Sila and Soul (Part 2)

As part of trying to open out the relevant territory for our contemplation, for our consideration and gaze, and as part of trying to unpack some of the questions and reflections and considerations that I want to offer and bring forth, let me pick up on something I mentioned in the talk the other evening: the fact that (it seems to me, at least) there's almost a lack, if not a kind of taboo, on a kind of moral education in our society, especially for people, say, beyond 18 years old, and even younger than that. It's rare to find an overt emphasis and thrust towards ethical education of human beings in our society. Of course, there are paradigms, and programmes, and visions, and frameworks of personal and psychological and spiritual development and growth that would pertain to adults above 18, and traditions of that. And so, as part of the whole consideration, I wonder, if we look at a couple of those paradigms, and look at the tremendous gifts they bring, and how they support our growth, and also potentially support our ethical growth, our growth in terms of our relationship with morality. And look as well at some of the potential lacunae, gaps, blind spots, and limits that such paradigms and traditions and frameworks might have. So lacunae and limits regarding certainly the relationship with morality and moral development, if you like, of the human being. But also, because it's related, how one conceives of and senses oneself, other human beings, and the world.

So I don't want to replace such paradigms, declare them wrong or anything like that. But in shining a light on them, certain aspects of them at least, is it possible, I wonder, that something can be added? What can be added to them? So perhaps we can consider some of the usual ways we think about and approach development, psychological, spiritual development, and personal development, and where it's limited, and then what might be added to that, what might be complementary -- not so much as replacing, as I said, but complementary or extending what's already there, what's already available through that. And the two principal possibilities I want to offer through these talks for that sort of addition or extension will be imaginal practice. So I want to include imaginal practice as one possibility of potential extensions, and that includes, as I said, how we sense, then, the self, others, world, also our desire. So really the whole sensing with soul avenue. Secondly, and related, I'm not quite sure what to call it, but something like the ideational-imaginal, or the ideological-imaginal, or imaginal ideas, which I've touched on briefly, I think, in the last few years, but want to say a little bit more about, and particularly with the ideas of value and virtue, values and virtues, and their relationship with soulmaking.

So principally these two -- imaginal practice as we've talked about it so far, and then also a kind of extension of imaginal practice into what we might call the ideational-imaginal, imaginal ideas, or ideological-imaginal. Now, all these strands or areas are not really separable. It would be nice to go through the talks here and kind of do a chunk on this and then a separate chunk on that. I don't think that's really possible. But I'm going to try and separate them a little bit, but some interweaving is just inevitable, so that's just part of the deal. Very broadly speaking now, the two paradigms I would like to consider of personal, psychological, or spiritual development are psychotherapy and Buddhadharma. Now, of course, they're two extremely broad categories there, so we're not talking about one thing when we talk about psychotherapy, nor are we talking about one thing when we talk about Buddhadharma. There are many different kinds. So in what I say, in terms of considering the gifts and the limitations of what might be involved in those paradigms, you know, there's the danger of generalization, and so I apologize in advance for that. If I qualify everything, really the talks will go on forever. But I hope you get the general drift and the soul-intention, the soul's intention behind what I'm saying, and that this can be an inquiry grounded in love and care.

So we're not talking really about either of these things as one thing, psychotherapy or Buddhadharma, certainly -- many different kinds. And, of course, there will be individual differences among people who are part of a certain sub-tradition of Buddhadharma, or a certain kind of psychotherapy. There will be individual differences in how they digest, assimilate, respond to, what they take or leave, how they relate to those particular teachings or invitations or trainings. So we can see, just again, very broadly speaking, with psychotherapy, at its best, it has the promise and potential to free a human being up from too much torment of the psyche and of the person and the kind of self-hatred or incapacitating inner critic, etc. And to open the heart, and in so doing, develop empathy and emotional skill and capacity of the heart, and also relational skills. So all that is possible. And in that freeing up, in that opening the heart, in that development of the empathy and the emotional capacity and the relational skill and capacity, then that can open up and support the capacity and the tendency for ethical care.

So at its best, that would be a fruit of psychotherapy -- that it really works on the heart and the relationship and the being and the psyche in a way that makes it more possible to be more open with regard to ethics and to be more sensitive, to be more caring, to be more discerning, to be more courageous, all these things. At its worst -- and again, this is too general a statement -- but at its worst, people can be in certain psychotherapies or relate to certain psychotherapies sometimes for many years, and it may be hard for them to realize it from the inside, but what there can become is a kind of tendency to actually become a little more self-preoccupied than they were before. So it kind of feeds and forms an ongoing state of being of self-preoccupation. The gaze is turned inward, concerned with my process, my growth, my, my my, my neurosis, my patterns, my family, etc. And there's a kind of contraction of the being and a lessening of the availability for ethical sensitivity and openness and care. The antennae are not so even tuned that way, because they're self-preoccupied primarily, in certain ways.

And perhaps also certain psychotherapies or certain ways of relating to certain psychotherapies may also breed a kind of attitude of entitlement, that one looks at one's past or family or upbringing or whatever and feels, "I never got what I needed," and so one thinks one is justified in compensating for that in one's life and in one's choices and in one's relationship to society, etc. And again, that movement there may not allow so much of an opening and a care for ethics. So that would be at its worst, I suppose -- some of what's possible in some kinds of psychotherapeutic paradigms and relationships or trainings.

In its gifts, we can see that the Dharma would have similar potentials and promises to free up the psyche from a kind of torment that incapacitates it in terms of its care for others and its ethical care and concern, from the inner critic. Similarly can open the heart and the capacities for empathy and the capacities of the heart in general, etc. And there is, in addition, in the Dharma, of course, there is this emphasis on sīla -- sīla, samādhi, paññā -- and so the ethics is right there, to some extent or other, right from the beginning. It's not ignored, as some psychotherapies will not even mention ethics unless it's a legal matter, where the therapist then feels obliged to tell the police something or is torn in some way. There's also, in the Dharma, the teachings of the emptiness of self, so at least theoretically there's the restraining of the possibility of sort of endless self-preoccupation. And of course, there's the encouragement and the teachings for the cultivation of brahmavihāras -- loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, etc.

[13:54] But, you know, a few things about practices in general, whether it's the practice of psychotherapy as a client or as a therapist, or the practice of Dharma. Practices can evolve in unforeseen ways. Once one gets into a practice, and you start -- it's like sailing a boat; you start dealing with what's coming up in practice, and what life throws at you, and how practice says to respond to it through the lens of those teachings or those paradigms or that framework. And the fact is, as one gets into practice, and sort of into that vocabulary, and that way of looking at things, and the techniques, and the approaches, it can evolve in unforeseen ways, so that from inside of that practice, inside of that trajectory, it's not always clear if we're off balance. We're dealing with all this stuff through whatever it is. There's stuff coming up, there's stuff from my past, there's stuff in my family, in my situation, in my work or whatever, through certain lenses, and in the very close dealing with it through those lenses, sometimes we can get a little off balance. It's almost like the lens is a bit like a horse's blinkers or blinders. They may close our view in certain ways. And in that, we can get off balance in ways that we don't even realize, and the whole practice can evolve in unforeseen ways. Sometimes you step out and you think, "How on earth did I get there? How did I get there?"

In addition to that, it's really important to point out, as a general point, that any conceptual framework will bring limitations. Any conceptual framework and any idea, any concept and any conceptual framework, any logos, whether it's a Dharma logos or a psychotherapy logos, whatever it is, anything else, brings with it automatically its own set of limitations. It sets us up to see and to ponder and to respond and to process things in certain ways. It opens the eyes to certain factors, and closes them to others. Opens the consideration, the heart, to certain things, and closes them to others -- the view, etc. That inherent fact of some or other limitations that go with conceptual frameworks, it also goes with the soulmaking paradigm. Any conceptual framework. So I don't want to say all this, as I said, I don't want to replace psychotherapy or Dharma with soulmaking at all, because Soulmaking Dharma will also have its limitations, also its blind spots and its dangers. But it's really, I think, a point of wisdom and maturity that's necessary to emphasize, that any conceptual framework, to do with anything, will bring its limitations. So when we talk about psychotherapy, or this psychotherapy, or that kind of psychotherapy, or this kind of Dharma, or that kind of Dharma, it will bring its limitations. And with that, there's the possibility of limited and inadequate views, responses, capacities -- inadequate with respect to the kinds of moral challenges and situations that humanity faces today.

So there is that possibility, that some of these paradigms and trainings, or possibly all of them, will be limited in some way. It kind of behoves us to have a look, "Well, how? What are the possible limitations? What do I need to look out for? Is there a way of, when I see a possible limitation or inadequacy, how can I expand it? What might be possible?" So the kinds of things we want to consider, they do not apply to everyone. (And again, there's danger of overgeneralizing there.) Of course they won't because, as I said, two people in the very same paradigm or teaching or training or whatever will take it in differently and respond and digest differently. Second thing I should say, as a sort of caveat to all this, is that certainly from where I sit right now, everything seems to be changing very fast in the Dharma world -- in the Dharma world in particular, in the wider society now. I hardly go out any more because of my illness, so I'm at home; I'm not sort of there talking to a lot of people. But it seems to me, and maybe it's just my friends and students I do still see and mix with and hear from, but it seems that [there are] very quick and sometimes surprising changes. Sometimes I look at people, for instance with regard to climate change and species extinction -- for years [they] haven't seemed to be interested in that at all, and then very suddenly, on fire, on fire and deeply, deeply committed, investing a lot of time, energy, taking a lot of risks, working very hard in those areas. Something has happened, perhaps with the sort of explosive growth of the Extinction Rebellion movement, particularly in England, and perhaps other factors.

So some of those cases were really surprising to me, and it's a really pleasant surprise. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but certainly it's becoming much more widespread. And in a way, what that indicates to me is that whatever I might say regarding, for instance, ethics and Dharma, or whatever, and the need to consider expanding our Dharma to expand our ethical sense and deepen our ethical sensibility, whatever I might say here is only going to be one factor in the mix of what galvanizes and supports and allows and opens that kind of expansion. And so it might be, for instance, with the XR (Extinction Rebellion) movement, which, in the UK -- depends where you are listening now, but in the UK it's really taken off. I'm sure there are many people in our UK society who have never even heard of it, but for others, it's really become a thing, and mainstream news, etc. And it might be with the Extinction Rebellion that one of the factors is just the fact that when more people are brought together, and there's this kind of safety and support in numbers -- that's something I want to return to -- and the kind of platforms and mechanisms are made available, then that kind of ethical stand, if you like, if that's what we call it, ethical stand, becomes much more possible. Whereas if one was alone in that, and without the structures and the supporting structures, then one would be just relying on one's own kind of penetrative ethical alignment and devotion and discrimination, and that's a lot harder.

