Aspects of the Imaginal (Part 6)

Let's take just a moment to remind ourselves and make clear again the point of what we're doing right now, frame where we are, and the trajectory of what we're trying to do right now in this set of talks, or rather, in this talk. So we were identifying a group or a list of elements or aspects of the imaginal, to try and make more clear what we really mean by that word, 'imaginal,' which different people use. And so that, to support the understanding and the grasping of the conceptual framework that we're using and employing, and also to kind of deepen, enrich, and refine the sensitivity and the discernment in practice, when one begins to notice these things, pay attention to them, and tune to them -- these aspects and elements of the imaginal constellation/experience.

And in addition to that, we are pointing out the possibility of noticing and tuning to some of these aspects in different ways in order to, if you like, support the movement of, or the development, the evolution of some perception into the more fully imaginal route, the more authentically imaginal route. And we said there was a spectrum of the uses of imagination, and kind of at one end is more what we're calling 'imaginal.' So that these elements can be played with, attended to in a way that amplifies them, ignites that specific node or element or aspect that one's paying attention to. And then that, in turn, can ignite or spread that illumination, that activation. That soul-life can spread through the other nodes of the lattice, the other stars of the constellation. (1) So the general point about this kind of amplification or ignition, as we said, we can notice one of these elements or aspects. And here I am, working with an image. Here I am with a certain perception. And I notice one of these elements. I bring my attention to that, and I kind of sensitively tune into that particular quality.

(2) Or I bring a delicate question to bear in relation to that node. So for example: "Is this imaginal figure autonomous? Do they seem independent?" And just the introduction of the question, lightly, it shapes my attention in a way that shines a light on that particular element, and the light may illuminate, ignite, amplify that element, draw it out to the consciousness, bring it to life, really. And then, from there, the whole thing may become more imaginal.

Or the question: "Is this imaginal figure -- do I have the sense that they're -- would I call them 'real' or 'not real'?" And so sometimes the questions can be posed in actual language in time like that. Sometimes that's way too clunky. It's more a kind of question that's very subtly implicit in the very attention itself, in the looking -- very, very nuanced and delicate. Or another question, another kind of way of bringing a very sensitive, curious attention -- again, say, with the example of an imaginal figure or material perception that we're wanting to, again, help it move, evolve along the spectrum towards a fully imaginal, fully sensing with soul -- another question might be: "Am I loved? Am I loved by this other that I am perceiving?" And/or: "What kind of love do they have for me? What's the quality or the character of that love that may be there, that I might sense?" So again, possibly just noticing, possibly a kind of questioning, or a kind of curious, sensitive attention to one of those elements or aspects on the list that we're going through.

(3) And thirdly, the possibility that one can actually shift one of those elements, move it, turn it on, switch it on, wiggle it or jiggle it, or change it a little bit so that it turns on. And in being turned on, it turns on the other elements, and the whole constellation, the whole lattice is turned on, illuminated, amplified to resonate in that imaginal kind of wavelength of things.

So there are those three possibilities: just noticing; just a kind of questioning or sensitive, curious attention; the possibility of actually focusing on one and shifting it, switching it on, turning it on, wiggling, jiggling it until it comes on. Very delicate, all this. Very delicate, very light. Not so clunky. I've said before, and I'll say it again right now: you know, a lot of the evolution, I think, when we talk about practice going deeper or evolving or maturing, a lot has to do with things becoming more subtle, actually. Not so much more fireworks, more clunkiness, more grossness. A lot has to do, I think, with the experiences becoming subtle, and correspondingly, our awareness and our responsiveness and our responses becoming much more sensitive, much more delicate and nuanced and subtle.

(4) And sometimes, as a kind of third or fourth possibility, we can actually start deliberately with one of these elements that may be accessible for us at that time. So for example, we might just have accessible to us a general sort of humility in relationship with what might even be a very vague sense of divinity. And there's just the sense of my humility in the face of the divine, or whatever words one wants to use. And then that humility, despite the vagueness there, again, it functions. That node is being illuminated, amplified, brought out more, brought to life more. And that can spread. [7:44] And the vagueness may remain. You know, we talked about a sense of divinity as one of the other nodes. Well, that may remain vague. Or it may get more clear or more particular, or whatever.

Or another one that one might deliberately start with is actually loving. I'll come back to this later. So here's this perception of another, and what if I actually express love? We said that love was one of these nodes: love, loving, and being loved. What if I actually just, now, deliberately, I feel the germ, the seed, the basis of that love? You notice just a little bit. What if I amplify it? What if I express it? What if I tune into it, switch it on? Then what happens?

Or it might be, as another example, for those who have what I would call a deep understanding of emptiness, and one that's really accessible in the perception, one can have that understanding in the moment, in the actual perception of things, of the Middle Way of emptiness, neither real nor not real, and the kind of magic of that. And if you do know that kind of level that I'm talking about, and the way that opens up all kinds of possibilities, as well as the sacredness of things. And then that Middle Way of emptiness, for some people, it's quite easy then, it's fertile ground to open up the Middle Way of the imaginal that we'll come back to shortly. And then that can open up the whole realm, the whole tenor, field, and texture and wavelengths of the imaginal.

Or it might be that what's accessible right from the beginning, in a deliberate way, is that fullness of intention, that element that I drew attention to (I can't remember what number it was on our sort of list). The fullness of, like, "I am here. I am intending in practice. I am in a stance of relating to this figure, or this other, or this imaginal perception not primarily for my sake, but for something bigger: for the sake of soulmaking, for the sake of the divine, for the sake of the Buddha-nature," whatever, however one, whatever makes sense to one. That fullness of intention is also going to have a kind of alchemical catalysing capacity at that point, potentially.

Or it may be -- and I think I've suggested this, and we've done a little bit on some of the retreats -- one can start with a deliberate image of one's energy body, or a deliberate image of one's body. So for example, just imagining the body as a body of light, and maybe it wants to be a particular colour -- blue, or could be anything. And just staying with that imagination, and then tuning. It's a deliberate imagination, but then feeling what that feels like, what the body feels like, with the sensitivity, tuning to that particular wavelength of that image and that sense of the energy body. And see what opens up then from this image of the energy body and the sense of it. And it may be that other images open up, or that itself becomes genuine imaginal image, or something starts to interact with that, or it relates to its environment, its immediate environment in a way that's genuinely imaginal or sensed with soul, etc.

