Dharma(s) Discovered and Created (Part 3)

If we return to consider a little bit more the influence of contemporary cultural context on the tradition, on the evolution of the tradition, on the Dharma, the shaping of the tradition, and we look at the current cultural context, one read, one reading of that, of our current cultural context, the larger cultural context, is that we're in a strange sort of hybrid time, in a way. So we had the rise of modernism, or modernity, if you prefer, with the Western Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. And one characteristic of modernism, philosophically, is the belief, the view, the hope that one -- humanity -- can lay hold of 'the truth,' capture it in a clear, unmediated way, a single truth, and that can be known. And so of course, we've talked about science and the Scientific Revolution, and how that encapsulated that -- embodied, really, the central thrust of that belief, and idea, and hope. And of course there were other movements in philosophy, etc., that captured that.

So the legacy of modernism is still very much with us. It's still very much alive. At a certain point, as I chronicled, you know, through the reflections on science and the history of science, through philosophical considerations, other factors, political and anthropological considerations, etc., looking at the studies of other cultures, and there was a rise of a sort of collection of related movements that we can loosely bundle together under the term 'postmodernism,' loosely. And that very much aggressively challenged the belief and the idea that there could be a direct perception of truth, that there is one privileged perspective which reveals the truth or reality, whether it's scientific, or philosophical, or social, or ethical, or whatever. And so there was a rise of postmodernism, particularly in intellectual circles.

But some of that spilled into non-intellectual circles, the person on the street, the everyday person who's not in academia. And so, one read of our contemporary larger cultural context is that we're living in a sort of mixed time, where to a certain extent, what is still very much dominant as the mainstream cultural paradigm is essentially modernity -- that there is one truth, that science can lay hold of it, etc. Mixed with that is a kind of filtering into the common consciousness, if you like, of a kind of postmodern reservation, objection, hesitation to that proclamation or that idea of there being one truth, one reality, one privileged perspective which we can come to, or which this person or that person, or this culture or that culture, has over and above another culture.

So these two kind of opposed ideas or opposed sort of views about reality and truth, epistemology, and all of that -- and as I said, it covers all kinds of areas of human existence, not just science -- they kind of co-exist in the common consciousness, in a strange way, so that there is a sort of reluctance to close down the possibility of people just having different opinions, and different takes on reality, or perspectives, at the same time as there is a kind of dominant view of "This is how reality is," and it tends to adhere to the sort of classical scientific materialist view and secular view. So that in itself is a sort of strange mix of postmodern philosophy with the sort of dominance of modernist views. They're mixed together. It's a strange combination. And what does that imply? How does that play out in how we view the Dharma, sense the Dharma? What influences will that have on the Dharma, but also on how we view Dharma, etc.?

So as I mentioned just now, one of the traits or thrusts of postmodern thought and philosophy is this objection to any claim of reaching or knowing a universal truth, and any claim that there is such a universal truth, or that one can hope to arrive at a perspective which will reveal that universal truth. And rather, truths or reality perspectives, or world-views, or even morality views, etc., under the rubric of the postmodern gaze, the gaze of postmodernism, views all these perspectives as just 'so-called truths.' They are viewed more as just cultural products. And so one of the sort of constituent or related movements of postmodernism is what we might call 'postcolonialism.'

So academics and others looking at the influence of the aggressive colonialism of Western European countries (but we also might say the US, etc.) on indigenous cultures and other cultures around the world, imposing their views of reality -- it's happened in all kinds of ways: imposing aesthetic, imposing reality-views, imposing legal views, imposing sociological, economic modes of thinking and action, and wishing to kind of recognize that, and recognize that that has gone on, and reclaim some of the indigenous power from that kind of oppressive spread through colonialism. And so, part of all that study brought the view that, "There are no universal truths. There are just different cultural views."

Of course, even among modern philosophers, this is not a sort of simple fait accompli, as an argument. There are nuances to this. It's much more sophisticated than I'm presenting here. However, that objection or nervousness when anyone claims a universal truth, any person, or any culture, or any religion, etc., is part of, as I said, a thrust of postmodern philosophy that has, to some extent, filtered down into our ordinary culture. So I heard from a colleague who was teaching with another teacher, and the colleague of mine played two pieces of music in the meditation hall one evening. And her co-teacher afterwards said she should be careful. She shouldn't assume that those pieces of music will be universally felt the same way by everyone in the hall. So I think they were two pieces of music by two basically white men. I think it was George Harrison and Leonard Cohen. And this co-teacher was kind of saying, "Well, careful of the sort of" -- they actually used the word, but "the kind of colonialism there, supposing that music by two white men will be heard by everyone with the same -- it will land in the same place," as my colleague was hoping it would, to communicate a certain point, or create a certain atmosphere, etc., in the hall.

Okay, fair enough. Good point, maybe. But at the same time, this co-teacher was probably -- my guess -- overlooking the presumption of universality in the Dharma. In other words, the Dharma tends to proclaim -- and most Dharma folk presume -- a universal truth, that the Four Noble Truths are universal truths, or certainly that the sort of pith of the Four Noble Truths -- that craving brings suffering, and releasing craving brings a reduction in suffering -- just that much, that is assumed to be a universal truth. And it may or may not, again, be explicitly trumpeted as such, but I wonder whether most Dharma folk, people who are steeped in the Dharma, actually just really assume that. [11:29]

Now, most Buddhists (so-called), I don't think kind of try to enforce their view or their way on others. They would acknowledge and allow any person's freedom and autonomy, to a certain extent, to choose their path, their religion, their conceptual framework. But maybe, perhaps just like, I don't know, say, a fundamentalist Christian who is not evangelical might believe that those who don't choose Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour will not go to heaven -- they might believe that, or they might even believe this person will suffer in hell for eternity, I don't know -- but without being aggressively evangelist about it. They won't impose that on others so aggressively. But it's still harbouring a certain view. I don't know. Is it the case that people who are steeped in Buddhism, or consider themselves Buddhist, assume, without aggressively foisting it on anyone else, that basically, those people who choose differently, who don't practise the relinquishment of craving and other aspects of the Buddhist path will suffer and do suffer because of their kilesas, because of craving, their personal craving, etc.?

