Between Ikon and Eidos: Image and Hermeneutics in Meditation (Part 7 - The Scripture of Body and Earth)

So we've been talking about ideas and concepts, and the place they have and the impact they have on the possibilities for sensing with soul. We talked some about the different ways that we receive a legacy of ideas, a kind of mixture of ideas from the past, and the influence that has on possibilities of our experience and our conception. We talked also about the possibility of other ideas, rather than limiting our experience, opening up our experience. That's a little bit what I'd like to continue exploring. We talked also about the possibility of actually questioning ideas to open the realm of possibilities for us. We talked also about certain ideas that we can kind of open up a bit more, again to open the range of possibilities available to us.

We talked, too, about the possibility to listen or read or whatever, and listen for ideas. This isn't some big intellectual exercise. There are ideas flying around all the time. Listening for ideas, and then lingering with an idea if it feels like there's something about it that speaks to you, speaks to the soul. And then that lingering, listening and lingering, is giving those potential seeds of ideas a place in the soul-womb, a place in the soil. It's planting them in the soil, and perhaps reflecting on them is turning that soil to nourish the seed more so that it might give rise to, it might suggest, it might open out into a way of looking, or a range of ways of looking and sensing with soul.

We also mentioned the important place for the emotions in all this. When we're talking about ideas, and the place of ideas in sensing with soul, and the importance of ideas in sensing with soul, those ideas are, again, not abstract. They are connected to, informing and informed by, shaping and shaped by, and grounded on the emotions that are in our heart. So there's a necessary place and a necessity. When we talk about ideas giving rise to or helping seed any kind of sensing with soul, the emotions are there, included, wrapped up, interwoven with that. So we talked about, for example, emotions like devotion and devotional yearning. And just the general fact of it needing to matter: this idea needs to matter, because this way of looking matters to me, to my soul, right now, to my sense of existence. That sense of mattering, we could say that's an affect, partly, an emotional condition. It's also a soul-condition. But that water of the emotions is like watering the seeds so that the seeds can come alive, the ideas can come alive and spring forth, suggest a sensing with soul.

And, of course, implicit in a lot of what we've been saying for a few years is that practising sensing with soul, opening to those kinds of experiences, also opens our ideation. It opens our conception. It expands our ideas about things and our conceptions of them. It gives rise, also, to new ideas -- new ideas, different ideas that we haven't had before; sometimes we've never heard before. The very perceptual experience, the very sensual experience of sensing with soul, gives rise at times to new ideas, or expands our range of possible ideation in regard to something or other, some or other aspect of existence. Now, all that is implicit just because of the way the soulmaking dynamic works. We've talked about that. In the interfusion, the interweaving, the inter-insemination of the eros-psyche-logos elements of the dynamic, the enriching, deepening, widening, complicating, and making manifold of the image, of the psyche aspect, what we're calling the psyche aspect, the image, the sense of, if you like, the sense of something or other, in the expansion of that, after some time -- as we said, the logos is a little more slow to move, generally, but as that keeps happening, we keep opening up to different images and different aspects, and that whole imaginal range, the range of sensing with soul, the perception of things, all kinds of things, starts expanding more and more, and impacts us. It impacts the soul. It registers, "This feels important. And this feels beautiful. And this feels meaningful. And this gives another dimension."

And we sense a kind of truth in that, a kind of truth. Anything and everything, this sensing with soul can touch. And so the idea of any and everything will be gradually expanded, gradually filled with new possible ideas -- again, in the wider conception of possible plurality of truths, perceptions of the truth. So not 'only this, and not that,' but 'this and that.' This way of seeing, this way of conceiving, and that way of conceiving, in the embrace of a pluralistic understanding, the generosity of pluralistic understanding of truth.

But the sensing with soul will begin to impact our conceptions of what is real and what is true. Over time, it expands that. That's a really important point. That's a general point that I want to make today. So as I said, the sensing with soul will impact the ideas, expand the ideas of any and everything that gets involved with soul. It becomes an erotic object, an erotic-imaginal beloved -- anything at all, whether we conceive of it as part of us, or material, or someone else, or whatever. Included in that, in that fertilization and expansion of the ideas of what things are, and the ideas about things, that includes ideas about the earth, about where we are, about these surroundings, and ideas about nature, and also ideas about body and materiality.

This is where I want to start, with ideas about body, and then a little bit about earth and nature. We've talked a lot about body, placed a lot of emphasis on it, a lot of emphasis on practising with the kind of sensitivity to the whole energy body. And [we've] stressed, as one of the aspects of the imaginal that might help to move things along, to open things out further into, or further along what we might call the spectrum of the imagination towards more fully, authentically, genuinely imaginal, we've pinpointed one of those aspects being the whole energy body awareness, the kind of poise and sensitivity and consciousness that pervades the body that way. And one of the things we said at some point, probably a few times, is that doing that is one of the things that can help transform, transmute, craving into eros -- the problem of craving into the gift of eros, the bounty, the opening of eros, and the gift and opening of what it brings. So that, again, with the awareness of the whole energy body, it's a constituent of the wider approach that's -- it's a necessary element in supporting the soulmaking, supporting the sensing with soul.

[10:07] As we're aware of the energy body that way, and the sensing with soul is then opened in any moment, and we linger with that, then one of the things that happens as the sensing with soul begins to spread, or to include and embrace and touch more aspects of our experience in that moment, it can and will start to include the body as an imaginal body. In other words, we're starting just with energy body awareness, which is a kind of way of paying attention to our body, and as the sensing with soul gets established and opens out, and in its opening out, the body then becomes imaginal. As one aspect of that, that's a possibility. What does it mean to sense the body imaginally, the imaginal perception of the body? Again, that's going to have all those aspects to it that we outlined in the first talk of this course.

