In Love with the Way: Images of Path and of Self

Often, it seems to me, I feel like there's so much to say, so many angles of exploration, angles of perspectives or avenues to open up, directions to explore, make available, dimensions and openings, aspects, pieces of a jigsaw, pieces of a larger picture that feel to me, seem to me, to be potentially at least quite significant, that they might be very helpful for different people at different stages in their own explorations and considerations. And there seems to me, as I said, often to be so much to try and communicate with all that that I find myself hurrying through pieces that I would do better not to hurry through.

And I think sometimes listening to new material, or listening especially when something is communicated in a hurried way because I'm trying to get on to the next thing, it's not easy for the listener or for someone hearing all that to actually discern what might be significant. So something might be a really potentially significant opening or avenue of exploration or piece to consider and, because of this hurrying, or just because it's new, it's not always obvious what's significant. It's not always obvious where something that is presented fits in a kind of hierarchy of significance, of important ideas, of potential openings, etc. So I apologize for that tendency I have sometimes. But I'd like to kind of redress it a little bit, and take a bit more time to explain something that we talked about the other day, and to explore it more, and actually really to invite you to explore it in some way.

So we were talking about eros, eros for the path, eros for awakening, for, if you like, the goal. What is it to have an erotic relationship with the path and with that movement, if you like, towards awakening? What, to me, what's involved in that? What does it mean to have an erotic relationship? Are we, are you, in love with the path? Are you in love with practising? Is there a sense of beauty, beauties there? Is there a sense of the richness of dimensionality of the path itself and of yourself on the path? Is there a sense, is there enough of a sense of a beyond, a more, a more to discover, a more to open to, a more to realize, that allows the eros there?

And is there enough richness and authenticity and power and fertility to the fantasies and images of the path and awakening (a kind of 'other' there, the path and awakening), also of the self, and also of the eros? As we said, these fantasies of other, self, and eros, in this case of path and awakening, self and eros, will constellate together. They will be pieces of a larger imaginal constellation where there is eros, where we love, where something is deeply alive for us in that way. And also wrapped up in that, and often with fantasies, is some relationship with past and future, in this case with tradition. What's the relationship of the path as I sense it, as I vision it, the path and awakening, myself on that path? What are the images of all this, the image of my love, the image of my desire on the path, my love for the path, and the image of the tradition that, if you like, goes with that path or that hands us the path?

So all these aspects will be involved in a really fertilely rich erotic relationship with the path and with the movement towards awakening. And it's particularly this aspect of the fantasy and image of path and awakening, of self and of the desire and of the tradition, particularly the fantasies of the path, that I want to explain a little bit more about and explore with you and invite you to explore, as I said. For most of us, the usual presentation of the teachings and of the path -- and this doesn't go just for a Buddhist context, but the usual presentation in a lot of spiritual contexts (not all, but a lot) -- the usual presentation is as a movement to end or at least reduce suffering, and with that, to replicate if not the Buddha's awakening, at least some of the Saṅgha of old, the enlightened ones, the arahants, etc., of the past. So one's essentially rediscovering for oneself or following the instructions of what some sage or mystic in the past discovered for themselves and offered teachings and a map, etc., and one is essentially seeking to kind of replicate that awakening. So the awakening is something that's reconstituted, if you like, or sought from the past, from what was given to us -- someone else's awakening, if you like, that we're reconstituting.

That's not necessarily only Buddhists; we could be in all kinds of paths trying to, in a sense, on a path, trying to reconstitute the kind of awakening that we get the sense, for instance, Ramana Maharshi seemed to have discovered, or Nisargadatta Maharaj, or Krishnamurti. Or it might be put in a secular Buddhist context. So it might be Advaita, Indian this or that or whatever, Buddhist, traditional Buddhist -- secular Buddhists, it's also just got a certain vision, a certain idea of what it means to end suffering, and a certain movement to replicate the Buddha's awakening. And even if it's just something of a path that's just about mindfulness, and we're kind of seeing that as somehow the way to end or reduce suffering, and we're replicating that way from whatever we conceive of the tradition there, whether it's Buddhist or not.

There's the ending or reducing of suffering, and the replication of someone else's past awakening, or something close to that to which they seem to be pointing and trying to articulate in language or in their being. But usually those aspects there of the presentation are not recognized as fantasy. They're just presented as, "This is what we're doing." It's often not quite stated so boldly that we're trying to replicate something, but that's the two principal thrusts. I'll come back to the fantasy aspect of those. But that's the usual presentation that most of us, whether you're in the Gaia House tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition, or the Buddhist tradition, or the neo-Advaita, or whatever else it is. I've forgotten the names. But it's a similar kind of presentation, a similar kind of fantasy of the path, double fantasy of the path there.

And these two, when we talked about this before, and I said I felt like I hurried through it and wasn't so clear, these two strands of that presentation, we could say one strand is what we might call the medical patient fantasy. I was calling it the medical model. Let's call it the medical patient fantasy. So in the Buddha's time, the physicians, the doctors of his day, would present their medical sort of assessment in a kind of formula: diagnosis of what is this disease, what has the patient got; what is the cause of this disease, why do they have this disease; possible prognosis if the full course of medication is taken; and then the medication, the prescription, the main prescription and what else is involved.

So that's actually, if you can hear it already, that's the presentation of the Four Noble Truths. They're given, they're modelled, on a medical formula. And so we, so to speak, are to follow the doctor Buddha's, the physician Buddha's orders there. What's the diagnosis? There is suffering. What's the cause? Well, the patient is craving because they have avijjā (so let's say craving and avijjā, what we were calling 'clinging'). The prognosis, if the patient will take the full course of medication -- meditation and surrounding activities -- they can see a complete cure. They can realize a complete cure of this disease: the end of suffering. And the prescription for that is the eightfold path.

So as good patients, the Buddha has diagnosed us, and given us a prescription and possible prognosis and all of that, and we're to follow the Buddha's orders there. And if we do so, we can end suffering, or at least reduce it to the extent that we really are able to take fully on board his recommended prescriptions. Now, why am I calling that a fantasy? I'm rather drawing attention to there are fantasy elements inextricably woven up with that, as there are with actually all perception, or most perception, or a lot of our perception, certainly, when we're involved with something, when we love something. Partly this is fantasy because it gets enriched through the eros and through all kinds of ways that it's filled out and becomes meaningful and beautiful to us and that we really care about it. Partly also it's fantasy because -- and as I've addressed in a few talks in the past -- what does 'suffering' mean? It sounds like just an obvious thing, that we're all talking about the same thing. But what actually do we mean by dukkha, the Buddha's word for suffering, that's usually translated as suffering? And what does freedom from suffering mean?

