Destiny, Autonomy, Love, and Soul (Q & A)

Okay. Just a reminder. If you would like to ask something or share something or bring something up, and you'd rather it wasn't recorded and made public, then let me know, and I'll press 'pause' on the recorder.

Gareth?

Q1: working with duty and autonomy in images, expressing duty and autonomy in life / images that appear evil, and the effects of different conceptual frameworks

Yogi: It's a multiple part question.

Rob: Ah. [laughter]

Yogi: [inaudible]

Rob: Duty, yeah.

Yogi: How to relate to duty to an image. The word that's coming up is 'destiny,' and that sparks a whole load of questions about autonomy and free will and timelessness and emptiness, as well, and how to relate the kind of experience of emptiness to the image and duty, and also how that duty -- if it shifts over time, it changes, or if the duty itself is [?]. And how to feel into what aspects of that duty require action [?]. That quality of participation in that image feels like duty in and of itself. And then it felt like just all the nodes I can think of somehow coalesced around this. Is that a quality of the nodes, that each one somehow contains the others, and is that what you mean by the lattice of nodes?

Rob: Okay. [laughter] So Gareth has a question about duty. [laughter] Just kidding. Is that really just the first part or ...? Okay. Let me try and say something, see how it lands, and then see if you have more. Okey-doke. So I'll start at the end. Yeah, the nodes of the lattice, or what we're calling the nodes of the lattice, they reflect each other, they imply each other, they contain each other. They also complement each other. So some of them have this kind of -- they're almost like different sides, or they drag each other in. So when you have a sensing with soul, like the kind of thing you're talking about, everything you said, I would expect. You know, I would expect just these questions and just this unfolding. The word 'destiny' comes up. We haven't mentioned it, but I would expect it to come up. Something happens when we work with an image with this sensitivity, with enough openness of logos, like Catherine was talking about, enough conceptual framework, that it starts growing, it starts expanding. More and more elements of existence -- not just of ourselves, but of existence -- get woven in and sensed with soul and caught up in that whole eros-psyche-logos dynamic.

So then there's image, and in some way or another there's a sense of duty -- not just where there's image; actually where there's any soulmaking. So, for example, we can just briefly talk about something that's not image -- let's say a jhāna, okay? It's the quieting of images. When you first open to a jhāna, at first, I mean, it's very rare for someone authentically to say [casually], "Huh. Well, that was nice." [laughter] It comes with a sense of duty. It's like, "Wow! Look at what is possible. Look at this vista that has opened up in terms of a realm of consciousness." At the minimum, my duty would be something like, well, I need to explore this more, I need to practise more, I need to find out more, maybe I need to go beyond this, maybe I need to share this with others. Yeah?

So any time there's a stretching of the psyche in a way that feels meaningful to us, we have some kind of sense of duty with it. And with an image, that can, as you said, manifest in different ways. So this is really important. Everything, all the parts of the first part of your question, they really do intersect. The danger in duty is, you know, a fundamentalist religious terrorist, isn't it? "I have this, it sounds divine and this and that, and I'm on fire with it, and my duty is to kill" or whatever it is. Missing completely -- well, quite a lot, actually, but one of the things missing is this: we participate, we assent, there's this create/discover, an imaginal Middle Way. So if I think about some of the things that -- actually, any instance of duty that I might feel in relation to something soulmaking, some image or sensing with soul, it can feel actually like the most important thing in my life, that duty, but I still feel, "Real or not real?" It's still got that kind of amplitude of the breadth of the Middle Way ontology. Yeah? So that, for me, is really key, you know.

So this is, again, it's something we notice. It's important to think about it, and talk about the concepts, but I think one of the things I'm trying to emphasize about the nodes, one of the aspects, is that we notice them. Whatever order it comes in, you notice a sense of duty, but then you'll also notice this Middle Way, if there's the sensitivity, if there's the delicacy, if there's the energy body there, if there's the openness and all the rest of it. You see? So we can kind of have this notion of duty, and then something gets cut off, and then we engage this question about duty -- I'm not saying this is what's happening to you, but -- we engage it on a purely intellectual level. That's important.

Part of this business of what I'm saying -- everything gets subsumed into soul, into soulmaking, including the intellect. (I point up here, but it's not really up here. It's everywhere, isn't it, the intellect?) So including the conceptuality, but you can also use your body and your sensitivity and your mindfulness and your attention. You will discern this sense of yes, this duty that feels so touching to the soul, so calling. And I'll say it again: for me, it feels like the most important, those duties are what feel like the most important things in my life. And, you know, I've said this somewhere or other before, but one of the things that brings me equanimity, deep equanimity in relation to possibly dying soon and cancer is the sense that I'm on track with my duty and I have tried to do my duties, plural. And that does something to the whole sense of existence and life and death. It's not everything, but it's immense -- to die with that sense. Do you understand? But I would never try to convince anyone else that what I sense as my duty is some kind of independently objective fact in the universe. It's something, as you said, I participate in, or to go back to the nodes today, I create/discover that duty.

