Dukkha and Soulmaking (Part 7)

We've been talking in the last few parts of this talk about the ways and some of what's involved in how the imaginal or sensing with soul frees us from dukkha, or relieves dukkha, dissolves dukkha, drains the dukkha out of a certain situation or thing that's happening. And I hope, again, that you have felt and experienced that for yourself in your practices with the imaginal. One begins to get a sense, a palpable felt sense and conviction, of not just the fact that sensing with soul can at times reduce dukkha (or that's often one of the results, if you like, or issues from it), but we begin to get a kind of sense and a conviction of the necessity of the imaginal dimension, the necessity of sensing with soul, the necessity for the soul of sensing with soul, but also the necessity for our well-being, and the necessity in terms of a relief from suffering, or rather, just the prevention of suffering by, if you like, ensuring that the imaginal realm is open to us and accessible by practising sensing with soul, by having that facility and that access.

So sometimes we see that some dukkha is locked into place when there is not the access to the imaginal dimension, when there isn't that facility and flexibility. Sometimes we even sense that dukkha arises when there is the absence of the imaginal dimension, when that door is shut, that that very shutting of that door, the absence, allows a certain dukkha to arise. And also in relationship. So sometimes we're with someone in some kind of relationship, could be any kind of relationship, and in that moment, perhaps (or perhaps longer, in the stretch of the relationship), we sense that they are seeing us, but they're seeing us in a kind of flatly human way. They're not seeing more than our flatly human dimension. And in that, we can feel like this person has missed us. They've missed, actually, our personhood, the fullness of our personhood, because they've not seen the soul dimension. They've not kind of acknowledged that. They're not sensing us with soul. They've missed us, missed our personhood, missed the fullness of it and the fullness of our humanity.

So it's not that soul is one thing and human is something else. The fully human, I would say, embraces or includes the soul dimension. Of course it does. They're not really different at all. But we can feel the pain and the dukkha of not being seen, of being missed, when the soul dimension is missed in the way that we are being looked at, perceived. And conversely, sometimes it's exactly being seen imaginally by another, being sensed with soul, it's that that heals, or begins healing, or contributes to healing, as much as and sometimes more than another level of being seen.

Sometimes someone sees us through a way of looking that, though it's trying to give love and compassion or encouragement or protection to some aspect or feeling or character within us, mixed up with that is a reification. And it's reifying that very part that it wants to give compassion to, or love, encouragement, protection, whatever. It's reifying that, and perhaps it's shrinking us to that. There is, then, the absence of the imaginal. There is not the Middle Way. Something is being reified. And if it's shrinking us, then there is not the concertina, and there's certainly not the imaginal concertina, the sense of "I have, you have, a whole concertina," as we described when we went through the list of the elements, the aspects of the imaginal. You are a whole concertina of available images. Actually, that concertina is infinite. One senses that, so that one isn't selecting just one or two and reifying them. They're all theatre, and they're all available.

Sometimes we're looked at in this way. There's all the good intention of love and compassion, and wanting to protect us or encourage something, but something there is not imaginal. It's reifying, and perhaps it's shrinking us to that. It's gone out of fashion now, but that kind of inner child work that was quite popular in psychotherapeutic circles (probably still is, in some streams of psychotherapy), and even when someone recognizes or is talking to that child part, with a lot of love and compassion, and recognizing "this is a child part, or this is a young part, or this is a vulnerable part," and even they might think and communicate, "I know you're also an adult, and you're also strong, and you're also capable," even then, when they still have the "this is only part of you," and despite the intention of the healing, there's something that doesn't quite do the trick there sometimes, because the soul is not seen. There's reification, and oftentimes a kind of narrowing. At least, there's not the imaginal concertina. Let's put it that way.

And in that, we feel unseen. Or if we're looking that way at someone else, they feel unseen. So certainly some aspect feels seen. They feel like some part is being seen and acknowledged, and perhaps they're appreciative of that. But also a person can feel like something is not seen, and it's frustrating. And what is seen is seen in a way that lacks the full power of the healing potential, the full power of that kind of magic that can be communicated, and the healing that can come with that, and the freeing and the kind of liberation that can come with that when the imaginal is opened, when there's sensing with soul. It lacks power because it's reified and because it's flat. There's a flatland view, flat person view, flat human view.

I don't know if you recognize what I'm talking about here in your experience, or you might feel it in the way that you have sometimes looked on another, a friend or whoever. Sometimes we are being, in these times, if we feel we're on the receiving end of this, we're being somehow approached through too narrow and too rigidly held a paradigm, a psychological paradigm, psychological conceptual framework -- one that doesn't recognize the daimon, doesn't see the daimon there. So there's some compassion, but it's not actually as full and multidimensional and rich and kind of multifaceted as it could be. It's somehow too solid sometimes.

Sometimes we feel, or the other person feels, if we're looking at them this way, in this, from a soul-perspective, a kind of incomplete way, in a truncated way -- you know, we've cut off certain dimensions. Sometimes a person says, "I want that holiness in my suffering, I want the holiness in my weirdness, I want the holiness in my pathology to be seen, to be even celebrated, to be revered. Yes, I know there's dukkha in that. Yes, I know I'm not completely clear about that, and I know there are other parts too. But there's something I want you to be seeing. I want to be seen here. I want the soul to be seen -- even that aspect, that daimon, that has with it its arrogance or whatever. I want you to see the soul of that, the soulfulness of that. Yes, I know it's problematic. Yes, I know it has its problems socially or whatever." A person says, "I want to see," "I want you to see." They want us to see the daimon's struggle as well, the daimon's brilliance, the daimon's beauty, whatever it is, to be seen, celebrated, even revered. Remember, reverence is part of the imaginal perception, the constellation of the imaginal perceiving. But the seeing, the celebrating, this reverence, this revering, is not reified. It's not a reification, because it's imaginal. It's the imaginal Middle Way. It's got that theatre aspect to it.

