Between Ikon and Eidos: Image and Hermeneutics in Meditation (Part 1)

I hardly need to point out that much, perhaps most, of what we are referring to as 'sensing with soul,' most of the range of sensing and perceiving and sensibility that's involved in that, sensing with soul, most of that is really not very usual in our culture, in our time. Those kinds of perceptions, those kinds of openings and sensibilities, and also the ideas that kind of undergird them and support them and are also involved are not conventional ones. They're not commonly found in our culture or commonly kind of sanctioned. So for that reason and for others, this sensing with soul, the opening of that possibility -- perhaps for many of us; not for all of us, but for many of us -- will need a bit more grounding. We will need to feel that it makes sense, that it's grounded, that it's legitimized.

Even if one is very attracted to these practices, and even if one has been practising them already, there will be, very often for people, a nagging doubt creep in, or a tendency to want to dismiss at times the perceptions, the sensibilities, the senses that have opened, and the experiences there, and the whole kind of approach. So I feel it may be valuable, perhaps, for many, and perhaps at different times, not necessarily just at the beginning of one's explorations, to see if we can give a bit more ground, theoretical ground, if you like, to what we're doing. Another way of understanding or conceiving of what's needed here is, as I've said before, to elbow a bit more room, to create a bit more space to be free to practise in this way, without being hemmed in, crowded in, imprisoned by the conventional view and the dominant paradigms, and something being squashed in that lack of space. So to create a bit more space, to create a bit more or find a bit more ground, to give the whole thing more legitimization in one's mind.

Partly, our freedom to practise this way is impinged on, or we feel a little bit reluctant -- sometimes that's because sensing with soul opens us. That can be tricky. It's tricky to be open, and opened in different ways. So the heart is opened, or sensing with soul involves an open heart, and it may open the heart further. The soul is opened. There are demands of us in terms of attention, attunement, humility. The sense of self and the sense of world is opened. There may be a sense of responsibilities that come with all that. All this sometimes makes us a little bit ambivalent about treading this path, or even, in any instance, about entering into a sensing with soul, or opening a certain sensing with soul. Partly the demands are, if you like, on the emotions, and the responsibility, and the heart and the soul, in that sense.

But partly it's also, the ambivalence that we have, etc., is partly as a result of ideas -- ideas that we have, that we have usually absorbed from somewhere or other (a teacher, or teachers, or a teaching, or a tradition, or the wider culture, or this or that sub-culture). Those ideas that we have shape our world-view, our Weltanschauung, and our sense of what we are, what life is, existence, and all that. Those ideas can either give us confidence and a sense of legitimacy to this kind of practice, to sensing with soul, and support our freedom to practise that way, to sense with soul, or not. They can undermine our confidence, undermine our sense that this is a legitimate way of engaging with the world and with ourselves and with experience, a legitimate way of experiencing, etc., and cramp the freedom we feel to do so.

So in this talk or group of talks, depending on how you want to count it (and I'm not sure how many parts there will be), I want to weave a few things together if I can, if that's possible. One is to open up some very specific practice possibilities that we'll get to, that may then suggest avenues for you, or things you can experiment with, or kinds of directions. That's one thread of what I want to do in this talk. A second is actually to look at the place of ideas, in those practices that I want to talk about, but also in the larger opening and, as I said, legitimation, the ground, and the creating space for sensing with soul. So the place of ideas, and weave that together.

I will say something right at the beginning, and say it again. I've said many times, and I've written about it, etc., that ideas or concepts are present in all and any perception, all and any experience, all and any experience of appearances. Ideas and conceptions are present in that. Moreover, they shape our perception, our experience. They shape appearances. They limit, also, what an experience is, how it is formed. And they're part of the fabrication of all and any perception, experience, and appearance. The only 'experience,' in inverted commas, where that is not the case is the opening to the Unfabricated, and that's an 'experience' that I'm not even sure we can actually call an experience or a perception. But all and any other perception, experience, appearances involve, intimately and fundamentally, all kinds of ideas and conceptions.

[8:45] Now, I can just say that, and say it kind of emphatically. I'm aware that's how I'm saying it. But if you're not sure about that, then investigate. Find out. How are you going to find out if that's true or not? One way of finding out is by exploring this double, intertwined path of exploration that explores fabrication of perception and ways of looking, together. In the course of doing so, as things begin to unravel, so to speak, or fabricate less, one will see that this is the case. No conception, no perception. No conception, no fabrication of perception. And what we perceive, what the experience is, and what the appearance is at any time is, as I said shaped, fabricated, limited, constructed by the idea or the ideas, concepts, present in consciousness at that time. One can also experiment, as well, with entertaining different ideas and concepts, entertaining them in a way that they're actually translated practically into ways of looking, and then seeing how the ideas are formed, shaped, limited, fabricated dependent on that conception, in line with that conception, determined by that conception.

So any and all experience, any and all appearance/perception, ideas/concepts are present in, in a fundamentally formative way. When we come to sensing with soul and imaginal perception, those kinds of experiences and perceptions also include ideas. And as a subset of the kind of ideas, they also include values, and I'll come back to that, the idea of this or that value. The Greek word 'eidos' is where we get our English word, 'idea.' Actually, 'eidos' in Greek has a kind of double meaning. It means 'shape, or form, or vision, or image,' and it also means 'idea' -- 'eidos,' 'idea.' And the verb form (it's similar in English) reflects this kind of double meaning. The verb form in Greek from 'eidos' means 'I see, or I know.' As we say in English, 'I see,' meaning 'I understand' -- not just 'I see visually'; 'I understand,' 'I understand the idea, or I know, I grasp the idea,' or whatever. So there's a way in particular [that] ideas are central aspects that we can kind of tease out or focus in on within sensing with soul, and I hope to come back to that.

