Ontology and Conceptions of Reality in Dharma Practice

... [Over the next] hour and a half, to just gently keep tabs with what's going on for you emotionally. How's your heart doing? How's your body doing? Can you feel the body sensations? Is the energy body open? How's the sensitivity? So, very easy in a cyber space, virtual space, whatever we call this, to kind of lose that a little bit, lose the contact. It's really a practice, and maybe we can all kind of try and do that. Does this make sense? Yeah? Okay.

I wanted to say something about these kind of groups and asking questions. It applies to, I guess, group interviews as well -- even one to one. Often people are a bit nervous to ask questions. It's very understandable. Sometimes they're nervous to ask because there's a possibility that their question might be judged, or they think that it might be judged. Perhaps they think it will be judged as being too basic a question, or maybe it's a bit stupid. But also the opposite, that it's a bit advanced and people will think, "Who's this?", etc. So that's one reason sometimes people are reticent and nervous to ask questions. And secondly, there's the possibility that sometimes we're not very good at formulating our question. So we feel a little reluctant to ask because I can't quite put it into words; I know there's something, but I can't quite articulate it well enough. So you sense the question but can't articulate it clearly enough.

So I would really, really, with all my heart, want to encourage -- just do the best you can with that. Whatever your question, it's highly, highly likely that it will be helpful to other people. So even if you think it's basic, if you think there's a possibility it's a stupid question, or if it's super advanced or whatever. So know that, if that can kind of impact your mind and your heart's choice about whether to ask. And not to worry about either of those things, about whether your question is basic or not, and secondly, whether you can articulate it clearly enough or not. Occasionally people are a little bit lazy with questions, so they just kind of say, "Oh, just say something about awakening!" or something like that, and it kind of gives me all the work to do. So occasionally that's the case, but usually not. Don't worry -- just try to put something out there if you're not that clear about what the question is, and maybe I'll try and respond to that, and in that process, maybe it will whittle down to actually get to the nub of what your question is, hopefully. So it might be, actually, that even formulating questions is a bit of a skill, you know? It's like a muscle; it's something that we can develop. And if we don't try, then it doesn't develop.

Okay. That's about questions. Now, the idea with these seminars is really to have them be essentially led by you. They're question-led, from the Saṅgha, and I'm not going to prepare anything [sound cuts out briefly]. This one is an exception (unfortunately or fortunately). So between the time that the topic got suggested and now, a couple of people have emailed me, or made a comment, or this and that, so it made me wonder -- maybe it's good if I say a little bit to introduce this topic, because I think for a lot of people it will perhaps just sound really abstract: "Well, what's that got ...? Maybe a few people will be interested in that as sort of a specialist area of interest." So I wanted to say a few things that kind of open the topic up and make it clear a little bit why we would even have a seminar on this and why it's important. So I hope that's okay. And then after that we can get some questions. I'll try and be relatively brief.

So "Ontology and Conceptions of Reality in Dharma Practice." That word, 'ontology*,'* gets used in slightly different ways. I think I use it mostly to mean what's quite a common way of using it -- it's the whole question and exploration of what is the reality status of something. What can we say kind of exists and what doesn't exist? Or, to make it more complex, what different kinds of reality do different things have? That's a bit more variegated there. So it's a branch of philosophy, and as I said, we could think, "Well, that's all a bit abstract. What's that got to do with my life? What's that got to do with my Dharma practice?" But I hope in what I'm going to explain now that you will realize it's anything but abstract. It's actually completely basic, and really fundamental, and a really, really important question.

So one way we can enter this is thinking about what happens in our life when we decide X is real, and Y is not real (whatever X and Y are). What happens? What are the consequences? In other words, what are the consequences of an ontology, any ontology, that decides this is real and that's not real? So for example, this table is real, this computer is real; an image that I have is not real. Or vice versa -- the image is real, but the table is kind of an illusion or something. So there are all kinds of decisions, views, concepts we have about what is real and what is not real, and that basic decision -- I'll come back to this -- is operating all the time, or a basic decision about what's real and not real is operating all the time in our consciousness, any time there's an experience, and it has massive fundamental consequences, for our practice but also for our whole lives.

[7:40] Let's explore this a little bit. What are the consequences of reification? That's another fancy word, and I'm just using it here to mean viewing something as real. If I reify X, it means I view something as real. What are the consequences? Does everyone know what this word papañca means? Yeah? You probably do. So I'm in a kind of mental maelstrom and I'm believing something about what's real, about what this person thinks of me, and I'm all messed up about that and all confused. At that moment, I've made a reality choice, or I'm engaged in a concept and a view about what's real. And you can feel it right then in the dukkha, in the moment but also in what may come out of, what choices may come out of that moment of papañca. Here's this confusion, here's this reactivity that we call papañca. Wrapped up in that or sitting on it, it's sitting on a view of what is real. And then maybe I make a really stupid choice because I say something to them, or I say something to someone else, and then I have to deal with the consequences. So, a very obvious case of where a reification will have consequences. Later on I start to realize, "Oh, yikes. Maybe I was just kind of in a spin and that wasn't really real, what I was seeing from the vortex of that papañca."

Okay. So we all know that as practitioners. What happens if you've been exposed to a certain kind of predominantly, let's say, Theravādan Dharma, or rather some streams of Theravādan Dharma, that say actually, as the Buddha said, sarvam idam māyam: this world, all this world, is an illusion. It's a fabrication. What is really real is the Unfabricated. So there again, we've got an ontology that says X is real and Y is not real. X is the Unfabricated, Y is the fabricated, meaning this world of phenomenal experience. And this Unfabricated is beyond any experience, beyond any form, beyond any subject/object, beyond space, beyond time, beyond any perception.

If I've been taught that, and I orient around that, what are the consequences? What's the relative value I give to this world, relative to this something called the Unfabricated that maybe I haven't even discovered yet? Can you see that there's a relative denigration of the world there? The world of experience, the world of matter, the world of bodies, the world of relationships. So there will be consequences for how I practise, for what's important, for my view of what matters and what doesn't matter. Do you understand? Massive. That view is actually quite rare in the Dharma world, but it's still a possibility. Now, we could flip that around. What happens if you've been exposed and taught [what is] these days a much more common Dharma that says actually what's real is what's experienced through mindfulness, through bare attention, through the simplifying of papañca and the simple so-called contact with the bare actuality of things; all this talk of the Unfabricated is some kind of mystical nonsense, it's an accretion to Buddhism, and papañca is also nonsense.