I remember on one retreat, we did a guided meditation with the Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ mantra, and conceiving and imagining the syllables as jewels, and the body as made, somehow, in some mystical way, made of these cosmic, magical jewels of compassion, of the syllables of the Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ mantra. Or might just be jewels -- yes, again, magical, mystical jewels. What is it to have a body of jewels?

Or it might be something kind of at the other end of the [spectrum]. Jewels can be very hard, can't they? Adamantine. But might be something at the other end of the spectrum, in terms of earthiness and solidity. What is it to imagine the body as a body made of, or at one with, or mixed with, or emerging from the roots of trees, underground, in the dark, damp, fragrant soil, the moist earth, and actually imagining that? And then, again, tuning into that, and see what comes from that. So, different possibilities in terms of how we use these nodes, how we relate to the nodes in terms of supporting and encouraging that movement into the fully imaginal, and the fully sensing with soul.

(16) So we were going through our list, and we got to, I think, number sixteen -- what I was calling number sixteen, depending on how you count, how you slice it up. And that was meaningfulness. And we made the point that specific meanings, specific echoings of the image with life, and the life with the image, and the sense of maybe a particular kind of duty or particular values -- these elements are all kind of, if you like, sub-elements, or part of the aspect of meaningfulness. But meaningfulness -- that's what the suffix '-fulness' is partly intended to mean -- meaningfulness is something larger than any specific meaning, or even a limited, finite collection of meanings or echoes or whatever, or reduction to values. Meaningfulness is something larger. It's somewhat akin, in its kind of largeness and openness, to the kind of infinite echoing and mirroring. As I said, it's bigger than individual echoes or ways that life and image reflect each other.

So meaningfulness is more like, we say, like this image or this perception I have is pregnant with meaningfulness. And so there's something discernible, and something half-hidden, just like when you see a pregnant woman or animal. The pregnancy is visible and palpable, but what is being gestated is not yet visible. Of course, in the case of pregnancy, it will become visible. So sometimes things emerge from the imaginal, from the sensing with soul, from a hiddenness into manifestation. But we never exhaust that meaningfulness. The pregnancy, if you like, is never fully over. The imaginal is always pregnant. The soul is always pregnant and always giving birth. Or at least, very often -- giving birth again and again.

So there's something kind of tangible, and something obscure. There are the intimations of meaning, and all that is intended by the word 'meaningfulness.' But the obscurity, or the not quite knowing what's there, half-hidden, it does not make meaningfulness any less powerful for that. So the fact that we're not entirely clear what it is that so moves us, and so has this meaningfulness for us, and gives us a sense of devotion and orientation, and functions like a beacon for us, touches our heart, touches our soul, the fact that we're not exactly clear what it is -- we can't neatly define it, wrap it up, sum it up -- does not take away any of the power of that meaningfulness. Quite the contrary.

(17) Okay. And then number, I think, seventeen on the list, on our loose list, is something that I've called something like eternality or timelessness, or at least some kind of alteration of the time-sense. So some sense of the timelessness or eternality of an image is an aspect of what makes it imaginal in our language, in our conception. And I've talked about this before in a few places. For me, it's a really important element. Imaginal images have what I was calling an 'iconic' nature, versus a 'narrative' nature. They don't go somewhere in time towards some grand resolution, like a story, some heroic finale and redemption, necessarily. The power and the redemption of the imaginal is not in its narrative apotheosis. It's not in its narrative kind of culmination or endpoint. So this, to me, is quite important. I call it 'iconic' rather than 'narrative.' Images tend to be iconic rather than narrative.

So for example, you know, nowadays a lot of people are very importantly drawing attention to the need, as hopefully humanity makes a transition or an evolution, really, a development of wisdom and practical wisdom into, let's say, 100 per cent renewable energy -- so, so important, and coming away from fossil fuels and polluting fuels. And so the imagination, the faculty of the skilful imagination that human beings have is a very important faculty. Can we imagine that future when everyone, their homes are powered, and energy comes, and transport comes from 100 per cent renewable energy, electric cars and whatnot? Can we imagine that, and imagine the stages that might move us towards that, that might transition us towards that state, and that there's no depletion of resources, minerals, etc., from the planet, species loss? Can we imagine that? It's a skilful use of the imagination. That's more of a narrative image. It's not yet imaginal.

Imaginal has more this timeless, kind of eternal quality. It's not moving in time, necessarily, towards some goal. Or if it is, because some images do have a relatively narrative quality -- it's what I tend to call, use with the word 'fantasy' -- but they have this aspect, they seem: it's always already happening. This story, all the elements of the story, all the stages of this fantasy, of this narrative image, are actually somehow still happening, always happening in hierophanic time, and holy time, and sacred time. And somehow, curiously, the beginning is happening at the same time as the end of the story, even if they're, on the face of it, separated in time. So there's still this timeless or eternal sense, whatever words we use to describe that, in an image, an imaginal image that is of a relatively narrative nature. [20:57]

So what this means in practice, regarding this element, is that we can pay attention, when we're working with an image, to the sense of temporality within and of that image, or that imaginal perception, or the way we're sensing something with soul. So we pay attention to the sense of temporality, and notice it. Now, this is often quite subtle. And it's as if the two levels go on at once: the sort of movement in time, of course, and the eternal aspect. But can we start tuning to the sense of temporality, attending and noticing the sense of temporality, then noticing and tuning to the sense of timelessness within the larger sense of temporality, the sense of eternality somehow pervading this image? And that, again, just as with the other elements, that noticing can amplify that very sense of eternality, which brings the whole thing sort of -- raises up, if you like, or if you don't like that vertical innuendo, amplify or illuminate or bring alive that element of the imaginal, and then that element, again, spreads, and the whole thing becomes imaginal. [22:51]

So there are many possibilities and flavours of time, and also of timelessness, when we sense with soul, in the imaginal. It's not just one kind of experience we're talking about. There are many possibilities. So for example, one may be dwelling with a whole body, energy body awareness, and the sense of eternality of oneself as image, and of one's life as image, but in a certain way -- meaning, in this case, just as an example, the sense of one's whole life with its narrative, and its difficulties, and its dukkha, and its challenges, and its tragedies, and all of that; its story and the conditions of body, of soul, of story and conditions of relationship with others and world. [24:00] And all of that kind of sensed or seen, so to speak, from, if you like, after death, from out of time: sub specie aeternitatis, meaning from the perspective of eternity.

