Visions of the Beyond

I'd like to start by offering you a few questions to explore. Now, this is pretty unfair of me, because they're pretty big questions. So you might want to spend a little time now, or actually take them away and be with them for as long as feels fruitful for you or interesting for you, or if you're listening at home, you can press 'pause' for as long as it feels helpful. But let me just start this way, to open something up. One question: what do you love about the path? What do you love about your path? What do you love in practice? And what comes when you drop that question in? What responses from your being? What do you love about the path? What do you love in the path, in practice?

And you can linger with whatever answers come, responses come from your being, and their resonances in the heart, in the soul, in the body, in the emotions, sensing their effects on you, the effects of the responses, the effects of the questions. What do you love about the path, about practice? Maybe there's a whole stream of different responses and answers, and things that you love, aspects that you love. Maybe it's one aspect or thing in particular. This is very unfair, because I'm going to move on and ask a second question, related but different: what do you want from the path, from practice? What do you want? Where are you going? Where do you hope that you're going? Where do you conceive that you're going on this path?

Or to put it in different terms, some people feel themselves moving towards something. What are you moving towards? Or in a different kind of conception or image, what are you opening to or hoping to move towards, or differently, hoping to open to, to receive, even? Different images, sort of active and receptive, if you like. What do you want? Where are you going? What are you moving towards? What are you opening to? You could use different words here. What's your sense, conception, image of the goal, the destination, the aim, or if you prefer the language, the result or the fruit of the path? Or just the direction that you're moving in. So whatever words or way of articulating it helps you. What is it that you're after? What is it that you want? And again, is it possible to kind of feel into the effects of that question, the effects of the responses in the different dimensions of the being, the body, in the energy body, in the heart, in the soul, in the mind? You can linger with the answers, and feel their resonances, sense their effects on you.

Perhaps some responses have come to each of these questions, "What do you love about the path? And what do you want from the path?", so to speak. But let me ask you this as well. And I'm aware of how unfair this is, really, in the time that we have right now, but let me ask you this as well: do the responses that have come so far, do they feel complete, exhaustive? Or is there a feeling that, "Yes, that's part of it, but there's something left over, something that I haven't quite articulated yet, or perhaps even discerned or identified"? Or is it, "No, that's pretty much it. That's it"? So there's not a right or wrong here. Just asking.

Okay. As I said, you can come back to these questions, and reflect on them and be with them any time you want, of course, for as long as you want. But let's move on now, and let me bring to bear a few perspectives on all this, on path, on goal, etc., from the point of view or involving many of the ideas and the directions of inquiry and exploration that we're dealing with and focusing on in this retreat.

Let me start by saying: I don't know if you realize this -- you may or may not realize it -- but I would say that to some extent, the conception that we harbour or entertain of the path and of the goal, or let's call it awakening, and the fantasy of the path and of the awakening, to some extent are going to be conditioned by what we read and hear. So the very way I think of the path and I think of the goal, or what it includes, or what it is, or what direction it's going to take me or supposed to take me, etc., or what it includes, what it doesn't, all that, to some extent, will be conditioned by what I'm exposed to -- reading, hearing, teachers, this, that, others, friends, etc. And some of that, of course, is dependent just on the era, the age that we live in, the time that we are in.

Now, I've mentioned this before. I don't know how obvious it is. The sense of self that we have now, that we just feel, or most people would feel is completely obvious -- "This is what my self involves. This is what my self includes. This is the kind of interiority I have. This is the way I not just think of the self but feel the self, experience the self" -- that sense of self, and also the freedoms that I conceive or feel or hope or aspire to for that self, the kinds of freedom and the ranges and directions of freedom for that self are different now than they were in the time of the Buddha in India. And one just has to read the suttas to notice the complete absence of certain kinds of relationships with the self, both difficult and exhilarating, or interesting, or opening, or complex. Our very sense of freedom, of course, the freedom for that self, or the freedoms, plural, for that self and of that self, are actually different, are conditioned by the age that we live in and what comes to us from the outside, from the era, etc. [10:40]

To me, it's interesting to realize that. It does something to realize that. Then we might ask, on the back of such a realization, then, if our views of all this and our fantasies of all this, path and awakening, are conditioned to some extent by my environment, what is a conception and a fantasy that is, so to speak, authentic for me? Or am I just a kind of puppet pulled in some way by what I'm hearing or reading, and what's kind of in the air around me, in my culture, in my time, in my society, in my spiritual sort of fashions (for want of a better word)? What would be an authentic conception and fantasy of path and awakening for me, authentic to me? I mean, 'authentic' means 'born of myself,' 'independent.' It's actually related to the meaning of 'independent.'

Now, that question, "What's an authentic conception and fantasy of the path?", is not a question that the Buddha and other spiritual teachers of different ages [asked]. It would never even have occurred to them to ask it, partly because we live in a very individualist culture now. That whole way of conceiving the self and choice, it just didn't exist back then. The Buddha would never have asked, "What's an authentic conception for you of path or of awakening?" So that's interesting too. And I wonder whether even for us these days it's really a helpful question.

Perhaps a better question, I think, a better question would be: the way of conceiving and fantasizing of path and awakening, are they soulmaking for you? Or which ways are soulmaking for you? That's a different [question]. Again, it's related, but it's a different question. So what ways of conceiving and fantasizing and imagining path and awakening are soulmaking for you? That's actually quite a radical difference in approach and questioning. Now, notice with that, if we come back to this point that we are to some extent conditioned, our views or what we can conceive of as a path and what awakening is, is to some degree, to some extent, conditioned by the culture. Whether it's conditioned to a great degree for me, or to a very small degree, my views and my conceptions, my images of path and awakening, how much it is conditioned for me by the culture is actually not the important factor. It might be a lot, or it might be a little, but what's important is not the so-called authenticity or independence. It's the soulmaking. That's the test.

So just like when we talked about in imaginal practice, it doesn't matter if you deliberately introduce an image or change an image, and then you think, "Ah, is that just my ego? I shouldn't be doing this." It doesn't matter. The test is in the soulmaking. So here, too, the degree or the extent to which it feels like, "Oh, this is just conditioned from my culture, from what I've heard," that doesn't matter. From this point of view, the question is: is it soulmaking? And how soulmaking is it? Is it supportive of soulmaking or not?

But notice, too, a more kind of radical distinction from the ways we usually think about these things is that the goal, aim, destination, direction, result, fruit, whatever word you favour there, the goal -- let's use that one for now -- that you conceive or fantasize is not just, the question is not just, "Is that helpful for you to conceive and imagine that way? Is it healing or is it freeing?", whatever those words mean. But is it soulmaking? So that's quite a, I would say, radical difference of approach, of orientation, of entering into these questions.

