Transcription
Naomi, do you want to go first? We're collecting questions that might pertain to bits left over that need to complete the set of foundations, so that people are clear on that, and then we're going to see if we can kind of weave that together.
Collecting questions
Yogi: It's about fullness of intention, and working with all the bits that have been taught, where this paradigm sits with awakening, how participation fits in awakening, because there are parts of what has been experienced here that feel like what some people describe as aspects of awakening. I understand that the logos of awakening is also [inaudible].
Rob: Okay, great. So I won't repeat until I try to collect them and see.
Yogi 2: I wonder if you have something more to say about creating/discovering.
Rob: Okay, good. Thank you. Dave?
Yogi 3: About the role of logos, one of the stars in the constellation, and just a sense that -- it feels like there have been times when something has been soulmaking without having an obvious role of logos, at least in the moment. So two quick examples. One in terms of movement. Sometimes there are movements that happen, and it very much feels like part of what is soulmaking is that there isn't a logos attached in the movement. Another is sort of in relationship. There's one example I can think of where it's almost like something is happening energetically, and the bit of it that was soulmaking was the fact that there just wasn't a logos obviously attaching. In a way, there's a sort of blissful ignorance as to what's happening that seemed part of the soulmaking.
Rob: Yeah, good. Thank you. Okay. Two, three -- there were six, apparently. James?
Yogi 4: A word on the idea of 'soul' itself. I'm kind of interested if maybe you can come up with some near synonyms or some kind of poetic, simple, poetic images for it.
Rob: Okay. Four. Derek?
Yogi 5: In proper Dharma practice [laughter], I don't have really distinct memories, but I have memories of when that really worked or clicked for me. I'm aware of the emptiness of how this works, this perception, but it feels very much like those moments had a sense of imaginal or otherness and these kinds of things that we've been talking about. I feel like there are implications in what you're saying connecting things like that.
Rob: I'm not quite understanding the question. You've had experiences in prior practice that seemed kind of imaginal, and what are you wondering?
Yogi 5: I just want to hear you talk more about -- sometimes it seems like you're connecting those experiences to -- that when something works in practice, that we are drawn towards these moments of beauty and the autonomy of an other, even if we don't have these frameworks for this vocabulary.
Rob: Okay. I think I understand. Was there another one? Yeah, Andrew?
Yogi 6: Today with the energy body, you were encouraging us to find out how to [inaudible] -- not that more is better, but the range can be limited. So you were suggesting the long breath and ... I'm just thinking of people listening at home, and aware of the possibility sometimes that the body movements can take over and get very intense.
Rob: Yeah. Okay. So let's see if we can weave that in.
Yogi 7: My question is related to the practice. For example, within the intention of [inaudible] mettā, we don't just go around and wait for mettā to arrive. There's an intention in practice, even though I don't feel like mettā right now, there's that effort required. I'm just wondering with the imaginal -- you mentioned several times you can't do it all day long. And I've also noticed at times that the mind feels sluggish, and just needs to settle back, relax into more simple -- some simplicity. So just that balance of effort and settling back, because it seems that there also needs to be intentionality. It's not just, "Oh, an image will arise."
Rob: Yeah, sure. Thank you. Very good. Yeah. Okay?
Yogi 8: A quick one. This thing about you love an image and an image loves you back -- it's not quite an exchange [inaudible].
Rob: Okay. All right. I don't actually know that I can remember all that now. But let's see what happens, and if I don't ...
