Transcription
Okay, so we may have a Q & A every day. Let's see how it goes. And the time may stay at this period before tea, or it may change. And they're optional, so, you know, check in with yourself each day around this time what would feel helpful. Sometimes you have a question to ask. Sometimes it's just in the listening, someone else's question or an interaction, can be really helpful, and sometimes you may just want more innerness or silence.
They're being recorded. People have said they're quite helpful as recordings to listen to. But if you would rather that your question was not recorded, let me know, and I'll press 'pause' so it won't be recorded. That's up to you. It's really a chance to ask just anything you want about the nuts and bolts of practice, or about a larger understanding, something that's going on, in the whole span of what we're calling soulmaking practices, so all those practices that are involved or potentially involved. Okay? Anybody, please? Yes, Anna?
Q1: stretchable concepts (soft and elastic edges), and sensing areas/organs in the body having their own intelligence; loosening resistance and clinging in order to open possibilities
Yogi: [inaudible]
Rob: Yeah, sure. Could everyone hear that? I'll repeat it just in case it doesn't come out on the recording, if that's okay. Correct me if I don't catch your question correctly. Anna's asking: we've been talking about, especially today and other retreats that some of you have been on or heard recordings, we've been emphasizing the energy body, and that kind of awareness, and opening that up, and that kind of consciousness. Anna's asking: what about, is there the possibility of different areas or organs within the body having their own sort of consciousness? (Is that good enough? Yeah? Okay.) Absolutely. Yeah, there is.
So one of the things I want to stress is that pretty much -- I can guess that this is true -- any concept we put out there and that we engage in (so, energy body being a concept) is a stretchable concept. It's an infinite concept. There's no end to how it can diversify and how it can gain dimensionality and open up and gain different aspects, yeah? So we might start with a fairly narrow and simple sense or idea of what the energy body is. As we get into it more and practise more, and as it becomes ensouled -- that means it becomes enchanted for us, this sense of the body, this sensitivity of the body -- becomes ensouled, and gets woven into the soulmaking dynamic, and then starts complexifying, becoming more complex, becoming more deep, becoming more multi-aspected, exactly one of the things that could happen is what you're talking about.
So it could be that one feels, yes, a certain organ in the body has its own kind of intelligence, its own kind of sensitivity and receptivity, its own kind of ways of knowing. Yeah? So you might have experienced this kind of thing or other kinds of things. What I want to say, and I'll maybe touch on it just briefly tonight, is again, the concept, in this case of the energy body, and the experience of the energy body is a growable one. So that's something that can very much come alive. And again, if it feels helpful in the moment, if it feels beautiful, if it feels opening, etc., you're onto the right track. Something is happening, and it's right, and it's good, and it's soulmaking. And I can tell by the beauty, by the sense of sacredness, by the sensitivity, by the harmonization, and all that.
So the possibilities are endless, actually. I'll repeat this tonight, but I'll say it now anyway: when we talk about energy body, it's a kind of vague, open concept. So I say, "Okay, this field, and I'm paying attention to the feeling in this field," but it's also an idea. So we have always an idea of the body. We say, "My body is a set of organic carbon-based molecules set in combination in a way that they work synergistically together." That's a sort of scientific materialist model of the body. "My body is a field of light with its own kind of intelligence." "My body is this." "My body is diversified into all these kind of individual intelligences." They're all concepts of the body and senses of the body and images of the body. So all that is wrapped up in the possibilities of what energy body can be. Does this make sense? Any more with that?
Yogi: Yeah. You then get resistances in a certain area of the body. And I guess I've got curious with the nature of awareness and avijjā and how that locks into -- things become resistant, and how that creates experience. And how, when you kind of give some space to it, and you get that kind of opening out ... I don't really have a question!
Rob: Okay, but it's a really good insight, so let's just repeat it for everyone, if that's okay. Anna's saying that it's interesting, paying attention to the experience of body as a human being, and the range of experience that's involved there. And what we notice, as Anna points out, is when there's resistance, in Dharma language, resistance is a form of clinging, yeah? It's "I don't want," or "I contract around," or "I want," or something like that. There's the contraction of clinging, and that's wrapped up in the fabrication of experience. That clinging, that aversion, that resistance, that grasping, whatever it is, that "I don't like," "I wish it was better," "It's not good enough," whatever it is, all that's just varieties of clinging, and that will shape the experience that I have of anything in that moment -- of body, of self, of other, of world, all of it.
So clinging is involved in, as you say, the fabrication of our experience, the fabrication of our perception. In the moments that I relax clinging, as you said, just create a bit of space around it, I ease something with it, I bring a bit of love in (love as the opposite of clinging), a bit of softness, all these ways of relaxing clinging in the moment, it's like the experience that then we're in relationship with, whether it's experience of my body, or my health, my self, my whatever it is, it becomes less solidified, less rigidified as an experience, less painful, actually. Okay? And in that relaxing of clinging, we say in technical language it's fabricated less. The experience is fabricated less, becomes more liquid and more amenable then to imaginal perception, to seeing it this way or that way. There are more possibilities.
