Sensing with Soul (Part 2)

We introduced a bit of new vocabulary, a new term, 'sensing with soul,' as a possible alternative to the word 'imaginal' for some people, or a complement to it, a way of phrasing things that perhaps gives a slightly different slant or emphasis, in case that emphasis was sort of somewhat unfairly skewed towards the intrapsychic previously for some people. We said that sensing with soul, we could say, just means sensing, engaging the senses, being involved with our senses as human beings, in ways that support, open, and fertilize or bring soulmaking. Sensing with soul is just sensing in ways that are soulful, that bring soulmaking. We said that this business, to sense with soul, I would say, is so potentially important -- vitally, crucially important for our being in the world, for how we relate to existence, for how we relate to the gift of human life, how we relate to each other, how we relate to time, how we relate to nature and the planet, and also the grave environmental challenges that we face as a species at this point (as do other species).

For me, there's something here in this whole business that we're trying to get at and trying to shine lights on from different directions that's, as I said, vitally important, meaning 'to do with life'; crucially important, [which] means there's a crossroads here. We can relate to our senses in ways that close certain doors, open doors that we may really not want to open and go down, that may have grave consequences or limiting consequences, or we can find ways to relate to senses that actually open up gift and grace and beauty and soul.

I want to dwell a little bit less on giving examples, and just a little bit, again, on understanding: what are we getting at here? What's involved? Why is this so important? Understanding the concepts involved allows that vitality to come forth, to come through, in our relating to the world. It's actually understanding that can provide a kind of robustness to this whole endeavour, to this whole exploration -- a robustness to our experiences, so if we have soulmaking experiences, we have experiences that touch us, that move us, that seem to have bigger implications, it's one of the things that gives them a kind of grounding, and gives them the ability or the potential to be more than just ephemeral experiences that we sometimes just then forget, or that seem to have no consequence, or are easily dismissed, or don't seem to carry out and bring forth their implications. One of the things is the absence of a conceptual structure that really gives that soil and ground and rootedness and nourishment, and fits it into a context.

So for me, this understanding, I realize for some people it's not how they tend to relate to things, in terms of concepts and structures and how it all fits together, and many of the ideas that we're introducing are quite alien. So I realize that for some people it's quite difficult. For other people, it's quite attractive. But there is something, I would say, crucial and vital about understanding, because that allows the greater vitality of what's going on, of this business of soulmaking. It allows and offers robustness, durability, fertility to the whole project, the whole exploration. So I want to dwell just a little bit on some of the concepts involved.

Sensing with soul, we said, was sensing in a way that was soulmaking. Now, why do we call it 'soulmaking'? If we define sensing with soul that way, it just begs the question for someone listening, "What do you mean by 'soul'? What do you mean by 'soulmaking' or 'soulfulness'?" So why do we call it soulmaking? What is made? What is the making? What is soulmaking? I've been through this in different ways quite a lot in the last few years, but to say it again: one way we could approach this ... Actually, before we even say that, we said soulmaking, and we pointed out, at some point in the last talk, that this making is not only a passive process.

Again, there's a kind of straddling: it can feel to us, and in the movement of soulmaking it will feel to us, that something is given to us: images are given to us, circumstances are given to us, perceptions open up for us, in a way, as if there's a greater intelligence operating, as if the soul bestows on us as graces these openings that we call soulmaking. That's a very important perspective. And at the same time, there's an opposite or complementary perspective: it's not only a passive process, this making. So yes, there's a sense of givenness, of grace, of necessity, of something being handed to us, and sometimes that involves what is difficult being handed to us, as well as what is beautiful. So yes, there's all that. But it's not just passive. There is also, required in this making, our assent, our willing, our choosing, our responsiveness, and our steering, and our desire, our eros. So in the making, it's this mysterious, beautiful, somewhat paradoxical, perhaps, mixture or encompassing of both the passive sense of receiving, giving, grace, and also of doing, our making, our choosing, our desire, etc.

