Transcription
We're practising with and talking about soulmaking and soul as almost kinds of fundamental concepts, fundamental orientations, fundamental commitments. But it's actually quite hard, perhaps impossible, to really define soulmaking or soul completely, to really fully capture what soulmaking is, for example, to pin it down. And I think perhaps that's quite appropriate. It's quite right. There's a truth in that impossibility. There's something here between the poetry of these concepts -- they resist full explication, full capturing. There's a balance between the poetry and the science, if you like, of what soulmaking is and what these concepts are. We want to understand mechanisms, processes, dynamics, what's involved in soulmaking, how it works, but there's also an artistic dimension to all this, a poetic dimension to the words we use. We talked about this before. Something in the nature of soul and soulmaking makes them actually appropriately hard to define.
Because of that balance between the art and the science of what we're involved in, that doesn't mean -- just because things are hard to define doesn't mean we should just abandon any attempt at making delineations or definitions. Can we approach a definition or start with definitions in ways that are actually helpful, without locking them down, getting too tight, thinking that we've captured something in some watertight definition or truth or whatever? Can we just use the defining process, the defining movement, in ways that are helpful? What for? To serve soulmaking. The definitions that we come up with are in the service of soulmaking. For that reason, they need to be relatively light. At least I hold them relatively lightly, relatively loosely. They're just serving the movement of soulmaking.
Okay, so what is this soulmaking? We've just been circular already. But let's say, what is soulmaking, when we use that term, having said what we just said? We could kind of say something abstract about it, or give a kind of relatively abstract definition of soulmaking, and say that soulmaking is a certain relationship with experience, but a certain dynamic relationship with experience, because it is a relationship that involves the opening and the expansion of ways of experiencing, ways of knowing, ways of conceiving and imagining and relating to experience. So soulmaking is this expansion of my sensing, my conceiving, my perceiving, and an expansion in a way that includes the imaginal. So an expansion of the sensing, conceiving, perceiving of both object and subject.
Now, already there I couldn't help but use the word 'imaginal,' and that also makes it hard, because a lot of these concepts that we're using kind of imply each other. So there's a circularity of definition. It's okay. That kind of more abstract definition -- it may well sound really abstract. If you're quite familiar, if you've done a lot of work with soulmaking, you'll actually recognize that there's an insight there that captures well in a kind of general principle something fundamental to soulmaking. If you have a little less experience, it might just sound way too vague or open or, as I said, abstract. But you will recognize soulmaking in and from your own experience. In your own life you will recognize the experience, if you like, of soulmaking, when there is for us a sense of meaningfulness in regard to something or some movement. Not so much 'meaning,' as in, "It means X or Y," but meaningfulness; the pregnancy and all that's involved there when there are multiple resonances for us in the soul. When there is beauty, this is also characteristic of soulmaking: it has a sense of beauty, wide range of possible kinds of beauty. The imaginal, image and fantasy, is involved in soulmaking for the most part.
And because there's image and fantasy, in the sense of the imaginal sense of image and fantasy, that starts to involve, we start to notice, it brings in other dimensions of the image. Other dimensions of what we're perceiving come to be sensed by us. Reverence is also characteristic of the experience of soulmaking. Reverence, our English word, is from the word 'to revere,' obviously, which is from the Latin revereri, 'to be in awe of' and 'to respect deeply.' This has something to do with the sense when there is soulmaking of opening to something bigger than us. So it's connected with this opening of other dimensions, connected with the sense that goes with these experiences of the unfathomability of something, the inexhaustibility of, for instance, an image or the perception that we're having -- inexhaustible in its meaning, meaningfulness, inexhaustible in different ways.
Different kinds of love are also present in soulmaking. So soulmaking usually, or I'd say always, has some kind of quality of love in it. Again, it might not be obvious at first. All these are ways, aspects of soulmaking, ways that we recognize soulmaking in our experience at times in our life. And I would include what we're going to get to shortly, that soulmaking involves eros. When we ask, "What does 'soul' mean?", and if we try to define 'soul,' we could say soul is a perspective that brings soulmaking, that gives a feeling and supports and opens a feeling of soulfulness at any time. You see the circularity of all these definitions; it's the only way we can do this. Better to say that soul is not so much a perspective, but a set of perspectives, and a potentially increasing or an open set of perspectives. In other words, there are more and more perspectives that we open to that themselves open soulfulness and support soulfulness in different ways.
So we could say, if we want to avoid talking of soul as if it's a thing or an entity, we could just regard it: it's a way of relating. It's a way of looking. It's an open and potentially expanding set of perspectives that supports and opens and gives rise to, ignites soulmaking, the sense of soulfulness. If we wanted to talk about soul as an entity, as if it were an entity, then we could say something like: soul is that which relates this way. Which way? With that set of perspectives, that opening, open and potentially expanding set of perspectives that support soulfulness. Soul is just that which relates that way, that in the citta, if you like, that relates that way. And so, in the opening the set of perspectives, it will include image and fantasy. It will include the realm of imaginal perception and all that that implies and involves. As I said before, you recognize this, the unfathomability, the inexhaustibility, the sense of the autonomy of an image, the mystery. Divinity, perhaps, comes in the dimensionality that opens up, that we start to recognize more and more in the imaginal experience.
[9:58] Now, we said yesterday that eros is central in this process of soulmaking and the movement of soulmaking. It's a fundamental, indispensable component, if you like, if we talk in that language. So how does that work? If you recall our small definition, what we were calling the small definition of eros, we said that eros is the desire, the wanting for more contact with, more connection with, more intimacy with, more knowing of, more penetration of, and more opening to some thing, what we're calling an erotic object, the beloved other. So there's quite a sort of small, humble, relatively dry-sounding definition. We could add to that just noticing: there are certain aspects of the experience of eros that we will notice in our experience. For example, eros involves, there will be some kind of feeling or sense of juiciness, we could say; of different kinds of love, some kind of love in the experience of eros, and there are many different kinds of love. There will be some kind of sense of energization, and also of beauty. We could point to these as aspects of eros, as well as just the sense of attraction, of course.
