Between Ikon and Eidos: Image and Hermeneutics in Meditation (Part 3)

What if instead of one world-view, reality-view, ontology/epistemology/cosmology, being declared the singular truth over another or others, instead of that kind of war, cultural war, what if we opened up to the idea of pluralism? Not just because we think we should be nice to each other (though we should), but actually on philosophical grounds, because we realize the mistake in insisting on "there is a singular reality, a singular truth, approached by a singular epistemology," etc.

Again, so much at the forefront, ahead of his time, Nietzsche points out how much what's going on for us emotionally, our affects, actually affect the perspectives we have. Let me read a passage from his On the Genealogy of Morals. He says:

Let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as 'pure reason,' 'absolute spirituality,' 'knowledge in itself': these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always [those kind of ideas about pure knowledge] demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; and the more affects [the more emotions or emotional drives] we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our [so-called] 'objectivity,' be.^[1]

So, plurality. More affects equals more perspectives, more eyes and, if you like, reality or a thing or a text or existence being multi-aspected, amenable to multi-perspectives rather than just one. So that our knowing is always, if you like, involved. It's always got, as I said, a desire. It's interested in something. We've always got some kind of affect going on, some kind of mind state, and some kind of drive or intention. So it's always situated. The knower, the seer, the meditator, whatever it is, is always situated. There's an entwining of our desires, our drives, our thought, our concept, our affect, all of that. A guy called David Owen writes about Nietzsche:

Our consciousness is neither disembedded [in all of that, and in culture] nor disembodied; knowing, like seeing, is an activity which attends the embedded and embodied character of human subjectivity.^[2]

So whether it's perception or conception, it's influenced by desire, affect, perspective, body, all of that. Nietzsche talked about knowing as interpreting.

All knowing about the world is necessarily an act of interpretation, a selection of certain features and a disregarding of others.^[3]

All knowing about the world is necessarily an act of interpretation, of hermeneutics, a selection of certain features and a disregarding of others. And that's exactly what science does.

We only 'know' according to our 'point of view' -- our particular cognitive and affective perspective.

I'm actually quoting now from a guy called Christopher Hauke who wrote a book about Jung, and it involves a little discussion about postmodern thought and Nietzsche.

We only 'know' according to our 'point of view' -- our particular cognitive and affective perspective, [in other words] -- and no knowledge, including that of so-called 'science,' can be exempt from this. Moreover, we select according to our interests.

So we're back with this "what do we want," and can we actually admit that what we want is influencing our concept, world-view, perspective, interpretation, slant, perception, conception?

There is no dis-interested knowing.

And Nietzsche writes, in his Beyond Good and Evil:

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds [he wrote this at the end of the nineteenth century] that physics too is only an interpretation and an arrangement of the world (according to our [own] requirements, if I may say so!) and not an explanation of the world.^[4]

So the affect, what's going on for us emotionally, and our intentions, and our desires, affect our perspectives. Knowledge is perspectival. The ideas and the perception, the conception and the perception, all our cognition is dependent on what's going on emotionally and what our desires are. Knowing is interpreting, which involves selecting, emphasizing certain aspects, disregarding others. 'Interpreting' is another word for hermeneutics. Our interpretations depend on our interests. It's wrapped up with our desires. What do we want? As I said, mindfulness, too, is not divorced from desire. Mindfulness wants something. What does it want? Always our interests, our desires, are wrapped up in our perspectives, which give to us then what we see and what we think.

This is David Owen, who was writing about Nietzsche. He talks about pluralism. This is what I wanted to emphasize, that

[an] interpretation [about] the world [in this idea of pluralism, and this idea of interpretation that Nietzsche had] does not exclude the truth of other interpretations of the world which serve other interests. It is an important feature of perspectivism [this idea that reality and existence is open to multiple perspectives] that it rejects the idea that the truth about the world could be exhausted by any single description of it.^[5]

So there's actually an insistence on pluralism, not just because we need to get on with each other (which is important), but also on philosophical grounds. Actually be honest, be rigorous. Look what's happening in perception and conception, belief and assumption, and mindfulness, and philosophy, and science, and all the rest of it. So the truth of a certain interpretation, of a certain hermeneutics, of a certain perspective, doesn't imply the lack of truth of other interpretations.