So to me, this is an interesting question. It's like, do we assume the Dharma is universal, and proclaiming, and the holder of, the repository of universal truths -- at least some of them? Culturally speaking, there's a good case, I think, to look at Pali Canon Dharma teachings and that whole thrust towards transcendence, and solitude, and renunciation, with regard to the relationship with senses, the senses, and sense pleasure, and regard that as very -- put it in quotation marks -- 'male' as a kind of style, that the thrust of Pali Canon Dharma is quite 'male.' I think that case could be, you know, to a certain extent, very validly made. It's certainly patriarchal, or has been a very patriarchal structure. So one of the, again, related movements within postmodernism is feminist studies, and gender studies, and all that, and one can very easily imagine that kind of critique from the perspective of a feminist thinker, looking not just at the patriarchy through a couple of thousand years of Buddhist history in its power structures, but also a typically, as I said, 'male' flavour, and range, and leaning in the archetypal style there, of its aims and its methods.

So, to remove oneself from the world, to not be reborn, to transcend the world, to regard sense pleasures as something to be renounced, etc., the emphasis on solitude, all these things -- how much is a universal truth in there? And if we talk about, you know, again, going back to when we talked about different world-views spawning or setting up different Dharmas, the view of the round of rebirth being equated with suffering, and then the release of suffering, liberation, nibbāna is coming out of not being reborn again into the world, into any world. If that is central, then we're not just talking about cosmetic differences here. We're talking about something really fundamental. Is that very transcendent movement away from the world, away from sense experience -- is that something that is, you know, created by a male, coloured by males, reinforced by males, and reflecting a male style, archetypal style, if you like? The language is fraught here, so I'm certain to tread on some toes. I apologize. But I hope you get the basic point that I'm trying to make.

Several practitioners have told me: "I'm actually not interested in the Unfabricated. I care more about relationships and the beauty in relationships." Now, a woman practitioner told me that. And is that just because she's deluded? Or actually, is she holding on to and trying to preserve and create space for something that's actually been sidelined and denigrated over many, many years, and through the force of a kind of male-oriented and male-shaped teaching and thrust? [17:24] So do we assume the Dharma is universal and the repository of universal truths? And if we don't, then what?

Same about Soulmaking Dharma, you know. Do we assume the soulmaking conceptual framework is universal, reflects some universal truth, all these ideas we're putting out? One of the hopefully strengths and sophistications of Soulmaking Dharma is that, as I've mentioned a couple of times, the whole idea of breaking of the vessels, Shevirat ha-Kelim, is integral to the whole conceptual framework, and also with reference to conceptual frameworks themselves, so that part of the whole conceptual framework of Soulmaking Dharma is the fact that conceptual frameworks need to be stretched, need to be soft and elastic, will shatter at certain points, will have holes in them, will have certain inevitable incoherences that may fracture, and may break, and may need to be expanded, rebuilt, etc. [18:46]

And sometimes I wonder -- and Catherine and I have touched on it several times -- I just wonder how much of Soulmaking Dharma is a reflection of my personal dispositions, my history, my preferences, my blind spots, my views, my style of consciousness, my soul-style. Even things like the emphasis on the kind of fine discernment, the subtlety of awareness with regard to emotions and the energy body -- so this is just part of how my soul and my consciousness tends to work, or how I've developed it, how it has been developed over practice. It's something that, to a huge extent, Catherine shares, or has similar kind of tendencies of subtle discernment, etc. How much of that is necessary, and how much is, as I say, that the teachings themselves are actually just a reflection of my style, and not necessarily necessary? [20:05] So these are questions. These are questions. What do we do with all this?

If we stay with this strange amalgam -- uneasy, kind of incongruent, relatively incongruent amalgam of modernism and postmodernism, modernity and postmodernity, in our contemporary wider culture, one of the other, if you like, aspects or faces of postmodernism, in terms of the arts -- and someone told me that the whole postmodern movement actually started in architecture, I think, and some of the other arts, and a sort of introduction of kind of more pastiche elements, elements that belong to different artistic styles were placed and juxtaposed in the same building or piece of artwork, etc. And so, pastiche, that kind of -- from a certain perspective -- incongruence, juxtaposition of different elements, and styles, and traditions within one piece, that's also kind of characteristic of certainly postmodern art, to a certain extent. This is all grossly simplified, but it doesn't matter for the points that I'm making, for now.

So with the attack on the idea of a unity of view or unity of style, there is a sort of liberation of the possibility of, legitimization of the possibilities of pastiche and putting things together in all kinds of different ways, certainly artistically. And so it's possible, given that kind of permission in some of the wider culture, that a kind of eclecticism can creep into, or be consciously injected into Dharma or Soulmaking Dharma, etc. And even eclecticism -- if we just talk about in spiritual eclecticism or religious eclecticism -- can happen in two ways. One can be more in this sense of the pastiche, and the other can be eclecticism with the harbouring a background or foreground view that, "Actually, we can put all these things together. We can mix what Jesus was saying with what Rumi is saying, and what the Buddha is saying, or whatever. We can put all these pieces together because they're in fact all saying the one truth, the one universal truth, the one perennial philosophy, etc." And so that's quite common in some New Age circles. Or that view is quite common in some New Age circles and some people who have sort of espoused so-called 'perennial philosophy.' So this kind of eclecticism would be coming, then, from a very different place. Rather than, "There is no truth, and you can mix things together, and don't even attempt for a kind of coherent unity of structure," this will be coming from, "You can mix things together because they're all in fact saying the same thing."

Personally, I'm not at all sure how people hear teachings, the soulmaking teachings, but I don't consider myself a champion of any kind of eclecticism of essences. So I hope that people don't think I'm of the view that, "Spiritual teachings are essentially the same. It's just the expression that differs. They're all just different paths to the summit of the same mountain, etc.," that kind of trope that you will have probably heard before. My sense, rather, in offering these teachings and exploring these teachings, is of so many essential and fundamental differences, even within one tradition, such as Insight Meditation. So it's almost staggering to me, like really, how many basic differences there are among, say, the teachers of Insight Meditation even just in the UK, let alone in the States, and Europe, etc.

