The World and More: Immanence, Tantra, and Transcendence (Part 2)

Notice, of course, how central is eros in everything that we've talked about in the first part of this talk -- in the tantric symbolism and language, in the Kabbalistic symbology and language, in the relationship with the world of sense experience opening up in the movement towards the transcendent, in the re-enchanting of the world, in the very relationship with the world, all of that. So eros, when it is allowed to do its thing, when it is allowed to inseminate, impregnate, galvanize the soulmaking dynamic, that mutual fertilization of eros-psyche-logos, mutual complication, enrichment, deepening, widening, then it will affect the notion of the path and of awakening, the sense and the vision of what that is, and also the relationship with the senses and sense experience, with the world, with life, and also of course with sexuality.

It's interesting, historically. I'm definitely not a historian, but it's interesting to notice, for example, in Buddhism, the rise of tantra historically, as a historical evolution, after the initial so-called first turning of the wheel in the Pali Canon, and the Buddhist tantra came afterwards. And in Judaism as well, you have Song of Songs, etc., and other allusions earlier in the history of the texts, with the emergence of the Kabbalah in the Middle Ages, and also of Hasidism in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth century and after that, which started as a very radical, mystical kind of ecstatic movement, a real revolution within the stream of Judaism. Orthodox Judaism now, I think, seems to have become something rather more conservative, and really not so radical in that sense. But in Buddhism and in Judaism, there's a gradual emergence or ascent or elevation of eros historically -- also in Islam, I think, with Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi pointing to these kind of things; in Christianity, which maybe we'll come back to, although some people would argue that it was there right from the beginning in Jesus's relationship, either with Mary Magdalene or the so-called disciple that Jesus loved, which might have been a man, another man.

But in terms of what might have got then squeezed out in terms of what's mainstream, orthodox, and historically entrenched, and then, in time, historically, a gradual ascent, usually at the sides, in the esoteric, more 'elitist,' if you like, streams of the tradition, there was a gradual ascent of eros. It seems that way to me, just looking historically (and I could be wrong), so that eros becomes actually more integral to the whole vision. It's given a more central place in spiritual experience, in the path in these different traditions, and in the whole conceptual framework. Now, of course, many people would look at that and, for example, look at Buddhism, and say that's a deterioration from the purity of the Pali Canon; it's a pollution in time, a devolution. People might look at it that way. But we could also say that it's a necessary evolution. There's something operating in all these diverse spiritual traditions that's kind of manifesting humanity's (if you like) spiritual genius -- let's call it that: the intuition that reaches out and kind of gropes in some way to formulate, to articulate, to create and discover a way of including eros more centrally, sanctifying it, and also matter, and also sexuality.

So I wonder about seeing it that way. And it's interesting also. I mean, I can speak for myself, and maybe for other people: I wonder if this reflects -- you can see a historical evolution, but you could also maybe see, for some people, a personal evolution in their practice, and in the conception, and what eros is directed towards, and what eros is taken to mean, and where it moves, and then in the whole vision of the path, etc. If the soulmaking dynamic is allowed, eros-psyche-logos, this is what will happen. It will start to re-evaluate, reconfigure the relationship with the senses, with the world, with sexuality, and in that, with the whole path and goal of awakening, all of that.

So it may happen on a personal level, and it may happen on a historical level over centuries. It's interesting to see how they can mirror each other. I can't remember when it was -- we talked about Nietzsche's phrase. I think his phrase was "the myth of origins," highlighting the fact that we tend to assume, or most people tend to assume, that the first birth of a religion, of a philosophy or an ideology, is the most pure, the most authentic, the most radical -- radix, as in 'root' -- and the most powerful, and therefore try to scrape away historical accretions or cultural accretions, and try to return to some kind of hypothetical original form in the present. Or actually have a fantasy, and kind of reconstruct that vision in the present. Or, mixed with that, they're actually bringing the fantasy and preconceptions in, and just take what doesn't challenge the current popular metaphysics, take that from this supposedly pure original version, being the most radical, etc., the most powerful.

Or actually just look at it in a way that the history and the knowledge of history -- just deconstruct the whole thing with one's historical analysis so that the whole edifice, and the whole religious impulse, and the whole religious creation and construction becomes devalued, dismissed. Any religion, any philosophy, can just be deconstructed historically in a way that it's rendered almost valueless. There's a certain way of approaching it that way, a certain intention of approaching it that way. But Nietzsche pointed to this myth of origins, assuming that the first birth is the most pure, most authentic, most radical, etc.