So what you've got is X is real, and X is this 'bare actuality,' the 'simple reality.' And Y, the Unfabricated, and Z, the papañca, are not real. And then what does it do to my life? What does it do to my view of being? What does it do to my view of, my sense of the complexities of personality? What does it do to my sense of the necessity of my story? What does it do in terms of my regard and orientation towards mystical states and the Unfabricated? Do you understand? Huge, massive. So there's an ontology there that gives reality or decides that what's real is 'things as they are' or what's revealed in bare attention, or 'what is,' or whatever else. Again, images then, imaginal images, will likewise be irrelevant. They will be dismissed, demeaned, denigrated because they're not real, they're not what appears through this basic mindfulness. And how is that going to affect not just what I practise, but again, what I feel about what a human being is, and what perceptions of the world and of each other and of self I value, respect, follow, let touch me, etc.?

So some of the consequences of all this, what I decide to reify, have to do with what is correspondingly decided to be not real. The consequences for any of these decisions -- something will be of less value. Something will be demeaned. Something will be dismissed. Something we'll decide, "Not worth exploring," or will be decided to be illegitimate. It's like, "This image is just illegitimate. It's just papañca." Or the Unfabricated, "It's nothing. It's a Hindu creation" or something, or just irrelevant. So all this business about ontology, on a scale of the whole life and a life of practice, has massive ramifications about where I'm headed, what direction I go in, and what's the scope of my practice, what's included in my practice, what I care about, what I cultivate, what I value, what I explore.

But, as some of you already know, there are consequences also at another level, at a more immediate level -- that when we are able to view things in the moment, to come into a way of looking that regards this or that as not real, maybe even starts to regard more and more of our experience as not real in the sense of empty, empty of inherent existence, then we start to notice, in the sort of meditative art of that, that the actual phenomenal world, the world of experience, starts to fade. So things, self, others, suffering certainly -- we should start there; the first thing, if I'm in that papañca and I realize then, "Oh, this isn't real. It's empty," what happens to the suffering? It cuts the papañca. But we can do this, as some of you know, much more comprehensively, much more fully, much more deeply. Then not just obvious suffering goes, but the self-sense starts to fade, starts to get less and less. The self dissolves, gets lighter. Then also the world of objects and the world itself, and eventually even time -- past, future, and present -- and space and all of that; even awareness itself. The whole shebang, the whole show of phenomenal experience, starts to fade, or can fade, if we develop this art in the moment. It fades in the moment that we're seeing something as not real but empty.

So the consequences for whatever the -- let's call it the ontological view, the reality view -- are huge for one's life, and trajectory, and choices, and values. They're huge for one's choices about practice and the path that one's on and the direction that takes. And they're huge in the moment in terms of what actually happens to the sense of suffering, the sense of self, the sense of other, the sense of world, the sense of space, time, and awareness, and the whole thing. [16:29] Another example would be with emotions, let's say. So this is a delicate one. What happens if we've been practising a lot, let's say with just the art of really, really relaxing the push and pull, the tussle with experience, the rejecting of unpleasant and the trying to grab hold of and keep hold of the pleasant? What happens if we practise that and we get really, really good at that art, really, really good at softening the relationship with experience, and softening, say, the relationship even with an emotional experience? If we do that, and really develop that practice, you start to see: when I have very, very little push and pull in regard to experience, and particularly in regard to emotions, but in regard to experience in general, then actually a difficult emotion won't arise. It will not arise. We start to think, "What's actually happening?" I'm not shutting anything out. Is it that for the difficult emotion to arise it actually needs me, in the moment, to be wrestling, to be tussling? We say in the Dharma it's a dependent arising. Does this make sense? Yeah?

So maybe I've seen that. Maybe I've seen it a hundred times, a thousand times, and something has really sunk in in terms of my understanding; the coin has dropped. Then I can maybe no longer see an emotion as really being a kind of real retrieval, a real arising, like the emotion pre-exists somehow, either from my past or something else. Start to realize, "Oh." It's a very different view than most psychologies would regard. Then, maybe, based on that, I can actually decide to look at things and regard them as empty, because I've seen that they're dependent on my wrestling with them in the moment. And what is the effect of doing that? What's the effect when I know from conviction that something is empty (it's not real in the way that we usually assume it is, it doesn't have this independent existence)? What's the effect on, as I said, the sense of suffering, the sense of self, the sense of object (in this case, an emotion), the sense of the world, the sense of things, the sense of space, time, and all that?

This is something we start to really notice, and then I think one cannot help but start to question certain suppositions -- in this case about psychology or about emotionality in general, etc. I cannot have a sense of emotional catharsis without a reification, without some view -- usually subtle; it's usually unconscious -- that it's real. If I take that away, then actually the catharsis cannot happen. This kind of upwelling of an emotion from the past, it actually cannot happen in the moment. I'm not suppressing anything; I'm just looking at something and viewing it with a different ontological lens. What's going on? How do I need to open up my whole view of reality, of psychology, of emotionality, etc.?

So this exploration of the consequences of reification and the consequences of non-reification, this really is an art, you know? It's really a journey and an art. We can develop our skill and art at actually learning to non-reify at different levels and noticing the effects. It's one thing to hear a teacher say that, or read it or whatever; it's another thing to really know it, and know it for myself, and know it in my heart, and know it that it's like, it doesn't matter what anyone's going to say. I know something. The coin has dropped, and it's in my heart, and it changes my relationship with the whole world, my whole sense of existence and life and death and everything. And I know not just the experience, but I know what it implies. I've put two and two together and I've made four. That's a heart thing. It's not an intellectual thing. Something becomes part of the fabric of one's existence.

