Art and Dharma (Part 1)

Hi, everybody. Welcome, everyone. Let's start as usual with a bit of silence together, just to gather ourselves. Settling into your body, into your experience of your body right now, and the grounding of that, the groundedness of that, the connectedness of that. Opening up the awareness to embrace, to include the whole body, that whole space of the body, and inhabiting that space with a bright, full sensitivity, receptivity, presence. If you can, staying in touch with that whole space and how it feels, the sense of the body. How's your heart doing right now? It doesn't have to be any way at all in particular. Could be something quite intense is present, agitating, or really nothing out of ordinary. Could be quite quiet. Whatever it is, just allowing it to be there in the experience. And can it be connected to, noticed and held in care, so that the way we touch that, the way we come into contact with the heart experience right now has care, warmth, interest?

So if you can, staying with the whole body sense, staying connected with the heart and the movements of the heart. If possible, with all that, within all that, reminding yourself why you're here tonight. Some intention, some desire, some curiosity, some love brought you here, and letting yourself come into contact, remember that, and feel it, feel that love, feel that intention, feel what it does to the body and to the heart as you connect with it, align yourself with that love and intention, for this time together.

If it's possible to somehow hold all these pieces -- the body awareness, the heart awareness and care, the connection and devotion, alignment with your intention, your love -- can we open out to the sense of community right now, the sense of togetherness? In different parts of the world, there's a connection, virtual connection via the internet, but there's heart and soul and mind connection, shared interest, shared love, shared care. Feel that connection. Open to whatever your sense of it is right now.

Body awareness, heart awareness and care, connection with intention and love and desire, sense of togetherness and caring for that togetherness. And we can add that one of the ways we care for that togetherness, care for the community, is by recognizing that each of us is, in a way, a maker of tonight, a maker of our time together. We make a difference. You make a difference, your presence, your poise, the way that you pay attention, the way your heart is, your intention. So even if you don't say anything tonight, even if your screen is blank, you're actually participating at a very fundamental level. You're part of what makes this. It depends on all of us. What is it to really recognize the profundity of our participation?

[6:33] As I've been doing recently sometimes, just introducing these kind of five areas or domains of awareness, because it takes a little bit of work to stay connected in a virtual setting, I think, and it's something we can get used to. But perhaps if we could each remind ourselves at different times of these five, whatever you call them, five mindfulnesses: (1) the body awareness, (2) the heart awareness, (3) the awareness of intention, care for the heart, care for the intention, care for the love -- that's the third one, (4) the sense of togetherness -- that's something we can tune into, and then (5) this fact that what happens tonight is a dependent arising, and it depends on each of us, that we intimately participate in what's happening. So as we go through in the time together, I invite us all to remind us, each to remind ourselves of that, of one of these, keep checking in. It keeps the whole thing kind of alive, hopefully.

[7:53] I'm feeling quite strange about tonight's session. I'm very, very hesitant. Until very late last night, probably past midnight, I was really going to just leave it as questions. And then very late at night, some ideas occurred to me. But I'm still hesitant whether I should say what I wanted to say, and I'll maybe explain why I'm hesitant. Maybe one thing we could do is to get a sense of how many people know at this point that you have a question? Is there some way we could get a quick sense of that? So one, two, three, four. Have I got everyone on the screen? Yeah, I think. So it's a small group. There are four questions. It's a kind of intermediate number. Okay, so, I'm not sure what to do, really. I'm feeling hesitant. I'll tell you why I'm hesitant.

I mean, for me, art has been, since I was a teenager -- by 'art,' I mean music and poetry and literature and film and dance and theatre and all that -- is really, really deeply important. I feel really strongly, or I have very strong feelings in that whole domain and with regards to the whole thing and with regard to specific art. So there's quite a lot of sort of passionate interest there, and I'm pretty opinionated about art, so I'll be very upfront about that, and quite sort of hot-blooded about the whole thing.

So I just feel a little cautious, you know. I'm a Dharma teacher. Anne's saying [via chat] she'd like a talk. [laughs] Okay, well, let me at least explain why I'm hesitant to give a talk. So, like I said, there's a lot of passion. I'm inevitably opinionated, strongly opinionated, etc. It's stuff I feel really strongly about, and so I'm a bit cautious with that. I'm a Dharma teacher. I could say I'm a Dharma teacher, not an art teacher, but even these days, art teachers are probably not supposed to -- I don't know, Susy and some of you would know -- art teachers are maybe not supposed to impose their view of what art is or not on other people. So I don't know what to compare a Dharma teacher with -- what, who would be kind of legitimized to voice their opinions, etc. But that's also interesting, because maybe nowadays no one has that permission. Culturally, that permission has been subtracted, withdrawn, so that anyone can have any opinion about anything, whether it's art or whether it's not art or whatever. Anyway, the reason [for] my caution is my passion and my opinionatedness and my sort of Mediterranean hot-bloodedness with all this stuff. So, I'm going to try. If I give a talk, I'm going to try and really tone that down. Okay? I'm going to try. [laughs]

[12:34] Maybe what I have to say, at the beginning here -- and then we'll open it up for questions -- is just my personal relationship with art, or some aspects of my personal relationship, but I'm just sharing a personal point of view as opposed to teaching something. It's just like a confession. Actually, Dharma teaching is that anyway, you know. I can't remember who said, maybe it was Nietzsche or someone said, "Actually, all philosophers, all philosophies are actually confessions." You think you're inquiring into truth or presenting the truth; he says you're actually confessing how you feel about existence and what relationship a person wants to have with existence, how I want to see existence and self. Then instead of the truth comes first, and then I relate to that, it's actually, how do I want to relate to existence? What kind of world do I feel I'm in? How do I want to sense myself in relation to this cosmos? And then I and everybody else finds a philosophy or a Dharma or a version of Dharma that fits that. It's the other way around than we usually think.

I've said this elsewhere, but I'll say it right now: if we just think about Dharma, the kind of version of emptiness -- emptiness has not a million, but a lot of different versions in the Dharma -- the version of emptiness that a teacher teaches and that they kind of espouse, or that they believe in or that they choose to pursue as a practice, they're choosing that, I am choosing that and any other teacher is choosing that, based on what kind of world does it imply, because that's the kind of world that I want to live in. What does it imply about the cosmos? What does it imply about the self's place in the cosmos? So it's not like emptiness was this one really clear thing that the Buddha put out there 2,500 years ago, and we're sort of following that. People pretend to do that, but actually it's, "What kind of world do I live in? What kind of cosmos do I want?" And then one finds things that the Buddha says that kind of corroborate that.