[12:01] But really what I want to do in this talk or group of talks is weave together a few things. I want to talk partly about the ideas that influence us and influence our perceptions, and then our experience, and what appears to us, in our contemporary culture, the ideas in our contemporary culture. You and I are influenced by certain ideas, and that influences our very experience. So that's one theme. And woven in, as well, secondly, about ideas specifically in or involved with sensing with soul, or images, or imaginal perception. That latter thread I want to use to open up some meditative possibilities, kinds of things that it is possible to explore, perhaps that will suggest certain experiments or explorations or practices for you. Among those, some of what I want to at least touch on or draw out the possibility is that it's actually possible to meditate on an idea, not in an intellectual sort of thinking way -- that's possible at all, but what I really mean is on, if you like, the essence of an idea, and as a kind of very beautiful and soulful meditation on ideas that I hope to outline as a possibility in several different ways.

More generally, I want to also talk about some possibilities in practice, possibilities for imaginal perception, sensing with soul -- specific possibilities that might easily be dismissed or closed off to us as possibilities because of the ideas that influence us in our contemporary culture, or in some sub-culture that we move in. So partly, as I said, what I want to do, as I mentioned at the start, is to help legitimize those kinds of sensings with soul, those kinds of practices and directions. And part of that, it will be important to talk about ideas. 'Ideas' includes ideas of ontology (that is, what we believe is real and what we believe is not real), ideas about epistemology (what we consider a valid way of knowing things or knowing what is real), cosmology and anthropology (what is the nature of this universe that we find ourselves in, and what is the nature of a human being).

Interrelated with all of that is hermeneutics, which is really the philosophy of interpretation, if you like, originally applied to sacred texts, the interpretation of the Bible or the interpretation of some other spiritual text in some other tradition. But more widely in philosophy, it's come to mean the interpretation of existence, as well. So existence, this world, ourselves, if you like, is a kind of text (albeit not necessarily primarily linguistic), and we are involved in interpreting that. Whether we realize it or want to admit it or not, we are involved in an interpretation of existence, or interpretations of existence. So all this sensing with soul has also, interwoven with all that, and interwoven with all this business about ideas, is just generally hermeneutics, and what the possibilities or the limitations on our kind of lived hermeneutics of tradition, and what comes to us through tradition and texts and teachings, but also of existence itself. So I want to try and weave those themes together in this talk or this group of talks.

To start, I want to try a little bit of a historical perspective. I'm talking about the ideas that influence us. Why? Because those ideas have a huge effect on what we consider real, on what we consider knowledge, on our sense of existence, or ourselves, and of the world, and therefore what's legitimate or not in practice, etc. So a very brief, necessarily oversimplified historical perspective: you could say that medieval culture in Europe was actually very sophisticated in many ways, and particularly around religious thought and theology, etc. Somehow, coming out of those sort of intense and brilliant religious and theological kind of debates, and writings, and thoughts and ponderings, coming out of that, in a kind of strange way, emerged the Scientific Revolution and the Renaissance and the Western Enlightenment at a certain point. Actually, it wasn't at a certain point. Funnily enough, it was a sort of graded transition. The Scientific Revolution and the Renaissance and all this didn't happen just one day: "It's now the Renaissance!", or "It's now the Scientific Revolution!" Even the ideas that were at the fundament of the Scientific Revolution took several hundred years for the culture to really digest them fully so that it became, so to speak, everyone's basic point of view, or at least it heavily influenced everyone's basic point of view.

I want to draw out three strands or elements or kind of aspects of the classical scientific view (in other words, the view that emerged with the Scientific Revolution in Europe after the Middle Ages). I want to draw out three strands, not that these are the only elements or anything, but just for our purposes. (1) One was, what emerged -- and again, gradually it came to dominance -- one aspect of the three is a belief in a singular and objective reality, 'objective' meaning it's real, or things are this way whether or not I choose to believe them, or independent of how I tend to look at them, or what I'm feeling at any time, or what my imagination is doing and all that. With classical science, in time, with the Scientific Revolution, emerged the sort of world-view of classical science, which had a view in it: "There is one reality. That reality is independent of the way of looking, independent of the mood, independent of my emotions, independent of my point of view, independent of the observer, basically, independent of the subject. It's singular, and it's objective, and it's real."

(2) A second that emerged with the Scientific Revolution was what we can call Cartesian dualism. René Descartes divided the world, basically, into res cogitans and res extensa (mind and matter). They're just very different. They're two different things or realities in the world. And in a way -- we'll come back to this, but -- there was that division, a dualism between mind and matter, what we call 'Cartesian dualism' after René Descartes. That's the second. So singular objective reality; second is a kind of Cartesian dualism between mind and matter. These are interrelating, so you can kind of see the objectivism of that first element, the singular objective reality, has kind of got a link with the distinction between mind and matter, subject and object, to a certain extent. So singular objective reality; Cartesian dualism of mind and matter.

