Sila and Soul (Part 4)

Okay, let's try to elaborate a bit more on some aspects of the connection, or potential connection, relationship of soulmaking practice, practices, and these ideas of values, virtues, and connecting them through this notion of what we'd maybe call the ideational-imaginal, the ideological-imaginal, or imaginal ideas. And let's try and unpack that a little bit, unfold it, explore it a little bit. There are probably different orders we could go through this. We could approach it from different directions, different orders. But I think I'll start by saying a bit more about the ontology of values -- actually taking a certain view of the ontology of values, somewhat similar -- in fact, very similar -- to Hartmann's. Now, there are other ontologies we could adopt or take, entertain with regard to values -- in fact, a whole spectrum of ontologies -- but I want to dwell on this one partly because nowadays it's unusual and it opens things up in a certain way. It's less explored, and hence the soil there may be fresh and fertile and offer new possibilities.

Again, Hartmann made the point that values are not created by a culture or a person; they're not cultural or personal creations. They have a kind of independent existence. They're real existences, and exist independently of our desires or what we want to be the case, and also of our consciousness -- so whether we're aware of them or not, they exist. But they exist in a particular way, in what might be called the realm or the sphere of ideal being. That word, 'ideal,' is important. It's related to the word 'idea' specifically, but also 'ideal' in the sense of when we have ideals, and what's ideal as in what's the best possibility. So it has a long history, that word, 'ideal,' and 'idea.' There's a lot wrapped up in it. And that sphere of ideal being, the realm in which values, for instance, among other entities exist, has its own ordering, its own structure, its own laws.

So that notion of a sphere of ideal being goes back to Plato -- and maybe even before that; I don't know. But as far as we know, it goes back to Plato, who talked about the realm of ideas; and Aristotle as well, variations -- he talked about eidos; and the scholastics, the Christian scholastics in the Middle Ages also talked about essentia or essences. So it has a long history, a long pedigree, and as I said, it tends to be very out of fashion these days. It went out of fashion, but it had a lot of fruit and implications in the history of Western philosophy and thought and the way we look at the world for many, many, many years.

Before we get into that just a bit more, again, we could adopt the stances, the perspectives of various other ontologies with all this, and we don't actually need to adopt Hartmann's kind of postulate of an existence completely independent of consciousness. So remember we talked in the past about in the Zohar, how it says that we create God as much as God creates us, and this whole notion of participation that we have in the imaginal and soulmaking teachings, that somehow, mysteriously, soul and its beloved erotic other, or consciousness and its object, mind and matter, they participate in each other, they co-create each other in a way that transcends or complicates, takes to another level the division between consciousness and object, between subject and object.

But that notion of participation is actually very much one that Plato talked about in explaining ideas, and he said that the things of this world participate in the ideas. So the kind of existence particular to an idea is that kind of existence "'through which' everything participating in it is just as it is." That's a quote from Hartmann. So that, in other words, when we resonate with a certain moral value, and when we act in alignment with that and inspired by that, we're participating in the moral value; we're participating in that level of being. Or when an object in the world that's circular or triangular is participating in that ideal geometrical structure of circularity or triangularness. So that notion of participation, it was always a bit mysterious to people what Plato meant by that, and it's still a little mysterious, but that notion of participation is key to this whole idea, this whole notion of the realm of ideal beings, of ideal existence, of ideas.

So values are one subset of ideal beings, ideal existences or ideas or eidos. Others might be mathematical entities and laws. This was originally where Plato, probably through Pythagoras, perhaps got the idea of this whole realm of ideal being, and it remained central to Plato's thinking and a kind of basis and model for his whole thinking. So mathematical entities and laws, mathematical laws like the laws of geometry and entities like pi or other mathematical entities don't have spatio-temporal existence. They don't exist in space or time. I cannot come across them. I cannot lay my hands on them. They don't exist in the way that we tend to encounter other existences, as existences in space or time -- my body, this book, whatever; it exists in a certain space, at a certain time, or for a certain time. But mathematical entities and laws, a certain mathematical equation, doesn't exist in space and time, yet it has a kind of reality, an ideal reality, a reality in the realm of ideas, in this realm of ideal being. It's not impermanent. It doesn't arise and pass. It's not like this mathematical law comes to an end or gets created. But the mathematical entities and laws actually pervade the world of 'real' things -- let's say 'physical' things. They manifest in them. So those mathematical entities and laws are actually part of the principles of reality.

So this is one area, perhaps the only remaining area, where this whole notion of a sphere or a realm of ideal being, of the existence of certain ideas kind of on a more abstract level, is still current among certain thinkers and scientists, mathematicians, physicists, etc. It's not at all popular when we come to ethics and talking about values as possible kinds of ideal being, a species of ideal being. But mathematics is. And so why I'm mentioning it is just perhaps you can get a sense, even just from what you might know about mathematics, of like, "Oh, there might be such a stratum of existence as this realm of ideal being," that it's not something that can just be dismissed or pooh-poohed immediately as a silly notion. Sometimes when people introduce teachings on Plato they talk about the ideal horse or the ideal dog or whatever, as if it exists somewhere, and that always struck me as a not very helpful way in; it's almost setting the whole philosophy of Plato up for ridicule. Actually if you sophisticate that a little more, it can be made workable, of course, not ridiculable. But mathematical entities and laws should, for most people, more easily strike one as, "Mm, yeah, that's interesting." They kind of have this existence in another dimension. They're real. They're not just creations. We can't get rid of them. As I said, they pervade the world of physical things. They manifest in the principles of that reality.