Traditionally, in the Buddhist tradition, at least, what seems to me unavoidable if you read the suttas -- but actually, I really don't care whether it's so-called 'historically accurate' or not; it's not important, especially not important for what I want to unfold in this talk -- but let's say traditionally, in the Pali Canon, the goal, destination, aim, fruit, etc., of the path, was a realization of the transcendent Unfabricated, meaning this transcending of the world of perception. Not just the world of labelling, but the world of sense experience, and the world of any kind of sense of experience of subject, any kind of experience of object, of space and time. And this dimension, āyatana, realm of the Unfabricated or the Deathless, transcendent realm, was something the Buddha put a lot of emphasis for. And one way of intuiting, sensing, understanding the coherence of the whole Pali Canon, it's all a movement of lessening fabrication, culminating in this opening to the Unfabricated, something utterly beyond anything that we can say of it or describe it, except by talking about it for the most part in the negative, as the Buddha mostly does: "Not this, not that. Beyond this. No 'this' there, no 'that' there," etc. Something utterly, utterly mystical and transcendent there. Now, I'm not spending a long time talking about that in this talk, but I have in other places, etc.

Some people, in my experience, are very interested in this. They hear about this realm, this dimension, this possibility, this opening of the transcendent Unfabricated, the Deathless, whatever you want to call it, and it really sparks their interest. There's a fire there. Some people yearn for this opening, to move towards that, to know it in this lifetime, etc. And it's actually a central yearning and thrust of the whole way they feel the path, as it seems to me it really is in the Pali Canon as well.

And some people, other people, hear about this or read about it, and are not interested in it at all, for different reasons, at all. That's just something to notice. And in the tradition, this realization or opening to the transcendent or Unfabricated was intimately tied up with the end of suffering, so that in the moment of, let's say 'experiencing' that, for want of a better word, 'opening' to that, the moment of unfabricating, that comes about through a complete dying down, in the moment, of the factors of clinging (push-pull), including avijjā (ignorance), in the moment, that propel fabrication. The clinging and the avijjā propel fabrication, if you know the teachings of dependent origination. In the moment when those are completely quieted, there is no fabrication of perception happening, of self, other, subject, object, world, time, space, etc. The arahant, the so-called completely awakened person, has just erased or eroded or cut off all clinging and all avijjā, and so, at the end of their life, they are not reborn -- in other words, there is not the propulsion to create more fabrication of perception, so no perception, no world is reborn, if you like, put it that way. They are not reborn into the world. So it's intimately tied up with the view of ending suffering because one ends rebirth.

And this is also a movement in the Pali Canon, getting off the wheel of rebirth, just ending that whole cycle of death and rebirth, etc. So this movement to the Unfabricated is intimately tied up with ending suffering. Tying this back to the opening talk, if I remember, we talked about, okay, but some people have a yearning to know this Unfabricated, this transcendent, a desire, a deep desire for that, and it's not completely captured in or described as a movement that all they want is to end suffering. Wrapped up in that yearning for them, there is the desire and the longing of the mystic. So it's not only captured by, or even primarily, in some instances, described as or captured by 'a desire to end suffering.' There's a whole range here of people at different times in their practice. But how much desire do you or I have for this? How much does any practitioner have for this, that opening, that realization?

Now, another thing to point out about that is that the other kinds of, or let's say a certain direction of mystical experiences, including experiences of all kinds of universal oneness, whether it's a oneness of awareness, a kind of cosmic consciousness, or infinite consciousness, or universal awareness, or universal love, or the universal ocean of being -- there are quite a few possibilities -- they all, if you like, are connected on a spectrum of lessening fabrication, which has its kind of end point, so to speak, in a complete cessation of fabrication. So they're all kind of degrees of less fabrication, if you like. And they're kind of grouped together, roughly, along a line, along a thread of lessening fabrication. So that in practising different ways of letting go of clinging, one moves on that spectrum of fabrication, and opens to these different perceptions of less fabrication, which will involve less fabrication of subject and object, self and world, and that split, and that concreteness, and one knows and experiences and opens to all the different kinds of beauty of those different kinds of universal onenesses. We'll come back to that. [22:33] But there's a tying together in a certain direction of the spectrum of lessening fabrication, culminating, if you like, in this Unfabricated.

One of the things, apart from that movement of lessening fabrication, one of the other things that this movement has in common is that there is a 'beyond' there. In all these openings, before I fully opened to them, before I fully opened to a sense of universal love permeating and being the fabric of all existence, or universal awareness, or this transcendent, completely Unfabricated, before I fully open to it, it constitutes for me a 'beyond': beyond what I already know and what I've already experienced. I might intuit it. I might have heard about it. I might have had glimpses of it. But it's still a beyond. And recalling what we've been saying about the whole soulmaking dynamic, where there is a beyond, one of the possibilities that constellates with or in relation to that beyond is eros, right? Eros involves a beyond. We've said that. So that this whole sense of the possibility of opening to, realizing different kinds of universal oneness, mystical experiences, this transcendent Unfabricated, etc., one of the possibilities is that eros constellates in relation to that, for me, for you.

And with eros, and if it's allowed to do its thing, as we've said, it will then constitute and constellate and start to involve fantasies and images in regard to, in relation to, that whole beyond, and the movement towards it, and what it includes and involves, and what's around it and associated with it, so that there is the erotic-imaginal, involving fantasy, involving image, of awakening, of enlightenment, of realization, of the Buddha who showed the way, or other teachers in the past and the present who have realized that which I haven't realized yet fully, and who are showing me the way, or living that, or examples of that. And fantasies, images of the path, and of the self on that path. And all of this, we are saying, is soulmaking. Rather than being a bad thing, there is beauty that comes with that, with that filling out of the erotic-imaginal, that constellation and constitution of the erotic-imaginal there. Beauty comes with it. Meaningfulness comes with it, a sense of depth, soulmaking, all of that that we've talked about. So that's one possibility with this beyond: that it constellates eros, and everything that that brings and that allows and that starts to involve and galvanize.

Another possibility, though, is that it constellates craving. Not eros, but craving. What? Why? How? What determines whether it constellates craving or eros, and the pain of craving and the contraction of that? What determines? What guides it one way or another? What conditions it? What sends it into craving rather than into eros, or into eros rather than craving? And then, when there is craving, and the pain of that, a teacher will often say to a student who's then got this aspiration to realize the Unfabricated, but they're struggling with it, "Drop it. Drop desire. Drop striving. It's not about getting anywhere. It's not about achieving anything. Nowhere to go, nothing to do," all that whole rhetoric there.

This is really important: what determines? What happens? You know, we've touched on some of this. It's like, is there a tendency, do I have a tendency, when there is desire for something, to emphasize in my being, in my attention, the sense of lack there? I feel the lack more than the desire and the beauty of the desire. Or a self-view gets very reified and solidified and stuck in relation to that which I desire. Perhaps I assume, "I'm not going to be able to get this. Other people might, but I won't be able to get this." Or the self-view constellates and hardens in some kind of relationship or construction of self-measurement in relation to this: "Where am I on the ladder towards awakening, or this experience, or the Unfabricated, or this thing?" And measurement comes to be the dominant flavour, and all the pain of a realist-conceived self-measurement, and the contraction of that.

