Pain, as Void and as Sacrament

Okay. What I would like to do today is to offer a few things that might be helpful working with pain, working with predominantly physical pain (although some of it, as I'll come back to, will apply very well to mental pain). But offer a few things that may be helpful, hopefully will be helpful in working with physical pain, pain in meditation, developing the kind of skill and art in meditation in different ways, skills and arts that can certainly reduce the suffering around and in relation to pain, but also actually attenuate, ease pain -- attenuate it, reduce the actual sensations of pain. And/or, as well as that, can -- what shall we say? -- sanctify the pain, the very unpleasant sensations; transubstantiate them, divinize them. And I'll explain what's involved there and what we mean by that.

So certainly what I want to address is meditative skills, meditative approaches, development of those arts in meditation that can reduce the suffering that comes with pain, in relationship to pain; can also reduce pain, the actual intensity of the pain, sometimes very dramatically; and also the kind of transubstantiation, divinization, sacramentalization of pain.

I should say, of course, and I'm personally aware, through direct experience, and, I'll say, painfully aware, that pain, we could say, there are three types. There's kind of occasional pain, just from, for example, sitting a really long time in meditation repeatedly on retreat -- back hurts, the knees hurt, this or that hurts, the hips hurt. There's occasional pain, from whatever it is. There's also chronically recurrent pain as a kind of second category. It's maybe not all the time in an uninterrupted way, but it keeps returning. Maybe it never fades completely, or maybe it does fade completely at times (I mean fade naturally, just go away), but it keeps coming back. It's a chronic feature of one's life. It just keeps coming back, and one has to deal with that. And then there's just sort of, in a way, simply chronic pain: it's just there all the time.

So, in a way, what I'd like to offer here, ways of working in meditation, applies across the board there to all kinds of pain. However, in the third category, where there's pain that's just chronic, it's just there all the time, it won't be possible all the time to engage some of these practices, because one's life will naturally need to be busy doing other stuff -- interacting with other people, of course, working -- and that's hard. So I have to meet the world, be in the world, do in the world, in relationship and in work and whatever else, and there's this pain, and it's pulling on the attention, but it's not possible to give it the wholehearted fullness of intention or the kind of skill and subtlety and sophistication of the kinds of attention of some of the practices I'm going to talk about all the time, because I'm busy doing other stuff. I can't give it the same quality of attention as I can when I'm not doing anything else but sitting down or standing or walking to meditate. And so, of course, thankfully now, most people, certainly in the West, and hopefully more and more in so-called Second and Third World countries have access to pain-killing medication, and not to forget that, if there's just chronic pain, because we can't be in deliberate, full-on kind of artful meditation, meditative attention with it all the time. But actually, what I'm talking about applies to all three categories.

Partly what I'm going to do is just list, briefly list a selection of practices. It's not an exhaustive list at all. What it is, though, is a kind of list in a little bit of a, let's say, progressive or ascending order of skill or development or art. In other words, I'll start with practices and approaches, meditative approaches, that are relatively easy, relatively well-known, as well, of course, and then include more and more that are actually, well, a lot more powerful, but also a lot more difficult to develop. What I really want to stress, though, is that they're absolutely possible. I'm not talking about anything that's not possible. If some of this, towards the end of the list, or even the middle of the list, sounds completely outlandish and otherworldly and impossible for a human being with a physical body to accomplish, that's just not true. It's just not true. It's so much a matter of finding the right ways to practise, and applying oneself in the right ways, and really developing one's art, stage by stage. So some of the things later in the list will depend on the arts developed in the earlier stages of the list, and they build on those stages as platforms, and then what we're talking about is absolutely possible and available and accessible to us as human beings. No reason why not.

I'm not going to go into too much detail around technique, because I've done so for actually most of these practices elsewhere, and either written about them in Seeing That Frees, or talked about them in different talks over the years, and given quite a lot of detail of technique there. But what I do want to do is mention them and give some explanations of what we need to understand here. And I also want to include soulmaking practices in relation to pain, sensing pain with soul, etc. As I said, talking predominantly about physical pain, but much that I'm saying will apply to mental dukkha as well. So if you're listening at a time when the mental dukkha is what's interesting to you, then see how much of what I'm offering here is adaptable and try it. And occasionally, of course, as I go, I'll try to remember and remind and put things in terms of mental dukkha as well.

Okay. The first thing I should say is, probably everyone knows, even after being a young child, that if we tense up, if we tense our muscles with pain, it usually makes things worse. Not always, but usually makes things worse. So if there's pain, a first thing to do, if we're working in meditation, is just relax the rest of the body as much as possible, because that tensing of the musculature is only adding to the problem. So the first thing, maybe very obvious, but it's quite important: just relax the body as much as possible.

(1a) And the first practice is what we might call just simple mindfulness or bare attention, if we even want to use that word, but let's use it right now. So just bringing mindfulness and a kind of bare attention to the pain. What does that mean? It means trying to drop the story around the pain, the story that goes with it of how it shouldn't be there, and "Why me?", and "Maybe I'll be a cripple the rest of my life," or whatever it is, or "I am this way," or "It's not fair," or "Compared to other people ..." Whatever it is, whatever story there is there, the attempt with the way of looking we call 'simple mindfulness' or 'bare attention' is to drop the story. That's one of the strands of unhelpful relationship that we're trying to drop -- dropping the story. And seeing if it's possible to come, as part of dropping the story, to come really into the present moment, into, let's say, bare or direct contact with the sensations of the pain.

So less story; just what does this actually feel like? And what does it feel like now, in this present moment? Not dwelling on how long it has been that way, how long this pain has been around. Not dwelling on how long it will be or might be this way. So we're not joining the dots, if you know the practice I talk about sometimes, 'Dot-to-Dot,' seeing how pain gets constructed -- or actually most phenomena get constructed, but certainly dukkha phenomena get constructed -- by joining the dots in time and joining the dots in space. So that's part of dropping the story. But really seeing: can I come at it now? What does it feel like now? What's the sense of it now? What's my experience of it now? Really getting that sense in the present moment, coming back to the present moment. So what's happening, if you like, is we're jettisoning the story, but we're also jettisoning the projections of the mind into the past and the future, so that what we're relating to, and what we're actually perceiving and carrying in the moment, is not a temporally extended experience that's then made heavier and more difficult by that sense of temporal extension all the way back in the past, all the way potentially in the future, with the worry of all that. What it really is is this sensation right now, these sensations right now.

It might also be possible, as an aspect here, an aspect of what we call mindfulness and bare attention, to even sometimes drop the label 'pain.' Sometimes even that word, pain, the labelling of it, starts to constitute something as pain. In other words, the label is not a neutral factor. It's not, "There is something, and then I label it afterwards, and it would feel just the same if I labelled it 'tomato,' or if I labelled it 'pleasure,' or if I labelled it whatever." We start to realize that pain is actually a fabricating, constitutive factor. So part of the sort of attempt in the way of looking that we call simple mindfulness or bare attention is this: see if I can drop the labelling 'pain' that the mind is either doing kind of automatically or deliberately. Sometimes we might be labelling in a sort of Mahāsi technique way, which can be really helpful, but at a certain point, it's like, hmm, maybe that labelling is actually not so helpful, because it's actually part of consolidating, solidifying, promulgating something. So that's really interesting as well. Less story, more present moment, which means less temporal extension, less past and future and the worry to that, less construction by joining the dots in time (and, we could say, also in space, perhaps, but let's just stick with the time one for now), dropping the labelling of pain, etc. In all that, there's less reactivity, we could say. And in a way, one's also trying to be less reactive. It's part of even that initial movement of just relaxing, just relax the body -- see if I can be less reactive here on different levels of my being.

And what this can lead to, if I just stay steady with that process, keep trying with that practice, bringing that way of looking, the mindfulness, the bare attention, is that it might just become -- the pain just becomes "It's just sensations." It's stripped of all these other levels of story and temporal extension and all that, and it might be even stripped of the label 'pain.' It's just unpleasant sensations. It might be, if the mindfulness is really strong, that you find even at this very basic level that if you really sustain the mindfulness in these ways, keep kind of dropping those unhelpful factors out (the temporal extending, the story, the labelling, the reactivity at a certain level), that it might be, then, if the mindfulness is really sustained and really strong, and there's quite an intensity to the mindfulness, that the degree of unpleasantness (which really means the degree of pain) reduces, right there, as I'm attending to it very carefully, very intently, with the mindfulness, moment after moment. So that's what we might call the first practice.

(1b) Actually, we might call it one version of the first practice, because a second way of doing that practice would be pretty much the same thing, but with a much more spacious awareness. So in the first practice, let's say it was my back hurting, or the small of my back, or my knee or something. One focuses the attention in a kind of narrow way on those sensations there, and just works to kind of support the way of looking, what we're calling mindfulness or bare attention (which, when we unpacked it, meant those things that I explained). One is just focusing there in that small region, narrow attention, over and over, supporting, engaging that way of looking that we call mindfulness or bare attention.

