The Ontology of the Soul, and the Soul of Ontology ( ... inevitably)

Okay, let's continue on the track of ontology for a little bit. There are several points I would like to make, so I'm going to weave them together. The first comes up in relation to a question that someone asked: what is the difference between the imaginal Middle Way and the Middle Way of emptiness? So this is an important ontological inquiry and important ontological clarification that needs to be made here. What's the difference between the imaginal Middle Way and the Middle Way of emptiness? So the Middle Way of emptiness was something coined, actually, by the Buddha, a term coined by the Buddha in the Kaccāyana Sutta, which I mentioned the other day, in the Pali Canon, where he answers Kaccāyana's question about Right View, what's Right View, and he says Right View is the Buddha's Middle Way which falls between the two extreme views of "it is, or it exists" on one hand, and "it isn't, or it doesn't exist" on the other hand.^[1] That's his definition of the Middle Way.

Much more commonly, and what most people are much more familiar with, of course, is the Buddha defining the Middle Way as a Middle Way between sensual indulgence, indulgence in the sense pleasures, and hardcore asceticism on the other hand, so the Middle Way. But there's a second meaning of 'Middle Way' in the Pali Canon, that the Buddha used, and that second meaning became the primary meaning in the Mahāyāna teachings. Nāgārjuna and others picked up and really, you could say, the whole elaboration, and profundity, and sophistication, and breadth of the teachings on emptiness in the Mahāyāna, in the Buddhist Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna, comes really out of that couple of sentences exchange in the Pali Canon between the Buddha and Kaccāyana, where the Buddha uses the term 'Middle Way' as an ontological kind of teaching. It really has to do with emptiness. Although he doesn't, as I pointed out there, use the word 'empty' or 'emptiness' in that exchange, it's still what we're talking about when we use those terms, 'empty' and 'emptiness.'

So there's the Middle Way of emptiness, and then in the soulmaking teachings, when we talk about the nodes of the lattice, or the elements or the aspects of the imaginal, we also have something called the imaginal Middle Way. What's the difference between these two? Because they've got similar-sounding titles, so are they the same, or are they different? Well, they're different, and it's important to actually clarify this.

That element of the lattice that we call the imaginal Middle Way, we can also call it a 'theatre-like quality' (and we do), or 'neither real nor not real.' Those are perfectly adequate synonyms and adequate terms for what we mean by the imaginal Middle Way. So all three -- imaginal Middle Way, theatre-like quality, neither real nor not real -- they're all saying the same thing. As an element of the imaginal, it is, though, like the other elements of the imaginal, it's primarily a description of the qualities of the imaginal realm -- something we notice; something noticed or empirically observed that is characteristic of images when they are more fully imaginal.

So that's how the whole elements teaching came up or arose. It was really me trying to pinpoint the flavour of the terrain, the flavour of the realm, what's characteristic of the realm of the imaginal, because it was clear to me that images that were what I would call imaginal had different sets of qualities and implications and aspects, etc., than images used in other ways or in other systems, whether it's Ridhwan or other psychologies or other things. So I was trying to kind of designate or pinpoint what's the difference. As such, kind of what was involved was just a sort of hanging out with an image, in the mundus imaginalis, in the imaginal realm. And actually even that, the mundus imaginalis, is Corbin's term, so we're using it differently, the word 'imaginal,' than he used it, which is different than how Hillman used it, etc. But it was really hanging out, and then just noticing, noticing these subtle differences, or subtle, as I said, characteristics of what I would call images that are more fully imaginal, in contrast to images that are not really what we would call imaginal.

So it's really a description, an observation, something we notice. And in that, this imaginal Middle Way is quite a wide designation, okay? Theatre-like quality, neither real not real, like the other elements -- humility, etc., grace -- what's meant by that is quite broad. The word itself needs to be, the concept itself, the designation pinpointing itself needs to allow room to be able to stretch -- and I'll come back to that in a minute -- to be able to stretch, to broaden, etc., to have soft and elastic edges. It's quite a wide designation.

In contrast, when we talk about the emptiness Middle Way, the Middle Way of emptiness that the Buddha was talking about and Nāgārjuna and others picked up on, the emptiness Middle Way is the result of a very careful, usually long, ontological inquiry, in practice and in conception. In other words, after practising with emptiness practices or ways of looking or analytical practices, after really thinking it through, and thinking it through in a very subtle way, etc., and sophisticated, bringing the philosophy with practice and conceptual work, meditative practice and conceptual work, what results is the Middle Way of emptiness. It's the result of that ontological inquiry.

So while we can and we do entertain various sort of ontological systems and conceptual frameworks when we practise the imaginal and sensing with soul, there is not one ontology or ontological view that we are aiming towards, that we are hoping to arrive at, or adopting exclusively. The imaginal Middle Way leaves ontological inquiry out of the forefront of imaginal practice and sensing with soul practice. So emptiness Middle Way is a result of an ontological inquiry, and in imaginal practice, we're kind of leaving that aside. We might do it beforehand or around it, but the actual imaginal practice doesn't involve ontological inquiry, and there's no one ontology, as I said, or one ontological viewpoint that we're hoping to arrive at, and then we've got it: "That's it. That's our ontology."

Of course -- and I'll come back to this -- ontological inquiries may become soulmaking, or may be or may become soulmaking, for some people at some times. In other words, the whole question of ontology becomes very exciting for the soul. And thus, you know, images and fantasies build up around and in relation to ontological inquiries and ontological ideas. It's also the case that the soulmaking dynamic, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, will eventually shake up and expand whatever ontologies we profess or hold. But still, ontological inquiry is not primary in imaginal or sensing with soul practice, and we are not seeking an answer to an ontological question there, whereas in emptiness practice we are; we want to come to the answer, the truth about the fact of emptiness, the universal truth there.

So as emptiness practices and understandings deepen and refine, the emptiness Middle Way, the Middle Way of emptiness gets clearer and narrower. It's more like a razor's edge. It's very fine, this between 'it is' and 'it is not,' 'it exists' and 'it does not,' 'neither real nor not real.' From the emptiness point of view, the emptiness Middle Way becomes clearer and much more like a razor's edge. In other words, the tendencies towards nihilism ("It's not real. This isn't real. Nothing's real") on the one hand, and reification ("It's real. It is. It really exists") on the other hand -- the two extreme views that the Buddha pointed to and, again, the Mahāyāna picks up on a lot, the tendencies towards nihilism on one hand and reification on the other hand, they're gradually diminished -- gradually, as we go deeper and deeper with emptiness practice, and emptiness understanding, and as our understanding comes closer and closer to the sort of narrow tightrope of the Middle Way of emptiness.

So again, to contrast, the imaginal Middle Way -- in contrast to the emptiness Middle Way -- is not such a precise or narrow concept, partly because the whole imaginal process admits various ontologies or ontological systems, as we've pointed out several times in the past, and illustrated in different talks and things. So it's less of a tightrope or a razor's edge, and more like a kind of avenue, a wide road -- I don't know, a boulevard or something -- than a razor's edge, than a tightrope. So that within the range of the imaginal Middle Way, there can be various positions of more or less reification. And again, the concept of the imaginal Middle Way, like the other concepts in Soulmaking Dharma, has soft and elastic edges.

[11:19] Still, starting soulmaking practice with a careful emphasis on kind of curbing the reificationist tendency, and then, only then, in time, widening the range of ontological views in play, widening the range of ontological views about image or what we're sensing with soul, exploring positions at different points on the width of that broad road of the imaginal Middle Way, that will be the most fruitful way to progress, that order -- starting with careful emphasis on, as I said, curbing the reificationist tendency, and then broadening out from there, slowly, gradually. Because if one has in the past only reified images, if that's my history, I've only known and worked with images that I've reified -- and that's mostly the case for those who use images in psychological or spiritual or shamanic practice, that they're usually reified. Even if a person says, "Oh, I'm not reifying," unless they really are making it clear that they're not reifying, you can pretty much bet that they're reifying. You may not hear that word, but it takes a lot of work to not reify something.

So if one's used images in other ways, more conventional psychotherapies or spiritualities or shamanic practices, and the images have been reified, then it will be very difficult, I think, to come out of that habit of reification and kind of move towards the other side of this wide road of the imaginal Middle Way, and have the facility to explore a less reified stance. And if that's the case, if then I don't, I cannot move away from the reificationist side of the road to explore the less reified road, then that whole side of the road, that whole territory of soulmaking possibility, won't open up.