So we're going a stage further and actually pointing out the suffering of the neglect of the imaginal dimension, the suffering, the dukkha that ensues and is kind of locked into place, perhaps, when we don't sense with soul, or when we are not sensed with soul in relationship, when a relationship isn't that full. I think I've said before (and I can't remember what retreat it was; perhaps Of Hermits and Lovers): I realize that depression is a complicated business, and there's not one kind of depression for human beings. But I would say that some kinds of depression, or some periods of depression, actually are instances of, or we could say are caused by (and then, of course, like all these things, they kind of loop around; they get into a kind of stuck place), but they're actually caused by a lack of eros, a cutting off of eros, an inhibition, a disconnection from eros and of soulmaking.^[1] Nothing is alive as imaginal, as fantasy in the good sense. Everything is flat, and the soul is deprived of its fire, if we want to use a fire image, or it's deprived of its juice, its juiciness, its moisture, its water. The flatness leads to depression. The soulmaking dynamic is arrested, is ground to a halt. It's inhibited. It's restricted. Eros is not opening and penetrating. There's not the dynamic there, and there's a depression.

[12:51] Again, I hope you can recognize what I'm pointing to here in your life and in your practice. If not, again, this is one of those aspects I feel it would be really worth considering, reflecting with this idea, on your experience, on your past, on your history, and very lightly perhaps even on the history and the past or the situation of a friend or someone you know. Because it's through reflection, through actually bringing alive these ideas in your own consciousness, in your own reflection, in your mind, that they kind of go deeper, and things start to connect in your understanding, in the logos. I think I said at one point -- if I haven't said already, I really want you guys to get the taste of all this, the taste of soulmaking, which means experiencing it for yourself. I also want you to get the idea of it. Do you get the idea? And 'getting the idea' means also really digesting and utilizing, and making active and making your own, the conceptual framework. Then you could actually build it or build onto it or whatever. But that together. The logos is part of the whole soulmaking dynamic, so getting the taste and getting the idea.

I'm pointing to, right now, the necessity for us of sensing with soul, of soulmaking, of imaginally perceiving, perceiving imaginally, in order to decrease suffering at times, relieve suffering at times (or certain kinds of suffering, certainly). And in order that certain kinds of suffering don't arise, we need that kind of mode of being or those kinds of mode of being that we call soulmaking and sensing with soul.

And, to add to that, I want to touch on, again, something I have mentioned before somewhere or other, perhaps in the Re-enchanting the Cosmos retreat. You will notice, again, as your soulmaking progresses, let's say, or as you get more into this, let's say, there will arise, when the soulmaking starts to go deep, and starts to really get rich, and in the nooks and crannies and in the soil of our being, and that soil is turned and tilled and worked, and made moist, and planted with seeds in the soulmaking process, and the soulmaking increases and expands, and deepens and enriches, and all that -- there is, in that process, the re-enchantment of our dukkha, which we talked about, I'm pretty sure, in the Re-enchanting retreat. Both Catherine and I talked about it. So important. So, so important. We've touched on it already in this series.

And then, as that builds, the re-enchantment of the dukkha, there is, with the soulmaking dynamic sort of taking up the dukkha itself as an erotic object, re-enchants it, and then there is the perception that emerges and the idea that emerges -- so both, if you like, the image and the logos -- of my dukkha, this dukkha right now, being somehow necessary to God. Somehow this suffering, in some kind of not fully explicable way, is necessary to God, necessary to the Buddha-nature, necessary to divinity. It's a perception and a conception that arises organically, I would say. Something like that perception or conception arises, organically and inevitably, with the deepening of the soulmaking process and the soulmaking dynamic.

I talked, I think, in one retreat, about the Kabbalistic notion of 'the need on high' -- in other words, God's need, the divine's need, however you want to put it, the need of the Buddha-nature. But that need is in and through the particular -- the particular events, currents, elements of my existence, your existence, of one's life and one's unique personhood. So the divine need is not just some abstract, universal thing, nor is the divine just this (as we've mentioned many times) universal essence of some kind, by virtue of which there is a kind of equality of what looks ostensibly different: "This particular and that particular, they're all one because they're all of the same essence or divine essence or substance."

There is that view and the importance of that view. We've touched on this before. But this need on high that we're talking about now, this perception of a need on high, and the sensing of the divine and the divine's need in and through the particular -- my particulars, the particulars of my personhood, my journey, my life, my story, my dukkha, the elements of my existence. That means my thinking, my intelligence, my emotion, my sensitivity, my body, my this sense door, my that sense door, all of that, my perceiving. That's only possible when the particular is sensed in an imaginal way, this dukkha or that. Then it kind of rises to another level where it's not just sensed as image, but in and through, or as the sensing it as image expands, the sensing it with soul expands, enriches even deeper, then it's sensed as part of the need on high. It's necessary to God in some strange way, this very difficulty. It's a kind of amplification and a deepening of the re-enchantment of the dukkha. But the suffering, or the element that I'm talking about, has to be alive as an image for us that is soulmaking in order for that to take place. It's like that being alive as image is a first step that allows the perception of a particular as necessary to God.

[20:15] And it's not even only just dukkha. It's my particular way of thinking, or my particular way of perceiving, sometimes when it's a very particular kind of sensibility or aesthetic, or way of feeling beauty, or a particular relationship with one of the elements or a particular sense door or whatever. It's unique to me somehow, part of my personality. And the dukkha. Whatever it is becomes image first, and then the sense of it can become, "It's necessary to God." Sometimes, it's true, this idea of the necessity to God of our particular difficulty, or some particular element of my psyche, or the way my mind works, or something in my body, that idea that you're hearing now, and maybe you've heard before, might then function as a kind of seed or spark to trigger image. We've talked about this before. It's almost like a poetic idea or a kind of logos that, if you like, goes into the mix, is taken up by soulmaking, and sparks a kind of imaginal seeing of that very element or of a particular element.