So when we talk about ontology in this context, in the context we're talking about -- conceptions of reality in Dharma practice -- yeah, we can talk philosophically and that's actually really important and interesting, but what we're really talking about is taking these ideas about reality, what's real, what's not, what's empty, what does empty even mean (in this case; we'll get to other things, hopefully). But rather than thinking about them, it's translating that idea into the way of looking, so it becomes very subtle, very agile. It actually becomes a way we sense things. It's not something we're thinking about, "Oh, yeah, I wonder if that's real or not. I'll decide to see it as not real," and it just remains up here [in the head]. We're talking about something that exists in the body and becomes part of the way we sense things with all the senses. So it has to somehow go from the discursive mind into that kind of subtle agility, and there it will start to have these really, really potent effects and we'll notice them.

[22:49] Okay. A couple more things. When we're practising a way of looking that is looking at something as not real -- let's say empty (and 'empty' really means 'neither real nor not real'). Let's say it's empty, as opposed to real. X, whatever X is -- this sensation in my foot, this lamp post, whatever it is, awareness, time, whatever -- X is empty, not real. Usually at the same time, something else, some other thing -- Y -- is viewed as real. Every time I'm practising a way of looking that "this is empty, this is empty," almost always, something else is regarded as real. This may be intentional -- I'm actually deliberately regarding this as real, whatever the 'this' is; deliberate, explicit. Or it might be, and maybe usually is, implicit. We're not even fully conscious that we're regarding something else as real.

So some of you will know the practice that I call the vastness of awareness. Lovely space opens up in meditation, things are very calm, very almost mystically serene, a huge space of awareness. And in that space, phenomena, sounds, body sensations, thoughts, maybe just arise and fade, arise out of that space and disappear back into it. And as you open up to the beauty of that space and settle into it, those phenomena that arise and pass begin to feel like, or we have the sense, they're not really real. They're insubstantial. They're kind of the same stuff as this space, as this mystical space. But usually, at that point, the mystical space -- usually a vastness of awareness or something -- is regarded as real. So this isn't real, but that's real. That's an example. So you get a real phenomena, and a kind of illusory. Or, for example, the aggregates -- the body, the feelings, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness. They're not really selves, but we might be regarding them as kind of real in themselves. So there's usually this mixture of what's regarded as real and what's regarded as not real. Or time is regarded as real in the background.

Sometimes that sort of -- let's call it incompleteness of non-reification -- is just part and parcel of the process at most stages. It's just how things unfold. We can't just decide, "I'm going to see everything as not real." We don't have the art for that yet; we don't have the platform for that yet. So it's just part of the process. It's fine if you reify this while you're seeing that as empty. It's part of how things deepen. It's part of the exploration. And sometimes it's actually helpful. So, for example, in soulmaking views, we might view an emotion or my eros or my desire as it's more real to say that it's God's desire, or it's the Buddha-nature's desire, or it's the divinity's desire or emotion, that emotion is a divine influx. So again, there's a kind of leaning onto, "Oh, this is a bit more real, or a lot more real, than that." And that leaning towards "this is real and that's not" actually will have a huge effect, will empower certain processes, certain unfoldings, certain directions.

Or again, going back to the example of the vastness of awareness, it's okay if I reify that. Maybe I even fall in love with it, and I even have a kind of devotional relationship with it. That's also going to be really helpful and potent and valuable, for a while, as long as it's not a final resting place, a kind of ultimate truth; as long as it's provisional and we're just entertaining that idea. There's a lot of people here, so you will all be in very different places with the kind of things that I'm talking about right now, of course. But with time -- we're really talking about an art here that, to me, has a lot of beauty to it, and there are so many different possibilities and kind of roads within that realm that you can travel down and explore. One of the beautiful things, one of the more subtle aspects of that, is that we can also learn to lean, so to speak, to different degrees, in different moments, on the view of something being empty and not really real. So you can just have it in almost like a tincture in the background. Or you can really lean -- while I'm sensing this thing, whatever this thing is, I'm really, really leaning on the knowing that it's empty, and I can play, like if you drive a stick shift or a manual car you can play with the way you balance the clutch pedal with the gas pedal, with the accelerator. That's part of learning how to drive. I can hold it steady, I can do this one more or that one more. Same thing, but to much more subtle gradations of how much you can lean on the view of emptiness, how much it's just there as a very, very subtle colouring, or you're really leaning on it. And again, all this will affect what unfolds, what actually unfolds in the moment in my practice. Yes, it's subtle. Yes, it's sophisticated. Yes, it takes a while to develop. But the possibilities are immensely beautiful.

[29:21] Maybe last thing. Some of you have heard me say this, because I say it a lot in talks. I would say there's always some conception, there's always some ontological conception, in any moment of experience. In other words, any time there's any perception, any time there's any appearance, any time there's any experience, there's some ontological judgment that we are making, okay? Now, most of the time, that's not at all verbal. It's not discursive. It's not like a big, "Hmm, I wonder ..." Sometimes it's, "Was that real, or was that not real?", or it's a philosophical thing. Mostly it's just going on automatically, unconsciously. So when I say 'concept,' there's always some concept. Part of the concepts that are going on are a kind of assessment of what is real. That's just part of consciousness. But it's not a discursive thought; it doesn't even involve words most of the time.

I saw this movie about the great footballer, Zinedine Zidane, one time, and he was saying sometimes when he's playing his mind just goes completely quiet. He was amazing, really amazing footballer. And he said the mind just goes completely quiet, and something happens, and he dribbles and scores a goal. We could say, "Oh, no concept there." No. There is still a concept. It's not verbal. It's not discursive thought. But he still knows the ball needs to go in that goal, not that goal, right? This round piece of plastic or whatever it is, it needs to go between those posts. It's all intuitive, it's pre-discursive thought, but it's a concept. Or, you know, just even when there's no sense of self, or very little sense of self, everything's really quiet, there's no thinking, I still know, you still know, there's something different about this body than those other bodies. Somehow there's agency associated with this body and not with those bodies. Somehow it's not a good idea to shit in my pants right now. Now, I'm not thinking that. It's not a discursive thought. It's an implicit concept. It would be a bad idea for a lot of reasons to poop in my pants right now, okay? So this is the kind of thing -- and actually much, much more subtle than that [laughs] -- this is the kind of thing that I'm talking about when I say concepts are just all the time. Part of the concepts that are going on with any experience is what we could call an ontological judgment. We judge this as real and that as not real. Sometimes we're confused and we have moments of not knowing. But this is part of any moment of consciousness.