The opposite direction of movement, from a stricter non-reifying -- which is what we tend to emphasize at first -- from a stricter non-reifying, gradually to explore more reifying positions, that won't be so difficult or face so much inertia for us in our practice, because reifying is actually a normal human tendency, especially when we feel touched by an image or perception, when it matters to us, when it helps us. So if we think about what will allow a greater total territory to be accessible and open to us, it will be, I think, if we proceed gradually in that order, from being really quite strict and careful about the non-reifying -- as much as we can, without policing it too tightly, getting too anxious about that, for most people; it's all very individual, this, you know -- but generally speaking, a greater total territory will be accessible and open up to us if we go from emphasizing the non-reifying at first and then gradually expand it to more reified, ontologies that reify more, reify images, etc., more.

So the imaginal Middle Way, just to sum up, is really just something observed, something noticed about a quality, an aspect, a characteristic of images that are more fully imaginal. The emptiness Middle Way is a result of a careful ontological inquiry in practice and in conception. In the emptiness Middle Way, we're aiming for a kind of answer, result -- to understand what that really means, the emptiness Middle Way, it's one very narrow razor's edge/tightrope of truth between 'is' and 'isn't.' In imaginal practice, we're actually not sticking to one ontology, or ontological view, or ontological system, even. So we can just as easily entertain an idea of a providential divinity, a providential dharmakāya or Buddha-nature that makes appear to us images and even events and persons in our life in response to what we need at a certain time in our path -- we can entertain that kind of ontology, as well as an ontology of a Buddha-nature and dharmakāya and divinity that does no such thing, that has no providence, as well as we can entertain an ontology, a conceptual framework, "There's no such thing as Buddha-nature or divinity or dharmakāya in any of those kind of transcendent ways." So we have a range of ontologies, and we're not aiming at one, necessarily. And anyway, ontology is not forefront in our practice.

And the imaginal Middle Way, in contrast to this narrow tightrope of truth that we're aiming for as a result of our inquiry, the imaginal Middle Way is a wide boulevard, and we want to actually have freedom to take up any ontological position regarding reification on any of the points across that width of the boulevard, and see what they each do. But it might be easier if we start with the non-reification one. If we get too much into a habit of reifying images, it will be very hard to then open up non-reified images and all the soul-realms and soul-worlds that they open up. Okay, so that's a clarification, hopefully, between the emptiness Middle Way and the imaginal Middle Way.

As far as emptiness is concerned, as well, it's important to point out that, from a strictly narrow Buddhadharma point of view, all we need to know about ontology for the sake of liberation from suffering and liberation from avijjā (fundamental ignorance), all we need to know about the ontology of things is that things are thoroughly, completely empty. And that realization of emptiness needs to have woven into it (or alongside it, but hopefully woven into it) an understanding that we need to respect conventional reality, that there are some conventional realities that we really need to respect. As I pointed out yesterday, if we have penetrated to that result of the emptiness Middle Way, the understanding of the thorough, deep, radical and comprehensive emptiness of all things, if we have done that via the ways of looking approach, then ethics and karma and dependent arising of self and world, dependent on attitude, dependent on action, dependent on mind state, etc. -- all that is obvious, and in fact, woven in. It's obvious because it's woven into the very investigation into emptiness right from the beginning, as we talked about yesterday.

And if we go deep enough in our inquiry into emptiness and our penetration of the truth of emptiness, to understand the Middle Way of emptiness in its deepest and most precise sense, then we see that no-self also is just a view. We can pick it up, "There is no self," but it's just a view. It's not an ultimate truth. And the view of self becomes just as available, or available again, if you like, as the view of no-self. Emptiness is just a view. Emptiness is empty. Not-self is just a view. Self is just a view. And all of these become available as views. We're only left with ways of looking.

But from a Dharma perspective, this is all we need to know about ontology: that things are empty, because that's what liberates us from suffering and from the root cause of suffering, which is avijjā. And, hopefully, woven into that understanding, that ontological understanding that everything is empty, we also understand the need to respect certain conventional realities, and hopefully particularly around ethical consequences -- karma, dependent arising in that sense -- and secondly that we have the flexibility to respect self as much as no-self, emptiness as much as not emptiness. To not just respect, but to practise and to see those ways.

From a strictly Buddhadharma point of view, that's actually all we need to understand ontologically. And if you've really gone into the question of emptiness, you will realize that even a realization, a full realization of emptiness, still leaves a lot of questions about the exact ontology of different conventional realities, of different relative truths. In the history of Buddhism, there has been vehement argument about this over 2,500 years. Certainly once you get into the Mahāyāna, and certainly in Tibet, really quite a lot of very sophisticated and hot-blooded polemic debate around all this. You only have to look at Mipham Rinpoche from the turn of the twentieth century, just before and into the early twentieth century, and his engages and dialogues with other traditions, including Gelug scholars, or look at some of the writings of the Karmapas -- particularly the eighth Karmapa, Mikyö Dorje, etc. -- especially when it comes to this question of the relationship between conventional and ultimate reality, conventional truths and the truth of emptiness, the thing-ness of things and the emptiness of things. This is really quite a long-standing argument. And in terms of how it then applies to tantra as well, and much else, there's a lot there that's left open and open to debate.

Some of that debate, particularly some of the things that Mipham and Mikyö Dorje got interested in, it bears very much on what we actually understand by the emptiness of something. So some of the areas of that argument pertain to the status of tantric deities, the ontological status of tantric deities and other things, but some of it actually pertains to what does 'emptiness' mean, and therefore, is this version of emptiness actually liberating or not? Now, I've gone into this briefly, but in a fair amount of detail. It's quite a central piece of the last portions of Seeing That Frees, so you can find it there, and you can also find some references there if you're interested.

But the main point is that even a full, comprehensive understanding of emptiness still leaves questions regarding the exact ontology of conventional realities. And we could say the same might be true of, for example, quantum physics as it goes deeper: what exactly is the ontological status, the reality status, of a basic particle? We think, "Okay, this table is made, this desk is made from molecules and atoms, etc., and those are made of protons and neutrons and electrons, and then we go down, and there are even more basic particles," etc., although an electron is classified as a basic particle, but still. Then what is the reality status, what is the ontological status of those basic particles? And it's not simple. As I mentioned the other day on a retreat at Gaia House, Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum physics and a Nobel Prize winner, he said, "Everything we think of as real is made up of things that we cannot think of as real."

Now even more, since his death, even space and time are regarded as emergent and not fundamental phenomena. At a quantum level, they emerge. They're constructions, and in some sense, also dependent on the observer. Einstein did some of that work with his relativity theories, but then even more so at a quantum level. So we're still left with these questions about the ontology of different conventional realities. This is important. When we then come to soulmaking teachings, of course, they cannot help stimulating such questions, or they should stimulate such questions, and they do stimulate such questions -- not for everyone, but certainly for some people, and some people will get very derisive, etc.; some people will be too easy, perhaps too lazy and quick to just adopt a certain ontological acceptance. But, you know, it's up to them. I've been through all this in other talks; I'm not going to dwell on it too much any more. But the questions pertain -- ontological questions don't go away with regards to soul and image and soulmaking and all that. They are all empty, yes, but it's still, as I said, emptiness, realization of emptiness, gone all the way to the end, still leaves questions about the exact ontology of different conventional realities.

So what about the ontology of soul? This is something I've talked about quite a lot, but very briefly, just to repeat: we can define 'soul' in a couple of ways. One is just soul is a kind of way of looking. It's a kind of way of looking, or it's a group of ways of looking, even. Soul is the collection of ways of looking that are soulmaking, that open up a sense of soulfulness. That's what soul is -- so that open up the elements of imaginal, that deliver the elements of the imaginal. Soul is just a way of looking. It's not an entity. Or, if we want to define soul as a kind of entity, it's that entity, that instrument, that organ, so to speak, in the human being, which looks in those ways -- looks in those ways that open up soulfulness, that support soulfulness, that engender soulfulness and soulmaking. Soulmaking, then, if we think of soul as an entity, soulmaking is a kind of making or a growing of that organ, of that instrument, a growing of its size, of its range, of its capacities, like a muscle that grows, or an organ, or a child's brain that's growing in its capacity as an entity.

[28:34] So either it's not an entity, if we think of it just as a kind of way of looking, or it's an entity, but that entity is just as empty as any other entity. It's just as empty as a self, and we use the language of self. It's just as without too much problem in our conventional exchanges with each other, and the way we think about our lives, and the way we relate to what's actually very important in our lives. We use the language of self: "I want this. I don't want that. I really hope that. I feel this," etc. But if we use the language of a sort of entity language for soul, then that entity of soul is empty like self is empty, like the aggregates are empty, like the body is empty -- empty in itself, empty of phenomenal existence, empty of truly being an inherently existent thing. Vedanā is empty. Consciousness is empty. A moment is empty. All the aggregates are empty. Any phenomenon is empty.

