Transcription
So yes, just to pick up on and add a bit to something Catherine said, I think, in the opening talk. There's a lot of material here, and of necessity, then, some of what we put out we will just touch on and mention, and some we will elaborate more. That's just the nature of the limits of time, etc., and just not wanting to talk all day long at you. That connects a little bit to what Catherine said, anyway, in the opening talk, which is: can you listen in a proactive way? There's a way of listening which is kind of just sit back, and let things come in, or drift through, or whatever, which is a lovely style sometimes. But for many different reasons, it would be good to listen more like, "That piece there, I don't understand it, but I'll bookmark it for later, and then I'll chase it up after the retreat, or I'll ask questions," so that you're listening with a kind of self-reflective, critical attitude to what are the pieces that I personally am needing, or missing, or not quite getting, or that I can shelve for later and all that.
I want to pick up where I finished early the other morning, and go through that material with you, and then add a bit more. Just to say, in terms of meditation instructions, at this point they're fairly open, in the sense of we spent the first day emphasizing the intention for samādhi, for kind of gathering a sense of harmonization and well-being, and just leaning towards that. So that's always an option. That's always a gear you can go into: "Right now, I'm doing that." We also talked about the energy body as a way of just working, or opening a variety of ways to work skilfully and carefully and with compassion with what's going on emotionally, whether it's lovely or difficult. That, too, is a gear, is an option: "Now it feels time to do that with what's going on."
Then we started to introduce the idea of images. We were saying 'intrapsychic' for now, 'inside,' so to speak. So there are those three options, and then there's just going into a sort of basic mindfulness, or a mettā practice, if you see fit. So it's quite open. There's no order here. It's not like, "First I do this, and then I do that, and then I do ..." You can be very flexible with all of this. But consider it like an open buffet. If you want your dessert before your mains, it's completely fine. You can't be practising with an image or images all day long and not doing anything else. It's not in balance. It won't be helpful. So you want to be kind of gliding in and out in response to what's going on between these different kinds of practices -- being just with the emotions and caring for them in the energy body; the samādhi; working with image; maybe some other practice that you already know that seems helpful right now.
Just to reiterate, we're introducing the possibility of moving. Not just walking up and down; we're actually moving the body in here or outside. So the walking period is now called a moving period. You can move in relation to an image, etc., or to energies -- primarily an image -- if that feels helpful for you.
Okay, so a little bit about just some practice things. Doubt. Really, really common. It's common anyway, of course, on the path. You know that. It's one of the hindrances. But in relation to this kind of thing, it's extremely common. There are different kinds of doubt, and different aspects we can be doubting. But very often, a couple of moments after an image might arise, the first thing that arises afterwards is doubt. It's often something like, "That's probably not significant," or "It's not very interesting," or "It's not as bizarre and weird as I hear other people say," or "It's a bit too weird," or -- very common -- "I made that up. That's just my ego. I made that happen," or "It's just a random daydream."
These couple of moments of doubt are really, really common. Expect them. They'll come up. But so often, despite that mental reaction of doubt, so often it's still worth gently preserving with a kind of gentle attention to what's just arisen. You can be aware of the doubt or whatever. You don't have to buy into it, because if you stick with it, what you'll often notice is that what seemed insignificant or just a kind of ego projection or whatever, actually if I tune to it, if I work with the energy body, etc., it does start to gain imaginal flesh, and richness, and depth, and beauty, and become soulmaking. What seemed insignificant is potentially fertile and important. So let the judge be not that moment of mental doubt, or those moments of mental doubt, but let it be the sense. Stay with something, play with the different things that we'll describe in terms of the way of relating to images, and let the sense of soulmaking be your judge of whether something is worth sticking with or not. Judge by the fruit, not by the initial idea of "How did this image arise?"
Whether an image is fruitful depends on the relationship with it. It could be, in some of the examples I think I gave, the mind was daydreaming. It started daydreaming some music or whatever. In the first instance, it didn't seem that amazing. But just nuancing the relationship with it, something becomes more imaginal. It's in the relationship.