And on top of that, I myself don't believe I have 'an interpretation' of Buddhadharma, one interpretation, or 'my Dharma' or 'my version,' etc. I feel more that I have many Dharmas, many kinds of larger conceptual frameworks I can move in and out of, partly dependent on who I'm talking to. And they're all kind of accessible and valid. So when -- I mean, not so much in this talk, but in other talks over the years -- when I'm using diverse examples and artefacts from various traditions, I'm using them, I feel, more in a kind of opportunistic way, if and when they help what I'm trying to communicate. And part of what I want to communicate is my sense of the necessity of plurality, of an open field, or an orchard, a garden, a pardes, to use the Hebrew word, of infinite possibilities of interpretation, of creation and discovery. And that is different, if you like, than eclecticism. It's serving a different point.

I don't know how you feel. I wonder how you feel when you hear me or another Buddhist teacher, teacher of Buddhism, using stories from religious traditions other than Buddhism -- so for example, from the Old Testament. It seems quite rare to hear teachings from the Old Testament in Buddhadharma circles. But I wonder how that lands. They're always, you know, trying to illustrate or open up certain ideas about awakening, or the infinity of hermeneutics, or the nature of the soulmaking dynamic, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, or whatever. So it's much more common, for instance, to hear Jesus and Rumi in Buddhist, certainly in Insight Meditation teachings. What's selected from Jesus and Rumi's teachings is teachings about love, and selflessness, and oneness, etc. Maybe for some people, Old Testament teachings have a remnant of, or a suspicion that they are full of, you know, pictures of divine wrath and judgment, and they're dualistic, etc.

But still, I wonder where that lands generally, this drawing on other cultures and other traditions. And if we stay with this just for a moment, it's interesting, you know, a teacher could use a Buddhist image or icon with a non-Buddhist interpretation -- so I could take some image, or story, or icon from Buddhism, whatever it is, and interpret it, say, in terms of oneness, like universal oneness, as if Buddhism was teaching universal oneness, which it isn't. (Well, it's hard to make that case in my mind). Or conversely, one could use a non-Buddhist image or icon or story, and give it a Buddhist interpretation.

And so, I wonder where those two modes sit with you or land. So what, for example, are you identifying with? Am I identifying with being Buddhist? And so, do I object, maybe, to certain non-Buddhist images, or anecdotes, or whatever, or language? And if I am identifying with being a Buddhist, why? What is going on there for me psychologically? What is it, exactly, that I am loyal to, that my allegiance is to? Is it to 'being a Buddhist'? Is it to freedom from suffering? Is it to something else?

So I think that's really quite interesting. What's actually going on for us in our identity, if we are identifying with being Buddhist? And also, which carries more weight when we hear or read it: the concept elucidated or taught with respect to an image -- or exemplified, the concept exemplified and expanded on -- or the image? So I was hearing from someone who was really practising for many years in the Insight Meditation tradition, and then through different circumstances and events, she moved away from the Insight Meditation and the whole world of Buddhadharma, and was practising in another tradition -- I'm not sure quite how it would be characterized, but some kind of non-dual, non-dualistic kind of Islamic-based tradition. And then, she was telling me that she felt drawn to Buddhadharma again, and was explaining that this draw was because she had felt Kuan Yin calling her home to explore some of her presence as a figure in her own right, as a presence, and as a presence within herself. So this reconnection with Buddhism came through the sense of Kuan Yin.

I don't know what was the case with this person, but my question is really, is it just an icon, in this case Kuan Yin, typically conceived and labelled as 'Buddhist'? Because if it's just the icon, where's the Buddhadharma in that? Actually, representations of divinities, throughout history, they've passed, they've moved, they've been traded, they slip and are shared between one culture and religious tradition and another, countless, countless times. And academics have traced that in all kinds of ways. So just because it's Kuan Yin, and Kuan Yin is regarded as a Buddhist deity, bodhisattva, etc., does that make it a return to Buddhadharma if it's only that it's a typically Buddhist deity? If it's nothing more than that, just the borrowing of a deity and a relationship with that deity -- perhaps through visualization, perhaps through image, etc. -- where's the Buddhadharma there?

You know, similarly, I heard that when Christian missionaries went to Tibet, I think it was -- pretty sure it must have been Tibet -- and they started trying to teach the Gospels, and teach about Jesus, and teach the sort of theology of Christianity, they actually, in a way, had very little impact, and very little influence, because the Tibetans heard the stories about Jesus, and the beautiful healing stories, and his sacrifice, and all of that, and just heard it, and said, "Oh, he's just a bodhisattva that we've never heard of before." And so he was just easily, without any friction at all, just accommodated into their already-large pantheon of deities and bodhisattvas, and they completely missed the essence of Christianity, and certainly missed any differentiation between what they were believing and thinking, and their conceptual frameworks, explicit and implicit, and the Christian ones. So again, when we talk about traditions, and eclecticism, and borrowing, and referring to all that, what are we actually talking about? What actually has the clout? Is it just a kind of representation, or is it more the deeper, essential conceptual framework with the delineations and things? So there are a lot of considerations in here, I think, to reflect on.

I've made the case before, and I get the impression I'm not the only one who feels this way, but in many regards, the postmodern movement, philosophically at least, kind of reached a dead end, or has come to a dead end, in a certain way. So partly, it was supposed that, in the attack on any proclamation or hope or idea of a universal truth that could be arrived at by adopting, you know, the perspective that reveals that truth, etc., would open up the ground for more fertile cross-pollination and conversation, etc. I don't think that has happened. Or it doesn't seem to have happened very much. Certainly it hasn't happened much in philosophical circles, as far as I can tell. And the whole thing kind of, well, died, to some extent. Or we could say, has it died? So again, I mentioned someone, for instance, like Richard Rorty, who made such an insistence in his very smart critique of truth claims, and privileged perspectives on reality, and all that, deconstructions of even the attempt at ontology and epistemology, all that stuff, and then was hoping that this would, in his words, "open up the conversation." That was the most important thing, to "open up the conversation, keep the conversation going."

