Transcription
Daniel Thorson and Rob Burbea
July 23, 2018
(housekeeping)
Daniel: A little bit of housekeeping before we start the show: the first thing is that I wrote a companion article on Medium to go along with this episode. I invite you to check that out.[1] The second thing is that Rob and I mention that we had a conversation before this that was recorded. Unfortunately, due to connection problems, that conversation really didn't flow in the way that I would like, and so I'm releasing the conversation you're about to listen to first because it just feels much more lovely and it's more in line with what I wanted to create. I'm happy to release that episode if there's interest, but I just didn't want you to think that you missed something. With that being said, there's another short intro, and then the show.
(intro)
Daniel: Hello, there. So in this episode of Emerge, I'm speaking with Rob Burbea. Rob is a spiritual teacher out of the UK. He teaches at Gaia House. I've never been there, but I encountered his work here in the US through the internet, through connecting with his spoken-word presentations of what started out as a Buddhist approach to meditative training and perception, let's say, readjustment -- to use a kind of military term for some reason. But that is the way that I first encountered Rob Burbea, and I think that is how he is most well-known, for his work with emptiness and the book Seeing That Frees. That itself is a wealth for any practitioner who really wants to go and see for themselves what is possible on the level of my own perception, as far as being able to see things differently, at the very least.
More recently, Rob has created something rather radically different. He calls it a Soulmaking Dharma, I think is the most recent way of framing it. It's also called sensing with soul, or the imaginal approach. That is a very significant departure from typical Buddhist meditative traditions. As you'll hear in our conversation, we attempt to do some justice to what it is that Rob has discovered on his journey deep into what meditation is and can be, and maybe what it needs to become in order for us as the human experiment to really find ourselves and come into our own. I've had the honour of hosting a lot of really interesting and I think quite beautiful conversations on Emerge and, you know, this, what Rob has created and the work that he's done, I think that if I can kind of point whatever attention that's pointed at me towards him and his work that he's done, I think the world would be well-served. I think that what he has created and discovered is a paradigm shift for spirituality, and more than that, I think, for human consciousness on this planet. So I invite you into this conversation with an open mind and with a willingness to expand your conceptions in order to deepen and complexify your experience. Please enjoy this episode of Emerge with Rob Burbea.
(show)
Daniel: Welcome to another episode of Emerge. In this episode, my guest is Rob Burbea. Rob is a meditation teacher and author and the creator of an approach to -- hmm, hard to say what it's an approach to, but an approach that is called sensing with soul or imaginal work. We're going to talk about a lot of different aspects of that, but first I just want to welcome you, Rob. Thank you for coming back on the show.
Rob: Thank you for having me, Daniel. It's a pleasure to be with you again.
Daniel: Wonderful. So we're going to start in a different place than we did in our last conversation, and that's kind of around your creative process when it comes to creating the body of work that is called sensing with soul or the imaginal. So for those who don't know, you came out of more or less what we might call the Insight Meditation tradition, and most of your earlier work has to do with what people would see and identify as kind of like meditation practice as conceived in places like Insight Meditation Society or other places like that. Certainly there are unique contributions from your book, Seeing That Frees, that I think are extremely valuable, but it kind of fits within that general way of seeing what meditation is, approach to life, so on and so forth. But then your work with the imaginal, it seems to me -- and I think it might seem to people who are looking in from the outside -- is quite a radical departure from places like Insight Meditation Society. That might even be to put it lightly. It is very, very different. To start this conversation off, I'm curious, what were you seeing in that world as you participated in that world, and what questions did that lead you to ask or struggle with that led you to begin creating and discovering the body of work that we now know as sensing with soul and the imaginal?
Rob: Okay, thanks Daniel. That feels like a big question. Let me see what I can do with that. By the way, we just did a retreat at Gaia House on this theme, and we called it Foundations of a Soulmaking Dharma. I don't know if we'll stick with that terminology, but that might be a broader way of referring or a term for referring to this kind of body of teachings and this direction in practice, Soulmaking Dharma. Yeah, it was intentional to keep the word Dharma there. We could have made a choice; I could have made a choice there either way, not keep it or keep it. But there is a connection there which I will hopefully try and reconstruct.
Hmm. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is actually that the approach to the teachings of emptiness which I kind of put into my book, I view as really quite different than sort of more typical approaches that you find in certainly the Insight Meditation tradition widely, certainly in secular Buddhism versions, and in a lot also of Tibetan and Zen versions. That kind of developed in me, those approaches to emptiness, and the broad kind of sense which we covered last time when we spoke, that broad sense of what the path is and what one is actually doing in meditating and where it's going -- that broad sense developed slowly for me and is quite different than other approaches. I suppose the seed for it came from one of my teachers, who I haven't had any contact with for, gosh, almost twenty years, sixteen years, Ajaan Ṭhānissaro, also known as Ajaan Geoff, Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, who is based in San Diego in a monastery there. He's been a monk for, goodness knows, forty years or something probably, from the Thai Forest tradition, a particular strand of that tradition. He talked a lot about this idea of fabrication, and I picked that up from him.
The movement of meditation is then learning how to unfabricate -- that's a big part of it, to unfabricate the world of perception and the sense of self. Those two things go together, the sense of self and the perception of the world. So he really emphasized that in his teachings, drawing strictly on his Theravādan lineage, from that stream of the Thai Forest tradition. I was very taken with that. It made a lot of sense to me, and it made sense of my meditation experiences at that point. I probably feel that I have taken that core idea and extended it further than he would probably be happy with, is my sense. Because he -- I think it's fair to say -- is staunchly dualistic, in the sense of this world, this world of the earth and this world of selves and this world of perception is basically all fabricated, and it's the world of saṃsāra, less than, less holy than, less important than the Unfabricated, the Deathless realm or the Unconditioned, the realm of nibbāna, and it's worth less than that.
