Between Ikon and Eidos: Image and Hermeneutics in Meditation (Part 5 - Bodhicitta)

So three characteristics, a kind of classical Buddhist teaching that many of you will be familiar with. If we briefly move to a much more modern kind of idea and vocabulary, concept, 'living life to the full.' I've heard that a fair amount, and sometimes it's conveyed as the point of practice: the point of practice is to live life to the full.

I heard this in a talk one time, and I can't quite remember who gave it years ago -- someone describing a walk that they'd done when they were on retreat at Gaia House. He was describing how something had been going on in his mind. In preparing for this walk -- so maybe it was towards the end of the retreat, and it was a little longer walk or something, and he was trying to arrange the 'perfect' experience or day, as perhaps he was transitioning out of retreat. In so doing that, he in fact missed the opportunity to be present to the trees and the breeze, etc., on his walk, because he was busy figuring out stuff, I think, about how he was going to have the perfect day. This was in the context, I think, if I remember, of explaining and emphasizing 'living life to the full' as the aim or the purpose of the path in practice. As I said, I've come across that in quite a few places.

Again, it's an idea. There's quite a lot involved in it, and maybe just to say a few things about it. Is that idea of living life to the full, as it's commonly conveyed, or as it's commonly understood, let's say, because a person might be meaning a certain thing by it and someone else understands something differently. But as it's either commonly meant or commonly understood, is it actually living life to the full? It's quite a big phrase, 'living life to the full.' What might be missing? Or what's involved in that phrase, and what's left in the idea, and what's left out? If this person had been walking, and perhaps consumed in thinking or outrage at some, I don't know, political injustice, or trying to understand something in the Dharma, would that be disqualified from 'living life to the full,' because they were really wrapped in that? Or is it dependent on how mindful one was of the experience, like, "I really know now I'm doing this thinking," or whatever, or just being lost in it? Does that kind of influence whether we consider it as living life to the full or not? If one was walking, and one says one was lost in nature, is that living life to the full or not?

It's somehow wrapped up, or it can be wrapped up, in the way we hear it or the way it's communicated, as somehow being related to mindfulness in a modern sense. But it's not quite clear, to me at least. What is clear: I would guess that probably the more usual notions of, say, being present or being mindful, do not imply or include a sensitivity to or perception of anything more than what we've been calling the flatly material, let's say in nature, or an attention that is more than kind of flatly sensual. So there's a kind of unidimensionality, or a very limited dimensionality, to the sensitivity and the perception -- although there is a kind of awareness along with sensing of, say, mental movements that might be happening at the same time, or awareness of how one is interacting with the experience (with aversion, with craving, with thinking, with planning or whatever). But dimensionality, in that kind of presence or awareness or mindfulness as it's typically understood, or one of the ways it's commonly understood (let's just say that), is missing or limited. Sometimes it's even construed as an awareness that excludes or shaves off any sense of dimensionality. So it's exactly that: we're just cutting off, and being really simple, and kind of the bare actuality and all that.

One could say, and some people would want to be all-inclusive and open and say, "Oh, but sensing the dimensionality and divinity or whatever of things can be, or even is included, in that mindfulness and in living life to the full." But the fact is -- again, I'm talking about influences of ideas here -- the fact is, however, it's not mentioned much at all. We don't really have that language yet in the wider culture. So it's not mentioned much about dimensionality and divinity in the wider culture, but also in our teaching culture. When we use common phrases like 'being present to the moment,' or 'the touch of life,' or 'the breeze on the cheek,' we use those phrases quite a lot as teachers, but if we only use those phrases, and talk that way, it may be that those phrases have with them, in the minds and souls of the speakers and the listeners, all kinds of fantasies and ideas, cosmologies and visions of awakening. Sometimes they're spelled out, and sometimes they're not. Again, I'm talking about how pervasive and subtle can be the ways that ideas come into the way we communicate, the way we think, the way we listen, the way we speak.

