Beauty and the Buddha

I'd like to speak a little bit about beauty, and I hope that in doing so, that will maybe seed something, nourish something. In speaking about it, I'm going to try and tie some things together that we've already touched on, and also open them out further, so both tied together and opened out. I'm not sure that there's such a linear path possible through what I want to communicate. Perhaps there is, but I can't quite see it exactly. Perhaps in the nature of it, what I'm trying to do, what we're doing, is shining a light on what is already tied together, implicated together, mirroring each other, and what already opens out further, or suggests a further opening out, so that a linear motion through the material is not really that possible, just by the nature of the material and the way it's connected.

So many of us, many of those listening to this, for many of us and for many of those listening to this, we would say and feel very much that beauty is important, deeply important to us in our lives, for us in our lives, and therefore also the whole realm and conversation, investigation of aesthetics, and the application of aesthetics, also important. For some people, it's not or it really doesn't seem to be that important. I know quite a few people, beauty is not something that they invest in a lot, that they care about a lot, that they pay a great deal of attention to and support and care for.

There is a connection, though, with eros and soulmaking. It seems to me that those people for whom beauty is not that important are also people for whom there's not a great deal of soulmaking movement happening in their lives, not a great deal of eros. Beauty is a part of and an element in soulmaking. If we look to the Pali Canon and see what it says about beauty, as far as I'm aware, we find something that might strike us, at first, some people, as a little curious. The word 'beauty,' those kinds of words, are only found in relation to the mind. And not only that -- in relation to the mind, or certain minds, or minds in certain states, if you like. So the fourth jhāna, sometimes the Buddha and the texts refer to that as 'the beautiful,' that stillness and the radiance of the mind there, and the state there of equanimity that goes with the fourth jhāna.^[1]

So this is, as the Buddha said, equanimity based on singleness, when there's a kind of closing out or really deep fading out of the senses, and the mind is just collected into stillness and a kind of radiant presence of stillness and equanimity there. Or the Buddha talks about equanimity based on multiplicity as a connected but slightly different state where one is still open to sounds and sights and smells and touches, but there is equanimity in relation to them, stillness, and actually there is a degree of fading.^[2] So both those, whether it's so-called equanimity based on singleness or multiplicity, there's a degree of fading -- that's important -- a fading of the perception of senses and sense objects. We'll come back to that.

So there is this reference to the beautiful, but only really in regard to the fourth jhāna and beyond, or to a Buddha's mind, or an arahant's mind, free of defilements, pure and therefore beautiful. Or sometimes, in some kind of ways, to the body of the Buddha, the physical body of the Buddha, which is full of the thirty-two -- I think it's thirty-two -- marks of a great man.^[3] It has to do with Indian mythology, etc. And that's regarded as beautiful. With respect to the world, the world that we live in, and the earth, and the senses, and what comes to us through the senses, the word 'beautiful' and 'beauty' is not used. So beauty is in or of the mind, and everything else is just talked about in terms of, rather than beauty, as what is pleasing to the senses, or sense pleasures.

This has all kinds of implications, that bifurcation of language there, and more than that even, because the Buddha talked about in the Pali Canon sense pleasures being like a snake's mouth, or a pit of burning coals, or a torch of hay that one is carrying into a headwind, etc. -- all these images of danger and pain associated with what is pleasing to the senses.^[4] The whole Pali Canon, as we've touched on before, has this movement, this thrust towards transcending the world of the senses -- pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral -- to the Unfabricated, to the fading of sense experience in all six senses, including the mind. And through that, to the ending of rebirth, an end of being reborn in the world of senses, or, if you like, the world of the senses and sense experiences being reborn.

So there is clearly a very negative connotation, if you like, given to sense experience and the sense experience in the world; it's not a realm of beauty. It's not where we look to for beauty. That's quite interesting, and it has a legacy which I think we are still not clearly investigating, aware of, open to, sensibly confronting, questioning, etc. If, bearing that in mind, and what's there in the Pali Canon, if we, though, look at what is our phenomenal experience of beauty, what is our actual experience of beauty? We have, as human beings, at least most people have at times experiences of beauty. And we can say, I would say and most people would say, that's more than just something being pleasant in the senses, and more than sense pleasure leading to a kind of craving.

Most people would say when I experience beauty, there's something different than it's just a pleasure in the senses that the being, the mind, or the body craves for. Something in the experience of beauty, if we're investigating what it is as an experience, that whole constellation, something touches us. So it's more than craving. Something is touched in the being, but by 'touched,' I also mean more than an obvious emotion. So an obvious emotion -- grief or compassion or some kind of passion or something, can be for something or other -- may be touched and triggered in the experience of beauty, but we are touched in the experience of beauty in our being in ways that go beyond or include more than what are obvious emotions. We'll come back to that.

We have a friend, a Buddhist friend, who wrote a piece recently about beauty, and particularly about aesthetics, really, and his approach to aesthetics. And so he was actually saying that beauty, briefly, he said beauty was something that comes out of mindful experience, or mindfulness of experience, so that there isn't the craving, there isn't the taṇhā, and through mindful experience -- for instance, on retreat -- the world appears radiant, the things of the world appear radiant. And that radiance is a perception, an experience of beauty.

He says more, and we'll go on, but just to pause there with this idea of radiance or this experience of radiance. Notice that that experience of radiance -- and some of you will know this, of course, from being on retreat, being silent, being mindful: as the mindfulness kind of ratchets up its power, there is a radiance in experience. You go outside, the grass, the sky, the cup, the tea, the steaming tea from the cup, etc., has this quality of radiance that we can feel. It's a universal quality. Radiance seems to, in that state, in a state of heightened mindfulness, let's call it, the radiance pervades everything. Everything seems to be radiant. It's a universal. It's not in and of, so much, particularities. The radiance of this is not particularly different than the radiance of that. There's something universal there. Just wanting to note that.

A further thing to inquire into with this radiance is: what is it? And what do you mean? What is meant by 'radiance'? In our friend's way of thinking or conceiving of this, it's not a kind of luminosity, and certainly not a numinosity, attributed to the object or kind of flowing through it from beyond in some way. I think what it actually is is just an experience of vividness, a vividness of perception, of anything that comes into the realm of perception, anything that comes into the realm of sense experience. Why? Because with mindfulness there's less distraction. The mind therefore doesn't dissipate so much energy. It accumulates energy. It becomes brighter, more alert, more present with that as, if you like, the grime is wiped off the windscreen, so to speak, and so there is a vividness, there is a brightness, a radiance of perception, to perception of things.