Okay. Last thing, and then we can open it up. So all this has, as I said at the beginning, massive implications, and in terms of practice it has all kinds of implications. Some of the implications have just to do with the kind of possibilities that open up for us in practice, like avenues that we could explore, openings, territories that might open up in terms of experience, etc. So this all becomes really part of the beauty, of the art. What happens? Is it possible to explore the effects of these kind of ontological views, different ontological views in practice? So, for example, in the brahmavihāras, if you're practising mettā or compassion -- I know how to do the regular mettā, and I know how to do the regular compassion, "May you be well, may you be free of suffering," whatever it is; it's coming from me to you. What happens to the whole experience and quality of that particular brahmavihāra, whether it's mettā or compassion or whatever, when at the time I'm practising it, in that moment, I'm actually seeing the self of the other person as empty? What happens to it? Something to explore. Actually, it gets a lot more beautiful and a lot deeper, so there's the answer. But you need to know it for yourself.

But there can be all kinds of gradations there. If I say, "Okay, the self is not real. The self is empty, but the mind moments over there are real. This person is suffering. There's a suffering mind moment, then there's another suffering mind moment," I could then view, engage the way of looking, "I'm giving compassion to those suffering mind moments. There's no person there." I'm deciding the self is empty and the mind moments are real. But I could go even further, and the mind moments are not real. What happens to the compassion then? So often we think, "Well, how can there be care and compassion if I'm regarding the object as empty?" But actually it makes it deeper, richer, bigger. So sometimes in regard to all this, people have fear that emptiness or whatever will create a nihilistic lack of care, but it's not what happens, and I would say a measure of how, let's say, well the emptiness practices are working, if that's what we're talking about, a measure of that is the degree that it opens up sensitivity and care and commitment to care.

When we get into Soulmaking Dharma and imaginal practice, the possibilities are just exponentially huge in terms of playing with whole different kinds of views about what's real and what has primary reality and secondary reality. You can just play with all that. Something gets freed up in the whole conception. You can just start entertaining these ideas and experience different worlds open up. Different selves, different worlds, different cosmoses open up dependent on just entertaining, temporarily, a certain ontological view about what's real. So really the possibilities are endless, literally endless, and these are all things to explore. Usually going slowly, we just start to explore this and gain more confidence in all that.

Okay. I think that was what I wanted to say. That was quite long. [laughs] As I said, it was triggered just by a few comments that came my way before the seminar started. So I hope that was helpful. We can open it up to questions. Please bear in mind what I said before about questions. If you're feeling a little unsure or nervous, it's very normal. I really encourage you to try, and it will almost certainly be helpful for others. So I've talked a fair amount about emptiness, but really it doesn't have to be about emptiness. It's really just in Dharma practice. We see in brahmavihāras, in mindfulness, in soulmaking, this business of ontology is relevant to all of that. So the questions can cover all of that. So, I think Wah -- was that you with a question?

Q1: emptiness and ontological categories

Yogi: [39:33] My question is does emptiness fit it in a philosophical or ontological category already, and could you talk a bit about it if it does.

Rob: Does emptiness fit into an ontological category? Yeah, so, emptiness is a kind of ontology. In other words, the whole teachings about emptiness, certainly as they exist as they were developed in the Mahāyāna traditions, are basically a philosophical exploration of emptiness with practical implications and instructions. In other words, because emptiness also deals with the question of what is real and what's not real, and what is the reality status of things, and it comes to certain answers -- actually it depends who you ask within the Buddhist traditions, but it comes to certain answers to those questions. So basically it's an ontological exploration, yeah. Philosophically speaking, the whole teachings of emptiness are part of an ontology, yeah. You look confused. What's confusing you there?

Yogi: I suppose I've only been reading about ontologies recently and heard things like realism or consciousness as primary, or even kind of guerrilla ontologies. That's probably all that I've heard, actually. And I was just wondering if you could kind of describe -- so it doesn't fit into one of those; is that fair to say?

Rob: Say what the three were again. The last one was guerrilla ontology?

Yogi: Yeah, I only know a couple. Guerrilla ontology, realism and consciousness as primary. Those are probably the only ones I've heard of.

Rob: Yeah, yeah. So, again, it depends. In the Buddhadharma, if you line up, let's say, 100 different teachers, even if you line up twenty teachers from the Insight Meditation tradition, and ask them what they mean by emptiness, and just keep going with the questions, "So, does that mean this is real? So that's not real?" They'll always say emptiness means something or other is not real. They'll always give you that answer: it means it's not really real. So then if you keep going with the questions -- this person has said, for example, "The self is not real," then you would ask them, "Oh, but the aggregates are real?" They might say, "Yeah, the aggregates are real, but the self is not real." The next person in your line of Buddhist teachers, they'll say the self is not real, "So the aggregates are real?" "No, the aggregates are not real. The aggregates are empty too." Okay. You might go down and someone might say, "Matter is really real. Matter is the only thing that's really real." So that's a kind of materialism.

In my view of emptiness, there's nothing that's not empty. But, as I said, within Buddhadharma, and especially if you include the Theravādan schools -- and this is one of the critiques of the Theravādan schools by the Mahayana schools -- is that they don't see enough of the range of emptiness. It's a quite common critique, because they leave the aggregates as being real, or time as being real, or impermanence as being real, or matter, whatever it is. So realism, it's hard to say what it means, but basically it means something is real. So then you have to ask, "Okay, what is this person taking as real?" And for some people it's like bare attention is a kind of realism; they've decided that what they experience in a state of sort of relatively equanimous mindfulness is real. For other people, it might be that they're physicalists or materialists and they've decided that mind is an illusion, self is an illusion, consciousness is a kind of illusion; what's really basically real is matter. So you'd have to ask a realist, "What do you think is real and what do you think is not real?"

Consciousness as primary, again, sometimes that's a kind of what they call idealist view which just flips the whole thing and says, "Actually, matter is more an illusion. The only thing that really exists is mind, is consciousness, and everything is just the kind of play of appearances in the mind." There's lots of different versions of all these, philosophically and historically in the East and the West. As for guerrilla ontology, I have no idea what that is. [laughs] Do you want to say a bit about it, or does that ...?