When I talked -- I think it was in The Mirrored Gates^[2] -- and began to talk about sensing with soul, and actually playing a little bit with opening up the ontological considerations or possibilities of more reification, a bit more reification when we're practising sensing with soul and the perceptions that come up with sensing with soul. That's a really interesting area as well. So why bother to go into all that? Well, partly for our own purposes, in the sense that our conceptual framework, the whole logos of Soulmaking Dharma, is really based in and on emptiness. It's based in ideas like create/discover, neither real nor not real, and all that. So it's simply rooted in that kind of, I would say, more sophisticated ontology, and that kind of participatory ontology, or an ontology of participation, rather than sort of stark notions of independent existence, as if that's what qualifies for reality -- its independent existence.

Partly for our own purposes, it's based on a more sophisticated ontology -- the whole logos, the whole conceptual framework of Soulmaking Dharma is. But partly, explaining the ontology of soul briefly just now, repeating what I've said elsewhere, I think, partly also to kind of proactively rebuff certain expected objections and critiques from either Buddhists who tend to think in a very, let's say, narrow and common way, and perhaps not very well worked out, with a not very well worked out ontology. I was trying to rebuff certain objections and critiques: "Well, that's not Buddhadharma, if you're talking about soul. Didn't the Buddha say ..." "That's not something real. That's just metaphysical speculation. Any language of soul must be just metaphysical speculation. It's the opposite of phenomenology," etc. I've gone into this at great length elsewhere; I'm not going to repeat it too much now, except I will say a couple of things.

So partly it's in response to that kind of somewhat typical or typically expected objection, and partly it's for our own purposes, because soulmaking is necessarily rooted in a more sophisticated ontology and epistemology than the ones that most people in our culture are used to and that our culture typically regards as simply "This is what's real. That's not real. This is what's true, and it's because X or Y," in terms of independent existence, etc., socially agreed-upon perceptions.

It's interesting, if we just linger on this a little bit more. Some people in the Dharma, some expositions of Buddhadharma, some explanations of Buddhadharma, or simply of kind of mindfulness extractions from Buddhadharma, some people use reductionist materialism in a kind of obvious and explicit way, and they explain Dharma, and explain meditation, and even explain liberation, perhaps, from those premises, from the premises of a sort of reductionist materialism -- in other words, in terms of atoms and neurological networks, etc., and neurotransmitters and all the rest of it. And they explain what's happening in meditation and liberation as perhaps a change or even a kind of increased efficacy of, for example, neural pathways.

Other expositions of Buddhadharma never mention atoms or that sort of thing, the components or the elements of reductionist materialism. They never mention them. They never, perhaps, even mention the classical scientific materialist world-view. But they try to present what might seem to be a more 'phenomenological' -- let's put that in inverted commas, a more 'phenomenological' Dharma, or a more existential, existentialist Dharma, and a more 'phenomenological'/existentialist idea of suffering, of what suffering is, what the problem is, and of what liberation from suffering is or might be. The whole thing is kind of given a more -- or attempted is a more 'phenomenological' or existential approach, without mentioning scientific materialist elements or views.

But if we go into it, if I try and adopt such an [approach], or try and propose such an approach, we actually quickly realize that that kind of 'phenomenology' (in inverted commas) is very limited, because there's only one way of looking there. There's only one way of looking that's admitted, and that way of looking "sees the truth. And this is how all human beings" -- or it's supposed; this is assumed -- "This is how all human beings, if they are honest, and if they are brave, that's how they will experience self and world. They will experience it like this." This is what this phenomenology says. It's what a lot of phenomenologies do, actually, or attempts at phenomenological philosophy and psychology.

There's no place there for different ways of looking, and different ways of looking then opening up different senses, whole different perceptions and senses of self and world and cosmos, etc. And similarly, the existentialist kind of Dharma rests on an assumption that the meaningless, flat cosmos of classical scientific materialism, it rests on the assumption that's a proven reality. So it rests on reductionist materialist ideas as a presumed background and basis, even if they are not mentioned, never mentioned. And, you know, it's interesting: the fact that reductionist materialist conceptions are assumed to be irrevocably proven as fact, that may be part, at least, of what gives some of those existential Buddhists their often kind of haughty and unbudgeable arrogance that comes across in their stance and their tone. Problem with all that is that physics itself, the same scientific method that delivered that kind of view -- starting in the sixteenth, seventeenth century, let's say -- as it developed, that same scientific method has begun to bring about the crumbling of that basis. Not just physics, but also contemporary Western philosophy, and also was deconstructed and kind of demolished by Nāgārjuna's Dharma, etc., and the whole Mahāyāna take on deeper understanding of emptiness, deeper working out of what emptiness means. So that whole background view and basis, not mentioned but assumed real and so rested on, it's no longer tenable and sure as a truth, as the reality of things.

So we're in an interesting place right now in terms of Western philosophy; I think also in terms of Buddhadharma; certainly in terms of modern science. And I think, as I think I've said elsewhere -- I'll say it again now -- I think ontology, and also epistemology, which goes with it, which is "How can I trust this knowledge about what's real? How can I trust? What do I trust? My senses? My thinking? My scripture? Other people's opinion?" I've talked about this a lot elsewhere. Just to say now: ontology and epistemology are never-ending explorations and questions. I don't think humanity will ever come to the end of these things, of these explorations, and their possibilities, and the questions there.

And as such, because of the never-endingness of ontology and epistemology, there can be eros for it. Ontology itself, as I alluded to earlier, ontology itself can become for us an erotic-imaginal other. The whole area, the whole domain, the whole inquiry, the image of oneself as ontological inquirer, etc., an image of oneself on that path. There can be soulmaking out of that erotic-imaginal relationship, or in that, with that erotic-imaginal relationship with the never-endingness of ontology and ontological questions and explorations. So you can get very excited about this, very into it, very struck by its possibilities for the soul. Soulmaking can come from ontology, from certain ontological views. We'll come back to that. But it can also come in relationship to ontology.

So I don't remember, in the Four Parables of Stone and Light^[3] series, if I said this, but I'll say it again. I was thinking, you know, if you hear someone say with regard to ontology, or with regard to epistemology, or even with regard to things like emotions and ethics, human emotions and ethics, if you hear someone or read someone say they've figured it out, they know the answers now, in any of those areas -- ontology, epistemology, emotions, ethics; there are probably other areas -- "We've figured it out. I know what the truth is there now," if you hear someone say they've figured it out, run a mile. I would run a mile from such a person. They've come to the end of ontological inquiry, epistemological inquiry; they've understood fully what human emotions are and involve, how they arise, what they can be; or ethical questions -- I would run a mile.

And also, if you come across what's maybe just as popular these days, especially in people influenced by some fairly recent Western philosophy, "Oh, I'm not interested in ontology. I'm not interested in epistemology. That's all metaphysics. I've put that aside. It's not relevant. It's not what the Buddha taught. It's not relevant to life," etc., I would run a mile. You should run a mile. Either one of those extreme views is, to me, problematic. It's safe to say it's problematic. As I said the other day, and I pointed out several times recently, ontology and epistemology are inevitable. They're inevitable in the very fabric of our perception -- not even as big, philosophical, rambling inquiries with all this kind of conceptual grinding, etc., but they are woven in. Ontological assessments, epistemological assessments are implicitly, non-verbally, unthinkingly woven in as conceptions into every perception we have as human beings. They're inevitable. Even if they're inconcludable, questions of ontology, ontology and epistemology are inevitable. And I don't know, but I have a sense, really, that Western philosophy went through a phase that I think called itself 'post-metaphysical.' Well, we might now be in a post-post-metaphysical phase, or just about to be, or something like that. So there's a lot here, again, that can open up soulmaking -- that can be soulmaking for us in these inquiries, but also allow more soulmaking to open up, and I want to come back to that.

But let's just stay with this for a while and actually bring in the connection between eros and ontology. So again, let's see if I can try and convey what I'm trying to get at here. The scientific method's attempt -- it started with this attempt to sort of say, "Let's exclude affect, human affect" -- in other words, emotion and desire, which could be regarded as an affect. "Let's exclude affect and desire from the process of inquiring into truth." When it arose in the sixteenth, seventeenth century, really got going, the scientific method's attempt to exclude affect and desire from the process of inquiring into truth instigated and then installed for modernity, for modern culture, really a definition of 'truth' as partly 'that which is independent of the affect or desire of an observer.'

So it kind of started with that: "This is our M.O. This is our modus operandi. This is how we're going to go about things." And then that became a definition of truth. It instigated and then it installed it, so that that's how we tend to think of what is true. "Truth is that which is independent of the affect or desire of an observer." But if one realizes, as one goes deeper into all these things, that there is no truth independent of the observer -- again, seems to be very much that quantum physics, as much as some people don't like that conclusion, that that is what quantum physics is concluding. It's remained unchallenged for getting on for a hundred years now. Not unchallenged, but it has remained without convincing challenge at all. Some people still really don't like it. Very few people have really picked it up, and inquired, and opened up, and looked further into its implications, but that seems to be, so far, unbudgeable. As I said, similar conclusions from Western philosophies, and certainly from Buddhadharma and emptiness and the ways of looking approach.

