Opening The Dharma of Desire (Part 1)

Let's continue our inquiry into desire, the whole realm of desire and desires, and expand a bit more our explorations of desire and regarding desire, our skills, our capacities, our insights in this area. So I'd like to offer a different approach (I think I mentioned it already), different way of working with desire than we've elaborated so far, and to tie that together with some of the previous things we've been talking about, and also make some other observations about desire and our relationship to it.

Okay. So this different approach, I have broached it, mentioned it in the past in the talk "The Beauty of Desire (Part 2)."^[1] I can't remember if it was 2011 or something like that. You can find it if you're interested to have more details, more examples, etc. But I want to offer it again here. For me, what happened was: I was meditating in my room at Gaia House, and in my meditation I tried something different, and it felt to me like I discovered something that was certainly new for me, something (through an approach which I'll explain) in the meditation, a discovery of something new and actually quite surprising, something that I'd not heard anyone else mention or describe or point to, and something that had very surprising implications outside of the kind of box of what was, up to then, my understanding of Dharma, etc., and any other understanding that I'd heard of Dharma at the time.

I can't now actually remember what was troubling me. I know that it was something to do with Gaia House politics, and I only even remember that because it's in my notes. I didn't write down what it was. In the course of time, exactly what it was that was upsetting me at the time in the political situation at Gaia House, behind the scenes, has completely faded and is of much less interest to me than the actual insights that came there and the possibilities for practice that emerged and felt like they were discovered. So something was going on, and I was troubled and agitated and, as I said, a little bit upset by something to do with Gaia House politics. I was sitting in meditation, and being with this situation and my feelings, and for some reason I found a different way of approaching it. I asked myself, "What do I really want here? Is there a desire for something? And if there is, what does that desire really want?" I can't remember whether it was obvious to me that there was a wanting and desire in the first place, or maybe I just assumed that because there was dukkha. But anyway, I asked this question: what do I really want here? What does this desire really want? And I let that question reverberate in the being. And the answer that came was, "Freedom from constraint."

So, okay, I understood that answer; it had a meaningfulness for me, even though it might sound quite abstract. This is something I'm going to come back to. In its very abstraction, it was very meaningful for me: freedom from constraint. This really was what the being, the psyche desired. So I felt into that desire for freedom from constraint, and really allowed it and felt its movement -- more than just within the psyche; within the whole energy body, actually. The energy body reflects the psyche, reflects the citta. Yes? They're completely, intimately connected. We've talked about this, I hope, in the past. But not just allow it, accept that it's there, etc. I mean really open fully to the energetic current of that deep desire for freedom from constraint -- really allow it; really feel the movement of that current of desire; really open the whole energy body, the whole body, even bigger than the physical body; open fully, fully, fully, as fully as possible to that energetic current or stream or movement of desire through the being, through the energy body.

When I did that, it felt like the quality that I was wanting, this freedom from constraint, was actually already available. It was, so to speak, made available or discovered to be already available by this way of approaching it, through this way of approaching it, so that I had right there the very thing that I most deeply wanted, this sense of freedom from constraint, this knowing of freedom from constraint. And it came not from turning away from the desire, but actually going deeper into it and allowing it more fully, opening to it more fully. Yes? It wasn't a putting down. It wasn't a letting go. It wasn't a recognition that desires are delusions or anything like that. Quite the opposite. So out of this discovery -- which really struck me very strongly; it was like, "Oo, that's really interesting." Very enjoyable as an experience, but the insight there was really striking: "This is not what should be happening at this point. I haven't seen this before. I haven't heard this before." So that was kind of condensible down, filterable down to a set of basically simple practice instructions, which I'll say now.

When one notices there's dukkha, whether one notices that there's a desire obviously there or not -- in other words, sometimes we're experiencing dukkha, we're experiencing dissatisfaction, and it's clear, "I really want this. I need this," or whatever it is. It's clear that desire is present within the dukkha and wrapped up in the dukkha. And sometimes we have dukkha and it's actually not obvious that there's a desire there at first. So it doesn't matter either way. Where there's dukkha or when there is dukkha, whether desire is present obviously or not, (1) first step, you can ask yourself: "What am I really wanting here? What am I really wanting?" So this question involves or asks for us to unhook the desire from its most immediately obvious object, from the thing that we -- "I want that person. I want a relationship with that person. I want this event to happen. I want that object," etc. So this is the immediately obvious object of desire. In a way, this question, "What am I really wanting here? What does the desire really want more deeply?" is asking us to unhook from that immediately obvious object that it tends to get stuck on, contracted around, infatuated with, etc., all that.