And to quote either Kinneging or Hartmann:

Things, acts, and occurrences in the real world [in the physical world] necessarily comply with the principles of mathematics.^[1]

So, you know, I drop this pen, and it moves through the air towards the ground in a trajectory based on principles of mathematics. The way it hangs together dependent on the forces that hold the molecules together, the size of the circumference compared to the size of the diameter -- all these, those mathematical laws shape and govern the actuality, the physical actuality. "Things, acts, and occurrences in the real world [in the physical world] necessarily comply with the principles of mathematics."

But there's a difference if we consider values as species of ideal being, because values differ from other kinds of ideal being -- for example, mathematical entities -- in that values don't automatically shape real things, physical things. They may be realized. They may be actualized in physical existence. We may act on a value. We may express it and manifest it. Or we may not. So the physical, what most people call the 'real' world, may not correspond to the ideal world, the ideal being of a value, unlike mathematical laws where there's this correspondence -- physical things, so-called 'real' things, have to correspond. Values, as Hartmann says, are not "inviolable determinants to which everything physical is subordinate." They're not "inviolable determinants to which everything physical is subordinate." So the notion is that they are real entities existing in this ideal sphere; they're not creations of ourselves. But unlike other entities existing and laws existing in the ideal sphere -- for example, mathematical laws -- everything in physical existence doesn't have to conform. They may conform, they may follow that, they may shape physical reality, or they may not.

Values have a kind of mode of being, Hartmann says, in relationship to the physical world of an 'ought-to-be.' They 'ought to be.' So a value is what ought to be; there ought to be justice, there ought to be kindness, there ought to be mercy, there ought to be truthfulness, etc. And Kinneging says:

When the ideal finds itself in opposition to the real [in other words, when there isn't justice, for example, in the physical world, so the ideal of justice is in opposition to the physical, what he's calling the real], when it is unrealized, the ought-to-be becomes actual. [In other words, the ought-to-be is kind of stimulated; that aspect of the existence of the ideal is stimulated, and he says] The ideal "calls out" to be realized.^[2]

Okay, so they're not automatic determinants. They're not necessarily there in every case, but there's this ought-to-be that goes with them. And as we said in the last part of the talk, that humankind, humanity, human beings are the point of contact between the physical world, the world of perishable things, of impermanence, of coming and going, and birth and death on the one hand, and the imperishable, timeless realm of moral values, of these ideals on the other. Human beings have access to and contact with the ideal world, and in regard to values, that portion of the ideal realm, the realm of the ideal, the realm of ideas, human beings have this kind of crucial linchpin function. It depends on them. Human beings are, in Hartmann's view, the only beings capable of grasping values, sensing them and acting upon them. Only they can convert the ought-to-be into physical reality, the ought-to-be of the ideal into physical reality. Other beings, inanimate objects, etc., cannot do that.

[15:32] So Kinneging writes, really in summary:

The rest of existence is dull and dead to the call of the ideal. Man [humanity] is the guardian of the ought in the world of physical being [in the world of what he calls 'real' being]. In human beings only, the ought-to-be is transformed into the ought-to-do.

The ought-to-be that is part of the call of the moral value in the ideal realm is, in its relationship to the physical realm, is transformed into the ought-to-do. Humankind, this person, that person, I, you, 'ought to do' this. And he writes,

In man only the ought-to-do is transformed into a moral act.^[3]

So we've touched on that before. And we also touched on the fact that this knowing of the elements of the sphere of ideal being, this knowing and perceiving of what we might call ideas, is intuitive -- it's what philosophers call a priori knowledge. It's not a deduction. I grasp it intuitively, and that goes for values as well, as the laws of logic and for mathematical laws. They're intuited, and we know something [snaps fingers], with an immediacy and a kind of certainty, and we recognize that it's a necessary and general truth.

One difference between Hartmann and Plato is with regards to, let's say, the question of what is, so to speak, more real, more substantially real, more true -- the realm, the sphere of ideas, the realm of ideal being, or the realm of physical being. Plato considered the realm of ideal being, the sphere of the ideas, as having, if you like, a more fundamental and truer kind of existence, and the instances in the world were kind of reflections or shadows, even, of that truer, more fundamental existence of ideal things, of a realm of ideas. Hartmann inverts that, and he says -- this "nimbus of loftiness" surrounding Platonic ideas, Hartmann rejects.

Ideal being [for Hartmann is] "a 'thinner', floating, insubstantial being, half-being so to speak, which still lacks the full weight of [proper] being."^[4]

And he criticized Plato, along with many, many others, along the lines that if one gives a sort of primary reality to the sphere of ideas and to that realm of ideal being, one denigrates and devalues the things of life, the things in the transient world of physical existence. I don't know whether that's actually true, and certainly whether or not that was Plato's intention; could read it both ways, and probably different traditions arose out of Plato's thinking with different emphases. But anyway, Hartmann makes that reversal. I'm not sure it's the case that it follows that if you give primary reality to the realm of ideas over and above the instances and the reflections and the instantiations of those ideas in physical reality, whether that corresponds or leads to a denigration, a disinterest, a rejection of the world. But Hartmann thinks it does, along with many other people. That's a main criticism of Plato, as I said, through the centuries, and then for other reasons as well, in terms of his larger system of ontology -- Hartmann rejects that idea and inverts it. So the realm of ideal being for Hartmann is something that kind of has less reality but is still real in a sense.