But anyway, what that points to is, as I said, what that very pleasant surprise and the suddenness of all that points to is that whatever I might say in these talks about ethics and Dharma, and opening that up, it's just one piece, one factor. And a third thing to say is that, related to what I started this ethics talk saying, that I regard ethics and this whole investigation as kind of endless, potentially endless, a corollary of that is that there's always more growth possible in our relationship with ethics. There's always more growth possible. So if in trying to kind of open up this subject and elucidate, we look at this tradition, or we look at that kind of teaching, or we look at this paradigm or whatever, and we say, "Oh, that could be limited in this way, and that could be limited in that way," that will always be the case, because, as I said, limitations will go with any conceptual framework, and there's also this endlessness. So however unlimited we get, we can get even more unlimited, even more growth with regard to ethics, even more sensitivity, even more discernment, even more range and depth and height with regard to ethics. So that means, really, whoever, whether it's me or anyone else saying, "Oh, why don't we think about it this way? Or we could think about it this way," there will still be more growth possible, and therefore, considerations to point out: "Oh, what about this? What about that? Is it possible to develop this?"

So let's consider a few things, and start just with a couple of things about psychotherapy. I was talking a little while ago with a student in the States, and she was reporting to me that she was working with a therapist, I think, regularly and for a while. There was some situation -- I can't remember exactly how the situation arose. It might have had to do with where she was living in relationship to where her workplace was. I'm not sure. But at any rate, she was considering buying a second house, or a second property. And she was starting that whole process of looking and investigating, and going to see places and things like that. And at some point in this process, she became really concerned whether it was the right thing to do, for ethical reasons -- that a second place would also mean a lot more driving, and she was concerned about her carbon emissions from driving; also just having to buy more stuff, more furniture, more clothes, etc., if you've got two places. And she was talking about this dilemma and her feelings about it with her therapist. And part of her process in or alongside and sort of woven into this whole consideration, this difficulty and this decision that she was trying to make, was also an image. She was beginning to explore a little bit of the imaginal.

And one of the images that came was a monk, this imaginal monk character, who had a -- as part of his mode and his calling -- movement towards renunciation. And so she was trying to explain to the therapist her feelings and her unsurenesses, and her consideration, seriously considering giving up the whole idea of buying a second property, and regarding it as an act of renunciation, and that she felt moved by that and a sense of almost devotion that was tied in with this imaginal monk character. And the therapist -- she was trying to explain all this -- just started shaking her head and sort of tutting, and regarded this whole movement as some kind of denial, that she was in denial about the pain of having to give up this second property idea, and the denial at a kind of wanting to feel the grief. So she dismissed the imaginal figure of the monk and the renunciate as not real, as delusional, as a delusional protective mechanism against this grief of not buying a second house. Perhaps the client had already decided not to buy a second house or was explaining the process; I can't remember exactly how it transpired. But basically the therapist heard it through a certain lens, that this is a protective mechanism against grief, and all this monk business and the devotion about renunciation is just a kind of unreal, delusional protective mechanism there.

What's then clearly not on the psychotherapist's map at that point is the whole idea and territory of a kind of ethical passion, of the soul's care for virtue, for ethical virtue. It's not on her psychological map of what it means to care for the self, of what it means to heal, of what human growth and purpose involves. So this struck my student very strongly, and it really didn't sit very well with her, and we talked about it. So I don't think this is an isolated case. And I wonder -- I think part of my larger point is -- do therapists, and do psychotherapeutic paradigms, need to expand their vision and their logos to include the psychological trauma and pain of ecological decline, for example? And the psychological trauma and pain -- I'm using those words deliberately, trauma and pain -- of, for example, not choosing in one's life in line with loving the earth, or in line with what speaks to one's soul more nobly, in terms of virtue, etc., so that it may then become part of how people think and feel and choose, and what they respect. Psychological thinking, psychotherapeutic thinking, has a lot of clout in our culture. It's spread from, you know, the confines of Freud's couch in Vienna all those years ago to become just kind of woven into our normal ways of considering life, and human being, and self, and our relationship with existence.

So just as childhood trauma and a feeling of "my needs were not met in childhood, whatever they were," just as these have become normalized in the wider culture through psychotherapeutic paradigms, through the normalization of psychotherapeutic paradigms and the kind of airing of that through media and all kinds of phenomena, they've become normal ideas -- childhood trauma -- they weren't before -- "my needs are unmet." These are very specific, contemporary cultural points of view, manifestations, ways of understanding and, again, conceiving and sensing and feeling ourselves and life. And just as self and self-expression, or the creativity of the self, or the individuality of self, these, too, through psychotherapeutic thinking, partly through psychotherapeutic thinking, have become very normalized. They're part of what we consider our right to address and to heal and to include, part of what we consider as healthy visioning and sense of one's existence, part of our normal, normally accepted goals in life.

Or, again, human relational intimacy -- it wasn't that normal a few hundred years ago to think about human intimate relationships in the way that we do now, the vision we have of them, the hope and the goal: "I want to work towards that kind of relationship, that kind of vision of intimacy." This has all come about partly through -- through various factors, but the way psychotherapeutic thinking spreads out from the counselling room into society, so that in the wider culture, certain ideas with corresponding goals and rights become normalized in that wider culture. So do psychotherapists, does there need to be an expanding of the paradigm to include, as I said, the whole realm of psychic trauma and grief and pain and rage at ecological decline, and also at the kind of grief and remorse of not choosing in line with that deep care, either deep care for the earth or deep care for one's ethical sensibilities?

Some of you will be familiar with the term -- what's it called? -- spiritual bypassing. So that is quite a common accusation by psychotherapists, and it has definitely some ground, implying a kind of bypassing of psychological and emotional wounds by spiritual thought and practice. So one gets involved in a spiritual practice, and then starts having spiritual ideas, and a spiritual paradigm, and a spiritual outlook and practice, and wonderful as that can be, it can also be a kind of bypassing of what needs looking at in terms of one's psychological patterns and wounding. [35:04] What's also important to point out is that often, sometimes what also might be bypassed are political and social and environmental wounds and callings. So we can look at a spiritual paradigm and say, okay, there can be spiritual bypassing of psychological wounds. There can also be political and social and environmental factors and wounds and callings that are bypassed in that. But as much as we talk about spiritual bypassing, is there not also the possibility of -- what would we call it? -- psychotherapeutic bypassing? That is, concentrating on one's personal psychological healing and wounds from certain perspectives. Everything is always from certain perspectives. I can't get away from that. Whatever I look at, whatever I relate to, whatever I try to heal is looked at through certain perspectives. They're either conscious and considered, or they're not.

But concentrating on one's personal psychological healing and wounds from certain perspectives may not be addressing or responding fully or very much at all to the soul, the spirit, or to the social and environmental. So yes, you can talk about spiritual bypassing, but we need to add to that the possibility of psychological bypassing. Not long ago someone wrote me an email, a student. I hadn't been in touch with them for a few months. I think the last interview we'd had, there was a lot of anxiety and torment and real difficulty that they were experiencing. And they wrote me an email just recently, and said, "By the way, a lot of that difficulty I was experiencing, I now realize I was not letting myself open to the magnitude and the depth of my torment and my feelings and my grief and my pain about the wider ecological devastation, climate change, the future even of the next few decades and how that hangs in the balance for humanity and for so many other species, the massive species loss, and the toll, the impact that had on the psyche." And he said, "I was trying so much to look for a personal reason, and looking at my past, and working in therapy, and doing this and that, and it was coming into my practice, and I was trying to understand it. I was looking at it through the lens of a certain paradigm, a certain narrow paradigm. And then I realized actually this is something else. And in realizing it was something else, I could begin to open to it. I could give it its place and give it its due, and begin allowing the heart to feel it, to respond to it, to care for that." He said, "It's a lot, but I feel much better. It's now not sabotaging me in ways that I just cannot get a handle on and cannot understand."

One more small -- well, it's not small, but a large piece here. I'll just mention it briefly, and I hope to return to it. I mentioned that we have what we might call a kind of pandemic or epidemic of the inner critic in our culture, and it partly goes with a culture of individualism, a culture where there's less community, more alienation from each other, from wider social networks, from the earth, from society, and this emphasis on individualism in what I was calling an immature way. And one of the flip sides of that, one of the shadow sides of that, one of the inevitable costs of that is a rise in inner critic and the afflictions of that. And so, sometimes that's a lot of what people will bring into not just a Dharma context but a psychotherapeutic context as well. So inner critic -- some people call it superego, which is a word that Freud coined. Actually, I'll just quote from Alasdair MacIntyre again, from After Virtue, about that. He says:

Important was Freud's presentation of the inherited conscience as superego, as an irrational part of ourselves whose commands we need, for the sake of our psychic health, to be freed from.^[1]

I actually think that's an oversimplification of Freud's views, but it's fine for now. In other words, what Alasdair MacIntyre is saying is Freud presented this sense of superego as a kind of irrational part of ourselves that we need to, through psychoanalysis, liberate ourselves from its oppression. So it's not really something to be respected so much -- that's where I think Alasdair MacIntyre's simplifying a little bit -- but it's rather, first, to work through it and to be liberated from it. And then Alasdair MacIntyre continues:

Freud of course took himself to have made a discovery about morality as such and not just about what morality had become in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe.

Again, this cultural and historical contingency. Freud was dealing with such a limited range of population, at a certain time, in Europe, Northern Europe, in fact, and then generalizing from that sort of subset of the population to make universal truths, and not realizing the historical contingency. But actually, the point is more that morality, then, in a way, gets relativized as something irrational. Conscience, rather, in a way, gets relativized, and that portion of morality that has to do with conscience gets undermined or put on shaky foundations when it's regarded as just an irrational part of ourselves, something oppressive that we need to get rid of.

What I want to ask or throw into the mix here is now, at this time in our wider culture, what do Dharma practitioners and teachers, or Diamond Heart practitioners and teachers, or psychotherapists (either those psychotherapists or their clients), believe and disseminate about conscience? So it's not a word we hear that much any more, is it? We certainly hear 'inner critic,' and if you're in, for example, Ridhwan, they talk about 'superego.' But 'conscience' is not a word we hear much any more. At least I don't hear it much. In other words, is that word, 'conscience,' getting eclipsed or put into the bag of "Oh, it's superego, it's inner critic"? And is there something that's actually necessary in our moral development, our moral capacity and sensibility, that's then getting regarded in ways that make it irrelevant? What does it do to our sense of morality when we lose that word, 'conscience'? When our only relationship with guilt is afflictive? And when things are just regarded either in inner critic terms or superego terms? Actually, maybe that word, 'afflictive,' doesn't really capture what I'm trying to say. Perhaps a better word would be 'immature,' in the sense that if our relationship with guilt is immature, it might be trapped -- either trapped in the whirlpool of self-recrimination and looking back in the past in a way that's very contracted, very solidified, very painful, not actually very helpful, and not productive, and not orienting or leading onward in terms of future action. So that would be one kind of immaturity. Or, perhaps at other times, a kind of shunning of guilt, a refusal to feel it, an avoiding of it, just wanting to get rid of it, so there's nothing seen as positive or redeeming or helpful in guilt. So that, also, would be a kind of immature relationship with guilt. So either on the one side or the other, the relationship with guilt can be immature. Maybe -- we'll come back to this -- there can be other relationships with this whole notion of guilt and conscience that are more helpful.