So what is it to get a sense of oneself and one's whole life, that whole stretch -- birth to death, maybe even more -- seen, if you like, from after death, from out of time? And that's one possibility. I'm just giving a possibility of a kind of eternality or timelessness. And one can sometimes actually find one's way into that perspective with the energy body. And if there's that energy body awareness, and that eternality, it can open up the door to the imaginal -- the doors, the gates to the imaginal, the gates to the mundus imaginalis. The imaginal world can open up just from seeing oneself -- one's self becomes image, one's life becomes icon, and becomes seen with soul, sensed with soul. And this will bring with it the other elements: the humility that we talked about, the fullness of intention that was talked about. It will ignite, illuminate, amplify, bring those into existence. And likewise, those elements -- for example, humility and the fullness of intention -- will likewise help that sense of, in this case, beyond time-ness, or timelessness. [25:51]

This perspective of eternity will help to ignite, illuminate, amplify, bring that into existence. And then one is sensing oneself, sensing one's life and one's death, and that whole journey, with soul, as well as this moment now, as well and including the dukkha -- all the dukkha, the whole life with the dukkha. And that itself is extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily redeeming, healing, transforming, a prayerful, mystical perception, sensing all that with soul. And then at that point, there may be other possibilities that open up from that. One can relax that sort of whole life from the perspective of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis. One can relax that whole perspective and emphasis a little bit. And then those other aspects or another relationship with time can be sensed with soul, other relationship with timelessness. [27:03]

So for example, the unknown of the future and the moment can come and be sensed with soul, that very unknowing: we do not know our fate. We do not know the future. But when it's arrived at that way, opened up that way, with that kind of fullness and richness and dimensionality, that's quite different from just a kind of more flat acknowledgment or recognition of a very basic insight, that we don't know the future, and one then, for the sake of equanimity, abides in a simple 'not knowing.' Quite different. Quite a different level of sensing and perception there.

Now, let's say someone was hearing this, and hadn't listened to all the other stuff, and they said: "What are you saying? Are you saying that this is something that's not impermanent?" And obviously, for a Buddhist, that would be a kind of horrific heresy, or just ridiculous, or whatever. I probably don't need to say this to you guys at this point, but of course images are impermanent. Of course everything is impermanent. Impermanence is obvious, you know? And by introducing this aspect or element, and drawing attention to it, of eternality and timelessness, we're not kind of dismissing the perspective that things are impermanent. The images, this very image that one is perhaps so moved by and senses as eternal, that very image is impermanent, comes and goes. So we're somehow holding both at once. Again, yes, of course, it's obvious: it's impermanent. And there's this timeless kind of stratum or dimension or aspect to it.

Sometimes, again, people with a lot of deep emptiness practice, if that's something you've developed, or you just know that it's a possibility, one really can come to the point where one thoroughly and absolutely knows the emptiness of time, alongside everything else. And that knowing of the emptiness of time opens up and legitimizes a lot of possibilities in practice. So we're kind of, as I said, holding the impermanence, and not so much 'permanence' as 'timelessness.' But you could say 'permanence,' yeah. 'Always already happening.' We're holding them together.

As William Blake said, "Help us, or save us from single vision!"^[1] "It's just this or it's just that. It's just eternal. It's just impermanent." There is this capacity in the imaginal to see with more than one way of looking at once, if you like. And there's nothing here that is being kind of presented or practised because one can't face the truth of impermanence and the fact of death. It has completely nothing to do with that. So all this practice is grounded in, yes, death comes, and we don't know when, usually. Everything dies. Everyone dies. I will die. You will die. Everything is impermanent. We do need to face up to that in life. We need to open the heart and the being to that.

So it's not coming out of an inability or a refusal to face that kind of reality. Nor is it a kind of clinging to this sense of timelessness at the expense of an acknowledgment of impermanence. I hardly need to say this. We're not talking here of images of 'happy ever after,' and you say, "Oh, that will be what will happen," or an image that ends all rosy, with a happy ending or whatever. We're talking about something completely different. In what I just described about sensing the whole of one's existence with soul, there is still death. There is still suffering, and sometimes quite a difficult suffering that our life is afflicted by or given to handle, etc. It's not transmuting that into some other kind of ending. Yeah? I know I don't need to say this.

(18) Okay. Number eighteen is what I've been calling the imaginal Middle Way, or the Middle Way of the imaginal, or the theatre quality, the theatre aspect of the imaginal. So, this non-reification: it's not taken as real and literal and purely concretized. And the relationship with the 'real' self, in a 'real' world, etc., is much less solid, less fixated. So you know, someone might have, they say, "Oh, I had an image or I had a vision of teaching or of serving," or whatever it is. And traditional, or rather, maybe more usual kind of Dharma or spiritual approaches to that kind of thing, someone having those kind of images or visions of themselves teaching or serving, or whatever it is, would be, "Well, let go of the attachment to whether that vision materializes and whether you get what you want, whether it comes to pass." [33:47] So there's the teaching of, "Yeah, you had that image, but just let go any attachment to that, to whether it materializes."

Or it might be, again, in a more kind of usual or common approach, "Can you be aware and discern with that vision or that image of serving or whatever it is? Because it may be, if you like, true, or accurate, or a kind of prophetic intuition, if you like, or something, of the future, or something that you're called to. Or it may be your delusion or your wishful thinking or whatever it is." But in either of those two more common or usual spiritual approaches, they both rest on a kind of realist appropriation of the image or the vision. They refer it too simply, too directly, too literally, and too concretely to a real self in a real world of real time. Yes? So all these, the other elements that we're talking about, the timelessness, that's kind of not there, and it's all about a real possibility, in a real self, in a real world.

