Sila and Soul (Part 5)

So it's possible in life, and among the complexities and difficulties and the busynesses of life, it's possible that we, at some point, start to feel an erotic attraction, we have eros for values, for moral values. And that eros allows, instigates, stimulates soulmaking in relationship to those values. Or in the dynamic, in the process, in the journey of soulmaking, anyway, at some point, moral values begin to come alive, begin to be swept up into, included, involved in the soulmaking dynamic. And as such, either way, the values become, for us, erotic-images. Or this value or that value, or values as a whole, moral values as a whole become erotic-images, become ideational-images. The ideational-imaginal sense of values can begin to open up. And with that, implicit in all that, is the sense of them, of these moral values as ideas/ideals, having dimensionality, having this beyondness, and being pregnant with meaningfulness, meaningfulnesses, and gracing us with a sense, an expanded sense of meaningfulness. All this is part of what happens as soulmaking starts to involve values, as values start to stimulate the soulmaking and the eros. And they complicate, enrich, deepen, strengthen the relationship with moral values in this sense.

And of course, that affects our choices in life, affects our perspectives on life, our sensibilities in life, and our choices, so it becomes easier to choose that which is not easy, to make this ethical choice, this sacrifice, this renunciation, this involvement in an activism or protest or whatever. We're not so limited that we are pushed and constrained to choose just what is easy or what we think makes us 'happy.' We can talk more about the 'joy' of this kind of relationship. 'Joy,' for me, is a richer word. It's a more soulful and spiritual word than just 'happiness.'

And part of that joy, and part of that whole relationship, is the capacity to be challenged, and the willingness to be challenged, even the desire to be challenged by and through the calling and the beyondness of this sense of whatever value or values we're talking about; a capacity, a willingness to be stretched, to stretch oneself. Aspiration grows. Nobility, dignity comes with all this; a capacity, an ability, a strength to abide and choose independent of the dominant view, the common view of those around us in the wider society, or in our particular sub-cultures or sub-traditions. Beauty, in all of this, devotion, and meaningfulness can all come once the values, in this sense, start being incorporated, worked on, fermented in the soulmaking dynamic.

And that will, of course, like working with any image, working with the ideational-imaginal in this sense will start to include the perceptions of self, other, world, and the eros itself, our love, our passion for the values themselves -- all those aspects (self, other, world, eros) start to become imaginal, start to gain all this dimensionality, etc. So there's a lot of power in this, in the best sense, a lot of enrichening and deepening. And strength comes, and capacity and willingness comes, as I said.

A little while ago -- I'm not sure, probably more than a year ago, I can't remember -- but I was on a little panel about climate change, responses to climate change in religious groups. And I was on a little panel with one of the other participants. And one of the other persons on the panel was George Marshall, who some of you will know. He's based in Oxford, and he does a lot of research -- I'm not sure, sociology and psychology and such -- research on messages we put out about climate change, or messages that are out there about climate change, and how they impact, and what basically works to make a difference, to engage people, and what doesn't work. So it's some really interesting work, and very, I find, valuable sort of input. And we were on this panel, and it was his turn to give a little presentation, and one of the things that struck me in what he was sharing was that he had spoken to an Islamic community somewhere, or several Islamic communities, and sort of asked them about this, and he had some questionnaires prepared and things. But what struck me was that they said, in terms of how they want to respond to the challenge of climate change, that they want it to be a jihad, a holy war. And of course, take away all the craziness that goes with that word, unfortunately. Jihad means 'holy war,' 'holy engagement' in a noble struggle. And so they didn't want to just, "Oh, remember to put the recycling out," or something like that. They wanted something that was really, genuinely a stretch for them.

So we want to feel like we're engaged in that way. So there is both a certain soul-stance of the religious orientation and sensibility that actually wants that beyondness, wants that stretch. And it's related to all this business about dimensionality and beyondness and meaningfulness, etc., duty, that we have as elements of the imaginal. But there is also, as I said, once the soulmaking starts involving the values, once the values become erotic objects, then also the willingness and the capacity to stretch and be stretched are there, and the strength to undertake all that starts to come in the being. As I said, we can start more and more to stand in our values, for our values, stand by our values.

I remember being also part of a little Dharma group, talking about climate change, and trying to make different creative responses to it -- DANCE (Dharma Action Network for Climate Engagement). And one evening we were in a little group, and a couple of the people were saying that they were a little aversive to protests and engaging in protest, or going here or there and being part of a protest around inaction against climate change, and for action against climate change. And the sense that they had of protest and why they were a bit aversive to it and disinclined was that, for them, a protest seemed to be a negative thing: "I'm protesting against this or that." And they didn't like that negative connotation that had to do with anger, etc., if I remember.

But actually, the etymology of that word 'protest,' to 'protest' means: 'pro-' is 'for,' and 'test' is related to 'testify' or 'testament.' So it means, and certainly from its Latin roots and through the French -- often it originally meant something much more positive. Pro-test: I testify for something. I bear witness to something. I make a declaration, a testament for (pro-) something. And that was the original meaning. It had a much more positive connotation. And implicit in that, bearing witness for something, or to something -- I bear witness to something -- only as a consequence of that particular orientation and commitment is one bearing witness against something else. So I bear witness for, I take a stand, I testify for the need and the importance for immediate prioritizing of action on species loss or climate change, or whatever it is, and as a consequence, I'm bearing witness against the inaction, the laissez-faire, the empty words, etc.

And so all this moral strength, moral courage can come when the relationship with values opens up. And we said the importance of anchoring, and the anchoring needing to have another dimension, a 'beyond' to it, so that when there's difficulty -- there's difficulty either in terms of personal renunciation, difficult choices in one's life, because they're the right thing to do, because they're ethical, but there is cost, or whether it's the difficulty of being in a protest or an action of some kind, an activist action of some kind -- we need that strength. We need that steadiness. We need that anchoring. We need that courage and that largeness of soul. Or when it's difficulty in terms of -- increasingly, I hear many people who are doing research, etc., predicting, you know, the species loss and the climate change is happening so quickly that there will be all kinds of breakdowns in terms of social structure and our larger structures of civilization, you know, in the not-too-distant future. I don't know if that's the case or not, or to what extent it's the case. But then there's difficulty on a massive scale -- not just a personal difficulty, not just difficulty in this situation, but a much wider social difficulty. [12:52]

But it's interesting, you know, the word 'crisis' is, at its root, from a Greek word, I think, which means 'decision.' So 'crises' are often decision points, points of decision, moments, times of the necessity of decision, this way or that way. And crises -- difficult as they are, challenging as they are, costly as they are -- can often also be doorways, opportunities. In fact, that word, as I've mentioned, I think, several times over different talks, 'opportunity' -- its root is porta, which is 'door.' So a crisis is a time for a decision, but it can also be a door, opening a door. I go through this door or that door. And a door to what? It's an opportunity to practise in the deepest, fullest, widest, and sometimes most challenging sense of the word. And you can see this relationship between crises and opportunity -- not that we wish crises, not that we want them to come, and we're sort of bored when there isn't a crisis. But you can see this relationship in its extreme form -- again, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as I mentioned in the talk, very extreme crisis situation, and it brought out such courage and such moral integrity and steadfastness. Or as I mentioned also in a previous talk, Viktor Frankl reporting on those among the starving concentration camp inmates at Auschwitz, those few who would give away their last piece of bread, and in intense crisis situation, and it brings out something so profound in humanity, something so beautiful in the soul. In that desert, in that ravaged landscape, a flower blooms. And we can enjoy and be touched by its fragrance, its perfume, its colour, its beauty, years and years later. And it makes a difference to us.

So it might be that crises at different levels -- as I said, personal; or in the middle of a difficult situation, like a protest or an action when it gets a bit hairy; or much wider, with climate change, with species extinction, the possibility of social collapse, societal collapse, the collapse of certain structures that we've become very used to in our civilization -- they present themselves as crises, but they can also offer doorways. So in the midst of the most difficult situation is the possibility of the most beautiful soul-expression, the most beautiful soul-allegiance, the most beautiful and deep and touching and far-reaching soul-stances.

