Dukkha and Soulmaking (Part 8)

Okay, so we've been talking about dukkha and soulmaking, and that whole nexus between the two, how they bear on each other. And that draws in, of course, the structure of the Four Noble Truths, and our interpretation and conception of the Four Noble Truths, and the relationship with soulmaking, because the Four Noble Truths deal essentially with dukkha -- its arising, its causes, its release, etc.

We began this talk, many parts ago now, we began it looking at and drawing attention to the ways sometimes it's possible for imaginal practices or soulmaking practices, if they're related to in the wrong way, or if we don't quite have the right pieces in place, it's possible that actually they give rise to dukkha. Then we moved on to look again at some of the ways and some of the aspects of how imaginal perception, sensing with soul, can actually release dukkha, relieve suffering.

So if we stay with that piece a little longer, the way soulmaking practices relieve dukkha. We've talked a lot about individual instances, and what's going on there, and how that works. We could also make a kind of, if you like, an observation at a larger scale. It seems to me, so far, that it's much less likely for the inner critic to arise, or the kind of suffering of ego-measurement to arise, in the context of or in relation to soulmaking practices and that whole soulmaking path, or imaginal practices, etc. It's much less likely for that kind of suffering (ego-measurement, inner critic, etc.) to arise there, in that context, with respect to that kind of conception of a path or set of practices, than it is for it to arise in relationship to, say, emptiness practices, or the movement and the quest, the search for the Unfabricated, fabricating less and opening into the Unfabricated; or jhāna practice, the exploration of the eight jhānas that the Buddha referred to; or the whole kind of search for stream-entry, or the stages of awakening.

This is just an observation. And it makes a lot of sense to me why that might be so, because at least the way we have been presenting it, this soulmaking business is without any final goal. So unlike a jhāna or the Unfabricated or stream-entry or whatever, there are no kind of stages of progress or a final kind of goal mapped out. We'll return to this in the next talk, hopefully. But I would actually rather conceive the path more open-ended that way. So there aren't these gradations of progress, stages of progress by which one measures one's progress, nor some final goal that one can say, "I have arrived at. I haven't arrived. My friends arrived, but I haven't," or whatever it is. In the absence of that kind of ladder of measurement, the ego-structures around measurement and the inner critic have no scaffolding on which to fabricate themselves. So that whole pain that arises and [is] so, so difficult for so many people in our culture today, the whole pain of that inner critic and self-measurement and comparison, etc., it really doesn't arise so much. It seems really not to arise so much in the soulmaking movement and the soulmaking practices. As I said, this is something we'll return to.

But again, at a kind of larger level, I want to dwell a little bit today on a larger level, talking about paradigms and conceptual frameworks with respect to dukkha, and how we conceive of dukkha, and causality of dukkha, etc. So let me share something with you, something from an interview some time ago, with a student who asked for an interview to talk about soulmaking and imaginal practice, and that kind of thing. I have her permission to share this, as usual. Quite a lot came up. She was telling me, as part of the interview, something about experiences she'd had in relation to eros and image, etc., in the past, right from her childhood through her adulthood, as part of the interview.

She shared that she came from a childhood where her parents quarrelled quite a lot, and that wasn't something she liked at all. She really wished that they hadn't quarrelled so much, and found it difficult, unpleasant. She also shared that perhaps when she was maybe around 8, that she used to go to bed, [and] awake in bed, would have these fantasies of or images of -- it was a little vague, but something like some men taking her or dragging her down into some kind of mine or a coal mine or something, and then doing sexual things with her or to her. I don't think she used the word 'abuse,' but. We were exploring this a little bit, and I asked her what that felt like, or what its effect was, and what exactly they did. She couldn't remember what the effect was or what her feeling about it was at the time.

Okay, so let's just slow down here. I don't want to ride roughshod over this. I know that just hearing that kind of image, just as an image, can have quite an impact. There's been a lot of news recently about sexual abuse, and actually the exposure of that in Hollywood, in the film industry and elsewhere. So let's just take time here and take care of yourself if that does kind of bring up difficult stuff for you. What I want to focus on here is something about, as I said, images and conceptual frameworks. This is an instance of an image. In an instance of actual abuse, it's really important, of course, that that needs to be exposed. It needs to be addressed. It needs to be confronted. It needs to be healed. That healing actually involves not just the victim, but also the perpetrator, who can only do such things when there's some kind of wounding at some level in the psyche.

[8:51] Here I'm not dwelling so much on that, but I want to make more a point about images, and conceptual frameworks, and assumptions around causality. Yeah, so I'm aware, even just sharing that as an image can have an impact, so want to take care around that. She also shared that she grew up -- she was raised as a practising Catholic in that household, with a Christian education, etc. She also had, in her youth, fantasies of what she called 'sexual union with God.' Again, they weren't very specific fantasies, but they were definitely there. As she grew up, and still in the Catholic faith, she shared several things which just showed how this wasn't -- she is not now, and she kind of never really seemed to be, a kind of weak character, easily dominated in life, nor dominating either.