So it can also work the other way round, or it can even work that the two happen together, the re-enchanting of the dukkha or the seeing a particular as image (any particular), and the seeing it, the sensing it, the knowing it as necessary to God, the entertaining of the conception that this particular, or this particular dukkha of mine, is necessary to God. So sometimes they can even occur simultaneously. Really any order, actually. And in a way, you could say there's a kind of mutual dependent arising there. The sensing imaginally of a particular, an event, a trajectory of one's life, an element of one's existence, a particular dukkha that's there on the one hand, and the sensing of its necessity to God -- we could say those two are dependent co-arising facets of a single complex shift or quantum leap of perception, of relationship and way of looking, rather than two shifts and one causes the other. I mean, it can occur that way, or they can just be regarded as mutual dependent arisings.

Sorry about that; I think I can say that a little clearer. The sense, the perception, the conception of any particular event, or element of one's being, or narrative in one's life, or one's particular, unique personhood, the sense of any of that as necessary to God -- that sense, that perception, that conception, will usually arise on the basis of already perceiving that particular imaginally, sensing it with soul. So with that as a basis, then as it fertilizes more, there's this kind of fuller level of perception of its necessity to God.

So usually the causality is that way round: imaginal perception first of this particular, and then that particular sensed as necessary to God. Sometimes the causality works the other way round, of course, so we have this idea of something being necessary to God, and that idea we might hear or read or something, functions as a seed, a stimulus, to open up the perception so that we can perceive something or other, some or other particular, perceive it imaginally, sense it with soul. And then the third possibility is that both of them arise together; they occur simultaneously. We're really talking about one organic movement of soulmaking that affects the perception and the conception. But the usual kind of direction of causality is the imaginal perception first, the sensing with soul of this particular dukkha, this difficulty, this story, this current of being, this element of my existence, of my mind, of my body, of my psyche, perceiving that imaginally first. And then, through that imaginal perception fertilizing and enriching more, then the sensing of it as necessary to God, the conceiving of it as necessary to God. That's probably the most common order of causality.

I talked about, too, in the past, in several retreats, about the Kabbalistic notion of tikkun olam. I think I mentioned it on this course as well. The healing of the world, or the restoration of the world. In that Kabbalistic idea, it's a kind of archetypal, cosmic psychological and philosophical metaphor. The tikkun olam is actually a whole movement. It includes the very alienation, or destruction, or chaos, or fragmentation (or something like that), that asks for a redeeming, a tikkun, a restoration. So actually, in the bigger picture, the whole thing -- the very difficulty; and then the soulmaking with respect to that dukkha or difficulty; and then what we do, what emerges either through duty and emerges in action or voice, or just as a shift of perception, a way of looking, a re-enchanting, a healing of the world and of existence, of being, of life and death, through the ways that we can now perceive it and conceive of it. That whole thing -- the alienation, the destruction, the fragmentation, the difficulty, the soulmaking process in regard to that, and what emerges, what is the fruit or the issue of that soulmaking process, whether it emerges in concretized action and voice, or just, so to speak, in the modes of being, conceiving, and perceiving -- all of that is the tikkun olam. All of that is this mystical movement that we find ourselves going through and engaging in, being inevitably drawn into in our life, and having to deal with or called to deal with. And it's also the movement of the divine. It's a cosmic archetype.

[28:10] Now, you know, again, I really want to repeat: I cannot, and you cannot, and you should not -- please -- foist this kind of idea on anyone, or try and convince anyone of this. It emerges, this kind of idea of the necessity to God of this whole movement of dukkha, soulmaking in relation to the dukkha, and then what comes out of that. That idea emerges as an idea, or as a perception, or both, actually, with a degree of soulmaking. When we can relate to our dukkha in the right way, through connecting with it, through the honesty, through the humility, and then beginning to sense it with soul, it becomes image. Our dukkha becomes imaginal or is imaginally perceived. We imaginally perceive our dukkha. We see it, we sense it with soul. The dukkha is re-enchanted. And also our eros -- the very same thing. Again, the eros, we've talked about this many times: the eros becomes an erotic-imaginal object to ourselves. Our very eros is re-enchanted, given dimensionality. And our very process of soulmaking -- all these, our dukkha, our eros, our soulmaking, they all become re-enchanted. They're all sensed with soul. And in that, in the kind of dynamic of that, over time, at some point, they too are perceived as somehow divine, somehow rooted in the divine, somehow not separate from divinity.

We sense, perceive, and conceive that through our dukkha, through our eros, and through our soulmaking, we are participating, in and through the particulars of our life, including the particular difficulties and struggles and challenges, we are participating in the divine in and through those particulars. And, at the same time, the divine is participating, in and through those particulars, in us. The divine is participating in us. Divinity is participating in us. Divinity is being made and created in us. This is necessary to God, necessary to the Buddha-nature.

For some, these may sound like very strange ideas. But as I said, I think there's a kind of inevitability here, perhaps, to these kinds of perceptions. They're not rigid, ultimate truths. They're perspectives. They're soulmaking perceptions, they're conceptions that one can eventually move in and out of, or one finds oneself moving in and out of -- both. Some of you will recognize something in all this that's a little bit parallel or has analogies to the philosophy of Hegel, if you're familiar with that kind of thing. I only recognized this recently. I wasn't that familiar with his ideas at all before. I started to realize, "Oh, there's a kind of parallel, it seems, in what he was trying to get at and what's emerged in the soulmaking logos." It is slightly different. Well, there are many differences. But if you listen to this quote from his Phenomenology of Spirit. It's a very famous book that he wrote. I have to explain something first: for him, the kind of, if you like, central principle or goal or movement of evolution of the whole of existence, really, was towards what he called 'spirit,' or 'rational being,' or 'spiritual, rational being.' I can't and I also don't want to right now explain quite what he meant by that, but I'll quote him, and then we'll substitute 'soul' for what he says.

So he said,

[Spiritual, rational being demands] the seriousness, the anguish, the patience, and the labour of the negative.^[2]

As I said, there are parallels here, a little bit interesting, in what we're creating and discovering as a soulmaking logos, and some of the way Hegel was thinking. So if we substitute 'soul' for whatever he means by 'spiritual, rational being' (which is more than it probably sounds at first): "Soul, soulmaking, demands the seriousness, the anguish, the patience, and the labour of the negative." So again, there's a necessity there to soul of our dukkha.