But very little came out, certainly in his writings, and there's very little conversation happening. And it didn't seem to spawn much, or open up much of a conversation, or much fertile creation and discovery, either in terms of ideas or anything else. And I made this point before, but partly, the problem is that a lot of the academic philosophers lack any technology, in the sense of any meditative technique, and capacity, and developed practice, to actually shift ways of looking, to move in and out of different ways of looking, so that their very sense of reality, their very sense of cosmos, their sense of human being, their perception of things actually changes.

Now, of course, that's the central thing, as I would see it, we practise in Buddhadharma, at least as I tend to most commonly present it. And that takes practice. So I can have the idea that there is the possibility of different perspectives, but if I can't actually engage different perspectives, it just stays completely at the level of the written academic word or debate. Nothing is really affected in the being, and there's no real exploration of new ground, of different perspectives, no real creation and discovery happening. So that's maybe one reason why the whole postmodern philosophical movement just sort of died, or petered out, lost its life.

A second is -- and again, I've pointed this out before just recently -- that often, many of those philosophers espousing the impossibility of seeing truth or the existence of one truth, or arriving at one preferred perspective on reality, most of those philosophers espousing that and claiming that actually had a hidden agenda. And sometimes it might have been hidden to themselves; I don't know. And that hidden agenda involved a kind of strongly secularist, almost nihilistic materialist stance. That was their basic ontological commitment. And on top of that, they might have even had an agenda to cut down, to denigrate, to make impossible, to bar from the conversation anything that reeked to them of more spiritual views, more ennobling views, other dimensions, divinity, etc. So, saying one thing, but actually blocking the discourse from opening up in certain areas. Also just, as I said, closed the discourse so it ended up atrophying, and nothing really new came into that pot, other than people repeating over and over: "There's the absence of truth. We can't ...", and bashing each other, slapping each other's wrists when it seemed like this person or that person was claiming some kind of privileged perspective, usually without realizing it.

Now, I'm sure that in recent years, and the last couple of decades, even, I'm sure there must be thinkers and burgeoning movements that I'm just unaware of. Someone was talking to me just the other day about 'metamodernism,' and saying that this was the beginnings of a philosophical movement that related [to], had something in common with what we were teaching, and may provide part of a way forward, out of this sort of dead end or lifeless pool left over from postmodernism and this strange mishmash of the dominant modernism with sort of filtered-down postmodernism. So that's very, very possible. I don't know much about it, what 'metamodernism' means. I don't know much about it yet. But you know, again, if we're saying, "What do we do with all this? What do we do with our cultural context? What are the effects of the cultural context? And how might we look at the Dharma, look at tradition, look at where we've got to, look at where we are, and how we move forward, in light of our consideration of those contexts, and particularly, now, our current cultural context?"

So, going back to the previous talk on ontology and epistemology, you know, one way forward, as I mentioned there, is the kind of working towards an 'absolute' that, if you like, is a truth, an independently existing truth, existing, if you like, in another dimension or dimensions, so to speak, so that from our usual human perspectives, we can only glimpse part of that truth, or one angle, or one aspect of that absolute at one time. But actually it exists there as something we can kind of work towards, or intuit, or somehow, perhaps even create some kind of sense of, or open some kind of sense of, whether it's intellectually, or meditatively, or both, or whatever. [43:04] Now, that kind of idea is, as I mentioned in the talk on ontology and epistemology, is kind of anathema to a lot of those thinkers influenced by postmodern philosophy -- but not all, and it would provide one way forward, again, that we can then think about the Dharma, or think about whatever tradition we're talking about -- Buddhadharma, or soulmaking tradition, whatever -- as aspects, as partial aspects of that greater absolute. And that can happen in all kinds of ways, at all kinds of different levels.

But another I've mentioned in the past, another possible way forward out of this dead end, is really the idea of practice and Dharma as art rather than as a pursuit of truth, like science is, or rather than as a religion, both of which postulate truths -- definite, universal truths. Certainly Soulmaking Dharma, I would regard as an art. And I tend to regard mainstream Dharma as an art as well. And again, I've talked about this before. I'm not going to go into it too much right now. But then, with art comes the possibility of, if you like, 'artistic truth,' 'poetic truth,' which has power, but not the same kind of truth claim or truth conception, conception of truth, as, say, typically religion does, or typically science does, or typically philosophy or other domains of human inquiry have.

We mentioned in one of the talks recently that perhaps the imaginal and sensing with soul needs its own epistemological category, a third epistemological category. It's not just the kind of knowledge that we tend to think of, that corresponds with some independent, objectively existing external truth. Neither is it just a belief. It's a third category. So those kinds of considerations and ideas would be opened up and wrapped up in the idea of Dharma, and certainly Soulmaking Dharma, as art.

There are also, then, as in art, there are endless possibilities. So the possibility even just of, like, tonal music, the possibilities are endless. They're infinite. For example, as with painting, there are actually endless possibilities. But those endless possibilities that are part of the art of Dharma, the art of Soulmaking Dharma, let's say, need to be, as I said before, balanced, or offset, or form a creative, be in creative tension with some kind of constraint and resistance. Just as in art, there's some kind of constraint and resistance, and that's part of what forms the crucible for the creativity and the discovery. So there are these infinite possibilities, and somehow they're given more power, more depth, more transformative potential, etc., by being placed in a crucible whose walls offer some constraint, some limitation, some resistance. So we talked about that in regard to ontology and epistemology. There are other domains that provide resistance and constraint as well. [47:14]

But also, like art, I would say Soulmaking Dharma itself is, in the sense of endlessness, it's unfathomable. And it's irreducible, as well, like art, or like an image. It's unfathomable and irreducible. The whole of soulmaking is unfathomable and irreducible -- irreducible in the sense of, we can't actually say, "What is it for? What is the soulmaking for?" Its purpose, what's the purpose of soulmaking? Soulmaking is the purpose of soulmaking. So you end up with a kind of circular definition, as all the perhaps deepest things in existence tend to be. It doesn't refer, it doesn't deliver us -- primarily, its purpose is not to deliver us to something beyond itself. The purpose of soulmaking is soulmaking. Soul loves soulmaking. And so, that also has an analogy in art, homology in art. What's the purpose of art? Sometimes when philosophers have historically set their eyes on the domain of art, and try and come up with aesthetic theories, oftentimes they want to link the art to some moral message, or some cognitive idea that we're supposed to understand from a piece of art, etc.

