Transcription
Good morning, everyone. So you've probably got the sense already, or the understanding, or the feel, that these explorations, and this kind of paradigm that we're exploring and presenting, that one of the sort of key features of it, or characteristics of it, is its tendency to be able to expand, and to want to expand into different arenas, domains, reaches. There was a question, and I said, in a way, if I had to sum up really briefly what's the point of all this, why are we doing it, I would put that in the language of "to expand, to open up further and further the senses of sacredness." So this idea of possible expansion, possible growth, is a feature, characteristic, kind of intrinsic almost -- the possibilities of extensions, reaches, ranges, expanding in different aspects and domains.
You've probably kind of got that sense already. Soul is -- you could say there's something very organic here. It's really like a living thing that wants to grow, like a tree or something else. And so this notion of or fact of wanting to expand, or at least the potentials to expand, is really key. So you've probably got that sense already. This morning, I want to kind of draw together, under that rubric of expansion and range, five domains of possible expansion, possible extension of range. We won't have time to go into all of them, so we're just going to pick two to explore in a bit more detail. But if I just go through them quite briefly. And actually, all this has already been said, but it might be good to put them all together as a list of five under the idea of possible ranges and where am I with those possible ranges.
So (1) the first is the whole idea of the elements of the constellation or the lattice. We might feel, you might feel in your practice, that so far you've got a really good sense, or it feels like a very alive and rich sense of some of those elements. They really make sense to you. You've experienced them. They've even opened up in ways that were unexpected, etc. But others of them are a bit kind of cloudy or even kind of still relatively inert. Nothing has really happened there at all. They haven't really illuminated. So there's no right or wrong in this, but there's this, let's call it an intrinsic potential, or even an intrinsic eros that soul has, to reach out and open up and illuminate more and more of these nodes. So part of the investigation is -- and we'll come back to this -- where am I in my, let's say, my soul's opening out to a sense, an experiential sense, and also an understanding of these elements.
Okay. So that's the first one, in terms of a domain of possible expansion and increase of range in practice. The second one -- we could go in any order here, but the second one. Again, I've mentioned all of these before, but just to collect them together from a certain angle in terms of this idea of expansion and possibility and where I am. (2) The second one is the expansion along the axes of the soulmaking beginning to involve, infect, infuse self, other, and world. So actually in any moment of perception, any moment of any kind of perception at all, there is always some sense, no matter how subtle or vague, of some kind of subjective sense, some kind of self-sense, some kind of objective sense, and some kind of world-sense. And these three can feel very separate, or very hard, or kind of much more connected and open, but still, that triad is absolutely intrinsic to any moment of perception: self/other/world. And the question for soulmaking is, what are the perceptions of self/other/world at any time, but in terms of expansion, possibility, and range, what do I notice here? Perhaps do I have a tendency for the other, the object, for example, to be where all the erotic-imaginal coming alive is at, and not so much the self? Or I don't really let it spread to the world?
Or perhaps the other way around: I'm so kind of taken with the way I come alive as an imaginal subject that I can kind of fall in love with -- there's nothing wrong with that at all; it's really a question of balance. Is the water, are the waters of soul flowing in these three directions? Or is one of them -- tends to be a bit lopsided? And if so, which way? People will differ, and it differs over time. But actually I'd like to add one more element into that, which is eros. So self/other/world/eros. You could say eros is a part of my self. It's an aspect or an energy or force in my self. But again, the question is, what tends to become quite fully, and vividly, and richly, and erotically-imaginal for me of those four, and which maybe tends to get missed? My own eros, has that become for myself an erotic-imaginal object at times? Can it? What would that mean? So again, it's just kind of one way of thinking about territory and range and possibility, and just, what are my tendencies? What are my patterns there? What are the places where actually maybe I have an unconscious idea, "That's not so good to go there"? Okay? So that's the second one.