And again, really, I absolutely don't want to communicate a dogma, or "this is a religious belief," or something like that. It's rather, as I said, that I just want to point out the probable inevitability of such a view emerging, such a sense, perception, and conception. And also, turning it around a little bit, we could say, alternatively, that this view or concept supports soulmaking. So if we have that conception of the possibility of the re-enchantment of dukkha, and the possibility of sensing it with soul, and the possibility of it being somehow necessary to the divine in ways that we can't even quite fathom or completely, neatly articulate, there's a conceptual seed there, if you like, that just functions as a possibility. And that shifts or introduces -- as a concept, it introduces or it's supportive of soulmaking, and it introduces the possibility of seeing and sensing in certain ways. As we've pointed out before, it therefore becomes valuable and valid. It's valid not so much as a scientifically provable truth, or some kind of religious dogma or credo. It's valid because it's valuable -- in other words, because the idea supports soulmaking, or can support soulmaking. We can choose to entertain such a view without necessarily believing it as 'true.' This, again, to me, is one of the great gifts of the soulmaking movement and paradigm.

Just lingering with Hegel, he wrote a lot about Christianity as well. In the time he was living in, that was the sort of paradigm everyone was in. And for him, God didn't choose to create the world and create something that wasn't God, so to speak. Nor was it just simply like everything was of the substance of God. It was more that, in Hegel's thinking and his philosophy, it was more that God needed to, God had to, create the world, and create what looked or what might have seemed as not divine in order for God's own fulfilment. So God needed, for, if you like, God's own soulmaking, to create the world, what seemed to be outside of the divine, and create it with difficulty, with resistance, with finitude, in order to realize his/her/its own personhood, to become what it, in essence, really could be.

In other words, the model there was the sort of Bildungsroman, the romantic novel of someone who faces a lot of, encounters a lot of struggles and a lot of antagonisms, and that builds their personhood, if you like; it makes them who they are. They're shaped by their struggles and by encountering adversity, etc. So the self at the beginning is kind of not a full and rich personhood until it goes through that encounter and all those difficulties, and works those difficulties in the ways that it can. So the encounter with the world, and the antagonism of the world, and the difficulty of the world. That personhood, whether it's humanly conceived or the personhood of the divine or a divine, if you like, only emerges or only is created or discovered "in and through the struggle with, and the ultimate victory over and appropriation of, the initially alien."^[3] I'm paraphrasing a writer called Cyril O'Regan who wrote a very interesting book about Hegel and his religious thought.

He goes on to say, "For Hegel ... personhood, even divine personhood, is only narratively possible." And that narrative has to include suffering, and the encounter with suffering, and the working through of alienation, and difficulty, and fragmentation, and destruction. So the idea of a divine that doesn't suffer was really not attractive to Hegel. The apathetic divine, the non-suffering divine, wasn't something that -- for him, it didn't qualify as a divine. A divine that doesn't suffer is not worthy of the name 'divine' in this whole understanding of things. And if I borrow it and make the connections, it's like, again, our suffering, in and through my journey, your journey, my particulars, the particular elements both of my joys and my particular ways and styles of existence, and my dukkha and the way that becomes soul -- this is part of, if you like, the narrative of God. And it's necessary to God, to the divine, to the Buddha-nature, for its own fulfilment, its own coming into full being.

[41:08] So the goal, so to speak, or the -- this is a teleological process; we've talked about this before. The causality is kind of in the future. There's something being pulled towards this fullness of soulmaking. But in our paradigm, unlike Hegel's, soulmaking has no end. It potentially has no end. So the point of all this is soulmaking. And that can be regarded as the soulmaking of the divine. The soulmaking that, if you like, my soul goes through, creates/discovers, is a part of the soulmaking of the divine. Again, it's a perception or a conception or a conceptual framework that arises out of experience -- or that can arise out of experience; I don't mean to insist on it as a belief. I think I traced the, or an attempt at the sort of phenomenology of soulmaking, how divinity and this whole kind of perception and conception can arise, inevitably, even, as one just works with the soulmaking.

In this, what we could call the path of soulmaking, the logos that we have in relation to dukkha, in relation to suffering, is not primarily to explain why we suffer or furnish reasons for our dukkha. Sometimes that's the way, as human beings -- we want to know why. But sometimes explaining suffering or giving reasons for it doesn't do much for us. What would an answer for 'why' give me? It may be that a 'why*,'* why there is dukkha, maybe if I'm blaming myself for it, and there's some kind of other reason given that doesn't point the blame of causality on myself, then perhaps I can blame myself less, so there's a point to ask that question, "Why?" It serves a purpose. But if an answer to the 'why' of suffering is just an answer, and it gives you no task that is meaningful, gives me no task or orientation that is meaningful, it hands me no struggle, then maybe that's a kind of soul-death.

In creating or discovering, or establishing, or thinking about a logos, a conceptual framework around suffering or with regard to suffering, beginning to ask, "What place does suffering have? Or why does suffering arise?", these kinds of questions, we have to be careful what we're looking for, and what we get with certain kinds of answers. I remember some time ago -- I can't remember when it was; a few years ago -- I was invited to participate in a sort of dialogue with a rabbi in London, a sort of Buddhist/Jewish dialogue.^[4] Several people were involved, and they were suggesting sort of themes for the dialogue that he and I could chew over together from Buddhist and Jewish perspectives. It seemed that a lot of people were suggesting this question. I think it's called 'theodicy' in theology. It's like the concept or the explanation of why bad things happen, or why suffering arises, or what is the point, what is the place of suffering, or if God is good how come there is suffering -- that sort of thing. It seemed also when I got there and with the audience, if I remember, there were also several questions along that theme. For instance, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" That kind of question and, yeah, if I remember, I think it was even suggested as the main theme of the evening. Having grown up in a sort of Jewish religious environment, I recognized there's something -- particularly, I think, for some reason, it's quite a common question in Jewish circles.

