Sensing with Soul (Part 6)

At the beginning of this series of talks, when I was trying to outline what we would try and cover, I mentioned that I wanted to explore a little bit more about some of the philosophical questions involved in this whole endeavour, in this whole opening up and exploration of soulmaking, and particularly questions of ontology and epistemology. Just to refresh your memory, those words, which I've been using a fair amount now and then over the last few years: ontology is, roughly speaking, the kind of philosophy that deals with or decides or tries to ascertain the reality status of different things, so what we count as real and what we count as unreal, and that investigation. Or, to state it in a bit more refined way, ontology is the philosophical discussion, if you like, of what kinds of reality different things have. And epistemology is the philosophical investigation, discussion, argument, whatever, regarding how we know, how we know what is real. So what qualifies as knowledge? What qualifies as a mode of knowing, a way of knowing? What qualifies as something that is knowable? And that's epistemology.

I think I said in the end of the first talk (which has now actually become two talks: "Aspects of the Imaginal" and "Sensing with Soul"), at the end of that, which is now, I would like to visit those questions a little bit, of ontology and epistemology, and also hopefully later on in the last talk of this series. So I want to open that up now a little bit because I think it's really, really important. But it's a huge subject, so I just want to open it up a little bit, without letting the threads get too out of control at this point, or too sprawling, because they do have all kinds of implications, and ways that they connect with all kinds of things.

For now, I want to open up a little bit of this territory, this philosophical territory and questioning and rethinking regarding ontology and epistemology, with respect to soulmaking, sensing with soul, imaginal perception, and connect that with where I left off in the last part of this talk with the observation that sensing with soul (whether it's so-called intrapsychic images, or purely extrapsychic, or a mixture of those, sensing with soul), woven into sensing with soul, woven into what we mean by 'imaginal' perception, is a sense of, a sensing of, values. For instance, beauty, kinds of beauty, love, goodness, nobility, courage. The sense of that, either explicitly or implicitly, consciously or less consciously, is woven into the very sense of soulfulness that we have when we are sensing with soul. And also a sense of the value of tradition, or a sense of the value of its kind of complement or opposite, if you like. I don't know what we'd call that: 'innovation,' or perhaps even 'revolution.' Humility, surrender, duty -- these are values that we can sense, not just in ourselves, in the relational poise and stance with respect to what we are sensing with soul, but also in the object.

All kinds of values, and all kinds of shades of different values, are discerned, sensed, picked up on, attuned with, resonated with. Can we say that they are known? That's where I want to tie these questions of ontology and epistemology, with this particular strand of the observation that sensing with soul includes, woven into it, involves a sensing of values. In our culture, modern culture nowadays, one of the things that characterizes the modern global world is just how much differentiation there is, and how much sort of plurality of cultures there are. But what we might call the 'dominant culture' is characterized by a certain ontology and epistemology, and I would say a lot of confusion regarding epistemology with respect to values, which I'll explain as we go through this talk.

And that affects, or is related to, how difficult it is for us to kind of state out or claim some respect with regard to sensing with soul or imaginal perception, and the reality of that, or the possible reality, or the reality status of that. One can imagine no one objecting, saying, if you shared with almost anyone, "I had an image, and it was really lovely, and it really touched me," and the person would be either interested or not interested, or say, "Oh, that's nice, dear," or whatever. A few people would say, "Well, that's very dangerous, because you might go psychotic, or you might lose touch with reality," etc. We've said all that before. But if you said, "I had an image, or I sensed this tree, and I sensed that this tree loved me. I knew that this tree loved me," then many people would object. You can't use the word 'know' there. You are making an epistemological claim that you have no warrant for. It's not the norm in our society. When we try to open up and see, "What can we do with this question of ontology and epistemology with regard to the imaginal?", we are confronted by a kind of contemporary cultural viewpoint that limits severely the knowledge claims, the epistemological claims, and the ontological claims of anything that we might sense when we sense with soul.

