Transformation in Soul (Q & A)

Again, please let me know if you want to ask a question and you'd rather that your question or the interaction wasn't recorded. Just let me know, and I'll press 'pause.' Anybody, please? Is that Nic? Yeah.

Q1: the sense of self in imaginal and emptiness practices

Yogi: Yeah, I'm getting really interested in this, getting really interested in images themselves [inaudible]. Just getting really interested in [?], what I take to be my kind of everyday self [?], the imaginal selves that are [?]. Yeah, that whole area, it's like, you know, ten years of Buddhist practice saying that there is really no self, practising emptiness, thinking I could get around it that way, that it wasn't really necessary [?], and then getting quite uneasy sometimes with it the psychological [?], that you can't let go of what you haven't got in the first place; you have to find a self or make the self healthy before you can let go of it. The whole confusion around practice and healing. And now it feels like, with the imaginal, it's really amazing. [inaudible] I'm not really sure what it is that's being healed. It doesn't feel clear what this everyday psychological self is, and the imaginal self.

Rob: Okay, so, let me see if I can summarize that. Nic's saying that she's getting very interested in the interface between the senses or the images of self, and healing the self, and the emptiness of self, and the different pathways that are sort of taught or offered through that mixture. Would that be a way of rephrasing what you said? Yeah?

And so, in some Buddhadharma, there's this teaching that the self is empty, but it has this connotation, therefore, that it's kind of almost not worth bothering about, in the sense of the richness of the personality, or the depth of the personality. It's just a fabrication. It's just a construct. It's just an illusion. And we're kind of opening that out to other possibilities. Well, is there a question there? Is it like, what is being healed, or ...?

Yogi: Yeah, but ... [inaudible]

Rob: It's important, but I wonder if we can just kind of ... is it possible to ...?

Yogi: [inaudible]

Rob: So in a way, there's one pathway that may be just, "Let go of the self. It's irrelevant. Just deconstruct it, or see that it's empty," and then there's this kind of, as you said, psychological sort of dictum or maxim, "Well, you have to have a self before you let go of it," and so one kind of builds that solid sense of self, and a sense of self-identity, and all that. And then maybe you do the emptiness stuff. And where does the imaginal come in in all of that? Is that ...? Yeah?

Okay, so you may pick up something common in the sort of answers I give, which is like, "Yes, it's all good." [laughter] It's all available and helpful, you know. They're different angles on things. I'm not really sure what to say right now about the middle one. Are you saying that you feel ambivalent about that, building up the self? What are you saying, where you're at with that middle psychological dictum?

Yogi: [inaudible]

Rob: Yeah, well, it gets made -- it gets given dimensionality. And it gets given a rootedness or a sense of origin in divinity, for a start. And that's huge. That's absolutely massive. That's not the typical Western sense or idea of self. We tend to be suspicious if someone has that kind of sense of themself, that somehow they're rooted in divinity. And not just in a kind of universal sense, that we're all rooted in [divinity], we're all children of God, etc., we're all part of the universal oneness of whatever that universal oneness stuff is. But in a very particular sense, that you, with the uniqueness of your manifestation, the uniqueness of your personality, the uniqueness of even the difficulties that you encounter, and the story of your life, and even the tragedies that you're handed, or that I'm handed, that this is somehow -- we get a sense, in this kind of 'Middle Way' sense, that that's given from the divine, or given to us in our uniqueness. Our uniqueness, our unique journey, is actually rooted in God, has its origins in the divine. Use whatever language helps you here. I am an angel, you are angels, all of that. And the journey that I'm on, or what's handed to me in my life -- this cancer that I might die of -- this is somehow necessary to the divine.

Now, I'm not going to reify that and cling to it. But there's a kind of view, and actually, a sensing with soul that I can enter into with something: this is a part of the narrative of my life. It's a fact. But it's multidimensional, and it's given place, given meaning, given depth, given divinity, given a sacredness that pertains to its uniqueness, your uniqueness. Do you understand? That's healing at a whole other level. It's like -- I'll talk about me right now. Let's say I die from the cancer. There's a healing that happens at a whole other level, whether or not I die. Do you understand?