So there's a depreciation of the world and the world of self, and the whole realm of perception is worth much less than this Unfabricated. The whole thrust of that path is kind of to transcend the world, and ultimately not to be reborn again. It's very, very traditional Pali Canon dualistic teaching. And I feel like one of the things that emerged in my practice was to kind of, I feel, go beyond that dualism by exploring two central concepts. One is this notion of fabrication, the fabrication of perception and the possibility in meditation of gradually unfabricating, fabricating less and less self, less and less perception, etc., and developing skill in that. And the other central concept is the idea of ways of looking -- that we are always, let's say, sensing (not just looking; I use 'looking' as a kind of narrow metaphor there), but we are always sensing in some way or another, with some kind of conception operating, some kind of attitude, some kind of relationship going on, always. There's no perception without a way of looking. What we can regard meditation as is a playing with, a skilful playing with and experimenting with, a range of ways of looking.
So I took these two concepts and I really devoted myself to them. I was just completely obsessed with emptiness for some years. [laughs] At some point it occurred to me I was kind of on my own in my explorations and exploring this particular direction. Most Insight Meditation traditions talk in terms of a kind of reality: there's certainly that which is fabricated, like the kind of gross delusions and ego-trips and nonsense that the mind gets into, but basically with usually a stance or way of looking that's something like a mindful equanimity, this is regarded as revealing the reality. It's no longer just a way of looking; it's a way of looking that reveals reality.
So the approach that I had of taking these ideas of ways of looking, of fabrication, and just really pushing them, how far can they go, at some point just kind of popped out of the range of normal Insight Meditation. And then even beyond the range of what this dualistic classical conception that you find in the Pali Canon -- it's very unpopular now, but Ajaan Geoff was a big champion or is a big champion of it. Going beyond even the notion of fabrication, even the notion of the Unfabricated -- not dismissing it, but regarding that, too, as empty, and coming out in a sense that there was no duality and certainly no hierarchy of worth, ultimate worth, between the fabricated and the Unfabricated. All was holy, all was sacred, and what one was left with after this long, subtle, deep journey of meditation, exploration and questioning and experimenting and playing, was the truth that there are only ways of looking. None of them reveal some ultimate reality. All so-called ultimate reality is empty. We're just left with this range and flexibility of ways of looking that can open up holiness and all kinds of extraordinary experiences.
So that left me in a very, for me, beautiful and liberating and profoundly exciting and open position, and a quite different position than I would say most other Dharma teaching, certainly that I knew of then and that I know of now. Usually there's some either explicit or implicit indication that no, that's not real, but this is real, whatever that and this are. It seemed like this approach had kind of exploded or demolished all such notions, and just left one with this kind of free-wheeling beauty of the openness of ways of looking, and the possibility of just developing the art of that and the skill of that. That, to me, is actually quite different.
Now, the reason I explained all that at such length is that that put me in a different position when I reached that point. It kind of opened up, it legitimized, all that thorough and wide and deep investigation of emptiness, ended up legitimizing this flexibility of ways of looking, without any kind of background weight of assumption that, "Oh, yeah, but that's not real. You can play with ways of looking, sure, and sure you can look at things a different way, but this is really the reality." It just completely wiped such a notion off the table, and left me with yes, we can look in different ways, we can explore that in meditation, and there's a holiness everywhere, sacredness everywhere, available to us. So that, to me, opened up the possibilities of the whole direction of Vajrayāna practice, of perceiving divinity in all things, of even what Buddhists call 'defilements' -- greed, hatred, aversion, the unclean, etc., the body. All this could be -- through this freeing up of ways of looking and legitimization of nothing but ways of looking, freed up the possibility of seeing sacredness and divinity and all of that, just by virtue of a way of looking -- not real, not unreal, but certainly beautiful and lovely.
The thing I did then was I began to explore, when I could, just really on my own, Vajrayāna practices. I read a lot, I experimented with practices. But after a little while -- I don't know how long; several long retreats -- I found that they didn't really satisfy me. They seemed still based on certain assumptions and ranges that I wasn't comfortable with, and perhaps I wasn't clear about it, and perhaps there were elements of my being, of what was important to me -- for instance art, for instance certain kinds of other passions -- that weren't given a place even in the Vajrayāna traditions or streams, except in very narrow and prescribed ways. Even the practices themselves of deity visualization and energy work, they were all kind of quite prescriptive in terms of what you were supposed to do, and they limited in that way the range of creativity and playfulness and possibility in perception.
There was all that, and I was kind of hunting around. At some point, someone gave me a book. I can't remember when or what prompted them to give me, this student to give me this book. It was James Hillman's -- you may know this book, Daniel -- and ... I keep forgetting the other guy's name, but they're both extremely wonderful. It's called We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse. Are you familiar with that?
Daniel: Yes.
Rob: So I just devoured that book; I was so excited by it. I know it had been around twenty years and possibly it was old hat and had gone in and out of fashion long before, but it just electrified, it just lit me up. I loved the brilliance and the spark of sharp social criticism there and brilliant psychological insight that I got from both -- I think the other guy is called Ventura, Michael Ventura, I think his name is. James Hillman and Michael Ventura. I absolutely loved it. A lot of what was said there -- it's a kind of series of recorded interviews between the two of them over a couple of years, I think, back in probably 1990 or something. A lot of what was said there in terms of its critiques of psychotherapy as it had developed after about a hundred years in the West, kind of mainstream psychotherapy, and also the wider social sphere or culture, I felt like a lot of that was actually applicable to the Dharma, too, and certainly my world that I moved in of Insight Meditation.