Sometimes we can actually start with deliberately imagining the body. Alongside the energy body awareness, we can start with a deliberate imagining of the body. Even if it doesn't feel imaginal at first, it might become imaginal when we have the energy body awareness and we just start to get into that image. For instance, one could sometimes ignite an opening into the imaginal, an opening into a wider sensing with soul, by just settling into the body (in other words, being with the felt sense of the energy body), and then maybe lightly, lightly with that sense, and then deliberately imagining the body in a certain way. So it could be anything: a body of blue light, for instance, with the contours that this body has, but it's made of blue light, and it has that texture, and that substance, and that appearance. It might be that, as I resonate with that deliberately imagined image, it becomes imaginal, and I can support it doing it that way. In that, then, the world, and the sense of self, and perhaps others as well, will become imaginal in the usual way that cosmopoesis spreads when there's imaginal perception.

So that's one thing that's worth trying, is just deliberately imagining the body a certain way and seeing if it becomes imaginal. Because once it becomes imaginal, as I said, the impactful experience of the imaginal in general, and sensing with soul, eventually, or with a kind of slower pace to it, a slower tempo to it, begins pushing at the edges of our logos, of individual things and our wider logos, our wider conceptual frameworks, and stretches them, or breaks them open, or enlarges them.

This little thing that I just suggested, deliberately imagining the body, it's interesting. When I said "a body of blue light," that already implies a kind of more ethereal register on the spectrum of the energy body from very solid to very ethereal. I wonder. For a lot of people, I think it will be easier then. Things are more labile, more easily moved, less tending to heaviness and stasis with the imagination and with the whole sense of it. So it might be that, for many people, it's easier when the body is perceived deliberately lightly that way, for then it to open into the imaginal. But it actually doesn't have to be. We've stressed this several times, and I want to re-stress it. Just as we can have a sensing with soul of the body, as I think I shared the other day, the body sensed in, tuned in, to the earth element. And this earth element is stone. It's hard. It's dense. It's got its kind of darkness to it. And it's somehow related to the cosmic stone that's around planets or on planets or whatever. This cosmic earth element begins to have its own personhood, and its own way of perceiving and sensing, and its own kind of intelligence -- very different than a typical human intelligence, of course. But one could start, then, this deliberate imagining, with a much more solid, dense image that's much more solid and dense on the register there -- lower on the register, so to speak; less ethereal. Play with all of this, and see what happens. See what's possible.

Would it work, as well, this little exercise, would it work if one's perceiving one's energy body 'ecstatically,' so to speak, in the original sense (meaning not in the same location, in the same space, as the physical body)? Sometimes I've described, you know, how sometimes I might feel my energy body joyfully turning cartwheels. It's as if it might be 10 yards away. I'm still very aware of the physical sensations, and where the physical body is, but it's as if I've got two body awarenesses at once. Or flying, or whatever it is, or dancing. So will this work if one deliberately imagines the energy body outside, for instance deliberately dancing, or deliberately doing these ecstatic somersaults, etc.? Again, which is easiest? Whenever I talk about that body outside, I don't think one ever loses touch with the sense of what's, so to speak, what the conventional perception is, of where the material body is, etc. But you can try as an experiment, and see: is it easier this way or that way, or both, or only one?

I mentioned at some point, and I think it was in this series of talks, that when we talk about any kind of body awareness, any kind of mindfulness of body, whether it's energy body awareness as we've been talking about, but just mindfulness of the body or awareness of the body, usually wrapped up in that, what we're calling mindfulness of the body or awareness of the body, it will have three aspects or dimensions to it.

(1) One is the physical sense of the body. In other words, what I really mean by that is the kinaesthetic sense. What's the felt sense of this space? What's the felt sense of the body? We could call that 'kinaesthetic,' as a first aspect.

(2) It will also have, as a second aspect, some kind of image of the body. Some kind of image, some kind of mental representation. It may be imaginal, but it may not be. I can just sort of see or imagine my body in space, even if my eyes are shut or whatever: how it's comported, what posture it's in, all that.

(3) And as a third aspect, it has an idea of what body is. There's some kind of logos operating there. Usually we don't give this much attention. We're not even that conscious of it. As I said, a lot of logoi, a lot of concepts and ideas, are subliminal really. They're below the radar of our consciousness, and they're unquestioned a lot of the time. But there's always, with any moment of bodily awareness, a felt sense (a kinaesthetic sense), some kind of image, and some kind of idea. For instance, my idea might be the body is made up of meaningless matter in some kind of very impressive arrangement that allows all this material matter to function together as a sort of very complex unit, etc., but it's essentially flatly conceived material, matter. It's still flat, even if we look at it in terms of systems theory, if some of you know that -- that it gives, it generates a sort of higher level organism, organistic unity, organic unity. It's still flat from our perspectives, in terms of what we're talking about.

[19:55] But there are always these three aspects with any bodily awareness. The important point, what I want to say, is one of them is the idea of the body, the ideas about body and matter, the concepts that are operating (which we may not be aware of at the time). That's included as one of those three aspects whenever we pay attention to the body, whenever we're aware of the body, even if it's not a deliberate mindfulness thing.

So just to recap something again. I'm recapping quite a lot in this talk, but it's important. Why so much emphasis on the energy body? Sometimes, I know people have asked me, and even though I know that I've said it before, I've told them, it's very easy to forget. One reason is just that the practice of the energy body, in the way that we're talking about it, gives so much help to practice. We can use it as a resource, through the cultivating of samādhi, the harmonization, the alignment, the opening we might feel, and just dwelling in that, and really feeling this body, this physical space that I inhabit, is a lot of the time for me a resource, a source of nourishment, a source of well-being. That's immensely useful.