Same thing with the version of awakening or enlightenment. This version of enlightenment versus that version of enlightenment, what does it do to the sense of the world? What kind of world or cosmos does it deliver, and what kind of sense of the path and sense of the self? Same thing with my fantasy of the Buddha. All of this, it's all fantasy coming out of what my soul wants, and what this teacher or that teacher, what their soul wants.

[15:33] I was thinking, you know, why is this even important tonight, art and Dharma? Now, some people would say, "Well, yeah, okay, that's a session, that's a seminar that people who are artists will go to because they're kind of into art and they're into Dharma, and it's nice if those things can connect, so maybe that's why it's important." For other people, it's like, "Eh, whatever. I'll go to the one on emptiness or whatever." But I think it's actually -- and this is part of what I want to say; now we're getting into the place where I need to be cautious and you might get angry at me -- but why is this connection between art and Dharma relevant or important or even interesting? What I wanted to say, and it's not quite the right way of saying it is, "How we relate to and conceive of art is how we relate to and conceive of existence." That's not quite precise enough, but that's what I sort of came up with, and it's not quite right. So how we relate to and conceive of art indicates -- it's the same as how we relate to and conceive of existence, and I mean life and death and the cosmos.

If we take a step backwards and say, if, you know, things like the plight of the planet right now, the plight of the earth, species extinction, climate change, how human beings are treating each other -- if all those crises are actually dependent on, what we could say, an impoverished relationship or ideation or idea of what existence is or what the world is, then actually all this becomes important. Climate change, species extinction, not waking up to that, for example -- it could be said that all comes out from a very limited, impoverished, thin, flat, poor, reductionist way of seeing the world. And if my relationship, if one's relationship with art is kind of bound up in how I view existence and life and death and world, and all these crises are dependent on how I view life and death and world, then you can see that my relationship with art may have something to tell me about things like climate change, even indirectly. Does this make sense? I'm not quite saying it right.

[18:15] Maybe a slightly weaker statement might be: if art (and again, I mean that whole totality of what art can be), if art is really or deeply important to a person, then the ways that they relate to and conceive of art will usually indicate how they relate to and conceive of existence and life and death and the world, etc. Or say it another way: what we look to art for indicates how we look at existence. What we look to art for tells me about how I look at existence in the big picture, and human being, and cosmos, and world, and nature. In a way, then, this whole thing becomes not just a sort of marginal interest for people who like to paint in their spare time or have a career teaching art. There's some connection here, and it's hard to box it in, and I don't want to be too precise -- I feel like any statement we make about art, something will always slip outside of it. It's bigger than anything we can say about it. I want to come back to that. But instead of this being a kind of marginal interest for a few people or something, there may be something here that's really of fundamental importance.

[19:48] So it's interesting. It was the first seminar of this series, and someone gave it the title "Ontology and Conceptions of Reality in Dharma Practice." Now, my guess is some people saw that title and thought, "Well, pff, I don't know, long words for intellectuals or philosophers." I hope it was clear pretty early in that seminar -- I tried to make it clear -- no, this is absolutely fundamental, whether you know what 'ontology' means or whether you consider yourself an intellectual or philosopher. This is absolutely fundamental to Dharma practice. You cannot get away from it. And I wonder whether there's something about the connections between art and Dharma that are, in a different way, they're also fundamental concerns. It's not a sort of marginal interest thing.

[20:39] So, what do we mean by 'art'? What do you mean by 'arts'? Can anyone define it? [laughs] I'll be very impressed if you can! Someone told me -- it was Stephen Batchelor, I don't know how many years ago, somehow talking about Damien Hirst, and someone said about some piece of Damien Hirst, "Well, is it really art?", and Damien Hirst said, "Well, it's in an art gallery, so it must be." It's sort of like, it becomes just a backwards way of defining it. I wonder whether any definition we make about art will end up being too small. Something will always be outside of it. I could say something about -- probably each of you could maybe say something about, explaining why you need to make art. Sometimes it's like, why is there this compulsion, this sort of need to whatever it is, write music or write poetry or whatever it is? It's like a drive. It's something I can't almost say "no" to. And I could probably, and probably each of us could say something, at least, about why I need to make art, why you need to make art. Why do I need to interact with the art of others? But I feel like whatever I say about that still doesn't capture all it is. There's something mysterious about art, and about the need to make art, and about what art is, that will always be bigger than what my head can get around it. So I am kind of compelled or subject to a kind of desire or eros that I can only ever partially understand. I don't know if anyone relates to that, but that's what I would say.

[22:37] And if we talk about the totality of humanity, you know, people have such different reasons or explanations about what they're trying to do when they make art or what they get from art. I remember being in those caves in the South of France. Is it Palaeolithic, or Neolithic or whatever? That prehistoric cave art, you know, it's amazing. And they were sort of, the guide or whatever was explaining, "Oh, some people think it's a religious thing or a ritual thing or this or that." But maybe, like us modern people, they also didn't quite know why they were making art. They could say, "It's because of this and because of this," but they're driven by something bigger than themselves. So we look back and try and put them in a box of understanding themselves, and we don't understand ourselves in relation to why we make art, fully. I don't think any reason for it can ever kind of explain the need to make or to have and be in contact with and be open to art, and certainly not the totality of humanity's reasons.

[23:49] So we've got this question, "What is art?", and I'm not even going to try and answer that. Well, I'm going to say something about what's important to me, but it's still an open question: what is art? And then we've got, whatever the theme is tonight, and I don't know who suggested it or what they wanted, but we got "Art and Dharma." So another question is, "What's the Dharma?" And unfortunately, I'm going to say I don't know. [laughs] If we really look at why people are doing Dharma, there's the same kind of scope there in terms of what actually is involved. This is something I've talked about elsewhere, so I'm not really going to go into it too much.

But these are really important questions, and maybe someone has something to say about, "What are we actually talking about here when we say 'art'? And what do we mean when we say 'Dharma'?" Because we can very easily use Dharma vocabulary and assume we're all talking about the same thing with the same intentions, and as I've explained in different talks, that may not be the case. We could actually be a bit more honest in terms of our psychology and what's going on, and what the Dharma is, and what we think we're doing in the Dharma, and what draws us there, and what we're after. When we put those two together, art and Dharma, then you clearly get, or there is the possibility of relating to Dharma as art. Again, it's something I've talked about; I'm not going to talk about it too much tonight.