And let the desire reveal, if you like, what its deeper essence is, what its deeper purpose is, what is more deeply wanted. This will often -- in fact it will always -- appear to be more general, more of a kind of generality. It might even seem a little bit, if you're hearing this, just more abstract. Notice it also (and I'll repeat this) involves an unhooking from the image -- so we're on a slightly different tack now, as I said, a slightly different way of working, a different approach -- to the deeper desire, in this case freedom from constraint. It wasn't that I wanted this or that to happen politically, or someone to say this or that or whatever. In the example I gave (and I'll give more examples in a second), it was freedom from constraint. It sounds more general, more abstract. It's the deeper desire there. The answer to the question "What do I really want?" wasn't so much coming from the mind, but it's like dropping that question into the being, to the whole citta, the whole psyche, the heart and the soul and the mind.

[9:40] So first step, what am I really wanting here? What is really more deeply wanted by this desire? What is the deeper desire, if you like? (2) Second step: clear away, clear off the table, sweep clear the table, so to speak, metaphorically, of any Dharma preconceptions that one has regarding desire. "Desire is a kilesa. It's a defilement. It's an impurity. It leads to dukkha. It is self. It brings self. It's craving and that's problematic" -- all this stuff that we're used to, familiar with, that's really important as perspectives and approaches. But just actually for this approach right now, just clear the table clean of any preconceptions. In that open space, or more open from preconceptions, just introduce, is it possible to play with just a little bit, some kind of trust of the deeper intelligence of, if you like, the soul or of the desire? Just playing with the idea, the possibility, that this movement of desire that looks problematic, may even look petty, certainly looks like it's causing dukkha, etc., or wrapped up in the dukkha, just play with the idea that actually there's something to trust here, there's a treasure deep down there in the desire. It manifests in its movement a certain intelligence of soul. Like phototropism, the movement of, for instance, sunflowers turning towards the light, turning towards the sun, and other plants as well (you know how plants and trees grow towards the light), that maybe the desire, deep down -- certainly it gets twisted, certainly we get into wrong relationship with it, but maybe deep down there's something akin to phototropism there, and a kind of intelligence of the soul, maybe.

But at any rate, there's a kind of, let's just trust it and see if there's not a treasure here. If it's not actually already there, if that's too much as an idea to trust, actually trust that the way of relating to desire can turn it into a treasure. Okay? So that's an easier step in terms of trust. That would be the second one: clear away preconceptions, [and] introduce a little bit, some degree of trusting this movement of desire. Those first two steps are actually reversible. So the asking, "What am I really wanting? What does this desire really want?", unhooking from the obvious object as the first step, and the second step (clearing away preconceptions, and introducing a little bit of trust, playing, entertaining a little bit of trust of the desire), you could flip them, okay? Even when I don't yet know what the deeper desire is, I could just introduce the entertaining of the idea that there is a way of paying attention to desire that turns it into a treasure, or there's something buried deep in desire already that is a treasure that can be discovered. The order doesn't matter there of those first two steps.

Then the third (3) step in this three step process of the practice here would be to then really feel that desire and really allow it. It's almost like you can feel it in the whole being, especially in the energy body, and feel it -- perhaps it's a current, a movement, a stream, a surge; perhaps it's really strong, perhaps it's quite subtle -- but really feel it, and really, really allow it, and really open to that energy, that stream, that current, that movement. Really opening the space of the energy body and allowing that to flow, that's the third step.

So let's give some examples to flesh that out a little bit, that process, that practice. These examples are actually -- I'll give a couple of examples -- they're actually repeats, old, from that talk that I mentioned, "The Beauty of Desire (Part 2)", where there are more examples as well. Part of the reason for that was because -- this I discovered, and then got very interested in it, and just started trying it out with this hunch that I had of how it would work and that it would work. I started trying it out on yogis in distress, and in interviews, and friends also, etc., and colleagues, and with myself in different situations, and this was part -- tying this in now to the whole researcher fantasy -- this was part of the researcher fantasy, that actually grew or emerged alongside -- to be honest, it had been there on and off as one of, an available fantasy that had been there for quite a while for me -- but it emerged with this discovery, and then I rode with that expanding researcher fantasy as part of the whole research that fed into the whole thing. So I was kind of conducting research, if you like, on myself and with others, and trying this process out when people were going through different things.

I tried it for I don't know how long (perhaps a couple of months or something), quite a lot, and I estimate that it probably was successful in the ways I'd expect it to be, I'm guessing about 95 per cent of the time, that it became so predictable exactly what would happen, that it would open things up in this way. Actually, there are nuances that I may come to later, but basically the fact that it would open up, relieve the dukkha, open up in this way of realizing that one already had the abundance of what it was that one was desiring, and the dukkha would release in that, and there would be a transformation of the experience of the body, the energy body, and the consciousness and the psyche, and a different state would open up. That became actually so predictable that I stopped kind of pursuing it so much in the research, stopped taking notes on what I observed with myself and with people. The one time that I remember it didn't work was with a friend who, as we were doing it, was kind of slouched on the sofa or something, and I hadn't said to her -- partly because it was a friend, I hadn't said, "You know, I think it would be better if you sat up so that the energy could flow more easily." So it didn't actually work so well. But apart from that, I'm pretty sure it worked every time. I sort of was convinced and stopped taking notes, as a result of which I don't remember a lot of the examples now [laughs], as I moved on to doing other, if we use the researcher fantasy, other areas of research, etc.