So again, I want to quote from Nicolai Hartmann, who points out, quite interestingly, that -- I have to preface this, because he uses the word 'reality.' Because of some confusion about ontology there, different systems of ontology, we can substitute the word 'actuality.' So in other words, when a value is 'actualized,' we talk about the 'reality' of that value, when it's actually present, manifested, chosen, etc. So he wrote:

The value of the [actuality] of a value is immediately evident [in other words, when there's kindness there, when there's justice there, clearly it's valuable; we know that; we feel it as a value], whenever and wherever that's the case. However, "[t]he non-[actuality] of values also has a value [in other words, the absence of a value, the blocking of a value, the pervasive blindness to a value that may be around us]. This becomes perceptible, as soon as we consider that active, intended realization is possible only where a value is non-existent, and that, in addition to that, it is active, intended realization, in which the higher, moral, species of value is realized [is actualized]."^[1]

In other words, in a situation where there is no justice, to work towards pointing that out, and supporting the possibility and the actuality of justice to come there -- that initial absence of justice was a value in that it enabled the values of the sensibility, the choice, the action, and the actualization of a value. And it's all those -- sensibility, choice, and actualization -- that make a moral value. In other words, that active engagement, that doing, that choosing by a human being is itself valuable.

So it's a strange fact that the absence of a value has value because it allows our moral being to engage, to work, to grow. Hence the value of attainment of a value in the world stands in opposition here to the value of attempting the effort, even if the goal is not attained or not even attainable. Again, we're back to that beyondness, and also back to this question of intention being central, as the Buddha pointed out, as well, in his teachings on karma and sīla. So the non-actuality of a value is also a value. And so, strangely, crises, absences, immoral situations, situations of immorality are strangely potentially valuable because they allow us to exercise our moral being, through which we grow, through which the soul grows.

This actually echoes teachings from way back in the Zohar. And if I can find a little quote here, there's a curious quote. It says:

There is no good so perfect as that which issues out of evil.^[2]

That's one of those almost poetic lines in the Zohar that can get interpreted in multiple ways. But could it have something to do with this point that I'm trying to make about crisis as opportunity, and the non-actuality of a value having a value, as Hartmann says? There's maybe, perhaps, a relationship also with, you know, we put so much emphasis in the Soulmaking Dharma, when there's dukkha, of being with the dukkha and working on it, and having this crucibilic relationship to it that allows soulmaking. And sometimes the profundity of the soulmaking that comes out of dukkha is really worth the effort. Whether that's always the 'best' kind of soulmaking, whatever that might mean, comes out of dukkha -- I wouldn't necessarily say that.

There's also Adin Steinsaltz, who, I think, commenting on that Zohar passage -- I'm not sure -- but anyway, he writes somewhere or other:

It is only in a world on the brink of disaster, one where the potential for evil, suffering, and ignorance is always at hand, that such values as kindness, compassion, courage, and wisdom can be actualized. A paradise, a Garden of Eden world [he writes], would afford little or no opportunity for the exercise of values, and for the development of character.^[3]

Actually, one more passage from Nicolai Hartmann. He's talking here about conflict and situations in life (I'll come back to this), different kinds of conflict, and not just conflict of wars or arguing people, but conflict in terms of different choices or the complexity of situations, or different parties wanting different things or pulling in different directions, or values pulling in different directions, etc. [23:31] And he writes:

[We can] speak in [a certain] sense of conflict as a value. [Okay, so this is related.] In the domain of knowledge [in the domain of science and philosophy and other things], problems as values, although paler and more restricted, correspond to it. As in knowledge a problem is a basic value, although it is the opposite of insight.^[4]

So we want the insight, but a problem -- difficult as it is, and hassle as it is -- is actually a basic value because it's the opportunity. It's a doorway into insight. It's something that we have to work and wrestle with and digest and assimilate. And out of that compost can grow something beautiful; beautiful flowers can grow.

[So] as in knowledge a problem is a basic value [as in the realm of knowledge a problem is a basic value], although it is the opposite of insight, so in ethical life conflict is basic, although it means incompleteness, disharmony, indeed a lack of indubitable value....

Conflict is that which keeps discernment and the feeling of value alive and opens up new vistas.

So, much as we would want simplicity and peace, and not to be hassled, and we think we'd want everything to just be hunky-dory and perfect, actually, this strange situation about this realm of saṃsāra: "Conflict is that which keeps discernment and the feeling of value alive and opens up new vistas," partly because of the complexity of our lives, the complexity of situations we find ourselves in, especially, as I pointed out, more and more so in the age of globalization. He continues:

Moral life is, in general, life in the midst of conflicts; it is concentration upon them, a constructive solution of them through the commitment of the person; and all ignoring of it is a sin, an irrevocable injury to ethical Being -- even to that of one's own personality.

So to withdraw, to put the blinkers on and ignore the complexity of a situation, the conflicts inherent in a situation, the obscurities, the incompleteness, the differing demands -- even in oneself, let alone within/between people around oneself -- to ignore all that, he says, "is a sin" -- strong language! -- "an irrevocable injury to ethical Being -- even to that of one's own personality." We're somehow injuring our soul when we choose to kind of ignore conflict and complexity for the sake of simplicity and peace.

So as all this works together, there's nothing that really comes first. As in the nature of the dependent arising of things, they're all pieces that feed each other: the values becoming erotic and caught up in the soulmaking dynamic; the dimensionality, the beyondness, the meaningfulness; the willingness, the capacity to be challenged, stretched, to aspire; the strength, the courage, the devotion; crisis as opportunity; conflict and absence of value also as the ground, if you like, of our moral being, the soil out of which our soul grows, our moral being grows. All this is part; all these factors can feed each other. And with that expanding, enrichening, deepening, widening our soul's relationship to values in this sense, there will come -- in the dimensionality, in the sense of beyondness, there can come a sense of the divinity of values, the divinity of these ideas (as I touched on in the last part, I think), and that possibility.

And it's interesting, going back to Plato, when he writes about virtue. And I was reading an article by Julia Annas. And she points out, she traces through his works over many years, she traces different positions that Plato took or presented with regard to the relationship of virtues and divinity. And it's quite interesting in that we see similar positions in different traditions of Buddhadharma. So one, in the Phaedo, for instance, there's a teaching there, a thrust of the teaching there that is really about the practitioner, the philosopher dying to the world, detaching themselves from the everyday concerns, and the everyday desires and beliefs, etc. And:

True virtue [there] does not [actually] deal with [the concerns or the events or] the matters of everyday life but [actually, "true virtue," she writes] consists in an escape or "purification" from them.^[5]

And Socrates, in Plato's text the Theaetetus, says human life must unavoidably contain evil. So he says:

So we should try to flee from here to there [to the divine realm, away from life, ending rebirth] as quickly as we can; and flight is becoming like God to the extent that we can. And becoming like God is becoming just and pious, with wisdom.

So there's one teaching there, one thrust through the writings of Plato, that's this very world-escaping, ending rebirth kind of thrust, in which virtue has its place -- either as a stepping-stone to this escape from the world, this removal from the world; or virtue is identified with being exactly that removal from the world. So there is this kind of going hand-in-hand of the movement of transcendence and the opening to what is transcendent to the world -- in that particular thread of Plato's teachings, that transcending and opening to what is transcendent to our world goes hand-in-hand with this kind of regard for our world and the affairs of humanity as insignificant.

In later dialogues of Plato, a different position is presented. And the idea of the individual's becoming like God is framed as: the divine, if you like, operates with goodness and as goodness, and wants goodness, so that when we see, when we act and choose and sense in line with goodness, we're actually putting ourselves, so to speak, in the service of, or we become part of, the unfolding of the divine goodness, and the unfolding and the enactment of the divine's intention for goodness in the world. So you get that in the Philebus and the Timaeus, and sometimes in the Laws.

The work of the divine reason is to organize things for good [Annas writes], since the divine is good and ... seeks to spread goodness in the way it orders things. Becoming like God thus comes to be construed as aspiring to identify with the goodness-producing works of the divine ... which makes it less surprising that this is a characterization of virtue. Virtue continues to be seen as imposing rational order on potentially refractory materials [like our desires and our obstinateness], but this is [connected with the divine].

