Sensing with Soul (Part 7)

Now let's come back to the connection I made at the beginning of this talk between epistemology, epistemological questions and concerns regarding sensing with soul, and similar questions with respect to values. So remember, epistemology is about knowing: why is it okay to say, "I had experience X and I had experience Y," but I'm only allowed to say, in having experience X and experience Y*,* "I knew X," but I can't say "I knew Y"? Some things, we can say we had whatever experience we had, but in terms of knowledge, knowledge of reality, that's the epistemological remit: what constitutes, what qualifies as knowledge? How can we know? What are the modes of knowing? What is knowable? Why can I say of some experiences that there was a knowing, and of other experiences, they were just experiences? And epistemologically, they have second, or third, or whatever class status, fourth class status, maybe. So there's that whole question with regard to sensing with soul. And then it's linked to a similar kind of question with regard to values.

So I can say, or it's deemed okay for me to say, "I know this bag of potatoes weighs X kilograms." That's fine. Or, "I know they are potatoes." Or, "I know we were in a car crash the other day." Once I get to things like, "I know this is beautiful," then some people start to get a little bit nervous. "I know this is more beautiful than that." Or, "I recognize, I know beauty. I know goodness. I know love." This is a knowing of values. I experience a sense of beauty. I experience this as good. I experience love. "I know" gets a little more tricky when values are involved, or people are less willing, generally, in the culture, to grant the same epistemological status as knowing there are potatoes in front of me and they weigh X kilograms, knowing that this piece of metal smashed into that piece of metal at X miles an hour. If I say, "I know this tree loves me. I know this tree, this tree that I love, I know it loves me ..." If I say I feel that it does, or I experience that it does, that it loves me, that's generally more acceptable. People might raise an eyebrow or two. But to say I know that it loves me seems like an epistemological step too far for our culture.

So I want to really open up this area a little bit of ontology and epistemology. I hope you can get a sense of how important it is. Maybe can we just walk around in there, and pick up some stones, and overturn them, and see what's underneath, and that kind of thing, in that domain of ontological and epistemological questions, just a little bit? Values have been relegated, slowly, in terms of their truth status in our culture. They are, as I said, especially as modernism rolled into postmodernism, in a way inevitably (or a certain kind of postmodernism at least, the dominant kind of postmodernism), the values are just regarded as historically conditioned, culturally conditioned opinions of what is beautiful, of what is good, etc. To say "I know this value. I know it to be there," its status has been epistemologically and ontologically relegated.

Now, the connection with sensing with soul is partly analogous. It's kind of parallel. There's an epistemological parallel in the relegation. As I said, if I say, "I know this tree loves me," or "This imaginal dimension of my friend's being (or whatever), I know that," again, it seems too far for the modern outlook, the dominant modern outlook. So partly it's a parallel with the epistemological kind of cramping with sensing with soul, and partly it's because, as I pointed out, sensing with soul includes a sensing of value. So these are kind of bound up together just by analogy, but also because one is included in the other, or they weave together.

Sensing with soul, the sensing with soul of others, of the world, of the self, that, in our time, needs epistemological validation. When we come to purely intrapsychic images, as opposed to extrapsychic sensing with soul -- let's say, "That tree loves me. This tree loves me," as an example of a sort of extrapsychic (so-called) sensing with soul. When we contrast that with a purely intrapsychic imaginal image, it seems to need that kind of validation less. In other words, there's a kind of validation that most people these days, perhaps, would give. I don't know about 'most,' [but] many people in our culture would give a certain epistemological validity to intrapsychic images, just because we've had more than a hundred years of psychoanalysis, etc., post-Freud. So most people -- well, let's say 'many' people -- would accept that the psyche has a kind of intelligence regarding our inner life and feelings, and the moral, a kind of intelligence of the psyche regarding its moral judgment of our actions in the world. And it manifests this intelligence, the psyche manifests this intelligence through images, in dreams, in our imagination -- in many ways and forms, but dreams and imagination would be dominant ones, common ones.

So that degree of validation, there is a kind of knowing. If I get an image of something or a dream of something, at least many people in our society would regard it as having a certain validity as some kind of knowing, but in regard to my inner life, my inner feelings, some part of myself, if you like, reflecting and reflecting on another part of myself, or a way I've acted, or the relationship that I have to certain people or certain things in my life, or my childhood, or whatever it is. So there's a certain knowing there manifested in the image, and we can know that knowing. When we sort of interpret this dream or this image in a certain way that constitutes a knowledge of ourself, we say, then, we're 'knowing' it.