But I would say that art -- yes, it can deliver a specific moral message. Yes, it can deliver a certain conceptual message. But it's always going to have areas and depths and breadths that are beyond anything that we can explain or package it as. It's always going to perhaps include the moral, but more than moral, and more than just the moral, and if it does include the moral, it's going to include it in a way, just like the imaginal, with this dimensionality shading into divinity -- you know, this region where it feels, perhaps, like it's making a moral impact on the being, it is making a moral impact on the being, but exactly how, and what, and why, and how that works, and what exactly the moral message is is not so clear, as opposed to a piece of art or a part of a piece of art that, "It's very clear. This is the moral. This is the moral message that you take from it." So, there's a kind of -- yeah, there's something irreducible in art, and I would say there's something irreducible in soulmaking. It preserves its own domain, beyond and above -- or it preserves, let's say, areas of its own scope that are beyond and above the moral, the cognitive, the intellectual, and also the utilitarian, in the sense of it helping something else or even reducing suffering.

So all these go with it. We've talked about this before. Yes, the moral, because values are one of the elements of the imaginal; yes, the decrease in suffering in different ways; yes, the intellectual component, but in a way, it will always have these beyonds that deliver and open up, and whose purpose is more than those domains. They're there, but it will always be more. And as such, you say, "Well, what's the point? What's the use of it?" Well, soulmaking is the use of it. And it just stops there in that kind of circular self-proclamation.

If we, again, just linger a little longer with this whole idea of postmodernism. I'm sure I'm not the first person to point out something like, when you ponder it, you know, one can realize that the very idea ... Characteristic of postmodernism is this idea that ideas and views come from, or emerge from, or are constituted by historical and cultural context. So they're not truths. They're just conditioned by historical and cultural context. That's the very typical postmodern sort of critique or analysis or explanation, really, of things, of ideas, and views, and world-views, and beliefs. But one could say, or one could point out that the very idea or belief or view that ideas or views come from, or emerge from, are constituted by historical and cultural context is itself a view, idea, and belief emerging from a certain historical and cultural context. So what does that do? "Hmm, hold on. My head's spinning a little bit." Maybe, then, that idea is not a truth. The idea that ideas are culturally emergent is itself a culturally emergent idea. And again, we can point back to Heidegger and others. And what does that do? Does that relativize it as a truth? Does it mean that that very idea about ideas being culturally conditioned, and emergent, contingent, may not be ultimately true? And what does that do to our sense of possibilities there?

And again, certainly, sometimes there's an agenda -- sometimes hidden, sometimes explicit -- in this idea, in this typically postmodern idea that ideas and views and beliefs come from a culture, are born from a culture, and don't reflect any universal truth, don't represent any movement towards a universal truth. In that, what's often expressed as well is a prohibition on the idea that the cultural conditioning and the cultural context itself represents something like a divine movement, or the life of, the intelligence of the World Soul, or something like that. So this is a definite no-no in the views of those postmodern philosophers. It would still retain the idea that ideas are culturally conditioned, but just say the cultural conditioning itself is a reflection of something larger being worked out through humanity, through the World Soul. It's a movement of the divine, of the Buddha-nature, etc.

That idea that then, in a way, sanctifies, to a certain extent, cultural contexts and movements and influences is too reminiscent of Hegel, the philosopher Hegel, for most contemporary philosophers. And he was enormously influential, and then became almost like the focal point of vehement attack, and has gone massively, massively out of fashion in the last while. But when Hegel had this idea -- it was called 'Absolute Spirit,' it's called 'Spirit' -- that the cultural context, and society, and religions, and philosophies, etc., and art, they're all part of a wider movement of the Spirit, and evolution of the Spirit. The problem, or one of the problems with Hegel was that then he decided, or he proclaimed, that this process of growth of the Spirit through culture, etc., had reached its zenith, its peak, in his philosophy itself, which [laughs] of course is problematic for a number of reasons.

But we could entertain, again, neither as a truth nor an untruth, but as a perspective, as a conceptual framework that we're free to move in and out of, we could entertain a very similar idea: the cultural conditioning, the cultural context, are part of a movement, a divine movement of the World Soul, intelligence (however or whatever words we want to use there), but regarded as open-ended, as opposed to either having arrived already at its summit, at its peak, at its completion, or as moving towards, in the future, some peak, summit, where we'll all know when we've arrived there because everything's just perfect and hunky-dory. We could regard that movement, that divine movement, as open-ended, just as we regard the soulmaking movement as open-ended, and the awakening that soulmaking opens and delivers as open-ended, as endless in its possibilities, and endlessly fertile. And still, it's a divine movement. [57:28]

So as I said at the beginning, there's a lot here in the pot, a lot here to kind of unearth and shine the light on. And I really want to hold back as much as possible -- I realize it's not completely possible -- hold back from imposing any conclusions that I might tend to make from all this, and just sort of, yes, expose these things for your and our consideration. But when we put all these pieces together, as we've talked about, and the considerations about history, the considerations about cultural context, and cultural conditioning and influences, both past and present and future, and the place of our personal inclinations, and our personal desires and soul-styles -- when we put all that together, you know, it's possible, from all of that -- I don't know how you're feeling right now, but it's possible, I would say, to conceive or situate Soulmaking Dharma, to write a history in at least two ways regarding its situation vis-à-vis, let's say, mainstream Buddhadharma. So given everything that we've said, it's possible to, yes, conceive of its place, and write that history (history as fiction, remember) in at least two ways.