If one realizes there is no truth independent of the observer, then the way of looking of the observer must be considered. And why, then, can't affect be readmitted? In my readmission of the observer, and the position of the observer, and what the observer does, and how the observer looks, why can't I readmit affect and desire and even eros? And perhaps they're given even equal status with any other affect. So desire and eros are given equal status with other affects; they're just all part of this idea that truth doesn't exist independently of the observer. There are just ways of looking. No ultimate truth, just ways of looking. And so there's what I see with this affect, what I see with that affect, what I see when there's eros, what I see when there's some other emotion, etc.

We can go a little bit further into this, push in a slightly different way. [48:47] If 'the truth' -- put that, even, in inverted commas -- is instead something that's infinitely penetrable. So it's not so much there are lots of different angles on something, but it's more that truth is something infinitely penetrable, is a journey into dimensionality, and yes, we might say dimensionality and divinity. A journey of penetration, if you like, or opening to, if you want a more receptive mode -- opening deeper to, opening oneself deeper to.

If truth is defined that way, as infinitely penetrable and a journey, there is no one, final, ultimate truth, except this general kind of journey into more disclosures, more discoveries. And if that is what reality is, this deepening journey, never-ending journey, infinite sort of penetrative movement, if that's what reality is, then it is exactly eros in the way that we are using that word, eros as we define it, in the way that it wants closeness, contact, wants to know, wants to connect with, and in that wanting more penetration, wanting more opening, it ignites the soulmaking dynamic, and that allows more, deeper penetration, the generation of more beyonds, the discovery of more facets and aspects of what it is that we're in relationship with, what our subject is, what we're penetrating, etc.

So it's exactly eros in the way that we, in the Soulmaking Dharma, are using that word. It's exactly eros which reveals the truth and reality. And in that case, eros is more valuable than other affects, and than an absence of an affect, an emotion. Because eros has this tendency to penetrate further, and if truth is something that's infinitely penetrable rather than just kind of horizontally infinite (in terms of sort of perspectives around a circle), then it's exactly eros which is what opens it. And that view of truth and reality does not posit truth and reality as what is independent of the observer, independent of observing. It recognizes the profound participation of the soul in creating/discovering what is disclosed. To me, this is an interesting thing, and perhaps it can be developed -- this idea of eros as having actually ontological value, more significant and powerful epistemological/ontological value.

So the theologian and philosopher John Milbank, I'm just starting to get to know his work. I find it very fascinating, and very fascinating some of the overlaps and common areas, common desires, as well, between his work in what they call the radical orthodoxy movement, a kind of Catholic theology. Finding it very interesting, those overlaps. I only know his work a little bit. There's a famous book he wrote, Theology and Social Theory, which I've just picked up. I haven't got very far in it at all. I was just actually on the preface. It's a preface to the second edition. And he wrote this:

The nihilistic vision [which is what he means by this sort of flat, purposeless cosmos of scientism, scientific materialism] makes its conclusions from a cold reason that disallows to the 'moods' of eros, anxiety, boredom, trust, poetic response, faith, hope, charity and so forth an ontologically disclosive status.^[4]

Just what I was saying before: it's like affect is, from the start, ruled out of any definition of truth. So the moods, the affect of eros, anxiety, boredom, trust, poetic response, faith, hope, charity and so forth are disallowed any ontologically disclosive status. They don't tell you, in other words, anything -- they don't open for us any knowledge about anything that's real, ontologically disclosive. But if our ontology admits a category of the real which, yeah, includes our participation and creativity, our poetic responses, well, then eros (and secondarily, other emotions like those Milbank listed above, or as I just mentioned), eros does disclose or open up to us the truth, or, we could say, truths, or truth as a journey into truth, infinitely penetrable truth, as I explained. To me, this is really, really interesting.

Second point in the scientific method's sort of starting points, and then what was really axiomatic in terms of methodology, of approach, but then actually spread from methodological technique or process to assumption about reality, an unquestioned assumption about reality. There's a second one, apart from the ruling out of affect and desire -- "Truth is only what is observed in the absence of affect and desire." Of course, this has been questioned from other directions, as well, but a second I first came across in reading Catherine Pickstock. She has a book called After Writing. I found it quite a difficult read, the language. But she's a colleague, I think, of John Milbank. And she makes the point, in her book After Writing, that Descartes, who, of course, was one of the founders of the scientific method, defined reality as 'that which is clear and discrete and easily comprehended by the mind.' Reality is defined as that which is clear, discrete, and easily comprehended by the mind. [They] say, "Okay, what is reality? It's this. It's what's clear, discrete, and easily comprehended by the mind. That's what we should investigate, and we should forget about everything else, because it's not real. We want to investigate the real. That's what science is." So that definition or delineation of objects to be investigated, as I said, came then itself to be taken as a truth. Initially it was just, "These are the objects we're going to investigate, the ones that are clear, discrete, and easily comprehended by the mind," but then, at some point, it came to be, "This is what is true." It was taken itself as a truth. Anything that did not fit that definition of being clear, discrete, and easily comprehended by the mind was regarded as untrue, unreal, and unworthy of attention.

Now, you can see, again, if someone in quantum physics, for example, or even relativistic physics, if someone tries to say, "Well, the really simple things, the really clear, discrete things, and easily comprehended, are these little billiard balls of basic particles, or things like space and time, and time as Newton defined it -- absolute space, absolute time. It's just kind of there, a big, empty space, not doing anything, not affected by anything, and time just flows, absolute time. And these little billiard balls are pretty much the simplest, most discrete, clear things that there are. They're very easy to understand. It's just a little billiard ball, something you can't chop up further." But again, starting from that view from Descartes, quantum physics has just then -- if you ask someone, "What really is an electron?", you'd better have a lot of patience and a good bladder, because we don't know. And the answer is definitely not simple. It's definitely not something that's either clear, or discrete, or easily comprehended by the mind. So the very starting premise of a mode of investigation here became a definition of truth, and when the mode of investigation, the scientific method, continued along those lines, it just completely decimated its very starting point and that definition.

But for our purposes, I want to say again something about eros in relationship to ontology, and the ontological value and place, potentially, of eros -- the epistemological and ontological value and place of eros. Because eros, when allowed to stimulate the soulmaking dynamic (and that's what we mean by 'eros' in its bigger definition, its larger definition), eros will open up exactly what does not fit inside Descartes's definition. Here's this object, and if there's eros for it, in relationship to it, that object begins to become to us more mysterious, less comprehensible, because it's unfathomable. It becomes unfathomable, it becomes not discrete, because it possesses dimensionality shading into divinity. It possesses soft and elastic edges. It becomes poly-aspected and complex, rather than single and simple. So again, it's eros that opens up or that bursts open Descartes's definition, in much the same way as physics has done.

[1:00:39] It's interesting, too, just picking up on one of those words in the little quote from John Milbank. He noted the word 'boredom' there, which I found was interesting, because we tend to think, "Oh, that's not a very productive or creative affect or emotion." I don't know quite what he meant, but it was there in a list of affects with truth-indicative power, truth-indicating power, with potentially ontological disclosive status. Or, rather, actually, all he was saying in that quote was that it had been ruled out, but by implication, might it be there, even boredom? Might our boredom with, for example, the sort of typical, common insistence on and hegemony of the truth of a flatly materialist cosmos -- might our boredom with that idea, a boredom with this insistence on "This is the existential reality of things," a boredom with the sort of little billiard ball idea of matter, and now even of mind, a boredom with reductionist materialism -- might our boredom at those views, and those views being inundated, surrounded by those views, and being inflicted on us, oppressed by them -- might our boredom be a feeling to trust, telling us that something in that picture is not right, not true? I don't know what Milbank meant, but that's something I was wondering. Boredom as a valid affective and effective indicator of truth, and 'truth' in inverted commas if we have this more open idea of what truth is.

Actually, just lingering with that, if we do conceive of 'truth' -- and again, I feel like I want to put it in inverted commas -- but 'truth' conceived more as a process, a journey, a deepening and opening that is never-ending -- if we conceive of it that way, and if it is eros above or as much as anything else which drives that journey and reveals or opens truth (because, as we said, of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic), then the discoveries on the way are still valid as partial, provisional truths. They may be partial truths, but they're provisional truths. And so we see parallels to that in science. Some of this overlaps with things I said on the Four Parables series.