If we just pause for a moment and recap what we're doing here. [45:14] Looking at the whole area of ethics, of course, and trying to open up, and interested in the relationship of soul with ethics, and ethics with soul. And as part of that, kind of shining a light in a really overgeneralized way, but hopefully a little bit helpful, too, shining a light on some of the kinds of paradigms of growth and development that we encounter, that are around at the present time, and seeing where they might have holes, gaps, blind spots, etc., in them. And in the process, wondering, what can we add to that? And beginning, as I go on, beginning to add considerations and possibilities in terms of what we know of soulmaking practice, sensing with soul, up till now, and then perhaps there are others, as I said, when we talk more about values and virtues, and other ways of thinking about ethics, and thinking about so-called personal development and the growth of our soul, and how that might augment the range of possibilities and perspectives.

So if we turn now to Dharma, to Buddhadharma and that wider tradition and, as I said, try and shine a light there. Again, just pausing briefly: it can be hard sometimes, for lots of different reasons, to shine this kind of spotlight on one's own tradition, if one feels one loves a tradition or is identified with a tradition, with belonging to a certain tradition. It can be hard to critique it, to question it. It can be hard to even spot what's wrong or admit that there may be something missing, etc. But maybe if we love a tradition, we have a duty of love to that tradition, and part of that duty is to care for it, like we care for, I don't know, a car or a musical instrument that needs repairing or has a hole here or there, or whatever it is, you know? There's maybe a duty of love if we love a tradition and a body of teaching. That's part of what I was talking about -- what is it to be in dialogue with the tradition? Maybe as Alasdair MacIntyre was saying in those passages we read when we talked about tradition, that for a tradition to be healthy, to be vital, it needs some strands of conflict, of argument, of debate, of dialogue to keep it healthy. So that's part of what a living tradition is, to be -- and someone who is living a tradition, I would say, should be -- in dialogue with that tradition.

Another reflection here that might be helpful is, again, I think, always to be aware that whatever light we shine on anything, whatever way we look at anything -- so if that's in the context of a practice, in the paradigms and perspectives of a certain practice -- we'll tend to look at whatever it is, self and the elements of existence, from certain perspectives. They frame it along certain lines, within a certain scope, in a conceptual framework, look at it through certain lenses, shine a light from certain directions. And that's part of what makes a body of teaching, or a tradition, or a practice, etc.

So if you think in that sense, then there's always going to be shadow. Shadow will always be there. We will never get rid of shadow. And I'm using that word, 'shadow,' in a very specific way. So it's come to mean something quite narrow -- I think Jung was the first one to introduce it, and it's come to mean something more and more narrow, just as if it's the sort of shunned parts of oneself, the ignored, the unconscious parts of oneself that are negative or destructive and that usually have their roots in some pain in childhood or something like that, or in the development. I want to use it in a much broader sense, in the sense of: imagine a light shining on an object, any object. That light shining on that object, that whole gestalt there of the light and the object will cause a shadow. The other side, on the opposite side of the object from the light, the opposite side of the object that's being illuminated, there will be a shadow, a shadow of that object. And if I turn, shine the light from a different direction, from a different angle, a different perspective, the shadow will be different. It will be shaped differently. It will fall in a different area, etc.

So basically any time we shine a light on anything, any time we look in a certain way, any time we frame our vision, and our gaze, and our practice, and our thinking, and our conceiving in certain ways, there will be shadow associated with that. It's just the way consciousness works. So again, it's not to single out this or that tradition or practice, psychotherapy or Buddhadharma, this kind of therapy or that kind of Dharma, and say, "Oh, that's bad or rubbish or incompetent" or anything like that. A more mature understanding is whatever practice we do, whatever conceptual framework, whatever tradition we're in, it will have its shadows. And we're never going to get rid of shadows. As long as there's light, there is shadow. So, for example, Jung, who coined the term 'shadow,' I think, he often gets critiqued for not including so much developmental psychology and ego psychology in his whole framework and paradigm. And then of course we can look at those who emphasize a lot about childhood wounding and the development of the child, etc., and as we've done already, touch on some of the ways there will be a shadow cast from that: "Oh, I'm missing the socio-political, the economic, the environmental effects. I'm maybe missing soul or spirituality. Spirituality may have the shadow of spiritual bypassing, avoiding ..." So wherever we shine the light, there will be a shadow. Wherever there's light, there's shadow.

Another related reflection is -- and we'll come back to this -- part of the problem here in discussing ethics, or if we kind of put our finger on a central element of the diagnosis here of the whole situation, is that all these different traditions, you might say, as much as they shine light from a different direction, another way of saying it is that between different traditions or practices or frameworks there are different weightings and prioritizing of different values. So in the whole range of different moral values -- and then using that word, 'moral,' really widely -- we can emphasize this or that, or this one above that one, this one to the extent of almost ignoring that one, and vice versa. So partly what's happening here, and partly what happens in a lot of the sort of superficial and often loud and strident sort of arguments and hecklings that go on in our society is there's just a discrepancy between the relative valuing of different moral values between two parties. Anyway, we'll return to that. But all that is just to say, again, we're not singling out any one tradition for criticism or something like that; it's really part of the whole endeavour of looking at morals and moral considerations, that these shadows and these differences in valuing will be inevitable. As I said, it's part of also duty of love to look at that and to question. It's part of the honesty. It's part of the integrity. It's part of the rub of true relationship with a tradition, with a body of teaching that one loves, with a logos.

So if we turn our gaze just briefly, and again in too speedy and superficial a way, onto Buddhadharma and the different kinds of Buddhadharma, for example, and see where some of those might have gaps, lacunae, limitations with regard to their relationship with the kinds of openings of morality that I think are needed in our day and age. [55:35] If we look at sort of traditional Theravādan Buddhadharma, I remember staying at a monastery for a while. It was wonderful in so many respects, in terms of a lot of the meditation teaching, and the opportunity to practise kind of undisturbed in a lovely setting and all that. But one day I was struck -- I was helping out in the kitchen, and clearing some stuff, and I just asked, "Oh, where do you keep the recycling?" And the answer from the monk came, "We don't recycle here." I was kind of shocked a little bit, and he said, "This is all just saṃsāra. All this is saṃsāra. Why bother with it?" And so that pained me, and I felt it was really an inadequate point of view. There are so many wonderful gifts from that monastery and the teachers there, but set in a very traditional context of Theravādan Buddhadharma where the aim is really to get off the wheel of rebirth, to get out of saṃsāra, saṃsāra being phenomenal existence, the experience of life and death and perception, experience, appearances. And the whole thrust, the whole movement of meditation practice is to sever that link, to not be born again. And what one is leaving behind is just saṃsāra, and with it, it's kind of illusory.

So you can see, if we tie that up with what we were talking about in the other talk -- I think it was the talk on ontology, perhaps, and epistemology -- and there were four world-views I laid out, and four kind of ontological views, and one of them was exactly this: only the Unfabricated is really real. All this fabrication is not real. It's saṃsāra, and it's worthless, and we're trying to get out of it and not be tied up with it. And so, again, the shadow side of that is that it's possible that there's an attitude of simply a lack of care about this so-called saṃsāric realm, about the world, about the earth, and about, in this case, something like recycling. So that would be an example of a kind of blindness coming out of shining the light in a certain direction. And actually, nowadays, that kind of light -- in the context of Buddhadharma -- is actually relatively uncommon. Not that many people are actually practising that way, thinking in terms of rebirth, and ending rebirth, and severing that link, and the fabricated realm being, in that sense, illusory and to be relinquished. But rare as that is now, and precious as it is for what it offers, it also has this inevitable lacuna in it, inevitable limit and, I think, fault in a way, when it comes to relating to the world.

And then, you know, again, if just briefly on this we look at certain teachings -- I don't know if they're more pop teachings or what -- where a practitioner has sort of got the idea that they're trying to move towards some kind of awakening that has no desire in it, that the eradication of desire is where they're headed and what they're aspiring to. We don't have to really linger here very long, but one can [ask] -- what would a life like that even be like? What would it be like? How would I relate to the difficulties in the world, and to what the world needs, without some kind of desire there? So that kind of gross oversimplification of what one thinks one's doing often leaves a lot lacking, leaves a lot missing in terms of the larger life and the larger possibilities of ethical response.

Søren Kierkegaard, the philosopher, wrote a book called Enten-Eller, and -- if I can find it -- I'm mentioning this because, in a way, there's something he talks about there that bears a similarity, again, to certain, perhaps, kind of pop, popular sort of notions of mindfulness, or maybe even kind of pop non-dual teachings, Advaita teachings -- not really what I would say are the fuller teachings there. But in this book that he wrote, Enten-Eller by Søren Kierkegaard, there are three characters. There's character A, who recommends what he calls the aesthetic way of life, and there's character B, who recommends what he calls the ethical way of life. And then there's a third character who's called Victor Eremita, and he sort of edits and writes notes on the papers, the sort of academic papers of both. And actually Alasdair MacIntyre writes about this again, so I'll read a little, short passage from him. He says:

The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic [okay, so there are two kinds of styles of life: the ethical and the aesthetic] is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil. [Okay, subtle difference, but really, really important.] At the heart of the aesthetic way of life, as Kierkegaard characterizes it, is the attempt to lose the self in the immediacy of present experience.

Doesn't that sound familiar a little bit, from certain kinds of teachings?

The paradigm of aesthetic expression is the romantic lover who is immersed in his own passion. By contrast the paradigm of the ethical is marriage [so the other way of life, the ethical way of life, so-called ethical way of life, the paradigm is marriage], a state of commitment and obligation through time, in which the present is bound by the past and to the future. [And so he says] each of the two ways of life is informed by different concepts, incompatible attitudes, [and] rival premises.

So, you know, sometimes when there's too much emphasis, for example, when there's a lot of emphasis on living in the present and dissolving the self in the moment and in the present experience, and being one with what's happening, etc., that sounds very reminiscent of what Kierkegaard's calling the aesthetic way of life. And in its kind of highlighting and emphasizing the present moment, the shadow there is it misses the future, and what's necessary in terms of a commitment to the future, and where does that fit in for our soul, for our spirit, for our practice, for our conceptual framework. So this is one style of way of thinking about practice. It's quite popular. It's, to me, a truncation of larger bodies of teaching. But there's something about future-commitment that is really important that is missed then. I want to come back later and talk about soulmaking, and future-commitment, and how that relates to -- what their connection is, or what's the notion of future-commitment in soulmaking.

If we look at my own tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition -- and again, I want to say that it's changing very rapidly now, or it seems to me that things are changing quite quickly with regard, say, to something like climate change. A little while ago, some years ago, I used to bring up the issue, and people might mention it, and some teachers and some people involved in Insight Meditation would say, "Well, that's a political issue. Climate change is a political issue, and we don't do politics. We try and be apolitical, non-sectarian, etc." So I think this is less common now, but it still bears mentioning and considering if we're thinking about traditions, and the life of traditions, and what goes on for us in terms of our relationship with ethics and morality, and what goes on in our mind when our tradition and our commitment to a tradition meets the wider moral landscape.