So this may be something that people -- how do you say? -- that it's a kind of quite common trope: 'Dharma as art,' 'the art of Dharma practice' or whatever. When I've tried to unpack that a bit more, open it out a bit more (better to say), I mean more than just that there's the sort of technical aspect and the craft aspect of Dharma practice. There's that, and there's heart and intuition. There's sort of formulaic stuff and improvisation. So some people might mean that about the Dharma being an art: it means it includes improvisation and the heart, and it's not just a technique and all that. As some of you will know from talks I've given in the past, it's like, I would say, "Yeah, sure, all that, but something much more." And that calls into the question, what are we actually doing the Dharma for? So, again, if I ask you, why are you making art, or why do you go to an art gallery, or whatever kind, why do you engage with art, as a reader or [inaudible] or whatever? And that question is much broader than the usual answer that people will give to why they're doing Dharma. I'll say, "Why are you doing Dharma?" "It's for liberation. It's for freedom from suffering." If Dharma becomes art in the deeper sense, it's also like, "Oh, it's going beyond that limited idea." And it goes into the same question: why do you do Dharma, why do you do art? And then something on a different level is opened. The whole rationale, the whole reason for doing it is opened up to a different level, a different scope.

[27:27] What's the point of Dharma? What's the point of Dharma if we see it as art? Why are we doing it? What's the direction in which it goes? Where's it ultimately going to lead us to, if there is an 'ultimately'? What's its relationship with the past and with tradition and with the future? How I think about the Dharma, how I relate to it, how I sense it as a practitioner -- these questions get exploded wide open, or not, or they get contained, and then my ability to see Dharma as art or sense it as art gets also very limited and contained.

When we talk about Soulmaking Dharma, I mean, I think there's every -- that's the way I would see it, there's every case there for seeing Soulmaking Dharma as a kind of inner art, inner, or rather the art of perception. What did we call that retreat? Re-enchanting the Cosmos: The Poetry of Perception. Actually, do you realize that in the Greek word poiesis, that the making, the artistic making of perception, that our perception, inner and outer, whether it's an intrapsychic image or the way I see another or the world, that that's a poiesis, that's a making, that's an artistic creation? And that puts me in the place of being an artist. But again, why? Where's it going? So Soulmaking Dharma, that's what we're in the business of. We're in the business of recognizing that possibility of the poiesis, of the creativity in perception, and exploring that, investigating it, engaging it with our whole being. So there's a real case there for that being art, that kind of practice.

[29:28] And then, again, I'm just touching on things that I've talked about in the past, and you can find them in talks and stuff -- I don't want to elaborate on them tonight; I want to say something different. There's also, I've talked about different fantasies we have of being on the path. So this relates to what I said a couple minutes ago, that the self on the path as practitioner can feel -- I have the fantasy of being an artist, or I could have other fantasies. I could have a religious fantasy. I could have a medical fantasy. I could have a scientific researcher fantasy. I've talked about that in the past. But there's Dharma as art in different ways.

And what about the flip, art as Dharma? So I remember -- gosh, it must have been fifteen years ago or more, I was teaching on a Yatra in the South of France, and lots of people walking, 200 people walking, Dharma thing, beautiful event. And we would have these breakout groups during the day at different periods, and different themes. As a teacher, you would say, "Oh, I'll do one on this subject or that subject." I did one on art one day, and I can't remember, maybe twenty people, thirty. I don't know; I can't remember. And what was really interesting -- it was sort of more like a discussion, I sort of facilitated a discussion -- but what was really interesting to me was it was a bit like the group sort of was divided spontaneously into two.

There were about half -- I can't remember -- but about half of the people were really interested [in the process rather than product]. It's like, why, what's art got to do with your Dharma practice? And they would say, "It's about the process." In other words, when I engage in art, when I'm dancing or when I'm painting or whatever, then I'm really interested in the flow of that experience, and I'm getting away from any planning or pre-intention, I'm getting away from conceptuality, I'm getting away from any of the self's will. And I remember one person actually said, "And every time I finish a painting, I burn it or I throw it away, because what was much more important to me was the process -- that process of flow." And the other half of people were much more interested in the product. I can just share right now, I, as an artist, was much more interested in the product. After a little while of experimenting with process, it mattered not at all to me if I was completely bonkers, pulled all my hair out, a nervous wreck, etc., by the end of it, as long as that product somehow expressed something that did it for my soul. I'm just saying there are different ways of relating, and of course, some people, it will be both or whatever. That, to me, is interesting.

[32:31] Again, art as Dharma. The artist, I think -- and check this out for yourself -- if you're an artist, and if you're in your mojo as an artist, if it's working for you, if you're in your groove, if it's alive, if you know the soulmaking lingo, you have, at that point, part of it being alive, part of your inspiration, part of your love, part of your drive, part of your ability to do is that you have an image, an imaginal image of yourself as artist. If you're completely not familiar with the language of imaginal, I don't know if I can explain that right now, but there's a whole soulmaking relationship with the art that gives fecundity to the whole thing.

In other words, I'm engaged in this -- whatever I'm doing, writing a poem, whatever it is, writing a novel -- then the thing itself can become imaginal to me, the object itself. But there is a sort of reflexive part of the soul, of the awareness, that's sensing myself also as part of a larger image, and the image is of myself as artist, and it's beautiful. So I have a double eros there: I have eros for the work that I'm working on -- and as Stravinsky said when they asked him (when he's an old man and he's written so much music), "What's your favourite piece that you wrote?" and he says, "Well, the one I'm working on right now." In other words, that's the one that's got his eros. So the work of art is an erotic object and becomes imaginal, but also the self. And that's actually, I think, part -- it's not ego; it's part of a healthy taking care of the relationship with art. Again, we don't tend to have, in our contemporary society, and even less so in Dharma culture, a way of conceiving this or including it. If you're thinking about yourself, either it's not empty or it's ego or whatever. Of course, it can be ego, but that's a different thing than an imaginal image and all that.

[34:51] So it's like, part of what I want to say, and I've said many times before, is can we actually expand the psychology here to notice more of what goes on for us when things feel really alive artistically, or when they don't feel really alive? What's the difference? What's going on? What needs to come in play? And some of it we need new language for, because we're not given this language, either by the culture or by the art culture or by the Dharma culture. But to then take care of that sort of multiple image-sense, multiple imaginal sense, including the self as image, that, we could say, it has a connection with Soulmaking Dharma, because we talk a lot about that.

