Heart Art and an Introduction to Image

Good morning, everyone. So this morning there are actually two areas I want to try and cover in this session. It's quite a lot. As I said, it's a little bit, perhaps, dense in terms of teaching at the moment. And I can just say a few things about these two areas. Some of it will be in the form of just, "This, this, this, this, this, this," and not necessarily elaborating so much on the "this." We'll come back to that point I just made at the end today. But the two things I want to talk about and just say a little bit about are taking the energy body teachings a little bit further, specifically with regard to working with emotions, and secondly, beginning to talk about image.

Okay. So yesterday we introduced the idea of the energy body, and the practices with the energy body, with a particular orientation towards developing, moving in the direction of samādhi, of a kind of well-being in the energy body, an integration, a harmonization, energization, and just emphasizing that direction of intentionality. So within that, when there is anything at all pleasant, or comfortable, or even lovely in the energy body -- or in the emotions, as well, so joy, peace -- these will reflect in certain textures and energies, if you like, wavelengths in the energy body.

When anything like that is around, there is the possibility of leaning, inclining the attention towards, resting in that, enjoying it, developing it. This is the direction towards what we call samādhi. So here's this -- maybe it's just a kind of light sense of open peace, but I can feel it harmonized in my whole body. Well, I can open to that. I open my body to it. I open my consciousness to it. I open my awareness to it. I endeavour to be intimate with it, to really get close to this texture, to relish it, to taste it, to know it. Really touch it, touch it with the body, this loveliness, whatever it is. It could be very extremely lovely, blow your head off; could be really quite subtle. But the intention is to nuzzle into it, rub yourself in it, open to it like you're sunbathing, etc. Become intimate with it, and basically enjoy it. Yes? "Thou shalt enjoy." [laughter] It's the first commandment of samādhi practice. With the whole energy body. So it's basically turning on a hedonistic attitude, and really getting into it, bathing in it.

Involved in that is what we could call a 'tuning.' We're tuning to, we could say, a certain wavelength of energy -- let's say the wavelength of this kind of peace, or this kind of lovely tenderness, or this kind of effervescent joy. In energetic terms, there's a certain wavelength, and I kind of tune into that wavelength with my attention, but actually with my whole being: with my body, with my focus, with my mind. Everything is tuning: "Ah, that's the wavelength of that particular loveliness that's available right now." Like you tune a radio dial, you're tuning to this. Ça va?

Okay. As I said yesterday, the energy body will not be, cannot be, lovely all the time. It cannot be open all the time. It's just not the way it works. So there is the possibility, within the intention of developing samādhi, within that track, there is the possibility when the energy body is not so open -- it's a bit twisted, or contracted, or something's a bit tight, or whatever it is, or it's a bit agitated -- there is the possibility, within the direction of samādhi, to gradually develop skills to work with those difficulties and knots and contractions so that they open up, and so that the whole system moves back towards some kind of loveliness. Okay? So that's a whole art in itself. I've talked about it elsewhere, and you can certainly ask, etc. I'm just mentioning it now.

So actually one is skilfully relating to this difficulty with the intention, like, "Okay, how can I maybe finesse it or nuance it to open up, to soften, to move basically towards something more comfortable, more pleasant, more well-being?" So skilful, deliberate intention. It's not a grasping or a forcing. So that's all available.

But as well as that intention towards samādhi and working with the difficult, there are other intentions. One might be, well, here is this difficulty, and maybe it, in itself, has a certain kind of intelligence. Maybe there's something in the middle of this difficulty that I need to honour, that I need to open to and be with, and it can somehow teach me something; I don't know what. Maybe it has a treasure in it. And then this opens a whole realm of possibilities in itself, this slightly different attitude. What is it to relate skilfully, in that sense, to what is difficult? So the intention here is not so much to change it, but to somehow honour it and see what might be learnt, if anything, or just to be able to be with. That's all -- just to be able to be with, to bear with, to hang with the difficult.