I think someone asked in the audience, and I think I responded that we have to be careful with questions, because sometimes we can ask questions like 'why' -- "Why is this happening to me? Why am I suffering? Why?" -- and it sounds like a question because it's got the word 'why' in it. But actually, we're not really asking a question. We're just kind of complaining out loud or to ourselves. In Yiddish they say kvetching. Not a question. Kvetching means 'to complain.' In a Buddhist paradigm, one would explain suffering as the karma from kilesas, as the outflow from greed, hatred, and delusion. That viewpoint or that answer may give us some way of going forward in the present. In other words, it may give us a task, if we pick it up in the right way. As I said, it gives us then a struggle. My struggle, my task, then, is in relation to these kilesas, and what can I do then to purify, etc. So that very basic Buddhist answer gives us something of a framework around which to structure our practice and our intention, our aspiration, to purify and eventually not make karma, etc., in a sort of Buddhist vision.

[48:40] In the soulmaking paradigm or logos, the answer is for the service of soulmaking. An answer to the place of suffering, or the purpose of suffering, or the 'why' of suffering, or explaining it, or a reason for suffering -- we want the answer to be in the service of soulmaking. It should support and stimulate soulmaking. In other words, we want to adopt, entertain, engage conceptual frameworks, ways of looking, ideas that open, support, nourish, deepen soulmaking, increase soulmaking, with respect to and in relation to our dukkha. It's a different paradigm than just ending dukkha, and just finding some explanation: "Oh, okay, that's why there's suffering."

Those kind of conceptual frameworks that might support soulmaking, those kind of ideas, will involve the dukkha itself becoming image, being sensed with soul. And conversely, sensing our dukkha with soul, sensing it imaginally, will tend to expand and stretch and impregnate our concepts and conceptual frameworks, our logos. So if we open up the logos and the conceptual framework with certain ideas, then it's easier to sense the dukkha with soul, sense it imaginally. And sensing the dukkha imaginally, re-enchanting the dukkha, being able to sense it with soul -- our dukkha, this dukkha -- will, because of the soulmaking dynamic that we explained, with the eros-psyche-logos stretching, it will open up our ideas and eventually make available to us, accessible, concepts and ideas, conceptual frameworks, whole views or ideas about what the cosmos is and what existence is, that we can then move in and out, that we're called in and out of.

So that's one point for right now. And the second is, if we are thinking in terms of reasons and explanations around suffering, if the mind tends to go that way, why do we tend to think causally and in terms of temporal origins of beginnings? We tend to place the cause in the past. I've talked about this before, but I really think it's important. We're really not used to thinking in terms of telos: I am suffering right now because I'm called to something at which I've not yet arrived. I'm called to something I can only dimly work out. I'm called to something that's going to take some work and some reworking, and reframing, and turning upside down, inside out, and breaking, and stretching. There is suffering because of that. The suffering is in the service of this telos, rather than the suffering is a result of a cause in the past. It's such an unfashionable and rare way of conceiving now. As I pointed out, Hegel was fond of that kind of (what's called) teleological causality, teleological way of thinking. It's a very different way of looking at this dukkha going on now. We usually go back to the past. I'll come back to this. We immediately go back: "Well, it's caused by what happened to me when I was a child. It's caused by my family situation. It's caused by something intrauterine. It's caused by a past life. It's caused da-da-da ..." It's always past.

Maybe there's a whole other conception that we can entertain at times. Again, this really isn't dogmatic. I'm not suggesting replacing one so-called 'truth' with another so-called or so-claimed 'truth.' But it might be interesting to be able to kind of switch between, move in and out of these very different conceptions, almost polarly opposite conceptions of causality -- cause in the past, leading to the present; cause somehow, strangely, teleologically, in the future, so to speak, and explaining, if you like, my suffering now, this dukkha now. Again, it might arise through the practice, soulmaking practice, or it may be something -- what would it be to just play with this? Not as a replacement for always, but a very different view. Very different what then unfolds in the present moment, because, of course, we're bringing a different way of looking, because part of the way I'm looking is the concept, and part of conceptuality is causality. If the conception of causality is different, then the conception in the way of looking is different, the way of looking is different, and because of dependent arising, what unfolds is different. What is sensed in the moment is also different.

So then, practically, the question becomes, "What can be created and discovered through this dukkha when the logos gives it place and relationship to soul?" Now, it can still do that in the conception of causes in the past, temporal priority. But what if it was the other way around? What can be created/discovered through this dukkha when the logos gives it place and relationship to soul, the logos gives this dukkha a place? And gives it a place also potentially teleologically, though we may not exactly see clearly at all where it's headed. What limits do we place on what can be created/discovered through that? In other words, do we only discover that clinging and craving bring suffering -- hugely important to see -- or do we create and discover more than just that insight as well? It's a really important insight: fabrication, clinging and craving, bring suffering. Or is there more too? We create and discover more than that. Are we placing limits on what can be created and discovered through this dukkha? The telos is open. It's not so much an arrival point as a movement, an open-ended movement. The creation/discovery is possible through this very dukkha. It's potentially open-ended if we don't limit it.

[57:15] You can probably tell, or it may have occurred to you by now: all this brings up questions regarding the contextualization of the soulmaking logos, if you like, with respect to the Four Noble Truths. And wrapped up in that, it also brings up questions of the interpretation of the Four Noble Truths. I've talked about this before, I think, especially in those talks, "Questioning Awakening," "Buddhism Beyond Modernism," and "In Praise of Restlessness." Four Noble Truths -- everyone agrees on the Four Noble Truths. But what is dukkha? How are we regarding that? What is it exactly that we're addressing that's dukkha? And what does the Third Noble Truth, freedom from dukkha, look like? What exactly is involved in the Second Noble Truth, the arising and the causing of dukkha? Again, just listening to, say, the range of Gaia House teaching -- what a range there is! Everyone uses the language of 'Four Noble Truths,' and yet they're kind of just empty words that get filled with really very different meanings, and ranges and directions, and concerns and developments.