So this radiance that's perceived there, and perceived as enjoyable, etc., and perhaps some people would call it beautiful, is just, again, really a property of the mind or awareness in certain states. Some people would even say it's a brain property. So I have some questions about that experience of radiance and what's involved there. But our friend goes on to talk about the sublime, which we've talked about before, earlier on this retreat, and this whole Romantic notion of the sublime, meaning what is beautiful, if you like, in terms of pleasing sense experience, but not just beautiful -- also in a way terrifying, dwarfing to the sense of the self, the sense of the fragile human body and existence in a vastness that could swallow it up, dwarf it, erase it easily. So Turner, it's a fantasy of being strapped to the mast of a ship in a storm. There are the colours and the vividness of the sense experience, and also that hugeness and danger and kind of terrifying, confrontational openness to nature.

In this experience of the sublime, which, for our friend, is very important in his notion of aesthetics, and especially Buddhist aesthetics, something transcends the self here. There is a kind of transcendence. But what transcends the self is really just only impermanence, tragedy. It's seeing contingency and dependency of things, being dependent on other things. So there's a kind of emptiness there, but implicit in the understanding of emptiness is that it's tragic, that it really means impermanence, and just means these real things are dependent on other real things; material things are dependent on other material things. What transcends the self is, if you like, the existential predicament of the self that surrounds it, that is inevitably waiting for it; our unavoidable (in this view) existential predicament of inevitably moving towards non-existence.

So there's a kind of transcending there of the self, and in his view, also art is regarded as transcendent, but in a slightly different way, because we can't quite fully say what this piece of art or that piece of art means. And our friend says more. He says, "[This] makes me uneasy." I feel uncomfortable. I want to be told: what does this painting that I'm looking at, what does this sculpture I'm looking at, what does it mean? "I want to be told what it means, [and] I want to be told," he says, "how to feel about it."^[5] He connects this with the poet John Keats's notion of negative capability, which, in Keats's words, is a state of uncertainty or doubt without any irritable reaching out after facts or reason. This is negative capability. Our friend takes that to mean, really, without any reaching out beyond, away from a state of uncertainty and a state of doubt, except certainty and non-doubt about the existential predicament.

Here, and what's important to our friend, is the poignancy, the poignancy of the tragedy of our existence, and the tragedy of impermanence, of our impermanence, of everything's impermanence. So making art, in a Buddhist context, needs to be about this, because this is what the Dharma is about -- it's about opening to this, and art is only really about that. There isn't, then, the possibility of expanding out of an art that actually can expand beyond being about that poignancy and tragedy of impermanence.

This is all fine and legitimate, and of course everyone's allowed to have whatever view and approach to aesthetics they would like. Just from our point of view, and what we're trying to open on this retreat as ways of practising and ways of conceiving, notice a couple of things. One is that there is a limited and a singular view of life here. Life is taken axiomatically, dogmatically to be really about or to involve this absolutely real existential predicament, moving to non-existence, the tragedy of impermanence, etc. So there's a singular view of life: this is how life is. And it's a limited view, and a limiting view. It's limited to that singular view. And also of art, the view of art: "This is what life is. This, therefore, is what art, at least Buddhist art, should be."

Notice, also, in this approach of our friend, that any individual or any thing is mostly or only interesting to us or for the art -- or at least as far as the art goes -- it's only interesting in the fact of its movement towards obliteration, towards extinction, towards erasure in the universal facticity of impermanence. The thing itself is, sure, it's different from that thing, we can see that, but that's not so interesting in itself. Individuality has no real depth to it; it's only interesting insofar as this thing has this tragic impermanence that all things share, all things and all selves and all individuals.

As I said, all that's fine and totally allowed, no problem. But from our point of view, it is both limited and limiting, or from the point of view of what we're trying to unfold on this retreat and other retreats and other teachings. If I were to explore or flesh out a little bit or articulate what's involved in the experience of beauty, what seems, what are the facets or aspects involved in the experience of beauty, again, from a phenomenological point of view almost, what does it include, I'd point out a few things. So one is that in the experience of beauty, we're not just enjoying the beauty of the object, whether that's an object of the senses, in nature, or art, or whatever it is. What's involved in the sense and the experience of beauty is also that we are enjoying our, so to speak, our sensitivity or subtlety of awareness or attention with respect to that object that is beautiful. We actually enjoy the way that we are engaging with it. Do you see? We enjoy our attunement. We enjoy the arousal of being, of consciousness, of senses, mind, heart, that is there in relationship, the aliveness that's there for us, in us, through us. We enjoy the state of intimacy and the relationship of intimacy. We enjoy the connecting, connection -- all this. And you can recognize some of this language that we've been using.

All this means also, if you like, that in an experience of beauty, we are enjoying our eros, our erotic connection, our experience of the erotic, of our eros, of the erotic connection with the object. And part of the experience of beauty, I would say, whether we're fully conscious of it or not, involves seeing the beauty of our eros, of our response. Might not have realized it fully consciously, but when I have a sense of beauty, I'm also appreciating and seeing the beauty of, let's say, our eros, my eros.

So that's one aspect to point out. Another, and related, is that -- this is hard to articulate, or at least I'm finding it hard to articulate -- if you pay attention when you're experiencing beauty, sometimes there's a sense of something, related to what I just said, something almost within us resonating; there's a kind of resonance with whatever we're perceiving as beautiful. There's, so to speak, a chiming or an echoing between the object and the subject. It feels as if perhaps something is being echoed there in the object, or we are echoing the object, or the object is mirroring something in us, or something in us is mirroring it. A resonance, a chiming, an echoing, a mirroring of something, so to speak, within us with the object.

Now, this isn't a state of merging in oneness and union. There is still this otherness there that's necessary to eros that we've talked about. The otherness is there. The polarity is there. The twoness is there. Connected, but two. Maybe there's a sense of participating in something. I think there is. In a deep sense of beauty, we feel that we are participating in something deeply. But what is it that we're participating in? What is the object of beauty? What is the beautiful thing? Again, whether it's senses, a sense object or a mental object, an image or a piece of art, or whatever it is, a piece of music. What is that object with which we are resonating, in which we are participating, in which there is a participation together with? That object itself, I would say, is magnified. In that erotic connection, in the perception of beauty, the object is magnified, amplified, let's say. It's widened, so to speak. So that if you listen to music, if you listen to wordless music, and there's really a perception of beauty, it is not just bare sound. It is not just bare sound. I would say it's not even just pleasant bare sound. The object is, in the experience of beauty, the object that we find beautiful is somehow magnified, amplified, widened and deepened. What does this mean? What does it mean? How is it thus widened and deepened?