I would say that probably the more dominant interpretation or framework underpinning and connected with that kind of language of being present to the moment, being open to the touch of life, being present to the breeze on the cheek, and all that stuff, is more implicitly materialist, simply sensual, in the sense of truncating or cutting off any dimensionality in the way that we would use that word. It's what I would call a kind of modernist understanding. It's shot through with a modernist or underpinned, undergirded, by a modernist understanding. Or sometimes a kind of simply unitive -- some kind of mystical oneness is going on. Even if the speaker is meaning something different, a person hears it that way. So these are the common ideas that influence this kind of language or the concepts that we often use when we're talking about mindfulness, the phrases that we often use when we're talking about mindfulness.

Someone who is listening from the perspective of those more common views won't have their perspectives and ideas challenged or expanded if we just stick to those same phrases. Someone who might be open to perceiving dimensionality is not really having that openness and those ways of looking supported by the teachings unless it's explicitly mentioned, unless it's drawn out, elaborated on, filled out, pointed out. Usually it's not. Sensing of dimensionality, that level of experience, and that potential function of mindfulness, is usually not being drawn out, not being legitimized, not being given value, not being prioritized, amplified, explained, or understood more widely, because it's not being articulated. The ideas don't get a sense to function as seeds because it's not being drawn out in the communication. As I said, some people would say, "Well, good, because that business about dimensionality doesn't have any place at all in the Four Noble Truths," and then we're back to this whole debate about what is awakening, and what are the Four Noble Truths, and where does soulmaking fit with that. I've been through all that.

[9:58] But we could ask, 'living life to the full' -- if we come back to that, living life to the full. Am I living life to the full if the soul-dynamic of eros-psyche-logos, and its mutual insemination, expansion, etc., is cramped and blocked? How 'full,' whatever that means, can such a life be? That soulmaking dynamic is a part of life. Even if we've never heard of it, even if it's only functioning in a limited way, it's a part of life. It's a part of how the psyche works, we could say. As I've pointed out before, without the expansion of psyche and logos, the eros and the pothos can only expand outwards, horizontally, at the same level, flatly, unidimensionally, trying to get more and more experiences at that same level or of the same kind. Then living life to the full becomes about, "Now I'm going to bungee jump," and -- what are they called? -- 'bucket lists' and all that, and travelling more widely. Or it becomes an endlessness of this one-dimensional mindfulness, flat mindfulness, so-called 'presence' to a so-called or so-seeming 'reality' that's actually limited in depth.

Actually, what happens, long-term practitioners of mindfulness or presence as it's so conceived, many of them begin to want more than that. I'm talking about people who have been practising really for some years. It depends a lot on the soul-type, as well, and the eros. I've talked about that elsewhere. But many long-term practitioners who are practising in that kind of way, where the mindfulness or the presence or whatever you're going to call it doesn't have a dimensionality, and that ongoing opening of the eros-psyche-logos is not supported, they begin to want something more than that kind of mindfulness and presence. In a lot of those cases, they'll begin to explore other paths. Either they'll change paths, or they'll use other paths that have a bit more psychological richness or a bit more allowance of something, a bit more erotic or whatever it is, or devotional, or this or that. Or they get into more study: "I really want to study mindfulness." And again, without being aware that study itself is imbued with fantasy, that one is soulmaking in the study. It's not just, "I want to intellectually understand more," if the study is really rich. But there's often a blindness behind the movement. There's not the questioning or realizing fully: what is behind this movement to want to expand from just this flatly conceived sense of presence or mindfulness?

So in this idea of living life to the full, which can be, for some people, quite a commonly used idea, a question: how do I know it's full? What does that mean? 'Full' means it's reached its maximum. Living life to the full. How do you know that it's full, that it's reached its maximum? How do you know that more is not possible? What does it mean? I don't just mean 'more' flatly, horizontally. How do you know that more of even what 'life' actually means is not possible? What is included in this fullness that one alludes to, if one's using that phrase or hearing that phrase? Fullness, to me, must include meaningfulness. And as we touched on earlier, much earlier in this course, meaningfulness means more than only actualizable meanings or purposes. They're important in our life too: "I had this purpose, I achieved it, and there was a meaning for me." But meaningfulness must actually be something infinite and not ever finally achievable. It always is bigger than what I can achieve. Wrapped up in meaningfulness, or wrapped together, are meaningfulness and fantasy or image. As we said, that also has a 'beyond' to it. Even still, it's like living life to the full, if it includes meaningfulness, then wrapped up in meaningfulness we have something of fantasy and image, and then it's no longer that flat thing any more.

