Transcription
[I'm going] to try and say a few general things that I hope will be helpful, and also try to finish touching on the rest of the nodes, the rest of the aspects that we haven't touched on. And time is limited, so it will be a brief touching on.
I don't know if you've noticed something about practice in general, whatever the practice. If you've been in an environment, in a climate, in a community of practice, on retreat or off retreat, where some particular practice or quality is emphasized -- mindfulness, mettā, focus of mind, ability to stay with the breath, or whatever it is, or soulfulness -- what can easily happen is, through the repeated emphasis on that particular quality, which is a lovely and important quality, whatever it is, then the self-judging tends to construct itself in relationship to how I am doing, and how I think other people are doing in relation to that quality, right? Same with soulfulness.
So this is really, really important to just know the sort of wily patterns of inner critic, self-judgment. It's a dependent arising. If we were here emphasizing something else, it would construct itself in relation to that quality. This can happen in relation to anything.
Soulfulness, soulmaking, the sensing with soul comes and goes. We've said this. It really comes and goes. And it comes and goes dependent on conditions, inner and outer. Past, also: our conditioning, the way we have been formed and cast, in all kinds of ways, at all levels of our being, mentally, emotionally, energetically, relationally. All that feeds into what happens in this moment, or what can happen. Inner, outer, past, and present -- all those conditions. We would see this if this was, let's say, a jhāna retreat. At some point, it would occur to us, "Oh, a jhāna arises when the conditions are there." It's less something to judge oneself about. So we can sometimes put too much pressure on ourselves to have experiences of soulfulness, and to be sensing with soul all the time, or this or that. Can there be a kind of attitude, again, somewhere in the Middle Way, between an over-pressuring or an over-forcing for something, and kind of not taking care of the conditions that we can take care of, not nourishing, not feeding in those conditions?
In our culture, soulmaking is unfortunately not a habit for us. We might have that experience, but we don't tend to sense with soul by default, unless it's supported by listening, by reading, by conditions, by practising, by attention to the kind of things that we're talking about. So there's this kind of balance. Something needs nourishing and practising, taking care of all the different conditions. And I can't force it, can't pressure it. Soulfulness on demand is not really possible. So related to that, again, I just want to emphasize that what we're doing here, we're talking a lot about imaginal practice and sensing with soul, etc. But it's within a larger context, with this larger palette. You know what 'palette' is, like a painter ...? Yeah. Different colours, different kinds of practices, all of which help nourish the being, but also nourish the sensing with soul.
So imaginal practice sits alongside gathering the nourishment in the energy body, and the harmonization, the well-being. It sits alongside taking care of my heart, and the woundedness or the pain that comes and goes there. It sits alongside mettā practice and emptiness practices and working with desire, and letting go of desire, dropping whatever involvement. All of these are part of the colours of our practice palette, the colours of our artist's creation toolkit. So you can really think about moving fluidly, and kind of balancing between these practices, different practices. Really important.
The palette, yeah? The palette of practice. The 'palette' can become a 'palace.' Palace: a house of soulmaking, many mansions. And you know, sometimes, when we're on retreat, it's like, "I've got a week, and I've really got to -- okay, let me, I want something to happen this week." These are teachings to take away. Everything we're talking about is something to kind of digest, rather than trying to pressure some kind of experience arising for the week, yeah? So it's takeaway.
Soulfulness, soulmaking, sensing with soul arises, like all things, dependent on a whole host of conditions coming together in the moment: influences from past, present, inner, outer. And it happens not in a linear way, not in a smooth way. In other words, what we experience is some kind of opening in a sensing with soul, some kind of sense of soulmaking, and inherent, intrinsic to that process of soulmaking or that sense of soulmaking is this expansion we talked about: the vision, the senses are expanded in some way or another, the energy, the mind, the sense of what is perceived, etc., and the ideas. And then that alternates with periods where there is no soulmaking, or it doesn't feel very soulmaking. Something is just not being fed into the conditions. Or we meet some kind of limit or block.
So this could be ideational. Catherine [and I], we've both talked about the eros-psyche-logos dynamic. Sometimes there's an idea. Sometimes we're not even conscious of the assumptions we have about ourselves, about what we're sensing, about reality, about all kinds of things, about path, about liberation, about whatever it is. These assumptions exist, usually at best semi-consciously in the psyche, and they form kinds of limits or walls. At some point, the soulmaking bumps into that.
