Transcription
Possibilities of soul, the possibilities for soul, are endless. They're endless. And that endlessness is also endless in different directions. Soul opens up in different ways, can open up in different ways, in different directions, at different levels. We discover a lot about all kinds of things, but also about soul, through stillness and through silence. Sometimes, for many of us, stillness and silence can become a kind of habit, if you've been on a lot of retreats where there's a lot of stillness, a lot of silence. In a place like this place, this week, or at Gaia House, stillness and silence are the cultural dominants. If someone were to come in this hall and see a bunch of people sitting still and silent in funny postures, they would consider it quite strange.
So we discover, we can discover, a lot about soul. We will discover a lot about soul through the stillness, through the depth of stillness and silence. And yet there's also a direction through movement and through non-silence, through sound. So sometimes what happens, and many of you will have experienced this, and I've talked about it before, one is sitting still and silent in meditation, aware of the energy body. Maybe there's an image or something going on. And one can actually feel the energy body moving. To an outside observer, it would look completely still. It looks like this -- I'm just sitting in silent meditation -- but I feel and there's an imaginal sense and an energetic bodily sense of the body dancing, or moving, or turning cartwheels, or whatever it is.
So this is a really fertile area of meditation to open up that way. Or, again, an image, and there's a roaring coming through the image. No one can hear anything; it's, if you like, purely in the image, if we say it that way. But because it's imaginal, it's soulful. They go together. I don't know if some of you have had this kind of experience. Then, of course, we can actually move, and we did a little bit of that in one of the sessions. I've talked about this in the past as well. So what is it, if I put the question to you rather than say what it is, what is it to practise moving and practise sounding? And can that be soulful? What might that mean? What might that feel like?
We might have a practice of tai chi or qigong or something; there's movement involved. Is that soulful? How can it become more ensouled? So there's a direction here of possibility. This came up, Andrea asked, and in individual interviews: we have a culture of stillness and silence. Could it be that we open up the sense of practice to include movement? And then this question, this -- not so much a koan, but an ongoing investigative, explorative question for you: what does it mean for movement to become soulful, to become more deeply soulful, more fully soulful? What does it mean for sound, for voice, to become more soulful, more deeply soulful?
And a lot of it is about cultural dominance. I've said this a couple of times on retreats. You know, it can be strange, because you go, "Here it's where we sit and we're still." Maybe a person thinks, "I'll look a bit weird if I'm the only one sort of moving." How influenced we are by culture around us. So I'd like to open that up again as a possibility. Movement can be very, very subtle, really subtle. The hands are moving, or some movement, and it can feel completely soulful. Or the sounding can be really subtle. What matters is the soulmaking, not what the movement looks like to another person or how much movement or what it is. So we're just opening up a kind of possibility, a level of practice.
We have sitting period, walking period. You could say sitting period, moving period. Okay? It might look absolutely like walking up and down in a delineated form. And again, there's so much to learn from a circumscribed walking path. You walk between two points, and it's very contained, contained in lots of ways. There's a lot to learn that way. But it might be sometimes that you want to explore something different. There's stillness, sitting, and then there's movement. And what is that, with the energy body, with the imaginal, with the possibility of soulfulness? Some of you have movement practices, exercise practices. And still I put this question: what does it mean to deepen the soulfulness, to open the soulfulness in relation to yoga, tai chi, if you're following prescribed forms? It's an open question for you to find out, for us to find out.
I want to go back to the nodes, the aspects of the imaginal, and pick up where we left off. I don't know if Catherine's done it already ...? Okay. Some of you are taking notes, and that's fine, and that's actually great. We will try to put the list up of these nodes on the board, of these aspects, at some point ... today. [laughter] Again, why are we doing all this? And it's a lot. We're actually zipping through. And today I'm going to zip through. Really, it's like a high-speed bus tour through. It's partly to highlight, draw your attention to certain features. What's the point? Partly we're interested in discernment, meaning this whole movement of meditation is, whatever the practice, a movement into more and more sensitivity, more and more subtlety of awareness, more and more refined perceptions, ability to discriminate and discern this and that. All that is in the beauty and the art of the unfolding.