(3) And the third was a little bit ... let's say it grew more than was originally intended. So originally with the Scientific Revolution, the intention and the emphasis was to disregard anything that wasn't empirical -- in other words, anything that couldn't be sensed with the senses and then verified in experiment. So there's a kind of anti-metaphysical trend there. It started with this attention to what was visible or sensible (let's put it that way), empirical. But as science developed, and discoveries were made, and theories were made, then there was a growing structure of what was in essence behind appearances. So the empirical sort of emphasis or inclination was to pay attention to appearances, what can be sensed, and don't talk about anything if it can't be sensed. But as science probed more, it went behind appearances more and more.

So, for example, an electron. I mean, atoms were an idea that were, at some stage, behind appearances, but electrons, even now, today, are still behind appearances, in the sense that no one has ever witnessed an electron. An electron is a theory. It works very well. Actually, there are different theories of the electron, quite different theories of the electron. But there are postulated, as physics in particular developed -- there was more behind the appearances. Another kind of dimension, if you like, that was behind the appearances, were physical laws. So again, no one has actually directly witnessed Newton's law of gravity or Maxwell's electrodynamic laws or whatever, electromagnetic laws. They are, so to speak, behind appearances. No one sees F = Gm1m2/r2 or whatever it is. And quite different laws, like Einstein's law of gravity, can be applied behind the appearances to explain the appearances. So in the movement of science, with the progress of science, the initial kind of, quote, 'anti-metaphysical' -- I was going to say 'crusade,' but let's say 'emphasis' -- and the emphasis on attention to the appearances and the empirical, actually opened up more and more behind the appearances. And this 'behind the appearances' was partly what some people at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, for instance Francis Bacon, and I think Locke, actually wanted to do away with.

I'll just pause for a second. So these three elements that I want to draw out: (1) the belief or the assumption, positing of a singular objective reality, (2) the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, and (3) the sense or the inclusion, if you like, of what is actually behind appearances, in the form, for instance, of subatomic particles, which are not directly sensible, and physical laws themselves, the laws of physics themselves. So there was a wonderful and just staggering, breathtakingly beautiful expansion of scientific knowledge, and all the brilliance and creativity there, until early in the twentieth century. Some discoveries were made, some experimental results came out, that just called everything into question, the very basic fundaments of that classical scientific world-view. And what emerged was relativity and quantum mechanics, and they were an absolute revolution.

Those three principles were affected. Those three elements of the classical scientific view were affected. There was a huge shaking up -- in fact, complete fracturing or dissolution -- of the unanimous belief in a singular, objective reality. It was found that a lot of the properties of subatomic particles and fields and waves, etc., were indeterminate. They weren't this way or that until the observer came into the picture. It was no longer an objective reality, or singular. So until the observer actually made a certain experiment in a certain way, we couldn't say whether what was happening was a wave or a particle, where it was or how fast it was, what its mass was or how big it was. All these really fundamental (or previously conceived as fundamental) constituents or aspects of reality, being objective and being singular, were now severely called into question, undermined.

[27:56] Before a certain observation, a thing is said to be in a state of superposition: it's both a particle and a wave, and it's neither here nor there, nor this fast nor that fast, nor this mass or that mass or that size, etc., nor at this time or at that time, nor having a certain energy or not. Some people even now are beginning to question whether this before that actually applies (in other words, temporal sequence). So everything gets called into question. And what exists is the state of superposition, it's called: kind of wave and particle somehow existing at the same time, a thing being in one state and another state at the same time in some completely illogical manner, or where a thing is being a kind of meaningless statement, or how fast it is being a meaningless statement, or how heavy, or what energy it has, or whatever. What actually takes the place of any singular and objective reality is a waveform. So it's as if a subatomic particle is actually, so to speak, metaphorically, before we make a very specific measurement, before that moment, it's actually, or one can think of it as actually kind of a probability smudge. So it will, for example, be quite probable that it's here, a little less probable that it's over there, and even less probable that it's over there. This is just smudged over an area. It doesn't exist in one location. What we have is an equation that gives its probability distribution for various really basic aspects of reality.

I just want to say one more thing here. Heisenberg, who was one of the founders of quantum physics, published a sort of simple explanation of what was going on here in, for example, his uncertainty principle, which talks about this. He made a mistake, he later admitted. He tried to explain what was happening by the fact that when we look to see where, let's say, an electron is, we need a photon, a light particle, to see where the electron is. In seeing the electron, the photon bounces off the electron back to our eye, and that's how we gain a sense of its position. But in the photon impacting the electron to then bounce back to our eye, it moves the electron. And that is not actually -- he later admitted he made a mistake in trying to oversimplify it. That's not the basis of quantum physics, because in that case, the electron does have a position. It is a particle located in space. It is here or there, or this velocity or whatever. And what happens is our measurement kind of pushes it this way, but it's still an actual thing. The more accurate explanation of quantum physics that Heisenberg posited has nothing to do that. In itself, so to speak, the electron or subatomic particle does not have any particular velocity, does not have any particular position, etc. It's more just, this can be conceived of as what's called a wave function, a kind of equation that gives this probability smudge over space and time.

So the kind of collapse of the idea of a singular, objective reality was one thing that emerged with quantum physics. A second -- shaken, but a little less so -- was the whole duality between mind and matter, Cartesian duality. Some people really wanted to hold on to that. Some people, as I'll come back to, wanted to move towards 'everything is just matter, in fact, and mind is just matter, really." I'll come back to this. And some people (I don't know if they're in the minority) actually suggest doing away with Cartesian duality between mind and matter, and actually developing a physics that includes consciousness, etc. So the (let's say) shaking up of, all the questioning of the whole mind/matter duality thing, without any real conclusions yet. But certainly the observer seems to be involved, and the measuring seems to be involved. The observing seems to be involved in a way that is not radically separable from what we then perceive as reality.