She had this Catholic upbringing, and about 10 years old, she had a Catholic teacher, a woman Catholic teacher, who she loved. She really loved this teacher. And one day they were waiting to go into confession, and waiting with the teacher for her turn for the confession. And the teacher was wearing furs. She was wearing a fur coat or a fur scarf or something. And the student challenged her. It was like, "Why are you wearing dead animals? Why are you wearing furs?" The Catholic teacher was a bit stunned that this question came up, and actually got up and went to consult her colleagues, her fellow teachers. She came back after a few minutes, and responded to this student, "God told us to subjugate other animals." This was the answer that was given to this student. And at that point, right there and then, she just lost interest in Catholicism.

So there's a spirit there that's willing to question authority, make her own decisions; she decides what's right or wrong. Even though she loved this teacher, it's like, "This is not worthy of being pursued." Later, something a little bit similar happened when she was exposed to and involved in the Zen tradition and started meditating. Similarly, she questioned the -- I don't know if it's a rōshi or whatever, the abbot or whatever it was, around the use by the Japanese army in the Second World War of comfort women. This rōshi or teacher, whoever it was, gave her an answer that basically said it was justified and it wasn't wrong, this abuse of women by Japanese soldiers, by the Japanese army in the Second World War. And again, this student just dismissed any authority she had given to this teacher and that whole lineage of teaching. She lost interest and moved elsewhere, and eventually found herself in the Insight Meditation tradition.

And there, again, there was a pattern, or rather ... That's too hasty to say that. Again she found herself feeling and having erotic feelings and even sexual erotic images in relation to a female teacher, although that wasn't and isn't her typical sexual orientation. That happened again with another teacher of a different gender, etc. So why am I sharing all this? That was part of a much bigger conversation. What I want to dwell on here is, as I said, a point about images and about conceptual frameworks and assumptions about causality.

So in the course of that interview, which was quite a long interview, if I remember, we talked about the initial image of the coal mine, that sort of sexual image in the coal mine, being dragged down or taken down. And one of the things I brought up, one of the pieces I brought up, was that there's a myth. You may know the myth of Persephone. Persephone was a young, beautiful goddess, out with her friends on a mountainside, I think in spring, on a beautiful mountainside, picking flowers. [She] stooped to pick up a particularly beautiful flower, and as she bent to pick it up, Hades, the god of the underworld -- who was either using the flower as a disguise, or the flower changed; I can't remember the details, excuse me -- but basically Hades snatches her and drags her down into his realm, his kingdom, the underworld. It's quite a long, complex, and interesting myth, with her mother, Demeter, grieving for her and searching for her. In the end, or rather the outcome of it, if I remember rightly, is that Persephone is taken as wife of Hades, and becomes queen of the underworld, and then divides her time between the upper world, our world, this earth, the human world and the world of nature, and the underworld, the world of spirits and souls, where she is the queen of that underworld. I think she spends half the year in the upper world and half the year in this underworld.

Now I'm borrowing from James Hillman, who uses that myth, who points to that myth, as a kind of archetypal myth or archetypal presentation of a kind of emphatic soul-moment, in the sort of story of human souls, what he calls the 'initiation' into the underworld, into the underworld of soul. In his view, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sexual violence or sexuality. It's a myth of being pulled, of innocence, apparent innocence, being pulled down into a whole other dimension of things that involves darkness, that is actually about soul. The underworld is the realm of souls. And that has to do with death, and the kind of dark and also pathological (or seemingly pathological) sides of the soul. As I pointed out in an earlier talk in this series, for Hillman, there was a real emphasis -- he never let go of this emphasis on the necessity of the soul, in his view, the necessity of the soul to pathologize and to create pathologies, to create kind of complexities and ensnarements and entanglements in dukkha.

So this myth of Persephone being dragged down into the underworld, and then that becoming a domain where she spent half her time, where she was actually in her element there, this is a myth of initiation into the underworld of soul and soulmaking. It's not about evil. It's not necessarily about sex, in Hillman's interpretation. But it's about a kind of initiation or movement, at some point in one's life, into the realm of soul, including the pathology, including the darker realm of soul. So I was sharing something of Hillman's point of view there, and we were looking at this together. I pointed out a possible interpretation or conceptual framework to bring to bear, or a lens to bring to bear on these memories of having these images that the student was sharing, is that this was the beginning, let's say, of this kind of initiation into a darker kind of soulmaking. And again, by 'dark,' I don't mean evil. I don't even necessarily mean sexual, although it might be in this case, because there were the fantasies of the sexual union with God, and the eros towards different teachers, etc. But this initiation into different kinds, different faces of divinity. Because that's what happens to Persephone. Her mother is Demeter, the god of the earth, of the fields and agriculture and the earthiness. Then Hades is the god of the underworld, of shades, of ghosts, of souls. It's a very different kind of divinity. They are both gods. Hades sometimes is also Dionysus; they're sometimes equated.