Answering questions
So where to start? Maybe with James's question. We use this word 'soul.' Can I give a poetic image or something like that? I would prefer not to, actually, and there's a reason for that. I'm a little reluctant. In a way, what we're doing in this paradigm, in this teaching, is not prescribing images so much, whereas in other traditions or religions you get the images prescribed (the Eucharist, or Christ on a cross, or whatever it is), which is great, but there's a kind of -- I don't know what you'd call it -- like a meta-stance here that images will be individual, created/discovered, etc. So in some ways, concepts -- although an image is going to be elastic, too, and will evolve -- for me, I feel like I'm a little bit just tentative about prescribing images or offering them out, whereas concepts seem a little bit more kind of pointers in a direction that can be a bit more loose for me and then evolve. So one of the concepts -- if that's okay -- one of the concepts about all this is that concepts need to be loose. They need to be elastic. If we define them, it's like there's a real tension between defining them too tightly and rigidly so that they can't grow, so they can't gain depth, and meaning, and width, and all that, that on the one hand; on the other hand, not bothering to delineate precisely and with discrimination between concepts, so that actually there isn't much fruitfulness. So there's this kind of dance and tension between that. Soul, almost more than any other of the concepts we use, falls right there.
But we could say, having said that, and very loosely, we could give circular kind of descriptions. One way is soul is just shorthand for a sense of soulfulness, with all that that means. But another way is to kind of point to it in a more subjective sense, as it usually gets used (like "you have a soul," or "soul has you," or whatever). What might it mean there? Again, it needs to be very open. But kind of circularly, soul is the organ or the instrument of perceiving soulfully, perceiving in ways that are soulmaking. And so the more we do this, the more that organ kind of grows in its powers and its range and its capacities. So seeing in ways that feel soulmaking -- which means the eros, the beauty, the meaningfulness, all that stuff, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic -- sensing in ways, whether it's internal or external, thinking in ways, that whole capacity, body, relating to body, all that, the whole instrument becomes a kind of organic, alive, multifaceted organ for soulmaking perception in more ways than we can -- we're going to discover, etc. So that leaves, for me, that leaves it very wide, but gives a sense of what it might be. Is that ...?
Yogi: Yeah. Thank you. If I can ask in a short, slightly cheeky follow-up, if the word 'soul' didn't exist, do you have a sense of a word you might use instead?
Rob: 'Psyche.' Okay. I've forgotten some of the questions. But I did mention, so what happens in this growing of the range, and the kinds, and depths, and even modes of perceiving soulfully, is they are created and discovered. We discover them. Something happens. There's this word -- who is it who asked this one, create/discover? Yeah. So there may be a word in English -- I don't know if Catherine said this before I came this morning -- but there may be a word in English which means something like 'both created and discovered at the same time,' so a bit created and a bit discovered. This bit's created, but that bit's discovered. Something that somehow means that completely in one. I don't know if there's a word.
Yogi: Magic! [laughter]
Rob: Okay, great, yeah. So magic, or I'll just put create/discover. In a way, what that does is, for me, it reflects a little bit the actual sense we have. A lot of the language we use is kind of just giving words to things that I think, if we just let this process happen, we'll get this sense. So a bit like the real/not real thing. Sometimes you ask someone working with an image, "Does it feel real or not real?" And they'll be like, "Kind of neither and both," you know. That's just a natural evolution of the soulmaking process. That's what we begin to notice and sense about some soulmaking perception. But just so is the create/discover. There's a sense that I am doing this, I am creating this, but there's also a sense that I'm discovering something, I'm stumbling across something; something was given to me. Does this make sense? So, in a way, that element, 'create/discover' or 'magic,' reflects both or is designed to reflect both, "Oh, you'll notice this," and this word or phrase for it is just, "This is characteristic of soulmaking experiences. It's characteristic of sensing with soul. It's got this kind of strange amalgam of the two." Yeah?
But it's also intended as a kind of, if you like, guide or balance point. So when I remember, "Oh, that's an element," then I remember something of my participation in the creation and the discovery of this. It has to do with the node of participation. And that does something else connected to the 'neither real nor not real.' It does something to my whole relationship with what I'm perceiving, whether it's something in the world, or another, or something purely internal, etc. It seems to narrow it, because we're saying, "Not that, and not that. This thing in the middle, create/discover, or neither real nor not real." At first it seems to narrow it. But it's like the old phrase, "Narrow is the gate. Narrow is the path," but then it opens, by virtue of going. Just for a while it might feel like, "What are they talking about, and why do I have to constrain it to that? Why can't I just feel it this way or that way?" It's all good, but there's something about this narrow gate in a lot these things that then opens up way wider than either of the other two, just what I create or just what I discover.