But one could also do the same thing within a much, much larger space. So actually, again, relax the body, then let the awareness get really large. I mean larger than the room that you're in, as large as up to the sky and even larger, if it's possible. One way of really helping open up the awareness to a more spacious awareness like that is by listening, because sounds come from all different distances and directions. Just give some attention to listening. If you can do that for a while, just disregarding the pain, great. If you need to include the pain and open up to the listening, either way. But somehow, just trying or supporting or letting the awareness open up much more spaciously. Then the sensations of pain, the vedanā, the unpleasant vedanā (means the same thing), that are arising and passing there, flickering -- as we pay more attention, we'll notice all kinds of qualities of their texture, and the fact that it kind of throbs or pulses and flickers, all of it meaning it's changing in time. We'll just naturally notice that. But all the kind of dance of appearing, disappearing, throbbing, pulsating, fluctuating sensations, occurring in the body or somewhere in the body, have a much larger context of this much, much larger space. So it's only a small area bubbling away like this unpleasantly in a much, much larger context. You have to practise this to actually see: "Oh, this is a really, really helpful thing to do."

In a way, we could say, well, what's happened then is that instead of the pain taking up, let's say, 100 or 90 per cent of -- let's call it the space of our awareness -- it's taking up much, much less. And we actually have that sense: here's just this area of pain, a small area of pain, in a much, much vaster space. And so its impact on the being, on the psyche, on the citta, the felt sense of it is of something relatively small in a much larger space. Actually, even that, too, we could stay with that, and it can go to very deep, beautiful places -- change our whole sense, open up our whole sense of things.

But whether we practise it with a narrow attention, as I described at first, or with this much more spacious attention and awareness, basically that method of mindfulness or bare attention, both those ways of doing it, will lead to a lessening of suffering in the moment. There will be less suffering in relation to or from the pain in the moment. We could say there's less fabrication of the suffering, because I realize then, "Oh, it's only when I look in these other ways, when I do kind of unwittingly drag in the temporal extension, when I do bring in my story and the "poor me," etc., "why me?", and I do bring in the kind of labelling in a way that's actually constituting and solidifying something -- it's only when I do that that the suffering is stronger. When I let go, when I take those things out or drop them out of the way of looking, the suffering is less. In other words, through this way of looking -- mindfulness, bare attention, narrow or large attention -- we are fabricating less suffering. There is less suffering fabricated. And maybe, as we practise, some fairly good chance that, at times, there will also be less fabrication of the unpleasant vedanā, actually less pain. Not just less suffering around and in relation to the pain, but less pain too.

So all these factors, they're fabricators, okay? We really want to understand this. Why? What's happening here? Well, just what we said: these factors of bringing the self in, bringing the story in, bringing reactivity in, papañca, temporal extension, labelling -- they're all fabricators of vedanā. Sometimes people talk as if vedanā is just a given. It's what it is, and all we can do is minimize the suffering, the second arrow, in relationship to it. And it might be with just this first practice, or these two versions of the first practice, that that's what we see: "Yes, I can minimize the suffering around it, but the pain, the intensity of the unpleasant vedanā remains what it is." As we go into the other practices, that whole teaching of the two arrows, if you're familiar with it, from the Buddha -- is it the teaching? Well, it's not quite the teaching of the two arrows. But the idea that suffering is an unnecessary addition to pain -- that's seen as a provisional truth, a provisional teaching. And we start to realize that, as described in the wheel of dependent origination, the twelve links, that self, papañca, reactivity, all this, they will fabricate all the elements of that wheel, all the links of that chain. So as there's more fabrication, as there are more of the fabrications of self -- more story, more "poor me," more "why me?", whatever it is, me compared to other people who I'm sure can sit comfortably and whatever, all that -- as there are more of those kinds of fabrication, there's more fabrication of suffering, but there's also possibly more fabrication of vedanā. We may start to see it even at this level, or it may have to wait till the next levels of practice we'll go into in a second.

Usually, where there's vedanā, there's usually some form of clinging. I'll just slightly expand what I mean by 'clinging' there. Usually, when there's pleasant vedanā, we cling to it. We grasp at it. We want to get more of it, or we want to hang on to it, at least. So there's clinging in the most common sense of that word. Always when there's pleasant vedanā, there's clinging. I know some of you won't have heard that, but if you are familiar enough with my teachings on dependent origination and emptiness, etc., I would say always. Always where there's vedanā, there's clinging. Let's just say, for now, at a certain level, the habitual response to pleasant or unpleasant vedanā is clinging: we try to hang on to the pleasant, or get more of it, and we try to push away, we're aversive to the unpleasant. Also the so-called neutral, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, we tend to fall asleep, and actually there's a kind of clinging in that, or get dull, uninterested, bored.

[24:32] So this clinging, what we want to understand is how this clinging works as a fabricator, okay? So there's one way, like I said, when there's really a lot of pushing away, or trying to hold on, the pain's very strong, there's a contraction of the muscles, and that contraction doesn't help. There's also contraction of awareness that happens with clinging, and, as we mentioned when we talked about the second version of mindfulness, with a much more spacious awareness, that contraction of awareness also doesn't help. Partly, you could say, as we said before, it increases the sort of sense of how pervasive the pain is, that it's taking up the whole of consciousness, the whole of experience. There's also a way in which we could say that a smaller awareness, it puts a pressure on something, in a way, or it can put a pressure on something, just as if we have a gas in a container, and we squeeze that container, so we shrink the container, the pressure of the gas will increase, the intensity. The pressure in physics is the speed of the movement, and the momentum -- it's related to the momentum, the kinetic energy of the movement. So, analogously, the pain increases when there's the contraction of the awareness.

But there's something more fundamental than this muscular contraction or contraction of awareness. There's something more fundamental to the way that clinging, the degree of fabrication of vedanā is dependent on clinging. More clinging, more vedanā is fabricated. Certainly it's hopefully obvious to most practitioners after they've practised just a little bit of insight meditation: more clinging, more suffering. Now, another level is: more clinging, not just more fabrication of suffering -- more fabrication of vedanā itself too.

Okay. So there's that level of practice, and it's really important, and it's a really basic skill for everyone to develop. It may or may not, as I said, reveal this deeper level of understanding about dependent origination and the way clinging fabricates vedanā -- it may or may not. But then there's a whole other level. (2) So, for example, there are practices such as the three characteristics as ways of looking. Again, all this is in Seeing That Frees. But practising the three characteristics in very specific ways. I mean really engaging them as ways of looking. So those three, or actually any emptiness way of looking -- again, many, many in Seeing That Frees. So the three characteristics are dukkha, and there's what I call dukkha (method

1. and dukkha (method 2).^[1] With dukkha method 2, there are different variations. Like I said, I'm not going into detail, because I've done this in so much detail elsewhere. You can find it certainly in Seeing That Frees, and you can find recordings that talk about it. But there are many variations.

And we can talk about 'welcoming' practice, again, both with a narrow attention, with a spacious attention or awareness. We can talk about directing mettā to phenomena, to dharmas. Many, many practices here. Again, can be done [with] narrow and spacious attention. We can talk about emptiness practices such as seeing that the whole and the parts of something -- let's say a pain, or a region of pain -- contemplating the mutual dependent arising and mutual emptiness of the whole and the parts of the pain. We can talk about the practice of 'not one, not many': this pain is not one, not many. And that's a way of seeing its emptiness -- looking at it, attending to the pain, feeling, sensing the pain, at the same time we have this very delicate, agile, sophisticated understanding, very lightly, almost like in shorthand, very delicately in the way of looking, or wrapped up in the way of looking: "It's not one, not many," meaning it's empty, and that very beautiful, profound practice. We can, again, feel the pain, but be aware of the emptiness of any dualities, or particularly the emptiness of the duality of pain and pleasure. What does that do? We can look at the pain and analyse it with the sevenfold reasoning or other reasonings.

Many, many possibilities here; very, very powerful practices, okay? And again, most of them can be done -- not all of them, actually; some of them can be done with a narrow attention, focused on the pain, or with a wider attention. Many possibilities, and many variations for each possibility, in many cases. And what we're doing here is we're engaging a way of looking -- meditatively, lightly, as I said the other day in the talk on emptiness and ways of looking -- that has much less clinging in it, much, much less clinging in it. So you can see that in the dukkha (2) method. It's actually deliberately getting a sense, some way or other, getting a sense of the clinging in the moment, any push-pull, any aversion, any hanging on, any tension in the relationship with a phenomenon that one is attending to, and relaxing that clinging. So some of them work obviously very directly with the clinging, some much more indirectly, or they're working with the avijjā, and reducing the avijjā in the moment, in the way of looking. So I'm attending to this phenomenon, this pain, with some degree of less clinging, at some level or some aspect of clinging, and some degree and some aspect of avijjā has gone.

And again, because of the map that the Buddha gave of the links of dependent origination, less clinging, less fabrication. Less avijjā, also less fabrication. And as I said the other day, avijjā also is actually just another mode of clinging. It's a subtle mode of clinging, and it's seen as such in Mahāyāna terminology. But this is what we're doing, and this is what an insight way of looking is, basically. It's relating to, attending to, sensing something or other, any phenomenon whatsoever, through a lens that has, in some way or another, a little or a lot less clinging in it, a little or a lot less avijjā in it. And because of that, that phenomena, right here, right now, in this moment that I'm still attending to it, is fabricated less. The intensity of the unpleasant vedanā actually starts to decrease, and sometimes dramatically so. And we can talk about a kind of, again, hierarchy of potency of these kinds of practices, and in a way, that's partly -- well, there's a thread through Seeing That Frees that traces that hierarchy. I think I said the other day, to look at something through the lens 'empty,' understanding that it's fabricated, is much more potent as a way of looking than just looking at it as anattā, which is usually more potent than, let's say, just impermanence. And looking at it through a lens of that the awareness that knows it is anattā, is not me, not mine, is usually more potent than "this pain is not me, not mine." Empty -- it's empty of inherent existence; it's empty of having any phenomenal self, this pain -- that's even more powerful, etc.