We could also ask -- really what we're saying is, what is 'life' in this version? 'Living life to the full.' What is life? What's included in this vision or idea, both of 'full' and 'life'? And again, what is not included, or not even intuited as a possibility, not even admitted as a possibility? One of the things with that is the whole notion of, as I said, what life is. And related to 'what life is' is "What is the world?", because we live life in the world, or seem to live life in the world.

I can't remember if I mentioned this on a previous retreat,^[1] but there's a writer called Robert Bellah, and I think he wrote a book called Beyond Belief.^[2] He points out that what he calls 'world rejection' was very common to religious traditions and spiritual traditions only really in a certain sandwiched chunk of the history of the world. Before, say, about 1000 BC, you wouldn't get any kind of religions or teachings that were about rejecting the world so much. This is his take. I don't know enough about the history, but I'm sure it's not quite so squeaky clean, black and white. Maybe predominantly characteristic of religious traditions and spiritual thought, etc., before about 1000 BC, was that they were all 'this worldly.' There was no sense of escaping the world to some transcendent, Unfabricated beyond or whatever.

Then there was a long period where religions and spiritual traditions and thinking actually were more geared toward world rejection. Pali Canon Buddhism, as I would read it -- and it's quite hard; you would have to take out huge chunks of the Pali Canon to construe it as not what Bellah would call 'world rejecting.' Buddha's kind of hell-bent on ending rebirth, on getting beyond this world, ending appearances once and for all, not being reborn again, dissolving, or whatever one might say, into the transcendent Unfabricated. Buddhism wasn't alone. There were many others that sought to end rebirth in that kind of movement, something similar. So before 1000 BC, and then from 1000 BC until almost the start of the modernist period, where, again, in our time, it's quite rare, this kind of orientation or aspiration or attitude of world rejection. I mean, you do get ISIS and all these kind of people, but they're also just very ... well ... confused, to say the least. But generally speaking, broad brushstrokes, characteristic of both ancient times, before 1000, and modern times, is not so much world rejection.

[19:00] So this living life to the full actually takes its place -- and you can hear it; it's not something you would ever find in the Pali Canon, living life to the full, or tasting life fully, or anything like that. It's a modernist notion. That's why it feels so comfortable to people, and makes so much sense: "Oh, that's what mindfulness is for," rather than, "Mindfulness is in the sake of not being reborn. It's in the sake of transcending all fabrication of perception, unfabricating, so you know the transcendent Unfabricated. And then, at some point, you can not be reborn into the world of fabrication at all, of any perception. Not be reborn." That's not a very common modern notion. So wrapped up with this 'living life to the full' is a certain relationship or view and stance to the world, in relationship to the world, but also of practice and the world. Wrapped up in it, I think, is a massive toning down or reversal of any kind of aversion to the world or anti-eros to the world. And more, in living life to the full, there's a modicum of sort of allowance for or inclusion of a certain amount of, let's say, relish or juiciness with regard to the world. That's why it's attractive to us, because in modernist times, most people don't really go for this 'get beyond the world' thing. So there's something we could almost call eros, but it's really in quite a limited sense. There's a view and relationship with the world there, and a certain stance to the world that's more common, and therefore more easily popular, these days.