Now, we can nuance that and go into that in all kinds of ways. But let's also point out, in terms of aspects of the experience of eros, a couple of other ones: arousal. Okay, now by 'arousal,' I don't just mean sexual energy or sexual attraction, sexual arousal. It can be that. That's absolutely possible, of course, as one manifestation of eros. It may be that if someone hooks you up to some kind of scientific measuring equipment and measures your -- I don't know what they call -- skin galvanization response or whatever it is, and measures your brainwaves and stuff, they can measure that there's arousal even with non-sexual eros in the way that we're using it, in the way that we're calling part of our range of what eros means. Certainly that's possible. But what we can say is part of eros is an arousal of interest. Okay? So something in the being is captivated, let's say, in a good sense. Captivated. It's attracted and there is this arousal of interest. Because mind and body, citta and body are always connected, that arousal of interest and the openness that usually goes with eros, this tends to energize, arouse and energize the energy body. We're not necessarily talking about sexual arousal here. That's included.
But there will be an arousal of the energy body, let's call it that. The energy body will feel energized. It will feel opened and probably aligned. This, we've said, is characteristic of imaginal practice too. This may be super remarkable and intense, this opening, alignment, energization of the energy body. It may be very, very subtle. Oftentimes it can be there without feeling at all agitated, etc. It's not an unpeaceful feeling. We'll come back to that. Let's come back to the energy body stuff.
Arousal as well as attraction, what we could call juiciness or aliveness, some kind of love, energization, beauty, all that. There are also two other aspects we could draw attention to in the experience of eros. One is dynamism, and one is what I'd like to call autoeroticism. Eros is dynamic in the sense -- you can hear it -- because the wanting, the attraction, there's a dynamic attraction, movement towards, if you like, the object, the erotic object. But eros has a dynamism beyond that, which I need to explain a little bit more in order to explain the fullness of that dynamism, and similarly with the aspect of autoeroticism.
If you recall that small definition of eros, I don't know whether this stood out to you, that word 'more,' wanting, desiring more contact with, more connection with, more intimacy with. This 'more' is extremely significant. Classically, Eros was part of a band of gods or demigods that were called the Erotes. There was Eros, and one of them was called Pothos. Pothos is this infinite longing, always wanting more, always looking, so to speak, to the horizon, to the beyond. There's an infinite yearning that goes with eros, so to speak. So eros is always accompanied by pothos, and in our sort of dry definition, that's the 'more': more contact. This wanting more, it's not to imply that the connection that we have and the contact that we have is not fulfilling. There's not this kind of poverty there or thirst in the sense of we don't have a sense of fullness there. So part of, and actually, you could say one of the aspects of the experience of eros, is delight. There's delight in the present contact, and the 'more' in the definition of eros may just be a kind of wanting that delightfulness and the magic of that connection to continue, wanting to linger in that magic, in that beauty, in that opening.
This 'more' may not be that obvious in the experience. It may not stand out in the experience. It may be really quite subtle. I'm emphasizing it, though, heuristically, or for heuristic purposes -- in other words, for educational purposes. I want to draw something out here. I want to explain something about the process or the dynamic of soulmaking, because it hinges, or it's driven by, propelled by that word, 'more.' It's extremely important. So how does this work? What are we talking about here? When there is eros, there is this pothos with it. There's this desire for more contact, connection, intimacy, knowing, penetration and opening, as I said; all those words used in as full a sense, each in as full a sense as possible. This desire for more, it will propel a motion and a dynamic that can then unfold in different ways. Now, one of the ways it can unfold is that if I am open to the imaginal, the realm of the imaginal and the realm of imaginal perception of this beloved other, of this erotic object, whatever it is, if I allow the imaginal aspect of experience to open up, the imaginal dimensions, if I respect that, if I tune and open to that, then what's possible is that the movement there of the psyche with the eros and this desire for more actually starts finding more, if you like, discovering more in the beloved other, in the object.
It also, we could say, creates more. It creates and discovers more. What 'more'? More in the imaginal. My beloved other, he/she/they, whatever, it if it's an object, it becomes more through the erotic contact, through the erotic connection and sensing and gaze, etc. My beloved other, she/he/they, starts to reveal to me, through my gaze, through my sensing, any of the senses, other facets, new facets. They become more complicated, more manifold. They have other dimensions, other sides or faces, facets, etc. So for example, she/he/they become a theophany, or they become a goddess, as well as who they are. I know them, I know their history, I know all their physical being; it's not as if that all disappears, but as well as that obvious physical dimension that we can all kind of generally agree on, there are other dimensions, if you like, of their being that I start to perceive. So the process of 'more,' it kind of thrusts in, penetrates more to reveal more, or opens more. It discovers and creates more in the erotic beloved.
[20:45] So she/he/they start to -- gradually, in steps -- show me more faces through the imaginal. I start to perceive their multidimensionality, this image coming through them, this god/goddess or angel or whatever it is. All kinds of specific examples we could give here. Now, because they are now more complicated -- the jewel of their being, if you like, is more multifaceted, shows me more faces; there's light shining from all of them, or more mystery there; they are, so to speak, bigger as an image, more complex as an imaginal perception -- there's more to be attracted to. They're more mysterious, more unfathomable, more inexhaustible. There are more different kinds of shades of light and characters shining out of them. So the eros is then further inflamed, further amplified, through this increase of the image, through this making manifold and dimensionalizing of the image. It doesn't all happen at once; it can be really a process in steps, or it usually is, over time.
The eros is inflamed more, and that, again, has this wanting more in it, and so the process goes round. It inflates, amplifies, expands, widens, deepens, complicates the image even more, the erotic-imaginal other. As this goes on in steps, at some point it kind of knocks on the walls of my concept, my ideation, my belief structure about who this is that I'm encountering now, what a person is, what the soul is, what image is. My conceptual belief system is getting pushed on to expand with the expansion of the imaginal perception. That, too, then adds multidimensionality -- in this case, a kind of conceptual multidimensionality and complication and deepening. If my concepts, my conceptual structure and belief system, my conceptual framework of who they are and who I am and what psyche is and all that is pushed out, I cannot just believe this simple, flat, reductionist, one-dimensional view of who they are and who I am and all that.