And yes, it can change over time, curiously. I can think of certain images I just shared recently in a talk, long-time images, that in the dance of life and image, and in the infinite echoing and reflection of those, those have transformed over time. So the duty is different, but that wasn't something I decided to change, like, "That one's a bit sad, so let's kind of change it a bit." It was something that evolved in this dance, in this sort of mysterious, infinite echoing of life and relationship in life and that image, so the sense of duty actually began to change. It's like the same image evolved naturally in the process of soulmaking. Not because I came and said, "I think it would be better, or I would have less dukkha, or it would be an easier journey for me if I changed the image and changed the sense of duty with it." Does that make sense?

So yes, it can evolve like that. Yes, there's always this sense of participation. Yes, there's always a sense of free will, which is -- I was talking very quickly. I can't even remember when it was. Was it last night, with the autonomy?^[1] One of the things I was trying to stress is that we always have a choice with soulmaking, and it cannot happen without some sense of my autonomy and my freedom to say, "No. I'm not going to do that duty. I'm not going to engage this image. I'm not going to follow this eros. I'm not going to listen to that calling. Or I am." So there's always this sense of actually both the autonomy of the image -- something is asking something from me; something calls me, wants something from me. A lot of psychology, it would be, "Oh, we're working with imagination. What can I get from it?" Yeah? And that's all part of it. That's part of it. But there's a kind of, to me, whole deeper, more beautiful territories, landscapes, vistas, dimensions that can open when we also ask the other question: "What do you want from me?" In a way, it's a big ask.

So this kind of autonomous image, it's me but it's not me. It's part of me but it's beyond me, and it wants something from me and from my life. But I always have my autonomy. So not only am I not going to be kind of, you know, possessed in some way where I'm just doing this zombie thing or whatever, but also I can say no. (There was another part ... Yes, and there was something else. Okay, so the destiny ... Oh, I know what it was.) So two things. Yeah. Destiny, we'll hold on to that for a sec, and discerning what the duty is. A lot of this work -- if I think back over my sort of journey with this kind of exploration, at the beginning it was all very clunky, and describing it to others might have sounded very dramatic, pretty dramatic images or whatever, and this kind of journeying process in a landscape with dragons and all that kind of stuff. As it progresses, I think -- and this applies to other meditations, as well, like emptiness -- everything gets more subtle, and we grow in sensitivity and delicacy. So the question of duty -- take that religious fundamentalist terrorist: it's anything but subtle. You know, blowing yourself up in a bus station is not a subtle gesture at all. It's all very reified, and the sense of duty and what the duty is. So the duty with an image can be all the way to just: my duty is to behold it, and to be touched by it, and to be open to it, and to have that sense of mystery. In my heart, even though I might not physically bow, something is bowing. Something has that reverence. That's the duty.

So sometimes it's just that, and no one else knows anything about it, and no one else can see any obvious manifestation in your life. Just been touched by the poetry of something, and it's between me and the image, me and the divine, me and existence. Other duties manifest more concretely in the life. But I would be a little suspicious of ones that reflect too kind of accurately the image, you know? So, for example, you know, one -- and I've shared in lots of talks -- one image for me is this kind of solitary soldier. That's one of the ones that's changed; it's really not that present much any more. But for a long time, it was there. Now, the last thing I would want to do is join the army. [laughter] It's really not my cup of tea, you know? [laughter] And I've, you know, I was never into fighting. I didn't even like rugby and all that stuff. [laughter] But I can see in my life how combative I am when I need to stand up for something, or some vision or sensibility that feels encroached, or some kind of care that feels encroached socially, politically, or in a certain scene. I can see it mirroring that way, but I'm certainly not driving spears through anyone or that kind of thing. So there's a kind of reflection there, but it's not ... Do you understand?