It's not quite eros in the way that we would say, but let's say something like that: there's some kind of mild erotic connection between self and world, life and world. But if the eros is really big (and again, I've talked about this before), or if it gets to be bigger through the fertilizing of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic in the ways that we've described, then one can have both, and one will have, at some point, both an eros for the world and the eros for the beyond, the transcendent, the Unfabricated. And the eros for the world, if it gets wrapped up in, allowed to invigorate and catalyse the soulmaking dynamic of eros-psyche-logos, we will start perceiving dimensions to the world, to ourselves, to others, and there will be a kind of divine immanence that will come forth, through/in/with/as that dimensionality. That's in/through/with the world itself, not as something beyond. And, at the same time, there will be eros for the transcendent. So big eros, when a person has a big eros, or when the eros is allowed to become big, and worked so that it becomes big, there won't just be this attitude of mild erotic connection with something called 'life' and 'the world.' There will be something much fuller than that. It won't just be that mild eros for life and the world, and a kind of abhorrence for a beyond, a transcendent beyond. There will be, in some weird way, what Bellah might call both world rejection and world -- what, affirmation? I'm not sure what the opposite would be -- love or loving? We will have both erotic thrusts, erotic openings and desires.

As I said, when the eros is allowed to stimulate and then get involved and enriched and deepened and widened in the soulmaking dynamic, then life and the world begin to gain dimensions, be perceived imaginally, as image, in all the ways that means. And they become, in that way, infinite, exactly for the reasons that I mentioned when we were talking about dukkha. Because things don't have sharp and hard edges, they have this infinity of possible dimensions, and soft, elastic edges to them, so that life and the world become infinite that way. We're attracted to that infinity there, and fullness is not possible. But it's also possible that there's eros, as I said, for the Unfabricated, and then there's that particular kind of fathomlessness and infinity, if we can call it that, to the Unfabricated. Both are possible.

'Loving life' comes to mean more and more. It comes to embrace more and more. And I don't just mean embrace more and more experiences because we learn to be mindful, present, to more and more experiences. It certainly comes to mean much more than enjoying vivaciously a good time and the sensual and interesting pleasures and experiences that are available to many human beings today, if they're affluent enough: going to parties, and dinner parties, and skiing, and going to beaches, and wild water swimming, and fine dining or whatever it is, that kind of 'loving life,' and the zest for that that some people have. 'Loving life' can mean way more than that. As it becomes ensouled, 'loving life' means something much more than that. It may also come to mean being deeply and widely and reverently attuned to the beauty and to the mystery of being. To love life may mean to endlessly discover and create an infinity of dimensions of beauty and of mystery in life. Yet it's so deeply that it's not only life but the whole of existence to which one is keenly, profoundly, devotedly receptive, attuned, open, sensitive in the sensing with soul, in the movement, in the love of soulmaking, and in that whole relationship, stance, attitude, poise that that favours, opens up.

So that becomes the inclination. The whole of existence one is attuned to in this profound and devoted receptivity, openness, sensitivity. And that whole of existence includes death, so that in loving life so deeply, one is not afraid to let its appearances fade. One is not afraid to let go into death. Loving life, if that really opens for us, means loving life and death. It's more than only accepting death that we're talking about, because a true love, a soul-love, ensouls all that it embraces, all that it touches. Death, too, is ensouled, become image, become deeply and endlessly beautiful, a deep and endless mystery. All that is opened, again, by the journey into deep unfabricating, and by the sensing with soul.

[28:20] So we get these ideas, and again, they influence us, and they may limit what our practice is, and also how we sense existence, and then how we live our life. Another idea that many of you will be familiar with is mostly used in the Mahāyāna tradition. It's spreading now, and it originally came from the Pali Canon. It's the aspiration of bodhicitta, that idea, the aspiration of bodhicitta. That is delineated as having -- there's an ultimate bodhicitta, and there's a relative bodhicitta. The ultimate bodhicitta is actually the realization of emptiness. That's the ultimate Buddha-mind, bodhicitta. The ultimate awakened mind is the understanding and the perception of emptiness. Relative bodhicitta is what most people are more familiar with. It's this aspiration to attain awakening, to attain Buddhahood, for the sake of all sentient beings, so that one can serve them.

Certainly the relative bodhicitta, and in some meanings also the ultimate, is based on, or the possibility there is based on the notion of Buddha-nature, or Tathāgatagarbha in Sanskrit. It's because we have Buddha-nature that there's the possibility that we can become awakened, and become Buddhas, and serve other beings. But this Tathāgatagarbha, this Buddha-nature, has really widely different meanings. It's used in very different ways across even just the Mahāyāna traditions. I'll come back to that.

