even with the arising and passing away of things, beyond a sense of being with or reduced to or just open to the process of life, or the flow of life, if you prefer slightly more poetic language. Clearly it's way beyond this. It's not continuing, no arising, no passing away, utterly beyond the senses. Utterly beyond any thing whatsoever. We can't talk about a process or a flow; a flow of what there? Utterly beyond, again, a sort of state, or stance, or ongoing experience of 'the touch of life,' or of 'meeting life,' and certainly beyond anything that could be construed as 'being with things as they are.' Utterly really transcendent. Reading the Pali Canon, you know, for me it's unavoidable, these kind of passages, and how everything funnels towards that. The whole path is constructed towards this understanding as central in the opening of liberation. You can try and explain it away, or try and de-emphasize it, but you've got quite a job there in terms of if you try and do that. It's not something you can really ignore. You are confronted with these many, many passages, and how everything moves towards that, as I said.

As I said in one of the talks, somehow we need to account for this Unfabricated and the Buddha's emphasis on it, and also our experiential experience of unfabricating, and the whole understanding of dependent origination there and emptiness that we talked about much earlier. But in a way, the Buddha is mostly saying in another passage:

Where all phenomena cease [in this transcending], all ways of speaking cease.^[9]

It's only possible to talk in negatives: it's not this, it's not that, there's the absence of this, there's the absence of that, this is not there, that is not there. And there's a sort of what's called 'apophatic' language. Apophatic theology is an equivalent in the Christian and other theistic traditions. Or the via negativa. So there's not only that this transcendent lacks any attributes that we can talk about; it's actually that the way to it is a via negativa, a negative way, meaning a putting aside of this, putting aside of that, letting go of this, letting go of that, and going beyond this, going beyond that -- going beyond any sense perception, any form, any thing, anything conditioned or created, so any 'experience' in the normal sense of the word, of some kind of thing experienced. One goes beyond that. One puts it aside, and one comes to something that is also negativa in the sense of lacking in attributes that one can ascribe to it.

And this kind of thrust is common, I think, probably in all the major religious traditions, spiritual, mystical traditions, certainly because we're really in the realm of mystical experience now. So certainly in Buddhadharma -- or rather, in some Buddhadharma, let's say -- and certainly there in the Pali Canon, in Neoplatonism, in mystical Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, etc. And for many of those, or within strands of many of those traditions, it's absolutely intimately linked, if not equivalent with, the supreme goal of the path. So knowing that, opening to that, experiencing that is entirely conflated with the supreme goal of whichever mystical religious tradition we're talking about. And so again, in relationship to the world, and in relationship to what we must call 'life,' there is this longing and this aiming for and this pointing out of the availability of something beyond all this, beyond the world, and beyond life, beyond sense experience, beyond the aggregates that make up life and our experience of life, self and life.

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the saints of the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, says:

For the thirst of human souls requires some infinite water; how could this limited world suffice?^[10]

So in these different traditions and in the Pali Canon Buddha, we could say there is this yearning, there is this longing. And as I point out, the Buddha was extreme in his dedication for wanting to go beyond and open to this. There is this yearning, this longing, this desire, this eros for this transcendent. This exists. This eros, this yearning exists, and it exists very, very strongly in some people, and some people a little bit less so, and some people, it doesn't seem to exist much at all -- in fact, there might be a turning away from that, a rejection of that possibility, a fear of it, all kinds of things. We'll come back to this. But one possible direction of our eros and our whole movement and longing of the soul is towards this transcendent, towards knowing it, towards opening to it, etc. We want something that, in Gregory's words, "this limited world doesn't suffice." We'll come back to that quote because I want to kind of look at the different possible directions for eros and soulmaking. We'll revisit that quote.