Why not, though, why not regard religions and philosophies teleologically? We've talked about that word before: the telos, the aim. Where are they headed? What are they drawn to? So the evolutions of, in this case, the different religions or Buddhism or whatever it is, and the telos is actually regarded as more authentic, more true, more radical, and more essential. This is upside down to the usual way we think. But in other periods of history -- Aristotle, and after that -- this was regarded as a very valid way of thinking about causality. And is it possible to actually turn the whole thing on its head and see it differently? So whether it's slowly, gradually, or suddenly, human beings think, reflect, intuit, experiment, create and discover religious forms, and practical forms, and practices, and conceptual frameworks, and experiences that actually are part of an evolution, a moving towards something. As Michelangelo said of sculpture -- I can't remember the exact words, but he's just removing bits of the marble to reveal something that's already there. The statue is already there in the marble. Moving towards something, so to speak. I don't know if that's a very good analogy, actually, but ...

The historical currents and events, then, are not so much regarded in a way that devalues and deconstructs and then dismisses. But we could even go a stage further and regard them, too, as the operation of some greater intelligence. So even if there are historical factors coming in, and adding to something, and shaping and reformulating at different periods in the history, in the evolution of a tradition, of a religion, even that could be regarded, for instance, as the kind of intelligence of the World Soul operating to inform and influence the evolution. All that is an intelligent operation of the World Soul towards a telos, towards some goal. But unlike, if you know Hegel's philosophy, unlike that, the goal is actually open-ended. So what's that, to have a telos, to have a goal, but actually it's open-ended? One never finally reaches it. There's this open-ended movement, but the evolution is regarded as towards more authenticity, if you like, towards more purity, towards more the radix, the radicality. Why can we not regard things that way?

Actually, a slight aside, but relevant: despite what I've just said, I know that there are quite a few people around who believe some old scholarship around Buddhist tantras, which stated that Buddhist tantrism was basically borrowed from or evolved from Shaivite Hindu tantrism, and it was just a derivative thing, and therefore the whole Vajrayāna was a historical devolution, a pollution of the pure, original Buddha's teaching by alien influences in India, etc., like that. And then more recent scholarship, for example Benoytosh Bhattacharyya and others, actually have pointed to it being quite the other way around in their research, indicating that Buddhist tantras had a big influence on the evolution of Hindu tantrism, and in fact that mantras and dhāraṇīs and maṇḍalas and mudrās and all these kind of tantric notions and practices are actually present in Buddhist texts as early as the first century of the Common Era, for example in the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa and things like that. So that's interesting, if we're going to play the game of what's the pure origin of something, and regard everything that comes afterwards as a movement away from purity, as opposed to regarding it telistically, teleologically, the other way around: a movement towards more what is authentic, a growth, an evolution. But there is, it seems to me, as a non-historian, a gradual ascent of eros historically, and therefore also of sexuality -- that it becomes more integrated, less denigrated, more elevated, given place in the whole sort of spiritual outlook and approach, religious practice and thought.

You see this in Christianity. For example, there was a seventeenth century Lutheran called Johann Gichtel. And listen to this for some instructions. "To Sophia." We have to explain: sophía (you find it in the Old Testament in the Bible, I think in Proverbs as well) literally means 'wisdom*.'* It's Greek for 'wisdom.' But she is regarded as the first, if you like, being that God created. She was with God and God's love almost from the beginning, so to speak. She is not God, but she is somehow divine and part of God or something like that. There's different ideation around who exactly she is, but she's a feminine, quasi-divine figure of devotion, and prominent in different streams within the Christian tradition.

Listen to this from Johann Gichtel in the seventeenth century:

To Sophia, as the essential love, make yourself more united, more known [so these are instructions for a practitioner: make yourself more united, more known to Sophia], and while praying, focus your imagination on her, as you do on your wife, and give yourself over to her way of loving with your body, soul and spirit. You will find within your soul a great relief and sweetness, and an excellent strength in your prayer.^[1]

And actually, wrapped up in this teaching about Sophia is a whole cosmology, or cosmopoesis in our outlook. He points out that Sophia's presence is regarded as permeating the created world -- the skies, the plants, the flowers, the metals, everything. He writes:

We also recognize [Sophia] in this created world, since she is emanated in the heavens and on the earth and in everything that grows, and is to be seen and found on the firmament, and likewise in herbs, flowers, their colors, odor, taste [or] virtues, also in metals of the earth and their tincture.

One can sense in that, there's a whole quite elaborate conceptual framework and theology involved in Sophia, and the relationship with the world and levels of existence, and what's called in the hermetic and other traditions 'sympathies,' harmonic resonances between, for example, metals and their tinctures, and certain herbs and colours and odours and tastes with, if you like, spiritual dimensions. However, Johann Gichtel and the other theosophists that had a similar kind of outlook in relation to Sophia, and erotic relations with Sophia in the imaginal prayer, still often regarded actual physical sensual relations, even within the context of marriage, as much less preferable. Somehow there's still a bias, and perhaps a result of entrenched views regarding sexuality and the so-called 'battle against the flesh,' which is such an entrenched notion in both Western and Eastern thought. It goes back to Plato, probably even before that, and reflected in the monotheistic traditions, etc.