So these are old examples. Excuse me for repeating. They're actually good examples because they reveal different facets of the process and of what's involved in the assumptions, etc. One involved a woman, a student, who -- this is not on retreat -- had met a man in another country, and was engaged actually in a kind of long-distance romance. He was a long, long way away. So it was a new romance for her, and there was lots of texting and messaging back and forth. She came in for an interview that she requested, and she said, "I'm craving." She had done a fair bit of Dharma practice, and we had worked in the past with vedanā, and watching craving, and stationing the awareness on craving, noticing different vedanā, not getting sucked up in the craving. We had done quite a lot of that practice. She was very interested in that, and very interested in equanimity, etc. That was her kind of leaning and interest for actually quite a long time in practice.

[18:37] She said, "I'm craving, and I feel that that craving is a contraction of the being, it's painful, and there's also fear that I might lose this budding romance, it might fall apart." She was planning to go out there to visit him and see what would happen, and "I fear that it won't work out, and then there will be the loss and the pain, and this is all dukkha" -- amongst the loveliness, but she was also getting into a reasonably difficult state with the whole thing. She was aware that craving involves hype. We had talked about this before. It involves constructing of artificial differences, and kind of amplifying the differences between things and times so that they seem really different: that over there is so much more preferable than this over here. Here and now is less than, not so interesting, not so desirable; it's really markedly different from that over there.

And the papañca that comes in amplifies that process. The word papañca is actually connected with the word 'amplify' etymologically -- it implies that, or 'expand,' etc. So she was a little bit aware of that already, but we talked about how it was operating in this case, because she said, "The adventure begins then," in other words when her plane arrives in that country to see what happens with this guy, etc. "The adventure begins then," she said. "Now I'm just kind of in limbo. I'm just waiting." Now, we looked at that, and saw how much of a construction that was, because there was lots of lovely exchange electronically, etc., now, in the moment, and the papañca comes in and the craving comes in and denigrates the here and now and raises up the there and then. Really inquiring into that: "Is it really that different without the mind making it so, without this process that craving tends to ignite, this papañcizing process that increases differences?", which then feeds back to cause more craving, etc., and that whole saṃsāra cycle, basically. So we talked about a way of looking that kind of worked against the papañca, seeing you've got six sense objects here, five aggregates here, and when you get there to see him in the foreign country there will be six sense objects and five aggregates, and is it really that different, or is it the mind painting things, making it seem different in a way that's actually not that helpful? So this kind of standard Dharma teaching, we went into this, and seeing that if we can deconstruct the hype, then the craving also releases, and as we release the craving the hype gets deconstructed, etc.

So that was all good, and we talked about that in this kind of long interview. But then I also introduced this other approach, the less-standard approach. I asked her, "What are you wanting?", to which she just replied, "Him!" Very simple: him. It's like it's obvious, right? "I want him. What are you, a dummy?" She looked at me like, "What are you, a dummy, Rob? I want him." You see how hard it is to see sometimes beyond the most obvious object that desire seems to be presenting: "I want him." So I said okay, let's explore that a little bit more, what's involved in that desire. I asked her again, and kind of a little bit more spaciously, to open it up a little bit. And she said, "I love that I can say anything with him and I'm listened to. I love that I can say anything and I'm listened to." So even that, that's more general, or it's an expansion. But even that, it was like, okay, let's go into that a little bit deeper, what the deeper desire is. She broke it down into four parts of the deeper desire connected to this fact that she felt like she loved that she could say anything and that she was listened to. She said, "I want the opening of the heart. I want the expression," the fact that she could express. "I want the connection of being received. And I want to love." So the general desire was actually full of all that -- the opening of the heart, the expression, the connection of being received, and I want to love. Can you hear how, relatively, they're quite general and kind of a little bit abstract-sounding? I don't know if that's quite the right word, but certainly more general.

In this case, once you've got to that level, the desire is not so much hooked on or landing on or contracted around a limited object. The object that it wants is actually kind of a more open object, a deeper level object, we could say. It's not really even an 'object' in the usual sense of the word. And then feeling that, in touch with that, okay, stay with that, that deeper level of the desire, and actually feel. She said this current is quite deep and quite powerful, and it's not how she usually experienced herself or what she, in her words, how she usually "takes herself to be." Just with her, and encouraging her: okay, let it fill the body. Allow it. Feel it. And this emphasis on really, if it's possible, to open to it, really open the body to allowing this current and feeling it. As she did so, with me kind of supporting her a little bit, she reported that in that moment, as she did that, her self-boundaries, her sense of the boundaries of her self, were beginning to dissolve, and an expansion was happening, allowed, in the whole sense of her whole being.