Because one could say to that response that used to be relatively common, "Oh, well, was, let's say, the Holocaust a political issue? Or was it an ethical issue?" I mean, the Holocaust was perpetrated essentially by Nazis who were democratically elected in 1933. Therefore, you could say, "Well, the whole thing is political. It's just a matter of policy, whether they want to exterminate Jews and Gypsies and communists." Does that make it just a political issue, or is it an ethical issue? You can imagine this kind of conversation: "Well, that's different than something like climate change and what to do about climate change, because that involved intentional murder. The Holocaust involved intentional murder. And the concentration camps and extermination camps involved intentional murder." But actually, only some proportion of camps, concentration camps, were deliberate extermination camps where they actually put people to death deliberately, like in Auschwitz, for example. Others -- so, for example, Bergen-Belsen, and ghettos where they, for example, imprisoned Jews -- there was just a kind of level of deprivation there, and the conditions there that 'happened' to result in many deaths (many, many deaths), which the Nazis obviously didn't mind. Now, that kind of, "Well, that's just how it is for these people. We're not actually deliberately killing them" -- but in a way, one is setting up the conditions or not taking care of the conditions so that death becomes relatively inevitable. Now, something like the attitude of many corporations to climate change, it's all a kind of -- what's the term? -- collateral damage.

So the notion of, the sort of excuse or point of view that says, "Oh, something like climate change is a political issue," it doesn't really fly. It's one of the ways we can kind of squirm out of opening up to, facing up to, a difficult moral situation and what it asks of us. Or again, in some Buddhist circles -- and again, in Insight Meditation, I used to come across this, with regard to something like climate change, "Oh, I don't have an opinion," as if having an opinion about climate change, or about what should change, or what to do, or what I should do, was all part of views and opinions, which are to be transcended, let go of, etc., because they're a fetter.

But to say "I don't have an opinion" and to live a life where -- I don't know -- for example, one is flying an enormous amount, and generating a huge amount of carbon emissions, way more than one person is sort of entitled to, and not speaking about it, that's actually expressing an opinion, even if I'm saying I'm shunning opinions. Again, what would it be, for example, in apartheid South Africa, or on the US slave plantations, or next to Gypsies and homosexuals and Jews being deported or gassed to death, to say "I don't have an opinion"? So there's something in the situation with certain issues, like climate change or species loss, etc., that allows us to sort of distance, to use mechanisms, mental mechanisms, that kind of distance ourselves from any sense of engagement or culpability or responsibility morally -- that it's political, that it's a matter of opinion, and views and opinions, etc. As I said, this is happening, thankfully, much less now. But I'm mentioning it partly because these are the kinds of things that can arise in traditions. Whenever there's a light, the light of a tradition, the light of a practice, a conceptual framework, it will bring with it certain shadows in certain directions.

And again, sometimes, in certain Buddhist circles, I wonder about the dominant ethos. So -- remember, the word 'ethos' is related very closely to the word 'ethics' -- the flavour, the character, the personality, either of individuals, or prominent individuals, or of the whole Saṅgha, of the whole kind of flow of a tradition. And so, again, sometimes with all the emphasis on non-harming and gentleness and kindness and softness, particularly nowadays in Western Buddhadharma, some Western Buddhadharma, particularly the Insight Meditation tradition, the emphasis on softness, sometimes one almost gets the sense that the dominant ethos, in the dominant ethos, the most important thing for a teacher or anyone else is not to offend anyone, that that actually almost trumps anything else. And if challenging students, or challenging retreatants, or people one's communicating with, if challenging them even might be deemed by them offensive, then it's important not to challenge people, and one sort of doesn't say something or backs off. So this ethos of non-offending -- which you can see it has a certain moral value to it, but when that moral value is trumped over the necessity or over the possibility of actually challenging people's behaviour or moral outlook or choices, getting them to think about it, it could be said something's gotten out of balance here from a certain perspective.

Again, I remember -- I think I shared this already -- Suvaco, a colleague, a Gaia House teacher, teaching a retreat at Gaia House and saying at some point to the yogis there, "You know, some of you" -- maybe he even said "a lot of you"; I don't know -- "will be much better off taking in a refugee family into your home rather than coming on retreat." It was quite a challenging thing to say, you know? And perhaps ruffled a few feathers. I don't know. But sometimes this ethos of gentleness or non-judgmentalism, which, again, with all the pain of the pandemic of the inner critic, they become so emphasized in the teachings -- and, in a way, importantly so, rightly so, helpfully so -- but the question is, can they be overdone so that they begin to eclipse other considerations, they trump other considerations? So that there's always this kind of need to be gentle, or be perceived as gentle, so that, for example, protests in the street are not considered okay, because one thinks, "That's probably not gentle. People are shouting, or it's loud, or it's against the law," as the XR protests were, and that contravenes a sort of unwritten law about gentleness, or the dominant ethos about gentleness.

What's in charge here? How conscious are we about it? And how wide is the range of our consideration? Or non-judgmentalism, as I mentioned -- again, that can have a shadow side when it's overemphasized. So there is a difference between discernment -- we could say discernment on the one hand, and judgment on the other, and it involves whether you're judging people, or actions, or speech, or behaviour, for example. But I read a passage the other day, a couple of passages, where the Buddha is really quite judgmental. There's enormous loving-kindness, enormous generosity and compassion coming out of the Buddha, and at times he sounds or is extremely judgmental, harsh, critical. The same with Jesus -- such mercy, such beautiful love coming out of that heart, and that being, and that life, and that sacrifice, and at times, it's fire coming out of the mouth, the fire and the blade of judgment.

Another issue, I think, to look out for is just how easily -- and it's related to what I just said, but -- how easily within a tradition or in a Saṅgha or community there can be a kind of coalescence, a streamlining into a certain range of common behaviour and common views. Just one is in the tradition, and so one goes along with that, even if one is not quite conscious of going along with it. One, a little bit, gets swept up in the stream of that tradition, and contained within the family affiliation and loyalty of the community. And this may not be conscious at all. And so one comes to act in certain ways, or have certain views -- or rather, certain ways of acting become the norm in that tradition, and just are unquestioned. It's just what people do -- certain choices, certain ways of doing things, and behaviours, etc., and views.

And in that, there can be a loss of the individual's autonomy, making their own decisions about behaviour and about views, so that certain behaviours and certain views can become very normalized, very normalized. So I've talked in the past, I know, and written about, for example, how normal it is -- and again, I hope this is beginning to change; there are signs that it might be, but -- how normal it is in the Insight Meditation tradition to really do lots of flying. So this is just an example of a kind of behaviour that can get very normalized because it's what everyone around me is doing and we kind of think that we're good people because we're Buddhists, and we're interested in less suffering, and we're spiritual people, etc. So the issue is not really about flying, and I've talked about that enough; let's say the issue is really about, for example, how am I relating to my carbon emissions? And one way of thinking about climate ethics is to kind of calculate -- and people have done this -- how much carbon emissions would be, even if we shared them equally, in order not to, say, heat the planet over, let's say, 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees. Then you work backwards from that: "Okay, this is how we need to limit the carbon, and that works out as such-and-such a quota, tons of carbon emissions, per person, per year," let's say. That would be one way of thinking about it. And in a way, that's a very reasonable way of thinking about it. I mean, it leaves aside climate justice, and who owes what what from the past, etc., but just as a start, that's one way of thinking about it.

So the issue really here is how and when and why does it become normal for so many of us to blatantly and unthinkably use up more than our fair share of carbon, and so put into the atmosphere and add to the global warming and the misery that will come from that disproportionately? What's going on there? And so, as I said, in certain traditions -- I mean, in wider society; the Insight Meditation tradition is just a reflection of the wider society where it's just very normal for people to fly loads and loads, and not think about this potential way of contemplating climate ethics. Actually, it's only right that I have an equal share to everyone else, and what do I think I'm doing when I just extravagantly consume much more carbon, put into the atmosphere much more carbon? So again, what gets normalized in the wider society absolutely certainly. Just recently, Extinction Rebellion was planning a disruption of Heathrow Airport in protest of the planned building of a third runway. And it was pulled, it was retracted, the plan for this disruption. I don't know the ins and outs, but I wonder whether it was just because the public outcry would have been huge, because it's so normal to think, "I am entitled to fly on holiday. I'm entitled to fly somewhere for some pleasure, and maybe several times a year. And if that doesn't happen, it's worse than any" -- [people] don't actually think this, but it's an unthinkable state of affairs.

So something gets normalized in the larger culture, and also in the Insight Meditation culture, for example. I'm sure it happens in lots of other cultures, certainly corporate cultures and all kinds of things. But something's getting normalized just because it's normal in, in this case, the sub-culture, and it's normal in the sub-culture partly because it's normal in the wider culture -- partly. So again, what's the responsibility of a tradition to really wrestle with -- I mean really wrestle, really question -- the dominant values in the wider culture, when it's necessary to do so? We pay, very easily, lip service to anti-consumerism, "Oh, that's greed. It's one of the kilesas," etc. But to really do that.

If we think then about what's a fair share of carbon dioxide as one way, or a certain way of thinking about climate ethics. And actually, some of you will have heard of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. It's a kind of rational formula that he came up with for an equalitarian ethics -- in other words, very much in line with what I'm just saying. So we have to regard everyone equally. Everyone gets equal respect and equal share, so to speak. But this categorical imperative is a way of thinking about one's action and kind of testing, testing it by the standards of this rational idea, which says that "One ought so to act as to be able to will that everyone should act so." What that means is, let's say I want to use up three or four times my fair share of carbon for the year. Can I really wish, can I really will, that everyone does so? Because I know that if everyone uses three or four times, then the whole ship sinks. If I use that measure, that rational measure, Kant's categorical imperative, it puts certain constraints on the choices I have to make, or I have to then -- okay, maybe I do use three times my carbon share this year or whatever; somehow I have to justify that, or I have to offset it, and I don't just mean planting trees somewhere. I have to consider whether there are cases where, in the larger scope of taking care of everyone equally, this equalitarian ethics, in the larger consideration of that that it actually is justified, it does make sense.

So how do I decide? If, for example, I really feel that my -- I mean, let's take flying, just because I can't think of anything else right now -- that my flying over there, back and forth, wherever it is, or many flights a year, if I really think that there's so much good coming out of that, it's so necessary, then maybe the balance of that good outweighs the harm of putting all that carbon into the atmosphere. But how do I decide? It's not that easy. And one of the things I think I was, when I used to talk about this a bit and write about it -- it's hard to make prescriptions here, but at least, I think, what I wanted to feel and to see was that there was a wrestling with these issues, that they weren't just easy. Because, as I said, when it gets normalized -- when, for example, flying a lot to go on retreat, to teach a retreat, to go and visit a certain Buddhist tourist site or whatever -- that last possibility gets much easier. If I'm flying a lot anyway to teach retreats and whatever it is, and I'm not really thinking about it too much, I'm not really wrestling with it, then that other flight to go on holiday, or to do something even if it looks vaguely Buddhist, it's part of what gets swept up in the normality. It's just normalized. What I was hoping for, I think, was more a sense of people wrestling with these choices, which I really hear is beginning to happen nowadays, and I'm thankful for that.