You know, in the centuries following Plato, and the years of Neoplatonism and Christian thought, this realm of ideas, as I said, was quite central. There's a long thread of the development of that whole notion, the exploration of it into theology, into philosophy, into all kinds of areas. And as it came into different kinds of theology, these ideas, this sphere of ideas, was considered sometimes a part of divinity itself -- in other words, they were aspects or attributes of the divine, sometimes even names of God. So in the Islamic tradition, and in the Jewish tradition, and also in the Christian tradition through Pseudo-Dionysius, they talk about the names of God, related to this notion of the ideas. Or sometimes they're conceived of slightly differently, as if they're almost angelic existences, close to the divine -- they're the first sort of orbit of being, created being around the divine, the first kind of rung of an existential hierarchy. There are many different variations. Or they're emanations or expressions of the divine. So as this notion of the sphere of ideal being filtered into history, got digested, assimilated, worked on, taken up, pondered upon, reflected upon, it took slightly different forms in the way it was worked into different philosophies and theologies and, as I said, with great consequence and a lot of fecundity over the years.

Okay, now I want to actually pause on this question about which is truer, which has the more fundamental kind of existence -- the sphere of physical, the things of physical reality (which would be the view of most people nowadays, and for quite a long time), or the sphere of ideal being. Which is truer? Which has more fundamental or more real existence? So I would like to talk a little bit about mathematics. So ... breathe. I know some of you are very traumatized by mathematics classes in school, etc., or poor mathematics teachers or whatever. But I just want to linger on something as a way of, again, expanding this territory, perhaps. So, yeah, breathe; it won't be terrible. I hope. [laughs]

There's something in mathematics -- some of you will know all this, but -- there's something in mathematics: a class of number called an irrational number. Now, it has a very specific definition, but for our purposes we're going to define it in a slightly imprecise way as a number whose decimal points go on forever, okay? So that's a very loose, imprecise definition. It's not actually the definition of irrational numbers, but it goes with being an irrational number. So you know that number pi that's involved in geometry and circles, with the Greek letter π, is an irrational number. What is it -- 3.1415926, and then it just goes on; I don't know the other digits. But those decimal places go on forever; they never stop. And that's bound up with what it means to be an irrational number.

Apparently the existence of irrational numbers was discovered by a guy called Hippasus. The story goes he was on a ship with some Pythagoreans, some followers of the philosophy of Pythagoras. Now, they, too, believed in the kind of divinity of numbers and the fact that numbers were mystically woven into the cosmic fabric, the fabric of the cosmos. So he was -- I don't know -- on a boat or a ship or some kind of maritime vessel with a bunch of Pythagoreans. And on the deck he was, with the help of geometry and some sticks and stones, etc., explaining to them about his discovery of irrational numbers and proving to them how they must exist -- for which he got very little thanks; in fact they were completely outraged and threw him overboard. [laughs] So I hope that they were in a small boat, on a small pond, and that he could swim, and just swam to shore and was safe. I don't know. But it so offended their system of philosophy and their sensibility, this idea that a number could be irrational like that, could not be specifiable, its decimal points go on forever.

But there are the existence of these irrational numbers. So pi, as I said, is an example of an irrational number. What is pi, if you remember from school? If you measure the diameter of a circle, then you can say that the circumference of the circle will be of a length of π × the diameter, or 2 × the radius × π. And the area of the circle will be πr2, okay? And again, there may or may not be pain associated, but I'm sure you remember this from school. But pi is an irrational number. So is -- and this might have been what Hippasus was showing -- the square root of 2. So again, if you have a triangle, a right angle triangle with its two shorter sides being each 1 unit in length, then the hypotenuse, according to Pythagoras's theorem, is the square root of 1^[2:1] + 1^[2:2]. 1^[2:3] + 1^[2:4] is 1 + 1 = 2, and so the hypotenuse is the square root of 2. The square root of 2 also turns out to be an irrational number -- I don't know, 1.414 something-or-other. It goes on forever.

There are many other numbers like this -- I mean, famous numbers, but there are all kinds of numbers like this. There's Euler's number, the natural logarithm. In fact, all square roots of natural numbers, other than perfect squares like 4 and 9 which have square roots of 2 and 3, all other square roots -- like the square root of 6 or the square root of 8 or whatever -- they're also irrational numbers. I'll explain why I'm talking about this in a second. [laughs] There's this strange class of numbers called irrational numbers. There's also a whole class of numbers called imaginary numbers. And again, some of you will know this from slightly higher mathematics. So they are -- call them i or j, they're the square root of -1. So when you multiply -2 × -2, you get 4. What that means is two numbers are the square root of 4: negative 2 and positive 2. What you can't get usually, in the usual way of thinking, is the square root of, say, -4. I can times 2 by -2, and I'll get -4, but if I times 2 by 2, or -2 by -2, I get 4. So the square root of -4 seems to not exist, so mathematicians at some point just made an imaginary number called i, which is the square root of -1. They're sometimes called complex numbers.