Thirdly, and as actually I've just said, an experience of beauty is more than, is not only an experience of pleasant sensual contact or pleasant sense experience. That is not an experience, in the way that we're talking about it, that qualifies as beautiful. Nor, I would say, is it just a matter of a pleasing arrangement of visual elements or sonic elements. If you think, what is it about a Rothko abstract painting? Yes, certainly there are pleasing proportions and arrangements of colours and shades of colour on a canvas. Or Willem de Kooning, another abstract painter. Or in wordless music. Yes, of course, there's a temporal arrangement of different timbres and sounds, etc. But the experience of beauty is more than just being pleased at the arrangement of pleasant sense experiences.

And I would go further and say that, to me, it's not that we can -- like our friend said, actually; I would agree -- reduce beauty to, "It just means this or that. This painting means this. This piece of music means this, X or Y." When we reduce art or sense experience in nature or whatever to "it means this," to meaning, there's a kind of monovalency, singularity of meaning. Or even if it has one or two meanings, we've then reduced it. We've limited it. And that's different to the notion of meaningfulness. Again, it's maybe not the best word, but there's an openness to that. It can include specific meanings, but there's something more in the experience of meaningfulness, and that, I would say, is more characteristic of an experience of beauty. It's not a reduction into a kind of monovalency: "It means X or Y."

Nor is it -- and as I alluded to before -- that beauty, the experience of beauty, is confined to an emotional experience, or certainly not that (though it may include) whatever's beautiful triggers our emotions, or emotions associated or referring to my personal narratives, stuff that's happened in my life, or human narratives in general. It may include all that, but I would say there's something more, that it needs to be open. Experiences of beauty, if I'm just exploring the phenomenal experiences of beauty that we have as human beings, I would say partly what characterizes them is this sense of more, of beyond, or unfathomability, of inexhaustibility, and as we just said, also of meaningfulness. And also, as I said before, there's an involvement in the experience of beauty of, as well as the object, also of the self, and again, maybe not so obvious, but of the world. Our sense of the world is transformed when there's a deep experience of beauty of anything. It affects our sense of the world. And also our eros is involved.

So again, we get that fourfold sort of -- I don't know what to call it -- constellation that's always involved in any perception: self, world, other, and desire (in this case, eros). The involvement of all of those is, as we've already said, involved in a sense of beauty. Can you see, can you hear, how the characteristics, or some of the characteristics of the experience of beauty echo, mirror, are similar to, many of the characteristics of imaginal experience? There's some relationship with our experience of beauty and our experience of the imaginal. And I shouldn't need to say this at this point in the retreat, but I will say it: by 'imaginal,' we do not just mean so-called intrapsychic, the images that come to me when my eyes are shut, out of contact with the world of the senses. That's so crucial. The imaginal involves, again, a set of perspectives, perceptions, ways of looking. It involves soulmaking, beauty, and it can be right there in my perception of this room right now, of the ground beneath me, of my own hands, of you as I'm looking at you, of this tree. Our perception of the world can be imaginal.

There's a mirroring, an echoing, a similarity, a correspondence between the characteristics of the experience of beauty and the characteristics of imaginal experience. And so much so that I would wonder: does beauty actually imply, our experience of beauty implies that there is soulmaking happening, in our sense. It implies already some opening up of the imaginal with respect to this piece of art, with respect to this piece of music, with respect to this flower that I'm looking at, with respect to whatever it is. So it involves, then, depths, dimensionality. That's part of the experience of beauty, I would say. And these are open-ended. There's an openness of depth, an unfathomability. The dimensionalities that might open are without limit, without preordained limits.

So, again, referring back to our friend and his kind of view of aesthetics or statement of aesthetics, there is a 'more' there in this awareness of the sublime. There is a kind of 'beyond' there in the awareness of the sublime that's part of the whole aesthetic sensibility and project, as we talked about the sublime in the previous talks. And there is a meaning there. Art has this kind of singularity of meaning. It means, it refers back to, it points towards always this poignancy of the tragedy of the impermanence. But, as I said, relative to what we're trying to open up here, it's a limited perspective on both life and art, and it's limiting. There's a monovalency. It has one meaning, and that meaning is the poignancy of the tragedy of the impermanence. The fantasy, the image, the soulmaking is only in those kinds of perceptions, those kind of perspectives, and in those artistic endeavours that would come out of that and be restricted to that, the fantasy, the image, the soulmaking is only with respect to that tragedy, etc. It's limited by that.

The transcendence is also limited. It's monovalent, or, if you like, bivalent, as we said there are two kinds of transcendence that we might consider: the transcendence of the art, and the transcendence of the sublime, transcending the self. But it's just that. It's two kinds of transcendence. It's bivalent only, and only refers to the uncertainty in regard to the art and the, if you like, tragedy with regard to persons and things.

My friend and I have quite different, I would say, although it might sound quite similar at first, quite different views, conceptions, interpretations of emptiness. And this is part of what's at the root of the difference then in approach to -- well, approach to life, practice, beauty, aesthetics, and a whole bunch of other things. So for my friend, the teachings of emptiness, and the fact, if you like, of emptiness, are actually tied into a fantasy of tragedy and opening to tragedy, the tragedy of impermanence and the fact of just uncertainty, existential uncertainty. His understanding of emptiness implies dukkha: there is dukkha because things are empty, and there's tragedy because things are empty. This is quite the opposite of most of the Buddhist tradition, where emptiness implies and leads, if you like, and our confrontation with it, our exploration of it, leads to freedom. It implies freedom. Knowing the emptiness of things, opening to the emptiness of things, brings freedom. Not tragedy. Not dukkha. Quite the opposite. It's a remedy for dukkha.

And the teachings of contingency or dependency, everything being kind of interconnected, not having one basis or being based in itself, so to speak, are, in those other sets of teachings, really just used to say, "Don't get excited about any one thing, because any one thing relies on everything else. It's connected with everything else, depends in some way on everything else. So don't get excited about any one thing." So the whole premise and tenor and directionality of the teachings of emptiness is really quite different than certainly the way I would present it or I would view as being the basis for our work here and these kind of teachings.