But it's striking to listen to that as a kind of imaginal meditation instruction similar to what we've been talking about. Also what comes to mind is a piece of writing by Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who died, I think, in 1968. Beautiful writer, beautiful person. And he has a really gorgeous piece called "Hagia Sophia," if you ever come across it.^[2] And he describes waking up in hospital, in a hospital bed, with a nurse there kind of by his bedside. [He] opens his eyes and sees this nurse, and sees in her face and in her manner and in the tenderness of her ministrations, he sees Sophia. He perceives her theophanically. Something very, very beautiful there, and he weaves a beautiful piece of writing around that. I wonder how much that perception there was a result of the personal evolution of his practice. I don't know enough about where he came from. He certainly was living as a celibate monk, a Trappist monk, a very strict order at that time. I'm told that he had, or I heard someone else [say] that he did in fact end up having some kind of (presumably unconsummated) relationship or friendship with a nurse, and I'm just wondering, again, what the play there was of imaginal, theophanic perception, tied into a beautiful, mystical, multidimensional theology and conceptual framework and vision, and then actually allowed to permeate the human relations, and still open to that multidimensionality. I don't know.

In Christian Gnostic traditions -- and I'm aware there's a lot of confusion around what that word, 'Gnosticism,' means, and whether it even really refers to anything -- but there's a text called the Greater Questions of Mary. Here it describes Jesus in the presence of Mary (who is probably Mary Magdalene) "produced a woman from his side, began to have intercourse with her, and partook of his emission," meaning that he ate his ejaculate, his semen, to show that "thus we must do, that we may live."^[3]

It's a very striking kind of depiction or scenario there. You'll notice how, in these historic texts, how heteronormal the bias is. So there is that bias there, and it's reflected in the texts and the depictions here. But one wonders, in this Greater Questions of Mary, in that image there of Jesus doing that, is this talking about an imaginal practice, that one does this imaginally? Is it talking about an actual practice? I mean, you can't actually produce a woman from your side, but maybe actually having sex and actually partaking and eating of the sexual fluids, etc. And apparently there were certain sects, I think one sect was called the Borborites, which actually did that as part of their religious practice and ritual.

So is it imaginal practice it's referring to? Is it actual practice? Or is it just metaphorical and representational, if you like, a reference to semen? Because in a lot of Gnostic texts, apparently, the divine element in humans that must be gathered during the process of salvation was metaphorically called 'semen.' So maybe these (Jesus and the woman and the intercourse and the semen) are all just symbolic metaphors. So what is it? An imaginal practice? An actual practice? A metaphor? People would interpret it -- apparently historically they have interpreted it very differently.

Similarly in Buddhist tantra. So the beginning of the Guhyasamāja Tantra, the opening lines of the Guhyasamāja Tantra -- which is the root, the most important tantra for many Tibetan Buddhists, but particularly for the Gelug tradition, which is the tradition of the Dalai Lama. It starts like this. And I've heard that most tantras, or at least many tantras, start with the same opening line. This is Sanskrit:

Evaṃ mayā śrutam [thus have I heard] ekasmin samaye bhagavān sarvatathāgatakāyavākcittahṛdayavajrayoṣidbhageṣu vijahāra.

One of the things about this is it can mean many different things. Like I said before, it's something to do with the way Sanskrit can fit words together, so you can have lots of different permutations of what it might mean. And I would say that the plurality of possible meanings implicit in the Sanskrit, in the constructions, is intended. So it invites the reader into a kind of poetic participation with the text, an exploration also that implies a practice, a meditative encounter with the text that must include a flexibility of imagination, view, and conceptual constructs.

So it's not just a text you read for information; it's multifaceted. You enter into a text like this, with these multiple meanings, as a kind of offering of different meditative stances, if you like. A door is opened to different meditative possibilities, imaginal and conceptual, in the very polysemous possibilities of the language. So that whole, if you like, intrinsically ambiguous or polysemic articulation, it supports not just a poetic and practical approach, and a sort of openness of interpretability; it also supports a whole conception and view of the image or any perception of reality. It's multi-levelled, not singular, possessive instead of many faces all at once, none of which have an existence independent of the mind, but which are only elicited or activated by the way of looking or interpreting that the mind has in that moment in relationship with this image. There could be parallels with tantric and Vajrayāna language in the tantras and what we're talking about with the imaginal practices, and also, as I've referred to in the past, with Kabbalistic teachings regarding the Bible and other sacred texts.

