Image, Ethics, and Awakening (Q & A)

[practical retreat stuff, Q & A starts at 7:00] Again, I apologize, I didn't have time to collate them into a sort of logical thread of order, but let's just see. [shuffling questions]

Q1: ethics, the five precepts, extending the range of archetypes with Soulmaking Dharma

"Is there a reason you don't have a ceremony of taking some form of precepts at the beginning of this kind of retreat? I would find such a ritual very supportive in the creation of boundaries and safety within which this beautiful work can take place."

Thank you. Yes, interesting. You're probably not alone, whoever wrote that. All the retreats at Gaia House are run with the explicit understanding that everyone, everyone here, will be keeping the five precepts. That should have been kind of gone through by a coordinator before the opening. Yeah. The reason Catherine and I didn't do it is just because often it feels like, with these kind of retreats, there's quite a lot that we would like to do on the opening evening, and we're conscious that people have travelled, and we'll run late anyway, etc. So in a way, we're looking to minimize what we do, and if the coordinators can do a bit in their opening, there's just a practical reason to hand it to them.

Of course, for some people, a coordinator sitting up here and just reading a list of the precepts doesn't carry the same impact on the soul, on the being, or beauty as a ritual might. So yeah, we acknowledge that. Maybe it's something to think about. But more broadly, people will probably differ. If I speak personally -- and not to say everyone should be like this at all; people differ. Some people, I have heard them say that, at some point in their history of their Dharma practice and exposure to Dharma teachings, they formally took the precepts with so-and-so teacher or so-and-so in such-and-such a place in India. And of the people who say that, for some it's clear that that was really a turning moment in their life, and they took that very seriously, and perhaps their ability to incorporate that as a turning point was due to the ritual and the ceremony and the way it was set up.

For other people who have reported that to me, I see that they took the precepts, and I see that it didn't make much difference. They're still not keeping this or that precept, or the precepts. So the presence or absence of a ceremony, in itself, doesn't really do anything. Again, people are different, so that's really important. But if I think back, I heard my first Dharma talk -- never had heard any Dharma at all. I think I was 19 or something, in college. And probably my memory is a little hazy, but I seem to recall that the teacher just sort of talked for I don't know how long, and went through the precepts and the Four Noble Truths and the eightfold path in one talk. [laughter] And I was like most other 19-year-olds -- ingesting certain substances, and things like that, and partying, you know. I heard this talk, and I stopped smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol and everything. And I've practised every day since then. [laughter] Apart from when I had that thermonuclear explosion thing when I was actually sent away from a retreat -- but that wasn't for breaking the precepts; that was for being nuts. [laughter]

So my point is that the presence or absence of a ceremony, it may help some people. It may do nothing. To me, the precepts are just a way to live, you know? They're just completely incorporated into my being. And I would say these practices we're doing, any Dharma practice, they totally rest on the precepts. So that's what the Buddha talked about. We talk about foundations, bases, roots, etc. The precepts are a foundation. You want to start playing with all this super firey eros and things like that when you don't have a kind of basis, a really rooted basis in the precepts, it's not going to fly. Things will break. The vessel, the ship will fall apart on the stormy oceans. So to me, they're just completely integrated, maybe so much so that it's a blind spot and we should emphasize them more, because it might not be the case for other people. But for me, they're just how you live. They're not necessarily how you be on retreat or off retreat, or now we're doing something special; it's just part of how you live. And that goes with a commitment to kindness and compassion and care and sensitivity and all the rest of it.

This isn't in the question, but I will just add: they form a foundation, if we pick up on the language that -- I seem to have been absent every time Catherine seems to have gone through this with you, the difference between foundations and roots. You've said that? [Catherine inaudible in background] No, physically absent. Yeah. So, anyway. There's a foundation. And then what happens to the precepts as the Soulmaking Dharma goes deeper? Or we should say this: what happens to one's relationship with ethics as the Soulmaking Dharma goes deeper?

When I first started talking about Soulmaking Dharma -- I hadn't even thought of that word back then, but I think the first couple of talks I gave were actually about ethics. If I remember, The Meditator as Revolutionary^[1] and The Necessity of Fantasy.^[2] They were about climate change, ethics, and image or fantasy. And they were probably way too long and complicated, so probably most people just heard talks about climate change, which is fair enough and fine. But part of the point I wanted to make, and I still want to make it, is that it can be easy, and maybe even common (I don't know), for some Buddhist practitioners or practitioners to look at the kind of things we're talking about and doing, and worry about the ethics there, or maybe not hear so much about ethics and think, "You're talking about all this sexual stuff, and then you have this violent imagery that you're saying it's okay, and all this business."

I would actually -- and what I was trying to do all those years ago -- is actually say, look, we have all this talk about ethics, and we have these ethical commitments in the Dharma. Are there not gaps in them? Image is operating anyway, whether we have even heard the word 'imaginal' or 'soulmaking,' so that oftentimes the image, the archetypes that are prevalent and dominant and influential for a lot of Dharma practitioners are ones of passivity and equanimity, and you don't get -- especially in Theravādan Dharma, you get the picture of the Buddha with his eyes shut and he's meditating. He's very, very peaceful and fine, thank you very much, while the world is burning. And that's not at all to blame the Buddha or anything like that, but images operate for us. They're highly influential. So what can happen -- I'm not saying it always happens -- what can happen is that then there are crises, and the range of responses or the range in which the practitioner's self can then manifest and embody forth or speak up or not speak up gets limited by the archetype that is unconsciously operating.

So what happens when we do Soulmaking Dharma, everything gets stretched. The archetypes get stretched. So there is the place of the troublemaker. There is the place of the person who will not shut up, who will rage, who bellows fire, who puts themselves on the tarmac and gets arrested, as some of you have been doing. It's just a different archetype. It's extended the range of archetypes. And in the extension of the range of archetypes, it's extended the ethical response. So we say, "I'm okay, because I'm following these five precepts," and there's actually very little engagement with ethics and very little creative tussling with, wrestling with the almost impossible questions and conundra that we have in modern times, in a globalized society.

