Dukkha and Soulmaking (Part 6)

Generally speaking, we can observe that when there is dukkha of any kind, really, and some situation or some thing in our life, in any dimension of our life, when there is dukkha and we can allow ourselves to find skilful ways of being intimate with, opening to, connecting to, contacting that dukkha, and holding it, and responding to it in different skilful ways, sometimes out of that crucible, the heat of the dukkha, if you like, an image is born, or an image of the dukkha, or an image that is in relationship to the dukkha.

That image might be born just within ourselves, in our own solitary practice. It might be born through a field in which the imaginal spark jumps, so to speak, from one person in the field to the other, or the image is communicated from someone else to ourselves. That opening of the imaginal perception, or the arising of the imaginal in relationship to the dukkha and to the difficult situation, the sensing with soul there, we could say is a kind of way of looking -- or rather, sensing with soul embraces a whole range of ways of looking, of perspectives, if you like, that will bring, in some way or other, some healing, some liberation, some relief and release from the dukkha. That's just a general observation that I hope you've seen many times already if you've been practising, and you can trace it through many of the examples that I've given in talks, or Catherine has given, or perhaps other teachers too.

So I want to point out a few things about all this. Often there's some situation that feels oppressive, that there's dukkha, and we see that very situation imaginally, or we find an image there of that very situation, or of ourselves in that situation, or of the other -- perhaps the other with whom we're having a difficulty, or the other who is suffering. We find a way to see them as image, or the seeing of them or ourselves or the situation as image arises for us out of that crucible.

That seeing, that kind of way of looking, the sensing with soul, brings with it a lessening of the oppression, a lessening of the contraction, a greater degree of spaciousness and ease. It's not because we've gone away from or avoided the situation or the pain in it. It's not that at all. But it's because we've allowed it to have or to give birth to or reveal, or we've created or discovered, the imaginal dimensions of it, other or more dimensions of that very dukkha, of that very situation, of ourselves, of an other. In that, it creates more space. And, as we pointed out, an aspect of the imaginal constellation is inevitably the sense of what we're calling the imaginal Middle Way or the theatre, and that's there, too, and that in a way that parallels quite closely the Middle Way of emptiness that also releases some suffering out of a situation, some of the grip of the craving and the contraction in relation to the difficulty that causes extra suffering.

So there's, generally speaking, because of these factors, more space, less concretization or only a concretized view, only a flat view of what's going on. All of that makes the whole thing feel less oppressive. And it's as if the image or the imaginal figure or the perspective of the imaginal perception, the perspective of sensing with soul, has a kind of wisdom in it -- a soul wisdom comes, is given to us, is transmitted to us, through the imaginal, through the sensing with soul, regarding actions, speech, bearing, poise, attitude, intention in that situation. In other words, something is communicated to us of a kind of practical wisdom, or that has implications for how we might then be differently in that situation. Sometimes it's a matter of then consciously trying to implement it. Sometimes the very opening to the imaginal by itself effects that shift in our action, speech, bearing, courage, poise, intention, what we're trying to do in the situation or what we can stand behind and commit to doing.

This way of soulmaking, this way of sensing with soul, this way of imaginally perceiving stands, as I said, alongside and together with or in our larger repertoire of tools, arts as practitioners that we can have in regard and in relationship to suffering. So it's not always, "Here's some suffering. Oh, can I see it's impermanent? Can I see it's empty? Can I bring more mettā? Can I just let go?" These are all very, very important, valid, indispensable arts, if you like, skills that we develop in Dharma practice. But there's also the way of the imaginal. There's also the way of sensing with soul.

Now, if someone's very new to this, and they hear something about "find the image here with the suffering, in a suffering situation," you know, that's probably very liable to be misunderstood without much previous experience of imaginal practice. "See it as image" or "find the image here" may seem to be suggesting some kind of disconnection from the reality of the situation, some kind of going into an extreme of anti-realism, or avoiding it with a sort of pleasant construct of wishful thinking or daydreaming. But by this point, you've been listening and practising, and you know we mean something much more sophisticated and artful than that, that involves and demands our integrity, and our sensitivity, and our presence, and connection, and openness, and humility, and all of that.

With all this, and this possibility of sensing with soul as one of the modes, one of the ways in which dukkha is eased and relieved, we might also ask (again, regarding this question or this fact or element of the imaginal, of intention and what I called 'the fullness of intention' in that list of elements of the imaginal, aspects of the imaginal), we might ask: does the intention in sort of endeavouring to see this difficulty or this difficult situation as image, or to find the image there, does my intention there have to be more than just for the sake of trying to find some ease? In other words, does my intention have to be for the love of soulmaking and the fullness of soulmaking?

We pointed out before: that very fullness of intention is part of what makes it imaginal, what qualifies it to have that adjective or label 'fully imaginal,' 'authentically imaginal.' But fullness of intention is also what opens up and delivers to us the authentically imaginal, sensing with soul, soulmaking. Here we're asking: if I'm only trying to find a way to relieve my dukkha, saying, "Ah, okay, let me try an image. Maybe that will get rid of the dukkha," and that's the kind of extent of my intention -- I'm only trying to relieve dukkha -- will that be enough to relieve the dukkha? Or does my intention have to be even bigger? It's not that I don't acknowledge and I'm not aware of that dukkha may well be relieved in the sensing with soul, but the fullness of intention, that it's for the love of soulmaking, the whole of soulmaking, and that that soulmaking is more than just 'my personal psychospiritual process' -- it's for the sake of the divine, right? That's all in the meaning of what we mean by 'fullness of intention,' as we said in the first talk.