So lots of possibilities. I'll just reel off a list here. (1) One possibility is actually learning to focus: here's this tightness in my throat. I'm not sure: is it an emotion? Is it a grief? I don't even know yet. Okay. It's possible to very delicately focus the attention right on those sensations, and just train them there. Then the question is, how much? (a) Laser beam, or (b) really delicate? What does it need? Within that, I'm letting it be what it is, this moment and the next moment. I'm not saying, "Come on, I can just nudge you so you can be nice." That's fine! It's not like it's not Buddhist to do that. It is Buddhist to do that. These are just different options, different orientations, okay? But in this mode, it's just allowing it. It's like [cups hands], just like that with the hands; a little bird can land there, and then it can fly off and see what's next, and it flies off. This is the attitude. It's a very delicate allowing and holding.

That's one possibility. (2) Another possibility might be, again, to bring in the whole energy body, but the space of the energy body forms a context, a space, really, for this difficulty. So let's say, I don't know, I've got this tightness in my belly or solar plexus. And again, I'm not sure: am I anxious, or ...? Don't know yet. Or maybe I do know. But I can then open up the energy body awareness and let this difficulty sit in the middle of this body bubble, this space of the energy body awareness. It gives it a different context. It puts it in that awareness. And oftentimes there is, in that larger awareness, a certain kind of -- sometimes -- a certain kind of okayness. So it kind of holds it in a certain way.

(3) Third option: we can learn to hold the difficult in love, to bring in, or, let's say, access a quality of mettā, or compassion, or tenderness, or holding around. So this difficulty, this contraction, this hardness, whatever it is, this knot, it's almost like it's held in a bath of something else -- some warmth, some tenderness, some care. So this painful shard of rock is touched by something different. And you're just letting those two things come into contact with each other -- the difficulty and the lovely warmth. You just put them together, without forcing anything to happen.

I should mention -- I mentioned it somewhere or other, but I can't remember when.^[1] For those of us who have done a lot of training in mindfulness, it's often the case that when we come to work with emotions, we use a very skilful approach, which is, "Okay, I see my mind is da-da-da-da, all over the place, and there's all this stuff going on. Let me focus, tune the attention to the sensations of the emotion." So here's this heaviness in my chest, or whatever it is, and in my mindfulness of the emotion, can I just look at the level of sensation? In a way, everything simplifies. Are you familiar with what I'm talking about? Yes? Wonderful. And sometimes what can happen is that a person who does a lot of mindfulness practice, insight meditation, actually that becomes almost their only option.

[10:32] It's like one mode of relating to the emotions. What's it missing? One thing it's missing is it's missing self and story. Right? Because part of the whole idea of mindfulness is "Let's just kind of leave that out." So for some of you, it might be interesting to open up the concertina, the fan of options. What is it to be with this emotion in this kind of bare mindfulness -- supposedly bare mindfulness -- way, no story, no self, just these sensations happening in the moment? Great. One option. (4) What would it be, though, to bring yourself in contact with that whole constellation of the emotion including the self? So it's not just sensations and just emotion; it's me having the sensations. And that's important. Catherine talked about yesterday, you can have a practice with no self, no self, no self. You just want to kind of ignore or get rid of the self. It won't be full enough, rich enough, juicy enough, just psychologically, let alone soulfully.

So sometimes we go into a mode, we open to a mode, it includes self. And that might include story. And then there are further differentiations: what kind of self are we talking about? (a) A reified self? (b) Or a self that I also know is empty? (c) A self I see as image? There are different kinds of gradations of the mix one can put into this, if you feel ready to explore that kind of thing. Dependent on that, dependent on what kind of self and how much self, if you like, is there, and how much story, and what the attitude to the story is -- "This is the reality, this story," or "This story also has the liquidity in it to be sensed as image" -- dependent on all this, the experience unfolds differently. It's dependent arising. And all that is in the beauty and the art of what we can explore with the difficult, these slightly different emphases and angles, and different experiences open up. Different kinds of healing are available. And sometimes healing won't just happen, just looking at those sensations all day long, and actually something is not getting healed, because there's not enough self in it, and there's not enough story, or the story is too rigid. So again, it's not like there's a right answer, there's a right way to do it: "Just do this one thing for the rest of your life, and everything will be fine."