And some of the less socially sanctioned kind of corners and angles and protuberances and ways of our personhood might be -- sometimes the healing is to soften them, to change them, to make them less dukkha. And sometimes the healing is at another level. So-and-so's still an arrogant, you know ... [laughter] So-and-so's still belligerent. They're always fighting for this cause, and on the edge of being obnoxious, or whatever it is. It's like, what does healing look like? You sand everything down, so it's all like, "Let's make everything polished and kind of bland and beige"? [9:47]

Or is it that there's an angel in that very difficulty somehow? Then the question is an open one: it's like, okay, how much does it need transforming, so that I'm not just stuck in something that's actually not soulful? So that's always the thing. What's soulful, you know? But also, it's just not kind of pointless dukkha. How much does it need to be transformed? How much does it need to be blessed by this other sense of it? And the healing is in that. And also, how much freedom is there? Because the other aspect of healing might be -- also, you could say we're at times, with emptiness, emptiness of self -- it's to see that we're multiple. That's why I said: you're angels. You're not just one. Yeah?

And so there's not so much rigidity. You see: my personality, or the patterns that I manifest in my life, in relationship, in thinking, in expression, in my work, in the way I move my body, they can get very rigid. It's just like, okay, that person just always -- I always do things this way. I don't even realize that I'm stuck in it. Or maybe I do realize. So one of the things with soul -- and we've kind of implied this in what we've been saying -- is that there's a certain freedom in having more range and having the flexibility. I can have the light, and I can have the dark. I can have the raging god, and I can have the god of infinitely soft benevolence -- all as me, and into me, and through me, and all that. I can have, as we said today, the stillness and the movement. Do you understand?

So I'm less fixated on one self being 'how I am,' and I open to the -- Hillman would call it the polytheism, the multiplicity of the angels that come through me, come through you, that speak to you, that want something from you. Yeah? And so there's something that's liberating, in the sense of breaking out of a rigidity and an enclosedness, in recognizing the multiplicity of what's coming through me, and what's being asked of me, and what my soul-relationships are with angels, divinities, images, etc. Yeah?

Where that ties in with emptiness -- again, this is a little bit related to what I said this morning -- is that, again, with a certain kind of, I would say, not fully deep understanding of emptiness, then we say, "Oh, the self is empty. Therefore it's worthless. Therefore we'd be better off without it somehow." We have this image, like a liberated person sort of doesn't have one, or they're kind of, "So, what is that?" And is that even something that I want? It's always put down and put aside, or it's tolerated. We tolerate: "You have this personality. Keval has this personality. It's okay. It's just personality. It's just form." And we don't get too hung up about it. So it's kind of neither particularly attacked or celebrated or seen as divine, the self and the expressions of the self.

If we go deeper into emptiness, like I said this morning, you see that the very fact that any self-construction at all is empty means that I'm free to construct the self any old how. And if I'm strictly in a Buddhadharma gear, I'll say the constructions of self are for the purpose of reducing dukkha. If I'm expanding that a bit more -- and there are whole questions here about paradigms and where they fit, but when we expand a bit more, we could say the constructions of self, at any time, the images of self, can be in the service of soulfulness. And that may overlap completely with the quieting of dukkha, the dissolving of dukkha, or it might be it's not quite that simple. [14:14] But the very fact of the emptiness -- the thorough, complete emptiness of self, totally; any conception of self is empty -- allows us to fabricate, and self to be fabricated in different ways. We see: it's all play. It's all theatre. And we can be moved by theatre and play. You understand? Does it make sense?

Yogi: [inaudible]

Rob: Good. And like you said, just to say, there's always this gear. We're not kind of emphasizing it so much on this retreat. Last retreat, partly because we called it Of Hermits and Lovers: The Alchemy of Desire, so we didn't want everyone blowing fuses and things. We just spent a day talking about letting go, you know? So that's a gear too. And this gear of, like, yeah, shoring up the self, and getting a really solid sense of self, where my boundaries are, and who I am, and all that. I'll go back to what I said right at the beginning: all good. All these directions are good. Sometimes, I think, as a general point, I want to say that it's a little bit like the only mistake we can make is to be stuck in one way of seeing things, one way of thinking about the self, or relating to the self, for example, yeah? Whatever that is, it doesn't have that flexibility, that malleability, the fluidity, the range that is, I think, a result and an expression and embodiment of freedom: range, flexibility in thinking, in acting, in relating, in meditating. Yeah? So I'm just echoing what you said, that actually they're all good. Yeah? And then the art is like, when? What's helpful, when, and in what ways? Does that ...?