In our friend's presentation, there is not this inclusion of the dependency of things on the way of looking, and there is not the allowing of different ways of looking because things are empty. There is not the allowing of a flexibility of ways of looking, and there is not the practice of the flexibility of the ways of looking. There is, in fact, just one way of looking, which is geared towards seeing this impermanence and tragedy, etc. At least one kind of sanctioned way of looking.

Rather, in how I would understand it, and how I've taught it, and how I would always teach it, emptiness means, the emptiness of something means it's not independent of the way of looking. There is no independent reality, independent of the conception and way of looking at any time. And rather than emptiness being just kind of tied in with impermanence and kind of equally tragic, if you like, the emptiness of things or a realization of the deep emptiness of things means understanding that all things are neither permanent nor impermanent. Neither impermanent nor permanent. They are beyond the categories of impermanent and permanent. Neither impermanence nor permanence are ultimate truths.

So the Mahāyāna teachings in particular are full of these kinds of emphases and point this out repeatedly. For example, in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, so many quotes are possible here. For example:

Form, feelings (vedanā), perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness are not permanent or impermanent [are neither permanent nor impermanent].^[6]

And in another Prajñāpāramitā sūtra:

The perfection of wisdom ... does not describe [any phenomenon] as permanent or impermanent.^[7]

So to keep harping on about the impermanence, and to rest only in the view of impermanence, is not a perfection of wisdom; it's a certain relative wisdom that needs to be transcended, deepened, gone beyond.

Nāgārjuna, who is, if you like, the paragon teacher of emptiness in the Buddhist tradition, second really only after the Buddha, also wrote in some of his main texts, he says:

[In a relative sense] everything is impermanent, but [in the absolute sense] nothing is permanent or impermanent.^[8]

And again, so many of these things I could quote. But he writes:

There is no origination. There is no destruction. The customary usage of origination and destruction [in other words, impermanence] has [however] been expounded [by the Buddhas] for practical purposes.^[9]

It's a stepping-stone teaching. To limit our Dharma understanding, our exploration, our perspective of life, and also our approach to aesthetics and art and sense experience and the rest of it, just limit it by a limited understanding of impermanence and a limited exploration of emptiness -- well, it limits.

How might we open up the possibilities for beauty, and also then for our aesthetics and our practice, and also, in that, open up soulmaking, because they're connected, beauty and soulmaking? If we refer back to our friend, or in general, perhaps we need to explore more deeply the nature of objects, of things, of life. We feel like, we say, "Oh, life is uncertain. Life is this or that. It's huge," etc., but we've actually nailed it down, nailed what it is and given that a reality. What is it? Well, it's this tragic impermanence, and this hugeness that might dwarf me or erase me or extinguish me and my existence at any moment, the fragility of that. We say that's what life is. We need to perhaps explore more deeply the nature of objects, things, and life, to open up the possibilities for beauty, for aesthetics, and for soulmaking.

And also we need to open up and explore more and deeper, if there are, for instance, these feelings, these emotions in regard to selves and things, what my friend would call the 'unbearably poignant' feelings, emotions of unbearable poignancy, seeing this fragility, impermanence of things, seeing this sublime. Going deeper into those feelings, not just stopping there with the first sense of them, and then perhaps intellectually formulating them or whatever, but not stopping, really feeling into them, certainly not avoiding or brushing them away or brushing them over, but going deeper into them, explore them, open to them. Do you have the skill to do that? Go deeper into these feelings, care for them. See how that actually transforms the feelings themselves, not by avoiding them, not by brushing them over or painting them pink or whatever. That deeper exploration -- don't arrest that exploration of what you're feeling if it's painful, that unbearable poignancy. Deeper exploration transforms the feelings. Because everything is dependent, the transformation of the heart transforms then the self-sense, and the sense and the perspectives and the very sense and experience of things and of life, just through going deeper, and exploring more, and caring more, and being more careful with the feelings.

So both poles, both the object pole, so to speak, and the subject pole of experience, need more exploration in order to open out the possibilities for beauty and aesthetics and also soulmaking. Both poles: subjective and so-called objective. Beauty is in between. Beauty is not wholly within, nor is it wholly without. Beauty is in relationship. We say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's not just in the eye; it's in relationship, in mutual dependence of subject and object, just like image is. The image is not just there, nor is it just here ('image' in the sense that we're using it, imaginal image). And just like soul is. What we mean by soul is in between. It's in the between. It's in the relationship -- and actually, just like existence is and life is and being is and world is and the senses are. There's unavoidably an inextricable link between the subjective and the objective. They are inseparable, subject and object, the poles here. There's a mutual involvement, a mutual dependency of object and subject, a dialogue, a conversation, a mutual participation. The same with the soul and the world.

So if we're stuck, or rather, in order to open up further our sense of beauty, both poles, the subjective and objective, need working with. We can explore fruitfully both poles and where they are limited, where they are less pliable. So in the pole of the object, to see that it's empty in the sense that it doesn't exist independently of the way of looking, doesn't have an inherent existence. It's empty in all kinds of ways, in fact. We're not reducing it to a scientific materialist or reductionist materialist view, because then I've limited the object. I've decided that 'it is this,' and that kind of reductionist materialist view of things or objects or sense experience, it doesn't hold water if I investigate it. If I limit my view of objects, things, to a one dimensionality, then it's almost like I'm not investigating them properly. I'm limiting what I can see there, what I can sense there. So this one dimensionality needs to open up to the dimensionality, to the experience of dimensionality of/in sense objects.

And also, as I said, the subjective pole, the pole of my experience, you know, taking care of the heart, the emotions. Catherine was talking about the senses connecting to the heart, an experience and a conception of the senses as connected with the heart. This will also support the sense of beauty and opening and deepening of beauty. We can also say that, as we've touched on already in the retreat, in experiencing, in coming into sense experience with something, the whole energy body is involved. So I'm taking care of the subjective pole by bringing the whole energy body into contact with. It's not just my eyes that see. What is it to look with my whole energy body, as well as my eyes? What is it to know with my whole energy body, as well as other senses? So this whole energy body is included in the knowing. It's epistemically and epistemologically included. We're not shrinking down and dismissing other ways of knowing. There is not an epistemicide or epistemic cleansing that has been so rampant in Western society in the last few hundred years.