[7:56] But why do we call it 'soulmaking'? What is made here? Two ways of kind of approaching this. We could say soul is made through soulmaking. What is being made? Well, soul is being made, hence the word. But then that begs the question: what do we mean by 'soul'? So, again, we can approach this in different ways and at different levels, but we could say 'soul' means a quality, or rather the, if you like, collection or manifold qualities, aspects or dimensions that constitute a sense of soulfulness. In other words, meaningfulness; beauty, a sense of beauty, beauty that touches us; an involvement of the imaginal capacity or the fantastical capacity; an ideation, or concept, or conceptual structure, or framework, or logos that is stimulated and that can support the whole network of elements, the lattice, the constellation of what is involved in soulmaking.

Eros is involved, this wanting more connection, wanting more penetration, wanting more intimacy, wanting to know more of the erotic other, the beloved erotic object; a sense of theatre, this Middle Way between real and not real; this infinite echoing and mirroring; a sense of theophany, etc., that we've been through. This constitutes a sense of soulfulness. And 'soul' means the various qualities, the collection, the manifold qualities, aspects, or dimensions that constitute a sense of soulfulness. Soul means that, the way we're using it, and that's what's made. In other words, soul there is something we recognize. We recognize soulfulness, we recognize soul, and we recognize soulmaking phenomenologically -- in other words, in our experience. We recognize that dimension or those aspects of experience.

A second way we can kind of think about soul or speak about it is somewhat -- holding this lightly -- as an 'organ' of sensing, or an 'instrument' of sensing. So the human organism is, if you like, composed of different organs, and we could think of it -- very lightly -- as soul as an organ. It is that in us (or perhaps which we are in), that which senses -- which, again, includes thinking and imagining -- that which senses in ways that bring and increase and open a sense of soulfulness. Soul is that organ that senses in ways that open, support, and deepen a sense of soulfulness. It is an organ of soulful ways of looking.

Soul is an organ of soulful ways of looking. So this 'organ,' if you like -- which we could put in inverted commas, and we can also deconstruct it. By putting it in inverted commas, I mean it doesn't have inherent existence, which means, if something doesn't have inherent existence, that we can conceive or view it like this, and we can conceive or view it like that. It's open and amenable itself to different ways of being conceived and sensed. Because soul doesn't have inherent existence, it is not one fixed thing, independent of the way of conceiving it and the way of sensing and looking at it. So we can look at it from different angles, different perspectives. We can deconstruct it further into its various elements or aspects, or ways of looking, or kind of properties or whatever.

But we could say soul is this organ which is or holds the capacity and ranges of ways of looking that bring soulfulness. So it's, if you like, an organ that employs ways of looking that support, or open, nourish, a sense of soulfulness. It is this organ or instrument or capacity. Or you could just view it as a range of available ways of looking. Soul is that. It's more of a verb, like soulmaking. It's just a range of ways of looking. It is this organ, this capacity, this instrument, or ranges or a range of available ways of looking, that is made in soulmaking, that is built, that is developed.

Just right there, there are two kind of ways of seeing what we mean by soul, or conceiving what we mean by soul. The first is a kind of phenomenological recognition: it's an object or experience. We have the experience of this kind of theophany or beauty or meaningfulness. The second is the, if you like, imputed subject of that range of objects or experience, this organ of ways of looking that bring soulfulness. So we can conceive of it as kind of an object, if you like, or kind of a subject, or both.

Soul, in its activation into the soulmaking dynamic of eros-psyche-logos, which we'll review in a minute, soul makes -- in other words, it creates as well as discovers -- soulfulness. And it creates as well as discovers, it makes, soul-capacity and soul-sensing. So soul is that capacity to sense, that ability to sense in a soulful way, in ways that bring soulfulness. It makes the objects, the aspects and dimensions of objects, the subject, the self, the world in cosmopoesis, in a sense of divinity, with eros, with dimensionality, with beauty, etc. It makes and creates and opens all that up in the very sense of the fabric, the texture of existence, and the sense of what our existence is. And all that is why that's so important, because that has enormous implications for how we live, how we relate to our life, death, and the world around us. It is this openness of and potentially increasing capacity to make soul (which means to sense in those ways) that is so important.