[11:01] So I'm conceiving of soulmaking as more than my psychospiritual process, and I'm also conceiving of the locus or location, if you like, of soul, as more than just here. In soulmaking, it's not just my soul which is here that gets made into soul or whose soul is increased and made more, magnified. It's also, so to speak, the soul out there, as other: nature, the trees, what is perceived and discovered in the object is also soul. So 'soulmaking' means soulmaking everywhere, and in all aspects of soulmaking -- the eros, psyche, logos, all of that. So what we find is when there's that kind of fullness of intention, or to the degree that there's that fullness of intention, to that degree is the imaginal opened up, is the sensing with soul opened up and supported and galvanized, deepened, enriched, and the soulmaking. And also to that degree is there release of dukkha. In other words, if the intention is only for the release of dukkha, and I'm just trying to kind of find an image so that I might have some relief from dukkha, and perhaps I'm approaching it in quite a contrived way, even, trying to put an image there and maybe that helps ...

Actually, there are two points there. One is about the limitations of the intention or the range of the intention, the fullness of intention. The other is about how I go about it, whether it's contrived or I let it emerge. Of those two, the first is perhaps the most important. Maybe if my intention is only the sort of release of dukkha, it may be that less dukkha is released. The contrived thing is a little more open as a question, because sometimes we do deliberately: "Here's this difficulty. I'm curious what this imaginal figure that has been so meaningful for me in the past, I'm curious what happens when I bring this imaginal figure into dialogue, into relationship, into connection with this dukkha or with myself experiencing this dukkha." That might be contrived in the sense that it's not just emerging organically, by itself, from our connection with the dukkha. So that may or may not be useful.

The release, the decrease of dukkha that is enabled through imaginal perception, through sensing with soul, is very interesting in what it delivers, in how that kind of dukkha is experienced, as I've touched on already. There's something akin here to the two arrows metaphor that the Buddha used, the second arrow being the kind of secondary contraction or reaction to a suffering. It might be a physical suffering, and perhaps the mind is getting embroiled in that. The body, also, has a kind of secondary level of contraction: the energy body contracts around pain, around emotional pain, around physical pain, etc.

So this release of dukkha that comes through the sensing with soul, it releases what we might call the cloud of second arrows (or something like that). But it might leave, of course, what is inevitably difficult, inevitably unpleasant, inevitably painful physically at some point, or even tragic. What it does with that -- in leaving it, it doesn't leave it in just a flat way; it leaves it in a way that is impregnated and shot through and rich with soul. So there's this definite sense of release of dukkha, the cloud of second arrows. You can feel that in the clarifying, opening, harmonizing of the energy body, and the easing of the mind and the nervous system. And the rest of the dukkha, the kind of unavoidable tragedy of what we might be facing, unavoidable difficulty of what we might be facing, is rendered with soul. Sometimes -- in fact, very often -- what happens, if this process goes deep, is then that is perceived as perfect. There's something perfect about this very difficulty that I actually wouldn't wish on anyone. I certainly didn't wish it on myself. In a way, I'd rather it really not be here. Somehow, in the sensing with soul of the whole difficulty, there's one great level of reducing the suffering, and the remaining dukkha is regarded as perfect -- and again, not in a contrived way, not as a shallow sort of posture, spiritual posture or intellectual posture.

Someone on a retreat in the last -- well, since I've been ill. I can't remember what exactly it was in response to; perhaps something that I'd written, or perhaps something that I'd shared in a talk. They wrote me a note on a retreat. I can't remember exactly what the note said, but it said, "How can you talk of your cancer and your situation as perfect? I have a really hard time with this." I think -- I can't quite remember -- I think the note mentioned terrorism or something like that. It's a really, really good question. And I don't think, if I remember, in the retreat I got the time. I think I said a little bit in it. I squeezed a little bit in, in a Q & A, reading from the note. But I didn't really have the time to amplify it, so I'd like to say just a little bit about that now.

[18:21] One can -- and people do -- adopt a sort of concept that 'everything is perfect,' and it's a kind of spiritualized attitude or something. So everything is perfect, including the tragic, including all dukkha. But that posture or that kind of concept or idea, sometimes we can hear it -- it's just way too facile. It's lacking in integrity and in sensitivity. There's something disconnected in it. It's not really letting the heart and the soul be impacted, engage with, meet, be worked on by the dukkha, by the tragedy there. There's something disconnected and unattuned, something indifferent, sometimes to the point of a kind of callousness in relation to one's own suffering, or in relation to someone else's suffering, or the suffering in the world. And actually there, for all the kind of ultimate-sounding, spiritual-sounding wisdom in that 'everything is perfect' sort of idea, there is actually a lack of wisdom and intelligence, as well as those other factors: sensitivity, connection, attunement, etc., integrity.

But somehow, because of the prevalence of those kind of teachings -- which, when they come from the right place, they do have a wisdom. But sometimes they don't come from the right place. A person is just picking it up, and it's not wise, it's not sensitive, it's not intelligent. Other times, students pick up that, or hear a teaching like 'everything is empty, so everything's okay,' and try and apply that -- or just some great tragedy, some great social tragedy or environmental tragedy -- and are trying to apply the teachings of emptiness or the perspectives of emptiness to this tragedy. But that student, in their understanding, in their visceral understanding, in their practised, worked, integrated, digested understanding of emptiness, that level of depth and comprehensive emptiness might not be yet digested to them and available to them. It might not be natural to them at that level that would be commensurate with a kind of seeing it as perfect. By 'seeing it as perfect,' I don't mean seeing it as perfect in a way that we just don't give a damn, basically -- just go and watch TV, watch a film, disconnect.