So we could have a vision of the path as just coping with a lot of the sort of more obvious difficulties, stresses and strains and unpredictabilities and fragilities of our life, and something like mindfulness, continuous mindfulness, allows us to meet again and again and again, and just keep meeting the sort of incessant stream of the next thing that life throws at us, and kind of cope with it by meeting it in this way that reduces suffering. So there's a kind of minimal, if you like, sense of what suffering is and what freedom from suffering is possible, what those two -- the first and the third truths -- are really referring to. One minimal way is a kind of coping through mindfulness. It's actually extracting more just one term of the eightfold path. But it's also kind of acknowledging that some dimensions of existence are just really hard: "This is our existential situation. It's brutal. It's meaningless," etc. And there's a kind of, "We can do our best to sort of bear up to that and cope with it by meeting it without too much demand or expectation, by going with the flow, by bringing bare attention or mindfulness, not superimposing religious ideas or all that kind of thing, or hopes." That's one kind of fantasy, as already you can hear is wrapped up in that.

Another way is just around the whole healing paradigm. So a healing of body, of energy system, of our psyche, a kind of psychotherapeutic meditation, healing the wounds of the past, healing the ways our personality has got twisted from events or situations or just pressures, long-term pressures of the family or whatever it is, history in the past. The fantasy that's now quite a rich fantasy in the culture, the kind of psychotherapeutic or typical psychotherapeutic fantasy -- of which there are actually many, but -- the path becomes really about that. And in that kind of picture, what does suffering mean? What does it really refer to? And what's freedom from suffering? What does it look like, and what tone does it have, etc.?

And even somewhere like Gaia House, if you listen to enough teachers over the years, you really get the sense that what people are talking about or pointing to or holding up as a possibility, or the only possibility of a goal for practice, is really quite divergent, of what suffering means and what freedom from suffering means and looks like and what its range is. There's actually a huge range in the interpretation or the presentation of that range, of that Third Noble Truth, but by implication of the First Noble Truth as well. So there are teachers at Gaia House and elsewhere who say, "I do not suffer. I do not suffer." And, you know, quite the other end as well. I've said in the past, in a way, the Four Noble Truths, this teaching about suffering and freedom from suffering, is more like a skeleton. It's more like, to borrow the Buddha's image, fleshless bones, to borrow the Buddha's image in relation to senses that we talked about.^[1] The Four Noble Truths are like fleshless bones, in a way. What do they mean for us? What do we make them mean? We need to flesh them out. We share vocabulary, but it's just like a skeleton. Within that shared vocabulary, of course it can sound like we're all talking about the same thing, but it might be that for the most part all we have in common is that vocabulary and the kind of reference of belonging to a certain tradition.

But that fleshing out, that filling up of the skeleton happens how? With psyche and logos, with image and fantasy, and with ideation, with concept. What are we referring to? How does it work? How does it look like? What does an awakened person do? What do they look like? How are we on this path? Where are we moving to? What's it going to be like? What is it like now? What are the pressing issues that I feel are to be faced, to be opened to, to be explored now?

So there's this medical patient fantasy, as we said, that's part of the usual presentation. And there's also, I would say, a religious fantasy wrapped up in the usual presentation as well, again, whether it's Buddhist, whether it's some other spiritual tradition. I'm trying to remember a name; I just can't remember... The Power of Now guy. Sorry, can't remember, but anyway. It's still presented that way: freedom from suffering, and you're replicating something that he or she is pointing to in different ways, usually in a certain style of linguistic communication. And the styles can differ hugely, as much as the fantasy of what it looks like and what it involves.

Why I'm calling it 'religious' is because -- one of the things we could say, or one way we could use that word, 'religious,' is in the sense of religio. Ligio is from the Latin, like 'ligament' or 'legislation,' something that binds. So it's binding us (re, 'again'), to re-bind us to something. In other words, to bind us to something from the past. Whether you accept that etymology or not is kind of irrelevant. But there is something about religions, as far as I can see, for the most part, in that they place their authority in the past. The authority is in the past. We've touched on this a little bit on this retreat, and I've certainly touched on it in other retreats. So you can hear that in replicating the Buddha or whoever it is, Nisargadatta or Ramana Maharshi or Krishnamurti, and replicating that kind of -- the sense that we get of the awakening that they're trying to communicate, and our somehow trying to replicate it, even if we're not thinking in terms of replication, that that's actually what's happening there.

That kind of movement of replication and the authority in the past, even if this person is still alive, it's their past awakening that we're referring to. They say, "On such-and-such day or whenever, this happened, and now I'm like this," and we say, "Wow, that's amazing," and we try and replicate that. So I'm placing the burden of the meaning of the word 'religious' in 'religious fantasy' for now not necessarily with respect to the subject matter, but with respect to this kind of fantasy of having the authority in the past. Some people say, "No, religious has to do with believing in some kind of metaphysics or metaphysical beyond or transcendent, or you believe in life after death, or you believe in God or divinity or that kind of thing." Yeah, you could say something like that if you want. I think just for now, flexibility of how we're using words, what I want to point to is not so much that but the fantasy about the style, the style of fantasizing self on the path. That's what I'm talking about in these four kind of fantasies that I've offered already, that I'm just elaborating a bit more. The fantasies or the style of fantasizing the self and the path, and the self on the path.

So there's something, as I said, replicatory here with the authority in the past. Now, the path or our vision of the path may involve a kind of felt promise of this 'more' or 'beyond' which we can discover regarding how we perceive self, other, and the world. In other words, the perception of things -- our sense of the path might include this promise of something beyond what I already know. It could be just a little bit beyond, not that different; it could be something massively beyond, radically different opening up in the perception there of self, other, world. And it could be that that sense of what's radically different is an obviously (quote) 'religious' difference in the way some people use that word. But that actually could be present, that beyondness, in any of these four fantasies. And it could also have the kind of religious flavour of beyondness or transcendence, etc., that's opened up in the perception. But that's not the key thing I'm pointing to, because it could be in any of these four.