[9:31] Again, Isaiah Berlin, writing about Vico within the context of talking about pluralism. He says:

'I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said.' That is relativism. [So that's not pluralism. It's just, "I like this, you like that. We have different tastes. That's it." That's relativism. Berlin writes,] Vico's [view] is not that: it is what I should describe as pluralism -- that is, the conception that there are many different ends that men [let's say human beings] may seek and still be fully rational, fully men [fully human], capable of understanding each other and sympathising and deriving light from each other.^[6]

So it's not an exclusive, singular truth. There are different takes, different perspectives, and they can all have truth. They can all be true, they can all be rational, because they serve different ends. In other words, what do we want? What's our interest? That will shape the perspective. That will shape the interpretation. That will shape the perception and conception. And all wrapped in that is the epistemology, the ontology, the cosmology, the metaphysics, and all that.

So human beings have different ends, and we may seek different ends and still be fully rational, fully human, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light from each other. Again, it's a social concern. But for me, it's more than just a social concern; it's a philosophical concern as well. So we have in our soulmaking logos and practice, in our desire, we have the end of soulmaking. That's the end to which we're aiming. Aiming at that is different than aiming at an objective truth, or saying, "This is true, and that other thing isn't it." We're employing rationality. Some of this logos employs rationality in the service of the end of soulmaking, the goal of soulmaking.

So we come back again and again to this question: "What do you want?" What do I want? What do you want? Of course, that changes at different times. In some situations, I want this or that, and I have this perspective or that perspective. What do we want though?

I heard two stories about a Burmese sayadaw. These are secondhand. One said that he -- he must have ordained as a monk after he had children or a child or something, and been practising as a meditator before that; otherwise it doesn't quite make sense to me. But anyway, he said he was present at the birth of his child, and lifted the child as they were born, and held the child. He said, "I looked inside myself, and there was no emotion. There was no emotion." And this was described as a triumph of Dharma practice. This was the fruit of his Dharma practice, that here was his own son or daughter, lifted up from the birth, and there was no emotion. This is a triumph of practice, or being portrayed or conveyed, as I understood it, as a triumph of practice. The person who conveyed this story to me said she was -- 'horrified' was not her word, but she was saying it's like, "Boy, is that what I want? I have questions about this guy."

Another story of this sayadaw, walking in the beautiful hills of Burma. Apparently it's just exquisitely beautiful, and these sort of rolling green hills that go off into this blue of the sky there. The monks -- the person who told me this was a monk at the time, under this sayadaw, and they were walking in the hills mindfully, etc., on their walk. He stopped at a certain point, and just was overcome with the beauty of the environment around him, and seeing these hills, the sky, and the nature there. He was just in rapt awe standing there. A minute or so later, the sayadaw -- because they were walking in single file -- the sayadaw came up, and just stood behind him, and said, "What is beauty? It's just form and colour." And this person who was a monk, a junior monk, thought to himself, "I don't think you and I ..." [laughs] "I don't think you and I understand each other." He didn't say that, but that was the thought.

So again the question: what do you want? What kind of sensing do you want to open up? What kind of emotional life do you want to open up? Where is your practice headed? Where do you want it to be headed? Similarly, I read quite a while ago a different Burmese teacher describing what he conceived of as the arahant's experience. It basically sounded like a kind of impersonal machine, sort of just aware of the atomistic processes unfolding in time. That's the fully enlightened being's experience of existence, this kind of ticker tape of existence, of life, of being.

So does the victor ... 'Arahant,' by the way, one of the meanings is 'victor,' 'foe-destroyer.' Does the victor become a prisoner? A prisoner of a certain mode and direction and scope of sensing and perceiving and believing and conceiving? I mean, it's a whole other question, whether that really was the totality of this monk's experience, whether it really was always that he had no emotion in regards to his children, whether always he perceived beauty and deconstructed it as kind of meaningless shades of form and colour which we can only get attached to in a problematic way, and therefore we need to see through them, or whether the arahant really only experiences that atomistic process and the impersonality of that. Or is it just that the conceptual framework won't allow them to articulate different experiences and different pulls? Is it really that there's that much of a prison, that actually they've completely cut off certain kinds of sensibilities and experiences, or is it really that they just don't have the language and the conceptual structure to articulate or give value or even admit experiencing something at times, or admit to themselves?

