Wisdom and Desire

There is nothing more significant, more powerful, more central in the determination of our being, our life, our experience, than how we are with desire. How we are with desire, our relationship to it, our ideas about it, our logos about it, our skill or lack/lacks thereof, shape our self. They make us. They shape us this way or that. How we are, what we do, how we see, the very sense of our being. They shape our life. That relationship shapes our life and shapes our world, opening it or closing it, colouring it this way or that.

Desire is a maker of worlds. Whenever there is perception, whenever there is experience, there's actually desire. We can't get away from this forever. We're always making something, because there's always desire. What, though, are we going to make? What can we make? What freedom do we have to make this or that? So this whole question of desire, and what does it mean to open this up as a question, as an exploration, and bring wisdom in relationship to desire? Sometimes we're a bit too simple with this. We say desire is something just to let go of, to get rid of, the quieting of desire, and that's what the path is about. Can I do anything*,* anything without desire? Anything at all? The simplest -- can I go to the toilet without desire? Can I practise the path? Can I live my life and have a full life? Can I love without desire? Certainly can I be in an intimate, sexual relationship without desire? Can I work well without desire? Is there art, is there creativity without desire?

On every level of our being, from the most complex and involved to the most subtle, I cannot get away from this, and I cannot get away from what it's asking of me. I can try to bring a simplifying answer to it, and maybe that reassures something in my heart and my mind, but if I'm awake, I very soon bump into the rub that that simple answer or conceptual structure doesn't actually fit my life. It doesn't actually work with the range and the power and the subtlety that we need.

So what is your relationship with desire? That's a big question. What are your ideas about desire? Maybe some of them will be conscious. Some of them will be unconscious. And sometimes in Buddhadharma, we can have a sense, "Desire is not good. The path is to end desire somehow. And desire always goes with vedanā, so desire is always kind of chasing pleasant or trying to get rid of unpleasant." But is that really, is that the limit of what desire is? That it's something in relationship to the tonality of pleasant and unpleasant, and either chasing the pleasant or -- ? Certainly sometimes it is. Does that really capture the fullness of the human psyche's relationship and motivations of desire?

Is the only desire that's kind of acceptable a desire for a decrease in suffering? How are we thinking about desire? How are we delineating desires? We've got to have some desire, because you wouldn't book a retreat, wouldn't come. Maybe the only desire that's good is the desire to end desire, or the desire to decrease suffering. So we have some discernment about desire, but we put it into two camps, and everything else is "it would be better if I didn't have it, but somehow I do have it, and I kind of arrange my life with it."

Do we live like that? Do we live, really, really, if I look at my life, do I live in a way that follows this discrimination of "the only good desire is a desire to decrease my suffering or the suffering in the world"? I mean, there is that desire, and that might have a lot of power. But is that really, are we really living like that? I'm just talking about honest and discerning self-reflection now. So I might have an ideational structure. I might have got it from Dharma teachings or somewhere else. Is that really what's going on? Is that really what's happening in my life? Is there some kind of cognitive dissonance here? Do we need a bigger and perhaps more complex psychology around this thing called desire, this force called desire?

And what are the asks? What are the demands? We are born with this force called 'desire' operating in our life. What is being asked of us here? Is it just the quietening of that? Is it just to put everything else aside as much as we can, and just have the desire for the decrease of suffering? Can we begin to discern different kinds of desire, and different kinds of relationship with desire, and different kinds of ideas about desire? I'll get back to this soon, but we talk about craving and eros, and discerning between them. And can we discern between those two? And can we guide, if we're stuck in craving, and the contraction of that, and the pain of that, and the tightness of that, is it possible to allow that to open up, to skilfully guide it so it becomes eros -- something much more beautiful, fruitful, open-ended, not contracted, fecund in the best possible way? Do we have that skill?

So there are questions of discernment here, and questions of skill I want to come back to. But let's just pause on the discernment thing. Most of you here, if you come to sort of more than, I don't know, three retreats in your life, you probably love something about all this path and practice and all that. What is it that you love, and what is it that you want? And is it really, again, is it really just to suffer less? In a way, it's a little ironic, or paradoxical, or perhaps not fully honest that we have a terminology that talks always, with all the brilliance, through the Four Noble Truths, about reducing suffering. My contention is we have all kinds of things going on that we desire, and what we really love, and why we show up here, and are willing to sit through all the difficulties, and walk through all the difficulties, etc. Is it just because we want to reduce suffering?