When it comes to extrapsychic images, it's really these that need the epistemological validation or championing, or perhaps promotion, after their relegation over the last hundreds and hundreds of years, and perhaps a different kind of promotion. This tree that I love, if we take that as an example, this tree that I love: how do I feel, sense, that it loves me? How do I know that it loves me, that love flows between us? There's an epistemological, ontological question there. How can I feel justified in saying, "I know that this tree loves me"?

Let's linger with this a little bit. When my friend says she/he/they love me, how do I know that she/he/they love me? Saying "I love you," as any honest and mature human being knows, doesn't guarantee the truth of that love. With respect to, I don't know, someone incapable of expressing their love verbally or in obviously interpretable emotion or gesture -- say, someone who is paralysed. Did you see that film, My Left Foot, with Daniel Day-Lewis? It was many years ago. I thought it was fabulous. He plays a boy with cerebral palsy who cannot speak and has very limited motion just in his left foot. He's essentially paralysed and rendered incapable of communication for much of his adult life. One of the things that I found so touching and beautiful in that movie was the relationship he had with his mother, and their love both ways. But how did she know that he loved her? He was incapable of expressing it. It's a complicated thing. But even, in a way, when he did eventually manage to express it, it was dismissed by some people around him. It's like, "How can he ...? He's just a vegetable," was the sort of view. She, very movingly for me, said to him at one point when they were alone, she looks at him -- I can't remember what his name was, but she said, "Sometimes I think you are my soul." Very beautiful.

But in that sort of situation, or say with a pet or a dog, incapable of expressing their love verbally or in some obviously interpretable motion or gesture, and in the absence of some scientific measure of love, how do we know that this being loves me? How do we know? We could open it up even more. We could say, well, what is love anyway? Is love a feeling? Is love an action? Is love a commitment to action? Which actions, and when? Or maybe it's an attitude. Is love an attitude? Or is love a tendency to try to view and act in a certain way? None of those, as possible definitions, is universally agreed upon or enacted by human beings. So in relation to something like love, we have a problem epistemologically. This tree that I love loves me. I know that. I know that the way lovers know, the way lovers know not just that they love, but they are loved -- the way they feel that. How do I know it? By what organ of perception, by what instrument of knowing, by what mode of knowing do I know that? I could say I know it in my heart. I know it in or through the soul. I also know it in my body, in the touch. This tree that I love loves me, and I know that the way lovers know.

[13:35] So what we call perceiving imaginally or sensing with soul, perceptions of the imaginal, soulmaking perceptions, always involve -- though they are not reducible to -- they always involve sensing value (for example, beauty or loveliness or meaningfulness or goodness). And knowing values like beauty or goodness or love is not, it seems, as simple as knowing what is material, what is measurable, and what is socially agreed-upon reality. This is why there's a difficulty here for us nowadays. In the modern West, we find it hard, or it is not so generally accepted -- and especially, as I said, after postmodernism -- to claim we know something's beauty, or even something's goodness. We are only allowed, it's only politically correct, to claim a subjective perspective: "I find that very beautiful," or "I find that very not beautiful," or whatever. There's really some intelligence in that. It's this escape from dogma, and this freeing up of the individual subjectivity to grow in its own way and find its own sensitivities, etc. But it's easy to go to another extreme here, because only a kind of (if even there is such a thing) completely unpassionate human being, and even then only with regard to what does not involve him or her or them, only such a person, in such a relationship or situation, will say, and really believe when they say it, regarding a sense of right or wrong in terms of value or beauty or whatever, "It's all relative and only a matter of opinion."

For me, to consent to the possibility that the Smurfs ... do you remember the Smurfs? [laughs] I checked with Mark and Ava. They're much younger than I am, and they remember the Smurfs, so hopefully most of you will. They were like these little, blue, dwarf-like cartoon characters, and they had a few hit singles, a hit movie, and number one Top of the Pops singles -- I think a few of them. But for me to consent to even the possibility that the Smurfs's songs are as beautiful (if we take beauty as a value) as Beethoven's late string quartets, or John Coltrane solos or whatever, politically correct as that might be (it's not okay to say that one is really more beautiful), but actually, if I were to say that or to be in a situation where I'm forced to say that, I can feel something. It does something in my soul and my cells. Yet, to imply that it's not so, to imply that one is more beautiful than the other and I know that, is not politically correct. We're not granted that epistemological validity of knowing with regard to beauty. Do you see the connection here? Are you thinking, "Why are we talking about the Smurfs now?" The question of making knowledge claims, epistemological claims, with regard to values, and so with regard to beauty, with regard to the Smurfs, is related to our hesitation, our shyness, our withdrawing, our non-claims (if such there be), or possibility of making knowledge claims with regard to sensing with soul. Because what we know in soul ways of knowing, as I said, always partly involves values and ideals -- not only what is measurable or material or socially agreed upon.