But as I said, the two sort of interwoven strands of fantasy in the usual presentation of the path or the usual way that most people tend to consciously (or, for the most part, consciously) fantasize their path is the medical patient fantasy and what I'm calling the religious fantasy. Compare that, either of those or both of those, with what I was calling the third possibility -- I've changed the order here, by the way, but let's call it now the third possibility -- of the scientific researcher fantasy. In contrast to putting the authority in the past, science also looks to the future and anticipates, in its very assumptions and in its very project, anticipates making new discoveries in the future that it does not know today and that were not known in the past.

So yes, it uses the past, but it's quite prepared to make radical breaks with the past and throw out anything from the past that no longer works, is either proved wrong or just doesn't serve as part of the most coherent and economical framework or helpful framework for understanding things. In contrast to the religious fantasy that looks to the past, so to speak, in its authority, the science looks also (or, let's say, predominantly) to the future. I think I gave this example a few years ago on a talk. Let's take the scientific study of gravity. We had Galileo and Copernicus making initial -- you know, at the time of the Scientific Revolution, really at the forefront there, and making initial observations and hypotheses about the movement of planets, and separately about gravity with Galileo. And then along came Newton, and sort of synthesized, if you like, Copernicus and Galileo with a theory of gravity, and it was related to the whole new physics that was emerging and the whole new scientific method. It rested on certain assumptions about the scientific method, about reality, about all kinds of things, wrapped up in that theory. He drew on Copernicus, he drew on Galileo, and he drew on a lot of other people as well, but both the scientific methodology and the ideas about planetary motion and gravity.

And then a few hundred years later, along comes Albert Einstein and, in effect, to a certain extent, demolished Newtonian ideas of motion in space and time, and also later, some years later, Einstein did the same with the Newtonian theory of gravity, and replaced them with a whole other theory of gravity that was really quite different in really fundamental respects regarding assuming what was real and the whole structure of the theory and what its implications were, etc. Nowadays, what's kind of at the cutting edge of research in modern physics is having realized that Einstein's general theory of relativity (which is a very successful theory, very beautiful theory) doesn't actually work well with the other main theory of modern physics, quantum theory, the theory that applies to subatomic particles -- or is used in applications with subatomic particles is a better way of putting it.

So in trying to synthesize these, there are various theories proposed. None has been anywhere near proved yet, but for instance there's something called quantum loop gravity and superstring theory, etc. If a scientist were to say -- so I'm a scientist and they say, "Oh, yeah, what are you doing? What are your ideas? What's your research?", etc., and I say, "I believe that Copernicus was right. I'm only interested in Copernicus. Anything beyond Copernicus is a pollution of the tradition. It's not proper science. It's a devolution," etc., this would strike us as, "Mm, I'm not sure about this person! It sounds a little silly. I'm not sure about this person's scientific standing and authority and how they're thinking about things." [laughs] It's only the religious fantasy that puts all the emphasis on the past like that.

So you get this kind of "what the Buddha said." Someone was just telling me the other day, this teacher said, "Oh, this is where Buddhism went wrong. This is where Buddhism lost its way in its going on about the Unfabricated. This came after the Buddha. It was put in by Vedanta people, and the formless jhānas and all the rest of it." And it's like, how strange! What is going on there to have this insistence on what the Buddha said as being the ultimate authority? What's going on there? It's a religious fantasy. A person might be absolutely committed to secularism in the sense of they find exactly that, the idea of an Unfabricated or a transcendent abhorrent, etc., like that, but still there's a religious fantasy. There's a religious secularism there, or secular religiosity or whatever.

Am I aware of the fantasies? How come I've just decided that the Buddha is the ultimate authority? Can I not see that there must be a fantasy going on there? A person might admit, even within that fantasy, "Yes, well, okay, he was a little bit conditioned in certain views by his time and the limitations of the Indian world-view at that time, perhaps around his political views. Could be wrong here, but he didn't seem to speak up much against slavery or against the practice of owning slaves, or his attitude towards ordaining nuns seems a little dubious, etc., but still, apart from that, those kind of slightly minor details, he is the fundamental authority, and we are trying to replicate something. We're trying to find what he really said, assume he's the ultimate authority, and somehow replicate that."

The scientific researcher does rely on the past, uses the past, but may jettison or shatter models of truth from the past, assumptions about reality, directions of investigation, all kinds of things, as we said with Einstein and Newton. And I think I mentioned this the other day, that the scientific researcher fantasy, it may be an open-ended fantasy. If you talk to some scientists, some of the scientists would say, "We'll never fully understand everything, everything about the universe completely, there's nothing more to understand." It's open-ended in that sense. Or it may not. You talk to other scientists, and they actually think there will be a time when we've pretty much figured everything out. Slightly comically -- I've forgotten the name; there was an English physicist who said exactly those words just a few years before both the quantum revolution and the revolution of Einstein's theories of relativity, which threw everything into disarray and just showed how much more there was to understand, etc.

But there is, as I said, whether it's open-ended or not in the fantasy, there is this openness and interest in the new, and intentionality towards discovering new, new discoveries. The emphasis is towards new discoveries in research science. And again, relating that to what that means in terms of, let's say, Buddhism or whatever, the newness here is not so much presenting old teachings in slightly adapted ways to new groups of the population, new demographics or whatever. But really the possibility here is of really different understandings, really different insights. So I remember when I first used this idea of the researcher fantasy, and I just tossed it out a little playfully when I was talking about "The Beauty of Desire," in the talk Part 2.^[2] And partly what was so interesting to me about that and so sort of striking there in the material in that talk was this shouldn't happen. I felt like I discovered -- I'm not saying other people hadn't discovered it, but for me, I had not seen it before; I don't know if other people had discovered it or not. This shouldn't happen. According to the teachings as I understand them, of the Buddha and the Pali Canon, that shouldn't happen. Desire, wanting, unless it's very specific, in certain specific directions, basically brings suffering. And if you find that actually no, you can go deeper into that desire and hold it in a certain way (as we're going to talk about on this retreat too), and it actually does not bring suffering -- it actually brings joy and fullness and abundance and all that, abundance of being -- well, that shouldn't happen. So that's really interesting. That's like Max Planck at the start of the quantum revolution presenting his findings in the laboratory, and he really didn't want to present them, because he knew this contradicts everything that we think about radiation, black-body radiation and how radiation is emitted by hot bodies. It's like, "I don't want to share this. But something is really up here."