The third aspect, regarding this 'behind appearances,' with quantum physics and relativity then started to get very, very abstract. So the laws that governed, and even the ideas about subatomic particles and what they were, started to get very -- they would kind of 'explain' appearances. So, if you like, they're attached to appearances, because an electron is not an electron without the laws that explain it. But I can't see those laws directly. So all this dimension of what was so-called 'behind appearances' became extremely abstract -- I mean, so abstract that the human mind can't conceive of it other than in very abstract mathematics. So that probability smudge that I mentioned, that's actually an equation in multiple dimensions, depending on how many particles you have. It could be in fourteen dimensions or something, and when you square the solution of that equation, you get the probability density, so to speak, of this probability smudge at a certain location, in a certain time. Really abstract. Or with some of Einstein's general theory of relativity about the curvature of space and time -- this is behind appearances, so to speak. But particularly with quantum physics, the dimension of reality that was behind appearances grew larger and larger with physics, and then became more and more abstract.

Wolfgang Pauli was a Nobel Prize winner in physics. He wrote in a letter to a friend -- this is from 1948, but he could have written this earlier:

When the layman says "reality," he usually thinks that he is talking about something evident and well-known; by contrast it seems to me that it is the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time to work out a new idea of reality.^[1]

He goes on to something that we may come back to at the end of this talk, but I'm not sure. So, "the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work out a new idea of reality." Reality is not something evident and well-known, he says.

What I have in mind concerning such a new idea of reality [he says] is -- in provisional terms -- the idea of the reality of the symbol.

The reality of the symbol. So this Nobel Prize-winning physicist, later in his life, was a patient of Carl Jung, the analytical psychologist. Only for a short time, and then Jung sort of passed him over to someone else, because Jung was actually very interested in his ideas, in Pauli's ideas regarding the cosmos, regarding mind and matter. Jung and Pauli had a long and very sort of fecund correspondence and friendship, really, over some years, and developed the elements, let's say, of a theory which some people call dual-aspect monism. What that really is is, again, a singular kind of view of reality, but reality as something that's neither mind nor matter, neither psyche nor phúsis in Greek (where we get the word 'physics' from). Rather, both mind and matter are different aspects of an underlying reality that kind of coordinate with each other in different ways. And that reality is, so to speak, beyond mind or matter. It's neither mind nor matter. It's something that mind and matter emerge out of epistemically, meaning in our consciousness, when we experience. In our knowing, this singular kind of transcendent reality that's a monistic structure, one kind of thing, splits into subject, object, mind and matter, etc.

So again here in what Pauli's hinting at and what he worked at, there's a 'behind appearances.' There's a singular idea. It's not so objective, because he's tying in the mind and the matter in terms of what gets experienced. And he had to do that, because he was at the forefront of the quantum physics revolution, so he could not utterly, completely believe in this objective perception of reality. But notice he also said "the reality of the symbol." Symbols, for him, were archetypal. That's where he was interested with Jung and the unconscious and the psyche. And also mathematical symbols. He did some really interesting work on tracing archetypal ideas in the evolution of scientific ideas, particularly with Kepler, a beautiful astronomer who developed mathematical theories of astronomy, and how driven Kepler was by certain religious and archetypal ideas. Actually, Kepler discovered his theories based on certain archetypal images and symbols that shaped those theories.

[40:15] Anyway, that's a little bit of an aside. We may or may not come back to that. But one of the points here is what Pauli says about our time. He's writing in 1948, and now, seventy years later, it's the same. It's still 'our time.' These conundra, the situation of what influences us, what has evolved in science but which no one has really got their head around. Quantum physics has made a lot of inroads into technology in our culture, but not a lot of inroads into how people actually conceive existence and how we sense experience. It's still our time. The sense of reality is still -- what were his words again: "It seems to me that it is the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time to work out a new idea of reality." It's still 'our time' now. We haven't worked that out in a way that really shapes our perceptions at all.

So I want to highlight, and draw attention to, and consider some of our legacies, if you like, or the legacies that we inherit that influence our thinking, our beliefs, our assumptions, and our experiences, and then what we dare to do in life, how we relate to life, but also as practitioners. Now, I said this is an oversimplified story, but actually one thing that I think it's important to point out or just acknowledge is the legacies that we have are complex and actually contradictory. Let's try and go into this a little bit, and pull out a few threads here.

I was reading a guy called Christopher Fuchs. He's another physicist, a contemporary quantum physicist, and interested in something called quantum Bayesianism. He was discussing Richard Feynman. I mentioned him the other day. He was another Nobel Physics Prize winner. Feynman was once interviewed. He was quite a character, and so some of his interviews are quite famous. He said something like, "If there was a massive catastrophe [he was probably thinking of an atomic bomb, or atomic warfare], and everything was destroyed of culture, the one little snippet of wisdom that I would hope survives and that would be the basis to then build everything worldwide [I'm paraphrasing him] would be the statement that, the nugget of knowledge that everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis."^[2] This is what Feynman said. Once you just pick up that hypothesis, everything else follows. I mean, he was more interested in science than anything else, but.