And then what happens when we have that contraction? What do we do with it? And is one of the possibilities that issues from a sense of contraction at some point or other, it's just I drop it? I just drop it. And I go into some other kind of relationship that has just dropped that desire and that view and that sense of possibility. Or perhaps there is what we touched on when I was telling you about the psychoanalyst W. R. D. Fairbairn, and he talked about the anti-libidinal ego-defence: that when we fear not being able to have what we desire, or being rejected, or the impossibility of getting it, that there are some structures in us that kick into place that actually prevent us even wanting it. Anti-libidinal. They prevent the libido, the eros constituting to even want that and come into relationship with that. We just cut it off, sometimes to the extent we don't even feel the desire at all.

So, interesting to me, and complex, and so important. What goes on for us? What constellates out of that possibility of any kind of beyond? Beyond what I know, beyond what I already know, what I've already experienced. What happens with us in relation to that?

A sense of the beyond can constellate eros, as we were saying. When it's a desirable beyond, it constellates eros. That's a possibility. But the reverse is also true -- as is so often the case with these dependent origination things -- that where there is, let's say, a lot of eros in a person's being, in their soul, flowing in their life, that lot of eros, that fire, that movement of water, if you like, that eros will constellate a beyond. As we've said, it needs, eros needs a beyond. And it will discover and create a beyond. Yeah? So the beyond constellates the eros, the eros constellates the beyond.

The transcendent Unfabricated, or any of these kind of stages on the way to that of some kind of perception of universal oneness, onenesses, are one possibility of beyond, one direction of possibility of beyond, of possibilities of beyonds. If dimensionality is allowed to the sense of existence, to the sense of consciousness, but also to the sense of the fabric of the world, if one allows dimensionality, one of the possibilities is that it moves in this direction, different kinds of onenesses, along the spectrum of lessening fabrication, until eventually it's the Unfabricated, opens to the Unfabricated. So, if dimensionality is allowed, this constellation of a beyond that comes from eros, one possibility is that.

If dimensionality is not allowed, is not something that the psyche or the consciousness, or the logos or whatever, allows, admits is possible (I'll come back to this), then what happens to the eros?

Here's a person with a fair degree of eros in the small sense, and it cannot open up into or it cannot open up other dimensions of perception. So there is just a one-dimensional world. This is it. And then that eros, in its wanting more, can't open, discover its more, get its more, have the beauty of the satisfaction, the fulfilment of more, and an endless more in the opening of the perceptions of dimensionalities. It must go, so to speak, flatly outwards, horizontally, and move in one dimension, wider and wider: "I need more, I need more, I need more." The eros wants more always, and so, more this, more that, in the one-dimensional world. More acquiring. Endless acquiring of experiences or possessions or whatever it is. It's only got one way to go, and that's horizontal. It has no depth of beyond to move into. The beyond is just beyond flatly, in terms of more that I can acquire, in terms of conquests or relationships, or possessions, or experiences, or whatever it is, Facebook friends. Endless, wider and wider horizontal movement, that the eros is driven into what we call greed and craving in the Dharma language. [33:14]

And conversely to all this, if there's not much eros in a being -- and that could be, you know, because it's blocked for the different reasons that we've touched on, and we can keep going into that and exploring that: how does it get blocked or limited in different ways, the eros and that whole dynamic? Or it could just be, you know, some people, just natural to their being, natural to their soul, there's just less eros. Some people really have a lot of fire, a lot of rivers, torrents of water. There's a lot of eros moving in the soul. It's a soul with a lot of eros. And some less so. There's no judgment here with more or less. It's just natural to a being. I'm certainly open to that point of view. The question is whether it's natural to me, this much eros, whatever that much is, or whether it's blocked, or whether it's kind of forced and I'm straining for an eros or a torrent or a fire that's actually not natural to me. But sometimes there's not that much eros, and so there's not enough eros to constellate much of a beyond. Not much eros, not much sense of a beyond, that which I haven't yet known and experienced and opened to and penetrated, etc., and the excitement of that, and the attraction and the beauty and the longing for that. Not that much eros, therefore not much 'beyond' constellated.

But with regard to the transcendent and that whole line, if you like, or spectrum of lessening fabrication, and the different kind of mystical experiences of, let's say, universal onenesses, etc., I'll say that, in regard to that, one of the questions is and the sort of investigations for us is: can we notice, for us, for a practitioner on the path, if there is a sense, a relationship with the transcendent, and the eros for that, and desire for that, how it moves and when it moves and why it moves between eros and craving? And coming out of that question and that investigation is: how do I take care? What is involved in taking care of the soulmaking and the eros in my relationship with the transcendent, this thing, this dimension, whatever dimension it is that I haven't opened to yet?

This is a very different way of thinking about this. Can I take care of the eros here? Implicit in that, it means "Can I take care of the soulmaking?", which means "Can I take care of the image in all this?", with the different aspects. So it means in relation to that object, that erotic object, that whatever specific beyond that I have heard about and I intuit and I've glimpsed and I want to open to -- the object, but also the self. Remember this imaginal constellation: object, self, world, and eros. So can I take care of the eros and the soulmaking? What does it mean to take care of the soulmaking in relationship to this kind of beyond, a transcendent beyond or whatever, in that direction? The object, the self, and the eros itself. How do I do that? What's involved in that? How do I care for that?

So that's one possibility. Let's call it the traditional one, and the movement towards transcendence. The second possibility, which we've actually already touched on, is that dimensionality, as we said, any sense of dimensionality to existence, let's say, to the way that the world is, that is blocked. It's absolutely refused, or at least not supported in the world-view, or for whatever reason it's blocked. Then what we get, as we said from our small definition of eros -- wanting more, wanting more contact, etc. -- it can only move in one dimension, and the 'more' will just push it wider. So I need, if it's in relation to a certain [person], a lover or whatever, I need more contact. And then, at a certain point, that's exhausted, because I can't have any more contact with you, or I get tired because you're just one-dimensional. There's not more to discover in you, so I go chasing someone else, or I have affairs, or I, you know, whatever it is. Or I have this car, and then I need another car -- whatever it is. I've been on holiday here; now I need to go there. It's not coming from a sort of badness in the self. It's just coming from a limitation of the soulmaking dynamic. So it becomes this kind of chasing of experiences, or trying to accumulate and acquire experiences. And because it's flat and it doesn't have the other dimensionalities to open up, to create/discover, to be revealed, to move into, it becomes, in some way or another, just a chasing of pleasantness, pleasant sensations, and a kind of avoiding of unpleasant, and this kind of movement to somehow prop up, through this accumulation of experience, the ego moving in a one-dimensional world.