But one possible direction is towards this transcendent. The eros, the thrust of the eros and the yearning to open (again, if we use sexual sort of metaphorical language) is towards this or in relationship to this transcendence, the transcendent I don't know yet, for some people and to differing extents. And as I said, it's transcendent, clearly from those quotes, and one could read lots of quotes from different other traditions -- Neoplatonism, and the different mystical traditions of monotheism, etc., monotheistic traditions. But it's beyond. Beyond what? Beyond the world, beyond appearances, beyond even certain knowings of a oneness, as I said -- beyond a oneness of love, beyond a oneness of consciousness, etc. It's beyond, transcending. It climbs over: trans + scandere.

So the pothos (remember, the pothos is what wants more with the eros), the pothos wants this 'more,' and it's kind of set this really transcendent 'more,' this really profound, if you like, or very high, depending on up or down in the analogy. The pothos projects it there or, if you like, smells it there, intuits it there, has heard of it there, and that's where the 'more,' the pothos, that's where the 'more' gets placed, the sense of the 'more,' and that's where the eros gets directed.

So there's not the spread of the eros in the small sense, in one-dimensionality: yes, the pothos wants more, and so I just get more cars, more sexual partners, more tasty food and different cuisines of different countries, more travelling, more whatever it is. It's not spreading into one dimension. There's actually another dimension, or other dimensions, because usually this Unfabricated is kind of mapped (and not just conceptually, but experientially) at the sort of end of a series of dimensions. In a way, you could conceive of the jhānas, the eight jhānas that the Buddha of the Pali Canon points to, as I said before, I think, on this retreat, [as] states of progressively less fabrication. Each of them is a dimension. So the 'realm' of infinite space, we could say the 'dimension,' the same word, āyatana, 'sphere' of infinite space, of infinite consciousness -- these are different dimensions or realms of being, realms of experience, realms of perception, dimensions. And transcending the eighth, the next dimension, if you like, is this Unfabricated, sometimes actually referred to as nibbāna.

But the pothos is moving into other dimensions, and has as its ultimate aim, or what it believes is its ultimate aim (which is something I'll come back to), this ultimate dimension of the transcendent Unfabricated. Nor does the eros just accept one dimensionality. Or rather it doesn't just accept that there is only one dimension, and although I have this desire for some other dimensions, what I really need to do to be free of suffering is just accept the experience on this one dimension -- in other words, what the senses give to me, the apparent or seemingly obvious finitude of my life, the difficulties I encounter, all of that. And my job to be liberated, what I am moving towards, is a stance (hopefully an ongoing stance) of just accepting, not craving, in relationship to this one dimension, because there are no other dimensions, so don't look for anything there. And rather than spreading out to just want more and more on this one dimension -- more cars, more partners, whatever it is, more experiences -- the liberation is in the just accepting and kind of containing or cutting off the movement of the pothos, the movement of the eros, of the 'more.' And so being, accepting just what is given to me in this one dimension.

So what is the relationship, as I said, with eros and life, if you like? How is eros directing itself in relationship to life and the world? The holy life, some of you will know, is again something that the Buddha talks about a lot, and refers to a lot in the Pali Canon texts. It's a very common phrase, 'the holy life.' And there are stock phrases in relationship to it. There might be a story: this person or that person, man or woman, "received the going-forth into the homeless life." So they became a monastic. Actually, they were more homeless then, because they didn't stay in one monastery. They tended to move around and just spend the rains perhaps in one monastery, or short periods in staying in this monastery or that monastery. But generally speaking, they were on the move. They were much more homeless than most monastics are today. But so-and-so "received the going-forth into the homeless life." And then a little later, or a long time later, this so-and-so, she "reached the supreme goal of the holy life."^[11] So the homeless life and the holy life. The holy life is the homeless life, if it's a Buddhist homeless life -- in other words, with the eightfold path and all that. That version of monasticism is regarded as the holy life. In other words, you can be homeless in another tradition that doesn't have the eightfold path, but that's not the holy life.