Christopher Fuchs said or wrote:

[The problem is] the imagery that usually lies behind the phrase "everything is made of."^[3]

So again, I'm going into all this because I'm really interested in the ideas that influence and limit us, and direct and shape our experience, both meditatively but also our life experience. So Fuchs writes, "[The problem is] the imagery that usually lies behind the phrase 'everything is made of.'" He cites William James, the philosopher and psychologist, "called it" -- this problem -- "the great original sin of the rationalistic mind."

And then he quotes William James, and it's from William James's book, The Meaning of Truth. This is William James now. He says:

Let me give the name of 'vicious abstractionism' to a way of using concepts which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively [or singularly]; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of 'nothing but' that concept [that's the key point, 'nothing but' that concept] and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged.

Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought. [It's stopping something. It's limiting something.] It mutilates things [he continues]; it creates difficulties and finds impossibilities; and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and logicians [I would say human beings, scientists, Buddhists, Dharma practitioners, whatever] give themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of the universe, may, I am convinced, be traced to this relatively simple source. The viciously privative [I think the word 'singular' would be better, the viciously singular] employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind.^[4]

In other words -- and this is really key -- Feynman says the key thing is everything is made of atoms, and then what creeps in for us is, as that view, and that view that emerged with the Scientific Revolution really gained hold, then the fundamental view, the fundamental take on what is real, what's real? An atom is real. Or he could have said a subatomic particle is real, getting more, quote, 'fundamental.' I think what he means is, if you think everything is made of atoms, then you say, "What is an atom?", and you'll get beyond what we nowadays call an 'atom' to the fundamental particles. "Everything is made of fundamental particles" is probably what he wants to say. And then what creeps in as a kind of axiomatic dogma of our present culture is that becomes a dominant view: everything is really only made of the meaningless movement and combination of material particles.

So we have here an instance of, I think, when Jung described how the victor, the victor of the scientific world-view over the medieval religious world-view, actually becomes a prisoner. This is quite subtle. It's more that, subtly present, so to speak in the background of our thinking about the world and of our opening or closing possibilities for perception and interaction and relationship with the world, undermining subtly, subtly present and subtly undermining a kind of ground for meaningfulness, for soul and sensing with soul and all that, is this kind of dogma, what William James called the 'vicious abstractionism' of the dogma 'everything is made of.' In other words, it's (A) really, the realism, and (B) the only. It's really only, and only what? Particles (what Feynman really meant to say).

Everything is really only meaningless movements and combinations and interactions of atomic particles, so that whatever we engage in as human beings, and even if it's spiritual work, or soul work, or psychological work, or whatever, there's somehow pervading in the kind of groundwater of our mind this, "Oh, but it's really only." Now, sometimes that comes to the forefront, and for some people it's really at the forefront all the time, and others it's just there in the groundwater, it's in the bedrock, and it exerts its influence. This vicious abstractionism, which is one of the problems that grew out of the success of the Scientific Revolution, became scientism: "It's 'nothing but.' That's the only thing that's real. Everything is that." So hooray for William James to point out this vicious abstractionism. He was actually a scientist. Anyway, it was good that he did that.

[51:00] So for example, someone told me the other day -- actually told me a while ago of this beautiful, beautiful sensing with soul, this soul-experience of the moon, sitting outside on her back step some months ago, and the full moon suddenly talking to her, and talking to her in a very personal way, and with a lot of love, and very kind of dear. She opened to that, and went into a whole series of meditations, sensing with soul, and relationship with the moon, really changing or opening up a lot of perspectives on matter, soul, all kinds of things. Very moving, and very soulful and important for her. Not at all crazy, not at all ungrounded as a human being: she pays her bills, she has about as functional relationships as anyone I know, etc.

And then recently, again near the full moon, she was somewhere, and kind of in sight of and in the sight of the full moon. A similar experience or class of experiences began opening up for her in relationship to the moon, and the very personal love and personal relationship, and the moon actually talking to her personally and loving her personally. There was quite a lot to it, which I can't go into now. What I want to emphasize, though, is that the first time somewhat, but the second time, she noticed that there was some hesitation, as I alluded to at the beginning, some ambivalence, some slight reluctance to open to this kind of sensing with soul, and some doubt. Now, part of it -- and she pointed out -- was actually that it's hard to sustain the kind of attentiveness, the quality of attentiveness, the refinement of sensitivity, and the openness that that kind of sensing with soul demands a lot of the time. It's actually hard, and so we kind of have to be up for it, you know?

It also demands sometimes inhabiting a kind of vulnerability. This is related to what I said: the necessity of the open heart and the humility. Sometimes we need to really sit in, as I pointed out in some of the talks on this course, we really need to connect with what's difficult emotionally or in the heart, and really be in that. In this case, there was a kind of vulnerability, and she actually had to inhabit it (that's my word), actually inhabit the vulnerability. That's quite hard as well. We have to be up for doing that. The sensing with soul might open us further. And sometimes when we're open as human beings, we also assume that to be open is to be vulnerable, because we're not protected. We're not walled off. We're not closed. We don't have a shield. So there was some ambivalence because of those reasons.