So there's a kind of hierarchy, and in a way, Seeing That Frees is, let's say, not completely, but loosely organized in the progression of that hierarchy of potency, just because it's actually a hierarchy or a progression of both meditative skill and also depth of understanding, and understanding that comes from experience. As I said the other day, I can't look at something with a way of looking that understands it's empty until I have really understood for myself that it's empty, for example because I've seen that it's fabricated, because I've looked at it with, say, the second dukkha method, or the first dukkha method, or anattā, and seen that it fades, therefore it's fabricated dependent on the way of looking. When that's seen so many times and felt, and the impact on the being felt so many times, that understanding is consolidated. Then that consolidated understanding can be engaged, can be used as a way of looking. I've moved to another level of practice there, another depth.

So there are lots of these kinds of practices, these unfabricating ways of looking, these insight ways of looking. There are lots of them, but there's also lots to them. So, as I said, for example, take what I call dukkha method 2 -- there are lots of variations. Or we just mentioned the anattā, 'not me, not mine' -- we can regard the pain itself, the unpleasant vedanā, as 'not me, not mine,' but we can also attend to the unpleasant vedanā, the pain, at the same time we're including an awareness of the awareness of that pain, including both, and then regard the awareness of the pain, our awareness of it, regard that as anattā. Or, for example, the usually completely unnoticed -- so to speak, unconscious -- intention to pay attention. Whenever we pay attention to something -- and I don't just mean as, "Oh, right now, I've really got to pay attention!", or deliberately in meditation; I mean just paying attention to anything. Whenever we hear a sound, there's a movement of the attention there, if we hear a sound. There's a movement of attention towards that object, and so that attention is something that needs an intention behind it. And that intention is almost always unconscious. We don't realize it unless we're actually making an exercise and trying to pay attention: "Oh, I'm really going to pay attention!" But even then, we only realize, usually, a very gross level of that intention.

But in every moment of consciousness, you could say, the mind is attending to something. It has to be. In any moment of experience, which means any moment of perception, which means any moment of appearance or phenomena, the mind is paying attention, and with that, there's an intention to pay attention to that phenomena. Now, we could, as we're attending to the pain, also include in our awareness the very, very subtle sense of the intention to pay attention -- this very, very subtle, moment to moment, almost throbbing movement. Very, very subtle in the mind. And we could regard that intention to pay attention as anattā, as 'not me, not mine.' Or we could regard our aversion -- I notice there's some aversion to this pain, and what if I regard the aversion, the pushing away, the subtle (I'm talking about aversion not at the level of the mind saying, "Oh, this is terrible. I wish it would go away." Just the subtle energetic pushing, energetic trying to distance oneself), we could regard that aversion as anattā. We could adopt a way of looking where the actual object includes not just the pain, but also the sense of aversion to the pain, and regard the aversion as anattā, as 'not me, not mine.' It's a more sophisticated way of looking. And the same with if we move to a level where we're engaging a way of looking that understands, 'empty, empty.' It's looking at things as 'empty.'

So there are all those possible objects. Not just the unpleasant vedanā, not just the pain, but the awareness of the pain is also empty, which again means more than "It's not me, not mine." It's not just 'not me, not mine,' anattā. It's empty of phenomenal existence. That's a very, very deep level of practice, and even quite a sophisticated understanding to be able to do that. And again, with the intention to pay attention, with the aversion -- the aversion, it has no inherent existence. The aversion is empty, etc. So there are many objects. What we could say is that pain is a dependent arising. Okay, we've talked about, we'll begin to see, through these practices, how pain is a dependent arising because it's dependent on the way of looking. You start to see, if I can really pay attention, engage some of these ways of looking, the pain just fades. It just disappears. It dissipates. It dissolves. Or at least it attenuates. We begin to understand: the pain, the unpleasant vedanā, is dependent on my way of looking. But it's also dependent on all these other factors. It's dependent on attention. It's dependent on my identifying with the awareness of it -- all these factors, and many more.

So we could say actually pain itself is a dependent arising in that it is a constellation, if you like. It's many things threaded together, woven together. It's already a thicket of things. It's hard to separate out these things. But meditatively, one can, let's say, separate them out enough -- ultimately, they're not separable, and that's one of the real deep understandings that emptiness teaches, but meditatively, practically, in our art, in our meditative art, it's possible to separate them out enough to isolate them to work on ways of looking that target, that pinpoint, different twigs in this thicket, different thorns in this thicket, different threads in this tangle, and that starts doing something. But really, pain is a constellation, we could say, and any or all of those elements within the constellation of what we call 'pain' can be objects of an insight way of looking. We can practise; we can train our insight way of looking on those objects.

[41:16] So pain is a dependent arising, fabricated by the whole constellation, and it's also a dependent arising, fabricated by unskilful ways of looking at the whole constellation. Unskilful -- most of them are just habitual and completely unconscious. Pain itself is a dependent arising in terms of it's fabricated by all these other factors of attention and whatnot, but it's also dependent on ways of looking. It's a fabrication dependent on ways of looking at that whole constellation.

Okay. That's a huge area, and I said I've gone into it in lots and lots of detail elsewhere, so I'm just kind of listing it and unpacking a bit of the understanding right now. (3) A third possibility, for those of you who have developed jhāna practice to some degree, there's a quite lovely and also quite amazing possibility and way of practising here. I actually offered it on this recent jhāna retreat at Gaia House,^[2] and I think a lot of people were just quite amazed at what happened, and the magic of it, and that it would be possible, and what it sort of suggested about the nature of things and the reality of things that we believed were just givens, just primary. Like I said, oftentimes our understanding of Buddhadharma is that vedanā is just a given: "It's just what it is. This is what we're given -- unpleasant vedanā, pleasant, neither. It might vary from person to person. This person likes that sound; another person doesn't like that sound, and that might depend on history, etc., but in the moment, it's just a given." There's a whole other level of understanding, which really understands that's actually not the case. Vedanā is not a given. Vedanā is a dependent arising, dependent on how we're looking at it in the moment, on the way of relating to it in the moment, the way of looking at it in the moment.

So here, once one's developed enough familiarity or mastery at a certain level of jhāna, wherever that is (first jhāna, fourth jhāna, whatever) then one can, if one has practised enough, with that familiarity, and there's enough skill with it, one can actually begin to take what I call the primary nimitta of that jhāna -- so, for example, in the first jhāna, it would be pīti; that's the dominant flavour of the first jhāna and the thing that I'm giving the most attention to, the primary perception -- and if one's familiar enough with and skilled enough with the first jhāna, here's this area of pain in the body, and one can just decide to see it, to feel it, to sense it as pīti, which means bliss or ecstasy or rapture. It certainly means pleasant feeling. So what was unpleasant, one just decides to see it as pleasant -- based on what? Based on my familiarity with that perception from my jhānic experience. And if one is skilled in the second jhāna, one can feel, sense, see this area of pain in the body as happiness. It's no longer dukkha. It's no longer unpleasant. It has become pleasant, and its very texture and vibration is happiness. Or, again, through the different jhānas, a kind of luminous stillness, it can become. It's kind of not even pleasant any more; it's kind of very subtly pleasant, really, but technically speaking, it's a kind of neither pleasant nor unpleasant (actually it's subtly pleasant). So this area of pain has just now become an area of luminous stillness; there's no pain there. Or in the fifth jhāna, it's just become empty space. Or it's become consciousness, if I take the primary nimitta from the sixth jhāna. It's become nothingness, etc.

Again, this might sound completely unbelievable, but as I said, many people who had never even heard of this possibility before coming on the retreat at Gaia House -- it was just over three weeks' duration of retreat -- began playing with this when I suggested it, and found, "Wow! Wow! This is really possible." We're, you could say, colouring the perception of an area. We're changing the perception of an area. There's a kind of magic, just as there will be, if one really develops the insight ways of looking practice, there will be a sense of, "Wow! This dependent origination business is magic." There's something in this unfabricating and fabricating, dependent on the way of looking in the moment -- it's really magic. It feels like magic. And our ability to do this -- to take, let's say, an area of pain in the body, and to just have the intention of feeling it as pleasure, as sukha, or as pīti or whatever it is, or as nothingness -- our ability to do that strongly implies -- there's only one conclusion: it's empty. It doesn't exist, this pain, as a given, this unpleasant vedanā, as a given, as a thing that's a kind of absolute reality independent of the way of looking. It doesn't exist only from its own side, so to speak. It doesn't have inherent existence.

So when we practise this way -- let's say we develop jhānas and do that, or let's say the insight ways of looking, and that happens -- we understand it's empty. It's a dependent arising, but dependent on the present. Not just dependent on the past: "Yes, this pain is dependent on my injury. Yes, this pain is dependent on my illness," whatever it is. "Yes, this pain is dependent on sitting hours and hours and hours, and the body getting stiff," or whatever. It's a dependent arising, dependent on the way of looking in the moment as well. So we understand something. We have that insight, and we get that, and we get that it's empty, it's dependent arising, and it's malleable. It's a fabrication dependent on the way of looking, and it's malleable. It's not a solid, fixed thing. Not just that it's impermanent, and not fixed in that way, and not solid in that way. It's actually malleable. Our way of looking shapes it, can shape it. It does shape it. And with development of art and skill in meditation, it can shape it, and shape it from pain to pleasure, and all different flavours of pleasure, in fact, because that deep nothingness is also, in a strange kind of mystical way, a kind of pleasure -- even in its kind of being neither pleasant nor unpleasant, it's actually a kind of pleasure. The Buddha, he says, "Sometimes I teach three kinds of vedanā: pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant nor unpleasant. At other times, I teach just pleasant and unpleasant." Anyway. In a way, the two kinds of vedanā model is a more subtle teaching.