So putting all this out is really just to, again, throw some seeds out. It's like, "What's that? Can I notice that? Can I discern this and that?" Making distinctions, or recognizing distinctions in the perception. This is all really important in soulmaking. So it's for the sake of that kind of refinement and enriching of awareness and attention and sensitivity. It's also, as I said when we introduced it, for the sake of clarity. There's a whole conceptual framework here that understanding different aspects of it will help bring that clarity of understanding. But it is not -- at least I hope it doesn't become -- a kind of canonized dogma: "This is the soulmaking catechism. I credo the twenty-eight ..." [laughter] And it gets very rigid like that. It's more like seeds. It's like, "Oh, what's that?" And even the words we use, they're maybe words that we're very familiar with in English, but they kind of have different possibilities when we use them. They're like poetic seeds. Can there be this straddling of an attitude that's both very precise and interested in refinement of discrimination and discernment, and also kind of loose and labile, fluid enough and flexible enough to ...? Yes? Good. [laughter]
Okay. Third point, "Why are we doing this?", is because, as I mentioned, there's a possibility in recognizing these nodes in the moment, in a practice, that something is activated in the whole process. So, for example, Catherine talked yesterday about one of the nodes, loving and being loved. And some images, it's very obvious. They're love images; it's palpable. It's the most obvious feature of that image. Other images, and I've described in other talks, etc., where that's not an obvious feature, but it's there. And what can happen is I begin to notice that feature or that element, that aspect, that node (for instance, being loved). It's like this image, whatever it is, is very stern and seems a bit forbidding, or maybe a bit scary, but as I pay attention more closely, I notice there's this unusual kind of loving that this -- if it's another imaginal figure -- has for me. And that noticing, the very attuning of the attention to that node or that element, ignites that element of feeling loved further. And that ignition of one part of the lattice ignites -- the ignition spreads. Yeah? So the whole thing comes alive.
So one way this all works is via noticing. We just notice. That's why we're throwing out these things: "Can you notice this, can you notice ...?" Some of them are a lot easier to notice than others, with individual variation. But the noticing ignites or activates something, and the whole thing can become, let's say, more imaginal, fully imaginal. So there's the capacity to notice actually what's already there that we hadn't fully noticed in the field of the imaginal. It's like there is this thing that we're calling sensing with soul or imaginal perception, and we're kind of discovering what it is: "Oh, there's that. Oh, yeah, right. It was just dimly in the awareness." That making it more obvious in the moment ignites something. Okay? That's one possibility.
Second possibility, which we touched on, is to be more deliberate with the nodes. I think it was the second node, the energy body -- I can, again, notice what's happening in the energy body, or I can also just kind of deliberately emphasize that node and activate it. Let's say I'm in relationship with a tree, or with another being, or with a so-called internal image. Can I bring my whole energy body into relationship with that tree, with that being, with that image? I sense it with my whole body. Not just with my eyes, not just with my ears. I sense it with my whole body. Or I just start to kind of deliberately activate more of that energy body sense. So I'm kind of turning up the dial, if you like, on the energy body node. Yeah? And that, again, can activate that, which can open up the whole lattice, ignite the whole lattice.
(6) The sixth element is trust. We mentioned trust. Now, this is an example of one that could work both ways, in terms of noticing or activating. Sometimes we're with an image, and maybe to the mind it seems a bit untrustworthy, or a bit pathological, or violent, or strangely amoral, or immoral, even, or whatever it is. And then, again, we can notice sometimes that, "Oh, hold on. There's something in me, so to speak, that trusts this." So we notice the trust. Trust is an element of the imaginal. It's one of these elements of the imaginal. Sometimes we can be more deliberate with the trust. What I'd like to say, and I presume that we wouldn't be here, no one would be here if you didn't sense that in the imaginal, and even in the weird images that one might get, you'd be a little tentative about sharing them with certainly many people, there's something to trust here. It sounds weird, it looks weird, it smells weird, but there's a treasure here. We sense there's a treasure here.