I'm interested in a few things here with this idea. One is: how does this work for us, this aspiration, if it's something that's alive for you, this bodhicitta aspiration, if it's actually part of your practice? For some people it will be, and for others not really. That's fine. But if it is, how does it function? Here, I think one of the things going on (it's worth pointing out) is the involvement of idea in image, or sometimes the possibility of them being interchangeable even. In aiming at, or aligning ourselves with, or being devoted to something more than this life -- usually the bodhicitta aspiration is viewed over lifetimes: I'm on a track that will ripen in awakening, in Buddhahood, in future lifetimes. Is that aligning, is that aiming, is that devotion to something more than this life, is that living life to the full? If I don't think of it in terms of future lives, then just the value and the ideal of that kind of self-giving, that kind of outpouring, that kind of serving and dedication, that kind of goodness, there's a kind of ultimacy. There's a kind of ultimate value and ultimate ideal there. If that's what's going on in the aiming and aligning and devotion, that being meaningful to you, then, again, is it living life to the full? Because it's more to do with something that either ripens beyond this life, or that, in the very ultimacy of the value and the ideal, it is beyond what can fully be reached ever.

I think I mentioned, but I'll come back to it, because I feel it's an important thread to weave through: goodness, beauty, love, whatever, these values have no limit to them. They always have a 'beyond.' They're always transcendent of wherever we are. To aim at, to align oneself with, to be dedicated to and devoted to, and to be moved by those kind of ideals that are wrapped up in the bodhicitta aspiration, it needs to be reflected in my life. I mean, it's quite possible that someone can just mouth the bodhicitta aspiration, and then live a completely unscrupulous life, etc., without any dedication to other beings. But it needs to translate. We're talking about stuff that moves my heart, that moves my soul, that I can feel my being aligned with that. I practise bowing to that, aligning my being, sitting in the dedication, sitting in the devotion, kneeling towards that, feeling the reverberation of the being, the heart, the soul, the energy body, with this ideal of bodhicitta aspiration. I can feel that, the meaningfulness of that, the beauty. I can feel the effect that has on my soul, on my energy body, on my heart.

So I'm talking about that. In that, then, (A) it must translate somehow or other into the life, in how I choose to live, what I choose to do, in the widest possible way. Or there must at least be the attempts in one's life to live in the direction of that ideal. But (B), it is just a direction, either because I have this "it can't possibly ripen that I'm going to be a Buddha in this life," especially if I have a Mahāyāna idea of a Buddha, or because in being primarily a kind of conglomeration of values, and thus an idea, it has something that's 'beyond.' Values always have a transcendent dimension, these kind of values. We can't possibly fulfil them. However good I am, it's possible to be good-er. However loving I am, it's possible to be somehow more loving. However beautiful something is, it's possible somehow for it to be more beautiful. At least one might just conceive of that possibility. There's always a kind of transcendent beyond to values. And as I think I mentioned earlier but I'll return to, that's one of the ways they bear -- the relationship of values as ideas; values [like] goodness, beauty, whatever -- the way they relate to and have similarities with, overlap with, bear on images.

But in the fact that it's somehow beyond this life is that, if we relate it to what we were just talking about, this third idea (bodhicitta aspiration) to the second idea (this living life to the full), is it somehow more than living life to the full? Because I can't actually achieve it. The fullness, the ripening, is beyond this life, or in the ever-transcendent. Though a value is somewhat partially achievable, it's always going to have this transcendent. Or if the bodhicitta aspiration manifests as a kind of image somehow through, let's say, a tantric deity kind of embodying or representing that bodhicitta aspiration, and so the aiming at, and the aligning with, and the devotion to is an image -- image, too, in the way that we've been talking about, the erotic-imaginal will always have this 'more' and 'beyond.' It's part of what we've talked about. It's part of what the eros will create and discover. There's always a beyond.