(5) Another option: sometimes we can bring an image to meet the emotion. Just as we bring the mettā, for example, or tenderness to sit around the difficulty, we can bring an image. Maybe you have imaginal figures that you already sense they love you, and you love them. So you can bring this image. And what does this image, perhaps, communicate to you in your difficulty? Witnesses you there, sees you. How do they see you? Can you see how this image is looking at this dukkha? Can you see and feel how you are being gazed at? So again, there's a kind of alchemy that happens when I put the difficulty in contact with something.

Just rattling through a list here. (6) Another option is turning the allowing dial up to 11, as they would say in Spinal Tap -- meaning, here's the difficulty, and I'm not just kind of letting it be in the usual mindfulness sense (which is great). The thing I'm completely interested in is: how much can I allow this? How much can I let go of completely even the smallest trace of aversion or resistance? That's what I'm mostly interested in. That's a very skilful way of being. Some of you know what happens when you do that. It's an extremely interesting thing to try.

Again, rattling through the list. (7) Sometimes -- in fact often -- an emotion, difficult and lovely, has a kind of dynamism in it. It's a vortex of moving energy, if you like. And because of that, you can feel that dynamism in the energy body. So this rage, or this frustration, or this whatever-it-is, you can actually feel a kind of power and dynamism in the energy body that's related to the emotion. And because of that energy, if you like, it can give birth to an image. Sometimes this is extremely gross: there's the dynamism and the power that's associated with this emotion I feel in the energy body, and lo and behold, then I become a fire-bellowing dragon. Wonderful. The whole thing has moved. Or it can be extremely subtle, or rather much more subtle. I'll give you a little example.

I think Catherine mentioned, I don't know why it's arisen, but I've got all kinds of problems with my hormones now, different hormone levels. I can't remember if this was before or after I started the medicine, but either way, I've been feeling pretty strange. [laughter] On it or off it, I don't know. [laughter] I'll just read you this thing. "I was meditating in the morning, feeling so confused and discombobulated and lacking in mental capacity recently -- possibly a consequence of a thyroid problem?" Anyway. "So sitting this morning, I feel into the difficulty." So it's like, this is what's happening, and I feel this difficulty and this whole kind of gestalt of the difficulty -- it's mental, it's physical. "I feel the difficulty of it. I feel it as difficulty. I see there's some aversion to it. Subtle, but it's definitely there. And I sense the subtle contraction in the energy body in relation to it -- it's in my chest, in the throat and in my chest -- that goes with that. So I tried to work with it in different ways, but the mind is not very focused," which is part of the original problem. [laughs] "Somehow, out of this, out of my willingness to be with it, and to be intimate with the difficulty in this kind of open way, then suddenly an image comes. The image is of an old king, sitting in a room alone, or almost alone." Sitting in a room, and the room, by the way, looks very much like the living room in my house [laughter], which I wasn't in at the time.

So he's alone in that room, except that there's this very small baby monkey with him. "He's very old. He has this mauve velvet cloak on, and a crown, but the crown is really not very fancy. He's lost his powers. He's really old, and his mental and spiritual capacity -- he's pretty confused, as well; maybe he's got dementia or something like that. And he's completely lacking in energy. And he has to see something now. Despite his state, he has to get clear about something, or some kind of clarity about something: that his kingship is not his. It was given to him by the divine, by the earth, by the Buddha-nature. Nor are his spiritual or mental powers his. They're not his. They never were. If death is coming, this is a time of relinquishment. Somehow his heart needs to understand this. His soul needs to understand this. A time of relinquishment, anattā, and seeing this is not-self, this is not mine, and in a way, of entering, if you like, the kind of very simple state of the erasure of one's mental and spiritual power. A simple state -- just all that goes. And the erasure of these qualities and the gifts that were bestowed on him. The little monkey, this little baby monkey, climbs onto his chest." [laughs] You know how they do. So he's very kind of lost; he doesn't quite even know where he is, and he's confused. This little baby monkey climbs onto his chest, and presses itself the way very young babies can. They're old enough to communicate love, their love. Not just they're receiving love. They can communicate this love.

