Rob Burbea Responds

Daniel Thorson and Rob Burbea

August 18, 2018

[https://anchor.fm/emerge/episodes/Rob-Burbea-Responds-e1vm3d]{.ul}

Daniel: Welcome to another episode of Emerge. On this episode, we have back again on the show Rob Burbea. In this conversation, we're going to respond to questions, concerns, and feedback that arose in response to our first conversation that we shared, particularly some feedback that we got from the subreddit r/streamentry. Just to set context for this conversation, I want to appreciate a couple redditors, u/duffstoic, u/philosophyguru, u/armillanymphs, and u/aspirant4, among others, for contributing to what I thought was a really vibrant and useful conversation about the previous podcast episode we recorded together. There were some comments that I thought verged on trolling, but actually a lot of it was really beautiful and well-conceived. I think, for me, I saw it as an expression of interest and curiosity. So I just want to honour that, I thought that was really cool, and also say that this conversation and the questions that we're going to be focusing on are basically pulled directly from that thread. I did a little bit of reinterpreting and reassembling, but the questions themselves are pretty much verbatim, more or less, from that thread. The basic and general feedback, I think, if I could synthesize it in one sentence, would be that a lot of folks left that previous conversation not really feeling like they understood what soulmaking actually is, or what the imaginal actually is. Some people actually expressed a lot of suspicion or concern about that. So hopefully by directly addressing some of the questions that were brought up in that thread, we can give you a better sense and enough context to kind of help you feel comfortable diving in to the actual recordings on Dharma Seed, if that's something that ends up being interesting to you. So we're not going to try to do the job of the audio recordings that are available on Dharma Seed, but our goal is, instead, to respond to the confusions and questions that surfaced through our last conversation. All that being said in terms of context, Rob, welcome back to Emerge.

Rob: Thank you, Daniel. I'm really happy to be here again with you.

Daniel: Great, yeah. So to do this well, I have decided to do my best to kind of -- in terms of the questions I'm going to be asking, I decided that it would be interesting and useful to sort of channel where I imagine the questions are coming from. I think I can do that because I was kind of a member of the Pragmatic Dharma scene for many years. In service of that, I'm going to re-present some of these questions that were asked in the thread to Rob, and Rob has agreed to be a good sport about that and let me do that. Rob, do you have any additional context you'd like to lay out before we jump in to the actual questions?

Rob: What kind of thing did you have in mind?

Daniel: Nothing in particular, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to speak on the context.

Rob: Only that, like I said, I haven't seen as much of the responses as you have, nor do I know that community and what their particular kind of concerns or set of assumptions and skills are. So I don't know that community and I haven't seen the questions -- just the little bit that you sent me in the email. But I'm certainly happy to try and do that, and then perhaps there are some larger kind of perspectives on just the whole intention and process and challenge of talking about all this stuff. We can get to that later, I suppose.

Daniel: Great, wonderful. Okay, so let's jump in with what I think was my favourite question, as long as it was held lightly, not to reify this question too much. Here's the concern: often, when something cannot be explained in plain English, it ends up just being bullshit. The redditor in question linked to a picture about how to understand science articles, so an average sentence is hard to understand, and the subject matter is simple, it's probably just bullshit. In a sentence or two -- this is a question from the redditor -- in a sentence or two, explain the imaginal in plain English. What is it? What are the practices, specifically? And how are they better and/or different than traditionally Buddhist ones?

Rob: Okay, so that's three questions that you want me to answer in a couple of sentences. [laughs] Can we break them down into at least three questions? Is that okay?

Daniel: Yeah, we'll process this together as best we can. Maybe we can start with, in a sentence or two can you explain the imaginal in plain English?

Rob: So, I'll try. As I said, later we can talk about perhaps the kind of assumptions behind the question, etc., and why it might be not so simple to explain this. But let's say when we talk about the imaginal -- when we talk about the imaginal, in this (what we're calling) Soulmaking Dharma, we're really talking about, if you like, kinds of perceptions. Okay? Now, usually when we talk about imagination, we mean just something that's available to my private eye, but we mean both so-called inner, intrapsychic, and outer (if you like, extrapsychic) perceptions -- so perceptions of the world, perceptions of imaginal figures that appear just to me. We mean all that, but also certain kinds or ranges of perceptions of the world of things that everyone would agree is there -- this tree in front of me, this person that we can all see is there, the fields, the birdsong we can hear; whatever it is, as well as more private perceptions.

When we say 'imaginal,' we're not really talking about a kind of firm, sharp division -- I prefer to talk more about a spectrum. We can talk about perceptions that are more fully imaginal, or really less fully imaginal. So the first thing is we're talking about perceptions, and those perceptions -- whether they're inner or outer, so-called -- are, if you like, held in, supported by, opened up by certain ideas that don't hold a view that this perception is real, nor that it is unreal. So when we talk about the imaginal, we're also talking about not just perceptions but also conceptions. Usually, when we perceive, whether it's an inner experience or an outer experience, we tend to think it's real or it's not real. This opens up that whole dualism or dichotomy to allow conceptions of what we're perceiving, and who we are, and what is happening, and where we're going, that are not restricted by our usual kind of more limited conceptions. So the imaginal involves perceptions, inner and outer, that are not restricted by the conception.

Now, what kinds of perception? They are perceptions that touch the beholder deeply. They are perceptions that strike the person as beautiful, deeply beautiful, movingly beautiful. But we're not just talking about the kinds of universal mystical perceptions that people might be familiar with, perceptions of oneness, perceptions of universal love, being, or awareness, and this kind of thing. Mostly we're talking about perceptions that involve and enhance and have important to them the particularities of things -- not a dissolving of particularity, but a bringing out and a celebration and an honouring and a reverencing of particularities. And what we perceive also starts to have a kind of personhood. So all these characteristics are part of the kinds of perceptions we're talking about: particularity, personhood, beauty, eros, humility.