A friend went out and bought me this. I don't know -- where the hell did this come from? What conditions was it made under? Who suffered for this and who profited? I keep the five precepts -- it doesn't say anything about sweatshops in Bangladesh or whatever it is. So I'm not saying there is, but it's always like, when the eye is awake, it's looking where there can be a kind of complacency: "Oh, I'm a good Buddhist. I follow the precepts," but there actually isn't that real wrestling. What on earth are we going to do about climate change and species loss when there are seven billion people to feed, most of them are in poverty (not most, but), etc.? These are difficult ethical questions, and if it always just looks peaceful, it looks okay, it looks equanimous, maybe the heart feels a little something ...

So soulmaking, I would say, if you like, the foundation of ethics becomes a root. In other words, it becomes something organic that can grow and nourish, like a root of a tree grows. But then that enters into difficult territory. I'm going to piss people off. I've pissed plenty of people off, you know. I have to be okay with that and decide -- maybe it's the ethical price of pissing people off versus something else. So that's one point. The second point is element number twenty-seven -- this is actually one that I know. [laughter] I think. Mary will tell me if I've got it wrong. Is it values? Yes! [laughter] So values -- and that includes ethical values, moral values -- are actually implicit in images, interestingly. They're not immediately obvious, but we are ethical beings. Again, I was physically absent, but I think Catherine said the thing about when the word 'justice' is mentioned that more of the neural network lights up. We have, the human soul, the healthy human soul, let's say, has this love of moral values. I was planning to give a whole series of talks on ethics, but I got the metastatic diagnosis and I've just been completely busy with that. I hope it'll be possible.^[3]

But the point is that values, including moral values, are actually wrapped up in images. They're there, and again, we can tune to them, turn them on, see what they say, get turned on by them. The whole question of values -- look, humanity has been debating ethics and values since before written history. It's complex. It's one of these subjects that's so rich it's unending, and it's not comfortable. In other words, if you think you've found easy answers to ethics in your life, you're just not really engaging it as fully as it might be engaged. They're open-ended, ongoing, difficult questions that we wrestle with, and if there isn't that wrestling there, well, something else is going on, but it's not that full rooting or becoming root of ethics.

But going back to what I said before, the range is extended. So it doesn't just look kind of, "Oh, he speaks softly and calmly, and he's very good at letting go and equanimity, and never says anything that might offend anyone." You think about Jesus or someone -- of course it got him into a lot of trouble, didn't it? Didn't end so -- well, it depends where you put the ending, but. Anyway, you get the point. To me, it's a really, really important area, and it's integral to what we're doing, and if it isn't at the beginning, it will become so. It must, just because of how the soulmaking dynamic works. It will pull these things in. They will become obvious. It will extend your range ethically and your ethical sensibility and moral sensibility, all that. But yes, in terms of ceremony, we can certainly think about that.

Q2: the place of ritual in soulmaking practice

Here's an interesting question. I actually don't know ... well, actually, here's one that follows immediately: "Can you see a place for ritual or a need for it in soulmaking practice? And if so, where does it fit?" Absolutely. We usually have a few rituals as part of these retreats -- maybe less this time, just because of my health and capacities and energies. We're very keen on it. I think partly the function of rituals, from a soulmaking perspective, is -- what's happening in ritual? Again, this is one of these subjects we could talk about a lot, but one of the things that's happening in ritual is that, when we meditate, and it looks very still, and the eyes are closed, what's engaged? Mind, so to speak. And, okay, experience of body. But action of body is not. It's still. And then typically when we meditate we close the eyes, so there's a kind of shutting out of a lot of the sensory connection with the things of the world.

In ritual, one of the things we're doing is including the actions of body, the manifestations of voice, speech, as well as mind, and the objects of the world. All that gets included, which doesn't usually when I sit silently with my eyes closed, meditating on something. So when we talk about sensing with soul, and when we talk about this idea that the whole point, perhaps -- I mean, for me, anyway, the whole point of these practices and this teaching is to extend and expand the range of our senses of what is sacred -- then ritual is very much a part of that. I remember a beautiful ritual that Catherine led. Some of you were here. It was a few retreats ago. I think it was this on the floor, and then she spoke a little bit about certain words and things, and we had these tangerines, if I remember. Were any of you here for that? For me, through the ritual, the tangerines right then, in that space of whatever it was, half an hour, they became sanctified. My sense of the tangerine was of sacred, sacredness right there. So this is part of the function of ritual, that it starts to include the things of the world, the objects of nature and the senses, and supports and opens our capacity to sense them with soul, to sense them with sacredness, as sacred, including this self, other selves, bodies, the actions of body, the gestures, the movements, etc.

We haven't done it on this retreat, but we did a bit of movement -- I think we had three or four sessions of movement on one of the retreats. And again, the function is the same. Look, here I am fiddling with my hat, or moving my hands -- if I'm sensing with soul, this very movement of hands, just automatic when I blah blah blah, the very movement has this poetic sacredness to it. So it's part of the function of ritual to make things like the ordinary movements or ordinary objects (food, tangerines, whatever it is) and sanctify them, bless the eyes, bless the senses that they can sense that way, sensing with soul. That's one of the functions.

So absolutely, I think there's a place. I never used to be into ritual at all, and now I totally love it. Just, like I said, this retreat had to be limited, unfortunately, somewhat. But there's still time, so we don't know what might happen.

Q3: is consent needed before relating to someone as image in person

There was another question ... Yeah, here's the question that I didn't quite know how to answer, really. But I'll say it anyway and see what comes. "Do you think any consent is needed before relating to someone as image, live, in the moment? For example, over soup yesterday, I had a highly erotic encounter with the person sitting opposite me. My energy body was very alive, and it felt soulmaking. Really I'm very curious about what seeing others and self as image whilst interacting with them, or live, as it were, in the moment, can open up? The benefits, the risks?"

Yeah, I don't know about the consent thing. So I don't know. That's my main answer: I don't know. But I can tell you the kinds of things that I'm thinking. If the elements are there and they're switched on -- in other words, if it's really fully imaginal or towards that end -- then there's no danger, there's no intrusion, there's nothing like that whatsoever. Why? Because it's not real. It's neither real nor not real. And there's humility, and there's the sense of divinity, and there's love (which implies a respect for the other person's being). And anyway, to perceive that way takes an extraordinary amount of sensitivity, so it's not that in the seat of that sensitivity one's going to be exquisitely sensitive to how beautiful they are and how much eros one is feeling and completely insensitive to another person and their space and what they might need, etc. I guess it's possible, but it's highly unlikely.