One other way of amplifying what's happening in the soulmaking dynamic is that it has elements, and one way of breaking up the elements is to say that eros and psyche and logos are always involved when there's soulmaking. They're always involved when there is sensing with soul, always involved in the imaginal perception. What that means, we said eros is this wanting more connection, wanting more contact, wanting more penetration, intimacy, opening to the erotic object (whatever that is, whatever that erotic object is), what we might call the beloved other. We talked a lot about eros. And we said one definition of psyche, in this sense, was that it's the imaginal faculty, so the sense of image, of sensing with image, if you like. And logos, we said, was the conceiving, the notion or ideation or whole conceptual framework that was operating at any time with a perception. So all these factors are involved when there is a sensing with soul. There has to be eros, the imaginal image has to be involved, and also some kind of ways of conceiving that support that deepening movement and that sensing with soul, with all the elements of the imaginal constellation, the elements of soulfulness that we've enumerated.

In the soulmaking dynamic, what we were calling the soulmaking dynamic or the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, these elements of eros-psyche-logos interact with each other. They get involved with each other, woven into each other, in ways that stimulate their mutual feeding, mutual expanding, enrichening, complicating, deepening and widening. This can happen in many ways. One of the most obvious ways that happens is because eros, if you heard in the definition, has that more. It wants more. So whenever there's eros, there's the enjoyment of what is present and the appreciation and the beauty there, and at the same time, it has pothos in the eros. Pothos is the Greek divinity of infinite wanting, of wanting always more. So within it, eros has this pothos, that no matter what beauty and depth and richness it has, it's always got an element of wanting more.

Rather than being a problem in the way that craving is a problem, this endless thirst that the Buddha talked about, taṇhā, creating more and more suffering, keeping us on the wheel of rebirth, there is something creative and stimulating and fertilizing about this pothos within the eros, this wanting always more. It orients itself to what is beyond what it already knows, what it already fully experiences, what it's already fully familiar with. It, if you like, discovers beyonds. It also casts out and creates beyonds. It sets itself in relation to an erotic relation of longing, if you like -- or just desire, or impetus, or dynamic -- towards that beyond. In doing so, it then finds, creates and discovers, more beyonds in the sense of what is going on, in the sense of the object. The imaginal sense of the beloved other is deepened, widened, given more aspects and dimensions. All this is created/discovered -- also in the self in that imaginal constellation, and then in the world.

So eros, because of the pothos, always constitutes a beyond. And that beyond, it wants to move into it. It wants to penetrate it. It wants to open to what is more. And that engages and stimulates and fertilizes the whole eros-psyche-logos dynamic. When there is more beyond then perceived, then we could say the image is enriched, and then that greater image, the greater beauty of it, and dimensionality and aspects and complexities of it, it stimulates more eros, etc. And then, at some point, maybe the whole idea of, "What is going on here? What am I in relationship to? Who is this that is in relationship? What is my self? What is the soul? What is this looking? What is this eros? What is this world around that I perceive?", the whole idea, not just the sense or the imaginal image of all that, but also the whole idea, the notion, the logos of all that also gets stretched. It has to get stretched. So either our previous ideas are shattered, and they get reconstituted, if you like, in a larger way that can encompass what we're experiencing, or they just get stretched gradually in this whole gradual movement of the soulmaking dynamic. So this can be over time, either at sudden junctures where there's a kind of breaking of the vessels, or much more gradually, in this kind of elastic stretching over time.

[22:25] Just to point out something there: in this 'beyond,' eros has an element of impetus to transcend. But the impetus to transcend can be, as we've pointed out a lot in previous retreats, can be beyond the appearances, beyond the object, or it can be a transcending in the sense of transcending just the limitations of our idea and image of what we're presented with, what we're encountering. In that way, it stretches. Rather than going beyond into a kind of fading of appearances, the transcendent beyond of unfabricating, it's actually that the beloved other itself, and the self -- whatever eros and the soulmaking dynamic kind of gets involved with -- that object or other gets expanded. So there's a kind of transcending of the limits, but not beyond the object, so much as beyond just what was known of the object. So more gets created and discovered -- more dimensions, more aspects, more beauties, all of that.