So seeing this in practice, feeling it in practice, doing it in practice, and feeling, sensing the results firsthand, that area of pain there. It's not that, "Okay, I'll just go and pay attention to where it feels good." I mean, that's a skilful thing to do, as we explained on the jhāna retreat as well. But I'm looking at that pain there, and that pain transforms. It is malleable. It's transformed through adopting a different way of looking at it. So we understand that, and the very understanding of the emptiness, the dependent origination, the fabricated nature and the malleability of vedanā, of perception, in this case of pain, implies the possibility -- it strengthens and adds to our sense that this is possible, that perception is malleable, that vedanā is malleable. So we do it. We understand the emptiness, the dependent origination, the malleability. And that understanding of the emptiness, the dependent origination, the malleability, actually shores up our sense of the possibility and actually increases our skill. It's somehow like our very knowing of that, technically, our very knowing of the emptiness, the dependent origination, the malleability of it, when we have that knowing, there's less avijjā, and because there's less avijjā, the pain is actually more malleable, because it's avijjā which fabricates the pain and fabricates the kind of solidity. So actually when we're engaging, and we're confident, and we're approaching something with a way of looking that knows that it's malleable, it actually becomes more malleable. But that knowledge of malleability needs to be first dependent on our experience, as before.

So it might be through these practices, through the jhānic practices, that certainly there's no unpleasantness there, but it may be that we replace it with pleasure. It may be that it's replaced with a very deep fading and unfabricating of the vedanā -- for example, when we play with perception in a way that we're just seeing consciousness there, or we're just seeing nothingness there. That's a very deep fading, a very deep unfabricating of the vedanā. It is not yet a complete unfabricating. It's not a complete cessation of perception and vedanā, but it's very deep. It's gone beyond the vedanā of pleasure and perception of pleasure.

[52:43] Okay. So these, again, they might sound just unreachable, but they're really, really not. I'm going through quite quickly because I've talked and written elsewhere, again. (4) There's a fourth possibility or fourth basket of possibilities, level of possibilities. Once one has developed in some of these emptiness ways of looking and insight ways of looking, it's actually possible to look at a pain, to sense a pain -- again, you can listen and see how much of this will apply to all kinds of other phenomena, not just physical pain; maybe mental pain, maybe other things as well, a lot of it. So there are much broader lessons here as well, broader [?]. But once one has really developed some of the art and skill there in these emptiness ways of looking, one can engage an emptiness way of looking. Let's say I'm looking at something 'empty,' and I understand it means 'fabricated,' or 'just a perception,' or 'empty of having inherent existence' because I've done the sevenfold reasoning before and I've seen it many times, that it can't have inherent existence. So I'm engaging one of these deep emptiness practices, but it's as if I'm not completely putting my foot down on the insight pedal, so to speak. So in my way of looking, there's not the full amount of the kind of tincture of the insight of the emptiness. I'm putting in maybe a half amount. Or, in the sort of car analogy, I'm pressing on the gas, on the accelerator, but not completely. There's a whole range there of how much I can kind of lean on the knowing of emptiness within the way of looking in any moment.

Again, it might sound outrageously sophisticated and impossible. It's really not. It just takes practice -- but practising in a certain way. It won't come about just because I've spent 10,000 hours on a cushion trying to be mindful. I have to practise in certain ways that this kind of level of art is developed, that it builds up, stage by stage. So what happens in this one is I am engaging a deep emptiness way of looking, but I'm playing with the kind of intensity of the emphasis on emptiness within that way of looking -- how much I'm leaning, so to speak, on that insight of emptiness, how much I'm pressing on that pedal, how many drops of this tincture of insight are in the way of looking. And then there's some fading, but not a complete fading. Because if I've developed those practices, those insight ways of looking, and particularly the emptiness ways of looking, then when I attend to a pain and I'm looking as it as empty, empty, and I've consolidated that practice, I've developed it, that pain will fade. It will disappear.

Here, I'm actually looking at it as empty, but not allowing it to completely fade. You think, "Well, why would you do that? Why would you bother to do that if you can have it absolutely, completely fade?" So this, I think, is a very interesting question, and there are two answers we could give. The first one is what I would consider the more important one. I'll state the answer as a question, actually. Here's the question that we started with: why would you want to only partially fade some pain when you could completely fade it? It's dukkha. It's unpleasant. Why would you not just want to fade it completely? And the answer, in the form of a question, I would put it like this: what is most sacred? What is most sacred? That's the answer. That's the answer to this question, "Why?", why I might only want to partially fade it at times.

Now, this question, "What is most sacred?", is actually a question only for those practitioners who know, through their own experience in meditation, through their own repeated experience in meditation, and their understanding, who know this deep, complete fading of things -- who know the Unfabricated, who know cessation, and the implications of deep fading, implying the total emptiness of any phenomenal reality, any experience, any appearance, any perception, any vedanā.

So this answer that I'm going to give probably -- well, before we get on to soulmaking, at least, we'll just talk in terms of classical Buddhadharma -- this answer only really will make sense to people who know about very deep fading, and know personally, through their experience, through having developed the practices that I've just talked about, particularly those insight ways of looking, which has to be based on the mindfulness, etc.

So the answer is a question: what is most sacred? And if you know, and you've gone as far as that complete cessation, complete, deep fading, reached the Unfabricated, recognized the fabricated and therefore illusory nature of all phenomenal reality, then you're at a point when there is likely to be a hierarchy of sacredness. Phenomenal reality is an illusion; it's a fabrication, which has this connotation of illusion and lie, as does the word 'concoction' (both are translations of saṅkhāra) -- in contrast to which the Unfabricated, the complete fading of all perception and all vedanā, is real, is true, because it's Unfabricated. It's not a dependent arising, it seems.

One is probably, at that point, leaning or looking at the world as the lower tier, if you like, in a hierarchy: the fabricated in contrast to the Unfabricated. And the Unfabricated is the true and the holy, if you like, the sacred. But as I've explained elsewhere, we can actually then not stop at that point. We can go deeper in our exploration of fabrication and emptiness. I'm not going to explain it here again. It's in Seeing That Frees, and I think it's in that talk, two-part talk, "Approaching the Dharma,"^[3] I think it's called, [and] other places as well. We begin to see the emptiness of fabrication, the emptiness of the process of fabrication, and the emptiness of time. Fabrication is a process in time. The emptiness of fabrications, the emptiness of the process of fabrication, and the emptiness of time. And all that, as we go deeper, then, we start to realize the emptiness of the Unfabricated, which exists in a kind of dualistic opposition with the fabricated. If the fabricated is empty, there's not really a fabricated, then the Unfabricated, too, as a dualistic contrast, kind of is collapsed -- not as an experience, but as a duality, it's collapsed. There is no hierarchy.

And we come to a deeper level of realization, deeper, even, than realizing the Unfabricated through the cessation and total unfabricating of the phenomenal world of perception and vedanā. We come to a deeper realization that's non-dualistic, and what opens up for us, then, is a sense of a world of empty, divine, and magical appearances. Already magical to see that they're dependent on the way of looking, dependent on fabricating in the moment, but magical at a whole other level when you also realize that fabrication, too, is not a real thing, and a time in which things could be fabricated is not a real thing. You're at the edge of the level of what even 'magical' might possibly mean. Now 'emptiness' starts to have a bigger meaning than 'fabrication.' At first, they were a little bit synonymous, if you follow the ways of looking approach. Now 'emptiness' means more than 'fabrication.' And because there's no hierarchy of holiness, of sacredness -- divinity everywhere. Holiness, sacredness everywhere.

The world of phenomena becomes a world of empty, magical, and divine appearances. But here's where language gets so tricky, because someone could hear something like that, and perhaps they only know a level -- still a very lovely level of practice, but perhaps they only know that level of practice that I call the vastness of awareness, where there's a very spacious, kind of effortless-seeming awareness, and phenomena arise and pass within that vast awareness, within that space, spacious awareness, and they seem very insubstantial, these phenomena -- just diaphanous; you see through them. They're of the nature or the substance of the awareness. Some people call that the opening to the nature of mind, or the realization of the nature of mind, etc.

So someone just familiar with that level of practice could say, "Yes, yes, it's a world of empty, magical, and divine appearances. I know exactly what you're talking about." But no. No, no, no, no. This is really, really important: I'm talking about a whole other level. So, beautiful as those openings and those perceptions are at the level of what I call the vastness of awareness -- really, really important stage for a lot of practitioners, maybe the majority of insight meditation practitioners -- we're talking now about a whole other level. As I said, this is only for people who have gone beyond that to the total fading and cessation, to the complete Unfabricated, beyond any sense of space, any sense of awareness in that sense of vastness of awareness, any sense of phenomena arising, any sense of all of that, any sense of time, any sense of the present moment; understood the implications of that, and then gone beyond even that. So we're talking really about several quite significant stages further than this vastness of awareness, of what some people call the nature of mind, the realization or practice of the nature of mind, nature of awareness. This is where the same words can be understood or used at very different levels. So here, when we understand a world of empty, magical, and divine appearances, all three of those words -- empty, magical, and divine -- have just very different levels of connotation. They're imbued with a very different level of understanding, and really stretched further there.

