Elements of the Imaginal (15 - 18)

We were a little bit unsure whether to give any more teachings this evening. Been quite a lot of talking today. Some of you, at least, may feel quite full with words and ideas, and the sharing and listening. So, try and walk a line between not talking too much, too long, and on the other hand, talking enough to at least do a little justice to the themes we want to cover. So hopefully a Middle Way, a compromise. I'm going to talk about four more nodes in a minute, and just a few things, general things before that. Given what I've just said, you'll quickly see that some of the nodes, as we go through this list -- it's all really quick, actually. Like I said, we're giving a high-speed bus tour through them. But some of them, we'll linger on longer. For instance, today, with eternality, humility, reverence, and grace, we spent time exploring that for ourselves in the sharing, etc., in the exercise. And some we'll just kind of touch on to point to them, and some get a fuller discussion.

Okay, before I get to the nodes, let me start with some general things. First thing's an announcement that every day, from now on, on this retreat, at least ... [laughter] I wish I would have the power to do this. [laughter]

Catherine: Do you really?

Rob: Yes! [laughter] We're going to ... you know what I'm going to say? [laughter] The lounge will be a designated space, and time -- for that period after the morning session in the hall, after the morning teaching in the hall ...

Catherine: Approximately 10:50.

Rob: So 10:45, 10:50 until ...

Catherine: 11:30.

Rob: ... 11:30, it's a designated space for silent, free soulmaking movement. Or soulmaking free movement. What does that mean? Well, find out what it means. [laughter] Create, discover what it means. The question I would put to you is the question I put when I talked about -- remember, the other day, it's like, well, what does it mean? What is it for this movement that I'm doing right now, or the stillness, or this gesture, or this posture, what is it for that to become soulmaking? What does that feel like? What does it look like in this moment? What supports that to be soulful? So it's open-ended, and it's an investigation. It's free, and it's silent. I mean, you can walk or stand in that period as well. But during that period, every day, that will be a designated space to explore that. Ça va?

Yogi: So this is not sounding?

Rob: Oh. I'm inclined to say sounding's okay, actually. Not talking -- unless you're talking in tongues. [laughter] Maybe. But not talking to each other with words. But if it feels like some sounding is, you know, and you feel okay with people around and whatever. How does that sound?

Catherine: I think it's okay. It's just, the thought I had was that, if you in go in there, that you practise.

Rob: Yeah.

Catherine: You're not going in there regarding, watching.

Rob: Yes, so this is, it's really -- soulmaking, that's the thing. Is this soulmaking? It's an ongoing exploration. What is it that supports or ignites or nourishes soulmaking, generally speaking and in this moment? And intention has a lot to do with it. Okay?

Some general things. If it's not clear, and perhaps we didn't re-stress it or emphasize it at the beginning of this retreat, which we did on other retreats, but it's worth saying again: sensing with soul is not something that's going to be happening all the time. It's not even a possibility of a constancy of experience there, okay? This is partly related to one of the nodes Catherine talked about this morning: grace. Something is given to us. Or from a certain perspective, something is given to us when we're sensing with soul. There's this inexplicable, unexplained gift. So it comes and goes. It might not be very dramatic, but in some ways, we could say, just relative to conventional perception, it's something extraordinary, to a certain extent. If it was all the time, it would quickly become ordinary. And (A) it doesn't work that way, and (B) we wouldn't want it to become ordinary. So you're not really, we're not really trying to kind of hang on to some particular experience all the time. It comes and goes. Part of it is gift. That's part of the very sensibility of it. It's why gave that 'grace' as a node.

But what that also means, practically speaking, is that in the day, there's a kind of wide palate of practices you can move between. And you can be quite fluid and quite responsive with that. So to try and do imaginal practice all day, I think, would be too much. It would somehow imbalance the being. You want some of that, and then when is it time to kind of go more into relative unfabricating, calming, simplifying, gathering, the nurturing energy in the energy body, or just being with one's emotions in a kind of healing way, or mettā, or emptiness, or the working with desire as some of you will know we've worked with on other retreats? So there's a necessity to move between different practices, and the possibility of, again, this kind of skilful, responsive, sensitive navigation to when and which.