"So it presses itself against him, like a baby, and with a very young sort of child's loving -- very pure, very innocent, very sweet. This is what I tune to." It's that interaction. It's one of the things I tune to. It's something very, very lovely. You can hear it's sweet, and it's soothing and pacifying in there. It brings a lot of tenderness, and kind of another level of okayness with what's happening. I give you this example. When I choose examples, there are different reasons for choosing them. So one is the dukkha is involved, okay? This wasn't an image that kind of just went around the dukkha or kind of ignored it, like, "That's all right, but look at this wonderful thing that's happening here." So the dukkha is involved. It was involved as part of the crucible that gave birth to the image, and it was still there at the end of the image. It wasn't like, oh, the monkey got onto his chest, and then suddenly he transformed into this kind of handsome young prince who was ... [laughter] ready to rule another kingdom. [laughter] The dukkha stays. It -- I don't know, what can we say -- receives other harmonies with it, other dimensions, okay? It's one of the reasons I'm choosing this image.

It's more than simple anattā practice. It's more than simple not-self. Beautiful, wonderful practice. It's something more here. It includes that, but it's more. The self -- and you can obviously see the parallels there, or I can -- the self becomes image. There was, I felt, a real relationship between me and this king, my state and this king. The self-sense moves towards an imaginal self-image. And we can say there's letting go, but in a way, there's more than traditionally what we understand by 'letting go.' It's got whole other levels of dimensions and echoes and juiciness around it. These are some of the reasons why I choose this image to share.

[22:37] Okay. This soulmaking conceptual framework, it includes many possible angles, and approaches, and intentions, and directions within it. Like we said, I can do samādhi; I can be with the difficulty; I can look for image -- all kinds of possibilities. When we talk about emotional awareness, in this larger soulmaking paradigm, the purpose of our emotional awareness is not only to reach peace. It's not only to reach peace. It's not only that we work with our emotions so that they can purify, and the only emotions we end up having are the four brahmavihāras. I'm not saying it's not that; I'm saying it's not only that, okay?

There is also, in this process, in this journey, the movement towards, the invitation to sanctify what we tend to regard as unskilful or impure emotions. What does it mean to sanctify rage? What does it mean to sanctify fierceness, to let that become image and holy, to find the holiness, the holy roots of these kinds of emotions? Hysteria. Hatred. James Hillman said, "You've got to hate something." On a soul-level, there's something very wise there. "You've got to hate something." What does it mean for hatred to be given these extra dimensions? Roaring. What is holy roaring? Madness. What is holy madness? The sanctification of being also madly in love. Priapic, the eternally horny. What is that? What's the holiness in that to be found, and the echoes there? These things can become image, can find their archetypal roots. It's not that then we identify with these things, with these. But it's that something is opened in the range of soulmaking, something is opened in the soulmaking with them, and the range of -- this is so important -- the range of our sacredness is opened, the range of our senses of sacredness is opened. The range of our images, and the range of beauty and duty is opened.

So it's not only in this framework that we're saying, "Have your feelings, be connected with your feelings, be mindful of your feelings on your way to peace." There's a bigger invitation here. Sometimes a person is working very diligently, with a lot of care and goodwill with their flow of emotions, and oftentimes with this typical sort of mindfulness mode where it's just focusing on the emotions almost as sensation, without so much story and self. But it's just going on. A person is tracking their emotions, and it's actually not very fruitful or helpful. I don't know if some of you have ever had this kind of relationship with difficulty, where I'm aware of it, I'm aware of it, I'm aware of it, I'm aware of it ... [laughter]

So there's a certain clarity there, and a certain mindfulness, but there's no dynamism. Nothing's happening. It's not going anywhere in that process. Something is stuck, and the wheels are kind of going round and round in this difficult emotion. I'm mentioning this because four or five people have mentioned something similar to me in the last maybe month or so. Sometimes, with all that, there's actually frustration at the whole process. I'm not supposed to be frustrated, because I'm supposed to just be okay with what is. No! [laughter] I'm fed up! [laughter] Maybe I need to feel the power and the dynamism of feeling fed up. So I'm concentrating on everything else, but I'm feeling the fed-upness. It's there, and I'm somehow not clocking it. It's somehow not allowed, or just I'm not used to feeling it. So maybe I need to feel that, and allow it, and allow its energy. Or sometimes maybe I need to vocalize. What does that sound like, when I let my body express that frustration? Or again, feel it in the body. Sometimes this tuning into the dynamism and allowing the dynamism, or even allowing yourself to express it, it gets things moving. It loosens things. I'm not talking about catharsis. I'm not talking about getting rid of, purifying: here's this emotion, and if I kind of primal scream or whatever, then it is released. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about loosening something so that an alternative flow or an alternative circuit can be found or introduced.