Yogi: I suppose, yeah. Just lastly, if you were to have to -- you know how those things have names, those other versions? If you were to have to say a description of this ontology, would you say it was like 'phenomena is co-dependently arisen ontology' or something? Or if there's a positive term for it. Or would you say 'everything is not real'? I mean, you said that, but it didn't sound like that was the case.

Rob: Am I equating my view of emptiness with dependent arising?

Yogi: Or do you equate it with anything in a few words?

Rob: I would equate it with dependent arising, but again, you line up the same hundred Buddhist Dharma teachers, and ask them what dependent arising means to them, you're going to get radically different answers, radically. So if you compare someone like Mipham Rinpoche, the one who died 100 years ago, compare his answer to what dependent arising is with, I don't know, some other people who may be around now, they're completely different animals, just vastly different. So yeah, I would say emptiness and dependent arising are kind of two sides of the same coin, in a way, or different ways of saying the same thing, but again, it depends what you mean by 'dependent arising.'

And also what I would say with the Soulmaking Dharma -- emptiness is, as you said, going back to your first question, an ontological exploration. Does that not make sense when I say that?

Yogi: I just write it down and think about it.

Rob: Okay. So ontology, as I said at the beginning, is just the question of what is real and what is not real, okay? That's all the exploration of emptiness is as well; it's just a progressive questioning of what's real or not real, but using practice, and using the power of deep practice. So emptiness is an ontological exploration. When we get to Soulmaking Dharma, we're just exploding the whole thing even wider. So there's lots of ontology that emptiness doesn't cover, because it would be immature and lazy to say, for example, "Oh, everything's empty, therefore everything has the same kind of reality. So an image has the same kind of reality as this table or my head or whatever it is." That's too sloppy, too lazy. So an image has a different kind of reality, an imaginal image has a different kind of reality than a papañca imagination, and a different kind of reality than a physical thing. They're all empty. But there's a whole other exploration of ontology there. So that's point one.

And point two: in Soulmaking Dharma, as I said, what we're also doing is something has got liberated in our whole kind of range of concepts of ontology. So I can decide -- I sit down now, and I decide to give, let's say, more real than physical Rob, and this body, and this illness, more real than that is the image, the image of myself, the imaginal image of myself. Now, usually, people would say, "Of course the physical Rob is the real one. It lives in time and does this and now lives in Devon and blah blah blah. And the image is less real." But you can just play with flipping that, or, as I said, leaning on the different views of how real they are. Or I could play with my image as an emanation from the Buddha-nature, from the divine -- that's the ultimate reality; the image has slightly less reality; and then this physical Rob has even less reality. You can play with all -- they're endless possibilities. So when we get to Soulmaking Dharma, the ranges of our ontology, our ontological play, really, and exploration, get vast, absolutely huge. Okay?

Q2: limitations of the vastness of awareness

Rob: Now I should do a written one if I'm going to do what I said, right? Oh, wow, there's a lot there. So I'm going to take these in chronological order, and there's one from Lucas. I'll read that. [49:05] "One conception of the Dharma that I have found very helpful is that everything is awareness or consciousness. I've heard you mention in more than one place how this is not the end of the story, but I'd love you to talk more about what the particular limitations are with this conception. I continue to find this way of seeing very freeing, especially as it's very accessible to me in daily life, but I'd like to know if there's anything you would suggest looking out for."

Yeah, really important, lovely question. So part of the question is what are the particular limitations. Here's this lovely, freeing, very accessible and even in daily life, beautiful way of looking, brings a lot of liberation in the moment, this "everything is awareness." And again, it's not an idea; it's a way of looking. So Lucas is saying this is great -- what are the particular limitations associated with that? In a way, we need to taste those limitations for ourselves. I can only know them as limitations if I've gone beyond that particular state, right? I could say, "Well, it still exists in time, and there's still a sense of space," something like that. Really subtle. If we just take the time one, really, really subtle. So sometimes with this state that you're talking about, with this way of looking that you're talking about, there's a sense of a kind of eternality to it, but only in the sense of it seems like this awareness will go on unperturbed forever. The play of appearances that sort of reflect in it will change, but that awareness will just remain beautifully, serenely, mystically undisturbed, on and on and on in time, without beginning, without end.

So it still exists in time, albeit for an endlessly long period of time. So there's going to be all kinds of peace and freedom associated with that, and mystical beauty. It's a really lovely state. I can only know its limitations when, for example, I taste another kind of timelessness, which is not something that continues in time. It's not something that lasts forever. It's something that then becomes very hard to talk about, because language is usually based on time and an understanding of time. This is all kind of laid out in my book, but one way of working would be, for instance, to work with the time aspect, and actually find ways of deconstructing, in the moment, time -- past, future, and present. And maybe you do that in the vast awareness, or maybe you do it outside of it, whatever. It's possible that then you go beyond even that kind of eternality that's in there. Retrospectively, you realize, "Whoa, we're at a whole other level now, a whole other level of sense of liberation, of beauty, of mystical wonder," etc.

If I say to someone, "This vastness of awareness, it's dukkha. As the Buddha would say, that's dukkha," often that gets interpreted as, "Oh, it's just an experience, and therefore it will fade in time." No, it's dukkha also because it's fabricated. You only realize that, you only realize that it's dukkha relatively speaking, when you go beyond it. So I think in this progression of exploring, it's not that you want to ditch something like that. You have a treasure there. Really develop it, cultivate it, have it be accessible as it is, more and more. It's possible spontaneously sometimes that in that state, or just after you've been hanging out in that way of looking, an insight organically and spontaneously occurs about, for example, time, that then takes you to another level of understanding of time, of the emptiness of time, and then that has an effect on everything, including the possibilities in that state or going beyond it.

So you could just kind of keep doing what you're doing and -- I don't know what the probability is of that [spontaneous insight] happening; I have no idea. It might be small. It might be huge. I don't know. It's certainly, absolutely possible. Definitely. But I just don't know. If you really want to see, "Is there anything beyond this?", then ... You could just say, "I really want to know, so I'll just hope that it goes beyond that from practising it," or you could say, "Well, I'll keep doing that, and maybe it will go beyond it, and I'm enjoying it anyway. And I'll see what else I can kind of cultivate to support it going beyond that." So for me it would be a little bit of a risk to just hope that it does, but it might. You might want to back it up with some sort of additional directions and options. Does that sound okay? Okay, super. Okey-dokey. Now we have a spoken one again. We had some before -- there was Harry. Harry, do you still have one?