But if we go back to that Sanskrit opening line, "Thus have I heard, ekasmin samaye bhagavān, on one occasion the Blessed One was dwelling in" -- now, you could translate it "in the vaginas of the diamond maidens, of the heart essence of the body, speech, and mind of all Tathāgatas." "At one time, the Blessed One was dwelling in the vaginas of the diamond maidens, in or of the heart essence of the body, speech, and mind of all Tathāgatas." That word that I'm translating as vagina is often translated as vagina, bhaga. It, too, has many possible meanings. It can mean vagina. It can also mean enjoyment or happiness or prosperity. It can mean place or inheritance. It can also mean love and sexual passion. So it's a multifaceted word. But it's an interesting choice of word there, and that together with all the tantric symbolism, etc. Now, you get commentaries on the tantras, on this kind of sentence there, which assign each word different levels of meaning. And so they would say that the bhaga really refers to the clear light mind or emptiness, or this or that, so the Buddha was residing in the clear light of emptiness, etc., and each of these words would have different levels of meaning.

But again, we're left with this. What actually is Buddhist tantrism getting at with its references, its sexual symbology and references and languages there? And again, like we talked about in the iconography of the yab-yum, the sexual union of a Buddha and his consort, is it just symbolic? That's one option, is that the eros depicted or referred to, the sexuality, the sexual fluids or organs or energy that are referred to, are these just symbols, so that for example the yab-yum, the sexual union of the Buddha and the consort, is just the union of wisdom and means that we talked about before, and it's just a symbol for that? It's only a symbol? And so you get commentators who insist on that: "This has nothing to do with sexuality, nothing to do with that. It's purely a symbol for spiritual orientations or realities or unions," etc. One possibility is it's symbolic, or perhaps only symbolic.

Another possibility is that sexuality, sexual energy, etc., is regarded in tantra or used in tantra as a vehicle. It's purely practical, as a means, an expedient means. It's just because it's a powerful energy which, when gathered and channelled in the body and in the energy body, can give rise to great bliss and actually shifts in consciousness. So this is a very common presentation of the tantric relationship or view of sexuality, sexual energy, sexual fluids, etc. It's just really that: you're gathering a certain very powerful energy. Because of its power, because sexuality is regarded as the most powerful energy that a human being has or is subject to, it's powerful enough that if it's gathered in a certain way, channelled in a certain way, preserved in a certain way and then channelled, it can bring this bliss and a shift in consciousness. Now, for some, it's just about the bliss, in the kind of pop versions. A shift in consciousness is possible that will enable the consciousness to open to emptiness or clear light without having to do a lot of other practices which are harder, and take longer, etc., to develop.

But this is a second possibility, that the tantric perspective and relationship with sexuality and sexual energy is really just as a vehicle, and if it was another energy in human beings or that human beings were subject to that was more powerful and was more expedient (I don't know what that would be -- eating chocolate or whatever), then they would just use that instead. There's nothing about sexuality per se that's interesting other than it's just a vehicle. It's just a means of getting from A to B that's kind of a turbocharged one, a turbocharged vehicle, if you like. That would be a second possibility.

Or is the tantric view and relationship and conception of and regard of sexuality and eros actually attempting a resanctification, a re-enchanting, a divinizing -- perhaps a kind of transubstantiation, but certainly a resanctification, a re-enchanting, a divinizing of what was often seen before that as not holy, not sacred? A resanctification of sexuality, which was regarded as a defilement. So, a symbol only of something spiritual? A vehicle? Or a resanctification of sexuality itself, a re-inclusion of sexuality itself, in itself? So with the vehicle, it's not that sexuality is itself holy, because it's just an expedient means; it could be replaced by anything. But in the third option, it's actually that sexuality itself is being resanctified.

People have very different interpretations of tantric texts and teachings and all that. Or is it all three? Is it all three? That it is symbolic, that it has its multidimensional, multi-levelled resonances and reflections? Sexuality, eros, sexual imagery. That yes, it could be a resanctification, and also a vehicle? For us, at least for how we are thinking of it, I would say it's all three. It does have this multi-levelled multidimensionality to it of symbology, of what the image reflects, the eros, how it's mirrored. And it is most certainly a resanctification. I would like to see it that way. There's a widening, a deepening, an extending of what is regarded as sacred, a re-enchanting of the cosmos.

And very much a part of that is the view and the relationship of sexuality, and not just in a one-dimensional human way as expressing love and our right to pleasure. And as a vehicle -- except that, for us, the vehicle is not so much about the energy; I mean, that's fine, and I would actually say there are more possibilities there with the energetics, because you can take any opening of the energy body in a number of different directions if you know how to navigate it. But primarily, the vehicle for us is as a vehicle of soulmaking, because the eros and the sexual imagery and the erotic-imaginal actually impregnate the imagery, give it dimensionality, and open up the soulmaking, and open up the divinizing, the perception of dimensionality and divinity. So it's a vehicle in that sense, but it's a vehicle for the imaginal and the soulmaking.