Sometimes working with difficulty -- and it might be there's already an image, or it might be without an image -- at some point it's like, can I sense where is the dynamism in all this? What is it, where's the point where there's power and movement in potentia? And actually tune into that, and allow that to move things. Again, we're not trying to get rid of. You could say, in a certain language, we're tuning to and supporting a kind of native intelligence in the difficulty. I'm not finding the dynamism so it will kind of bugger off. There's an intelligence here in this frustration, in this, whatever it is. Possible flows of energy and emotion are opened by feeling it in the energy body in this way, and allowing it, feeling into its power, the movement there, the dynamism. Different than this 'allowing on 11' practice that I talked about before. That will actually do something different.

[29:49] So sometimes feeling the emotion as energy, and the energy moves, and when the energy moves in the energy body, the self-sense moves. Energy body, self-sense -- all these things are connected. I let the energy move, the sense of self will change. And sometimes when the sense of self changes, an image can come, sometimes. I use this word 'dynamism.' It's not that all images are something so dynamic, like that image that I shared of the old king and the monkey, but out of the sense of, in that case, weakness, of loss, of loss of power, an image was born. There was something liquid in going to the image.

End of part one. There's a lot to get through. Is that okay? All right. Part two, about image. We use this word 'image.' If you would just imagine right now, just however you're able to imagine -- don't worry; you don't have to get in the lotus posture. [laughter] Just imagine a toilet that you know well. [laughter] At home, or where you've been staying regularly, or even upstairs, or wherever it is. Imagine a train station or a bus stop you can imagine well. Imagine maybe someone who would be a neutral person in the mettā practice, would fall into the neutral category. These are all 'images,' you could say. Even if it's not visual, you have a sense of something. Actually, there's a way in which we can call any perception an image. Any perception at all, in a certain way of using language, is an image -- just looking at me right now, or looking at your hand, or the room, or whatever.

But what do we mean when we use this word 'imaginal'? What's an 'imaginal image'? There's a problem with language here. Just because it's a mouthful to say 'imaginal image' every time, mostly when we use the word 'image,' we mean 'imaginal image.' Occasionally we don't, just to keep you on your toes. [laughter]

There's quite a lot of richness involved in what does this mean, this word 'imaginal,' in the way that we are using it in these teachings. There's a gradual evolution, a gradual development of understanding what's involved in the richness of that idea. We can talk about, rather than "Is it imaginal, or is it not imaginal?" -- probably the toilet wasn't imaginal. Probably. But we can, rather than making it a black and white thing, we can talk about a kind of spectrum. So things can be, if you like, more fully imaginal or less fully imaginal, rather than saying "Have I got it or have I not?" Part of what we mean when we say 'imaginal' is that certain qualities are endemic or intrinsic to the imaginal, like beauty, like eros, like a sense of meaningfulness (which is beyond just a meaning or even several meanings). There's a kind of inexhaustibility to images. I can't reduce them to just this, or just that, or even just this handful of things.

A sense of dimensionality, of unfathomability. Love is there with the imaginal, both ways. The image, an imaginal image, is sensed as autonomous at a certain level. It's not just a part of me, or I'm in control of it, like a little puppet or something. Oftentimes, there's a sense -- we could even go a step further -- there's a personhood. An image, even if it's not an animal, it has its own kind of personhood. Humility. Part of what's involved in the whole relationship or constellation when there's an imaginal image is a sense of humility -- here; I am somehow humble in relation to this image. And duty. Somehow, in some way, I owe something or I'm asked something by this image. With all that and much more, there's a sense of soulmaking.