Daniel: So Rob, I'm channelling this redditor, it's my archetype of a redditor, and he said "in a sentence or two," and you said a lot and it makes sense to me, Daniel, but I can imagine somebody listening and feeling like, "Well, that was just a lot. That wasn't one or two sentences. I can explain meditation, Buddhist meditation: you sit down until you're enlightened. That's one or two sentences." I want to, again, represent that desire for kind of simplicity. Is there a kind of nugget that you would point to as being what the imaginal is?

Rob: If I say the imaginal is a whole possibility of the art of perceptions that open up soulmaking -- that's it. The practice of the imaginal, sensing with soul, is the art of perception that opens up soulmaking.

Daniel: Beautiful. The second question this redditor asked was, "What are the practices specifically?" Again, here I'm imagining he's like, "Well, I know in meditation I follow the breath at my nose, and that is what I do when I meditate." So what are the practices, in the same way that following the breath is for Buddhist meditation, perhaps -- what are the practices of the imaginal that are clear and succinct, and you can kind of see?

Rob: I don't think I can limit them. Part of, if you like, the conception of the imaginal, is that it's not limited. There will be an infinite amount of practices. If I had to sum up what they do, again, they're practices of perceiving, either things in the world that everyone would agree are there (this desk, my body, this person), or inner, so-called inner things (characters that might appear to me), perceiving them, meditating on that perception, holding them in perception, in ways that open up soulmaking. What I actually work with in that could be anything at all. It could be my body, it could be my illness, it could be my death, it could be this person there, it could be some figure, it could be a tree, it could be anything at all.

Daniel: Okay, and then ... maybe I can reformulate this question and say, what is a particular example of a practice somebody might do if they were practising in the imaginal work?

Rob: Ah, okay. If I can divide it into this kind of artificial division, just for now, for ease of explanation, between so-called inner appearances -- something that arises in my private imagination -- on the one hand, and then extrapsychic -- looking at an object everyone would agree was there. In the first case, a person might be meditating, and even gets distracted, and some figure arises in the imagination, or some scene. Or they might have been touched by a dream the night before in which there was a figure or a scene. Then they take that image and can work with it in ways that include a fair amount of sophistication meditatively, in terms of the sensitivity of heart that's involved, the sensitivity to what we call the energy body, certain ways of feeling one's somatic experience and conceiving of the body, and also sensitivity to conception -- bringing all that, subtly and delicately, into a kind of relationship with this internal imaginal figure or scene, in a way that supports soulmaking (which also is a word I haven't explained yet). The same could apply to this apple tree -- I've got my eyes open, I'm looking at it, and I'm bringing all that that I just talked about, my whole sensitivity to the energy body, of my heart awareness and all the subtlety there, and my conception, into relationship with what I behold with my eyes that everyone else would agree was there. I'm perceiving it and conceiving it in ways that open up the experience.

Daniel: Okay. I think, listeners, you might get a sense of how difficult it is to really nail down a practice like we might be able to with Buddhist meditation in the example I used. I think there are also some really good examples in the thread that you can find, of people expressing what imaginal practice is like for them or how they experience it. But moving on, I think there is another thread of questioning that I found to be really interesting around the fitting in of imaginal practices with more traditional Buddhist orientations to the path. So specifically, the questioner wanted to know where do imaginal practices fit into the three trainings of Buddhism. The three trainings, for listeners who are unaware, are morality, concentration, and insight, I think is how I've heard them translated. Maybe, Rob, you have a different sense of them. But how do the imaginal practices fit into those three trainings from your perspective?

Rob: So the first one, ethics (in Pali, it's sīla), forms a basis. It really forms an important basis -- a sort of commitment to, understanding of, and inquiry into ethics forms a basis for all the practices that we do. Someone coming to these kinds of practices without that basis, and a basis in the other two that you mentioned, is probably not going to get very far. It's asking quite a lot in terms of skill, etc. So it forms a basis, that commitment to ethics.

But I would say there's a possibility of imaginal practice and this kind of thinking actually extending our ethical sensibilities and commitments, and bringing in some more challenging questions. This I addressed, to people who are interested, actually quite a few years ago -- I wonder if it was 2011 or 2012 -- with two talks, one called "The Meditator as Revolutionary," and one called "The Necessity of Fantasy." They were both kind of critiques, if you like, of the typical Dharmic, Buddhist ways of thinking about ethics, and where in fact they limit our behaviour. In the example I was drawing on there it was concern for the environment and also about climate change.

You would expect -- if it was so simple that everyone just needs to be mindful, everyone needs to learn to be calm, and train their mind in this way or see that there is no self -- you would expect that Buddhists and certainly teachers of Buddhism would, for instance, make radical commitments in relationship to climate change. It's just an obvious ethical choice. The fact is, at that time, that wasn't the case. The question is why? Why is it that there is so little -- I don't know what to call it -- strong and gutsy outspokenness and activism around ethical issues and issues of social, environmental, and political concern, among Buddhists and Buddhist teachers? One way of approaching that critique is actually saying, well, the images and archetypes that kind of infuse and limit how we think of the Dharma are actually constraining the ethical range, so that the image we have of the Buddha sitting silently, calmly, unmoved, kind but not really involved, silently in meditation with his eyes closed, actually starts to infiltrate the life and the ethical choices.