But in all this, you can see, in these examples I've been giving from the Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition and the Buddhist tantra tradition, that sexuality is kind of reflected in and reflects, and is implicated in and involved in and affects the perception of cosmos, world, and divinity. So there's a kind of mirroring here. We've talked about this in these different examples. The human sexual, as I said, reflects, mirrors, expresses, manifests, affects the cosmos, the world, and the divine.

I remember an image. I shared one very small part of the image a few talks ago. It was where the beautiful woman took my hands and placed them in the prayer posture, and then mirrored that with our fingertips touching, and drew my attention to our relationship rather than to what part of me wanted to get caught up in some larger political issue.

Following on from that, what happened in that image is at one point I take the sun out of my heart. The sun feels like it's right at my heart centre. In the centre of my chest, there's this really radiant, bright sun, and I take it out of my heart centre to give it to her. It feels like I want to do that as an offering of love, and it seems natural to the image. It seems so at first, but then I become unsure in two respects: one is, I'm unsure if I'm making this up. I think, "Where did I get this from? Is it that I maybe was looking at some alchemical text briefly, and I've just forgotten about it?" I certainly didn't recall ever seeing anything like that, but I somehow become suspicious that it's just some idea I got from some alchemy or Jung or something or other. And secondly, it just feels like it's not the right thing to do.

In terms of the first kind of suspicion or hesitation there, I would make the point now -- this was a few years ago, but now it seems clear to me -- that it absolutely doesn't matter if that idea or that gesture or that movement was stimulated or seeded by something I had read somewhere in some text or something, or flicked through, or seen a picture or whatever it was, something similar to that. It does not matter. That doesn't make it unauthentic. What matters is the soulmaking.

People would sometimes be more impressed if I really hadn't seen anything like that before, and then I found it in an alchemical text. This is the sort of thing Jung would do quite a lot, and point to the reality of universal archetypes, etc. For me, it doesn't matter. What matters is the soulmaking. And there's an acknowledgment that that soulmaking can be fed, and sometimes mysteriously so, by anything at all -- by ideation, by reading, by hearing teachings, by dreams, by whatever it is. More important was the second objection: it just felt somehow, as I did it, that actually this is not the right thing to do. More important was that the sun stayed in my heart. That was part of preserving the polarity, in fact, because later she seems to have the moon in her heart centre. This kind of gave another dimension to the polarity. There's the sun in my heart centre, and the moon in hers, and there's this attraction between sun and moon, and polarity there between sun and moon, but also a kind of balance. And all that is mirrored somehow in our erotic-imaginal relating, the attraction, the polarity, and the balance. In that, it seemed like that attraction, balance, and polarity had kind of what I would now call cosmopoetic overtones. And again, later this spilled out into the world in terms of the cosmopoesis.

So this image stayed for a few days, and it sort of came back in different meditations, or I brought it back, but oftentimes it would just come back, and it was more involved erotically, etc., with sexual imagery, etc. I remember at that time I could feel my mind trying to grasp intellectually what was going on: "What does this mean? What does this sun and what does this moon represent?", and trying to fix this or that meaning. Letting go of that a little bit, and more getting an intuitive, sort of vague and subtle sense of this sun and moon, and this polarity, and this balance, it was reflecting something cosmic. It was reflecting a kind of cosmic harmony or relationship or a part or a dimension of some kind of cosmic harmony. And that harmony and relationship existed already as a perception. So it wasn't that this was kind of saying something about me and my psychological balance, or balancing sun and moon and masculine and feminine and all that. I was trying to make it mean something like that, but just relaxing a little bit, and then actually getting a sense of, you know, this is something beyond just the personal (let's put it that way). It was already existing as a kind of cosmic balance that was already present, to be realized and appreciated, rather than telling me something about what I needed to do to rebalance myself or something like that. That was the sense of it.

And also, in that sense, in that kind of cosmic, multidimensional, multi-levelled sort of mirroring, there was a sense then of the cosmos not being separate from me, not being separate from my imagination. So again, something in the erotic-imaginal mirroring and reflecting something, a level of the cosmos, of the divine. We can say there's a kind of alchemy, there's a kind of magic going on there, but it's in the perception, in the sense of the world and of the human being. That's the kind of alchemy and magic that we're interested in.

There's another text, a Hermetic text called The Asclepius, a very old text, and it describes or it states that the act of sexual union between two lovers is a divine mystery; that sex itself is a divine mystery, not only, it says, because it's an image, it's a mirroring of the productivity and the androgynous unity of God (that means the transgender, or bigender, hermaphroditic nature of God, being neither male nor female, both and neither, etc.). Again, actually, in this text, there's still the sort of heteronormal bias there, normalizing bias of heterosexual orientations. But, you know, this is hopefully a progress in history where the logos, the ideation, the image of what sexuality can be, etc., might be hopefully growing. But the act of sexual union in this text is a divine mystery, not just because it's an image of the productivity and the androgynous unity of God, but also because it is actually possible for both of the lovers to experience that original androgyny -- in other words, to experience another dimension, if you like, of their being, but also of God's being, of the divine being.