So before I get on to the four nodes I wanted to talk about this evening, just briefly, again, if it's not obvious, there is something about the relationship between these nodes, between these elements and aspects. There's not a linear relationship there. It's not like, "First this one, and then you get that one, and then ..." We could say there's a sort of commonality of the ones that are maybe more likely to be noticed later or earlier. We could say that. But actually, there's no order. And it's not like in any practice, "First you do this, and then you do that." We were and we are emphasizing the energy body, but actually, any node, the ignition of any node can then ignite any other node. The causality is every which way in this lattice. Yeah?

And also, in terms of the relationship between them, you know -- I've said this before, but again, it's worth saying. You'll have caught this already: some of the nodes are sort of implicit, or this node is really a shade of that node, or a reflection of it, or an aspect of that other node, or it's already implicit in that node. What would an example be? For example, when we talked about dimensionality, and divinity, and beyondness, and unfathomability, these are sort of concepts or senses that can dance around each other, weave into each other, for example.

Other nodes have a kind of almost polar, polarizing -- they move in opposite directions between a certain pair, or they're a bit contradictory or almost paradoxical. So what would be an example of that? Well, actually, in a way, you know, the node of grace that Catherine talked about this morning, and the very idea implicit in the whole idea of the lattice -- that you can kind of ignite a node, and then it becomes more imaginal. There's this kind of, to me, important embrace of the receptive and the active, the technique and the mystery of grace. That somehow seems really part of the art of this whole practice. It's neither always one or the other. And the balance between the two can be very fluid. Yeah?

So I'm going to speak about the next four nodes on our list, and I'm going to endeavour to be brief. So just kind of a few points and suggestions and articulations.

(15) The fifteenth one is the non-reducibility of what is sensed with soul. So what does that mean? It means that in the imaginal constellation, there's a relationship with an image or with a sensing with soul, a sense with soul. There's a relationship with it that the concept and the sense of it is not reducing it: "This only is this. It only means X or Y." So for example, we can reduce things under the kind of rubric and the gaze of scientific materialism. I look at the tree, or the rose, or the curtains, and I just see flat, meaningless -- the random dance of flat, meaningless matter according to certain physical laws. That's a kind of reductionism: "Everything is made of little subatomic particles that move meaninglessly." And we say, now, we can view that way, but if we only view that way, that flattening, that reduction, will flatten the sensing with soul. [11:56]

That's one kind of reductionism. Another is a kind of, well, different kinds of psychological reductionism. So for example, "This image represents my empowerment, my power, my self-empowerment in life, and this will give me that." Or, "This image represents my compassion," or some other brahmavihāra, or some faculty of the mind, or something like that. "That's what this is." In that reductionist view, it's a representation: "It is this." And implicit is that "It's only this." So it's okay that we view it as, "Yes, it's matter." We can understand matter in that sense -- but not only. And it's okay that we could say, "This is a representation of empowerment -- but not only. And compassion -- but not only." It's the 'only' that's the killer, that's the flattener.

Or again, we can have an image and say, "This image is arising because it's representing, it's re-presenting something from my psychological history, something from my past, something from my family, etc." And yes, it may be related to that, but again, it's the 'only' that squeezes the soul out of it. "I'm having this image because, and only because, X or Y happened to me when I was a child, etc. And this is re-presenting it." In the scope and complexity and richness of images and sensings with soul, that can be part of it. That can be part of why that image is coming up, but only one level of it. The 'only' is reducing, and that's what will kill the sensing with soul. It will literally squash the dimensionality, and the richness, and the complexity, and the unendingness, and the mystery, and all of that, the multifacetedness.

So we touched briefly in the Q & A, and also in one or two interviews: this image may be related to my past, may be related to some character in my family -- my father, for instance, or whatever it is. The image kind of echoes that. It's not just a representation of my father and how he was tyrannical with me, or whatever it is. And then there's this possibility. A reductionist view would say, "The image is caused by what happened to me in my life, and it's re-presenting it now as a psychic image, and that's what it is." So the causality runs from real, material events in the past to image now in the present. The causality is conceived that way, yeah? If it's 'only,' that's where we lose the soulfulness.

There's another way of seeing things: that images are actually primary. I've touched on this on other retreats: images are what drive. They drive our lives. You know, the image that I've shared in the past, the image of a solitary warrior, soldier, or the image of the lonely wanderer, the solitary wanderer: I can see that that has been generative in my life. It's like the image comes first -- not so much first in time, but it's primary. It gives me my life. It shapes my life. It shapes my perception of things. We can conceive the causality going that way. We can conceive the causality going that way instead. Or we can conceive it as coming from a whole other level, as I mentioned briefly in the Q & A. Soul, the mystery of soul, gives me, offers me my images and the events of my life. It's another level of possible conception. But reductionism will kill, okay, in one way or another. That's the fifteenth there.