I'm going to, hopefully, in the last talk, pick up on this realm of values, in the way that they are an element of or a part of our sensing with soul -- as I said, love, kinds of love, beauty, kinds of goodness, nobility, that whole list we gave. And hopefully there I will offer some different pathways with all of this, and ways that the whole sensing with soul can be navigated in slightly different directions. Because sometimes it's possible, when we are sensing something with soul -- and say it's my beloved other, someone with whom there is a sense of the erotic-imaginal perception. And perhaps we are holding hands. I'm holding hands with her, with him, with them. And in that touch (and perhaps in the sight, but let's say just in the touch), I'm sensing with soul, I'm perceiving imaginally, with everything that that means.

Within that, kind of one strand of that sensing with soul at that time might be her love, let's say, his love, their love for me. How do I know that? How am I picking that up? I can say I know it. I know it through the touch. Is someone going to convince me that I can't know that love, her/his/their love for me through the touch? Love, as I said, is a value. I'm going to elaborate on this. What about loveliness? Her/his/their loveliness. We're touching, we're holding hands, whatever it is, and within the whole kind of kaleidoscope and multidimensionality of the perception, the total sensing that is going on when we are in that erotic-imaginal space together and the sensing with soul together, I sense her/his/their loveliness. It's part of the sensing with soul, and it's part of their particularities and my particularities and my self and all that. But there is a way possible of tuning into just that element, just the loveliness.

Now, that is much more than just pleasant experience. It's a particular kind of pleasant experience. But if I go into it more, it's almost like I can focus on and open up the very essence of loveliness, the essence of a certain value (in this case, loveliness). It's sort of her/him/them, but it's sort of a universal beyond. It's some kind of essence of (in this case) loveliness. It's almost like there's a whole other pathway that can be opened up when we sense with soul that I hope to return to later as an additional possibility, perhaps in the last talk. But let's leave that for now.

The main point is about values, and sensing with soul involves a sensing and ... can we say a knowing of values? And what does that have to do with the ontology and the epistemology and those kind of issues with regard to sensing with soul? So first, I hope a very brief sort of history lesson or historical perspective. Galileo Galilei, brilliant scientist, really, in Italy in the sixteenth century, believed that the world -- he said that understanding the world is reading a book written in the language of mathematics.^[1] This was a sort of fundamental, almost religious principle that he held.

In that view, he decided to pick up on and reinstate a view that was prominent in one stream of ancient Greek philosophy -- what's called the 'atomistic' view of Democritus and Lucretius. He said when we deal with the world, there are primary qualities. He didn't actually use that word; it was Locke that coined that word. But Galileo said something like there are primary qualities. So, for instance, how heavy a thing is; whether it's moving or at rest, and how fast; at what time it's happening, where; its location; its size; its shape; whether this thing that I'm talking about or looking at or trying to investigate is one thing, or a collection of a few things, or a collection of many; whether it's touching X or Y, or not touching. All those are amenable to mathematical representation. They can be measured and given some kind of mathematical symbol or status, whereas, he said, qualities like taste or sound or smell or colour are -- again, it's Locke's actual phrase, but Galileo made the point originally, that these are kind of 'secondary qualities.' He said these are more subjective qualities. There's something in the sensitivity of the sensitive soul, sensitive organism, and they're subjective. They're not 'real.' Only primary qualities are real. They're secondary qualities, and qualities of a secondary status.

Now, that idea, enormously brilliant idea, and very, very fertile idea in terms of giving birth to the whole Scientific Revolution there, picked up on by Descartes, by Francis Bacon, by Locke and Hume and others, and gave birth to the whole notion of Cartesian dualism, actually. And there I'm following the writings of someone called Marcus Appleby. People often think this Cartesian dualism (this is a little bit of a tangent, but I'll throw it in right now), the whole idea of mind and matter being separate and completely different things, originated with Descartes but was born in him or through him because of a kind of idea of a transcendent God, and that the mind, the spirit, etc., was linked to that transcendent God. But actually Descartes was much more secular in his thinking than, say, someone like Thomas Aquinas, who had come before him, who was much more influenced by religious thinking, and had a much less dualistic philosophy regarding mind and matter.