So this further creates more attractive depth, complexity, yumminess, etc., and that further inflames the eros. So gradually and in stages, the whole process kind of cycles on itself, you could say, feeds itself, nourishes itself. All these aspects -- the eros, the image and the imaginal dimensions, and the concept, the ideation -- start to mutually inseminate each other, to mutually inflame each other, to mutually deepen, widen, enrich, expand each other. So you've got the eros, what I'm going to call psyche, and the logos. I'll explain what I mean. Eros, psyche, logos. Eros is the eros as we've explained, this movement. The psyche, we can use it in two ways, this word psyche. I can mean by it just the totality of the citta, really, the psyche. I can also mean, and what I mean in this instance here is I'm using the word psyche to mean the totality of imaginal perception present in the moment, okay? And then the last word, logos, that I'm using as part of this dynamic -- the eros-psyche-logos dynamic -- means my concepts, my ideation, my set of beliefs, my conceptual framework.
These three, eros-psyche-logos, the movement of eros and that particular kind of desire, the totality of the imaginal perception in the moment, and the ideation wrapped up in all that, the concept, the conceptual framework wrapped up in all that, they come together to mutually feed, nourish, support, open, widen, deepen, inseminate, fertilize, ignite each other in what we call the soulmaking dynamic. A big part of what that does is it widens, deepens, enriches, complicates, makes more manifold and more yummy, the erotic object. They become, for instance, a theophany. They're expressing some kind of angelic dimension or nature that's coming through them in addition to their being -- obviously I know this person, I know, as I said, their physical history, their psychological history and all that, but they start to have theophanic or angelic dimensions. And there's also the movement into cosmopoesis, which I'll come back to: the imaginal movement starts spreading beyond just that object, starts spreading to the world. Now, we talked about this in other retreats, so you should be familiar with that movement of cosmopoesis.
What we're calling this eros-psyche-logos dynamic or this soulmaking dynamic, soulmaking process, what I've just described, could just keep unfolding like that in stages, very rich, very beautiful, very expansive, expanding. Or it can get blocked, if you like, at any point, and actually from a number of directions. For example, if I have a rigid -- I don't know -- secular scientific materialist conceptual structure, and that's my logos, and I absolutely refuse to give any validity or reality to the imaginal perception that I might have, then that will cause me to dismiss the imaginal perception and disempower it that way so it cannot feed back into this whole soulmaking enrichment process. It could be an idea that's a more, if you like, existential idea. It could be an idea about who this person is. It could be a concept about what our relationship should be: I shouldn't look at them that way, or it needs to fit into this box, or whatever it is. It could be also something -- the possibilities are endless -- but for example, a person might think, "Well, I've been practising the Dharma for ages, years and years. I know what the Dharma is." If something happens in my perception which pushes the boundaries and starts to want to expand the walls of how I've boxed in the Dharma, and I say, "Well, I'm an authority," perhaps, or "I know what the Dharma is," then it's actually coming from, if you like, the ego-structure, the hardened ego-structure that's creating walls that will not expand because I don't want to disrupt or threaten my self-view of knowing what the Dharma is, or having it sorted out, or being the one with answers or an authority or whatever it is. So this could come from all different directions.
[29:09] Or it might be that a certain image is refused. The block can come from the direction of logos in all kinds of ways. It can come from the direction of the psyche -- in other words, the image. "I refuse that kind of image. It's too weird. It's too dazzling. It's too dark," whatever it is. Again, many, many ways that can happen. But a similar sort of arresting or blocking or constriction of the whole soulmaking dynamic and tendency to expand will happen or can happen being blocked through the psyche direction, through the imaginal or the restrictions on image. And it can be blocked through the restrictions on eros. Perhaps we feel that that energy is too much; we're not okay handling that desire. Perhaps there's been a certain psychological history with desire that we tend to limit how much flows through us, or the way it opens up the bodily energies we're not comfortable with, we don't trust, or the way it opens the heart. All of that. So they're blocks in the eros-psyche-logos dynamic. Unhindered, it will just keep tending to expand in stages. There's potentially no limit to it. It's infinite. Infinitely deepening, infinitely widening, infinitely complicating, infinitely enriching, enrichening, if that's a word, in potential.
But, of course, being human as we are, it can get blocked, it does get blocked in all kinds of ways -- hopefully just sometimes temporarily, and then we see, and something either shatters and expands or just expands gradually. But other times the blocks can be a little more habitual or longer lasting, etc. So this is really, really important, this eros-psyche-logos dynamic. It's a kind of fundamental concept that we'll come back to again and again. You'll start to see how the small definition, in the way that it kind of opens up this soulmaking dynamic, is immensely powerful when we can understand that, and you see how it applies everywhere in our life potentially. Everywhere, every domain, dimension, aspect and direction of our existence can be brought in and involved into the movement, the furnace, the beauty of this dynamic. Okay, so, really important. We'll keep coming back to this, and use it as something that we kind of relate everything to. We can relate all our experience to this understanding.
Once we open up that understanding a little bit and bring it to bear on our experience as it unfolds, we could also say that, okay, so we have this small definition of eros that we've given twice now, but in a way, when we also use the word eros, because of its tendency to want to fertilize, stimulate, inseminate, ignite that soulmaking dynamic, that soulmaking process and expansion and opening and complication, it's almost as if eros really implies with it, involves with it already, soulmaking, and thus the imaginal and soul. So when we use that word 'eros,' sometimes we'll be meaning the small definition, and sometimes we'll be actually meaning this kind of larger definition of the whole eros as it is in the soulmaking dynamic, in the eros-psyche-logos process of expansion and mutual fertilization and feedback and enrichening. So there's a kind of larger definition of eros with a kind of larger implication of what's involved with it.
Now something should be obvious. I'll mention it. Eros then is clearly not equivalent with mettā. I would say that eros, similar to when we said soulmaking always involves love (some kind of love; it might not be obvious -- we talked about this before in other talks), eros, because it is involved with soulmaking, it involves soulmaking, eros always includes some kind of love. Part of our job is to discern and to notice: what kind of love? How is the love expressing? What is the character of it, the quality of it? But though eros includes love, in a way, it's more than love, and not equivalent with mettā. It's more than just mettā. Mettā is sort of implicit in it. We'll come back to the relationship with mettā in a little while, the relationship of eros and mettā. But notice a few other things too. Eros, as we mentioned the other day, is not just -- as some people define it, and still some people define it following the Neoplatonic tradition -- some people define it as a movement towards union, unification, a movement towards oneness. Actually, if we draw out one of the implications of what we've just said of the way eros operates in the soulmaking dynamic, eros actually both needs and creates and discovers otherness. Eros implies and involves otherness, twoness. It needs a polarity. Eros needs this polarity of something that it's attracted to. It needs that twoness. But it also, in its whole movement, it creates and discovers or creates/discovers other aspects of the object. It creates more to the object.