But it can be a resource, this energy body awareness and energy body practice, in other ways. Helpful in the deepening and also the navigation of other practices. For example, mettā: how do I know what's helpful right now in the mettā as I subtly weave my mettā practice and respond to what's going on? The energy body is telling me. Similarly with samādhi or compassion or emptiness practices, and imaginal practice. Remember, that's one of the indicators that we're on the right track with an image, even if the mind is telling us, "Well, I don't know. This is kind of crazy." Also very helpful with emotional awareness practices, etc., in the cultivation of positive emotions, and also the working with the difficult emotions. All of that, it's just very practical help.

But implicit in what I've said so far tonight is another aspect of working with the energy body. It's that, again, over time, experience with the energy body, and with that kind of attunement, and sensing the body that way, will begin to re-enchant the body, and through the body, the self. The body is always a primary -- at least connected with the self, whatever one's conception of the self might be. So involved in energy [body] practice over time, one of the things it starts to do is re-enchant the body. Through that sense (which, as I said, that felt sense makes a deep impression), we get the sense, through energy body awareness, through paying attention in certain ways, we begin to get the sense or the impression of the body not as essentially just flat matter, just a product of its genes, just a bunch of complex molecules kind of swarming around in interaction with each other. Yes, one can, as I said, in the spirit of plurality, in the generosity of plurality, entertain that conception and go along with it, etc.

So I take my medicine -- well, I take my medicine; that says enough. But not just that. Over time, we've paid attention in a different way, and been impacted by these experiences and just the repeated sense of a different sense of the body. So we can sense the body not just as flat matter, but also somehow resonant, somehow having a spectrum of subtleties of vibration, going into what we might call the more ethereal, as well as the more dense. Somehow connected with light even. Somehow, more importantly, connected and integrated with the cosmos, and not only in material ways. Through the sensitivity to the energy body, we get the sense of this body, this energy body (meaning this body; I really mean this one of the dimensions or the range of dimensions of this body), is somehow integrated into the cosmos and connected with the cosmos -- but not only in material ways. That sense of deeper and more beautiful and richer weaving in becomes more prominent. It's a sense, it's an impression, and it begins to be an idea. Over this whole range, ethereal to dense, this paying attention that way opens up the sense of the body. And as the body, through this, starts to become more imaginally perceived, as we said earlier, then it's as if body and the matter of the body and the organism of the body starts to have its own soul. We can be in erotic relationship with this body, this body as beloved other.

And in being ensouled that way, there's the intersubjectivity and the autonomy. We start to sense that the body has its own intelligence, its own perception. Again, by that, I don't just mean, "Wow, isn't it clever the way the body transports nerve signals from the brain to the end of the fingers, or interchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide in the alveoli in the lungs." Yes, that's pretty smart, but we're talking about its own subjectivities, its own dimension and kinds of knowing. That starts to open up.

So in all this, practising with the energy body, as the body becomes imaginal (partly supported through energy body awareness), the idea of body opens up, the idea of bodies open up. Experience influences idea, but as we've pointed out a lot, idea/conception/logos influences experience and opens it or shapes it or directs it, limits it, colours it, closes off certain avenues. And the concept/logos/idea of the body and materiality certainly affects our range of experience and perception of body. I shared that little anecdote about being on retreat in the woods for ten days in complete solitude, and really practising a very fruitful but very kind of narrow Theravādan avenue of practice range with really going into the jhānas. Very lovely, and very, as I said, fruitful, but also a Theravādan logos, a Theravādan fantasy in the background, though I didn't have the words for it at the time.

All that, implicit in that Theravādan logos and fantasy is only a partial interest in the body, only an interest in opening up certain perceptions of the body, and only for the sake of letting go of attachment to it. So the body as foul and full of unclean substances and parts; the body as a corpse, a potential corpse, a future corpse; the body as just the four elements, a kind of deconstructing to "it's nothing but the four elements." This whole conceptual framework of the movement of, let's say, narrowly conceived Theravādan Buddhism, is framing and has an idea of the body a certain way, and directs the attention in a certain way to the body. Indeed, that shaped my experience of it and my perception of it when I caught sight of myself, my naked body in the mirror in the woods there.

We could have, of course, all kinds of ideas. Let's say the mass-produced and mass-proliferated relationship to the body that's pushed in a lot of popular culture these days, where it's a kind of obsession, but it's also a kind of worry about one's own appearance, and "it's got to look this way or that way." It's very easy to have judgment, self-judgment, other judgment come into that, and all the problem that brings. What's the conception of body? Again, it's set in a wider cosmological conception, as is the Theravādan conception of body and attention to body. This conception and attention to body in, let's say, popular culture in our society, is also set in a wider cosmological context. So ideas, again, are connected. They nestle in each other. They feed each other back and forth. They support each other.

[30:30] Another conception of the body could be, as some of you might know, in tantric Dharma, and the practices they have there with channels and drops of blood and semen and all this. It's a very different conception of body, or the kind of alchemy of those tantric practices. Or a shamanic conception of body in some cultures, or indeed any indigenous culture. It's a very different wider cosmological conceptual framework, and different conception of body and materiality, and that will affect the experience. We could give so many examples, but experience is shaped by the way of looking, and part of the way of looking is conception, whether we're aware of it or not.

Again, I'm just saying in other words what I've said before, but there's really this possibility, seeing all this, to open up the sense of the body, and therefore the idea of the body. We say, "No, the body is like this. It's like this. This is the reality." But is it? Or is it only that? Or are there other ways of experiencing and other ways of thinking?

So back to hermeneutics, the interpretation of matter, the interpretation of body as part of the interpretation of existence. Remember, 'hermeneutics' originally meant the interpretation of sacred texts. As philosophers went into all this, they realized, "Well, actually, we're talking about everything." So ideas are connected. We actually interpret our cosmos all the time. And hermeneutics, to me, is a really interesting subject, really interesting. What happens in that interpretation? What is possible in that interpretation? What am I not aware of in the hermeneutics of my existence?