The holy life is the tradition of the Buddhist monastic practising the eightfold path. She "reached the supreme goal of the holy life, knowing and realizing it (the supreme goal) for herself in the here and now." He knew, she knew -- and this is the person, what they say at liberation; it's a stock phrase when they've become an arahant, fully liberated -- he knew, she knew, "birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled," or the holy life has been led: I've done it, finished the holy life. "Done is what had to be done. There is nothing further for the sake of the world."

So there's an arahant. There's nothing further for the sake of the world. 'The holy life' -- in other words, the path of practice in a celibate, renunciate, monastic tradition is the holy life. So life itself is not holy. 'The holy life' refers to something very specific that's actually oriented towards what is the end of rebirth -- if you like, the end of life, the ending of future lives. So it's not life, either as a wonderment of biological evolution and diversity; it's not life as in just this amazing, changing kaleidoscope of experiences. That's not holy. What's holy is getting beyond all that. And nor is the holy life just living the ethical life. It's not a holy life if it's just ethical. Ethics, the sīla, and a celibate life, in this case, are indispensable. They're also admirable and praiseworthy. But they're not the point or the end. An ethical life is not the point or the end of the path. It's actually just a prerequisite, a necessity, again for ending rebirth. It's part of the path, if you really want to become awakened, and that's what makes it holy: the end.

When the Mahāyāna came, this began to shift a little bit, and now there are sort of more popular versions of the Mahāyāna that are how people think about it. There's a shift so the bodhisattva ideal became quite prominent. It's sort of someone who's fully awakened, or almost fully awakened, and who makes the choice to stick around -- in other words, not to end their rebirths, but to stick around out of compassion, out of love for other beings who are suffering. So 'the holy life' actually is more tied in with an ethical movement as we would tend to understand it, meaning a movement of love and a commitment of love: this person is sticking around, not ending rebirth. There's a shift in that with the Mahāyāna, and with the sort of populism of Mahāyāna, the populist understanding of Mahāyāna, teachings about bodhisattvas.

Also in the Mahāyāna there's a kind of non-duality between the Unfabricated (this total transcendent) and the world of fabrication, the world of the senses. But as I said, in the Pali Canon, somehow or other, whatever one decides -- and we said earlier, we're going to bring something to our interpretation of the Pali Canon, but whatever one does with that, we unavoidably have to deal with this transcendent thrust that's there. The Buddha talks about 'escaping from this world.' And the jhānas, as I said, being progressive states of less fabrication, are actually progressive states of escape. The Buddha describes them: there's the first jhāna as an escape, and then the second jhāna is a better escape from the world, etc.; the eighth jhāna is the best escape, except for the last one.^[12] And then in talking about vedanā, too, the Buddha makes the distinction between worldly vedanā and non-worldly (I think that's the word he used) pleasantness -- for instance, the pleasure of the jhānas; it's not coming from the senses.^[13] The rapture, the bliss, the ecstasy of the jhānas, it's not coming from sensual touch, taste, smell, sight or sound. And the Buddha also in the Pali Canon talks about the supramundane, beyond the world (the loka), meaning the transcendent.^[14]

So there is implicit in all this a kind of relative denigration of the world, a denigration of life. Life is only serving, if you like, something that goes beyond life. Life is only 'good' to the extent that we use it to get beyond life. And the world is something to be transcended, something to be got beyond. Now, this is not that popular, or rather it's not really brought out much in a lot of modern Western teachings. And sometimes people really try and make the case that the Buddha of the Pali Canon absolutely didn't have a transcendent thrust, and it's really about being in this life and being open to everything. I find that a little hard to twist things that way in an interpretation of the Pali Canon.