Rather than collapsing the object or collapsing into the object in oneness, a sort of melting in white light together or whatever it is, it actually creates more complication, facets, dimensions, etc. And it needs that to further stimulate the eros. So it needs this twoness, it needs this otherness, these facets and dimensions, these othernesses (plural) that are attractive to the eros, if you like. It needs it, but it also stimulates the creation and the discovery of more and more otherness. If, as I said, this soulmaking dynamic is potentially infinite, it will just keep creating more and more otherness. There's a kind of tension there. There is the attraction towards, and partly there is an attraction towards melting at times -- we'll come back to that -- but at the same time, there's a need for otherness and twoness, retaining the twoness, retaining the polarity of the two, the subject and the object, the self and the beloved other, connected. I might even know that we're one, but I need to retain the two. The eros needs to retain the two. And it will stimulate further and create and discover more otherness and more and more othernesses, in fact, as we'll elaborate as we go.
So intrinsic to or implicit in the movement of eros as it is allowed, or to the extent that it's allowed to fertilize the whole soulmaking dynamic and be involved in the whole soulmaking dynamic, is that it does create and discover more to the object, more to actually everything in the end. It creates/discovers. It's a creative process and a revelatory process, put it that way. There's a lot we could say about this, but let's just say that for now. Part of that, implicit in what I've just said as well, implicit in the sense of twoness and implicit also in the otherness that it creates and discovers and needs, is that there's a beyondness that's a part of the erotic connection. Again, it's a need, a necessity for eros, and it's also a creation of eros. It will create some beyond what I already know, and it will discover a beyond what I already know and experience, which serves to attract the eros more.
Now, that beyondness is not totally transcendent, in the sense that, as I said, the eros still delights in the appearance that's there and in the connection that's there. So it's not, "I want the beyond. Who cares about this now that's here, that's present, that's immanent in the appearance?" It's not a beyond that's, if you like, dismissive of the tangibility and the presence in the sensual appearance as it is right now in whatever stage of perception or imaginal perception. It delights in that. It includes that. But as part of the dimensionality, there's a beyondness as well, shining through or intuited or glimpsed, etc., and that's part of the whole package of soulmaking, part of the whole constellation of eros and what eros constellates. Both a beyondness and -- I don't know what the other word would be -- a presence in the sensory contact, in the imaginal perception, in the appearance. Both are attractive. Both are delighted in. Both, if you like, captivate the eros.
[40:30] So there's a lot there. We're moving quite quickly. I'm aware of that. We can bring this out more in the groups and the Q & As, etc., in the individual meetings as we relate it and as you start -- and I would like you to really start -- trying to relate this to experience, your experience as it unfolds, as much as you're able. It will help to digest this, and let these ideas and concepts, let the logos in fact, be really fertile for you for the soulmaking process.
If we think about now the relationship between eros and equanimity, there's quite a lot to explore there and unpack there. These may be words that we don't often think, don't imagine go together, eros and equanimity. What is the relationship? Are they mutually exclusive? How does it work? Related to all that are questions about balance in practice, equanimity being related to a sense of balance, or rather balance being one of the factors that's involved in a state of equanimity, equanimity implying a balance of the consciousness, of the citta, of the being.
So what is the relationship between eros and equanimity, and how might we support our navigation in these kind of practices so that there can still be a kind of balance there? Again, there's so much to say here, but let's just say a few things. This soulmaking dynamic has a natural inclination, when it's not hindered, to keep kind of cycling on itself, growing, fertilizing itself, inseminating, giving itself, the eros-psyche-logos, the different dimensions, just feeding more and more, giving themselves more complication, giving each other more complication, more expansion, widening, deepening, everything that we've said, more enriching. Now, that process of expansion, that soulmaking expansion also wants to expand in different directions. So it's not just in the direction of eros, in the direction of psyche and the direction of logos, which anyway are really three aspects or connected aspects of soul, you could say, rather than three separate things or mechanisms.
The eros-psyche-logos dynamic, the soulmaking dynamic, also wants to expand in different directions, by which I mean -- and again, this is something to notice in the practice, and really, really important for navigation -- what often happens is that, let's say we're working with an image, and there's some kind of eros in relationship with that image, as there will be when an image is imaginal (some kind of eros -- could be sexual, could be not sexual, whatever). And the soulmaking process, the eros-psyche-logos, starts to impregnate and expand and create/discover more to the erotic object, more to the object, to the other. Oftentimes what we don't notice in the imaginal constellation, or rather we each have different tendencies here, but what can be quite common is for some of us not to notice that at the same time, at the very same time that the object of the imaginal perception is expanding, the subject is similarly expanding. My sense of self is also becoming imaginally infused, imaginally enriched. I also become for myself an erotic object. The image of my self is part of the whole imaginal constellation. It includes self and other. It's not just other. Oftentimes our gaze is so transfixed by the beauty of the other, or the awe, or the fear, or the weirdness of it, or just in attending to it out of habit, we put the attention on the object.
So almost making the attention a little bit bigger to notice what's happening with the imaginal sense of self, in this practice right now, in this imaginal constellation. You will begin to notice that the self, too, is drawn in and impregnated, amplified, complicated, widened, enriched, deepened. In the imaginal perception, in the web of the imaginal perception, it includes not just the object, but also the subject. Not just other, but also self. And this soulmaking dynamic also wants to, again, naturally, include the world. Its expansion into the world -- in other words, the environment, the world around us, and the fullness of the senses -- is just another way of referring to what we've talked about before, the process of cosmopoesis, that through this beautiful other that I'm with, whatever it is in the image, whoever she/he/they/it are, that becomes imaginally alive, imaginally deepened, there's the eros there, and also the self, and also the world. This cosmopoesis is a natural movement, the expansion outwards to include the world. It's like the imaginal perception spills over to imbue, to fertilize the perception of the world. I'm not going to say too much more about cosmopoesis, because we've dwelt on it a lot in the past retreats.