Now, she had done some practice, but not actually that much of what I would call the deeper end, etc., so this expansion of the whole sense of being and the sense of the boundaries dissolving was actually quite scary for her. There was some resistance and contraction that kicked in. I said, okay, we don't need to force anything. Let's just respect the fear here. What are you afraid of here? What's the fear that's causing this resistance and contraction? Is it fear? "Yes." What is it? Is it losing yourself, is it disappearing, is it just the unfamiliarity? At that point we ran out of time in the session, and I had another meeting or something. But we talked about the need for compassion for the self that's resistant and fearful to that opening and that new experience, and that introducing the compassion and the not forcing over a threshold into a new territory of being and experience, the compassion for the self that feels fearful, that is resistant, that is a little bit contracted there or trying to keep contracted, if you like, can really help, and it's possible to play one's edges with new experiences.

But eventually, whether it happens kind of immediately or relatively quickly or really quite at a gentle pace, slowly over some time, these kinds of expansions of being -- and I'm mentioning it because it's actually quite a characteristic experience of working (not always) with this practice that I'm elaborating on right now -- eventually we're able to allow that kind of expansion, and we can feel in that a whole new sense of life force, if you like; libido, let's say, connected with the desire; a whole new sense of self that goes with that; a whole new sense of strength, openness, independence, being independent of this or that thing happening, event happening, getting this or that object, etc. One sees this abundance and opening, and independence, and strength, and beauty that comes. All that treasure that kind of comes up to the surface and is made available is strangely seen to be not dependent on the object of desire being there or on having it. We are fulfilled to a huge extent, to a surprising extent. I mean, almost always there was a surprise involved here for people. Fulfilled to an extent more than what we are used to feeling in our lives. We're not used to feeling that extent of abundance and fulfilment and openness and treasure and brightness. But we're fulfilled not by getting this or that object, and not even by trying to renounce or ignore or (quote) 'let go' of the desire, but actually through the very flow of the deep desire. We're going deeper into it, and really respecting it, and really opening, opening to it. The libido, the life force, is opening the being there through the desire.

[29:27] And then we may wonder with that, is it actually possible that craving -- which, as we've been saying, has this kind of contraction to it, feels painful; in the case of this woman there would be the swings to the fear of loss, of rejection, etc.; involves this repeatedly moving away from the present moment to daydreaming and being lost in the future and that kind of what we might call poor fantasizing -- is it possible that that craving in that sense, the contraction of craving, is actually a result of not connecting to, not realizing/recognizing, and not allowing the deeper desires to unfold, to be felt, and for those currents to flow? What we call 'craving' is a matter of not connecting to, not realizing, not allowing the deeper desires to unfold and to flow.

Similarly with eros, it goes to craving when it doesn't have the imaginal dimension, when something is blocked in terms of psyche and logos. Here it's a slightly different approach that we're talking about, and it will move to contraction of craving when there is not this deep respect for the desire, connecting to it, recognizing and feeling it, and really allowing it. And this funnelling into craving, and the contraction of craving, and the pain, and all the kind of craziness that goes with that, may also be a habit of the being. In other words, we are trained away from the erotic-imaginal, and away from, if you like, the deeper levels of desire as we talk about in this other approach. One wonders: what is going on here? Why does it take one course habitually, into the contraction of craving, and not others? And is it that actually it going into that is a result of not allowing something else -- either in the context of the erotic-imaginal direction, not allowing the psyche and the logos to expand, not allowing the imaginal dimensions, or in the context of this kind of practice, not allowing the deeper levels of desire and that movement of the being there, the contact with it, the allowing it, the opening to it, the respect for it.

Another example. I could give an example myself, just partly because it's a different one, a different kind. This goes back a few years. I was interested in the -- I still am, actually, very much -- interested in, for many reasons, what a study of modern physics could bring to a Dharma understanding, and the ways it could open up certainly the parallels with emptiness, but also the implications there for ontology, cosmology, and more and more now, actually, epistemology as well, studying the philosophy of science a little bit. But this is back then. As I said, these are old examples. I was studying a lot about modern physics. And in the heat, if you like, of the eros there, of the desire, I felt something which I recognized as familiar to me and my kind of, if you like, personality structure or constellation or whatever. It was a kind of impatience to understand, and a pressure to understand. So I was hungry to understand. I was studying a lot. And really the sense was, well, you read something, but that just takes you to the next thing to read, the next book. One book leads to another, and you kind of follow these leads. And the feeling of impatience and pressure was coming in, sort of in the background, but then a little bit pushing on the whole psyche. It felt like I was unable to read these books fast enough. There was a sense that I wanted to arrive at the sort of end of the whole process: "Now I understand, and now there are no more books to read! Phew! Done!"