There are plenty of people who relate to meditation like that, but it's usually only -- maybe they go to an evening course and learn a few techniques to suffer less. That's great, and that's really important. And learning how to suffer less is really important. What is it that you're really wanting though? I mean, it includes that, but what else? What draws you here? Not just to this retreat. Is it not that you are in love with a kind of beauty about all this? There's something about sitting this way, and doing what you do, that is beautiful to you, that you are in love with some mystery, some perfume of mystery that comes with all of this. And that, in itself, is not really about reducing suffering. Is it not that you love love, and you love the goodness of heart, and the beautiful qualities of heart?

It's not just a functional relationship. When we're in love with practice, it's not just a functional relationship: "I come so that I can learn some things to reduce suffering." Yes, but more. How many people have told me over the years, "Boy, when I heard the Heart Sūtra for the first time, and I didn't know what the hell it was talking about, but something, it's like, 'I want that.'" There's something ignited in the heart. Or talk about emptiness: "I don't quite understand." What's attracting you there? Is it just that, "Oh, that sounds like a very, very good idea that I could reduce my suffering by understanding that." Good, good. Okay. That's not what happens. Something else comes into flame. And I would contend, actually, the way I think about emptiness, you can understand at lots of different levels. The beginning levels of emptiness, or the, let's say, less profound levels, are very much about different ways of seeing that reduce suffering. As it gets deeper, it becomes much more about mystery, and, I would say, sacredness -- the kind of beauty and mystical sense that opens up in the deep reaches of exploration of emptiness. Yes, that has an effect on suffering, but that's almost not what's driving a person to practise at that level, and to be drawn at that level. And yet, somehow we don't quite kind of acknowledge that, or recognize that fully, and give it its due and its place. We just keep talking about reducing suffering.

[12:02] And is it not the case that when you show up here, and when you practise diligently, and you devote yourself to practice over years, that you have, as I mentioned last night in the Q & A, there is a fantasy, or there are multiple fantasies, woven together for you, of practice, of path, of yourself as practitioner with all that devotion, of the tradition that you are walking in the stream of and supported and nourished and inspired by, of practice itself, of awakening? All this has become imaginal for you to some degree. The Buddha, the teachers, the lineage of teachers. And all that is beautiful, and all that is, to some degree at least, erotic for you. There's image already there.

And yet, somehow we don't really kind of say, "Hey." [laughs] "Maybe this is significant." We don't have words for it, and we don't point it out. We just keep talking about reducing suffering. So there are differentiations. We'll come back to this. And then there's that differentiation, also, what goes with it is the asks. What are the skills and arts that I can develop, that I can open up, in relation to this whole complex, really mystery of desire? So can you let go? Have you practised that? This thing that I'm obsessed about, this papañca, this person that I want that maybe doesn't want me or whatever it is. Can you let go? We talk a lot about that in Buddhadharma, right? Let it go, drop it. How's your skill at doing that? You don't have to answer. [laughs] Can you let go of those big "aaaahhh," you know? Do you have enough practice at that? That's one of the foundational skills of all this soulmaking. Like, if you can't do that, mm; maybe some work at developing that. For a lot of people, that maybe needs to come first. I don't know.

And then, what about letting go at a much more subtle level? So yes, there's the big papañca obsession of this thing that I want, this person that I want or whatever. And then there's the whole possibility of letting go in meditation at more and more subtle levels -- things that you wouldn't even consider are things to let go of, or you wouldn't even consider them as craving. That whole, the beauty of that movement into more and more subtle, subtle letting go, and what that opens up. And yes, freedom from suffering, but much, much more -- the beauty and the mystery, as I alluded to before, that opens up in relation to emptiness and fabrication and the Unfabricated.