So the imaginal constellation includes not just the other, the object, the imaginal object, or this person who I am perceiving imaginally -- in other words, I'm including the imaginal dimensions in my perception of them -- not just the other, but also the self, and also the world. Three aspects. And a fourth aspect: the eros itself. In other words, our very sense of the eros involved in relationship to the image, the eros with the image, the erotic connection with the image, that too begins to be subsumed, to be drawn into, to be imbued by the imaginal erotic gaze. It's subsumed and drawn into the soulmaking dynamic and the fertilization by eros-psyche-logos, so that the eros itself that we are experiencing, our eros right now in relationship with this imaginal object, also begins to become imaginally alive. We perceive it imaginally. It starts to have other dimensions. It itself can become eventually a sense of theophany. The eros itself is sensed to be sacred, sensed to be divine in different ways. It also appears to us, gradually, unfathomable, mysterious, etc., inexhaustible in different ways.
[48:41] So this eros-psyche-logos dynamic, that three-faced -- three-faced soul? I don't know -- also wants to expand in this fourfold way: towards object, towards self, towards world, and towards eros. Self, other, world, eros. It wants to move in all those directions. In a liquid analogy, the water of soul, the waters of soul, want to flow in all those directions. Or, if you like a fire analogy, the fire wants to spread in all those directions, the fire of soulmaking, the fire of the eros and the erotic-imaginal.
Why am I mentioning this? Partly it gives us a clue about navigation in practice. In other words, we can check at any moment, am I including -- all I have to do is include it in my attention, just what's happening with the self. And sometimes just including the self-sense, the image of the self in the attention allows it to be fertilized by image and eros, and it comes alive, or the world, or the eros itself. So sometimes it's just a matter of attention. We might have, as individuals, certain habits of tendency. Some people, the attention tends to be more habitually to the self when they're doing imaginal practice -- and probably also in life as well -- and they tend less to be able to keep the awareness open to the object at the same time. Or vice versa: we're so transfixed and captivated by the divinity of the object that we don't pay attention to the self-sense, and if we did, that would start becoming correspondingly divine. It would start to grow in divinity as well.
For example, if you're doing a devotional practice with a tantric deity or yidam or just an imaginal figure that's kind of divine for you -- there are all kinds of possibilities there, but let's say just you're somehow resting in the lap of the Buddha or Tārā or whoever it is. You're being held by them. And they appear to have all the divinity, and I'm the human receiving their love and their healing energy, whatever. If I dwell in that image, if I just keep dwelling and letting it do its thing by the way I'm tuning, by the way I'm opening, by the way I'm sensitizing in the practice, opening the energy body, paying attention to the resonances, if I just let it do its thing, it will just be a matter of time before the sense of my self in that image, resting in the lap of the Buddha or being embraced by a divinity or loved by a divinity, it will just be a matter of time before I start to feel my divine dimensions. The divinity in the image, the theophany, starts to spread or catch alight so that not just this Buddha or this yidam or whoever it is, this tantric deity, this imaginal figure is divine, but I am both human and divine at the same time. I'm given dimensionality just through the soulmaking process happening.
So sometimes it's just a matter of attention. Other times, we have a more long-standing tendency -- and again, there can be different reasons for this -- for not being able to open to a sense of, for instance, our self as image. So we've reified the self, and the other is image, and there's something blocked there in the whole soulmaking dynamic. It wants to flow into the self, it wants to impregnate the imaginal perception of the self, give it dimensionality, beauty, mystery, unfathomability, inexhaustibility, divinity, but for whatever reason, whether it's habit or other reasons, I'm only allowing it to go and do its work and fill out and come alive in, let's say, one of these directions (for instance, just towards the object and not so much towards the self, not so much towards the world or the eros). So there's a sense somehow, I have all this eros towards this person that I'm perceiving with such beauty, they have such beauty and depth of divinity, etc., but I'm feeling myself as just a human, and my eros is just maybe a little bit embarrassing or clumsy, or maybe even still remnants of the view that it's defiled or a defilement in some kind of way just mixed in with that.
Or the block may be towards the world. A person's doing all this practice -- I touched on this in the last retreat, the Re-enchanting retreat -- doing all this practice, good work on their psychological process and all this stuff, but the world in which it takes place just remains a flat world, remains unenchanted because it's unimpregnated by the soulmaking movement, the soulmaking dynamic. The eros hasn't reached there to bring it imaginally alive. So it's worth checking a couple things. One is, is there a long-term tendency there that one has to always lean one way? And that's interesting to know about oneself. And then can I practise including the directions of self, other, world, and eros where I don't tend to lean habitually? Or maybe it's just a momentary imbalance, if you like, or non-opening in one of these directions, and what the practice needs in that moment is just, "Ah, yeah, I can let it include that," which oftentimes means just opening the attention there to include: "Ah, let's include the self." So I'm aware of an imaginal constellation here, self and other, maybe self and other and world, and let it spread that way.
My experience teaching and working with people with this stuff is that this is not at all obvious, in fact. We often don't realize that the soulmaking dynamic can open, wants to open in all these different directions, is even potentially open if we would only notice it. We might feel stuck, or more often we feel out of balance in some way or other, or that something is very hard to tolerate -- the eros is hard to tolerate, or we're toppling over in some way. In other words, there isn't a kind of equanimity. There isn't a balance. But can you see, even if we use a kind of physical analogy, can you see that if the flow of the eros is allowed to go in these different directions, towards the other, but also back, so to speak, towards the self, and out to the world in all the different directions, and to itself, then the whole movement -- again, if you think of water flowing, the directions balance themselves, so that we're not toppled over towards the object or imploding in ourself or whatever it is? So playing with this, adjustments, awareness opening up to include that, to tune to this, is crucial if we're interested in allowing the process to open more fully and have its full life and its full power, if you like -- I mean efficacy. But also in terms of just navigating in a way that's actually balanced and sustainable.