Now, sometimes what you can do is just deliberately -- just a grain of trust. Okay, it seems like a strange image, it seems like a strange experience or sense of the world that I'm having right now; can I just sprinkle a grain of trust into the mix right there? Just a little bit of trust can be enough for the alchemy to start happening. Without that trust, everything just gets rrrr. It can't kind of enrich and deepen. Yeah?
All this is dependent arising. So in other words, if there's not trust in this so-called subjective pole of the whole field, of the imaginal field, then, like I said, everything kind of either grinds to a halt or stops or gets limited, or my lack of trust, my distrust, my suspicion, my fear colours the image. The image is a dependent arising. The sensing of the world is a dependent arising. Like in a nightmare, if you've ever had this experience, you're being chased by the monster, and I'm afraid of this monster chasing me, it's getting bigger and bigger as it's chasing me -- if you've ever turned around to just face the monster and give yourself to the monster ... Has this ever happened to anyone? What happens? It transforms. Why? Because the relationship with it has transformed, because the whole thing is a dependent arising. I participate, we participate in the co-creation/discovery of what we sense, whether we're talking about intrapsychic images or sensing with soul.
If I can just sprinkle that little bit of grain of trust in, then I'm participating in the creation of this image in a way that allows it to open. You can think about sprinkling a grain. Sometimes with trust, it's a matter of, like, "I don't know about this, so let me just create a little frame. I'll let myself play with trusting this, experiment with trusting this image or whatever I'm sensing right now for ten minutes, or twenty minutes, or five minutes," or whatever. In that way, I'm not saying I have to sign up to a lifelong kind of marriage to this weird monster or whatever it is. But I can just create a time frame. Then at the end of that time frame, I can just step out of that. So that can be a helpful thing to do as well.
In terms of trust, there's also trusting a particular sense that we have, a particular image. There's also trusting the whole process that we're engaged in, all this business of soulmaking and the logos. So there are different kinds of trust. If you can find a way, if we can find a way in practice of just allowing or just encouraging a little bit of trust, that helps, the dependent origination, and in the process, just helps things to become more fertile, to open up. Okay. Let me move through some very quickly, again just sprinkling seeds.
(7) The seventh aspect is that images, by definition, imaginal images elicit, open, nourish, support, ignite soulmaking. So something is not really an image unless it has that kind of -- we recognize the resonances, all the different kinds of resonances that it has in the soul. So the sense of soulfulness is a characteristic aspect of the imaginal. There's another part of that which I'm just going to mention, because I've talked about it so much before on previous series of talks and retreats. An image stimulates, opens, supports, grounds, nourishes soulmaking. What is soulmaking? This is what I'm not going to explain so much. Just to say: soulmaking, we could break it down to say it involves what we've been calling the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, and the way they weave into each other and inseminate each other, and open, and expand, and deepen, and enrich, and complicate each other. Eros, psyche, and logos. I'm not going to go into it right now. We can talk about it if you want another time.
But to say that soulmaking has this [expanding] -- something expands in soulmaking. There's a sense with soulfulness of something stretching, stretching the psyche, actually, if you like, stretching the sense of things, the idea of things, the ideas of things, the perceptions of things. That stretch can happen very quickly, very suddenly, or just kind of more gradually over time. But soulfulness, the arising of soulfulness, the supporting of soulfulness, is an aspect of the imaginal. And soulfulness is more than heartfulness. Heartfulness is very important. Heartfulness is a part of soulfulness. Soulfulness is more than heartfulness in lots of ways. Is that okay if I say a bit more? Are you guys okay?
Okay, I'm going to just flip the order because I'm moving through quite quickly. I'm going to jump to what was the tenth on our list, and then come back and do the eighth and the ninth.