Many times, I've stressed emptiness is a tool. It's a very, very powerful tool. Or rather, to the degree that we realize emptiness, it's a tool of that degree of power. In a way, it's a very powerful tool. But like all tools, a tool has a certain range, so we apply it where it works for us, where it's appropriate. Trying to apply emptiness when we can't really even pick up that tool at that level, or where it's just, for some other reason, not the appropriate tool, this isn't wise practice. This is not skilful practice. This sense of the perfection or the rightness, the mysterious perfection and rightness even of some dukkha or some tragedy, is available as a genuine and profound sense that is soulmaking and fruitful. When that tragic situation or event or thing or that dukkha is seen as image, when the imaginal perception is there and when the sensing with soul is there, it emerges. This mysterious, almost ineffable, almost unarticulatable sense of the perfection and rightness, and the grace of even what is most difficult and most tragic in dukkha, emerges when we see it as image, when we sense it with soul, this difficulty, this situation.

For example, the cancer that I have, and the prognosis I was given, and the real possibility of facing an early death, and a death not very far away -- finding ways, or there emerging ways that that became image. It was sensed with soul. And then that transforms, really, transfigures the whole sense of the whole situation. This sensing it as image or sensing it with soul is a sensibility. It involves receptivity. It involves tuning. It involves humility. It's not a technique, as we pointed out before. Or it's certainly not only a technique. In those kind of situations, it's probably even less in the realm of mastery or technique. There's even grace involved in that receptivity to what soul is giving us, if you like, through the very dukkha.

So sometimes a situation, an event, a feeling, some kind of dukkha, some kind of tragedy, even, whatever it is, something like -- if I use the example of my cancer, it needs to become image first. It needs to become imaginal image first. We're there with it, and in our connection with it, in our openness and sensing into the whole situation, it becomes image. We sense it with soul first. And then, "This is perfect. This is somehow perfect in ways I can't even get my head around. I don't fully understand." The whole thing becomes image, but I'm not approaching it first with this kind of idea of the perfection of all things and the perfection even of dukkha.

So if I do try to approach big, deep difficulties and dukkhas with this kind of attitude of 'this is perfect' as a kind of spiritual idea that's not commensurate with what's going on, and I'm not really attuned, it can be really silly, really a kind of platitude, and actually offensive. It might be someone is taken with certain kind of non-dual teachings, and might hear this 'everything is perfect' like that, or in a different kind of tradition, 'everything is God's will.' But it all depends on the integrity, the sensitivity, the openness, the humility, the work, the receptivity, the attunement of the relationship, the crucible in which the sensing with soul, in which the imaginal perception emerges.

[27:14] So again, all this is to put the imaginal and the sensing with soul -- to add it as one option, either in addition to, or mixed with, alongside, other options we have as Dharma practitioners when faced with suffering, when faced with dukkha. In that regard, there's something more ... I've sort of touched on it. Well, I've touched on it many times, but I've touched on it a little bit in this talk. I've stressed the importance of contacting dukkha, connecting with the difficulty, opening to it, and then the image emerging from that, then the sensing with soul emerging with that. We can hear that, and there can be, in our hearing or understanding of that, there can be -- what could we call it? -- a belief lodged in there that there's something 'real' in there of the suffering that we can kind of objectively contact, that we can see 'just as it is' (maybe that's a better way of putting it), and then, when we connect with it 'just as it is,' then out of that an image can come. That's fine, and that's sometimes the best way of working to approach the dukkha, and so that the soulmaking can come out of it. But, you know, I've said this so many times: the contact with dukkha, or with anything, is never direct, bare, simple, unmediated, truth- or fact-revealing. There's always a way of looking, and wrapped up in the way of looking there are always ideas, concepts, and conceptual frameworks with any contact or any connection with anything. Any time there's any perception, that involves some kind of way of looking, and wrapped up in that is all kinds of concepts and ideas and conceptual frameworks.

So the dukkha that we connect with in our practice -- we're trying to first connect with dukkha -- the way we might sense it or perceive it, or contact it or whatever, is not actually the 'bare actuality.' It's not the 'fundamental thing,' the 'real thing.' Nor, even, is the story we give to ourselves of its origin, of its cause. That's something I'll come back to. I hope in all this talking you can get the sense of an alternative possibility, either of actually sensing or conceiving, that the image is primary, that the way we sense with soul is primary, is first. I don't mean that 'temporally first,' as first in a temporal sense: first this, then a nanosecond later some interpretation or something like that. I mean in the sense of conceptual frameworks often place something as more fundamental, as more the primary driving force of the psyche, let's say. You can get a sense sometimes, I hope, at least, in your experience or in your conceiving about experience, that there's a possibility of conceiving and sensing, feeling, that the image is primary, the imaginal is primary, is, so to speak, first.

It may be that one also gets the sense, or the sense in hindsight, or entertains the concept that (as I mentioned earlier just briefly) the image is primary somehow, and out of that, situations arise. With that as the sort of seed or kernel, out of that, our life situations arise mirroring the image. Or some kind of dukkha arises which we quickly get into a kind of unhelpful and non-soulmaking relationship with, so that then we're just left with the dukkha, and the image might have become papañca, the eros that might be there might have become craving, and everything's gotten flattened. Maybe sometimes even a step further: we can sometimes even come to be able to regard, at times, or move in and out of the conceptual framework that might even regard our very process of learning as somehow given to us by soul or in the process of soulmaking -- so that this image, and then everything we went through with that, it's given to us as part of the soulmaking, for the sake of and as part of the soulmaking. So our history, even the painful aspects of our history, and our learning, and our development psychologically, in soul and in relationship, all of that is somehow part of the soulmaking process, given to us as potential by soul, as seed by soul.