Related to that, I'll make another distinction. It's close but different. Again, something to check, something we might have individual habit patterns around, either just out of habit or for particular reasons. I was working with someone a little while ago, and she felt like there was a lot of eros with a certain image, etc., and this was too much intensity. It was hard for her to bear. She said it was almost like she felt it was just going to blow her fuses, or she'd just short-circuit, or get too excited in a way that it just dissipates and kind of fritters away. What had actually happened there was that she had become captivated, her attention and consciousness had been captivated in not such a helpful way by the energetics of what was happening in her energy body, specifically around her heart area with the eros and with the beauty and the opening, the sort of flame there. It was hard for her to bear that flame. She felt it was getting too intense in a way that would just kind of explode the process. She would be left with nothing. It wasn't that she thought she was going to go mad or anything like that; it was just it felt so powerful that it was actually fragile.
I kind of recognized this was going on, and also recognized that she hadn't realized that because she was so captivated by the intensity of the feeling in her heart, at that time she was giving less attention to the image, funnily enough. This is what actually started the whole thing was the image and the beauty and the eros there, and as the energy built with the eros in her energy body, she started to give less attention to the image. The attention on the heart area was actually putting it under too much pressure. There wasn't enough spaciousness in the attention to allow the energy to kind of move more widely, instead of being so constricted it became like a pressure cooker in her chest.
Now, this opening can happen in two ways. The opening of the attention can happen in two ways. One is opening of the body, opening of the energy body. Now, you should be familiar with this, opening the awareness, letting the energy, the currents, move how they want to move within the energy body; just opening the awareness as well, giving the whole sense of the energy body more space. Because the awareness is bigger, the sense of the energy body will be bigger, and the energy can flow how it wants to flow -- in, out, up, down, whatever, around, spirals, whatever it wants to do. Especially when there's intense eros or intense sexual energy as well, it often gets caught somewhere in the body -- maybe around the genitals, maybe around the heart, whatever; it could be anywhere, really -- and it needs more space. It needs to be allowed to flow and fill a space, or even move in or out of a space as it wants to do. Sometimes we don't give it enough space with the attention, and it constricts and becomes unbearably uncomfortable or intolerable or throws us out of balance. In order to have more capacity to hold what wants to move through us in terms of eros, in terms of energy, in terms of beauty and opening and all that, what can really help is just creating more capacity in the space. Just by opening the awareness, then the energy body opens, and allowing it, even helping it, imagining it flow. We've talked about this before on other retreats.
But there's a second way the awareness can open or the attention can open to help, related to this example I gave of this woman working this way, and related to what I just said before about the constellation of self, other, world, and eros. And that is recognizing, for instance in this case, attention was too tightly bound and kind of myopically focused on the energetic experience. It was like, "Wow! This is really intense!" There was a lot of intensity there, but because it was so caught up, it actually felt like it was just going to dissipate somehow, discharge or short-circuit. By then keeping aware, staying aware of the energy, giving the energy a little bit more room, but primarily in this case actually re-including the imaginal other -- so including, again, not just the energy body experience, which is vital to imaginal practice as we keep stressing, but also don't lose track of the other, of the imaginal object, the erotic object, the beloved other. Again, you've got a constellation there. You've got the imaginal other, and again, I start being interested, and the attention gets interested in their beauty, etc., not at the expense of my experience here, either energetically or imaginally, but not denying them either.
So there's this kind of openness and inclusion, and the energy, instead of all being caught up in the physical energetic body in one location, can both spread through the body and also through the whole imaginal constellation of self and other and eventually world. So there's more capacity there, and the whole experience can have more potency. The whole soulmaking can be more potent. So intensity is actually neither here nor there. This goes for all kinds of meditation practice. Intensity -- I mean, it can feel like a big deal, like, "Wow, something really important is happening." It may or may not be. What's more important is the potency. In this case that I've been describing, there was a lot of intensity, but there wasn't going to be much potency until she opened up that awareness to re-include and balance it, if you like, with the awareness of the imaginal other and the beauty there and the erotic connection there. Any time there's a choice between intensity and potency, we want the potency. We want the soulmaking to fertilize the soul and open it. Otherwise I just have an intense experience, and then it's over, and so what? Nothing's stretched, nothing's changed, maybe even I get a bit freaked out or scared.
[1:04:43] So intensity can be lovely, and an organic part of the process, and remarkable, but what we're more interested in is the potency. And that potency sometimes will require an intensity of experience as part of it, and sometimes it doesn't even need to be that intense and we can still have the potency. Sometimes something has gotten too intense because it's not balanced. The awareness is not spread in the directions, balanced in the directions that it needs to balance in.
So we're talking about balance. We're talking about navigating in the practice, developing our art, developing our skill. I should point out that -- okay, so we've got self, other, world, eros, energy body, imaginal, the emotions that are going on, the desire and all that. It's not that all these elements -- self, other, world, eros, energy, image, emotion, desire -- that they all need to kind of find this perfect point of static balance, and that they're always equally balanced where the attention is. It's more that actually understanding, having a conception that these are aspects of the total imaginal experience that we can pay attention to within our field. And at any time, we can kind of lean more or less, and emphasize more or less, any of those aspects. We can bring them into some relative balance, which doesn't necessarily mean equal balance, but we can move and, say, lean more towards the object, or more back towards an awareness of the self, and the image of the self, or more out towards the world, or all equally, or more towards the energy body, or more towards the sense of the desire itself, or more towards the image, etc. The whole thing is dynamic and fluid, and there's a kind of dance there that's really an art rather than some kind of either static ideal or some kind of formulaic thing. We can play with this, just as all practice is play, finding out, seeing what the moment needs, what unfolds from which different emphases and how I lean. That's part of the beauty and the fun and the potential of practice.
Now, I should also add to all this that of course if we're talking about balance and equanimity then what we've talked about already, or what we will talk about more as well on the retreat, developing our skill in letting go, in dropping craving, in easing craving, etc., when it arises, and just letting go of something, not being compelled to engage or give our attention to anything at all, that skill and capacity to let go is something we want to develop. For a lot of people doing this, they will have developed quite a lot of that before they even go into these kinds of practices involving the erotic-imaginal and the opening to desire. It's not always that things move in that order; some people actually open to explore this, the practices of eros and opening to desire, etc., at the same time as they're learning practices of letting go, and putting down, and dropping, etc. But there is a question here about what to practise when, and what order in my life of practice I develop these different approaches, what order I develop them in. The capacity for cultivating equanimity, for sitting in a really still, equanimous state, whether that's kind of more absorbed in jhāna or more open to the multiplicity of experience, the taste for and the accessibility of equanimity in our life and our practice is really, really important. It's really important. And it complements what we're exploring now, the kinds of things we're emphasizing on this retreat.