He did anyway, thankfully, but he felt very ambivalent about that. He knew something was up. So this is really what I'm talking about by the researcher fantasy. It's like, things that don't fit, areas that don't fit, directions, insights, openings that actually move into new territory, new insights, etc. And again, in terms of comparing these different fantasies that we're sort of outlining here, one may be a researcher into mystical states, for example. One may be a researcher into insights and approaches that some people would deem religious or spiritual or whatever. But the fantasy of the movement, the fantasy of the self's way of engaging, how it sees itself, how it images itself in that movement in relation to a path and the path that it's on, is one of what I'm calling the scientific researcher, the person who can discover, make new discoveries.

So these four fantasies (we'll come to the fourth one shortly), they overlap. I think I mentioned this the other day. It's a matter of emphasis and what's dominant for you, for me, what's dominant at different times. Do we have flexibility with them? Or am I just stuck? "I can only look this way, I can only fantasize this way." Is there flexibility?

And the fourth is what we were calling the artist fantasy. And this is also quite different. So you might ask, what is art for? Is it for the end of suffering? I mean, some art is clearly politically motivated art with a message or this or that. Not necessarily. And even the scientific researcher fantasy may not be for the end of suffering or even the reduction of suffering. Might just be an interest in mystical states, an interest in consciousness, an interest in experience, an interest in dependent arising that's not motivated so much by wanting to end suffering.

What's art for? Who can answer that question? Who is to say what art is for? Is the impulse for art so deep in the human being -- in humanity, let's say, because it's not in some people, obviously, but -- in humanity that it can't be contained by a certain statement of purpose? What, too, we might ask, is the artist's relationship with tradition? So most artists, at least most artists that one would take seriously, let's say, again, if an artist says -- let's say a painter -- "I only paint like Michelangelo. Anything after Michelangelo is rubbish, and I'm trying to just replicate Michelangelo's -- maybe not his exact paintings, but maybe even his exact paintings -- replicate Michelangelo's style." That's, you know, a person's free to say that, of course, but it's a little -- it sounds limiting. If an artist said that, it would sound quite a limited view.

On the other hand, an artist is probably not going to be ignorant of, say, the tradition of painting, if they're a painter, of Michelangelo, and what came after, and the impressionists, and Cézanne, Picasso, etc., abstract expressionists, whatever. There's going to be, maybe in the training, a learning to replicate the tradition, and maybe a dialogue with the tradition, maybe a fighting of the tradition, maybe a trashing of the tradition. But if an artist was either ignorant of the tradition or only wanted to paint like, let's say, Michelangelo, we would be a little dubious about what their depth or capacity or power or fertility as an artist was, is.

So what is it, or what might it be, to have a fantasy of self and path that we might call artistic? We can leave that question fairly open for now. If I remember correctly, I think it was in the talk called "In Praise of Restlessness"^[3] some years ago where I first discussed or broached this possibility of a radically different conception of the path and of the self on that path, a vision, a fantasy of the path as art and the practitioner as artist in, as I said, quite a radically different way than just the sense of a matter of technique. And in the two talks that came before that in a three-part series, "Questioning Awakening"^[4] and "Buddhism Beyond Modernism,"^[5] tried to poke holes or expose gaps in the cages and the constructions of belief and view that prevent such a vision of the path, such a fantasy of the path. So there's, if you like, providing the groundwork for such a fantasy, actually elbowing the room for that kind of fantasy as a possibility. And certainly in the -- if I remember -- last retreat, the Re-enchanting the Cosmos: The Poetry of Perception, and talking about "The Art of Perception"^[6] and all that, again, trying to support this possibility of that kind of fantasy.

Maybe just to point out one extra thing about the artist fantasy. And you can see how a lot of this is not so simple as it might at first sound. In a way, the fantasy of the artist has another further level to it where one, or the artist, if you like, whether it's the artist as Dharma practitioner, soulmaker, or artist as painter or sculptor or whatever it is, musician, senses or imagines that their discoveries and creations are participations, are participating in, if you like, the divine creation, the divine creativity, the art of the divine, of the Buddha-nature, of God, of the daimons, etc. And our discoveries, creations, their discoveries and creations, are participating in that divine movement, divine outpouring, divine discovery and creation of new logos, etc. So there's this kind of whole other level of a deeper sense, if you like, of participation, that the art that one is involved in in one's life is actually a participation in the divine art. I mean more by that sense and by that fantasy than just saying the sense, as people often report, "I was just going with the flow," or "I just got out of the way, and the art, the poem just wrote itself," or "The painting just painted itself," etc. This vision that I'm talking about, it may involve a lot of struggling, a lot of sketching, working out, trial and error, thinking, planning -- it's not to be mistaken for the sort of "just let it all flow and try not to think" sort of idea of things.

Now, you could also have that sense of a deeper level of participation in the divine -- that one's artistic process, one's discoveries and creations as part of the art, are participating in the divine creation and art -- one could also have something similar with the researcher fantasy, that the creations and discoveries of new observations but also new ideas, new logos, new frameworks, new conceptions of things, that this also could be sensed, seen, felt, fantasied as participating in the sort of, if you like, becoming of God, the evolution of the divine, the Buddha-nature, etc. So just pointing out a whole other level of possibility here in some of these fantasies.

And in a way, that makes me want to reiterate this point that there's a lot of overlap between these fantasies. That idea of another level of participation could be in the artist fantasy. Could also be in the researcher fantasy, etc. Could stretch it perhaps involved in the other two that we talked about. But again, to stress that these four fantasies that I'm laying out, you know, like we talked about, delineations, they can seem neat and separate, and we make it sound that way, but actually they overlap. And they're not exhaustive. So there might, again, there might be other -- quite possibly there are many other fantasies, etc., possible here for the way we vision and imagine ourselves on the path, and the path, and what awakening is, and the goal, and the tradition, etc.