I certainly don't mean to foist these ideas on anyone as some kind of dogma. And one shouldn't really enforce it on oneself or on another, ever. It's more just ... these are possible ways of looking, ways of framing, ways of conceiving. We can entertain, move in and out of entertaining, certain concepts, certain conceptual frameworks -- if they prove helpful, if they prove soulmaking, or when they prove soulmaking, rather than a fixed dogma: "This is how things are. This is the truth of things. This is how one should always respond. This is how one should always think and regard. This is the truth."

[34:52] This seeing or sensing my dukkha, or what is given to me, and what difficulties are given to me and challenges are given to me, this seeing and sensing of all that as perfect in this kind of mysterious way -- and that itself is kind of unfathomable; that's what I mean by "I couldn't quite get my head round it or articulate it" -- this seeing and sensing of it as perfect (which implies that it has become image first), seeing it as a gift from the soul, as a gift from some god, or however we want to put this, this doesn't imply just a passivity of receiving: "It's all perfect, it's all gift, so all I have to do is receive something." Again, there's, to me, a little more sophistication in how the conceptual framework is working.

As I pointed out (I can't remember when) in this series of talks, we can regard it as given. Soul gives us these things, if you like. That's a certain conceptual framework, a certain way of conceiving, a certain sensibility also. And, at the same time, in order for it to be soulmaking, it's not enough that I am given something. I need to assent to what I am given, and assent to endeavouring and working to make soul there, to see it in a way that makes soul, to relate to it in a way that makes soul. So yes, we can say that something is given: these things are given to me. Soul gives us the beautiful and the difficult. And, at the same time, the soulmaking needs my assent. The soul gives us what it wants for our soulmaking, and at the same time, it needs my assent, my will, my soulmaking orientation, my soulmaking intention, my soulmaking tuning. My participation is required, so that, as I pointed out, in the twoness of eros, the twoness that's part of soulmaking perception, imaginal perception, sensing with soul, not just the autonomy of the other but also my autonomy is necessary, is preserved in that twoness, and it also has its due emphasis in the twoness that is part of the imaginal constellation. My autonomy is necessary because I need, or the soulmaking needs, my autonomy. I need to harness my will, orient in a certain way, adopt a certain attitude, work towards the soulmaking, and there's the grace of what is given to me. Somehow, again, that curious polarity is embraced, the mixture of opposites or paradox or whatever there.

So my choosing, my will, as well as my listening, my deliberation (which may well include doubt and uncertainty with regard to what is happening and what the right approach is), all that is necessary as a part of soulmaking. And perhaps without them, without my choosing, without my will, without my listening, without also my deliberation, my doubt and my uncertainty, soulmaking is not possible, or it's limited; the extent and depth and range of it is limited, perhaps. Maybe that's exactly because of the stretching that's part of the soulmaking dynamic. Remember, the eros-psyche-logos getting stretched, that's part of their mutual fertilization and expansion. So if we don't feel stretched, then soulmaking is not happening. And sometimes being stretched is difficult. It feels difficult, and there's doubt and uncertainty, etc., and work involved.

Connecting with dukkha through that connection and the kind of poise of that connection, the sensitivity and receptivity and attitude and intention there, and the listening and the attuning, something in or around or in relation to the dukkha, or from the dukkha, emerges as image. The gates to the mundus imaginalis are opened. We sense what is happening -- ourselves included, the dukkha included -- with soul. And out of that can come (as part of that, then, soulmaking unfolding) a sense of perfection, the almost mystical, unfathomable, baffling almost, perfection of the very dukkha itself, of the tragic.

Some of you will know recently I received a diagnosis of very extreme osteoporosis -- really extreme, apparently. I had no idea until I started breaking bones without any impact, very little impact or just nothing at all. Bones started breaking, I had a scan, and she said, "This is really severe here." I had no idea, so that was quite a shock. I've yet to find out what it means long-term. It sounded like they can't really make it much better, so what does that imply if I survive the cancer, etc.? It was somewhat of a shock, and there's a lot of unknown in terms of what will actually happen, what will be possible for my life, and my range of activities, and all kinds of things. There's a sense with it, obviously, of vulnerability in the body. One might very easily break bones with the slightest of impacts, break one's back, etc., or even without an impact, just moving in a certain way, not even particularly fast or hard or strange movements. So there's a sense there of vulnerability with that. There's the vulnerability of the not knowing. There's the sense of physical vulnerability on top of the cancer and the chemotherapy, etc.

And so I found myself with that, and was just sitting with that, and sitting with the sense of the whole thing: the unknown, the physical, the sense of the frailty of my body, the sense of not knowing what the future would be, and all of that, and the emotions. Opening to the whole of it, connecting with the whole of it, with the whole of the energy body, and the vulnerability being a difficult emotion, but that lends itself or has a door that opens into the possibility of humility. And humility, we said, was one of the aspects of the imaginal, didn't we? So right there, with the whole energy body, and then the humility easily accessible -- in the humility of the not knowing, the humility that came via the vulnerability and the frailty, the sense of frailty of the body (both as an idea and as a physical sense). Then opening to or finding within that the sense of eternality as another aspect of the imaginal. I didn't approach this in a contrived way, so this was just organic. In retrospect, I'm reporting and articulating what stages enabled something to open up here, and these are the elements involved. As it happened, it wasn't contrived or planned, what I would do.

But there was a sense with the whole energy body, with that connection with the dukkha, with the humility that opened and was a lovely kind of softening there, then the sense of eternality, and, as I think I touched on earlier just very briefly, many kinds of eternality as an aspect of the sensing with soul. In this case, it was a sense of the whole life, my whole life, with its narrative and its difficulties, and particularly, in this case, the physical difficulties, and the sort of [laughs] what might be a litany of physical difficulties, or a narrative of illnesses and physical challenges, etc.