So it's almost bringing in, saying, there's a whole other realm here of our psychology, the image and the archetype, etc., that is influencing things, but we're not talking about it. We're just talking in simplistic terms: mindfulness, reduction of suffering, seeing the illusion of self, etc. Just look -- is it actually addressing the issues? How is it limiting the ethics? So with sīla, with ethics, this forms a basis absolutely, a solid basis, and possibly imaginal practice, soulmaking practice, can extend that.

With the second one, the actual word in Pali is samādhi. It usually gets translated as 'concentration.' I don't particularly like that word, because I don't think it really brings out what the Buddha was talking about. It is not just the ability to nail your mind to some object and keep it there, come what may, without wavering at all. That's a fairly useful skill, but it's pretty limited. The Buddha talked much more about jhānas, deep absorptions, which are a lot more to do with well-being and mystical experience and opening up the sensibility and sensitivity. All that meditative skill, again, forms a basis or at least an important component, a developing component, of soulmaking practice. As I said before, it takes a lot of delicacy, sensitivity, nuance of the art of meditation, meditative skill, with all kinds of dimensions of our being, to be able to do this work. It's like doing some kind of really delicate sculpture or dance or something like that; it needs a lot of skill. So yes, focus and calm and jhānas and all of that, but also a lot of other meditative skills I've alluded to.

The third one, insight, mindfulness -- we could say, actually, we could talk about any mindfulness, insight, emptiness -- these are all important components, you know. One of the things, for example, that we do in soulmaking practice, really kind of bring back in the whole experience and energy of desire, and the whole question of desire: is it something that I just need to let go of? Get rid of? Get over? And actually are there ways that I can open up my experience of desire so it opens me up and opens up other directions? To do all that, I need to be able to let go. I need the simple mindfulness, I need to be able to put things down and let go and all that kind of stuff.

With emptiness, which is also a component of this third -- paññā in the Pali, it's wisdom or insight -- again, we talked about this in our first episode, or actually technically the second. Most teachings of emptiness just kind of say something like, "The self is an illusion," or "Dissolve the self," or "Explode it" or something, and stop there, maybe get to some kind of Absolute or Unfabricated. I think soulmaking teachings, imaginal practice, is based on an understanding of emptiness that goes beyond just the deconstruction. Because it sees that everything is empty, including deconstruction, it legitimizes a playing with reconstruction. So it's based on a different understanding of emptiness. It's not that everyone needs to have a very deep experience of emptiness to be able to do soulmaking practices, but some people do. Some people need that. Some people take it on faith. And some people legitimize it in other ways. Also, it's very common for people doing imaginal practice to actually find that their understanding and experience of emptiness -- not just of self, but also of world, emptiness of world -- actually opens up, deepens, grows, from doing imaginal practice, without doing much more emptiness practice. So that's a way it can work, that way around as well.

Daniel: Okay. I'd like to kind of double-click on the emptiness piece, because another sort of inquiry that I heard people represent was something like, "I still don't really understand what the point of imaginal work is. You talk about seeing emptiness, and how that frees the mind -- that seems like an end point to me." They go on to say something like, "No self, no intrinsic reality, no problem. What's all this imaginal stuff for?"

Rob: Right, yeah. So this would be a very understandable and probably common sort of question that someone would have. I have to say, you know, I'm really not wanting to evangelize or convince anyone. Maybe other people are, but it's not something I want to do about all this stuff. I don't even claim that it's better or whatever than anything else. Some people, like myself, will go very deep into emptiness -- all of it, absolutely all of it, deeper than also maybe some other conceptions of emptiness -- and still want more. What is this 'more'? Where does that come from? It's partly what we call the 'eros.' There's something in some people, in some personalities, if you like, in a certain language, in some souls, that wants more. What more does it want? It wants the soulmaking. It wants those kinds of perceptions. So others won't have that; they're just purely engaged in a kind of technology for the reduction of suffering, and they're just maximizing the reduction of suffering, "thank you very much, that's all I came for, that satisfies me." That's fine. Why should I or anyone else try to convince those people that they need anything more? But others, who have certain personalities, who love deeply, who have a lot of eros, who have a lot of what we call 'soul,' for whom the imagination speaks to them anyway, they will want a different paradigm.

We could also ask, for example, what does seeing that there's no intrinsic reality, seeing that there's no self, what does that imply, for instance, about such areas of my being or domains of my being as my sexuality? What does it imply, what does it affect, in terms of my relationship with nature, other than "it's all one, it's all flow"? What does it imply about the whole way that I see the self and personality? It's probably the case that what most people think of as this kind of seeing of not-self, or even understanding of emptiness, that kind of liberation -- none of those areas are really opened up to be very fertile. There can be an absence of problem there, and a certain freedom of movement, but they're not really generative, fertile, rich, important, meaningful, sacred.

Lastly, and connected with that, is that when we travel the emptiness path -- and the samādhi path, in terms of jhānas -- and I think we touched on this in the last episode -- there's probably, I don't know, I've never counted them, but there's probably certain very predictable experiences that happen, sometimes not in order but most often in a kind of progression. You can kind of gather them up and you know what's going to happen. There is not just a decrease in suffering; there's also a sacredness there, which to some people is very important. But the kinds of perception of sacredness are, if you like, limited in scope. There's like X flavours -- I've never counted X, but twenty-five or something, and these are the experiences. Again, it's like ... is there something in us, or let's say in some people, that wants more? That is not satisfied by that? We can call that craving or greed, or we can call it eros and a desire of the soul for soulmaking. That would be some of the things I would say in response to that.

Daniel: Great. You touched on this a little bit, but this is another question that I think was well-represented in the conversation. It's around the kind of prerequisites, and specifically is this kind of work something that really only makes sense to do after achieving a certain level of insight into emptiness?