[35:39] Here's where it gets a little bit hairy for me. So, I don't know how many people -- I mean, it's called, "Art and Dharma"; I'm not sure who suggested it or what they wanted, and if this is anywhere near close. I know there was a course at BCBS [Barre Center for Buddhist Studies] in the States about kind of Dharma and art, or Buddhist art or something, and sometimes people come and say, "Okay, what makes art Buddhist, or like, what would it be to have Dharma art?", and kind of outside of, you know, thangkas or whatever, just depictions of deities that you get in Tibet. What would it be? What would it involve? What makes it Buddhist, and what makes it Dharma art? And oftentimes what gets pointed to is, "Oh, it's a concern with impermanence," or a concern, or a depiction, or it's somehow an expression of the poignant tragedy of our existential situation as human beings, or our limitation, our finitude as human beings. This is what makes actually any art, in some people's opinion, any art that's worth their interest, and this is also specifically what makes Buddhist art. It's concerned with impermanence, the tragedy and the poignancy of our existential situation. Or maybe it's something about interconnectedness, that there's something about this piece that kind of reveals how everything's connected to everything else.

Or sometimes people borrow a couple of terms from the Romantics. One is the notion of the 'sublime.' And that's a word, historically, that actually got used in a lot of different ways. So some people say, "Okay, art needs to be expressive or manifest the sublime," and what they mean by that, or rather what they say they mean, is borrowing from Kant, Immanuel Kant, when he had his sort of philosophy of aesthetics. And so for him it was a mixture. It was the sense that the human being had in relation to the kind of infinite grandeur and threat of the universe as a whole. So there was a mixture in there of both sort of reverential awe and a sense of the spiritual, with a sense of the threat to the small, finite individual. And that mixture was called the 'sublime.' Other people made it something really, really -- the sublime is only what's terrifying to the human being. And so some people nowadays say, "Okay, the sublime is what Buddhists are interested in. Buddhist art needs to be interested in that," but the spiritual bit gets shaved off. The awe bit, the reverence bit gets shaved off, so it becomes just about the human being in relationship to the terrifying enormity of the meaningless universe or something like that, or impending death.

The other term borrowed is a term from John Keats, the poet, and it's 'negative capability.' So John Keats said negative capability is when a person is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. So it's a property actually of the person -- they have negative capability; they're able to be in that kind of space, in relation to anything, but in relation to art or poetry or whatever. There's a funny thing from a Woody Allen movie -- I can't remember which one it was -- but they're at an art gallery, and someone says, "Oh, that painting has a wonderful negative capability" or something. It's a very pompous sort of thing to say, but they got it the wrong way around -- it's really a thing about the subject, not the art. And then some people take that and say that's part of Buddhist art, that's part of Dharma art, that's an important part, to be okay with not knowing, to be okay with disorder, to be okay with disorientation, with confusion etc., and you get this mapped onto sort of Zen 'not knowing' and all that kind of stuff sometimes.

[40:23] Then one last piece that I've come across is an acknowledgment in sort of Buddhist talking about art or Dharma talking about art that a work of art is transcendent in the sense that -- that's a loaded word; what does it mean to different people? There's a sense of, "Okay, I can't quite capture what that art means or what it does," and that's something I want to come back to. So the work of art has something almost beyond the elements that make it up: the paint, the colour, the balance of the hues, the composition, all that, whatever it is. They're the elements, but the art itself is always transcendent to that. It includes that. They're absolutely important. As an artist, I need to get those really right. I need to fuss over that, as we were saying with Arjuna when he asked about films the other day. You really need to fuss over those details. But there's something always transcendent in the work of art.

I read a colleague's sort of explanation of his relationship with art, sort of from a Dharma perspective, from his sense, and these were the kind of things he was pulling out -- impermanence, the sublime as sort of existential threat, the limitation, the poignant tragedy of our existence, this negative capability, this 'okay with not knowing,' and then this fact of transcendence which he pointed out, but then he explained it just by saying that a whole, the whole of the work of art, is transcendent to its component bits. And then he linked that to Nāgārjuna, etc., who talked about wholes and parts in relation to emptiness. But I felt like there was something missing, again, in the sort of accuracy of what was being pointed to.

There's a sense that the work of art is transcendent, or a human being is transcendent -- transcendent to what they appear to be. So you divide a human being into the aggregates, and is that just what a human being is? There's always a sense there's something transcendent. From a technical point of view, a whole, the collection of the aggregates, is always more than its parts. It's always transcendent in that respect. But what this person was trying to explain, the sense of transcendence as just a connection between wholes and parts, that had something to do with Nāgārjuna and emptiness -- he said a work of art is transcendent; it's not reducible to its parts, nor does it exist independently of them. But to me, that was missing the point, because anything composite, anything that has parts to it -- even an atom, or maybe even a quark, or the stock market, or a rainy day, or this shirt, or my faeces, or whatever -- all of them have parts, and they're all transcendent to their parts. Does that make them art? Part of what I really want to say is there's something in the way that we think about art, and maybe the way we think about art if we're trying to put it into Dharma boxes and rationales, that actually misses the point: I've picked up on the sense that it's transcendent -- there's something about it that grabs me, that I can't quite grasp -- but then I try and explain it in ways that don't actually do justification to it, don't do justice to it.

[44:04] Or again, if you highlight music, it's like there's a sense, "Oh, you know, art, for it to be Buddhist art or Dharma art, it has to be about impermanence." So, actually, I mean, music is the most impermanent of arts, or dance or something. It's like, if I go boom, boom -- okay there's a perfect fourth, two notes, it's impermanent. If that's the whole meaning of the art, it's like, well, any music is going to have exactly the same meaning because it's all impermanent in the same way. This piece of music is not going to have any more depth of meaning than that piece of music, because they're both just impermanent. So people are trying to explain these things without sort of ... Maybe they're trying to fit something into their view. Again, I go back to what I said at the beginning: this view of the world, "This is what I want to sense existence as." Or maybe it's just not a full consciousness of what's actually operating in my heart and soul when I feel touched by something artistic.

So there's this transcendence, this sort of beyondness I can't quite capture. I see that this art, this painting, or this novel, or this piece of music, whatever, has these elements, these words, this arrangement of its components, but the transcendence of it, its sort of beyondness, is a positive thing. It carries a meaningfulness. And I mean that word, again, in Soulmaking Dharma language: meaningfulness as including individual meanings, but more than individual meanings. In other words, an infinite number of meanings, and some of them are going to be obscure in the sense that I could say, "Okay, this piece of art means X and Y." If it's just that, it's going to be flat and limited, and it won't have this transcendent; I've just explained it, but it needs to have more. So it might include, "It means this, and it means that, and it represents this and that," but it's got this kind of obscure meaningfulness to it. It includes clear meanings, and then this shading into more, what I would call meaningfulnesses. And part of that is their relative obscurity to us. We can't quite put our finger on: why did that touch me so much? I don't know. If I can explain it, I think it doesn't satisfy the soul.