So the question I asked, as an answer in response to the question, "Why would you only want to half fade when you can fully fade pain and unpleasantness?", is "What is most sacred?" And if this sense of non-dualistic world of empty, magical, and divine appearances, that means that pain, that half-faded pain, actually -- so it will attenuate a little bit; can't help attenuate some -- that pain is empty, magical, and divine. And I've not just gotten rid of pain; I've maybe attenuated it somewhat, but it's become empty, magical, and divine. And if I care about sacredness, and if sacredness is part of what I want -- or, let's say, at least, that it's not that all I ever want is to get rid of my pain, all I ever want is a reduction in dukkha -- then this level actually becomes very important. And this ability to -- based on my understanding of this non-duality between fabricated and Unfabricated, which is based on my understanding of the emptiness of fabricated, the Unfabricated, fabrications, time, the process of fabricating, which is based on my understanding of fabrication in the first place, which is based on my practice of way of looking -- then that actually becomes the one that opens me, in this moment, to a beautiful sense of sacredness -- deep, profound, mystical. And that touches me deeply. Still got some pain there in that moment, but there's a whole different sense of the pain, self, and existence -- if I care about sacredness.

So that, I think, is, for me, the most important answer to the question, "Why would I want incomplete fading, want this only half-fading, when I could actually fade the pain completely?" I would say that's the most important answer. Historically, there's a very related answer, but it has to do with Buddhology, the notion of what a Buddha is. I'm only going to allude to this; I may or may not come back to it in the context of another talk at some future time. But there's quite a big difference between the notion, the Theravāda notion of what a Buddha is, and what a Buddha-mind is and does, and a Mahāyāna notion of what a Buddha is, and what a Buddha-mind is and does. In other words, the Buddhologies between Theravāda and Mahāyāna are actually quite different.

In the Mahāyāna teachings, it's said -- I think I mentioned this the other day in a talk at Gaia House; I'm pretty sure -- it's said only a Buddha can look at a phenomenon and thoroughly look at it knowing its emptiness, without it completely fading. Only the non-dual -- it's called 'gnosis,' wisdom awareness. Only the non-dual wisdom awareness, or jñāna in Pali and Sanskrit, only the non-dual jñāna of a Buddha is capable of fully knowing the emptiness of appearances, fully knowing, in that moment, the emptiness of appearances, at the same time as keeping those appearances from fading. So that's a kind of very basic tenet in Mahāyāna teachings. It's in the Mahāyāna Sūtrālamkāra and the Mahāyānasaṃgraha. Those are very core texts of Mahāyāna teaching. Tsongkhapa, a great Tibetan teacher, a founder of the Gelug school, reiterates it in his Illumination of Thought, a commentary on a basic text of Chandrakīrti centuries earlier. Mipham Rinpoche comes back to it from a different strand; he's a Nyingma master. So it's in the different streams of the Tibetan lineages as well. Not a lot of people know it though. Not a lot of people know that teaching, or know just quite the import and the significance of that teaching, in the Mahāyāna and for Mahāyāna philosophy.

As I said, it has to do with Buddhology -- I'm not going to go into this too much -- and what is the aim of practice. So a bodhisattva is someone who's aiming or has vowed to become a Buddha. But in the Mahāyāna, a Buddha is not someone who is then born (like the story of Siddhartha) and then becomes a Buddha, teaches for a while, and then dies, and just disappears because they're not reborn any more, like an arahant. In the Mahāyāna version or Buddhology, a Buddha is someone who is able to be fully awakened, fully enlightened -- that means no more avijjā at all -- but they can be in the world. They are reborn, so to speak, or at least, in most of the Mahāyāna Buddhologies, an emanation of them appears in the world -- the rūpakāya, the three bodies of a Buddha, the rūpakāya, the emanation of the Buddha.

So there are all kinds of arcane-sounding and convoluted-seeming and sophisticated Mahāyāna teachings that actually come back, or trace, are rooted in, this basic problem: how is it that if I don't have any avijjā in any moment, that I perceive anything? Because for a normal human being, as the Mahāyānasaṃgraha says, and those Mahāyāna texts, for a normal human being, when I look at something, when I engage a way of looking that has no avijjā in it, then that phenomenon fades. There's no perception of that phenomenon. There's no avijjā, therefore no perception. So the question is, how can a Buddha then be reborn into the world of perception? How can they be in the world, or at least an emanation of them be in the world and help, continue to help, instead of just reaching enlightenment, teaching for a few years, and then not being reborn, and therefore not being of help?

So with the full weight and force of their complete prajñā/paññā, wisdom, insight, and their jñāna, their gnosis -- which means no avijjā, and with no unskilful saṅkhāras, no karma of subtle craving or clinging -- how can a Buddha be reborn, without avijjā and without any saṅkhāras, unskilful saṅkhāras? Be reborn so that they can be in the world, which means that they have to perceive, so that they can help. To help, you have to perceive, which means there needs to be a world. There needs to be perception of a world. So some versions, an arahant is totally liberated, has removed their avijjā completely, but they still have a kind of momentum of saṅkhāras, a karmic momentum of saṅkhāras that's only exhausted when an arahant dies. It's a bit like a car, been running, and then runs out of petrol, and its momentum, even though it's run out of petrol, it's run out of the avijjā that would keep it going, it's still going to go for a while, until the conditions are such that the friction of the road or whatever or a hill makes it stop. So that's one of the models for how an arahant is in the world. Their continued existence until they die is just propelled by old karma, the stream of saṅkhāras coming from past karma. And then at death, that's exhausted, and they never get reborn, because there's no more avijjā, and the stream of saṅkhāras is exhausted.

But if you're not reborn, then you can't help. And if you don't perceive (so, reborn into the world, or the world of perception is reborn), I can't help, so I can't have infinite compassion. So the bodhisattva in Mahāyāna teaching has a different aim. They're aiming to be in the world, with that full prajñā, full jñāna, which means no avijjā, etc., and they need to perceive at the same time. Anyway. This, as I said, spawns all kinds of complicated conundra and philosophies and things in the Mahāyāna, but very few people know the roots of some of these teachings. It's as if the Mahāyāna were given a kind of riddle to solve, and did so very, very, I think, beautifully and creatively and variously, in terms of how they figured that out.

[1:16:45] So what Vajrayāna practice is, then, is essentially a mimicking of the Buddha-mind -- tantra and Vajrayāna, this seeing of divinities, and seeing appearances as divinities. So if you read tantric texts, a lot of them are about seeing the elements (earth, air, fire, and water) as divinities, etc. "Seeing appearances as divine" is a sort of stock Vajrayāna phrase. When one practises the different Vajrayāna practices, one can actually conceive of them as what we're really doing is mimicking a Buddha's mind, and the hope is that, in mimicking a Buddha's mind, we eventually become just like a Buddha, just through the habit of mimicking. What we're mimicking is that ability to fully know the emptiness of something at the same time as sustaining the appearances without them fading.

So only the non-dual jñāna or wisdom awareness of a Buddha, a Mahāyāna Buddha, is able to fully know the emptiness of appearances without those appearances fading. All the rest of us, either we're leaning on the emptiness insight pedal fully, in which case the appearance that we're looking at will fade, will disappear -- the perception won't get fabricated -- or we have to back off that pedal and let the appearance reconstitute. So when we're playing with this incomplete fading, you're actually playing with lightly touching, lightly including, lightly emphasizing the emptiness insight within the way of looking so that it doesn't completely fade, and in that way, you're mimicking the Buddha-mind, the Buddha-perception. And as I explained earlier, then it's possible that one starts to perceive in that space, in that middle ground there, dependent on all the insight and the art of practice from before, one starts to be able to perceive all things as bliss -- primordial, cosmic, divine bliss; not just as pīti, for example. So yes, pleasant, yes, divine, but blessed. The 'bliss' here means something else in the Vajrayāna teachings -- "The nature of all things is bliss," as it says -- not just that they're all pleasant, but they're divine and blessed.

So, you know, Dzogchen is a teaching that I think is said to have nine levels within it, nine levels of teaching, but I don't know how often this kind of thing gets included. It would be very understandable, or very common, to hear Dzogchen teachings, or practise them, or read about them, and actually just understand them all only at that other level that we were talking about before, in terms of the vastness of awareness and so-called nature of mind. A lot of the words can be used at different levels -- different levels of understandings and different levels of the art of practice: divine, magical appearances, bliss, insubstantial, whatever it is -- empty, even.

So there's a lot here, but I'm not going to say more about it now. What I am going to say is, basically, through the development of both our insight and our meditative art, this way of practising I'm talking about now, where there's this incomplete fading -- deliberate, incomplete fading -- through the gradual development of our insight into emptiness and our meditative art, we're kind of given, or it's opened for us, both the licence and the ability to fabricate for the sake of more sacredness, for the sake of being touched by a sense of sacredness, of divinity, of beauty; for the sake of opening to that and immersing oneself in that, being in that; for the sake of sacredness, and beauty, and a whole other level of what we might call 'healing.' So there's physical healing, obviously. There's the kind of fading of a pain and having some relief. And then this kind of divine contextualizing, or this transubstantiation of the pain into something magical, empty, and divine, and a cosmos that's magical, empty, and divine, a cosmos of appearances that are magical, empty, and divine. That constitutes a whole other level of healing.