Rob: I want to be cautious here. I will say, for me personally -- and I think I described that in one of our conversations -- for me, going really deep into emptiness, and deeper than I had come across anywhere before, in fact, was what kind of landed me, opened me, or left me in a place that legitimized all this, what was to come in terms of the exploration. I don't know whether everyone needs to do that; certainly some people. I can think of some students, they had to do all that. They even got to the point they could see there's no self, they can have an experience of the Unfabricated, and what some people would call stream-entry and even further, but they needed to go further with the emptiness to actually legitimize this non-duality between the fabricated and the Unfabricated, this opening up of the possibility of seeing sacredness everywhere. So for some people, that's what needs to happen. And other people don't -- they already have, maybe from modern philosophical inquiry or just living with a kind of wide and deep artistic sensibility, they already have what they need in terms of the legitimization of it for themselves, so they're free to play.

Now, the skills that are needed, these I think are quite -- there's quite a lot asked. A lot of soulmaking happens in relationship. We're beginning to open up that, how people practise with each other with all this stuff. It takes a lot in terms of honesty, in terms of psychological awareness, in terms of emotional sensitivity, capacity of the heart, of the intellect, to play lightly with ideas and entertain possibilities, all kinds of sensitivities to what I was calling the energy body, somatic experience. I think that's all part of it. Whether someone kind of has so much pull towards this kind of practice, it's so meaningful for them and they have to learn that on the fly as they go -- that may be the case. So I think it asks a lot; exactly what order things happen in for different people, I think that's more open and fluid.

Daniel: Yeah. Just to add a little bit from my perspective on this question, I think one of the things that you helped me differentiate between was what we might call the experience of cessation, and the understanding that's the whole point of why we meditate, which is to understand or see the way that emptiness is, so clearly that our suffering is alleviated. At least that's how I made sense of it. I also have friends, people that I've met, who have needed very little meditation to understand emptiness and have insights in that direction because they've had a lot of philosophical and intellectual training around things like postmodern philosophy, or neuroscience, which shows that the self is a kind of epiphenomenon of collections of networks in the brain firing, and so on and so forth. Just to kind of further destabilize this fixation on cessation -- which, I remember when I was a member of this kind of Pragmatic Dharma community, people were really gunning for it, as was I for many years of my life. So I just wanted to add my kind of two cents to that.

And then another question that came up is, "Is this just a kind of new version of magick or tantra? It seems like the imaginal is a way to allow or include magickal practices in a constructive manner, kind of mending the apparent contradiction between insight and magick practices." Is that a fair assessment of what the imaginal is?

Rob: I'm not entirely sure what people mean when they say 'magick.' If it's the kind of, you know, attempt to influence the course of events, or influence matter in some way, then no. There's quite a difference. Because the intention in the soulmaking practice is not for the sake of -- more and more, it's not for the sake of anything but soulmaking, anything but that opening up of the sacredness and the richness, etc. So that's one of the distinctions we talk about, one of the elements of the imaginal being a fullness of intention -- meaning there's a kind of humility, and the intention is for soulmaking. I don't really know what you mean when you say 'magick,' so perhaps you could explain that, Daniel.

Daniel: The redditor in question I don't think really explained what they meant, so I'm not sure. I think maybe we could have a similar question, though, around tantra. Is this a new version of tantra?

Rob: There are different kinds of Buddhist tantra, and other kinds of non-Buddhist tantras, but. It has some similarities, but we could point to a few differences. For instance, usually in Vajrayāna or tantric practice, the images that you are given are prescribed. They belong to a kind of limited range of tantric deities, etc., or bodhisattvas, or this and that. Oftentimes it's actually your guru, your teacher, who will say, "You meditate on this. That's your image." And then it's a very prescribed form, and a very prescribed way of meditating: "You do this, you do this, you imagine it looks like this," etc., and you go through a certain ritual with that. I think with imaginal practices, one of the differences there is that we don't prescribe images. We're more talking about a kind of meta-framework of practising with any image that comes up, or any sense of a deity, or any object that comes up. We trust more in what comes to the practitioner as an image or as a perception. Occasionally we'll be in a group and, for instance, share an image together or whatever, or people will do that in dialogue. But basically it's open. It's not prescribed like that.

Related but more fundamental to the difference between, say, soulmaking practice or imaginal practice and tantra is that tantra is still premised -- however distant it might seem, and however rarely they might talk about it -- it's still premised on the Four Noble Truths. The idea of suffering, and enlightenment is the eradication of suffering. However different it is from the original Pali Canon teachings, there's an image of what awakening is, what Buddhahood is, and that's where they're going. So the whole thing is in a kind of -- however extravagant and far out and distant it might feel in the future with tantra, in terms of aeons and all that, it's still within a prescribed and fixed idea of what awakening is, a fixed logos [concept or conceptual framework], a concept of what awakening is. One of the maybe challenging but kind of radical things about Soulmaking Dharma is it even begins to subsume that whole question of awakening. We begin to recognize our fantasies (in the good sense), our images, regarding the path, regarding awakening. And the whole sense of possibility of what can open up, and what awakening can be, just begins -- we begin to get a sense that it can just extend indefinitely, in a very beautiful way, a very fecund way, and our sense of who we are on the path, where we're going, and why we're doing this. So in some sense, it kind of breaks the box, even, the walls, of that very far-out idea of awakening that you get in Vajrayāna. So that would be a more fundamental and far-reaching difference.

Daniel: Wonderful. Okay, so then this next question ... I'm not sure if it was in response to our conversation or the article I wrote that went along with our conversation. So first I want to just check with you, Rob. Would you agree that one of the effects of this kind of work can be that it sort of amplifies your sense of meaningfulness in your life?