But there can be other kinds of walls or limits that kind of lock the soulmaking for the time being. For instance, there may be some kind of block or limit in the way -- in how much the libido, the life force, is allowed to move in the being, to flow and open things up. Sometimes for all kinds of reasons, the flow of the life force is blocked in our life, or blocked in certain areas. Could be just an energetic thing, or just in terms of our enthusiasm, our love. Something arises and it quickly gets quelled or shut down. Sometimes it's so quick that we just have an instant, a flicker of liveliness, and then something gets shut down. That can be energetic. It can be psychic. It can be all kinds of things.
Or sometimes, in relation to the eros, that we're a little bit suspicious of that much eros, and especially if it's sexual. And that suspicion, or that prevention of the flow of eros and the fire of eros also forms a kind of limit -- hopefully temporarily. Or the psyche can be blocked, and the sense of the images we have. We're fixated on certain images. All this is very delicate, and it needs a lot of care, a lot of discernment. So we talked a bit about duty, quite a lot about duty yesterday in the Q & A. And we can have the duty of an image, that goes with an image, the duty of the image. But there's also, we could have, for instance, the image of duty. So this node, for some people, it's quite -- which I'll talk about just briefly now, and a little bit later -- the image of anything that could be soulmaking, that image of that thing might be locked. So perhaps from our past -- again, for all kinds of reasons -- the notion of duty, or any other notion, or the image of relationship, or the image of self, or some image that I associate with my history, and it's got locked. So the image, the psyche, then, is not allowed to expand.
So what happens in the life of soulmaking is that there are periods, long or short, where there are different kinds of, we could say, walls that are met, locks. So we don't expect this kind of just incredibly smooth, endless opening of soulmaking. It has this stopping, starting, stuttering, coming and going rhythm to it. Really natural, really important. The whole shebang is what we're interested in, the whole picture.
And as I said, sometimes those walls, those blocks are just shattered through. They're just broken in what can sometimes feel very dramatic, but also quite difficult: what I call the 'breaking of the vessels,' borrowing the Kabbalistic term. And sometimes it's just very gradual. Something's stretched. And sometimes we're locked, and we don't even realize we're locked and it's going on. So all this is interesting to us, and to be expected, rather than: "Not having any soulmaking today," or "It feels flat," or whatever. So the question is: what is there, and what can I work with? And what can I become aware of? And to expect that kind of pattern. Yeah? [12:32]
(23) Okay, so let's just visit a few nodes. I think we're on twenty-three, which is the fullness of intention. So again, to think of these as really, rather than on/off switches, each node is perhaps a sense of something that can be deepened or filled out, become richer in meaning. And as that happens, we can say the experience becomes more genuinely imaginal -- something like that, or more fully imaginal. So it's very natural as human beings, and also as suffering human beings who want to grow, who want to develop in certain ways that we see, "This quality is lacking in me," or "I miss this in my life," it's very natural to want to appropriate any practice for the sake of that self-development, and for the sake of also that easing of dukkha. So of course it's normal. I think what we're saying is not that that shouldn't happen. Of course it's going to happen. And it's healthy, and it's normal.
But at some point -- maybe you've had this sense already -- you can kind of glimpse a bigger vision of intention, a bigger possibility: that somehow, in this image, or with this image, with this sensing with soul, with this practice, what I'm wanting, more than this self-development, or even just the ending of this dukkha that I'm feeling right now, or the development of this pattern or that quality or whatever, is I want soulmaking. That becomes the bigger bow, the thing, the bigger vision of serving, the bigger reason of why we're doing this. I think that's quite a rare thing. So again, it's going to come and go, but you can get glimpses of this. What is it to practise for the sake of soul? What is it to engage in one's meditative work, and one's investigations, in other language, for the sake of the divine? Doing it for God, not just for me. What does that even mean? It's one of those concepts that can just -- like all of these, there's no end to this idea.