So one is a world-transcending movement, which regards virtue as either a stepping-stone to that transcendence, an escaping and disregard of the world, or identifies virtue with that very escaping and disregard of the world. And then in the later dialogues, there's more a sense of virtue, our virtue being, if you like, almost an identification with or an instrument of the divine virtue. So can you hear already there are parallels between the sort of classical Pali Canon thrust (which I mentioned, I think, near the beginning of the talks on ethics) to end rebirth, to transcend, to be removed from the world? And whatever care we take with pāramīs and other dhammas and cultivation of sīla, etc., is really secondary; it serves the purpose of a springboard or an enabling of that transcendence. That's the primary purpose of them, versus other interpretations or spins that you get in Mahāyāna Buddhism, for example, where it's possible that the bodhisattva or the Buddha, certainly, a Buddha, certainly, but also a bodhisattva or practitioner, through the Buddha-nature, is expressing, manifesting, radiating, if you like, the dharmakāya, the body of beautiful qualities, of virtues of the Buddha, in this world. [35:16]

And of course, if we practise soulmaking in relation to all this, and as we've said, in the context of Soulmaking Dharma teachings, in a way, both of those options can open up for us. But we would certainly expect the second option to open up. Why? Because as something gets involved in the soulmaking dynamic, as something becomes an erotic-imaginal object for us, in this case the ideational-imaginal, or through an imaginal figure, the values become erotically imaginal for us, then the self-sense is subsumed into that, becomes imaginal, the world-sense, all of it. Our eros itself, our passion itself becomes imaginal, and in that, it gains, all that gains dimensionality and divinity. So again, with the soulmaking dynamic, there's the possibility for us to see our virtues, the virtues that our life enacts, plays out, our sensibility to them, our choosing them, our courage to enact them -- in body, speech, and mind -- is actually the expression in this world, the refraction in this world, of the Buddha-nature's virtues, of the dharmakāya, of God's goodness, of the attributes of God. And we'd expect that perception to become available, that conception to become available as something we can entertain. There's just a sense and an idea that arises naturally through practice.

And with all that, other possibilities start to offer themselves, become available. So again, I want to read you a passage from Hartmann, if I can find it. And here he writes -- he's talking about how we sense values, and he says:

Grasping a moral value is sensing it, or more precisely, being gripped by it.^[6]

And I was struck, reading that, how interesting I found it that he put it in the passive: we are "gripped by" a moral value. For us to grasp a moral value is for us to be gripped by it, that the ideal moral value, the imaginal, the ideational-imaginal moral value has some agency on our psyche, just as we talk about with images. They have autonomy and agency, and that's part, or that's one of the elements, isn't it? So this "being gripped by" a value -- by the angelic quality of a value, by its autonomy and its independence -- this "being gripped by" is the crucial thing for effecting change. Maybe the strength of that grip and the number of people who are gripped in that way is significant in terms of developing a current, a wave, a momentum for political or social change.

But it's interesting. Again, when we relate this to the elements of the imaginal, and we talk about autonomy of image and of self, so we never lose our own autonomy. And I think it's important to realize: we can grasp a moral value, it grips us, but there's still an element where we remain free to choose in that direction or not, to be in service to that moral value or not. Is it the case that there's no free will here, that the moral value utterly determines my will, and I have no choice but to realize it? Or do I retain some autonomy, some freedom of will? So that's a related question: the whole question of freedom of will. But we can begin to sense, more and more, this autonomy and agency of the imaginal as a potential. And all this, again, is part of the enrichening and deepening, dimensionalizing and divinizing of our sense and concept of this ideational-imaginal, of the moral values.

And it's interesting, and just to mention, I was reflecting on: is it the case, then, that the higher values and virtues, the ones that are more redolent of a divinity -- the higher values and virtues, in a way, they're more easily disturbed? They're 'weaker,' Hartmann would put it. They're weaker. They're higher, but they're weaker. And they're less popular. They're less commonly realized. But at the same time as all that, they also seem, or I wonder if those are the ones that elicit the most profound dedication and sacrifice in the relatively fewer people who are devoted to their actualization. In other words, those values that seem more noble, more divine, as I said, give rise to -- in those who are sensitive to them -- seem to give rise to the most profound dedication and sacrifice. [42:42]

And again, could that fact be significant if we then talk about potential system or political system change, or political change, social change? So think about people like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Mandela, take three sort of almost iconic figures, completely devoted to justice, or a huge part of what they did was this devotion to justice. And they were powerfully influential figures. But I wonder whether they had something about their person, as well, about their own ethos. They were rarely explicit about it or trumpeted it, but it was there. And something of their ethos had something of the spiritual and the holy and the noble in it. They had what Hartmann calls 'radiant virtue,' I think is his word for it: this radiancy of the being that sort of bestows, I don't know, a spiritual light on those around one. So there's something, we could say -- did they exude or transmit or communicate, in their being and in their rhetoric, something more than merely the values of justice? So talking about justice, they're working for justice, but there's something else going on here.

And there are other situations where there's a need for social justice, and other social justice movements where, if you like, the higher imagination, the sense of higher values has somehow not been ignited. That higher imagination and the imaginal -- it's not been captured there. So there are many issues in that predicament, and partly because they might lack a person who, in their being and in their speaking, communicates that, exudes that radiant virtue. I wonder about that.

But is it possible, again, if we relate it to just what we're talking about, about the sense of divinity, that with the values, or when there's a sense of more divinity, there's a deeper and fuller, more intense devotion to, a dedication and willingness to sacrifice to those values? And that can come through the value itself, or it can come through a person who, in a way, is a channel, or their being, as we talked about when we talked about the self, is a refraction of a daimon that embodies that value, or a reflection of that -- either, if we think about that, that they're refracting an angel, or they're refracting an idea, an 'ideal' in this sense that we mean, the ideational-imaginal.

But with the sense of divinity, somehow or other, around that issue, then, it becomes part of what people are dedicated to, actually. So it's more than just the plain issue of, say, social justice, in whatever context it is. It includes that, of course; it never removes itself from that and completely transcends that. But it has other dimensions because other, even higher values are wrapped up in it, and they exert an attraction on the soul, and a loyalty in the soul that is sensitive to them -- devotion, dedication. So with all this dimensionality, divinity, all this sense of dimensionality opening up in regard to values, in that possibility, there's also the possibility of the sense of divinity in the values being opened up. And then that has an effect, again, on choices, on stances, on sensibilities, on capacities. So this dimensionality is actually, in certain ways, part of different teachings and different cosmologies.

So there are some Islamic cosmologies that present a kind of three-tier picture of the universe, if you like. I'll read you a passage from Henry Corbin, and he's writing about the writings of a Shi'ite philosopher, Qāḍī Sa'īd Qummī. But it describes a certain cosmology, and what he's describing is actually quite a common cosmology, again, coming out of the original Platonic ideas and Platonic maps and notions and cosmologies, and through the Neoplatonic, and into Christianity and Islam and Judaism, and all kinds of other philosophies. So he says:

There are three categories of universe. First, there is the phenomenal world ... a realm where things are perceptible to the senses [so that's the world that everyone would agree on]. [But] then there is the suprasensible world ... the world of the Soul or Angel-Souls, commonly designated malakūt: the "place" of the mundus imaginalis ["the world of the imaginal"] whose organ of perception is cognitive imagination. And then thirdly, there is the intelligible world of the Pure Intelligences or Angel-Intelligences ... whose organ of perception is the intuitive intellect.^[7]

So that three-tiered cosmology was, as I said, very, very common. The second two tiers are alien to our normal, dominant Western outlook. The second of those -- "the world of the Soul or Angel-Souls ... the 'place' of the mundus imaginalis" -- of course, is one way of framing what we've been talking about a lot with the soulmaking teachings. And now when we talk about the ideational-imaginal, one way we can think about it is as corresponding to this third tier, this third level of cosmology. Here, it's so strange as a concept and as language, it almost doesn't resonate for most people, I would imagine, in the modern Western world: "the intelligible world of the Pure Intelligences or Angel-Intelligences ... whose organ of perception is the intuitive intellect." So our intuitive intellect can perceive these ideas, these ideals, the ideational-imaginal. And these Intelligences or Angel-Intelligences that exist there are also said to be -- and this is quite important -- they're unified with their object of intellection.