So the myth is kind of an initiation, an opening, into suddenly a different realm, a different kind, different faces of divinity, different theophanies. Different kinds, also, of beauty: darker, more complex, shadier, involving death, etc., and the metaphor of death, and the soul-meaning of death. Could it be -- and again, I'm not insisting on this, just opening up a possibility -- could it be that what is initiated by the arising of these images for this young girl is the seeds or the prompting of a movement that may take decades to mature in the soul? Just as, I think, in the story of Persephone and Hades, it took her a while, took that whole process a while to mature and reach this kind of ... 'agreement' is not the right word, but new point of balance, if you like, with her being queen of the underworld.

Could it be that, as I've pointed out, this soulmaking -- one of the ways, I feel, it's very important to see it, or what's most important, one of the most important aspects of it, is this expanding of the range of the sacred, opening to more kinds of beauty, etc., more kinds and places and directions of sacredness and of divinity, etc. That includes, for some people at least, opening to the dark, and maybe the sexual, and maybe these kinds of divinity and beauty, and the possibility of sensing, the possibility of engaging and being worked on those directions, those dimensions, those colours as soulmaking, and opening up and discovering and creating beauty and divinity in those directions and in those dimensions, with those faces and those kinds.

[21:37] So that would be a very different kind of theory to, quote, 'explain' the arising of these images than some of the more familiar psychological theories that we're exposed to. It's really this business about conceptual frameworks and ideas and assumptions about causality that I want to just open up a little bit and bring up for our, bring into our consideration. Very often, we might hear -- someone might tell us, someone might share something very similar, like that image from a young time, an image of being dragged or taken underground like that, and something sexual happens. And we might very easily infer conceptions of causality. 'Infer' means 'to carry in' -- ferre, 'to carry in,' from the Latin. We sort of carry in conceptions. Now, this, of course, is related to what I've kept emphasizing over and over again, that concepts and conceptual frameworks imbue our perception. They're involved in any way of looking. Most of the time, we're not conscious of it, of exactly what conceptions are involved. Most of the time, we don't have much flexibility with what conceptions are involved. But they come in. They're inferred, they're carried in, and they colour, shape, and determine to a large extent what then we see, and of course how we feel about it, how we react, how we respond, etc.

Often we hear something like that, an image like that, and almost without helping ourselves, the mind is bringing in -- without being able to help ourselves, the mind brings in conceptions of causality. The causality usually functions in terms of from past to present to future. In other words, something must have happened before she was 8 years old to give rise to these images. So something in the past gave rise to those images, and there's a causal explanation based on temporal priorness, versus, as I mentioned the other day, what's called a teleological explanation of causality, if you like, where somehow the being, the psyche, and what arises is pulled towards and pulled, we could say -- or, for example, one explanation is the image arises and it's pulling us towards something that we don't even quite know what it is. It's pulling us towards a certain possibility. It's pulling us towards a certain opening or direction or door of soulmaking. So in that teleological view, the 'cause,' if you like, is in the future. But it's not a finished fact in the future. It's a very different way of conceiving of causality. It's a very different conceptual framework.

So rather than the view (which could be very possible, and a very viable view of causality), "This image arose for her when she was 8 years old. Something in the past happened that caused her to have such a pathological image," or what many people would interpret as a pathological image. And that, too, is open to questioning, because when I asked her, she actually couldn't remember what the feeling of those images was. It might have been that she enjoyed them, that they were beautiful and rich. It might have been that they were distressing. Maybe a combination. There are much richer differentiations we could make between possibilities of how it actually felt for her, what effect it had, but she couldn't remember. The question is, in a teleological [explanation], if we bring that in as an alternative to "something happened that was difficult, and it gave rise to this particular pathological expression, this particular pathological image," versus, actually, in the seeming pathology of this image, the soul is, in a teleological way, drawing us towards something. The seeds are in the future, if you like. This is the seed being planted from the future, opening up or leading us, inviting us to a door of, in this case, wider, deeper, and different kinds of soulmaking.

So one of the points I want to make is: can we look and question? Can we be aware of and then also question whatever tendencies we have of assumption, and leaning, and narrowing of interpretation or concept regarding causes in the psyche and for the psyche? Can we acknowledge and be aware of the fact of just how much cultural conditioning there is that creates habits of assumption, tendencies to lean this way, tendencies to narrow the conception and the assumption in certain ways?

There's quite a lot to this, but let's slow down. For the most part, you know, except perhaps in times when we're attempting to practise a very close, very narrowly focused microscopic awareness, mindfulness, or bare attention (so-called), except in those times -- which, in a funny way, for all the sort of clarity that they seem to bring, they also bring their own kind of blindness. You know, when you're just myopically staring at something so close, you tend to not see the bigger picture. But for the most part, human beings, in our awareness of things, in our mindfulness of things, in our just everyday awareness -- except in those times when there's really narrow, microscopic focus of attention, which produces its own certain kind of blindness -- for the most part, we see and experience things with and through some or other lens that involves some or other concepts of causality. So causality, as I said, is part of the conceptual framework that goes on, most often not explicit as thinking, not even that conscious -- but then it can become conscious, or we elaborate on it, or we draw it out as a conclusion, or we insist on it. But whether we do that or not, it's woven into our actual experience, our actual ways of looking.