Clinging contracts the possibilities: "This thing, it's real. It is what it is, and I'm stuck with it." Versus what happens when there's -- and there are so many different ways of clinging, and there are so many different ways of relaxing clinging. There's a whole art. When I do that, things become more fluid, more liquid, and more open to possibility, to magic in the perception. Does that make sense? So that's a really important insight. Lovely. Good.
Q2: different possible experiences and images of the energy body; inclining towards samādhi
Yogi: I suppose I've got two different energetic things going on that I think are probably both energy body. They feel quite different. The strongest sense that I have is around the head. [inaudible] When I'm practising regularly, it's there quite a lot of the time. When I'm not practising, as well -- I can feel it now. And it's pleasant. If I tune into it, it fills out [inaudible] and goes more down my back a bit. The other field of energy that I feel -- it's a bit like, if I experience my toes, I can experience my toes as like a visual picture. I can sort of see, in my imagination, I suppose, see my toes wiggling, and sort of connect that with my body, as it were. Or I can feel the felt sense, what I think is the felt sense, which is almost like going into the inside of my toes. When I do that, I can't really find 'toes' as such. I can just sort of find this kind of toeness. That's another sense of it, energy, I suppose, energeticness around that. And then there's a sense that -- so if I feel into that now, it doesn't stop there. The energy doesn't stop at the sense of toeness. It's as though it slightly keeps going underneath a little bit, not very far, but a little bit. It's a very different feeling to this strong, quite strong energetic feeling that I have around my head and my back. I just wonder: why? Is one not the energy body and one is? Why are they -- there are two fields going on, and one feels stronger than the other, and I kind of feel like what I should be doing, as it were, is to strengthen the one around my head or bring that more in my body.
Rob: Okay. Good, yeah. Bless you, I've forgotten your name, sorry.
Yogi: Rowan.
Rob: Rowan, that's right, yes. So Rowan is reporting two seemingly distinct experiences and wondering what their relationship to each other is: whether one's the energy body or they're both energy body, and what to do with each of them. One is a sort of experience that's over and all around the head, and then down the spine, and it's quite pleasant. And the other is actually different experiences of the toes and around the toes.
Yogi: Everywhere in the body.
Rob: Oh, everywhere in the body, okay.
Yogi: Yeah. I can sort of tune into it. I can feel it in my hands. I was just using my toes as an example.
Rob: Okay, yeah. Okay. So an experience of body parts where sometimes the form of the body parts is retained in the imagination, and sometimes that kind of dissolves into just a vague sense there. And sometimes it extends beyond the body, beyond the confines, the outlines of the physical body, but it's not as pleasant or as intense as the first experience. It's kind of neutral. Okay.
Yogi: And it's much less strong. The thing around my head is very strong.
Rob: Okay. Yeah. So I would say it's all energy body, okay? 'Energy body,' if I could press 'rewind,' I might have chosen a different word. [laughs] Because it's such a huge scope, you know? So what we're talking about with energy body is a whole range of experiences that we can have of this space. That might mean it retains the contours of my physical body. It might mean a very subtle experience. It might mean a really intense experience energetically. It might be very pleasant. It might be very ethereal or very dense, like dense as stone, you know. All of that is energy body; it's the range of what's available.
So what we're interested in, in the broad reach of, let's say, soulmaking practices, what we're interested in is opening it all up for investigation. Just opening it all up for experience, just expanding the range of experience and familiarity, and what we're comfortable with, and what can kind of get ensouled. If you had a different question -- for instance, "I'm interested in the energy body, but right now I'm interested in that kind of direction of energy body that's about developing the samādhi, developing that well-being and moving into jhāna and all that stuff," which I know that you've explored a little bit -- then I would say, okay, of these two experiences, I would lean more into the exploration of the first, the head, because it's more pleasant and more vivid.
And your job then, if you're in your gear of, "Right now, I'm just into developing this well-being in the energy body, not so much in the emotions and not so much in the image of the body as soul-manifestation. I'm going for the jhāna thing, the yumminess and the nourishment there," then what you want to do, without grasping at it, is to let what's pleasant be where your attention goes. And in time, with a little kind of gentle tending, let's say, that kind of pleasantness will begin taking over the whole body. It will spread, as I think it already is a little bit. And you can encourage that with the awareness in different ways, and we can talk about it if you want. But you would focus on that one, just because it's more pleasant, if you wanted to go and really develop the sort of samādhi side of things with the energy body, the samādhi direction with the energy body.