And then, related to that, we don't want any kind of dogma or rules, necessarily, but to prioritize a kind of sensitivity to the sense of soulmaking, to trust that in the moment with an image. It may be that that comes through one very specific aspect of the image, or it may be in the whole kind of gestalt of it, but this will be the most fruitful thing. This is what my nose is following. This is the thread, the sense of soulmaking. That will bring things alive. That will be most fruitful. As we've both said now, it may include, and even come through, arise from, dukkha. So that's also part, just being aware of that. And again, I've probably said this: the implications are not to prioritize how clear is this image, the form. We're not doing visualization meditation or exercises. Not the clarity of form so much is important -- occasionally it might be, because that clarity of form might actually help the soulmaking -- but the sense of soulmaking, which is often a more nebulous, hard-to-pin-down kind of quality, but you can recognize it. You get better and better at recognizing when that whole soulmaking dynamic is going on, when there's soulfulness.
[9:03] Implicit in this, and I'll come back to this hopefully this morning, very easily we can relate to an image, and think, "What is the guidance for me in my life here? What's it telling me to do?" Maybe I have a job choice or a path. "Should I go to India? Should I ..." whatever it is. And we want the image to come as a guide: "You should do this." And it's so clear. Sometimes that happens, or sometimes we get encouragement or whatever from an image, but again, it's about intention. If I prioritize this, something closes down. It's not that it doesn't happen sometimes. Can I not have my primary intention in relation to this image be "guide me," or "what is the guidance for me"? Rather, tuning into and staying with what gives the most soulmaking sense, what gives the most soulfulness.
In a way, that's a kind of experiment. We'll elaborate on it starting this morning, in fact. But see, find out for yourself, what kinds of attitudes, relationships, concepts, stances support the soulmaking to open, and what tends to close them down. Be your own researcher. We will certainly put some teachings out about that. But this is a much more interesting question (and all meditation is like this): "Right now, what's helpful?" And the question is, for each practice, what does 'helpful' mean? In this practice, it means what's most soulmaking. There's just a gentle sort of artful responsiveness to what's going on. I'm sailing this boat in response to the different currents and winds that are around. It can all be very beautiful, very subtle, in the relational field between, let's say, self and image, so that it's better to focus on qualities of the beauty, the kind of beauty that an image seems to have for you in the moment, and it may be very vague. Catherine talked about it last night. The sense of divinity that seems to inhere in this image, or the sense of grace, or mystery, or my sense of humility in relationship to it. All this can be very, very subtle, but these are all part of what it means for something to be soulmaking, all these qualities. Focusing on that will be much more helpful for the whole process, as we are outlining it, and what it opens up to, than looking for guidance, or trying to get visually clear or whatever.
In a way, I've said a little bit already, but started to say the other morning, and implied a little bit in what I've already said is this question. We use this word 'imaginal.' A lot of people use it -- not a lot, but quite a few people in different schools and things use it this way. What does it mean? Or what does it mean as we are using it here, and we want to convey and open up? There's actually quite a lot involved in it. It's a rich concept. It's not like a simple thing. It's rich, and it's almost paradoxical, and nebulous in some areas by necessity. It's a necessarily partly nebulous concept. Usually we like things really clear: on/off, black/white, is it this or is it that? The art of this is we have to be okay with a kind of nebulousness and elasticity of definitions and descriptions and concepts, all that.
Having said that, we could -- in fact, we have, in other situations -- ask, "What does it mean for something to be imaginal? What does that mean? What is an image?", and actually just delineate or point to a whole cluster of qualities or characteristics or attitudes or perceptions that are there that kind of constitute what it means for something to be imaginal. We can call that the constellation of the imaginal, or the lattice of the imaginal, all these qualities. We're just mentioning this. Some of them we're going to kind of throw them out and list them on this retreat, and some we'll go into a little bit more detail. But the idea is, again, this is not such a black-and-white thing. It's more like a spectrum. So if we go back to me asking you to imagine the toilet that you're most familiar with, there's imagination involved in whatever way. It may be visual, or there's some sense of that toilet. It is possible that that could be imaginal, with all the beauty and divinity and everything [laughter], if you spend a lot of time like I do in that place. [laughter] Anyway. But probably not. It's a use of the imagination; it's an image, in a certain sense of the word. But it's probably not in this fully fleshed-out, soulful, multidimensional way. It's probably not imaginal.
So again, rather than saying on/off, "Have I got it, or have I not? Do I understand what they're talking about, or do I not? I think everyone else has, but I haven't. I'm not getting it. My experience can't be," let's just think of it more as a spectrum, as a direction. As more of these qualities that we'll list, as more of them get lit up, the whole thing, we could say, becomes more imaginal, or more fully imaginal. There's no point in this kind of spectrum that we can say you've got it or you haven't got it, or you can say to yourself. But we're thinking about the possible fullness and richness of it.