Remember when we talked about the spectrum of uses of the imagination? We said there's papañca, there's a kind of possibly mindful images and mindful healing images, imagination and intrapsychic images, and (we could say) extrapsychic sensing with soul images. In that little list, along that spectrum there, it's really the epistemology and the ontology of that last category -- the extrapsychic sensing with soul, and to some degree the intrapsychic -- that's the category that's tricky for us. Papañca we just dismiss. Even if we put into that little spectrum, if we insert the image that comes with ESP or extrasensory perception, it's really that last one. We can find a category, "Oh, it was valid, that dream I had that turned out to be a premonition of this happening, or gave me some information in advance (so to speak) of some event happening," or whatever it was, or something that minds can do under certain conditions. In a way, it's really not a big deal, but on another level, it is a big deal because it has lots of implications.

But that, in itself, it's easy to find an epistemological and ontological slot there. It's like, "Oh, okay. I knew this in advance somehow. And even though it wasn't proved until that thing actually happened and I found out that it was true, there was clearly some kind of knowing in advance." So we can give it that place. We can support it with its own kind of ontology and epistemology. The thing that's difficult with the epistemology there is just that, as I said, we don't know it's knowledge until we've checked it with asking our friend, "Were you in such a place there?", or they do call when we dreamt that they would call, or we get some news and we dreamt that the news would be such-and-such as opposed to something else. We only know it, checked off as knowledge, at that point.

Still, epistemologically and ontologically, it doesn't seem to create that much problem. But particularly the extrapsychic sensing with soul, it's that that's tricky for us. If we connect that to what we've been saying about values, images that might come -- and remember, 'images' might mean any sense modality, but dream images or some kind of extrasensory perception of images in any of the sense doors don't seem to involve a sense of values so much. This is just my observation. See what you think. I think it's fair to say.

They don't feel imaginal. They don't have those qualities, those aspects and elements that we ran through in the list. It's almost like just a communication of information. They're not permeated by a sense of beauty or meaningfulness. Maybe meaning, but not meaningfulness, not depth, not unfathomability, etc. ESP images, if we can call them that, feel just kind of matter-of-fact. They're bits of information only, really. They don't have that whole imaginal constellation of elements and aspects that we ran through in the first talk.

So ESP experiences feel very matter-of-fact. They're ordinary in themselves. As I said, perhaps when we reflect on the fact that we can even have such experiences at times ... I think it's really the mind under certain conditions has such experiences. If we look at it that way, it has nothing to do with ego. But perhaps when we reflect on the fact that we can have such experiences, and reflect on what the implications are for understanding the nature of awareness or mind, consciousness, and its relationship with matter, then that whole reflection and acknowledgment and recognition can be and feel soulmaking for us, if it's a new reflection and a new opening of the logos there. But the sense and texture of the actual ESP perception or image itself is often very ordinary. It doesn't have a sense of holiness or divinity or all the rest of it to it.

[23:53] There are other kinds of perceptions. I'm going back to this -- I think I put it right at the beginning of the Path of the Imaginal retreat -- this kind of, "Is there some kind of classification or categorization of different kinds of uses of the imagination?" Because there are other kinds of perception. Someone was telling me about being present at her grandmother's death, and being aware somehow of her grandmother's soul or awareness entering another realm, leaving this realm and entering another realm, and sensing the joy and the gift and the wonder and the revelation of that. Now, in that kind of perception, there's immense meaningfulness, a sense of beyondness, depth, divinity, wonder. The energy body, as she experienced that, was harmonized and open, and all the rest of it. So those kind of perceptions are closer to imaginal perceptions, though they are taken as true and real rather than in a very theatre sense, in that imaginal Middle Way sense that we were emphasizing. There are all kinds of divisions here in terms of ontology and epistemology. How to distinguish these different perceptions of other dimensions or realms from what we're calling imaginal images and soulmaking perceptions, sensing with soul? How to tell the difference?