What I call 'dot-to-dot' meditation, I taught that in the context of teaching emptiness. It's quite an easy meditation to do with basic mindfulness, and it's a kind of reductionism. So this big thing -- I can do it spatially with, say, a pain in my body, or over time, with experiences that are taking place in time. Instead of them joining up into one big, problematic thing, or something lovely ("It's going to be this fantastic experience!"), and you could say the mind has joined together these atomistic dots, and actually deconstructing that, seeing the dot-to-dot. I called it that because of those drawing books that I used to have when I was a very young kid, and you had numbers, and you pencil or crayon between the dots, and then you get a drawing from these atoms. It's a kind of seeing a certain level of fabrication of experience. You can kind of unfabricate by being aware of that. There's a kind of reductionism in that, into the view that ensues then. So there is a strong strand of reductionist perception, and reductionist ontology and epistemology and all that, in the Dharma, and it's certainly something that I've employed myself as well.

You also get it, interestingly, in other traditions. I was reading about Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor who was also (still) a very widely respected and very influential philosopher, stoic philosopher. He describes practices, if I can find them. I read about this through Michel Foucault.^[7] "[First], exercises decomposing the object in time; [second], exercises decomposing the object into its constituent parts; and third, exercises of reductive, disqualifying description." All of which are very Dharma-esque, if you like. And then he talks about an example that's quite striking, Foucault says, that "involves musical notes, or dance movements," or movements, something like that. The instruction that Marcus Aurelius gives, philosophical instruction, is pay attention to music. When you're around music, or there's a beautiful piece of music, or a beautiful dance happening, pay attention in a way that kind of atomizes. So it pays attention just to this note right now, and not the whole, the movement of, say, the sweep of a melody, or the sweep and the flow of the motion, the integrity, the whole of the gestalt, or the whole of the motion of the dancer or whatever. Why? Marcus Aurelius says, "[Because then] you will scorn a delightful song, a dance" or whatever.

[21:16] So he's giving this as advice, as deconstructive reductionist advice, in order not to be attached. Then he says, "Always remember to go straight for the parts themselves, and by analysis [by this kind of reductionist analysis] come to scorn them." And to scorn -- Foucault goes into some bit about Greek etymology and whatever, but it means, basically, 'to look down on.' Why?

Because if we look at a dance in the continuity of its movements, or if we hear a melody in its unity, we will be carried away by the beauty of the dance or the charm of the melody. We will be weaker than it. If we want to be stronger than the melody or the dance, if we want to prevail over it ... if we want to retain this superiority, if we do not want to be weaker than the whole of the melody [etc.], it will be by dissecting it instant by instant, note by note, movement by movement. [And then] we realize at once [when we do that] that there is nothing good in these notes and movements.

Foucault goes on a little bit, and then he says:

This text I have just been reading on musical notes and dance ends, however [this Marcus Aurelius text, saying this]: "In short ... always remember to go straight for the parts themselves [actually, he gives an exception that has to do with virtue, morality of the self], and by analysis, come to scorn them. And now, apply the same procedure to life as a whole."

So this analytical deconstruction of the perception of continuities, etc., and he applies that to life as a whole. You get this kind of deconstructive -- it's very popular in Pali Canon Buddhism, and other Buddhisms, very popular in Theravādan, in other spiritual traditions that kind of mirror that. But what's partly interesting to me here is that the very examples he uses are music and dance. This is exactly, I think, the sort of thing that Nietzsche, were he aware of it, would howl at with outrage and his own kind of scorn. When does disenchantment become just silly? When does reductionism become silly, and serve only limited ends? So we can end up applying it to life as a whole, and then actually clinging to the view, the interpretation, the hermeneutics of reality that ensues then. Why? Because then we will conquer. We will be stronger than. We will not be weaker than. We will not be attached, etc. Again, one asks: is the victor then, the one who is stronger, actually imprisoned by the limitations of the world-view then, and the limitations of what's allowed by a certain philosophy?

So beauty in art or in nature, music, emotions, narratives, selves. If we're always going to deconstruct these things -- the beautiful, the artistic, the lovely music, the emotions, the narratives, the selves -- if these are always deconstructed, that is silly. I think that's silly. Because sometimes we want, we have other ends. We have other wants, other desires. We want our sense of whatever this thing is to open up differently, rather than just that we don't feel weak in relation to them, that we don't feel attached in relation to them. We want, for example, a sensing with soul, with everything that comes with that: the meaningfulness, the beauty, the dimensionality, the divinity, duty, all of that.