So just watch the mind that gets into black-and-white thinking. Particularly the ego and the self puts itself in relation to that black-and-white thinking, usually in the negative, like "I'm really not getting it." It's a direction. It's an aspiration. It's a possibility of fullness, of further riches, of further beauties. We can talk about what it means to be more fully imaginal in the way that we are using it in these teachings.
Why talk about this constellation, or lattice, or these elements? Two reasons. One is in order to get clearer. As I said, this is a subtle, rich, complex concept in our teaching, what it means for something to be imaginal. It's not like you can just go [snaps] boom, "It means that." People often ask me, "Can you just sum it up?" [laughs] And I say, "Well, maybe, I ..." [laughter] But partly we would like you to get clearer, to get more and more, internalize this almost intuitive, gut sense of, "Ah, yeah, that." Something illuminates, and you get a sense of the richness. So partly just for the sake of clarity, what are we talking about? What kind of possibilities of soul and psyche and consciousness? What kind of experiences are we talking about? What direction? What realm? That's one reason, for the sake of increasing clarity and understanding.
The second reason is that it turns out that this kind of knowing about this constellation of different elements of the imaginal, it turns out that that's actually really helpful in practice. Sometimes, for instance, something arises -- that toilet or whatever, or just a daydream or something -- and it's an image, and it's there, but it's not particularly imaginal. It's not particularly rich and unfathomable, or inexhaustible, or mysterious, or all these other qualities. One of the things that's possible is there are elements, let's say, not immediately sensible in the imaginal experience, in the image experience, in that moment, that my noticing of them illuminates them. It draws them out.
For instance -- I didn't plan to talk about this one, but it's the one that's come into my head right now -- there's often love between. Love is one of these elements. It's characteristic of what we call the constellation of the imaginal -- love both ways. I somehow love that image. I might be a little suspicious of it. I might be scared of it in some way. I might be questioning, "What does this mean?" But there's somehow some love there. And there's somehow some love of the image for me. This image loves me. And again, a lot of this work is about expanding ranges. So very often, I say 'love,' and we tend to have quite a narrow idea of what that looks like, or what constitutes love. Sometimes with an image, the kind of love is not the kind of love that we're used to. So something is happening here also to open up our sense of what love can mean and can look like. But the noticing of the love -- I haven't noticed it at first, and so I just look, and I begin to see, "Oh, yeah, there's a kind of love here. I can feel that. Wow." It might be subtle at first. My noticing of it draws it out in the attention. It illuminates that star in the constellation of what 'imaginal' means. And the illumination of that quality -- I could have picked any one; I just talked about love -- the illumination of that quality starts to illuminate other things, so the whole thing starts to come alive, get illuminated.
[20:05] We're not just saying all this for the sake of clarity; we're saying all this is part of the art and the subtlety of being able to support something to open up in soulfulness and soulmaking. Sometimes, also, you can deliberately introduce one of these elements. I'll come back to that. It's not just [that] noticing it will amplify it and draw it out, illuminate it, but actually I'll see, "Oh, let me deliberately introduce one of these things," and that, again, potentially ignites the whole lattice.
There's not an order through these. We could list them. A few things about this whole concept of this constellation, or lattice, or whatever we want to call it: it's not an exhaustive list. If I go through it, you could say, "Well, what about such-and-such?" It's not intended to be exhaustive. It's just to begin to open something up. We could have sliced up the elements slightly differently. So in other words, some of them overlap with each other. Some of them kind of pull in different directions; they seem a bit in a kind of tension of some contradiction between each other. And there's not an order here, so it's not like, "First this one, and then number two ignites, and then number three ignites." It's all a web of mutually dependent potential illumination.
Some we're just going to list and mention, and some others we'll elaborate on, just because of time on this retreat. Again, if this sounds interesting to you ... you know, some of you either have already¸ or will, fall in love with this whole thing. You'll fall in love with this soulmaking business. And if that's the case, then chase it up. There's material already out there on the web, etc. Ask one of us. Talk with each other. Learn from each other. But again, going back to that proactive listening possibility. And some of you won't [fall in love with it], and that's fine: "It's not quite for me." But if you want more, then yeah, take that into your own hands a little bit. Ask. Seek out.
I don't know whether to go through the list now. [laughter] What, just the whole thing?
Yogi: We want to hear the list!