So when we use this word 'imaginal,' it means all that and more. These are things that happen in relationship. It's not like the image by itself is this. The humility is here; it's in the subjective pole. The beauty feels like it's more over there. But the imaginal is saying something about the relationship between my experience and this thing, whatever it is that I'm looking at. Let's take that one of humility. So here's this image, and maybe it's fantastical, and there are dragons and all kinds of things, but something about it is not quite juicy. It's not quite really touching. There's not really this sense of profound soulmaking to it. Maybe one of the things is I check, "Oh, there's not humility here. I don't feel humble in [relationship]. I don't feel a kind of reverence." And maybe, sometimes, just noticing that, it begins to open up. Something's changed in my relationship, because now humility is in my relationship, and then I see the whole thing opens up and changes.

When we talk about 'imaginal,' we're really talking about a relationship, a whole constellation of relationship. What that means, as we've just given an example, it means that something can start as imaginal, with all this juiciness and richness, and if I am not careful with the relationship, it collapses and it gets flat. Whatever eros was there becomes craving and clinging, and the whole thing just gets brittle, one-dimensional. But also the opposite is possible. Here's this thing that didn't start out very juicy or very soulmaking. It was a bit flat. There was definitely a good dose of craving in there, not eros. I attend to, I work subtly with the relationship, and the craving becomes eros, and the papañca or the flatness becomes imaginal. It's part of the art and the alchemy. So it's dependent on the relationship, and the conceptual framework, and the way of looking at any time.

I think today what I want to do is talk about what we might call 'intrapsychic' images. But actually, we can sense the tree outside, or this moment right now in the hall, or your own body -- the senses can be sensed imaginally. The world can be sensed imaginally, and others can be sensed imaginally. We could call that 'extrapsychic.' Right now, just to say a little bit about 'intrapsychic' -- in other words, ones that are apparently more internal. After a while, this whole distinction will lose its meaning -- intrapsychic, extrapsychic. Everything gets sensed with soul. Everything becomes, the world becomes imaginal, potentially. But right now, let's just make that distinction for teaching purposes. When we say 'this image,' "What do you mean, 'image'?" It's not necessarily visual. There's a problem with language. In English, we say 'image,' and you immediately think 'visual.' It's not necessarily visual. It can come predominantly through any sense, any sense or a combination of senses, or in some ways, somehow I can't even quite locate the sense, or there's a kind of synaesthesia involved. All these are possible.

If it's visual, the visual detail is often not very important. And if it's aural, if it's a sort of aural image, sometimes the sonic detail is not important. So the clarity of form of an image is not the most important thing. We're not doing visualization concentration exercises. What's important? Soulmaking is, the sense of soulmaking. Sometimes the image is very vague, but the soulmaking sense is there. It's not like I have to get clearer about what the image is, I have to see it clearly. I'll give you an example. Oh, it's another hormonal one. [laughter] So struggling with the effects of hyperthyroid -- not sleeping, very sort of unpleasant buzzing energy in the body, heart rate just kind of really fast and thumping. In all this, hard to get a sense, hard for me to kind of get a sense of -- I don't know what you'd call it -- my depth of resources, or even depth of perception. I feel somehow thin, spiritually thin, and not easily settled, or actually even in my body. So really feeling quite strange, and not much calm, etc. So I focus on the sensations, and again I sense the dukkha. It's just what's going on. I recognize this is dukkha. I open to it.

Eventually, a few minutes or something, I decide I'll see it, I'll play with seeing it as empty, and also me as empty. In a way, just like some anattā practice, it fragments into aggregates and sense elements, etc., a little bit, and I mix that with a sense of the emptiness of time, to work a little bit with that. Then there's a sense of, with that, one of the possibilities -- it's almost like my whole life as kind of slides, like film stills, like the whole thing is there all at once; frozen, timeless moments of perception/experience. One of the possibilities. So the perception of it and me as empty in this way. And at that level, at least, it helps to ease the dukkha. There's a considerable release of dukkha. It opens some quite pleasant space in the experience, and there's some ease with that. There's a sense of the possibility of some samādhi there because of this softening. But actually it doesn't feel personal at all. What I've just done there is I've looked at something in a very universal way, and a movement towards the universal. The experience, the dukkha, there's a kind of universal, and the space that opens up is a kind of universal space.