Descartes really kind of incarnated this, what we call Cartesian dualism between mind and matter, and then the whole scientific method was born from Galileo with Descartes, Francis Bacon, etc., extended in the philosophies of Locke and Hume. And then what came with that, gradually, over time, was a whole ontology and epistemology, and a relegation of certain aspects of our experience, aspects of the world, into what we might call, what were called 'secondary qualities,' meaning less real, and then what we might even call 'tertiary qualities' even less real than that (for instance, values). This took a long time. Values, with the Scientific Revolution and the so-called Western Enlightenment and modernism, eventually became just regarded as historically conditioned opinions, really -- what is beautiful, what is good, what is right or wrong, what is the nature of love, etc., what is one's duty, all of this.

[17:33] So there's a kind of hierarchy established over time, historically, starting in Europe, and then in the West, and then more globally, concerning what is real and therefore (as I touched on in an earlier talk) what is respected and valued because it is more real, or 'real' as opposed to 'not real.' This happened gradually. So the hierarchy of ontology, and with it of epistemology, and also of respect and valuing, and therefore also respect for different kinds of knowing or, eventually, this feeling that you're not justified to say you know X. You're justified to say you know this, but you're not justified to say you know that. This spreads, actually, into all kinds of sub-cultures, the actual divisions of what is real, and therefore what's worthy of respect and valuing.

There are differences in different cultures. For example, in psychotherapeutic cultures, what's real and therefore what's worthy of respect is slightly different, and different among the different psychotherapeutic cultures. But also the different (if we could call them) spiritual paths, whether they're so-called 'secular' spiritual paths or so-called 'religious' spiritual paths. All of them kind of bring in, either implicitly but more often explicitly, a certain ontology, a certain hierarchy of reality or categorization of what is real, what is not real, what is more real, or what is less real in some instances, and with that, roll out a hierarchy of respect and value for things themselves and also for modes of knowing. So there's an ontological, epistemological, and a moral kind of hierarchy that's rolled out, implicitly or explicitly, with any kind of culture at all, really. Each one will say, "This is real and therefore valuable, worthy of respect, and we respect the knowing of this real thing or this real aspect. But that (in contrast to this, whatever this and that are) is not real, and therefore we don't respect and value it, and we don't respect and value the knowing of it, at least as much, or not at all."

So originally, what started as a kind of liberation from religious dogmatism with the Scientific Revolution, with the Renaissance, and with the Western Enlightenment, what started as a liberation became, gradually, over several hundred years, really, a kind of imprisonment of one form or another. We are somehow told by whatever culture we move in, or cultures we move in, "There is this hierarchy. This is real. This is less real. This is more worthy of respect. This is less worthy of respect. This mode of knowing is valuable and worthy of respect, and this is not," etc. That can actually become an imprisonment. What started as a liberation in Europe just after the Middle Ages becomes, in some ways, an imprisonment for us.

I want to make quite a few points here. They sort of weave together. One point is what we value. This changes, as I said, with the dominant ontology and epistemology. And also I want to make a point about the ontological and epistemological status of different values. I hope you can follow the different strands here. Where I'm going with this whole talk is, if sensing with soul includes the sensing, the perceiving, and perhaps the knowing of values, and if historically the knowing of values is dismissed because it's not a primary quality -- it's not even a secondary quality, it's something else; it doesn't conform to the epistemology of the classical science and scientism -- then sensing with soul, because it involves sensing values and perhaps knowing values, the knowing there ... well, we cannot claim any knowing there. It's not given any place or platform, because values are not given any place and platform. I want to make that point over the course of this talk. And also I just want, more generally, to point out the incredibly powerful influence of ideas in our psyche, in our modes of discourse, modes of conceiving, ways of looking, ways of relating, all of that, the whole conception and sense of existence.