How to discern, I don't know that I have an answer to that, really. But maybe it's something to do with this other node of the infinite echoing and mirroring, so that there's the -- and this maybe ties in the destiny -- there's a sense of my life, my choices, my actions, my behaviour and the image, and they mysteriously echo each other so that as everything gets more and more subsumed in soulmaking, which means everything (my body, my intellect, my sense of my journey, my dukkha, the cosmos, the sense of God or Buddha-nature, materiality, relationship, everything), then, more and more, we get this echoing sense, this infinite mirroring. It's like I said, again, I'm not sure when (was it yesterday?), we can conceive -- a normal way of conceiving images in our wider culture would be: something happens in my life, or something exists in my psyche, and the psyche generates the image of that. It's a result. It's a representation. We can play with a conception the other way round: my life is generated by the images. The image is primary in that sense. What's my destiny? Is my destiny somehow -- tie this in with the autonomy -- not given so much as I'm offered something? I'm offered something, and that thing might be a really difficult thing. It might be really, really dukkha, you know? Or it might not. It might be something really lovely. So I have to say 'yes' to that. This cancer could just be cancer. It could just be death. It could just be pain. Or it can be sensed with soul. So that's not a destiny, so much as an offering: "Do you want to pick this up and sense it with soul?" And then it becomes a destiny. We make it. We soulmake. Do you understand?

So again, even the sense of destiny is created/discovered. We participate in it. We retain our autonomy. And yet there's something possibly calling us. And all of that is, you know, both a kind of concept and an image, really, of life, a sensing with soul of life, but also conceptual ideas that arise. You know, you said it; I didn't say it yet. It arises out of the alchemical process of soulmaking. I would expect these things to get -- everything, everything, everything will get woven in. Soul wants to grow. Soul, as I said sometime or other, loves soulmaking, and will just reach out and draw in everything into that process. Do you understand? ... How's that for the first part? [laughter]

Yogi: [inaudible] If I just put it out there, the kind of general second part of it, do you want to -- I don't want it to sort of dominate the whole Q & A. I think it's quite a big one, and it sort of shades into some of what you just said. It's about evil.

Rob: Evil, yeah. I wonder if other people would ...? I'm not sure about -- I don't know what to do. [background chatter, people saying it's interesting] Okay!

Yogi: It's just about I get that sense in some images that [?] dark. I have had that experience of being quite terrified by it. But also there's, like, when I feel into them, and notice there's the loving and being loved, and the trust, and there's a kind of [?] benevolence that feels present in the imaginal work. So I just kind of wonder about -- I'm thinking about a particular person who experiences or has experienced images that just feel like there's no benevolence and ... how to help, I suppose is one question. And somehow it feels like this way of practising has a sense of blessing, like a dark image comes, and working in this way, it's blessing the image. The other thing thing that's come through, it's like the way Ajaan Fuang, one of the Thai Forest masters, would help people when they had, in that logos, spirits. It feels like there's some elements of this practice, like the love and the care, that they would encourage. Whether that's the same thing or ...? Then, obviously, there's the whole area of mental health and schizophrenia, etc.

Rob: Sure. So the question's about evil, and images that feel evil, and then images that are terrifying or dark but not necessarily evil, and how does it fit in with mental health, and other cultures where they're much more comfortable, people believe in spirits and spirit possession and that sort of thing. So I can just say, for me -- I can't say about your friend, because they're not here, and I haven't met them, and I don't know. If I'm with someone who's agitated in some kind of way that maybe suggests something like that, I guess, for me as a teacher, I have a certain sense of whether there's a possibility there to convert an image, even if it seems evil and terrifying, for that to become imaginal. We talked about this spectrum -- on one side, papañca and that kind of reification of that, the clinging of that, the terror of that. So sometimes people might come with something that's really disturbed them, but there's something in what they're saying that shows me a possibility, and then we can work together with a lot of this. Other times, and I can think of several examples where a person wants to work with the imaginal, but I can see they're really not ready. They don't have that capacity yet, you know. So I'll say absolutely not, not for you, not for you yet. And they might need other kinds of help, etc.

Part of our conceptual framework is that the image is a dependent arising, like everything else. So it arises, how the image is, and whether it seems evil or, as you say, it can be dark -- and this is really, really important if you haven't got this yet: an image can be dark and involve dukkha but yet have that love in it somehow, and the beauty, and it feels soulmaking. Really, really important to know that. There's the light side and the ethereal side of soul, and there's the dark side, and there's not any greater beauty in one, or greater soulfulness. This is really, really important. So there's that range of what an image kind of -- the texture, the tonality of an image, let's say, in terms of light and dark, in the broad sense of what those words mean.