It may well be that some of what we classify today as 'imaginal' and 'neither real nor unreal' may, at other times and places in human history, both in the past and in the future, be classified as real and accurate perceptions of matters of fact, just because (what I said before) ideas in history change, and that influences massively our sense. Even if we're not philosophers and we don't even think about it, have never heard of these words, 'ontology' and 'epistemology,' ideas in the culture massively influence that, and that will influence how we think of all these different kinds of experiences involving the imagination. But there is a certain subset of experiences that we might call ESP: ESP regarding matters of fact in this material world, that just feel very ordinary and unimaginal (in the sense that we've outlined it, of the imaginal constellation, the elements, the aspects).

I think this is very complex. Can it be an open question? Can it remain an open question? I don't know anyone who has figured out -- certainly not to many other people's satisfaction and agreement -- some kind of categorization of the ontology and epistemology involved in different sense perceptions, if we include sensing with soul and imaginal perceptions. Perhaps there are grey areas. Perhaps there are crossovers and in-betweens. Complex. Interesting.

I think for us right now, again, just wanting to sort of walk around in this area, and turn over some stones that maybe haven't been turned over for quite a while, and kind of create a bit of space in there, in what can usually be a domain that doesn't have any space to walk around in. It's just given to us, "This is how things are. This is what's worthy of respect. This is not worthy of respect." So just wanting to walk around in there. I think, at a minimum right now, let's say that.

We could say that experientially, even when we do kind of hold to this imaginal Middle Way, and a kind of, "No, we're not really saying it's real, and we're not really saying it's unreal," those perceptions, those imaginal perceptions, that sensing with soul, can have a huge effect, even with the kind of Middle Way held with regard to ontological status and reality. That can have a huge effect. That sensing with soul or imaginal perceptions with the imaginal Middle Way can have a huge effect on our conceptual frameworks, on our orientations, on the directions we have in life, on what we're devoted to, on our whole sense of existence, and actually on our ontology, epistemology, cosmology, etc.

So just picking up on that point: it may be that humanity may not ever arrive at a conclusive and finally complete answer or truth regarding the ontic status of imaginal images, of what we sense with soul. That may well be. It may be that there's no way of finally knowing any of this for sure. But phenomenologically (in other words, in our experience), we can notice that adopting or finding ourselves in the imaginal Middle Way -- that is, sensing images or soulmaking perceptions as neither real nor not real, adopting that stance or finding ourselves in that stance regarding imaginal perception or sensing with soul -- automatically and often effortlessly allows us to have and feel, with respect to an image, with respect to a sense perception, a sense of duty with freedom and relative non-attachment, senses of sacredness and meaningfulness without fixation or tightness, senses of depth that are still open to more discovery. So phenomenologically, the stance of the Middle Way, the poise of this Middle Way, of holding that or finding oneself in that, is a very helpful and fruitful perspective. We can notice that. We can notice how it feels for us as we receive the gifts there of freedom, of energy, of wonder, of beauty, of joy. In other words, this poise of the Middle Way is very, very fruitful and helpful in terms of freedom, energy, wonder, beauty, joy, devotion, soulmaking, etc.

[30:59] Conversely, we can see, and we can notice, we can feel what happens when an image is reified or literalized. We can see what happens. We can see what dies. Something tends to die when that imaginal Middle Way gets squeezed, when the theatre goes out of it. Something dies in the whole experience. And how those gifts of freedom, energy, wonder, beauty, joy -- particularly the freedom -- are often unavailable when an image is reified or literalized. As is often the case, and [as] I've said before, we need to look to the effects of our way of looking to inform our choices, our stances, our attitudes, our perspectives and conceptions. But what we can say is that the stance of the Middle Way, the stance of the imaginal Middle Way, brings really good results. We feel its bounty, its fruitfulness. As I said when we were talking about theatre, it's powerful. It has effects. But we recognize the theatre of it. And one of the fruits is the soulmaking.

At the same time, we could go a little further with the ontology and epistemology involved here. Adopting that Middle Way is in some respects very fruitful, and in some respects it's also a relatively cautious approach. I think in the end of the Eros Unfettered talks I mentioned a phrase (I don't know who coined it) about metaphysics, and a sort of disparaging comment by someone or other that metaphysics, that branch of philosophy -- which, for some people, just translates as anything spiritual, or anything (what we would call) soulful -- translates as or is equivalent to being in a dark basement, pitch-black basement, looking for a dark black cat that is not there, and that whole way of talking about other dimensions and divinity and all this business is something equivalent to that.^[1] It's quite a disparaging comment.