Rob: You want to hear the list? [laughs] All right. So I'll just name them, and some of them won't mean anything to you at all at this point, and that's fine. I'm probably going to go through it too fast to write it down at this point. Well, you can try. It depends how fast you write. We can have a race. [laughter]
So not in any order. This is the important thing. This is the thing about dependent arising. There's not cause and effect; there's mutual arising, and then mutual fading of things. So twenty-eight items. [laughter] It's not exhaustive as well. [laughter] Some of them kind of imply each other, imply another one, or kind of overlap and involve each other, and some of them seem like they're kind of opposite.
(1) The first one is the lattice or the constellation itself. In other words, the first thing about the imaginal constellation is that it is a constellation, and the recognition of that. The implication of that is that a thing is not an image by itself. Nothing is anything by itself, actually, in any perception or anything. So when we say 'imaginal,' we're not talking about just a kind of object. Here's some mythic-looking creature. What are they called? Griffins? What's a griffin? [laughter] It doesn't mean it's imaginal. It's in the relationship. It's in the whole constellation. So the first thing is an image is as much about my way of looking, my way of conceiving, my way of relating, as it is about the objective pole. So some of these elements are more subjective, and some are more objective. In other words, they seem to characterize more the subjective pole, and some seem to characterize more the object. The image is the object, and the subject is me as practitioner. Okay. But the first one is the very fact of the constellation itself.
(2) Second -- not in any particular order -- is the energy body: the involvement and the awareness and the sensitivity to the whole energy body. That's an example of a subjective one, yeah? It's here. I'll just list them now, and I'll come back to some of them.
(3) Third one I've actually also already mentioned: love and being loved. Love, the flow, the two-way flow of love, is inherent in the imaginal.
(4) Number four, eros, which includes love, but is more than love, as Catherine pointed out.
(5) Fifth is beauty -- something that touches us with a sense of beauty in this image. Again, it might not be beauty in the sense that I typically think of what is beautiful, but somehow the soul finds, in whatever this is, a sense of beauty.
(6) The sixth is trust. I'll come back to this this morning, hopefully, if I get some time. I'll come back to that one, trust. Trust is an element. And again, in a way, that will be a two-way thing. I somehow trust this image. I also trust the whole process, the whole process of what we're doing here. That's a level of trust. And also I trust this image. It may look violent. It may look pathologically disturbed. It may look really weird or crazy. But somehow trust is an element of it.
I'm talking now about trust, so I might as well [continue]. In fact, we talked about it earlier with this doubt thing, not to buy into it. When there is no trust, the imaginal will not open up, as it goes for all these. It won't open up fully. It will just stay as an image, a bit more flat. But if I can introduce some trust, just a grain of trust -- this thing is not what I'm used to, this thing looks like it's defilement, whatever it is -- if I can introduce that, then that trust, in the dependent arising of things, is like I put a grain of some kind of alchemical elixir in. Just some trust, and that does something, as all these do. It opens things out. Without the trust, it won't open out. Of course, human relationships are like that as well, aren't they? But basically, dealing with images, you're in relationship. One way of saying what we were saying this morning is the whole thing is relational. We're talking about relationship, in lots of different ways. Sometimes this is hard, the trust thing. It's not like, "Oh, this is really easy," for lots of different reasons. But I think I said in the Q&A last afternoon, you can sometimes just put a ring fence around it: "For five minutes, I'm going to play with some trust." I sprinkle that, a grain of trust, whatever it is, and for five minutes I ring-fence it, and afterwards, thank you very much, that was my little experiment in trust, and I can go back to holding at arm's length or being slightly suspicious. So don't push yourself. But you'll probably notice something: that in that five minutes, the trust has an effect. It has to have an effect, because the whole thing is dependent arising, relational. Okey-dokey.
(7) So seven is that an imaginal image, in our sense, is soulmaking. In other words, there is a sense of soulfulness. That's partly circular, implied in all this, all the beauty, and the love, and the depth, and all that. And soulmaking means that the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, what Catherine referred to the other night, that is active. It's kicking in. All these things are opening each other and creating more complexity and beauty and all that. And soulfulness is more than heartfulness. It includes heartfulness, but it's more than heartfulness.
(8) Number eight is a sense of dimensionality. This is not easy to put into words, or even sometimes pinpoint. But that dimensionality, it's as if this thing is not flat. It has the vague sense of other dimensions to it. These dimensions kind of move forward into divinity, or rather they recede into divinity. The divinity is implicit in this direction of dimensionality. [30:21]
(9) Connected with that is number nine: images have a sense of something beyond, beyond just the surface. There's a beyond that I don't quite understand yet. In fact, they have a sense of unfathomability to them -- I can't quite get to the bottom of them -- just as, actually, a human being does, just as you do. When I don't feel my own unfathomability, I don't feel very well. There's something not right. Maybe some people are kind of stuck in that. That will be difficult. When you think of, contemplate another human being, there's a sense of their unfathomability. An image is like that. It's unfathomable in lots of ways. Okay.