Okay, so this is all strange language. What it means is that the Angel or the Intelligence -- the mind, if you like, the consciousness in that realm -- is united with its object. And so, for example, the Intelligence that knows and meditates on, in that realm, let's say, justice or kindness, is itself one with the kindness. There's a unity of subject and object postulated there. Interestingly -- I'll just read a bit more, because I find it very interesting:

Our philosopher [he means this Qāḍī Sa'īd Qummī] relates these three categories of universe to three categories of space and three of time. There is the obscure, dense time ... of the sensible world [so our usual sense of time]; [there is] the subtle time ... of the imaginal world of the malakūt [the mundus imaginalis]; and [then there is] the even more subtle time, the absolutely subtle time ... of the world of the Intelligence [the world of what we might call the ideational-imaginal].

And it's quite involved. He says a bit more. But all of them come from -- all these worlds open up from the

energy [which] is [sometimes] designated ... as Nafas al-Raḥmān (the Breath of the Merciful One) [in other words, God, Allah, is what opens up and keeps in existence these levels of world, of universe. Sometimes it's called that -- "the Breath of the Merciful One"] and sometimes [it's called] the primordial Cloud ("amā"). [And then he writes:] Having established this initial schema, our philosopher is now in a position to conceive the reality of events and forms which, while not ceasing to be events and forms, possess a time and a space that are in no way those of the sensible world to which we are accustomed exclusively to relate our notions of event and form.

In other words, we usually think of event and form as being in our world, and we say, "This happened on June the 14^th^ at this time, over there, and I saw this form, or this event happened," or whatever. But with this scheme, there is then the possibility of events and forms that happen at other levels, in other times, in another time frame, if you like, another dimension of time, another kind of space than what we're used to in our sensible world. [53:52] So again, there's this dimensionalizing -- there's not just the duality between form and formless. There are different levels of formation. Actually, I'll just read a bit more, because he says:

There exists between these three categories of universe a certain number of essential relationships, in that each higher universe is the cause of the one below it, and contains, in a manner more subtle and elevated, the totality of universes below it.

So in some way, the mundus imaginalis contains and corresponds -- there are correspondences between the mundus imaginalis and our world that everyone would agree on, the world of sensible physical phenomena. [54:40]

Moreover [he continues], while thus containing and enveloping the totality of the universes below it, each higher universe is also the esoteric aspect [the hidden aspect] ... of this totality, its hidden, inner aspect or centre.

So the esoteric, hidden aspect of this world is the world of Angels, of the Angels, of the images. As we say, we look at this beautiful flower on my desk, and it's gorgeous in its form and colour, etc., in its materiality, and it's also refracting, reflecting, echoing, mirroring, expressing, corresponding to something on another level, in the mundus imaginalis, as is myself and yourself. Daimon, refracted: we echo, mirror, refract, reflect, express, and manifest something in the angelic realm. And the whole world is like that, potentially like that.

There's a complication here that I think is important, and I won't go into now, in that -- well, two things, actually, to say. One is that in the particular cosmology he's talking about, it's almost like each person has or creates their own universe. So the mundus imaginalis has this objectivity to it, and yet my mundus imaginalis is different than yours, and correspondingly with the others. So there's a personal nature to this cosmology. It's almost as if there are different universes opening up with each person, if you like, at their centre, and yet there's still an objectivity there -- first point.

Second point is that usually, or often, what goes with that kind of three-tier cosmology is a hierarchy, and some of the dangers we talked about in what that can do in terms of attitudes to the material, phenomenal world. I'm not sure that danger is automatically implied or consequent, but it might be there or not there, even if there is postulated a hierarchy. In other words, the level of the ideas, the Intelligences, and the objects of intellection is higher than the mundus imaginalis, which is higher in the hierarchy than the phenomenal, sensible, physical world. Even if that hierarchy is there, it may or may not lead to a denigration. It may actually increase the veneration, the devotion to, the sense of beauty of the phenomenal, physical world by giving it that dimensionality, by giving it that rootedness, by giving it that beyondness and mystery -- all that. Or it may not.

We're also free to entertain a conception that doesn't hierarchize (if that's a verb), doesn't place those three levels in any kind of hierarchy. So it's almost like we can regard what we're trying to open up now as the ideational-imaginal -- we can regard that whole realm or sphere of ideas or ideals as not necessarily higher than the world of images, the mundus imaginalis. We could regard them as non-hierarchical realms that open up for perception, for experience. Or we can regard them hierarchically. That's part of our freedom of conception, freedom to entertain different conceptions.

But where there is soulmaking in relation to values; where the soulmaking dynamic, as I said, starts to open, starts to subsume and draw into its process the whole realm of the ideas of values, and values as ideas/ideals; where there's eros of values, something like these kinds of senses of the values, of the moral values, as divine ideas/ideals (we use this word, as I said, interchangeably, as they have been in history). Something like those senses -- something like that will emerge out of the sense of dimensionalizing. Some kind of sense of their autonomy, some kind of sense of their agency, their pull, their demand, their call, our duty to them, etc. -- all that will open up. The possibilities, the particular particulars of the possibilities, the way it opens up for each soul, or at different times in practice, etc., in life, that might vary. But something like this, I think, will be inevitable once the values are caught up for us in the soulmaking dynamic, once we have a soulmaking and erotic relationship with them.

And then we can sense ourselves in our meditations, in our life, in our being, in our sensibility, in our acts and choices and stands, as participating in that divine sphere, realm of ideas. And we participate in this or that value, this or that moral value. And there's a nobility that comes with that. There's a grace and a privilege. It gives our life a sense of beauty, nobility, along with everything else. 'Nobility' is a word we may come back to, because Nicolai Hartmann uses it in a particular way, and that's not the way I'm using it right now. So we may come back to that, what he means by that, because it's quite interesting. But I mean more that the participation in values in this way, the sense of participation, comes with the soulmaking -- participation being an element of the imaginal, an element also, then, of the ideational-imaginal. And it brings with it, among other gifts, among other graces, a sense of nobility.

Now, 'noble' is also a word, of course, that we have in the Dharma tradition: the Noble Truths, and the Noble Ones, etc. Ariya is the Pali. And I don't know -- there is some relationship between ariya and Aryan, and somehow the peoples that travelled over to India and emigrated from Iran, and perhaps it might have had some ethnic or even racist implications, as they were 'purer' or 'better' -- I don't know. And in our culture, in English, 'nobility' also has a kind of class association with it. But I mean it more in a soul-sense, in the nobility of a being, of a soul, of a disposition, of an ethos. And to me, that's very much part of the territory that opens up for us, and the flavour of soul that opens up in our self-sense as we allow the soul and encourage the soul to engage with higher values, moral values in these ways.

And it's interesting. I remember teaching quite a few years ago with a teacher, colleague. And she was giving a talk, and I was obviously there, present. And some part of it -- she started talking about this word, 'noble,' as in Noble Truths and Noble Ones, etc., that the Buddha used quite a lot in his teaching in the Pali Canon. And she said, "I just can't relate to that word," and she seemed quite embarrassed about it, or embarrassed even about talking about it, or imagining that it might be something that had anything to do with herself, or that she might grow into. I can't remember what the larger point she was making was. But I was struck by that, because for me, it's a very beautiful word. It captures quite well certain qualities of soul, and directions and alignments and devotions of soul and ethos. I think where there is soulmaking, it will bring a sense of nobility. And where there is this kind of soulmaking relationship with the virtues and with moral values, with the ideational-imaginal of moral values, it will bring that inevitably. It will weave it in. It will open it out. [1:04:27]

So all this, you know, asks quite a lot of us, as is often the case with soulmaking teachings. And as I think I mentioned at one point, you know, there's often -- not always, and it's complicated, so I don't want to oversimplify it -- but there's often a relationship with how much we are sort of tied up in knots and in the pain of, let's say, the inner critic, or an anxiety about ourselves with regard to what other people think -- there's often a relationship between how strong that is (self-anxiety and inner critic) and an inverse relationship between that and our capacity for virtue, and for even having a sensibility to moral values and virtues, especially the higher ones.