So as an image, if there is an image of Tārā or Avalokiteśvara or something, and it becomes something that kind of condenses the bodhicitta aspiration for us, there's both eidos and ikon there. There's ikon in the sense of it's imaginal. It's an image that's imaginal, that has that infinite depth and potential to open. And it's eidos, it's idea as well. It's this conglomeration of values. So there's something there about image and idea, how they relate. But there's something here about, just linking it slightly to what we said before, being more than living life to the full. It's beyond living life to the full. But we don't need to dwell on that.

[38:28] This word for Buddha-nature that I mentioned, Tathāgatagarbha*.* Tathāgata has its own whole etymology and stuff, but we could just say 'Buddha' is another word. Buddhagarbha. It's another word for 'Buddha.' Garbha is the interesting word here. Garbha can mean a womb or a matrix. It can also mean an embryo, so that which is in a womb or emerges from a womb. I'm taking this etymology and things from a passage by Shenpen Hookham, in a book, I think, called The Buddha Within, which is quite an interesting book.^[3] So garbha in Sanskrit means womb, or matrix, or embryo, or, for instance, something like the gold that is in a goldmine, or the diamonds that are in a diamond mine or whatever. There's quite a range of what it can mean. Garbha can also mean 'born from.'

So you see with this, partly because of the variation in what the word garbha can mean, [and] partly also because of the ways that Sanskrit works in terms of making compound words that you stick together and then you can relate the two words of the compound (Buddha and garbha, Tathāgata and garbha), you can relate them in different ways to each other to generate different meanings. So it's an inherently kind of ambiguous -- or rather, a language that's amenable to multiple interpretations, very commonly. For example, when it's said -- and again, there are oftentimes no verbs in Sanskrit sentences -- so the Buddha says, "All beings Buddhagarbha." So all beings are the Buddhagarbha? Or all beings have Buddhagarbha? That much is ambiguous or open, let's say. I'm mentioning all these for -- again, there's the possibility of meditating on bodhicitta as a meditation on an idea, a set of values, and a devotional meditation that really involves the energy body, the soul, the heart, the being, the focus, the surrender, the intention. And there's a meditation that can be more on an image.

We said the notion of bodhicitta as an idea was rooted in or dependent on the notion of Buddha-nature, Tathāgatagarbha. If we go through the different possibilities of what Tathāgatagarbha might mean, and then this idea of "all beings Tathāgatagarbha," "all beings are the Buddha-nature," or "all beings have the Buddha-nature." I'm going to go through some different possible variance of meaning it could have, that kind of common Sanskrit phrase in the Mahāyāna tradition. And hopefully what you can get from this is it generates different meanings, and each meaning can be an idea that can be converted to a way of looking.

For example, "all beings Tathāgatagarbha" could be "all beings are a womb of the Buddha," or "all beings are the womb of the Buddha," or "all beings are a womb of the Buddha's/Buddhas." Even then, "a womb of the Buddha" could be the womb that gives birth, or that holds the Buddha before a Buddha manifests. Or "the womb of the Buddha" could be the Buddha's womb. You have to play with this. You have to think about it a little bit. "All beings are the womb that gives birth to the Buddha." That means you are a womb, from this idea which can be translated into a way of looking with a little playing with it, and then meditated on. "All beings are the womb that gives birth to a Buddha." You are a womb, a matrix, that gives birth to the Buddha, to a Buddha. What does that do? Your body, your soul, your psyche, your practice.

And again, one can actually take that in quite a flatly conceived way: "Ah, yeah, so that means if I really practise hard, then I'll become a Buddha." Or, "You are the womb that gives birth to a Buddha," what might that mean sensed more with soul, sensed into more imaginally? What might that mean for this moment, not just as a future potential that tells you to, "Yeah, hit the cushion again. Practise harder"? Or, as I said, "You are the Buddha's/Buddhas womb." "All beings are a womb of the Buddha's/Buddhas." Again, play with this. Turn the phrase over. Each one of these can have different directions of meaning, and they can become temporarily crystallized as something to meditate on, an idea, and then through which you can see another or see yourself and see beings. Again, because garbha can mean 'born from,' "All beings are born from the Buddha." What does that mean? What might that mean? "All beings are born from the Buddha." Can you feel into that? Can you sense into it with soul? There's a kind of soulful thinking that has to go on a little bit, and a kind of hearing it poetically. "All beings are born from Buddha." What Buddha? Where? How? What does it mean? What might it mean?