Q3: different angles into seeing and feeling emptiness

Yogi: [55:11] So I wanted to ask about the use of the word "deciding" what reality is. You started out by saying the decision we make about what is real is central. I have found that in trying to bring about that decision, I've kind of created a split between the ontology that you're talking about, whether it be vast awareness or an understanding of emptiness in all things, and my kind of intuitive ontology, like "This tea is hot," or "I'm hungry," or "I don't like people pushing into queues in front of me." When I strive to see emptiness in those things, I just get a kind of push-back from my body, my physical self. There just seems to be a bit of a loggerhead situation. And that happened a couple years ago where I kind of figured out that I was banging my head against a brick wall, and I haven't been able to find a way to kind of soften the suggestion that reality might not be as we intuitively understand it. As a result, my practice has become a bit more embodied, and I've become less ambitious about trying to test out different understandings of what might be real and might not be. So any kind of suggestions on how to soften that split, whether that split is something that exists for other people in practice, would be most welcome.

Rob: Thank you, Harry. I'm wondering whether it may be an issue of just when you decide to practise in emptiness ways. So if it's a case of here's some dukkha, and I'm kind of bringing the emptiness to bear on that dukkha -- although that's usually the way I suggest, because it matters then and we're engaged -- sometimes what happens for some people is that there's a bit too much pressure, because I'm actually trying to get rid of something (which is totally understandable). If that's the case -- I don't know if it is, so I want to ask you that -- but if it's the case, I wonder if it would be more fruitful to actually let your curiosity and also any kind of loveliness that comes up when you're practising viewing something as empty that may not be a problem, but let the curiosity and the loveliness actually lead your practice rather than the dukkha. Anyway, I think curiosity and loveliness are really important parts of any practice, whether we're talking about mettā or soulmaking or whatever. But especially for emptiness, it can be important to kind of go more in that direction. Does that sound relevant, or not quite?

Yogi: It sounds relevant. I just feel that the intuitive understanding of what is real is just really hard to convince in any way. So I can sit down and go with what is lovely or try to nurture curiosity, and on the cushion, it's pleasant. You were talking about things going from the discursive mind deep into the heart, and that path, from the discursive mind to the heart, just feels like it's difficult to follow. I think you're right in that it feels more blocked if I'm taking on something like suffering than it does with the lighter things.

Rob: Yeah. So for other people, it won't be; that's actually when they're most engaged, and it goes well. But it can be the other way around. Again, there are so many different ways of doing things, and different personalities, so some people will approach the whole emptiness question discursively at first. If you know some Tibetan Buddhists like the Gelugs, that's how they teach it -- you actually do twenty years of discursive kind of logic and all this, and then you go and meditate. I'm not exaggerating; that's what they do. So that's fine. But one possibility, for example, might be to make the question of ontology a little bit secondary. One way of doing that would be, if you know from my book what I call, let's say, the second dukkha practice: I'm sitting down to meditate. I'm not thinking anything about ontology or what's real or what's not. But whatever's there that I notice any kind of reaction to, my job is just to soften it. As I do that, if I'm doing it, usually it will start to just be lovely. Let that loveliness take you, let that loveliness kind of keep you on the cushion doing that in that mode of practice. There's no pressure about, "It's this particular problem that I'm struggling with and I'm trying to get rid of," nor am I approaching it with some big philosophical conundrum. You could say I'm just practising letting go, and making sure I really enjoy the ease that comes with every little moment of letting go, every little relaxing of push-pull.

So it's that enjoyment there, in the body, in the embodiment there, and in the heart, and in the emotions -- that enjoyment will act as a kind of lubrication for that direction, and also kind of a glue; the lubricant will be a kind of glue to keep you on the path. And at some point, stuff will happen -- you just start to notice, "Oh, less suffering," or "Oh, different sense of self." So gradually, gradually, you can just start noticing what I call the spectrum of the sense of self. But you're not starting, "That's right, I'm going to do this so things can fade so I can understand ontology." That's fine for some people, but everyone has to really get a sense of what's my angle in, what works for me, and what keeps it juicy and interesting. Yeah? So it might be that doing something that way around just inevitably starts to soften and loosen ontologies, because of the experience that arises, but I'm not starting with that intention -- even though a part of you (and I know because -- actually I haven't seen you for years, but I'm assuming a part of you is still philosophically very keen), you still might be really interested in those questions and interested in shaking things up ontologically, but it's like, you can't let that be in the driving seat too much. So put that one in the back seat, let the comfort and ease and just the letting go be in the driving seat, and both of you are going to get where you need to get to in the car, yeah? Does that make sense?

Yogi: Yeah, it's really useful. Thank you.

Rob: Super, good. Okey-doke.

Q4: addressing the intuition of the reality of matter

Rob: I'm looking at the written ones again. [1:03:43] Here's a long one. Let's see. It's anonymous, so I hope that it won't need extra questions for me, but I'll try. "Practitioners working with ways of looking can come to realize through meditative practice that all perception is empty, i.e. consciousness and time as well as the objects of awareness. However, the intuition that there is nevertheless stuff out there that is not empty outside of perception seems often to persist. To support the validity of this intuition, such people might say that being hit by a bus is likely to result in an alteration in perception that is not entirely dependent on the way of looking, i.e. the matter and velocity of the bus is actually not empty, or at least has inherent existence independent of perception. However empty the perception of buses seems to be, the road traffic accident victim still actually bleeds to death, or so it appears. This intuition leads to an incomplete scope of what is regarded as empty and is quite a tenacious view. Fantasies of what lies outside of perception, particularly scientific materialist ones, are difficult to disabuse people of, even though they might limit the depth of freedom available. Pointing out that such intuitions are themselves empty or recourse to the traditional two truths doctrine of Madhyamaka or emphasizing the agnostic position of silence with regard to things outside of perception that we, by definition, have no access to doesn't seem to convince anyone. How would you recommend addressing this gap for practitioners between the emptiness of perception and the intuition of reality of matter?"