But it's interesting: why is there that insistence by some that the Buddha of the Pali Canon did not have a transcendent thrust? That, to me, is very interesting, for different reasons. We're hopefully going to touch on all this. Now, some is purely individual, which we'll come back to, to do, so to speak, with the soul of the person, and the soul-calling of the person. But a lot of it is also cultural. So in our modernist culture, in our modernist society and the views that we've grown up with, there's a kind of abhorrence, for various reasons, for anything that is transcendent in that sense. Some of it has to do with it being too close to a kind of life-denialism, and if life is all you have -- which is what a lot of modernism asserts, that there's just this, and when you die, you die, and that's it, and there's nothing beyond, and there's absolutely no place for metaphysics. There's a lot of confusion around what that word [metaphysics] means, but there's no place for anything beyond the senses, or what you can see through the senses or through a microscope, and infer from that.

So there's a kind of real thrust of that kind of ruling out, absolute, dogmatic ruling out of metaphysics from modernist philosophy, and actually most postmodern philosophy. And that has spread into the culture, if you like, so that a cardinal rule is, "Nothing beyond. There's just this," and we have to find what we are looking for in this, in just this, meaning the experience of the senses, meaning what comes to us empirically. It also means what science tells us, or seems to tell us, but that gets a bit more confusing if you take science a bit deeper.

So it's not that simple, because many people nowadays clearly believe -- although many people just believe, "This is it, and when you die, that's it," a lot of other people believe (I have no idea what the sort of split is), a lot of other people clearly believe in some kind of life after death, some kind of spiritual world beyond, where I'll be with Grandma again and my spouse or whatever it is. But that kind of 'beyond' is not at all like the Unfabricated. In other words, it's still a realm of experience. It's pretty much like this one, only it sounds nicer in some way, and kind of very nicely it's not subject to impermanence, etc. There's a kind of split between people who believe that and people who believe there's just extinction.

But this whole Unfabricated, something beyond experience, or a series of dimensions that move beyond all sense experience, all perception, etc., this is too much -- I wonder if, in some respects, it's, for a lot of people, too much like an extinction, or it just doesn't have an attraction for lots of reasons. And so we're squeezed in. With that refusal of that transcendence, we're squeezed into either this hope for something better beyond death, where there's this eternal being with one's loved ones, etc., or we're squeezed into just this. There's just this, and there's just life. Then the version of Dharma that comes out of that squeezing into 'just this' or 'just life as it seems to be,' or perhaps just a little bit atomistically reduced into a kind of, "The self isn't real, so what there really is is a process, but everything else is also just a process of atoms," etc. Somehow, in either version there, which I'll revisit, one of the options is to be squeezed into a kind of existentialist version of Dharma, which is a lot like, or informed by, existentialist philosophy or existentialist psychoanalysis: "This is it. This your place, to somehow find, eke out some kind of okayness or freedom or acceptance of this undeniable existential situation that this is it, that there is this life that's essentially meaningless, that's essentially finite," etc.

But the question partly here is, when there is the rhetoric of 'just this' or 'life,' what is actually meant? And I've talked about this before. When you say 'this,' what do you mean by 'this'? "There's just this." What do you mean by 'life'? Especially when you give that word, 'life,' a capital L. Do you mean just the senses? Do you mean bare attention, and what's revealed by bare attention, or something else? Or something sort of incorporating much more than that?

Broadly, in this non-transcendent or this refusal of the transcendent, we could kind of distinguish two possibilities there. There is what I just alluded to: a kind of existentialist path, if you like, which is, "There is just this one dimension that comes to us in the senses. There's nothing more than that. We refuse anything more than what is obvious to most people in Western culture, to the senses of most people in Western culture." In other words, we're just going along with what most people in our culture of Western scientific materialist modernism can actually perceive through their limited training they've had in perception. So there's a kind of flatland of one-dimensionality, and what freedom is available in relationship to that one-dimensionality, taking it almost as given. As I said, it might be acknowledged that the self doesn't really exist and is more of a process, as is everything else a kind of process. So what's the possibility for freedom there? And what's the possibility for soulmaking in such a one-dimensional flatland that refuses any kind of other dimensionality or transcendence?