Yogi: [inaudible]

Rob: Yeah. Very good. So, really good insight, Nic. So basically, Nic's saying that even if she's in the mode or the thinking of shoring up boundaries, and shoring up the self, and really setting boundaries, and being clear about that (that's sort of something that is maybe more typical of modern psychology in the West), then even that endeavour, and even that way of viewing things can be, in the language we've been using, can be sensed with soul. So that whole idea, and that whole movement, and that whole endeavour, and everything that's involved in that, it can have all the dimensionality, and all the kind of divine referencing and context, and blessing, and sacredness, and duty, and all the other list business. It's the same thing, but it's seen with, it's sensed with soul. You understand? So, absolutely. And there's a big difference between that and seeing it more rigidly, which can be still really, really helpful, seeing it more kind of flatly, if you like. Yeah? Really good. Important. Thank you.

[inaudible in background] Yes. Well, Robert had his hand up before, so I'll come back, yeah, try to.

Q2: transubstantiating difficult emotions like anger and grief

Yogi: I'd be grateful if you could explain how strong emotions other than love relate to sensing with soul.

Rob: You mean more difficult emotions?

Yogi: Yeah, like grief and anger.

Rob: Yeah. So the question is how strong emotions and more difficult emotions, like anger or grief, relate to sensing with soul -- emotions other than love. Yeah. So first thing to say is, love can also be soulless, relatively. Everything is a spectrum. I can love something, and it doesn't have that dimensionality and divinity, yeah? So love is an aspect of sensing with soul, but it's not, by itself, enough. Yeah? Anger, for instance -- are you saying, "How would you work with it?" is the question, or just, "How does it fit conceptually?"

Yogi: Yeah, does it have a legitimate place at the table in addition to the twenty-eight nodes? [laughter]

Rob: I see, yeah. Okay. So, yes. Yes. But it's more like ... it relates to Nic's question a little bit. It's like, whatever's coming through can be spun off into papañca, can be ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, transcended somehow ... [laughter] or related to in a way that opens up soulmaking. So we participate in everything. Here's the anger. (We'll weave in the practice and the concept together.) So here, I'm sitting. Maybe I don't even realize that I'm angry at first. I just feel hot and bothered, you know? Or maybe I feel depressed, and actually, it's something in there, just like, "Hmm." And I say, okay, this is what's -- the emotional awareness is absolutely indispensable, too; it's an absolute part of the foundation of the practice. I feel into this depression, the kind of heavy cloud of it. (I'm just making this up as a possibility.) And I feel that heaviness. And it feels like something's pressing me down. And I'm with it, and I'm just like, "Man, I feel like I've been pressed down a lot in my life." And then it's like, "You know what? I'm really pissed off at being pressed down." I get angry at the depression, for instance. Yeah?

And then I'm with something slightly different. The depression has maybe got a depression and an anger. (I'm just making up a possibility.) And so it's like, "Okay, that's interesting. Let me feel into the anger." Energy body. What does it need? Maybe it needs love. Maybe it needs mettā. That would be one approach. Maybe I just need to kind of let that anger be in the energy body, and see what it does. And so there's kindness in the approach, but I'm not trying to change it, okay? And I'm not, either, just watching it as sensation. So I've got energy body. I've got this. Maybe it feels like there are these glowing embers in my belly, and I can feel this, and it's mixed with frustration, and it's confusing, etc. I'm just with it, and I'm holding it, and I'm letting something emerge in the energy body, in the emotionality, in the way I'm tending to it. And then there's a lot of energy wrapped up in anger, a lot of emotional energy, and a lot of psychic energy wrapped up. And also, in some depressions, it's a kind of energy that's just trapped, and either attacking oneself or just locked. Not all depression, but a lot of depression has a lot of energy.

When I start relating to it in this way, and being with it in the energy body, being sensitive to it and allowing it, but in a very intimate way, then the energy, the psychic energy in the emotion may liberate an image. It may generate an image. So it was maybe just embers, and then out of the embers comes some kind of fiery, wrathful deity stomping around and roaring, and he's got a trident and a nine-bladed sword and all that. And maybe I'm a little bit scared of this. And maybe I feel like I've become that. Or maybe he's looking at me and engaging with me. Then I'm in the realm of the imaginal. [23:23] Now, with that, as one of our nodes business, is a sense of duty. (So I'm going quite quickly here.) But I then would engage this figure: either feel what it feels like to become that figure, or engage him in relationship. I'm in meditative (mindful, sensitive, energy body, emotional awareness, awareness of the resonances) relationship. Or how does it feel to become this deity, and to see the world, and to feel the world? And what does the body feel like, and what do I feel like?