Part of the, I would say tragedy of all this, is in our contemporary Western society, it's actually nowadays quite possible to keep chasing this quite a long time. Even for people who don't conceive of themselves as kind of in the rich portion of society, even people who are not, relatively speaking, in terms of Western society, are not of the greater means financially, etc., it's still possible. How many TV stations are available? How much different kind of food experience is available? How much cheap holidays are available? So it's actually unfortunately quite possible, with all the effects this has on the environment, etc., and all kinds of other stuff, it's actually quite possible, unfortunately, to keep chasing this really quite far down the line. And there's an endlessness possible here, but it's flat. And what's not recognized is that it's one-dimensional. It doesn't come alive as fantasy. It's all conceived as real: a real self, having the possibility of accumulating or possessing real objects or real experiences in a real world. And if we are viewing it critically from a Dharma perspective, the eros there or the desire, the craving there (better), so to speak, is also a real thing.

And of course, some people from a Buddhist perspective say, "Well, that's not a path. That's not being on a path. It's saṃsāra, this endless flowing on." Sāra means 'to flow,' this endless flowing on, this endless chasing, the endless thirst of taṇhā. But that's one possibility of what happens with the germ of eros, if you like. That is a kind of path, I suppose, but people would generally not consider that a path. Buddhist people would not consider it a path, a legitimate path. But if we come back to Buddhist versions, if you like, then there are some Buddhisms, if you like, and particularly, perhaps, what some people would associate or call themselves by, some 'secular' approaches, let's say, to practice or Buddhism, or even they wouldn't call it 'Buddhism,' or whatever, some approaches, some, again, conceptions or fantasies of the path, would state right away that there is no beyond. And certainly not a beyond that's anything other than a fantasy, in the poor sense of the word -- a hope, a kind of wish fulfilment, a consolation, etc. There's no real beyond. Any beyond that you might conceive of or harbour, from this point of view, is what might be, what some people would call, "That's just metaphysics" -- in other words, nonsense.

And in this view, or this approach to a path, notice something: that the path is the goal, or there's very little difference between the path and the goal. So both path and goal are described or characterized or constituted by just, "There is this life. There is this experience of life, this finite life. It's finite in a number of ways. This finite life needs to be the path, and the goal is just meeting this life: being open to it, meeting it, letting it touch us, coping with that, repeatedly and endlessly, until there's death and the extinction of the consciousness at death," in this view. Then there's just an endless kind of repetition of meeting life, life with its finitude, with its tragedy, etc., and with its limitations and its existential limitations. Just endlessly meeting and coping with what life is, again, conceived pretty flatly, pretty one-dimensionally, and with strong existential limits and finiteness to it in different ways.

Or there's a kind of arrival at some point at a kind of stance of resignation, we could say. Being resigned to, "This is all that life is. It's not more than this." Or you could call that, some people would call that equanimity, rather than resignation -- whatever; it kind of amounts to the same thing -- in the face of reality, of life, which is construed as real, and the real, to borrow a certain phrase from some contemporary philosophers, 'facticities.' It's a funny word, because they want to avoid words like 'truth.' So this is what's conceived as real: this life, this that I see in the senses, that appears. This is what things are. This is what life is. In this view, life is just what it seems to be. It's what most people would agree on. And in the path, then, notice there's not more than what seems obvious to most people, through the senses, through the understanding of what life is and what existence is. There's not much more than that to discover and to open to.

So in this sense, there's not much beyond what I already know. Awakening is not constituted and does not involve much more than I already know, already realize, already experience. There's not much of a beyond there to discover, etc., to open to. Still, though, notice what happens with this. Eros comes in. If it exists in the soul, it comes in. And it starts doing something. And so life, in this view, starts to get a capital L. And life starts to get romanticized a little bit in different ways and kind of elevated. Now, it might be the elevation of the touch of the breeze on the cheek, and the moment-to-moment flow of existence. But some way or other, whether it started that way, with a certain kind of romantic view of life, or the eros comes in and tends to elevate an element because it's impregnating it with what eros does, to a certain extent, but it's limited by the view. So one possibility with this is that life gets a capital L, and then part of life, part of existence, part of the world is, if you like, or part of the sense of the world and of existence is the sense of the sublime. And that, too, is maybe given a capital S. You may know this from, I think it originated with some of the Romantic poets and painters, so for example William Turner and people like that. I can't remember who else. And what that really is, the sublime, is something that is beautiful, sensually beautiful, but also terrifying. It's this mixture of beautiful and terrifying, because it's so much bigger than the small, fragile, relatively -- well, yeah, fragile, puny, but fragile me, self.

So wrapped up in the sublime is some sort of aesthetic sensibility mixed with a good dose of kind of feeling almost overwhelmed by or trembling in existential fear at the hugeness of things. Wrapped up in it, too, is the tragedy of impermanence. So this is what 'life' is, the sublime and the tragedy of impermanence. And we are asked, in this path, to face that, to open to it, to feel the poignancy of it. All these become quite central aspects of the path.

Now, this constitutes, constellates, a kind of beyond -- beyond me, beyond the fragility of me. Also beyond my existence, because my erasure in non-existence, at death, which could happen any time, and the tragedy of that disappearance and that erasure, that, too, is a kind of beyond me. So there's a kind of beyond here that's allowed by the limited logos, and other limitations that might come in there, but any other beyond either just doesn't occur to the person, or they're not interested in it, or, as I said, it's flatly disallowed, a priori, from the beginning. It's ruled out, completely disqualified as a possibility, so that, again, the path, the sense of the path, the conception and image of the path or of awakening becomes principally about coping with 'this.' And 'this' meaning 'life,' conceived and sensed in a certain way, with its existential limits, with its kind of inherent meaninglessness as well, and its inherent tragedy. These factors, these aspects come to the fore, and that's what the path becomes about: coping with this.

In this kind of approach, the eros and the soulmaking dynamic, the eros and the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, are limited. They're quite limited here, partly because of the realism: "This is real. Nothing else is allowed. This view is what reality is. This is the facticity," if those words are used. Oftentimes words like 'truth' are avoided. But "This is real," and because of that realist basis, and because of the refusal of any more dimensions to existence to discover, to open to, to know, to penetrate, there's a one-dimensionality, and the realism at the base of the view limits the eros-psyche-logos, and also how much eros may constellate or gather from that. [50:41]

So in this view, there's a kind of rhetoric of, or this approach to the path, there's a kind of rhetoric of 'this,' of being in touch with this, etc., and everything that we said, but not the rhetoric of, or the invitation to, any kind of opening or knowing or experiencing of what is beyond what is already pretty obvious. There's a little bit of that, but not much. There are many reasons, many possible reasons why that kind of view, for many people, has gained a lot of traction, is even attractive, or seems inevitable or the only one they can get behind -- the rise of secularism, of course; the domination of views of scientific materialism; the movement of kind of existentialism in philosophy and psychology and psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. So there are many reasons. We don't have to go into that.