So that's a whole other class of numbers that kind of has a strange existence. But these numbers, as I said, turn out to be fundamentally woven into the governing of the universe -- in mathematical laws, but also in physical laws. So they govern the geometry of things, in terms of the circumference will have a length of pi times the diameter. The hypotenuse of that triangle, if it's 1 unit and 1 unit, will have a length of the square root of 2, an irrational number. All kinds of physical laws, especially when we get down to quantum physics, include this imaginary number of the square root of -1, and numbers like the natural logarithm number, Euler's number e, etc.

When we think about this, this is quite interesting. So numbers like pi and i, this imaginary number, imaginary square root of -1, and numbers like the natural logarithm e, are fundamentally wrapped up in physical reality. And, if you like, they are dimensions of physical reality. They govern physical things, and the laws that pertain -- they're part of the laws that govern physical things. Yet they never manifest themselves or manifest precisely. Why don't they manifest precisely? Because, for an irrational number -- imagine: okay, this circumference is exactly the length of pi times -- let's say the diameter is 1. It's exactly the length of pi, or the hypotenuse of that right angle triangle is exactly the square root of 2. That means if I try and make a triangle with that size hypotenuse, or I try and make a circle with that size circumference, I cannot do that. It cannot exist, because the actual length of it is infinitely specifiable. In other words, I get it to 3.1415, and it's just a little bit more because it's 3.14159, and then I go to that, it's just a little bit more, 3.141592, and then ... This will just go on forever. We'll never reach the exact length there of the circumference. The circumference can never be that exact length. It's always going to be a little bit more or a little bit less, because I can always go to the next decimal point.

So here are these things, here are these entities -- pi, i, e -- fundamentally wrapped up in physical reality. They are, so to speak, dimensions of physical reality. They govern physical things. They're involved in the laws that govern physical things. Yet they never manifest exactly or precisely. And if we're talking about abstract, imaginary numbers, like this imaginary square root of -1, it never manifests. How can it manifest? How can I have it? I can have one apple. I can have five apples. I can have eight apples. I can have half an apple. But I can't have i apples. I can't have the square root of -1 apples, or the square root of -9 apples. It's, in a way, abstract and imaginary. It manifests in this indirect way. It itself doesn't manifest, but it governs manifestation.

Actually, there are also quantum mechanical reasons why a perfect circle can never physically manifest -- in other words, that circumference can never exactly be pi times the diameter -- that have to do with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, in terms of measuring the actual location of something. So if you get down to atomic level, where actually is that atom? We can't locate it precisely. So if we measure the length of, say, this -- whatever we're talking about -- piece of string or piece of wood, actually it doesn't have a determinate length. It doesn't have an exact length that we can know exactly. Maybe there are also issues, at an even deeper quantum level, about the quantum nature of space and time, so that even when we consider, "Okay, well, this thing, this atom might not be here or there, or we can't determine exactly what distance it is from something else, but space itself can have a distance," but actually recent quantum theory more and more starts to dispute that.

Why am I going on about all this? Some of you might be wondering. It's certainly not for intellectual titillation. It's certainly not to intimidate. [laughs] Or to confuse, or to re-traumatize anyone. And it's not for intellectual titillation; that's not the point. That's not why I'm going into this. It's not that it's merely, "Oh, that's interesting. Hmm! How interesting!" Nor is the point to induce in you a kind of genial bafflement at existence, which sometimes seems to be, for some people, the point of emptiness teachings, as if that itself were some kind of achievement or goal, to be sort of puzzled by the (in inverted commas) 'mystery of existence.' That's not the reason. But there's something about this parallel with certain mathematical entities and this notion that there might be a realm of ideal being, a sphere of ideas, eidos, idein, that pertain not just to mathematical entities but also to things like love, beauty, goodness, etc., that can never perfectly manifest, but still they shape, govern manifestations, they direct manifestations, and they exist kind of in this other realm.

So there's a parallel here. Actually, there is another class, as well, of these kind of, if you like, abstract or ideal entities. So one is these irrational numbers, like we talked about -- pi and e; one is these imaginary numbers, like the square root of -1, i; and another is the entity that's called the wave function in quantum mechanics. It's also called Schrödinger's equation. It's actually an equation that -- it's a sort of fluid mathematical entity, if you like, that exists in an abstract multidimensional mathematical space. When you square the solution of that equation, you get the probability of finding a particle here or there, or with this velocity or that velocity, or whatever, at a certain time. [35:33] So the actual existence of it is this fluid mathematical entity, if you like, that exists in a kind of abstract, multidimensional, mathematical space. What kind of existence is that? The mind can hardly get around what it means. It's an ideal kind of existence. It's very abstract. And yet it bears a direct relationship with the shaping of our physical world and reality and what manifests on the physical plane.