In a sense, eros has this push, or impetus, or longing, or direction of ... we could call it 'transcending.' We could call it 'transgressive.' In other words, literally moving beyond boundaries, moving beyond limits. I'm just mentioning this as a sort of side point, but because of this pothos in the eros and the constitution of the beyond, eros, we could say or wonder: does it need to be transgressive? Does it need to go across boundaries? Wherever there's a boundary, eros will push across that in different ways. Does eros, in a way, constellate or create transgression?

Now, transgression, if you're familiar with that word, often has a kind of moral implication, doesn't it? But I really mean it in a much broader sense, transgression of any kind. It may be moral. It may be a transgression of category, or type, or behaviour, or divisions. But transgression implies this otherness, something other than what was within the limits, something beyond. Eros, as I said, needs and creates othernesses and beyondness. When people have affairs, or find themselves drawn to, or attracted, or they can only be sexually or romantically stimulated in certain conditions or environments, or when something is happening that's a little taboo, that's a little transgressive, or a lot transgressive in the moral sense, I wonder whether part of what's really happening there is it's this natural impetus of eros to constellate a beyond, which it then wants to explore and dive into and open to.

It wants to, or it does, need and constellate a transgression. But that transgression is actually potentially much bigger if we allow ourselves the whole involvement of psyche and logos, the imagination and the logos and dimensionality and all that. So it's perhaps a kind of limited or constrained or thin manifestation of a transgressive movement and impetus in eros, which is really, as I said, a thinner and poorer and limited manifestation of something much larger and more essential, and much more potentially fruitful, and more giving rise to and more supportive of soulmaking than the turn-on of some kind of taboo often is.

Again, I'm dwelling on the conceptual framework or the understanding of what's really involved when we're sensing with soul, and what's really involved, or one way of understanding what's involved in the soulmaking dynamic. I'm dwelling with that, and looking at it from different angles, and trying to shine light on different aspects of it, because I really think, and I see, that understanding the larger picture, understanding the dynamic -- how soulmaking works, what it involves, what supports it -- understanding that, really digesting it conceptually in ways that we can actually bring it, engage it in our practice and in our experience -- that understanding of the dynamic will be so, so helpful, so fruitful. It really gives the whole movement of soulmaking much more power, range, fertility. Also, it brings a beauty in itself. We see the whole thing -- when we understand it more, as we understand it more, the whole thing emerges to us or is revealed to us as something of much more power and beauty and consequence. So that's why I'm dwelling a little bit on these elements of the dynamic.

[29:26] Let's say a few more things about it. If we consider these elements -- eros, psyche, and logos -- these central aspects, they're really parts of the same thing, but we could divide them into three, as I've said before, divide that whole soulmaking process into three, as if they were separate. But to say a little bit about it: it seems to me that it might be generally true to say that eros is more labile, more subject to change, more changeable than psyche, than image, which is in turn more labile, more changeable than the logos. It seems like between the three terms or aspects of this trinity there's a gradation of how mercurial they are, how changeable they are, how labile they are. So eros -- again, you'll notice this if you engage these practices, and you really notice what's going on, and track your own experience -- eros comes and goes and fluctuates, ebbs and flows, relatively quickly. Even over a few minutes, the eros is sort of coming and going, and getting stronger and weaker, and disappearing and coming back.

An image, the psyche aspect, tends to stay a while, though it does need some focusing on and steadying. We need to engage the psyche aspect, the image, and hold it in a way that it can stay steady, but once it's there it can tend to be relatively steady. Within that, the eros in relation to that image can ebb and flow up and down. The concepts involved, the logos aspect, tend to be even more steady, less changeable. They expand or shatter only under greater or more sustained pressure -- in other words, repeatedly sensing this whole other dimension of being that we get when the eros opens up the image again and again, or if it's very marked. Only under greater or more sustained pressure does the logos change, move, stretch, or shatter -- though with practice we can be quite agile and quite flexible in deliberately moving between different conceptual frameworks. Again, this is something that I would really encourage. It's almost like you can just look at something with a certain logos, and then switch, move agilely, look at it with a different logos and a whole different conceptual framework. That's very much available with the maturing of practice. It's something I would really like to encourage. All of that agility and flexibility of conceptual frameworks fits into this much larger logos that is partly a function of the whole deep teaching of emptiness and dependent arising, to be able to open up, that it legitimizes that and allows it, and gives us that permission and that ontological and metaphysical legitimation of that.