So just as in the history of science, Newton's laws of mechanics and gravitation, for example, will function, they do function, very well to predict outcomes within a limited range -- within a limited range of accuracy, but also of the phenomena that we're dealing with. Newton's laws function very well to predict outcomes. It was Newton's laws that enabled us to land a rocket on the moon. It was very complicated mathematics, working that out. And even when they sent a probe to -- I can't remember where it was -- Jupiter or Neptune, you know, it's tremendous accuracy of prediction. It was all coming basically from Newtonian mathematics and equations, so it functions very well to predict outcomes -- how this cannonball will fly; exactly where this tennis ball will land, how high it will go, whatever -- within a limited range.

And because of that, because they predicted outcomes so well for so long, before [?] the stuff that didn't fit, they seemed for so long absolutely true, because they functioned so well to predict outcomes. But, in fact, Newton's laws are only -- and even does the word 'law' qualify any more? -- they're only, in fact, partially or provisionally true. They've been superseded by Einstein's special and general relativity theories, the conceptions and the equations.

So there's something in science where we see this, what we can call 'provisional truths.' It's not like Newton's laws are completely not true, or irrelevant, or they are not completely adequate to a certain level. It depends what we want to do, and depends also not just what we want to do, or want to calculate, or want to figure out or explain, but it also depends on what our idea of truth is. But we see a similar thing in Dharma, so that the relative truth of dependent fabrication, dependent unfabricating, it still functions. And from its basis, from an understanding of, "Yes, if there's clinging, if there's aversion, if there's selfing to some degree, it will fabricate more. To the degree that I let go of clinging, let go of aversion, let go of fabricating, let go of delusion, avijjā, there will be unfabricating" -- from the basis of that relative truth, we can accurately predict, as I was sharing recently, the fact of, yeah, when you direct mettā at phenomena -- I'm not looking elsewhere; I'm keeping this phenomenon in my attention, but directing mettā and compassion right at it as I pay attention to it -- the phenomenon fades.

Or, same thing as I mentioned yesterday: if I view something as anattā as I'm paying attention to it, or any of the other three characteristics, there'll be some degree of fading, even though fabrication and dependent origination, as we would conventionally understand them -- to be operating between separable phenomena: this gives rise to that, dependent on this comes this, etc., as if they're separable and real entities, phenomena -- that whole view of fabrication and dependent arising is not ultimately true. "This is fabricated by the mind. Self is fabricated by clinging, or this link in dependent origination is dependent on that link of dependent origination, the twelve links, and they're separable kind of real entities." That's not actually ultimately true. But the relative truth of dependent fabrication and dependent unfabricating still functions, just as Newton's laws still function. They have a provisional truth to them. And impermanence, as well, is a provisional truth. It's a relative or conventional truth. Ultimately, neither 'impermanent' nor 'permanent' is true of anything, as Nāgārjuna points out, because time is empty (other reasons too).

So there's a parallel here in these three domains: science, classical Dharma, but also when we get into soulmaking. And the whole idea that conventional truths, or the truths that open up through science, or the conventional truths of classical Dharma, and the conventional truths of what we encounter in soulmaking, these are provisional truths -- they're provisional truths, but we can still have a journey, a directionality, a sort of infinite penetrability into truth in the bigger sense.

[1:09:48] So if we stay with this idea of conventional truth, something else I want to point out is that, very easily, conventional truths are assumed real. That's why I say conventional truths are provisional truths. Conventional truths are provisional truths. Doesn't mean they're worthless. Doesn't mean they don't have a place. Doesn't mean they can't be relied on. Cause and effect, reliably -- if I drop something heavy on my head, it'll ... that's actually not such a good example! Cause and effect, conventional truth still functions. It's a provisional truth. Provisional truth can still be relied upon, to a certain extent, within certain provisos, within a certain limit.

What happens is conventional truths are then usually assumed to be real in all kinds of ways. Conventional truths are typically assumed to be real, are assumed to be ultimate truths. So that's really one thing to be very, very aware of, and to be concerned with. It's something I've talked so much about and written about. But there's a second thing, which is also important. I've also mentioned it before, but it's really worth emphasizing again, and maybe with a slightly different illustration and angle. When we assume, or when we adopt a conventional truth, one question is: is it real? Is it ultimately real, or is it just a conventional and provisional truth? But a second question is: what does the adoption of this conventional truth lead to? When I assume and conceive and look in the terms of this conventional truth, this provisional truth, what does it open up for me? And what does it close for me? What does it bar from my experience, from my understanding, from my journey, from my life and practice?

Let me give an example. Recently, I taught the Jhāna^[5] retreat at Gaia House, and I am very, very ill, probably in the last stages of my life, and with a lot of pain. The doctors are experimenting, trying to find the right medication for pain, and sometimes it's just making me foggy and affecting me in all kinds of ways, and tired, and other times really not touching the pain very much. So there's a lot of pain. There's a lot of difficulty. There's not a lot of energy. A lot of my time is spent struggling with my digestion or on the toilet or whatever. And I managed, with the help of the angels, I think, to teach this twenty-three day retreat or whatever it was just recently at Gaia House, a jhāna retreat. And several people said or wrote to me something like, "Your willpower is amazing. Wow! You have such willpower." And, you know, I appreciate the affection, and I guess what's a kind of compliment there. But I want to just linger on this, although it sounds anal. I just want to linger on this, because if a person is conceiving of that, "This is what a dying person is choosing to do, and then somehow able to sustain over time, teaching every day for hours despite all the other challenges," and if one conceives of that as a result of willpower, what's that actually implying?

Willpower, to me, implies -- or the meaning, what is willpower? What is the will? Is it, I don't know, a faculty of the ego or the self that can decide autonomously to do or not to do something arbitrary? In other words, what it decides to do or not do is irrelevant. It's just a matter of something called 'willpower.' The ability, the capacity, is purely a matter of the strength and steadiness of something called 'will.' What about love? What about love of something? What about eros, again? Does that have no place in why something is possible, why something is sustainable? What about the call, the calling, or the wish of the daimon, the daemon? What about a sense of duty, a sense that honouring the demands of the angel is more important, more beautiful, more sacred than living comfortably, or longer, even, or living with pleasant vedanā, or at least minimally unpleasant vedanā?

Of course, even before we get talking about eros, and angels, and soul-duty, and love, and all that, what about just other factors like the capacity to see in different ways the emptiness of dukkha, the emptiness of difficulty? What about qualities like patience? Patience to stay with what's difficult -- what we call 'forbearance.' I think it's one of the six pāramīs the Buddha alluded to. It's certainly one of the ten pāramīs of the Mahāyāna. So there's a whole level that we could just look at in terms of classical Buddhadharma teachings that's actually involved, rather than just simplifying it into this thing called 'will.'

But what I want to emphasize more is: what about other dimensions of being, aspects of our psychology? Love, eros, again, the calling of the daimon, the sense of duty, the demands of the angel, and the sense of that being more important than anything else in life, the honouring of that. That's more important, more beautiful, more sacred, as I said, than comfort, or minimizing unpleasant vedanā, etc. And if such a person is thinking in this way that doesn't include love, eros, the demands of the angel, the phenomenological fact of the call or the wish of the daimon, or the sense of the duty to the angel, if they're thinking without any of that, and if they are, on top of that, explicitly or even subtly implicitly comparing, let's say, themselves and their willpower to mine, and judging 'mine' -- and again, I want to put that in inverted commas, because I don't think of it in terms of willpower, really -- and they're judging 'mine' to be more, then they may be simply, rather, not understanding their own -- let alone my psychology -- their own psychology fully or finely or accurately or carefully enough.

So their, what seems like, to them, perhaps, their relative absence of, or their relatively weak willpower, is really -- I say really, because otherwise they would mention it; otherwise it would be included in how they assessed what seems to them something quite remarkable, this feat of teaching through all that -- their relative absence of something called 'willpower,' relatively weak 'willpower,' is really an absence of connection with their daimon, or their angel -- a blocking, perhaps, somehow, of that connection, and of their eros, and an inability to sense themselves as image, and sense their lives with soul. So I may come back to this, because all this actually bears on questions of ethics, on ethical choices. It applies, let's say, to ethical choices, and to our individual ethos, our individual character. I may come back to this in another talk.

Now, of course, it's not that someone who has an erotic relationship with a calling or project, or a creative project, or an offering that they want to give, or a service that they want to do, it's not that someone who has a sense of eros, and duty to the angel, and demands of the daimon, and all that, and love, it's not that they will always feel that way -- they always feel filled with love and eros and the juiciness of all that. So of course there will be times when the sense of calling, of love, eros, is not there, or is much diminished. And then there may be, at those times, a reliance on something we could call 'will' or 'resolution' or 'discipline' or something. Actually, I'm going to come back to those words. But it's like parenting, or being in a long-term relationship: you know, deep down, that you love something, and that you're totally committed to it, and that it's meaningful and important -- you know that, even at the times you are not. And it's that knowledge that sustains. Again, it's not simple willpower. It's a knowledge of the soul-depth of something, even at the time you're not feeling that love or eros so directly.