One of the people that explored this a little bit was Heidegger, the German philosopher. He wrote, in a very famous text called Being and Time:

An interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us. If, when one is engaged in a particular kind of interpretation ... one likes to appeal to what [is just there, what is 'standing there'], then one finds that what 'stands there' in the first instance is nothing other than the [seemingly] obvious undiscussed assumption of the person who does the interpreting.^[1]

Yes? He's just saying in different words what I've been harping on about for quite a while. But we see our seemingly obvious undiscussed assumptions. We, so to speak, interject that into our perceptions, or, let's say, that's part of the fabrication of our perceptions.

The hermeneutical circle, I talked about that once, I think. I can't remember what retreat it was. But "the hermeneutical circle is never purely philological."^[2] Let's skip a bit and say: it's not simply a movement between the parts and the whole of a text or what is presented in existence before us as an object. So we figure out what this means in relation to a whole because we figure out the whole, and there's a kind of mutual fitting together of the whole, or an attempt at mutually fitting together the whole and the parts and what they mean. The hermeneutical circle is the problem of, I can't interpret the parts unless I have an overall idea of what the whole means, but I can't interpret the whole until I've interpreted the parts (whether that's a text or parts of existence or whatever). Heidegger's saying here, it's actually more than that. It's more than a kind of scientific jigsaw. It's what he [Gerald Bruns, discussing the passage from Heidegger] calls "an ontological movement between the text [or the object] and our situation as interpreters of it." This was all elaborated by another philosopher called Hans-Georg Gadamer, which, again, I find really interesting and really important.

We bring ideas to objects. We can't help do that. But in experiencing and in opening up our experience, the objects that we have brought ideas to, the perceptions that we have brought ideas to, the sense of things that we have brought ideas to, open up our ideas, give us our ideas back, generate ideas back. I mean, it's not really that dualistic, but we throw something in, and something is thrown back at us.

Can we see body as in the realm of hermeneutics like everything else? As an object for interpretation, an aspect of existence that, like a sacred text, is open to interpretation? And like we've talked about in the hermeneutics and the midrashic condition and all that, it's open, it's flexible, it's multiply interpretable -- if it matters, if it matters to you, if it matters to the interpreter, if it matters to the one who is sensing. Body as sacred text. What might that mean? Body as amenable to this kind of infinite richness of sensing and interpretation and dialogue.

I got an email from someone. I'd like to share it to you. It's a report about her practice. It's really rich, and partly why I'd like to share it is because of what we're talking about right now. There's so much in it, in terms of describing really skilful, responsive practice. I'll highlight some of that. So she was on retreat, and this is a kind of report, post a fairly long retreat. "I was sitting, doing the releasing clinging practice." You've heard me talk about that, just again and again noticing clinging, releasing it, noticing clinging, releasing it. I think I called it the dukkha method two. It's a very lovely practice that opens up the unfabricating and the understanding of emptiness, and brings with it real softness and loveliness and healing.

"I was sitting, doing the releasing clinging practice, and sat for the forty-five minutes without moving, and felt very still and peaceful and comfortable, so I continued to sit. When most of the people left the hall, I had this kinaesthetic sense of a field of energy, a kind of net of soft, web-like material that covered me and the hall and all the people in the hall." So already we're in the realm of energetic, energy body experience, and image of materiality, if you like, on the edge of all that. "I could feel it," she continues, "but I knew it was so light that it was only because I was very sensitive that I could feel it." She's aware of the mind state, and there's this real sensitivity there. "I could feel it glistening," she says. "It was gossamer, very delicate but very potent, sublime and powerful. It felt really special. I was a bit taken aback by it. But then I felt a very faint kinaesthetic sense that I had a nun's habit on." Then she has pasted in a delightful picture of a nun. [laughs] I have no idea what order that is or anything, but it's a pretty far-out-looking nun's hat. She says "something like that" with the picture. "Which really surprised me and amused me because of the funny hat."

I'm not even going to try and describe the hat. "But it was rather beautiful," she says. "Along with the feeling of being a nun was this complete devotion to you." She's writing this to me, and she's explained that she has many, many images, lots of rich images. Some of the images that she has, some of the imaginal images that she has, are people that she knows, like we've explained as a possibility. So I'm one of those people. And in relation to me, she has quite a few different kinds of images, very different. So there was this feeling of being a nun, and "this complete devotion to you, the image of you." She's very aware of image as image. There's not this kind of reification or concretization or grasping or clinging there. It's an image, and it's just something that possibly gives rise to the soulfulness and the soulmaking, with the awareness of the imaginal Middle Way and all that, which she's made very clear and she's very aware of.

[41:06] She says, "The image of you as Buddha." She says, "I'm sure you remember how I have several images of you, and one is of you as Buddha. This image is wrapped up in your Dharma, so when I say I'm devoted to you," she says, "it is to you and all that you are for me in this way. You represent practice, soulmaking," etc. So she's explaining that. "I know, obviously, that you are more than that," so she's not reducing me to this. She knows that I have a human side and all that, of course. She's not identifying me in this Buddha image, thankfully. "I know, obviously, that you are more than that, and I have several images of you," she's repeating, "but this one is very prominent at the moment," and then along with some other images she described that we won't go into here.

She continues, "It felt like you were there in the hall, sitting at the front by the statues, but you weren't a visual image at all." Again, all this has so much possible teaching in it. Not a visual image here. What kind of image? "It was like an impression of you, like the space had your imprint or something. Your essence was there. It was really ethereal, but at the same time, very powerful, strong, and tangible. It didn't make sense at all, but it did make sense." Can you hear how much is here, just in the words that she's using to describe this experience? How many elements of what she describes are things we've touched on in the teaching? It doesn't have to be visual. There's going to be some doubt sometimes. It kind of makes sense, and it kind of doesn't. All of that.