It continues, though, "[but] for ignorant and irreverent people, [sex] is a mere act of the flesh."^[4] So again, it's something that a certain logos, a certain way of looking, a certain reverential approach, transubstantiates something, transforms the perception of something, opens up; a vision is discovered there. A dimensionality and a divinity is discovered in the sexuality. I don't know if you ever have had the sense of actual sex as a kind of act of cosmic and divine mirroring, the actual participation in something that's much bigger, something of the human sexuality reflecting, mirroring, echoing, participating in something much larger, much more multidimensional. Cosmic and divine dimensions in the very sexuality, in the very sex. Quite possible.

That Hermetic text, The Asclepius, also says that the act of sexual union mirrors the union of the human being with the divine. So there's all kinds of mirroring going on. You get this sense in a lot of these traditions and texts, something emerging that's pointing to a multi-levelled, multidimensional, multifaceted mirroring, echoing, reflecting, interconnectedness inner and outer. It's all interconnected, mirroring, influencing each other. This word, 'participation' -- there's a mutual participation that's multi-levelled and multidimensional. This citta, this mind and heart, this soul, this body, it participates in the soul, the body of the cosmos and of the divine. Participation. This citta, your citta, my soul, my body, your body, participating in, mirroring, influencing, completely connected, the inner and the outer, the personal and the universal, the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual.

But this is a way of looking. It's an invitation to a way of looking, rather than, as I'm sure it can sound very easily, just some very abstract and very strange idea. It's an invitation to a way of looking. We can make this a reality, in the sense you make it, you open to it as an experience, by entertaining certain ways of looking, through the imaginal perception, through the attitude, through the heartfulness, through the soulmaking looking, the soulmaking sensing. It becomes actually lived and actually materialized. Spiritualization of matter and materialization of spirit.

Apparently in many medieval Jewish prayer books, there was an Aramaic formula that preceded certain prayers, or many of the prayers, and some or all of the ritual commandments, what's called the mitzvot, in the prayer book. And it said something like, "Liturgy is performed," or this or that is performed, "for the sake of the union of the Holy One, blessed be He, with His [Shekhinah]," with the divine presence or the immanence.^[5] So this prayer that I'm going to say now, this ritual that I'm going to do -- whatever it is: washing my hands, or eating bread, or drinking wine, or whatever -- this is performed for the sake of the union of the Holy One with His Shekhinah, his divine immanence, his immanence. So again, this marrying of the levels, the transcendent and the immanent.

Erotic imagery, erotic language running through these different traditions, and emphasized again and again, the multi-levelled, multifaceted, multi-reflecting nature of all this. And one wonders historically (I don't know enough about it) what that then was taken to imply by different people, at different times, in different places in history, in these different traditions -- what that was taken to imply for the nature and the place of human eros and sexuality, and what it was taken to imply for the meaningfulness, all this erotic, sexual description of the divine realms, and the meaning of prayer, and what that does, and other rituals and actions reflecting, influencing, etc. What was that taken to mean regarding the meaningfulness, the nature, the place of human eros and sexuality? It seems to me -- and again, I'm really not a historian -- that there was a lot of tension in that question and a lot of ambivalence historically around what it actually meant or implied for actual human sexual relations.

But even that aside, all this is really quite different, I think, from the way we're used to thinking of things in this era of modernism and secular modernism, and humanism, secular humanism. I was raised in London. I had an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, very strict, and had to follow all these rules and rituals, and you can't do this on the Sabbath, and you have to do this, and you have to wear that, and you can't ... A lot of rules. But the whole explanation of it that I was given in that Jewish education, in my family and at school, it was all very literal, and all actually very one-dimensional, in fact. And so there was a lot of fear as a young child -- a fear of breaking these rules and these commandments, and God being angry and punishing you, and all this kind of stuff. It was kind of enforced, both at the school and in my family home. And it seemed to me at a certain point -- I really rebelled against it -- that there was just a lot of i's being dotted and t's being crossed, or whatever the phrase is, a lot of very particular attention to details that seemed -- I didn't have the language, perhaps, at the time -- just seemed to be lacking a whole level, amplitude, or dimensionality of meaning and resonance there. It was just this kind of literal, one-dimensional fulfilling of certain commandments. A lot of them seemed completely bizarre. And as soon as I hit my teenage years, I think, pretty soon I became an atheist, and the whole thing just seemed stupid to me. I was a sort of secret atheist, and then a much less secret one.

Interestingly, an atheist is also in the grip of a very literalist view. So there's a literalist view of all these, what's called the mitzvot, the commandments, the rituals, etc., and there's a literalist view of how silly they are. It's taking the whole thing -- the sense of divinity, the sense of the rituals and what they're for, and all that -- both sides are just literalisms arguing with each other.