Okay. Now, again, if we just dwell with this trinity of eros-psyche-logos and the dynamics involved in that, and just say a bit more about logos. The logos in the soulmaking dynamic, in the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, doesn't expand only when the sense of the image or the sense of the self expands, when the psyche expands. What can happen -- and again, you will recognize all this if you really get into these practices and this way of approaching things and exploring this territory. When there is eros for logos -- in other words, when we see the beauty of the whole framework, and the beauty of the conceiving function of the soul -- when there is eros for the logos, and we're attracted towards it, it becomes something that is beautiful, attractive, has a beyond to it, divine, has dimensionality.

When there is eros for logos, the logos is ignited through that eros. This igniting of the logos engenders more creation and discovery of new concepts and new conceptual frameworks. So it's not just through the psyche. There can be a direct erotic connection with logos itself, with the whole conceptual framework, but also with the very element of the soul that we call logos, the very capacity or that part of the instrument that we call logos. And then that engenders more creativity. It's like there's a whole activation of the logos structure or strand of the soul, and all kinds of creativity and discovery in regard to concepts and conceptual frameworks is born from that erotic connection with logos, when that gets going. And, of course, the whole eros-psyche-logos dynamic might itself be stimulated into expansion when the logos itself is directly stimulated -- again, not just by the sense of the image, the imaginal sense opening to then knocking on logos' doors and limits, and saying, "Something needs to stretch here." Logos can be directly stimulated, directly stretched, or shattered, or ignited by something one reads, or something one hears -- a concept, a thought -- or a thought or a concept that arises spontaneously in the mind. That stimulates the logos directly to expand, to stretch, to enrichen, complicate, deepen, to come alive, to come on fire.

So there are different ways, perhaps different styles, that each of the elements of this trinity operate under, but also different ways in. It's not always the eros stretching the psyche, which then stretches the logos, eventually, at some point, if there's enough sustained pushing on that and expansion of that. There are many ways these elements can get stimulated, involve each other, and fertilize each other.

[37:08] So we could say, and I think it's pretty fair to say, soulmaking is complex. What we're trying to unfold here in this vision or logos or conceptual framework of the whole business that we're talking about, it's complex. It's not easy to understand. It's not easy to explain, either, and sum up in a nutshell. It's quite foreign. It's quite alien to our usual ways of thinking in modern society. And I would also add: probably the way we're conceiving it would be alien to ancient and premodern societies as well.

In somewhat light-hearted justification of this difficulty, I'll quote Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, quite a character and a beautiful spirit. He won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on quantum electrodynamics. The day he was informed that he'd won the Nobel Prize, you know, the phone doesn't stop ringing, and all these reporters flock to his house, and they want an interview and photos and the rest of it. So there's this one reporter who comes to him, and sticks a microphone in his face, and says, "Professor Feynman, can you explain your theory in five minutes for our audience?" [laughs] And Feynman looks at him and says, "Do you think that if I could explain this theory in five minutes that it would be worth a Nobel Prize?"^[1] So some things are complicated, are unusual in terms of the way they stretch the thinking, are difficult to explain, and can't necessarily be summed up very simply until one has the familiarity and the experience with the terms, and then you can kind of sum things up in a nutshell. It would probably be the case that Feynman might have been able to explain his theory when people were already relatively familiar with it, but then there's a lot being implied in the words spoken.