Again, two poles. One pole would just be the inner critic, "Oh, people will judge me if I fly a lot," or whatever, and the other pole is just going ahead because it's normalized, and I'm not afraid of judgment because the normality in my tradition or my culture is [for] it not to be judged, so I just do it. Can there be a Middle Way, where there's actually a wrestling with it, a questioning: how do I decide? If I'm using Kant's categorical imperative -- I'm not suggesting that's the only way of doing things. How do I actually weigh up the relative amounts of suffering or the relative help, whether I fly or I don't fly? I don't take those emissions, or I do fly and help whatever that situation is? And again, swept up, caught up in the sort of homogeneity and the stream of a tradition and its way of thinking and its sort of accepted behaviours, what would it be to actually be more independent and wrestle more independently, or together, the Saṅgha together, or people within the Saṅgha actually really wrestling with these questions? So there's something for me about the wrestling which shows an aliveness ethically. It shows I'm willing to not be peaceful; I'm willing to put up with the agitation of this and the lack of simplicity of it. Some of these choices are really not simple. So there's something about assenting to, and opening to, and putting up with, and confronting, and entering into the difficulty, the wrestling. It's not peaceful. It's not simple. It doesn't fit that shrunken range of Buddhist archetypes of peacefulness and simplicity.

[1:28:52] So you can imagine if that became, that way of thinking, for example, about how do we divide up a fair share of climate emissions, per person, per year or whatever, for the whole of humanity, as one way, and connect that with Kant's categorical imperative. Then, you know, you can imagine saying to someone, "Oh, I'm going off here or there. I'm going for a holiday. I'm going ..." whatever it is. And they say, "Really? Wow. Well ..." You can imagine having some kind of document, or you need to kind of justify it some way. And a person asking, "Where's your LEEFSAJ?" What's a LEEFSAJ? L-E-E-F-S-A-J. "Where's your Lethal Emissions in Excess of your Fair Share Allowance Justification?" And actually that becomes the normal. You don't just do something like that. Or your HEEFSAJ -- your Harmful Emissions in Excess of your Fair Share Allowance Justification. If that actually becomes the normal way of thinking about it, it's like, "Whoa, you're doing what?"

So a lot of this is just a matter of what's normal. Because if we talk about carbon and climate, and also species loss -- these related issues -- because the threads of cause and effect are so much more complex, it's hard to actually -- it's not like stabbing someone to death, where it's very clear what's the cause, what's the effect, who's the culprit, etc. With something like climate change and carbon emissions in seven-plus billion people, plus government policy and all that, it's actually quite hard to trace the threads of cause and effect. But in a way, again, we can very easily let that complexity and the difficulty of tracing it very clearly obfuscate and eclipse our sense of moral responsibility. So, "It's not too far for me. I don't mind killing and stealing as long as no one finds out." No one's going to find out because the thread of cause and effect is too complex. These are hard, hard issues, I think. Hard to think through. Hard to kind of face up to.

What I alluded to earlier, just now, I did hear about several sort of -- I don't know what to call them -- Buddhist sightseeing trips, really. I mean, they get billed as pilgrimages, but. So flying to Bhutan or India or whatever to go to some Buddhist temples and this and that. And so, again, what if we took, for example, Kant's categorical imperative, or this idea of a fair share of carbon emissions? How would I justify that? What would I say on my -- what did I call it? -- LEEFSAJ form? What would I say to that family in Bangladesh who have almost no food because of floods, and no house? Or to those dying of, I don't know, dengue fever that has expanded its territory with climate change and global warming? Or those whose livelihoods, health, and homes have been destroyed because of years of drought? Already people are in that situation, human beings are in that situation, and in the future, because of these excess emissions. What would I say? Actually to really contemplate that conversation. Imagine yourself, imagine myself there with them, or here with them.

If we make it simpler, sometimes it's easier to see -- imagine you're on a ship. I'm on a ship with, I don't know, ten people or a hundred people, even. And I want to explain to them why I'm allowed to eat more food than them, to shit on the deck, and they're not allowed. Maybe I'm a Dharma teacher and I'm explaining, and I give them a Dharma talk. That would be an interesting thing, my Dharma talk to these ten or a hundred people justifying why I deserve that special allowance "because I do very special work, you know." Sometimes we have to, because of the complexity of the situation, actually make it a bit smaller and say, "Hold on. What actually is the difference?" It's a difference of scale. But to be in that situation, on the boat, in the middle of the ocean with nothing else around, which is the situation of our planet, and then decide that I can emit more, not care about my waste, use up more resources, etc. What am I really going to say to them? How am I going to justify that?

So again, what's normal? Imagine if we take a different moral issue. So I might slip out easily, "Oh, yeah, I'm off to wherever-it-is to see some Buddhist temples or whatever, and I'm going to fly there, and then I'm going to fly here," and whatever it is. What if I just mention to someone, "Oh, yeah, well, my slaves are going to help me out." People would be like, "Your what? Your slaves?" It has become not normal. So not to underestimate the power of just what becomes normalized through the body and the flow and the range of a tradition, or sub-culture, or wider culture. Everyone, I think, would object to slaves, and very few people would raise their voice around, say, using up more carbon, or flying a lot. I mean, I was partly being a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but if we're just talking now, before we even get onto the soulmaking possibilities, just in terms of more mainstream meditative possibilities, it might be interesting to, in stepping up and opening out to the whole range and difficulty and depth and complexity of the moral challenges here, to actually engage in certain meditative exercises, for example, to really let these issues go deeper. Because I think what can happen is that they don't really register in the heart and the soul and the being, and there's a way they can kind of stay at arm's length, and so we're not really dealing with them.

For example -- as I said, I was a bit tongue-in-cheek before, but -- what about imagining a family in Bangladesh or Jakarta or in sub-Saharan Africa who find out that the floods there, or the drought, and the threat from these floods or drought or whatever, to their lives are made worse and more probable through climate change, so that their house and fields and whatever it is become unworkable, uninhabitable; they become a refugee, or die, or their relatives/family die, they're cast into poverty, into abject poverty, very little hope of getting out of that? And they learn somehow that this is related to something called climate change or whatever, and there's the education there. And they also learn that climate change is caused by CO~2~ emissions, mostly, and most of the CO~2~ emissions come from rich people, most of whom (rich people) know about climate change and its connection with CO~2~ emissions. And these people in this family in wherever it is -- Bangladesh or Jakarta or wherever, or Africa somewhere -- they hear about that. And they also hear that actually these people don't need to fly. These rich people don't need to fly, but they like to go on holiday or whatever it is, because it's pleasant experience.

So again, what would I actually say to them to justify my choice to fly on holiday, or to eat red meat, or to drive an SUV or whatever it is? Or even just to choose the slightly cheaper energy company? Or even as a Dharma teacher if I fly to teach a lot? Again, just with the easy assumption that because I'm a Dharma teacher my flight and my life and my efforts must be decreasing suffering ... What would it be to actually have that imaginary conversation in meditation, and really be with the whole emotional range of it, with the sensitivity to all that? It might involve a little bit of squirming and difficult feelings. Within that, also, to become and to cultivate this kind of possibility of a real sensitivity to the discomfort, to when things feel out of alignment, but also when they feel in alignment, and when there's a sense of integrity. So these, again, it will be reflected in the heart and the energy body. They actually feel different.

But that might be an interesting practice, to actually use the imagination -- it's not imaginal, but the imagination in meditation; put yourself in relationship with those kinds of human beings, and we don't, in the rich West, we don't often come into direct contact with, and actually have that imaginary conversation, with all the availability of the heart and the energy body, taking the time, listening to the mind, watching what the mind does, watching what's happening in the body, feeling it. And as I said, developing sensitivity in that to where things lack integrity in ourselves, where there's this kind of squirming, and where they are in integrity and in alignment, and the whole range of emotion there. Because part of what ethical practice asks of us -- and even more so nowadays, with all this complexity and the globalization and the situation, again, if we talk about climate change and species loss and environmental degradation/destruction -- part of it will actually ask us for not just a sensitivity in all these kinds of ways, sensitivity empathically, sensitivity to ethics and morals, which is something I'll come back to. But also it asks us for a great capacity emotionally. Can I tolerate the grief here? Can I tolerate the remorse? Can I be with that? Again, let it be in a crucible so that something redemptive, helpful, onward-leading, ennobling comes out of it. So it's asking quite a lot. But that might be an interesting exercise.

Again, we're just talking about Buddhadharma now, but sometimes what can happen is certain priceless elements within a tradition or a teaching can actually then -- we can hide behind them in certain ways. So, for example, the Four Noble Truths. It can, at times, become something of a delusional trope or delusional rhetoric. So, for example, I'm off on a sightseeing trip to wherever it is, Tibet or Nepal or Bhutan or whatever, and it's kind of Buddhist, but as a Buddhist practitioner, I feel myself or I want to think of myself as having this commitment to decreasing suffering -- my own and the world's. And yet I know, or I should know, that making that choice, what's essentially an unnecessary trip, will increase suffering. How do I square my devotion to and commitment to the paradigm of the Four Noble Truths and decreasing suffering, how do I square that with the suffering that, although difficult to trace, will result from my choosing to go on that particular trip and fly?

You know, what's interesting about that kind of thing is one goes, perhaps, on these Buddhist -- I don't know what to call them, but sometimes they get called pilgrimages -- Buddhist sightseeing trip or pilgrimage or whatever, and you can sense, from the soulmaking perspective, what's wrapped up in there is something is inchoate as an image. It's potentially an image. So, for example, Ladakh, or Bhutan, or Nepal, or Tibet -- there's the whole sense, or almost like not quite imaginal, but there's the image of Tibetan Buddhadharma history, and all the colour and the richness of that, and the beauty of that. And that's a potential, potentially imaginal image in the psyche. But if I don't have a way of relating to it where it actually becomes authentically imaginal, then the only way I can relate to it is as something concretized and literalized, and I need to go there. Without the soulmaking paradigm, without an actual imaginal practice, understanding how there doesn't need to be the literalization, any duty I have to that image may not need to be literalized, without that soulmaking paradigm, this incipient eros for this fantasy or non-imaginal image of Tibetan Buddhist history or whatever has to be concretized. If one has practised more with the imaginal and the soulmaking paradigm, I actually don't need to go there. I'm not going to get actual teachings there, or it's very unlikely I'll get actual teachings there that I wouldn't otherwise get if I stayed here and got on the internet or in a book or from a teacher here. I'm not going to get actual teachings there that would make a real difference to me or my teaching. I mean, I might, but it's pretty rare these days.

But with the imaginal practice, it's actually possible, "Oh, I can enter into an erotic-imaginal relationship with that whole region, with that whole lineage, with that whole beauty there, and it's just as alive and fecund in my soul and in my psyche, just as beautiful and rich and onward-leading and opening, just as soulmaking -- maybe more -- than if I went there and actually had concretized the whole thing." What's a fixated image, and what's an imaginal image? So without the imaginal sensibility, without a sense of what it means for something to be imaginal and how to practise with that and the taste for it, things get concretized, and the concretization has a cost to others -- also to myself.

So, as I said, there are possibilities here, and it's really not to say one tradition or practice is better than another, but there are possibilities to kind of expand some of the ways we relate or fail to relate ethically, some of the ways that our ethical consideration and behaviour fall short, or our ethical vision and sensibility fall short. It's possible to expand from different perspectives. [1:47:47] And one of them is the soulmaking paradigm as we've taught it so far, with image and all that. So if we think about -- just as an illustration of that -- if we think about what traditional Buddhadharma -- and again, I'm mostly thinking of Insight Meditation Dharma, but it probably applies to other traditions, other sub-traditions -- what the typical limits on ethics, and remember, on ethos there, on the character or flavour of practitioners, of beings, of how the whole thing gets shaped and limited, the whole tenor of that trajectory with regard to, let's say, activism and the possibilities of activism, and, let's say, while we're on the subject, activism with regard to climate or species loss, mass species extinction, etc.