"My devotion was coming out in a strong feeling of energy leaving my body and going to you. It was delightful and energizing. I really enjoyed giving my full, devoted energy to you. It was as if there was a space left after giving all my energy that was very quickly filled with a sublime, warm love, an unconditional love. And then the sense was of devotion and compassion. It felt sacred and very special and divine. I was divine." Again, there's this inclusion, this spreading of the soulmaking dynamic, of the sensing with soul, to include self and other, as we said before. There's not, as well, importantly, as I said, for the balance and the health here, it's not just that she's seeing me as divine, and not herself. As things evolve, there's the "I was divine, you were divine, and it felt as if our divinities were in communion."

Now, she's describing something that took place over several days. So that's one period there. And then she went for an interview with a teacher, in this case Kirsten. She said, "Then I explained the bit about the nun to Kirsten. Kirsten asked lots of questions, and in my explaining, it came out that I felt my hands had some sort of healing power." So again, sometimes talking with other people, sometimes in the temenos around images, it can draw out the power of the image, ignite it further, help it to become fully alive, and actually give birth to or create/discover other dimensions or aspects of the image. She also expressed her appreciation of the skilful way that Kirsten was asking, particularly when she was trying to explain something, and making a gesture with her hand, and Kirsten pointed out the gesturing and said, "What does that gesture mean?"

She says, "It came out that I felt my hands had some sort of healing power, like if I cup my hands around someone's face" -- like you might imagine a nun doing to a small child -- "it would make them feel better, that in the touching there would be some tangible love transmitted." Again, this is over some little time on retreat. "Then I had several waves of hindrances -- restlessness and aversion. Then I read the bit in your book, and to my great surprise, they went away easily," the hindrances. "But then came a huge wave of grief," for a relative that had died recently, "and my mum," who had also died a few years ago, "and the life I've wasted. It felt as if the grief was right behind the hindrances, as if they were connected." Then she says, "This is my first question. Do you think they were linked? Do the hindrances often mask something else?" And yes, they do sometimes, indeed. They mask deeper emotions that we're not quite in touch with yet. We're kind of holding back a little bit. Sometimes the hindrances are masking a deeper emotion that is calling for a different kind of attention, connection to, and opening with, and healing, etc.

So this grief came, and then, "In the sitting, I very softly wiped away the flood of tears with my hands, and my hands became the nun's hands, and I cupped my face." She's actually doing this in the sitting. She's moving her body out of the still meditation posture, and cupping her face with her physical hands, but they're the nun's hands, with the healing that comes out of them. "I cupped my face, and then this crack appeared. It was like there was a sliver of space that allowed the love to come in," the love from her hands, "so that there was the grief and the love existing together -- the love for lost ones, including myself. I could hold this deep loss and the love together. It was really special and wonderful."

So again, there's so much here about dukkha and soulmaking. We talked about how healing images can be. In this case, it's a kind of level of grief that the image, and particularly the bodily images here, and the ideas of the body that are implicit in all this, this was what allowed a kind of level of healing to come in, or to start a level of healing, or perhaps -- who knows where it will go? Then she said, "I have had trouble making my mum an image, as it's difficult to bring her to mind without being overwhelmed with grief." Her mum died, as I said, a few years ago. "But some time after this, she spontaneously came as an image, and helped me when I was feeling doubt, giving me encouragement." So again, this person, like many of you listening, is someone who has doubts, as many people do -- doubts about their practice and themselves, and all kinds of doubts. I'm partly pointing that out to say: if you're listening to this and, "Wow, that sounds amazing, I'm sure she's like this or like that," this is someone who has doubts as well.

The image of her mum, as well, was kind of enabled through the healing that came out through the other image that involved devotion and also the different sense of energy and different sense of body. And then the image of her mum was sort of brought alive and able to kind of communicate with her. Then she says, "Later, I did your practice of eros and the brahmavihāras with a difficult person, and I chose my mum as the beloved." I don't need to repeat it, but I'll say it again: eros doesn't mean necessarily sexual. There's erotic connection because her mum is image, is imaginal, and with the imaginal, wrapped up in that, is eros. So her mum is the beloved as image, and then she's having this difficulty with someone, and there's aversion, and all kinds of things, fear and judgment, whatever. So the beloved erotic-imaginal other (in this case, her mum) came, and she used that in a brahmavihāra meditation, which helped to open and support the mettā and compassion to this person that she was struggling with. So one image has brought another, the image of her mum, to life. It's enabled it to come through where it wasn't so able before, and it's given it life and potency. She said, "And that broke the spell of the ill-will that I hadn't been able to shift. It shifted like magic," she said.

[50:13] As I said, there's a lot there in terms of just so many aspects of working this way, in terms of the willingness to experiment, the flexibility, the responsiveness, the care, the sensitivity of attention, all kinds of things. It's a very rich and beautiful report. But implicit with the images that she describes and the sensing with soul that she describes are ideas -- ideas about bodies: hands that heal, her hands, her physical hands touching, that can heal on different levels; ideas about energy, and this kind of net of energy that's touching and connecting everyone in the hall; ideas also about the locus of personhood.

One of the things about the body is that we tend, very understandably, to consider it that's where someone is, and that's kind of where their consciousness is, and sometimes we say it's in their brain or whatever, if we're getting quite narrowly material. But in that image that she had of me, it was not a visual image. It wasn't that I was there. It was like a presence was there, and it was somewhere near the front of the hall. But it was there. Where is the personhood? She knows that I wasn't there, but it was like I was there. Where is a person? Where is a consciousness? There are other ways to open this up. One of them is through the sixth jhāna. If you spend a lot of time with that, the whole notion of where a consciousness is, and whose it is, gets really opened up in terms of the potential ways of perceiving and conceiving of that. But also through sensing with soul and imaginal practice. Body as locus of personhood, or locus of personhood not necessarily being limited to a physical, material location.