And in neither case of those two -- either "Let go of the attachment to whether it materializes," or "Discern, you know, is that an intuitive glimpse of the future, possibility? Or is it just your kind of delusion there or wishful thinking?" -- in neither case is the image treated imaginally. In neither case is it related to as, or allowed to be, an imaginal image in our sense of the word. Instead, it has to be categorized as either real or not real, either real or delusion. And the Middle Way of the imaginal kind of is not content with either real or not real, either real or delusion, real or papañca. So this is what I mean by the Middle Way: neither 'real' nor 'not real' seem adequate or accurate or truly appropriate kind of categories or labels for this imaginal perception, or this, what I'm perceiving when I sense with soul.

And another word I use here is the theatre, the theatre element of it. So when we say 'theatre,' that doesn't necessarily mean 'dramatic.' Remember, I was giving examples of images that are really not dramatic at all, or even particularly narrative. They're just a sort of freeze frame of something. So the word 'theatre' doesn't imply a kind of grand drama or narrative. But it implies this kind of quality of or status of, "This figure, this perception has power for the soul, has a certain depth, a certain ability to affect and move me or us. It's important to me. It even feels necessary. Soulmaking comes with it. There's this infinite echoing, mirroring -- all that." We talk about 'poetic truth' or 'artistic truth.' So that's another way of saying this. We're talking about something that's true, but it's a poetic truth. It's not a literal truth or necessarily a concrete truth.

I don't know if you've ever been, as I have, to a play in a theatre, and the theatre is very small. And one's sitting very near the actors. The actors may be very good, and it's a very intimate, vulnerable experience to be in a good theatre with powerful actors in that way. It's very intimate. You are involved. You cannot not be involved, unless you really go into some kind of shutdown mode. It's actually vulnerable for you as a member of the audience. You're right there, open. Your being is open. The actors can see you. Yeah? So all this relates to imaginal figures as well, and when we sense things with soul (which I'm using interchangeably). You can't be untouched in that situation, unimplicated. It's not the cold distance of the ideal scientific method: uninvolved.

And so, when we are practising, and something's imaginal, we can notice: "Oh, it has this kind of theatre-like quality," in terms of, "It's not real, because it's theatre, but it's not not real either." And I don't just mean by "it's not not real," by the fact that, "Oh, it's just happening, so therefore something exists." I mean there's something, there's a deeper kind of poetic truth being communicated there. But this aspect -- and again, it's something we can notice, and I am pretty sure that, in time, anyone doing these imaginal practices and kind of getting into it will just notice that this is an element, this is an aspect of the imaginal -- which, again, we may not notice at first. It may not be obvious to us at first. It has a quality of theatre, has an air of theatre to it. It's kind of neither real nor not real. Neither of those labels or categories really applies. It's in the imaginal Middle Way. Again, noticing that tenor of it, that status of it, that air or quality to it, amplifies that quality. It becomes more apparent. Over time, it becomes something that one can just notice immediately, with practice. And then, again, the whole constellation can amplify, illuminate, evolve to the more authentically, fully imaginal.

So that word, 'play,' that I tend to use a lot in my teaching, whatever I'm teaching, Dharma-wise, practice-wise, is necessary or relevant in both of its senses. We go to the theatre, and we see a play. So there's something of a play happening, but something that has this artistic, poetic, necessary, vital, deep truth to it at the same as it's theatre. 'Play,' in the other sense, is necessary as well: the capacity and the permission for us to play in meditation, and with perception, and in life -- play with concepts, play with experiences, play with ways of looking, play with energies. Are we able and are we free? Are we granted permission to play? To me, that's absolutely necessary for -- actually, the way I tend to teach, it's maybe not necessary, but really, really helpful for all practice. And in this realm of the imaginal and soulmaking, I would say it's vital, absolutely vital, necessary.

So it's an ingredient. Play, in both senses, is an ingredient of imaginal practice. And it's an ingredient of soulmaking that remains fertile and expanding. Something can be soulmaking, and then something freezes. We've been through all this on previous retreats when we talk about the soulmaking dynamic and eros-psyche-logos and all that. So we could say, play or the quality of play, the aspect of play, in both its senses, is a prerequisite of soulmaking and imaginal practice.

So some practitioners have deep desire. There's no doubt about their desire and their aspiration and their dedication to practice and the path. But that element of play is not so easy for them, for different reasons, possibly. One of them may be just the capacity to play is inhibited by the very image, or the logos, the psyche or the logos of what practice looks like. And so I encounter this occasionally. But so important, I think: play, in both its senses. [43:38]

And you know, you just have to watch children playing to see how sometimes, how very serious that play can be, how captivating it is for them. And as I said, to me it's something really, really beautiful. And they're not mistaking it for reality if they're playing whatever it is -- soldiers or whatever. They're not mistaking that for real: "Well, I just shot you, bang-bang. You're dead. And now you get up." It's like, well, that doesn't make sense. There's no confusion there. Just so with a play and playing and this imaginal Middle Way and the theatre. There's no confusion about categories of reality, for the most part. We'll come back to this, actually. But the play can be very serious, very engrossing, very vital and vitalizing, and deeply important. And of course, we talk about playing music. See the play and the beauty and the necessity and the seriousness of -- well, I know for me, as a jazz musician, when I was playing and all that.

What I've also noticed recently is sometimes people -- and understandably; I don't think I've really touched on this so much, or not really made it transparent: the relationship of this imaginal Middle Way to the Middle Way of emptiness and the more traditional Middle Way that the Buddha referred to in the Kaccāyana Sutta in the Pali Canon, and then was really amplified by Nāgārjuna and the whole Mahāyāna teachings -- Middle Way referring to emptiness, between 'is' and 'is not,' 'exists' and 'doesn't exist,' 'real' and 'not real.'