And just to say, and I know you've heard me speak quite -- what's the word? -- with a critique of this kind of thing in the past, but I really want to say: this is perfectly valid and okay for some, for some people. It really, you know, maybe it suits their soul. Maybe for them, that view of the path, that concept of the path and awakening is actually soulmaking for them to the degree that satisfies their soul and their eros. Maybe a set of fantasies of the self, and the path, and the Buddha, and what awakening is, constellate around that whole view, and imbue that view, inform that view, in a way that's, to some degree, soulmaking, or to the degree that satisfies their soul.

So I really want to say: it's completely okay. Again, the question is, is it soulmaking? Is it soulmaking for you? Is it soulmaking for me or someone else? And again, you know, it might be that such a view satisfies because there's not much eros in that particular soul, and that's completely okay. Why should there be? Who's to say that's a good thing, or a bad thing, or whatever? It's fine. It's just natural, maybe. And so there's not that much eros-psyche-logos dynamic expansion, the fire of that, etc. But the question is really: why? And is it soulmaking, or are there anti-libidinal patterns, or blocks in the logos, or rigidity, or fear, or whatever it is, that's coming in and blocking the whole thing so it's not actually as soulmaking as it could be, or not, so to speak, genuine or authentic to that soul?

These, to me, are the more important questions. Not "Is it right? Is it wrong? Is it what Buddha said?" This is all a whole other level of view and story and soulmaking, fantasy that comes in around that. Or, you know, the other possibility is what can happen is someone starts with that kind of view and that sense and that concept of the path. That's what they're given to understand from what they've encountered or read or what they've been taught. But that person has a lot of eros in their soul, so to speak, and the eros is not being blocked, or rather the blocks are not sufficiently rigid, the walls there are not sufficiently rigid to prevent the eros-psyche-logos dynamic pushing on those walls, and stretching the view, and stretching the possibilities of experience that then that person opens to, and stretching the logos and the conception, and the whole sense of what awakening can be, and what the path then is -- either stretching it gradually, or in stages, or shattering that view, breaking those walls, this breaking of the vessels I've talked about before, the Shevirat ha-Kelim they talk about in certain streams of Kabbalistic teaching. And because of the eros, and the aliveness of the eros, the expansion of that and the breaking of those walls, a new conception needs to, a bigger conception that allows more, and a bigger fantasy that allows more, needs to be constellated and constructed. Because some people do have a lot of fire, a lot of soul, a lot of eros, and there will be this movement to expansion. Oftentimes there's a quickness with that. And there is all the multidimensional, multi-aspected fertility, the eros-psyche-logos. And they need or they create or they discover or they open to more.

Okay, so a fourth possibility is what we might call, classically, a tantric view, or a set of views that we might call tantric, as a way of conceiving the path and awakening, etc. You see in a lot of those tantric thangkas or icons, paintings, or sometimes sculptures, there's the depiction of a Buddha as actually a couple, in sexual union, in erotic sexual union. There's the yab-yum. So usually it's male/female, and the Buddha and the consort. But the totality is actually conceived as the Buddha. So it's not like the Buddha and something else. The totality of that union is the Buddha or is a Buddha. And that is, it represents, it conveys through an image, a vision and a conception of awakening. So there's the union, depicted sexually, there's the union of emptiness and appearances. Sometimes it's conceived that way.

Emptiness in that view, often in the tantric view, doesn't only mean emptiness of inherent existence in the way that I've mostly explained it in the past. It means really a transcendent -- how to say this? -- a non-dual awareness, a non-dual wisdom awareness, a gnosis, a jñāna, a non-dual wisdom awareness that's not separate from appearances, that is empty in itself and that knows the emptiness of all things. So that, that jñāna, is actually what 'emptiness' means in some tantric traditions, not just the emptiness of inherent existence. And that is in erotic union, in sexual union with, not separate from the senses, the world, experience of the senses, appearances. And those appearances are empty and divine.

Or in some explanations, this yab-yum, this erotic union, sexual union that's depicted there is depicted as the union of prajñā and upāya -- wisdom, which again is this wisdom consciousness, this wisdom awareness, this gnosis of a Buddha, of a fully enlightened being, which is what I said before, this jñāna, this knowing, this empty knowing, pervasive, universal, cosmic awareness of emptiness, non-dual, not separate from means. So there's wisdom and means, the two kind of treasures of a fully enlightened being. Wisdom and means. And the means is not just skill in teaching; it actually refers to, in its deeper meaning, the upāya, it means the maṇḍala, which is the world, the world of divine appearances that appears to that wisdom awareness. So there's this union of wisdom and means, which effectively means of subject and object -- of wisdom awareness, if you like, and world; of psyche and phúsis, of soul and the world, soul and the world of the senses, the world of appearances.

Now, in classic tantra, at least in some streams that I'm familiar with, that constitutes a beyondness. All that constitutes a beyondness, something that I've not quite fully realized yet that I want to know, want to experience. But notice that the divinity there and the beyondness there is both in the divine appearances, but they also have a place for the transcendent, the non-fabrication of perception and experience. Both are there. And there's the tantric instruction, the instruction in the Vajrayāna, the thrust, the central thrust of that whole yāna, really, of Vajrayāna, of seeing, sensing, knowing, recognizing all experiences as divine. Not just empty of inherent existence, but divine and empty of inherent existence. Knowing all experiences. Not just some experiences, all experiences. So there are these crazy teachings about eating faeces, and eating semen, and seeing unethical actions, all of it as divine. Can I see all of that as divine? Now, you're probably aware by now: what we're teaching here, what we call imaginal practice or soulmaking, that whole movement, there are a lot of parallels and connection points with that whole direction and movement of Vajrayāna teaching and tantric teaching. They're not the same, and I wouldn't want to equate them or claim that. But there are a lot of parallels there, obviously, with what we're teaching.

And both of those streams, just like the tantric, the soulmaking direction, or the sense of the path as a path of soulmaking, the sense of awakening as a movement into soulmaking, the movement of soulmaking, gives place to, gives an important place to the imaginal. That's characteristic of both tantric and soulmaking practice, of course. And that includes the intrapsychic imaginal, of course, but also the imaginal pervading the world and opening up the world of the senses. So there's not just this transcendence; there's this opening to the senses, and the inclusion of the senses as part of the path. And there's a possibility of divinity, not just transcendent to the senses, but in and through the senses in what we talked about, theophany and cosmopoesis. So the possibility of beyondness here, to open to, to know, to fully penetrate, to fully explore, and become intimate with, and all that, are many. In fact, they're unlimited. They're infinite. Do you get that? There are infinite possibilities of beyondnesses to know, because the possibilities for theophany and the possibilities for cosmopoesis are unlimited, and the possibilities for imaginal divinities. It's just infinite. There's no limit on the soulmaking creativity there and discovery there.