If we just analyse it for a few moments. In, let's say, traditional Insight Meditation or Buddhadharma, we might say there are certain limits on the ethics and on the ethos (because those two go together), so therefore on the possibility of activism, because there's limited possibility for the sense of different aspects of our existence, and oftentimes they're kind of unconscious. So, for example, with regard to the self, there's this inherited archetype of the peaceful, detached Buddha, or "This is what an awakening person is. This is the flavour, the ethos of their being -- they're peaceful, they're simple, they're detached. They don't get upset. They don't shout on the street. They don't break the law. They don't ..." etc. So in terms of the scope of the ethos and therefore the ethics of the self and how it might be supported or not to engage in, let's say, activism, and maybe even civil disobedience, there's a limit there because of the ethos, which is hardly recognized as something that's handed to us and makes an imprint on us. It's not talked about as an image. It's not talked about as an archetype. And because it's not talked about and recognized as such, it has more insidious clout.

So in terms of the self, there would be one kind of limitation there. In terms of other -- so we can think about self, other, world, eros, and time, so those five categories. Self is limited in the way that I've just explained. With regard to others and other human beings, again, there's maybe a tendency to not want to create a duality, certainly through judgmentalism. There's no place for an image of war, of battle. We can't have kind of opponents. There's not scope in it, in terms of what we're given in terms of image and thinking. That's got to be on its way to hatred, the defilement of hatred, is the usual assumption. It's reified. But can there be the theatre of war? The image, I mean, of war? The image of opponents? The image of battle? It's not reified, but again, in the theatre of things, it can have that power, without it being reified into the defilement of hatred.

Bill McKibben, a founder of 350, and a long-term environmental activist -- and actually, I think he wrote the first ever book on climate change -- at one point a few years ago, he came out and said, "They are the enemy." Who? These big oil corporations, these big fossil fuel corporations. And actually starting to talk in those terms. Now, yes, we can reify that and get into all kinds of problems and defilement. But we can also use that as an image, and the self can be cast as a warrior, for example, in relation, theatrically cast, imaginally cast as a warrior in relation to this enemy.

So there's limitation on self, limitation on other, on the sense of self, on the sense of other. The world, too -- self, other, world. The world tends to be -- if we just speak about Insight Meditation Dharma -- it tends to just receive the same view of the world as the dominant view in the culture. It's a flat world, so to speak. It's not dimensional. One subscribes kind of to the scientific materialist view, maybe with a few magical notions bound in there or floating around. The world itself is, in many respects, just -- it may be beautiful, but it's a kind of irrelevant and purposeless backdrop for the project of my own liberation, and my practice.

Again, some of this is not conscious, but because it's the dominant Weltanschauung, the dominant world-view in the culture, it seeps into the sub-culture and just becomes part of it -- unless it's actually questioned, unearthed, reworked, opened up, considered differently. Self, other, world, eros -- my passion, my love, my tears. So again, traditional Buddhadharma, either they're 'mine,' and that would be an unskilful way of looking at them, or they're 'not mine,' they're anattā, and that would be a skilful way of looking at them. There's no other option. There's just either mine or not mine, my rage, my eros, my love, my grief. Or in terms of time -- self, other, world, eros, time. I'm putting those five together because they kind of go as a sort of bundle of fabrication. They tend to get fabricated together, self and other and world and time and some kind of desire. So how they get fabricated matters a great deal, as we've touched on in these talks and beforehand, and they tend to get fabricated together as a kind of bundle. Not always exactly in the same moment, but they're related.

So with the fifth one, with time, again, usual in the Insight Meditation tradition would be we only have the notion of impermanence, that things are impermanent. That's the way we relate to time. Or that we can take, of course, we can take practical measures for the future, and those practical measures may either succeed or fail. What's missing there? There's impermanence and working practically for the future, and that future, whatever projects we have for the future, whatever hopes, may either succeed or fail. What's missing there? There's no eternality. There's no sense of the eternal in that.

Let's linger on some of these a little while. So in terms of the self, and also the, if you like, attributes or the range of self-sense and self-expression, again, oftentimes what's missing -- we said the warrior is missing, but also the kind of place for wrath. We have it in the Tibetan deities; at least you have the image of it, the wrathful deities. But it's still somewhat problematic, how that is supposed to translate into one's life. But is there a place for wrath? For righteous indignation? For moral indignation? Does that have a place in our moral life? Is there a need for that? Is there a maturity in allowing that place? Of course it goes with shadow. Of course it goes with potential dangers and misuse and delusion. But is there a place with that? So oftentimes, again, in the usual range of what we receive as the ethos and therefore the ethics of Buddhadharma, let's say, that has no place.

Nicolai Hartmann is a philosopher. I mentioned him before in other talks, and I'm going to come back to him and talk quite a bit, I think, about some of his work. But he pointed out -- he's sort of surveying classical ethics with Aristotle and Plato and things like that. And he talks about Aristotle's Nicomachean, I think, which is a book Aristotle wrote about ethics, and it names the virtue of -- I think it's praotès. At first sight, it seems to mean something like 'gentleness.' So that's a moral value or moral virtue. But it seems to mean actually something -- when he looks into it closer, he says it seems to mean 'equable temper,' more almost than gentleness. So what it really means is something between violent temper on the one hand, and on the other hand, an incapacity to feel righteous indignation. So with regard to mildness of temper, with regard to this praotès:

A special merit lies in the view that not only easy excitability to anger but also complete incapacity to feel wrath is a moral defect.^[2]

So this is Nicolai Hartmann writing about Aristotle's Ethics.

A special merit lies in the view that not only easy excitability to anger [so that's the one we'd very easily recognize as what he calls a moral defect] but also complete incapacity to feel wrath is a moral defect. The presupposition of this view is that anger in itself is something valuable, therefore, indirectly, that in general there is moral value in emotion.... It is evident that here a far deeper appreciation of emotion is expressed than we find elsewhere among the ancients.

He's talking about the Stoics and people like that. And of course we can translate that to our contemporary age and just in terms of, let's say, Buddhadharma, the sub-culture of Buddhadharma. Even within the Insight Meditation tradition, you see quite a range in the sort of emphasis of different teachings within the Insight Meditation tradition on the importance of emotion and appreciation of emotion, and what's the range of importance, what's the range of emotion to which importance and place is given. But here, this incapacity to feel wrath is a moral defect as much as being too quick to temper and to anger.

So again, we're talking about where do things get limited, just by virtue of being in tradition, in the run of accepted ways, accepted modes of thinking and regarding. And if we come back to this point about time -- so I mentioned time as one of the elements there (self, other, world, eros, and time), in terms of this bundle that tend to get fabricated together in both conventional perception and in imaginal perception, so all together. They go together as sort of aspects of fabrication. Sometimes when I'm talking to people who are trying to work towards solutions with regard to climate change, or they're activists, etc., and sometimes they use the word 'story': "We need a new story. We need a new narrative." And it can sound like, "Oh, we're talking about the same thing when we talk about image or fantasy. It's just story and narrative are similar words, or just interchangeable words for that." But when I listen to them, it's clear that we're actually talking about different things. So yes, I think we do need a plan or plans about what we're going to do about climate change and halting species loss and that kind of thing. We need concrete plans and tools to implement those plans and legislation and all that. But some of these activists and people who are concerned, with a lot of care and heart -- again, it's not to say this is wrong; it's just to add to it -- talk about story and narrative and the need for a wider story and narrative in regard to climate and how humanity is doing with all that, and particularly how it will face the likely mayhem and catastrophes that many people consider likely in the face of climate and environmental breakdown.

So the story and narrative as it's used by some of these activists, some of whom are colleagues, it may mean -- because it's a story, it brings a kind of binding to the future. So it actually connects with that passage that we read from Kierkegaard about not the aesthetic way of life but the ethical way of life, the marriage as the paradigm of that, and a marriage being a commitment in time to the future, through the past and into the future. So this idea of a new story, a new narrative, or new stories and new narratives, they seem to bring -- and they may bring -- this binding to the future, but of course, what if that future does not turn out at all as the story hopes or plans? You can have a story for how we're going to build sort of resilience or human community and cohesion, social cohesion, when there's food scarcity, or water scarcity, or disease is rampant, etc., and there's social breakdown. But what if that future does not turn out at all as the story hopes?

An image, in contrast, in the way we're using it, an imaginal image, because it's eternal and timeless as we've talked about, as one of the elements of the imaginal, it seems not to imply a future-binding. It's just eternal. So it seems, if it's not quite the aesthetic way of life, it's neither the ethical way of life as Kierkegaard was talking about it because it doesn't have this binding to the future. So it seems that because of the eternality element, the timelessness element. But actually it does. It has a bond with and commitment to -- for example, an image in relation to, an image of oneself as an activist, or a warrior for the earth, or warrior for species, or whatever it is, that image needs to be eternal, partly because in being eternal it doesn't then depend on what happens. Whatever happens, that soldier will fight. There's a kind of endlessness to the problems we face and to what we need to address and what we need to combat, actually. So in those images that I used to share years ago, one of my recurrent images of this solitary soldier, one of the things that's interesting is he's always fighting, and there's a kind of endlessness to him. He rests and then he gets up to fight, and then he rests and he gets up to fight. And there's not an end to that.

So there is actually a future-bonding. There's, as I said, a bond with, a commitment to, however that pans out, however that plays out, however that's refracted into the life, commitment to acting, speaking, expressing, fighting, seeding, giving birth in whatever ways are helpful or necessary or part of that whole duty of the image, ongoingly, no matter what. It doesn't depend on achieving a specific outcome. [2:06:51] So certain movements of activism, they will go on forever. There won't be an end to them. The revolution, if you use that word, goes on forever. There's always something. And in a way, that's part, it's wrapped up in, a more imaginal way of sensing the whole thing. And there's, of course, the duty there, and the infinite mirroring and echoing, as elements of the imaginal. So that image in our sense, imaginal image, is slightly different than story and narrative, and it does bring, if one has an image of oneself in that way, for example as an activist, as a warrior, or whatever -- it may be a midwife; it may be healing the planet; whatever the image is -- it doesn't actually stop. Both the image in itself and also the reality of the situation is not going to stop. But there's duty coming through that, refracted from the image into one's life, into one's actions, speech, etc.

So if you go back to Kierkegaard and his distinction between the aesthetic way of life that has no commitment to the future and just wants to kind of lose the self in the present moment and merge with the present moment -- no self, just this moment -- compared with this what he called ethical way of life and this sort of sober commitment to the future, what's missing in that distinction is the psychological awareness of what we might call soulfulness. Each of those may have that, what he calls the aesthetic and the ethical. It may come in so that the distinction is actually much more complicated. But the main point here is, in relation to time and the future, the allowing of more imaginal dimensions, more imaginal filling out of the ethos and of the possibilities and the ethical sensibility and the sense of self/other/world, etc., with relation to time, then we get this whole other dimension of eternality, which binds us to the future in a more kind of endless way and is not so tied to a certain outcome.