Rob: Yeah. Yes, definitely.

Daniel: Okay. And then the question is, "To me, meaning comes primarily from doing things that are meaningful -- for example, deepening relationships with people I love, and doing things that help reduce suffering or solve some important problem. I can't understand how the imaginal would improve my relationships or help reduce carbon emissions or help people suffer less. Meditation, on the other hand, directly creates more meaning for me, because it reduces my own suffering and cultivates virtues like compassion, which in turn improves my relationships and helps me focus on what's important to me." How does the imaginal actually improve my sense of meaningfulness?

Rob: Okay, yeah. This is a big question. And again, I very much would expect that kind of question or difficulty in understanding something, just because of what we've all been saturated in -- both by the modernist world-view that we can't help walking around in in our world, but also by the Dharma view, which again emphasizes that the whole point is reducing suffering, removing the obstacles to a reduction of suffering, and also to things like compassion and universal kindness and that sort of thing.

But it might be, for instance, if you talk about relationships, that there's a possibility of meeting another person, of interacting with another person, that just opens up and perceives and is touched by other dimensions of the being that we had no sense of before. And this gives, as I said, different kinds of sacredness, different kinds of beauty, different kinds of duty, as well, different echoes of meaningfulness and all that in our life. This person is no longer just a flat human being, or just a product of evolution, or just a set of neurons that begin to feel the world in a certain way or sense the world in a certain way. This person is also angel, has other dimensions to them.

Again, I'm not claiming that as a reality or insisting that's real and the other is not real. But we open up the legitimacy and the actuality of those kind of senses of things, and a sense of my self, and a sense of my place, and also a sense of the world. So again, it's like, "Why should we bother about the climate?" One level is just because as climate change kicks in more, there is more suffering. The net suffering goes up in the world, and therefore just functionally we want to reduce that suffering. But there's a whole other dimension possible, and attractive to some people, that there's a kind of unspeakable range of possibility of our sense of the beauty, and the sacrednesses, and the divinity, and the dimensionality, the mystery and unfathomability and purposefulness of nature -- either single things in nature or the totality of it. And that gives other levels to our sense of being, our sense of what the world is.

A lot of what might happen in certain psychological ways of approaching things that are quite common, or certain Dharma ways of approaching things, is it all takes place against a backdrop of the world that's just assumed to be a certain way. My intention for my healing, my psychological healing, my Dharma healing, my intention for a good relationship, or to reduce suffering, or this or that -- it all takes place against what's essentially a meaningless backdrop of flatly conceived matter. It's often operating with that implicit assumption in the background. For example, as one of the things that's possible, we can begin to question and open up that whole assumption, and all kinds of other perceptions and feelings and dedication is possible in relation to all that stuff. I don't know if that gives beginnings of an answer?

Daniel: Yeah, it does, and I want to spend maybe a little more time here, because I think it's such a useful distinction for people who are coming to this from a Buddhist background. We might say that the purpose of a traditional Buddhist path is the dampening and perhaps eradication of suffering, of dukkha, and then I think it's fair to say, Rob, that perhaps the purpose of the imaginal path, in a sense, is the amplification of what you've called soulmaking. If that's the case -- and I think what you said in the last answer is that this, unlike perhaps suffering, is an infinite journey. Right? There's no end to the process of soulmaking, in your understanding. I wonder if you could kind of elaborate a little bit more on that distinction between suffering and soulmaking, and say a little bit more about what exactly it is that soulmaking is.

Rob: These are really big questions. Let's see. Maybe you can pitch in if you have any thoughts. 'Soulmaking' is a vague term, and it's deliberately vague. It's a deliberately elastic term. But we could talk about something called 'soulfulness.' Soulmaking is the engagement with experience, participation in experience -- whether it's intrapsychic or extrapsychic -- that brings with it a sense of soulfulness.

What does 'soulfulness' mean? Here we could rattle off a long list: depth, a sense of depth, beauties, mysteries, eros. It's characterized by humility; by this being touched in the heart by the kinds of sense of sacredness, multiplying, complexifying, getting wider and wider, not being restricted. There's a sense, perhaps, of vulnerability even; of divinity -- even if I don't have a rigid or fixed or even clear theology worked out, there is a sense of divinity that opens up; reverence, dimensionality, love. All these are aspects. We could list many more that are characteristic, make up, constitute, what we call a sense of soulfulness. Soulmaking is whatever practices and attitudes and thoughts and ways of being open up and support a sense of soulfulness and a widening sense of soulfulness. We have a sense, "This is something I'm doing, I'm creating this. But I'm also somehow discovering this."

In the process of doing that, when I start to engage those practices and attitudes and ideas, etc., that create and discover a sense of soulfulness, then, if you like, my ability, my capacity, and my dexterity to experience in those kinds of ways -- and further, to extend that experience -- increases. Just by virtue of practice, by virtue of that opening, building on those openings. So we could say -- if we define 'soul' as a thoroughly empty phenomenon -- but if we define it as that in the being, that organ or instrument of the being, that can sense, inner and outer, can sense, can perceive, in ways that bring soulfulness. Soulmaking, then, is the generating of soulfulness, and the supporting of my capacity, my organ, my instrument, to sense that way. I don't know if that answers or begins to answer ...

Daniel: We'll find out when we share this conversation, I suppose, if it feels satisfying to the person who proposed that question. The last question from reddit that I want to share in this space -- I think it's my favourite question. "Is this a cult?"

Rob: Is this what?! A cult?

Daniel: Yeah.