So, at the risk -- considerable risk, probably -- of sounding anal and maybe crossing the line into some kind of anality about words and the words people use, if someone had said to me, or if they'd used the word 'discipline,' on the other hand, rather than 'will' -- 'will' is from the Latin; it just means 'I want,' 'I want something,' just to stay with the intention. 'Discipline,' on the other hand, is related to the word 'disciple,' and from the Latin disciplina, which means 'teaching,' or discipulus, which is a pupil (discere is 'to learn' in Latin). If a person uses that word, or if I think about it in those terms, as a discipline involved in staying steady, and showing up, and offering that despite everything, all the challenges, discipline implies that it's not self-enclosed. It's not self-deciding. It's not totally self-instigating and self-actualizing, as the word 'will' is, we now commonly understand -- actually, both words, 'will' and 'discipline.'

But going more into the root of the word 'discipline,' it could open out a different sense. It implies a relationship. At least, its etymology implies a relationship -- an imaginal relationship, perhaps: the image of offering something; the image of being a servant, doing one's duty; the image of what one wants to offer; the image of the retreat; the image of the teachings; the image of passing something on. The word 'discipline,' in its more etymological meaning, invokes, implies, involves relationship. It can become imaginal relationship. And humility -- I have to be humble to learn from this person, or that person, or this thing, or that event or situation, or this experience. I have to be humble. Something has to be greater than me, the one who teaches -- the thing that teaches me. And it implies, in all that, there is implied an other, and that can become an erotic-imaginal other.

So it's possible that the whole thing becomes an imaginal constellation. If we're talking about ethics, and what it takes to stay true to one's ethics, and really stand firm, courageously, and unmovingly, unwaveringly, it may be that there's an image of that virtue, as we touched on in the "Sila and Soul" talks on the Four Parables course. The virtue itself has become image, has become ideational-imaginal, and there's other there, and I'm in erotic-imaginal relationship with that other. I'm a discipulus, and humble in relationship to that other. But it also might be, like I said, a work project, a certain duty -- a creative art project. Étienne Souriau talks about "the Angel of the work." We're a disciple of the Angel of the work, perhaps. Just opening up words now, just to get a fuller sense of what can be involved here when things are difficult, when things are challenging -- or how our sense of things can be extended, put it that way, and not shrunken and amputated to fit into narrow and flat psychologies and philosophies. So the word 'discipline' could, potentially, if we look at its etymology, open up more.

But another word is 'resolve.' So a person could have used the word 'resolve': "Oh, you have such incredible resolve." And again, we typically hear these words, 'discipline,' 'resolve,' etc., just as we hear the word 'will,' as something totally self-instigated, self-initiated, self-sustaining, self-actualizing. But the word 'resolve' is from, again, Latin, re + solvere, which means re-, 'again,' and solvere is 'to loosen' -- 'to loosen again.' And solvere means 'to loosen' or 'to release,' but one of its meanings is 'to free from debt.' So 'to free from debt again.' What might it mean? To free from debt to the angel again, because the angel's demands are infinite and never-ending.

So I honour the angel by trying as best as I can to discern what my duty is, and to carry that out as best as I can, and it will be not an exact copy of whatever the image is, or whatever the angel seems to be completely. I will always fall short. We've talked about this before. But in that resolve, I'm freeing myself from debt because I'm paying my debt. Then I'm freed from that debt, the debt to the angel, to the daimon -- the duty. And, as I said, re-, again, because it will never end, and there's another duty, and the angel is always out ahead.

Or, again, if we want to open up the potential meanings here, someone might have used the word 'sacrifice.' I think someone did. And that means, in Latin, sacra + facere -- facere is 'to make,' and sacra is related to 'sacred, holy': to make holy or sacred. So, to me, that would fit better. Now, this isn't about me -- so, a sacrifice, "Oh, it's like some kind of grandiose thing about Rob or whatever," any of it. I really want to, again, point something out about -- what I started with here was the general point about what conventional truths are we adopting? What do they lead to? The conventional truths that we adopt, the provisional truths that we adopt -- in this case, about psychology -- what do they lead to? What do they open up? Or what do they limit, if someone thinks in terms of certain ways, in terms of words like 'will,' 'discipline,' 'resolve,' thinks of them as being self-enclosed, self-instigating, etc.? 'Sacrifice,' hopefully it's already got the hint of another level in it, because it's already got the implication of making something holy or sacred. But it can lose that. It has lost that a lot in our culture.

So this isn't about me. I want to open up something in the ways that we tend to think about our psychology, about what drives us, about what we're doing, about what makes certain things possible or not. The question is, what do these ideas, what do the truths we are grasping at, holding on to, or even just adopting, open up or not? Where do they take us? So if we go with the etymology of 'sacrifice,' you know, 'making holy,' 'making sacred' -- what's holy? What's sacred here? Again, the angel, and the angel of the work. You know, very often, most of the time these days when I teach, I have an image of not just contemporary practitioners and students, but an image of the unknown future practitioners. They will never be known to me. They're in the future, elsewhere in space, elsewhere in time. And the Saṅgha in the future becomes a sacred, imaginal other to me, is sensed as sacred. And to somehow refract that angel of the work into this plane of existence, let's say, to refract that is sacred. To do and to make work for that is a doing for what is sacred -- facere, 'doing,' sacra is 'sacred.' Sacrifice, doing for what is sacred. And I feel it as a making sacred.

So again, if we're so used to certain psychologies, all this may sound pompous or grandiose, and of course there's that danger: the ego gets hold of it, and it's reified, and all this other stuff. But if we hold it in the right way, in the soulmaking ways, actually it opens up dimensions and distances and perspectives and possibilities. We're then fuelled by and supported by something very different than 'my will' in this kind of flatly conceived, almost mechanistic model of psychology.

Even when I said earlier, and it's important to really understand this, there will be times -- of course there are times; of course there are times when one doesn't have the sense of the other, of the calling, of the eros, of the love. And then one, perhaps, is in a mode of just, "Okay, I've got to get through this." Or the sense of the other, the love, the eros, the image is much diminished. But then we have this other word, 'commitment,' in English. And again, it's like long-term relationship or parenting: one's committed. And again, from the Latin, co + mittere, which means 'to put together or to join.' To join -- you make a commitment, you join. But what are we joining here? [We] tend to think, "I'm joining with my partner, or I'm in commitment to my children or their education or their upbringing," whatever it is, "their safety." But we could also say, what are we joining? In those times when it does feel flat and like a drudge because I'm not so seeing with a sense of soul, and there isn't the depth, and the eros, and the calling, and the love, there's not the sense of it in that moment, what are we joining? We're joining that very flat drudgery to the knowledge of the holy. Like I said, we're, in the long-term, resting on that knowledge, in long-term commitments, long-term relationships, or parenting, whatever it is. And we could say we're joining. This that feels like flat drudgery, we're joining it to the holy. We're joining the holy to the flat drudgery. It's joined like by an umbilical cord, and it's fed by that knowledge and by that sense.

[1:33:59] I have to say, also, even just this morning, I felt really -- I don't know if it's some of the drugs they're giving me at the moment and the medication, or what it is, but so tired, so lacking in mental energy, etc., so sleepy, really. So how am I going to do these talks later on? How am I going to do that? And just with what seemed like very, very reduced mental capacity, sitting in sort of attempted meditation. Then, at some point, I realized the ideas, these very ideas that I'm talking about today, the ideas that I want to communicate became sensed, also, as angels. The idea became erotic-imaginal other and angelic. They want to be communicated. These ideas, some of the things I've been talking about today want to be communicated. Again, there's a parallel with the notion of the ideational-imaginal, which I introduced on the Four Parables course.

So the ideas, then, are sensed with soul, and they become images. They become imaginal images. Then even when my mind feels really so tired, so foggy, so sleepy, so lacking in energy and brightness, I can sense as other, as other than me. I can sense their energy, these idea-angels, these angel-ideas. I can sense as other their energy, their brightness, their desire and eros to be made manifest. And somehow, I can trust that their eros will enable that manifestation.

So, you know, this question: what does a conventional truth that I'm adopting, what does it deliver? Where does it take me? What does it open up? What does it close? And the answer is selves, and others, and worlds, and cosmoses depend on the conventional truths I entertain or adopt -- and much more powerfully when I assume they're real. Again, we might limit certain avenues, certain whole realms of opening and being, possibility, conception -- all of it. Again, 'willpower' versus 'eros' or 'daimon.' I mean, it's a helpful psychological notion, these psychological theories, assumptions, so-called realities. It's a helpful idea. But compared with eros and daimon, it's very much less rich, and if we just have notions of willpower, we're actually, again, I think, missing part of our psychology. We're totally not seeing part of our psychology.