I'm pretty sure that I must have said [this] in the past, but I'm going to repeat it now. I've said a couple of things or a couple of directions in to potentially defining what we mean by 'soul' earlier in this talk. I sense this is repeat, and if it's not, it's really important I'm saying it now. It's even important to repeat it. The word 'soul,' or the concept 'soul,' the idea of 'soul,' like other really crucial and important and fundamental words -- like love, or like Dharma, or like self; actually, like any thing or concept that really matters deeply to us and to our sense of existence, like the word 'love' does, like, if you're a committed, really dedicated practitioner, like the word 'Dharma' does, like 'self,' like 'soul' -- in a way, they're kind of undefinable, and they need to retain a certain dimension of undefinability.

That is, it's important that they not get trapped in a logos, in a conceiving and a conceptual framework that is too tight, too rigid, too narrow, so that, in our terms, eros, psyche, and logos can expand, and enrich themselves, and get complicated and deeper and wider, in relation to that very concept. In other words, soulmaking can happen in relation to soul, so that the very idea, the very concept of soul, is something that soulmaking gets hold of and expands. Why? Because it's expanding the logos. It enriches, deepens, widens, stretches, shatters, opens, complicates that very concept. The idea and the sense of soul will keep opening, deepening, getting richer. It is, in itself, fertile. If I lock it in too tight and too narrow and too limited and rigid a definition, it can't be fertile. Its fertility is limited.

When we say 'undefinable,' we don't mean 'nonsense' or 'non-existence': "Soul is just a nonsense concept because you can't define it," or "It just doesn't exist." We don't mean that. Nor do we mean that, realizing its undefinability, we then think that that implies or suggests that we just shrug and turn away from the idea of soul because it's just a silly concept, because it's not strictly and rigidly and tightly and precisely definable. Actually, just the opposite. We have defined it, with quite a lot of words and from a few different perspectives, but its ultimate undefinability, it opens or furnishes space for a never-ending creativity of exploration. It allows this never-ending creation and discovery in the exploring, in the conceiving, in the logoi. And it's this never-ending exploration that is soulmaking and is fertile.

One last point for now in all this. We have said -- again, it's a repeat, but it's important to say -- that as soulmaking gets going, and there's the fertility of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, and the discovery and the creation of beyonds, and more dimensions, and more sensitivities and discernments, in both the image, and in the sense of eros, and in ideas themselves (in the element of logos), that creation and discovery essentially makes -- in the making of soul, more distinctions are made. They're made to perception. They're made to conceiving. They're made to nuance. They're made in the realm of emotion.

So making distinctions is part of what happens in soulmaking. It's an element. The whole thing gets more nuanced. We discern between this and that -- so, for example, between eros and craving. Just, if you like, an infinite birthing, creating and discovering of distinction-making, discernment-making. Not purely conceptual -- also in the body, in the ways we relate to and with the body; in the very sensitivity of the psyche and the consciousness and the organism and the sensing; and also in the concepts. So soulmaking brings distinctions, and making distinctions also opens up and supports the possibility and fertilizes the possibility of soulmaking, so that, for example, the distinction between eros and craving is supportive of the whole endeavour of soulmaking. If we just limit desire to "it's all craving," which is way too simplistic, that won't serve soulmaking. Or even if we just limit it as we talked about -- it's either unskilful desire, craving, or it's a skilful desire, a kusala desire, chanda for the elements of the eightfold path or the factors of awakening, etc. -- that, too, is not a fine enough or nuanced enough distinction to support the conceptual elements and the experiential elements that are part of soulmaking. Soulmaking engenders the making of distinctions, discernments, fine discernments, all kinds of discernments, at all kinds of levels and aspects of our being. Soulmaking involves making discernments, and distinctions, delineations. And certain delineations, distinctions, and discernments support and open and fertilize and catalyse soulmaking, catalyse this process of creation and discovery.

Okay, let's stop there. As I say -- I've said it a third time now just in this one talk -- there's a whole other level of beauty and import that becomes apparent, that is revealed to us, and a whole other level of implication and power that also get revealed to us, when we understand conceptually, when we really get a working understanding. That means in practice, not just purely intellectual, abstractly intellectual. In practice, we get a working understanding of the elements involved in soulmaking, and what it means, what sensing with soul means. That's why I'm dwelling on them today.