So the story, including the conditions of body, of soul, of relationship with humans, with ideas, with friends, with (quote) 'foes,' with societies, with cultures -- all that was kind of sensed, or I moved into a mode where that was sensed or seen, so to speak, from after death. As if the whole life, that whole narrative and everything involved in it, and all the dukkha involved in it, these particular dukkhas, and that whole stream, was sort of seen from a perspective out of time, from after death, like the whole thing was just sort of there. As I mentioned when I touched briefly on this before, the whole narrative and story, and all the conditions and all the difficulties, were seen sub specie aeternitatis in Latin, 'from the perspective of eternity.'

That combination of the openness to the dukkha, the connecting, not hiding from it, not running away, but connecting in good, healthy ways with the situation, with my feelings, with the fact of it, with the whole energy body awareness, with the humility opened via the vulnerability, and with this particular kind (in this case) of sense of eternality, then the whole imaginal sense of the whole situation opened up. Again, we could say the doors or the gates of the mundus imaginalis, the realm of the imaginal, opened up.

But it's not something other than. Not something other than cancer and possible early death, or a possibly longer period of time with a very frail and incapable body and severely restricted activities. It's not something other. It's this body, this dukkha, this moment, this life, this death, this story -- all of that sensed with soul. Again, it's not necessarily that there's going to be, because of that, because that perception then feels so healing, so beautiful, so tender in the presence of the divine, so blessed in and with all the difficulties, all the vulnerability, all the unknown, all the frailty, it's not necessarily because of that level of healing that then the situation is without difficulty or without (from a certain perspective) a certain tragic element, or that my bones then kind of miraculously go back to normal. I mean, maybe something like that happens; I don't know. But that's kind of not the level that felt even the most important at that point. There was such blessing, reverence, tenderness, grace, mystery of dimensionality and divinity, an attenuation of the dukkha through relating to all of it and the opening up of the soulmaking there.

[49:06] And to draw one element out of what I just shared, when we can sense this or that dukkha or our life or ourselves with soul, sometimes when that deepens or unfolds to a certain extent, we can perceive all of it as gift, all of it as grace. So that even this difficulty, even this cancer, even this possible early death, even this possible -- I don't know what a life with severe osteoporosis looks like, extreme osteoporosis. I don't know. And that restriction and whatever it is, that vulnerability. All of that is felt as gift, and the gift of life, and the gift of my life with its particulars. Again, I'm really not wanting to foist this on anyone as dogma: "You should see things this way. This is how it is." Talking about ways of looking, talking about possibilities. There's always a sense of discerning what is appropriate to us right now and our situation. What helps? Is it soulmaking? Does it heal and liberate and relieve dukkha, and in what ways? Or what might be given to me, like my antennae are alert for what soul might be prompting me or handing me as clues for where the soulmaking is. One possibility, possible if we call it a way of looking, is that in the soulmaking, in the sensing with soul of all of that dukkha -- life, self, etc., with soul -- there is a sense of all of it as gift, all of it as gift.

When we talk about the gift of life or sensing life as a gift, that kind of idea, if you like, has many possible different -- we can understand it, or we can have a sense of it, or it might mean something at many different levels. For example, a more conventional way of seeing it, for someone who has a kind of religious orientation or attitude: sensing myself as something separate from the divine, and sensing time more conventionally, sensing life and death more conventionally, and there is something or somewhere or some level that we might call divine, and we receive this gift of life from that divine, the miracle of it, the beauty of it, the dukkha in it that we can't quite fathom. The sense of the gift of life then is very beautiful still, but because of the more conventional view of time, of life and death, and the more perhaps normal view of oneself being something separate from God, the beauty there and the sense of gift is only at a certain level.

There's a whole other level possible in the sense of grace and gift when we begin to sense that this self and my soul is not separate somehow from the divine, from Buddha-nature, whatever we want to call it. We participate in God, and God participates in us, not separate, in the most profound way. And when life and death -- my life and my death -- become imaginal image for us, when they are seen and sensed with soul, seen and sensed as image ... which doesn't mean there is no death, or I'm going to live forever in some kind of afterlife, or there's a heaven or whatever it is, or I'll be reborn or whatever. It doesn't mean necessarily believing any of that.

It's more that life and death, as they appear to us, become image, become imaginal. A whole other level here of the sense of the gift of life when the self and the soul and the divine or the Buddha-nature are not seen as separate. They're interpenetrating and interparticipating. Life and death become image, they are perceived imaginally, and time is recognized as empty -- thoroughly, deeply empty. Then there's a whole other level of gift that opens up. Part of that gift is exactly the sense of the depths and the mystery of participation, of our participation, my participation, your participation in existence and in the divine. And also our participation in sacralizing existence and the cosmos. So this is part of the work of the soul, I would say, and what to me, as I shared, is so important, or perhaps the most important thing in soulmaking: the sacralizing, the making sacred, the rendering sacred, the perceiving as sacred, and then relating to as sacred of the whole of existence and the whole of the cosmos, and that in an infinitely expanding possibility of ways. It's that sense of the depths of participation and the mystery of that that is so much a part or that comes with a whole other dimension, if you like, of the sense of gift, of the soulmaking perception of the gift of life.

I shared -- I think perhaps on my website; I can't remember -- a practice that sort of arose organically one night.^[1] It wasn't too long after the operation, after they'd sort of analysed the cancer tissue that they took out, and gave me a prognosis which was not very good at all, with stage IV cancer and all that business. I remember not being able -- at that point, my tummy was still very, very unsettled, so it was difficult to sleep at night. One night, giving up on trying to sleep, and sitting up in bed, and practising in the dark. I'd just been given this prognosis and the news about what stage the cancer was at and all that.