But the licence there is given, what I called the licence to fabricate for that purpose and in that way, is based on -- another word for 'licence' is we have the understanding that this is a deeper insight. It's deeper than going all the way, just going all the way into the Unfabricated, complete unfabricating. But it's only a deeper insight if we have experienced and understood that deeper or complete fading, that complete unfabricating, the Unfabricated. If I haven't understood, then only a sort of relative insubstantializing of pain or the world of phenomena is not necessarily the deeper insight. But if I have gone all the way to the Unfabricated, and then gone beyond that, then I understand that this partial place, this partial fading, this kind of middle region -- empty, yet appearing -- I understand that that embodies, if you like, manifests the deeper insight. But only if I've gone, in terms of my fading experience and understanding, deeper.

Okay. So there are all those -- what was it? -- four groups of practices there, I suppose: (1) the mindfulness, a couple of different ways, (2) the insight ways of looking, (3) the playing with perception with jhānic qualities, (4) the deep emptiness ways of looking but without the complete fading, towards the sacredness. (5) There's also a whole set of practices that usually get called 'exchanging self and other,' talking about really exchanging the happiness of self and other. I won't say too much about that, but again, it's in Seeing That Frees.^[4] There's a section on that with, by that point, what will be -- again, it depends: what's possible here in this set of practices of exchanging self and other depends a lot on what one has developed in previous insight ways of looking practices and understandings of emptiness and fabrication and all that. But basically, here's this pain, here's this dukkha, and this applies just as well to mental dukkha or hindrances -- I think I threw this out on the jhāna retreat -- or depression or whatever it is. Here's this dukkha, and I start to relate to it in a very different way. I say, "I take on, I accept, I want this dukkha now." While I'm actually in contact with it, I'm paying attention to it, this dukkha, here, now, this experience, I take that on so that someone somewhere else, maybe someone I will never know, never ever meet, I take it from them to relieve them of their burden of dukkha. So it's a kind of magical thinking. Or one can also do the opposite, with one's happiness, and actually, when one experiences happiness, or even just imagines experiencing some kind of happiness, a specific experience of happiness, specific experience of dukkha, and actually, with the happiness, one gives that away. One gives it to someone else in meditation.

So again, we're talking about not a philosophy or a sort of way of living, but a meditative way of looking -- which, again, means it's light, it's delicate, it's agile, it's subtle. And it's in contact with this experience. If we're talking about physical pain, it's in contact with the physical pain, and then looking at it in a certain way. So I'm taking it on. In a way, I'm welcoming it. And that way, it's very related, of course, to the 'welcoming' practice, or the certain version of dukkha method 2. Very, very beautiful practice, connects us with others and the heart, and beautiful intention, and love, and compassion. Also magical. So many possibilities here. So many possibilities. Because when I decide to take on this suffering, this experience of the suffering right now, in that taking it on, I'm also -- and this is why it's related to dukkha method 2 -- I'm actually lessening my normal, habitual, compulsive aversion, pushing away. I'm relaxing that aversion. And that, actually, one of the things it does is it starts attenuating. Because there's less aversion, there's less clinging; because there's less clinging, there's less fabricating of the unpleasant. So it actually makes it easier to bear.

Then, I can, again, linger in that beautiful space, where the heart is connected, the pain is eased somewhat, I'm taking it on for others. So I'm connected with others, with the compassion, with the beautiful intention, with the almost sacrificial intention, and the attention to the unpleasant vedanā, which is attenuating because I've changed my relationship to them in the moment. One can also mix it with emptiness, because as I do that, they get unfabricated more. Maybe that's my first taste of unfabricating, and I start to realize, "Oh, they're empty." Or maybe I've understood they're empty from other insight ways of looking. Then I can play with these empty sensations, this empty unpleasantness. I take it on. Knowing it's empty, it's easier to take it on for your sake, etc. There are so many variants here and possibilities, and such a beautiful realm of practices, group of practices. It can be really creative. And again, doing this can really open up the malleability of perception and the sense of divinity of perception, mixing love with emptiness, and again, in a way, taking us towards the Buddha-mind or mimicking the Buddha-mind, and so, if you like, towards more tantric, some of the tantric practices, Vajrayāna practices. A lot of possibilities here. Really beautiful, really creative. Really, really worth playing with.

[1:30:02] And sometimes, of course, what happens, you know, very understandably, very normally when there's dukkha, mental or physical, is that the self contracts around it, and the self gets kind of hard and woven around the pain (mental or physical). And here, we're partly just really opening up the sense of self, opening up that sense of contraction. That's part of what's happening there. So there are a lot of possibilities there. You can be very creative. You can use your imagination a lot. And it does open up a lot of possibilities that are tantric, or quasi-tantric, or Vajrayāna-like, etc.

(6) But there's also, of course, the possibility of imaginal practices here in this whole realm with pain, as I mentioned at the beginning. And one possibility might be, a little bit similar to the exchanging self and other -- there's a relationship because it uses the imagination; it also uses the self. So where there's an imaginal relationship with an object, pain, it will start to involve the sense of self, and the soulmaking dynamic, the imaginal will spread to include the sense of self. So we can actually deliberately include the sense of self from the beginning. I want to go into this a little bit.

So, for example, here's this pain, here's this dukkha, here's this illness, here's whatever it is. And one can have some kind of image of it as a sacrifice, or oneself as a sacrifice, as a sacrificial victim, if you like. Now, that may be a fully-blown sort of image of a sacrifice and oneself in that or whatever; it could be much, much more subtle than that. But in some way, the pain and the suffering and the self are woven into an image of sacrifice. So it might be a kind of very, yeah, you know, detailed, prominent image of being a sacrificial victim in relationship to the pain, or it might be that the whole notion of sacrifice and sacrificial victim remains kind of vague -- it's not so filled out as an image; it's just a kind of potent idea, so that rather than paying a lot of attention to an actual image (there's this thing going on where this sacrificial victim is, I don't know, burnt on the altar or whatever it is), it's actually just the notion, again, like a tincture, the idea of a sacrificial victim, for example, but it remains vague.

It might be just a kind of archetypal idea, and that's in the background. What's more in the foreground is the pain, etc. And the image, so to speak, is functioning more as an ideational-image background, or a sense of a vague archetype. Or it might be through a very specific archetype. The obvious one is Christ. Maybe there's an identification, for example, with Christ's passion, Christ on the cross, etc. And again, that could be that the image of Christ comes very much to the foreground, and the pain is still there, etc., but the image of Christ and the sense of identification comes more to the foreground. Or the other way: it's just in the background. It's the archetypal idea, and sense, and resonances, and soul-beauty of the archetype of Christ and the identification with that. That's in the background, and what's in the foreground is my self, my particulars, this experience, but that has become imaginal, and partly the image of it is sustained by the background archetype.

And again, we talked about this word, 'sacrifice,' the other day very briefly. The etymology here is 'to make sacred' -- fice, facere in Latin is 'to make,' sacra is 'sacred.' To make something sacred. I'm not talking about, like, Hollywood meanings of the word 'sacrifice,' where there are strange rituals on altars with blood and sort of weird stuff that we don't understand. I mean, it might be that. But the question as always with soulmaking practices is: is it soulmaking? What's needed here? What degree of image? What degree of image in the background? What kind of image? It might be very, very subtle. It might be kind of dramatic and gory, or it might be very, very subtle. But the question is: right now, what's soulmaking? So, careful not to buy into a gory Hollywood sort of incomprehensible understanding of the word 'sacrifice.'

But in including the self in what's happening, and maybe this imaginal notion or an image-sense of sacrifice, sacrificial victim, then the whole thing can become imaginal. The elements of the imaginal can ignite -- the divinity, the beauty, etc. And it starts to really include the person, and my particulars, and maybe even the sense of the necessity of this suffering, the necessity of this sacrifice, the necessity of this dukkha to the divine. I'll come back to that.

Before I come back to it, just to say a few things about all this. So any Dharma practice should bring about a reduction of pain in the here and now, in the present. Even something like doing mettā for other beings, or compassion, or whatever it is -- any Dharma practice should bring about a reduction of pain, even if that's not what one's aiming for, even if one isn't trying not to pay much attention to the pain, or if one is, or if one can't help including it in the attention. Any Dharma practice should bring a reduction in pain to some degree. Why? Because any Dharma practice, all Dharma practices, even practices like mettā or whatever, are effectively reductions, in the moment, of clinging. Reducing clinging, again, there's a reduction of fabrication. The reduction of fabrication, also the pain gets fabricated less. The unpleasant vedanā get fabricated less. So any Dharma practice should bring a reduction in pain right now -- not because I'm distracting myself because I'm paying attention to my mettā phrases or whatever. It should bring some degree of reduction in pain, even if it's just a little bit, in the here and now -- not because one's distracting oneself through practice, through trying to do some practice, but actually because there's less clinging. That's the understanding of dependent arising.

But more importantly, I think, again, what's the point here? What's the point? The Buddha talked about meditation -- particularly jhāna, but actually all meditation -- as "pleasant abiding in the here and now," and that being one of the reasons to practise meditation, that one's actually being able to abide, to be, to dwell in a pleasant state in the here and now. "Pleasant abiding in the here and now" is one of the reasons for meditation, for developing meditation. But the other reason the Buddha gave, of course, is for the development of insight, and the ending of the fetters, the ending of the effluents -- liberation, nibbāna. So obviously we regard meditation as a process leading, developing that insight so that there is at some point liberation. This first reason that he gave -- pleasant abiding in the here and now -- is often not so much emphasized in contemporary teachings, but it's a reason he gave: "This is why we practise meditation, for a pleasant abiding in the here and now." In other words, can I abide pain-free? But also to develop insight.