Compare that with the more Kabbalistic or mystical kind of relationship with, re-viewing of, participation, participatory understanding, of these rules and ritual elements, etc., in Judaism. So I'm going to paraphrase a writer called Daniel Matt who writes about Jewish mysticism, but I could have picked quite a few other writers. This is quite a minority view within the Jewish religion, but it's reflective of certain strands of mysticism within that. I'll paraphrase what he writes. He says:

Kabbalah constructs its mythical realm out of the elements of Jewish law.^[6]

In other words, here are the elements of Jewish law, these rules and rituals that one is told, that just come down to one, and some of them seem pretty bizarre. And rather, what the Kabbalah does is this spiritual genius of approaching something that's given*,* and finding, giving it, creating and discovering whole other dimensions of meaningfulness, invigorating it with life in a participatory way. So Kabbalah constructs this mythical realm out of the elements of Jewish law.

The commands of the ruler of the world become instead sacraments and mystery rites that simultaneously reflect and influence the pulsating life of the universe. The code of law becomes a secret code. Judaism is transformed into a mystery religion; symbolic and magical aspects of the mizwot [the ritual commandments] are alternately emphasized. The mystic integrates himself [again, gender-biased language] into the pattern of the cosmos and stimulates the flow of [divine] emanation. His ritual act represents the divine and calls it forth [re-presents the divine and calls it forth].

Not a rationalization of these laws in earthly terms -- for example, you can only eat this because it's better for your health, or you can't eat that because it's not good for you, or whatever it is. The Kabbalists expand the dimensions. It's not just rational and earthly now.

The human actor is now a protagonist in the cosmic drama. The mizwot are literally the essence of life, according to Kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla -- his life and God's life. They are not reducible to autonomous reason [it's not just that you can think of practical, humanistic reasons for them], nor are they simply imposed heteronomously [in other words, a sort of separate God just says, "You better do this, and watch out if you don't!"]. As extensions of the divine qualities, they [the commandments, the mitzvot, the ritual acts] permeate the universe and constitute its fabric.

What a different view that is, and the beauty, the fullness, the multidimensionality of that creative engagement with this received tradition to give it whole other dimensions of life there, whole other dimensions of beauty. So this is different than a kind of view of ritual that "if we don't do X ritual, the sun won't rise tomorrow," or whatever, which is clearly not true and quite provable to be not true. So it's not that, that kind of literalism, and it's neither the literalism of that kind of one-dimensionality of the child's view of ritual or the simplistic atheist's kind of literalism. How do we conceive? How do we look at the elements that we are given? How do we look at life, action, our human being, divinity? How do we conceive of these in ways that are soulmaking in the broadest possible range and depth?

The Zohar is an ancient Kabbalistic text from the early Middle Ages -- twelfth century, I think. In the Zohar, again, this understanding is offered that the purpose of practice, spiritual practice, religious practice, the purpose -- not just meaning prayer, but meaning action, etc. -- the purpose is to mirror and effect the divine. So in the Zohar, it says, "In every commandment, in every mitzvah, your effort is to unite the blessed Holy One and His Shekhinah." So this transcendent aspect of divinity with the immanence, with the divinity that permeates the world. "In every ritual action, your effort is to unite the blessed Holy One and His Shekhinah," this divine immanence.

That mystical understanding and enactment of the commandments of the mitzvot, if we're just staying in the Jewish tradition, in our language we could say that the conceptual frameworks and the ways of looking we entertain, that we skilfully use in our life, in our meditation practice, open up perceptions, and also our action and our embodiment in the world, when they are and the world is seen as divine, as a divine creation, with that sense of duty and with that sense of participation. In the words of the Zohar, they serve to "light up the queen" -- the queen is this divine immanence, the Shekhinah, this female aspect of God.

Light up the queen to strip her of the dark clothes of literalness and adorn her with garments of shining colours of the mysteries of Torah.^[7]

Torah is a Jewish word. We could say, "Strip the world of the dark clothes of literalness and adorn her with garments of shining colours of the mysteries of the divine," or if you like, "of the mysteries of the maṇḍala, of the mysteries of the Buddha's kāyavākcitta, body, speech, and mind; the mysteries of the Buddha-nature." It's a similar principle through the engagement of the erotic-imaginal. It's a whole different way of entering into and relating to and conceiving of and practising whatever it is: meditation, prayer, action in the world, embodiment, speech. All the beauty of that, the poetry of that, impregnating it with this soulmaking potential, seed, life.