So what's the relationship between that traditional emptiness Middle Way and the imaginal Middle Way? [45:43] They're not quite one and the same. I would say the emptiness Middle Way, for me, it's extremely important, but in terms of imaginal practice, it's more like, understanding the emptiness Middle Way is part of the much larger conceptual framework of the whole of practice and a certain range of directions of possibility of Dharma. In other words, understanding that deeply, the Middle Way of emptiness, is an integral part of a much larger logos and conceptual framework, which we're trying to kind of unfold and explain and also, in fact, develop. So it has a kind of different place in the scheme of things, if you like -- not entirely, because for some people, the emptiness Middle Way, when they really get a deep sense of that, that's the thing that, for some people, opens up the possibility of the imaginal as a viable and kind of sensible path, legitimized, and also opens up that sense of sacredness and the possibility of perceiving things imaginally with the imaginal Middle Way, in the imaginal Middle Way.

So for some people, that understanding the emptiness Middle Way is a springboard, either conceptually or in actual practice. The practice has actually arrived at that very deep sense of the emptiness Middle Way, and that's what opens up the imaginal Middle Way. Other people -- and I wonder whether they're in the majority -- other people don't need that deep sense of the Middle Way of emptiness in their practice. It's quite a deep level we're talking about. They don't need that. It's more that they have more a poet's sense of things, of poetic truth, of artistic truth. They have the sense, and they can feel it, of the kind of theatre element. So it's just there in the perception. It's there, integrated anyway into their life, into the way they live and consider things and relate to existence already, this potential of the imaginal Middle Way. And as I said earlier, if it's not, it will emerge. Just as one gets familiar with the mundus imaginalis, with the imaginal realm and the perceptions there, one actually notices, like, "Oh, yeah, there's that quality, and that distinguishes it, this imaginal Middle Way, from other perceptions."

So for me, I thought quite a lot about this when I was starting to teach this kind of thing, and was unsure whether to include it or not. But more and more, I really lean towards wanting to include it as a necessary part of soulmaking, a necessary part of what it means for something to be imaginal, and for something to be sensed with soul. I feel it's absolutely crucial, and not just for the philosophical sense and kind of framework that it gives. Not just in the service of creating and establishing and opening up and filling out a kind of adequate and robust conceptual framework for everything that we're doing here. But I think that's very important too, actually. I think it's very, very important. But it's more crucial in the sense of this really helps the balance, especially when there's a lot of eros, especially when the soul is on fire that way, and there's all that beauty and all that attraction to this path and opening, and all kinds of things are opening up. It really helps, this Middle Way, this sense of the Middle Way, theatre element. Really it helps the navigation, the balance, and as I said, the fertility. It helps the soulmaking. It's an element of any soulmaking. [50:24] And, you know, I'm going to come back to this, because it's actually not quite that simple. But let's just say that for now. And I would like to emphasize just how important that is. Okay, so that was number nineteen, I think.

(20) Number twenty is something we've actually already said: that the imaginal, or soulmaking, or sensing with soul is -- like they say of beauty -- it's "in the eye of the beholder." Or we may say, "in the soul of the beholder, in the senses of the beholder." And that realization, that awareness, that recognition, that concept helps the imaginal Middle Way, when I realize, "Oh, something is not objectively, independently imaginal," whatever it is. We've went through this in this talk earlier, [in] Part 1, I think it was. So realizing that, remembering it, recognizing it, and being aware of it, keeping in mind that concept -- you know, again, very, very lightly -- it helps establish us, open us on to the Middle Way.

In other words, soulmaking, sensing with soul, the realm of the imaginal, an imaginal figure, or imaginal perception of something is in the eye, in the senses, in the soul of the beholder. Another way of saying that is -- again, we said it before -- is the imaginal is really a way of looking. And by 'way of looking,' I mean, that includes a way of conceiving, a way of relating. Yes? So nothing is, so to speak, objectively or independently imaginal. The imaginal arises as a dependent arising, dependent in part on the way of looking. Yeah? So that, as I said, that twentieth aspect, as a concept, as an awareness, as a recognition, helps, for some people, in the establishing of that Middle Way, the imaginal Middle Way.

Now, for some people, this talk or this teaching that perception, or actually, any perception, whether it's imaginal or material, is dependent on the way of looking -- this teaching that any thing is dependent on the way of looking is tricky. When one hasn't quite seen it for oneself in practice through deep fading and all that, and the way things manifest dependent on the way of looking and what's wrapped up in the way of looking, and then it comes as a teaching -- and I know I emphasize it over and over again -- and for some people it's a little tricky, because the usual way of thinking and understanding can't help but conclude that if something is dependent on the way of looking (whether I sense something with soul, or I have this imaginal figure, or this beautiful perception of sacredness), if it's dependent on the way of looking, then somehow it actually can't be real, then, because our usual way of conceiving of reality is independent of the way of looking, having objective existence. And it can't be real, therefore it can't really have value, and it can't really be sacred.

So this is troubling. And I'm aware because I emphasize it so much, it can be a bit of a stumbling block for some people, and inclined to sort of do away with that element. So a couple of things about this: I would say that, again, a deeper understanding, journeying deeper into that whole experimenting and playing with and exploring ways of looking and the whole notion of fabrication -- that whole revelatory journey, beautiful revelatory journey -- the deeper one goes, at a certain point, one really sees for oneself, one understands in one's bones the emptiness of everything. That means it's not that objects are dependent on the way of looking, meaning that the self somehow, or the mind, or the awareness, or something here in the subject, or the way of looking, "This is real, and it forms a real basis for what is not so real." We go deeper on this journey into understanding emptiness in practice -- it has to be in practice -- and we understand that everything is empty. Self is empty. Subject is empty. Awareness is empty. Mind is empty. Ways of looking are empty. They don't inherently exist.

And what that does, because everything is empty, and equally empty, if you like, then all becomes, rather than "One thing is valuable, and in relation to that, or relative to that, this thing is not valuable. This is sacred because it's real, and that is not sacred because it's not real, and therefore not valuable," everything, because everything is equally, deeply, mysteriously, mystically empty, if one really goes into the roots of what emptiness means, and what we can sense of what emptiness means and is, then everything becomes sacred. Everything becomes valuable. Everything has this status of the traditionally Buddhist Middle Way of being neither real nor not real.

And there's a magic in that, in how it is and how things are, and their appearing but being empty. So it rather opens up the door to more sacredness, more comprehensive sacredness, and more possibilities of kinds of sacredness. So I've talked and written about this before. I'm not going to go into it right now.