But in our conceptual framework, in our logos, the image is always a dependent arising. That's partly what the lattice is saying. It's saying that the image, it does have a certain autonomy, but at the same time, when we talk about the imaginal or what's imaginal, we're talking about the whole thing, the whole mix, gestalt of all the lattice, some of which seems objective, and some of which seems part of me, subjective. So when we talked about trust, it's like, if I can just sprinkle a grain of trust there, the image changes. The image will become less threatening, because I've now put something into the alchemical vessel called 'trust.' I've put this substance called 'trust' into the alchemical vessel, and the alchemy of what then happens is changed. Do you understand? But the other -- what Catherine mentioned today, logos, is also one of the nodes, so that actually what arises depends on the conceptual framework.

So in a culture like Thailand, for example, Ajaan Fuang and those guys, in Thailand they live and breathe, they're brought up with a conceptual framework of spirits and ghosts and possessions and all kinds of stuff. And so when they have a certain experience, they're bringing -- even the least intellectual person there is bringing that whole logos, not as a whole, big, articulated philosophy, but just kind of implicit, and that colours the experience too. Now if that's not shiftable ... You know, Ajaan Fuang is not going to sit down and teach them about dependent arising and all that stuff necessarily. But he would introduce something like love. And so again, the node in our language, the node of love is again something I notice, but also something that I can bring. My loving the image, it's like the trust, and it starts to change something. It's because the image is a dependent arising, but also the conceptual framework. So again, if in my conceptual framework there's the idea of it as a dependent arising, there's just for a little bit entertaining the idea that soul has treasure for me, that there's something redeemable in what appears dark and what is dukkha -- and 'redeemable' doesn't always mean making what's dark light; it means seeing the beauty and the soul in the dark. Do you understand? But that's part of the conceptual framework. The idea of dependent arising is part of the conceptual framework.

So in some situations, you simply can't change the conceptual framework. It's too big a job. You know, someone asked me, "Can you recommend some talks that explain the conceptual framework?" Well, yeah, but they're quite long. [laughter] The thing about conceptual frameworks, it's quite heavy. It's heavy machinery, you know? A lot of it's unconscious. But eros is something that can flicker up very quickly and die down very quickly. Image can flicker, but it tends to stay around a bit longer. Logos is like -- it's slower. And some of the logoi that we have, they're really entrenched, and we don't even realize we have them, like about what matter is or about what the universe is. We've inherited that from hundreds of years of Western culture. I mean, not everyone has that. Or all kinds of things, you know. So that's the slower piece in all of this. It's hard to sit down with someone and kind of just get them to change their conceptual framework. After a while with this kind of business, you can, actually. You can just go into seeing things with this concept. Someone asked me about something: in time, when concept and conceptuality and the thinking mind and logos gets involved with soul, then, again, it ignites it, it fertilizes it, it makes it active. It will push out. It will expand. It will gain complexity. And it will also gain flexibility. So it becomes quite possible to just change a conceptual framework right in the moment: "I'll just see it this way. I'll just conceive of it that way." So going back to your thing about duty, "I'll just conceive of it given to me as destiny." Or I'll conceive of, "No, I'm completely autonomous." Or something else. That becomes, with practice, really quite flexible. You can just step in and out of different conceptual frameworks.

But the main point here is that the image and the tonality in terms of evil, good, benevolence, dark, light -- the image arises as a dependent arising, dependent on concept, affect, trust, sensitivity, energy body awareness, love. Yeah? We participate. You can't not participate. And it's just a matter of realizing the kind of full beauty and extent and depth of the participation. Is that okay? Okay. So it's 6:32 or something. Do you ...

Yogis: More! More! [laughter]

Rob: Okay. Just a little bit. [background chatter] The notes? You're here? [shuffles papers] Okay, so, actually let's go to Jill's question.

Q2: how does the node of loving and being loved work, how to recognize it

Yogi: Should I just say it?

Rob: Oh, sure.

Yogi: I'm interested in node three, loving and being loved. That's the question, how that works.

Rob: How that works, okay.

Yogi: Especially the being loved.

Rob: Yeah. "How does the node to do with love work, especially the being loved, being loved by an image or being loved by something or other that we sense with soul (which could be a tree or whatever it is)?" Yeah? When you ask "how does it work," Jill, do you mean what's the sort of conceptual mechanism there, or how do I recognize it, how do I ...? Okay. So how do I recognize it? I'll take the second one first. Some images are just obvious because it's, you know, a grandma that's just kind of hugging you, or actually some images just tell you, "I love you." And again, we said what does the image want? It wants you to know that you're loved. It wants you to know. It wants to communicate this love. And your duty, if we link it with Gareth, my duty is to see that and recognize it and let that in, yeah?