There are also ideas here about communication, communication that can take place between me and her, and between her mum and her. So again, regular experiences of sensing with soul -- it usually wouldn't happen if it was just one or two, but regular, it starts to open up the sense of the body (if we're staying with body right now, and matter), and then the conception gets pushed on. It gets questioned. It gets expanded. And it gets made plural. Again, pointing out that wherever there's image, there's idea involved. The ideation or the concept is an element of the sensing with soul because it's part of the eros-psyche-logos structure, if you like, of soulmaking. Ideas are wrapped up in images. They go with images. That's something we'll stress again.

So what is it to approach or see the body hermeneutically, and with the spirit of, in the poise of, a disciple, if you like, someone to whom the interpretation of this text matters? Body as sacred text, and it matters. I'm not approaching it with just a cold so-called 'objectivity' of science. Body and world as sacred texts. We've talked about texts a little bit last night, and in the past as well, the potential sort of richness of meanings, plurality of meanings, and playing with words, and playing with etymologies, and playing with sounds, and text as sacred sound, and the numerology, and all that. We talked on a previous retreat -- I think it was the Re-enchanting the Cosmos retreat that gave attention to the mudrā, hand posture, and general body posture and movement of the body, to enact movements of the body and postures of the body, and to sense those movements and postures of the body with soul, sensing the holiness there, and the multidimensional aspect of that.^[3] Body and world as sacred texts. And in the spirit of participation, the interpreter's participation is part of the text. It's participation, so that moving the body, and reading it this way, if you like, sensing it with soul, is part of creating and discovering what the body is, what the body can be.

I think it was the same retreat, we talked very briefly about language. We had a guided meditation with the Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ mantra, and actually starting to perceive those syllables of the mantra as if they were infusing the fabric of the cosmos: a jewelline world of these radiant, mystical syllables of the holy mantra.^[4] That is the fabric of the world at one level: primordial sound, divine and cosmic powers in the sound. Could we not just practise chanting that way, and then everything that came out of that (if you remember that guided meditation, the meditation moved beyond sound to an all-embracing perception of things), but could we actually practise listening this way? Listening, and what are we listening to? You think, "I'm listening right now. I'm listening to the words. I'm trying to understand what you're saying." But could we listen to speech, and perhaps hear and understand, and also listen to the sound?

What is communicated? Is it just information? One person tells the other, "The salt's over there," or something very complicated, or whatever, or "I feel good," "I feel bad," or "Yesterday I did this," or "My story is this." What is communicated? There are so many different levels, so many different dimensions of what's communicated through speech, potentially, what's heard through speech. Can I practise, perhaps practise with another -- practise with another consciously, deliberately, or practise with another just who everyone is listening to? Practise hearing the meaning, and the divine music, the mantra. As they say in tantra, "Hear all sounds as divine speech, as mantra," "Hear all sounds as mantra." That's a tantric instruction. Can you actually practise listening that way, whether it's to your friend, whether it's to someone else? Mantra, divine speech, incantation, hearing the music in things, hearing the prayer in things. All sound as prayer.

I touched, on a past retreat -- I think it was, again, the Re-enchanting the Cosmos; I can't remember -- what does 'prayer' mean?^[5] That's another instance where we can have an idea of prayer, and it's quite narrow: "I'm asking for something from some bigger power or higher power, and I hope that they give it to me." Prayer can mean that, but it has a real range of possibility. It's a word that, once that word starts getting involved in the soulmaking dynamic, that really opens up. Prayer becomes something limitless in its possibilities. Prayer as blessing. Every prayer is a blessing. And so if this, what I'm hearing in speech, but maybe also in any sound -- the wind, the birds, even right now (you maybe can't hear it on the recording) the sound of the electrical hum from the heater beside me in this freezing house. [laughs] Divine music, divine speech, incantation, spell, music, prayer, blessing. What is blessing? What does that mean?

[1:00:38] If it's the divine blessing all creation, that includes me. That includes everything around me. That includes this room, this space. That includes you. These sounds now are the sounds of the divine, blessing all creation. It's the prayer of the divine. But all creation is not other than the divine. So the divine is, in some ways, blessing itself, and even blessing its blessing. Blessing its blessing. When there's a sensing with soul, when there's that kind of opening and attunement, you can hear this in everything. You can hear this way as a practice. So there are ideas, too, of language and sound. We can open those up. What is being communicated? What is language? What are these sounds that I'm hearing? What are they? What's going on there?

I learnt recently about something called joik. I think that's how you say it [yoyk]. It apparently belongs to the Sámi peoples. It's a word that belongs to the Sámi people. I'll explain what it is. The Sámi peoples are indigenous to Lapland, northern Finland, Norway, parts of Russia, so those kind of very northern peoples. They sing joik. They might sing a joik song, and if there are lyrics or whatever, then you say, "Well, it's the story of a wolf, or it's about a wolf." But when you ask what they mean by it, or what's going on there, it's not that they sing about this or that, about an animal or a person or a place or the land. It's rather that they conceive it. The idea with joik is that they sing the land. They don't sing about the land. They sing the land. Remember that image? I was saying the birdsong was singing and weaving my energy body, my body, in some kind of very healing way. The birds were singing me. So the joik sings the land. It invokes, rather than evokes, the land. I'm not sure if that's the right English. But they sing the land. With their song, they weave its being.

When they have that kind of space in their logos, then entering into that, and singing that way, and having that ideation, there's a deep sense and concept there and framework there of participation. They're singing. They sing the land. They sing the animals. They sing things into being. They weave into being. Participation of their own creativity, if you like, or their own voice in manifestation, in cosmopoesis. There's a kind of intimacy there supported by that and involved in that. It must be more than just, say, another idea which is a recognition of material equality: "It's earth element. I'm earth element," and earth element is perceived flatly, or "It's atoms, and I'm atoms." There's an intimacy there that's got a whole other richness to it.