(21) What I want to emphasize right now is the twenty-first element of our list, which is the sense of participation. [57:11] I'm emphasizing that in contrast to this kind of immature, not quite full understanding of a dependency of way of looking, which then reifies either the way of looking, or the subject, or the self, or the mind, or awareness that does the looking, does the sensing. The notion of participation, to me, it gives a sense of a dependency on the subject, on the way of looking, on mind or awareness or self, but not without any objective pole or pole of value in the object, pole of sacredness or reality in the object. So this sense of participation is the twenty-first node or element.

And I said when I mentioned it in one of the earlier parts of this talk, the idea of participation, the notion of participation, it preserves autonomy in an understanding and a sense of non-separateness. So when something participates in some way in something, it's kind of got its own autonomy and kind of non-separate. And the kind of sense of participation we're talking about, the concept of it and the sense of it -- meaning, again, it's something sensible; we perceive it; I'm not just talking about an idea, just an idea -- is a kind of mystical one. [58:56]

So we might have a sense, for example, and a concept of participation in a divine archetype. So we're working with this imaginal figure, perceiving this imaginal figure, and there's a sense: "I'm somehow participating in the divinity, so to speak, that I'm perceiving. I'm participating in an archetype." So the archetype actually needs my participation. And yet I kind of witness that archetype. I participate, or I can get a sense and a concept of participating in the mundus imaginalis. But again, it takes my participation. My participation is a part of it. It supports it. It feeds it. It nourishes it. It transforms it. It changes it. I am not separate from this mundus imaginalis, and yet it's not just a part of me, or reducible to me, or "just a figment of my imagination" in the poor meaning of what that means. Can get a sense, a concept of participating in the 'always already happening' in hierophanic time of whatever it is that I'm witnessing, participating in, a part of, partaking of, fabricating of the image. [1:00:37]

You get a sense, a concept of participating in the eros of the divine, or the divine eros. We talked about or traced that movement, that evolution of that kind of sense. Very particularly, I traced it in the Eros Unfettered talks. One really gets a sense, a perception, mixed with the concept of, "My eros is somehow -- I'm participating in some larger, deeper, more mysterious, more unfathomable, more divine eros." And similarly with the mind: that one's own mind, one's own insights, one's own perceptions, one's own conceiving, one's own holding of ideas, and entertaining of ideas, and the arising of ideas, that one's mind is somehow participating in a divine mind, in the Buddha-nature, in the cosmic Buddha-nature. One also gets a sense, can get a sense and a perception of participating in the intersubjectivity of the imaginal other, or the object, or the thing, person being sensed with soul. One participates in the intersubjective communication of eros flying back and forth, and love flying back and forth between the self and this other in soulmaking.

One can, again, get a sense, as all this deepens -- and again, I would say, and the trajectory I traced in some of those talks in Eros Unfettered with all this is -- I would say it's a natural evolution. It's actually a natural and inevitable evolution of the sense of things, and the concept, if we're following this path, at some point. I don't need to rush it or hurry it or whatever. But one can get a sense that this perception that I'm having right now, and this soulmaking that's happening right now, and then perhaps my whole life, and even the life of the culture and the history, is a participation in the larger unfolding mystery of soulmaking, in some larger unfolding of, again, the divine soulmaking. It's the soulmaking happening of the Buddha-nature. And I, my soulmaking, all that that involves, and all the elements and aspects and dimensions of my being that that involves, in that perception, in that conceiving, in that openness, in the body, in that -- all of it is participating in some much larger mystery of soulmaking that's unfolding: the Buddha-nature's soulmaking, the soulmaking of the cosmic Buddha, the soulmaking of the divine, the soulmaking of the god, whatever.

So to me, when I get a sense of this (and I find it quite hard to convey), it's a deep and mysterious concept. You know, we're not talking just about, for example, when the food delivery truck pulls up at Gaia House on whatever day it is, and go out, and several coordinators help the work yogi, and the kitchen coordinators help them unload the food delivery and put it away, and you say, "Oh, I participated in the unloading of the food delivery today at Gaia House." So that's a very sort of -- typically it will be quite a flat, sort of unmysterious meaning of 'participate.' I'm talking about something that, yeah, includes that, but somehow more, somehow more mysterious. [1:04:46]

As with many of the other facets and dimensions of the imaginal, this one may not be evident at first. I mean, it may be, but it may be one of those that's kind of like, it emerges to our attention and consciousness. We notice it more after a time, after we've kind of got more used to the imaginal realm and the perceptions there, and we say, "Oh, yeah, there's that quality." It can be quite intense, the sense of participation. But it can be really, really subtle. So there's a great variety in how sort of palpably and obviously it manifests. But I'm talking here about a deep and mysterious concept, deep and mysterious sense of mystical participation in something.

(22) All right, number twenty-two is what we want to call, I think, now, the concertina, the imaginal concertina, or the concertina of the imaginal. We used to -- and I think one or two people picked up on it; I can't remember when -- but we used to use the phrase 'vertical spectrum' or 'vertical spectrum of the imaginal.' I think we want to retract that -- it was a little unfortunate choice -- and replace that same concept, but really, by the concept of 'concertina.' You know what a concertina is? It's like an accordion that kind of opens, like that. Or like -- is it called a 'bellows'? Thing that you use to blow air on a fire. Something that kind of expands to reveal. Or like in those kind of old file cabinets. They kind of stretch open to reveal the individual files, or they can be kind of compact, and you don't see all the files there.

So again, there's probably a better word, but just for you to get a sense of what I mean by this: when there's an imaginal image, or a perception of something sensed with soul, it's also sensed to be in a context of possible other images. In other words, this way I'm seeing my beloved and sensing her/him/them imaginally, sensing them with soul, and it's like, an image comes. And it's sort of them, and it's sort of not them. It's coming through them. It's a theophany.

But there's also a sense at that point -- and again, sometimes this might be quite dim, sort of at the edges of our consciousness -- of: "Oh, this is one image that I'm perceiving in a kind of larger context of other possible images." Because I could perceive her, sense her with soul, him/them with soul, and another image might kind of come, or come to the fore, or replace this one, or be there at the same time, or be lingering in the background. So it's as if this concertina -- I really mean, it's almost like there are other possibilities, other possible perceptions, so to speak, waiting in the wings. Again, like a theatre: this character, this image is waiting for its time to come on stage. This actor is waiting. There's sort of a sense of other possibilities in potentia.