[Rob and Daniel laugh]

Rob: I don't know. Do you feel like you're in a cult, Daniel? [laughter]

Daniel: Well, I've never met you in person. I don't know. When I saw this question, I said, "Well, if it is, I hope I get my cult decoder ring in the mail soon." I haven't really been getting much correspondence from the other cult members. [laughter]

Rob: You can be in a cult of one, I suppose. But ... [sighs] Is it a cult. I don't know, what's a cult? Generally, it seems to me that a cult is something that doesn't allow differences of opinion, that is quite rigid in its hierarchy. When there are differences of opinion or expressions of individuality, they are met in some kind of shaming way or punitive way, etc. There's a kind of dogma there that's enforced. There's a disempowering of individuals and their autonomy, etc. These kinds of things, it seems to me, are characteristic of a cult. Would you add anything more, Daniel?

Daniel: I mean, yeah, I think that's a pretty fair assessment.

Rob: Okay. So I would say that -- I can't remember what I said now, but let's see. I think I personally -- and it's kind of explicit in the teachings that this is a creative and elastic and open-ended paradigm. In other words, whatever ideas we have that one might call 'dogma' are more intended to open things up, they're a process of opening things up. And also explicit in the teachings is that the whole conceptual framework will be stretched, and will also shatter, will break at some point, will include contradictions, etc. My hope, very strongly, is that as things go on -- if they do go on -- that people will start to feel like they can be creative and bring their discoveries and their creations into the whole paradigm, so it begins to be organic, and no one owns it. But it's a bit like science, you know. Is science a cult? Not really. It's just that you do need quite a lot -- going back to what you asked earlier -- you do need quite a lot of understanding and skill to kind of really offer something valuable into the scientific discourse, or the philosophical discourse, or whatever it is. So it asks that. What were the other things? Can you remind me?

Daniel: The attributes of a cult?

Rob: Yeah.

Daniel: I mean, honestly, I think we've responded to this question adequately. I think it was -- I partly brought it up as a joke because it's so ... not what this is. But I also want to recognize the place that this kind of question is coming from, in terms of, you know, in the spiritual world there's a lot of sketchy stuff goin' down. It is easy to see radical claims, or new 'paradigms,' and be suspicious that they're coming from a place where people want to make money or control other people. I think that's not what's happening here, from my perspective, being an ocean away from you, Rob, and the community in the UK. But I do think that we've done a good job of dissuading people from that perspective. If we share this conversation and they still have questions, that can be ... maybe we can reflect on that more and see what they really mean by the term 'cult.' But in any case, I appreciate you playing ball with that question, because I think it's helpful.

The last question that we can spend however much time you want to give to it -- we've now kind of exhausted the questions that I took out of the conversation on reddit. We can kind of take a step back, I think, as we discussed previously, and sort of reflect on why these kinds of questions and this desire for simplicity in explanation is so challenging within the context of the imaginal. The story that I'm remembering, as I ask this question -- I think you shared it was either Feynman or some other Nobel Prize-winning scientist, who when a reporter asked him, "Why can't you just sum up your discovery in one or two sentences?" And the scientist responded, "If I could sum it up in one or two sentences, do you think they'd be giving me a Nobel Prize?" There's this kind of tension, I think, between our desire for simplicity and what it is that you're pointing to, and what it is that acts of discovery in general can point to -- at least if they are, in my estimation, paradigm-shifting; you don't have to agree with that assessment. But I'm curious to hear you respond to that sort of tension between perhaps simplicity and clarity.

Rob: There are certain things that it's totally appropriate to explain simply. If I was an engineer, and I was trying to explain to you the engineering challenges and mechanisms of a suspension bridge, yeah, I could just lay it out simply. Or even the process of nuclear fission in an atom bomb or something like that. That's completely appropriate. I think there are other things that are not so easy to explain. Even explaining emptiness can be, to a certain extent, relatively simple. And explaining what I would call meditative techniques and technologies can be and should be relatively clear. When I do that as a teacher, I really try to take as much care to make it really clear what people can do.

And then there are other domains of human being and human exploration that just won't be reduced that way, you know? It's not appropriate. We actually kill something. And more than that, if we go back to this word, *'*soul,' soul doesn't only want what's simple. The movement of a lot of mindfulness meditation and in a lot of typical Dharma is towards more and more simplicity: just this moment, just this breath, just this sight, just this sound, etc., and even beyond that to just this it's all one, all diversity and all complexity dissolves into some kind of oneness. The movement is towards simplicity. We could say part of the soul is fulfilled, the being is fulfilled, to a certain extent in that movement towards those kinds of deep simplicities. But there's another part of what I've called the 'soul' just now that actually wants richness and complexity, and will generate it, and will discover it, and will create it -- more facets to things, complex ideas, sophisticated, subtle ideas that expand, that are not so rigid, that fracture into other ideas. That whole richness and fertility, and that whole movement of expansion, is actually implicit in our whole conceptual framework, and, I would say, it's what the soul wants.

So that's one thing, or a couple of things. I would also say, again, if we explain why -- let's say from a neuroscience point of view, we explain what's happening neurologically in meditation, and how this basically creates happiness or allows happiness. Or even if we don't go into the neurology, and we explain just how training your mind to be calm, training in non-distractedness, training in letting go of reactivity, how that supports happiness and well-being and also things like efficiency in life -- all that is actually really easy to understand, and relatively simple to explain. But partly because in explaining, in those terms and with those constructs there, we don't have to explain anything new regarding the basic sort of world-view. Everyone knows about neurons to a certain degree. Everyone knows the basic kind of scientific materialism that goes with that, etc., the basic notion of a person and what the purpose of life is -- all of that.