So how's your journey with that, with the subtlety, with letting go at more and more subtle levels? You might be listening -- please, "Oh, that's so much. I'm just a ..." Well, how about seeing it as, you know what, there are treasures everywhere, or you are in the middle of the most glorious banquet buffet, and you say, "Oh, it's terrible." [laughter] "There's all this food I've got to eat!" [laughter] And the person says, "It'll be there. This banquet will keep getting replenished longer than you live." And you say, "Oh, that's just terrible!" [laughter] It's beautiful! I will never get to explore all the possibilities there are, partly because of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic opening up more and more. And that's wonderful. I can relate to it as "ugh ..."

So there's that journey. There's letting go of gross stuff. There's letting go, this exploration of more and more subtle levels of meditative exploration of exquisite beauty and profundity that opens up. Then there's the ask: do you dare to follow the desire for what you love? Even if it brings dukkha? Do you dare? And this, again, has something to do with shaping our life. What happens to me and my life and my person if I don't, if I close that down and I say, "That's dukkha. I might start judging myself if I don't get it. Or I'll probably get hurt"? What happens to me, and my personhood, and my being, and my life?

Think about the Buddha's journey, and that kind of mythical story. Prepared to put up with a lot of suffering. And again, it's spoken of and conceived as what he wanted was the end of suffering. Or think of an artist. We were talking yesterday in the Q & A. The artist's journey, and the dedication and the frustration of that. Do you dare to follow the desire of what you love? And there can be dukkha in that. Actually, there will be dukkha in that. What's it about?

And so, as I said, there's a whole range of skills here, and we don't have time, certainly not now, to talk about all this. We've talked a lot about this. We did Of Hermits and Lovers: The Alchemy of Desire. We did a whole retreat just mainly focused on desire and different aspects of it. So that's there on the web. There's a whole other retreat, a long series of talks, Eros Unfettered. There's lots of subtlety to all this, lots and lots of possible skills there. One of the practices we did that a lot of people found -- actually, to everyone's pleasant surprise -- really quite easily accessible, I call it the OCD practice, but that's ... [laughter] That's actually short for Opening [to] the Current of Desire. [laughter] I'm not even going to explain it now. But this is something not to do with eros as we're talking about it, not even to do with the imaginal so much. It's to do with the energy of desire, and the way that we can have a different, skilful meditative relationship with that that opens it up in a completely different way, and brings fruits that we wouldn't even have imagined would have come from relating to a desire. There are all kinds of possibilities. And that material is out there; we don't have time to discuss it now.

But this question in relation to the imaginal. So we have this thing that we're calling eros. It's a kind of desire. And we contrast it with something like craving. And as I said, can I recognize the difference? Can I discern the difference, when it's craving and when it's eros? And further, is it possible for me to learn how to open up craving -- the pain, and the contraction, and the constriction, and kind of block of that? Can I actually open that up so it flowers into eros, with all the beauty that that brings? That's a skill. How do I learn that? I learn that by making mistakes, as we were saying with Chris's question last night. I have to fall down with this. I have to get burnt. How else am I going to know what the difference is between craving and eros until I actually get burnt? It's like, "Oh, that's what happens. Ouch." It's okay. It's part of the learning. We're playing with fire. If you want to play with all this, you're playing with fire, and you'll get burnt. It's okay. You'll survive.

There's a tremendous amount of skill possible in all this, and so much depends on it. Going back to the beginning, so much depends on our relationship with desire, and our capacities with desire, and our ideas about desire. And this particular kind of fork between craving and eros, so much depends on that in terms of worlds that are born, selves that are born, experience that opens up. We can learn a lot. We can master a lot in terms of that art. But we will never be the master of eros completely. It's bigger than us, like all the gods. Bigger than us. So there's a kind of humility with that. So yes, there's some mastery, and there's some artistry and subtlety, and that's really, really important. And there's a kind of humility in relation to it. All these things -- eros, emotion -- they're bigger than we are. And, you know, thank heavens that's the case. Would you really want to master all the mysteries? Would they be mysteries if you were the master of the mysteries? Don't we always want something bigger, something we can never get our heads fully around?