(10) Number ten is related to this: the boundaries are elastic. This is actually soft and elastic. This is really important, because oftentimes what happens with perceptions, or we relate to an image with a certain idea, like "it's this," and it just has kind of rigid edges. Again, like a human being, you think about your sense of self, or bring to mind someone you love: where are their edges? Their edges are soft; you can't quite find where they are. And they're elastic. They move. They expand. I'm talking about the edges of being. The edges of who a person is, what an image is, are soft and elastic. Also, the concepts that we use in this whole paradigm are soft and elastic. They're precise, but they're also soft and elastic and expand. That's very important.
(11) So number eleven is an image has a quality of eternality to it, of timelessness. Catherine used the phrase "it's always already happening." It's not so much a narrative, like I go on a journey, and first this, and then I slay the dragon, and then I rescue the princess, and then we get married and whatever. It's not so characteristic of the imaginal. Or that whole narrative is somehow always happening at the same time. So there's some or other sense of timelessness, eternality, to the imaginal.
(12) Number twelve -- and again, you can see how all these kind of implicate each other or invite each other -- is reverence. In the face of eternality, of timelessness, a natural (if we allow it, if we don't get in the way) response of the soul is reverence.
(13) Number thirteen -- I've already touched on it somewhere or other -- is a sense of grace. There's a sense in which, with all the art and finesse and subtlety of altering my responses, or changing my attitudes, or the emphasis of energy body, and the art of how I can be active in relation to an image -- there's also a very real fact or necessity to realize, that an image is a grace. It's somehow given to us inexplicably from beyond. We don't control this thing.
(14) Number fourteen -- again, you can see how connected these are -- is humility. This is really important. In relation to this image, somehow I'm not regarding it as just "it's mine," like a little puppet I can do what I want with, or I can control it, or it's part of me. It's somehow bigger, and I am in the presence of something beyond, bigger than me, or in some way I don't understand it, in some way divine, and therefore humility is, again, a very natural response, if it's not blocked in us for different reasons.
(15) Number fifteen is we're not reducing: "This image means this. This image is referring to this that happened in my childhood," or "This image means this for my guidance exactly and only." It doesn't only mean anything. You cannot fully capture an image, or the implications of it, or reduce it to something. It's not reducible to anything at all. It has this beyondness to it.
(16) Sixteen is autonomy. The image is not part of me. I don't own this image. It's like a person. Oftentimes it has a personhood, and they have their autonomy. Images do things or say things that will surprise you. They're not in your control. Now, in a way, they are in your control, and you're creating them, and it's a dependent arising, etc. So this is part of the art: I realize that, in a way, I grant an image its autonomy, or the idea of its autonomy, through my concept, my implicit concept at that time. So there's a dance here of yes, it's autonomous, and it's a dependent arising. There's a very sophisticated balance there in the art of it.
And with the autonomy ... I'm kind of explaining them all now, aren't I? [laughter] This is another part of the autonomy: you don't ever lose your autonomy. You don't lose your self-will. You're not going to be taken over and possessed by something so that you lose the ability to make heartful, rational, sensible choices. You have your autonomy. You need to assent. You need to participate. So there's autonomy on both sides.
(17) Seventeen, and I think Catherine already alluded to this, there's twoness. So it's not so much about dissolving in oneness. For soulmaking, we retain twoness. Eros wants to retain twoness. It wants to retain two. It needs that polarity between, maybe between me and the image. That twoness is necessary. [inaudible question in background] Yeah. Well, let's say: differentiations and particularities, they don't all dissolve. Maybe that's another way of saying it.
(18) Eighteen I will come back to. It's theatre, or what we might call the Middle Way of the imaginal -- neither real nor not real. It's really important. We get that sense. If someone asks you, "Would you say that's real?" Not quite. "Would you say it's not real?" Not quite. It's somewhere in between. I'll expand on that in a minute, hopefully.
(19) Number nineteen, and related, is we realize that this image is created by us, we might say, but also discovered. Discovered means it's already there. We create it and we discover. There's not really a word, in English at least, for getting that combination, that it's both created and discovered, or neither, or somewhere in between.