Also, what's wrapped up in that is, sometimes -- and I think maybe all of you have tasted this; otherwise you wouldn't be here -- is that this work, or these kind of practices, they can be very thrilling at times. Yeah? At times. And sometimes we find our vision of what soulmaking is getting a little smaller. And we're just chasing that sense of vitality, or that sense of connection, or that sense of thrill. Again, very normal, very human. But soulmaking involves everything. Sometimes, for instance, the soul knows that it wants -- as Catherine said yesterday -- to fall in love with logos, to fall in love with ideas. Are they being left out of my whole vision of what soulmaking is? I want the whole. The soul wants everything. It wants to everything to be touched, and involved, and drawn in, and contaminated, and infused with soulmaking. So the fullness of intention also means I'm not just, "I love it when that flow of vitality comes, and the energy," or "I love the love," or whatever, but it's the whole, or at least the possibility of that. Yeah? Again, sometimes, you can't force this so much as you might notice this at times. Or you might just gently remind yourself of the possibility, and then something opens up more imaginal, so to speak.
(24) The twenty-fourth node is duty, and we talked quite a lot about that in the Q & A. So it's interesting. Again, if we think about connecting nodes with each other: there might be a sense of duty in relation to an image that it seems to communicate to me or hand me, this sense of the possibility of picking up, and engaging, and assenting to -- possibility, the invitation; not a forcing -- the invitation to assent to some kind of sense of duty. And part of my job is discerning what that is. If we pair that duty with, for instance, the node of divinity, then it has a certain flavour to it. If I pair the node of duty with the node of creation/discovery, and emphasize the creation, then it modifies the relationship -- the other one, the connection we've made with divinity. Because oftentimes with divinity, what tends to happen for a human being is it gets very reified and very kind of solidified. Does this make sense?
Yogi: Could you repeat that?
Rob: Yeah, so duty is a loaded concept for many people. It's not an easy one in our culture. There are probably historical and social reasons for that. So sometimes people can hear the word 'duty,' and it's a bit like, "Now, there were twenty-eight nodes, but I only seem to remember twenty-seven." [laughter] That could happen with any of them! Sometimes. Some people just relate to it, "It's fine." So what I was trying to say was, we can think of duty on its own, and then we bring our history to that, as I said earlier. We bring already an image of what duty is. Now, I might have got that image from who-knows-where. And that can be constraining.
If I connect nodes, and I remember, "Oh, divinity," then in relation to the notion of divinity, my sense of duty can get very hard, and that's why we talked about that fundamentalist terrorism; it's all very hard and reified sometimes. If I connect the node of duty with the node of creation/discovery, then the whole sense of duty becomes less reified, because it's got that element, and it's like, you know, I'm participating in the creation of this duty. It's not just some absolute, objective truth. Yes?
So there's a way that these, they kind of -- not just the nodes, but also the interrelationship with nodes -- as I said, sometimes they are aspects of each other, and sometimes they kind of balance each other. Yeah? Not sure what else to say about duty. We talked about it a lot. I think I'll leave it.
(25) Related to duty, actually, duty could be seen as an aspect of the next node, which is meaningfulness. So it's twenty-five: meaningfulness. I use that word -- I hope I'm using the word correctly in English -- 'meaningfulness' means more than 'meaning.' In other words, an image or a sense that we have might 'mean' something to us. For example, it might reflect something in my life, or it has this meaning or that meaning, or reflect something in my history, or this duty, or this teaching. It might give me a teaching. It's telling me something about how I tend to approach something. It might be telling me something about how I tend to approach practice, and it gives me a teaching about how I might do things differently, for instance. But that teaching is only one meaning. The image is pregnant with an infinite possibility of meanings, and some of those meanings are not discernible yet. This, again, relates to the beyondness, and the kind of hazy edges. Sometimes very clear: "Yes, I recognize that meaning. I recognize that teaching. I recognize whatever it is." And then I have a kind of vague sense of other meanings, and the knowledge, or the even vaguer sense, of just a kind of inexhaustible richness of meaningfulness.