I can't remember if I made the point, but what if I hung out in such a basement, wanting to find such a black cat, and maybe someone gives me infrared goggles, or maybe I start not looking with my eyes but touching with my body, with my hands, and the feeling and the senses there? Maybe my eyes just get used to the dark. And actually there is a cat there, and I experience that cat for myself. Then what was called 'metaphysics' just becomes the valid conceptualizing, or attempt at conceptualizing and forming conceptual frameworks, with regard to what I experienced, because here I am touching this soft, warm, furry thing that looks and feels and sounds like a cat, a black cat.

So just like science is the endeavour of creating valid concepts and valid conceptual frameworks of what we experience, and just as Buddhism -- whether it's, in inverted commas, a 'religious' Buddhism or, in inverted commas, 'secular' Buddhism -- involves a valid conceptualizing of what we can experience, and what we do experience, or at least what some people experience. If it didn't occur to me to start sensing with my touch to find the cat, if my eyes didn't get used to the dark, if I didn't spend long enough that my eyes got used to the dark, if no one gave me or I didn't find that there was a pair of infrared goggles there that I could also use, I wouldn't experience the black cat, and I would consider this as all just a ridiculous waste of time, conjecture, 'metaphysics' in the most disparaging sense of the word.

But once I experience it through my meditative dedication and work, and practice, and opening up, and careful, intelligent practice, once I experience things, then those things come into the realm of, "Well, I need some kind of conceptual framework for these things." And if I experience them regularly and a lot, and if they make a difference in my life, I'm going to need some kind of valid conceptual framework around that, just like science, just like any philosophy, whether it's a sort of educated philosophy or just everyman's sort of working philosophy.

And again, with regard to ontology and epistemology, science and philosophy debate ongoingly the being or non-being or ontic status, reality status, of what seems most evidently there. Ontological debates still go on in science and philosophy regarding things that we experience and things that seem really obvious: chairs, chariots, cats, quarks. All this is still up for ontological debate in the realm of science, and the philosophy of science, and also wider philosophy. Same with gods. Same with divinities. Same with soul. We experience it. It seems evident to our senses with practice. And so it can be drawn in. There's a validity to drawing it in to the ontological and epistemological debate. Experience must be accounted for, generally speaking. Generally, whatever philosophy -- again, even if it's not a worked out philosophy or conceptual structure, we account for experience with our ideas somehow. We try to account for experience with our ideas, put it that way.

Again, we inherit or receive, [are] impacted by a whole set of hierarchies and value systems, or hierarchies regarding ontology and epistemology, from the cultures that we move in. If we might regard, or if someone might regard someone who is, say, tone-deaf or colour-blind ... I mean, mostly people are polite about it and not offensive, but we somehow regard them, "Well, somehow that perception is, or as a perceiver, there's something (I don't know what the word would be) inadequate, or not quite competent, or deficient there." Or an autistic person, someone who is autistic. One of the theories of what's going on there is they can't read emotions in another person. It's as if another person is devoid of emotion for them, of emotional reality. There's no reality to them. They can't actually perceive it. And again, generally, in terms of psychological diagnostics, we regard autism as a kind of pathology. There's a perceptual deficiency, inadequacy, incompetency there.

Now, some people would -- and again, it's not quite politically correct, but it's pretty dominant that we might regard, let's say, a premodern, so-called premodern tribe, an indigenous tribe somewhere, and that whole world-view, would regard them also as deficient or incompetent perceivers and conceivers and thinkers because they don't have science in the way that we do. They don't even have that scientific methodology or that scientific directionality. But we could ask: isn't that an epistemological colonialism? That just, "We've got this view, and we're convinced this is right and this is better. They are deficient just like an autistic person is deficient in their perception and conception, just like a colour-blind or tone-deaf person is also deficient in their perception of colour and sound." There's a bias there of what we could call a kind of epistemological colonialism: "Our culture is right. That culture is wrong. We know what's real. They are barking up the wrong tree with regard to reality."

Why, just in principle, doesn't someone who thinks that way accept this culture's regard for my/your inability to perceive souls or spirits, for example, in nature -- something we might call akin to sensing with soul -- why don't we perceive that as a deficiency, like that's a kind of autism? We're simply unable to see some aspect of reality, like tone-deafness or like colour-blindness. Our culture or the dominant culture has ruled out that as qualifying for reality status. It's got a relegated ontological status, and any kind of knowing that one might claim is not justified. Any kind of, "I know this tree's spirit," whatever it is, "I know this forest's spirit," that's not given its epistemological validation. So we could really push at this circumscription, this cramping that has been given to us, imposed on us, by the dominant culture.