(20) Number twenty is what we call the concertina, which means that when I'm relating to an image, I'm not shrinking it down. There's always a sense, implicitly, of other possible images. They might not be at all clear, but vaguely, it's like, "This is just one image of many possibilities." So it's not like this is the reality; this is one. There's a sense of there's more theatre possible; this is just what's happening in the play right now, but it could be different.
(21) Twenty-one: the imaginal sense is slightly less fabricated. I'm not going to say anything about that right now.
(22) Twenty-two is that concept is involved, even if it's implicit. A logos, some kind of idea, as Catherine was saying, some idea of what my suffering is, or something about suffering, some idea of anything at all. Ideas are actually implicit or explicit in the imaginal sense. We're not talking about a non-conceptual experience at all.
(23) Number twenty-three is fullness of intention, which I've mentioned already, and I'll come back to shortly. That's a very beautiful one, fullness of intention.
(24) And twenty-four is duty. That's, again, quite complicated. We'll come back to it. There's some sense of "I have a duty to this. I have a duty to this image." It's often not so literal, okay? So it gets refracted into our life and into the way we live, or some attitude or something, what this duty is, or what's involved in that.
(25) Twenty five is an image is meaningful, which means it's full of meanings, and full of meanings that we can't even quite know what they are. So yes, they might have specific meanings: I can relate this to my ... I mean, clearly that whole king thing that I shared the other day, it's clearly very related to my situation, etc. But there's more. There's meaningfulness, which is different than meaning, "It means this," or even "It means these three things," whatever it is. It's pregnant with a kind of infinity of meaning.
(26) The twenty-sixth is -- I'll just mention this now without even explaining -- there's a kind of infinite echoing or mirroring between your life and an imaginal image. They echo each other infinitely. They mirror each other infinitely.
(27) Twenty-seven is that implicit in images are values -- virtues or ethical, moral values. So it's part of the meaningfulness, what's meaningful. Wrapped up in an image is something of a value that we find noble or beautiful, etc., or important in life.
(28) And the twenty-eighth is participation. There's a sense of participating in something. We may fill that out. That's quite a complex one, quite a rich, profound one. We're participating in something much bigger than us.
[inaudible question in background] So just now, I put that as sort of implicit in the dimensionality. Again, we could slice all this up. We could come up with a list of forty or ten, you know. But sacredness, absolutely implicit; divinity, holiness, something like that. And again, that has a very broad range of meaning, really broad. Sometimes we're used to thinking of divinity this way or that way, yeah?
[43:54] All right. Well, that was the list. [laughs] Let's just reorganize here. Let's just say a few more things. I have a few more minutes. I want to expand [on] one of them I talked about, number eighteen, the Middle Way of the imaginal. When I first sort of thought about this phrase, there's a sense of theatre. And like theatre, if you see really good theatre -- I have friends who are very involved in theatre, and I would go. Some theatres are really small. You're sitting right there with the actors. And it's really intimate, like you feel kind of naked there. You know it's not real, but like all really good art, its power is potentially immense. So there's something about this with image. It's not real, but it's not not real. It's got this artistic or poetic truth to it, and all the power that comes potentially with poetic or artistic truth.
But this is a tricky one, this 'neither real nor not real' element. I'm really not going to get into this now. Ontology is the fancy word for kind of thinking about what is real and what isn't real. So the ontology here, I think, is really interesting, and I would like to view it more as an open-ended exploration and questioning of possible conceptions of reality and not reality, and that fine distinction kind of right there in the middle or whatever, or emptiness and all this, which also very much addresses the question of ontology. So it's complex. It's infinitely rich. Humanity will never figure it out as a final answer. There's a whole history of it. It will continue as long as humanity is around, this whole philosophical endeavour. And it's variable. It's part of what can be variable in what we bring to the imaginal, my whole concept of the reality status of things.
What I would like to say is there's something about this paradigm that we're trying to unfold and open up that, if we don't start with this imaginal Middle Way (neither real nor not real) as much as we can, just holding that in mind even if we can't quite get a sense of it, it's as if the whole thing gets off on the wrong foot a little bit. If we can start there, it will be that the whole thing starts to, or can, draw in or expand the range of our notion of reality, and bring in things that we would have considered not real. It can expand the range there. But there's something about, I think, starting with this Middle Way intention, as much as is possible. I know this is a really difficult one for people. But just as much as you can, and then let things unfold from there. If I start with some reality assumptions, it probably won't get so loosened, the whole thing. And again, actually, the range of experience and beauty and soulfulness that will open up will be less.