So one is that the soulmaking is part of Buddhadharma, and so, as such, it's within the perimeters, within the boundaries, within the scope of what we understand as Buddhadharma. And certainly it evolved from Buddhadharma, Insight Meditation, as its basis. It uses a lot of the tools, a lot of the concepts, a lot of the meditative tools and techniques and approaches that, again, for the way I would practise and teach Buddhadharma, are part of Buddhadharma. It came very much, as I explained, out of a sort of deep exploration of emptiness. We can, as I have done, again, I think, in certain talks, maybe including that "What is Awakening?" and other talks, it's possible to rethink, or better, expand our sense of the Four Noble Truths, expand our sense of, "What do we mean by 'suffering'? And what do we mean by 'awakening,' especially now, if we cannot assume that everyone believes suffering is just being on the realm of rebirth from life to life, and liberation is getting off that wheel of rebirth, and not being reborn again?" Then the whole notions of suffering and awakening become more open to different interpretations. And it's possible to expand what we mean by 'suffering.' As we talked about, we're including the suffering of soullessness and the awakening of soul. So I've explained all this at much greater length, but then we're really using the framework of the Four Noble Truths and expanding its range.

And certainly, there are other elements of Buddhadharma that, we could say, in Soulmaking Dharma, they're the same concepts. They're just expanded beyond, maybe, what many proponents of mainstream Buddhadharma would put out there. So for example, you know, in the Dharma, we talk about dāna, sīla, samādhi, paññā. Sīla, samādhi, paññā: ethics, samādhi (meditative absorption, well-being, concentration, etc.), and paññā (wisdom). So you can see that, when I touched on yesterday the relationship between emptiness and image, that we're really opening up the range of insight regarding emptiness and its implications. Or for instance, when I mentioned that the truth of anicca is perhaps not an ultimate truth, as many Buddhists would consider it an ultimate truth, the truth of impermanence -- actually expanding the insight and seeing, "Well, actually, time is empty too. And all things that exist in time are empty." And so, with the emptiness of time, the door is opened to a perspective of timelessness, eternality. So it's almost like more insight, if you like, deeper insight widens the range and the scope of what's actually possible. So there's paññā there.

If we talk about samādhi, we've talked a lot about, for instance, the fluid back-and-forth between samādhi states and working with an image; the experience of wherever you are, working in meditation with an image, for example, there's a fork. You can go into the samādhi more. You can go into the image more. I've delineated four or five kind of realms or experiences that one can be in with an image, or with the essence of an image, etc. And so this is also extending. Alongside the eight classical jhānas, we can extend the range of what kind of states it's possible to kind of settle into and regard as realms, meditative realms, states of relative meditative stability, etc. So again, all the samādhi is there. All the paññā is there. It's just stretched a little bit.

If we talk about sīla, about ethics, actually, I hope that I will be able to talk about that after this talk. So again, I would urge the view that what's happening in Soulmaking Dharma is, actually, we're expanding the ethics. We're certainly not getting rid of the ethics. So again, our practice is based on ethical care and ethical attention. But it perhaps widens it. Talked about, sometimes, in talks like "The Meditator as Revolutionary" and "The Necessity of Fantasy," I think, the almost unconscious limitation on our ethical sensibilities and our ethical stands and actions, the limitations imposed by a limited range of archetypes that we inherit, or that are the legacy of mainstream Buddhadharma. And so, again, the Soulmaking Dharma might open up the ethical range more because it opens up the range of archetypes through which one can sense and tune to the ethics of a situation, and then respond as well. So I'm going to elaborate on that in the talks to come, I hope. I won't say too much now. [1:06:01]

Or even dāna, you know -- again, we're very much rooted in the practice of generosity in all kinds of ways, and I've talked about that when we talked about opening the energy body, the importance of that, and radical generosity. But it's also possible to say that, you know, in soulmaking, in some of the particular elements of soulmaking, dāna is implicit, you know -- in duty, for example. Duty in relation to an image has to spill out somehow into the world. Or somehow, even if it's actually purely intrapsychic, duty in relation to an image -- there's some kind of dāna there, some kind of giving of the being that is expressed through that duty somehow.

One might also say that, regarding dāna, the soul is intrinsically and naturally generous, that it wants to share itself, to display itself, to show and manifest its gods, it daimons, to mirror and echo infinitely in life, in body, in speech, in perception, in mind, in art, in work, and so much. It pours itself out endlessly. It wants to impress, in that good sense that I was talking about. It wants to connect. It wants to share. Soul wants to reach out to soul, impress and be impressed upon. There's a generosity in that.

You know, you could say soul serves itself, but from another perspective, soul is more than me, or certainly more than ego. It's always at least tied or tending to the social and the community, the earthy and the cosmic, the hidden worlds as well. It serves all of that. In its service and devotion to soulmaking, it serves all of that. Because of the intrinsic tendency to expand, it expands into all these domains as well. So there are all kinds of directions, aspects, levels, dimensions of generosity wrapped up in Soulmaking Dharma.

The one view is that the Soulmaking Dharma is just within the scope of Buddhadharma. It's just one sub-tradition, much as Vajrayāna is, or Insight Meditation is, or whatever, within Buddhadharma, and really what's happening is we're just expanding the range of what we mean by dāna, sīla, samādhi, paññā without letting go of any of what we already meant by dāna, sīla, samādhi, paññā. We're just expanding it.

But a second way of writing a story, or seeing it, and situating it, conceiving of it is that, actually, Buddhadharma is in soulmaking. It's a part of soulmaking. So why? How could we say that? Because soul-styles and soul-desires, as we said and emphasized, they direct and determine what kind of Dharma I want, what kind of world I want to sense myself in, what kind of vision and sense of humanity, what kind of liberation, what kind of flavour of being. And so the soul-style, whether it's conscious or not, the soul-wishes feed in to determine the Dharma. And again, we could regard that as a movement of the World Soul in more of a global sense, if you like, so that Dharma itself is an expression of soul, of soulmaking. And as such, it's a dynamic, evolving, moving, volatile, and multi-faced, multi-aspected, multidirectional movement of soulmaking.

So one view is, "Soulmaking Dharma is within the Buddhadharma," and another view is, "The Dharma is in soulmaking. Buddhadharma is a movement of soul -- was, is, will be a movement of soul. It's conjured forth from soul. It's built by soul. It's shaped and determined by the desires, and the movements, and the inclinations, and the processes of soulmaking."