So I think, yeah, my answer is I don't know, but I would think that if all the elements are there, then actually it's completely safe. If they're not there -- in other words, if a person hasn't really tasted -- they just hear, maybe they just randomly pick a talk on Dharma Seed and start listening, "What the hell is this?!" [laughter] And then they write to whatever the international Buddhist authorities are [laughter] and say, "Do you know that there are these people in Devon ...?" [laughter] That's all based, that kind of trepidation and fear, "it must be unethical" and all this stuff, or "what are they ...", that's all based on not having tasted it, not having understood. I think if a person really knows that, then they'll recognize these elements there and they'll recognize the non-intrusiveness of it.

One thing I threw out once or twice was when we talk about energy and energy body and the energy field between people, now most spiritual cultures tend to think of that as a real thing. What is that -- it's got a word, like psychic vampire or something? Has anyone heard ...? That sort of thing. Such things may well exist, absolutely, but certainly we're not doing any kind of psychic vampirism. [laughter] But more importantly, I think, when things really get going, the sense of the energy is neither real nor not real. Not just the image, not just the object, not just the self, but also the energy. And that does something as well. In other words, it makes it unintrusive, uninvasive, etc.

But if these pieces aren't there, and you just kind of hear a bit or something, and a person feels some kind of licence, "Basically it's just saying it's okay to do whatever," I would get a little nervous, yeah, with that. So those are some of my thoughts about that.

Q4: igniting the nodes to move toward the more fully imaginal; grace and shaping the way of looking

"Hallo." Hello. [laughter] "I am still very new to the imaginal practice. Could you line out very briefly again what it is that is important or necessary to pay attention to when just at the cusp of entering into a specific imaginal practice or when bringing in an image to be worked with? What are the important questions to be asked, or some of the important questions to be asked to oneself or the image? Is a certain amount of resonance, aliveness, or meaningfulness of the image a prerequisite to be able to work with it in the imaginal, or can any one be brought alive by slowly tuning into the elements?"

Again, the simple answer is I would point to the elements. And they don't necessarily have to be in a specific order. There are many examples I might have given -- I might be sitting and maybe not feeling so well, maybe affected by drugs, maybe not; that's kind of irrelevant. The point is that the mind drifts off whatever I was trying to do, and there are bits of daydream floating around for some moments. Some of those daydreams, the initial [thought] is there's nothing interesting there. There are many times where actually, for some reason, I decided to take one of those daydream fragments or something and actually bring it in and work with it, and it becomes imaginal. The one often for me is music -- just sort of music is going on and I work with that, and very rich imaginal territory opens up with the sort of musical daydreams that were going on. So it's not the object per se. It's more the way of looking, the way of relating, and everything that we've been talking about in terms of energy body and attention to the nodes or seeing if I can ignite this or that element, balancing, seeing if the self can get involved. All that will fertilize and support whatever is going on to become more fully imaginal.

And, as I said when I gave the short talk on the elements of the imaginal in the lounge, you know, there's this tension. There's this kind of creative, contradictory nature, contradictory relationship between some of the elements, so that we have the very first element of the lattice is just the lattice itself. In other words, it's saying, look, it's not the object. It's the way of looking. Remember that. And all these elements are part of the way of looking. Nothing is inherently imaginal. So, you know, Lord of the Rings movies are not inherently imaginal. I mean, they might be to someone, or they might be to someone in a certain state of mind, but they're not inherently imaginal. They've got ogres and -- I'm not really into them, so I don't know, what else do they have? [laughter] They have princesses and wizards and elves and all that stuff, hobbits, Middle-earth, a whole landscape. You'd think it was totally imaginal, but it's not inherently. Mythical content doesn't equate as imaginal. Imaginal, in our language, means the elements are coming alive, and the more they come alive, the more fully or authentically imaginal in what we mean.

So what that means, then, in terms of this question, is that on the one hand you've got, okay, it's kind of up to me. It's kind of up to me to finesse and work with and shape my way of looking, meaning my whole relationship with this object in the world or this image or whatever it is, right now, and maybe in doing that, maybe in that technical art, let's say, in the art of the technique and the technique of it, it helps the most seemingly irrelevant thing to become fully imaginal. It was just this blah blah blah that went through my mind, but actually because the relationship has been worked, I've done that actively. Yeah? So you've got that on the one hand, the sort of encouragement to be active, to say you can change the way of looking, you can play with the relationship, and if you do that skilfully and with art, you're going to create a kind of relationship in the moment that allows the image to become fully imaginal.

So you've got that on one side. On the other side, you've got element number I-have-no-idea, which is grace, with the implication that -- and maybe you've tasted this; a lot of these elements are to be noticed, so it's more like, "It was a grace. It was a gift. I couldn't have made that up. I couldn't have choreographed it and the very precise way it mirrors my life or my dukkha or my ...", you know? So you've got this kind of inexplicable gift, grace, on one side, in a somewhat contradictory relationship with the encouragement to develop one's techniques and skills. But basically, yeah, I guess I would point back to the nodes. There might be something in terms of that node of grace, of a certain posture that's open to grace. That goes then with humility and reverence, so a certain poise. I feel that's very much part of these kind of practices. It's not all about, "Right, let's fix this thing." Nor is it all about ...[long silence, laughter]. There's something balanced there. If we're talking about grace, grace also requires a certain sensibility to open to it and to receive it. It's actually quite a delicate, beautiful, subtle poise of the being to be open to grace and to notice grace.

So there's a tension here. I wouldn't point to any one particular thing. Energy body is always a good place to start, but it doesn't actually have to be linear at all like that. I think that answers? Is that okay? Or is there more? It's good? Okay.