So I recognized this pressure -- actually just a dukkha; didn't see that there was a desire in it. Then recognized the desire that was pressuring there, and felt it, as I said, with these instructions that I've outlined. Going to the deeper question, what is it wanting, this desire? This example is a little bit interesting, because the desire at first blush seemed to say, "I want to end this process of inquiry. I want to understand everything so I don't have this kind of continuous more-books-to-read thing, because one thing leads to another, one understanding leads to another, or one line of inquiry opens another one, or whatever it is." When I went more into it, actually, what was deeper and more alive was that it was a desire for inquiry. It was this desire to question, to make discoveries, etc. -- in this case, to discover for myself by absorbing what others had discovered, and making connections between what I was doing, etc. This question, "What is it wanting?", actually opened this sense of joy in the ongoing inquiry so that, if you like, the desire changes tack in the inquiry, or we could say that it opened to a realization of how much of a desire for inquiry there was, ongoing inquiry. The change in tack is the ongoingness becomes beautiful and the thing that's wanted. There was tremendous joy liberated with that, the joy of ongoing inquiry, ongoing questioning, ongoing discovery. This whole pressure that was felt, and the sense of "it needs to end," etc., was liberated through asking the question and opening to it. There was a whole beautiful and energized, energizing sort of opening that happened in the energy body, in the whole citta, in the whole psyche, really, of this joy of discovery there.

Let's just state again those three steps. There were two examples. Three steps. Let's reverse this. The first two steps are reversed, because we're putting them in the other order this time. (1) First one clears away whatever Dharma preconceptions that make one dismiss desire, or denigrate it, or be suspicious of it, etc. -- it's a kilesa, it's only coming from self, or it feeds the self, or it causes selfing, or it is selfing, or it's craving, it just brings dukkha, all that. Just clear away, even just momentarily, just as an experiment, just temporarily, I'm going to clear away those preconceptions, without needing to clear them away forever or say there's no insight involved in them (that's absolutely not true). Just temporarily clear them away, and see if you can introduce, just temporarily, a kind of playing with or entertaining of, a trusting of a deeper intelligence to the movement of desire: that there is, either in the way that I relate to it or already there at bedrock, if you like, a treasure waiting to be discovered in the movement of desire. (2) And then this question, second step: what am I really wanting? What is this desire really wanting? What is the desire really for? Unhooking or ungripping, if you like, letting the desire ungrip from its sort of immediate, obvious image of what I want, or this person or that object or that event, whatever it is, to be this way or that way, and let it find or reveal to you what's the deeper thing wanted, the deeper level of the desire, which will probably sound more general. (3) And then really feeling that in the psyche, in the body, and allowing it, especially in the energy body. Really, really opening the space for that current, that energy, that movement there.

[39:08] I was going to kind of report some more findings there regarding the actual experiences and the states that seem to tend to open up when one does this kind of practice, and bring a bit more specificity and nuance to that, but I think I'll leave that for now, and leave you to research it for yourself, and play with it and see what you discover in terms of the directions and the experiences and the states that can open, and if there are patterns there, repeatable kind of observations and movements that happen. So perhaps that will be for another retreat. We'll see.

But just to say something around all this, and actually around everything that we're talking about on this course and on this retreat: you know, sometimes with desire there is lack wrapped up in it, or it's coming from a sense of lack, or another emotion, or something like that. And sometimes, of course, we may need sometimes to first be with the actual emotional experience of distress or difficulty, or lack, or sadness, or grief, or whatever it is, anger, upset, that's going on. Maybe that, too, has a few different aspects or is a mixture, as often an emotional state is, a mixture of different emotions -- not always, but often is. And just to be with that, and see and feel and allow what's going on there emotionally. And oftentimes there is a lack there that's felt. The question then is -- well, two questions. One is: do I have the skill to do that? Do you have the skills to do that, as we've talked about in some of the energy body work and on other retreats and teachings elsewhere? Just really developing my ability, your ability, to work well with, in this case, difficult emotions (also beautiful emotions can be difficult to handle). Do I have that? Do I know that? Is that in my toolkit, you know, that I really have different ways of working well, meeting well, opening to, caring for in meditation, in my life, the range of emotions that come up for me in the course of life and practice? "Do I have that skill?", first question.