So two points here. One is not only might there be this realm of ideal being, which we can see more clearly and more obviously for most of us in the realm of something like mathematics, but it might also apply to the realm of values (point one). Point two is this question of which is more real. Which is more real? Is the law more real, that has the number pi in it, even though I can never manifest that number? Is the law more real when it has the imaginary number, even though I can never manifest that imaginary number itself? Is the wave function more real, that exists in this kind of ideal, abstract, multidimensional, mathematical space? Is that more real than the physical manifestation? Which is more real? The realm of ideal being or the realm of physical instantiation of ideal things?

So as I mentioned, this realm of ideas was often considered divine, as part of the divine, or very close to the divine, etc. And I wonder whether, with regard to values and virtues as a kind of, a species of ideas, whether they, too, we might consider them divine, just like Plato's ideas. They have this kind of infinite beyondness to them, yet they're also immanent -- they manifest in shaping manifest, physical reality. We can have, just as with divinity, this infinite beyondness and immanence, transcendence and immanence. Just as with divinity, we could have a clear kind of concept of what that divinity is or a vague and more obscure concept or idea or notion. There can be, and just as with divinity, something divine, soulmaking in relation to them, and/or they can become image.

In regard to their not having spatio-temporal being, we could say the same of images, right? An image doesn't really have spatio-temporal being. It exists, as we're saying, timelessly, with this element of eternality. Or you could say, as Corbin says, they happen, images happen, in hierophanic time, in the mundus imaginalis. Maybe that's the same thing as saying the eternality. Kinneging says that ideas or the elements of the sphere of ideal being don't have spatio-temporal being, but they're attached to and carried by spatial and temporal being. They're attached to and carried by spatial and temporal being. So again, there's this notion of participation in the Platonic sense there.

So we're talking about: how can we possibly conceive of, what kind of nature, what kind of ontology or being do these values have? And there's something, I think, important in this leaning towards this kind of ontology. Important possibilities, I think, open up. I want to give another example in the realm of values and ideal being, values as a species of ideal being. I remember -- it was sixteen, seventeen years ago -- I had an operation in hospital, and they gave me a general anaesthetic. And they were just about to inject the general anaesthetic, and they said, "Okay, in about ten seconds, you'll start to feel sleepy, and then you'll lose consciousness." So they were kind of preparing me, which sometimes they don't do, but in this case they did.

So they said that, and I was aware of the possibility that I might, you know -- some possibility; small possibility, probably, but -- some possibility that I might die in the operation, so that those seconds might be my last seconds alive as they're telling me this, these seconds: "In about ten seconds, you're going to lose consciousness." And I just instinctively and kind of spontaneously said to myself in those seconds of dwindling consciousness, "Mettā, mettā." And I put my faith in that. That was what I aligned myself with. I didn't think that much about it at the time, but several correspondences made me think about it recently. I wasn't practising mettā at that point. It wasn't that I was saying, "May I be well," or an intention for mettā, for well-wishing towards other beings and myself. It was sort of tangentially implied, but I wasn't actually practising mettā at that point. I certainly wasn't making some kind of rebirth wish for myself -- you know, "If I have that in my consciousness when I die, then that will be a good rebirth" or something. I wasn't hoping that somehow mettā would magically protect me from death and harm, as the Buddha sometimes says in his descriptions of and his teachings of mettā. Nor was I kind of dissolving my being into the feeling of mettā.

Looking back, I wonder: could it be that without realizing it at the time, I was kind of orienting myself to, I was giving myself to, I was somehow viewing my life and death as given to, as participating in, as devoted to, as in reverence of mettā as a kind of idea in the sense that we're talking about, as a kind of eidos? Now, we talked about the need for anchoring, and how human beings need anchoring, and especially when things are difficult. And we talked that anchors work best if there's an anchoring in something other -- so, like we said, with an anchor for a ship that's floating in water, [it] needs to be made not of water, and the anchor itself needs to be not of water, and it needs to be in -- what's the word? -- tractable contact with something that's not water. So the anchor needs to be not water, and the anchor needs to have a hold on or be held by something that's not water -- in other words, something that has more steadiness; it's of a different substance.

For us as human beings, this is profoundly helpful, if there's something we can find to trust, that can be for us a spiritual anchor, an anchor for the soul. I'm not really talking about an anchor for attention, like a mantra or breath or body sensations, or even mettā as an anchor for attention. But is there something, so to speak, on another plane that we can trust? Even if the sense of that is vague, something that -- again, like the example I'm giving -- if I knew that I was dying in the next minutes, I could give myself, I would give myself to that; I would abandon my being to it; I would see my whole life in the light of that -- not hoping that it would somehow save my earthly life or cure cancer or whatever, but something I would want to give myself to, I would give myself to, give the gift of my being to.

So there are many possibilities here, and obviously we each have to kind of find what works for us as an anchor. It's not a kind of prescriptive formula here. But there's something, again, in the notion of the realm of ideal being, and in certain kinds of elements of that realm of ideal being -- for instance, values -- that might function in this way. If I'm going out, if I'm going out of existence right now, or things get really difficult, what do I trust giving myself to? What do I bow to? What do I trust bowing to? What do I pour my remaining being out to? It's not really for me, even. It's not for anyone specific. So it could be love, goodness -- these are vague notions, you know? It could be a notion of a deity, you know -- Kuan Yin, God, the cosmos if it has a kind of soul-sense, or the earth, or Buddha-nature. So, as I said, it's not practising mettā or a mantra continuously for the sake of an anchor in difficult times or whatever; obviously that's helpful. There are times when that is helpful. But we're talking more like a devotion of the heart and soul, a devotion of the being, some kind of fundamental statement or orientation from my soul to existence, to being, to the mystery of things, to the cosmos, to the divine, to the Buddha-nature, about what I want my life to be and to have been about -- even, and this is important, given the fact that for anyone orienting this way, giving themselves in this way, aligned in this way, devoted in this way, for anyone doing that, their actual life will have come up short from that idea and that ideal in so many ways, of course.