So it's something to remember occasionally in practice, and that remembering kind of starts to shape my sense of what's going on, and my sense of what's going on shapes my relationship with what's going on. And that determines what, then, is possible. Does that make sense?
Yogi: Yeah. I'll listen to it a couple times more.
Rob: Okay. Some of these concepts are tricky. There's not really a word in English, because we don't -- a lot of the way we think in English, about reality, and about self and object, is dualistic. When we go to non-duality, we just kind of go to a kind of "all one" soup or something like that. This is neither. This is neither, okay? Both of those are great. It's fantastic to perceive and conceive dualistically at times. It's really, really important. And it's a lovely range of experiences, and really important mystical experiences, that happen when everything dissolves in some kind of mystical soup. But there's this other thing, let's call it, in the middle, that seems narrow at first, and then opens up a whole other range of experiences, and we don't really have the language for that, partly because language is based on notions of subject and object. The verb is the thing done by the subject in relation to the object. Does that make sense? Maybe there are much better ways of explaining this, but that's all I can come up with now. There's something curious about a certain range here that really is not well-captured, certainly in the English language. I don't know enough about other languages, but I presume not so well either. But I don't know.
So yeah, it takes a while. But again, a lot of these elements are things that we notice. We're teaching kind of from the front here, but we could just say, "If you keep doing this stuff, at some point these are things you'll notice anyway, regardless of whether you've heard them." If you're practising with enough sensitivity of what's going on, what's the feeling here, I think you would have some kind of sense of things when it really feels soulmaking that is exactly that. Now, you might put it in your own words, but it will be reflecting the same thing. Does that make sense? So that's very related to participation, which was actually just part of the question.
What were some others? I'm forgetting now. Fullness of intention? Who asked that one? It's the same one? Fullness of intention and awakening were both you, Naomi? Yeah. There's so much to say about this one. I've talked a lot about it, so if you're interested you can hear hours and hours and hours of me wittering on about this stuff. [laughter] Many, many hours on this. There's a recent talk called "What is Awakening?" There's a whole -- I can't remember the titles, but whole hours of segments of talks in Eros Unfettered. And a couple of years before that, in a November Solitary here, there was a talk called "Questioning Awakening." It had two follow on parts, "Buddhism Beyond Modernism" and "In Praise of Restlessness." That forms a three-part set. And there are probably others. Maybe some other people can tell you. But there's lots and lots of material.
So this is really key. I'll try and be brief with this on what's, I think, by definition, the way I would like to approach it is that it's one of these endlessly expanding subjects. That is not typically how we think of awakening. We tend to think, "That is awakening," "It's like this," "I've got it, or I don't," or "I'm halfway there," or whatever it is. In this paradigm, the notion of awakening is ever-expanding. That's related to, a bit like this buffet of treasures that I described the other day. We think, "Oh, it's terrible," and actually it's just glory upon glory of beautiful creation/discovery.
But having said that, just to make a historical note that contextualizes all this. If you're around enough, even around at Gaia House, just Gaia House, let alone going to Japan and looking at the history of Dharma in different countries, and you ask even just teachers, or retreatants, "What's your idea of what awakening is? What's your image of what an awakened person looks like and where this is going?", you're going to get -- just from Gaia House, just from Gaia House teachers, just from the Gaia House teacher council -- you're going to get a huge range. You could just say that's the historical state of Buddhadharma. You could also say there's a reason why we have range, that has more to do with the nature of soul, okay? But I'll put that one aside.