Part of what's happening with the soulmaking teachings is that, for instance, we're not going just for a oneness. We're not just going in the direction of dissolving the self. We include that, but more than that. There is, as I said in the other podcast and today, there's a different understanding of emptiness too. So all that needs explaining -- the way the emptiness opens out the legitimacy and the possibility of seeing, all kinds of ways of looking and all kinds of sacredness. We're not taking neuroscience as a kind of dogmatic basis or assumption for what a human being is and what the world is made of and how human beings work; we're actually, at times, questioning that, or opening up very different world-views, very different anthropological views. In fact, we don't even have one world-view! It's not like, "Oh, here's the world-view." This legitimizes not just ways of looking, a diversity of ways of looking, but a diversity of conceptual frameworks. I can go into a neurological point of view and just look at things that way and understand. Of course. I just don't believe it's ultimately real. I can come out of that and go into all kinds of other ways, or a practitioner can. So there are multiple, actually infinite, endless possibilities for world-view. That's another thing.

Another reason is we have to actually, if we're going to get into this, I actually have to start re-legitimizing -- or convincing people, perhaps, if they demand convincing -- re-legitimizing the imagination, which has been denigrated for the most part over several hundred years in Western society. I also have to re-legitimize or give place to and reason for taking another look at desire. Are we just trying to let go of it? Are there other things we can do with desire? Are there other levels and elements of desire that can open us up? So all this is very, very different from both the typical Western modernist world-view and also the typical set of Dharma assumptions. All that is going to need investigating, unpacking, etc., convincing. All that. So that's partly why it's difficult to explain, you know?

Daniel: Yeah, and what is coming to my mind -- there's this book that I'm reading now by I think he's a physicist, David Deutsch, called The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. He makes the argument in this book that -- he says that "all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations." And good explanations can be quite complex, because reality itself is quite complex. Especially if we're attempting to move forward a paradigm, it will probably look quite complicated as it's being built -- just as, I imagine, modernism probably looked quite complicated to premodern people. You know, we had to have a whole Enlightenment for it to [laughs] come into being. Just so, these things that you're talking about, Rob, there is the possibility of a simplicity on the other side of complexity, but the explanations themselves -- at least I've experienced them to be themselves kind of psychoactive, and they sort of threaten various materials that I've built my conceptualization of the world out of. There is a function of explanation, but it goes beyond this sort of just practice-based sense of what it is that meditation is all about. You can actually experience this in a Dharma talk; if you listen to a Dharma talk, it itself does things to you. It itself makes you experience the world differently. I just want to kind of add that piece because I think that aspect is so often underestimated by Buddhist practitioners and spiritual practitioners in general. I think there is this kind of retreat from the complexity of life, and a desire for the simplicity of Buddhist practice, that I see in a lot of these spaces. I wonder if there's anything you'd like to say about that, in terms of the kind of cultural context which might make people so hungry for a simple explanation.

Rob: Thank you for that. That's very beautifully put, and you covered a lot. I'm not sure what to add or if you're after something in particular. I'd just like to say that, you know, I'm not against the movement of simplifying and simplification of consciousness, of perception, of thought, etc. I think what I kind of object to a little bit is when that overextends itself and we only hold in esteem that movement towards simplification -- even meditatively or conceptually or in the way we look at the world. So it's a certain gear, or a set of gears, those movements towards simplification. It's great. And you asked what are the skills, what are the prerequisites -- yeah, the ability to do that meditatively and with the thinking, "let's just simplify and look at it this way," that's really important. There's a lot of relief that comes, especially as you point out in our societies these days, it's so complex in so many ways; our minds are full of thoughts and all that. I think what I would just like to add and say again is there are other desires in the being for many, many people. Not for everyone. And if going towards the simple and simplifying everything and just a reduction of suffering does it for someone, that's great! Go for it. I'm not insisting or trying to convert anyone at all. But my experience is so much, working with people, that in their experience with, let's say, a difficulty, when it's looked at and opened up in a soulmaking way, with all the complexity that that brings, that it's fulfilled something or satisfied or quenched, temporarily, something in them that isn't in the simplification.

Just a couple more things. Imagine being time transported back to medieval times, and we're going to try and convince someone about the neuroscience of meditation. [Rob and Daniel laugh] They would be completely bamboozled. They just wouldn't understand what we were talking about. Even just assuming that there was no God, or whatever it is. This is all contextual, what we hold as complex. Owen Barfield -- I think I might have mentioned this in a talk -- said that a knot, like a knot in a shoelace, is actually quite a complex thing. When you untie the knot, you're left with a simpler state, two bits of string that are not knotted. The movements you have to make to untie that knot, the hand movements, the finger movements, are actually usually pretty complicated. But you're ending up with something that's simpler. So this whole question of complexity and simplicity is not -- well, guess what, it's not as simple as it seems.

And the other thing, just to touch on what you said -- and I said this, I think, in one of our podcasts -- there's also the re-ensouling of the intellect, of concept, of ideas, of thought, and the possibility of that becoming beautiful, and rich, and endlessly fecund, and far-reaching in its implications. Yes, there is something necessary to crack open. For some people, a kind of rigidification or solidification of certain ideational structures won't allow this kind of soulmaking experience. They will just refuse it. They won't -- it will just be dismissed, within a certain rigid belief structure or set of assumptions. So sometimes that needs cracking open. That knot -- to go back to that analogy -- needs untying. And that takes quite a lot of work. However, I view both the ideas themselves and the challenging of ideas and the cracking open of conceptual frameworks as part of soulmaking. As you said, sometimes that can be as exciting for the soul as working with an image directly. So idea and image, to go back to what we said at the beginning, are part of soulmaking. I don't know if I answered what you actually asked, but ...