For a long, long time I felt very -- I don't know what to say -- passionately devoted to protecting the earth, passionately disturbed and concerned at our collective environmental blindness and lack of concern. A lot of what was said there applied really to that, this kind of -- what I called at one point, and they don't call it this, but I called it kind of psycho-myopic denial, in psychotherapeutic circles and in a lot of spiritual circles. One is so consumed and fascinated and kind of obsessed with one's own personal process of 'my growth,' 'my liberation,' 'my healing,' 'my personal process,' 'my psychology,' 'my patterns,' that one completely misses -- there's a kind of myopia to the inner psychic, in one sense, that one misses the influence and the tragedy on oneself and on the rest of humanity of collective socio-economic conditions, environmental attitudes, etc. So this married well, and it made a lot of sense to me just looking around at the world I moved in -- which I loved very much, the world of Insight Meditation; I was completely devoted to that as well.
So there was all that, and that began -- it really fired me up. And then I got interested in James Hillman, having read that book, and I bought another book or two books which were kind of okay. That book's kind of interesting, the Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, because -- I don't know [laughs], maybe I just missed it at the time, but in hindsight, I don't remember it as even talking about the imaginal. So I started reading other stuff, and that was very different. It was talking about the imaginal. It wasn't like social critique. I was like, it sort of interested me, but it didn't really take until -- maybe I'm painting this sharper than it was, but -- until I got hold of a book of his called Re-Visioning Psychology. I read that, I think, three or four times, immediately one after another. I read a section twice before going on to the next section. I took notes. I made all these markings in the book. I read it three times in a row like that, that intensely, on a long retreat I was doing. It seems to me now -- sometimes we paint these things in hindsight differently -- but it seems to me now that was really a turning point. It completely opened up a whole world for me and exploded things in my notion of possibility or of what was of concern. I wasn't a person who had a tremendously rich imagination. I'd probably been trained out of that from "come back to the breath," "let it go," "that's just a distraction," "that's not real," etc. -- that whole attitude, after decades of that, full-time earnest devotion to the sort of typical Insight Meditation path, etc. So I'd probably been trained out of that. It wasn't really that that's what made sense to me, but something in it spoke to me, and it just blew me away. I absolutely loved it. I loved the way he wrote, I love the style. I'd never come across writing in that style. Everything about it was just gorgeously fascinating to me and lovely.
I started really taking that up as a theme. I think -- I can't remember -- I think that might have been 2011, that point, but I can't remember. So it started creeping into my talks a little bit, particularly in the sort of attempt and encouragement and critique of the Insight Meditation tradition and Buddhism as a whole in relation to things like environmental problems and climate change. But I was left with kind of two things. One, it's completely on my own with all this. I was living at Gaia House, the resident teacher, living in one not very large room in the middle of the building, surrounded by -- at least this was my perception at the time; I'm not saying it's a reality -- surrounded by a certain way of thinking and looking and conceiving of the Dharma, and a whole bunch of assumptions. Something in me was beginning to explore all this imaginal stuff, and beginning to explore it for myself in practice. Hillman talks very little about practice or about how one works with these things. I couldn't find anyone else who was interested. I thought maybe I should get an archetypal psychotherapist, but they're actually impossible to find -- they don't exist any more, people who really prioritize that.
So I was exploring this on my own, and just burning inside with that. I felt like something in me -- again, this is an image, and I'm not saying it's a reality -- but I felt like I was banging against the walls of this ideational and attitudinal prison or cage that I was living in that was the Insight Meditation world that I had a central place in. This was a tremendously exciting time for me, and also really difficult. There was a lot of loneliness in it. There was a lot of this emerging sense of a kind of duty to somehow crash these walls down or even just draw attention to them. So it was difficult. It was also difficult because at the same time, I was writing my book on emptiness. Something in me was just opening so fast and so richly to all this imaginal stuff, and experimenting very much in my practice with that, and yet I had to write this book on emptiness, which at that point almost entirely consisted of work that I had already done, paths and practices and insights that I had already explored, already figured out, some of which I had already talked about, and yet I had to try and write this book and be as clear as I could in the language. That was just a huge, huge endeavour, and one of the things that made it difficult was this disjunct with where I was really at in terms of what was my creative edge in my practice, and then I had to spend hours and hours a day -- after my work interviewing and teaching -- writing about it. So it was, in a lot of ways, incredibly exciting, and really quite difficult, if that makes sense.
I had to figure out practising with it on my own, and there was a lot of insight with that. So I was practising with it and experimenting with different ways of practising. When I look back now, it was very different than it is now, how it has evolved. It was very kind of clumsy, not so subtle, not what I would call now the more fully imaginal. But it developed slowly. There was a lot of insight -- it's almost like I would experiment in practice, and my mind, the insight, would just flicker at the same time, make connections, and struggling to kind of marry it to or embed it in a larger Dharma conceptual framework, and where it really didn't, and where it did, and where it could and all that. So it was really, really fertile and exciting and really difficult.
Writing the book in that situation -- I think it took me, I don't know, two or three years to write the book. That was hard for the reasons I said. I knew that the book would be rejected by the publishers, which it was. They wanted something -- what did they say to me? -- they said, "Great idea. Can you write something shorter and simpler for the casual practitioner?" Something like that. [Rob and Daniel laugh] Which is exactly the response I expected, but it was difficult. It was really difficult. So I was trying to practise with the difficulty, not via the emptiness route, because that wasn't really ... I wanted to explore more the imaginal route. So I practised with all that difficulty via this kind of imaginal practice that I was developing and experimenting with by myself. It was very isolated, writing this book for a while and working on these practices which seemed so at odds and so different, with the kind of world that I was living in and ideational structures and assumptions and all that.