[46:47] And so that transcendence, rather than being something that just tells me about my limitation as a human being, that I can't quite understand something, or it's just a whole, the relationship of wholes and parts, it's opening out to something, it's pointing to something. There's something positive there, meaningfulness, a pregnancy there.

Again, this is all personal confession, etc., just my personal thoughts and needs, my soul-style or whatever, but if I say, for me, what do I need, what do I look for or listen for, whatever, I want that: I want a sense of eros, and I mean that, again, in the specifically soulmaking. I want the sense of beyonds. I want the sense of those beyonds being pregnant, full with meanings I could perhaps articulate and define, but with more than that. I want it full of depths and dimensions that shade into divinity. I want a sense of unfathomability. But with art, the interesting thing is all that is coming through the art, through the form, through the appearances. This gesture in the dance [swirling motion with arms/hands], or the whole dance, the gesture, it's not beyond appearances, it's through, in, and behind. So this unfathomable mystery is in and through particular forms. Yeah? So we're not just talking about a "Just get rid of everything. I just want the Unfabricated. I just want something called emptiness" or whatever.

[48:48] It exceeds our grasp, but not in the sense of just being a horizontal exceeding -- like, "The universe is really big, and that's really scary." That's an exceeding of my grasp; I can't get my head around how big the universe is, and how small I am in relationship to it. So that's how some people kind of construe this term, 'sublime.' I mean, if we use a sort of more vertical -- it exceeds me vertically, the depths, the sense of divinity, dimensionality, pregnant in the depths. It's there in the surface, but the surface has depths, and they're all together, and it exceeds what I can get my head around or explain or point to words or articulate. I dimly sense it, and that's part of the whole thing, but it's vertical, so to speak, rather than just horizontal, if that makes sense. And there's this 'meaningfulness' being much larger than 'meaning,' or rather, including individual meanings, as I said, but larger than that, and more mysterious than that.

[50:00] When I was thinking about this, as I said, very late last night, and then I said, well, what about, like, novels and things like that? And if I think, for example, of some novels that have really touched me -- like, just again, just a personal confession, but say William Styron's Sophie's Choice, for example. I said, "Well, okay, well, where's all this kind of shading into divinity and meaningfulness?" It's a story, and maybe a lot of it's true, in fact. It doesn't seem to fit. But is it more that in the novel, for example, my sense of that novel is the sense of the depths of the characters, that there's something in how he depicts and writes and how he writes -- the depth of the characters, or of the events there, have this kind of infinite pregnant meaning. They have meanings, of course -- it's about the Holocaust and madness and sexuality, all kinds of things, but it's always more than that, it's always something in excess of that, and it's in the sense of the depths of the characters and the events. Or something in them kind of reflects back -- and this is, I feel, what art does, as well, in its best sense -- it reflects back into that's then how I sense the world. I look at this, I listen to this music, I look at that even abstract painting, and it changes my relationship with the world. The world opens up its depths to me, and my sense of depths. And there's also, of course, just the beauty -- I mean, that novel in particular, such beautiful language, and how he writes, and the sound and the rhythm and the poetry of the language, that that, too, it's like, it's not actually about the meaning of the sentence only; it's actually about the music of the language, and somehow that's got this infinite depth and meaningfulness. So I thought, maybe, maybe it does work as a theory.

But then this negative capability, going back to before, it's not just being okay not knowing what something is. It's in relationship to beyonds that are positive, to this dimensionality shading into divinity, to meaningfulnesses, and that's different than just either I'm confused -- "I don't know. I'm limited as a human being" -- or there's something, but I can't quite put my finger on it; it's a something. So even if it's not kind of delimitable, definable, precise, there's a direction there and a sense of something, as I said, positive.

[53:06] Let me finish with something. Some of you may know this. Someone sent me the other day a link to an icon. [picking up painting] I'm not sure if this is going to work, okay? I'm going to turn this light off, and I want to see if I can do this. [displaying painting for the camera -- see Figure 1 below] Okay. Does anyone know what that is? Anyone seen that before? Yeah. Okay, this is -- I'd never come across it before. Someone sent me a link, and I just thought it was amazing. So this is an icon by the fifteenth century Russian Orthodox monk and artist called Andrei Rublev.

{width="4.545833333333333in" height="5.661111111111111in"}(Figure 1: Andrei Rublev's The Trinity)

So, now Alexia, I apologize for this; I'm showing a painting. I'm sorry, if we had more time, I would do it with music and all kinds of things, but ... [Alexia: "Oh, that's okay, don't worry; it's fine."] Apologies.

So this is one example. This is a very dangerous thing to do, because if I only give one example, it might give a limited sense of the kind of possibilities I'm talking about, and what I'm trying to point to, and they're, in fact, an infinite range. This -- can everyone see that? Yeah? This icon has, I think, two names. One is The Hospitality of Abraham and the other is The Trinity. So The Hospitality of Abraham is referring to a short little passage in Genesis in the Old Testament where Abraham is hanging out in his tent one day, and he sees three men, three strangers come by, and he runs out to meet them. And he says, "You must be hot and tired and hungry and thirsty, please come to my tent and accept my hospitality." And in a very modest way, he makes his tent their home, and he allows them to rest there, and he feeds them and gives them drinks, etc. And it turns out in the story that they are angels. It's three angels. And so this is partly an icon representing that: the angels receiving -- Abraham is not in the picture, but they're receiving the hospitality in his tent, in his house, whatever. I prefer sometimes to take the biblical stories as little vignettes -- sort of take them out of their context, and then they become much more imaginal than sort of seeing it within a whole thing. It's also got the title The Trinity, as in the Holy Trinity -- the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Okay, I can't quite see what I'm doing, but I'm going to try and do this. [gesturing to the three angels] So what you have here is these three angels, or are they three aspects of God, the Trinity, okay? So there's already a double meaning. For me, also, if they're angels, what does it say about, what does it mean to be hospitable to the angels? Now, some of you are already deep into the Soulmaking Dharma. That may already have a lot of resonance to you. What does it mean to be hospitable, to create a space to the images that come? Yeah? Some of you, that may not mean anything at all, but I just mention, for me, this is very touching, just that idea, Abraham's hospitality to the angels. It's also the Trinity, the mystery of the divine Godhead.

There are so many things that are interesting. In the story, he's gone out, and he's kind of slaughtered a calf, actually, to give them some dinner, and that's, whatever it is, the sacrifice of the calf is in the middle there. [pointing just below the middle angel's hand, to the cup on the table and its contents] But what's interesting is these three angels, all these three aspects of God -- what's more interesting to me is they circumscribe a space. What's dominant in this picture is the space. Can you see that actually the eyes go more to the space between them? [motions to the space to the left and right of the middle angel] They're sort of sitting in a triangle, if you like. The eyes go more to the space between the three figures, the three angels, or the space between the aspects of the divinity. Can you see that, just visually? There is something in the middle [points again to the cup on the table], but actually that doesn't so much draw the attention -- it's the space. It's the space between them.