So we could look at it two ways. Somewhere before -- I can't remember, and it was probably in the context of saying something else, but I think I said actually, you could see it three ways.^[1]

(1) You could make a claim that Soulmaking Dharma is well within the scope of traditional Buddhadharma, and maybe even stretch it and claim, kind of, "The Buddha did teach Soulmaking Dharma," etc. So you get that, that's very typical in religious innovation, is to claim it, the innovation, paint it as an original teaching, so then you get the stories of, "The Vajrayāna was proclaimed by the Buddha, by Siddhartha Gautama, in his lifetime, but just to a secret set of disciples, or just in secret to a select set of disciples, for example. It's always been there, and then it was only revealed gradually over time." Similar with Mahāyāna, etc. So there's a painting of something -- again, it's to do with the fantasy of origins. It's to do with the way religions think backwards to the founder and the truth being 'behind me,' a truth that I'm trying to replicate. But one could paint it that way, as a first option. One could perceive Soulmaking Dharma that way.

(2) One could perceive it as completely having broken out of the bounds of Buddhadharma, and being something else. A vessel has shattered. It's open, and now it's outside of the perimeter.

(3) Or a third way: one could regard Soulmaking Dharma as part of the current expansion of Buddhadharma in the West, the current birth, actually, of Buddhadharma in the West (Buddhadharma, very young in the West), and that we are involved -- and not just people who are involved in Soulmaking Dharma -- all of us, anyone, are involved in that kind of meeting of cultures, just as when the Buddhadharma went to Japan, or China, or Tibet, and it met with indigenous cultures -- the cultures, and religious thought, and conceptions that have been there for a long time, and sensibilities, and styles of being, and soul-styles. And it had to kind of 'marry' the two, and it did, so that Japanese Zen -- much of it is grossly different than, say, Tibetan Buddhism or Theravādan Buddhism, etc. It's taken on, it had to be expanded and shaped in the context of that meeting of cultures. So that would be a third way of regarding, a third story about Soulmaking Dharma and its relationship to traditional Dharma. And actually, we're part of that expansion that's happening right now, so that movement of the Buddhadharma meeting Western culture at this time, and we're in that process. And that's where Soulmaking Dharma sits, as one of the discovery/creations, fermentations, explorations of that meeting. So there are three options there.

And I think I pointed out, whenever I mentioned this before, that of those three options, which do you prefer? How would you like to see this? And how much, again, is it just a kind of archetypal or soul-style that determines the story that we, or you, tell yourself? In other words, do you want to see yourself as a renegade revolutionary, breaking out, starting something new? Do you want to see yourself as a midwife, a part of the gentle care of birthing a new life, a new growth? Or do you want to see yourself as loyal and traditional within an already-established range of what's already agreed upon as "This is Buddhadharma"? And maybe which story I choose depends on soul-style.

So I don't know how you feel now. Maybe that's just a few too many groundlessnesses in there for you. I don't know. With all this reflection, and all this, what we've sort of exposed in the pot, how does this land with you? And if there are two ways of spinning a story -- "Soulmaking Dharma is in Buddhadharma," or "The Dharma is in soulmaking. Buddhadharma is in the soul, and it's part of the soulmaking" -- might that also be a version or an instance of what Lee Smolin, who I quoted about the hypothesis of duality -- two very different ways of looking at the same thing; they seem completely incongruent, but they are merely two ways of looking at the same thing. It's a part of Buddhadharma; the Buddhadharma is a part of soulmaking.

So I don't how this lands with you. I don't know if it agitates you, makes you nervous, makes you angry, makes you concerned, if it excites you, if it just baffles you or perplexes you, if it depresses you. I wonder whether part of opening to all this, and reckoning with it, and acknowledging it -- that doing so, opening to it, recognizing it, acknowledging it, pondering it -- is actually part of a kind of psychological maturity, a kind of spiritual maturity of soul, that to ignore all these considerations that I've touched on would be a little immature. It's like, "Oh, I don't want to acknowledge that. I don't want to think about it. It's a bit too much." Maybe, looking at what we've got here, admitting this mix, and the complexity of that, and the nebulousness of it, and to a certain extent, the groundlessness of it, maybe that's an ask, psychologically, and spiritually, and for the soul. And to be able to do that, and to be willing to do that, is asking for a kind of maturity of soul. And is it possible to open to all this, and assimilate it, digest it, relate to it in a way that's actually fertile, soulmaking, helpful, beautiful, expansive?

So now I can't remember who, but someone, and probably more than once, asked me: "Why is Soulmaking Dharma so complicated? You've got this stuff going on, and all these words." I don't know. It's a good question. I'll say a few things in relation to that. Partly because -- not just to explain, but to support and to justify what is other than our culture's dominant, taken-for-granted, and habitual, default views needs a kind of -- it's difficult to do that. It's a complex movement. Owen Barfield has this metaphor: you know, the movements a hand makes when you untie a shoelace are actually very complicated movements, but the resulting state is actually relatively simple, when the two sides of the shoelace are untied. It's simpler, that state, than a kind of knot. So it may be that untying, if you like, recognizing, exposing, untying a lot of the very ingrained assumptions, perspectives, conclusions, and views that we have typically, because we live in this culture at this time, and because we have been saturated in Buddhadharma, it may be that doing that actually is like untying the shoelace. It actually needs quite a complicated movement, but then things are a bit more open.

Second, perhaps, reason why it's all so complicated, or why it seems so complicated, is just the fact that logos and intellect, as we've pointed out, are part of the soulmaking dynamic. They're part of soulmaking, and they're part of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic. So we've said the soul wants and needs complexity, not only simplicity. Yes, the soul wants simplicity at times for different reasons -- it wants a kind spiritual simplicity, and it also wants a simplicity sometimes when it's overwhelmed with dukkha, but it doesn't only and always want simplicity. It also wants complexity -- interesting, fecund terrain and material and challenges. And we've pointed out, in the soulmaking dynamic, soul itself will complicate, complexify, as well as it simplifies at times. In the movement towards the Unfabricated, there's a progressive simplifying, you could say -- simpler than anything we usually consider simple, simpler even than oneness. But the soul also wants complexity, and working with images and sensing with soul tends to complexify, tends to add more and more faces, aspects, dimensions, etc. Both those movements are part of soulmaking. So the imaginal complexification, and imaginal practice in general, is only a part of the larger potential range of soulmaking, which involves both, which can involve both the movement to a simplification, simplifications, and the movement to complexity. And the soul wants both. The soul is hungry, infinitely hungry, infinitely thirsty.