In a way, in terms of their overlapping, it's partly dependent on the degree of scope and the permission we give ourselves for each fantasy. So, for example, the researcher fantasy -- if I feel like, okay, that fantasy is around, the question is what's the scope of the research that's allowed, that I am given permission to inquire into and research and question and carry out my investigations? With each of these fantasies, you know, how much they overlap with others partly has to do with that, the scope and permission. So, for example, you hear me teach and perhaps other teachers really emphasizing play, experiment, find out, try things different ways, have the permission to play and experiment, be creative.

And so one might bring that to bear on, let's say, you have a certain emotion that's difficult one day, and you're playing and experimenting with, for example, the kinds of attention that you bring to bear on the experience of that emotion. Am I going to laser-beam it right now with a sort of very microscopic, intense, intensely energized attention? Am I going to hold it in a kind of very soft, more spacious attention? Am I going to let the attention just touch it like a feather, very, very delicately, very softly? And in the moment, one is experimenting with that kind of attention, and the question is, which is the most helpful way of being with this right now? I don't know. I'm going to experiment.

So in a way, that form of experimenting is the researcher right then. But it's quite limited, because you can already hear that that experimenting and research is nestled within the medical patient fantasy, with what's going to reduce suffering. Which is fine; there's no problem with that. But it might be that, again, the scope and permission of how much I am allowed the fantasy of a researcher, the self-view, the self-image of a researcher, is actually quite limited, so that other things might in fact be happening at times in my practice, but I don't dare to pick up on their ramifications or question them, etc.

And it's complex, because one might feel that, "Well, you know, I'm still developing my chops, as they say in the music world. I'm still developing my understanding. I'm still developing my capacity to do these basic things, like play with the kinds of attention I give difficult emotions, play with the energy body, learn different emptiness practices, find my way around the imaginal and all this new language, etc.," so quite rightly, one doesn't start researching a full depth until one has had a certain amount of training, etc., and also, you know, perhaps the table is a little cleared in terms of one's not too overcome with other difficulties, etc. So there's a place for all this. But sometimes we just do not give ourselves permission to expand the scope of, let's say, the researcher fantasy, to dare to question. And then we may not even notice certain things that are perhaps worth questioning or might open up a whole new area of investigation, some new discoveries, etc., just because we haven't given ourselves -- haven't given that self-image, that self-fantasy and the relationship with the path and awakening, we haven't given it enough permission or scope.

So there's overlap. They're not exhaustive. And also, to reiterate: all four of these that I'm laying out are valid. They're all lovely and wonderful. I'm not wanting to imply any kind of hierarchy: "First you do this, and then you move to that, but if you're really, really good then you have this one." The question is what is, if you like, authentic to you? What way of fantasizing self, path, awakening, and tradition is authentic to you? And you know, that's a different question than just like, "Oh, the artist," or whatever, "that sounds pretty cool. I think I'll go for that one," because it sounds more interesting or rarer or whatever. We're asking what's authentic to you, and that's not necessarily an easy question. I'll come back to that in a second.

We can also point out (something I alluded to a few moments ago) that we can be so used to a certain mode of relating to and seeing and fantasizing self on the path, in relationship to the goal -- for example, the medical patient fantasy or the religious fantasy -- so used to a certain fantasy that actually very quickly any venturing out or opening up to another fantasy quickly gets sort of shrunk back down and put in the box of the habitual fantasy again. For example, maybe I see that I've been in the religious fantasy, and I've got this idea of trying to kind of duplicate or discover for myself this awakening that I hear this and that teacher talk about, and they talk about maybe different levels, and I wonder where am I, etc., and what happens is that fantasy easily, as I said, squeezes into a kind of ego-measurement. And then maybe I hear about these different ways of fantasizing self and the path and awakening, and I let go of that whole religious fantasy model and moving towards some awakening, which someone else is talking about, that's supposed to be fantastic, etc. I just kind of let go of that. And when I let go, out of the confines of that religious fantasy and everything that it seems to imply, all the baggage that it brings with it, when I let go, I realize, "Oh, that's better. I feel I can breathe now," and there's the letting go of that whole structure of self-measurement, etc.

Lo and behold, with that, there's less suffering. I feel unburdened of a kind of suffering, because there's less of this ego-measurement: "Where am I? Am I there yet? Why am I not there yet? Why do other people seem to have got it and I don't seem to have got it?", etc., or "I'm going too slowly," or whatever it is. I let go, there's less suffering, and then very quickly I relate to the whole idea that we're talking about with different fantasies back in the frame of like, "Oh, it's good. So when I let go of that one, I have less suffering. So which of these will bring less suffering?" Right there, I'm back in the medical patient fantasy. I'm thinking in terms of less suffering. There's nothing wrong with that; it's perfectly valid. It's just the question is, (A) is it conscious, and (B) is it authentic? Is it, if you like, the most soulmaking? What are we actually steering towards, and what's possible here? Because in what I just described, I've just found my way, probably not that consciously even, back into the medical patient fantasy with the logos, with the view and conception of "it's about less suffering, and that's what matters most."

So it's tricky, all this. I'd love to sort of just say something, and here are these four, and it's very simple, and it's very cut and dried, hey presto. But you can just see how much things overlap, there are other possibilities, [and] it's really not that simple. When Jung introduced the idea of the archetypes in his kind of way of thinking about things, people often don't realize this, but he insisted on you don't ever get a kind of pure archetype. Archetypes, if you like, they're -- what was his word? -- his word was contamination; they're always contaminated, they're always mixed was really his word, with other archetypes. You never get a single archetype on its own. Again, here, you never get a single fantasy on its own. It's variable, it fluctuates, it depends on how we're relating, it moves in time, it moves depending on all kinds of conditions, and they're mixed. You have multiple things going on at the same time, multiple fantasies, even, going on at the same time in different kind of mixtures and emphases.

And then this word, 'authentic,' is also kind of a not-so-simple word. When I say it's important which fantasy, or what fantasy, better, what fantasy -- because it might not be just these four; it might be something outside of these four -- which is authentic to you, now, that could mean which is the fantasy of the path that's kind of given to or for your soul, so to speak. What are you called to? What is the impression, the fantasy, that is summoning you, if you like? Putting the question that way implies already a certain fantasy and a certain concept or logos of autonomy, as if the soul has a certain calling, in a certain direction, has a certain archetypal influence, etc., that's kind of given to us and waiting to be discovered, and either we're authentic to that or we're not; we're in it or out of it, or we're in it to a certain extent, or in some situations and not others, more or less. I'm not saying it's a bad [idea]. I think it's a very powerful idea. But contrast that with the possibility that I would somehow like to hold as well that we can experiment and try different fantasies. In this case, we can try different fantasies of the self on the path, and fantasies of the path, and of awakening, and of the self in relation to tradition. We can experiment. We can create our own or discover/create, as we said before, new fantasies for ourselves, try on different ones, and see which is the most soulmaking, so to speak.