You ask people -- sometimes awakening means kind of, you know, coping with the existential, obvious reality of a meaningless material world, your birth and your death in that, and kind of just bearing up with that. That's what awakening means. And trying to be kind with that, and trying to have the courage to face the reality of that. For some people, that's what awakening means. For other people, awakening is just talking about a moment of awakening when there's this sort of fresh perception of things that doesn't seem to have a lot of ideation to it or a lot of will. That's a moment of awakening, and there's no grand awakening beyond that. For other people, awakening has to do with this transcendent Unfabricated, where one experiences in meditation the deeper and deeper fading of things, opening up to a realm that is completely beyond anything we can put into language, and that telling us something about all this -- which might be a kind of rejection of all this: "This is saṃsāra. This is worthless. This is nothing. The best thing to do is to get out of this and not be reborn again. The one who is not reborn again is the awakened one. Stages of awakening are moving towards how near am I to not coming back to all this world of perception. Just saṃsāra, just worthless."
You could go on and on and on, the different shades of it. What does it mean? And even track back: awakening is to do with the Third Noble Truth in relation to the First Noble Truth of dukkha. Then we ask, what is dukkha? What actually are we addressing when we say 'suffering'? Some of it's obvious, what it means, but if you expand the range of what that can mean ... So there's all that, and I find it absolutely fascinating, and fascinating how easily we can become really closed around a certain point of view. And what's the place of soul in that, whether we're conscious of it or not? Why is it that a person chooses to opt for this vision? It's not just because it makes sense: "I see how the pieces fit together." When I choose a vision of awakening, I'm actually choosing a cosmos. I'm choosing a vision of the cosmos, and I'm choosing a vision of the self in response to that cosmos. A person can choose: "I choose a meaningless cosmos in which the nobility of the self is to show up, and just bear with that, and have that kind of dignity and bravery and openness." Or a person can choose a magical cosmos: layers, and dimensions, and the participation of the soul in the creation/discovery of perception, etc.
Psychologically, I think it's an incredibly interesting question: why? Why choose this one or that one? What's going on for this personality or that personality? Without any right or wrong, but just seeing the whole thing from a soul-perspective. We can look at what we're doing here, this improper Dharma [laughter], as from the perspective of proper Dharma, and kind of fit it into, "Okay, so there's a lot of papañca going on, clearly." [laughter] "And clearly there's a lot of craving. And there's a lot of overthinking." [laughter] Or one can also turn things round, and look at certain other versions of Dharma from a soulmaking understanding. Again, why is the soul gravitating towards that? What is it about ...? And I go back to what I said the other day: when we're in love with the path, any of those versions, of those people who have those different visions, love it. There's eros there. They may not have that language, but basically something has become an image and a whole set of concepts that are meaningful to their soul and attractive to their soul. So then you have a whole soul-psychology kind of -- not deconstruction, but perspective on conventional ...
So there's all that, yeah? Okay. Then there's just this question of suffering and dukkha, related to the fullness of intention. I can only speak from my experience of dukkha I meet, and what I'm dealing with, and have had to deal with in the past, etc., and also working with people, working a lot, especially one to one, with abuse history, sexual abuse, and trauma, and all kinds of stuff, with this paradigm, okay? What it seems to me at this point -- I think I said it somewhere or other -- at this point I kind of just have an absolute trust that all kinds of dukkha can be healed through imaginal work. Not necessarily they will be in this session, or a person is quite ready for that, or even quite ready to look at things that way, you know, and bring that. But I just have that sense. And if I'm working with someone one on one, it's, "Is that doorway open? Can I sense that that may be available for this person right now?" And my experience is that there's a healing available through the imaginal that kind of addresses hurts, and pains, and soul-torments, and histories that other psychological paradigms -- which I'm quite well-versed in some -- don't seem to do, and mindfulness doesn't quite do it, and even emptiness doesn't quite do it. So that was really interesting to me, really interesting. I've just seen that over and over again, to the point where I just trust it.