Not too long ago, I was practising with a friend, and this perception opened up somehow of interstellar rocks, or the kind of fragments of rock that you might find, say, in Saturn's rings -- little lumps of everything from granular molecules all the way up to little rocks -- and that vision, and then of my body and her body as made up of stone, if you like. It was a sensing with soul into the earth element, into the element of solidity, we might say. Usually, when that meditation on the four elements is given in a Theravādan context, it's for the sake of deconstructing the body and making us unattached, or in the service of less attachment to the body, and the physical form of the body, and what happens to the body. Again, it's like Marcus Aurelius: we don't want to be weak. We don't want to be overpowered by an attachment to that, so we reduce. We employ a mode of looking that's the four elements, and it's in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. But usually the way it's taught, it disenchants and unattaches. This sensing with soul of, you could say, this cosmic earth element and the stone element in me, the earth element in me and in my friend, was not, however, lacking in holiness. It wasn't flat. There was a dimensionality there. As I stayed with it, I was really struck by it. It was as if the stone had its own soul, and it had its own subjectivity, and it had its own intelligence. If you've listened, I think I described in the Eros Unfettered talks how that kind of intersubjectivity and recognition of soul in the beloved erotic object will open out to a sense of soul there, a sense of subjectivity there, a sense of intelligence.^[8] It was a particular kind of intelligence, and a particular kind of seeing. What is it to see and to sense existence as the stones sense it?

So the holiness was there. The dimensionality was there. It wasn't a flattening and a deconstructing that took away that enchantment. There's something similar there, perhaps, to some tantric or Vajrayāna meditations on the elements. Very different orientation and relationship with the earth element, or the water element, or the fire element. Its holiness is there. Its holiness is amplified. It's more than just flat.

[29:10] So sometimes we might want to be, as Marcus Aurelius puts it, greater than something, not weaker than something, not attached to something, not subject to something so much. But sometimes we want sensing with soul. And sensing with soul, as I pointed out at some point near the beginning of this course, sensing with soul involves humility. It's not about being greater than, not being weaker than. There is a sense of this thing, this beloved other, this thing that I am perceiving/sensing, is somehow bigger than me. Sometimes we want that.

Again, we're talking about the ways that we can very easily become imprisoned by certain ideas, certain teachings, certain traditions, or takes on teachings, takes on traditions. Some of this happens in really gross ways. You know, sometimes I've heard about certain teachers or authorities in some situations being really quite aggressive and angry, even, with a student, perhaps in a one-on-one situation, or in a small group, or in a group of teachers. Really aggressive in a kind of, what we might call anti-religious, or certainly what we would call anti-soul or anti-spiritual, anti-transcendent, with that kind of thrust. And I wonder: why so aggressive? Why so angry in this insistence that anything called the Unfabricated is rubbish, or that's only confusing to people, or there's just this world, just this flat materiality? They wouldn't use the word 'flat,' but it's what we would call flat. Why the anger? Why the violence? Why the aggression?

Sometimes what's communicated is communicated in a very aggressive way, with the kind of throwing around of power, or the exertion of power there. As we said earlier, as that guy, Moscovici, wrote, questions of epistemology are questions of social order. Questions of epistemology, questions of ontology, questions of cosmology, are questions of social order and questions of hierarchy. Sometimes there is this very obvious use of one's power position to insist on this or that take on epistemology, ontology, cosmology, reality, whatever. What's going on there? Is it a personal thing, or an ego thing, like one feels a little lacking? I don't know. Lacking because one hasn't had certain experiences which other people have? Or is it some other -- this kind of, actually what we're grasping at with all this is, in some cases, fundamentally, is I'm grasping at a certain world, a certain cosmology, and that's actually more important than anything else? It's more important than the freedom or whatever, grasping at cosmology. So I'm curious what goes on. I don't think it goes on that much. But when it goes on, why the anger? Why the pushiness? Why the throwing about of one's power? Why the kind of aggression there?