We could even go further, and try and reduce willpower, in the kind of currents of reductionism in psychology that exist. You could try and reduce willpower to a kind of quasi-electronic circle, circuit of intentions and vedanā, and then the question is whether the reactions to vedanā, either unpleasant vedanā or pleasant vedanā, that are not associated with what it is that your intention has set out to do ... Someone says, "Oh, the pleasant vedanā of having a nice, long rest when I could be up preparing talks or interviewing or whatever," "The pleasant vedanā of eating something that I know might be pleasant while it's in my mouth but then will later be difficult in my digestive system, which may affect my capacity to teach," etc. One could try and reduce willpower to this idea of a quasi-electronic circle of intentions moving along electronic circuits, and vedanā, and then the question is whether the reactions to the vedanā overpower or deflect the intention. And you've got a series of little gates in this circuit, and 100110010001, whatever, and it depends on each electronic circuit junction where the reaction has overpowered or deflected, or has the intention stayed true to its course. One can have a neurological model that's something along the lines -- probably a lot more complex -- something along the lines of that.

Does that kind of reductionist explanation, does it constitute for us an understanding? What does it do to our lives? Does it enrich our lives? It might help, at times, to frame our process, our experience, our practice in those kinds of ways. So here's an intention, here's a vedanā arising; careful with the reaction, etc. Can my reaction be taken care of so it doesn't deflect the intention from its course or overpower it? But that's only one conceptual framework, or one way of looking, really -- one conceptual framework, let's say. And the important thing I want to say right now is it misses so much else out. Even if we think and practise that way, and even if, through thinking and practising that way, we're able to better stay with an intention despite many incidents of that intention encountering unpleasant vedanā or pleasant vedanā pulling it away, or thoughts and beliefs that may deflect it, even if we're able to do that so that we're able to get to do what was important or meaningful for us because our intention stays steady, such a framework or conceptual framework does nothing then to illuminate what actually is meaningful to us. It does nothing to illuminate meaningfulness itself. What is meaningfulness in such a ... How am I going to explain meaningfulness in terms of these neural circuits, and gates shutting or opening, or neurotransmitters being secreted from one neuron to another, or movement of atoms, molecules across a membrane, or electrons? We always have to reduce, again -- other than meaningfulness and what is meaningful, it's just another pleasant vedanā, or it's just another one or zero or whatever, or even meaningfulness just becomes, yes, the meaningfulness node of the circuit. It's just another one or zero or whatever on the kind of binary circuit computer model of the brain, the mind. Such a poor and impoverishing psychology. Yes, to a certain extent, it might be useful, in terms of we can adapt that kind of thinking to a way of thinking about mindfulness, but even then, it leaves so much out. It's poor and it's impoverishing as a psychology.

All this becomes really important when we talk about ethics, and I hope to do so in a few days, to talk more about ethics and virtues -- reductionist, behaviourist explanations that try to reduce our notions of ethics or virtues, and try to kind of decimate them, really, into more reductive and behaviourist notions. So Charles Taylor has written about this several times, a Canadian philosopher. I think he's still alive. He's pretty old now. One of the things he says is in a book called Sources of the Self. He says it elsewhere as well. It's that explanations like that actually end up being of, he says, "no use" -- I would say almost no use -- for a person living life. Certainly when it comes to ethics and virtues, they're of no use for a person living life. They leave out, he says, actually indispensable ideas and terms.

Again, this is quite pernicious, because we tend to think, well, a real understanding, a real explanation of, let's say, ethical behaviour, or our feelings about virtues or what's really going on when we're ethical or virtuous or whatever, what's really going on in terms of will and that sort of thing, a real explanation must be based in realities, and the only realities are the realities that natural science, or basically physics, has decided are real -- in other words, atoms, electrons, neutrons, protons, and all the rest of it. Everything else is not really real. So we try and explain everything using those constituents. So, many problems with that I've gone into already here in this talk and in other talks. But the point he makes is that for human beings, in a cosmos where there are human beings, attempts at reductionist, and, I would say, purely neurological, for example, explanations, which anyway always fall short of actually explaining anything -- for example, they don't explain consciousness or mind from matter; they haven't yet, and I don't think they ever will; they actually fall short.

But part of that, for human beings, in a cosmos where there are human beings, such attempts -- purely neurological, purely reductionist (so-called) explanations don't actually form the best account. The 'best' account means what makes sense of things. What do I need to use as a human being in order to make sense of things, in order to navigate the world of ethical choices? And I use the term 'ethical choices' in a very wide sense, to include things like "Here's something that feels important to me, and there are a lot of reasons why I could decide not to do it, and all these other challenging ..." So that's ethos, ethics, as well. They're provisional truths, but they're not necessarily the best accounts, because they're not the accounts -- I cannot talk in those terms and explain to myself in those terms of reductionist neurology in a way that makes sense to me of the choices I need to make, and of what will help me make those choices, and help me to carry them out and stay steady, etc.

So just as certain notions or models in physics, what's called the standard model of particle physics, seem to be, for now -- that's actually hitting some serious problems, but seem to be, for now, for us, the best account we can manage of physical reality, when we get to human reality, they're not the best account any more. They're simply not the best account. So this question, this inquiry -- really important. So crucial. What does this conventional truth that I'm holding, that I'm adopting, that I'm even just entertaining, what does it lead me to? What does it bring? What are its consequences for my experience, for my sense of things, for my sense of self and world, other? So there's that question. And there's the question: am I assuming it's real? Am I actually assuming a conventional truth is an ultimate truth, is something real -- this idea, this model, this notion is actually a reality? Am I assuming that? So two questions there.

[1:47:29] Okay. So we need to be careful with assumptions, but we also need to be careful with conclusions. Sometimes we have a notion and a model, and it does function in the way that good science functions well. A theory, or a law, an equation in science works as a provisional truth. It works, as we said, because it has predictive power, because that notion enables you to predict something happening, or occurring, or unfolding, if this is the case, that otherwise you wouldn't have been able to predict. So it has predictive power. An example from the soulmaking logos, from the Soulmaking Dharma logos, would be the example that we can predict, we can expect, that unless we block the soulmaking dynamic -- unless we block the eros, or psyche or logos is blocked in some way -- we can expect that the natural process of the soulmaking dynamic will begin to involve not just the imaginal object but also the self becoming imaginal, and then also the world becoming imaginal in some kind of cosmopoesis. Or if we start with the self and other and world or whatever, this spreading to include self, other, world, and, in fact, also eros, as we've discussed many times -- so self, other, world, eros become imaginal. They become infused with the imaginal. They become infected, drawn in, involved, caught up in the whole soulmaking dynamic and become imaginal. That's a prediction that we can make, so that we expect that. It bears out in our practice. We can notice it. Doing interviews, you can notice it. You can expect it. You can look for it. And if it's not happening, it's pointing to something being blocked. Then the question is, "Okay, where is it blocked?"

So that would be an example of a conventional truth or a notion that has only a conventional truth still having predictive power and therefore being a useful provisional truth, a useful provisional tool, a useful notion. Or the whole notion of the soulmaking dynamic itself -- that eros will ignite that whole dynamic so that eros, in seeking more (the pothos in the eros and seeking more) will open up more beyonds in psyche, more images, more dimensions, more aspects. So more will be perceived, and that will inflame eros even more. The whole process opens up even more until it pushes on logos. I'm describing it in one order; there are many possible permutations of how it opens. Pushing on logos, and then the ideation changes -- either is stretched or shattered. And all that opens up the sense of the beloved other even more; there's even more eros. So the eros-psyche-logos dynamic will work like that.

And all these, both of these predictions -- that self, other, world, eros become imaginal, and that the eros-psyche-logos will galvanize each other, deepen, widen, open, complexify each other -- both of those predictions come from the very basic sort of provisional truth or notion or theory: soul loves soulmaking. Soul loves soulmaking -- just that simple kind of axiom leads to these other levels of notions. This is all provisional truth, we could say. But there's predictive power in provisional truths. (Again, unless they're blocked -- but in that case, it points to, "Aha! Okay. Where's the block?" And you can find the block, perhaps unblock it, and then you see the process happening as predicted.) So that's an example of a provisional truth being used to make valid, helpful conclusions through its predictive power.

But careful with this. Some while ago -- in fact, many times -- people, and my own experience as well, it's the case that two or more people find that they've independently received or arrived at or opened to the same or very similar images. In a dyad, both have similar images of one person in the dyad, but they've arrived at them independently. So it can happen in all kinds of ways. But it's not that one person shared an image with the other and described it, and then the other person got a sense of the image; they arrived at them kind of separately, but the people themselves were connected in some soulmaking relationship. And then careful of: what does that imply? So here's an image that's shared, and one of the, perhaps, tempting conclusions, from the fact that two or more people spontaneously share the same or a similar image, could be that the image itself, its content, should be reified: "Now, because we've arrived at this independently, it must mean there's something true about this image" -- 'true' in the sense of 'real.' It doesn't need to imply that. It doesn't automatically imply that. So careful about conclusions as well. Careful about assumptions, but careful about conclusions as well.