This knowing, or rather, involving the whole energy body and the whole image of the body in the knowing, in the sense-experiencing, in the looking or whatever it is, is also a way, as we've touched on, that supports eros to arise in the sense contact. How do I move from craving to eros? One of the ways is getting the whole energy body involved, so that the imaginal and the soulmaking can open up. And then we've said before, again, talking about how to open up our possibilities for beauty, deepen, and the possibilities then for aesthetics, we need to allow the fertility of the imaginal, we need to allow psyche, and we need to allow logos to expand, and we need to allow the eros to flow through and in our relationship with sense experience or art or whatever it is. So that through this allowing, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic can expand, can enrichen, widen, deepen, etc. There's the perception, eventually, of dimensionality and divinity, both of object and of subject, as we've touched on.

We need to allow ways of looking that are legitimized because of the emptiness of things. Allow this diversity and flexibility, plasticity of ways of looking. All of that. Including, for instance, a deliberately sensing this sensation, or this vedanā, or this perception of an object, in any and each of the six senses, as divine. Deliberately sensing this as divine -- so this is a deliberate practice -- or as from the divine. Or deliberately sensing and viewing, a way of looking that deliberately senses and experiences and perceives or conceives this knowing, this awareness of this thing right now in this moment, this knowing itself, as divine or as from the divine, or that in that knowing, I am, you are, participating in divine knowing.

That kind of deliberate divinization of, if you like, the experience of the object, or of the self, or of the eros, or of the world, that deliberate divinization may be, the capacity to do that may be developed from that experience just spontaneously arising through similar perceptual shifts where any of those aspects, any or all of those aspects -- self, other, world or eros -- appear to us as divine, and we have that sense through practice, through soulmaking practice. Or it can come through and be supported through emptiness practices, ways of looking -- for instance, seeing this object or this vedanā or this sensation or this knowing, the awareness itself, as anattā, not-self. And that loosening of the self-appropriation, "This is my knowing. I am knowing. I am the one who is aware. This is my awareness, or this is my hand or whatever I'm looking at or whatever it is," the loosening of that identification and self-appropriation with regard to experience and the aggregates, so-called five aggregates, this loosening also, because of the loosening, it opens the possibilities. Then it's much easier to see them, for instance, as divine: "Not mine. They're divine."

But they are supported in different ways through practice. We're talking now about how to open possibilities for beauty, possibilities for aesthetic conception, and possibilities for soulmaking. Oftentimes, again, it's the logos that limits our sense of beauty, the range of beauty that we can experience, limits our aesthetics and limits the soulmaking. So, for example, to have just a body of teaching that kind of either directly or indirectly ends up saying, "There is no beauty to the world and in the senses. It's all just craving at sense pleasure," and then because of that implicit teaching or explicit teaching, one moves into a mode of relating that avoids or dismisses or denigrates sense experience and the world ('the world' meaning the world of sense experience), and there's the movement to transcend that as we've talked about, or we just get the more modern kind of version, the Western version, "Enjoy, but don't get attached." How does that work, exactly? Not really a very well-fleshed out teaching or something that we can have a lot of integrity with.

The relation with the senses, the relationship with the senses, is implicit in and directed by a whole metaphysics that comes with teaching. The relationship that we have with the senses and that we try and pursue with the senses is implicit in and directed by the whole metaphysics that comes with whatever teaching we're exposed to and following. There's a logos of what is real and what's not real, and how we can know, and what the world is, and all that. And there's a fantasy wrapped up in that. And also that's completely wrapped up with the conception, the fantasy of the path, and what awakening is, and how that relates to the world and the world of the senses.

So someone saying, like our friend, "Buddhist art is about impermanence, tragedy, and the sublime," why? Because that's what is believed to be real: "These are real things. Life really is like that. These are real." So again, there's a metaphysics involved that ends up determining the relationship with the senses, with art, with beauty.

What is it, what would it be, not to limit art, not to limit beauty and the possibilities of beauty, not to limit the possibilities of soulmaking? That they are actually open-ended, as we've discussed, potentially infinite in their directions? So notions and fantasies about reality, and the relationship with reality, including some kind of beyond, are, I think, tied up in the aesthetic sense. We can talk about, physicists and mathematicians talk about a beautiful theory or a beautiful equation, and part of that sense of beauty is not just the sort of elegance or simplicity of the equation or the theory. It's also that there's something, there's a dimension, it reaches to a dimension of what isn't yet known, what is not obvious. In another way, that's a way of saying depths, isn't it? The deep is what is not immediately apparent, what is not obvious. And it connects; the theories that are beautiful will connect the apparently unconnected, and they penetrate, open to, what is beyond current understanding, to another level. So there's metaphysics in physics. There's this movement. And that's part of the whole perception of beauty and the whole sense of beauty and the aesthetic sense.

Now, when it comes to practices, we also might be engaging practices that may limit the experience of beauty and the experience of soulmaking. A bare attention to sense experience, to art, or to something in nature, bare attention will not bring a sense of beauty. By itself, will not bring a sense of beauty or soulmaking. It might bring a sense of vividness and that radiance. If it does bring a sense of beauty, I would say at that point it's no longer bare attention, and we actually haven't realized that it's not actually bare attention. Doesn't bring a sense of beauty and soulmaking, because it doesn't allow other depths and dimensions and the imaginal to open up in relation to what is perceived and what is sensed.

Or, for instance, Mahāsi practice, where there's this very focused, narrowly focused, very kind of sharp attention, microscopic attention to the details of experience, and what comes down is these sort of moments of sensation, moments of vedanā, moments of perception of heat, cold, colour, whatever it is, and there's a kind of atomism there which we've touched on in previous retreats. And then that, this atomic seeing, if you like, this deconstruction or reduction of the world to atomic moments of experience and elements there, this is regarded as real, and being regarded as real in the logos, it creates a limit: "This is the limit. This is because this is real. We've reached the sort of base of what reality is; reality is made up of these extremely fine, fine grains of sand of experience, if you like."

Then, because there's a limit there, and that's taken as reality, there isn't this unfathomability, this inexhaustibility, this mystery to things, to experience, to perception, to sense experience. There is, in that teaching, a beyond sense experience, a transcendent, the Unfabricated, but it's not in and through. The beyond there is not in and through. It's away from experience. It's with the erasure, the fading, the cessation of experience.