What we're talking about here is getting in touch with a sense of another level of things. And it might be, this kind of, what I'm talking about, it may be only a moment here and there. But what may come out of that can give this other dimension of anchoring, and then that gives a different perspective on our life, a different perspective on what happens. So there's a possible kind of meditative journey there. It's hard to put this stuff into words. There's something mysterious in it, for sure. But it's also hard to articulate, and it's so foreign to our usual way of thinking of things because it sounds quite abstract. Sometimes when I have tried to explain this, I get the sense that the person thinks I'm talking about something material -- it's hard to grasp, sometimes for people, or it's hard for people sometimes to get a sense of something that's not material, that's timeless. And this notion of giving myself to that ideality, to that eidos, to that idea, is not only a kind of actual giving myself to it in life. So my mettā and your mettā and anyone's mettā will never be perfect. It will never be constant. It will never be complete. I will always fall short of the ideal.

So this immaterial, timeless, ideal existence that I give myself to, but in ways that giving, like the existence of the eidos, the giving and the existence have other dimensions to them, beyond the actuality in life. It includes the actuality, but the actuality never really measures up. But this notion of eidos are like images -- they're not material; they're timeless, and they have these beyonds to them. They have other dimensions. And that is what gives them traction as anchors for us. It doesn't imply that our actions and choices and how they mirror or refract the ideal or the image is irrelevant. So an idea or an eidos is only abstract if how we are in the world and how or whether it instantiates is irrelevant, if we don't pay it any mind. Then it's abstract. But there's something here -- this ideal being, this stratum of existence, these ideas, this ideational-imaginal. It's something greater than this impermanent phenomenon that I am, or that I appear to be. It's something also beyond me. And in the case of that example of the mettā before the operation, that 'something beyond me' is not the fact of all beings, mettā to all beings. Sure, that's beyond me. We're talking about it's beyond me in a different way. There's something deathless and timeless, as I said, there, greater than this impermanent mind/body practising mettā and then extinguished by death, for example. But we're not talking about something that goes on forever -- neither me nor my mettā go on forever in time. The deathlessness, the timelessness, is of the order of eternality. It's the non-spatio-temporal being of this realm of ideas.

But back then, you know, I didn't really understand. I didn't really have this language for it. But remembering back, "Oh, yeah. Beauty was there in that, in that orientation of my being in those seconds before going unconscious." And a vague sense, very vague at the time, of the kind of particular ontological category or kind of being, the kind of truth that such ideas have, that such values have as species of ideal existence. Trust was there. Trusting, somehow, in that -- little as I could even articulate or conceptualize or delineate what it was at the time that was exactly going on there. And there was eros in relationship to it, and dimensionality. So you can see how many of the elements of the imaginal -- trust, beauty, eros, dimensionality. We're talking about something -- we could say it's a kind of imaginal; ideas become imaginal, or the ideational-imaginal. How much it overlaps there.

But we need, I think, this kind of sense of a beyondness and of other dimensions. We need it for our soul. We need it also in our ethical orientations and considerations. There's something that underpins our ethics. We said that's why someone like Richard Rorty, it becomes very hard for them to talk about ethics. They have very little to say because they absolutely refuse any sense of dimensionality. But without a kind of beyondness or a transcendent element, space, this dimensionality shading into divinity, without that aspect or those dimensions to the virtues and values, or rather, without them in relation to the virtues and values that we still somehow in our society enact, enjoy, honour certain virtues and values to some extent, but without that, the sense of dimensionality, we still kind of go along with certain values and virtues. Or rather, perhaps, maybe that's the dominant view, that we go along with certain virtues and values, but without that dimensionality, without that beyondness, without that transcendence, without that dimensionality shading into divinity, and then those virtues and values, without those dimensions, become maybe just a kind of pale ghost, almost a charade of what virtues and values can be.

So eros without any dimensionality allowed -- what happens there? We've talked about that before, about if eros is not allowed dimensionality; it has to go horizontal. But right now I want to talk about something different, which is just what is the flavour of it when it doesn't have that dimensionality, when it's not allowed that dimensionality? Sometimes people -- in fact, I don't know, maybe most people who can spend enormous amounts of money, for instance, on weddings, which is a kind of celebration of love and eros, etc. But how often does it have that real dimensionality to it? Celebrating love, celebrating eros, making a big thing of it, but it might also be limited in these I think very important and fundamental ways.