Can you see also that this space between them, if I trace it with my finger -- I'm not sure if I can, but look at the shape of the space in two dimensions. It has the shape of a cup, of a goblet. [see Figure 2 below]

{width="3.0652777777777778in" height="1.7055555555555555in"}(Figure 2: outlining goblet shape)

Can you see that? So what do you have here? You have all this -- the whole notion of hospitality to images or angels or the divine or the visitation, you have the mystery of divinity, and who the hell (sorry, I guess I shouldn't say -- probably blasphemy if I was a Christian!), who understands Trinitarian theology? It's so far out, complex, I don't know, it's just -- it's mystery, okay? This is the mystery of the divinity. What's even more mysterious about it is the dominant thing about the mystery of the divinity is the space there, and at the centre of the space is a sacrifice. And the cup of wine -- I mean, it's reminiscent of the Eucharist cup of wine, etc. So the space is also the cup, and it's the cup of sacrifice, and it's the cup of wine, and Rumi and wine, and all that. So I don't know, is this resonating at all?

Can you notice something else about your personal reaction? Now, you might be having all kinds of personal reactions to this, so ... that's your problem, not mine, I think. [laughs] What I want you to check out is this. I don't know if this is possible to you, but this is why I introduced this. So we can talk about what this means, or what's represented here, and you can talk about, "Oh, it represents, for instance, it represents the Eucharist, the blood of Christ, the sacrifice. It represents the Trinity. It represents X, Y, Z." Now, I don't know if you can notice this in your own looking, that when you relate to it, and something in your mind and your looking collapses down your seeing to a meaning, what happens in relationship to it? And what happens, on the contrary, when you're looking, but the meaning is more meaningfulness, it's actually pregnant? [Figure 3]

{width="3.1145833333333335in" height="1.7534722222222223in"}(Figure 3)

So this space between them, this space there, or even the Eucharist, or the cup, actually, it exceeds any narrow meaning. Your mind is not tightening around some meaning. Can you notice the difference in what happens in your being?

For me, when it closes down, something dies a little bit. I mean, it's great, it's the Eucharist and blah blah blah, and it means this and means that, but it's just like images -- I've finished with it; it's no longer pregnant, it's no longer got that infinite transcendence, it's no longer got that unfathomability through the particular. But there are other ways or other moments when you look when it's just alive, and something opens in the soul, something opens in the heart and in the looking, and it's a very different relationship. For me, with this, it may or may not move you, but for me, it's like electric with this. There's something so beautiful in what it opens up. I'm not sure if this is making any sense at all to ...? Yes? Okay, some people are nodding. Good.

Why this is potentially misleading is because I don't want to point to this, what I was talking about, this meaningfulness, this unfathomability, these beyonds to which we have eros, this dimensionality shading into divinity as always referring to something that has a space in it. That would be too much about emptiness and Buddhism. It is in this case, but as I said, if I had much more time, we'd do loads of examples and with different art forms, etc. So it just happens to be in the space in this example, but there's something more about that beyondness that I wanted to communicate. So I hope that makes sense a little bit. Could you get a sense of the heart and soul closing or opening at different times in there? I'm not sure if you ...? Yeah? Good.

[1:02:44] Okay, so back to what I said at the beginning. Last thing. How do we want to sense the cosmos and sense the self? That question and the question, "What do we want from art?", and the question, "What do I want from Dharma?", to me, they're completely related. They're completely inextricably related. And pull out something else I said earlier: am I trying to fit my conception of art or my conception of Dharma into concepts that are too small, too small for my soul, actually too small for my relationship? Does it then come out as if how I explain what I'm doing, or why I love this or that, is actually not quite accurate or not quite honest? It doesn't actually reflect or describe a person's relationship, or process, or the psychology of what's going on, or their love, or their desire.

Nathalie had to cancel. She was going to be here tonight. She sent me a book ages ago, and I've forgotten what it's called, but it was basically about spirituality in art, but really what it was about was the relationship of modern art with spirituality, and actually how a lot of it had got squeezed out, and it's no longer allowed in the sort of contemporary artistic discourse. You go to an art gallery, and you read those little things that most people spend most of their time reading -- the little caption at the side of the art, then looking at art. Even if the artists themselves wanted to say something spiritual, oftentimes it gets curated out of the exhibition. It's not allowed in the discourse.

So what you get is people explaining their art or making art or relating to art or being told, "This is what good art is," or "This is what you need to see in art." And what is it? It's constrained by the kind of dominant modernist world-view. Which means what? It's either the story of the self, or a depiction of the alienation of the self in a meaningless, vast cosmos. And all art, or any good art, has to somehow be about that, and about, again, the poignancy of impermanence and the tragedy of our existence, and it's got squeezed and imprisoned. This is how we explain what art, "This is what the artist is doing." And then, of course, that art gets chosen over this art, and it's like, there isn't ... we're not allowed to say, "No, fuck it! That's not what I'm doing in art. I'm doing it for a different reason, and it has to do with divinity, and it has to do with the sense I have of depth and existence and wonder and mystery. And I don't feel alienated and constrained and finite, and like you're telling me I'm supposed to feel, if I was honest." But similarly in the Dharma, if we're trying to make this connection, are we sort of funnelling things too narrowly and limiting ourselves?

[1:06:01] So I'm going to stop there, but like I said, there's just a personal, my personal relationship with these kind of things, things I feel strongly about. Why I was so hesitant is I don't want to, if you don't relate to any of that, or you feel like you have a very different relationship to art, then I really want to allow that and respect it. And it's not for me to say why you should make art or what you should look for in art. So if you can just view the whole thing as just my personal sharing, then that's probably the most helpful way of relating to it. Okey-dokey?

We have some time if there's anyone who'd like to share. It doesn't have to have anything to do with what I said. I know there were some people with questions. Does anyone want to ...? How are we going to do this? Anyone have some questions?

Q1: concerns about the relative vs the absolute in art and Dharma

Rob: [1:07:02] Ah, Rose. Yeah.