Q5: working with sexual eros in relationship off retreat

"How to deal with sexual eros in 'real relationship' after the retreat, for example? A bit of guidance is required." Does this person want to say more about what the concern is? You don't have to. I could try and say something. But I'm not quite sure what the question would be. Yeah, okay. You don't have to. So how to deal with sexual eros in 'real relationship.' I have no idea what I'm trying to aim at with the response here. I wonder whether what's prompting the question, or part of what's prompting the question, is just again that obviously we're aware, everyone's aware sexual desire can harm people. In fact, mostly when there's sexual desire, at some point someone or other gets hurt, in some way or another. And certainly there's the possibility of intrusive or unwanted or abusive sexual desire being acted out and being, yeah, devastatingly harmful. So I wonder whether the question is coming from a concern about that, and therefore not quite trusting the soulmaking practice and one's own capacity to sort of tolerate eros, to be aware of it within this imaginal Middle Way, neither real nor not real.

Again, I would point back to more practising, and not kind of encourage someone to practise with a sexual eros if it actually feels like I don't have the vessel yet to handle that. I wouldn't practise with it in meditation, even. I mean, you have to see how it goes, but if it feels like, "I'm spending 23 ½ hours of the day under the cold shower" [laughter] ... You do need a certain capacity, and therefore a certain skill with the energy body, with view as well. One of the things a while ago I threw out in a talk -- I can't remember what they are now -- was a list of things you can do when it starts to get really hot, you know, and it's almost intolerable, the sexual eros. One of them is expand the energy body. Expand the energy body awareness. Why? Because eros is not a problem; what's a problem is craving. Craving goes with reification. Craving also goes with a contraction of the energy body. Every time there's craving, the energy body contracts. If you don't know this, study it until you absolutely know it for certain. A hair's breadth of craving, and you can feel it in the energy body. Relaxing of the craving, the energy body opens. Open up the energy body, and sometimes the craving soothes, and that craving can then become eros.

So what often happens -- it may happen more for men than women; I don't know -- but sexual energy often gets contracted to in a certain area of the body, and then there's an enormous amount of pressure in that area of the body, and it can feel hard to contain, and then one must act or release or this or that. But really simple thing -- again, it's practice, practice, practice -- the more space there is in the energy body awareness, the more that sexual energy can actually fill the whole space, and like a gas, when it has more space, there's less pressure. Right? You know that from -- did you guys do O-levels or GCSEs? [laughter] GCSEs, I think so. Do they teach you this about gases and ...? [laughter] So more space, less pressure is one very simple thing. A much more sophisticated thing in this list that I now cannot remember but is there somewhere in the Eros Unfettered series is, if you're able to do it -- and again, this will only even make sense or be accessible if you've already done quite a bit of soulmaking practice and imaginal practice -- is this desire, this eros, this sexual energy, whose is it?^[4] So of course the normal human thing is "it's mine." I don't even think it. It feels like mine. And either I feel bad about it or whatever, but it's mine. I'm identifying with it, just like that's the normal way to identify with anything that's going on in the body, usually.

Mainstream Dharma can say, "Whose is it?", and say, "It's anattā. It doesn't belong. It's not yours. Don't identify with it." If you take something that's going on in the body -- let's say, in this case, sexual energy that's uncomfortable, and you decide, "I'm just going to see it as anattā," and again and again, you're just viewing it, "Not me, not mine. There is this energy. There is this sexual energy. There is this discomfort," rather than, "It's mine." So I'm not even waiting to make sure that I have this idea that it's mine. You do have the idea that it's yours. It's just a normal human way of functioning. But in the mainstream Dharma approach, one of the contemplations of what's called the three characteristics is contemplating it as anattā, as not-self, not me, not mine. What happens if I take any experience and I just keep regarding it, over and over, "not me, not mine"? I know you know the answer to this. Oh, come on, humour me. [laughter] [yogi in background: It fades!] Good, it fades. The sexual energy will go away.

Again, this is a kind of practice you gain skill in, so the first thing is probably nothing happens, then if you stay with it, there's a bit more space, there's a bit more relief. I have a bit more distance on this sexual energy; it's not so compulsive, it's not so painful and difficult and oppressive. If you develop your skill with that anattā and you keep doing it, whatever -- it could be the same for a knee pain or whatever -- it starts to fade. The perception itself starts to fade. And so bye-bye problem, bye-bye sexual eros as well. Really, really skilful. Really, really wonderful to devote the time to develop that kind of practice. The main point is not for the relief it can bring in those kind of situations; that's actually completely secondary. It's way down the list. What's much more important is what that says about emptiness and dependent arising in the long run and that view.

So there's normal view: "It's mine. Of course." I don't even think it; I feel it. I identify with it. There's the possibility of a traditional Dharma view of regarding it as "not me, not mine." And then there's the possibility of a soulmaking, an imaginal view, which views this desire, this sexual eros, however hot and lusty it is, however even uncomfortable and forceful it is (forceful in the being), it's mine, and it's not mine, and it's God's, it's the divine's, it's the Buddha-nature's. So it's not just what they call a non-affirming negation, "It's not mine" but you're not saying whose it is, as you do in the anattā. You're actually saying -- it's a kind of triple view at once: "Mine, yes, of course. Not mine, yes. And God's." In other words, through this, through my eyes, through my lust, through my passion, through my desire, through my body, through my libido -- you choose your words -- the divine eros is operating, is seeing, is desiring.

Is that an absolute, dogmatic truth? No. It's a poetic point of view. We're entertaining a logos, a certain logos. And what happens when we do that? A whole other level of beauty and soulmaking comes in, but also the pressure comes off, because the tightness of the identification with it makes it uncomfortable, and the divine or whatever, the Buddha-nature, when it's seen as part of that, the problem goes out of it -- but the eros stays, unlike with the anattā. So that's quite a sophisticated thing to do, but it's there as a possibility.