But all of that whole range is energy body. So in terms of the actual image that's involved, it can be, yeah, it keeps the contours. There are countless images that we can have in any moment of the body. Some of them will be imaginal, and some will just be like I shut my eyes, and I kind of see my body sitting here, and it's not imaginal. Sometimes it dissolves in light, and we say there's no image. Sometimes there's just space there. All of that is energy body. It's all in the range of the playground. Does that ...? Yeah? Okay, good. Thanks, Rowan.
Is that Sandy? Yeah?
Q3: the spectrum of samādhi and the jhānas, and how this relates to soulmaking practices; is image always dominant when there's soulmaking and soulfulness
Yogi: [inaudible]
Rob: Merge or emerge? Emerge? Yeah. Okay, so just see if I get this right. Sandy's asking: so far her experience of the energy body is very much related to dhyāna or jhāna, Sanskrit or Pali, absorption, meditative absorption that the Buddha talked about. When we talked a little bit with Rowan about that, that kind of -- I see it really as a spectrum or trajectory. It's just this moving into more and more well-being. This field here, this space here, becomes more and more a field of well-being in those moments that we're going into samādhi. And there's a range of experiences we can have here. The Buddha kind of demarcated eight jhānas, but actually there's a really wide range if you look closer. And then the question is: how does that all relate to the soulmaking and the soul kind of enchantment of the experience of the body? Yeah? Is that ...?
Yogi: [inaudible]
Rob: But it's an important question, so that's great, yeah. So let's take the jhāna piece first. Jhāna means 'absorption,' or dhyāna. Sandy was using the Sanskrit. So 'absorption' or something like that. The Buddha talks about eight jhānas, and the first four are called rūpa-jhānas. Rūpa means 'body.' So one way of understanding what the Buddha is getting at there is, in this kind of -- one way of seeing it is he's really interested in: can you make this space here a field of nourishment, a field of deep yumminess? Not all the time, but have access to that in your life. And you can basically train that. You train it so that there's nice, deep, yummy nourishment in the body. Doesn't mean I never experience anything difficult. It certainly doesn't mean that I'm not in touch with my emotions; I'll come back to that. But at times, one has the capacity to dip into, like, different wells of well-being, and bathe in them, and be completely saturated and fed by that.
So the first four rūpa-jhānas, you could say, one way of conceiving of them is they're different experiences of this space. So in the first jhāna, the body has become, instead of the usual "I'm sitting here, and I feel my sensations, and I have the usual image of my body," the body, the experience of the body, has become pīti, has become rapture, has become the kind of pleasure that's associated with that. That is the experience of the body suffused and saturated, as the Buddha says. It's become a field of that kind of physical pleasure. Yeah? In the second jhāna, you could say the body has become happiness. If you stop someone on the street and say, "What does it mean for your body to become happiness?", they will think of some kind of chocolate or something that they ... [laughter] But we can actually experience, like the texture of the body, this space, becomes joy, and one's drinking that joy, drinking of one's body.
Third jhāna, the dominant texture of the rūpa, of the energy body, is peacefulness, like a really exquisite peacefulness. And in the fourth, stillness. In the fifth jhāna, this space here just becomes space. It's the kind of bliss of empty space. Really, really refined, etc. So one way of understanding the connection between samādhi and energy body is, basically, we can use the energy body awareness to cultivate well-being. That well-being has a certain continuum or spectrum to it, and the jhānas kind of demarcate certain places on that spectrum. Does that make sense? There are many reasons, I think, to incorporate energy body awareness. Another is emotional awareness and emotional sensitivity and emotional care for ourselves. The emotions play out in the body, and we can develop a real kind of sensitivity to the nuance of our emotional life, and also ways of caring for them, all here. It's all here. So that's a really, really good skill to take care of oneself, and I would say that's part of soulmaking practice. So you've got kind of two directions here. They overlap, actually, because joy is certainly an emotion, so the joy of the samādhi is an emotion, but what about heartache, what about sadness, what about longing, what about anger, what about brokenness of heart, you know? We really want to develop the art of being with, noticing, caring with all of that, including the really kind of unremarkable sense of emotions, just a little bit "nnnhh." I want to be sensitive to how that feels also.
Then you've got a reason to be with the energy body that has just to do with navigating practice -- so, for example, emptiness practices or different practices. As I mentioned with Anna, when you're on the right track in any practice, whether it's an emptiness practice or a mettā practice, the energy body tells you. Here I am doing mettā: "May you be well. May you be happy. May you be peaceful." And I'm sensitive to the energy body, and I notice this time around, when I say, "May you be peaceful," I feel that peace here. And okay, let me slow down with that word, 'peaceful,' and say it again, ride that wave, catch that current in my sail, let it fill the energy body, resonate with it. So the energy body sensitivity is working to help me sail in different practices. Do you understand? Does this make sense?