At that point, when it has become imaginal, or to the degree it has become imaginal, there's something felt. The anger could still be there, but it's transformed, but not so much into love or softness or equanimity. It's become a kind of wrathful deity. It's become a creative anger. There will be a feeling of liberation. So before -- I mean, certainly, in the example I just gave -- started depressed. I felt so ugh. Then when I feel angry, I start to feel a bit bigger, but I still feel caught in the anger. So usually we have an unskilful relationship with anger, and we just feel tied up in it, knotted in it. When it becomes soulful and imaginal, it doesn't feel like a problem any more. And it's not that we just kind of give ourselves license to buy a shotgun and go at ... [laughter] whatever, and just, you know, shoot our mouths off. Something has changed in the whole nature of what it is and what it feels like.

And maybe there's a situation. Maybe I felt depressed because I'm in a situation, or I have been a long time in a situation where the rules of the engagement -- in the organization, or the family, or the relationship, or whatever -- are actually constraining me.

So I've got a situation that I'm actually angry about as well. Now, the imaginal, we have to be very sensitive and very attuned here, and also careful. It might give me a duty and a perspective in relation to that situation. Do you understand? And that might look like, I say something, and it has -- not unkindness. There's a difference between unkindness and wanting to hurt (the Buddha says non-cruelty is one of the three primary intentions in the noble eightfold path), but it can be sharp, and it can be cutting, and it can be strong, and it can be powerful, and it can be angry, you know. But it's a very different thing, and the purpose of it, the sense of it and the purpose of it, and the whole experience of it, is much expanded and, again, given dimensionality, and a rooting in divinity. [26:09]

I can't remember who I was sharing with this morning. It was Mei-Wah, I think. Some of you know this: I wrote a letter some years ago to the Insight Meditation teachers.^[1] And it was about climate change, and what we're doing, or actually, what we're not doing in relation to that. And there was anger in it, and it was obnoxious, or it would be easy to read it as obnoxious, and I could certainly see it that way, and I think a lot of people found it that way. [laughter] And it certainly pissed people off, etc. I could be completely off here, but I don't regret doing it. And with whatever consequences it made, I think I will feel that till I die. There was something right about it, and right about the tone, and there was something, to my sense, kind of archetypal coming through. I'm not saying that's the only answer. It was maybe part of a beginning of something that needed lots of other energies. But it felt, at the time, like there was anger there. There was frustration, etc. And there was a kind of calling that, in this case, needed to manifest.

Now, if we go back to the example that we said before, it might be that the duty involved in this image is just that: I've just opened to it. I've just got a different sense of the situation. And I find that something's liberated. There's still the heat and the force and all that. But I don't feel I need to do anything. I could, but I'm not being asked to do anything or manifest or speak. And other times, we do get a sense of some kind of duty that's involved. Does this make sense? So it's not so much that anger itself would be a node, as much as, again, anger, like anything else, is something that can be related to with more or less soulmaking. How does all that sound?

Yogi: It sounds ... yeah, it felt clarifying, and this ...

Rob: Okay, good. And we could give a similar example with grief or whatever, but I don't need to. Is there any more, or ...?

Yogi: I was visited by a couple of images whose beauty and divinity seemed somehow dependent on anger and grief, respectively. And regardless of how long I spent with them, it didn't transmute into anything else. It stayed in the grief [?].

Rob: Right, right. And so, you know, is that not a part of life? There's tragedy in life, and one can look at that and conceive of tragedy in lots of different ways: as a kind of flat existentialist -- you know, "Well, that's life" -- or given soul. So again, it's not that somehow the child miraculously comes back to life, and everything's rosy and happy forever and ever. There's something in that particular image that you're describing, that there is this holy grief. There is this redemption that happens without transformation. It's a transubstantiation more than a transformation. It may be they change. And images can sometimes change, and sometimes over long periods of time -- long, long periods of time. But it may just stay there. There's something iconic for you in those images, and they've got something for you. They're teaching you something. They're part of the soulmaking. And the mind can't quite wrap it. This is really important. If the mind feels like it's figured it out, end of the ... It's always got this part of the beyondness. It's got this, "I get it, sort of, but I don't quite get it, and yet it speaks to me. It does something." You understand? So your job is opening to that, resonating with that, following that thread of sensibility and sensitivity. Yeah? Okay. [30:36]

Q3: what is soul / potential for soulfulness in any practice

Yogi: I wanted to ...