So there's actually an extra duty there, to a certain extent, but there's also a liberation there, because we're not so tied to achieving this or that specific outcome. Yes, we want that. Yes, we hope for that. But on the imaginal level at least, it's endless, it's eternal. And there's a duty there, and that duty binds. It's like the duty of marriage, the bond, the commitment to that endless refraction in time of the life of that image, of the duty of that image. Later, as I mentioned very briefly, I want to come back and talk about values and virtues as a different way of talking both about ethics but also about soulmaking. I will say hopefully much more about that later, but just to seed something now, and to tie it up with what we just said. If we think about virtues, and human virtues, and development of those virtues being one possible way of thinking about the kind of moral education or moral kind of development that I was talking about, there doesn't seem to be many programmes for the personal development beyond 18, let alone moral development. That's one way of thinking about it, is actually thinking about the virtues. We'll come back, talk about this.

That's open-ended, then. Unlike the story or the narrative -- "We need a new story or new narrative" -- that seems to -- sometimes when I hear these friends and colleagues and other people, activists or people talking, it seems to involve a trajectory in time, that we'll arrive at a certain place; it ends in time, this story or this narrative that one tries to introduce into society in the hope that there will be a collective buying into this story and narrative, and it will steer us all in a better direction. If we regard the sort of programme of development or the invitation of the development of human virtues, of our moral virtues as part of the possible development we can have as human beings, or what we can cultivate, then that can actually be open-ended. It's never perfected. It's never, ever finished. So there's a similarity there in terms of the open-endedness that goes with imaginal ways of sensing one's relationship to the whole ethical issues and also thinking about it in terms of virtues. We'll come back to virtues later.

If we just stay on what we know so far about the soulmaking paradigm, I probably don't need to say this, but I'll mention it anyway, just in case someone does raise it as a question. You know, the idea of theatre, or the idea of emptiness of reality and the imaginal Middle Way and all that, it bears no similarity at all with what's recently being coined as 'post-truth politics,' and fake news and Donald Trump and others spinning -- it doesn't start with him, of course, but spinning fake news or turning stories on their heads, etc., promulgating all that. So there's a very basic difference between if we say "everything is empty" or "there's no ultimate truth or reality." It doesn't invite that kind of -- I don't know what to call it -- misdemeanour of post-truth politics and fake news. As we said, emptiness doesn't mean all things are ontologically the same: "Everything's kind of untrue, so therefore anything goes." Again, how should we put our finger on what's different here? Well, one way is looking at what's the intention. What determines the choice of, say, speech or action or view if there's no ultimate truth?

In so-called post-truth politics, what's determining why a certain politician says this thing or presents a certain view which is clearly not the case and convinces people that it is? What's determining it? Well, it's things like ego and greed and fear. And the ego there and the self is reified. So in this kind of like "truth has lost its place," actually there's a reification of the self, and certain objects get reified for the purposes of greed or in relationship to greed. Also in, I don't know, some art that's influenced by postmodernism (I'm thinking of art that's, I don't know what to say -- at its worst), again, what's choosing, what's determining the choice of putting this out, or putting that out, or presenting this or that? And again, sometimes it can be that it's ego. The artist wants to be famous, wants to make money, wants to appear clever. There's a reification of nihilism there, of meaninglessness.

In soulmaking, rather, what determines our choice of what we put out there, of speech, of action, of view, if it's not some ultimate truth? Well, it's the sense of soulmaking, and all that that entails, including the fullness of intention, including beauty, including love, including reverence. All that is there. So if anyone gets nervous with these notions of emptiness, and the imaginal Middle Way, and the theatre-like quality, and possibility of using image but image isn't real, it's very clear where the intention is coming from, what determines choices.

If we touch on the Four Noble Truths, again, for the sake of asking: are there ways which certain central paradigms and kind of normalized paradigms can actually unwittingly become limiting for our relationship with ethics and with moral questions? One area I think is quite enlightening to consider in this regard is, say, litter.

It strikes me as quite a good example of something which isn't obviously related as an issue to the Four Noble Truths, for the most part. So caring about removing litter, you can't really -- I mean, in some instances you can, but you can't really say that that's going to lead to less suffering, or it can't really be looked at convincingly in terms of the Four Noble Truths paradigm. And because the Four Noble Truths are so central and so sort of determinative of the direction, and therefore the gaze and the outlook, and therefore the moral outlook and gaze and action or non-action within Buddhadharma, there may be limitations coming from that. Whereas if, for instance, with the soulmaking paradigm, we're actually including other ways of looking where the sense of soulmaking, the sense of sacredness and beauty, are given weight -- as much, sometimes, as a reduction in suffering. So that something like litter becomes part of a larger, let's call it a moral issue, and what we do about litter. In itself, litter is, you could say, yeah -- in some instances, of course, it's plastic in the oceans and for the marine life, etc., and that, just recently in the last year or two, is becoming really broadcast as a problem and more people are cottoning on to that. There's still a difference in the reason for concern. This turtle or whatever it is, or these seabirds will die, and therefore there's concern for the suffering of those marine animals. There's a difference in that kind of concern and the concern just that it's beauty or that it's literally trashing something that's sacred (the earth and the natural world).

So again, the Four Noble Truths becomes a normalized paradigm; it limits, can limit, the range of our concern of what goes into what we might call ethical concern, in terms of how we live and how we relate to the earth. Air pollution as well. Now in England and certain countries, many countries, it's really, really a big issue, especially with burning diesel, diesel cars, etc. But the focus is often on the health, you know, understandably, especially the health of children. And so, you know, that's obviously a real concern, but there's still a difference in the range of care and the actual object of what's cared about. Say I care for the health of my children -- they might get asthma, or they might get this or that organic problem -- and that's why I care about air pollution, versus, is there not just, from a certain perspective, from my soul, the sensitivity of my soul, there's just something wrong with air smelling that way, smelling of diesel fumes, smelling of coal fumes? There's something sacrosanct that is being tarnished that way, that is not being respected. Beauty, the beauty of just simple, fresh air, and the fragrances of life are not being respected. It's a different concern.

And in England, I don't know if they're still around, but certainly I remember from my childhood the slogan, "Keep Britain Tidy," asking people to pick up litter and put things in trash bins, etc. "Keep Britain Tidy." I notice a couple of things about that. One, it doesn't say "Keep Britain Beautiful." There's not, in the larger culture, this kind of respect for beauty. Beauty doesn't have the same place and the same kind of depth that it could have, and certainly that it does in the soulmaking paradigm, for example. And also I notice it's "Keep Britain Tidy" as opposed to "Keep the Earth Tidy," a slightly narrow, nationalistic view there.

Again, we're just talking about Insight Meditation tradition right now mostly, or Buddhadharma, and ways that, with all the gifts and all the bounty and the benefits that it can bring, can also be limited like any perspective, any tradition, any conceptual framework, any paradigm of practice can be limited, will be limited. And if we expand the scope of Dharma to include more Soulmaking Dharma ideas and perspectives and paradigms, then with that, there's a corresponding expansion in many different ways, many possible different ways, of our ethical range, sensibility, concern, action, view.

Let's point out another difference -- a few more differences, actually. I remember -- I don't know if I've used this language so much in the last, let's say, couple of years, but I used to talk a lot about the image being primary. People used to say, "What do you mean when you say the image is primary? What do you mean?" So I was talking with someone the other day, and she had a very beautiful image, a very touching image for her of just the feathery breast of a bird coming into contact with her heart and pressing up against her. There was a tremendous amount of compassion wrapped up in that image, very beautiful, and it opened the floodgates of some grief in a very healing way. But she said to me that she realized that the grief that she had been feeling prior to that image -- there was some grief, but she wasn't -- "Is it this? Is it that? What's the grief?" None of the kind of reasons that she was giving, that the mind was giving herself for what the grief was for, that it was landing on and explaining the grief, seemed kind of adequate. And then she recognized that actually it was grief at being out of contact with this angel. So it wasn't caused by this or that in the life, or this or that happening, or being lost, etc. There was actually, in the contact with this image, the recognition that the grief that had been there in her heart was a grief at being out of contact with an angel.

So in other words, the image is primary, and in this case, its absence is the primary cause, if you like, or condition, for grief to arise, rather than something in the life. So our emotions are coming, in this view that image is primary, our emotions are coming more from the image. Our actions, our choices are coming more from an image. And sometimes we're not even quite conscious what the image is. The image is what's primary. The image is what drives us. The image is not primary in time so much as primary in fundamental importance. So again, we're not stating that as a kind of dogmatic assertion, as kind of, in some way, finally or ultimately true. It's a way of looking. It's a way of conceiving. It's a certain logos that we can move in and out of. But actually it has a lot of both explanatory power and also soulmaking power when we start to see our lives that way -- not just our emotions; our minds, our inspirations, as I said, our actions, choices, our sensibilities, our love. The image is primary.

I'm mentioning it now partly because this person was also then, at a separate time, relating to me over a period of time there was a lot of -- actually many years -- there was a lot of concern, very beautiful concern with different social justice issues. And sometimes she would feel herself really in a quandary, torn between "How should I choose? How should I present this social justice issue? What's my responsibility here? If I do this, then I'm failing on that. If I do that, I'm failing on this," and really trying to do the best that she could in relation to these really difficult, ongoing, larger social justice issues. And an image came to her of the Black Madonna. And this image was very connected with her care for, her deep concern and commitment to working on social justice issues, these certain social justice issues. And she started to realize in working with this image, the sense was that her primary duty was to this Black Madonna, and this Black Madonna -- let's put it this way: her dedication to social justice, and to addressing issues of social justice, and voicing them, and working towards better solutions and opening them out, her dedication to social justice issues was an echo, was part of the infinite echoing and mirroring in her life of this Black Madonna image. And in a way, what she came to realize was her primary duty was to the Black Madonna, and the refraction of that primary duty into her life was the expression of, again, her work on, her care about, these social justice issues, rather than the typical way of thinking is the other way around, that her primary commitment is to addressing this fact or that fact of a social situation or this person or that person.

And in seeing it this way, the primary duty was to the image -- in this case, the Black Madonna that in some way sort of encapsulated, and echoed, and held, and illuminated, and was related to with care, these social justice issues. In realizing that the primary duty was to the Black Madonna, the kind of unhelpful agitation that she was feeling around what to choose in terms of how to act, how to speak, when to say this, what to do in this situation around -- they were very specific things, which we don't need to go into -- but her unhelpful agitation just subsided, and her whole relationship to that whole set of issues and what was coming up in the community context that she was having to deal with, it became much more workable, much simpler. All the depth, all the passion, all the beauty of her involvement and commitment was still there, but without the kind of unhelpful agitation that went with it.