Or, as a third example of practices that might limit opening, the opening of the senses of beauty and soulmaking, a practice where one just sort of receives experience, and abides, rests in a kind of openness of awareness. This will, as it progresses and deepens, that practice will lead to a sense of one taste -- everything, all experience, has one taste, probably the taste of awareness or love. Just has one taste. Insubstantial. It might be infinite spatially because the awareness opens up as if the awareness is vast. But in terms of dimensions, it just reaches that one dimension, this one taste of everything is awareness, or everything is love, or whatever it is. The dimensionality doesn't open up either beyond that or more than that or wider than that. There is not the fertility of soul-perception.

So I would say, why limit? Can we not limit beauty, art, soulmaking? I would actually say just like eros, and just like soul, beauty also will always be larger than however we define it. It will not be captured in any definition. Why? It's part of the mystery of being. Beauty, and our capacity for beauty, and our sensitivity to beauty, and the existence of beauty is one of the mysteries of being. We will never exhaust it in experience. We will never exhaust it in our creation of it. We'll never come to the end of the possibilities of creating beauty or experiencing beauty. And whatever definitions or ideas of beauty will never completely exhaust what beauty is. We'll never arrive at a final comprehension, captivated it. Just like eros, just like soul.

And also, just like divinity, the divine. Some people, that word, divinity, or the divine, or God, it's like, "What on earth do you mean?", or they just assume you mean this, what I've heard, a guy sitting on a cloud, meting out judgment to people, with a long beard or whatever. And sometimes people find it very perplexing: "What do you mean when you say that, God or divinity or whatever?" So maybe what might help for some people to open to that word, if one is curious and has enough looseness and flexibility and permission in the soul to allow that word or explore what that might mean, maybe we can open up that relation, if it would serve, the relationship to the word divinity, by analogy to beauty. There's something analogous here.

So if someone said, which people of course do say, quite commonly these days, "There is no divinity. There is no God. There is no Buddha-nature. There are no metaphysical dimensions, etc. None of that." Or they would say, "And if there is, it's irrelevant." In a way, that would be similar to saying, if I just pursue this analogy a little bit, similar to saying, what if someone said -- so people can say that, of course, but what if someone said, "There is no beauty"? Not "There is no divinity," but "There is no beauty in the world anywhere. There is no beauty in the world. There is no beauty anywhere. And, anyway, even if there is, it's not important. It's irrelevant." Of course a person can say that, and they can believe it, and that might be their own experience: "There is no beauty in the world anywhere, and even if there is, it's not important. It's irrelevant. But surely it's too much to generalize that for others, and just claim that everyone who perceives beauty or for whom beauty is important is just deluded or deluding themselves or something like that. Fine, if a person has that experience and wants ... But can't generalize that for others.

Divine, as I'm using the term, or divinity, it refers to experience. Just like beauty, it refers to experience. And the way I am using 'divinity' has, again, parallels to beauty, an analogy to our use of, what I mean by 'beauty,' because we cannot claim -- or we're not claiming, rather, I'm not claiming that divinity exists independent of perception, of a way of looking, of soul, just like beauty. So it refers to experience, and I'm certainly not claiming that divinity is something that exists independent of my perception, independent of certain ways of looking, of the way of looking, independent of soul. Now, if a person wants to say, "Ah, so basically it's an illusion then. You just said it doesn't exist independent. It's an illusion. It's non-existent. It's just a fabrication," again, this would be silly on a number of counts, such a statement, because show me something that's not fabricated. Show me something that's independent of the way of looking. All things are [dependent]. Bring that thing to me, show me, point to it. There's nothing that's not dependent on the way of looking, nothing that's not fabricated.

And if a person was to say, "Beauty is non-existent. It's an illusion. It's just a fabrication, in the poor sense of the word," would you really believe that? If someone said that to you, tried to convince you there's no such thing as beauty, it is an illusion, or if they said, this person might say, "People believe in beauty or they seek beauty as a consolation." People say that about divinity, don't they? "We believe in divinity, we seek divinity as a consolation." It's possible that some people do that with regard to divinity and/or with regard to beauty. They either believe in it or seek some kind of experience as a consolation. But really, again, 'divinity' is so charged, and has become so problematic, but translate that to 'beauty.' If someone said to you, "You believe in beauty or you seek beauty as a consolation" -- possible, maybe, at times, or some people at times, but really, as a kind of psychological assessment of what's going on in our relationship with beauty, really? It's hardly, for me, it's hardly accurate, or it's hardly comprehensive, let's say. It doesn't really flush out what's going on for us there with an experience of beauty. It's not that we desperately create beauty to console ourselves against the reality of a meaningless universe and of the finitude of our existence.

As much as we might seek beauty or create it, it finds us. As much as we might seek or create it, it finds us. We are struck by beauty, if you like, if we are only open. And 'open' means more than heart, more than just heart, more than just the senses open. Soul open. Something to recognize here. There's a mystery to beauty; it's always going to be bigger than the reasons why. The reasons why we create beautiful things, the reasons why beauty is important to us, the reasons why we experience beauty, we make those reasons, and beauty will transcend that. It will be more than that. Our whole relationship with beauty will always be more than that. Just as with divinity (what I mean is the experience of divinity) and the conception of divinity. So I'm making a parallel here.

And what's more, certainly in the way that I would like to open up that exploration of divinity and inclusion of that notion and that experience, divinity, like beauty, is not outside of sense experience. So there is certainly a dimension, a dimension or an aspect, if you like, of divinity, the transcendent Unfabricated, etc., that might be wholly transcendent of sense experience. Sure. But divinity, like beauty, is not outside of sense experience in the way that I would like to open that up. This is an analogy; I'm not saying beauty is God, or God is beauty, or anything like that. I'm not equating the two. I'm making an analogy. If divinity is just a baffling notion to you, and there are all kinds of reactions, think about and explore your relationship and your notion and your experience of beauty, and there are, I think, a lot of analogies there with the experience and the possible notions of divinity.

Now, we could use actually love or mercy or intelligence rather than beauty. Because in mystical experience, in mystical perceptions that are possible to open up, we can have experiences of love or mercy or intelligence or lots of other things pervading the cosmos, being present in the cosmos throughout, but those kind of experiences are less common than an experience of beauty in the cosmos, in the universe. Even if beauty is hard to define, most people have an experience of beauty. Actually, it is a kind of mystical perception; we don't think of it as a mystical or rare perception, a rare experience.