So this word, 'authentic,' might replace, "Which is the most soulmaking?", which we can either kind of feel into and sense what's calling us, or we can play with things, experiment and find out and try different ones on. I would like to hold both of those fantasies of the approach to soulmaking in relationship to these fantasies. I would like to keep both of them open. But however we relate to that movement and that question, as I said, we need fantasy. We need a fantasy of the path. For there to be eros, we need fantasy. And if we love the path, and if we love a practice and everything that's involved in that, or a lot of what's involved in that, if there is love, where there is love, there's fantasy. There's a fantasy operating. Yeah? To be in love with the path and to have an erotic relationship with path, we need fantasy. We need rich, fecund, beautiful fantasy operating.

So this is, as I said, I wish, I just wish I could come and just say something simple and that would be that, but you start to go into things more, and you start to realize it's not so simple. It's not so simple. So just drawing attention to some of the complexity of what we're presenting here, without (hopefully) overburdening it with so much complexity that it becomes just utterly confusing and a kind of thicket. But to pretend that it's so simple would also not be very helpful, because very soon you would discover, as you experimented and inquired into these ideas, that actually it's not so simple.

And can you also hear that there are many levels of this idea of participation involved in what we're talking about? Many levels. This idea, for me, it was a very profound idea of the idea of participation, participating in the divine, if you like, participating in the Buddha-nature, however you want to put it. So in this case, we participate in the creation, in the creating of what awakening is. We participate in the creating, or creating/discovering, of what awakening is. Which is a different idea than there is something called awakening, sort of there and waiting as a possibility, and you either have it or don't have it, are it or are not awakened, or you're at a certain stage of awakening, you're at the second stage or whatever. That's the usual notion. A different, a radically different notion: we participate in the very creation of what awakening is and can be.

Usually when we hear something like that, we tend to think, well, if I'm creating it, it must be worthless. It's not real. The only real, the only worthwhile thing, or worthy thing, is something that exists independent of my creation of it. Don't know -- can you get a sense of a whole kind of other level of ideation here? To me, a whole other level of beauty of an idea or profundity of an idea, that we actually participate in the creation, and possibly the delineation, etc., of what awakening is.

So going back to these four possible fantasies, what I really want to do is just open up, if you like, a basic notion here, a very basic notion about fantasy with respect to the path, and with respect to awakening, and the fantasies of the self on the path to awakening, and in relationship to tradition. Just that as a really basic notion, and just kind of waking up to that fact, if you like, that we fantasize in relation to all that, and that it's not a bad thing -- it's an important thing. So to understand this, understand what other possibilities might be there, and, if you like, I would like to somehow stimulate your inquiry into all this. And that's important to me. I said at the beginning of this talk, you know, to me this is actually very significant, or potentially it's extremely significant, what we're talking about, this fantasy of the self, how we fantasize the self on the path to awakening, all that constellation of fantasy there.

It's potentially extremely significant and far-reaching. But it's only potentially significant. If we don't kind of find our way into those ideas and those fantasies and have something move there, if we don't work this material and this inquiry for ourselves, then the significance and the ramifications of it, the effects of it, only remain potential. They don't actualize. So I wonder if it's possible for me to throw out some lines of inquiry for you to ponder, to take away, to take into your heart and soul, and let them do their work, or work on them, on the cushion, away from the cushion, in your life. Hopefully we can plant some seeds here.

So let's see how this is going to work. If I say there are four big questions, four big sort of lines of inquiry -- that's better -- threads of inquiry, if we say it like that. The first one has actually lots of parts to it, or elements to it. So it's quite rich. I think this is all quite rich, in fact. Let me just offer these threads of inquiry, and of course you may find your own threads of inquiry. That's part of the whole creativity of this process, isn't it? That's part of the, in fact, the fantasies that we're talking about, some of the fantasies that we're talking about.

In a way, what's necessary for all this is -- and this is the first kind of level of inquiry, the (1) first strand of inquiry -- do I, do you, recognize where and when there is a fantasy operating and alive of the self, of the path, the self on the path towards awakening, and tradition? So a whole fantasy constellation of self, path, awakening, and tradition. Do you recognize where and when that is alive and fertile and inspiring and informing and motivating and doing its soul-work? Do you recognize, in contrast, where what is dominant, where and when what is dominant, is more of an ego-measuring relationship with the constellation of self, path, awakening, and tradition? When is it fantasy and soulmaking and fertile, and when is it more an ego-measuring that has got the upper hand? And where is it none -- there's just neither a fantasy nor a particularly ego-measurement lens going on? It's just nothing much going on. So the first, if you like, place of entry is just: am I even aware of the difference? Can I tell the difference? What does that require? What kind of looking? Fantasies can be subtle, and the kind of fantasies that I'm talking about are indeed very, very subtle. Not always, but often. Perhaps it's best if they are quite subtle. They function as kind of background colourers and inspirers and givers of beauty.

So they can be quite subtle, which makes them sometimes difficult to notice. But as I said, where there's love, where there's eros, it implies fantasy. And sometimes what's happened is because of the ego-measurement coming in, a fantasy has just been squashed, perhaps temporarily, perhaps in a certain area. It's just been squashed. Or there's a certain area of practice or direction or whatever where fantasy has not yet arisen, okay? So that's the first kind of, if you like, platform or stage, is just: can I recognize where and when there's fantasy, in contrast to where and when there's ego-measurement, and where and when there's nothing at all, neither?

To nuance that a little bit, it might also be that in looking back over your years of practice and involvement in Dharma or other spiritual practices or whatever, you recognize that there are different periods, that at different periods in your history of practice or different periods in your life, the fantasies that were dominant, let's say, or operating, the fantasies that were in play -- that's a good way of putting it, the fantasies that were in play -- were different at different times, for all different reasons. So it might be that in kind of reflecting on all this or feeling into it or seeing if you can notice the colours and effects of fantasy and the influences of that or their absences, that they're markedly different at different periods and stages in your practice and in your life.