Where would that possibility, that kind of realm of possibility, or range of possibility -- is it that that's to work and to accept that that range of possibility, that flatland freedom and that flatland soulmaking, whatever freedom, whatever soulmaking is available there, is it that that's actually an individual soul-calling? Might there be for some people this is where the soul is called, to see the world that way, not to see it in ways more than that or beyond that, etc., and to make the soulmaking and make the freedom within the limitations of that, of that view? Is it, if you like, an authentic soul-calling, what we could call that? Is it actually the limits of the eros-psyche-logos process? For that person, that has actually reached its limits, and actually is a little bit stuck or cramped or confined, that we've talked about before?

And is that coming from a kind of indoctrination, again, from the culture, or from fear of what's -- you know, to not go along with mainstream opinion, whether it's academic opinion or cultural opinion or what, in one's different communities? So all these questions, whether it's individual soul-calling, whether it's just the limits of a certain soul, whether it's indoctrination from whatever culture, we could also apply that to the transcendent view, the view of a transcendence which I am wanting to know and wanting to open to and I've heard about. Again, it could be an individual soul-calling, could be some kind of limit operating there, or it could be some kind of indoctrination, if you like, or being fed by the culture a certain way.

So there's this transcendent option for the movement of soulmaking and eros. There's this kind of refusal of the transcendence into a flatland, if you like, what we're calling a one-dimensionality. And then there's a third that we might call 'immanence.' Immanence is related to, etymologically is 'remaining in.' Here, what I mean by 'immanence,' and what it means in most religious traditions, is the divinity remains in the world, in life, in form, in matter, in the senses. It infuses all this. It's not, at least in the way I would like to use it, it's not limited to that. In other words, there might be a beyond. And I know I've been very open with the definition of what I even mean by 'divinity,' and that was deliberate. We'll revisit it, but one of the things is, I would say, that divinity, one of the things is that divinity has some kind of beyondness to it, so it's related to dimensionality. Whatever this beyond is that I have a sense of divinity with, that is both beyond but also in life, form, world, matter, senses.

Now, in terms of individual orientations, reactions, transformations in relation to all this, some people will recoil from the transcendent thrust and the transcendent kind of teachings. Something in them is either not satisfied, or is afraid, or doesn't like it. It's interesting what's going on for someone who doesn't accept that, and then also maybe doesn't accept either the flatland, so wants or has the intuition of the divinity not just beyond, but in and through. Or some people refuse that kind of transcendent beyond, and it's just in somehow. Yet still, I would say it has some kind of sense of beyondness. We'll revisit that in terms of beyondness and divinity. But in terms of individual reactions, what I really want to say -- and this can change over a person's life and practice -- is that there are different stances and gut reactions to these possibilities. This is what I want to explore a little bit.

We might mention, as well, that these, you could say these three have shadows, if that's the right word -- limitations, or consequences, weak points or something. You can see, perhaps immediately, how it might be possible that someone is wanting to go beyond the world and, if you like, kind of rejecting the world, and putting their longing or their soul-movement towards the Unfabricated, towards this transcendent, but it's less a kind of soul-movement. More than a soul-movement, it's actually this vibhava-taṇhā, this craving for non-existence. There could be a kind of confusion that actually it's, "I want to get out of the world. I've had enough. I don't want to be reborn. I want this experience that turns everything off, and then I want to end it all." You can see how that could be a confused or rather a polluted movement within there that's not actually what the Buddha was pointing to.

And again, there can be maybe for some people an aversion or a fear of body, wanting to transcend body and the messiness and the sexuality of body, an aversion to or fear of soulmaking even, so there's a kind of shrinking movement or avoiding movement, like hoping for some kind of transcendent that one kind of skips over all this earthy, messy, confusing, what John Keats called "the vale of soul-making," body, eros, but it's coming actually out of a movement of avoiding, fear, contraction of the being.^[15] And again, there's a shadow there of possibly not caring for the world: "I'm out of here. I'm on my way out. This world has no value." In a kind of extremist view towards the transcendent, this world has only a value of a stepping-stone at best. There's no divinity in the world, per se. That's an extremely dualistic transcendent view, but I know people who have that view, and Buddhists, too, in fact.