At some point, I began teaching imaginal stuff. Some places I would go, and it was like the Red Sea splitting. Some people absolutely loved it; they just were hungry for it and they were like, "Yes! This is what I've been waiting for! I can't believe that no one's talking about ...", etc. And some people not only just completely didn't understand it, it just baffled them, and actually worse -- they really, really didn't like it. I was called all kinds of things in public, as well -- a heretic, a dangerous man, this and that, bonkers, you know, with a hundred people there. [laughs] It was, again, difficult. But I felt like there was something in me, a daimon in that kind of sense of the word. It's like it had to come out. It had to be spoken. It had to be said. It had to be roared.
So again, difficult, but there was a sense of really following my soul-duty, if that makes sense, at whatever cost. All in all, with the writing of the book, which takes so much time in solitude, and my very heavy workload at Gaia House, and my explorations of all this stuff that no one else seemed to be into at all and that some people just considered completely bonkers, it was quite isolated. In a way, and I've shared this some place or other, it was the imaginal practice that kind of -- let's call it the angels and the imaginal figures that came to me through that time, in relation to the difficulty, the difficulties that that period had and the challenges, and the kind of loneliness of it, and would minister to me and kind of celebrate even the fact of writing this book that no one seemed to be interested in at the time and no one wanted to publish. I don't know if you get a sense, it was tremendously rich and very strange as a time. I was kind of playing with a relationship to what was around me, and a relationship to myself and my existence and my work. I was playing with quite unusual attitudes and relationships to all that. It was ... [laughs] I don't know what to say, but it was interesting. I could say much more, but let's just say that.
Then, at some point, Catherine McGee, who is also a local teacher around here, and I -- we'd been friends for a while, since I really moved to this area about 2003, after I came off a long retreat and then was in and out of retreat. We'd been friends since then. I always felt a kind of rich and deep connection with her. We had, as I said, been friends, but we'd kind of not been very close over those years, and especially during those years of my isolation writing the book and exploring all this strange stuff which I was hardly talking to anyone to about at that time. We were a little estranged, I think, Catherine and I.
But for some reason -- probably her suggestion [laughs] -- we tried to sort of talk through that, talk through what's happened between us, where are we now, and what else might be possible. And we did that. We spent some hours on different occasions doing that. It was difficult. It wasn't easy. But at some point, something clicked. Something cleared up. We came back into kind of a -- I don't know, a connection, a rich, fertile, harmonious connection with each other. And with that coming back together, immediately then, it occurred to me that she was interested in this very work that I was doing, and interested in exploring it with me in real time. So we began working together and exploring a different kind of soulmaking practice, which I haven't really talked about. She and I are actually writing a book, but I think it's going to be a while before it will be out, for a number of reasons, one of which is that it's just a bit advanced. I think the more basic soulmaking teachings need to take root and be kind of -- their foundations laid in whoever's interested before this other teaching comes out. But basically we were exploring, in real time, what happens in a dyad, two people who are -- with all the mindfulness and sensitivity and honesty they can bring to that encounter -- exploring image in the moment, including each other as image, with the boundaries, and with all the eros, and the container and the care and the sensitivity, exploring what that does.
That was another immensely fertile explosion of possibility. I started taking notes on that stuff while we were working on it. I would go home and scribble all these notes and, again, try and put things together. That began a really, really fertile period. Through all this, and working with Catherine, the possibilities of a larger conceptual framework for all this stuff started to emerge. I remember saying to her at the beginning of our work, "We need a conceptual framework. I don't want to just borrow old ones that are around and more familiar to either of us." So that was really an intent. It emerged gradually and, yeah, there's just such a thrill and beauty to all this. So a lot of the work started to be with her.
After -- I don't know how long after we started working, but not that long, six or seven or eight months -- I got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was clear that it was very, very serious. I was about to teach a retreat called The Path of the Imaginal, and I wanted to teach it despite the diagnosis. It felt so important to me. I remember saying to the people in the office at Gaia House upstairs, "If I were to die, if I knew that I was doing to die, I would decide to teach this retreat. I would decide to give these teachings." It just felt that important to me. Maybe that sounds grandiose; I don't know. It didn't feel grandiose, it just felt like, again, I have some kind of soul-duty, and if you know the teachings, that means neither real nor not real, but somewhere in that imaginal Middle Way.
As it turned out then, I went back to the doctor who had diagnosed me, and she said, "You absolutely cannot teach the retreat. You're at risk of" -- I don't know what it was, not the tumour but the stent they put in to unblock the bile duct. She said, "That can get infected. You cannot teach the retreat." Just really three days before the retreat, I pulled out of the retreat at her insistence. People came to the retreat, and my colleagues, Catherine and Yanai and Kirsten, just held the space while I was upstairs. At some point, I decided, "Well, I'm just going to give these teachings, on my own, in the room, into my tablet." I just started recording the talks, which turned out to be -- heaven knows what I was thinking; they were way more than would have fit in a week retreat. [laughs] There were like thirty-four talks, forty hours or something. So that was interesting, just kind of in my own, having to get into this groove without the rapport of the retreat and the audience and the feel there. But I did that.