And then the land, or whatever they're singing there, that land and the animals, must surely appear in certain ways to them. Again, the appearance is going to be dependent on the way of looking, and on the idea in the way of looking. Actually, even in the very conception, it's already conceived of as not simply and objectively pre-existing: "The land pre-exists, and then we may or may not sing this funny song," or whatever. It's already implicit that somehow I'm participating in this land, but the participation is at a whole other level than just, "I farm the land," or whatever, or "I breathe the air." Surely such a view and such a practice makes the perspectives and intentions that would lead to, say, strip mining, or any kind of disconnectedly extractivist orientation -- it would make it impossible.

Apparently, the oral traditions of the Sámi people say joik was learnt from or was given by the fairies and the elves of the Arctic lands. [They] gave joik to the Sámi people. So it's a very, very old musical tradition, probably one of the oldest living musical traditions in Europe. When the Christians came there, they condemned it as sinful: "It's sinful to sing joik. It's a sin." It was prohibited, perhaps because it had some kind of association with shamans and pre-Christian sort of mythology rituals. Also because joiking was said to resemble magic spells. You can see that it has some of that idea of magic, of spells, of incantation, invocation. In creating and discovering the sacred sound there, nature is made sacred in a whole different way, and there is magic there. Wrapped up in that, there are ideas of earth, of song, of sound, and again, of communication, ideas of communication.

[1:07:41] Some of you will have heard of the three bodies of the Buddha. It's a very common Mahāyāna teaching: the dharmakāya, the saṃbhogakāya, and the nirmāṇakāya. I'm not going to go too much into that now. I've touched on some of it just a little bit in the past, I think. Dharmakāya, saṃbhogakāya, nirmāṇakāya. That word, nirmāṇa, of the last one (nirmāṇakāya), nirmāṇa means, actually, 'a magical creation.' Sometimes it's given a very idealist slant, non-materialist slant, so a magical creation is something that has no material basis. This is one of the bodies of the Buddha, and in Mahāyāna teaching, it's like the Buddha is really the primordial Buddha, who is manifesting a body that we perceive as physical at some point in history. And manifesting that, it actually is not material. It's a kind of magical emanation. Some Mahāyāna teachers would explain it that way.

But the word nirmāṇa means 'forming,' or 'making,' or 'creating,' or 'creation,' or 'building,' or a 'composition,' like a musical composition, or something like 'a work,' like a work of art. What else is in the etymology there? A 'transformation,' that would be another word, so that the nirmāṇakāya can mean 'the body of transformations,' or 'the body of magic transformation.' When we translate, or when I have touched on, and other Mahāyāna teachers (some) touch on these three bodies of the Buddha, the primordial Buddha (dharmakāya, saṃbhogakāya, nirmāṇakāya), they can be seen as -- especially the dharmakāya and saṃbhogakāya -- they can be construed as pervasive. In a way, they're non-spatial. They're not really anywhere in space, but they pervade everything and all space. So the saṃbhogakāya, one way I translate it is the mundus imaginalis. It's that whole body, in the sense of 'collection.' We talked about kāya, remember, in the talk on "What is Awakening?" at the beginning of this. What does kāya mean? It can mean physical body. It can also mean just a collection. So the saṃbhogakāya is just the world, really, the collection of things, in the mundus imaginalis, and with the energy body and all that.

And the dharmakāya, again, has a lot of different meanings. But again, there's something, in some sense, pervasive. In some sense, everything is the manifestation of dharmakāya. Nirmāṇakāya is often conceived more in a certain locus of personhood, a historical Buddha. But we can also hear it or interpret it as equally pervasive like the other two kāyas. So that nirmāṇakāya, if we translate kāya more pervasively, as the other two kāyas, then it becomes this world of material appearances. That can be the nirmāṇakāya. The parallel I'm making is, the world, this world of matter, as the world of magical transformation, the world of magical creation, etc. The world of, yes, magical transformation.

I talked about Amitābha the other day, and how, in the five Buddha families, he represents or is connected with the aggregate of perception, the third aggregate. There's another Buddha, Vairocana, in the five families of Buddhas in the Mahāyāna. Vairocana is like another kind of primordial Buddha. He represents the aggregate of the body, of rūpa. But in a way, it's the purified aggregate of bodily form. So when we're talking about in the primordial Buddha sense, it's really this level of the aggregate that goes with it. It's another dimension, put it that way. In some ways it's the ideal or the principle of spatial extension, or of space as the precondition of all bodily existence. So what does that mean? It means the space that we're in can be sensed into, conceived -- again, we're kind of injecting an idea that this space is somehow a manifestation of a primordial Buddha, of the primordial Buddha. This space where bodies exist and seem to move, where matter exists, is the body, if you like, or the essence -- its essence is Vairocana, primordial Buddha Vairocana.

Sacred texts. The body and the world as sacred texts. What is a sacred text? The Pali Canon suttas and the Mahāyāna suttas, and some Mahāyāna tantras as well, begin in Pali, "Evaṃ me sutaṃ," "Thus have I heard." Some of you will know this. In Sanskrit it's "Evaṃ mayā śrutam," "Thus have I heard." So what is it, again, what is it to hear a sacred text? "Thus have I heard." Can I hear that, "Thus have I heard," "Evaṃ mayā śrutam," can I hear that poetically? We read it as a kind of formulaic introduction to suttas in Buddhism. "Evaṃ mayā śrutam," "Thus have I heard," thus am I hearing, 'I.'