What makes that work better is this fullness of intention, kind of semi-paradoxically. Healing can be part of what I want, this ending of this dukkha, but if I can include a sense of "Actually, I want that in something even bigger, which is this fullness of soulmaking and sense of sacredness. I want to ensoul my dukkha. I want to ensoul my history, and the pain of my past," and whatever it is, somehow if that fullness of intention can open up, then it's easier for this multi-spectrumed, multi-levelled, far-reaching, far-penetrating sort of healing to happen. Yeah? So there's that.
Third thing. I mean, I could talk for hours. I'm not going to. [laughter] This is the last thing I'm going to say for this. Third thing is ... I've forgotten what it is now. Oh, yeah. I've shared this, again, in some of those recent talks. Again, what does 'suffering' mean? We talk about awakening, the Third Noble Truth, in relation to the First Noble Truth. What does dukkha mean? It might be that different ages, certainly different people, but different ages, different eras, different cultures, and different times have different kinds of dukkha. So there probably have been, in the history of humanity, many, many cultures and societies and eras where a crisis of a lack of meaningfulness -- or what we might call a lack of soulfulness -- just wasn't a pain. It wasn't there. Or rather, it was very, very rare. Whereas, I think, a key kind of strata of the dukkha of our society now, at this time, is the dukkha and the pain of soulfulness.
One of the things I shared on those talks was -- I've had cancer; I have, whatever -- and going to chemotherapy in the hospital in Plymouth. It's a huge hospital. It was so hard for me. It was really on the edge of my practice. Yes, it was hard physically. There was an enormous amount of dukkha there, etc. What was really hard for me was the soullessness of the place. Everything was plastic. There was this kind of cheeriness. Death was in the room, and people were sort of [tittering]. You know? And the way one is looked at by the medical system as basically I'm a bag of chemicals with some really not-very-promising statistics attached to it. [laughter] All of that, primarily the plastic and the lack of aesthetics, of all the things, and all the physical dukkha, and all the possibility of dying, etc., that was the thing that was just on the edge of my practice. Sometimes I really -- it was really hard. I couldn't quite -- while I was sitting there with this plastic pipe, and you're pumping poison into the body, I just, it was -- that was the thing that was really hard. There's a dukkha of soulfulness. That's a level of dukkha that, again, in the Dharma, we don't really have that language. It's like creating these words to open up something: look, there is a pain for many people at that level, meaningfulness, soulfulness, etc. So again, when we talk about awakening, Third Noble Truth in relation to the First Noble Truth, what do we mean by 'suffering'? What kinds of suffering? And what do they need? How will they be healed? That's some of what's in there. Is that okay?
The logos piece. So, yeah, when we use the word 'logos,' we don't mean anything necessarily obvious. Those two experiences you described, in relationship and moving, there wasn't any kind of heavy edifice or machinery of philosophical structure there, but just the fact that you could say "it felt soulmaking" implies that there's even something like what we call soulmaking, even though you haven't delineated it, and something of a soul, and something of a value to that. So that's enough logos right there. When we use the word 'logos' or 'concept,' we mean from something very complex, sophisticated, subtle conceptual structure, all the way down to just -- what I said earlier today -- any perception whatsoever of subject, object, and time. That's already concept. It's percept. So it could be just the most bare sense of momentary awareness, with nothing happening. And that's what I perceive, nothing, and it's happening now, in this moment. That's already concept. So we're talking about something really, really subtle.
And yet, one of the things -- this is not what you're asking, Dave, but one of the possibilities is a kind of quietening of the concept, but there's still a bare concept there, a subtle one. One of the other possibilities is that while we're working with an image, and it's touching the heart, and the energy body is going, and we're moved, and the soul is resonating, the mind can actually be kind of intuitively flickering, and getting insights, and seeing how -- I don't know if you've had this experience -- how different elements fit together, and how the structure works, and how soulmaking happens. So sometimes, in the process of soulmaking, it really involves the intellect, just in a kind of very -- I don't know -- almost automatic way. So there's that possibility too.