I practised in different ways with the emptiness, and really seeing everything as empty -- self, world, time, everything. That kind of rendered things liquid, malleable, as we said. In that liquidity, it was possible to sense the moment and sense also then more than the moment, the whole larger situation of my illness and the prognosis that I'd been given and everything -- it was possible to sense that with soul. So here's an example of the emptiness practices opening or taking us to the threshold of imaginal potential, at least.

There was a sense through that of sensing -- it was like my soul was sensed with soul. My soul became image for me in an imaginal way, as I just described. With that, the sense of my soul then was that the soul was somehow not separate from my life and my experiences and my death. It was also not separate from my time span, or whatever time span is given to me for this life, whether that's 52 years, or back then it was 50 years, whatever, or longer, or a long life, or a relatively short life. This duration of my life, my temporal duration between life and death, what happens in it, my experience of it, and my death -- my life and my death and my time, if you like, my time span -- all of that from this perspective of sensing my soul with soul. That was my soul. It wasn't other than my soul.

So instead of the soul being something in here, or as I said, an organ that perceives in a certain way, or something ethereal, like some kind of energy body that goes away when I die or something like that -- all of which are good conceptions. We said at some point when we were talking about conceptions that we want to have the concept of soul be kind of, to a certain extent, not finally defined, so that it can sometimes be expanded. The very concept and sense of what soul is needs not to be limited, because if the very sense and concept of soul becomes itself caught up as an object in the soulmaking dynamic, the meaning of it, the sense of it, the concept of it for us will expand. So I can't tie down too tightly the definition of what soul is.

In this kind of experience that opened up in the middle of the night, sitting up in bed, meditating, my soul is not something other than what I experience. It's not something other than. My life, its experiences, and my death is not something other than the temporal duration that is given to me between birth and death, and all of that is my soul, and all of it is theophany, because that's what the soul is. And none of it is separate from the divine, because that's also what soul is when it's sensed with soul. Whose soul? God's soul. My soul and God's soul, Buddha-nature's soul. So not separate from the divine -- both universally, in those kind of ways that we talk about with emptiness practices and non-fabricating practices, but also this life that I have, and this temporal duration, and these experiences I undergo, and my stories, and my narratives, and my death, is not separate from the divinity, is the divine in some sense, or participates in the divine, in and through all the particulars of my personhood, of your personhood, my choices, your choices.

[1:02:03] So there's that divinity of the universal. There's the divinity of the personal and the particular. We've dwelt a lot on that in some of the last retreats. As we said, the imaginal perception, the sensing with soul, preserves particulars and persons as soul and as rooted in the divine, and actually will create and discover more and more facets of persons, and more and more particulars of persons and of beloved objects.

Being, then, that my soul and whatever duration is given to me between birth and death is theophany -- that is my soul, and that is theophany, and that's not separate from the divine, and that participates in the divine -- with all of that, there's a kind of perfection implicit there, even if that time duration is short, even if there's all this difficulty there. Perfection is implicit in a sense of divinity. But 'perfection' and 'this or that being perfect' may not look like what we typically think perfection looks like. And, of course, with all that, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's going to happen.

So we said earlier that there's something, we could say, that is given to us. But it still needs my assent, my will, my soulmaking orientation, tuning and intention, my participation. This is a different approach to dukkha than just regarding things as impermanent -- my life is impermanent, health is impermanent, whatever -- as valid as that can be at times as a way of looking at dukkha, as a way of bringing some relief from dukkha. Nor is it only saying and adopting, "It's just empty." It's different from that viewpoint as well. Nor is it saying, "It's just dukkha. What'd you expect? Life is dukkha, or life involves dukkha, however you want to interpret the First Noble Truth. This is our existential situation. Deal with it. Face it. There's going to be tragedy," again, valid as that can be at times for some people. Nor is this approach saying, "Just accept." So because of this sense of perfection that I'm talking about, or gift or grace, it doesn't mean "just accept." Personally, I deliberately seek out all kinds of treatment. I'm willing to put up with a lot of unpleasantness that treatments cause as well. So it's not just "accept." Again, sometimes that's a perfectly appropriate and perfectly skilful response to some kinds of dukkha.

So this whole mode of practice is not just a matter of just accepting, nor is it a prioritizing of the attitude of accepting as some kind of finality. Acceptance has to be there at the beginning, in terms of connecting with one's dukkha and opening to it and feeling it. If I'm in denial about it, or if I just refuse it, or if I'm fighting it, then I can't even connect with it enough for that crucible to be formed or heated up, for the alchemy to happen. I think what I'm trying to point out now is, I'm certainly not trying to point to a path of, "Oh, just accept," and that's the final delivery of a soulmaking practice or a sensing with soul of some dukkha, that it just enables us to accept things at a deeper level, always that's what it gives us, that's where it goes.

I think it was on the Poetry of Perception retreat, the Re-enchanting the Cosmos, that someone asked in a Q & A, if I remember, about the perception of sacredness in plastic things or in the unpleasant also.^[2] I can't quite remember what I said there. Another person wrote me a note, again, which I only had time to write a note back to, but I thought the question was very important. Someone was saying that they care very deeply about the earth, about the environment, and about society, and struggled living in a city and moving around all day and seeing so many cars, and so many cars driven by just one person, etc., and so much pollution, and smelling the pollution, and knowing even when she can't smell it that the cars are releasing carbon dioxide and other pollutants. The question was something like, "I've tried to practise imaginally with that. I've tried to see the cars as kind of big, cute animals," or something like that. It was really an earnest question. She said that didn't really work. There was a real earnest questioning in there.