And second: is it necessary to first do that before trying this other approach? Because what can often happen is we assume that it is. And even more than that, we can get into a kind of habit where we always go to the lack or we always go to the negative, and we always kind of linger there in a way that just keeps it at a feeling of lack. In other words, it doesn't really transform it very much, or maybe it just kind of gradually, gradually soothes, and we're kind of okay, or we just get distracted by the next thing that's demanding our attention. But we can kind of get stuck in a habit here, and also in an emotional constellation of lack. So yes, lack and desire often go together -- not always; often, as I'll come back to -- and we can get more into or have a habit of tending towards, going towards the lack thread of those two threads that are interwoven, the lack and the desire. We always go to the lack, and we might feel, because of our habit of doing that, that this practice that I'm explaining now, regarding a way of being with desire, this practice, "Oh, that's a kind of artificial construct. You're making something happen if you do that, because it's not natural if you do that. The real thing, the thing that's actually present, the thing that's natural, the thing that's unartificial, not a construct, is the lack itself." That feels like the natural thing. I'm just (quote) 'being with what is.' Failure then to see the dependent origination. This is so important; we've touched on this before. So, so important. I'm not seeing the dependent origination. If I have that kind of view and that kind of response to hearing these different practices and these different approaches, I'm simply not understanding the dependent origination of experience.

And it may very well be that, through the habit of what I pay attention to and the ways of paying attention to it, that I just keep building this particular limited range of emotions and experience. Through what I pay attention to and how I pay attention to it and the habit involved in that, I do not see that I'm actually constructing. I think I'm 'just being' in a way that's very natural, not adding anything to the experience. I'm 'just being with what is,' but I keep constructing that same 'what is,' whether it's a sense of lack or whatever it is. I'm not understanding the dependent origination, the fabricated, constructed nature of all experience and all perception. I'm just locked into a kind of habit there, without even realizing what's going on. I take it as the 'truth,' 'reality,' 'what is,' 'things as they are,' etc.

So again -- and it's just my particular emphasis in how I teach -- it's like, can we hold this aim of flexibility? Flexibility of practice, flexibility of approach, flexibility of conception. Can we hold that as a sort of principal aim of practice so that we can do it lots of different ways? Here's this dukkha; I have lots of different ways of approaching it. Here's this feeling of lack; I have lots of different ways of approaching it. Here's this desire mixed with the lack; we have lots of different ways of approaching that. Lots of angles and ways that it unfolds the experience in different directions. Can we, again, experiment and see, rather than just being locked into a set of assumptions that we're no longer investigating? Experiment and see. Okay, can I go to the emotion, and care for that and be with that in different ways? And can I actually, at other times, try this thing with the desire? Can I do both? Can I learn to do both? Do I have that in my repertoire? And if not, can I actually gradually move towards a place, a time, when I have both in my repertoire? They're both just ways of approaching things.

Part of that might be that I actually need the skill to differentiate lack and desire. They're not the same; they're two different things. I mean, they're connected, for sure. They can be connected. But I can differentiate them as two strands that are perhaps entangled, and actually unentangle them. I'm not necessarily assuming an order: "First I have to do this, and then I'll be able to do that, or only then am I allowed to do that, or only then should I do that. First I have to do this." Yes, sometimes. And sometimes not. Sometimes you could go straight to this working with the desire as I've elaborated in this talk and "The Beauty of Desire (Part 2)" talk, and sometimes not. Sometimes I want to dwell more with the emotional difficulty, care for that in different ways, then maybe go to the desire thing, or not do the desire thing at all.

So there's a lot here about ways of practising, and order of practice, and our assumptions around all that. Again, you know, presenting this kind of practice, is it a desired prerequisite, a necessary preliminary capacity, to be able to let go of desires and cravings as we talked about right at the beginning, some familiarity with that? Do I also even allow myself to feel desire, or is there this what we talked about, this anti-libidinal force, that I just shut it down before I've even felt it? And then it's great to find Buddhism, because it just seems to be agreeing with that. "Yes, desire is bad. Therefore, just shut it down," and actually what's propelling me is a kind of anti-libidinal drive, in Fairbairn's words, or this kind of fear of having a desire. Can I actually feel it? Can I feel the energy of it, have the feeling? Do I recognize it? Do I know it? Do I know the different shades of it? So these may well be, if you like, prerequisite skills, capacities, abilities that may be necessary for these kinds of practices.

[49:09] So there are three basic steps, and this question about being with the lack -- before, or how much, or do I need to, etc. These to me are kind of questions that are involved in all this, around, that I would just like to open them up as questions. And, as I said, this need to experiment, learn how to do things different ways, from different directions, in different orders, question assumptions, all of that. And the other thing with the instructions for this practice is to throw in this thing about posture that probably, for most people, certainly at first, if not most of the time, posture will actually be quite important, because allowing and opening to the energy flow will be easier -- the third step of this practice will be easier -- when the physical body is relatively open and upright and uncontracted, etc.

So I'd like to offer this. I have offered this. And we would like to encourage you to pick this up as another possible practice, and play with it, try it, do it repeatedly. It doesn't have to be now. But at some point, do it repeatedly until you kind of know how to do it. Have that, as I said, in your repertoire. But to do that, and to have it available, and to have it actually be a working resource, you need to do it. You need to try it. You need to experiment with it. My suggestion is that, through experimenting with it, through trying it, actually making that effort to play with it for yourself, it can become incorporated in your toolbox, if you like, and that's a really good tool to have. Not to use it all the time; certainly not. It's like a toolbox -- you have a range of tools. Apart from just being really helpful because it's more resources, it's also fun, you know? That's part of the creativity. But you're only going to incorporate it and have it available as a tool if you pick it up, listen again to the instructions, you play with it, you make it your own, yes? This goes for all practices.