Then I was called, after about six weeks, I was called earlier than I had anticipated for the operation. It was still a long time, given that particular cancer. So I hadn't finished that retreat; I had to go in for the operation, which was a really, really major operation. They said to me, "It's a bigger operation than a heart transplant." So I was just wiped out. I was wiped out for most of the year from that. But after a few months, I got enough strength back, and before I was to start chemotherapy, there was just a little window, when I just recovered a certain level of strength. Before I was going to start the chemotherapy, which was a new thing -- and again, I had this very, very serious diagnosis, and the prognosis, the doctor said, was very poor -- but in that little window I completed the last five talks of that retreat. Then I started chemotherapy. But I just kept going. There were more teachings I wanted to give, so I think I gave that series, An Ecology of Love. [laughs] I remember I was alone in the house, and I was on chemotherapy, I think. The talk on the web is divided into four parts now. I gave it all in one go, or in two goes of about an hour and a half each, or three hours total -- I can't remember -- in one go. I felt really fine doing it, and I was really in the groove, and it felt really fine, and I was in my sort of what felt like flow of inspiration. Afterwards, I just threw up. It was way too much that my body couldn't handle. [laughs]
At some point -- Catherine was very dear, and looking after me a lot during this time, but I really didn't have the strength to show up for the kinds of work we used to do, dyadic work, this kind of meditative exploration and speaking in dyads, in pairs, that we used to do. That wasn't around, but I gave some talks and recorded them. At a certain point, though, I began to regain my strength, and we began to explore again, little by little. I couldn't do these really long sessions like we did before, but just little by little. Gradually -- I can't remember what the time frame was -- that started to become a more fertile place for creativity for us both, and just kind of amazing explorations. Again, the conceptual framework was -- there was a lot of discovery there, creation and discovery.
Daniel: I appreciate you sharing a lot about the kind of history of how these ideas came to be, and I in particular appreciate you kind of pointing out the influence of James Hillman. For those who are listening who aren't familiar with his work, Rob recommended a couple books, and I would also recommend -- there's a biography of his, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, which is also an excellent audiobook if you want to kind of get into his life. Just an incredible person, and he did incredible work. He wrote this book, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, and his subtitle I think was like The World's Getting Worse.
I think, arguably, from my perspective, a similar kind of critique as you mentioned could be levied against what I sometimes jokingly call the spiritual industrial complex. There's a kind of dialogue that it entered into with Western culture, say, sixty years ago, and it isn't clear to me that it's really creating the kind of people who are set up to really radically transform the world, or are capable of doing the kind of social-political work that our world is calling out for right now. I'm curious what have you learnt, both in applying James Hillman's work and just thinking about it and approaching it from that perspective, and then, if you have anything to say about how our culture is attempting to unfold the relationship between inner transformation and outer transformation right now, which I notice is often focused on healing your personal shadow, working on trauma, all of these things -- this idea that you can only change the world to the degree you've healed yourself. It seems like that's a kind of core thesis of the spiritual activist sect right now, to the degree that that exists, that I'm aware of. That whole sensibility is not really as present, at least that I've seen, in the kind of imaginal work. That's a lot there and you can take that in any direction you want, but yeah, please reflect on that as you wish. [laughs]
Rob: Okay. I'm not sure what the question is exactly, Daniel.
Daniel: Let's do a two part. Just like James Hillman wrote this book, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse, I have heard you say similar things about the introduction of contemplative and spiritual practice in the West. What have you discovered in interrogating the relationship between inner and outer transformation? Not to make that the kind of scaffolding, but what have you learnt about how it is that we might reconceive of spiritual practice so that we actually, in another sixty years of spiritual practice, make a real difference in the world, the outer world? Like we create the kind of people who can do that work.
Rob: It's a great question. I'm not sure that I have the answer. You know, I can point at what I see as certain pitfalls or dead-ends, promises that turn out to be dead-ends that I see in a lot of psychotherapeutic approaches or frameworks, and a lot of spiritual frameworks and attitudes. But I'm not sure that anything I would espouse would guarantee a different result. I think it's too early to tell. It might be that a lot of people who are attracted to, let's say, what I teach, were already the kind of people who were passionately devoted to both activism and inner work. I'm just not sure. It's a little bit -- since I've been ill in the last, whatever it is, three years now, I don't even go out much. So I'm not really there at marches and things. I'm not so plugged in to what's happening.
It can sound a little weird to only kind of point the finger at problems, but in the spirit of James Hillman, who was enormously and almost always polemic -- I think there is some wisdom and necessity in that. A couple of things occur to me, in terms of problems of typical spiritual approaches. One is many spiritual approaches have a kind of movement to two things -- one is toward some kind of, in technical language, less fabricating, or rather perception of oneness, that liberation or awakening or enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, is mapped out and conceived as some kind of knowing of that oneness (whatever that oneness is, whether it's love or awareness or whatever), and somehow losing one's identity in it or regarding that as one's deeper identity, and the liberation that that brings.
Beautiful, and really important, I think, for a meditator to go that route and open that territory up and those experiences. But oneness, the oneness of all things, lends itself to a kind of equanimity, if that makes sense. If everything is one, it doesn't matter if that particular thing there, or that particular forest, or that particular this or that, dies. Of course, that's recognized as a goal; that's hailed as a goal, this kind of movement towards equanimity, in a lot of spiritual paths, Buddhism included. The liberation is in that very "it doesn't really matter" sense; nothing is gained or lost, ultimately speaking, it's all okay. That kind of equanimity can easily be taken too far. It's a very subtle thing. It's not like this gross inertia, necessarily. It's very easy for it to be taken too far, in the sense of then it has consequences on how we relate to the things of the world and the species and the planet, etc. Does that make sense?
Daniel: Yes.