So in relation to this whole question about acceptance, and do soulmaking practices, do imaginal practices, just issue in a kind of depth of acceptance -- is that where it's always going? The short answer is no. But sometimes what can happen is, if we talk about the unpleasant right now (which may be the physically unpleasant, the physically painful, actual painful situations, or something else that's unpleasant, even the sight of plastic or whatever), sometimes with enough practice of emptiness -- and it may be emptiness of sensation, of unpleasantness itself, or of some kind of perception in any of the sense doors -- sometimes with enough realization or sense, practical sense, felt sense, perception of the emptiness of whatever is unpleasant, in the moment, in practice, that can automatically sometimes -- if it goes really, really deep -- there's a kind of sacredness that we perceive there.

Or what can happen is that, again, either the unpleasantness itself is actually malleable. In other words, what is unpleasant can be transformed. When we understand its emptiness enough, oftentimes -- not always -- oftentimes [it can be] transformed into the pleasant. So this pain in my back, this pain in my knee, whatever it is, with skill in emptiness practice, and also with jhāna practice understood the right way (we understand jhānas are a training in perception), because perceptions are empty they're actually malleable, including the perception of vedanā (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral). I'm pretty sure I've talked -- I've certainly written about this elsewhere, but I think I've talked about it somewhere or other.

But they're also malleable in the sense I described earlier in this talk, that there's a kind of liquidity [that] comes in, so the sensing with soul is possible because things have been made liquid, to borrow the alchemical metaphor. In that, even the unpleasant, even if it stays unpleasant, can be sensed as sacred, and with that, accepted. Or it becomes easier to accept then, whatever the unpleasant is there.

[1:11:27] But there's also, I feel, really a necessary place, important to point out, a place that there's also the requirement that we see, or ask at least, what these things -- if we're talking about pollution, too many cars, too much plastic, whatever it is -- see and ask what these things are asking of us. What are we called to, in action, in voice, or whatever? What are we called to, to redeem them? Again, I've shared in the past this Kabbalistic notion of tikkun olam, 'the healing of the world' or 'the restoration of the world.' Sometimes the level of healing is the healing of the perception of the world. Again in relation to my illness, it's like birds are weaving their birdsong, weaving a healing in my energy body, magically changing and transforming the flow of energy in the energy body, stitching my body with their melodies. And not knowing, of course: does that have any physically measurable effect on my illness? But the healing there is a healing of perception of self, of body, of world, of birdsong, of existence, of cosmos. So there may be a tikkun olam, a healing of the world, on that level of the healing of our perception of the world, out of the flatland of being sensed without soul, and its dimensionality opened up, its beauty, its mystery and all that, in the ways that we're talking about in all these teachings.

But it may also be that these things, these ugly things, these harmful things or these unpleasant things, difficult things, also ask us, or we are being asked, to change them, or to work towards changing them, to work towards changing the world, transforming society in some way or other. Again, implicit in that is not just an acceptance. It might mean some kind of sacrifice in our life, some kind of hard work for the sake of beauty, for the sake of justice, for the sake of goodness. It might mean, in that, that we have to let go of a certain amount of comfort, a certain amount of convenience, a certain amount of pleasure that we have access to in our lives, a certain amount of security. That may be part of what is being asked of us, part of what we might say is a calling for us. So in all that, in what is being asked of us, we might be stretched spiritually, or the soul might be stretched. And then, again, if that's seen also with soul, then our very stretching, our very being stretched, can be seen as part of, as I said, the soulmaking of God, God's soulmaking process, the divine or a divinity's soulmaking process, or the Buddha-nature's soulmaking.

So with all this talk about a sense of the perfection of everything, and the gift of things, and grace, etc., and the sensing with soul, and how that opens those kinds of sensibilities and perceptions, it's not simply that we're talking about moving towards a kind of blanket view of 'all is perfect, all is divine just as it is.' There are different possibilities here. Sometimes that's what happens. Other times we're actually asked for an engagement that comes at cost and risk in our lives, in our material lives, in our relationships, in our status.

Sometimes what happens in relation to a dukkha, what is unpleasant, is a healing image constellates in relation to that difficulty. So an example would be that birdsong. Again, anyone would have heard the birds singing outside, but the sensing them with soul, they became image -- in this case, healing image in relationship to this dukkha, unpleasantness, difficulty. That could happen in any way: Avalokiteśvara coming, or Jesus coming, whatever, or you even bringing Jesus there, or whatever the healing image is, in relationship to the difficulty. And because of the imaginal and the way the imaginal fire, if you like, catches, then if it's Jesus or Avalokiteśvara, they're already a kind of divinity, there's already the sacredness there, and that sacredness begins to spread to the difficulty, so in the pervasion and the expansion of the soulmaking that, too, is perceived as sacred.

Sometimes what needs to happen is an image arises that's not so much an obvious healing image, but may be more something like a kind of warrior image that I talked about, whether it's solitary or it's being part of a whole army or clan or group of warriors, or whatever it is. So perhaps for that person who wrote me the note regarding the cars and the pollution, and her soul pain around that, rather than trying to see the cars as enchanted, beautiful images, and I kind of take away the dukkha by seeing them as kind of big, cute animals sort of slouching along the street, it might be that the self-image is actually more appropriately transformed, expanded, deepened into perhaps some kind of warrior image. And then the question is, how does that translate into life? What's the duty to that image? What's the echoing in the life of that image? What's the mirroring?

So maybe self, maybe other, world, the eros itself, they can become imaginally infused in the constellation around the dukkha. Then what we have is -- if that does move over into our life, in terms of actually doing something, actually responding, whichever way that is, whether it might be a more strong standing up, or civil disobedience, or creating other kinds of structures, or a healing response of different kind of tonality -- action, voice, commitment, and image may all be involved, and they're all related. So in, or as partial response to this question, "What is this dukkha, what is this difficulty, what is this ugliness, what is this unpleasantness calling me to?" -- sometimes we can ask that question, as I said before -- a healing image in relationship to it might be a partial response to that. A warrior kind of image in relation to it may be a partial response.