Notice, too, that in this way of conceiving things, awakening, too, the goal or fruit of the path, awakening, too, becomes or is something infinite and something open-ended. In the Vajrayāna conception, because only a Buddha has that kind of awareness, is actually able to fully see the emptiness of things without that perception of whatever thing they're perceiving fading, only a Buddha (not an arahant, not anyone else) is able to both fully perceive and cognize the emptiness of something, and perceive that something at the same time (so they have this full awareness of emptiness and divinity at the same time -- only a Buddha), no one's going to say, "I am a Buddha," or even think, "I have reached that." So there's a kind of open-endedness, effectively, that constellates the path, as part of the path. It becomes open-ended: "I'm not there yet. I'm not there yet." Not only that.

And from the soulmaking conception, or in that conception of that as the path and that as the movement, because of the infinitude of possibilities of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, and what it creates and discovers, and what is revealed there and opened to there, the path is also and awakening is also open-ended. At what point of this soulmaking dynamic am I going to draw a line and say, "That's awakening now. I finished"?

Notice, too, something even more radical: that in different ways with the tantric conception and with the soulmaking conception -- let's just focus on the soulmaking conception now; there are similarities, but let's just focus on that for now -- there's a primacy given. I've talked about this before. A primacy granted or recognized, the primacy of image, primacy of fantasy. We come to recognize at a certain point that our sense of the path, our conception of it, our fantasy of the path, of awakening, of Buddha, of self on the path, is fantasy. It's grounded in image. That's a really, really radical reframing of the whole venture, a really radical realization, a really radical reconstitution there.

With this soulmaking, as I touched on just now, what happens then -- let me just ask you -- if you get the sense of this movement, what happens to the whole idea of attainment if there's just this infinite possibility of opening of the soulmaking? It's endless, potentially. Unlimited. What happens to the idea of attainment? What happens to the self-sense in relationship to whatever happens to the idea of attainment? What happens to that whole self-measurement construction? There's quite a lot to notice here. And I'll just point a few things out. They're all connected, so it's not a particular order, but I just want to point out a few things in addition to what I've already pointed out. Some of them, I've already touched on. But just to draw them out a bit more, and make sure you realize them, you recognize them.

So let's notice a few things here. This I've already said, but just to reiterate it: in what I was calling the traditional, let's say, perspective on things (this movement either towards the transcendent Unfabricated, or to some point of oneness, universal oneness of some different kind on that spectrum of lessening fabrication), the stages on that thread, on that spectrum, are actually, for a start, they're limited in one direction. So there's just a movement of lessening fabrication. We could probably enumerate how many kind of 'typical' experiences there are of different kinds of oneness, etc., and eventually this transcendent Unfabricated.

There's a kind of finite series of perceptions, of openings to different dimensions, different kinds of senses of divinity, really, that go with those openings, when they're very strong and deep for the being, for the opening of the consciousness there. But there's a finite series, and that series moves in, if you like, one direction: the direction of lessening fabrication. It might get flavoured a little bit differently, say with tender compassion versus awareness or whatever. There are a few different flavours, but they tend to be, there's a finite series that are sort of grouped together around the spectrum of lessening fabrication.

In contrast to that, we're trying to open up a kind of path that really places soulmaking quite centrally, or at least has a place for soulmaking. Would allow and give a place to all that, definitely, that movement along the spectrum of lessening fabrication or the different, the finite series of perceptions of oneness and less fabrication, and eventually non-fabrication, that happen along that spectrum. But in addition, there is an infinity of other possible directions because of the endless diversity and creativity of the imaginal faculty, the imaginal dimension. So the theophany can happen, theophanies can take this form or that form, or this character or that flavour. Instead of just going along one line into less fabrication, having a few kind of similar-ish experiences that are quite common for spiritual practitioners who practise with a lot of dedication and depth, it moves out in every possible direction, all the creativity and discovery that can happen in different kinds of cosmopoesis, different kinds of theophany.

Second thing, and again, I've touched on this, too, just briefly, but some, actually probably often, but some kind of conceptions of the path more than others, or fantasies of the path more than others, don't realize, or would really be very reluctant to admit, or refuse to admit that fantasy is part of the whole movement there and part of what is constellated there. There is fantasy of the Buddha, fantasy of what awakening is, fantasies of the self in relationship with tradition, in relationship to what the path is, in moving on the path. Not realizing that or admitting that. And also, I'm thinking now particularly of the third one, where there's no beyond, and there's this existentialist kind of Buddhism that's popular in some of the people who conceive themselves as secular Buddhists or whatever (but not necessarily). Anyway, the whole thing is dependent on realism, that the world really is like this, that the existential limitations are real, as I perceive them, that this is the 'facticity.' They might avoid the word 'truth.' But what would happen to the sense of tragedy, what would happen to the bravery that's required there, to open to that and feel the poignancy of it, if I acknowledge that it may not be real, that this is just one view, one way of looking, one perception? The whole thing collapses without the realism that underpins it, and the belief in the reality of this difficult existential situation: "That's the reality of things." The whole thing collapses. It can have no traction, no kind of power. And it's hard then to create a fantasy around it, hard for it to become really sustaining. [1:13:30]

Third thing to point out right now, and again, I touched on this before or hinted at it before: notice that in each of these, the four possibilities I gave -- (1) so the traditional possibility of moving towards the Unfabricated or different kinds of oneness, (2) the possibility of just moving in the world, really, acquiring more experiences, because there is no dimensionality, and just kind of craving, essentially, (3) the third possibility of this kind of insisting on one-dimensionality, but then the path is kind of coping with that, and being resigned, and having some equanimity in relation to that, opening to the reality of the one-dimensionality of existence, etc., (4) and the fourth possibility, what we're calling the tantric or the soulmaking vision and conception -- each of those four implies something with respect to the senses and the world, to how we then view and relate to the senses and the world, as part of the path, or as not part of the path, or just how the path situates itself, and awakening (however it's conceived in each of those four types), how it situates itself in regard to the senses.

For example, what I was calling the traditional view, that movement to the transcendent Unfabricated, beyond the senses, beyond anything remotely like sense experience, and that movement towards the ending of rebirth (if it's really classically conceived), that says something about the world of the senses. And you get this in the Pali Canon. It's something to be let go of. It has nothing really to do with the path. There's nothing good in the world of the senses. It's just something to be, yeah, put up with in this lifetime, but eventually to be transcended. In the one-dimensional view, in the craving, saṃsāra, non-path kind of view, the senses are -- one is just trying to acquire them. They all imply something about the senses and the relationship we have, or the path has, and then the view and the attitude constellated with respect to the senses and the world.

In the soulmaking or tantric view, there is a beyond, but that beyond includes, yes, a transcendent beyond, but also the beyond in and through the senses. So there's a beyond, so to speak, that's not beyond the senses -- in and through this experience of this beloved other, this tree, nature, the world, my body, whatever it is, when we come into erotic-imaginal relationship with that thing, that sense experience. There is a beyondness there. There's more to it. There's more to fathom, to connect with, to open to, to discover, to be revealed, to enjoy, to penetrate. So we'll come back to this more, the implications for the senses.