I'd like to say more about the experience of divinity, and the breadth and range of those kinds of experiences, but I'm aware of time, and I've talked about it recently elsewhere, so I'll leave that for now here. But just to say that when we are talking, when I'm talking about the experiences of divinity and that notion of divinity, we're really talking about infinite folds, infinite possibilities, infinite folds of the infinite, if you like, infinite aspects of divinity that can open up for us everywhere and in everything, that every facet of our being and every facet of existence can be divinized or experienced as divine in infinite ways. There is, because of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, because of the expansion of the soulmaking, of the movement of soulmaking, everything that involves and implies and galvanizes, there is the ongoing possibility of the creation and discovery of divinity, everywhere, in everything, in every facet -- even the creation and discovery of facets that we don't even yet perceive in things, in ourselves, in our being. And then those, too, will be divinized, these new facets, these unknown facets.

Now, sometimes, of course, people really don't like that word, divinity or God, because of all different reasons. And so sometimes I might use the word Buddha-nature, and actually, one could use them interchangeably as far as I'm concerned. In Buddhism, Buddha-nature has, you know, there's a whole range of teachings, divergent teachings -- people disagree about it, people argue about it; whole range of ways that word and that concept of Buddha-nature is used. So one of the ways it's used, especially recently, it's just come to mean like your nice qualities, your good qualities. So you might feel that you lack generosity or you lack compassion or you lack patience or whatever, but actually these things are there in you, just waiting to be unearthed. That teaching helps us in regard to self-judgment, etc., because we say, actually, it's your innate goodness.

That's one way it's used. Some streams of the tradition use it in a second way -- related, but in a second way: Buddha-nature just means your potential to be enlightened, to become a Buddha. The possibility of you becoming a Buddha is your Buddha-nature. Why is that a possibility? Just because the mind is impermanent and the factors of the mind are impermanent. So if you're, you know, stingy and not generous, if you're judgmental, if you're impatient, these are just impermanent factors of mind. Because they're impermanent, they can go away, and you can cultivate opposite qualities -- generosity, compassion, patience, etc. And in cultivating them, you grow towards Buddhahood.

There's another way, which I would prefer to talk about, or rather is what I mean mostly when I talk about Buddha-nature, that's in the tradition. It's something much more mysterious, mystical, transcendent, etc., or transcendent in some respects. It really refers to the cosmic Buddha awareness, if you like. But it's not even just an awareness; it's a non-dual awareness. It is empty in itself, but it's inseparable from what it knows. And what does it know? It knows the world, the world of appearances, which are also empty, and it knows that they are empty. So it's a knowing of emptiness, and the totality of both the knowing and what is experienced. So the awareness and the world. It's, if you like, the whole intersubjective field included when we talk about subject and object, the whole field together. It's the gnosis, the ultimate knowing of a Buddha, the ultimate intersubjective field of a Buddha-mind, but it's cosmic, okay?

And so that's more what I would like to infer when I use the word Buddha-nature. Buddha-nature comprises, in the Mahāyāna tradition, dharmakāya as one aspect or one dimension, if you like. In some teachings, dharmakāya really just means -- kāya is body, and one meaning of dharma is mental factors. So it's just the body, if you like, the collection of the Buddha's mental factors, of the Buddha's mental dharmas, of these dharmas. In the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, it means much more than that. It's not just the collection of the Buddha's mental factors, possessed by a certain individual, Siddhartha Gautama or whoever. It's actually referring much more to this non-dual, empty gnosis that's inseparable (subject and object, awareness and world), that whole cosmic, intersubjective field that knows the emptiness of things, is empty itself, and includes both awareness and world, subject and object, all being empty.

Actually, Buddha-nature also includes not just dharmakāya, but also saṃbhogakāya and nirmāṇakāya. We don't have time to go into that, but I've talked about this a little bit before, I think. If we don't restrict the meaning of those words and these kāyas to just an individual, historical individual or one possible individual in this finite form, their Buddha-nature or this person's Buddha-nature, and regard it wider than that, more cosmically than that, then the dharmakāya and the saṃbhogakāya and the nirmāṇakāya really include, then, this cosmic, universal subject, if you like, the whole realm of imaginal perception, the imaginal realm, and the world of physical appearances, or appearances that appear physical to us (whatever that means). So all of that, you come to something much more mystical, much more inclusive, and much less dualistic, as well, with a certain understanding of Buddha-nature that I would like to relate to the use of the word divine or God as well.

How can we move towards that? What would support that kind of opening of the view, that kind of platform of a view, actually in experience as well as in conception? You know, we know, for example, just a little bit of reflection, that I know my body, your body, is actually, though it looks like a distinct thing, it's actually in constant sort of permeable exchange physically with the material world: the air we breathe, the food we eat, what we drink, what we excrete, etc. There's this permeability between my body and the world's body, if you like. As we go more into and allow more and support more the soulmaking dynamic and the igniting and the fire of eros-psyche-logos, we begin to be able to perceive and to sense -- not just conceive, but to perceive and to sense -- because things that we perceive and sense become an erotic other, erotic objects for us, then the whole eros-psyche-logos dynamic as we've described, we start to perceive and sense those things and the world of things and everything and every facet and every fold and every dimension becomes, gains, a kind of autonomy. We sense it as having a certain autonomy, a certain intelligence, a certain soul, psyche, etc. And also its own eros. This tree comes alive as soul. It has soul. It is soul. It also has eros.

So psyche and eros, and intelligence, and all the rest of it, and autonomy, are not just in the human or animal minds; actually, with the eros-psyche-logos dynamic expanding, deepening, widening, fertilizing, all that, we start to sense ourselves and conceive ourselves in an ensouled world, a world that has soul, that is soul, an animate world. The word *'*animate' actually refers to anima, has soul, which is Latin for 'soul.' The world becomes animated. The world of things, of objects, of so-called inanimate objects, becomes animated. The whole open field of being becomes the field of eros and soul and eroses and souls and psyches, plural.