[1:20:59] Another way of saying what we're just saying is soulmaking in general, and soulmaking with respect or in relationship to some dukkha, extends far beyond just intrapsychic images. Sometimes it's just an intrapsychic image in relation to some dukkha that comes up, and all it needs is some kind of reverence and recognition of the holiness of that image, and there's almost no visible or sensible echo in the life that anyone else might discern at all. Sometimes that's the case. But oftentimes, soulmaking and the soulmaking response, or the soul's response to dukkha, goes way beyond just the intrapsychic, the confines of the intrapsychic.

So this is not simple, then, necessarily. And it's not that we can approach it, as I said, in a contrived way, with some kind of formulaic approach. We need discernment, and that needs a careful kind of listening, a careful kind of attunement, responsiveness, sensitivity. It involves both our receptivity and our activity, our proactiveness. And really all that -- discernment, listening, responsiveness, action, receptivity -- all that is in the service of kind of an inquiry: "Is it possible that there can be discovered or created, or created/discovered here, an image, an imaginal image, that is soulmaking? Can this be sensed with soul?", to whatever the dukkha is.

I shared that situation of a person who felt the dukkha of what she regarded as a lot of papañca stirred up by seeing this particular artwork, and then having this column to write, and the social situation she was in. She regarded it as papañca and a kind of manic energy. But it may be that there's something there that can be discovered, kind of buried in all that, that's actually potentially imaginal. And connecting with that, practising with it in all the ways we've talked about with the sensitivity, the receptivity to the energy body, etc., tuning to it, allows the imaginal to blossom, really, and then changes the whole relationship with those set of circumstances in the life, or changes also the inner movement, the inner relationship that was perceived as suffering. As we said, that discovery or creation of an image that is soulmaking in relation to or in the dukkha may not be what a certain (if we might say) ego-level of us wants. It may not be the outcome that would be most obviously what everyone might deem freedom from dukkha.

So we could make some distinctions, obviously, between (1) an image, for example, of a situation that we believe 'this is how things really are,' and we call that a fixation, or a papañca image, or something like that, or a fixated image. So here's this dukkha, or here's this situation or social situation or ourselves, and we're just lost in an image that we're taking as real, as true, as 'this is how things are.' So there's that kind of thing that every human being knows. (2) And then as Dharma practitioners, we also know the possibility of an image or a story or a fantasy whose presence in the consciousness and whose believability we are mindful of. In other words, I realize now that there's this fantasy going on, there's this image going on. And that mindfulness of the image allows less identification with it. We're less lost in it, less believing it to be true: "Ah, I see what's going on. My mind has got this interpretation through this image, and I can really feel the tendency to believe that's true," but with enough mindfulness we just see that, and we're not so sucked into it. There's some distance to doubt its complete veracity. So we could call that mindful observation of image or of what the imagination is doing.

(3) Then, of course, there's the third possibility, which is what all these teachings are emphasizing and drawing out and exploring and expanding: an image that has become imaginal (in the sense that we have outlined, and the sense that we mean it), or that we have entered as an imaginal image. When that's the case, naturally we don't sense it as either real or not real. There's the imaginal Middle Way as part of the imaginal constellation when it's imaginal. It's theatre. It's the kind of Middle Way that we talked about. So because of that, we're less lost in it, less believing it flatly, less identified and less reifying. All this should be obvious.

But the point I want to make in this context is that both the second and the third of those options, the sort of mindfulness of image or mindfulness of what imagination is doing and what the mind is doing in regard to its tendency to believe an image -- that option, the second option, is freeing to a certain extent. But just as freeing is allowing something to become more imaginal. The mindfulness kind of keeps it at bay: "Ah, I see that image is there, but it's just kind of over there. I see the tendency for me to get sucked into it, but I'm kind of keeping it at arm's length a little bit mindfully. So I'm not getting so sucked into it."

The third option of actually entering more fully into the imaginal, and letting it become more imaginal, is just as freeing with respect to whatever image is there. The difference, though, of course, is that in entering more fully the imaginal and allowing something to become more image, the image is empowered, whereas being mindful of what's in the imagination and the tendencies around it disempowers it. There's also a kind of dynamic quality, based on everything we're saying, the soulmaking dynamic quality that's possible in the last option. It still involves mindfulness, but it's a mindful entering in, and all that receptivity and sensitivity. The second option of just a kind of mindful observation and a resisting of what's happening in the imagination, the image that's happening in the imagination, is a bit more static, so you don't really get what's helpful in the image, what was the gift. The image was pregnant with a gift, and we don't really get that until we enter into the imaginal, until we allow it to become fully imaginal. That's maybe a better way of saying it.

So it's calling us. If we enter into a wrong relationship with it, it will bring more papañca and more dukkha, etc. But it's also pregnant with a treasure, with a gift. If we can allow that relationship to become fully imaginal, fully soulmaking in the way that we've been outlining, then there's a whole other dimension and range of gifts that we receive there. Sometimes the question is, "Is there an image here that needs liberating?" Don't know if so much a question as more just a subtle background attitude and style of approaching. Oftentimes within the dukkha there's an image, an imaginal image that's, so to speak, buried there, and the liberation of it, the realization of it, the entering into and exploration of it, the filling out of it, the blossoming of it, the liberating of the image that's buried there liberates us, or liberates that dukkha. It liberates us from that dukkha. Again, it's not that sensing with soul means seeing the situation differently, or going away from the situation, or turning away from it. Sometimes even that has, as the Buddha pointed out, there's skilful avoidance. But this sensing with soul that we're talking about now has more to do with the situation is not different. It's the same situation. It's just sensed with soul. We're not running away. We're entering into and opening out.