In a way, actually, values can never be removed from our way of looking or conceptual frameworks and orientations. It's actually values that orient us. So the scientific method, even (which, in a way, Galileo gave birth to, and it was developed more with Descartes and Bacon), is in part an implementation of certain values -- valuing this over that; valuing a certain mode of knowing, a certain way of going about establishing knowledge. So even though values themselves may be ontologically relegated, they always come in, even to a system that says or implicitly devalues them, relegates their ontological status and their epistemological status. They still come in to inform, to orient, to direct that system or culture. So more widely, I would say we need to recognize that different modes of being, different ways that we are in the world, different ways that we relate to the world, are governed, if you like, by different hierarchies of values.

So the mode of scientific investigation, the scientific method, the mode of poetry, the mode of art, the mode of politics and economics, the moral mode or the mode of navigating morally in our life, the mode of soulmaking -- all these are different modes of being, and each one has a different hierarchy of values appropriate to it, a different way of organizing and relating to what is most important, and also ontology and epistemology within that.

We need to be careful not to be stuck in one mode of being's sort of value system or hierarchy when we're actually moving into another mode of being, another mode of relating to existence, to the universe. Because certain value systems and hierarchies are kind of dominant in our culture, or established over hundreds of years through the education system, through the way people talk to each other, through the cultural agreement, it can actually be quite hard to recognize, "Now I'm in a different mode, and that value system, that hierarchy of values, that whole ontology and epistemology and what goes with it does not quite apply here. I'm in another field now. I'm in another domain. I'm in another mode of being." How do I decide between all these hierarchies of values? How do I decide and orient when I'm in different modes? And how do I prevent one dominant mode, dominant hierarchy, overextending its influence, spreading like a kind of colonialism, into areas that are beyond its reach, beyond its prerogative, beyond its purview, beyond its domain?

[28:23] So again, two points. I know this might sound complicated. Two main threads here. One is about the influence of ideas, and I'll come back to that in a second. Just to be really wary, and can we be really conscious of the influence of ideas? I know I've talked a lot, come back to this strand a lot over the last few years. I think it's so significant for us as practitioners, and just for us as human beings at any time, whenever we live, but certainly at this time, at this point in history. So that's one general point, the influence of ideas. And secondly, this idea that there's something about the way that values and a sensing of values are woven, implicitly or explicitly, into sensing with soul, and the epistemological confusion and quandary and relegation with regard to values that we have in our modern culture, generally speaking, in the dominant culture. There's something about that epistemological confusion that relates to our hesitation or shyness or non-permission with regard to the ontology and epistemology we might develop or claim with regard to sensing with soul.

With regard to that little brief historical perspective that we could kind of trace that thread there going back to Galileo, this developed and developed, and got more and more entrenched, and more and more taken for granted, really, woven into the actual normal perception of human beings and how they spoke to each other, the dominant discourse. Unfortunately for that whole perspective and the dominance of that whole hierarchy of values and perspectives, then came -- just in the realm of physics, if we follow that thread from Galileo -- then came Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, and the quantum physics revolution in the early part of the twentieth century, the first (roughly) quarter century of the twentieth century.

In those discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics, all of Galileo's primary qualities were rendered, if you like, non-objective. His whole point was these are objective elements of reality. Everything else (taste, and sound, and smell, colour) is subjective, and then later, values even more subjective and therefore less real. But with the quantum revolution, and with the revolution in physics with relativity and all that, all these primary qualities (mass, velocity, time; even the simultaneity of events, like what came first and after; location in space, in time; size, length, shape; whether something is even one, or a few, or many; whether things are part of one unit, and touching or not), all these so-called fundamentally, objectively real aspects of reality were kind of exposed as being not objectively real anywhere near the degree to which we thought they were. What the quantum physics and relativity physics revolutions exposed was just how much all these factors (mass, velocity, time, location, size, shape, one or many, contingency and all that) were dependent on the observer, dependent on the observing.

That whole differentiation that Galileo and Locke made between primary qualities and therefore more real, and secondary (or even what we might call tertiary) qualities and therefore less real, that just dissolved. The current state of physics, it's really hard to justify a belief or the sustaining of that whole notion, that whole hierarchy. In a way, what we realize is all of these things, all of these elements of experience, including value experiences, all these aspects of reality, aspects of the world, involve the subject, involve the observation. Participation is implicated in all of them. They do not have purely objective reality. So that whole hierarchy, that whole structure, that whole edifice, that whole tower crumbles.