There was also some ambivalence because, as she said, what she called 'the current drama,' which was actually a situation that needed dealing with, [not] so much as just a papañca. It wasn't papañca at all. The current drama, the current issues around her, in relationship and work, that needed to be dealt with, she said the sensing with soul, the sensing the moon that way and the relationship with the moon, 'relativized' the current drama, relativized what else was going on in her life. But it doesn't relativize it by transcending, or ignoring, or just kind of being flatly disinterested or aloof in some kind of equanimously aloof, aloof kind of equanimous way. But rather, the view is opened, and the whole sense of existence is opened, and what is going on in one's life at any moment is opened. And so it contextualizes what she was calling the current drama, or the current work and relational situation that she found herself in. That opening of the view and that contextualizing can also feel like a threat, because we get used to certain views of existence, and it's like, "Whoa! This is only a part of what's going on in a much bigger landscape, soulscape, sense of existence, panorama of existence." That opening can be a threat.

But on top of those ambivalences or reasons for some ambivalence and some hesitation, there were also intellectual doubts that she had. This is part of what I really want to emphasize in this talk. They are partly epistemological. This is where it comes in: "How can I trust this experience that I have? What gives it any sense of reality or validity? Can I call it a 'knowing,' or is it just a weird experience, a strange delusion?" She had flu at the time. In the flu, as you'll know, there's the extreme sort of assault on the physical system. There's a kind of feeling of not just physical vulnerability but emotional vulnerability that goes with that physical vulnerability; body and mind affect each other. So with the vulnerability, she thought, "I'm creating this. I'm making it. I'm fabricating it, in the poor sense of the word 'fabrication,' because I am ill, and therefore vulnerable, and I kind of need it." Knowing a bit of psychology, she drew in, "This is a kind of early narcissism, when the vulnerable, young baby thinks everything is talking to it and everything is for it. So now I'm perceiving the moon as being personally concerned with me, etc. I can explain it all away by my vulnerability, emotional and physical, creating a need which is a sort of regression to the needs and the strategies of a kind of infantile narcissism."

I want to point out what I alluded to, I think, in the Eros Unfettered talks: the epistemicide that has ensued or taken place in the name of the scientific method.^[5] In other words, with the dominance of what we could call modern Western culture, the global dominance of that, there is, both in our place geographically and also other places geographically in the world, there is the insistence (or at the very least, the strong insinuation and superciliousness) of regarding, "The classical scientific method and its assumptions is the only valid way of knowing. It's the only valid epistemology," that combination of rationality and empiricism, that particular combination of rationality and empiricism, with all the reality assumptions, etc., woven in there.

As I pointed out earlier, what happens then is there is an invalidation, in this epistemicide, in this killing off of other kinds of epistemology, of other possibly valid ways of knowing, other ideas about ways of knowing reality and realities. In this killing off, this epistemicide, only the scientific method -- which means disregarding, preferably getting rid of one's emotions and one's imagination; the invalidation of the emotions and also the imagination in epistemology, in what we regard as knowing. So you don't want to be swayed by your emotions. Knowledge is what happens when you have put emotions completely aside, when there is no emotion, or when you kind of discount what emotions are present.

[1:01:02] Contrast that with a possible epistemology which actually includes the emotions as a range of different perspectives or doors, if you like, to reality -- so including difficult emotions of vulnerability and grief. These emotions become valuable, valid different lenses or perspectives on reality. An emotion like the kind of vulnerability my friend was feeling, or like someone else wrote me an email describing very deep grief at the death of her mother and another death of someone close, and that grief opening up a whole perspective, a whole sensing with soul. Could we have an epistemology that actually includes emotions, including emotions that are vulnerable, and grief and whatever, as valid different lenses or perspectives or ways of knowing? In other words, including the emotions in possibilities for ways of knowing. They open up our sense of things, our senses, in ways that might not otherwise be possible.

Again, talking about the kinds of ideas that have got into the bedrock of our psyche, conscious and unconscious minds, and they really have an influence and an impact -- in this case doubt, or a kind of ambivalence or hesitation or reluctance, or in some cases just cutting off a certain door or gate or avenue of sensing, of experience, of validation of experience and perception. But it is complex, I think. As I said, we receive multiple legacies from our cultural past, and it's complex. Despite this vicious abstractionism lurking in the bedrock of our psyche (especially regarding matter), it's also true in the complexity of things that, generally speaking, most of us don't completely believe that kind of (what's called) scientific materialism or reductionist materialism, or 'physicalism' is probably a good word, that kind of physicalism: "Everything is really only this meaningless movement and interaction of material particles."

Some people want to go that route. You know, Descartes, at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, started, you could say, with a three-part division -- not just a two-part dualism of mind and matter, but also there was God. So you had God, mind, and matter. It didn't take very long for God -- actually it was Descartes who partly was responsible for sort of demoting God. He did the creative work, and then he just sort of steps back and looks on at the machinery of the universe and the machinations of mind and matter. So God was kind of demoted right at the beginning, and then just gradually more so and more so until there was just no real need for a view of God, it was thought, so one was left with just mind and matter. Then, within that, there was even a strong movement, some people loudly insistent, that actually it's all just matter. So mind is just what's called an 'epiphenomenon.' It's just a kind of emergence out of matter. It's just one of the clever things that matter can do is be conscious, be cognizant, be aware of other matter, if you like.

I don't think we live that way. Even the people who really try and push that quite loudly in our culture, that kind of radical physicalism, that particular vicious abstractionism of physicalism, of scientific materialism, I don't think even they really live that way. If it were the case, this kind of fundamental materialism, scientific materialism or physicalism, then it would mean that our mind contents are essentially matter. They're material. Your happiness or your suffering, or your perception of beauty or whatever, or your meaningfulness, or your being in love, really they're just certain neurons firing, or certain chemical molecules or atoms reacting in the brain, or electrical impulses. It's just matter essentially. That's what they really are.