(26) This relates to the twenty-sixth node: infinite echoing and mirroring, which I think, again, we touched on yesterday. So, this one is easier, I think, to discern with an image, with an intrapsychic image, than it is with sensing with soul. But there can be a sense, to be noticed, that this image echoes my life. I see that lonely, solitary wanderer image that I had really a lot was very, very important to me. And I could see how that image echoed my life in many ways. But I could also see that my life echoed the image. Do you understand? There's a shaping each way. And some of those echoings are kind of obvious. But again, there's this kind of haze of dimly perceived echoes and mirrorings discernible. I don't quite know what they are, but I just sense this kind of depth of echoing. A bit like when you -- I've never been to the Grand Canyon, but if you shout there, I assume it just echoes. I don't know, but ... [laughter] If it's one of those echoes where you don't really hear the end of the echo, like it just -- is that how it is? Yeah? [laughter] Anyway! The kind of echoing where it just shades into infinity. Yes? There can be that kind of sense with an image. My life, and this image, and my story, and my pain, and my duty, and my calling, and my passions -- there's this echoing that happens.
Again, sometimes we get locked into this. It's related to the causality: "My life causes this image. The events in my life, the history, what I've been exposed to, what I've been subject to, creates the image. It's a re-presentation." Can also view it the other way, and there's a possibility of just seeing two mirrors facing each other. Again, you get this infinite kind of mirroring. Where does it stop? You can't actually discern the end of it. But there are these discrete, connected, infinite mirrorings. [24:53]
So I mentioned that lonely wanderer image. And I can see there are kind of relatively obvious ways that has been mirrored in my life, and that my life mirrors that. And there are all these subtler ways. The image, related to that, of the outcast. Sometimes we identify too much with something in our life. "I am the outcast," or "I feel like the outcast," "I am the lonely one," "I am the lonely wanderer," "I am broken," "I am the broken one." This infinite echoing also implies this separation: "I am that, and I am not that. It's other than me." When we have that separation, but echoing, but interconnected echoing, there's more possibility for it to become imaginal, because I'm not just stuck in "I am broken," "I am an outcast," "I am the one on the edge."
Oftentimes it was a kind of -- well, a meta-image -- but in the beginnings of my trying to experiment with imaginal practice, I used to have an image of being in a prison cell, like down in a dungeon somewhere, and left there alone. And it was actually lovely. And it became, for a while, a kind of fertile place where images would come into that space. But there was something in me, and in my life, that I kind of -- I was going to say "identified," but it's not -- I could feel that echoing. There's something about being a solitary prisoner in some kind of dungeon that just echoes something. And yet it's a very fertile -- it's a prison, but there's a beauty born in that prison. And there's fertility and richness in the darkness there. Because they're separate, there's this echoing of two things, the image and the life, there is the possibility of fertility. If I'm just identified with being imprisoned, or outcast, or the lonely one, or broken, or the sacrificed one, or the victim, or whatever it is, the identification doesn't allow the thing to become rich in the imaginal. These images of ancestors, they're other, and I am them. I am them, and I am not them. I am in the lineage of those ancestors, and I am not in the lineage of those ancestors. I am heir to them, and I am not heir to them. There's something in this 'together, connected, but separate,' echoing, mirroring, and the mystery of that, and the infinity of it. [28:10]
And again, a lot of this is subtle; it's more like we just sense that possibility. It might be quite dim, but that can be enough to ignite that node and allow the thing to become more imaginal. It's a little trickier to see with sensing with soul, but actually, a couple of people, even on this retreat, have alluded to it. I might be, again, relating to a tree, or sensing the tree with soul, or whatever it is. And there's a way that my energy body experience, and my psychic experience, starts to mirror that of the tree. I come into some kind of resonance -- also a sensibility of energy body texture, the solidity, the way that the tree knows, is echoed in my being. [29:08] Yeah? Possibilities there.
(27) The twenty-seventh has to do with values, or rather, when we're sensing with soul, when there's an image, there's value. What is valuable is implicit in that. Now, that's also part of meaningfulness. In other words, this pregnancy of meaningfulness includes values. Beauty is also a value, but goodness, or nobility, that's a value. And it's part of the meaningfulness of when we sense with soul. I'm sensing something with soul, and there is a mix of values present for me in that experience. Again, sometimes just noticing that. We could say a whole lot more about that. I don't want to right now. But sometimes just noticing it can ignite something.