Some of them, or sometimes, some of these 'others' can be clearly sensed or perceived, even. They're kind of individually discernible, so that one is actually perceiving, at times, two images at the same time, or sometimes two images at the same time along with the sort of regular perception of my beloved other, or this tree, or whatever it is that I'm sensing with soul. Other times, the sense of the concertina is more vague. It's more kind of implied -- again, like a kind of pregnancy. Either the images there are vague, or they're just very dimly perceived, or we just have a sense of, "Ah, yeah. The concertina is open. There is a concertina." But the individual images that are there are certainly not coming to the fore, and also often not individually perceived. And maybe that's more the case sometimes, that it's just a sense of context.

So we can notice. Again, this might be a new element, and I'm not sure if I've talked about it before. But we can notice when that concertina expands, or it kind of like, the concertina comes online, the context, or this range of possible images, or just the sense of a range of possible images. It kind of comes alive or it comes online, so to speak. It's just expanded. [1:10:23] And again, we can notice that concertina, and tune to it, and that helps the whole sense become more imaginal. It helps the imaginal constellation become more filled out, more genuinely imaginal.

So might be -- and with that allusion to 'waiting in the wings' -- it might be that this element of concertina or aspect of concertina, the context, may be regarded as an aspect of the theatre element, or the Middle Way. So again, you can see as we go through this list how some elements are implicit in others, or kind of qualify others, as we said before. But in a way, this presence of the sense and the concept of a concertina or the context prevents us from kind of getting too narrow in our perception, getting too fixated. Again, to quote William Blake, it prevents us from collapsing our relationship and our perception and our conception into a kind of single vision, because we're aware of the concertina, and that does something to the whole tenor, texture, ether -- yeah, the realm, the air of the perception. So I hope that's clear.

(23) Okay, last one for now. Well, last one, actually. Yeah, let's say for now: concept. Concertina or context was twenty-two. Concept is twenty-three. And again, I mentioned this at the start when we rattled through the list. So imaginal perception, sensing with soul, is not non-conceptual. It's not a non-conceptual perception. One of my little quibbles by now is with just how freely and lazily, I feel, that that notion of 'non-conceptual' gets bandied about in some spiritual circles and some Buddhist circles. For myself, I don't mean, by 'concept,' 'thinking.' I've been through all this before. I don't equate 'concept' with 'thinking.' 'Concept' is a lot more subtle. You can have concept, do have concept, without actual discursive thought, or heavy-duty, kind of intellectual, big, fat ideas, complex ideas.

So I reserve the word 'non-conceptual,' the category of 'non-conceptual,' just for moments of the cessation of perception, just for moments when there is no fabrication and all perception is pacified, to borrow Nāgārjuna's phrase. There's a fading of all perception, a cessation of all perception and feeling. And that is a non-conceptual experience in my book, and only that really qualifies. And again, I've written and talked about that. I'm not going to go into it too much right now.

But for me, all and any perception has concept woven into it, and certainly any Dharma-perception, if you like, or perception that arises in the context of Dharma practice. So including mindfulness: mindfulness is not non-conceptual. So-called 'bare attention' is not at all non-conceptual. There is always some sense, no matter how faint or subtle, of subject, object, and time as the basic sort of tripod of fabrication of very basic perceptions and conceptions. So wherever there's any perception of any kind of subject, any kind of object, any kind of time-sense or sense of the present moment, even, or the present, there's concept involved.

And actually, in many of these practices -- Dharma practices, and regular sort of mainstream Dharma practices, and mindfulness -- there are all kinds of concepts woven in, all kinds. And in imaginal and soulmaking practices, sensing with soul, all kinds of concepts, a great range of concepts are brought in, or involved, let's say, and an important part. [1:15:22] So we mentioned the conception or some kind of concept, no matter how vague it is, of the divine nature of this other that I'm perceiving, this imaginal figure, or this other that I'm sensing with soul. The divine nature and origin is a perception, but it's also a concept.

We might also say that, implicated in this concept, in this idea of concept as an important element of the imaginal conception, is, we might say, at least also the concept that's involved is not reductive, as I said: "This image is a representation of my compassion, or something in my history," too tightly or narrowly or flatly conceived. So the conception has to be not too reductive or narrow that way. But things like this eternality or timelessness that we're talking about, that also is a conception. 'Always already happening' is a conception as much as it is a perception. We have an imaginal figure -- could be anything -- and they have certain qualities. So, you know, this warrior image that I sometimes shared, or warrior images (I think it's plural), that I shared some years ago: there's the conception, among many others, of their nobility, and their courage, and their dedication and devotion. These are all conceptions as much as they're perceptions. The whole conception and sense of an imaginal figure's autonomy and personhood, subjectivity -- their soul, if you like, or them as souls -- is also a concept as much as a sense. Love, as another element, is a concept. Of course it's also not only a concept, isn't it? It's a lot more than that, as are all these elements. They're not just concepts. But there is a conceptual element as part of any and all of this.

What we were just referring to a little while ago about the participation of my mind in the divine mind -- participation of either the thinking, the conceiving, or the perceiving, or both -- the participation of your mind in the divine mind: that's, again, a concept as much as it's a sense, an imaginal sense. There's something akin there -- there's actually a long tradition of that kind of thinking, certainly in Western spirituality. I don't know if it started with Aristotle and his idea of the active intelligence. It might have been before that, and then it was modified and went through a kind of evolution. Lots of spiritual traditions, Kabbalah and others, draw on that, and transform it, and use it as quite a central kind of mystical principle in their conceptual frameworks.