One of the things that struck me when I first introduced this in teaching was that only two people -- or rather, I only ever heard back from two people that they actually took it on board in a way that they repeated it for themselves, in other words not with me sitting there guiding, kind of offering it to them and suggesting that they try it, or even asking if they were willing to try it and then kind of guiding them through it. Now, it could be that loads of people were doing it all over the place, but I kind of doubt it. I could be wrong. But I only heard back from two people. One of them actually died a few years ago, and the other one, I don't know if she ever repeated it after the initial sort of thrill of discovering it and the ability to do it, and how transformative it was, and what it opened up, and actually how easy it was to do. That observation is quite interesting to me -- either people are just not telling me, just didn't tell me, or it just says something about my naïvety, I think, in not repeating teachings. So I think to be taken on board, new things, new approaches, new teachings, new practices need, it seems, an enormous amount of repeating, and probably by much more than one person. They probably need to be quite widespread in their dissemination, probably over a continent and over time, and different voices, and also offered much more slowly, even slower than I'm doing it here in this talk, so that they become just integrated into instructions over and over again, and people just become used to them, and hear it, and really do it.

Maybe it also needs a special name, like we have a name for different practices, and maybe that's part of what allows something to be digested and assimilated really actively, organically. So I don't know. I said to you I'm not very good at names. But something like opening to the deeper current of desire -- that's a way of summing up what that practice is, opening to the deeper current of desire. Still quite a mouthful. But anyway, that was interesting to me. And again, it's connected with this whole researcher fantasy, so tying that whole theme of the teachings with what we're talking about today. Again, I wonder why it was, apart from the need for repetition in the teaching. I wonder why people didn't then learn the practice or repeat it for themselves. Oftentimes what happened when I worked with people with this and sort of took them through it step by step, oftentimes they were so struck by the actual experience and the transformation of experience, of the sense of the body, and the state of consciousness, and the sense of kind of superabundance that came, it was kind of a 'wow' experience. But this, to me, is also really interesting: how we can be, if you like, captivated by the intensity -- I've talked about this before -- the intensity of an experience and the sort of 'wow' factor of the experience, and miss the principle involved. This, again, has to do with the researcher fantasy. Because it's the principle -- certainly it's the learning of the technique, the practice, and then the principle that comes out of it. What's it saying about desire? What are the principles of the practice, and what are the ramifications, what are the implications, etc.?

Actually, the more 'wow' thing to me is not so much the experience that opens up in the moment when you do this, but actually the principle, and how that or whether it fits with a narrower Dharma understanding, etc., or Dharma understandings. There's more freedom that will come out of that and the questioning of all that. So that was one thing that I observed, was people were often quite struck by the experience and neglected to ask -- in other words, there was the absence of the researcher fantasy -- to ask about the principles: "What's going on here? Isn't that surprising? What does this imply? What does this mean we have to rethink? What avenues does this open?" And of course, sometimes part of that is to do with people are just relieved to feel better: "I was feeling really quite upset about something or other, and now Rob's just done some magic stuff with me, and I'm just relieved to feel better." And, you know, that's understandable, but there's a way that the deeper investigation gets eclipsed and, tying it to our thing about fantasies of the path and of the self on the path, the researcher fantasy is not being supported there.

Just last thing about this is: I remember saying it in a couple of different, explaining this approach in a couple of different places, and a couple of different people sort of saying back something like, "Oh, so what you're saying is just kind of accept everything and be with what is." Which for many reasons is now partly something I expect, that there's a kind of way that we can hear -- I've said this before in other places, I think -- there's a way that we can hear that kind of chops off what's new or different, and just assimilates it to what we hear most of the time, what we're used to hearing, or what we already know. So people are used to hearing very often a sort of basic Dharma understanding of 'be with what is,' 'accept what's happening,' and although someone might be saying something really quite different from that, it can get just missed, you know? So that used to be quite shocking to me, but I've kind of got used to it. I think it's partly to do with how we're taught, and partly to do with how we learn as human beings, that it's important to create boxes and then fit things into those boxes. But there's a cost sometimes. Or at a certain stage, there's a cost to doing that.