And related to that, there's an implication of each of these kind of conceptions of the path with the movement of fabrication. Again, in the transcendent model, the movement is to end fabrication. The whole thrust is towards less and less fabrication. Everything on the path, in a classically conceived model, moves in the direction of less fabrication -- pretty much everything on the path. And eventually one wants to not fabricate at all, have that experience enough that there's this complete non-fabrication of the world of experience. And there's the elevation of that. Whereas in the soulmaking view or the tantric view, there's the recognition of the importance of that, but also the recognition of skilful or (let's say) soulmaking fabrication, beautiful fabrication. One knows it's empty, sees image as image, and one consents to, allows, opens to, supports that beauty of the soulmaking fabrication.

So can you see, do you realize how, of course, the questions that I asked you right at the beginning of this talk are, were potentially questions about eros? I don't know if you see, too, implied in what I've just been saying in the last few minutes, that if the eros is strong, and if it's allowed, then the sort of one-dimensional view won't be enough. It will, as I said, crack at a certain point, or be expanded at a certain point.

If the eros is strong and if the eros is allowed, it will expand the actual view and conception and image, if you like, of path and awakening, all of that, beyond. It has to. It has to open up more dimensions, and thus more possibilities, and more of a sense of 'beyond' to discover. And if eros is allowed to impregnate and catalyse the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, the soulmaking dynamic, the view of a one-dimensionality, where I'm just endlessly chasing more experiences and pleasure, etc., for the ego, horizontally, wider and wider, that also won't be enough. Something will open up. We realize: oh, there's another kind of 'more,' other kinds of 'more' I can get as I go deeper, as the dimensionality opens and the facets of things open.

But actually, what I want to say more than that right now is that if the eros is strong, and if it's allowed, and if it's allowed to galvanize the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, and that's allowed to self-fertilize and do its thing, then both the eros for the transcendent and the eros for what we might call the immanent (the sense of beyondness in and through the world of sense experience, the sense of divinity in and through the world, the world and the world of sense experiences), both the transcendent thrust, the transcendent opening, and the immanent, or the opening to the immanence, the divine immanence, both will eventually be opened to, just because of the tendency to unlimited and multidirectional expansion of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic.

And that could happen in any order. Someone might really want to know the transcendent, and that's really what they want to move towards, but when they've opened to that, and when they've experienced that and, so to speak, drunk from that well and that whole spectrum, then something might turn around back to the world of the senses. And that might start opening up through, in its immanence, and the sense of divine immanence there, and the whole soulmaking dynamic with relationship to the senses. Or someone else might do it the other way round, and the soulmaking happens first, with the imaginal and the whole world of the senses, and then at a certain point, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic also recognizes another kind of dimensionality can be had in the progressive lessening of fabrication of perception. But if the eros is full enough, it will actually eventually want both. And why not have both? Why not be able to move into both? Not in any particular order, necessarily. It could happen both ways. [1:22:26]

So these four possibilities that I've described a little bit are not intended to be an exhaustive list. But they're possibilities for the ways we conceive or imagine the direction and the aim of our path, or that anyone conceives or fantasizes the direction or aim of the path. Now, I know this is a lot, and I really don't want to overload you here. As well as there being conceptions and fantasies of the direction and aim, we can also kind of open up an investigation of the fantasies of the self on the path. Now, this is connected with what we've just been through, and again, I don't mean to be exhaustive here, but let's mention, I just want to mention this, because we'll actually come back to it. I just want to mention it. We'll come back to it tomorrow.

We could, for example, delineate a few possibilities of different fantasies, the way the self imagines or conceives what it's doing on the path, its relationship with tradition, with the job that it has to do, if you like. This is a little bit different, but related to what we've just talked about. And again, this list is not exhaustive.

(1) We could, and most people do, I think, conceive of the path in what I might call the fantasy or the conception of the medical patient or the medical doctor. This is actually the Buddha's original teaching. He presented his path in what was then the language of the doctor's diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription, etc., all that. Basically, we tend to talk and conceive of the path as a movement towards either eradicating suffering or, for most people, just reducing suffering.

So it's the increase of peace, calmness, and well-being, and getting rid of or reducing suffering. And we are the patient, so to speak, receiving the medicine, the prescription from the Buddha or from the teacher, or some of you are teaching already and, in that case, you are the doctor prescribing that. This is extremely common, because it's the language of the Four Noble Truths, which is the kind of principal building block of Buddhism. It's conceived and presented as a movement about what? About the First Noble Truth, about suffering, and the investigation of the cause of it, and the movement beyond or to lessen it in the third truth, and how that happens in the fourth truth. So the whole structure of Buddhism, the whole language and conception of it is very much planted in or imbued within a whole medical patient, medical doctor, if you like, image and conception.

(2) A second possibility that's very common is to have what I would call a religious fantasy of the path and the self on the path, in which, as is characteristic of religious movements, the authority is in the past. There's a great emphasis on tradition. And what one is doing, the self then in this path, in this fantasy of the path, in the religious fantasy, is really attempting to kind of reproduce an awakening that has been achieved and taught by some religious figure/authority in the past. So it looks to the past, and its tendency [is] to kind of scrutinize texts and seek authority in the past, in the texts, in the explanation of the Buddha: "The Buddha said this. The Buddha this, the Buddha that." And then what I'm trying to do is have some kind of awakening that's, to some extent, replicating the awakening that the Buddha had. That's the kind of awakening that I'm going for.

I'm moving through these very briefly. We're going to come back to it. So the medical patient, and the religious fantasy is the second one.

(3) The third fantasy, and I think this is quite unusual, is the fantasy of the scientific researcher, so that one is on the path, but one is perhaps motivated more by curiosity: I'm curious about consciousness. I'm curious about states of consciousness. I'm curious about perception. I'm curious about what can be discovered there. I open to the fantasy and the possibility that I might discover new things about consciousness, and we might discover new possibilities of perception and conception and experience and theories and all of that. In that model, the ending of suffering or even the reduction of suffering may, at times, not be the primary thing. The primary thing is interest, curiosity, understanding, opening of the discovery.

(4) A fourth possibility is what I call the artist fantasy. And again, here, you know, and I've talked about this in the past, what's the point of art? What's art for? I don't think there's an answer to that question. Human beings cannot fully circumscribe or define or capture what motivates us, what motivates an artist, what motivates our love of art. Why is the artist doing what they do? Some art makes a political statement, or it tries to alleviate suffering in some way, but most art has nothing to do with that. It's well beyond the medical fantasy, the artist fantasy. Has it to do with beauty? Yes. To do with creativity? Yes. And what's the relationship with the past then? We might, as an artist might, imitate past masters, and know how to do this style or that style, but the conception of art more generally is of something open-ended, just as some conceptions of science are. They look more to the future, rather than the past (as in the religious fantasy). An artist, I don't know what new forms, what new ways of thinking about art, what new creations will come. It's not just that we're trying to reproduce something from the past. And what's it for? And what part does beauty, in the range of that word, play in that?