Or the value, the virtue of determination. So, for example, the passion of footballers and football teams. What's that determination that they might have -- in service of what? So again, a lot of hoopla, a lot of kind of investment in it, but it's not seen in this light that allows its dimensionality to be sensed. And yet, we still kind of celebrate those virtues. There's some kind of caught-in-between place, perhaps. Or again, sexual enjoyment when there's no dimensionality allowed. What does that become? It's a pale ghost. Or individuality -- again, we kind of tend to celebrate that and respect that and value it. It's a value. But why? Without the dimensionality, it's not any kind of manifestation of, an echoing or a mirroring of a divinity through and in my personhood. Or dynamism, restlessness as values -- deep restlessness, dynamism. Without any deep purpose, it's just a kind of reactive busyness. Or peace in contrast -- without the dimensions of depth or sacredness, it becomes just about relaxation and de-stressing.

And all these values -- peace, dynamism, individuality, sexual pleasure, love, eros, determination -- they all kind of atrophied or have had their dimensions amputated in a lot of cases. Or perhaps people are still unconsciously responding to a sort of implicit sense of the dimensionality in them; I don't know. But there's potentially a kind of poverty in our life and in our society without them, and also poverty when we then come to consider and ponder the realm of ethics. So the notion of values as having ideal existence, as existing, if you like, in the sphere or realm of ideal being, gives them a certain dimensionality -- and, again, dimensionality, I think, shading into divinity, which we'll come back to. And that does a tremendous amount for the soul. [57:17] It's necessary for soulmaking, and it's necessary for soulmaking in relationship to values and virtues and ethics.

So I remember I mentioned about working in a dyad and just being struck by the sense of participating in the image of myself and my partner in the dyad, and the grace of that, and the privilege of that, the privilege of participating in the image which has these higher roots in divinity, and the eternality. And all of that, just a little glimpse, giving a different sense of a relationship to death. So touched, so blessed, so graced; such a privilege to touch and to participate, to be graced by and to participate in something which has these higher roots in divinity, has these other, divine dimensions. But might the same be true also of values when we sense them that way, that they give our life -- when they're dimensionalized, when we open to the sense of participating in their ideal being, participating in these other dimensions of being, this shading into divinity, that they give our life meaningfulness? That's what gives our life meaningfulness. That's what touches us. That's what makes a difference. So I've given the example previously, in the previous talk -- probably in the talk on dyad practice, I imagine -- but it could be with any image, and now I'm saying as well with values. When we sense them in this fuller, richer, more soulful way, there's a privilege and a beauty and a grace in being touched by them, in being called by them, in participating in them, in being aligned with them and sensing them. Even in sensing them, the soul receives, graced with a sense of meaningfulness and beauty, loftiness, aspiration.

So there's a lot shared here between what we're calling values, when we give them, when we allow them to have this ideal level of being, this existence at the level of the realm of ideas, just like images, just like imaginal images. And with all that, there comes the eros, the beyondness of them, the dimensionality shading into divinity. It calls our eros. Our eros also will reciprocally create more of that beyondness. Hartmann wouldn't like that, I suppose, because he just leant on the discover side, rather than the create side. But we can have an erotic relationship with values. And in a way, they have this unfathomable, inexhaustible dimension, just like pi and e and those mathematical examples. And just like images, where our life echoes and mirrors and refracts an image, an image refracts into our life, it won't be 100 per cent identical. There's a kind of unattainability; we cannot attain a perfect instance of our living out an image, or mirroring an image, or a perfect instance, a complete instance of this value in our life, this or that value. There's a certain impossibility, unfathomability, unattainability, inexhaustibility to values when they have this sense filled out, when we fill out the sense that way, when we perceive them that way.

I'll read you a passage by Hartmann. It's quite an interesting passage, which we could use and take in different directions, also regarding climate change, particularly when the outcome is uncertain or even likely that we're going to fail to avert tragedies. So with regard to action and faith and doing the right thing with respect to climate change, but also in regard to this beyondness of ideas; they have a kind of dimensions of beyondness. So he writes:

[Optimism] consists of a kind of general faith in the goodness of man. [Again, pardon me for the gender-biased language.] It manifests itself in a capacity to detect what is good and genuine in another's disposition amidst less worthy tendencies and to seize upon the good [to have faith in it], even to draw it out and develop it by the influence of one's trust. [But] beyond this there is still a higher ethos of faith. [So he's actually talking about the value of faith -- that's the context of this passage.] Beyond this there is still a higher ethos of faith -- in the vision of the great moral ideals of life, which the individual person does not actualize, and in the vision of the great upward strivings of humanity. Distant goals and vast enterprises require a different kind of faith, a faith which temporal unattainability does not stifle.^[5]

The fact that I will not reach that goal, or this goal, this ideal, will not be reached in my lifetime or even in time, it doesn't dampen the faith. It doesn't dampen the devotion and orientation.

It inheres [he says] in the essence of all such outlooks upon life -- and these are those which lend its highest meaning to our existence -- that the non-actuality of the goal does not prejudice the reality of the undertaking.

So the fact that we may not actualize the goal does not stop us from undertaking that venture, that aspiration, and acting on it.

Herein the potent moral element of "not seeing and yet believing" [I think that's a reference to Doubting Thomas and Christ] attains its culminating point.

So I haven't seen the fruition of this. I will not see the fruition of this. It will never be perfect. It will never be manifest completely -- certainly not in my lifetime -- and yet I have the faith. I have the devotion. I have the alignment. I can instigate action. I can devote and commit my being to that ideal.