Or again, it could be, "all beings are Tathāgatagarbha," "all beings are the Buddha's hidden treasure." Again, it's the Buddha's hidden treasure, so one possibility there, as a corollary, "we are the hidden treasure of God," "we are God's necessity," "we are the divine's necessity," "we are the divine's treasure," if I participate in it, if I see it a certain way. And 'it' means me and you, and my life, and my perception. "All beings are the Buddha's hidden treasure," the diamonds, the gold in the mine. That's corollary with this idea of belonging to the divine or having our roots in the divine. How is that communicated to us? How is that felt? Maybe it's communicated and felt through other images.

Or again, in Tibetan, which is mostly where we get this Tathāgatagarbha -- well, also Zen, but when we get it through the Tibetan, at least, it gets translated in a certain way, apparently, in Tibetan. I don't know Tibetan, but it's "all beings have the essence of a Buddha." That could mean "all beings have the essence that the Buddha is," or "all beings have the essence that becomes the Buddha," "have an essence that becomes the Buddha." So again, if you're listening to this, you'll probably have to rewind. If you want to get into this, rewind, and just write these down, and then take individual ones, and meditate on them -- which means playing with them as ideas, very lightly. They're poetic ideas. And then when something feels, "Oh, yeah, that's lovely," then it's like, okay, can I sit with that, and let that idea kind of percolate down into the soul, and infuse the sensing and the sensing with soul of oneself, of other, of life?

Again, 'essence' in Tibetan apparently has the meaning of some kind of good stuff that's extracted by purification from something else (so, for example, gold from gold ore, or sesame oil from sesame seeds). "All beings have the essence of Buddha." There are actually many possibilities here. "All beings Tathāgatagarbha," "sarvasattvās tathāgatagarbhāḥ." One can see the flexibility. Again, plurality, flexibility. And there's a lot of beauty here, and a lot of art possible. We can get quite adept at translating this kind of thing into a way of looking, or letting it translate into a way of looking, sensing with soul, sensing self, sensing other, as I said.

[49:02] I just want to finish today with one other thing to point out about this bodhicitta aspiration. If you're used to this bodhicitta aspiration from some Buddhist tradition or other, it may well be that it functions through an image -- say, an image of Tārā, or Avalokiteśvara, or even a kind of more vague internal image that you've come up with of what a bodhisattva is and what a bodhisattva does, etc. But it may well be that that image is kind of universal and, let's say, generic. We have a kind of universal, generic image of a bodhisattva, either because it's one given to us (say, Avalokiteśvara, or Tārā, or whatever), or just operating for us in our psyche. Whether it's perceived clearly or more vaguely, it may well be kind of universal and generic. In that becoming image, or being given an image, it can lose the particularities of one's own personhood. It can lose the kind of particular ways of this infinite echoing and mirroring of my personhood, so it just becomes a vague image of being a bodhisattva, or moving towards Buddhahood, or whatever. That's quite common in a lot of these traditions -- again, we've touched on this so many times -- to lose the particularities, and to lose or erase or make more vague the personhood and the particular ways the personhood is echoed and mirrored (my personhood, your personhood) in all this. So we're somehow just aiming for a universal, generic, or somewhat vague bodhisattvahood.

Contrast that with a too sharp delineation of exactly what I'm going to be, and what it's going to look like, and how I particularly will do this. Too tight, too rigid boundaries as well. The Jungian concept of individuation is quite an interesting concept, or at least can be moulded to be something more in line with what we might be interested in. It's a moving towards or a growing towards and a groping towards my individual sort of blossoming. But that blossoming has no end. It's personal. In Jungian therapy I think it would be, and certainly in the way we're talking about it, it's mediated or supported by the imaginal. In Jungian therapy, one would be looking at one's dreams and images and things that came up as, at some point, beginning to give us the clues -- as the analysis matures, to give us the clues of the threads of the individuation for me. My individuation is different from yours, whose is different from the next person. So it's very personal, and very unique, and retains my particulars. And maybe even my particular difficulties are redeemed and transformed -- not erased, necessarily.