Most of the time, the ways we are affected by these ideas is much more subtle, and the ways that we're imprisoned are much more subtle. It's just that we haven't considered the ways those ideas are having influences. We haven't considered them fully. We haven't questioned them. For example, when I was back talking about science and its attitude to emotion, and the way emotions were kind of devalued in that epistemology, contrasted with my friend's experience of the moon, a sensing with soul of the moon, in what she described as an emotionally vulnerable state. So that kind of idea of epistemology that we absorb, either from science or sometimes from a Dharma context, or the idea that imagination plays no role, has no epistemic value, contrast that with Pauli and Jung's conversations and beginnings of a theory that actually gave a place to archetypal imagination in the epistemology and the construction of reality. But the point is, these ideas, we don't maybe consciously trace the fact that we tend to dismiss a perception that happens when we're feeling, say, a lot of grief, and we don't give it epistemological validity -- we don't trace that to the Scientific Revolution. But it's quite subtle the way that works.

We've been talking about atomism as well. We may have imbibed that from the tradition. But you might be a practitioner who is not really into a kind of way of practising Dharma and way of meditating that has any atomistic, atomic reductionist kind of process view. That's not how you view things. You, or someone, may be more of a practitioner who is just into a kind of warm, kind, open 'being with' the emotions in the body, and the connection there, and regarding that: "This is what is happening. This is what I'm asked to be with, to meet, to see as it is, to open to. This is what is happening. This is what is arising for me now, these emotions in the body, this mind state." And then being with the breeze on the cheek when I'm outside walking, or the taste of the food and the sight of the food. And then also maybe I'm with and opening to the nature connection with the food, the soil on the carrots and all that. And all that is conceived of as 'what is.' All that is 'what is,' and what one needs to address.

Still, the question is: why limit the life-world (if one is even using that word)? Why limit that as the range of what one pays attention to? Why is that worthy of attention or considered real over and above, say, my friend sensing the moon in a certain way? "This is real. Because it's real, it's an emotion, and it's probably connected with my history, and I feel it in the body. And then the soil is real on the carrot and the potatoes. And the breeze is real. And it's real sensation." There's a limit to the life-world, a limit to the appearances and the experiences that are worthy of paying attention to. And implicit in all that is an epistemology and an ontology: these are considered real, these are considered worthy of attention, and how I can relate to them and know them. That's a lot more subtle, where we've got that kind of limitation in terms of the scope of the life-world, in terms of the epistemology, in terms of the ontology there. It operates more subtly, and we're not even quite sure where we've got those ideas from.

[38:02] Often what happens is there's a combination of influxes. So there's a kind of, for instance, into how we practise, and how we think of practice, and then how that affects our life, there's the encouragement to deconstruct in this kind of reductionist way and atomistic way that we described. There's the absence of any conceptual place for or encouragement of eros or even the discerning of eros. There's this notion, over and over, repeated, about 'what is,' and 'being with things as they are,' or 'being with what is,' etc. And all of that together may then have, for example, an impact on how we might relate to something like music and the arts, the emphasis on deconstruction, not the notion of eros. We're just in the idea of, "'What is' is important." We might listen to music. We might even enjoy music. But there's not really a conceptual opening out of the possibilities for music or art there. There's no positive place for art or music. Or, even worse, it may be music is just regarded as, "Music is good, but maybe New Age music where it's very calming. Maybe that can be a point of music." In other words, the point of music, if we're buying into, or if we've got the nag and the pull in the background of this emphasis on a kind of deconstructing, reductionist, atomic world-view -- no place for eros, this emphasis on just 'what is' and all that -- what place can music really have? It can't really be opened out. Or the arts.

I'll come back to Michel Foucault just briefly. He points out, I think quite interestingly, in a book called The Hermeneutics of the Subject, he said:

We can say that we enter the modern age (I mean, the history of truth enters its modern period) ... [So he's questioning this concept of truth, tracing the history of truth. He said that enters its modern period, and we then enter the modern age] when it is assumed that what gives access to the truth, the condition for the subject's access to the truth, is knowledge and knowledge alone.^[9]

In other words, truth is just something you either know it or you don't. If you get the knowledge, then you know what's true.

That is to say, it is when the philosopher (or the scientist, or simply someone who seeks the truth) can recognize the truth and have access to it in himself and through his acts of knowledge alone, without anything else being demanded of him and without his having to alter or change in any way his being as [a] subject.