In terms of this note, how to deal with sexual eros in 'real relationship' after the retreat, for example, yeah, I'm just not sure what's behind it. It might be something to do with a long-term relationship and where things are at in terms of the intimacy and the sexual intimacy, and one person feeling, "I want to open that to another level, the possibility of that," and not sure if the partner is interested. I couldn't possibly answer that question without hearing a lot more and talking a lot more about the nature of that relationship and what's possible. I think, like all retreats, even a sort of mainstream Dharma retreat, we have to be careful about what we, in our enthusiasm, want to impose on others, particularly those who are close to us, who might not be interested, who might not be ready for it, who it might not be what they want. And certainly if you go lustily speaking Greek to them, um ... [laughter] It may not go down so well, you know? "What are you even talking about?" So all this, just like any retreat, it asks for a lot of sensitivity, a lot of care, for the other person but also for you. We'll go through this again, but you're going to be very sensitive. You're going to be primed -- certain deep soul-desires come open and on fire, and we're basically saying, "Let yourself have that. Let yourself open to it. It's part of who you are," and everyone else, or most people, seem to be allowing that. And then suddenly, you know, one goes out into the world and it's not like that. That's not the agreement. That's not the view. We're back to structures and whatnot. So really to take care of one's own openness and sensitivity and vulnerability, but also those of others.

So I'm sorry, I can't say much more than that, and I might have completely missed the point here. But there's a chance to ask again or write again if you want.

Q6: sharing images in real time with others

Yogi: Rob, can I ask a question?

Rob: Yes, please.

Yogi: It's about the sharing of image, images of others with others. [inaudible]

Rob: Yeah, thank you, Lauren. Could everyone hear that? I think it is important. You haven't said it, but it would be a natural outflow of the richness of the practice, if one's practising. So we did a little bit on some of the last few retreats of sharing, very formal exercises where images were shared. Not necessarily the other as image right then, but just sharing images. Those of you who did that or have done it from the recordings, you can get a sense of just how potent that is, and the way we're just touched by the poetry of someone else's image. It's almost like an image can be infectious or shared, or I enter into an image that you -- oftentimes I find in interviews someone shares an image, and I'm living that image right there, and it's as if my eyes are as valid almost, my sense of the image, as the person. It's very potent. Or it can stimulate another image that's not the same image. So yeah, again, if we had more time, etc., on this retreat, and more capacity, we would have done more of that.

With the working with another, and each other is the image for each other in real time then, two things to say about that. One is, if you're already with your partner, and there's already that, and that's who you're doing it with, in a way, then, there's not the danger of if you're doing it with someone and maybe they're married to someone else or whatever the agreement is; they're not in an open relationship, etc. And then there's all this eros, potentially, flying around, and it's like, can we handle that? Are we okay with that? So that's a big ask. One of the reasons why I'm a little bit cautious about sharing some of that material is also because I feel, at this point, and maybe even more so given my predicament health-wise, I feel that these teachings -- or a lot of the time I feel; sometimes I'm like, "Oh, whatever," but a lot of the time I feel that these teachings, they're so new, and they need safeguarding. So even if three people went out and started to do that practice with great enthusiasm with someone where there was a boundary, and then that boundary was transgressed, and other people got upset, and then rumours went round, it would actually affect the whole thing, and it would affect what people think, and Gaia House would say, "Well, I'm not sure that we want to allow you to run another soulmaking retreat."

So I feel ultra-sensitive to the various ways -- that's just one way -- in which this kind of paradigm needs a bit of protecting, certainly at this stage where it's so new. The thing about, unlike in the Buddha's time, or even at the start of when insight meditation came to the West in the seventies, there wasn't internet back then. Nowadays one of us says something, it's on the internet, and someone in California is already doing something weird with ... you know. [laughter]

Yogi: We're always doing weird things! [laughter]

Rob: That's why I figured that it would land okay! I could have said Totnes. But anyway. [laughter] So I feel sensitive to that, and kind of some degree of responsibility, and some degree of just hope. I feel, in many ways -- this is a little off the track of your question, but I will come back -- I feel, in many ways, dependent and vulnerable to you guys, you know? Not just because I might not be around. I probably won't be around. Not just because of that, but I am anyway, or we are anyway, because it's not just me who's responsible or us who are responsible for caretaking for this. It's so easy for things to get diluted, misconstrued, acted on rashly or without care, that then has influences on other people in this room who didn't even know what you did or whatever. So that's one of the reasons why I'm a little cautious with it. I can't remember the other reason now, sorry. Sorry, gone blank.

Maybe if there's time, we will record some teachings about that. I think it just needs a lot of care, you know? I can't remember what else I wanted to say about it. How does that sound, Lauren?

Yogi: [inaudible]

Rob: So maybe at some point we can have that conversation, yeah. Let's just see ... [To Catherine] Did you want to say anything about that? There's quite a lot to say. The thing about that kind of -- it's superabundantly rich. So not just in terms of erotic charge, but it's very rich. It's like turbo-charging things. Not always, because sometimes there won't be that kind of spark between people. So it's asking a lot. It's asking to handle a lot, and one needs to have that possibility within oneself and in the dyad. Yeah, sorry, I'm just losing what I was going to say.

Q7: dark nights and kundalini roller coasters; problems with emphasizing the rapid seeing of impermanence over and over

"Thinking about the adventures of other explorers of the imagination/imaginal such as Jung or Hillman, Nietzsche, do you think that Soulmaking Dharma offers a smoother or safer path? Can these same approaches help with the difficulties that meditators sometimes encounter on and off the cushion, such as kundalini roller coaster, or dark night as described by Jack Kornfield in A Path With Heart?"

So just have to be brief -- some of these questions are huge, and I feel I could probably talk hours on them, but just briefly now. It was interesting -- I was struck by -- actually Hillman makes this point: when Jung started doing his explorations, and the Jungian tradition still (maybe less so nowadays, but for quite some decades), they used the language of "the unconscious," as if it's this terrifying pit of darkness and monsters and who knows what might come up and bite you, etc. That, if you like, almost seemed like a preconception. And then, similar to Julia's question yesterday, I operate with that preconception, and lo and behold [laughs], that's kind of what gets created there.