The third one (3) is the eros-psyche-logos dynamic itself, or eros, psyche, and logos. And again, here, if soulmaking is allowed to do its thing, if eros is allowed to inseminate, and fertilize, and get going, and do what it wants to do, then all these get called into the vortex of soulmaking, get involved, whirl around, reflect each other, inspire and inflame each other further, and the whole thing gets richer and wider and deeper, etc. So the question here, for reflection at any time, just gentle kind of being aware, is, for instance, what range is possible for me with each of those? For example, am I a little bit reluctant for eros to get really strong? It's a bit too intense and I'm not sure about it, so that my range, of the possible range of eros, from really quite subtle to really quite intense and strong, is actually truncated. Or it's not a matter of fear; it's just that it's not a habit of my energetic being and my, let's say, desire body -- it's not yet a habit to let that become inflamed, so it just inhabits a certain range.
Or it could be the opposite, that I'm somehow prone -- everything's super intense all the time, and it's always like raging fire, like this. And actually eros can be extremely subtle. It can be sexual or not sexual; sexual is just one kind of eros. But is there a tendency or a pattern or a preference, conscious or unconscious, for only the intense side of the range of eros? There's a tremendous amount that can be worked with -- really, really subtle eros, really subtle. Yeah? So that's an example. Or what's the range of the logos, etc.? So these three together is the third one.
The last two, actually, again, we've mentioned all this before, but it's good to collect them together in this kind of way of looking at them. The last two perhaps could be related to, well, actually the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, but. So one is (4) the spectrum of what we might call apparent sort of, let's say, pathology, dukkha, madness, violence, weirdness, etc., that kind of thing, how much, how apparent that -- sometimes I use the word 'dark'; we're debating whether that's the right word, but I use dark for now -- the range from really quite weird and dark, that most people in society would consider really strange and very suspect psychologically, the range from that to something that seems completely -- has no dukkha in it at all, nothing but what's kind of obviously pure and light and sweet, kind of obviously angelic in the traditional sense, in the narrow sense of angelic. So there's that whole spectrum there. And where am I with that? What are my tendencies? How open is the range for me? How okay is it? Do I have some relation of fear or preference? Or is it just that, as I said when I talked about this before, just souls are also different? And it also reflects -- to some extent, images reflect, to some extent -- what's going on in our life.
So that's another possible range, and just to investigate what even comes up for me when I consider those two, that whole range and the different areas. And then the last one, again, mentioned it before, (5) the fifth one is the range of energy body texture, felt sense of the energy body, from very ethereal and sort of luminous and insubstantial, and that kind of lovely sort of gossamer, filigree sense, very light, very delicate, to something that's much more dense and solid and that whole range of energy body experience. And again, what are my typical tendencies or patterns? What's perhaps a door that I'm closing on a certain part of that range for all kinds of different reasons that doesn't actually, let's say, reflect accurately my more natural soul, if we use that language? Or what is just, "Well, this is just how my soul is. It tends to be more often in this part of the range"? Yeah?
So these are five ranges to kind of just bear in mind and explore a little bit what the responses, reactions, inclinations, desires, tendencies, fears, unsurenesses are about each of these ranges. And I forgot to say one thing about the second one, about the self/other/world/eros thing. This has come up a couple times in interviews, and I think even in a Q & A, so I just want to repeat it now. You know, for the self to become imaginal, it doesn't need to be a figure in an image. In other words, you might have an imaginal figure, and that imaginal figure is just doing its thing, their thing, in their own world, and a person thinks, "Well, shouldn't I be in the image as well?" Not necessarily. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it responds to you in your meditation. Maybe you enter the image and become a figure in the image. But maybe not.
What will happen in the infinite echoing and mirroring, and in the way this image just somehow mysteriously speaks to you even if you don't understand, is that that starts to infuse into the self-sense, either right there in the meditation, or probably in other ways. And then the self-sense in life can become imaginal. And we get the sense that images are asking, we are born from images, as opposed to images being born from us. Images ask something of me. We play with the idea that my deeper identity is somehow from the image. From the image, I am expressing an image or images. I am asked by images to be their face in the world somehow, and that face is usually not literal -- it's refracted in very subtle ways. So in terms of the self/other/world/eros thing, don't put that, how that might open up the range in terms of self, it's not necessarily so tight and obvious. Okay? Is that everything?
Okay. So that's the general introduction. We're only going to have time, as I said this morning, to pick two of those and explore them, but bear them in mind, this list of five, if you go on with this kind of practice, as just something you might want to let yourself explore at different times. So Catherine's going to introduce how we're going to explore two of those list of five.