Let's say this: what qualities need to be present in the soul for me to -- let's say this as a poetic phrase -- to hear sacred texts? "Evaṃ mayā śrutam." What needs to be there to hear in this way, that we hear sacred texts (and 'hear' might be more than just the auditory sense), and to interpret sacred texts? We already said 'mattering.' Something about purity, I think, as well. Someone in a certain state of consciousness -- one could say 'purified,' but we can ask: what does that mean? -- they may hear teachings imaginally, or see an image, or behold a story, or a gathering of angels or bodhisattvas like are described in Mahāyāna texts, all of that. But these teachings may also be, just one hears them in the wind. They may be non-verbal. In the sensing with soul, it's as if the wind can be, at times, the wind or the birds are teaching. Their sound is sacred text, is scripture. But again, it might not be that what's translatable there is in the form of information, like when you read a sutta: "The Buddha was so-and-so, and this happened and that happened." The teaching can be non-verbal. It's not a matter of bits of information being communicated. But something about purity needs to be there to allow us to trust this as teaching.

What does 'purity' mean? One possibility is one is purified by insight into emptiness. Actually, it's interesting: when one's insight into emptiness is very deep, there is, at that time, a feeling of purity in the energy body. It's one of the things it does. One may purify, or feel oneself pure, or another pure, in a moment where there's this seeing all appearances as divine in a mimicry of a Buddha's ultimate gnosis, a Buddha's jñāna, but knowing that the subject and object there, the appearances that are divine, and the consciousness that senses that way and perceives that way, neither have inherent existence. And they're non-dual. They're connected. And one can, if you like, mimic that Buddha's jñāna, gnosis. Or again, those elements that move the imagination more into the realm, in the direction, of the fully imaginal or authentically imaginal. This also is purifying, partly because it brings in this imaginal Middle Way, and the non-clinging, and the craving goes to eros, etc., and it's not so much about my self. There's what we called the 'fullness of intention.' All this kind of renders the soul, at that time, in different ways, renders it what we might call 'pure,' pure to hear a certain way, and to trust a certain teaching that one might receive on the wind, through the land, through the birds, whatever it is.

[1:19:54] Sometimes when we hear, "You purify the mind or the heart, and then you perceive something, then the purity allows you to perceive what is true. That purity allows you to attain to the truth." If you remember what we talked about with Foucault, pointing out that that's what changed with the advent of modernity, is that we no longer had that notion about truth, that it takes the purification of the subject. But it might be also that purity could be itself a purification, mean a purification or involve a purification, from all attachment to any notion of truth, so that one is free to play with perception and with perspectives and ideas and ways of looking in this kind of pluralistic understanding that we've been talking about. In a way, why shouldn't the teachings that are the sacred text heard, "Evaṃ mayā śrutam," the sacred text heard in this way, in that sort of state, be trusted, and given, if you like, authority as much as another text? Or they become iconic for us; that's part of their imaginal nature. As I said, hearing a sacred text, "Evaṃ mayā śrutam," in sensing with soul, sometimes there's this synaesthesia that I talked about. So there's a fusion of different senses or interconnection of different senses. Sometimes I feel like I'm hearing through my eyes, so to speak.

I'm aware of the dangers in all this, of course. "Oh, this person says they heard this teaching," and they do translate it into some kind of information that they then want to persuade others of the truth about, and then they claim a power position in a hierarchy because of that, and there are all kinds of abuses of power. "We are the ones who have access to the truth," etc. But if the whole hermeneutics of this kind of thing remains open -- like the midrashic approach to the Old Testament, and the other sacred scriptures, or like reading tantra sometimes; it's quite open -- then we're in a different situation.

So all these practices that I've touched on and all of this sensing with soul involves the sense of the Middle Way, this imaginal Middle Way between real and not real, neither real nor not real, and/or a sense of the deep emptiness of it all. Sometimes that kind of ontology shifts a little bit, opens a little bit more to a sense of the plural nature of things, the plurality of truths, through participation. But it's as if, as I said at the beginning of this part of the talk, it's as if the sense of what is real, the conception of what is real and what is true, gets opened. It's impacted through sensing with soul. But in some way or other, it's either this Middle Way, 'neither real nor not real,' and/or the sense of the plural nature of truth, truths, of reality.

There's one more thing I'd like to touch on before finishing. There's this plurality or Middle Way understanding that's infused in all these possibilities and experiences and practices I'm talking about, but also infusing all these approaches and possibilities is eros and love and grace, as, for example, three elements of or aspects of the imaginal that we touched on that will be there with all these experiences. But also one that I perhaps haven't mentioned so much: praise. The attitude of praise, also, one of its elements is humility. I have to have humility. And I will have an organic, natural, spontaneous humility in relation to what I'm praising. We talked about humility before. But in all this hearing sacred texts, or singing the world, the earth, the animals into being, singing the animals, in all this listening to the divine speech, the divine mantra in sound, all of this, praise is infused in it. It's infused with praise. And praise is healing. Praise is healing.

So again, this is not abstract. We're not talking about ideas that are abstract. There's something that really touches the soul here. You know the word 'paean'? It's not that commonly used in English, paean. What it means is 'a song of praise.' It's a song or an ode of praise. It's originally a song of praise to Apollo, because Paean was another name, an epithet for Apollo. Apollo was a healing god, among other things. So a paean is a poem or a song of praise. It's related to another word, 'peony,' which is -- some of you will know this -- it's a plant with beautiful crimson flowers. The word 'peony,' the English word 'peony,' is from French via Latin, apparently: paeonia, which means 'healing*,'* because the plant was thought to have healing powers. Paean, Apollo, was the physician of the gods. So a paean, a praise, what we utter in praise (and 'utter' might be through our speech, but it might be through our gesture or our being) is healing. It's a kind of healing -- certainly healing of the praise. We talked about the tikkun olam, the healing of the world through my perception, through my action, through my articulation. And praise is also a healing of the praiser, the one who praises. Praising heals the one who praises.

So again, ideas that we're talking about infused in all this, and that are getting stretched in all this, we're not talking about them abstractly or as abstractions. They bring ways of looking. And those ways of looking involve our soul. They move our soul. They open our soul. They open our hearts. They involve our hearts. They demand our hearts. And in opening up the sensing with soul, they are soulmaking. Anything but abstract.