Yogi: Well, you may have answered my question already. Art, for me, well, it used to be quite different, but in the last many years, it's come, it's like an upwelling from inside, and it comes out of practice and somatic practices I've been doing which allow me to relax deeper and deeper and deeper into what is the mystery of my own being. And it's often the arisings that come as images and as powerful feelings and often terrible pain. Expressing them in some form of art, whether it's as a painting or a drawing or whether it's poetic, what have you, or a dance, it's been totally freeing and enabled me to sink even deeper or dive even deeper. So I haven't got any doubt in my own mind at all of the power and that this is the right way to go. That's how it feels to me. And yet, very recently, as I go deeper, I find an opposition arising in me, and it's as if a part of me which I had never seen before, but now is just beginning to emerge, is saying, "Well, this isn't pure practice. This isn't pure Dharma. It's all very relative, and so ultimately a very enjoyable time waste." Now, my mind ... I know this isn't true. And listening to you, you know, it was very encouraging, but there is that part. And is this, is this what you're talking about? This is what some people say, some traditions say, you know, it is relative. And how do I get through it?

Rob: How do you get through that doubt about whether it's just relative?

Yogi: Yeah, that obstacle. Because it's not a rational thing, but it's a real obstacle, and it's stopping me express myself in that way, and it's stopping me sitting on the cushion.

Rob: Oh. Okay. Well, I think ultimately, you're going to have to find your own answers to ...

Yogi: [laughs] Of course!

Rob: But I'm just trying to think what might help. I could certainly say something. I'm just trying to think what might help you. From a Dharma perspective, let me just say something, and see if it plants a seed: form and emptiness.

Yogi: Yes.

Rob: Relative and absolute.

Yogi: Yes.

Rob: You know? So, that might be something anyone ... well, there are Dharmas who preach just the Absolute, or just getting out of this world and not being reborn, etc., but that's actually quite a rare kind of Dharma these days. Most people realize or have a relationship with Dharma where they need to come back to the relative. There's the place of the Absolute, and there's the place of the relative, and there's a place of the connection between them. So any Dharma that dismisses the relative, you have to decide. I would agree -- a Dharma that dismisses the relative is a poor Dharma. It's a one-legged Dharma, and it's lame, and it's limited, etc., okay? But you have to decide what your relationship is with that. So it's not just about art, it's about the whole of existence. Do we care about the planet? Do we care about social justice? You know, if you say, "Ah, it's all relative," it's like yeah, it's all relative, just forget about it.

Partly the question may be your whole -- reminding yourself of form and emptiness: emptiness is form, form is emptiness. Relative and absolute -- both needed. At a whole other level, the Absolute is relative too. If you go really deep into emptiness, and we talked about this in the emptiness seminar, you go, "Okay, now I got to the Absolute," and then you go beyond that, and you start to see that's relative too. And that collapses the hierarchy between "this is the Absolute, real" and "that's not."

So we could say all that. And then pulling out something else I said, you know, I think it takes a lot of guts and a lot of self-confidence to kind of question dominant Dharma-received wisdom. It's a big deal, but in the end, what have we got to go on? What we've got to go on there is, what do I feel, what do I know, what's my sense of what's pulling me? And there can be all kinds of ideas that we've absorbed, but coming back to that, and saying, what do I need as a soul?

So there are a few different pieces in here. There's a kind of understanding I can't get rid of the relative, or I wouldn't want to anyway, that that's as much a leg of the Dharma as the so-called Absolute. There's the whole relativization of the Absolute: We go beyond "the Absolute is Absolute" into "the Absolute is relative," and that just collapses the whole thing. And then the third aspect is, where am I going to get my self-confidence from? Where am I going to get my compass from? You know, what am I going to trust in my "one wild and precious life," you know? What am I going to go on? Where am I going to get my bearings from? All these things, they're big deals. They're not small points we're making, but something in those three or the combination may give you a little bit of directions of where you might kind of ponder a little bit, or look to, to kind of get a different relationship with ...

Yogi: I think that last one is what resonated the most. I hadn't looked at it. One other thing that I didn't say, which I forgot to say, instead of letting it all flow freely, I'm blocked, both on and off the cushion, and I employ my time really busily in very, very worthwhile activities for others, yet seemingly I'm incapable of doing the same for myself. Does that make sense?

Rob: I think so. Yeah.

Yogi: Yeah. Maybe it's a lack of ... I haven't yet been able to really honour my own sacredness, worthwhileness.

Rob: Yeah.

Yogi: I do of the earth, but then I can't really of everything else, unless I do for myself, because we're not different.

Rob: Yeah. I think there may well be something in that, Rose. And it's related, as well, as I said -- part of -- I just skipped over it very quickly, but an artist needs to have an imaginal sense of themselves as artist, and that means sense the sacredness of what you're doing. It doesn't need to be grandiose. There's something else we're talking about. So all these pieces, they're quite countercultural, you know, either counter Dharma culture, or counter wider culture. I feel what you're saying. I don't think it's necessarily easy, but it may not be that you're very far away from finding your way out of this little prison box, you know. It doesn't sound like it to me. I think it's really there for you, you know?

Yogi: I think so, too, but it just hasn't come yet.

Rob: Maybe if we till the soil a little bit with what we've just talked about, it might.

Yogi: Yeah, yeah. That's great. Thank you ever so much.

Rob: You're very welcome, Rose.

Yogi: It's great to see you again.

Rob: Yeah, you too.

Q2: dysphoria causing blocks in Soulmaking Dharma practice, art, and activism

Rob: Alexia, did you have one that you wanted to ask?

Yogi: Essentially my question is quite similar to Rose's question, but the cause of it is quite different. So, for me, the relationship between Dharma practice, and specifically Soulmaking Dharma practice, and art and activism is a very, very symbiotic one, which kind of means that if I'm feeling disconnected from one, then I feel completely disconnected from the others. And recently, there's been a block in my meditation practice which has meant that I feel completely disconnected from that and consequently quite often from music, poetry reading, and activism also. I was wondering whether you had suggestions.

Rob: I think I would need to hear a little bit more about the nature of the block. Is that possible or is it a bit complex?

Yogi: I can try to explain. So I've been working quite a bit with energy body awareness, which I love as a practice. The thing is that I experience quite a bit of dysphoria, and it makes the energy body extremely difficult to sense. The whole front of the energy body feels completely locked, and it just is quite an uncomfortable experience because it draws attention to dysphoria.

Rob: What does 'dysphoria' mean, Alexia?

Yogi: Oh, sorry. It's related, in my case, it's related to gender, and it just means kind of varying degrees of discomfort with your physical body which, for me, then relates to the way that I relate to the energy body.

Rob: Ah. You don't mean physical discomfort with the body, you mean discomfort with how you're perceiving it and the idea of it and its identity?

Yogi: Yes, exactly. Yes.