So I remember I saw an ad on TV. It was for some car, and you know, like most car ads, it involves someone driving and presenting that person and their driving in some kind of almost comical way, to me. It's as if this car is going to make you wonderful and make your life like this, and you're going to experience yourself like this because of that car. And the music or the strapline or part of it was "Dance like no one is watching." I think it was from a song, and that was playing: "Dance like no one is watching." And the whole sort of tenor or presentation or thrust of this ad was somehow, this -- I think it was a woman driving a car, and sort of on her own, driving alone, and it was something to do with independence and freedom, freedom to be herself. So it was using the allure, the sort of front of individual self-expression as a sort of something that, in our attraction to it, we would then by association be attracted to that car, I suppose was the theory.

But actually, "Dance like no one is watching" was actually more about acceptance of self, relief from the anxiety, and relief from the anxiety of what others think of me: "Do they think I'm okay?" Now, if the car ad had presented it as more truthfully, that "Dance like no one is watching" -- why do I care if someone is watching? It's because I care what they think. I'm anxious about what they think. But that concern, that self-anxiety is, at the very least, or at most, is less than individual self-expression. The latter, you know, that individual self-expression as something, as a value, sounds better. We think it's a better concern. But this was conflating the two, and that, of course, is part of our problematic conception and relationship with and sense of individuality, and individuality as a sort of shrunken kind of value in our wider society, because we don't really have a wider, deeper, richer sense of individuality. So wrapped up in it is this social anxiety, the inner critic, the concern with "Do they think I'm okay? What will others think of me?" And as I said, there's a relationship between this anxiety over self-appearance to others and -- sometimes, there's a relationship between that and a lack of central concern for virtue. So this kind of reciprocal relationship: the more self-anxiety in that sense, the more inner critic, the less virtue, care for virtues in their breadth and in their height. And the inner critic, when it gets a real grip, can often even prevent a kind of ethical sensitivity.

But vice versa, sometimes when we start getting more this ideational-imaginal sense of values, when we have a soulmaking relationship with virtue, and we give attention to that, and that grows in our soul, actually the self-anxiety goes down, diminishes, partly because the self gets subsumed into the soulmaking process, and we start to sense ourselves as image, because that kind of social self-anxiety is related to not sensing the self as image, not having a sense of dimensionality to the self, of divinity, archetypal or imaginal roots and origins to the self.

Catherine reported that Ruth King, an African American Dharma teacher, was talking, observing to Catherine, saying, "It seems like so many Westerners have very little roots at all. There's very little sense of roots." And there are all kinds of social and historical reasons for that. She's talking about white people in, I think, the US, but maybe also in Europe, having very little roots. And there's a possibility of actually having a whole other kind of root: the root in, the sensing oneself as being rooted in the divine, having imaginal roots, imaginal origins. When we don't have that, we have, again, no anchor. We're blown this way and that. We're so vulnerable to, fragile in the face of what other people think. So there's this culture of individuality that's an impoverished, shrunken, narrow, and shallow individuality. It has no roots, or very little roots, or poor roots, impoverished roots, or its roots are in poor soil, flimsy soil, dry soil. When we can open up those roots, it gives us all kinds of strengths and capacities. It opens. And there's, as I said, a reciprocal relationship, and the causality, the dependency goes both ways. It's in this inverse relationship between care for ethics and self-anxiety.

And again, part of what we need -- let's put it the other way first: part of what comes out of that strength, out of that rooting, out of the whole involvement of values in the soulmaking dynamic, and the corollary -- a sensing of the self as imaginal -- allows, actually, what we might call 'healthy guilt,' or what I prefer to call 'remorse,' just to differentiate between guilt, which usually is really not helpful, as I pointed out in one of the earlier talks. It actually allows us to experience healthy guilt or remorse. Nicolai Hartmann makes the point quite strongly that actually, healthy guilt and remorse are necessary for our moral being. So again, let me read you a passage where he says -- so, making the point here about what's demanded of us in our relationship to values, in our exploration of morals, for a wide and deep and rich and beautiful relationship with moral being, but also what might grow out of the soulmaking starting to include and involve moral values. He writes:

There is a will to responsibility, even to guilt as regards one's own conduct; there is a repugnance to the presumption of exculpation [of being rid of guilt], as implying a repudiation of guilt. It is not as if one wanted guilt as such -- one would be glad not to have it. But once we are laden with it, we cannot allow it to be taken away, without denying our selfhood [our personhood]. A guilty man has a right to carry his guilt. He must refuse deliverance from without. To retain his guilt is valuable for him despite its oppressive load; it signifies for him the retention of his personality [of his personhood], the preservation and recognition of his freedom [his moral freedom, his freedom of will]. With his guilt he would lose a greater moral good: his manhood.^[8]

In other words, if he lost his guilt in that way, if he just ignored it or zapped it, he would actually lose something else. He would lose his personhood.

In taking upon himself his own deed and his guilt, in asserting his responsibility, in his sincere willingness to carry it, there is a moral pride in the free deed which speaks out; it is the majestic right to manhood [let's say personhood -- it is the majestic right to personhood], the foundation upon which all moral Being and Non-being rest. To surrender it is moral meanness, betokening incapacity to be free.... The presumption in washing away guilt, in discharging it, the admission of [quote] "mitigating circumstances," is at bottom a moral disenfranchisement and a degradation of the man.

So it's a strong teaching there. And again, it's difficult for us -- in our culture of inner critic, and the pain that that causes, and the pandemic of that, it's difficult for us to kind of recognize the place and the necessity, perhaps, of guilt -- I'll say 'remorse': "I admit that I acted poorly there, that I chose not in line with my highest aspirations, etc." He also makes the point:

That a conflict of values inheres in the concept of guilt is not to be overlooked.

So basically, he's saying, "Oh, guilt's an interesting phenomenon," because he says:

Guilt is and remains a disvalue in man; no one, so long as he is guiltless, could wish for it. But the astonishing thing is that when a man has once burdened himself with it and bears it, it gains the character of a value which contradicts the value of innocence.

So again, no one would want guilt. It's a disvalue. It's something we don't want, a disvalue. But once it's there and we can open to it in this way -- what I prefer to call 'remorse' -- once we accept it, hold it, and work with it, and take on its lessons, are taught by it, it actually has the character of a value, which is interesting. We become more mature. Our moral being grows through it. So is there a necessity for the self, is there a necessity for the soul, for a certain kind of relationship with guilt or remorse? Might it also be a necessity in our relationship with such difficult issues, and such fundamental issues, in that they question our fundamental orientations, priorities, and perspectives on almost everything, but fundamentally on the world, and on humanity's place in the world? Is there a necessity for remorse and guilt in our relationship with issues like climate change and species extinction, just as there is -- and many people have pointed out -- there's the necessity for grief? Some people, myself included, would say there's a necessity for anger or righteous indignation. And maybe there's a necessity for guilt.

I remember Catherine leading a guided meditation on one of our soulmaking retreats, and she had seven stages, I think it was. We had to choose something to become image for us. And maybe it was -- no, it was on sensing with soul. It was something in the world that we start to then -- she was guiding us through ways we could support the possibility of sensing that thing with soul, and I chose an apple tree that I had in my garden. And one of the stages that she went through -- I can't remember how she worded it, but it had to do with either asking forgiveness for or feeling a remorse for how we have looked on that thing in the past without soul, and so not seeing its holiness, and not conceived of or sensed its divinity, its dimensionality, etc.^[9] And particularly, it was that strand, at that point, that really touched me in what she was guiding us through. So even with this apple tree, which I very much enjoyed and loved, I could feel, pregnant in that stage, my own -- and also humanity's -- kind of impoverished, shrunken, narrowed, and shallowed relationship with nature, with the things of the world. And allowing my heart and my soul to be touched by that felt very beautiful, very important.