Rob: So that's one kind of incompleteness, I would say. I wouldn't say, "No, that's all wrong." I would just view it as incomplete. I think there's a lot to be gained for the heart and the being and the perspective in those kind of series of openings to different kinds of oneness, and the relative liberation and the relative resource of equanimity, etc., perspective that that can give. But it comes at a cost, very, very easily. Another one is -- I would say particularly Buddhists, but particularly Buddhist Theravāda approaches, meaning the kind of Pali Canon old school -- from a psychological perspective, the archetypes that are raised up and visible and implicitly or explicitly presented to us as desirable or as fruits of the path, the range of archetypes is extremely limited, as I've pointed out elsewhere. It's like, you've got the Buddha, sitting, still, completely still, with his eyes closed. Where is the raging one? Where is the erotic one? Where is the warrior? Where is the lover? Just archetypally, it's very narrow, and very poor.
When it comes to ethical action and activism in the world, that single archetype won't cut the mustard. Its fruits are very, very limited, so that you get in certain Buddhist traditions -- or let's say you did get; I think it might be beginning to change now with different communities of Insight Meditation practitioners -- but you don't get the fervour of the revolutionary, or the passionate lover of the earth, because the archetypes are limited. Now, no one talks about archetypes, because we don't have that language. In psychological language, if we talk in terms of imaginal psychology, there's all kinds of fantasies imbuing the sense of the path, and the goal, and the self on the path, and the vision of what an awakened person looks like, but it's all tacit. It's implicit. It's not highlighted. So you get presented these limited archetypes. No one's talking about that! No one says that. People just go a certain direction and view it as, "It can't be spiritual. It can't be Dharmic. It's not what an enlightened person does. They don't behave like that. They don't talk like that. They don't say that," etc., "They don't create such a fuss. They don't rage like that." It's not within the archetypal range. So that's another limitation. Maybe the same applies to psychotherapy, you know. What does a healthy person, a psychotherapeutically healthy and sorted, I've healed my past -- what does that look like?
Daniel: Right. That speaks directly into the kind of second part of the question, which is that I do see -- it's still rare that there is even a meeting together of the activism world and the spiritual world, but when I see that meeting happening in the US, at least, typically it gets reduced to this idea of "we need to heal our trauma, or do our own healing work, so that we can show up fully in the world." So there is this kind of -- I think largely uninterrogated idea of what healing is, what healing looks like, what the end result of a healing journey might be. But in any case, it reduces this intersection of spiritual practice and work in the world, change-making, to be this kind of healing journey. I wonder in what ways is that incomplete. Can you speak on that kind of tension I'm feeling?
Rob: Yeah, okay. It's interesting that you feel that. I guess a few things. First of all, Buddhist teachings, the most central aspect of Buddhist teachings -- certainly Insight Meditation teachings, but actually any Buddhist teaching really -- is the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths, it's like what kind of defines Buddhism. It's really that. Now, they get interpreted very differently, which I think is a very important point. But inescapably, they deal with the word 'suffering' -- in Pali it's dukkha, or in Sanskrit it's duḥkha. They deal with suffering and the release of suffering and the release from suffering.
So already, in the core Buddhist teachings, in the core Buddhist sort of directionality and vision, is something that we could just replace with the word 'healing.' And, more often, it's envisaged personally, despite the bodhisattva rhetoric, etc., that we come across, and commitment we come across. So you've got something right at the basis of Buddhist teachings that's -- you can't find your way around it. It can easily get interpreted in psychological terms as the problem is my suffering -- in other words, my need for healing -- and the path is the practice of that healing and the fruit of that healing. What we could do, though, is broaden what we mean by that word, dukkha, and suffering, and what we really encapsulate in it. That, I think, can open up the path in much wider ways and often unexpected ways. So that's one thing. It's kind of conceptual, but it's sort of again in the background. We don't realize, "Oh, there's a reason for that." Most spiritual paths, and actually the ancient attitude to philosophy, was also as healing, as medicine. So East and West, we're imbued in this notion of healing and path. It's there in the background, and it permeates our whole thinking and our whole directionality and endeavour. That's one thing.
The second thing is a lot of spiritual paths, I would say -- not all -- and a lot of psychotherapies -- but not all -- how to say this? I should probably not put these two together, but the spiritual paths certainly are to do with somehow quietening or even almost erasing the self. Again, in psychotherapeutic terms, it's healing the self, which is different than growing the self, let's say, and growing the wildness and the uniqueness of the self and the individuation that we talked about when we were talking much earlier. There's a certain attitude to the self. One is towards a kind of dissolution or erasure. One is to this kind of healing but not individuating, if we borrow Jung's terms. Then there's also, in regard to the self, this kind of tendency for most human beings now, certainly in psychotherapeutic circles but also in Dharma circles, to regard the self as caused by the past, and suffering and dis-ease to be caused in the past, in my personal history. That's a very different notion than having a sense -- held loosely -- of teleology, of what my self is called towards, what wildness, what individuation, what uniqueness I am called to manifest, what angels, what daimons are calling me. That's a very different vision. So those are some of the factors.
I don't know where things are at. I do have a sense that things are beginning to change in some circles, as I said earlier. Just broadening this notion of suffering, it's clear I think for a lot of people that we can no longer ignore, for instance, environmental degradation, species loss, climate change. There's an awful amount of just human suffering that is and is going to come out of that. So a lot of people are kind of making this connection. How they choose to address it, again, I wouldn't insist that the kind of teachings I'm trying to open up or explore, creating/discovering, are the answer. I think that would be arrogant. I think the difficulties we face as a species are so complex psychologically, economically, socially, politically, that we're going to need multiple directions. Because what moves me to action, what moves me to passionate speaking up and even putting my body on the line or whatever it is, is not necessarily what will move someone else, and what will make sense to someone else. I think we have to be very open-minded and have some humility here that we don't know -- I don't think any one person or any one view has or is the answer.