In the second version, the kind of more one-dimensional existentialist view, again we can see limitations, shadows, all kinds. There can be just the attachment to a certain limited view of the senses, a certain limited logos, attachment to the flatland view, a narrowness to perception, of experiences, of ideation even. And in a way, it seems like the opposite view, but again, it can lead to a lack of care for the world, because we're just refusing any beyondness, any divinity to the world. So although it's kind of within the humanistic, modernist humanist secularist paradigm to care for human beings, etc., and care for the planet because environmental degradation will affect human beings adversely, it's hard to get a really deep care for the world if the world is just meaningless matter. These are possible shadows. And of course there may well be a limit to (A) the depth of freedom, but also (B) the range of soulmaking there. Why? Because the actual sense of the world is very limited.

And in the third possible direction, if you like, or stance, or inclination, the drawback or the thing to watch out for there is just that it demands a lot from us, that kind of view. I'll go into this more. I'll just say, you know, if we're really going to open to body and soul and sexuality and eros as a field of divinity, and the world and all that, it demands a lot of rigour, I think, intellectually, ethically, practice, in terms of the artistry of practice, a lot of integrity, a lot of clarity -- all that. And it's easy to use a certain language and actually not really be so scrupulous in those areas intellectually, ethically, meditatively, etc.

So three kind of directions, without making too much or too strict kind of lines between them. But you can see this reflected in history as well, these three directions in history. Robert Bellah is a kind of historian of religion. He's also a sociologist or something, perhaps an anthropologist; I'm not sure. He talks about the history of what he calls 'world rejection.' So this, again, like, what's the relationship of the religious movement, if you like -- how does it hold the world? How does it view the world? What's the movement in relation to and with respect to the world? He investigates the history of world rejection. And he's a big fan of Max Weber, so he acknowledges that Max Weber pointed out that the kinds of world rejection that have existed have manifested in different world religions over historical periods. You can't just lump them all together. There's quite a range there. But having acknowledged that, he says:

But for the moment I want to concentrate on the fact that they were all [historically, they were all] in some sense rejections, and that world rejection is characteristic of a long and important period of religious history. I want to insist on this fact because I want to contrast it with an equally striking fact, namely the virtual absence of world rejection in [what he calls] primitive religions, in religion prior to the first millennium B.C. [is what he means by that] and in the modern world.^[16]

So in other words, you get historically what he calls 'primitive religions,' before the first millennium BC -- so that's before the time of the Buddha -- that had a virtual absence of world rejection. Then you get this middle period where world rejection is really quite marked in different ways. And then you get the modern period where again there is a virtual absence of world rejection.

Primitive religions [he continues] are on the whole oriented to a single cosmos [there is no beyond]; they know nothing of a wholly different world relative to which the actual world is devoid of value. They are concerned with the maintenance of personal, social, and cosmic harmony [etc.] But the overriding goal of salvation that dominates the world rejecting religions is almost absent in primitive religion.

In other words, this idea that salvation, freedom, liberation, awakening, nibbāna or something has something to do with getting beyond the world, that's not there in primitive religion. There's not this transcendence there.

Then he continues:

World rejection is no more characteristic of the modern world than it is of primitive religion.

This is interesting, I think, in terms of what's popular in the culture, what we're influenced by, and then how we read backwards into the Pali Canon, etc., and how we orient ourselves in our lives. This is really what I want to explore in more detail -- the relationships with these directions, what I'm calling the transcendent, the sort of existentialist flatland that refuses transcendence and, if you like, the immanence (which may include a transcendence, but actually insists on a divinity, some kind of divinity in the world, in life, in matter, in form and the senses). So how does soulmaking work in these three directions and inclinations? How does the eros work there? Where does it go? And as I said at the beginning, what is the movement of eros on the path or for the path, and for awakening, if the path and awakening are construed differently in these ways?