So that's very obvious. It could be sexual, you know, sexual erotic love. But it could manifest in all kinds of different forms, more or less obviously. But again, if we link it to something we said with Gareth, a lot of what happens is the whole feel of things can expand its range to include what's a lot more subtle. So it's interesting, you know -- I'm with this tree or whatever it is. Maybe it's a real tree, a physical tree. Or I have an image of some kind of stone. How do I ...? I have to be very delicate in my attention. So it's not obvious. It's not going to do something obvious in terms of its communication. I mean, it might, actually, because the tree could speak or something, but sometimes the range of things just gets more subtle, so that means we have to be quite delicate and open about how we might feel that. One interesting thing is: everything is interconnected, so it might be some other node that starts to ignite this node, but it might also be ... this node's really a pair, loving and being loved, so if you communicate your love somehow or other, in words, in gesture, in image, it might, then, in the reciprocity of things ... In other words, your love ignites its love, and then it becomes more visible.

So sometimes the communication acts as a kind of, you know, alchemical spark. Yeah? I don't think there's an exact answer, so much as just to know that it can get really, really subtle. Does that make sense? The conceptual mechanism ... I mean, in a way, it's part of the sense of the autonomy of image. In other words, this image has personhood in the sense that it has soul. So it has its own sensibility, its own way of knowing, its own intelligence, its own affect, its own love, its own eros. It desires you. Yeah? [laughter] Totally, yeah. We could have played another game on this retreat, which is just given some instructions, and I could have had a sealed envelope, you know, like they do on some game shows or whatever, and it would have the nodes in it. You would each have a sealed envelope. And I would just wait -- if it was a longer retreat -- in interviews for you to come and report which node. It's something that you would notice in the kind of mystical unfolding, but it's something we can also activate as well.

How does it happen? It happens because -- let's relate it to what Catherine shared about the soulmaking dynamic, this eros-psyche-logos. Here's an image, which we're calling -- it's part of psyche, okay, as image. And that image has something beautiful and attractive to it. And it feels like here arises my eros. There's something -- I'm drawn to this image, or I want to fill out in it, or there's some kind of desire, dynamic, that wants to kind of be more intimate with it, inhabit it more, or touch it more, know it more. You understand? That's what we could call 'eros.' If the logos decides that, "Well, an image is just some brain neurons firing. That's just some nonsense," nothing's really going to happen with that. It might give you an idea of what you might chase in life, but you'll have to go looking for it out there. If, though, the logos and the sensibility allow a kind of expansion, what happens is the image itself starts to get more rich and more deep and more imaginal, more multifaceted. It starts to come alive, really, through this kind of dynamic of eros, which is looking for more. Eros is always looking for more -- not in a problematic way if it's allowed to expand, if the image is allowed to expand. And as the image expands, it begins to feel like some of these things, like Gareth said, it begins to feel like it's asking me something, and it's loving me, and it's got this dimension and that dimension, and this aspect and that aspect. Do you understand?

So the wanting more, it's like it inseminates something and it starts to expand. Because the logos allows it to, because we're starting with a logos saying, "Maybe there's a treasure here, maybe the imaginal has something of value, and maybe there's something to discover here," then the logos can expand even more. So the image gains dimensionality, aspectedness, complexity, multifacetedness, character, personhood. Does that make sense? Because, like a person, you then are in relationship, and just as with a person, you would grant them full personhood. Only someone with some kind of cognitive incapacity would not be able to sense the personhood there, the fullness, that there's eros there, there's love, there's intelligence, there's a kind of knowing -- even if it's very different than what we're used to. So this image of a stone, it's like, how does this stone that has come so alive with soul, how does it know? It knows in a very different way than I know. It doesn't have all these fancy ideas, and doesn't talk for hours on end. [laughter]

Yogi: [inaudible]

Rob: Yes, precisely. It communicates -- exactly. Yes. So there's a resonance, and again there's this kind of mirroring, infinite kind of mirroring of you and the stone, for example, or whatever. That's very multilevelled. Rather than getting simpler and simpler, it gets more and more rich, more and more complex and diversified and multidimensional, multi-aspected. And then because of that, there's more for eros to fall in love with, and it's more, and there's a sense -- I see more, and I sense even more that I can only dimly, and that attracts the eros even more. So the eros kind of wants more, things expand more and more and more. And that's actually infinite. And then everything starts getting, as I said at the beginning, caught up in the soulmaking dynamic -- self, other, sense of world, sense of eros itself. All of it is given this kind of or sensed with soul, holiness, dimensionality, all the rest of it. Does that ...? Yes? Okay. That's enough, right? [laughter] Let's have some quiet time.