But clearly if we go into this, because of the three steps we've talked about in this particular practice, it's not the same as just accepting everything. It could sound a little similar, but if we say again, you know, really opening to the energy is not the same as just accepting. Just accepting can be very kind of 'nyeh,' you know? It's not this full-bodied, full movement of opening of the energy body that I'm talking about. In 'just accepting,' neither is there this active playing with a conception of trust and actually moving into entertaining the idea that desire may be trustable, may conceal or eventually reveal a treasure if I relate to it in a different way. That's not there in just a generic sort of 'be with what is,' 'accept everything' teaching, and neither is this question of going into the deeper level of the desire: "What am I really wanting here?" Just kind of noticing, "Oh, I desire this person," "I desire this to happen," "I wish that would happen, and not this," or whatever it is, is just noticing the kind of more immediate level of objective desire. So it's actually quite different.

I've said this before as well: if we have a limited conception of what the Dharma is, that it's just saying 'be with what is,' and 'try and accept everything,' if our understanding is limited, and then our practice is limited because the understanding is limited (it's just limited to generically trying to do that, 'sort of trying to be in your body,' as someone described their understanding to me years ago of what Dharma was essentially), then that understanding and that limitation on concept and limitation on practice will lead to limited experiences and limited insights. If it's just that, well, the range of practices that I can do, and the range of experiences that may open to me, the range of changes in perception, and openings, and openings of states of consciousness and feeling and all of that, and the range of understandings that I will have will be limited. They will be limited by the narrowness of the concept and by the narrowness of the practices that come out of or are implied by that narrowness of concept.

Okay. Last thing for now. This practice that I've elaborated on -- which I've already forgotten the name of, what I called it! [shuffles papers] -- the opening to the deeper current of desire, that practice (surely there's a better name) you'll notice is different, as I've said, from what we've been elaborating in imaginal practice. In imaginal practice, the image is retained. It's always retained. It may go deeper, it may change a little bit, but the image is regarded as primary and it's retained in imaginal practice, in the erotic-imaginal. Yeah? And by 'primary,' I mean we're not reducing the image: "Oh, it's really just this or that. It's a representation of this or that." In this practice of opening to the deeper current of desire, the image is actually regarded as secondary, if you like, to finding out what the deeper, more general desire is. So in that sense, the image may be regarded as a representation and secondary, and the image is not generally retained, because I'm going more to, let's say, the general, this deeper level of content of the desire, object of the desire, and the energy involved in that. We're really talking about a different way into the experience of desire, different way of working with desire, different tack there, different approach.

Actually, having said all that, it's really just a matter of emphasis, and there is certainly some overlap between the two. The erotic-imaginal and eros certainly -- as we've said on this retreat, and emphasized on this retreat and other retreats -- involves a trusting, playing with trust, a little bit of trust, a modicum of trust, trusting the eros and the image, so those two. So imaginal, erotic-imaginal practice involves that. And it involves working with the energy body, and in some instances opening, etc., or at least let's just say working with the energy body. So there's overlap here. And this practice of opening to the deeper current of desire, actually when we look deeper at that, we see that this whole deeper trust of desire that we're entertaining is an idea, but it's also a kind of image. I hope in the future to just talk about how image and idea are really not separate. They kind of shade into and imply and connect with each other. So we could say that there's overlap here because the opening to the deeper current of desire practice actually already involves image and the imaginal in its relationship with this desire -- in the form of this deeper trust of desire, that involves the imaginal.

But to say something we've said, and said right from the beginning of the retreat, to say it again: hopefully you're getting very aware now, it's blindingly obvious, just how easy and relatively common it is to stop or arrest prematurely what could be much wider, deeper, more nuanced explorations of desire, craving, eros, clinging, than we may first assume are warranted. It's so common to just stop that movement of exploration so it doesn't actually get very wide, it doesn't go very deep, and it's not very nuanced. It lacks a lot of subtlety and sophistication around this whole area of desire, craving, clinging, eros. So we see that in this practice that I talked about in "The Beauty of Desire (Part 2)" and now, that we're calling opening to the deeper current of desire, and we saw it in terms of this bigger and more subtle exploration with what we were calling clinging and realizing the spectrum of clinging and all the subtlety that can be involved in that, and also the framework of understanding what's happening there: that when we let go of clinging there's less fabrication of perception, self/other/world.

This is telling us about the Buddha's teaching about dependent arising, dependent origination, and emptiness, which is intimately connected with the understanding of dependent origination through the fading of perception that happens and through the fabrication moving up and down on this spectrum. We've talked about this, and I've talked about it and written about it a lot. That's a whole other deeper exploration of this whole question of desire. It's a whole direction there that goes much, much deeper, that we can actually realize a whole integrated conceptual framework of understanding in regard to dependent origination and emptiness there through the investigation of clinging, and playing with clinging, and the spectrum of clinging, and its reduction, and what that means. So that's two large areas, and then of course the whole area that we're focusing on for the most part in this retreat, of eros and soulmaking. And just see how much there is worthy of a wider, deeper, more sophisticated, more subtle, more careful and more nuanced exploration in these directions -- in other words, with regard to desire, eros, craving, and clinging.