What he means is, it used to be that to have access to the truth, you would need to engage spiritual practices. You would need to purify your being ethically, intentionally. You would need to purify your mind. You would need to work on yourself and your capacity, your ability, to actually know the truth. So something happens, and we enter the modern age, when it just becomes about "you either know or you don't." You don't need to work on yourself in any way.

This is also interesting in how it translates to Dharma. For a kind of Dharma that essentially is, again, what I might call 'existentialist Dharma,' that essentially equates practice with coping with the tragedy of the real world, the impermanence, our existential predicament -- that Dharma practice is essentially coping with that, and that's the view of Dharma. There's very little -- there is a little bit, but very little truth to be discovered or ascertained or arrived at that's not already obvious, and certainly none that requires a difficult course of practices, purifications, and spiritual exercises. It's just what we see, for the most part. Maybe also this seeing the self as a process, and everything is connected to everything else. But it's not that hard to see, and mostly it's like, "This is what you get," this existential predicament that is said to be obvious to everyone, and practice is coping with that in some way. I've talked about this before. Truth is still assumed here as the evident reality that one must relate to and cope with. It's just evident what truth is.

I would read the Pali Canon as insisting, rather, that the Dharma is kind of predicated on the difficult practice of gaining insight into reality and truth. That's what the Buddha means by 'insight into the nature of reality.' It's a long journey, and it's hard, and it's rare for someone to really go deep in that. Some modern interpretations of the Dharma just say, "Dharma practice is coping with this obvious reality of the impermanence and the kind of toughness of our existential predicament."

So we have one perspective that has truth with this metaphysical status of objectivity, metaphysics of objectivity: it is the truth. We can do all these difficult spiritual practices, and gain access to the truth that's hard to see, that's kind of concealed from us by our avijjā, by impurity, etc., is one view. And the other view is just: truth is obvious, and practice is learning how to relate to that, how to cope with that. What happens, I want to ask, to either of these perspectives when truth, or the idea of truth, loses its metaphysical status of objectivity? There is no objective truth that I'm going to arrive at, either because it's pretty obvious anyway and it's just what everyone agrees on in our modern world, or it's some kind of transcendent Unfabricated, or something or other. What happens to either of these perspectives when the idea of truth loses its metaphysical status of objectivity? And what happens, too, to the notion of care of the soul?

This is actually what Foucault's book was about, how knowledge and care of the soul kind of go together, so that if we have knowledge of the truth, it's caring for the soul. In the kind of existentialist coping approach that I just described that's quite popular these days in some circles, what does 'care of the soul' mean? It means, well, coping with the obvious truth -- that if I learn how to cope, I learn the attitudes and the kind of reflections or whatever, or stances that just allow me to cope with this obvious truth, and the difficulty of our existential predicament, and the tragedy of impermanence, etc., then that learning how to cope is caring for the soul, caring for the self, let's say.

In the transcendent or spiritualist approach, 'care of the self' includes practices, etc., that allow the discovery of the liberating truth. In that view, when I see that transcendent Unfabricated, when I see that reality that is obscured that takes a lot of difficult practice to see, when I see that truth, the knowing of that truth will also serve to care even more deeply for the self. So there's a care for the self in coping, and that's the limit of care for the self in one paradigm. In the other paradigm, yeah, there's some coping, and there's the development of whatever, and then the seeing of the truth is the ultimate care for the self, because that truth liberates me and takes care of me -- or rather, knowing that truth takes care of me, the wisdom that comes out of it, the attitudes, the non-attachment that comes out of it.

So I want to ask: what happens to either of these perspectives when truth loses its metaphysical status of objectivity? And what does care, self-care or whatever, mean when the self is realized to be empty, and not knowable as it is, but dependent on the perspective and way of looking? So neither are we saying there is no self. We're just saying there are multiple perspectives on what the self is. What is this self that I'm caring for? Is it the soul that we're talking about? Is it a process? Is it what? Is it the scared human being, daring to look at the existential predicament and the facticity of that? How do these notions, what happens to these kind of ways we conceive of the Dharma when we realize the emptiness of truth, the plurality of truths, and we also realize that no self-view, there's no particular conception or perception of self that is ultimately true?