Hillman points out, writing some decades later probably, I can't remember his words, but he's kind of sarcastic and caustic and says something like, "The unconscious now has just become" -- I can't remember what he said, but joking, "It's something that people kind of journal about and stuff. It's all very tame and not scary at all." So what's the true thing there? It depends on the conceptual framework, partly. Nietzsche's a whole other kettle of fish, and I'm not sure he was really into what we're talking about, anyway. Yeah, let's not get onto Nietzsche. [laughs] So do I think it's smoother or safer? And if we get onto this thing about kundalini roller coaster or dark night, some of you might not know what that means. Jack's got a book called A Path With Heart, and there are other books around which borrow this term from St John of the Cross called dark night of the soul. St John of the Cross meant it in a completely different way -- I mean, utterly, utterly different. The modern meaning in -- let's just keep it in Theravādan Buddhist circles -- has come to mean that if you do insight practice with a lot of intensity, and you start to go deep, you start to feel really uncomfortable, and really unpleasant things start to happen, and maybe you go a little nuts or you feel really sick, over and over.

And this just goes round and round in cycles. People give it the name "the dark night of the soul," borrowing this term from St John of the Cross. He meant something entirely different. Or you get a kind of kundalini explosion, an explosion of energy, similar to the thermonuclear thing I was describing or I alluded to. I feel quite strongly about this. Looking back to the book I wrote on emptiness, there's so much in that book that I thought would be obvious if I just said it really subtly and gently, and clearly it wasn't at all, so I should have been much more direct and strong: I feel this is a complete misunderstanding and a mistake. Why? Everything is a dependent arising.

If I feel sick from practice, it's because of the way I'm practising. If I feel jittery and I feel like I'm going crazy and I feel cycles of -- it's because of the way I'm practising. So this, what's being referred to here, either the kundalini thing or the dark night of the soul, tends to happen when two factors are prioritized in insight meditation: the contemplation of rapid, moment-to-moment impermanence, with a very narrow focus of attention, trying to get as atomized as possible. Here's a pain in my knee -- how microscopic can I get into those sensations, and how fast can I see them change? And the more microscopic, and the faster I can see it change, the better my practice and the (quote) "deeper" I'm going. And with that, there's a lot of intensity of effort encouraged. Put those three things in a box, what do you get? A box of mad frogs. [laughter]

Not for everyone; it also depends on the psychophysical type. If I think about my psychophysical make-up -- look at me, I'm even thinner than I usually am, but I'm thin, I'm kind of wiry and wired and sort of hyper-alert and all that. This is the wrong body and psyche type to do that kind of practice. You get thermonuclear frog parts all over the place. [laughter] And it's almost like you can just wait for it to happen. You put someone else in, who their body type -- it has words in Ayurveda; I can't remember what they are -- but they're more, you know, just more plump, more slow, etc., and also their mind is not so fast and intense, that kind of person can do that kind of practice all day. It's not a problem. It won't do anything. Partly it's to do with the psychophysical make-up. But anyway. What's also happening there is it's prioritizing impermanence as the main one of the three characteristics. And it's seeing anattā, it's seeing not-self, through the approach of impermanence: there is no self because all I see in here is impermanent things. There are other ways to do it, and you can find it all in the book that I wrote or in recordings.^[5] And then the whole insight practice unfolds very, very differently.

I'm saying it now: I think it's a little bit ridiculous, to be honest, and a lot of people suffer a lot, or get really proud that they're going round and round in these cycles of misery, as if it's some badge of accomplishment, and "I'm really near to arahantship because it's really, really miserable." [laughter] To me, there are all kinds of problems with that, but one of them -- and probably, in a way, the most serious -- is the deep insight isn't there. One's just seeing impermanence, and things are exploding or disappearing or going nuts or energy's flying, whatever it is, but where's the insight into dependent origination? Where's the insight into deep emptiness? One is seeing impermanence. Anyone can see impermanence. It's not a deep insight. It's not the level of insight that I think is more beautiful, more mystical, more transformative, etc. Sorry if that sounds opinionated; it's partly in response to, as I said, trying to say things so subtly and gently that it seemed like no one saw that they were there.

When we do this practice, we're emphasizing there's a lot of softness. Even when we say open the energy body, put the energy body in relationship with something, it's a lot softer than kind of burrowing my attention into some microscopic point and then just kind of holding it there. And the inclusion of the heart, and the sensitivity, and the encouragement to modulate and attune the attention -- all this is soft and subtle and open, and so that the path deepens in soft, subtle, and open ways for the most part, and there doesn't need to be all these explosions and difficulties and crazy-making stuff. Is it safer? Heavens, why don't I just stop namby-pambying around and say yes. [laughter] Okay? Sorry. [laughter]

Q8: locating the eros and loving and being loved in an image (sister in a room with a bird building a nest around her)

Now, here's a question that went with a long question about the loving and being loved, etc. Is it okay for the person if I read the longer note? How are they going to respond to that? Is that a yes? Okay. So here's a longer -- some of it? Okay. Let me just see. I partly don't know the answer to the main question, so that's actually interesting in itself. But it was such a beautiful image, and I just thought to share it, if that's ...? Yeah? And I can answer some of it, if that helps.

"Late in the retreat, I know, so I understand if you cannot answer my questions. I feel moved to share an image anyway and trust that in its sharing, something will reveal itself. A logos of keeping what is sacred safe and protected inside will be stretched." I see -- an idea, a pattern of keeping what is sacred safe and protected inside will be stretched by sharing it. Thank you. That's a very important point as well. "After the sharing last night, my energy body contracted in contact with the thought of Catherine and all the whispering angels' grief. This morning an image arose of my sister -- I think, in part, response to this -- which touched me deeply. Background, not image: my sister is passionate, beautiful, has a soul that loves soulmaking, naturally imaginative, highly sensitive, and possibly too sensitive and passionate for this world at this time? Since 18, she has suffered from schizophrenia, and is now totally housebound. The outside world is too impactful. So the image: my sister is lying curled up on the floor in her flat. She is naked. Her features are not at all distinct, but I know it is her. There is more emphasis in this image on the room with tall ceilings. The space feels holy, sacred, like a chapel.

"The light is dim, yet there is luminosity. The colours are muted in hues of brown. The position of her body is twisted and contorted, indicating the immense pain she is in, but there is a sense that she is assenting to this pain, choosing to remain in the room to take on the suffering of other souls who cannot or will not. Around her is a chaotic collection of eclectic objects -- crisp packets, popped balloons, rubbish, trinkets -- and a sense that a bird is building a nest around her, offering these objects to her, but the bird is not in the image, just a vague sense." So there's so much detail here, you see? You get the sense of an image, of an aspect of an image, but it's not visual. It's all part of the imaginal. Don't get hung up on the visuals. Yeah? So the antennae are up, and just what's resonant -- there's a bird, but I can't see the bird. I sense, I intuit. How do I know? I don't know how I know. It doesn't matter. What matters is the feeling of it and the sense of soulmaking.