So Eamonn and I were talking last night, and he made me laugh. I don't know if you made the group laugh when you mentioned it in the group. But anyway, he said, "Eros, psyche, logos, no one talks like that!" [laughter] And it's true. It's absolutely true. "Why all this Greek stuff?" [laughter] It's true, you know. "What the hell are you guys ..." [laughter] But actually, exactly -- no one talks like that, or rather, no one thinks like that. And again, we have a poverty of differentiation, a poverty of discernment, so that when we don't discern something called eros, separate from craving or just other kinds of desire, then we don't have the language and conceptual framework to guide and support this endless and amazing opening, because I keep putting it back into the same box: "It's just desire. I like it. I want it." It won't open the avenues.

So, yeah. I don't know why the Greek; I have no idea, but ... [laughs] But the differentiation is part of the world-birthing. It's part of what supports that. And again, we're back to logos and all that. So yeah, no one talks like that, but that's part of the problem, that we don't have the language. And as I said, look, it's already here. In the Dharma, we have this kind of very simplistic way of talking about desire, and letting it go, and what the path is about. And just look, just take some honest self-reflection as I talked about before. Is that really what's going on? And is there not already eros and already the imaginal there? And yet, we don't have the language. So that's why. That's why the language. And that language will help to support, and make sense, and open up these worlds.

So we want differentiations, discernments, subtle nuances of recognition, and ideas (and therefore, words, to communicate with each other) that support soulmaking. We don't have that in the culture, in the wider culture, and even in the Dharma culture. You could say, "That's fine. I'm not really interested in soulmaking. That's fine." But there's a cost.

So again, we think about desire, and we think it's either -- in this kind of simplistic view -- desire is either just ego, or just chasing the pleasant, on one hand, and that's unskilful, and we try and get rid of that, or it's skilful, it's kusala, which would be like desire for mettā, and desire to end suffering, and that's it. There's this kind of bifurcation that way. And then with the skilful desire, we can talk about, "Hey, don't overdo it. Don't push too hard." And that's great, actually, that bifurcation, that differentiation. But do we not need some more?

[26:06] So if I make just that bifurcation, those are the choices that are presented to me in my life: either I'm just saying, "Yeah, I can't really hack the whole path. Otherwise I'd be a monk or a nun. So really I'm kind of making a pact with or just kind of putting up with the fact, the recognition, yeah, I have some ego, and I kind of laugh at it: haha, self does this silly stuff. And yeah, you know, it would be great if I wasn't so into the senses and sense pleasure, but, pfff, you know." That conceptual structure, oversimplistic conceptual structure, gives me choices that it doesn't even make sense of my life.

So, eros. Catherine already defined it. Like I think I did with the energy body, maybe we can make a kind of narrower definition and a wider, fuller definition. Catherine already gave the narrow definition. Desire is a big, complex thing, and one delineation we make is of this kind of desire that we're going to call eros. And then we make a further delineation between what we might say is just the basic, narrow definition of eros, and then we'll open that up. The basic, narrow definition of eros, the small definition, if you like -- Catherine already said it: any desire or wanting for more contact, connection, intimacy, opening to, and opening and touching something, the beloved, the erotic other. Any wanting more of that. Yeah? So that's it. It's a very kind of, "All right." Very sort of basic definition.

The thing that's, again, so significant, is what happens to that wanting more. So this arises for us as human beings. We want more contact, more intimacy, more touching, more opening. What happens? If I'm stuck in a kind of view and sense of this beloved, this thing that I desire and want more contact with, that that's just what it is -- this real self desires more contact with that real thing which is ... that's what it is; it's kind of flat, let's say, and defined in a certain way, and it's got a box around it. This real self wants that real thing, in a real world, in real time. I want more of it. And I'm stuck in that idea. I don't think "this real world and real time"; I just assume it, because that's the default assumption. And let's say that conceptual idea, conscious or unconscious (usually unconscious), doesn't budge. I want more. Then I have to get that. Either I have to chop it off, chop off the desire, take a cold shower, whatever it is, or I want more, and then I put pressure on that person or thing, or I don't care what the effects are of me getting more. Or I can get as much as I want of that thing, but then I'll want more of something that's similar to it, so I go fly on a holiday there, and I don't care what it does to the earth. I want more, more and more. I'm stuck in the flatness. It can go nowhere but horizontally to the more. The more is only horizontal.