(16) Related to this is the sixteenth: what we were calling autonomy. So again, it's like, if I consider, "This image is a part of me," then it's not autonomous. It's just a part of me. Now, in certain psychological language, we say I'm 'projecting' this image. And maybe I project it onto a friend or a lover or whatever. I project my mum or dad or whatever. But then the image doesn't have autonomy. It's somehow part of me which is projected as an image, versus the image is both me and not me. It's something beyond me. It has its own personhood, like a person that we know, a flesh-and-blood person that we know.

So again, these nodes, you can notice them. And people are reporting, it's like, after a while, you start to notice, "Oh, this image has its autonomy. It really feels like another being," as we were talking about. Or the tree that I'm sensing with soul has its kind of personhood, if you like. And so that's another aspect of autonomy. Again, we could've separated them and made another node of 'personhood.' So that means -- and this is related to Anna's question in one of the Q & As^[1] -- if, for instance, I'm regarding, sensing the body with soul, my body, then it might be that I begin to sense the body as having its own particular kinds of intelligence. Or this tree that I'm sensing with soul. It's part of its personhood. It has soul. It's not just my soul. It has soul. It has a certain kind of intelligence that's maybe very foreign to my kind of intelligence, certain ways of knowing, sensibilities. This tree: how does a tree know? What's the intelligence, what's the personhood of a tree, or as Anna would suggest, certain organs in the body? This, again, it's not to start believing this. This will emerge in the fertility of the vortex of the movement of soulmaking. I could wait here and wait for people to report this, unless the wall is in the way, that "I absolutely refuse to entertain such a ridiculous notion." [laughter] "Because my third grade/high school science teacher said X or Y," whatever, you know. It's in the culture. But if the walls are not in the way, this is what emerges, in the fecundity, from the soil of soul, this sense of things. [19:30]

So there's the autonomy of the object, so-called, in the sensing with soul, the image. But there's also -- and Catherine alluded to this as well -- there's also the autonomy of the self. Nothing's going to happen, nothing is going to be given to me by grace that makes soulmaking happen by itself -- struck by lightning, transformed in an instant, doesn't even have to do anything. It takes my autonomy as a person, as Catherine said, to assent to it. No assent, no autonomy, in the sense of I am free to assent or not, to go along with, to open, to pay attention in certain ways, to entertain certain notions. I am free to do that. Do you understand what I mean? I have my autonomy. There's no automatic soulmaking, and no one can make me agree, no image can make me agree to it. So there's this double autonomy of, so to speak, the self and the object, without which there is no soulmaking, or very limited soulmaking.

Even if I become an image -- so sometimes, as I think Hannah said in a Q & A,^[2] you know, sometimes it's more common for a person, or different images at different times, the same person, they don't appear so much as an object, as much as one becomes that image. But still there's the autonomy of the -- let's call it the 'regular notion of self' to assent to that opening. You understand? Yeah? So, the autonomy of other and self in the sensing with soul. [21:34] Okay, that's number sixteen.

(17) Number seventeen: we called it twoness. So if I have an image that's sort of, it has an otherness to it, then what we said was that, in that case, the eros doesn't collapse the image into some kind of universal -- it doesn't melt. So there's an attractive pull with eros between oneself and the erotic-imaginal object, a beloved other. But it doesn't just go into some kind of melting union, bliss of, you know, white light, unification, etc. The distinctness -- maybe that's a better word than

'twoness' -- distinctness or differentiation is preserved. The erotic tension is preserved. Yeah?

Now, even if I'm becoming an image, again, maybe twoness is not the most obvious thing there at first, as I responded to Hannah in the Q & A, but still, differentiation is preserved. Distinctness of particulars are preserved in the soulmaking perception, or rather, in the sensing with soul. It's not going to these undifferentiated kinds of oneness.

Yogi: Would that be [inaudible] the image, and then there's the world in which it exists?

Rob: That might be part of it, yes. So that could be one way where there's the differentiation. There's the image, and then the world. And then, if you stay with it, there will be the particulars of the image, and the particulars of the world, you know. But yeah, there can be all kinds of differentiations, basically, yeah. And you know, at the same level as there's this differentiation, there can be, and there often is, an implicit sense or understanding of the oneness. So it's like there's the image and the world, but in a way, this world is that image, and they're kind of the same thing. It's just that it doesn't collapse into that or melt into that. Yeah?