For it is the high ideals [he writes] which man never sees actualized. To this lofty spirit of faith corresponds Hope -- a valuational sense of a distinct kind. It is not properly a moral value, like faith; it is not a new "virtue," but only an accompanying emotional factor, the form of happiness which accords with faith and which anticipates its contents.

So there's faith and hope in an ideal and in working towards and in trying to manifest an ideal, even knowing it won't manifest completely or in my lifetime. There's a lot here that's related to the movement of eros. And eros, remember, will always create more beyonds. The angel is always out ahead. So especially in the higher ideals, in the higher values, there's a kind of impossibility that go with them, that pertain to them. The image or the idea, the ideal, is the impossible, in a way. Actually there's a whole other reason why values have a kind of impossibility to them, related to the antinomies, the oppositions between, contradictions between values, but I don't want to complicate things, so I'll come back to that later.

But an image is an impossibility in terms of its manifestation, its full, complete replication, echoing, mirroring in manifest, physical reality in our lives. So the image and what we're talking about, these ideas or ideals, are the impossible. But the impossible is, if you like, the milk, the sustenance, the seed of the possible. It points a direction. It inspires, it emboldens, it roots us, it anchors us. But there's always the beyondness. As we said when we talked about images, the angel is always out ahead. It's moving away from us, but beckoning us, and pulling us as if by magnetism. We move with it. Our life moves with it.

[1:07:13] Now, there are all kinds of implications here very much to do with eros and soulmaking, of course, but just to touch on one briefly right now regarding guilt and healing. Sometimes, you know, we feel great dukkha when we have or we believe we have acted in ways we don't respect. And it's easy or common then for that to become a kind of quagmire or storm of repetitive papañca and self-judgment, and that whole nexus and difficulty of guilt. In all that, though, there is probably something -- a value, a moral value -- that we are or want to be devoted to. In the middle of all that mess and self-recrimination and self-obsession, there is actually a value that we are or we want to be devoted to. And that value may become clear to us as an idea, as an ideal, and/or as an image. Remember, values are an element of the imaginal. So it may become clear as a value idea itself, or it may become clear as an image, or both.

So that's quite important. Within all this storm of papañca and guilt, this swirling sort of vortex of that, it's possible -- it might be possible, with a little careful discernment and work in meditation -- to find amidst all that what is the value that we're devoted to. And either it comes in image form or it comes in this ideal form, in the form of an idea, of a value itself. And having contacted this sense of and clarity about the value, then a couple of things might be really helpful. We can meditate on that value itself in a way that our devotion to it, our love for it, are felt deeply. So I get clear what it is, and then I feel my love and my devotion it it. I feel it deeply in the heart, in the body, in the soul. So obviously, again, here the energy body is going to be very important -- the sense of alignment, of energization, of harmonization are integral to that sense of devotion, and necessary.

And then, within all that maelstrom of guilt and self-obsession, etc., we can find the value, we can meditate on it in a way that we feel that devotion and allow that sense of devotion and love for it to align the being -- the heart, the body, the energy body, the soul -- and dwell there, stay steady with that alignment and energization so that something beautiful and positive comes out of the mistake, the shortcoming, the ethical transgression.

But a second piece is important here, related to what I was saying just before. It's important to recognize that both values and images have always some portion of them that is transcendent in the sense of beyond -- beyond what we can ever perfectly mirror or manifest. We can never perfectly mirror that image or manifest perfectly that idea. Their beyondness, their transcendent dimension is necessary if they are to remain always erotic objects for us. So eros needs this beyondness; it needs something to be able to move into. It also creates that something, that beyondness. So we can live and try to speak and act and feel and think in service and devotion to these values and images as much as possible, but that will always fall short of their ideal or imaginal fullness.

Accepting this and still striving and devoting oneself in the gaze and in the act is a kind of soul-wisdom. And it relates to that passage from Hartmann that we just read. And the residual dukkha there from the awareness of their forever-beyondness -- remember, with the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, the sense of the erotic object will always grow and deepen; always the angel out ahead, no matter how much we grow -- but that residual dukkha from the awareness of their forever-beyondness is just part of our existential situation as souls, as human beings. Sometimes, you know, people have told me, "Oh, this happened in relationship with someone, and I was like this, or I did that, or I didn't do this." Sometimes a person is just spinning and spinning in guilt about that, and very painful. But is it possible to go right to that dukkha, right to that painful spinning, and in the pain, it's telling me about my love? It's telling me about my devotion. I find, "What is it? What is this devotion to? And can I feel that devotion? Can I let it align me? And also, do I realize that I cannot perfectly mirror, echo, replicate that image in my life?" So sometimes people are, for example, in a romantic or sexual relationship, kind of inspired or led by a certain image of themselves as lover, or relating their relationship and how they are to an image, a potential image of lover. But it will fall short. That doesn't mean that we don't aspire to that, we don't have that magnetic pull, we don't have that devotion. But there's a wisdom in knowing, "Yeah, I'm never going to completely replicate it."

Okay. I want to say more about this relationship of soulmaking and values, virtues, and the ideational-imaginal, but let's stop there for today.