If I'm not stuck -- I might start stuck in that ideation, but if there's an intelligence, if the imaginal opens up, then this eros wanting more starts to find more by, if you like, creating and discovering more in the beloved. So it's not just this, it's not just ... If the eros is allowed to include the imaginal sense, okay, then this wanting more, the eros starts to kind of create and discover more in what I love. It becomes richer. I perceive more there. I perceive more faces. There are more dimensions. You become, if it's you, you become alive to me with multiple images and depths and beauties. What a difference this makes! Then I'm getting the 'more' because more is there for me: more delight, more wonder, more mystery, more faces, more complexity, more beauty. I get the 'more.' Then eros wants even more, and that's where, if it's not blocked, the sense of the beloved other grows even more -- more faces, more dimensions, more mystery, all that.

If it is blocked, I need to go horizontally. If it's not blocked, it just opens up, the sense of things. This is such a crucial pivot. If I have an idea about, let's say, imagination, "That's just nonsense. I might have an image of Eamonn, but that's not reality. Eamonn's like that," and that's it, then the imaginal might arise from the power of my eros, but my logos doesn't accept the imaginal perception. Then I'm back to the prison, and it's got to go somewhere else, horizontally. When this repeated thing happens, the beauties upon beauties and mysteries open up, gradually. It's not all at once necessarily. But then, with this kind of repeated opening up of my sense of the beloved, other things start to happen. And one of the things that start to happen is I go so much in and out of these wondrous, and beautiful, and touching, and very different-than-conventional perceptions of, let's say, Eamonn, or whatever the object is, that going in and out, and in and out, something starts to "mm," in my thinking about reality and what a person is. Not just who Eamonn is, but what a human being is. And in that, who am I? And what is my perception? And what is this eros? And the world will look different. I go in and out, in and out enough, with enough striking of the soul -- my soul is touched -- and at some point in this, the logos, the idea of what on earth the world, reality, the cosmos, self, humanity is, starts to open. So the logos -- not just the eros grows, not just the psyche in terms of the image-sense grows, but the idea grows as well. Then the idea being richer, the sense of things is richer, and eros gets even more inflamed, and the whole thing can just ...

So that's what we call the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, and it's potentially endless. Just endlessly fertile, endlessly creating and discovering more beauty and more wonder. So as it's allowed to do that, let's say the object, again, if it's Eamonn, more of these elements of the lattice, more and more of these elements of the constellation, get illuminated. The experience itself gets more fully imaginal. So it ignites those different elements that we were talking about, but it also needs those to support the whole process. It needs a sense of beauty. It needs an ideational structure, etc.

So we need sensitivities, permissions, understandings, ideational structures, openness of perception, awarenesses, differentiations. We need all that to support this not being trapped in this "real self desires a real thing, in a real world, in real time," and all the havoc that that creates. And in a globalized world, with the technological power we have these days, and the spread of consumerism, consumerist culture, and a flat metaphysics that doesn't allow this kind of opening and depth, that is creating enormous havoc. People are taught that they can have their desires, they're given that opportunity and economic availability, and there's no metaphysics or conceptual structure that supports anything but the kind of rampant, destructive consequences of all that, because it's flat, and because it can only go to "more, more, more, more, more" in a very real way. You can see that personally, what happens in a relationship with a person, and you can see it globally. So I don't know that they need to be Greek, but I think ... [laughter] I think we somehow need these concepts. Or I would say that.

Practice-wise, everything feeds everything else here. Again, everything is a dependent arising. Here I am. Let's say in my meditation or in my life, I keep getting images of someone I really like, and I want that person. There's eros there, and they come to me in images. Or with any imaginal figure or whatever, or any object in the world where there is eros in the small sense. At that point, eros in the small sense, just this desire for more, it can go both ways. That's the thing. It could become craving if it's stuck in different ways, or it can open up in this bigger sense, and then ignite the whole imaginal constellation more and more, etc.