Ways of looking tend to, or for the most part they include some or other concepts around the causality. For example, when we hear about this student's images from childhood, we will tend to see them as results and/or as causes. Or at least we see them as kind of nodes in a causal network of other events, inner and outer: this is either the result of something inner or outer, or it's the cause of something inner or outer. This is just part of the way we tend to see the world. It's part of the way consciousness works, in fact, for the most part, unless we really try and make it not, at times, with certain ways of looking.

[31:01] So whether those images that she shared with me, whether they're considered the results, as representations of some actual abuse or trauma -- so perhaps she was sexually abused. Perhaps that's the result, and this is what the images are telling her. It's a replaying, a re-presentation of that, or some metaphor for some other kind of psychic abuse or trauma or ongoing situation. So they're considered either re-presentations of actual abuse or trauma, or they're considered the result, as her psyche's response to that actual abuse or some kind of ongoing traumatic situation in her environment, in her upbringing, in her family. For example, a response of avoidance through papañca, through daydreaming. Her parents quarrelled. Did you catch that bit? And does the mind connect that bit? Her parents quarrelled. It's a difficult environment, so she's avoiding that kind of psychic pain through daydreaming, through papañca, and through a craving for and a grasping at the pleasant vedanā of this sexual erotic fantasy.

Or the images are considered the result more of the soul and the eros seeking what's possibly its natural and fundamental movement and inclination to create and discover new and other areas, other realms, aspects, colours, and faces for soulmaking. In other words, the divinity of the dark and of the sexually erotic, in this case. These are very different ideas about the causality going on. But however we're considering it, we're usually seeing and experiencing that -- what we hear, in this case, these images -- as a result of something or other. The mind tends to kind of put it in a causal network. Likewise, we will always tend to see it, sense it, interpret it, as causal, as causally implicative of something or other. So again, psychological theories and conceptual frameworks come in, and we say, "Oh, this is going to be causal of the perpetuation of that trauma." In other words, if as a little girl she just has those kinds of fantasies after this or that trauma and that woundedness, unless she attends to it, and has help attending to it properly and understanding it correctly, understanding why she's having it (it's a result of this abuse or whatever), then that trauma is just perpetuated in the psyche and in the nervous system, etc., unless it's tended to and understood, quote, 'correctly.'

Or from a more sort of narrowly classical Buddhist perspective, indulging in those kind of fantasies would just be reinforcing tendencies of craving, aversion, and the delusive habit of papañca, of daydreaming. Just never mind the cause; these fantasies, these images, you're just building craving for that kind of sexual pleasure, or aversion to what's actually going on in the moment, 'the way things really are,' quote, or it's just the delusive habit of papañca. It's just daydreaming, imagination. It's nothing but that.

Or, again, they're causal: they're the first movements, the first shoots from the seed towards opening different directions of soulmaking. Perhaps in a Catholic upbringing, and it's certain colours of soulmaking, certain directions, and perhaps this was the first little shoots coming out of the seed of a different direction, opening up a different direction. Quite different in terms of causes and the causing, what might be the causes of this kind of image and that kind of indulgence (if we use that word), and what that might cause, where it might be going if it carries on, if one practises that, if one indulges in that.

So we're almost always seeing things in terms of causation, and in terms of past and future, and the connection between things or events, past, present, and future. And how we are conceiving and perceiving a thing or event in terms of its causation and its effects, or the range of possibilities we are considering as its potential effects. So what we bring in in terms of those assumptions and concepts about cause and effect, and the range there of possibilities that we even admit into our conceptual framework in terms of potential effects, etc., that determines, that's part of how we actually approach that thing or event; what we then do with it and to it, how we respond to it; how then those images and that psychic fact, if you like, or fact of the psyche of these images arising, and whatever feelings, etc., how that is then steered. So we're participating in its evolution in time through our inferring, our carrying in of different ideas, concepts around cause and effect, and that whole nexus between past, and future, and present, and all that.

Because we participate in perception that way -- we participate through the conception; through different kinds of conception we participate in perception -- we then participate in the evolution of things in time (in this case, of images and of souls, and of perhaps sexuality and eros, and all kinds of things). So we actually create and discover the effects of something by how we interpret it conceptually. That's an example of one level of the way we cannot help participate in perception. And our participation determines what we see. How we conceive of the past in relation to the present determines what happens in the present, what we perceive in the present, what we emphasize in the present, what we perceive, and then what unfolds in the future, because then it determines all kinds of aspects of how we relate to it.

[39:20] As I said, I'm just wanting to open up this whole range of discourse, open up areas and directions and themes for us to consider, for you to consider; open up the conceptual framework a little bit. And part of that, as I said earlier, is just wanting to draw attention to, and hopefully we can all be aware of, just how much we are culturally conditioned in the conceptions that we bring to meet existence -- every aspect of existence, every aspect from the most seemingly simple material aspect of existence, to the most complex and spiritual, including here the psychological and the imagination and all kinds of things. So just to be aware of how conditioned, how culturally conditioned we are. We bring in certain ideas just because we're surrounded by certain ideas, or we've been educated with certain ideas in either the larger culture or different sub-cultures, and then we form habits of assumption, habits of leaning, tendencies and habits to narrow down our range of assumptions and concepts operating, and thus what we do with things, how we respond to things, what we feel needs doing, how we conceive them, how we feel about them, all of that.