If we're talking about the Four Noble Truths, compare a sort of vision, if you like, where the Third Noble Truth, the freedom from dukkha, really means ending rebirth once and for all. Dukkha really means being caught up in this whole endless cycle of saṃsāra, of being reborn in different realms and worlds and circumstances, and all that pain. And ending all that with the ending of rebirth at arahantship is the priority, and is really the priority of the path. That's the whole gearing and conception. Everything in the path is aimed at heading towards that.

Compare that with a sort of probably more common version in our times, in modern times, of just the path as really primarily concerned with erasing and doing away with unnecessary suffering, and primarily doing that by simplifying the way the mind gets entangled in things, and makes things complex with all its ideas, and its relationships, and its selfing, and business like that. Just really draining out all that unnecessary suffering through simplification and letting go. Then that becomes the vision of the Third Noble Truth -- the vision of what we're addressing in the First Noble Truth, and the vision of the freedom from it. And the entanglement and complication of papañca, in that meaning of just the mind's kind of complicating things, is viewed as the Second Noble Truth. In a way, sometimes (I've alluded to this before) that kind of emphasis on simplifying is exactly, at times, in opposition to soulmaking, which enriches, gives more dimension, gives complexity, invites the complexity and fluidity of logos, etc., and also invites image, the imaginal, imagination, all that.

So in those two views or paradigms of the Four Noble Truths (ending rebirth as the priority, or this erasing unnecessary suffering, obliterating unnecessary suffering by simplifying one's mind and one's relationship with the world), in a way, there's no conscious, I would like to say, there's no conscious place or place in the logos for soulmaking. There's no place given, in the obvious articulation of either of those, for soulmaking. I'll come back to that, because I want to emphasize the word 'conscious' there. But another paradigm, again quite popular these days, is what we might call a kind of existentialist paradigm -- similar-ish to the second one, except there's even more focusing on dukkha. It's as if one hangs on to the dukkha of existence and the tragic impermanence of the existential situation that we find ourselves in just here in this world, everyone and everything and ourselves impermanent. It seeks to alleviate some of the extra suffering of that, but wants to hang on to the kind of undoubted, basic, real 'fact,' facticity, of the dukkha of existence, the tragic impermanence of this world. And there is nothing else but that, so our task, and the Third Noble Truth, is kind of reconciling ourselves to that tragedy and that tragic impermanence, this existential predicament -- sometimes almost clinging on to a vision of that, and an insistence on the existential predicament, read that way, being the only reality, and the tragic impermanence.

One emphasizes the tragic impermanence more than the particular personhood or the particulars or the personhoods that are lost through impermanence. It's almost like the impermanence is more important or more interesting or more clung to than the actual particular and the wonder that is lost, and the beauty, and the depths of that beauty of this particular, or this element of being, or that person and that personhood. In that whole clinging, there's a kind of rigidity sometimes, and a dogmatic assertion: "No divinity allowed." Even if you have a sense of divinity in your meditations or your being in nature, or whatever it is, it's just illusion. It's a priori regarded as an illusion, a priori regarded as something to dismiss. Even the idea that it's a worthy ... if you don't say it's a discovery, it's a creation, even that, it's a creation that's taking away from the primacy and the dominant, hard reality of our existential facticity of the tragic impermanence of ourselves and of everything we encounter.

So there's a kind of clinging that can creep in for some people with such a view, and the Four Noble Truths as given in that view, or that view kind of frames or fills out the meaning of the different elements of the Four Noble Truths. There's a kind of rigidity and there's a kind of disallowing of what might actually emerge organically in the perception, in the experience -- of dimensionality, of divinity, of soul, etc. But in those three views -- the ending rebirth as the priority, the erasing unnecessary suffering by simplifying the mind and the relationship with things, and this (I don't know what to call it) modernist existentialist focus on the existential predicament and the hard reality of the tragic impermanence of things -- you've heard me say this before, I'm sure, but I would say, not believing the kind of official versions of whatever is spelled out there in the doctrine, I would actually say look through the understanding of a soulmaking logos at what's going on there, and soulmaking and fantasy always creeps in, or it's always there, actually, where there is love, where something is really alive for us, where we're committed.

So any of those paradigms where a person is actually committed -- one might really say they only teach the ending of rebirth, and the priority, and it's all geared towards that, but actually, if they're on fire with that, there's soulmaking and fantasy crept into the whole thing, pervading the whole thing around the edges. The same with someone who keeps emphasizing simplicity, etc., and letting go, and erasing the unnecessary suffering. There's still the talk about -- it creeps in, talk about beauty, and something that inspires not just the heart but the soul. Or again, in the existentialist paradigm, one may be enamoured of a certain fantasy of self and world, etc., situated in a certain fantastical narrative that gives something to the soul, that for that person at that time is, to a certain extent, soulmaking. Wherever something's really alive, wherever we love something, wherever we're really committed to something, soulmaking and fantasy is already there. It's already pervading. It's already in the cracks.

This, to me, is really important, because I would say if we don't recognize that and identify it and admit it, we're not seeing what Derrida would call what's at the margins of our philosophy. We have this neat arrangement, and we don't see what's at the margins. We have this neat arrangement of ideas, and it all fits, perhaps, what the Buddha said, and we can translate terms, and 'that means this,' and we interpret that this way, but actually there's all this stuff at the margins which is actually where a lot of our juice is coming from, and a lot of our fire, and a lot of the beauty, and a lot of whatever soulmaking is going on. So to me, a fuller path, a fuller logos, a fuller conceptual framework needs to acknowledge it, acknowledge this thing called soulmaking and this thing called eros that we don't really have words for, that don't usually get included in the paradigm, but they're there, and they're functioning, and they're operating, and they're vital and vitalizing.

A more adequate conception of the path or conceptual framework, and also in relation to the Four Noble Truths, needs to include -- to me, I would say -- needs to or is made more adequate, let's say, and richer, by including those elements. Again, if we stay with this interpretation and contextualization with regards to the Four Noble Truths, there's what we outlined in Hegel's idea, in terms of suffering and where it's going, but more importantly, there's this vision of a path that gives soulmaking priority, that re-enchants dukkha and eventually recognizes the necessity for the divine or to the divine of this dukkha, of this particular narrative that I'm in. All quite different situatings or conceivings of what suffering is, how it arises, what we're doing with it, where we're trying to go with it.