So what helps it? As I said, I'm never going to completely master this; it's too much of a mystery. But how can I help it move towards eros rather than collapse into craving, open into eros rather than collapse into craving? One thing is all these nodes. Everything feeds each other, all these elements. Let's say either it's a person or an object or a thing in my imagination, person or object in my imagination: the more fully I bring my whole energy body into relationship with that thing, the more it supports the craving opening up to eros rather than staying in craving. That's really good news. There are many, many things we can do. What happens when there's craving, generally speaking, is there's contraction. There's contraction of the mind around the object, there's contraction of the self-sense, there's contraction in the energy body. Not so with eros as it opens up in the full sense. So one thing we can do, because everything is mutually dependent, we can open up the energy body more. The whole body in relationship to this image or whatever it is. What does that mean? The whole energy. As Catherine was saying, it's like I'm knowing this object. I'm in relationship with my whole body, my whole energy body. And that kind of supports the opening up of eros rather than the collapse into craving. Now, this can happen many times, and you will fall off the bicycle. You will get burnt. But hey, there are ways of kind of reopening it.

That's one. We could probably list loads, but another is this fullness of intention. "I want you. I want us to be in relationship. I want to have a baby with you. I want to whatever-it-is. I want that thing. I want to go on holiday there. I want this. I want that. I want it to happen." And yes, very often, that want can become for a real self, in a real world, etc. Maybe that intention is there; there's a kind of small intention. But can I open up to this fullness of intention? When I want you, or I want anything, this or that to happen in a relationship, what is it that I most deeply want? And what if that could be, actually, what I want is the soulmaking? It seems to be you, but what I most deeply desire is the soulmaking and the sacredness and the endless opening of that. It's not that this is necessarily easy. But what happens if I can open up the intention? What do I really want?

Sometimes people say, "Okay, it's not that thing or that person, but what I want is the aliveness or the juiciness that happens in their presence." Great. But I would say don't even stop there. You actually probably want something even wider and deeper than that. You want the fullness of soulmaking. And that can be an intention.

This Middle Way of the imaginal. Again, real self wants a real thing, in real time, real world. Can I see that this that I'm wanting, or this that I have an image of happening, and then think, "I would really like that to happen," is already happening? It's already happening. We are already making love in the imaginal realm, if that's what I want. It's already always happening. That's actually to do with the eternality; sorry, I skipped that. But that does something. I don't need to make this happen; it's already happening. It's a part of the imaginal sensibility. I recognize something, and that does something different to the nature of my desire. It opens up craving to eros. It helps to do that.

The one I meant to say was this 'neither real nor not real,' and can I find ways of playing with that, and again, actually get the sense. It might come from emptiness. It might come from just, again, with these elements, we notice things. So it's almost like you notice the fact that an image is neither real nor not real. It's not that you have to make it that. It's like, if you just pay attention, you see, "Ah, oh, yeah." Or when it's reified, you just remind yourself of that possibility, and then it has that quality of feeling neither real nor not real, and that does something to how much we need to concretize this desire.

I mentioned last night in the Q & A, there are lots of expansions potentially happening here -- the expansion of all the elements in what we're calling the lattice or the constellation, to more or less degrees; the expansion of eros, psyche, and logos; and the expansion of the imaginal sense from just the object, the expansion to self, other, and world. So again, if it's just the object and not the self that's imaginal, a real self but imaginal object, that also causes problems, causes contraction. So is it possible to actually just check: where has the imaginal sense gone and the eros gone? And actually, is it possible to just allow it to include self and world? That, you know, more space, takes the pressure off, allows more fullness, more beauty, stops the concretized "I want this. I need to get it."

Another one: grace. Just recognizing the grace in the sense of the erotic-imaginal starts to open the hardness of the craving. It's hard to feel grace and feel contracted in craving for something. The idea, again: if I'm stuck with a certain idea of "desire is bad," then there's going to be all this dissonance, and I sort of want it, and it's bad, and I don't have any kind of idea or conceptual framework about what is possible here with this desire. Maybe there's self-judgment as well: "Ah, I shouldn't be having this." Mess, contraction, knot. So what's the logos that's operating? Can I check that and see if it can open out in some way?

The sense of eternality, that's huge. I mentioned that just now. Always already happening. Humility and reverence. It's hard. Humility is interesting. We may or may not get to this. But what does that mean? For most of us, it's kind of a charged word, or we have a kind of small understanding of what it might mean. But if that starts to fill out -- so there's another expansion; each of these ideas, each of these elements, can also start growing in our soul. What is that? What is humility? What does it feel like? What does it look like? I might have a small idea of that. As soulmaking gets hold of the idea of humility, that starts to become rich and wide. And as that gets going, again, it's very hard to have a small, tight, rigid craving. Something is softened. Something is opened.