So again, we're talking really just about what are the ways that imaginal practice as we've talked about it so far can augment and expand and supplement the ways we already have of relating to ethical issues. If we keep going, another one -- I've already touched on it, but I'll say it again, because it's so important -- is whose grief is it that I feel in my heart for the earth, what we're doing to the earth? Massive, massive changes on geological timescales. Whose grief is it? Whose rage? Whose outrage? Whose indignation? Whose love for the earth? Whose rage at species loss? If I'm relating to the whole thing in a way, I'm sensing the whole thing with soul, sensing the situation, the plight of the earth, the plight of the species, the plight of humanity, and my heart, and my emotions, if I can find a way to sense all that with soul, then what passes through my heart -- and it might come from an image, from an intrapsychic image; it might come in more globally sensing the whole situation with soul -- I start to feel that those aspects of that whole situation that I call my emotions, that are my emotions, my heart, they start to be sensed as divine. Whose grief, whose rage, whose love? Yes, it's mine, of course. Yes, it's anattā, it's not mine, of course. Both perspectives valuable. And a third one: it's the Buddha-nature's. It's the divinity's. It's God's. It's coming through my heart. My heart, my grief, is an instrument of the divine care, and as such, the divine, the Buddha-nature, needs me to feel this grief.

You know, sometimes that's what it can feel like. The scope of the problems is so huge, just on a planetary scale, but also on a soul-level. It's bigger than how we usually feel ourselves to be. The emotion there is bigger than mine, me and mine. And again, of course there's the possibility of delusion with all that, especially if I take any of those -- my rage or grief or eros -- and I just rationalize it by calling it divine, and then that makes excuses for me to either indulge in it or sink in it or act out or whatever. Of course there's a possibility of delusional rationalization. But again, if we're talking about authentic sensing with soul, or at least moving more in that direction, the authentic imaginal, then this will be more authentic and genuine, and it adds the whole dimensionality to the very organ, the very instrument of the heart, and the very difficult feelings we're going through, if they're grief or rage or whatever, moral indignation, that kind of passion. It adds the dimensionality and the divinity there, and that gives space, and it gives an anchoring in something beyond. Enormously liberating, and helpful, and empowering, and soulmaking, and beautiful.

We said all these areas -- self, other, world, eros, time, and other aspects, beauty like we talked about, sacredness -- we can expand them all with the help of Soulmaking Dharma paradigms and what they bring in to flesh out and enrich and dimensionalize our sense of ethics, and the whole movement of the moral life within us, and what we respond to, what we see, what we care for, how we act, how we choose. So I think there's a case to be made that the usual ways, in our contemporary society and cultures, that we conceive of and sense the self -- and also the world, both the self and the world -- are not always but for many of us not quite adequate to the complexity and the difficulty and the demand of the challenges that we face, especially with regard to things like climate change and species loss and those huge moral issues there. And it might also be, as I was saying, that even within certain sub-cultures, like the Dharma or Insight Meditation tradition or whatever -- that again, the usual ways of sensing and conceiving of the self and of the world are not quite adequate. Not for everyone, but for many people. They need some other ways to open out the sense of self and world, and those ways, those other ways, might become platforms and supports for opening up the moral sensibility and the power to act, the capacity to act, the potential.

So it's interesting, you know, if we talk about climate change and species extinction, it's hard to imagine a kind of Hollywood movie about that that really would galvanize things in terms of speaking to people. It's not really a personal story in that sense. You can get earthquake movies and volcano movies, etc., and the focus is on the individual hero, and maybe his or her family and what they go through, and it gets shrunk down to a personal -- I don't know what they're called -- action movie or catastrophe movie or whatever. But something like climate change and species loss is much more than a personal story can ever really get hold of. It's not really on that level. And yet in our society, because of the culture of individualism, that becomes a kind of dominant way that we think about things, and it becomes a way that's the easiest for people to get moved and get galvanized and relate to something. But the contemporary sense of self may not be adequate. It's not personal in that way. A world-view that 'all is one' also may not be adequate, or, say, a certain kind of Dharmic practice where the story and the self is kind of atomized into sensations and mind states or whatever. That kind of lens also won't be very helpful when I look at the whole issue of climate change. It's too microscopic. It's missing the bigger ethical issues there. I mean, it might be helpful in part, in terms of navigating some emotions or getting clear about what the values are as a stepping-stone.

So in all kinds of ways, different self-sense, different world-sense, different emotional sense or sense of the emotions, in many cases need to be brought in, need to be allowed and included, to allow a more appropriate response. Do we need expanding our sense of self, our view of self, beyond the kind of what I called, I think, immature individualism of our larger contemporary culture? Do we need a kind of expanded world-view, given more dimension, given a different kind of ontology, etc.? And these things are hard to shift, you know. I don't know quite how they shift. It was interesting -- I watched a video of an interview of Polly Higgins, who died recently -- very wonderful woman. She was a lawyer campaigning for many years. She was only 50 when she died. She was a lawyer campaigning for many years to try and get ecocide -- in other words, the destruction of ecosystems -- recognized as a crime by the UN and by international law. So that was her project as a lawyer. Really lovely woman, and tremendous work in that, and she died just a few months ago, in fact.

But I was watching this interview, and she was being interviewed by someone who was extremely sympathetic to what she was doing. But what struck me was as the interview went on -- it wasn't that long -- almost immediately, the explanation of why it was important, why getting a law on ecocide was important, the explanation sort of slid from this idea that nature itself needs to be respected, ecosystems are sacred and need to be respected and need to be given the same rights as we give humans legally, it kind of slid to the rationalization, the reasoning underpinning this attempt to get an ecocide law passed, was because ecosystems support us. They support humanity. We rely on nature. We rely on the bees pollinating the plants and the flowers so that we can eat, etc. We rely on the water to drink -- all that. And I'm pretty sure that wasn't the only reason, and maybe not even the main reason, why she was campaigning for it. But in the conversation, it was two sympathetic people who cared about this issue and wanted to support it, how the dialogue slipped to a language that made the human beings' practical needs for health and livelihood the most important ones.

And it struck me -- it sort of just slid like that. But that whole movement that she was trying to support, to get a law passed by the UN against ecocide, and to actually frame it as even a crime that people understood, it raises interesting ontological questions. We can't get away from ontology and metaphysics with all this, and I don't think there's a way of talking about ethics deeply without talking about ontologies, but we'll come back to that. So it raises, this idea about an ecocide law via the UN, raises, to me, interesting ontological questions as much as ethical ones, because if you think about it, such a law, and kind of the ideas underpinning it, would be different than a law for, I don't know, animal rights for example, or choices like vegetarianism because of reasons of compassion for the suffering of individual animals. "I don't want to eat meat because that involves that animal suffering when it's slaughtered, or how it's kept," or whatever. When we talk about something like ecocide, we're talking about an ecosystem. That's not an individual animal. It's not even a collection of animals. It's not this animal, it's not that tree -- it's the system, which, in a way, has life, I suppose. You could talk about it in the way that a system of cells in the body can be alive, even while maybe individual cells are dead or dying. But a system is something different, and caring for an ecosystem, giving right, recognizing rights for an ecosystem, and then implementing in law rights for an ecosystem because they've recognized morally those rights, implies a kind of respect and reverence for the order and harmony and integrity of nature's functioning -- its, I don't know, life process. And inevitably such an idea rests on or draws in a kind of cosmology and anthropology and, again, metaphysics.

So grief at species loss, or plummeting numbers of species -- so many bird species, for example, or insect species are hugely reduced in numbers, although the species itself is not technically critically endangered yet -- but the grief, the heart's response at that, I don't know -- is it a different grief resting on a different sensibility? It's a particular ethical care that is different, though not contradictory to, a care for the suffering or death of an individual animal. That orca mother carrying around its dead calf for days or weeks in the oceans -- it was in the news a little while ago. A lot of clicks on that piece of news because there's the empathy with that individual orca mother and her calf, the suffering there. But grief at species loss seems to me a different kind of sensibility, and something slightly different is happening in the heart, in the soul, actually. And as I said, it calls forth or involves or demands a different kind of ontology and metaphysics, an expanded ontology and metaphysics, for us to actually respect that.

So all these issues are tied together. They're not actually that simple. [2:45:36] Now, some of this is already changing. I don't know if you knew this, but a corporation, actually in law in most countries or even in international law, for legal purposes it's recognized as a person. So a multinational corporation -- Exxon Mobil or whatever, some of these other large corporations -- technically, legally have the same status as a person, the same legal rights as a person. So that's been the case for many, many years. A river, for example, does not, for the most part. But it is starting to change, or rather there are a few instances where it's starting to change. But if you just think -- what's going on there? Again, going back to a point I made in the beginning of this talk, what's the relationship between law and ethics? Originally there was supposed to be a very close, tight-knit congruence there, but in many ways they seem to have kind of drifted apart. What are the ethics about the law that turns away refugee boats? I mean, it's a law. One is protecting ... One can make a link with ethics, but it becomes increasingly tenuous. Or protecting corporate rights over their responsibility to take care of the environment. You can trace an ethical reason. You can rationalize that kind of law ethically, or that kind of limitation on law ethically. But the connection between law and ethics has, I think, become increasingly tenuous, increasingly sort of divorced.

Some of this is starting to change. I was reading -- where was it? -- New Zealand, for instance, the Waikato River was given personhood legally, which is anyway how the indigenous Māori culture views it. It views it as a living being, as a person. You could say it senses it with soul (I mean, in some regards; there are going to be differences there, of course). They say "I am the river and the river is me." How can the river look after me if I don't look after it? And there are other places -- where was it? -- Mount Taranaki, also in New Zealand, and the Whanganui River. It was just recently in the last couple of years. Mount Taranaki and the Whanganui River are both sacred to their people, the indigenous peoples there. And actually earlier than that, in 2014, legal personhood was granted to the Te Urewera forest, and gave the local Māori tribes shared guardianship of that forest. It's part of their sensibility and their sense of duty and responsibility anyway.

In India, I think it was the Ganges and the Yamuna -- partly legally stimulated by what happened in New Zealand, I think, because it's all Commonwealth and therefore bound by similar laws, or there's some kind of legal structure that binds New Zealand and India as Commonwealth countries, I think -- the Ganges and the Yamuna were granted personhood status legally. So there are the beginnings of changes here. And in Toledo, on Lake Erie, there were -- I think it's actually passed now, but the residents of Toledo were also petitioning to sue polluters on behalf of the lake and for that lake to be recognized with legal rights, as a person would be. I'm not sure if the argument in Toledo was, again, to do with the effects on humans and the children's health from if the lake water was polluted, so -- I mean, it's still really great and wonderful, but again, ontologically, it's slightly different, or actually significantly different.

So there are the beginnings of change here, but really, do we need an expanded ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, self-sense, all of that? And again, not everyone is going to need this. It won't work for everyone. But for many people, that might be a really significant support, that kind of expansion. Remember that Moscovici quote: "Questions of epistemology are also questions of social order." Questions of epistemology are also questions of social order, and therefore questions of ontology are also questions of social order. And it's increasingly and glaringly obvious now with the tragedies unfolding around us. So how can we begin to sense and think and feel in different ways, in ways that do expand the ontology, the epistemology, the metaphysics, the cosmology and the anthropology, the sense of existence, the sense of human being, the sense of the life, and the being of the earth and nature and the species? And again, I wouldn't say it's the solution. It's one possibility. Sensing with soul is one possibility, one kind of paradigm that can open up that kind of expansion and change. And then on top of that change and expansion in the ontology of all that comes a change in sensibility, and therefore a change in view and action and law and human choices. One possibility.