My mind wanders briefly, and I remember: I moved house recently, and there was a box of old tapes from years ago. Some of it was me as a music student. I put some on, and it wasn't very good. [laughter] It's like, "Okay ..." I was just listening. But anyway, my mind wandered in the meditation, and I remembered that from whenever it was -- two days ago. And then my mind drifted again. There's a reason I'm saying all these details. My mind drifted off again to kind of hearing some music internally as kind of like improvised jazz lines, and seeing it -- because I trained in music, seeing those improvised lines, melodies, on the guitar, just kind of immediately. There's a kind of fluidity in all that. So actually it's a kind of daydream. I'm just drifting off into a little daydream. But with it, there's a kind of fluidity to the sort of improvisation and the way of being with it. And also with that, there's a kind of relaxation of the mind and the focus slightly. It's actually really lovely. It's sort of this quality of free-flowing music in the ether, if you like.

It's lovely, and then something shifts. I sense -- it just comes -- I am this music. I mentioned this the other day. I am this music. I am the music I make. My being is, my person is, music. I am played. I am being played. My life is music. It's really hard to articulate in words. My essence is music. And it's personal because it's this music. At that point, the music that I was hearing was not that clear. The soulmaking sense was in this different -- I don't know, is it an 'image'? Because what sense is it in? It wasn't like, "Ah, I really hear this music clearly" at this point. The image-sense is -- there's an image of self, but it's really an idea of self. There was the soulmaking sense. This is where the juice is. This is where the soulmaking is. I allowed the perfume of that to move through my being, and I allowed myself to be touched by that. It's personal because it's this music -- it's a particular music, as if my life is these sounds, these melodies, these harmonies, these rhythms; happening in time and eternal; given to me as me, and created by me. Given to me and made by me. And created contingently on, dependent on, in interaction with the circumstances of my life -- the situations, the events, all that.

[45:13] So the emptiness sense that I had worked on a few minutes before, that's still there. But now it's added to by this very personal, poetic sense of this existence, this existence in this very different sense of it, including the dukkha and including the challenges. They were part of the music. And I mean all of it, all of it. There's tremendous beauty here, and there's a big relief of the dukkha, like a whole other level. The sensations are still there. I'm not going all the way to fading -- just the sensations disappear and everything. It's not doing that. It's taking it in a certain direction, where the dukkha stays but it's made holy.

Again, why this example, out of many we could choose? Because the form of the image is not clear. I could have chosen, "Let me really hear that music clearly. Maybe I can write it down later" and whatever. No. That wasn't where the soulmaking was. It was in a much more amorphous sense of things. I choose that example, as well, because again, it came from dukkha and it included dukkha. It included a couple of moments, at least, of the mind wandering. And you know what? It's okay. There was the opportunism. The mind wandered. It was like, "Whatever." It's not a problem. What it wanted to became image, became fertile soil. There's an opportunistic responsivity in the practice. It's not about just "can I really stay with this one thing?" Again, there's emptiness, but actually, it's more than emptiness that we're talking about. Again, the self has, in this case, very much become image, but it's not clear what's the -- it's not a visual image, it's not particularly an aural image. And also this example because implicit in that -- or actually more than implicit -- is a whole kind of, if you like, anthropology and cosmopoesis. If you say to a scientist, "I am music," they'll say, "If I put you under a microscope, I don't see it." [laughs] "I can't hear it." There's a whole implicit kind of poetic anthropology. What is a human being? What is this cosmos? So idea is wrapped up in the whole imaginal sense.

Okey-doke. So the soulmaking sense is what's important. When I first started teaching the imaginal, I gave a series of talks somewhere, and someone came to me, and they said, after a few talks, "Oh, I know what you're talking about. You're talking about ghosts." I was like, "Oof." [laughter] "Wow." On the last retreat we did -- some of you were there -- not at Gaia House, I was in bed at night, and suddenly someone came into my room. I sort of sat up and turned round, and it was this little old woman. We sort of looked at each other, and then she just turned and went out. Afterwards, when we were packing up, the people that were helping clear up who worked there, they said, "Did you see the ghost?" And I was like, "It's funny you say that, because ..." [laughter] Now, that instance, there was nothing soulmaking in it at all. There's an image, if you like. It was weird, slightly. But there was no soulfulness there. It's not imaginal. It's something else, okay?