Sometimes I get the sense that it's possible to pick up on certain Dharma notions, even, and kind of construct a similar-ish hierarchy. The notion of bare attention, for instance (a notion that the Buddha never used, but that whole notion): if I cling to it too tightly, too rigidly, believing, "Oh, this really is bare. This really is as it is, as things are," etc., "Now I'm really being with things as they are ...", or certain limited ideas, related to that, in relation to mindfulness -- again, not what the Buddha taught, because the Buddha's mindfulness included is there mettā or is there not mettā, what is of value and what is not of value, even just pleasure and pain, pleasant/unpleasant, etc. The Buddha did not have such a pared down kind of lens, and then a pared down ontology and ontological and epistemological structure. It's true that there was a certain simplification and reductionism that he encouraged, but it wasn't that reduced.

But similarly with the science influencing the wider culture and, in a way, this whole Western Enlightenment, and modernistic and scientistic influence coming in then to so-called spiritual cultures, and kind of implementing implicit or explicit ontological and epistemological hierarchies there with ideas like bare attention, etc., the idea of, "What's real? What's more real? What's less real? The sensations in the chest? The complexity of the emotion? The story? Papañca?" We tend, or can tend, to bring an implicit value judgment about what's real and what's worthy of paying attention to, what counts as actual knowledge and just fabrication (in the negative sense). All that can get woven into our Dharma practice in ways that aren't fully questioned or elaborated enough, I feel, and then also into just obviously the way we live, and how we relate to existence, and how we relate to others, and what we care about, and what we invest in, and what we stand up for.

So these ideas influence reality notions of ontology and epistemology. Ideas get a grip, and shape our cultures (plural; we move in different cultures these days). Ideas get a grip, and they shape the cultures we move in, and therefore shape our beliefs, our assumptions, etc., in a really fundamental way, and particularly regarding our basic sense of reality/unreality, more/less real, ontology and epistemology, and therefore what is of value. All that's related. As I said, two points woven in together: what we value, because of reality notions here, ontological and epistemological notions, and also the ontological and epistemological status of values (like beauty or goodness or whatever it is, love). Two themes I want to weave together, I am weaving together here. But ideas. The point right now is about ideas, and just how influential they are, and how important it is to be aware of that so that we're not just in a kind of indoctrination there.

Jung very wisely wrote ... He's pointing out that at the time of the Renaissance ... Some people use that word, 'Renaissance,' interchangeably with the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, and other people point out there were three different movements going on there, but around that time. They all happened around the same time. He goes on:

The newly-won rational and intellectual stability of the human mind nevertheless [despite the old religious dogmas, etc.] managed to hold its own and ... to penetrate further ... into depths of nature that earlier ages had hardly suspected.^[2]

This is the point that I want to make right now. He goes on to say:

The more successful the penetration and advance of the new scientific spirit proved to be, the more the latter [the scientific spirit] -- as is usually the case with the victor -- became the prisoner of the world it had conquered.

The more successful the penetration and advance of the new scientific spirit, the more the latter -- as is usually the case with the victor -- became the prisoner of the world it had conquered (the more the scientific spirit became the prisoner of the world it had conquered). In other words, as I said earlier, what was initially a liberation can so easily become, and has, I think, to a certain extent and in different ways (it's quite complex), become a kind of prison for us: a prison of view, a prison of assumption, and therefore prison of limitations on value and care in regard to the world.

We could also, from a certain perspective, we could see the Scientific Revolution as a kind of -- initially, in soulmaking terms, we could see it as that initially when it happened, there was a kind of shattering of the vessels, although really it took a while for it to really take hold. But there was initially a widening and deepening of, you could say, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic of the cultural Weltanschauung, of the whole way the culture saw the world, what was then attractive, the eros, the impetus of scientific penetration and investigation, and the widening of the embrace of science, and the image of humanity in that endeavour, and the image of what the world was, and the psyche, and the logos (the concept) of what was real, what was not real, what a human being was and was not capable of, what nature was and wasn't.