Daniel: Thank you for saying that. And just to push back a little bit against the modesty, I think part of what it's going to take is the fertilization of human consciousness on a massive level, so that we can each of us follow our duty. Right? That involves, I think, at least in my experience, a certain breaking out of a container. I think that -- yeah, the framework or the approach that you've set up, at least personally, has been -- I don't know if I would have seen the contours of the box I was in without it. And so I agree it will take all of us, it will take many different approaches, many different experiments and all of that, and there's something of precious, precious, indispensable and invaluable beauty and appropriateness of the approach you've given birth to. I appreciate the sense of, "Yeah, this isn't the one way," and it's incredible, from my perspective. I'm just another human.
Rob: [laughs] Sure. That's lovely, lovely, and I'm really glad. It's very gratifying and beautiful for me to hear that from you, Daniel. I suppose, you know, one possible -- hmm, I don't know -- blessing of the kind of conceptual framework and set of practices and approach that we're trying to open up and create and discover, is that there's not a prescription in terms of what actually I sense with soul, or what images come to me, or what my sense of soul-duty is. There's a kind of individuality and uniqueness to each person and each period in time of a person's life and practice that's available. It's almost like it's a meta-conceptual framework, rather than -- you know, a lot of other, let's say religions, prescribe the images: "This is the crucifix. This is the" whatever it is. In a way, what I feel it's really important to do in this age -- I want to come back to this in a second -- where we're actually at a certain place with self-notion, at a certain place in what we conceive of as a human self and our self-sense, that it feels really important that we honour that individuality, and that range, and that uniqueness, and that need for people to find what speaks -- if we use a certain language -- what speaks to and moves their soul the most and the most deeply and widely.
So there's something in creating or discovering this more meta-framework that enables that to be a kind of womb for conceptions and fertilization in the broadest possible sense, in terms of people's lives and practices as you're describing for yourself. That's one thing. I do feel we're at -- probably every human being who was a thinking human being at any point in history would say we're at an interesting time now. So I'm going to say that too. [Rob and Daniel laugh] I said the other day on this retreat, if I remember, I feel we have a kind of cosmological and anthropological crisis. In other words, our ideas, our logoi, our ideas of what the cosmos is, what the world is, what matter is, what nature is, and our ideas of anthropos, of humankind, are poor, are thin, have reached their limit. And we see the effects now. Because of globalization and the massive power of technology, the effects of such limited and thin and not very fecund views of what a human being is, and what animals are, and what trees are, and what the world is, and what this cosmos is -- it gets flatly reduced in this scientific materialist or scientistic, even, view of our selves, of human beings. What a person is, what a human being is, what this world is, that needs some kind of expansion or even revolution.
In other words, what I'm saying is the typically flatly modernist, Western Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution-spawned view of the universe, of which we are the inheritors, as someone said to me, "in all its brilliance and all its brutality." We are the inheritors of that, and it has a tremendous amount of gifts and really a lot of costs. We are becoming more conscious of that. Carrying on with the same paradigm, with the same kind of views and conceptions and the same logos of what the world is, what nature is, what a human being is, it will not deliver, it will not give rise to the kinds of senses of reverence, and humility, and place, and awe, and duty, and blessedness, and participation that we need if we are to start treating the world, the world of nature, the world of other human beings, and ourselves -- let's just say better, or at least more interestingly.
Whatever frameworks or ideas or approaches come out, they're going to need to address -- let's call it loosely 'cosmology' and 'anthropology.' What we have developed does, I think, do that. It brings in, to me, what's quite sophisticated and subtle and flexible ideas and notions and possible views of who I am and what human beings are and what nature is -- this or that thing in nature, or nature as a whole -- and what the cosmos is. So it is perhaps one of a whole set of other possibilities that I don't know about that has that kind of possibility of giving birth to the views, the attitudes, the relationships, the ideas that will effect a much larger, deeper healing, if we go back to that word. For me, now, healing that doesn't involve that opening up and making holy of the world of perception -- healing that's purely so-called 'intrapsychic' or 'me and my past,' and doesn't open up the world, and the sense of holiness, and the sense of participation, and creation and discovery, and mystery, and beauty, and the endlessness of that -- to me that doesn't qualify as healing. It's only a partial healing. I'm okay with that word; it's just come to mean something much different, and it has to do with the nature of perception and conception in the widest and deepest possible sense. That's what gets healed. From that, all kinds of other possibilities -- personal, collective, and relational -- are possible.
Daniel*:* There's so much there. One thing that I've been kind of playing with, and one of the topics of this show, is the relationship between psychological well-being and socio-political transformation. I think that what you have created or discovered is one Archimedes' lever of psychological well-being. I've spent my whole life meditating and doing the things that are supposed to make you happy and healthy and wise and all that, but this work has just opened up a new dimension for me that -- I don't know, it was game-changing for me, and what I would now describe that process as being like is, you know, we talked a little about individuation. I know that Jung thought about individuation on the psychological level, but it feels like you have created a conceptual framework to enable a kind of spiritual individuation. What I also hear you calling for is a kind of meta-framework that enables there to be as many spiritualities as there are human beings on the planet, right? That we're past the idea of a kind of monocultured spirituality and into this extremely fertile, endless horizon of us all discovering what is most meaningful for ourselves in this endlessly beautiful and divine play.