[42:42] In regarding ontology and all that, I actually regard it as a never-ending exploration. I don't think that humanity will ever fully answer these questions. It's more like the questions themselves, and the positions that various cultures take with regard to them over time, is more like part of the story of humanity. It's part of the soul-evolution of humanity. Conceptual frameworks, ontologies, epistemologies, reflect and engender soulmaking. Certain conceptions, certain ontologies, certain epistemologies can open up possibilities for soulmaking. Certain emphases of conceptual frameworks open up soulmaking differently, so that that ontological and epistemological conceiving becomes part of the whole soulmaking movement, potentially.

What's quite popular in a lot of modern philosophy, some philosophers such as Richard Rorty, for instance, who's quite popular in some circles, almost look back in history and just acknowledge that the whole philosophical and scientific endeavour to arrive at a kind of conclusive ontology and epistemology has proved unsuccessful so far. Therefore, their attitude is just to drop that whole investigation -- just kind of shrug, and give up, and leave it, and kind of pooh-pooh those whole threads and investigations and explorations in philosophy.

What it seems to me, reading someone like Richard Rorty more closely, and the people who say that kind of thing or espouse that kind of thing, is that they're saying to drop all ontology and epistemology, but actually what happens is there's a default reversion to just whatever is the dominant, unconscious, and usually unquestioned ontology of the main culture. In other words, Rorty often let slip (I don't think he was even quite conscious of it) that his notion of reality was a kind of atomistic physicalist one, of atoms moving in space, etc., randomly, according to meaningless laws, etc. That's kind of underpinning, or it's his hidden, default ontology, and the epistemology that goes with it, despite the talk of, "Let's just drop all this talk of ontology and epistemology, because people just argue. Let's keep everything open so that we can move forward together in a spirit of harmony." Actually, underneath, there's a real entrenchment and preference for one kind of ontology and epistemology -- in other words, the secular, modernist, scientific materialist, dominant ontology and epistemology over and above anything so-called spiritual, religious, soulful, etc.

So if there is this kind of never-ending philosophical possibility, that soulmaking is potentially never-ending, and part of soulmaking is logos, and that, too, is never-ending, and part of logos is the exploration of ontology and epistemology, and opening them up, and trying different things out, and shifting ideas, and all that, and if soulmaking is endless, and part of that endlessness is the endlessness, the never-endingness of ontological and epistemological exploration or conceiving, creation, discovery, play, it might be that one of the ideas that perhaps its time has come, let's say, might be this idea of participation. Because up to now, the dominant philosophical and scientific modes have really veered towards a kind of objectivism and subjectivism. This goes all the way back to Descartes and before. It's like reality is what is objectively, independently real. You can talk about what's subjectively true for me, or my opinion, or my taste, or my just being a pawn of the culture, and being totally culturally conditioned and moved about by the trends in history, and historically contingent, but basically there's a gulf between subject and object.

A notion like participation is, in a way, a very ancient concept, and goes back to Plato. I don't know much about how he used it. All I know is that he was actually quite vague. He never really filled out what he meant by it. For me, it strikes me as a very important and possibly very rich and fertile notion, and a really key concept. Again, it's hard to fill it out. But one of the things we touched on before about participation is it does not fall into a kind of view of subjectivism, nor a view of objectivism ("reality is what is objectively independent," or "everything is just dependent on the subject"). There's some kind of mutual participation of what we typically conceive of as 'object' and typically conceive of as 'subject,' what we typically conceive of 'truth' and what we typically conceive of 'a knower or truth.'

So instead of being, "Truth is objectively real," we are participating in the creation/discovery of truth, the creation and discovery of truth. There's some word between, or straddling, or encompassing both creation and discovery that the word 'participation' hints at. It's a really deep concept that embraces and involves ontology and epistemology, and reality, and notions of God, and all of that -- even notions of awakening, as I mentioned in one talk. All of these things -- matter, reality, selves, subjects, objects, truth, liberation, soul, divinity -- all of them are participated in. We participate in creating/discovering all of that. To me, a very profound and potentially very fertile concept, as perhaps a new step in our play in logos, which is part of our greater play in soulmaking. A new step in our play with ontology and epistemology, conceptual frameworks, and how involved in that play is also what we perceive, what we sense, sensing with soul, perceiving imaginally.