There's the eros that sought, after all, to know things more widely and deeply, to penetrate them, their nature, their working, and also the laws that govern their behaviour. You know, laws are kind of another dimension -- physical laws, I mean, whatever it is: E = mc^[2:1], or Newton's laws of acceleration, or Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism. These laws are another dimension of the being of a thing, in a way. It's different, though in some senses similar, to the kind of imaginal dimensions of a thing, if you like. We're talking about dimensionality now. In the way psyche and logos give or create and discover other dimensions in the soulmaking process, we can also talk about the way physics discovers, and creates/discovers, physical laws that pertain to things themselves, but they are another dimension of things. The laws that govern the movement of an electron belong or are, so to speak, part of the electron, but they're a kind of other dimension of the electron.

So there's a kind of erotic movement, a movement of the imagination, a movement of the logos, a shattering, a widening, an opening of that initially. And then it's only, in time, when there's a kind of shrinking down to the scientism -- remember, 'scientism' means this belief that everything can be reduced to science, and reduced to a physicalist/materialist (usually atomistic) explanation of everything in the world: everything human, and all the elements of being human, everything in nature. It's only with that shrinking down to scientism and physicalism, when the classical science model shrinks down that way, that the (if we look at it this way) eros-psyche-logos dynamic, the soulmaking dynamic that we could say was part of the whole movement and shattering of the Scientific Revolution, the soulmaking dynamic of the culture, it's only then with the shrinking down and the rigidification that it gets frozen, that dynamic.

[44:48] What would happen, or might there be a place now for keeping that scientific method open, as I said, as one of the modes of knowing, one of the modes of being and investigation (with its own hierarchy of sets of values, and ontology, epistemology, and all that), keeping that open and perhaps opening soul methods of knowing? Recognizing that these two can live together, can complement each other, and actually expanding both further. Maybe at this point in our culture more widely, maybe some kind of growing of the meta-level ontology and epistemology to allow both those movements -- the scientific method movement, and the soul method movement, the soul method of knowing -- to allow both those to expand and complement each other would be, perhaps, a step in unfreezing the soulmaking dynamic, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, of the dominant culture. We could look at things like that.

Ideas influence. Dominant ideas that run through the culture, through the education, through the way people think and talk, they influence and they constrain and they direct our existences, as I said, our movements, and our expressions of care. And, of course, they direct practice, and that shapes our perception further or limits our perception. And the ways we practise psychologically, spiritually, etc., being directed by certain ideas, then shape perception according to those ideas, and also shape value according to those ideas. The perceptions that get reinforced or shaped or directed or circumscribed will also influence the values there. So prevalent in the larger culture and (whatever we might call) psychological or spiritual cultures, sub-cultures.

I read an article in The Guardian some years ago by a guy called Stephen Tomkins. He pointed out the Bible doesn't state anywhere that it should be read literally, yet an all-or-nothing approach -- I'm kind of quoting him now -- yet an all-or-nothing approach is the core of many Christians' faith: "I believe fully that the world, the universe was created in seven days, and this and that, and Jesus literally physically ascended to Heaven or whatever, and if I don't believe that, then the whole show goes out the window." So for many Christians or Muslims or Jews, this kind of literalist approach is really core to their faith, but the Bible itself doesn't say anything about being read literally. "Biblical literalism," he goes on to say, "is by no means an essential Christian tenet." He's talking about Christianity now, but we could easily apply it to other religions.

[Biblical literalism] is by no means an essential Christian tenet. No creed says anything about how to read the scriptures.... The Bible is the word of God, Christians believe, but why should the fact it's God's [word] mean it has to be read with naïve absolutism?^[3]

In other words, it's God's word. You can say, "Okay, it's God's word." Why can't we say God is a poet? Or spirit is a poet? It was written by the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit speaks and writes more as a poet, more as an artist.