Sometimes you might bring to mind someone you know and love, or something you know and love. And bring them to mind, and steady the attention on them, and open the energy body, and tune into what you value there. And that can begin to open up, make that thing, that person, that being, let it become image for you, become imaginal. There's also the possibility -- we touched on the person who wrote the note and mentioned this Aslan from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this sort of lion king, really. And somehow meditating, finding themselves in a kind of quasi-jhānic space that was imbued with the particular character of this Aslan, without the form of Aslan. There's an image. We could say that's still an image. Without the clear form, it's still an image. But it's possible at times to even kind of extract the value from an image.
So I wouldn't do too much of this, but for instance, one of the qualities of Aslan, I would say -- maybe the person would say differently, but just for the sake of the example -- is nobility. Aslan's a very noble being. So nobility is a quality or a value. And it might be that, here I am, meditating on Aslan, and it's a form. And there's the sense of a lion. And then that may go to some kind of space of Aslan-ness, and within that, one may tune into the nobility. And then it's like the essence of that value -- one can meditate on that. I'm just mentioning it as a possibility, but it's mostly not what we're doing here.
Or beauty. This is interesting, because one might be sensing something with soul, or it might be an internal image, and it feels very beautiful. Maybe it's connected to -- I'm hearing music, and actually it came out of some dukkha in relation to music, and no longer being a musician, etc. And then I heard, I let the mind spin this music and create music, improvising music, and let myself be touched by that music. And then there's the possibility of seeing, "Oh, there's beauty here." I'm just mentioning this as a possibility. It's possible to sort of extract the essence, or let the essence of beauty extract out of that. But it's no longer even tied to a form. The music has faded, and it's just kind of pure beauty. I'm just mentioning it as a possibility, without wanting to kind of suggest that too much as a line.
(28) And the last one is participation, the twenty-eighth node. In a way, sometimes, I think this feels like the hardest one for me to articulate, or one of the hardest ones. And I have a real sense of it as being something, again, that can just get deeper and deeper, the sense of what that means. So partly, you know, with the emphasis on ways of looking and fabrication, we can get very much the idea and the insight, actually -- the emphasis on the insight -- that what we perceive, what we sense, depends on the subject's way of looking, depends on the way of looking. To me, the word 'participation' kind of fills it out with the other side. It doesn't neglect -- there's some sense of an objective pole there, some kind of objective pole of value, of sacredness, of reality. So it kind of holds both. We're participating. It's a bit like 'create/discover.' We're participating in both sides of it. To me, also, that word 'participation,' it preserves my autonomy. You think about the word: "I participate in this," or "This participates in that." It preserves the autonomy of the participator in that which is being participated in. So it preserves a sense of autonomy with also a sense of non-separateness. Yeah? [laughter] Which, to me, is very valuable in giving a sense of the sense we have when we're sensing with soul.
So I participate. I have a sense of participating in that archetypal image of the lonely wanderer. Again, it's me, and it's not me. It's something I mysteriously participate in, this thing that is bigger than me somehow, holier and bigger. I'm somehow, my life somehow is participating in this image. Or the outcast, or the lineage of ancestry. We participate in an archetype, in a divine archetype. [36:06] We participate in the mundus imaginalis Catherine referred to, the world of the imaginal. We feel that we're participating in that. We're not an outside observer. Somehow our life and our perception is participating in all that.
As the soulmaking really starts involving every element of our being, also our eros -- my desire, my sexuality, my eros in a broader sense than sexuality -- we start to feel that as 'not just mine.' Whose is it? We start to sense this eros that I'm experiencing right now is participating in the divine eros, the eros of the Buddha-nature. A whole other sense of one's existence in participation, in a mystery of participation. Our soulmaking is participating in, is necessary to, is adding to the soulmaking of the world, the soulmaking of the World Soul, the anima mundi, the soulmaking of the Buddha-nature, the soulmaking of the primordial Buddhas, the soulmaking of God. It's not just me doing my soulmaking. There's a sense of something, some much vaster and more unfathomably mysterious participation.
I invite you to view all this as a journey, as an adventure, rather than a demand, rather than a list of what should be happening or evident right now, already. An invitation to an adventure, to possibility. The coming and going of things, and the coming and going of soulfulness. Whatever is arising right now, whatever is here today is really, really fine. It's part of that journey.
Okay. I think I'll stop there. That's twenty-eight nodes, touched on at least. Let's have some quiet.