[49:01] This whole idea about knowledge and what it means to care for the self, Foucault's book is really tracing that through history (actually, just a portion of history). These are things that we care about. They're wrapped up in Dharma practice. What does it mean to know? What does it mean to care for ourselves, to care for our life? And what does it mean, I'm asking, when we open up the notion of truth, we see its emptiness, and we open up a plural notion of truth, and when we see that any particular self-view is not going to be the 'real,' ultimately true take on the self? To me, when we are no longer in the view of a singular, objective reality, and when we're no longer in the grip of believing there is a particular view of self or conception of self that is the real one, then, to me, it opens up possibilities. The whole realm of our possibilities for practice, for thinking, for perception, for sensing, for exploring, is opened up.

One of the ways we can think about care of the self is care of the soul, in our sense of the word, what we mean by 'soul' -- in other words, soulmaking. That's what soul, in our sense of the word, cares most about -- soulmaking. We can view care of the self that way. And we can view knowledge and truth as participatory.

So can we be aware of, can we understand, how ideas of the real, or what's real, or ideas about reality, how ontological/epistemological ideas and commitments, beliefs, assumptions, come into our practice to shape, limit, direct our practice, and what it can be, where it can go, what it can do for us, and what it can open for us, and also into our life and our experience? These ideas, the whole point here is that they shape and influence our experiences -- our ideas, our experiences, our very sense/senses of things, of the world, of self, others, existence. And in that shaping and influencing, either they limit it or they open it. Or they limit in certain ways, and they open in certain ways. Can we see that, recognize it, be aware of it, understand it, this fact of the influence of ideas regarding reality?

Jean Baudrillard, a modern French philosopher, said:

The map ... precedes the territory.^[10]

The map precedes the territory. In other words, our conceptual frameworks, our ideas, shape the actual landscape, the territory, that we find ourselves then travelling through and experiencing. I can go with that, although it might be a little extreme as a view.

There's another writer called Boaventura de Sousa Santos. He's one of the guys that talks -- I don't know if he uses the words, but 'epistemic colonialism,' 'epistemicide,' those kind of things. I'm not sure if he uses the words, but he writes a little bit about that. He says:

Let's enlarge the present and the space of the world. Let's move on. Let's travel with crude maps. Between theory and action there may be correspondence, but there is no sequence.^[11]

"Between theory and action." We could say between theory and practice, between our ideas and our conception, conceptual frameworks, and how we practise, how we then experiment with perception. Between theory and practice or practical explorations, "there may be correspondence, but there is no sequence."

In other words, he's not as extreme as Jean Baudrillard, who says the map precedes the territory. There's a give and take in our practice of sensing with soul. Ideas shape perceptions, shape the sensing; the sensing that we experience also calls into question ideas, opens them, expands them, suggests new ones. Isn't that exactly what we're talking about when we describe the soulmaking dynamic as the mutual involvement, and dialogue, and enriching, and interpenetration, and impact of eros-psyche-logos, enlarging, being enlarged? The logos, the ideas, the conception, influencing the perception, the psyche, what we called the image of things. And the images, the perception of things, the psyche, influencing the logos. And included in that is our affect, our emotions, and how they colour and push and influence, and open different doors, shine different perspectives. And the desire, and the eros. All of that is included in the way this works, in the way that the territory then opens up, in the way that we discover the territory and construct our maps as we're going. So that could be, what Boaventura de Sousa Santos writes, could be a kind of metaphor or encouragement for what we're doing as well.

I haven't focused too much on the direction, in relation to all this, from the emptiness point of view. But either or both with understanding emptiness very deeply for oneself in practice, the emptiness of all phenomena, and actually that understanding being digested, going deep, maturing and affecting one's outlook, and gaining confidence in that perspective -- either with that, or both with that and with this brief questioning or poking a little bit, or critique, or opening up of these ideas that have influenced us, epistemological ideas, ontological ideas, metaphysical ideas, hermeneutic ideas, both in terms of their social aspects and their philosophical aspects -- so either from what we've been talking about over the past few hours, or from the emptiness perspective, or even with both, my hope is that will help create a little more space for us, and a sense of freedom, possibility, legitimacy to explore this sensing with soul and the range that's possible there. And create also, or discover, a kind of ground, a different ground philosophically, in terms of our beliefs and thoughts and ideas on which it can rest, this sensing with soul.

Okay, so from here, I hope that some of that is helpful, or at least sprinkles some seeds that may be helpful later on. And then we can go on now to look at specific practice possibilities, and relationship with ideas, and how they open up the possibilities in practice. Let's stop there for now.