It may imply, this fact that two or more people independently share the same or a very similar image, may imply, or it's more likely that it implies or suggests something like the fact that the citta, the mind or the soul or consciousness, is not as bound by and not as bound to the individual physical organism as we typically assume in our modern culture. So there are two conclusions there, and to me, the second is the more justifiable conclusion or step towards a conclusion. It suggests that more than a reification of images. So the imaginal Middle Way doesn't apply to the latter conclusion, the suggestion that maybe minds are not really just bound up and end with our skin; they're not bound up with my neurons, my brain, bound to and by an individual physical organism as we tend to assume so easily in our modern culture. So that may be suggesting that that may be a fact of conventional, provisional truth, that it's being suggested there. The imaginal Middle Way doesn't apply, because we're not talking about images then. We're talking about the nature of the citta and the capacities of the citta, boundaries of the citta. The imaginal Middle Way should still apply to the image in a soulmaking logos anyway. So it applies still to the image even though they've both been arrived at independently, sharing the same image or a very similar image. But imaginal Middle Way doesn't apply to questions about where's the boundary of the mind here -- is it just, as we tend to think, within the physical organism?

So sometimes things like this happen, you know. Many things happen in soulmaking practice. All kinds of things happen, and it's extremely interesting. But careful of our sort of logical process and what we tend to think something, what the conclusions are, what's suggested by some experience that happened -- especially something like that, because one of the things in our culture, one of the sort of ontological and epistemological assumptions in our culture that's pretty entrenched is that if a perception is socially agreed-upon -- in other words, if it's not just me perceiving something, and you can't perceive it -- if you and I and another person perceive the same thing, then that social agreement of a perception tends to validate the reality of that perception for us. That's one of our epistemologies, that we need to socially agree on something for it to be real, and anything that isn't socially agreed-upon is not regarded as real. So that's one of our received criteria for what is real and what constitutes knowledge of the real. It's received and usually unquestioned epistemology and ontology. So it can be tricky. Because we're sharing an image spontaneously, we tend to think, "Well, it must be real," because that's one of the criteria we tend to use for deciding what counts as real.

So just take this point a little further, about assumptions and conclusions and conventional truths, you know, the question of what do they lead to -- what am I assuming, what am I concluding, what conventional truths am I adopting or clinging to, and what does that lead to? We'll talk about something very different now, and talk about the nature of time, for example. Let me read something or explain something briefly. Going back centuries and centuries, millennia, really, there were two views of time -- two persistent views of time we can trace through the centuries in Western and I think also in Asian thought and Eastern thought. One of them is really that time is something real. It's essentially -- it's a substance, like Newton's idea. The other, though, is time is essentially the product of the soul. It's something that the soul kind of creates, let's say, or creates/discovers.

The second point of view, that time is a product of the soul, was the view of Plotinus, who is regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism (he probably would have regarded himself just as a Platonist, but anyway). And he held that point of view, and his explanation for it is that the soul is unable to kind of grasp the contents of intelligence. I have to explain what that word, intelligence, means in this context. Intelligence means, we could say, the attributes of Buddha-nature, or the attributes of divinity, or the attributes of the ultimate One, the angelic essences, you could say. The soul is unable to grasp the contents of that pleroma of intelligences, those attributes of divinity. In other words, you have Buddha-nature, you have God, or you have the ultimate One, and just as in dharmakāya, we could say, the attributes of the dharmakāya, there's a kind of transcendent, beyond being and non-being kind of unity, and then there's another level where the attributes of the dharmakāya -- love, and compassion, and power, and lots of other aspects -- become kind of manifest or visible, at a level of reality before they become physically manifest.

So there's a way that this dharmakāya, for example, if we use Buddhist language, can be conceived as totally beyond any attributes, totally beyond even the attribute of being or non-being, or one, or nothing, or many, and then another level where one can focus on the attributes of God, the names of God, the attributes of the dharmakāya. The soul is not able to kind of grasp all that in one go, in one indivisible act, so instead, it must kind of do it one by one, or perhaps in groups, and it must come into contact with, and behold, and get to know, and open to, and get to love, and practise manifesting those aspects of the divinity, of the dharmakāya -- let's say several at a time; can't do it all at once. Maybe one by one, maybe several at a time. But in so doing, it engenders time, and produces the sensible world as a temporal world. So 'soul' here really means World Soul. So these kind of hierarchies of reality where soul, World Soul, engenders time. Time is a product of the soul because of its need to kind of know and manifest those attributes of the transcendent divine, but its inability to do so in one kind of gulp, in one kind of gestalt, so it does so bit by bit, or aspect by aspect, one by one, or several at a time, and in doing so, it engenders time, engenders time and also the sensible, temporal world that we live in -- World Soul and our soul as part of or as mimicking the World Soul. So, very different than an idea of time as absolute time, as Newton would have it -- independently existing time.

Now, in a very different way, the whole ways of looking approach and inquiry into emptiness that I talked about before, and I outlined in Seeing That Frees and other places, the phenomenological approach to emptiness and dependent arising comes to similar kinds of conclusions -- that time is a dependent arising, dependent on the way of looking. Even time, even something so basic, that's arrived at -- here we have a very metaphysical, or it sounds like a sort of arbitrary metaphysical theory. I doubt that it was. I think it was probably as much something that came out of philosophical thinking as much as it was something that came out of meditative exploration, I'm guessing, from Plotinus and others. And in Seeing That Frees and this phenomenological approach, ways of looking approach to emptiness and dependent arising, you have something that comes out of meditation, and then realizes, time is empty, and time, the sense of time, is a dependent arising. And then again, we said in recent years in quantum physics, there's also, as I mentioned earlier, this sense that perhaps time is not a fundamental reality; it's an emergent reality, and a quantum reality. As such, it's dependent on the observer.

So even within Neoplatonism, by the way, there were different points of view. Plotinus had that point of view. Iamblichus had a different point of view, a more substantial view of time, apparently. Alexander of Aphrodisias, who was actually a commentator on Aristotle, he said, "Humans are poiitís

of time," the creators, the poetic creators of time. Time is part of our poiesis. We talk about cosmopoesis; also there's a poiesis of time. So it's the subjectivity of time as its sort of primary ontological reality, as opposed to the objective existence of time.

But what I want to ask again is: if time has no ultimately real existence, no inherent existence, independent of the soul, of the observer, what does that imply? What does it lead to, and what does it imply for liberation? What kind of liberation does such an insight bring? What scope does it mean for what liberation means and involves? What also does it mean for soulmaking? What does it mean for psychological healing? We tend so much to think of, "The past caused this difficulty in the present. Time moves that way, and it's a kind of inexorable reality to time, and the placement of things, and the direction of causality, etc." So what does it mean then for psychological healing? Again, this question. What we hold on to, what we adopt, what we grasp in terms of assumptions, conclusions, and conventional, provisional truths -- what do they deliver? What do they open up for us? And what do they limit for us? So what becomes just a whole kind of way of approaching psychological healing, and doors that might open up depths and areas of psychological healing that may not be reachable, possible, touchable through any other means, may be opened up, for instance, just from a different metaphysic of time, and a whole notion of healing, and how healing might be, or what it needs, or what's involved, but also our notion of human being. If our notion of time is not of something ultimately real, independently existing, what does that mean for a human being? What does it mean about death? I'm hoping to come back to talk about perspectives on death, sort of different perspectives on death. But we jump so easily into very simplistic notions, all of them reified, around death and impermanence and time, and also of human being. A human being is someone who's born, and then dies, and that's it -- whatever. Or they live forever in heaven or hell or whatever it is. Too simple, too reified. I mean, you know, again, valid conventionally, helpful conventionally, perhaps, to a certain point, but provisional truths. Maybe not the whole truth.

I hope you can see, then, you can understand, what gets blocked, what avenues, what openings, what experiences, perceptions, understandings, transformations become impossible if we're entrenched in the conventional view of time. For example, I was talking about thinking of ways of looking, practising ways of looking, teaching ways of looking, but actually harbouring this idea of some fundamental, basic, sort of nebulous flow or flux to which we apply ways of looking and get this or that appearance or this or that object, but that basic flux being real, and therefore time, with it, being real, and what that then prevents us from opening to, understanding, reaching, being touched by. What vistas, what realms it prevents. How significant this is.

But if time can also be opened up that way, conventional truths about time, different conventional truth about time can be adopted. What might that do? How might that open up for us areas and questions such as psychological healing, and the nature of a human being, and death? Not to mention liberation and soulmaking. These are important questions, important realizations.

Okay. I think we'll stop there for today.