You know, I think from a Dharma point of view, everything is pragmatic. So the whole question about emptiness is pragmatic, meaning -- contrary to what we just said to Harry -- where's the suffering? So I don't think that emptiness, certainly as I teach it, or anyone that I'm aware of really teaches it well, answers all ontological questions. As we said to Wah, emptiness is a part of the whole scope of ontology. When we realize emptiness to a certain degree, then suffering goes. There's a different relationship with existence. It does not answer all questions about the existence of matter. There are popular views about the existence of matter, but again, the more you push those questions in a scientific direction, those normal views are also brought into question. So, you know, in a lot of traditions teaching emptiness, as this person alludes to, they say there are just two truths: there's conventional reality. Yeah, this bus, if it hits me, it's going to hurt, at the very least. And then there's ultimate reality, which is that it's empty. The question is, from a classical Buddhadharma point of view, what do we need to know about reality in order to let go of suffering, in order that there's no suffering. And the ontological questions outside of that, from a Buddhadharma point of view, are kind of questions that Buddhists would say are not relevant. You get different Dharmas kind of explaining different things, but it's not so central.

So what do I need to understand here, to be free? And going back to the beginning of this question, you know, there's a big debate through the Mahāyāna tradition -- some people would say there's no stuff out there; it's more that there's only mind. And some people would say no, there is stuff out there; you can't go that far. So these are all part of the kinds of questions that have got endlessly debated. There won't be a final answer to this. There certainly isn't in Buddhadharma, and there hasn't been in Western ontological philosophical traditions, either. What do we need to understand for freedom from suffering? What's just extra interesting? And what maybe do we need to open up other possibilities in practice? If someone is talking to me about their emptiness practice and thinks they can stand in front of a bus and it will be fine, eh -- I'd have questions. It shouldn't obliterate those kind of sensibilities and distinctions, I think, practical, pragmatic choices. So I'm not sure if I've answered that question. It just says anonymous, so I don't know. Does anyone want to follow that up, or ...? Okay. So I'm assuming what I said was fine, but it might not have been.

It is argued about, etc. I've also been on a retreat where a Tibetan Buddhist rinpoche just basically said, "If you understand emptiness, you can literally walk through walls." So there are all kinds of views in the Buddhadharma there about that. But I'm not sure I've hit the nail on the head with the question, and whoever it is is not piping up. I'm just going to have another look and see. Yeah, I can't say any more just from reading the question. My way of teaching emptiness -- and it's different from, let's say, as I said, for example, the Gelug way of teaching emptiness -- the Gelug way would be to start with discursive thinking and philosophy, and really ponder all this stuff and argue about this kind of thing. The way I usually teach emptiness, the way I've sort of laid out in my book and on retreats, is actually start with something -- that's what I said to Harry -- usually, for most people, start with something that matters to you.

So this hypothetical thing about standing in front of a bus, it's like, it's hypothetical. If we talk about experience, what matters -- here I'm struggling with my relationship to illness; here I'm struggling with not having enough money; here I'm struggling with a view of someone that I think is real. Actually aim your practice at something that's alive and matters to you and matters to your heart, and take it from there. Start simple. And if you take it intelligently, it will just get deeper and deeper and deeper. A question like this, about the bus, etc., it becomes kind of like -- it doesn't really matter, because what needs to be answered from the perspective of liberation has been answered, and it's been answered in the heart and via what matters to the heart, as opposed to starting from some kind of more abstract intellectual position and then arguing with people who may not even really care about liberation; they're just arguing about ontology in the pub because there's not much else to talk about or whatever.

Having said that, as I said, in the Gelug tradition, people do approach it that way, more intellectually sort of top-down or whatever you want to call that. But it wouldn't be my way of teaching. I find that if people practice emptiness in the ways that I've described, starting with what matters, connected to the heart, following the threads of dukkha, and just deeper and deeper, more and more subtle, what needs to get answered gets answered, experientially, in the heart, in the consciousness, in the sense of existence, and these kinds of hypothetical questions, they just fade away because they don't really matter to the heart. I hope that's at least addressed -- I'm not sure if I was on target.

We have a little more time, so anyone for a speaking one? Is that Keval? Yeah, Keval.

Q5: working with pitfalls of different paths

Yogi: [1:13:50] I will try and be succinct. I'll do my best anyway. From what you've described, you've got different kinds of conceptions of the Dharma and the Unfabricated or whatever, but my experience is that, generally speaking, if you're moving around a lot of kind of Dharma circles, even insight meditation, Theravādan, Tibetan, whatever, there is a certain kind of trajectory. When you get to the subtle end of it, obviously there are splits and there are differences, but there's a kind of -- there's loving-kindness, there's mettā, there's moving towards the Unfabricated to some greater or lesser extent. The movement is in one direction, which is sort of towards love or blurring or sameness or unfabrication or peace or whatever. It's moving this way. Then you've got the kind of Soulmaking Dharma that you've introduced that has this, the eros side of things, sort of giving license to those other aspects of our being, working with image, working with desire and so forth, and passion and things like this, which, obviously, when we're engaging with the phenomenological world, when we're engaging with environmental crises or romantic love or whatever, that stuff is part of how we live our lives, so it's wonderful that we have a Dharma that allows us to engage with that meaningfully and not just dismiss it as kind of not real, not important or whatever. So I hope that's all clear.

Then you come to this sort of thing where when you've got the one trajectory, like towards peace or towards love or whatever, it's kind of easy -- when there's a conflict or something like that, or when there's difficulty, there's a sort of acceptance that, say, anger, for example, that kind of inflamed, that kind of passion or whatever, they'd say, "Well, we're all working towards this trajectory, which is towards peace and towards a calming of those things and towards a letting go of those kinds of things that create that," whereas I just wonder -- so basically in that first one, you've got a real and not real, in a way, and the real is peace, and the real is kind of fading and peace and unfabricated. But when you introduce this other thing, the passion or whatever gets a reality status that it kind of doesn't have in that old trajectory, right? So basically I'm just asking -- sorry, it's not very clear -- when you're engaging with people, and they're feeling really like, "No, my Dharma, the Soulmaking Dharma means -- my soul wants this," you know what I mean? And it's very strong and it's very full of emotion, whether that be kind of grief or desire or whatever, in a way that a sort of traditional conception of the Dharma would say, "Oh, put that down," or "Let that go," or whatever.