(10) The tenth was that in the imaginal, with the imaginal, the boundaries are elastic and soft. The boundaries are not definite and fixed -- the boundaries of self and the boundaries of other, so the boundaries of the image. The elasticity is related to what I said before just now about the soulmaking dynamic, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, having a tendency to expand. Here's this image, for instance, or here's my self as image, and the sense is of, "Here's what I thought it was, it seemed like it was," but as it gets caught up in the soulmaking dynamic, the sense of what that being is and what the self is and even what the world is expands. The idea, "There's Robert. There's Nathalie. They're like this," it's like the sense of what's involved in a Robert or a Nathalie, who they are, what they are, grows, gets more complex, gets richer, wider, deeper.
So there are, we could say, elastic edges. Things can expand and move. This applies both to concepts and to images. Soft edges means -- just right now, try two things. First thing is, think of someone, actually someone you love. And consider, get a sense of their being, if you can, if you get a sense of their being. Now, you might have a really sharp visual, for instance, imagination -- every little hair or stubble on their chin or whatever it is. So in that sense, the image, visually, as a form, it may be very not soft-edged. It may be very sharp-edged. But I'm talking about the beingness, their beingness. So this person that you love, get a sense of their beingness. Does that beingness of this person, their kind of essence, does that have an edge? Does it have a sharp edge? I mean, maybe it has some edge, a sense of, "Well, Mark is over there, and I'm over here. Mark is over there, and Eamonn's over there." There are edges there, and that's fine. At another level, that doesn't exist. That's fine. We're retaining a certain level of those edges.
But if I feel into Mark, or I feel into Eamonn, there's no sharp edge to a person's being. Do you understand? You get a sense of that immediately. That's how persons are. When we put sharp edges, a person will probably say, "Whoa, buddy. Back off." Or we don't like it if people do that to us. Or if we do it to ourselves, we don't feel well. Okay? An image is the same. If it's a tree that I'm sensing with soul, or a flower that I'm sensing with soul, again, it doesn't have a sharp edge. This soft-edgedness is part of the sense of an image. That's the tenth: elastic and soft edges.
Related to that, and a lot of these aspects, as I said, some of them overlap. Some of them kind of point in different directions; they're a little bit contradictory to each other. But the eighth and the ninth.
(8) The eighth is a sense of dimensionality. So that's also kind of a little bit implicit in this soft-edgedness business. When I think, my sense of Robert ... in that blurriness of his edges, first of all, I wouldn't want him to have sharp edges. I lose something of his beauty, of his mystery, of his essence if he's got sharp edges. Now, in the blurriness, as it transitions into blurriness, we could say there's a kind of dimensionality. It's like sensing into Robert, or sensing into this tree or this flower, when I sense it with soul, it's as if there are other dimensions that we sort of pick up on or intuit or dimly sense. Sometimes we clearly sense them.
So it's like I sense Robert, and I sense him as the angel there. Now, I can see Robert, and I see his stripey shirt, and I see his sitting and his form, and I know a little bit about his history in the human realm, and there's another dimension, the angelic dimension. Actually, there are multiple dimensions. Some of them will be clear to me, and some of them kind of recede into this blurriness. Is this making sense? Yeah? [Yogi in background: I got muddled because you were talking about Robert, and for a minute I thought you meant yourself and...] No, sorry, I mean ... Well, I could mean myself. Thank you for saying that, Rowan. I could mean myself. I'm also a Robert. But in this case, I meant that Robert. But it doesn't matter, because whatever we sense with soul, whether it's Robert Brodrick, whether it's Robert Burbea, whether it's the rose, whatever we sense with soul will start to come alive with dimensionality. We'll start to notice the dimensionality, the angelic dimensions. So whatever it is, really. Does that make sense?
Now, we could say, still on this eighth one of dimensionality, we could kind of separate it out and say, okay, now we can separate out something called divinity, or we could just lump it together and say this dimensionality kind of shades into a sense of the divine and of sacredness. Now, 'divine' is either a word that means absolutely nothing to people, or it's a word that we have bad history with, or it might be a very rich word. To me, it's actually an infinitely rich word. We can never exhaust what the word 'divinity' means, what it represents, what it holds. It is itself an infinite concept, infinitely rich with possibility.