Continues, "This image became like a holy altar. My energy body filled out fully, and inwardly I bowed, my heart centre open and bright, despite being moved to tears. Bearing witness to her suffering feels beautiful, despite or even because of the pain? This image had the immediate effect of opening my perception of the previous night and to all fellow retreatants -- angels bearing their own particular joys and pains. But the conception of individual suffering, theirs and my own, for what I and all of us have been asked to hold in this lifetime, expanded." Okay, so "the conception of individual suffering, theirs and my own, and for what I and all of us have been asked to hold in this lifetime, expanded." So already it's doing something to the heart, to the soul-sense, to the perception. "This is a new image, almost a snapshot of time, yet with the sense of the eternal. My question is, however, where in this is the eros? Is it between me and the image, the holy altar? Or is there something in the bird's tendings and offerings that do not ease the pain, and yet ...? Or is the eros to the poignant beauty in the image?" I would say all three.

So there is eros between the meditator and the image, the holy altar of this scene, the poignant beauty of it. There's eros towards that. But also within the characters of the image, there is eros. "Most of the nodes are alight within this image, but love and being loved? With a human or animal image, I get this, but with a snapshot image? Who is being loved? I feel love. But I'm sure I will figure it out if I stay longer." Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I mean, there's definitely love in the image, and maybe you don't need to figure out where the love is. It's so full of beauty and so soulful, being touched -- you can trust that. So we don't have to think, "Oh, this is all going swimmingly, wonderfully, but it's just that node," and then worry about that. It's working. Don't worry about it. Maybe we'll get some expansion of the teachings here that we haven't thought about yet. It's very possible, you know? As you say, you feel love; there's somehow love. I mean, there's love for your sister, it sounds like. So there's love that way. So there's some portion of it already present, and certainly between the characters in the image. But I don't know the answer, actually, and I find that interesting. But it may well be that as you hang out with this, it becomes clear. It's a great question, I just wouldn't lean too much on it at the risk of kind of disturbing the natural soulmaking sort of fermentation that's happening there. Yeah? Do you want to say more, or is that okay? Yeah? Thank you. It's beautiful.

Okay, it's 10 to 6. What should we ...? There are actually only a couple more.

Q9: alternatives to the words eros, psyche, and logos

One question -- "What would you have called eros-psyche-logos instead? Please expand a lot." [laughter] Actually, no. I'm misreading. It says "a bit." I don't know. I don't know what I would have called them. The only issue I have with those words -- I know some people don't like the Greek, but in a way the Greek is good because they're, to a certain extent, unfamiliar. "What is that? What do you mean when you say that?" If we used words like love or even just desire or passion or lust, they're so commonly used words that we tend to think we know what that means and what the range is, etc. So giving them slightly unusual names just helps to support that sense of, "What is that? I don't quite know what it is."

I have no idea what I would have called them in retrospect. The only reason I sometimes feel like, "Oh, I wish we'd used -- even imaginal or soul and all that -- different words," is just because of -- I think what I said the other day is that these words are used in lots of different practices and settings and traditions these days, and as much as I know about them, it's clear that we also mean something different. It's very easy, if you use the same words, to just assume that the same thing is meant. Less so with logos -- logos used to be used a lot in Western culture. It's at the beginning of St John's gospel, "In the beginning was the logos." Actually "the word," it gets translated, but "in the beginning was the logos." And that had all kinds of meanings coming from Platonism, etc. But that's kind of gone out of vogue. The only place I know that really uses it is the Ridhwan teachings where they talk about the logos of the teachings, meaning the conceptual framework of the teachings and that whole paradigm. So I'm less uncomfortable with the word logos just because it's more rare and so less likely to be just put in the same box as what we might have encountered elsewhere. Eros and psyche, I don't know -- I'm not sure it matters too much, but I can't think ... we could just make up words, but, yeah, not sure.

Q10: 'What do you want' from awakening, and the bodhisattva path; not being able to manifest all positive qualities fully at once, but being able to fluidly move between them

Then the last one, I actually didn't understand this question. Just going back to the lovely image of the sister (Q8), I don't think the issue was about the snapshot thing; that's just a certain kind of temporal style that the image was in. I think that has nothing to do with the question of love and being loved. Some images are just snapshots, but they have this -- some are a bit more narrative, or like Karen shared, there's an image but it has a whole narrative background. I don't think that's relevant.

There's a question (Q10) I didn't -- the person asked yesterday, and then again they wanted it addressed today, but I don't quite know. I'll read it, and then maybe you can help a little bit, if that's okay. "To be willing to experience fully the grief of extinction of life on earth, of humans, of ancestors and all their blessing of their particular lives, to be willing to fully accept this also means to stay connected deeply to everyone else and their grief, rather than freedom from suffering. Isn't this the bodhisattva path? I'm also referring here to the four-part talk you gave about awakening, asking 'what do you want?'"^[6]

Do you want to expand a little? I'm not sure I understand quite what the question is around.

Yogi: [inaudible]

Rob: What's the it that sounds the same?

Yogi: [inaudible]

Rob: Yeah. Thank you. Could you hear that? Thank you. I don't remember what I meant on those talks, sorry. One of the things that's happened -- there are a few things that have happened since the Buddha gave his teachings, and one is that however some people might try and kind of tear things out of the Pali Canon or whatever, the Buddha's teachings are pretty entrenched in a world-view that believes in rebirth, being reborn according to your karma, and suffering and suffering and suffering until you get awake and you get off that wheel of rebirth.