And that second reason, the development of insight, is actually the main point. Or rather, it's more important than pleasant abiding in the here and now. Sometimes people have said, "Well, you know, this can't be right, what you said about fabrication, and all that business about emptiness, and pain disappearing and fading and not being fabricated, because the Buddha suffered from back pain. You're telling me that it's possible of not fabricating physical pain, but if the Buddha had back pain, then what?" But there are suttas where the Buddha says he can be without his back pain as an old man when he enters certain states of meditation, very deep unfabricating. Then the pain disappears. It unfabricates. It's unfabricated. When he moves about in the world, as I said right at the beginning, when he moves about in the world, and he's interacting, and it's outside of that degree of sort of meditative art and deliberate meditative art and attention, the pain was experienced again. It was refabricated again.

What's more important here, though, is that the point of these teachings, the main point of these teachings about fabricating and emptiness and learning to unfabricate, is not to live free of pain, to live a life that just isn't touched by pain because one has learnt these tricks so that one never has to experience pain any more. This pleasant abiding is a secondary level of reason. It's important. It's a relief. We need to have some relief. We need to have that release from dukkha as much as is possible for us. But the primary reason is not to live free of pain. Rather, it's that in seeing the dependent unfabricating and therefore the emptiness of pain, there's a much more general sense and profound sense of freedom in relation to existence that emerges for a human being. Because I see the emptiness of things -- not just pain; the emptiness of everything -- a much broader, deeper, and more general sense of freedom in relation to the whole of existence emerges.

That's more important. The insight is more important. And that sense of existence changes, and this sense of the emptiness of all things, and that has a bearing on my whole life. It influences my relationship with the whole of my life. The painful, the pleasant, birth, death, how long my life is, how short my life is -- how I feel about all that depends on this level of insight. This level of insight into emptiness changes my whole sense of things.

But I would say even that, or even more important, more primary than that, is not just this changed sense of freedom, of liberation in relationship to the whole of my life and my death. Even more important and, I'd say, even more primary, is that that seeing of the emptiness of things deepens and opens a sense of the sacredness and mystery of all things as well. Really deep emptiness, as we talked about the other day. And actually I talked about it on the jhāna retreat as well, and a little bit today in this talk. Opens up and deepens a sense of sacredness. And to me, that's, if you like, the most primary point. Second is this profound and widespread sense of liberation in relation to my whole life and death. And then third is the gift we're very grateful for, the possibility of pleasant abiding in the here and now, relief from pain. But to me, they have a hierarchy there, which I think I mentioned also in one of those emptiness seminars in response to a question.^[5]

But also in soulmaking practice, that again translates as -- some of these soulmaking practices, and I'll describe one in a minute, or like what I alluded to with the kind of playing with the idea of sacrifice, they will attenuate, they will reduce the sense of unpleasantness, the amount of pain, the intensity of pain in the moment. But still, that's not the point. Soulmaking is the point when we're doing soulmaking practice.

So all this, of course, is related in Dharma to what I said about that middle space of sort of half-fading, that region of the spectrum of fabrication, spectrum of fading. It's also related to the exchanging self and other. In those practices, there is a sacredness, a beauty, a divinity that we open up to. But then when we come to soulmaking practice, you know, soulmaking is the point of soulmaking practices. It's the primary point. And yes, secondarily, we can often experience dissolving of suffering, relief from suffering, relief from dukkha. But the primary point of soulmaking practice is soulmaking.

I remember recently I heard that old gospel song, "Oh Happy Day." I hadn't heard it for yonks and yonks and yonks, and I realized listening to it that I had been, for many years -- I didn't really know the lyrics. I had thought, vaguely in the back of my mind, that the lyrics ... The actual lyrics are "Oh happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away." And obviously the version I must have heard yonks ago was, "Oh happy day, when Jesus walked," and then I couldn't really hear what the rest of it said. So not "washed," but "walked." And so the song was kind of existing in my mind with the wrong lyrics, but I much preferred the old version. Not "Oh happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away," but just "Oh happy day, when Jesus walked." That touched me, it touched my soul, much more.

In other words, there was an image wrapped up in, just of Jesus walking -- maybe with some of his disciples. And the image was not Jesus Christ with trumpets blaring, and triumphant glory, and little pink, fat cherubs floating around, and gallons of white light gushing down from the heavens. It wasn't that. It was sort of not even that distinct as an image, but it was, in a way, very ordinary-looking: just Jesus as this young man, walking, perhaps loosely, some of his disciples and other people around, just walking. That was it. But captured in that image of Jesus walking was almost stuff that I can't put into words -- just Jesus, his mercy, the mystery, the beauty, the divinity, the humility, the tenderness, the love, the compassion.

So if I think, "When Jesus washed my sins away," it's almost like, "Oh happy day," 'happy' because my sins are washed away, and there's a release -- it's something for the self's process. The image that I had with my wrong lyrics was just Jesus walking. There was kind of nothing for the self's process in there. It was just the imaginal beauty of that. And as I said, it was even like a really, really subtle, vague image, but moved me so much more than something that would be "I'm happy because he washed my sins away so that ..." whatever, "so I go to heaven, or I feel pure" or whatever. The gift and the grace in the image there is not in washing my sins away. It's not in being saved -- "Amazing Grace," etc., "save a poor wretch like me." The gift and the grace, in this sense, was much more mysteriously and subtly and all the more powerfully, for just how mysteriously and subtly and quietly it was woven in, just to the image of Jesus, in that sort of very earthy, humble but divine way, with all that sort of beauty there.

So, what's important? What's important in our Dharma practice? Of course, you have to decide that, what's important for you. I'm just sharing for me, if I put these things in a hierarchy. Even in deep emptiness understanding, the most important thing is the sacredness. It all comes. The freedom comes. The pleasant abiding comes, of course. But if I have to put them in a hierarchy of what the point of all this is, I would put the sacredness on the top, even above the freedom. And in soulmaking practice, it's the sacredness, too, and the soulmaking, basically.

[1:50:44] So just to fill out a little bit of an example. It's from myself a few months ago. I've been in quite a lot of pain for the last few months in different ways, I guess from the cancer. So, was meditating, and was in quite a lot of pain. I just want to describe one possibility, just to get a little bit of a sense, and hopefully it amplifies and illustrates in a helpful way. So, first of all, sitting in the meditation. Lots of possibilities -- could have done all those emptiness things, or the jhānic thing, whatever, but at that point was more inclining towards seeing what was possible in terms of soulmaking practice, in terms of sensing with soul.

So that very intention invites and demands a certain -- what we might call the 'poise' of soulmaking, which means I need to be there with my energy body awareness. I need to be there with that open and filled with that kind of sensitivity. I need to be there also with a kind of receptivity and opportunism, even, around the sense of soulfulness. So that's part of the soulmaking poise. Part of that is also confidence that it's possible that something here can be sensed with soul, [that] soulmaking is possible in relationship to this dukkha. So there's energy body awareness. There's receptivity to the sense of soulfulness, this kind of little bit of opportunism. Also dependent on a kind of quiet background confidence which is partly based on experience (or might just need to inject a little bit of trust). There's also humility in the poise: here's, yes, a very challenging situation, dying of cancer, pain coming in baffling ways and quite intense ways for long periods of time. Humility in relation to that situation, but also humility in relation to soul.

So that's part of what we might call the poise of soulmaking, a sort of space in which soulmaking, the possibilities of soulmaking, are supported or primed -- we're ready for that. Also the knowledge that image or sensing with soul is a way of looking, is something that I need to engage. I'm not going to just be given it; I need to make sure that I take care of the elements, take care of looking in certain ways, the way of looking, etc. Part of the poise also, the soulmaking poise, might be just slightly less fabricating. That's one of the elements of the imaginal. So just slightly less fabricating. And also the fullness of intention -- the intention is the soulmaking, not just relief of dukkha, not just whatever else it might be. Also, within this, what we might call poise, or what I've called at other times the kind of crucible, I need to feel the painful, difficult, or uncomfortable sensations -- so I can't kind of draw away from them; they have to be included. I need to feel them and feel the dukkha of that. I need also to feel the emotions initially as emotions. There needs to be some pathos there, as dukkha. There are the emotions that go with this pain that I didn't understand what could help it -- even physically, I was trying to stretch, or is it my back, or is it this or that? And there's a lot of confusion, and a lot of work and time and energy going into trying to figure it out. So there are all kinds of emotional strands and aspects within a kind of heart pathos. There's the physical dukkha, and then there are the emotions. And at first, I need to actually feel those emotions as emotions, feel the dukkha there, and some compassion for it, compassion in the mix. Really it was just spontaneous compassion that was there. This is all part of what I'm calling the poise of soulmaking or what makes the vessel or the space ready for soulmaking, part of what I have called in the past the crucible.

In other words, we are deliberately including, I was deliberately including the emotions. They weren't super strong at that time, but even if they were, if they were super strong, that would need to be what was included. Just there's dukkha here, there's a kind of grief here, etc. So this including the emotions, and a kind of softness in holding them. So this is also part of the art, part of kind of weaving that crucible or forming that crucible. I'm not relating to the emotions in a way that they're becoming just sensations, nor am I relating to them and to the dukkha there, emotional and physical, as without story. When I talked about the mindfulness approach, I'm sort of relinquishing story, putting it aside, dropping story. Here, I'm not relating to it without story. I'm actually including the story -- the story of my life, the narrative of my life, the sense of my self in time.