Dimensionality shading into a sense of divinity. Sometimes that divinity is very unclear. That's a very palpable sense. Sometimes we're even quite clear what we mean by 'divinity' or the concept. But some or other concept or sense of divinity, clear or kind of vague or obscure, is an aspect of the imaginal. One of the characteristics of divinity is, as I said, whatever we say about it, however clever we are at theology or philosophy or whatever, it's always going to be bigger. There's always going to be more. There's a kind of infinity of beyondness to divinity. And that ties into the ninth aspect. As I said, these are kind of implicit in each other.
(9) With an image (could be my self-sense -- I'm just sensing myself with soul; I've become a deity; it could be the rose; it could be another person; could be an intrapsychic image), there's a sense of beyondness. We sense, "I perceive this. This is what I perceive," whatever it is, and maybe that has some dimensionality, but there's a sense of, "There's more, there's more." There's more that I can kind of intuit and that's attractive. That 'beyond' has an allure. And that's partly what's related to the eros.
So we get this sense of there's a beyondness to an image. It's not just a form, a flat form. It's got this, again, dimensionality to it. And that beyondness is unfathomable. There's not a sense, again, that I can reach the end. So images, the imaginal, what we sense with soul, has a sense of unfathomability to it. But the dimensionality, the beyondness, the divinity, the unfathomability, with the sensing with soul, with the imaginal, it's not something that loses the appearance: "I just want the Unfabricated, the quieting of perception, the fading of appearances, the blurring into oneness." That's all really good and important. With imaginal perception, with sensing with soul, this sense of dimensionality, beyondness, unfathomability, divinity, is in and through as well as behind the appearances. Does that make sense? Yeah? No? [Yogi in background: Can you say it again?] Okay.
So in a way, you have to give some context, so it's good that you asked. Certain kinds of meditative practices -- this came up a little bit with a question last night, which I didn't actually pick up on last night. We said a lot of times in Buddhist teachings, a lot of what you get in Buddhist teaching -- oh, I could talk a long time about this! Let's see. It's worth saying again. I've said it before, but it's worth saying again. We could divide the thrust or the intention of the range of Buddhist teachings, we could divide it into three, okay? In terms of what gets sort of taught and what gets emphasized.
(1) So one (and this is the more traditional Theravādan way) is that basically here we are in the world of complexity and appearances and all the tussle of that, and we practise, and we practise seeing emptiness, and we practise letting go, and we're basically letting go of appearances. What happens is there's a quietening, a fading of the perception, a melting of the perception more and more, so eventually some kind of sense of oneness we begin to perceive. There's a kind of spectrum of that fading of appearances into different kinds of oneness, you could say -- love or awareness or whatever it is. And eventually there's the, you could say, dissolution into emptiness, or dissolution to what's sometimes called the Unfabricated or the Unconditioned. It's just the relinquishing of all appearances, and in that, a kind of letting go in relationship to the world. Does that make sense? Very briefly.
That, in some traditions, really gets emphasized a lot. That's the movement. It's a kind of transcending of the world of appearances and the world of complexity. I think that's very important, but I don't think it's the whole thing.
(2) Other Buddhist traditions, especially, more commonly, also in different cultures, emphasize what we could call 'just being with things as they are,' or mindfulness. So rather than trying to go beyond or through into some kind of realms of emptiness, it's rather this world, this moment, this sensation, and there's a kind of just with this, just with this, as it is, don't add anything, don't try and get rid of it; just meet the facts of existence as barely as possible, and practice is about being with that. Does this make sense? Very common nowadays, extremely common. Extremely common in certain cultures or certain streams of Buddhism.
(3) There's a third way which we could call the imaginal, or engaging with appearances, but not kind of believing so much in this 'there's a way that things are.' So I can't be with things as they are, because there is no 'things as they are.' We participate in the creation of things. We participate in the sensing of things. So we have then an opening of the possibility of imaginal perception. And, as I said, I can be with that Robert over there, and the angelic perception of him or the image of him, we can say it's a fabricated perception; it's not Unfabricated. I'm allowed to play with those perceptions. And the appearances become important, not just because they're kind of flat facts. They become important because of this fertility of the imaginal and because of the divinity. So the divinity is in the appearance. It's not just beyond the appearance; it's in the appearance, and the dimensionality is in the appearance.