I just wonder if -- maybe that's not so clear, but if you could just talk to that. You've got the emptiness thing woven into the Soulmaking Dharma, and yet it gives license to this other spectrum of emotions, gives a sort of reality status to a spectrum of emotions that lead in a slightly different direction, that lead away from peace and so forth. I just wonder where those two things come together. In the first one, it's one direction, and you just say, "If you're starting to feel inflamed in this way, you move in this direction. You don't go there." And I know maybe you've talked around this already with the kind of metaphor of a candle in the dark or fire in the dark, where there's the samatha and the peace, and then there's the sort of eros or something. But it's just something that's come up recently for me in conversation with other soulmakers, where there is a passion, and there's not the same kind of Buddhist agreement that actually no, what we all want is just peace, actually. I don't know if that makes sense as a ... You can't just say that this passion doesn't have the same reality status, so please, can we all just move towards the peace. People say, "No, this also has a reality status. My soul wants X, Y, Z. My soul desires this, and that is just as important as any sense of calming or peace or whatever."

Rob: The "this" that the soul desires could be anything? Is that what you're saying?

Yogi: Yeah, or it could be, I don't know, like something that seems unreasonable, or very emotional in a way that I think there isn't that much space for in other conceptions of the Dharma.

Rob: In terms of just what you've said, Keval, I mean, someone might hear that and say, "Yeah, it's great, isn't it?" Or someone might hear that and say, "Whoa, yeah, that's dangerous territory, isn't it?" So I'm not sure -- are you sensing a problem there, or ...?

Yogi: I think it can be dangerous territory because it just looks like -- the one kind of Dharma, it has this end of suffering aim, whereas the other kind of Dharma, someone in front of you really looks like they're suffering, and you want to be loving and engaged and be in dialogue, but then they're not accepting -- understandably, and of course it's true that the Buddhadharma isn't the only kind of Dharma or the only way that you can conceive of your experience, so they're saying, "No, no, I have this other Dharma, and this lets me ..."

Rob: Yeah, if I understand -- yeah, there's a difference in terms of what gets opened up and what gets sort of sanctioned, if you like. [1:21:03] The question with any practice is, what are the blessings? What does it open up? What does it deliver? What does it give me? What are the pitfalls and things to look out for? And within that, what particularly are the shadows in the sense of what are the ways that I can use the lingo of this practice and the jargon as excuses for something or other? Actually there is no practice and no path that exists without any of that. Even just talking about basic mindfulness, whatever -- secular mindfulness, anything at all, soulmaking, emptiness. It's going to have blessings, relative, that it brings. It's going to have pitfalls, places that can be tricky. And it's going to have ways where it can be used unskilfully, unhelpfully, with the front, the appearance of it being good practice. So that goes for anything. And it certainly goes for something like mindfulness.

Often when people hear about emptiness, they think, "Well, that sounds really dangerous." That's a long history in the Buddhist tradition -- people vomiting when they hear the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras and stuff like that, and shaking with fear and all this kind of stuff. And certainly when I first started teaching soulmaking -- actually the emptiness as well, but soulmaking, it was like, "Oh, this is terrible. You're crazy. You're nuts. You're really dangerous." But mindfulness also, or this whole trajectory towards peace, it can be an amputation, a numbing, a cutting off, a passive-aggressive power play. All kinds of stuff can go on in the name of peace, in the name of unfabricating, in the name of the Four Noble Truths, in the name of mindfulness, in the name of equanimity, etc., of calming. All kinds of things can go on likewise in the name of emptiness, and that was one of the reasons why Tsongkhapa, in the fourteenth century, actually had quite a conservative view of emptiness, relatively speaking, because he was like, "We've got to watch out for the ethics here." Similarly with soulmaking.

So the question with soulmaking -- a lot of things have to come together for something, in our language, to be soulful and soulmaking. It's not just the fact that "it's really important to me, therefore I steamroll over everyone," or "I have a lot of emotion, therefore it must be soulful," or whatever it is, or "I really have a lot of desire, therefore it's soulful." No. And one of the aspects of soulmaking -- two aspects: when something is soulmaking, when something is soulful, it's what I call the imaginal Middle Way, so it's still neither real nor not real. It's slightly different from the emptiness Middle Way, but it's still that -- it's not rigidly real like that. That's one thing. And the second thing is that one of the elements of the imaginal/soulmaking is the fullness of intention, that actually what I'm after here is the soulmaking, and I'm open to that. There's not some kind of ego-agenda there.

But these things are quite subtle, to actually sense what does it feel like for something to be in that territory of the imaginal Middle Way, what does it feel like to actually have that fullness of intention. Both those elements of imaginal practice are actually really rare. They're not like, oh, I just assume that they're there. Even for practitioners of soulmaking, they're rare. You have to really hone your sensitivity: "Oh, that's what it feels like when those things are there." And particularly the fullness of intention -- it's a really rare thing, because most people practise for themselves. They don't practise for the divine, or for soul. They practise for themselves. So these kinds of things, those kinds of elements -- and we could talk about others -- are massively important and powerful kind of safeguards. Now, we could go to other practices -- mindfulness and emptiness -- and talk about, okay, what are the safeguards in relation to those kind of -- I don't know what to call these -- either pitfalls or kind of con jobs, basically. We have to really bring an intelligence and a care and a kind of alertness to what can go on for us as human beings or for others in the name of spiritual practice or soulmaking practice or whatever. Does that address a little bit?

Yogi: That's totally helpful to hear you say some of those things. I'll just sort of let them go in. I know you've said a lot of that before, but it's still helpful, because you've said it in a slightly different way.

Rob: Good, okay. So I've got my eye on the time, and it's actually two minutes past nine, and I think we have to respect that people will need to leave, etc. Okay, thank you so much, everyone, for being there and for your curiosity and your listening. Bless you all. Thank you. I hope something there was helpful. And there will be more to come.