Now, to complicate things even further, I want to expand what that means, what we mean by the Middle Way of the imaginal. 'Middle Way' relates to the Kaccāyana Sutta that Catherine [talked about]. So you've heard this Middle Way. Usually in Dharma, 'Middle Way' is the Middle Way between asceticism and sensual indulgence, right? There's one instance in the Pali Canon where it gets used in a different way, which Catherine talked about. In the Kaccāyana Sutta, the Middle Way is the Middle Way between reifying -- something exists, anything exists -- and saying it doesn't exist. The Middle Way is neither. It's referring to emptiness.
About a half of the whole Mahāyāna tradition bases itself on those two lines of interaction in the Pali Canon, the Buddha with Kaccāyana. The whole elaboration, the beauty, and the richness, and depth, and complexity, and finickityness of their investigation of emptiness bases itself on those two lines. So that's the second meaning that the Buddha uses for this Middle Way. Now we've got a third one, which is this imaginal, neither real nor not real, which now I'd like to expand even further. So there's this 'neither real nor not real,' this kind of theatre quality, with all the power that that has as well. I'd like to add two things, which, in a way, we've already implicitly talked about, implicit in the Middle Way. They're not so much static points, as something about balances of range.
One is the balance of range of the energy body sense of density or insubstantiality. In other words, sometimes a person only ever has a very sort of ethereal sense of the energy body. Perhaps in the Middle Way of the imaginal, it's referring to just, in the whole context of practice, a person has the whole range. Sometimes it's dense and solid, and sometimes it's very ethereal. One is free to move in that whole range.
Third aspect. So you've got neither real nor not real. You've got this possible balance and range of the energy body. And you've got dukkha -- meaning, again, it's not so much a static point, as am I open to a range of the imaginal? Some just luminously glorious and free, and some -- as some of the examples both Catherine and I have given -- actually involve dukkha, pathology. The Lame Man is a divinity with a pathology. Hillman really emphasizes, says all images have to have pathologies. I would disagree with that. Can we just open up the range? So it's not always triumphant or radiant or glorious. Sometimes there are images that do involve dukkha, but the dukkha has a divinity and a beauty.
So, you know, I've shared many, and Catherine as well, images -- even images that you've maybe heard in other talks, other retreats. The lonely wanderer, or the solider, images of old, lonely men, or whatever it is -- plenty of examples where the dukkha is part of the image. I could give more, but I'm conscious of time. Or something might appear that's very angelic. I shared several times now when I was upstairs writing a book on emptiness, and for different reasons that was difficult. And then at some point, these angels came, and they kissed my heart, and ministered to me, and loved me for doing that. So angelic, and luminous, and light, and all that. But it was in relationship with the dukkha. It wasn't like, "Hah! Yippee! That's all fine now," and it dissolves everything. The dukkha remains part of the image, and part of actually the beauty of it, and the humanity of it, and the divinity of it.
Having said all that about range, and just checking: what's my tendency here? Is it always ethereal, and always without any dukkha in it, or is it always dukkha and kind of solid? Just checking the range. And having said all that, there are different, individual soul-styles. Some people, their energy body experience does tend to be just more commonly more ethereal, or not. Some people have a kind of -- I use the word 'darkness' -- to them, which I have. It's like, yes, there tends to be images that involve more pathology or dukkha, etc. So there's a kind of individual soul-style thing that we have to respect and take into account, rather than everyone needs to be perfectly balanced around some midpoint in that range. It's also the case, of course, that the images that arise in this infinite echoing, they reflect my life. So when I was talking about writing the book or whatever, of course some of the images reflected my life. If that's going through something challenging or difficult, that will be involved in the image.
[53:17] Okay. So that's expanding the idea of the Middle Way of the imaginal. One other I want to pick out for now is this fullness of intention. I threw some things out about this already. A lot of people come to Dharma for healing, in a quite broad sense of the word: psychological healing, healing of the past, etc., healing of dukkha. Even the intention for healing, it may be something less than the fullness of intention. Most people come to the Dharma for some kind of healing, and we're saying even that is not quite the full reach of possibility here for the intention. A fullness of intention means including that, but also for soulmaking, the intention for soul, the intention for serving soul -- and we might not even fully understand what that means. So this is a tricky one. It's not actually very, perhaps, common to really fill that out, but I'm mentioning it as an important possibility.