Then he points out (and many of you will know this) part of the problem is historical. Something happened with the Protestant Reformation. I don't think it was actually primary in what Luther intended, but one of the things that he sort of favoured and that came out of that was a very literal interpretation of the Bible, and a real limitation, a real tight circumscribing, on the range of how scripture could be interpreted. So a really kind of fundamental shift that happened there, and part of the result of that was religious fundamentalism. And that influences so much in the way one then sees existence, and the whole hermeneutics, interpretation of our existence, of our perception of existence. That movement, I think, that literalism, that Biblical literalism, affects and influences not just those who we might call these days 'religious fundamentalists.' It also affects many other people who consider themselves religious, and the wider culture, even secularists, or people who consider themselves secular and non-religious. Something happened in the whole regarding of the ontological and epistemological status of what we would call, in our language, sensing with soul and an imaginal perception, an imaginal reading of scripture, an imaginal reading of the texts of reality, the texts of existence, the text of body, of matter, of world, of others. Massively influential.

Disturbingly, in a different article by someone called Harriet Sherwood (also in The Guardian) quite some years later, there was a survey or study and -- I find this a little disturbing, myself, but that just betrays my biases -- they found that when a church emphasized a literal interpretation of the Bible, that actually helped increase church attendance and brought in a much younger congregation.^[4] So many more people are attracted, it seems, by a literalist interpretation of scripture, and for some reason younger people are as well. There's something here. Again, the larger point has to do with the ontology and epistemology of our endeavour or our exploration of what we're calling imaginal perception and sensing with soul. We're talking about large cultural ideas that really influence, limit, circumscribe, prohibit and relegate the status of certain modes of being, but also, even more significantly, modes of knowing, or what we might even try to state, to claim as modes of knowing.

[53:11] So this happens in all kinds of ways. That was a Christian example, but we could give a more Buddhist example regarding the way we see bodies or our body. That, of course, is dependent on the way of looking, which always includes a conceptual framework and the mind state. So when I use the word 'way of looking,' you know that it means a lot of different elements within that -- concept, and also just what we call 'mind state' or 'state of mind' or 'mood' or whatever.

I remember many years ago (I think it was almost twenty years ago), and I did a retreat completely on my own in a cabin in the woods when I was living in the States. I had never done -- it was a really, really solitary retreat. I didn't take any books, any Dharma talks, no recordings, nothing. Just me in the woods. I think I saw one person in the whole ten days, and by accident. There was an intense heatwave during that time, and then it rained for two days straight. I was just on my own, and in really total solitude. At that time in my practice, it was the first time -- something really happened in terms of my jhāna practice. I went really interested -- I had had a bit of an opening, quite a significant opening before in terms of the jhānas, and I sensed, "Oh, I wonder what will happen. I really want to explore that." So I went, and the first four jhānas really began to open up, and I was really excited by that.

I also had, in terms of if we speak about fantasy and image, I also had running through those (I think it was ten) days a very sort of vague, background, faint fantasy of being a monk, and actually filled out the fantasy. It was actually a Theravādan Buddhist monk. And that kind of sustained and gave some soulfulness to my days there, and my explorations, and my efforts, and my solitude. At that time, I had no articulation or words or even interest in imaginal practice. I had never heard of it, never heard of any of this, and certainly hadn't thought about it and explored it the way we have now. But in hindsight, I could say that that was running through, alongside everything.

I remember at some point there was a sort of large mirror, broken mirror, that was outside the cabin. And I remember washing. I would get water from a well nearby, and wash outside my cabin. There was no one around. And just at some point, catching sight of my naked body in this large, broken mirror fragment. And it looked so strange. [laughs] My body looked so strange to me at that point! Something happened in the course of those days in regard to my -- because of the way I was practising, and because of the fantasy (I'll explain this), and because of the practices I was doing, something happened that influenced very much, that shaped and coloured very much, my perception of (in this case) my body. I was also eating very, very simply, and not eating much at all. There was a very surprisingly easy renunciation with regard to sense pleasure and all the rest of it that was very much helped by the opening up of the deep equanimity in the third and fourth jhāna, etc.