But in relation to issues like climate change and species extinction -- massive, massive issues, fundamental issues in so many ways -- might grief, anger, and also guilt (in this sense that Hartmann is talking about it), remorse, be part of healing, part of allowing us greater strength, greater uprightness, greater capacity for courage, for action, and a greater just capacity of heart to hold all this, the depths of emotion?

And if we think about the actuality of our lives, and our complex lives (whether they're in a much wider social sense, or a global sense, or just even in a personal sense), sometimes the structure of situations creates or presents to us choices between what basically -- if we look at them in terms of values, choices between different values. If I do this, I'm prioritizing and validating and choosing in line with this value. But I'm neglecting this one, and I'm transgressing, if you like, a commitment to that other value. Opposing values -- hopefully we'll come back to this -- present themselves to us, and we have to choose.

So it might be just in a very personal situation where it's a matter of truthfulness to a beloved one, but one knows that that truth will hurt them. Notice I didn't say "harm." Actually, it's one of the Buddha's stipulations about right speech, that it's not harmful. But hurt is not harm. That a person might find this truth that I'm sharing or telling them about or whatever, they might find that hurtful -- may not be harming to them. It might just hurt. Life hurts sometimes. Truth hurts sometimes. But it might be that kind of choice. What's my loyalty to, in that kind of situation: the truthfulness or the non-hurting, the kindness, the compassion? There's not a formulaic answer to that. Each situation is different. Each situation is new, has a different, subtle particularity and nuance to it. [1:22:57]

Or it might be in a wider social situation. So for example, with the Extinction Rebellion actions, they disrupt, to a certain extent, the sort of 'business as usual' functioning of at least portions of a city or society for a certain amount of time. It blocks traffic, some people can't get to work, some people are trying to go there, this place or that place, they're delayed, etc. Or if you want to disrupt Heathrow's functioning, in protest at the building of a third runway -- it will disrupt and it will upset a lot of people. And so one has an allegiance, to a certain extent, to not wanting to cause upset, not wanting to inconvenience, and on the other hand, one has an allegiance to the need for action and waking up with regard to climate change and species extinction. And so these two values are in opposition. And myself and some friends, as well, when we were considering getting involved in Extinction Rebellion actions, this was part of what came up. Certainly it came up for me, and I think for others as well: "Oh, I'm not sure about upsetting people. I'm not sure. Is it ethical to do that, etc.? Let alone the possibility of a kind of backlash for upsetting people."

So there's no real escape from this in life, this fact of, we will be culpable in one way or another in situations. Even when we're choosing a certain value, we are often culpable because there's kind of another value in the situation that, in choosing whatever we choose, we're neglecting the other one. And that happens a lot in our lives, if you reflect on it. And I hope to come back to that point if I have time, but again, let me read a passage by Hartmann on that very point. So he's talking about this kind of thing, these kinds of situations:

It is inherent in the essence of such moral conflicts that in them value stands against value and that it is not possible to escape from them without being guilty [so what I just said]. Here it is not the values as such in their pure ideality which are in conflict [that's something we'll come back to, but he says] ... the conflict arises from the structure of the situation. This makes it impossible to satisfy both at the same time.

Important point, important for our maturity in looking at the whole sphere of ethics -- our moral maturity, also our moral intelligence. We have to realize this is the case. If I'm trying to wend a line, to travel a path where I'm guilt-free, maybe that's a pie-in-the-sky delusion. I will be confronted very often in life, in small ways and in large ways, with situations where I have to choose one thing over another. Not to choose is a sin, in Hartmann's words. It's a withdrawing of my soul's engagement with life, with the sphere of morality. So it's a refusal to participate in life and in values. It's a refusal to grow my soul. But to engage and think I can be guilt-free is also just lacking in a kind of mature understanding of the nature of our life, the nature of saṃsāra, if you like, the nature of moral situations.

So it's asking quite a lot. We can be given quite a lot through the soulmaking dynamic, as I said, as it starts to subsume and involve values. But it's asking, all this is asking quite a lot, as does all deep and wide practice, and certainly soulmaking practices. And is part of what's necessary also the kind of training in regard to our heart and our emotional capacity, and our emotional awarenesses? We put so much emphasis on it in the Soulmaking Dharma. Is that also a kind of necessary prerequisite, or at least part and parcel of our ethical training?

So the ethos and emotional training are linked. As I said, our capacity to feel certain emotions -- difficult emotions like guilt, like grief, like anger -- and sometimes, particularly with grief, it can be heartbreaking. Is the heart big enough? Have I made my heart big enough? Have I somehow opened the capacity of the heart, that it can hold all that? Am I able to discern and disentangle the different strands of emotion that might arise as what feels like just an overwhelming and confusing emotional complex? Can I see, "Oh, there's this emotion; there's that emotion"? Can I just kind of see, "Ah, there are two -- a few different things in there"? And can I focus on perhaps each one in turn, as well as on the whole complex? Do I have clarity as well as capacity? And that takes a real skill to develop that. I've taught about that at other times. Do I have the ability to prioritize certain emotions, for example? So even my love for this value -- can I prioritize that? Can I focus on this emotion, and actually stay steady with this strand of emotion, or stay focused -- as I was talking about with guilt earlier, in the earlier talk -- actually focus on that deeper current of my devotion, of my alignment, of my love of that, this or that value? Can I dwell in that?

So all these aspects of what we might call 'training of the heart' or the 'emotional awarenesses and skills' -- they are, as I said, maybe part and parcel, necessary, prerequisite, even, to our further growth in terms of our ethos, our relationship with ethics. And all this takes a lot of sensitivity. [1:30:49] Actually, the soul's sensitivity to values and to virtues is something that -- again, I remember reading, I think it was a Hartmann quote that said, you know, that it's not everyone has equal sensitivity of their soul to moral values, or to the range of values, or to certain higher values, etc. But we can take care of, we can love our soul's sensitivity to values and virtues. And we can nourish it and seek to support its growth, its widening, its deepening, its heightening. And our sensitivity to values, to virtues, allows us -- to the degree that we're sensitive to them, is the degree to which our participation in them is supported. So it starts with a sensitivity, with the soul being stirred, the soul feeling resonance, and feeling that beauty. And that, again, through the eros that's natural there, it draws us in to participation. And that soul-sensitivity to values, to virtues, in their breadth, in their height, in their depth, is itself a virtue. A sensitivity to virtues is itself a virtue.

So when we kind of survey or cast our eyes about us, I wonder sometimes if there are just rarer sensitivities, that some kinds of -- the sensitivity to, you know, not killing is -- I mean, there's so much different kinds of killing going on in the world, but basically, as an ethical sensitivity, it's quite common, not stealing, whatever. But other sensibilities seem much more rare, much less common to come across in people.

We could ask, for example, when I was talking about that Polly Higgins interview, and I'm sure she didn't feel it, but something just happened in the flow of the interview, that the sort of perspective and stance of, if you like, the value of the earth in and for itself -- so not as a support for human beings' survival and prosperity, but that value in itself -- seems rarer. So are there higher and more rarely sensed values? I think there are. And how much is that rarity with regard to those values and the kind of sensitivity to them, how much is that a function of historical conditioning, and the partiality of moral vision in any culture? And how much is it trainable? And how much is it sort of innate, if you like, to this or that particular soul, and less so to another soul?

So to me these are interesting questions, and important questions, especially when we start considering, you know, this whole idea or possibility of what would it mean to open up, again, avenues of moral education, which seem to have gone from our culture, as I pointed out earlier in the talk. So caring for and valuing the ethical rights of the earth, of species, of ecosystems -- as I talked about before, it's a different ontology involved there. And in terms of the ethics, and the ethical care and sensibility, that may be more rare, and relatively speaking, more unusual. [1:35:12]

There may be a number of reasons. Maybe it's, as I pointed out, the relative dilution of our perception -- the relative dilution of the effects of our personal actions and choices in the sort of mass web of effects of others' choices. It may have something to do also with just the decline in the recognition of virtue itself as important alongside efficacy in the ethical life, especially when the situations get very complex or seem hopeless or whatever. We've touched on that before. But also, again, related is the rarity of a metaphysics that supports recognizing the earth or an ecosystem or a species as valuable or as divine, over and above the sort of sum of its individual members' sufferings -- this orca as opposed to the species, or whatever.