Okay. Let's add a couple more strands to this inquiry. Let's introduce one more element of our constellation of self, path, awakening, and tradition, and that is fantasies of others, images and fantasies of others. So, for example, the Buddha. We could say that's to do with tradition. Or other teachers that mean a lot to us, that we have a heart-connection with, a soul-connection with. So there's fantasy involved there. They may be alive, they may be dead, we may know them only through books, we may know them quite well, etc. But to really recognize, this is important to recognize, that all this, included in the constellation of images and fantasies, in order for it to be fertile, there's going to have to be some fantasy of others -- Buddha, Saṅgha of the past, teachers, Saṅgha of the present, friends, etc., co-farers on the way, fellow farers on the way, etc. Again, this has to be okay. It's part of how the soul works. It's part of how soulmaking works. And, you know, it's immature not to realize it. It's immature to try and get rid of it. To me, what's psychologically mature is to recognize it and allow it its depth and function, recognizing image as image as well.

So including that, but the particular nuance I want to open up right now is not so much that one but actually in relation to different areas of practice. Because it might be that, as I mentioned, different areas or different practices or strands of practices, you actually have quite different fantasies operating in those different directions or domains of practice, different whole fantasy constellation of self, others, path, awakening, and tradition. So if I ask you, in relation to five different areas of practice, or directions, or strands of practice, possible strands of practice, to reflect on what tends to be the kind of dominant fantasy or fantasies in those directions or in those domains. So, for example, the first of these five, we could ask: what do you notice is, for you, the common or dominant fantasy of this constellation (self, other or teacher, or self, other, path, goal, and tradition), in relationship with deep emptiness practice, or deep emptiness practices? That's the first of the five.

How do you tend to, what kind of relationship of view do you tend to get into in relationship to the whole area and direction and domain of deep emptiness practice? Could be some people say, "When I realize deep emptiness, I will end rebirth. I won't be reborn again," etc. Could be that idea is involved. Could be, and probably what may be very common is that when I realize or if I realize deep emptiness, then I will end suffering, I won't suffer any more, or I will at least significantly reduce my suffering. And that would be very understandable if that idea was there. That's part of the fantasy. It's part of the logos and it's part of the fantasy involved. But let's see if we can really open this up and bring in a kind of openness of view and assumption, and also kind of honesty here, and ask, is that -- is ending rebirth, or is ending suffering, or significantly reducing your suffering -- is that what you most want? What you really most want? What you really most love? What you really most care about?

Is that what you feel called to? It may well be. Or it might not be. It might be of some importance, but actually there are other things that are more important. So what I'm really interested in here, again, is this authenticity, and opening up this territory of inquiry. And there might be other elements that come in that are important for you. Perhaps there's something about the tradition, and I love hearing the Heart Sūtra, I love those kind of enigmatic-sounding, mystical quotes that go back thousands of years, and when I'm engaged in emptiness practice or reading about it or hearing about it, I somehow feel connected with that tradition, and it does something. Just to recognize this is part, this is a thread of the fantasy that's alive for me and important.

Or it may be that actually a person just says, "Yeah, well, it's not so much all of that. Not even so much that I really hope to end suffering. I just kind of enjoy it; I enjoy playing in those ways. I enjoy what that whole framework of moving deeper into emptiness and the understanding of that and the practices involved -- I enjoy what it opens up in my perception and my conception and my assumptions. I enjoy the way it supports a kind of liberation of ways of looking, that all these other ways of looking become available, and all these practices, and there's a kind of beauty and art in them." Which fantasy would that be similar to in our framework of four possible fantasies? Or again, it might be that in relation to the whole deep emptiness trajectory, it's just not alive for you yet. Or it might be that it very often gets squashed. There may be a love, there may be a fantasy, but that fantasy often gets squashed into a kind of ego-measurement thing, and it gets too tight, too -- what? Realist? Lacking in soulmaking?

That would be the first one for you to kind of reflect on, ponder, see what comes to you, see if you can feel into. The second area or direction of practice would be imaginal practice. Right away, we can, for me at least, point out a distinction there that, to me, I'm not sure imaginal practice has a goal, has a final arriving point. With emptiness practice, I suppose that -- at least in the way I would think about it -- you can kind of reach a final arriving point. You could kind of say how much of the time am I able to dwell in that realization of emptiness without getting kind of shifted out of it temporarily or to some degree or whatever. But basically, it might be -- one way of conceiving it is just, once one has realized the emptiness of everything, then, you know, tick that box kind of thing; it's done.

Whereas imaginal practice, at least in the way we're conceiving it, it doesn't have a goal. It's characterized by not having -- it's open-ended, as I said in several talks in the past. There's no end to soulmaking. It might be, you know, if you're new to it and these words, "What is it that 'cosmopoesis' means again? And what's the difference between just having an image, using my imagination, and the imaginal?" It might take a little while to get oriented to the kind of logos that we're setting up, and the conceptual framework, and some of the skills in practice, and the sort of technique of that, if you like. But once that's there, it is without a goal.

And then how does that fact that it doesn't have a goal, therefore it doesn't really ... a kind of scale of measurement can't really fit onto it, as much as the ego might like to do that. It won't stick. It's got nothing to grab onto, unlike something like emptiness practice, which can tend to sort of have depths and stages, and even if it's not formulaic you can kind of, in a way, you could measure where one is on that scale of realization. Imaginal practice, I'm not sure that that's at all possible. So second area of practice and the question that goes with it: how do you tend to fantasize that whole constellation -- self, other, path, awakening, tradition -- in relationship to imaginal practice?

Okay, third area we could choose is samādhi and this whole -- traditionally, at least, the Buddha pointed to eight sort of classical stages of jhānas, four form jhānas and four formless jhānas, beautiful exploration and trajectory there. How do you tend to view that? Or you might be stuck in it's just this idea of nailing the mind to one thing, like the sensations of the breath coming in and out of the nostrils or the abdomen or whatever it is, and that's what samādhi means to you. And then how do you, how does the self fantasize itself in relationship to samādhi practice? Partly it depends on what I consider samādhi practice is, of course. But still, I see so much how that shrinks into a kind of ego-measurement thing for people, so much, whether one views it in terms of jhānas or whether one views it just as how focused am I on the breath or whatever it is, how in the moment am I, continuously in the moment, whatever kind of definition one is using of samādhi. But the question, again: can I be aware of what's operating for me there in that constellation -- self, path, goals, tradition, others, with respect to samādhi practice?