Rob: Yeah, that's lovely. Yeah. Thank you. [laughs] It touches me when you say that. That's, I think, maybe even before I was fully conscious of it, what I was or certainly Catherine and I now are consciously setting out to do, setting out to create and discover, and have this sense of yes, finding and making available and wanting to share all that you just shared. It's interesting to me, as well, beginning to teach this stuff; I did most of the teaching one on one for a while, you know, with various students. I was sharing this -- I don't know where it was; perhaps on this recent retreat -- how surprised I was, how really pleasantly surprised, that this work with the imaginal work and the sensing with soul could address and heal certain -- let's call them personal psychological wounds, that a lot of other psychotherapy paradigms didn't seem to be able to touch, or the meditation, etc. Just that level was really interesting to me. It's like, wow, there's a kind of purely -- let's call it psychotherapeutic healing level here, personal healing level, that's very, very powerful.
And then, as I say, healing comes to mean more and more, and the possibilities that can open up. One of them, which is very important to me, you mentioned some minutes ago, actually -- you said, how did you put it, "I wouldn't have been aware of the boxes I was operating in spiritually." This again -- you probably know this -- but this is a passion for me. It's like, can we become aware, as much as possible, of the set of assumptions and frameworks and presumptions that we're operating within, whether that's with regard to my spiritual path, the way I meditate, how I think about everything, how I approach everything, how I look at everything? So that kind of deconstruction, if we use a traditional term, that kind of deconstruction is actually very dear to my heart. It inspires and electrifies me, and I think it's so, so important for all of us.
Not to stop at deconstruction, because then, if we deconstruct enough in every direction, every sense of the word, then comes the possibility of this reconstruction that we're talking about. That reconstruction can fit, intimately fit, let's call it the needs of my soul, of your soul, and they'll be different. All this is part of it, and this, to me, the necessity and the beauty of bringing the intellect to bear. That's another piece -- you know, we talked about, right before you asked what did I feel was missing in the Insight Meditation world around me, one piece is the beauty of the intellect, the beauty of searing, cutting, flying with ideas and the rigour of that and the penetrating of that and the boldness that's possible in the ideas. All that can be ensouled, can be made beautiful, can be made electric. Yet, in so many spiritualities, it's like, "Just let go of thought. Thought is the enemy. Thought is bad." It's like, why not? Why can't we have eros there? Why can't we have soul there? Why can't we have that fullness as well as the beautiful silence and the absorption states and all the rest of it? Have it all.
There's something in this approach that we're creating/discovering which has a lot do with yes, my eros, my desire, my wanting, my hunger, my flame, my life, can go in every which way possible direction -- maybe not all at once, and maybe certain of those will open up at different times; of course they will. But intellect is one, ideas is one -- it gets very easily dismissed in so many spiritual circles. And what about sexuality? There's barely any talk on that apart from just "be kind, be respectful, don't be abusive." What is it to actually open that out, and not just with the typical tropes like sacred sexuality -- it's like, what can that mean? That can mean so many different possible things. Again, can I find, can I listen, and explore and open out, that my individual callings in those directions, your individual callings, are respected, and other archetypes and all this? It feels important to me, and a lot of people say to me, it brings -- when they do this work and they get into it -- it brings together so many of the things that I love, so many of the things that are important to me, so many of the strands of what I'm passionate about, instead of having a kind of spirituality that takes care of this but what about that other thing that I love so dearly, the art, or being a lover, or my sexual life, or my environmental commitments, whatever those are for each different person.
Is there not a way that they can be tied synergistically and beautifully and complexly together, and unfold together, and the whole thing -- rather than just saying, "Yeah, be mindful of everything, let go of everything"; that's too thin. It's too cheap. It's one gear. It's one approach. We need richness and fertility and flame and discovery in every possible direction. To me, there's something about that sense of the comprehensiveness and the complexity and inclusiveness in a very complex and particular way of the totality of one's being -- I know it's compelling for me and people have told me that that really attracts them when they start to practise and think in this way.
Daniel: Mm-hmm, yeah. My gosh. There's so much I want to talk to you about, and I want to honour the time container that we set up. I know you have dinner to eat. [laughs] I just want to say to folks who have made it to the end of this episode that, you know, Rob and myself, we threw out a lot of different concepts. I think, as Rob often says, we threw out a lot of seeds. Some of those might be alive for you, they might have sparked something for you. I just want to say dive in. Rob and the people who work around him have been kind enough to essentially release all of his material online. It's on Dharma Seed, dharmaseed.org. If you search for him as a teacher, you can find hundreds of hours of the unfolding of this conceptual model over time. You can see it at different stages in its development. You can listen to recent synthesized and mature versions, or go back in time and listen to these ideas as they began to emerge, as Rob was reflecting on at the beginning of this interview. We just touched the surface. We skimmed the surface. We talked about a lot of the kind of affordances of this approach, what it can maybe do or what it has done for me, but the place to dive in, if you want to, is through your own relationship with this approach, and that, unless you live in the UK, for now, that will probably take place primarily in the form of listening to audio talks.
So I just want to encourage everybody who's listening to go and discover, go and see for yourself, what this is. From my perspective, it is a paradigm shift in Western spirituality, and I imagine that Rob is probably too humble to name it as such, but I am personally extremely curious about how the Buddhist world and the Western spiritual scene will reckon with what in my view is a paradigm shift. Will it be able to see it, will it tolerate it, or will it kind of just shunt it off to the edge? My hope would be that spiritual practitioners are more accommodating for these kinds of major shifts than other parts of the human experiment typically are, where we have to kind of wait until people die to move along and transform those aspects of what we do. So I'm personally really passionate about it. Thank you, Rob, both for your teachings -- they have been a light in my life -- and also for your willingness to come on and share your own journey with it and all of the things that you've shared today.
Rob: Thank you, Daniel. It's really a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Daniel Thorson, "A Spiritual Paradigm for The Infinite Game" (23 July 2018), https://medium.com/@danielthorson/a-spiritual-paradigm-for-the-infinite-game-f43010f08819, accessed 23 April 2021. ↩︎