I was wondering, too, along these lines, why is it that some people seem more steadfast in their commitment and more attuned to certain moral principles than others? What's going on there? And I was struck by Greta Thunberg. When I first read about her, she was still just sitting on the steps outside the government building, the Parliament building in Stockholm. I was very struck by her sort of lonely vigil there, solitary vigil there, and her determination, her steadfastness, her will. And one of the things the article said was that she had Asperger's. So she was on what's called the 'autistic spectrum.' And I started wondering about that, and wondering whether, you know -- one of the characteristics of Asperger's is that, as I understand it, someone who has Asperger's is not so relationally empathic or sensitive, or not so attuned to or impacted by what another person is feeling or expressing in their facial manner or gesture or tone, emotional tone. So they don't pick up on those cues, or they don't feel such a sensitivity.

And it may be that for such a person, a person who leans a bit -- you know, leave aside the pathology of the word Asperger's, just someone who leans more towards principles and abstracts -- so someone with Asperger's might then, in the absence of such a pull of what other people think, and the cues they're getting back from other people, pissing this person off or whatever it is, that they're actually able to be more steadfast and more clear and keep their sight on principles and seeming abstractions like virtues and values, that they exert more of a felt demand of duty on them than the emotions of persons who are in front of me, who are getting angry because we're blocking the traffic, or angry because they don't like what we're saying about what we think needs to happen or what they need to give up, or what humanity needs to renounce, or whatever.

While for most people who are not so-called Asperger's, there's still some sensitivity to the impact and demands of the so-called 'abstract' or principles like values, are actually more impacted, more sensitive to, more swayed by, and actually maybe more empathic to other persons, so that then it might translate that, for some people, the way into this soulmaking with regard to values and the whole approach to ethic, it may be more through an imaginal figure, who is a person, with whom they are in relationship. And implicitly, then, they're in relationship with the values bound up with them. Remember, 'values' is an element of the imaginal. And that way in, through an imaginal figure and the values implicit or explicit there, may be more powerful in effecting, bringing about moral allegiances, choices, behaviour in their actual life. So there may be differences in people, in terms of whether one gravitates more easily, feels a clarity and a pull in relationship more with principles, ideas, ideals, values, virtues, than with people, imaginal or actual. There may be a difference in what it implies about the possibilities, or the course, the particular path of moral training, moral development. Don't know. Interesting.

You know, a lot of Jesus's moral power and influence come from the stories in the Gospels, for many people, as much, and probably more so, for most people, than Christian dogmatics, you know, theology -- "Thou shalt whatever." There's something very touching in the personhood of those stories of Jesus, which for a lot of people, that's what carries the moral power and influence of the Christian message.

But there is this possibility, I think, for everyone, and maybe there are personal sort of predispositions and predilections. But for some, for many, the relationship with and the pull of what may seem to others like abstractions -- like the values, etc., virtue and virtues and beauty and ideals -- that can be soulmaking, as we've been talking about. So is there a kind of, in a way, to some extent, and at some level, a kind of pull in opposite directions between, let's say, ethical ideas on the one hand, and relational empathy, personal empathy on the other? Or between principles and personal sensitivities on the other? I don't know, it's just a thought. Of course, one could be (I don't know) an SS officer, a Nazi SS officer, and perhaps probably most of them are fairly psychopathic, I imagine, and in that sense had very little empathy to persons, but may have an allegiance to some kind of principle or some kind of order, or some kind of hatred. So it's not simple. It still needs directing in the right way.

But for most people there'll probably be this double possibility, both through the imaginal and through the ideational-imaginal. And as part of the complexity, as I said, of our moral life, the actualities of our moral life, there's often a call, a tug from both directions. So there's a kind of fluid and sensitive balance and conversation of allegiances to principles, and to what we might call immediate empathy, just as I was giving the example of if you're taking part in an Extinction Rebellion action or whatever, and people around you are not part of that, are getting pissed, some of the people are getting pissed off. Maybe both these are part of a good life, the beautiful life. They're both virtues. So obviously, if we completely had no empathy or sensitivity or attunement to others, whoever's in front of us, and how they're feeling, that in itself would not be a virtue. It would be a dis-virtue.

But this possibility, as I said, to widen and extend and heighten our sensitivity to values, and the possibility to grow in our relationship to values, to moral values, in the sense of deepening our commitment to them, deepening our prioritizing of them -- this all is possible and, I think, very beautiful. So Hartmann also -- let me read another passage. He's talking here about two Greek virtues which I actually don't know what the difference is, because as far as I knew, they both get translated as 'wisdom' in English: sophía and sapientia. But I'll read you the passage. It's not so important about what those words specifically mean. I want to read you the passage where he describes a kind of maturity and depth and beauty of a relationship, a deep relationship with moral values:

To the wise man [to the wise person, the person with sophía or sapientia; I'm not sure which he's talking about] the domination of values in their ideality (the domination, in Platonic phrase, of moral Ideas [yes, the ideational-imaginal]) is something natural.^[10]

"To the wise man the domination of values ... is something natural." In other words, it dominates a person's life. It dominates a person's soul, their sensibility, their orientations.

In this sense Plato was right when he joined this virtue to the beholding of Ideas, and indeed in such a way that a man, returning from the vision of ideas [so this is something that Plato talked about; it's a kind of meditation -- we'll come back to that in a second -- but one can kind of meditate on these ideas, on the purity of the ideas; one could enter that sphere or realm of the ideational-imaginal], sees in their light everything which appears to him in life. The wise man carries into all the relations of life the standards of value which he possesses in his spiritual "taste."

So you meditate. You have that direct encounter, if you like, with what might seem to be a kind of abstract notion, this ideational-imaginal, moral value of this or that. One carries that back into life, and it colours, it shapes our perspective, our perceptions of our lives, and of the things in our life, and the relations of our life. And it orients us.

He saturates his outlook upon life with them. This domination of values does not come to him by way of reflection or through knowledge of commandments, but is an immediate, intuitive, emotionally toned domination, which from the centre of moral perception penetrates all unobserved and impulsive excitations, and is therefore already alive in them.

So there's something very beautiful in that, to me. I don't know if you can hear it too. It's not something we sort of come to by way of logical deduction. It's not that we're just obeying commandments or obeying the five precepts, or whatever. But there's something "immediate, intuitive, emotionally toned," as he said, something in our heart and souls is touched, is in contact with the ideational-imaginal of a moral value. And that spreads out into our life, into our sensibility, into our perceptions, into our choices and actions. So with all this, and these kinds of possibilities and relationships, again -- actually, I'll keep reading Hartmann here, but he writes some very important things, I think.

Man [again, gender language, but man], as the product of conditions, is neither good nor bad, however much disposition, upbringing and milieu may smooth or make difficult the way to moral goodness. He can only become one or the other [become good or bad], in so far as he enters the conflicts of life and makes decisions in their midst.^[11]

Again, so we have to engage. And that's part of our assimilating, digesting, working on, fermenting moral values in our being and through our lives. He continues:

Moral goodness is realized in him only as the value of rightly directed behaviour. In this sense everyone builds entirely his own moral being -- for good or bad.

"Everyone builds entirely his own moral being -- for good or bad." I was struck by that last phrase. Building one's own moral being is part, I would say, of building one's soul. It's part of soulmaking -- building, making -- right? Because values are an element of the imaginal, and because there's the possibility of these ideas/ideals being/becoming part of the erotic-imaginal, and we work on them, it's part of building, of making our souls. It's part of soulmaking. One more short passage from Hartmann, connected to that. He says:

Man is never morally completed. With his moral growth, he constructs himself [again -- making, building, soulmaking]; even without intending it, he makes himself the object of actualization.