So to me, this is particularly interesting around what arises psychologically for people, and also around pathology -- in other words, suffering and dukkha. I'm really saying this and pointing this out for the sake of opening up a plurality. I don't want to replace one conception around causality with another conception around causality: "This one's true, and that one's not. This is better than that one." I'm really interested, and I really hope you can hear this: I want to open up to a plurality. Is it possible that we can actually broaden our range of conceptions, and actually learn to see things in different ways, and move between these different ways of seeing things? That's the point of all this. I don't want to replace one with another in that kind of movement.

I think sometimes what concerns me a little bit is just when I sense there's this kind of narrowing going on, and this quickness to assume, and a sort of lock-in to a certain psychological framework that carries with it all kinds of assumptions, that somehow we've stopped questioning them, and particularly around causality. So from this point of view, and in this spirit of wanting to open up to a plurality, sometimes I wonder: why is it that so often (and yeah, among colleagues, and perhaps in the wider culture, and the wider psychospiritual movements, etc.), why is it that the universal experiences, for example, and traumas of physical birth and intrauterine experience, or even sometimes I've heard that the biological fact of the sperm struggling to penetrate the uterine wall or the ovular wall ... These kinds of physical, material facts, physical birth, intrauterine existence, and not even the embryo or the fetus -- actually the sperm, in its kind of desperation. I've heard this, like, "I felt in my meditation the dukkha of the desperation of the sperm trying to penetrate the wall, and I experienced that as suffering now. I'm reliving the pain of that, and that's influencing my life. If I can re-experience that in a certain way, and relate to it in a certain way, I'll be freed of the suffering that's being perpetuated in my life right now that's a result of that thing in the past." I have no problem with the possibility of all that. Sometimes where I get a little bit nervous is just how quickly it can shrink to the emphasis on this past: the past is causal.

So why is it that those kinds of things (the trauma of birth, physical birth, the intrauterine existence, the sort of struggle and desperation of the sperm, etc.), why are those kinds of things considered more significant and more causal for what I experience and feel now (in my case, 52 years later, or someone else decades later)? Why is that given more emphasis, and regarded as more significant, more causal, than, say, my reading about in the news, my reading about an oil spill a month ago, two months ago, whenever it was, off the coast of somewhere thousands of miles away, Ethiopia or wherever?

Why is the focus on the individual, and the past of the individual, this going back and back and emphasizing the past? And that's narrowed down, and that's given more significance than my reading about an oil spill, and how that might cause pain in my soul right now, how that might affect the way I am in relation to the world, and the whole patterns that get constructed if I'm exposed to that kind of thing, if I'm in a world that exposes me to that, and also exposes me to the kind of seeming lack of care. These things go on, and it seems like it's kind of okay. It's not really that big a deal on the scale of humanity's concerns. Or my awareness of the demise of the number of birds in Europe. Massive demise. Even just in the last ten years, massive. In the last twenty years, just at Gaia House, a lot less birdsong. Or the demise of forests in the Amazon, and rainforests -- actually all kinds of forests, everywhere. Or the overwhelming amount of plastic pollution. Even today and yesterday, I was reading just this massive, massive investment or cooperation between the Trump administration and large fossil fuel companies, Exxon Mobil, etc., agreeing to build -- I think it was a $180 billion dollar investment in new plastic-making factories on the Texas and Louisiana coast, coastal areas -- right when we're in the middle of all this news and alarm over realizing the extent of massive plastic pollution, how long-term pervading that is.

Why are these things sometimes not brought up for consideration as things that are causative of my dukkha right now, and causative, as I said, of whatever cramping I have in relationships and self-expression and whatever? Or the pain, for some souls, when one looks at the world and moves in the world, and it seems that one is surrounded everywhere by an emphasizing and a prioritizing of comfort and convenience, and pleasure and security, way beyond actual material needs? Everywhere there's this kind of automatic juggernaut, running on, of just prioritizing those values, if we can -- well, we can call them values: comfort, convenience, pleasure, and security, they are values. But those values, and then seeing, witnessing, moving in a world that for decades has and continues to emphasize those kind of values, and what that gives birth to, and the concrete material things and facts and artefacts that that gives birth to in the world. And the pain of a soul who maybe can't quite even articulate, "This is my pain. I'm somehow trapped in this kind of Kafkaesque world where this goes on, and so few people even seem to feel it as a concern."

Those kind of values -- comfort, convenience, pleasure, security -- the lower level values are emphasized, and prioritized, and invested in, in this kind of over and over and over and over, almost unquestioning way, it can seem to a soul in the world. They're emphasized over and above values like beauty, and soulfulness, and love, and truth, and exploring, "What does that mean? What's that journey into opening up more beauty, creating and discovering more beauty and truth? And what does that mean? And what are the domains of truth, and love, and the kinds of love, and the manifestations, and the expressions, and the courage to explore all that?"