Not reducing, or let's say -- that's actually good; we need to end. Twoness. So here's a slightly different one. Sometimes there's this desire for something, and that desire starts to collapse in a kind of union. In other words, we desire something, we move towards it, even in our imagination, and then we just melt with it -- which can be really lovely, and that's a real option. And some people define eros that way: it's the desire for union, the desire towards oneness. That's not how we're defining it. A lot of these words are used in different ways in different circles. We're saying eros preserves and needs a sense of twoness, and it's in that erotic tension between the two that the whole imaginal can be born. If I collapse into it, wonderful and great, and certain colours can open up and everything, but it's a different experience than the erotic-imaginal. Yeah? So there's something about preserving the twoness. It might be that, in a kind of different way, what collapses the eros is just maybe a habit or a meditative habit or a tendency to just go to oneness. Eros needs two, and it actually creates more, too, as I was saying with the example of Eamonn. It will create more faces of the two. It preserves, creates, etc.

Last one for now. It's implicit in all that I've said. It's that the beloved other has elastic edges, soft and elastic edges. That's part of their mystery. It's part of their capacity to stretch. And because of that, because of both that sense of mystery and beyondness, and the stretchability of them, that lets everything else be elastic and loose, and that's part of what eros is and does.

Someone wrote a note this morning or yesterday: "Would you at some point specify what you mean by the fullness of image, or something being fully imaginal? Is the fully imaginal the goal of our practice? And what would be the other end, opposite of that range of more or less fully imaginal?"

I don't know if the answer's already clear from what we said. A couple of things. So basically eros and all these other elements, if eros is allowed to do what it wants to do -- it wants to impregnate the psyche; it wants to enrich, and complexify, and deepen, and widen its beloved other, and then everything else, eventually -- if it's allowed to do that, then what will happen is the object, the thing that we desire, will become more and more fully imaginal, by which we mean more and more of those elements will start igniting. So I just didn't want to make too much like "it is imaginal or it isn't," like it's too much of a black and white, and then people get, "Have I got it? Have I not got it?" Think of it more as a direction. Things can be more and more ignited, because they're more and more fully imaginal. Then we don't get so on/off about it.

Why? What is the goal of our practice? Is it for everything to become fully imaginal? Not necessarily. It's a mode of seeing. It's a mode of being in the world that comes and goes, you know, at times, I think. What's the point? If you ask me, "Can you sum up in a sentence what's the point of all this?", I would say to open up the gates of sacredness. To open them wide and far and deep. More and more to expand the senses, the sense, the felt sense, the experiences of sacredness in our existence, in everything, any possibility. That's the point.

Now, we can do all that by, as Catherine was saying the other day, we can kind of let go of all desire in relation to objects: "I don't want anything but the Unfabricated, that which is beyond all sense experience." There can be eros for that, and there can be a desire for that. And there's a certain kind of holiness that goes in that path. We can have that, absolutely. It's not either/or. You can have that whole movement, and that kind of sacredness, and it's awesome. But there are an infinite number of other kinds of sacredness that have to do with things and particulars. Not the fading of things and particulars into universals, but things, and particulars, and angels, and world becoming angel. And that is endless. It's up to us what we want, but the purpose is this opening up of more and more of a sense of sacredness. Why? Well, either you want that or you don't. Or you could say it's what soul wants. Soul wants to sense that way. That's what soul is about. And the range of that, whatever sense we have of "this is sacred," it just opens that up more and more, more and more and more, the colours, the dimensions, the folds and angles of what that means. That's the point.

And for that, we need to speak in funny Greek words. [laughter] No, we don't. No. But we need these discernments. No discernment, no opening of certain gates. Yeah? So we need to make these differentiations of desire, differentiations, recognitions of how I'm thinking about it, what I'm allowing to be possible. Making the discernments and developing the particular, let's say, skills or arts in relation to all these different avenues, doorways, and discernments. Yeah? Is that enough? Okay. Thank you.