In this view, in this opening, in this soulmaking perspective, the cosmos is erotic and divine, and the eros is divine, and we are implicated in that divine, erotic cosmos, or divine cosmic eros. We're implicated in that. We reflect that. We echo it, it echoes us. We express it. We manifest it. We're involved, we are called on, and we are necessary, in and through our perception, our imaginal perception, our practice, our meditative perception, our ways of looking; in and through our perception, and in and through our action. So again, this is not a naïve belief in the power of ritual or magic, in some kind of very naïve way, if there are even such people any more who believe that (I'm sure there are). Not so much that, as an alchemy of perception, an alchemy of the perception of the cosmos and of the human being. It's not just intrapsychic psychology we're dealing with here; there's something about this inseminating and fuelling and firing up an alchemical process that involves our whole perception of ourselves, of each other, and of the whole cosmos.

So, in and through perception, and in and through action. And that can include our eros, our erotics, and our sexual acts, our actual sexual participation. In other words, if we're including our action in this, then we can include the sexual actions as well potentially. They're not only symbol. They can be seen in this way, too, in this larger soulmaking way too. The eros, whether it's in the meditation, in the imaginal perception, in the way we're relating to the senses, and the way we move and act and embody in the world, whether it's actually in our sexual relations, the eros, as we've been saying all along, it brings with it the possibility of stimulating and increasing the soulmaking, and expanding, enrichening, deepening the sense of the sacred. There is then the tikkun olam, the healing of the world, in the perception. We have a kind of place in the cosmos then, and our perception, our thoughts, our vision, our ideation, our speech and action, our embodiment, our sexuality, you could say has multi-levelled function.

And we have a place. We're integrated then. It's not necessarily a heavy kind of responsibility; it's actually quite light because we see it's all empty. This is not a realist view. We're seeing image as image. But if we can find the way into this through the practice, and through that opening up the logos and the imaginal perception and the whole ways of looking, then in the very non-realism of it, through that and through all that opening up, the world is sacralized. It's re-sacralized. The world is sacralized and becomes infinitely revealing. The world is a world of infinite revelation. There's no end to the revelation in the world that the world is, the revelation of soul, of divinity, of Buddha-nature. And the world, through these practices and ways of conceiving and entering, the world is sacralized and becomes potentially infinitely revealing, through our perception and through our embodiment, including sexual. Very different than an objectified world. Sacralized, infinitely deep, infinitely opening, infinitely revealing, rather than just one-dimensional objects and the objectification of that. What is the difference in the embodiment there, the erotic embodiment of the pilgrim versus the tourist or the vacationer, as we've said many times now? This sacralization and this infinite revelation happens through the eros. How central that is, the eros.

One last thing. In the creation of the divine, if you like, in the healing of the divine, in the creation of the Buddha-nature, which is implicit in what we've been presenting, in the creation and discovery of the imaginal dimensions of the self, aspects of the self, of the other, of the world, in the erotic moving towards, the erotic movement towards what is beyond, what is not yet quite known, the moving towards the 'angel out ahead,' in Corbin's words -- either never quite reaching it because the angel is always out ahead and keeps moving on itself, or never remaining at least in union with the angel or what is beyond -- in all this, there's a kind of infinite movement or infinite potential of movement, potentially infinite movement, as we've talked about with the eros-psyche-logos dynamic. There's telos here, there's moving towards, but that's open-ended.

What I want to draw attention to in that now is the fact that all of this -- this creation of divinity, this creation of self/other/world, this eros moving towards, beyond, to the not-yet-known, always this infinite movement -- it implies the dynamism of becoming. It implies time. In this movement, time, growth, if you like, telos, the dynamism of becoming, temporal becoming, is seen to be holy. It's bhava, it's becoming, but it's not realist. And at the same time, as well, there's also the timelessness here. There's also the dimension of timelessness, of eternity, that we know, as we've pointed out, in the iconic nature of the imaginal, that we feel that timelessness, that eternal quality, as well as in the Unfabricated, that which is beyond time.

Something in all of this gives a sanctity and a place and an importance and a holiness to both the dynamism of becoming and the temporal, and to the timeless and the eternity. If we go back to that line from Gregory of Nyssa, "For the thirst of human souls requires some infinite water; how could this limited world suffice?" So yes, beyond the world, beyond the limited world, beyond the limited world into the transcendent, into the Unfabricated, beyond the senses, beyond perception, beyond experience, beyond space, beyond time. Yes, know that, and all the levels going up to that of different kinds of oneness. The eros for the transcendent: "The thirst of human souls requires some infinite water." Yes, the transcendent. But yes, also, the world sacralized. Why? Because, as I said, it's potentially infinite in its revelations, infinitely revealing, infinitely opening. Through the eros, this limited world becomes an unlimited world. Or in the form of limitation, infinite depths are revealed. So both the transcendent, away from the world, and the world, too, but the world re-viewed, seen through the heart of soulmaking. Both those directions provide us with infinite water. And we can actually move in both of those. We can drink from both of those streams. And in a way, this is what will be a natural movement if eros is allowed to do its thing, as we've said.