[50:45] These are different kinds of, if you like -- they could well be regarded just as equally as potential causes of suffering, of dukkha, of pathology for me right now, for a soul right now in this world, just as much as what happened in my birth, and even how it was with my mum when I was X years old, and certainly then going back even more, in the womb, and with the sperm, etc. Can we open it up? If it needs opening up, can we open it up? I have this question sometimes, and yeah, sometimes a little nervousness around what appears to me a kind of shrinking, a narrowing of the concepts, and all the assumptions and habits that go there.

In those kinds of ideas that give real priority to what happens in the physical birth, what happens in the uterus, etc., and the sperm, it's worth pointing out that those kinds of associations and memories are kind of conjectural, and they're usually suggested to, or interpreted first by, some authority figure, such as a psychotherapist or a physical therapist of some kind, and communicated that way, and then interjected into the client/subject's experience. Then one begins, "Oh, yeah, I feel this ..." I'm not denying the truth there; I'm just ... where does it actually come from? What's the mechanism? What's the social mechanism? We talked about how images and soulmaking can be communicated in a field. This can too. Again, one wonders about truth and origin and all that.

It might be that the pain around, let's say, oil spills, and environmental degradation, and the kind of obliviousness or lack of care on top of that kind of environmental degradation, and what that does to a soul, oftentimes, it's not that anyone needs that pointed out to them by any authority figure. It's a more independently, or it seems, at least, a more independently arising experience by a person, rather than they're in a room with an authority figure who is telling them, "You know, it's probably ..." I mean, that can happen too.

But in sometimes this narrowing down of the emphasis to the material past as causal, always bringing that conception in or leaning that way, narrowing it down that way, we can see again, in that, from a certain perspective, we can see the dominance of what I called, I think, in an earlier retreat, the fantasy of origins, something Nietzsche pointed out. We're a little bit obsessed with how things start, and the kind of, "Yes, this is the origin of this now, and it's in the past." We also see in all of this, kind of related to that, this logos, this conception, of temporally linear causality: the past causes the present, and the present will serve as past cause to the future.

Also wrapped up in that kind of narrowing that I've described, that I said sometimes makes me a little bit nervous, a little bit more obscured in the way it's wrapped up is the whole history of the modern construction of self, as I think I've pointed out on previous retreats. How we feel our selves, how we think about our selves, and our actual experience of self now in this culture is really quite different than it is in other cultures in the world at present, and than it was even in these places that we live in now in the past (in other words, in different cultures). The way we feel our selves -- we take our selves for granted, the whole sense of our individuality, and our own individual trajectory, with all the conception of causality wrapped up in that.

That whole kind of understanding, it has a history. It wasn't always that human beings felt themselves like that, assumed that's who they were and what a self is and how people feel. So also wrapped up in this kind of narrowing of the conceptual range regarding causality and pathology is not just this whole idea of a temporal structure of causality and a fantasy of origins, but also this whole sense -- it's not even an idea; it's become a visceral sense -- of what the self is as a normal experience.

But again, please, I'm saying all this really not -- I don't want to replace a certain psychological paradigm with another one, and say, "This one is better than that one. This one's more real than that one. This one's more true," or whatever. I'm actually more interested in the narrowing. My hope is that we can open up our views, and open up the kinds of conceptual frameworks that we can bring to bear and entertain. You know, it would be silly, extremely silly for me to say or to try to make the point that the past doesn't affect the future, or that trauma in one's past or a set of difficult conditions don't affect the future and the growth of a human being. That would be really silly. I'm really not denying that. I'm not denying the importance of those kinds of ways of approaching, and looking, and healing, and thinking. But what I'm really interested in is opening to a plurality of conceptions, a plurality of conceptual frameworks and causal theories and causal thinking.

What happens if we can open up to a plurality, and move between the different conceptual frameworks of that plurality? What would that give us? What would that offer us? What would that open up for us? That's really my interest. Not to disregard one and replace it with another at all. So each of them becomes a paradigm, a conceptual framework, a sort of lens framework that we can enter into in regard to this or that suffering, or this or that experience, or whatever, and move between these.

I can't remember if it's just something I've written about recently, or I shared it in a talk, so excuse me; I'm not actually going to elaborate on it. But I would say that it's quite possible to place, as we're using them, the concepts of eros and soulmaking, to construct or discover a kind of psychology, but also a developmental psychology, a psychology of human development, based on eros and soulmaking being the primary drives.

So, you know, when Freud made his kind of psychology, his psychological theory, it was based on primary drives of the pleasure principle. The images were Oedipal fantasies there. That was the kind of basis of his theory. The whole thing driving his theory, if you like, or driving development, let's say, the whole developmental impetus in a human being, was the pleasure principle, seeking out of pleasure. And then how that interacted with the family situation, and the larger situation of civilization, and its laws and morals, kind of determined -- these two forces, if you like, in contact with each other, and oftentimes in opposition to each other, and what ensued -- determined the development of the human being. But what was primary there was the pleasure principle, and wrapped up with that, the whole Oedipal fantasy, as a fantasy.