Rob: Did you have your hand up before, Jill? Okay. Should we do that? Okay, last one. Yeah.

Yogi: A quick question. I think I'm not the only one that's a relative beginner to this, but I'm beginning to kind of ... bits are starting to coalesce. So I'm going to ask a simple question: what is soul? I know you've probably talked about this in umpteen talks.

Rob: Yeah, okay. So Jill is saying that "I'm a beginner," and I'd say we're all beginners, actually, and I'd definitely say that about myself. And the question is, "What is soul?" First thing to say, just following on from what we said to Robert, and I think what I touched on at some point, is: there are some really deep ideas in life that we will be poorer if we put them too much in a box, and we get a too polished, rigid, tight definition around. It's like the concept has to have these elastic edges that I was talking about. And it has to have some mystery. That's where its fecundity comes from. So 'soul' is a kind of nebulous concept at one level, yeah? Having said that, then we could say: soul is actually just shorthand for a kind of experience, which is all this business that we're talking about. So that's putting it as like, it's not a thing at all. That's one conception.

Second conception is: without giving it inherent existence, we say soul is some kind of entity belonging to my being, or given to me, or bigger than my being, some kind of entity who operates by seeing and sensing in these kind of ways that we're talking about. Now, that instrument or organ can get really shrunk. It can get atrophied. It can lose its blood supply, so that it barely functions in our life. Or it can grow, and get powerful, and get more facility and accessibility at sensing that way. So how does that sound?

Yogi: That sounds good! That sounds very good. So I'm assuming that all practices can be soulful?

Rob: All practices can be soulful, yes. Yes. All practices can be, because the soulfulness is in the relationship to something, okay? So anything can be soulful. However, if there's a practice that has built-in conceptual limits that, for example, disallow imagination, they just have a rigid conception of how things are, then they will be soulful up to a certain point for you. If they're new to you, they're all very exciting. So, for example, I trained a lot in a kind of atomistic Mahāsi style: look at the moment-to-moment sensation of everything. It's moment-to-moment vedanā and consciousness and all this, and the body is just atoms, and all that. At first, that's all very new, and it's exciting, and everything kind of explodes into this mist of atoms, and it's all really fast, and it's thrilling.

But then, when the implicit or explicit teaching is, "This is reality. That's it. Anything else is kind of delusion and nonsense," then the soul has kind of -- it's been stretched up to that point. It's like, all this is new. There's the expansion of soulmaking there, the expansion of new vistas, new senses of things, the excitement of the eros. But then, when it's been there for a while, there's no more soulmaking. There's something dynamic in soulmaking, something expansive. And if it reaches a wall, either it pushes that wall outwards so there's more territory, new discoveries, new ideas, new perceptions, new senses of things, new ideas, new sense of self, new sense of the world. Pushes it, usually quite slowly. Or it just blows through the dam wall and -- I've talked about this -- it's breaking the vessels. It just shatters things. And that can be a bit like, "Whoa!" And then maybe you build new ones, but bigger. They've got more range in them. Or the walls are stronger than the dynamic of soulmaking, and the psyche and the life just stay within those walls. And then what happens?

Yogi: It gets stuck.

Rob: Well, it's stuck, or something gets, you know, it just ...

Yogi: It just grinds to a halt.

Rob: Yeah. The soulmaking dynamic doesn't -- and then we feel that in our life. But because we don't have that language in our culture, we can't say, and we don't have that concept, "Oh, that's what's happening," or "That's what's not happening." So sometimes, or oftentimes in our life, we're going to meet walls. Even when we're not aware of it, we've got walls of habit, walls of energetics, walls of conception, walls of emotion that will block our soulmaking. That's normal. And then, again, it's like, okay, what does this need? Or is it just going to stretch it smoothly and organically and slowly? Is it going to bust them? Is it going to take some other work to look at those walls, and ...? Does this make sense?

So, yes. We should probably end. I know I didn't -- maybe we can do another day. Let's have a bit of quiet to finish.