I'm pretty sure I said -- I think it was in the Path of the Imaginal retreat, and it might have been in the "Soulmaking" talks there, the talks entitled "Soulmaking," I think, but I'm not sure -- that actually, I think that how we conceive of soulmaking in relation to ending suffering, in relation to the Four Noble Truths and that framework, how we contextualize or intercontextualize the two depends on our individual soul-styles, or our individual soul-moods at any time, and our individual fantasies -- part of which is just where we are in our own kind of movement with all this stuff. In other words, one could conceive of the whole soulmaking paradigm as a movement beyond the boundaries of the Four Noble Truths and sort of classical Buddhadharma. One could conceive of it as just gently pushing at the edges and stretching it a bit more, but essentially expanding what Buddhadharma is for modern times. Or one could conceive of it and articulate it as just being within the Buddhadharma: it's just pinpointing certain aspects that perhaps don't get so highlighted, but it's all within the paradigm of the Four Noble Truths as we see them.

How we do that, where we stand in, let's say, any of those three positions, or any of those three conceptualizations, conceptual structures, seems to me to be itself a kind of soul-question. One person tends towards a kind of radical, wall-breaking kind of identity or barrier-breaking identity. One person tends to want to identify with the tradition, and what's more conservative, and feel themselves within that. One person wants to see their soul as kind of on the edge of what's being developed and stretched. We can go to a whole meta-level here and, in a way, pointing out that the very way one might want to conceive of this whole logos that we're unfolding itself depends on individual soul-styles, individual soul-journeys, individual soul-moods. In other words, it might even change from day to day for a person. That realization itself is radical because it gives a kind of primacy to soul, to the imaginal, to fantasy. To not be too bothered whether I conceive of it this way or that way -- "We could do it this way. We could do it that way. It depends on soul. It depends on soul-style, on soul-mood" -- that itself is quite a radical position, if you like, that gives primacy to soul.

[1:14:18] I've said this before, I'm pretty sure. But let's stay with this a little bit. Again, I'm pretty sure I've said this, but I've pointed out, when I talked about the different kind of fantasies we have of our path and goal, that what I called the medical model, the model that really conceives of what we're doing and the direction of what we're doing as the alleviation of suffering -- either the ending of suffering or the alleviation of suffering -- what I called the medical model, which is actually a model that the Buddha himself used, deliberately framing his teachings in an analogous way to the way a doctor would frame things in his time in India. I pointed out, and I still hold with it, that it may be that if we're too wedded to a medical model of the path and our path, if we emphasize that medical model too much, and there's not much else going on in our fantasy and conception of the path, that restriction of the fantasy and the conception of the path may itself limit the soulmaking. We're emphasizing too much a certain model that concerns itself primarily with alleviating suffering, and there may be something in the limitations of that intention that limit the soulmaking that's then available to us.

An alternative would be (and I know some of you feel this way, at least at times) the sense or the feeling that something is more important to me than ending dukkha, than this Third Noble Truth of ending dukkha: "Actually, to be honest, I care more about something else. Something else is more important than ending dukkha," whatever that would even look like to end dukkha. So we could frame things that way. We could kind of arrange things that way, so that the soulmaking paradigm -- that being more important than ending dukkha as one point of view. Or we could also do something else or frame things in a different way, and suggest that much of the dukkha in modern times -- that you and I experience, I mean; there's a lot of horrific suffering in the world, but much of the dukkha of modern times comes from the loss of or the absence of meaningfulness in our lives, or any sense that any meaningfulness that we can feel in our life has any deep roots ontologically that we can relate to ("It's only a construct"), a loss or an absence of the sense of dimensionality of existence, of the depths of divinity; a loss of enchantment; a loss of a sense of duty that, again, is given to us in a way that's more than just my personal decision or invention.

It may be, or one could say and suggest, that these losses, these absences of soul, really, for much of modern life, or pervading much of modern life in our culture, then exacerbates, gives rise to, a lot of the ecological crises we face, because we look at nature as something completely flat and lacking in sacredness. We can't galvanize a care for it, or a depth of care, a depth of reverence, that would come from sensing it with soul. If we view things that way, if we frame things that way and make that suggestion, that "Hey, look where a lot of the dukkha is coming from in our modern, affluent, Western existence," and what ensues from that lack, from that loss, from that absence of soul, then we could say that the movement of soulmaking, the engagement of the soulmaking dynamic and that whole direction is actually reducing suffering, because it heals, it addresses, that lack or that absence of soul. Therefore, because it's just a part or a dimension or a level of the suffering that gets healed, we can place the whole thing, the whole paradigm of soulmaking, squarely and easily in the Four Noble Truths, again with our particular interpretation of what exactly is involved in dukkha, the First Noble Truth, and what exactly is entailed by the freedom from dukkha, and how exactly dukkha arises. But the whole thing is then framed within the Four Noble Truths.

You know, if I share just personally, the hardest thing for me -- and again, this is just personal -- but the hardest thing for me in being ill the last two and a half years was not the original diagnosis and realizing what that meant, to have pancreatic cancer. It was not the operation and the severe incapacity and weakness that I had for about a year afterwards, and still carry, really. It was not the prognosis when they found where the cancer was at and all that. The hardest thing for me, the most dukkha for me, it was not the idea of dying. It was going for the weekly chemotherapy infusions at the oncology department in a hospital nearby -- actually about an hour away. That was the hardest thing for me. And it was something very particular that was the hardest thing.