Yogi: [inaudible] would be an image if it's separate, but then one becomes it?

Rob: Yeah.

Yogi: And then it goes back again, so it might just ...?

Rob: Yes, absolutely. So the modes of relating to an image -- you might feel like it's separate, as you say, and then somehow I become it, or I fuse with it, or I enter it somehow, or it enters me, and I'm seeing the world and everything from its experience. And then it can separate again. So there are all kinds of possibilities. And that's actually quite normal. And some of you may want to -- if it's always one way, you may want to deliberately experiment with, actually, what would it be like to be that monster, or Aslan, or whatever it is? What would it be like 'from the inside,' so to speak, yeah? And then see what happens and where that goes.

(18) Okay, last one for tonight, the eighteenth. So twoness or differentiation or retention of particularities is the seventeenth. And then the eighteenth is what we were calling the theatre, the sense of theatre, or the imaginal Middle Way. So we have a sense, and again, I think it's something we can notice with images, with imaginal images. Sometimes if someone's working with an image, and it's really alive for them, if you ask them, "Is it real? Would you say it's real or not real? Or does that question, do those categories kind of not really apply?", they'll probably plump for that third category. It's somewhere between real and not real. It's a different kind of reality. But neither real nor not real seems accurate. [25:58]

So this is something we can actually notice. If you linger with it, you notice this quality of theatre to it. Sometimes Catherine and I, we're sort of doing, exploring something together with an image or something, and kind of differentiating when the practice or inquiry becomes more of, say -- Catherine's very familiar with the Ridhwan School or Diamond Approach. And that's one of the differences, is the sense of theatre, the sense of 'neither real nor not real.' It's very particular. And to me it's a very beautiful quality. It's a very liberating quality, and very potent. So one name could be the 'imaginal Middle Way.' It's the Middle Way between real and not real. Or the sense of theatre. If you think about theatre -- I don't know if you've been to, like, really, really good theatre, when it's a small theatre, and you sit there, and the actors are, like, as far from -- if I'm in the audience, they're as far from me as you guys are now. So it's really intimate. And you know it's play. Literally it's a 'play.' It's not real in the conventional sense. And it can be so vulnerable and powerful and transforming. So there's the same -- something of that in the imaginal realm, this theatre quality.

And so, again, it's like, what is it to recognize artistic truth or poetic truth? It's a different kind of truth, and it has immense power. But it's different than -- there's something particular about it. So today, in the Q & A, and a couple of people have asked me, "Do I need to do all this emptiness stuff that you're talking about, with this skill of really fabricate less, less, less, and then you get to the Unfabricated, and then you see that's empty, and it sounds like, boy, I'm a long way from that?" It's an open question. I don't think it's necessary. I think some people, many people, either they do that, and then they have easy access to a kind of Middle Way perception of things, between real and not real, because of the emptiness understanding. Or one just engages one's artistic kind of sensibility, one's poetic understanding of things. Or again, what I said earlier: we just notice. We just notice this kind of Middle Way status of images, this kind of theatre quality that they have.

Just to pick up on one the nodes from today: the eternality. You know, is that real or unreal? This image -- I mean, the most obvious thing about images is that they come and go, as we said earlier, and the sensing with soul comes and goes. So from one perspective, its impermanence is completely obvious. The passage of time and the change in time is completely obvious. And at the same time, there's this sense of timelessness, or different senses, different possibilities of the sense of timelessness. This is somehow always already happening. This is somehow iconic and not narrative. It's just a kind of eternal image somewhere in the vastness of psyche. So one can be sensitive to that quality of timelessness and eternality, however it manifests, and at the same time, never lose sight of the fact that things are impermanent. Bodies are impermanent. Lives are impermanent. Everything is impermanent. And images certainly are impermanent. Just because one sees the two, one can kind of hold them together, and that creates this kind of neither landing in one camp or the other as a kind of ultimate truth. [30:11] Yeah?

As I said, I think, I mean, all the nodes, there's so much kind of depth and richness to each one, and potency as well, and kind of liberative efficacy. By going into some of these nodes, like, for instance, this theatre, it liberates something. It really liberates something, and still has that power, the power of poetry, the power of art, of the power of beauty, the power of the Middle Way.

Okay. Think I'm going to stop there for this evening. Shall we sit together?