So in regard to the senses, and also in regard -- particularly now I want to talk about body and materiality. Again, I can only see this in hindsight, but what struck me right then was just how strange my body looked. With the jhānas there, the view of flesh is kind of one of anattā. It goes very quickly to the sense of 'not me, not mine.' It doesn't have, implicit in that whole -- (a) in that fantasy, in the Theravādan monk fantasy that was operating there, and (b) in the jhānas, and (c) the renunciation with regard to eating and sense pleasure -- all of that together, there was no sense of the body as anything sacred. No sense of this body as something wondrous and sacred. If anything, it just looked a bit of a strange sort of animal, you know. I could see my animal nature, and almost as if a kind of appendage.

It wasn't that there was hate or aversion, nor was there love. There wasn't any self-judgment of, "Oh, I wish I had bigger biceps" or whatever, nor was there any aversion to the animal nature. But there wasn't either any sacredness, or any particular interest or opening up of that sense of materiality. In the fourth jhāna, and in the first four jhānas, as you might know from the Buddha's description, mindfulness saturates the bodily sense. So we're not talking about being disconnected from the feeling of the body at all. But it's a very particular kind of body sense, and with it comes a particular kind of body conception and view, with that particular practice and with that whole kind of complex of ideas and fantasy that goes with the Theravādan monk thrust there, or the Theravādan thrust there, in relation to body and flesh.

We have a colleague, an Insight Meditation teacher colleague, and I remember her referring to her body as a sack of meat or something like that. It wasn't that it was particularly aversive, but she was saying it because -- well, it's a kind of way of referring to it that is one of the strands that's very strong in the Theravādan lineage in which she is very firmly rooted. It wasn't [that] there was aversion or hatred or anything -- at least not obviously. But it's a certain way of regarding it: not sacred, not having this dimensionality, not as something that the eros can open up; as something, rather, with regard to which we want to let go, see it a certain way that leads to dispassion, disinterest, etc.

[1:00:57] So, as I said, in the first four jhānas, the Buddha called them rūpa jhānas. They're really body awareness jhānas, primarily. That's really the dominant experience. In other words, the awareness is of the energy body. It's of that space. And then the different frequencies or textures of that space change. But it's not that we're out of the body, or disconnected in some way. Awareness is saturating and suffusing the body sense. But there's no real interest or focus on the materiality of the body, and certainly not an opening up of that sense. And as I said, when there is, under a sort of Theravādan insight rubric, it's hardly ever sacredness or wonder or a kind of erotic interest that is cultivated with regard to matter or body. It's more letting go, disinterest, a minimum of involvement -- just enough to keep it together so that you can liberate yourself, or regarding it as just the four elements in a kind of reductive way: "Let's not get too excited about this. It's just the four elements." Or it's kind of on its way to being a corpse; it's already a corpse. One imagines the body as dukkha, etc.

The point is, here was a certain fantasy and set of ideas that I had absorbed, and actually was really helpful, and I was really taken with them, borrowed from the Pali Canon, Theravādan Buddhist logos and fantasy and set of teachings regarding body and materiality. That massively influenced my body perception and conception at that time, vividly, immediately in the perception as I caught sight of myself in the mirror there, of my body in the mirror.

So regarding the body or materiality or anything else, I say it so many times: the way we see it, the way we experience it, the way we feel it, the way we conceive it is always dependent on the larger conceptual framework, whether that's Pali Canon, Theravādan Buddhism; whether it's Tantric Buddhism; whether it's popular secular culture, and we tend to regard the body in terms of self-judgment, or certain body types are elevated or denigrated, or this ego-identification gets involved; or if it's the larger conceptual framework of the kind of cosmology of, say, an indigenous Amazonian person -- always that larger conceptual framework, larger idea. Ideas influence the larger idea, set of ideas, as well as the mind state in the moment (and there's a huge range in that), as well as the feeling in the body and the image of the body. And that image overlaps with the conceptual framework, the idea. Idea and image overlap. That's something I want to come back to later in this set of talks.

So something like body and materiality, hugely influenced by all that. And the point I want to make now is how much it's influenced by idea, how powerful ideas were and are, and what ideas are we absorbing, certainly from the wider dominant culture, but also from the individual cultures, the sub-cultures, if you like, that we move in and are educated by and in.