But we also get a sense of this kind of thing -- the participation of mind in each other's minds, for instance, or in the divine mind -- we get a sense of that, I think, in our life. We get a glimpse of it, a taste of it at different times. So for example, when there's a kind of creative, artistic flow, and even if that's not necessarily something that happens instantaneously, like the -- I keep forgetting, those Zen drawings [ensōs], what the word is for that, that you do very quickly, or a haiku that just comes really quick, or some phrase that comes when you're improvising music or something. And there's a sense in the moment of, "Wow, something just came through." But also in the longer stretches of struggle with a big creative project over a long time, something that might take two or three years to complete, whatever it is: writing a novel, or writing a symphony, writing a book, or whatever. You can get a sense of this creativity that's happening, it's me and it's not me. My struggle with this, my creativity, my application of mind in and through the creativity is a participation of my mind in something larger -- call it 'divine,' whatever you want to call it.

But also between each other, you know? And I think I mentioned very briefly on a retreat once: it's like, sometimes people sharing humour, that moment when you and someone else or a group of people -- well, who knows whether it's more common with two -- there's a sense of, like, just grasping something together intuitively. And the spark, the flash of communication that happens there. The sort of brilliant intuition that happens, the connection that happens in finding something humorous or seeing what's humorous. And sometimes it would be very hard to actually articulate what it is. Something happens in the communication of that between human beings. [1:21:24]

But also with poetry, and with language, and with love, and communicating love -- you know, sometimes non-verbally, all that -- there's some way we kind of participate in some greater mind together, and that's how we can have these kind of intuitive flashes. We're participating together in something. We kind of 'get it' together, in a brilliant moment of revelation that defies any kind of mechanistic translation from one place to the other, solely through certain flatly conceived materialistic means.

So this kind of concept and sense is something that we can get a sense of in our life, I think, as well. But as I said earlier, when we were talking about participation as an idea, as a concept, as a notion, this participation in the divine is a concept, but I say it's very hard to articulate, very hard to define clearly. That's partly what I meant when I said it was a mysterious and deep concept. Perhaps it defies such completely clear articulation. We could give another analogy for participation: something like the arm or the hand of a clock. You know, Big Ben's big hand is part of the clock and participates in the clock's functioning. The clock needs that to be a fully functioning clock. And yet it's not the clock. So it's participating. But that's a much too gross and mechanistic analogy for the kind of sense that we can get of this deeper, more mysterious participation when we practise more with the imaginal and with soulmaking and with sensing with soul.

And on that note, we can, again, draw attention to the fact that many of the concepts we use in this soulmaking logos and conceptual framework, you'll notice -- I don't know if it maybe irritates you, or maybe you're thankful for it -- but you'll notice that many of them are quite kind of vague as concepts, or, if you like, open. So today, when we talked about meaningfulness, and the suffix, -fulness, is a leaving open. There's a kind of infinite possibility there. 'Inexhaustible' is the word we've used in the past, a kind of "I can't discern everything that's involved there." Similar with love. Similar, actually, with the concept of soul: it's a kind of deliberately vague and open concept. And soulmaking is also somewhat vague, and somewhat very precisely defined and delineated -- all kinds of nuance and subtlety, and qualifications, and specificities, and particularities, and things to notice, and things to include, and things to exclude, and blah blah blah.

But actually, in another way, or at the same time, it's a kind of vague and open notion. This relates to one of the elements on our list: this business of having soft and elastic edges. And I think I said at the time, not just imaginal figures, but also the concepts. The concepts that are part of soulmaking, and that actually lend themselves best to soulmaking, are ones that, if they don't start with it, eventually they have their edges get soft and elastic and stretchable. So there's this kind of vagueness and openness of concept, on the one hand, of a lot of the concepts involved. And there's this birthing of delineations, as I said, subtle nuances and differences and discernments: "There's this, and there's this. And then, on the other hand, there's this, and there's this, and it's slightly different than this."

And the whole soulmaking movement, the whole soulmaking dynamic, because of what we've been through, and describing in the way the eros-psyche-logos work to fertilize, inseminate, complicate, expand, enrich, deepen, and widen each other, there is the creation and discovery of more discernments, differentiations, delineations to make. So there is, at the same time as this kind of vagueness and openness, at the very same time, there's an increasing kind of subtlety, both in conceptual terms, in terms of the logos and logoi involved, and in terms of the sensitivity of a being, in terms of what we can actually sense. There are delineations and discernments there. So again, you've got this kind of straddling: vagueness and openness on one side; precision and delineation and nuance and subtlety of discernment in all kinds of different ways on the other, because there is the ongoing creation/discovery of othernesses -- other concepts, other aspects, other dimensions and sides and elements of things. [1:27:13]

But as I said at some point -- I think it was in Eros Unfettered -- we need a conceptual framework, and we need to use concepts in a way that serves what we're doing. And what we're doing is soulmaking. What we're interested in and what we're devoted to -- in this, for now, in this paradigm, in this stream of the teaching right now that I'm talking about -- what we're interested in and what we're devoted to is soulmaking. And therefore, the larger conceptual structure that we invoke and establish and present, and also the individual concepts, need to serve that. And so they need to be both open, and both loose, and also very refined -- fine discrimination, subtle and sensitive discernments of the senses, the inner senses, the outer senses, and the thinking, the conceiving that's wrapped up in the perceiving. And again, there's this straddling, this bridging, this including of the two we need, because it's exactly in that straddling, or rather, exactly that way of relating to and holding and conceiving of conceiving and concepts -- it's exactly in that manner, in that way, that soulmaking is supported.

So if we're talking about classical scientific method, we want something different. You want kind of sharper concepts. Or some social sciences or whatever -- you want actually quite sharper concepts that are measurable and strictly definable, and either it is or it isn't. Either it's a zero or a one. Computers work that way, and all that.

If we're interested in soulmaking, then our relationship with conceptuality -- again, it's not non-conceptual -- we're deeply interested in conceiving, in logos, in the concepts we're entertaining. We develop flexibility with that. We develop richness and sophistication. And that comes alive to us as something beautiful, not non-conceptual. That whole aspect of soulmaking, the logos aspect, starts to really come alive, if it's not already, and is an equally important and necessary and valid part and vitalizing part of the whole soulmaking movement.

So we're not going to be non-conceptual, but the kinds of concepts, and the way that they get born, and the way that they straddle this kind of softness, elasticity, vagueness, openness on one side, and refinement of delineation and discernment -- that way of straddling is also very much part of the way we relate to, handle, and think of concepts.

Okay. Let's stop there for now.