Someone like W. R. D. Fairbairn, the Scottish psychoanalyst who came much later, rather than pleasure as the driving principle, placed contact as the driving principle: this is what the infant wants, contact. Someone like Kohut, in his sort of what's called ego psychology that he developed, places actually its self-coherence -- the primary, the fundamental drive or impetus in the psyche for a human being is towards constructing a coherent and stable sense of self, ego. Very different ideas with different psychologies, different psychological paradigms, of what is fundamental, what's the fundamental drive. You can hear in that, actually, the closest, or at least the closest-sounding, it would be the Fairbairn, just of those three examples. There are many others, of course, but just to give those three as examples. The closest-sounding to what we're talking about would be Fairbairn in the contact. The drive for contact, the impetus for human contact, is what drives the psychic growth, the development of a human being in that psychology.

Contact, you'll recognize from our definition of eros: wanting more contact, more connection, more intimacy, touch, penetration, opening of the beloved other. It's just that, for Fairbairn, that contact is more limited in what it means. It's construed in what we would call more of a flatly human way. My point is, it's possible to construct a whole developmental psychology, and also a psychology of pathology, that's based on eros and soulmaking (as we are defining those terms) as the primary developmental impetus, and then see what comes out of that. That might be really interesting to do. And in what ways can that -- for instance, we talked about the soulmaking dynamic getting out of balance with the eros-psyche-logos or with self, other, world. What kind of pathology, what kind of developmental difficulty or arrest or imbalance would that give rise to? I'm not going to go into this. I'm just pointing out something for the sake of a larger point.

If we talk about developmental psychology, that whole paradigm, or just psychopathology, or those two paradigms, then we can regard a developmental psychology that focuses on causes in the material past, and just goes back, back, back, as much as it can, to the sperm, and maybe even to a past life and whatever, as one possible way of looking, way of conceiving, among other options. Can we regard it as one possible angle of direction, way of looking, way of conceiving, conceptual framework, among other options? So often it seems to me, at least nowadays in the circles I move in -- it may be very different in other cultures -- but so often it seems to shrink to that though. It's not one among other options. It just becomes a kind of mono-narrative or mono-conception: I only have one pair of glasses, and at a certain point, I forget that they're even glasses.

As I said, sometimes that can become too narrow. That kind of lens can become too narrow. We might miss, then, the political, social, cultural, environmental causes of dukkha, psychological distress, developmental bending out of shape, and also physical. I think way before I got cancer, I pointed out in a talk, you know, just how I felt it was really dangerous for people -- oftentimes people who don't have cancer or some disease that modern Western medicine has a hard time curing -- oftentimes people jump in there and say, "You have this disease, you have this cancer, because you haven't dealt with some emotion from the past. You haven't processed it," etc.^[1] It's a kind of gross assumption or a heavy accusation to bring in, and in a way, it's really a step too far of this narrowing. It's an example of a step too far of this kind of narrowing down of the causes of dukkha. We neglect to see, well, you know, there's a pretty mind-boggling cocktail of pesticides in our environment. Our air is polluted, our water, our food. We forget that, because we've somehow narrowed it down to this certain range of causes in the past that actually focus more on the individual and the individual story, wrapped up into that, constructed, if you like, by the whole modern Western construct of self. And also, sometimes, there's a narrowing, and much more often a narrowing regarding the notion of temporal causality being in the past -- the past as causal of present, and origins being in the past.

What if there are just different options available to us in terms of conceptual frameworks? How does it feel when I say that, when I suggest that could even be possible? One of the things I'm really quite interested in is the philosophy of science. In science, you can have (in fact, you often do have, in different points in history and right now) different theories that have equal explanatory power and equal predictive power. There have been times in history, even, when two or three or four theories explained the same physical phenomena, but in very different ways, and predict the same things, but again, for very different reasons. In the realm of science, in the world of science, what tends to happen then -- this situation exists, and it exists regularly in the history of science -- scientists seek to move towards a consensus where they decide, "We now favour this theory. This theory edges it over that one," at some points, either because we find different predictions, and we do experiments, and then we realize this one predicts what happens better, or for other reasons. I'm not going to go into this now, but it's actually quite interesting.

If we talk about conceptual frameworks or theories and truth, there's also, again, I think, a very interesting debate that's been going on for decades around what actually is the status, what is the link, what is the connection between a theory, a scientific theory, and reality. We might introduce that kind of thinking here as well, or that kind of questioning. There is -- forgive me if I get the name not quite right -- something called correspondence notions of truth. It means that one believes that this theory, or the elements of this theory, correspond to actual elements of reality. And that's what you're aiming for when you construct a theory, and that's what you're achieving when you achieve a theory that works. You're hoping for that. So the theory is actually just a representation, a kind of 1:1 representation. There's a correspondence of the elements of the theory and the elements of reality.