Rob: Okay, very good. Thank you for sharing that. You know, that doesn't sound easy, and clearly there's dukkha there. I think sometimes with these things, it's best, or rather, we can divide an approach -- we can think about a double approach here. So one approach is to find something that's nourishing, that's helpful, that feels good, and the other approach is to relate to the very difficulty itself in a way that can help it to open up. So two possible approaches, and not to kind of get locked in either one.

So if we take the second one first, the difficulty itself, the dukkha itself -- it's complex, you know; that's a really complex dukkha. There's heart pain there, there's perhaps confusion, all kinds of things. You would obviously know better than I do about your personal pain there. But if there's a way of being with that pain and opening to it, the advantage of it, or one advantage of it is that it's very personal, it's very unique. I mean, I'm sure other people have that pain, as well, but it's your personal pain, and it's unique. And when there's that kind of pain, there's the potential in it for it to become soulmaking, for it to become imaginal. You could almost start and work with all the dukkha of it. First you have to really feel it, and let it be in your heart, and let it be in your mind, and feel the pathos of it, feel moved by it, and be in that space. And then maybe it's possible to begin to almost see it in the third person. So this person who feels this way or senses this way about the body, it's almost like it's not so much me, it's in the third person. Does that make sense?

Yogi: Yes, it does.

Rob: So that almost like you're just helping it a little bit to almost be on its way to becoming imaginal, so that the very dukkha itself starts to constellate, potentially starts to constellate as other, as an image. You're still feeling it. It's still your dukkha. Of course it is. It's still your life. It's still your body. It's still your relationship with all that, but just for the meditation, it starts to constellate as other. And in being with that, in seeing, seeing them like that, in relating to them with the dukkha, with all that, it can become imaginal. When it becomes imaginal, it doesn't erase the problem or the dukkha necessarily, or the complexity of what's going on, but it gives it another dimension and another kind of range of beauty, necessity, divinity, etc.

When we just have the dukkha, and it doesn't have that, then what you get is this flatness and this disconnect that you're talking about, and then it can start transferring to other parts of our existence, as well -- our relationship with, in your case, music and all the rest of it. So sometimes when soulmaking gets squashed or disallowed or boxed in, prevented in one area, it has a knock-on effect to other areas of our soul and other domains of our life, and we get depressed and we get blocked, etc. But there's definitely the possibility here, in the nature of this dukkha, for beginning to relate to it -- let it become imaginal. Let that body, let that kind of pain, let that kind of situation of that kind of body-sense in this kind of culture (which doesn't yet really understand all that kind of complexity and doesn't view it -- it's beginning to change -- doesn't view it that well), that's also part of the larger image. Do you understand? There's the dukkha of all that, but there are certain ways of holding the dukkha that allow it to become imaginal and then something is liberated. But it doesn't erase it and dissolve it; it gives it sacredness and beauty and meaning and meaningfulness and all the rest of it. Does that make sense, even as a principle?

Yogi: Definitely, thank you so much.

Rob: You're welcome, and if you want more kind of details on that, then a lot of the soulmaking talks really talk about that. There's a series called "Dukkha and Soulmaking." There's some from the Roots Into the Ground of Soul retreat, and there's some from the new series I've done -- I think there's one called "The Crucible" and "Heat and the Material."

Yogi: Yeah, I've been working with them. Yeah.

Rob: So take your time with this. It's not easy, but it's all in the art of the relationship with, and there's something, I think, can blossom there.

Yogi: Thanks very much.

Rob: And then that will have a knock-on effect. Yeah. Okay, very well.

Q3: using what happens in imaginal practice to write poetry

Rob: [1:28:32] I'm aware of time now. It's nine o'clock. We only got to two questions. Let me just have a quick look at Mary's. How are you doing for time, everyone? Is it okay if I just answer Mary's question, or try and give quite a quick answer? Is that okay?

Okay, so Mary's question is: "A couple of years ago at a retreat, I asked about writing poetry from or about the images I was experiencing. You suggested that I didn't at the time, and just stayed with the imaginal practice. In recent years, there has been a wonderful dovetailing of my meditation, my movement practice, Prapto's Amerta, qigong, my writing, my creativity -- so much of my emotional life. It's been a very full time, but I've not gone back to using what happens in imaginal practice as inspiration for my poems. I don't know why this is. I worry I might be interfering with the imaginal practice if I turn it into poetry."

Yeah, thank you. This is a common question. I think it's really important. I think I don't have a strict answer. You know, it's up to you what you do, but I think my concern -- and probably why I said that in the first place -- was that if I'm making a poem, let's say it started with an image, and then I make a poem, when I'm doing that my intention has shifted. Okay? I've become a poet, and I've become, in my case, anally concerned with the music of the language and the rhythm and the unfolding of the poems in imagery, etc., and all my intention goes into that. Now, I may at the time of doing that or afterwards then have this secondary imaginal image of myself as poet, and that might be beautiful. And it may be in time that the poem kind of reflects, becomes an image. The poem becomes an image, and it starts doing its work on me.

So all that's great, and there's all kinds of soulmaking possibilities in there, and obviously all kinds of artistic and creative possibilities, but that's a slightly different thing than here's this image and I'm bringing what we call the fullness of intention -- my intention here is soulmaking. And not only that, I'm bringing all the delicacy of my meditative art, with all those elements and all this balancing of the energy body and the sensitivity and the heart, and I'm seeing how the image deepens, opens, unfolds, reveals more and more dimensionality and beauty, etc. I'm not saying that's not possible when you actually do that, but there is a divergence of intention, and I think an artist needs to have an artist's intention. A soulmaker has a soulmaker's intention -- there is an art in all that, but it's a different thing. So it's up to you. You can explore and see, but I think if I had to sum up in a nutshell what my caution would be, it would be that. And if I choose that too often -- I choose to write a poem or whatever -- I actually don't develop all this incredible delicacy of meditative art and soulmaking or the fullness of intention that would come if I didn't, if I kept it as an image and related it to that way, and saw what blossomed that way for the soul, in the soul, to the soul, etc.

So I don't think there's a right or wrong, but it's more like just, you know, kind of being aware. And this business about fullness of intention, I think I said it at some point recently in one of these seminars, it's such a big deal, and it's so rare to actually bring that to something, that I'm just doing this for the sake of the fullness of soulmaking. That's quite a rare deal. So if we're pulling a lot away from that, that also doesn't get developed, and that has a lot of consequences as well. So that would be a nutshell answer, if that's okay. Yeah? [laughs] Okay.

Okay, let's have a bit of silence to end, because we're a couple of minutes over.

Thank you everyone for being here, for bringing everything that you bring. Apologies for being late. Maybe see you soon. [laughs] I'm not sure, but we'll see. Okay. Bless you all. Thank you for hosting, Wah.