So your falling in love is just the movement of certain particles, material particles, and their interaction (usually consider it in the brain, sometimes consider it in the whole body). And then your falling out of love, and your suffering there, is also just matter doing different things, being in different places, or moving in different places, or different interactions between matter, particles in the brain. So in that sense, the suffering of the falling out of love, or the suffering at the loss of some beauty or whatever, that's also just illusion. What it really is is just atoms or particles or molecules moving or combining, etc. That's what the universe is. It's the movement and the combination and the interaction of particles. And then, amazingly, leave it long enough alone, this kind of matter in the universe with the physical laws, and amazingly you get life. And then out of life, you get the consciousness that goes with some forms of life, and the even more amazing consciousness of human beings. But in a way, what's really just happening, or in essence, it's just particles moving.

Even the people who push forward such a view don't actually live or think that way. They don't run, we don't run our societies that way. We take human suffering very seriously -- or we try to, for the most part, or some human sufferings, put it that way -- in law, and in our morality and ethics, etc. But that view of radical physicalism or vicious abstractionism that extends to the scientific materialism and scientism there ... If we're going to say, well, actually, we do take suffering as real, and we consider it real as something; we don't live in a way that we just regard suffering as just the movement of atoms in the brain or whatever, and electrical impulses in the brain. So if suffering is real though it's built or fabricated as a kind of mental construct from matter, then so is happiness, and so is beauty.

The sense of beauty is in the beholder. As we say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It's not in the thing itself. And so is love, and so is actually meaningfulness, and so is soulfulness, and so is the sense and perception, and the thought and conception, of divinity. All these are as real or unreal as suffering or pain, even physical pain. Physical pain is, if you like, mental. Atoms or particles themselves don't experience hurt. So pain is a mental experience. It's not a physical experience. Emotional pain, definitely. Physical pain also. It can be regarded as all of these are merely the movement and interaction of material particles, etc., which are not immediately perceived or conceived as such. When we move in the world, we don't live in a way that reduces something like suffering or pain to this view of radical, total physicalism, and the vicious abstractionism of that. We don't. But actually happiness, beauty, love, soulfulness, meaningfulness, and the sense and idea of divinity are all just as much mental constructs as suffering.

So you could say if you're going to respect suffering, all these others are equally worthy of respect. Or if you're going to disrespect suffering -- if you're going to really hold to that radical physicalism, then you have to actually disrespect suffering, or at least a lot of suffering. And you have to make a case for respecting certain kinds of suffering. But actually, if you just reduce everything to this physicalism, you come back again to a possibility, you open the door again, for the respectability of soul, soul-qualities and soul-experiences. All of these are equally worthy of respect or disrespect. All have equal value: the perception of divinity, beauty, even the idea, the sense of the ideal or idea of beauty in essence, soul, all of it as much as pain, as suffering, even as physical pain.

[1:14:20] So even in that radical view, it's complex. We don't actually live that way, in this vicious abstractionism. But it nags on us. We're pulled in different directions. There's a rabbi, I think he's still alive, called Adin Steinsaltz. He's somewhere in the States, in New Jersey or somewhere. He points out that (as another example of the way we're influenced very much by contradictory ideas, and that they're part of our sense of existence, and right and wrong, and value, and all kinds of stuff), he points out that one of the most obvious things in the world is that all human beings are not equal. It's obviously not true that human beings are equal. There are vast differences, in all kinds of ways, between this human being and that human being: better at this, not so good at that, more developed in this, stronger in that, whatever.

But democracy, he points out, our institution that we respect so much (although I sometimes wonder now, myself, but anyway), theoretically at least, democracy and the kind of humanism that underlies it enshrines a law on the principle that everyone is equal, that everyone's opinion is equal. He said it's obvious -- you just have to look at human beings or pay attention to what they do, what they say, and how they think, and their acts, and what they're capable of. It's obvious that humans are not equal. So our institution of democracy kind of assumes soul, he would say.^[6] We're assuming something that we can't directly see, that has universal value in everyone, and it's inviolable no matter what the apparent differences in human beings, the apparent inequalities between human beings. So again, you get a whole other kind of influx into our modern world-view than this vicious abstractionism of scientific materialism or reductionist materialism.

I'm not sure about what Steinsaltz says there, because it could be (I don't know) that our enshrining of a kind of equality between human beings is just silently acknowledging our postmodern uncertainty or agnosticism regarding what is of value, and we're so confused about values that we can't say or declare, and so we just say, "Everyone is equal." I don't know, and actually there are other ways to look at all that. But I think it's an interesting point that Steinsaltz makes, and possibly that really is coming in, that sense there of soul that's sort of hiding behind. It's kind of worked its way into the bedrock of our world-view.

But as I said, we are heirs to a complex legacy, a legacy that is a complex of contradictory influxes of ideas and, in a way, is confusing. We are confused. But still there's a way in which, as I pointed out, I think what Jung said is true of the Scientific Revolution's way of thought. [It] was a victor at that time, but the victor slowly becomes the prisoner of the world that it conquered. So for example, we find ourselves not entirely free to pick up the exploration of the range of possibilities that we call 'sensed with soul' because we're a little bit imprisoned, or a lot imprisoned, by these influxes of ideas that become dominant ideas. They won in the cultural debate, but we've become their prisoner, or that view becomes imprisoned itself. It can't move out of itself.