Going back to what I said earlier, there are times in life when we need to seek guidance or listen for guidance, for practical guidance about choices or difficulties or whatever. And sometimes, as I said, an image will give guidance: "Stay with what you're doing. You're doing good. This is good. Invest in that," or "Do this," or whatever. Sometimes that happens in different ways. But more often, I think, is it possible for the predominant intention to be for soulmaking, and not for guidance? And the fullness, the open-endedness, the sacredness, the partly incomprehensible nature of soulmaking, of eros, of beauty. We can never fully understand beauty either. Human beings will never get to the bottom of beauty, or eros, or a lot of these things. They're fathomless. And somehow my assent and opening and intention for the fathomlessness of all that, this is more full as an intention. This was, I think, Lauren's question in the Q&A. Sometimes -- and I've mentioned it this morning as well -- sometimes you can just play with a kind of inversion of concept: "This image is bigger than me. It's greater than me. I am derivative of this image." Turn everything upside down.
Just to wrap up. You can hear -- I think it's obvious -- there's a kind of maturing that's possible over time with all this, with understanding what on earth is this all about, understanding in practice. It's definitely available, the possibility of maturing in understanding and in practice, understanding in relation to these elements and practising with these different elements. And that takes time. It takes time. That's really okay. Just to realize that. When I first started exploring some of this stuff, and trying to work with it in practice, and figure out how to do that, if I think back on some of my old notebooks, the images there were much more narrative and much more complex -- casts of thousands, and characters, and all kinds of stuff going on. It seems now there's something kind of distilled in it. With an image, sometimes there's not a lot happening, but it has this eternal quality, and something kind of condensed in it. But my sensitivity is much greater, and my kind of intuitive sense of attunement and skill, etc.
Or when we introduced the movement yesterday, there's a real possibility of gradual maturing and growing in the possibilities of movement in relation to soul. Or the logos that Catherine was talking about, the conceptual framework. Yeah, it takes time. Even just conceptually, what we're talking about is sophisticated. It's not like a simple thing, you know? That takes time. There are lots of shades to it. And at some point, as Catherine was sharing, it's like something turns on, and there's eros for logos. We get excited about it. It happened on the other retreat. Someone was listening to an interaction in the Q&A, and just right then, something happened in her relationship with concept. It became illuminated, and now there's added eros, and there's soul in concept now for her. So all this takes time. This business about the Middle Way, and not reifying, and the fullness of intention -- these things are full and rich and subtle, and they take time to grow and grow into. So just know that.
Just to say, teaching, for me, is always contextual and always responsive, especially if I'm one to one. I find teaching groups kind of an impossibility, to be honest. You're all so different, and have different inclinations, and histories, and all the rest of it. If I'm one on one with a person, it's different. I might say to someone, in regard to the 'neither real nor not real' thing, "You're not really a dragon." [laughter] "Do you realize that?" [laughter] Or, the same person at a different time, or another person, "Do you realize you're more really a dragon? You're more really that dragon, with that dragon's mission, than you are a human being, in the way that you usually think of that and your story and all that." So for me, this is part of the dance of the Middle Way.
What would be wonderful, and what I would like to encourage and invite you to, is can you begin to explore, and begin to feel, to notice, to live the effects of subtle shifts of emphasis, or subtle shifts of view or the conceptual framework? So for example, what happens if I can shift with that real/not real thing? Just micro-shifts, and actually see, "Wow, that's quite a different texture and flavour and sense of experience that opens up." You have to feel this, notice it, live it, be impacted on it. We could talk all day long about real/not real and all that, but there's something, if you're attracted to it and begin to play with this, you will see, "Wow, it really does make a difference in the dependent arising of things." Or this fullness of intention thing. What happens when that opens up to another fullness? "Oh, that also changes the whole image." All this is dependent arising.
So experiment. Play. Find out. Know for yourself. Know it. You know it in the body. You know it in the kind of beauty and richness of the experience. Oftentimes, without even really adopting a conscious position, we take one position, and we're kind of attached to it, and there isn't this kind of flexibility or skill or willingness to kind of experiment and see what's different. I just decide -- it's not even conscious usually -- "This is how I look at things. This is how I look at this," and we don't realize, but actually it's a kind of attachment to one view or one emphasis.
With all that, it's really okay wherever any of us are with all this. It's a journey. We're journeying in this most wondrous, rich, truly amazing landscape. And it's okay wherever we are in that journey. Gradually we can explore that territory. It can become more full, and we can understand, make it our own. Yeah? Okay.