We were here once in a teacher meeting, and someone took a photo of one of the teachers. It doesn't matter who. It must have been on a digital camera or something, anyway. They saw the photo right then, and in his chest, it had a kind of ball of white light. Some people were like, "Oh, something refracted wrong in the light." And other teachers were like, "Oh, a deva." Now, probably for the people who said it's just light got in the camera somehow, it's not soulmaking. But some of the people who said it's a deva, it was more like, [flatly] "Oh, it's a deva." [laughter] It wasn't soulmaking at all. It's the sense of soulmaking that matters. Actually, either one -- the mystery of light and refraction could be soulmaking. It's not in the thing. It's in how we relate to it and what happens in that moment, whether it's soulmaking or not.

All right. Let me zip through some practice possibilities. In talking about intrapsychic images, how can we work with them? How can we kind of support contacting them, etc.?

(1) Number one: play with any practice that liquefies. Any practice like samādhi, or emptiness practices that you know, or mettā -- actually what they're doing, in technical language, is they're fabricating less. In that less fabrication, there's a kind of liquefying. So you do that, and you enjoy it, and then after a while you can kind of just come out a little bit, just relax the attention a little bit. Everything has got kind of liquefied, and that can be a very fertile kind of ground out of which images may arise.

(2) Second, I've already touched on, is an emotion that's there -- whether it's difficult or whether it's beautiful -- has enough energy in it that, if I feel it in the energy body, it can give rise to an image. It's got some kinetic energy in it. So through the emotion, emotion has energy wrapped up in it; that energy, felt in the energy body, can give rise to image.

(3) Third: when I was first trying to explore all this, what I found really helpful was imagining, actually deliberately imagining going to certain places. There would be places where I would just wait, and an image would arise. I don't do it any more, but one that became quite common for me was somehow a prison cell, down in a basement. I would go down, and I would be in this prison cell -- as the prisoner, usually. And there different images would come. But it might be under a big tree, or down another staircase somewhere, or whatever. It might be a certain place that you go that just becomes the place where you can meet images.

(4) Fourth: you already have plenty of images or potential images in your life -- people, historical figures, places. Gaia House might be an image to you, or certain teachers, or memories. There's lots in your life that's already potentially imaginal. Sometimes you can deliberately bring that. I never met John Coltrane. He's an imaginal figure for me. Or some other musicians, or loads of people. They're historical figures, but they function in my psyche as potential imaginal images. So you can bring them. (5) Fifth one: it might be you've worked before with an image and it felt fruitful. You can deliberately bring that back.

(6) Sixth: a dream that feels like it's really touched you in some way. Potentially you can bring that and work with that dream image.

(7) Seventh is a prescribed image. Sometimes we're teaching and we just pick up on an image, or offer an image, or an image from somewhere else -- a tantric deity or whatever. That's another option.

In working with an image, the awareness -- you want to keep including the whole energy body and the emotional state and the fluidity of that. It's okay -- as I said, you're going to lose focus. It's fine. Just come back. No big deal. What we're really tuning to is the sense of soulmaking. That tuning to the sense of soulmaking, implied in that is that mindfulness and sensitivity are very much a part of this practice. Again, there's a sense sometimes of, like, in this image, which direction or what aspect of it gives the soulmaking? If I go back to that music image, I could have gone to hearing the music more clearly, but that wasn't really where the soulmaking was at. It's a sense of guiding that way.

You guys look tired, so I'm going to stop, although I have more to say. There were seven [possibilities for contacting intrapsychic images], but there was just other stuff I was going to say. It could be that you're not [tired], and you're just looking that way, but ... [laughter] Let's somehow find a time later to finish this. Yeah. We'll jiggle things about, and I'll find a time to say the rest of this. Let's just sit for a minute or so together.