So there's all that, all those different -- and then when it comes to soulmaking, then we've got also a navigational sense, that when an image is potentially soulmaking for us, the energy body is one of the things that tells us. There will be an alignment, a harmonization or something. (I'm giving you more than you asked for in the question, but I think it's important.) It's part of the navigation. Then we get a whole other level, which I don't think I've really talked about so much, if I remember, and it's what we mentioned with Anna. When we say 'energy body,' what we've mostly been emphasizing so far is the aspect of the felt sense: what does this space feel like? But there is also, at any time, an image of the body. That image can be not imaginal -- like I said, I just shut my eyes, and I can kind of see the configuration of my body right now. But sometimes what happens with the image of body is it becomes imaginal, becomes a soulmaking image.
And as I said with Anna, there's an endless possibility there. This morning, I can't remember what point -- it was maybe after Catherine did her instructions. And I was just sitting with you guys, we were sitting together, and I actually had the sense of your beauty, all of you, and the beauty of souls here, and a sort of vague image arose. In other words, it was more the sense of a sort of rosebush kind of woven around a trellis, and kind of reaching out with lots of budding roses on it. And my body became that rosebush. It was also you guys. Or that rosebush became my body.
At that point, I've got a choice. I can kind of go into the image of that, or I can kind of -- that image itself, just the initial arising of that image, had a certain perfume, and opened the energy body a certain way. So I can kind of lean more into the image with some energy body awareness, or I can kind of take the perfume, and the way that's opened up the energy body, and just lean into that as a more energetic sense. Do you understand? Or I can kind of walk that middle line between, and have the best of both worlds, so to speak. It's not that there's a better or worse; there are just different ways you can sail. But there's a sense of the body had become flowering roses, beautiful, pink, flowering roses, and it was really gorgeous. So there was an image of body, and the energetic body sense, felt sense. Yeah? So there's felt sense, there's image of body, and that can become imaginal and soulmaking, and then there's also the concept of the body. What is a body? What is matter? We go into high school and get taught, "Matter is this. It's made of atoms. It functions like this. And it doesn't mean a damn thing, and it's random." And that's just the typical scientific materialist view. And then there are all kinds of other views: matter is love. Matter embodies itself, forms itself as angels, here, this, right now, this body. So we have possible concepts of matter and of body in any moment, and they may be more or less soulmaking. Does this make sense?
So when soulmaking is happening, actually there are all those three going on. I don't need to engineer it so much. It's more like this is something to notice. There's usually a subtle concept that's nourishing and supporting and stimulating the soulmaking. There's usually some image that's involved of the body. And there's the felt sense. And as those, particularly the image and the concept, start opening up more and supporting the soulmaking, then that's how that part of the question works. Does that make sense? So that's just in very general terms, and of course the art is in all the detail as well. Is that enough for now?
Yogi: [inaudible]
Rob: Yeah. We've been talking about this. So what is soulmaking? Let's say, for the most part, yes, soulmaking will involve -- when there's soulmaking, when there's soulfulness, it will involve image. That image will usually be the dominant thing when there's soulmaking. It's the primary thing. But sometimes it can be the secondary thing. So, for example, you might be in love with the Buddha's path, and you love practising, and you love the Saṅgha, and all of that. You never heard anything about imaginal practice or soulmaking. But I would say, for you, that that can still be soulmaking -- your love of practice, your love of Buddhadharma and that sense of tradition. And there's kind of -- we don't often realize it because we don't really have the language in this culture, both Buddhist culture and wider culture -- I would say that when you love something like that, and you're engaged and you're devoted in that way to practice, that there's, whether I realize it or not, a subtle fantasy operating, a subtle image of the whole thing, of the tradition, of the Buddha, of the lineage, of the teachings, of the Saṅgha, of yourself on the path and the beauty of that, and even the struggle of that. It functions as a kind of background cloud of fantasy in the best possible sense, that feeds inspiration. Does this make sense?
So most of the time, when we're talking about it, soulmaking will involve something that's really image, and it's got our attention, and we're conscious of it as image. There's also a dimension of soulmaking that functions as this sort of background cloud of fantasy, if you like. We could stretch the term in other ways too. So, for example, when the consciousness, when the soul just opens to something, that it's discovering more. So, for example, you mentioned the jhānas. When you're going through that process for the first time, and it's like "Wow!", and then the second one, and there's a real kind of discovery, and that opening into new realms has with it a sense of beauty and meaningfulness, etc. In the primary sense, it's not image; it's the quieting of image. It's the opposite. The imagery goes quiet in the jhānas, usually. But it can still be soulmaking because of the opening. The ideas are opening, the sense of things, the sense of existence, the sense of oneself, the sense of consciousness. And that opening and discovery and beauty and meaningfulness, that's all in the package of soulmaking. But primarily there's no image at that point, because it's the quieting of images in the jhānas. Does that make sense?
Okay. Let's have a bit of quiet together.