But can you see again that if the eros is allowed to do its thing and inseminate the whole soulmaking movement, inseminate psyche and logos, and re-inseminate eros, and spread out that way, and spread out in cosmopoesis, and include not just the other but the self and the world and the eros itself, then can you get the sense how there's a kind of balance implicit in that? And balance being characteristic of equanimity, there will be equanimity that comes from the eros being allowed to do its thing, not from shutting down the eros. So we tend to think either I'm in a state of desire or eros, or I'm in a state of equanimity. There's a way of going about it like that. But if I actually allow the eros, allow the desire in different ways, then actually I can have an equanimous eros, if we use that language, or at least a balanced eros -- let's say that. And if we allow eros to do its thing and open up in all these dimensions and directions and aspects that it naturally, if you like, wants to and will open up, then you can also see that there's a kind of equality of things, as we've been alluding to. Not just the other, but the self also, and the world also, and everything in the world is involved in, drawn into, subsumed in, caught up in, imbued by this whole erotic-imaginal process, the whole soulmaking process and the opening of the imaginal perception.
So in the cosmopoesis, and in that inclusion of all these aspects, there is an equality of all things. Everything becomes imaginally infused, imaginally alive, imaginally perceived. Everything becomes dimensionalized, unfathomable, inexhaustible, mysterious, beautiful, etc. There is equality of all things. Now, some of you will know that an equality of all things is one of the ways -- particularly in the Mahāyāna tradition -- they actually define equanimity. It's a regarding all things as equal, as also in the Theravādan tradition. So these characteristics of balance of the being, balance in relationship, balance of relationships, and the equality of all things that opens in our perception, these are characteristics of equanimity by definition in Buddhist usage of that term, and they're also characteristic, if you can understand, of the whole soulmaking dynamic or the whole movement of eros when it's allowed to do its thing, when it's allowed to expand that way, when it's allowed to impregnate that way.
[1:12:28] There are certainly differences, of course, between eros and equanimity conceived in a Buddhist way. Equanimity, being one of the brahmavihāras, shares a characteristic that all the brahmavihāras have. Like mettā, it actually moves in the direction of lessening fabrication, lessening the perception of the other, lessening the perception of objects, lessening the self/other divide, the subject/object divide, all this. And if you've done dedicated mettā practice over a while, you'll see that fading is characteristic. I and the object of my mettā begin to melt into oneness, or oneness of being, or oneness of heart; we are one luminous heart together. This is the way mettā goes. Deep equanimity practice being the quietening of the push and pull with all experience -- I'm talking about equanimity towards phenomena now -- that leads, because of the quietening of the clinging, the push/pull there, it also leads to less fabrication. So there's a quietening of the fabrication.
Eros, on the other hand, in distinction to that, eros actually moves in the direction of more fabrication, more beautiful and skilful fabrication. It's the path of, if you like, tantra -- skilful fabrication premised on, based on, involving a non-realism and understanding of the emptiness of what is fabricated. I know it's empty, therefore I can fabricate. I see image as image, therefore I fabricate. So in contrast to the fabrication of papañca, which has a kind of realism to it -- I believe this thing is real; I believe whatever the imaginary thing is or whatever, and all this proliferation -- the fabrication that comes out of eros when it's allowed to impregnate the eros-psyche-logos dynamic is not based on realism. It's this magical, beautiful, skilful, soulmaking fabrication, in contradistinction to mettā and equanimity, which tend to quieten the fabrication. So there are differences there.
But this aspect of the presence or absence of realism, to me this is really pivotal. I actually still haven't thought of good words for -- what's a good word for an image or fantasy when we believe them to be real? If I use the word 'image,' and most of the time when I use the word 'image' or 'fantasy' in these contexts, I really mean an imaginal image, an imaginal fantasy, with everything that's implied by that use of the word 'imaginal' in the way that we're using it. What might be a word for the kind of image or fantasy when it really is reified, it's not soulmaking, it's taken as real, and it's kind of one-dimensional, it doesn't have that dimensionality, doesn't have that seeing image as image?
I realize this is difficult for people, what we're calling the Middle Way between real and unreal. It relates to the Middle Way of emptiness, between is and is not. There's a similar Middle Way in terms of imaginal practice for me. I often get nervous when I'm with someone -- actually whatever the relationship is -- and they're using the language of images, etc., but it seems to be somehow there's quite a lot of ego in it and quite a lot of realism in it. Sometimes people use the language of divinity and soul, etc., but somehow it's just -- we talked about this before -- about me and my process, and the reality of the self is still somehow really central there, even if they're using the language, as I know some people use language like 'God's will' or this or that, but actually it's all very reified, and the ego is getting quite solidified in that process. It's very dramatic, but it lacks that quality of theatre, of knowing that it's theatre. Personally, it makes me quite nervous, and I've seen some quite difficult and abusive things, I think, through that, people engaging in that kind of thing.
In defining soulmaking, you may remember from talks from another retreat, I actually included in the definition of soulmaking an awareness of seeing image as image. I was very hesitant about that, and thinking about, for example, Catherine and I were talking about Mother Teresa, who saw people as her beloved Jesus. There's an imaginal perception there. Or her whole concept of Jesus and Christ and Catholic doctrine, etc. One wonders what her notion of real or not real there was. I'm actually not sure. But I sort of hummed and hawed for quite a while, and then just decided to land on the side of including that awareness of "this is image," seeing image as image, this awareness of a kind of Middle Way between real and not real, including that in my definition of what is soulmaking and what it means to have an imaginal perception.