Fourth one, with respect to mettā and the brahmavihāras. So a lot of this you might find it's just the same with all of it: "I always tend to do this." But it might actually be quite different in relation to one area of practice and the others. That's why I'm going through these five. Mettā and compassion may be very alive for you. There may be a real beauty of fantasy there, of what you're moving towards and what you're dedicated to, and others who inspire you in that way. Or again, it could be something that's contracted in a kind of ego-measurement and self-judgment: "Oh, I'm such a mean-hearted person. I'm so judgmental," or this or that, "I should be more kind." Or it just doesn't really register for you. "Nyeh, mettā. Never was much interested in that." If it's a fantasy, again, not just saying, "Oh, yeah, there's a fantasy there," but it's like really sensing what the fantasy is, sensing its beauty, sensing its multidimensionality, sensing its fantastical nature and everything that's involved in that. That would be the fourth.

And the fifth, for now at least, what about ethics? That's an interesting one. And the whole domain of ethical practice. I've talked about this in the past some years ago -- I think in the talk "The Necessity of Fantasy" was one place -- but Buddhist ethics at least is predicated and set up for the sake of the reduction of suffering.^[7] Actually primarily for the reduction of one's own suffering. So we may be fantasizing Buddhist ethics and thinking of it or the ethical practices that we do just in terms of the medical patient model. I know one of my teachers would think of it that way. It's like that's what you're doing: you're staying out of trouble, you're making sure your mind is not bothered and hassled by regrets and worries about if I'm going to get found out for saying something, or someone chasing me for this or that. It's not restless and worried about all that.

Or again, it might be with ethics that there's actually a much richer fantasy going on, that something really moves you about perhaps purity and goodness and straightforwardness and openness and transparency. There's something deeply touching and beautiful and calling to the soul about the ethical life, whatever that means and looks like to you. Or it may be that in relationship to ethics, the fantasy of the domain of ethical practice is really as inquiry -- that now, in a globalized world, and with such issues as climate change, etc., and very different political systems, and possibilities for destruction without destruction being consciously intended, say through the environment or consumption or consumerism or whatever it is having global impacts, all kinds of other things, or ethics around sexuality; we live in a different age now. [It may be] that actually what's beautiful to you about ethics is as a domain and an arena of inquiry, and that's the fantasy of the self in relationship to the path of ethics, etc. And that might, again, have certain people that are inspiring to you, a certain sense of what you're moving towards, etc., certain relationship to tradition.

And what often happens, or in contrast what often happens in relation to ethics is one relates to it out of fear: "I better keep these precepts, or I better keep these commandments," or whatever it is in a different tradition, or these laws or whatever, and we just follow authority or what we've been told kind of out of fear. Or again, it might just be actually ethics -- and I think this is the case for quite a few people -- is just not interesting. There's a lot more kind of interesting stuff in Buddhism, and so it's just not an area that the fantasy life has kind of enriched and made fertile and made beautiful. It's just, "Yeah, well, I'll probably keep the five precepts," but it's not really alive imaginally.

So that may help this inquiry into this whole area of fantasizing the self on the path, in relationship to the goal and tradition and others, those five kind of strands of practice. But I'm just offering possibilities for investigation so that you can kind of till this soil and make it fertile in relationship to this whole imaginal dynamic and constellation around self and path. So all that was kind of the first area. It was really about recognizing and inquiring where and when fantasy's operating, where it's more ego-measurement, where there's just nothing operating particularly, different periods, different arenas of practice or directions of practice, etc.

(2) Second possibility of inquiry, to add to that, is could you play with, could you take for a spin, so to speak, a test drive, these four fantasies? Separately, perhaps, at first. And try them on, experiment with them, imagine your way into them. Imagine relating to the path from, say, the researcher fantasy, or whatever it is. Think your way into them. So just as a kind of experiment in creative inquiry, as a way of extending and loosening up the soul and the soulmaking process there. So again, part of why I'm saying all this is, it's so easy for us to get kind of tunnel vision, but also just stuck on a railroad track without the ability to kind of steer ourselves in any direction, experiment and be creative and move things and create more space and more possibility there.

So could you, just in your imagination, or even in actual practice, try on these four fantasies that I've been outlining -- the medical patient, the religious, the researcher, and the artist? Play with them and think about them, and what that would mean, and what it would look like, and what it would feel like, and what it would imply. Yeah? So that might be fun. I think it would probably be informative to do that. Okay.

(3) Third kind of inquiry here is really what we mentioned before -- what fantasy or fantasies work for you? Doesn't have to be one of these four that I've outlined. It could be something else. You come up with your own, or it chooses you, if you like, if we use a certain language, giving soul more intelligence and autonomy. This fantasy chooses you, calls you. Again, this word -- what's authentic to you? What works for you? How do I recognize that? Again, so that presupposes what I said right at the beginning of this outlining the inquiries. Can I even recognize where are fantasies alive and fertile and offering, irrigating the soil, inflaming the soul, giving fire, giving beauty, giving depth, giving richness, stimulus? Can I even recognize that, compared to its absence or compared to the constriction of a more ego-measurement relationship? But what works for you? What's authentic? What's fertile?

And then (4) last sort of question or inquiry is, how do you feel about this idea or possibility of the path being open-ended? We tend to be handed and to receive from the tradition a sense of "the path has an end." We may think, a person might think, "Yeah, but I'm never going to reach that end. Other people can." But it can be possibly quite a different thing to actually view the path itself as potentially open-ended because of the possibilities that we've been talking about. How do you feel in relation to an open-ended path? How does that idea or that possibility affect the possibilities of then how you fantasize self in relation to such a path, and others, and tradition, etc.? So that would be another way in, possibly, to all this.

But I hope that one way or another you can, as I said, work this soil a little bit. It doesn't have to be immediately. But maybe carving out a little time or setting up the intention to till the soil, work the soil, turn it, to bring these questions into the soul or these possibilities into the soul. I really want to open up, as I said -- to me, it's quite a basic notion, really potentially significant. Something to understand here. Something to stretch the soul a little bit through inquiring into it, into this area. Okay?