So there are four. (5) A person might have an adventurer fantasy: the path is just an adventure. Maybe I'm slaying demons, or maybe I'm just -- don't know what. That could be a fifth one. (6) Or a sixth one is a lover: the whole path is kind of fantasied as a lover. And what's the movement of a lover, or the fantasy, or the sense of self? The path as lover. Lover of what? And what do lovers want, and what do lovers do? We're going to talk more about this, but I don't know if you can get the sense (I've alluded to it already) how each of these kind of casts, in the larger imaginal constellation that each one of these fantasies casts, the past is cast in a certain way -- how I view, again, authority, the past of the Buddha, etc., the tradition, etc., my relationship with that. And also the future and the direction. Also cast differently is what the self does. What is the job of the self? What is the interest or the priority of the self? What gives joy, and what supports eros? So all these are different depending on the fantasy. Eros and image go together, so of course it's dependent on that.

Here are some questions. Again, unfair, too quick, etc. But do you realize that you have a fantasy of the path? And of the self on the path? And of awakening? Do you realize that there's fantasy operating there? Maybe that's a better way of putting it. Implicit in that, in my usage of the word 'fantasy,' is not that it's a bad thing at all. Opposite. Important thing. Necessary thing. Beautiful thing. Gives rise to beauty. But do you realize that it's there? A fantasy is there. Do you recognize what it is? Or, let's say, what are the dominant fantasies? There might be more than one. Do you recognize what they are for you? Or what it is for you? What's dominant? What fantasy dominates, tends to dominate?

And this can be complex. I'm aware of this, because they can be mixed, or different periods or times in our practice where one or the other is the dominant fantasy, or different in relationship to different streams of practice. But can you start to get a feel for this? Are you aware of it? Really importantly, I'd say, am I, are you, locked into a certain fantasy? I'm just locked into that medical model. I'm trying to fit everything into that, and the whole way I construe the path and the self and my movement is that, or is in the religious model, or whatever it is: "Where am I in how well I have replicated what I hear my teacher or other teachers talk about or describe or seem to be living?" Am I locked into a certain fantasy or fantasies, or is there flexibility? Is there some creativity for the whole way I imagine myself in relation to the tradition, in relation to the goal or the aim or the direction in relation to all of that? Locked in or flexible?

And again, I'm sorry, I know this is quick: is it authentic? In other words, where has this fantasy come from? Am I just adopting the medical fantasy, and fitting myself into that, because that's the way that 99 per cent of teachings are presented? Not just in Buddhism either. Talk about freedom, talk about liberation, talk about healing, talk about meeting suffering, or easing pain, or peace, or well-being, or whatever. You know, different flavours. And that's so much the tenor of the language, so much the presentation, that we just can't help thinking that way. And also in the sense of like, well, he was the Buddha, or they are this teacher, and they must know, and therefore I'm trying to replicate that. Is it authentic? And I'm not saying these are bad at all. But the question we have, maybe more appropriate now, is is it authentic to you? And again, the better question, is it soulmaking? Are the fantasies that are in play, the fantasies in which you move, and in which your path moves, and which, if you like, cast the path before you -- gold dust; we cast a path -- are they soulmaking for you? Is it soulmaking for you? Do we realize, do you realize the implications of just the fact that there is fantasy operating in our construal, in our relationship, in our conception of path, of awakening, of Buddha, of teacher, of self on the path? Do you realize the implications of that?

I'm sorry. More questions. Going back to the questions we asked at the beginning about what you want from the path, if you answered to those original questions that you wanted peace, or you wanted ease, or you wanted less suffering, or whatever it is, just to check -- and I asked this at the beginning -- check: is it only that that you want? Is it only ease, or peace, or less suffering? Certainly, at times, that's the dominant thing that we want. And probably appropriately. I'm not saying it should be, or it shouldn't be, or whatever. Just check: is that all you want, the ending or even just the reduction of suffering, if you want just peace, just ease?

I think it's worth pointing out -- and I know that this is quite radical, but I think it's worth pointing out -- that if we emphasize the medical patient or medical doctor fantasy as kind of the thing that we most emphasize, or the fantasy that we most emphasize, or that's most fundamental, if that's what we emphasize as the most fundamental fantasy -- so it's all right to have a bit of the artist, or a bit of the adventurer, or a bit of the lover or the scientific researcher, whatever it is, but most fundamental is this medical patient, medical doctor fantasy -- I think it's worth pointing out that giving it fundamental status somehow (we're not usually conscious of this), that will probably limit the soulmaking potential, if that medical patient fantasy is too fundamental in how you're conceiving of your path or how you're teaching. Soulmaking may then be allowed, of course, but it's somehow always within or in the service of the medical fantasy or the medical model. So, "Soulmaking's good because it presents different ways of healing" or whatever.

Of course, we could ask: what does healing mean? And we could talk about the healing of the soul, in a bigger sense than just healing of suffering. What does that mean, the healing of perception? I've touched on this before, tikkun olam, the restoration or the healing of the world, the healing of the perception, of the soulmaking, the opening of the soulmaking. And with the artist fantasy, of course, what does the artist make? The artist is creating what? One answer could be making soul. In the poetry of perception, it's making soul. The artist makes soul, creates soul. We could construe that's the kind of purpose of the artist. And the researcher is researching soul. So you could construe it this way. And the lover. What does the lover want? What does the lover love? Your lover, not an abstract lover. Your lover. The lover in you. Or the hermit in you. What do they want?

So again, you can take away these questions, or if you're listening on tape, press 'pause' at any time, and sit with them if they feel fruitful, if they're interesting and opening. But what is your response, or what responses are kind of triggered in you when you realize that your love and your devotion to the path, your love of the path, your devotion to the path and all that's involved in that, when you realize that it's partly, at least, based on and imbued with fantasy? How does your heart respond to that? How does your thinking respond? How does your body respond? How does your soul respond?

You realize there's a certain basis in fantasy, a certain inextricable involvement of fantasy. What's the response of the soul or response in the body? And if you feel like somehow this takes the rug out from underneath things, and there's a kind of deconstruction of the fantasy and the concept of the path, that doesn't last, if that's even what happens. That won't last, because we need to construct, and we do construct. So the question becomes, what is constructed in the aftermath of that deconstruction? There will be a construction. What is constructed? And is what's constructed a realist construction, given a kind of realist belief and conception as a basis or not? If there's a deconstruction, what is constructed in its aftermath? And is it a realist construction or not?

You know, with all this, we could ask, what is driving and pulling me? What is driving and pulling all this, all this love and dedication? Well, it's eros. Or that's a big part of it. Eros is involved. And where does that come from? Where does it come from? We can say the soul loves soulmaking. We said that, I think, as a kind of axiom. The soul loves soulmaking. So the eros is for soulmaking. The eros of the soul is for soulmaking. The soul loves soulmaking. But whose eros is it? Whose soulmaking is it? Whose soul is getting made, so to speak? So, then, with all those, what is the view that I have of this eros? What is my relationship with this eros? Those questions have a large bearing on that.