If we take that out -- a lot of people no longer believe such a cosmology -- then you're left with, well, what does it actually mean? What does awakening actually mean? And what you get is a lot of different interpretations of what that means. What does it mean when you take away this ending rebirth as a goal? And I feel it's quite important to be on a path that feels authentic. You need to be on a path, I need to be on a path that feels authentic to me, that makes sense, that I really can get behind what I'm trying to do and what the goal is. So I don't know what I meant in that talk; it was probably in a certain context, so I don't want to hazard right now, but there's still this principle of 'what do you want?' If that's your sense of, "This is what I want from my life. I want to be in solidarity. I don't want to be removed. I want to be available. I want to be in service to the world and the planet and the suffering," then you should trust that, and the question is, how can I support that? What do I need? How do I make that a sustainable path and a beautiful path, really?

Historically, as another historical point, even the notion of the bodhisattva has gone through quite a lot of changes in different cultures over time and particularly now in the West. So if you went back and read, say, Śāntideva, or some of the original teachings on the bodhisattva path, he talks about wanting to sacrifice himself for all beings and all this and that, and he goes through all this very sort of florid poetry of self-renunciation and sacrifice. Then you turn the page to the next chapter and he's like, "Right, let's get away from all these people and find a solitary place where I can meditate and become awakened, where there's no one around and I'm not disturbed by anyone." The idea, it's also wrapped up in what it is to be a Buddha, and a Buddha in the Mahāyāna is someone who -- it's really complicated, but it's someone who is somehow a transcendent being but has emanations here on earth. So whether they're suffering or not, it's a whole question.

It then, somewhere along the line, came to mean this thing of someone who would postpone their awakening, which it didn't originally mean, actually. And then, even more recently in the West, it's come to mean just someone who sees their path as as much about service as about meditation, let's say that, or even more about service than meditation, and that's what they want to do -- they want to be in the marketplace, in the thick of things, in the refugee camps or whatever it is, or out there on the pavement with Extinction Rebellion, whatever it is, and that's their path. There is a certain freedom in that; there can be. So the word means something different. I think the more important thing is, because the whole metaphysic is completely up for grabs these days, I would give the question back to each of us: what do you really want? You don't know when you're going to die. You don't know how long you have. You don't know how long you're going to have your faculties for and your energy. What do I want? What do I want? And can I let that go deep, and burn deep, and stay steady with that, and have it translate into my life, and make it a priority? And that will be different from person to person.

That's part of the postmodern predicament -- there's no agreed-upon metaphysic, etc. So you're free, basically, now that it's not universally agreed on that the end of rebirth is what full awakening, arahantship or whatever, looks like. The question is, what do you make of it? What do you want? And what does it mean to you? And what do you most deeply want for your life? So I would give it back that way.

Just one very brief thing. Still within that, you're going to notice -- I noticed some years ago (I think this was more than twenty years ago, or maybe around twenty years ago), I had been focusing a lot on jhāna practice, and really getting into it, and making some headway, and feeling super excited about that. I had been on retreat, and was at home, back in the rhythm of my life, and was practising, and would notice on the days when the samādhi was really good, my heart didn't feel as sort of tender and open as it did on the other days. And sometimes when my heart was tender, it was the days when the samādhi, the jhānic samādhi, wasn't so available. That really struck me.

So it's similar to what you're saying. In a way, you know, we'd like to think there's this state of mind where you can just get it and you have everything right there, and it's all just tickety-boo, and everything's available. I'm not sure. So it might be more fluid than that. It's interesting to me -- the Buddha, when he talks about Right Intention, second factor on the eightfold path, he puts things in the negative. Right Intention, or Right Thought sometimes -- he puts things in the negative. So it could say something like, "An intention for kindness, an intention for compassion, an intention for renunciation," but he doesn't. He says, "An intention for non-harming, an intention for non-cruelty." And to me, that always implied the possibility that if I'm right there in the fourth jhāna, I'm not actively doing mettā, I'm not thinking about it, I'm not even that sensitive, but I'm in a state of non-harming and non-cruelty; it's an absence. So I wonder whether he put things in the negative because he realized you can't be in any one state that's going to have all of that. What we want is a life that -- well, what I want and what you may want [laughs] -- is a life that has access to that, that they're never too far away, that you can fluidly mix between the two. And you know, I think you know, that if you're an activist, you need some deep resources. You need some recharging. You need some rest. And that samādhi and that kind of just, "Okay, I'm just now with this, with myself," it's so helpful when you then go out and you meet the suffering in the world, or you want to do something courageous, or that takes a lot of energy and a lot of work. So the going back and forth becomes really skilful.

In a larger context -- last thing, because I think we do have to eat, right? [laughter] On a longer time frame -- I look at my life and I feel very called to serve, you know, in different ways, but I also obviously have been very called to explore meditative depths and that whole thing. I've done long retreats. I think at one point I spent most of a three-year period on retreat, you know. It was always clear to me, even at the time, the time that I was right in there with all the joy and everything, very secluded, not speaking to hardly anyone, it was always clear to me that that was a portion of a journey in the service of something that wasn't just about, "Oh, I get to feel good." Some people figure out a life where it's kind of balanced, they're just about balancing these things as it goes along. If I look more at my life -- and I'm not saying there's a right or wrong; it's just different styles of doing it -- I can see rhythms, and rhythms where it's much more contemplative, and rhythms where it's actually a little bonkers, I'm way too busy, etc., but I'm in the flow of, let's say, a service or whatever. So I look more at that balance.

But anyway, if you're dedicated to serving and caring and compassion and embodying that and expressing that, you're going to need also to take care of yourself as a minimum. So those periods when you feel, "I'm a little less in touch," it's okay. That's exactly ... You know, also when you're fast asleep, and no one would say you shouldn't fall asleep. You need to rest. Things get turned off. The world gets turned off when you're asleep. We need that. Yeah? But yeah, I would basically give you back the question. Your vision of what's beautiful, what's noble, what calls you; the life that you feel that if you were on your deathbed, clear and looking back with a clear mind, that you would feel you don't have regrets. Not that you achieved everything you wanted to achieve, but at least you went for it. Yeah? That's important. And only you can answer that. I can't answer that for you. The Buddha can't answer it. So that feels really important to me, to know that, and to be clear about it, to stay close to it, to stay true to it, to live that with passion. Yeah? Okay. Let's stop so that we can eat. [laughter] Let's just have a bit of quiet.