Soulmaking: making our souls, growing the beauty of our soul, the art of soulmaking. He continues:

He achieves his own synthesis in his preoccupation with the manifold values of life, by increase of understanding and participation. In evaluating the world [in relating to the world through the lens of moral values] ... he succeeds in transforming his own unique, irrevocable life into a general harmony, a real symphony of values.

So there's something plastic here, something creative, something artistic, something also unique to each of us (may come back to that) in terms of personal differences and inclinations among the alignments and allegiances to different values in the firmament of moral values.

So let's just say something about meditation possibilities here, and I just touched on one when we talked about Plato. But we can delineate three possibilities, all there as avenues available to us, and sometimes can move from one to the other, or it slips from one to the other, or they kind of overlap. But let's delineate three in regard to sort of meditation on moral values:

(1) One is just meditating on an image anyway because, as we said, implicit in an image is some kind of value, and some kind of moral value as well. It's an element of the imaginal, right? It's one of those twenty-eight nodes of the lattice. So that in meditating on an image, there are so many different aspects of that imaginal constellation that we can, at times, lean into focusing or tuning to this or that aspect as we choose, or one strikes us more. But one can tune to or be touched by the aspect of 'value,' the value that is implicit in, woven into/with a specific imaginal figure. And we can resonate with that, let our beings, let our souls and hearts and bodies -- and that's really important, the energy body, as always -- resonate, our total being resonating with that strand of the imaginal constellation, the strand of this particular value that's come in. We can feel it. We can put ourselves in relationship with, in a resonant relationship, dialogical relationship with that value, through being in relationship with that imaginal figure.

And we can also -- as sometimes happens spontaneously, or can happen deliberately, as I think I outlined in the Path of the Imaginal series -- we can actually enter the imaginal figure and become them, or feel what it is like to be them, see the world through their eyes, experience their kind of sensibility, and through that, experience the world through/with a kind of sensibility attuned to or prioritizing this or that particular value. So that's one possibility. It's just in the range of possibilities, of strands to pursue, to tune with, to focus on in meditating with an imaginal figure.

(2) There's a second possibility, working with an imaginal figure, and their form begins to fade. The figure itself begins to fade, and one is left with just the sort of 'essence' of their being, if you like. In a way, one is left with the ideational-imaginal, the idea. So I remember on a retreat (I think it was Tending the Holy Fire), someone reporting in meditation, they had as an imaginal figure Aslan, the lion from C. S. Lewis's writings -- Narnia, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and all that -- and at some point in the meditation on the imaginal figure of Aslan, Aslan as a figure, the lion form faded, and a space opened up. But that space was filled with, pregnant with, and characterized by the kind of essence of Aslan, the character of Aslan, which I think it was I who put the word 'nobility' to it, as if that might capture it; it may be more specific than that.^[12]

So that can happen: one's actually meditating on an imaginal figure, and it opens up, or one penetrates in a certain way -- just, a space opens up. It's a quasi-jhānic space, actually. Like, instead of the realm of infinite space, it's the realm of infinite Aslan-essence or infinite nobility. So there are so many possibilities in meditation. But in a way, one could say, what's happened there, in our language, is one has passed from the imaginal per se to the ideational-imaginal, through the imaginal figure. The form, the figure has faded, and one's left with a kind of absorption in a space of an ideational-imaginal essence. Same thing: resonating with it, opening to it, feeling one's eros for it, dissolving in it, perhaps, to some extent, energy body -- all of that, possibilities there, to really let the soul be touched by it, inspired by it, directed by it.

(3) And then there's a third possibility, which is meditation on these ideas or ideals, these moral values directly. Actually, a sense of justice or the idea of justice or beauty, if we say that -- okay, that's not strictly a moral value, but it almost is for me -- but anyway, one can, in meditating on that, get a sense of that idea.

So I'll come back to that in a second, but in any of these ways, any of those three ways in meditation, just in being sensitive to, in developing and allowing our sensitivity to, our allowing ourselves to be touched by these values, in feeling our devotion to these values, and in the choices of our actions, of our speech, of our thought, of what we cultivate, all of that -- the meditation, the sensitivity, the feeling of our devotion, our actions, our choices -- all of that feeds our virtue. It grows the virtues in our soul and grows our souls, part of our soulmaking. And it starts, as I said, to seep out, to extend to our whole life.

And in all of those ways -- the meditation, the sensitivity, the devotion, the feeling of the devotion to, the choices, the cultivation -- it's possible to sense or conceive the self and the soul, as I said, as participating in that (if we use that phrase from the Corbin passage), the Angel or Intelligence whose object of intellection is one with it. We sense ourselves participating in these divine ideas, in the divine ideational-imaginal of the values. And there's a privilege, a grace, a beauty in that. There's strength, there's meaningfulness in that. We can actually sense it, and we can conceive it, this kind of participation in that level of being.

In the third possibility, in that little list there -- so it's possible to take an idea. As I said, it might be justice; it might be beauty; it might be a certain kind of love. So we may come back to one of the kind of loves that Hartmann talks about: "love of the remote," love of those in the distant future, and the noble souls in the distant future one will never meet. [2:00:47] And one can orient towards that kind of love, or the idea of that kind of love. And you know, it might start with reflecting on how I am with that in my life, and sensing my life, and sensing, perhaps, maybe I do orient that way or I don't. And what would open that up? What would make that beautiful for me? Or as I said, I see it in my life. I sense I'm already touched by that value. I'm already devoted to that value. I can see it in the kinds of choices and sacrifices I make. So again, allowing oneself, one's story into it, and then it kind of crystallizes down to the purer idea, the purer ideal. And that can become a meditation object, and we can become kind of absorbed in that sense. So I'm not talking about a lot of thinking at this point. It's really a kind of space with the essence of this ideational-imaginal in it.

But in that process, in that meditative process that's possible there, again, at some point it will be inevitable that we will notice -- just as in meditation on an imaginal figure, an imaginal other -- that self and the world become involved, become implicated, become infected in that meditation, in that opening up of the soulmaking sense, so that there starts to be a corresponding sense or image-sense of the self and of the world that is part of the larger picture, larger dynamic, larger actuality of meditating on that ideational-imaginal object.

So the same principles of meditation apply. Here's that beloved other -- in this case it's an idea, a moral value as idea, as essence. But as we meditate, as we meditate and get absorbed in it and feel it with our whole energy body, etc., and the sensitivity and the attunement and the resonances, we start to notice -- we will at some point start to notice -- that self and world also become caught up. The soulmaking sense expands to our sense of self and the world. And that's actually, again, part of the deepening and the stabilizing of that kind of meditation.

And there may be, if you do pursue this kind of thing, there may be, too, at certain points, a kind of quantum leap. So at first, as I said, it might start -- one's actually kind of reflecting on that value, or kind of just holding it a little bit in mind, and there are thoughts around, and then maybe, as I said, a sense of one's life, and what the status of one's relationship and orientation is with regard to that image. But as one practises with it, it might then take a kind of quantum leap to another level, where there's a sense of another realm. One really feels, "Oh, I'm in another realm here." There's a kind of beatitude there, the pure essence of the idea. And that kind of quantum leap may or may not -- it might be gradual, but there's the possibility of a quantum leap, and the possibility of, let's say there's a gradation of possibility in this kind of meditation. So sometimes you get these quantum leaps in a kind of jhānic meditation -- suddenly, I mean, really, now I'm in the third jhāna. It's really a different realm. It really feels like I'm in a different realm here. And so something similar may happen: we enter the sphere, the realm of ideal being, the realm of the ideational-imaginal. And in that, as I said, there's great beauty. There is a beatitude.

So those are possibilities to explore, and certainly in meditation, but also in the wider range of what I've been saying here. So if you want, you can explore that. Perhaps some of you will even develop these ideas, these possibilities, and these connections more than I have, as time goes on. Again, with soulmaking, there's the opening, the complexifying, the enrichening, the extension of the reach, the drawing in of more and more areas of our being, of existence, of our lives, the creation and discovery of different, more and more erotic objects for us, erotic others. And so endless possibilities -- that goes with the soulmaking dynamic. That's here, and it can open out. And perhaps, as I said, some of you will also get likewise interested in this as a certain kind of area of potential opening and exploration for soulmaking.