Third possible reason why things are complicated is that I think we need a kind of sophisticated and robust philosophical framework, conceptual framework, ontology, epistemology, psychology, because a lot of what we're talking about will be quite alien and quite even shocking, perhaps, to many people who hear it, many Dharma people who hear it, many others who hear it, and so has and will receive criticism, ridicule, dismissal by some people who are very influenced by or are attached to mainstream views and beliefs. And so it needs the surety and stability and robustness of a more sophisticated philosophical and conceptual framework and psychology. And that means more complexity, more detail, more going into things at a deeper level, more bringing in other elements that may seem to draw on a wider range than usual, in our considerations.

We could say more as well. You know, the fact that, if we're going to say that stretching of conceptual frameworks, or breaking of not just conceptual frameworks, but perceptions, and heart-ranges, and all kinds of things, ranges of experience -- if that kind of breaking of vessels, either gentle stretching or breaking, shattering the vessels, to be then built again, and expanded away, shattered again -- if that whole movement or cyclic, spiralling growth of breaking vessels, stretching and breaking vessels, is an inevitable part of soul-life, and soul-growth, and soul-movement, then actually, we need a conceptual framework and a logos that includes and accommodates the possibility of breaking of the vessels in its very idea, as I said before, and that is wide in its possibilities. [1:25:45] So if we just make a Dharma that fits, that becomes a vessel, and then something in the soul, it pushes out and expands through that, the vessel was too small. So the vessel has to be wide, and so there's more in it. And so that 'more in it' can also be a little overwhelming or complex-sounding to some people.

But for some people, it may be -- or rather, I'll put it this way: sometimes, people say to me, "Soulmaking Dharma -- it's what the world needs now. It's exactly what we need in this time of crisis." And it's almost as if it's the one thing that's going to save humanity. I would be much more humble, I think, in an assessment, and say it's one possibility. Soulmaking Dharma is one possible Dharma for our times. It does seem to me to have the strengths, the assets, that it does include the personal, the particular. It does not just dismiss the self or reify the self, but offers an infinitely expanded range of possible self-expressions, self-theatres, self-explorations, etc. It has the, I think, advantage of not being a kind of realist framework or realist philosophy -- which is problematic for all the reasons that I've laid out over recent years, and even in this set of talks -- that it's more, let's say, congruent with a lot of developments in thinking about science and philosophy from recent years; that it allows and promotes, again, as a kind of integral and inevitable part of its movement, it allows us to sense the world with soul, to sense the earth with soul, to sense each other with soul, and the reverence, and the sense of divinity, dimensionality, reverence, beauty, humility, care, eros, beauty that come with that. So we see, we sense the earth that way. We sense each other that way. We sense ourselves that way. And that framework, both of ideas but also of meditative art, that supports that, again, you could say that's a really helpful thing at this time. It's a really important possibility at this time. And in that, it allows a much deeper, potentially a much deeper care. It gives ground and ongoing support and range to the kinds of care we have for the earth, for each other, for ourselves, including a way we could think about activism and engagement as part of that.

Of course there are other ways, but within the Soulmaking Dharma, it seems to me to offer all that. It also recognizes the importance, as I mentioned in this talk, of the choices about anthropology and cosmology, and recognizes how much those visions or views of "What is a human being? What is the cosmos? How is the cosmos? What kind of cosmos do we live in?", that that will affect what kind of Dharma we have, what kind of sense of "This is the tradition, this is the path, and this is the goal." So recognizing the central, basic influence and import of anthropology and cosmology on the vision of the Dharma, the sense, the scope of the Dharma, the version of the Dharma and awakening -- recognizing that and actually accommodating all that. So we can not insist on this kind of anthropology or that kind of cosmology -- actually, we can accommodate more coherently, more integrally, all these different views. We understand where they come from. There's a soul-need for this, or for that view, and it will spawn this or that direction, this or that sense of the path, this or that sense of the goal. Rather than kind of assuming that we're all talking about the same thing just because we're using vocab in unclear and not very well-defined ways, we recognize, acknowledge, accommodate, and explore the diversity in a larger range of whole conceptions of the Dharma. So all that can fit in too.

But yeah, in response to those people (actually, they're not that many, but I don't know) who say, "Why so complicated?", and are attracted to Soulmaking Dharma teachings but struggle a little bit, say "It's too much. It's too complex. There are too many possibilities for practice. There are too many new words and ideas." I have to say that some of it, I don't know if I would have put it out there at such a rate over the last four years were it not for my health situation, and having obviously a very difficult prognosis, and the possibility of dying at any time. It felt important to me to get the material out. I didn't want to feel like I died without trying to put that out there. And there's no need to digest it all at once. Hopefully, these teachings are there for a while, and they're there, and you can return to them, and you can pace yourself.

The other extreme reaction, one extreme would be, "I need to eat all this now. I need to digest it and understand it right now," and kind of overconsume, or consume at a pace that not just your mind, but also your heart, and your soul, and your life, and your relationships cannot accommodate that pace at which you're consuming these teachings. So that would be one extreme. Another extreme would be just to throw it all out because one's maybe attached to simplicity, for example. But a Middle Way would be: take your time. Again, it's so much a matter of responsiveness, attunement, care, listening, attentive sort of calibration of your soul and your soul's needs. And you know, how is it landing? How is it going? How is the assimilation?

But culturally, again, I would say we need, at this point, other options, rather than just the dichotomy, the sort of split between rampant consumerism and greed and craving, on the one hand, and a sort of oversimplistic view of desire -- that desire, unless it's desire for compassion and liberation from suffering, is basically bad and not trustworthy. So that whole, again, third possibility, or middle ground, or more complex, more nuanced exploration of eros, of desire, and the psychology, and the soul-aspects and dimensions and considerations of that, that's also necessary. So all that's in the mix, for some of you who were wondering.

Okay, let's stop there.