There's a problem here. And I realize this is difficult for people. If we say "image as image," or "don't take it as real," then people just -- very understandably; it's difficult -- go to the other extreme, and sort of dismiss: "It's not real, therefore it's just delusion or it's worthless, this image," or "Any sense of divinity I had is not real." Therefore, it doesn't have its power. It's a tricky one. I think maybe this comes in stages for some people, and there's a journey towards that. I can just say for now that when I inhabit what feels to me to be that Middle Way, that razor's edge between real and not real, either in regard to all things in terms of emptiness, or in regard to images and the whole notion of soul and divinity, that this ultra-narrow razor's edge or tightrope, or what seems like that, actually ends up being incredibly powerful, incredibly powerful in what it liberates in terms of the perception and the transformation and the dedication. And actually what appeared to be a really [narrow razor's edge], like there's no space either side and it's a very precarious balance, actually opens up. It's not narrow at all when you get inside that understanding and live it and feel it deeply in the core of one's consciousness, this Middle Way. It actually opens up a vast playground or dancing hall, and there's so much freedom and power and beauty, and room for movement and creative movement, and dynamism and energy that can come through there.
[1:20:54] I've alluded to this before, but just in terms of this realism thing: maybe you already know that kind of power, to some degree at least, because it comes through in our relationship with art. We've touched on this before. In literature or a novel that you're reading, something moves you so much. You know it's not real, but it still has immense power. Or poetry. We talk about poetic truth. We've been through all this before. Or theatre. You know it's a theatre. I'm sitting right there. I know these are actors. Some of them are my friends, even. Something about it moves me in a way sometimes more than so-called 'reality' itself as we tend to think about it. Or in movies or whatever. There's a power. You can have a feeling of this power through art, and that's exactly what we're talking about. Or you might know it in your own Dharma practice, that to whatever degree you have realized the emptiness of self, to whatever degree, and you know this self is empty, you still can engage your self, think in terms of your self, feel your self, respect your self, care for your self and other selves, selves that you care about. The knowing of the emptiness doesn't make something worthless. It doesn't make your self worthless. It's not that you then throw something out. So you may have tasted -- I know it's difficult, this what I call the razor's edge or the tightrope of the Middle Way here, whether it's in regard to emptiness, or whether it's in regard to the imaginal. But I think there are other avenues in our experience where we may already have a sense of how to come into relationship and occupy that Middle Way, how to be balanced there. It may be already in our life to a certain degree. But again, I acknowledge it's difficult, or it can be difficult.
The thing about it, though, is it liberates. And where there is the seeing of emptiness, this 'neither is nor isn't,' 'neither real nor not real,' and seeing image as image, this allows the erotic engagement, allows the power and the potency and the magic of that, and the captivation of that, and the dynamic of that, without being out of balance. This, out of everything, is the most powerful thing that allows, so to speak, equanimity in regard to eros, balance, etc. It's that balance of the tightrope of the Middle Way, which turns out, as I said, to be a whole beautiful playing field, a whole dance floor, rather than a thin, precarious tightrope balance. So the seeing of the non-realism, together with everything that we talked about earlier, the other aspects, balancing them. But the non-realist seeing allows more opening, more intensity, etc., if intensity is appropriate and feels appropriate to what's going on. It allows more trust. It allows us to move and navigate and dance with all this.
I actually feel that that sense of the Middle Way, that sense of theatre, is actually right there in the imaginal perception. In other words, I think it's intrinsic to it. Again, it's one of these things that we begin to notice. It's like, "Oh, yeah." If you ask someone -- they're with an image, and it's clearly alive for them as an image in an imaginal way, and you say, "Would you say it's real or not real?", they say, "No, it has some other category." It's palpable, endemic, intrinsic to the imaginal experience. That's why I wanted to include it in what I call soulmaking or imaginal experience by definition. I feel it's intrinsic.
Okay, very last thing for now. I realize it's a lot of info. Hopefully this will be useful to you for some time. Very last thing. With images in general, and with imaginal practice the way we're conceiving it, a lot is about my relationship with. Part of that relationship with means exactly what kinds of awareness and sensitivity and attunement I'm bringing to the engagement with the imaginal, to the erotic connection. As we talked about, it's like being aware: what's the natural register of this image? What register of substantiality or insubstantiality does it want to exist at, to play out at? I can play with that deliberately. But it might be also listening, attuning, sensitizing, respecting something.
With regard to sexual erotic-imaginal, where it's clearly sexual, and sometimes intensely sexual, or even what (from a normal perspective) seems bizarrely sexual or whatever, you'll notice something else. Again, a lot of this is just stuff to notice, aspects to notice of imaginal experience. You'll notice that when we're entering into imaginal practice, and here's a sexual image, it doesn't tend to escalate in the way that, say, an unimaginal sexual fantasy tends to escalate: you're daydreaming, and you're thinking and whatever, then this person, and you have a fantasy, and it all kind of heads in one direction, doesn't it? There's a kind of escalation and movement towards a certain goal that plays out in the fantasy or whatever. What's characteristic of images in general, and also most, let's say, sexual erotic-imaginal images is that they're more iconic. They're more timeless. So rather than escalating and having this kind of narrative movement in time towards some grand finale of orgasm or whatever it is, they tend to actually just be one thing, or something that stays more, so to speak, static in time. It doesn't have this goal orientation. It's as if the image, when it's really imaginal -- it could be whatever it is; it might be sexual intercourse or whatever it is -- but it tends to be, so to speak, sufficient unto itself. It might just be holding hands; it might be whatever it is sexually. But it doesn't have that kind of escalatory propelling in time movement towards some goal. There's something iconic. This image, in itself, you see there's a theophany, and it doesn't need to go anywhere else. This is something we notice more and more, and we start to trust it in relation to sexual images, in relation to strong sexual erotic-imaginal images, but also in relation to the imaginal anyway.
A larger point connected with all that -- and I'm going to stop right now -- is just that in time we begin to trust the imaginal soulmaking process itself more and more. No matter how bizarre, how strange, how unusual, how intense, how not intense it is or whatever, we get the sense more and more that there is something bigger than us here. There's a movement bigger than us, an intelligence, an autonomy bigger than us. At the same time as we understand it is a dependent arising, and the way of looking, and the concepts we bring, there's something, so to speak, from a certain point of view, bigger than us that we can trust. We start to trust the imaginal and trust soulmaking, trust where it leads us and what it brings us and the beauty of it. And that also includes trusting what appears to us as dark or weird or bizarre. We've been through all that before.