Okay, Derek. I didn't quite understand the question, but let me say something and see if it's accurate.
Yogi: You spoke to it a little bit.
Rob: Okay. Maybe it's the piece that -- I think part of bringing out this vocabulary, and making these discernments, is to say that this kind of stuff is going on anyway. This is just what the soul does. Either we have so-called 'intrapsychic' images, and a person is meditating, and it comes up. And people have told me, "Yeah, I've been meditating for twenty years," vipassanā or insight meditation, "and I never tell anyone these things that happen, because it doesn't seem like it's welcome." Maybe it's not welcome. The soul does generate, create/discover. That's part of what it does. There's that way, and then there's also the fact that if you love something, if you are devoted to something, it has become fantasy for you. It has become image, which means the sense of sitting there on a hot day, and working, and dedicating yourself, the sense of the Buddha, the sense of the path -- it's all part of the love, and dedication, and devotion, and eros to the path, whatever it is. But I don't know if that's quite what you're asking.
Yogi: Yeah. You've talked about that before, but it's just interesting for me to hear about it, to think about that, that perspective on the practice. And then that sense of "that's already happening," and coming towards this, and going, "Okay, I have these tools for working with something that's already wanting to happen, a process that's already kind of going in that direction."
Rob: Yeah, that's part of it, exactly, giving us the tools, the concepts, the refinements of skill and awareness that can navigate that. But there's a second thing to me which is also -- and I think I must have said it yesterday morning when I talked about desire -- it's like, when we don't have the words, and no one talks about certain concepts, we almost blind ourselves to them. I asked you guys, "Is that really what you love? Is that really what you're doing this for? Just the decrease of suffering? That's what's drawn you to Buddhadharma?" And it's almost like just giving us the concepts and talking about it makes us realize, I think, in a lot of cases, "Oh, there's more going on here. We haven't had the language for it." And when we don't have the language, it's almost like we can't fill out the psychological understanding and see what it needs. Does that make sense? Which, to me, is an important part of just psychological awareness of self -- like, what's going on in my life? What is it, how do I operate? How do I get drawn to something and galvanized and all that? That's, for me, a really important piece. Does that make sense? Yeah?
Andrew. Was there someone else?
Yogi: There was one about the intention [inaudible].
Rob: Okay, thank you. Let's do that, and then come back to that. So that's a really important one. I would say all practice, or deepening in any practice -- we could be talking about mettā; we could be talking about samādhi, or emptiness practice, or mindfulness, or whatever -- as it matures, the deepening involves a kind of learning to play with the gas pedal, you know, a little bit more, a little bit less -- in the larger sense, as in "I'll probably take a break the next sitting," or "I'll sit late into the night," but also in the micro-sense of how much effort, how much pressure, how much kind of direct intentionality, direction of intentionality, activity is there in the moment. That's not an on/off switch. It can be really, really finely tuned in any practice. I would say that's a really important part of any practice deepening, the sensitivity, the skill developing.
The same is true of soulmaking and imaginal practice. I think, almost intrinsic to soulmaking, in the create/discover thing, right there, 'create' is active, and the 'discover' is passive. You've also got -- one of the nodes is grace. The thing about grace is it's just inexplicable gift. It's just like, "Why was I given this? I didn't do anything. It just showed up." And you've got the first node, the idea of the lattice, implicit in which is "Hey, we can do subtle things that support soulmaking." So right in that whole twenty-eight nodes, you've got the implicit sort of dance of not just effort but also attitude. I see it as grace. I can see it as grace. I can see it as something that is an art for me that I can play with. You understand? So there's effort, but there's also attitude, and kind of way of looking, or way of conceiving.