Daniel: I don't know but I enjoyed it nonetheless. [laughs] I also want to just say, I'm going to go out on a limb, and say that if you made it to the end of this conversation and it was interesting to you, you are the kind of person who has these other dimensions and wants to explore them. Right? The very expression of curiosity itself is implicated in this whole kind of perspective and paradigm. So just to include that and name that if you're listening now, you made it to the end of this conversation, and hopefully it was interesting to you. In that case, there's something there. Is there anything that you want to say to kind of move this conversation towards a closing?

Rob: Let's see. Just a couple of things. I mean, one is in relation to what you just said. So far, in my experience, most people have gotten into this kind of practice or these ideas or this body of teachings, etc., in a way that it became profoundly and widely important in their lives and their practices, either from just hearing a couple of randomly selected Dharma talks on the subject (of which there are many now), and even though they didn't understand it all and didn't have from that one Dharma talk a grasp of the whole framework, something was touched, something in the examples given or something that was said in the ideas questioned. Something was recognized, something drew them on, and they wanted to explore more. That's probably the majority of people who are interested.

Or I or Catherine -- at the moment there's not more teachers than that; hopefully there will be -- are working with someone one on one or in a small group with some difficulty that they have, some suffering, some pain. And if it's me and I'm the teacher, I kind of intuit that, if you like, an image is in the air. There's the possibility of them accessing an image or an imaginal perspective or a sensing with soul -- of themselves or the situation or the problem -- and then guiding them gently through that, helping that to open up for them. Then they experience something that's more than just -- there is, almost always, a decrease in the suffering, a relief of the suffering, an easing. But they experience more than that. They experience this sense of soulfulness, and beauty, and meaningfulness, and mystery, and duty, and grace, and all the rest of it. They're profoundly touched by that. That touches them, it speaks to them, more than just, "Ah, good, I got rid of the suffering. Ah, good, I feel some relief, some ease." These kind of practices don't just dissolve the suffering, but open up different perspectives of it, different dimensions or levels of it. And then from that experience they want to explore more.

It will be interesting what happens from this podcast. I don't know. It might be that you and I are sort of sitting here and discussing a slightly abstract and brief attempt at explanation of the paradigms involved and that does give rise to a real passion and interest for some people. But that probably will be fairly new, although you described your experience there.

But again, it seems like one thread -- I would just give a personal reiteration of part of what I just said, and something that's been a thread through our conversation. I have this illness for the last three years, pancreatic cancer with a very poor prognosis. All kinds of challenges with that, from a very extreme, radical operation, and extensive chemotherapy, all kinds of drugs and side effects and things going wrong with my system. If I just speak personally now, I'm 52 years old, facing a possible early death, all kinds of physical pain, discomfort, a lot of incapacity -- there's a lot that I can no longer do because of my illness and because of the drugs and all that, limitations, etc. Now, I can, because of the training in what you're calling Pragmatic Dharma, and my explorations of that and my dedication to that over years, I could just be with all this or with different elements of the difficulty of what's involved in a really extreme illness like I have. I could just approach that with a set of tools of what we might call Pragmatic Dharma, with whatever extensions I have in my view of emptiness, and just decrease the suffering. I can see the emptiness of my self, I can see the emptiness of the illness, I can see the emptiness of dying, I can see the emptiness of time, etc. And I do draw on that quite regularly. It just punctures the suffering there, and brings a perspective of something deathless. That's very available and that's very important and good.

But, here am I, in this situation, dealing with this, and something in me wants more than that. It wants more than that in relation to this illness, in relation to the possibility of dying as still fairly a young man, etc. Something in me wants something more than just the quelling of suffering, the release of dis-ease. Something in me wants soulmaking. Something in me wants to ensoul this illness, this death, and this life. It's not because I'm afraid of the fact of dying, or I'm afraid of meaninglessness or anything like that. When I practise with the difficulties that come up and the wide range of difficulties there, I find myself just drawn to -- out of curiosity -- what's possible here in relating to this, in the perception of my body, my illness, my death, and all that. The intention is for soulmaking. There's eros there in my very approach to this very obvious disease and everything that it brings. I want more than just the reduction of suffering.

There's a personal example. Some people will be like, "I don't get it. It's not important." As I've said three or four times, that's completely fine, you know. But there will be other people who, when they taste that something more, whether it's before they've done the emptiness thing or after they've done the emptiness thing, or to some degree gone down that path of emptiness, they will say, "I want this too. I want that opening." It adds colours, dimensions, directions, beauties, sacrednesses, that are otherwise not available. We can just say something in the soul wants that for some portion of the human population, something like that.

Daniel: Thank you, Rob.

Rob: Sure.

Daniel: Okay, well, that brings our conversation, I think, more or less to a closing point, for now. I'm sure that there will be more questions. Thank you so much, Rob, for coming on the show and being willing to engage with this feedback. I think our capacity to respond to feedback, like what you're demonstrating right now, for me at least is an indication of a worthwhile system, that it's willing to engage with the world in this way. And reddit ... [laughs] You don't know, Rob, because you don't use reddit. I've been a reddit user for eight or nine years; my user account is six years old. I know the kind of place that can be, and I think it's really heartening to me as a reddit user and just as a citizen of the internet that you are willing to engage in this kind of participatory dialogue. I just want to thank you and appreciate you and appreciate this conversation for taking place. Thank you, Rob.

Rob: Thanks, Daniel. It's my pleasure. I just enjoy being with you and having this conversation. As you said, I don't know that audience, but I hope that it's helpful and interesting for those who might be drawn, who might be wanting to explore something like this. So thank you.