So psyche is not just in here, soul is not just in here, or in you somehow. We've already implied this by saying, in the use of the word psyche, we said yes, it means soul, or my soul, or your soul, in the subjective citta sense, but it also means, in the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, it also means the totality of imaginal perception. We said that, if you remember. In other words, the totality of objects and perceptions. So it's already implicit that psyche is not just in here, so to speak. And eros, too, you know, I told you about Eros always being with Pothos and with the band of gods or demigods called the Erotes. Well, another character, as well as Eros and Pothos in that little band that always goes together, is Anteros. And this is responding or returning eros, the mirroring of eros. And what we see with our imaginal experience, whether it's a purely so-called intrapsychic image or an imaginal perception, the deepening of the soulmaking perception of something in the world, is that that thing, whatever it is, or that beloved other, we start to sense that they have eros for us. The eros is returned. It flows both ways, from us to them, from them to us. The world of things loves us. It has eros for us. It has soul. It is soul. Souls multiply, become more manifold.

In all this, we're collapsing or, if you like, going beyond the sort of typically now ingrained assumption and perception of Cartesian dualism that Descartes made between mind and matter, res cogitans, res extensa. Actually, I was reading recently, quite interesting, it really started with Galileo Galilei, not with Descartes. That's interesting anyway. But this not so much collapse but opening out of that dualism, dissolving of that dualism, becomes not just an idea, but lived and sensed, a lived sense. It's sensed, it's felt, it's experienced, as well as conceived.

So that movement happens, as I said, just through soulmaking, and supporting soulmaking, and being interested in that and exploring it, and that expansion there through the whole eros-psyche-logos dynamic, as we've been explaining. It will move to that place, and then that place will become more manifold, the senses of divinity, the perceptions, the experience, the dimensions, the facets, creation, being created and discovered, all of that. Again, I'm answering this question: how do we open up that sense of the divine? What supports it? It also can be supported for many people through emptiness practices really deepening. For some people, they really need to go through that route.

So we see with the way I would teach emptiness and that whole line of exploration, we begin to realize through playing with ways of looking that, let's say, the mind fabricates, and through that, this thing or that thing, and this perception, that perception, this object, that object, is empty, is fabricated. And then we also see that this mind or this awareness, too, is not-self, it's anattā, and we can play with that view and see what happens. And we recognize eventually that this mind, this awareness that fabricates, it too is empty in itself. It's not only not me or mine, it's also empty in itself. We see, more than this, in this whole opening, we see that time is empty. And because of all this, fabrication itself is empty. The whole duality between what is fabricated and what is unfabricated, what seems illusory in some sense and real in some sense, that collapses. All of it, including the mind, can be perceived as sacred, as divine.

And we can say, yes, in a certain manner of speaking, at a certain relative truth, the mind fabricates. But the mind that fabricates is this divine mind. It's not mine. It's the divine mind, which is not separate from the things and the world, because we've seen all that through the dependent origination, through the understanding of emptiness. It's the divine mind that fabricates all perception, so-called physical, so-called imaginal, so-called combination. And this view becomes, this way of looking becomes available. It's a possible view. We can move into that. So I can engage that deliberately, that view, that it is the divine mind fabricating, the divine mind that's timeless, that's empty, that's beyond all that can be said about it. That divine mind is fabricating a world of perception, the world of things and objects and selves and others and all that. It's not separate from those fabrications, but it's that that's fabricating, not me, not mine.

As Catherine has emphasized, we could say 'mind,' but we could also say the senses, or include within the word 'mind' the senses. We tend to split these things. They're not really separate. The word, the Pali word and Sanskrit word, I think, is āyatana. The Pali is certainly that, āyatana. And it gets translated, āyatana, as bases, or organs -- so ear, eye, etc. -- or agents, in other words implying this active role that they have. They're extents, they're reaches, they're fields, as well, is a perfectly valid translation and is implied in the translation of āyatana. So that word, āyatana, it encompasses much more than how we tend to divide those meanings up in English. If we say 'ear,' we don't tend to think of the whole field of aural perception, or 'eye,' we don't tend to think of the whole field of visual perception, but actually that's included in āyatana. So it includes the objects as well. It includes the objects of sense perception, the fields of sense perception, the activity of the agency, the way that it is actually active, participatory, the senses are active and participatory, and also the so-called physical organ or base. Again, it's pointing to, this āyatana, points, to me, it points to this intersubjective realm, this non-dual sense, if you like, that we can have of the whole realm of experience.

So through the view of emptiness, through the practices of emptiness, for some people, it's what opens up the possibility of a certain view of Buddha-nature, of divinity. And implicit in that is a certain soulmaking, a view of soul and the soul's participation. And it can form a basis of possible further ways of looking and conceptions, a basis for the flexibility of that, and being able to entertain, because we've seen the emptiness of these things. And because of that, further soulmaking and, as I said, further folds, further facets created/discovered, come on that basis of that sense of participating and being in this divine field, if you like, the world as divine, the experiences of the sense and the senses as divine, ourselves, our minds, every fold, every facet of the being as divine. And that can be multiplied and deepened and enriched because of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic.

Now, it may be that someone is listening and thinks, "Yes, but is that real? Is that true, if you have this sense?" I hope that it's obvious by now from everything that we've said, and previous retreats, etc., that we have moved beyond, we have deconstructed naïve notions of reality and truth. We are in the playing field, the realm, opened up by the Middle Way: neither existing nor not existing, neither 'is' nor 'is not.' As the Buddha said, "I teach neither 'is' nor 'is not,'"^[10] neither real nor unreal, the Middle Way that is a result of emptiness practice and, if you like, a basis, but also a refinement or product of the refinement of imaginal practice. If you say, "Is it real? Is it true?", in a way, we get locked into very naïve and philosophically naïve and psychologically naïve notions of reality and truth.

What are we doing here? I'll say this again. I've said it before. What are we doing here? Is this whole exploration, whether it's of eros and soulmaking, beauty, aesthetics, are we wanting to serve something called 'truth'? I mean, maybe that's partly -- I think it is actually a part of it. But so often when people hear that word, or 'reality,' or whatever, they just have some idea, we just have some idea of something that's singular and objective, existing independently of the way of looking. Is it that that we're trying, this whole movement of practice, in the service of reaching some singular, objective truth? Or is it soulmaking? And that's a different intention, or we need to really open up what we mean by 'truth.' But for me, we're in the service of soulmaking. We're interested in supporting that movement of soulmaking. And in the movement of soulmaking, there will be an expansion. By definition, soulmaking needs an expansion of perception, an expansion into the perception of dimensionalities and divinity, divinities, Buddha-nature and all that. Limitless creation/discovery, revelation of all that. This is the movement of soulmaking. This is what we want to serve.