I think with a lot of soulmaking stuff it's really quite a delicate poise -- so even just to have the intention to be receptive to an image. When you said it's like, "Oh, an image will show up sometime," maybe; probably not, if that's the kind of -- it's like, "Whatever." There's already a kind of humility in the poise of, "Let's see what comes," and opening. I can feel there's already a kind of delicacy. There's already a sensitivity. There's an openness. There's already a humility of a kind. I may not even know to what -- to soul, to psyche, to the divinity, whatever, Buddha-nature. And there's the beginnings of all these things. So that poise is a kind of intention, or a kind of place on the intentional spectrum. That's very much a part. It's very much more delicate than, "Right! I'm going to ..." whatever it is. [laughter] So this is very, very delicate. Sometimes the energies that come and the eros that comes is really strong, but a lot of it is really, really subtle and delicate, and the kind of poise of intentionality or receptivity that we can ... It's the intention to be receptive, a lot of the time, as much as anything. Does that make sense? And as always, it's not a fixed place. It's an arena, this whole thing -- intentionality, grace, receptivity, humility, activity, art. They're just an arena for us to play and experiment in, and see what happens. It's never like, "Ah, nailed it. Now that's it," just as it's not with any practice [that] I kind of bandage the gas pedal in that position and just leave it there. It's always very subtly modulated in the art of response. Yeah? Is that okay? Good.
Last thing, if it's okay. The energy body.** Yeah, thank you. So is there a kind of danger in alerting attention to the possibility of, for instance, breathing in certain ways, where the energy body can have more energy? Potentially, yeah. My experience, meeting loads of people over the years, is that most people don't have enough energy, or rather, the energy is moving in their system in a way that it's just jangled, and not really harmonizing in a way that creates a lot of available energy. For most people, either the energy body doesn't harmonize, or again, there's a kind of restriction on just how much energy they will allow, how much energy we're used to flowing in the body. So I think, if I'm not taking too much care to be completely comprehensive, I'll lean towards that side of, like, "This is probably most common." I go and teach places, or here, and I can just feel -- you know, there's every good reason for it; lots of reasons, but oftentimes people tend -- they might feel quite chaotic and agitated inside, but actually it's a state of not much energy. So if I've not got much time, I'll lean on that side. But yeah, I guess there's a danger, but in that context, I wouldn't harp too much on the possibility of too much energy. You know that I feel very much that in a lot of cases, when there is too much energy, and flowing different ways, that it's a lot easier to fix and liberate than a lot of people say. You've experienced that. So I don't tend to get too anxious about that stuff. If a person has that experience with me, I know how to kind of make it not so much a problem.
It's true there is a danger, and Catherine and I had this conversation. Actually, it wasn't quite what she was saying, so I don't want to put words in her mouth. But yeah, putting these teachings out about following imagination and eros, and wow, maybe some people will just take it and run with it and make crazy, you know? Yeah, it's there. I think just the balance of things for me just felt a calling that it was necessary to do it, so. If they're not, then they can get in touch. I mean, if they're not with me, then I don't know.
Yogi: [inaudible]
Rob: Yeah. I think the way we tend to work with energy allows it to smooth more and not be so problematic. So there's ways of working with energy body where you're just, like, lighting fireworks to some kind of powder keg, and it's often not that helpful. So the way we tend to do it is much more organic, gentle, and things can open in a much more harmonized way. Is that okay for now? I think that was it.
Yogi: There was my question about the love.
Rob: Oh, yeah. Let me just say one thing because I'm aware of time. I think it's a matter of just having that idea, that it's possible for you to notice, but expanding the idea of what that could possibly look like or feel like or mean. When we think 'love,' we tend to think, "Oh, it's going to look this way." But sometimes it can be fierce, or kind of very stern, or whatever. So just expand the range, and then just look: "Oh, yeah, there's this kind, but I hadn't really thought of that as a face of love before." Yeah?
Yogi: Makes sense.
Rob: Okay, very good. Let's have a bit of quiet.