It really was, I have to say, at the edge of my practice, the edge of what I could embrace with my practice in a way that actually significantly reduced the difficulty of it. It wasn't the unpleasantness and the pain of feeling sick and toxic from the chemotherapy. All that stuff was there, you know, and yeah, it was definitely difficult. Nor was it being -- you know, you've got this infusion thing, and this drip computer machine going, and it's in your veins, and I had chronic, urgent diarrhoea from the chemotherapy and post-operation. So you're in this ward, hooked up to all this considerable encumbrance of contraption, knowing -- I'm sitting there, and I might suddenly and urgently have to get up and run to the toilet to move my bowels, with all that kind of chemotherapy paraphernalia attached to me and infusing and whatnot. Nor was it -- the most difficult thing was not being really cogently reminded of my own mortality and the possibility of my dying very soon, just by virtue of being in that situation, and feeling the way I was feeling, and having all this heavy-duty chemotherapy and all that. Nor was it actually the fact I was just seeing so much suffering. Sometimes it's pretty grim in the chemotherapy ward, in terms of what people are going through, and what kind of state they're in -- sometimes young people, you know, and the other patients. Nor was it the fact that the staff and the doctors or nurses were unkind -- for the most part, actually, they were very kind and caring, and helpful and pleasant.

The most difficult thing for me -- I can only speak for myself -- the most difficult thing for me to handle and to practise skilfully and adequately with was the soullessness of the place. That was the hardest thing. That's been the hardest thing so far -- with the osteoporosis, with the chemotherapy, post-operation, with the diagnosis, with the prognosis, with the possibility of dying, with the sleepless nights, with the lack of energy, with the restriction on what I can do and where I can go, and hardly going out of the house. The hardest thing was the soullessness of that oncology department, for me. The absence there of any beauty, or what seemed the absence of any consideration of beauty, or any consideration of what we would call soulfulness in the way it was designed and how it worked. That plastic, and stale, diesel-filled toxic air being recycled, and death everywhere, the possibility of death all around vividly there, and yet not being engaged or talked about or met soulfully, it seemed to me. I could say I was not able to perceive the soul in that place. I could say it like that. And all of this, all this soullessness, when in the face of death, in the possible proximity of death, the possible soonness of death, one needs soulfulness the most. That was the most difficult thing for me.

[1:26:04] Someone said (I don't know if it's true; I think it must be true) some anecdote about Oscar Wilde's dying words in -- I don't know where he was staying, in bed and dying. His final, dying words, looking at the wallpaper in his room, and saying out loud to the wallpaper, so to speak, "One of us has to go." Thinking about that [laughs] ... He's a funny guy, Oscar Wilde. But he was also, I think, very soulful and concerned with soul. It may be that those dying words were not so much, or not just, a kind of comically out of place flippancy and superficiality next to death, just a concern with the kind of decor, but actually a concern with beauty, and a statement of the fundamental and absolute importance of beauty as a necessity for soul. I mean, I don't know. But I think about those words, again, which I used to find just kind of witty: "Ah, it's good to go out with a kind of witty aphorism." Maybe there's a whole other level there.

You know, we could say beauty, soulmaking, soulfulness, they're kind of useless values. Like beauty is a luxury, and soulfulness is a kind of -- we regard it as a luxury, and it doesn't really achieve much materially. In a way, they're useless. Maybe the useless values are the most important and the most worthwhile. We can feel that they are, when -- certainly not instead of having our basic prerequisites met, of food and shelter and clothing and warmth, or a healthy life for the body, safe society. Maybe when the basic prerequisites are met, when the sort of gross neuroses are dealt with and the inner critic is a little bit at least placated or healed, when the most difficult psychological patterns are healed, when there's a kind of basic kindness pervading, then what? Then what? An end to suffering? End all suffering?

Somewhere in the Pali Canon the Buddha says, maybe several times, or implies, that the basic prerequisites of life -- food, shelter, medicine, etc., clothing -- need to be there to allow or need to be there as a kind of basis for practice and the path, for the quest for what is most important and most worthwhile, which was nibbāna. He pointed out this needs to be there. Without that, you can't really give your attention and give your energy and give your commitment to trying to reach nibbāna, which is actually the most important thing. But in the paradigm of endless cycles and possibly infinite cycles of death and rebirth, and that perilous process, sort of adrift on a vast cosmic ocean of enormous, infinite spans of time and infinite worlds, perhaps, and just being reborn dependent on a karma one didn't even know what that was, all the vicissitudes and ups and downs and wild circumstances that one found oneself in, so much suffering is at stake in whether that just goes on and on and on with all that suffering, and whether one can find a way out of that endless, endless suffering. For him, this, reading him, that vision of nibbāna, that vision of the Third Noble Truth, was actually what he was orienting towards. So much suffering. That was the most important thing.

But if our version of awakening or version of the Third Noble Truth doesn't involve or assume all those infinite cycles of rebirth and that degree of dukkha -- and again, he was in a world where there wasn't modern medicine and painkillers and antibiotics. There was not even the possibility that people would have that. Now, at least, we have the possibility. It's not an actuality in our world, but the possibility that everyone in the world has access to modern medicine and painkillers -- which is not the case right now -- and antibiotics, etc. For him, looking around, what horrendous suffering. You're kind of on this roulette wheel of where you end up, life after life after life. And if you have a good one, you'll probably have a bad one, because you've probably got some bad karma waiting to ripen that you don't even know about.

So in the absence, or when our vision or conception of awakening doesn't involve or assume all those infinite cycles of rebirth, and the horrendous pitfalls of that perilous roller coaster, what then is the most important and worthwhile thing to practise for, to practise towards, after basic prerequisites are met? The Buddha said after basic prerequisites are met, this ending of the cycle of rebirth, ending of this again and again and again, ad infinitum, the pain of birth, being separated from what we love, etc., and death, what's the most important thing? For him, it was ending rebirth after the basic prerequisites are met. If we don't have that paradigm any more, and many of you don't, what then becomes the most important thing? And could, in a way, the most important thing be something that is, in some way, kind of useless? Soulmaking, beauty, becomes the most worthwhile. So there's a suffering that I think -- probably you wouldn't be listening at this point if this wasn't the case for you -- but there's the suffering of the absence of soul, the absence of soulfulness. We're missing something. There's the suffering of the failure to honour what seems or is, from a certain perspective, useless. It's useless, but I miss it. And when we miss it, when there is that absence, when it's not addressed, when it's not included, when it's not allowed, when it's inhibited, there is a suffering. Suffering of the absence of soul.