So ideas, as I said, shape and limit our experience. They shape and limit what we consider worthy of practice or legitimate practice. They shape and limit our perception of self, other, world, experience. They shape how we sense existence in terms of life and death. And also they shape and limit what we do in the world, our acts, and what we devote our energy to, and our intention.

Now, can you see that this will still apply in terms of practice, in terms of Dharma practice? For example (and you've heard me allude to several times over the years), we can get a kind of reductionist Dharma. Oftentimes Abhidhamma teachings are kind of reductionist. They reduce things, again, to kind of atomic units. Both matter and mind, atomic units. And then these discrete atomic units are working in a kind of process. The practice is shaped in accordance with that idea of what reality is, so one goes for this kind of micro-view that will expose this, that we'll actually experience this atomic reality, or as close to it as possible. One works towards experiencing that. And then that whole process, that whole approach, reinforces itself: "I believe this. I look in a certain way. I see that." My seeing that confirms my view of it as a reality, as a truth, rather than as a perspective. A microscopic view, a narrow focus of awareness, a very sharp attention or mindfulness is a perspective. And that view of atomism is a perspective. It's part of the idea that influences the perception. It's a perspective. It's one perspective among many.

Sometimes a person's Dharma practice and understanding and whole trajectory is kind of imprisoned in a reductionist view of different kinds within the Dharma. Perhaps also you can be aware of sometimes when I refer to the epistemology, the dominant epistemology or the epistemicide that does away with or disvalues emotions, devalues emotions as opening up ways of knowing, as opening up perspectives, and tries or strives even for a kind of emotion-free state, you can also see, witness that in certain kinds of Dharma. Very easily we conceive of an ideal state of certain emotions, particularly equanimity. The common view of equanimity is that somehow, in equanimity, everything is calmed down, and we're just really seeing clearly, without any distortion of any emotion, because we're just really steady. The lake is clear, and we can see clearly. Or, as I said, certain emotions. Or with mindfulness, the idea is, "Okay, a certain emotion might be there. If I keep practising mindfulness, there's a quietening of the emotional state." But when I'm practising mindfulness, when I'm mindful, even if an emotion is there, I've kind of got some distance on it, so that I'm not so much seeing through the emotion as I'm kind of devaluing what it tells me about. There's an epistemic devaluing because of the aloofness or distance we have, or perspective, actually, we have on emotions. So that can creep in as well.

So this reductionist view, and the kind of atomism there, was exactly one of the things that, if you like, Nāgārjuna, as the father of the Mahāyāna, or one of the fathers of the Mahāyāna, was exactly what he took issue with. You can read his whole body of work as really picking holes in that reductionist Dharma, that kind of atomic realist view. So I'm talking again about ideas that limit our experience -- in this case, what about Dharma ideas, or the ways that happens? This limitation that comes from certain ideas happens within a Dharma context.

Another one -- we've touched on it either directly or indirectly -- is the absence of the concepts of eros and soulmaking. If we just consider the concept of eros, the absence of that concept doesn't allow, for me, enough differentiations of desire. It will lead to certain blind spots. It will lead to certain gates closing, not even witnessing, "Oh, that's a possible gate." It will lead to a certain very tightly circumscribed notion of what awakening is or could be. Because of the way eros will stimulate the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, the soulmaking dynamic, and that stimulates and stretches and expands and deepens our ideas and perceptions of things in sensing with soul, the absence of eros will also lead to a kind of rigidification, and a narrow rigidification of what, for example, matter is: "Matter is this. It's the four elements," or whatever. "Mind is this," in some view of what mind is or what mental elements are. "Awakening is this." So there isn't, because of the absence of eros, there isn't the possibility for the eros-psyche-logos dynamic to really get going, and stretch, and expand, and add dimensionality, and open up the view, and open up the ideation, etc.

And then a further problem or limitation coming from the absence of the concept of eros comes from -- for me, if we don't have the idea of eros, then we actually don't have an adequate understanding of our motivation or our desire in practice and how it works. Without the concept of eros and soul, soulmaking, we don't have an adequate, or wide enough, or rich enough, or complete enough understanding of what is motivating us, what are we actually desiring when we practise, and when we practise consistently, and with a lot of love and dedication. There's not, therefore, an adequate understanding or model or theory of our motivations and desires as they already exist. It's already driving us. Someone who loves practice has already got eros and soulmaking involved in that love, in that dedication of practice. As I've said, where we love, where we're dedicated, where we're devoted -- and I don't mean just 'devoted' in a typically religious sense; I mean devoted to something, devoted to doing, devoted to practising, for example, devoted to awareness, whatever it is -- where there is love, dedication, devotion, there is eros and a sense of soulfulness and soulmaking in the ways that we would use them. They might be limited, but they're still operating there. With the absence of the concepts of eros, the ideas of eros and soul, we don't actually have an adequate -- I don't think -- an adequate or rich enough or complete enough theory of what motivates us, what we desire, and how that actually works to propel and prolong a life of practice.

All right, I'm going to stop here for today, but I want to continue just on this theme. I'm reluctant to rush through it, because I think it's so important. I'm opening up things from a slightly different perspective than what I've done before, so I'm hoping that not rushing will be more helpful. So let's do the second part of this business about ideas tomorrow. Okay. That's it for today.