How did that sound? I'll just say one more minute on this. One way of understanding Buddhadharma is it's all about understanding fabrication. So 'fabrication' means: what is being created in perception? What is being woven in the realm of what we experience? How does experience get made? When I understand that more, and I begin to be able to let go of the clinging that creates experience, that fabricates experience, the sense moves more and more into Unfabricated. I'm clinging less, I'm letting go of identification, I'm letting go of all the grasping and pushing and pulling, and things just fade more and more.
If I go deeply enough into that process, I realize that everything is fabricated. There's nothing that's not fabricated, nothing whatsoever. Not the fabricator, not the mind, not the consciousness, not time, not space, not things, nothing. It's all fabricated. And in going deeply enough into that, I see that the whole notion of fabrication, too, is empty, because there's nothing that's fabricated, there's no time in which it's fabricated, and there's no fabricator. It's taking that process deeper and deeper and deeper. Is this ...? It's fine? Okay. It's also because I'm tired, so sorry if it's not ... When I go deep enough into it -- if I go a little bit deep, then I think, "Okay, there's something that's fabricated. This is fabricated. That's not fabricated." So there's a kind of duality between fabricated and Unfabricated.
Once I start going deeper, I come eventually to a point where I see it's all fabricated. There's not even an Unfabricated, because there's no fabricated. There's no fabricated, really. Fabrication is empty. Therefore, there's no Unfabricated, really. So the whole duality of fabricated and Unfabricated collapses. Where does that leave me? I'm just free then to play with different ways of looking and participate in the creation/discovery of being, of forms, of phenomena, including the imaginal. That understanding of emptiness at that level starts freeing things up. What that does is then legitimize what we could call skilful fabrication or soulful fabrication. Does this make sense? So it's like, if you go deep enough into emptiness, it legitimizes something about the possibility of the imaginal.
If I go back to those three kind of ways that Dharma gets taught, so you've got this all-out for the Unfabricated, for oneness, for going beyond appearances. I've got this legitimization of fabrication that we're talking about. That middle one, the mindfulness, when I believe in "this is what things are," then that doesn't legitimize the imagination. So someone who's, like, or if I was believing in the reality of bare attention and mindfulness, then imagination is exactly the wrong thing to do. It's exactly nonsense. It's exactly non-reality. It's exactly a waste of time. It's exactly what's going to get you into trouble, because Dharma is about being with something called 'things as they are,' or the facticity of things, or 'bare attention' or whatever.
Once you kind of expose the myth of that, then you realize this mindfulness business, it's really good as a kind of stream; we don't want to lose it. But if I say that's the only thing, then it leaves me a bit straitjacketed. And this whole business will be just utter delusion. We're spending a week in complete and utter delusion! [laughter] Delusion is a Buddhist word, though, avijjā. It's a translation of avijjā. Delusion, you could say, means, at a deep level, this non-realization that everything is empty. So to the degree that I'm deluded is the degree that I believe in mindfulness. [laughter, applause] ... As more than just a tool, okay? You can't do anything without mindfulness; it's really important. It's on tape now! [laughter] I really believe in it, and it's really important to practising ... [laughter] It's just how it gets framed and believed in and rigidified. It's like this has become an ultimate truth, even if people are not using that language. And again, you've got a wall and an absence of questioning. Does that make sense?
So, okay. Now I'll stop. [laughter] Let's just see ... So like I said, we're doing really a bus tour. I mean, I talked a lot longer than I intended to, but this is just a quick bus tour through these aspects to kind of prick up your ears and prick up your senses. It's like, "Oh, I can start noticing. Oh, yeah, there is this sense of dimensionality." Maybe that word doesn't quite work, or maybe the word 'divinity,' it's like, "I had thought it meant this," or "I made it just mean this." You have to feel your way into these. You have to sense your way into these nodes. Let them come ... Discover them for yourselves. Do you understand?
Let's have some quiet.