And there's a different kind of notion of truth that philosophers talk about, and that's called a coherence notion of truth, or coherence emphasis or something; I can't remember. But what that means is that it's not so much that the elements of the theory correspond with elements of fact or physical reality. Actually, what we've got when we say, "This is a truth," or "This is a theory that works," is that the elements of a theory fit together in a coherent way, but more than that, they fit together with other theories that we have. They fit well and in a coherent way with our, if you like, family or set of theories and conceptual frameworks for looking at the world and interpreting existence. That, to me, is quite interesting. What if we reflect in those kind of ways? Some of you have more of a bent to think about these things conceptually, and I think, actually, for me, it's part of the whole soulmaking dynamic at some point to ponder these things and kind of exercise one's muscles there. It actually is soulmaking.

But if we bring in these concepts or these different notions of truth in relation to the soulmaking paradigm, and how that may or may not affect our thinking and reflection and use or movement between all these different psychological theories, and theories of human development, and psychological development, and theories of psychopathology, etc., and theories of why dukkha arises now and all that. Some scientists, for instance Einstein, actually pointed out that you never really know if it's truth that's being revealed by a theory. Einstein's point was that being a scientist is a bit like having a watch, an old-style watch. You look at the face of it, and you look at the hands and the rest of it, and you can kind of hear it ticking and all that. And you're really guessing or constructing theories for what's actually going on inside, but you never really get to see what's going on inside, to finally corroborate your theory. He said science is always like that. We might feel like we've got more inside because now we've got an electron microscope and this and that, but actually there's always a way, there's always a level, at which you can't see. There's a sense that we never really know whether a theory corresponds to reality.

In a very different way, quantum mechanics, and what's called the Copenhagen interpretation, is saying that our physical theories are not really about what is there. They're about what arises in experiments, what happens on the needles and dials and readouts in the laboratory. They're really theories about that. I think also Richard Feynman, who won a Nobel Prize for his quantum electrodynamic theory, also said something similar in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I was trying to find it before this talk, but I couldn't actually find it. I think I remember him saying something similar. I'm just pointing out how interesting it is that you can have really quite different theories that have similar explanatory power and similar predictive power.

A lot of contemporary philosophers are even more keen on this idea of opening up or questioning the whole relationship between theory or concept and fact, or even perception and so-called reality. There's a long history of that in Western philosophy with Hume and Kant and Nietzsche, and even more so later. But what we have here in all this is the fact that different conceptual frameworks explain what we witness, explain what we observe in the human being, in our lives, in our experience. Different conceptual frameworks explain that differently. And they open up different directions. Or they lead us in different directions -- maybe that's a better way of saying it. They point us and prompt us in different directions. Different conceptual frameworks explain what we observe very differently, or somewhat differently, and they also prompt us and direct us in different directions.

What I want to say, what I want to suggest and even hope for, is I wonder if, partly helped by realizing the thorough and deep and radical emptiness of all things, and going into that a lot, it's possible to realize there is no ultimate truth of things. There is no kind of perspective on reality where one can say, "This is how this thing is." And that kind of extends from there. One realizes that, and it extends from there. That understanding goes deeper, and one realizes it extends also to conceptual frameworks. That doesn't mean to say they're all equal. We'll come back to this in hopefully the final talk of this series. But one senses that there is no possibility of arriving at some ultimate truth in that sense. And one begins to sense, through these kinds of practices, through the emptiness practices but also through the soulmaking practice, one really senses one's participation, as I've emphasized a few times, one's participation in perception, one's participation through conception in what arises, and also, even deeper than that, one's participation in the truth, or in what reality is and all of that.

Maybe it's possible through that. It may be possible, may be already accessible to you through some other facility or natural inclination. But it's possible that we can open up for ourselves this flexibility of conceptual frameworks, that we are actually free to move between different conceptual frameworks, and we're adept enough in different conceptual frameworks. We're not relating to any of them as, "This is the real one. That's not the real one. This one is true. That's not true. This is the final explanation of things, of what we see. This is the final explanation of human psychological development. This is the final explanation of human suffering or pathology or difficulty."

We can have, conceptually and practically, this flexibility. It's really available to us. Each of them, we recognize, has a different emphasis, a different way in, a different angle. It, perhaps we could say, opens certain doors and directions more, and perhaps others less, and delivers certain fruits more, and others less than an alternative one. But we can, at times at least, entertain a conceptual framework because that is a conceptual framework that stimulates and supports and opens soulmaking. It's not so much about 'truth' and this being the final reality. It's a conceptual framework that works in a way to stimulate, support, nourish, and open soulmaking for us. That would be one conceptual framework among others in the ways that we relate to dukkha, in the ways that we relate to our ideas about human development, and what it is to develop well, and how that can be impeded or contorted or whatever.

It's one paradigm among others, one conceptual framework we can entertain, we can adopt, move in and out of. And then wrapped up in that idea is a kind of metaconceptual framework of flexibility among conceptual frameworks. There's a kind of higher level idea that it's actually valid, and valuable, and helpful, and really legitimate to move between different conceptual frameworks, whole different paradigms about psychology, and development, and pathology, and suffering, and whatever. A metaconceptual framework. And for me, that metaconceptual framework is also a framework that stimulates, supports, nourishes, and opens soulmaking. To me, that's actually part of the soulmaking paradigm, the larger soulmaking paradigm, that there is this flexibility between conceptual frameworks, and that idea has its place in soulmaking.