That's more akin to the kind of work we're doing. If it's mediated and supported through images, this movement to something beyond, this 'angel out ahead' that Henry Corbin talked about, then it's my angel out ahead. There's a difference between that idea, what's the angel out ahead for me (or the angels, because oftentimes it's plural). Then it's individual. It's not just Tārā, or it's not just Avalokiteśvara or whatever. It's unique to me, individual. There might be a few different angels calling me, and that's also interesting as well. But that becomes my movement, let's say, towards something like the bodhicitta aspiration. Or I might give it a different name. I might just say it's the images that are calling me, the angels that I'm moving towards, it's the process of my individuation, whatever language. It can be more inclusive of and richly fulfilling and attentive to and involving my personhood, your personhood, and all the particulars of that. But the angel out ahead is image, is ikon, and therefore infinite and unfathomable, and always having a beyond. It's always out ahead. We never reach that angel out ahead fully. If we move towards it, it takes a step back, but we're always in connection with that. There's always that erotic relationship and coupling. It's with us. There's the eros both ways. There's the togetherness. But we never become it fully.

My process there, my soulmaking journey or opening, is based on my image, and it's also based on my values. We can talk about values like compassion and goodness and love and generosity, but they have to be translated personally. When one really starts to attune the heart and the soul with ideas and ideals (ideals are ideas, and values are ideals, are ideas), the particular way generosity speaks to me, the particular feeling and soul-opening and resonance I get with that (which is also, again, mediated through images and stories and examples), it's a combination of eidos and ikon, what we're talking about here, but it has to be personal. Somehow it's got to be a really personal connection.

There's a philosopher that I've just discovered very recently that I'm really starting to get very interested in, Nicolai Hartmann. He talks about ethics a lot. He talks about a lot of stuff, but one of the things he talks about is personality and the development of personality. He writes it's not something you can kind of -- how do you develop your personality, your particular personality, your unique personality? You can't just copy someone else you admire. You can't imitate, because that would just be a liar, and you won't be kind of true to yourself, true to the image that wants to come through you, the ideal (in a Platonic sense) you that wants to come through. I would actually insert that still, someone else, we might imitate them, but they can become image for us, and that my being with that meditatively, and resonating with it, and being moved by it, is part of me developing, let's say, developing my personality. I think he means that in a much broader sense than somehow some of the more tight meanings and shallow meanings and ways that sometimes gets used.

But one of the points he tries to make is: you can't imitate someone. You can't just kind of chase personality itself, chase this development of -- we could say, what's the particular way that your bodhicitta will come to fruition, the particular, personal way your bodhicitta will come to fruition? If we take this original idea of the bodhisattva and bodhicitta (which was there in the Pali Canon, actually, and then Mahāyāna reamplified it), and we kind of take it and open it up according to some of the ideas that we've been discussing, what might it do? Hartmann says you can't just kind of make personality happen by focusing on personality. He says:

Personality ... as a value is never by its nature actualized in reflection upon itself, but in reflection upon other values.^[4]

In other words, it's through meditating, this devotion to, this feeling the effect of, putting myself in relationship to, in soul-relationship to, in energy body relationship to, in heart relationship to, in meaningfulness relationship to the ideas and the values that touch my soul. It's through that, and through choosing and committing to act on them. It's through that that my personality is forged. It's through that that I move towards my angel, let's say.

So one's personality, you have to follow your own feeling of value, which is an idea, and this soulful meditation on ideas. No one can give you your particular kind of value resonances, the particular kind of distribution of emphases and resonances that your soul has with different values at any different time. That happens also in and through meeting life, and the complexity of life, and the joys, and the up and downs, and the difficulties, and the ethical ambiguities, and choice moments, etc. So these ideas have to be, obviously, connected to life, but they also have this kind of 'beyond' dimension always.

I think we'll stop there. And then, as I said, starting with more familiar ideas, and just trying to open them up, offer some different possibilities for practice, and then we'll gradually get into what's probably, for some people, less familiar ideas and less familiar practices.