That's all part of the ingredients. Including the story also means including time. I'm not just focusing on just this moment, just this now, of these sensations. And the time awareness, as I'll describe as I go into explaining what happened, the time awareness actually is quite then multilevelled and complex, because the time awareness included, as things opened up, it included the flow of time; it included this moment's experience of whatever was happening in this moment with the pain, etc.; but it also included what I've described several times before as a sense of my whole life sub specie aeternitatis -- from the perspective of eternity, from the perspective of after death. And the narrative of my life, almost like the whole narrative story of my life, viewed from, so to speak, beyond time or after death. The whole narrative of my life seen from that perspective, like it's an eternal sort of snapshot, but it's got the whole narrative in it.

So the time awareness involved, or that came, actually included all of that. It includes the story. It includes the sense or really the image of my life, of my whole life. So my whole life, when it's looked at in that kind of sub specie aeternitatis, that eternality, the perspective from beyond death, it's already kind of well on its way to becoming image, a fully imaginal image. So including everything that I've just said in the poise of soulmaking, including the self and the sense or image of my whole life, especially in the face of death -- knowing I have a terminal diagnosis, knowing I'm dying. And this sense of self, and sense of my whole life, is kind of circumscribed by the sort of 'before life, before birth,' and 'after death' times or periods. So somehow in the time awareness there are all kinds of different senses and levels of time we're talking about. I may come back to this, but this relates to what I was talking about in yesterday's talk, about the emptiness of time and what that might open up for us in terms of healing. I hope to come back to that in a second.

So all these ingredients there, and then what came was a kind of sense of a ritualistic kind of giving back of the moments of physical dukkha, the physical challenges and illnesses throughout my life -- and I've had long years of chronic illnesses. A kind of ritualistic giving back of all those moments of physical dukkha, physical challenges, physical illnesses, to the divine, to the gods, to the angels. These gods, God, divine, divinities, angels, they were not vividly seen at that moment. So we're not talking about that kind of image. The sense of them was there. It was clearly felt. It was palpable. So they were very much a part of the image. Their presence was felt, but they were not vividly seen in the imagination.

But there was this ritualistic giving back of these moments of physical dukkha, and all the illness, etc., the physical illness, moments of illness. And the sense of those sensations over a life as holy gift, sacred gift, which I was asked and agreed to bear. This was the imaginal sense that just came. So all the soulmaking poise and possibilities were there, and there was the receptivity and the attentiveness, and a certain sense of one's whole life sub specie aeternitatis. Somehow wrapped up was this ritualistic giving back of what I was given, as sacred gift, as holy gift, which I was asked and somehow agreed to bear. It was a grace given to me. Someone had to carry this, for some reason I didn't understand and I didn't know. And now in the meditation there was the handing them back with reverence. Of course, that handing back also was echoed a little bit with the sense of dying soon, etc. But in the meditation, handing them back with reverence and with care in this kind of ritualized, sacramental way. The image was as if of passing back a ritual object in a ceremony.

And again, this wasn't visually clear in terms of detail and distinct, clear visual details. Other images are. This wasn't. But it was the imagistic sense, the imaginal sense of the whole thing. It's part idea, part sense of, in this case, not just the moment, but actually the whole of life, and the whole kind of transaction of life. And this touched my heart deeply, and the heart became very tender with it all. Peace came, and actually, then, pleasure in the body. Where there was pain, actually pleasure spread. As I said, that's not the point, but there was this attenuation of the unpleasant vedanā, and pleasant vedanā came -- to some degree, a reduction of discomfort in the here and now. But all the elements of the imaginal were there, and this sense of grace and beauty and all the rest of it.

And the painful sensations were also there. It was almost like they were still there, as well as the pleasant, in this kind of curious, mystically coloured, mystically flavoured mix of sensations -- the painful and the pleasant. And the painful sensations became kind of like ethereal jewels floating in space, radiant jewels floating in space. And the heart bowed to all of that. The weariness of chronic illness -- for some of you who have had chronic illness, you know just how tiring it can be for the psyche, to have to deal with that day in, day out, month in, month out, year in, year out. Acute illnesses are very dramatic, both for the person going through it, but also for people who love them and people around them. It sort of stimulates a lot of interest and compassion, etc. There's a way in which chronic illnesses, they might be less intense sometimes, but they're asking something different of the psyche to bear over a long time, and it can be wearying.

And the weariness of the chronic illness was redeemed, and given dimensionality, and this divinity, and eternality, and meaningfulness, and duty, and purpose -- but duty and purpose that the rational mind did not, could not understand. I don't understand: what's my duty? What's the purpose of this? But it feels like it has a duty, a purpose to it. It feels like there's some meaning to it, wrapped up in the meaningfulness. But I cannot say what it is. I cannot understand with my logical mind what it is, what it could be. Beauty, love, lightness, the melting of the heart.

[2:05:58] I mentioned this founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus, the other day. In the last years of his life, he had developed some kind of illness. It's not really clear to us now what that illness was, but at any rate, he was abandoned by all his students because they feared that they would catch his illness. They feared that his illness was contagious. So I think for the last two or more years of his life, he basically lived in a kind of solitary exile. There was one of his students, who was also a doctor, who stayed with him through that period, whose name I've forgotten now. But he was abandoned by the rest of his students, and he lay dying. And as he lay dying, the doctor was with him, tending to him, just being with him as he died. After he died, the doctor wrote down his last words. Unfortunately, this doctor -- which seems to be the case for doctors nowadays as well -- had not very good handwriting, so it's a little bit unclear exactly, but it was one of two things that he said. Either it was a description of what he was doing as he was dying, and he said,

I'm trying to bring back or trying to give back the divine in myself to the divine in the universe.^[6]

Or he said, as an instruction,

Give back the divine in yourself to the divine in the universe.

And those were his last words. "Give back the divine in yourself to the divine in the universe." So this reminded me a little bit of that.

Again, we could say, "Oh, just awareness is divine, in terms of it's the same substance, the same divine nature of mind in everyone," but that's all just like water everywhere -- it's all water; there's no difference between my awareness and your awareness and the next person's awareness. It's all just the divine substance of awareness. Once you mix it back into divinity, it's all just the same, like mixing water in water. There's another kind of sacredness and kind of divinity and kind of sanctification of our personhood that we're very much interested in as human beings in soulmaking practice, and that's more inclusive of our particulars, and our particular narrative, and our particular dukkha, and the necessity (I mentioned earlier) of our particularities and our personality and our dukkha to the divine.

So in this sense, in this image of this kind of ritualistic giving back of these moments of physical dukkha, these physical challenges, to the divine, to the angels, to the gods, whose presence I felt but didn't really see vividly, and the sense of these sensations, over life, being given to me as a grace, as a sacred gift, because someone had to carry this, for some reason I didn't understand -- something I was asked to do, and agreed to do. All of this: neither real nor not real. All of it theatre, understood that way because it's image. But in that way, the divine in me being given back was something very personal. It wasn't just my awareness, let's say, being the same nature as everyone's awareness, universal awareness. So this, perhaps, just as an illustration, one possibility.

And I said, mentioned very briefly when we talked about time the other day, and the different views of time as different conventional views of time one's adopting, and what they open or close, and mentioned that idea, the Neoplatonic idea, actually, of the soul engendering time because it wants to know the divine attributes, or the level of angels, or what was called intelligences, or ideas, or forms. It wants to know them. They are eternal and timeless, and it can't grasp them, it can't know them all at once, so it engenders time, soul engenders time, so that it can know them all. But they have to be one after the other, in sequence, in temporal sequence. We mentioned that the other day. And because the self is always more than one thing, or more than one way of looking at it, more than one narrative, more, even, than one soul-narrative, because we have many angels, not just one angel out ahead. So you could say the soul engenders time to know that particular angel, where there is this eternity of contract, of being given as grace, as gift, as sacred gift, this pain. And then that's played out or stretched out over time, over fifty-something years between birth and death, because I also need to have times within that, other times, where I know other senses of self, other angels, not just that one. I'm more than that. There's more to my soul than one story, one narrative, one angel. There are more angels to my soul than one.

So it's just an illustration. I don't know if we can make a summary, but there's a lot about the poise, the soulmaking poise, if that's our intention, for soulmaking with a certain dukkha, with a certain physical pain. There were a lot of elements, a lot of aspects to that that I ran through. And then potentially this including the self and including this kind of beyond death, this sub specie aeternitatis view of one's whole life, one's whole narrative. So time and timeless get woven in. The way of being with the dukkha and the emotions and the story that don't cut them out, but also don't squeeze them or look at them in a way where they just become sensations -- all this is part of the crucible, and then an image arose. That's one possible illustration.

[2:13:47] As I was reflecting on that a little later, I also wondered, then, in that image-sense of receiving these pains, these discomforts, these health difficulties -- long, chronic health difficulties -- in the image-sense of receiving all that from the divine, from beyond or before life, as part of my image, the image of me, the angel of me, the image of it as my duty to carry, my duty to carry this for some reason, to manifest, to express it, and the image then of giving them back ritually, reverentially. And again, none of that reified -- neither real nor not real; imaginal Middle Way; theatre-like quality. As I was reflecting on all that, I reflected on a couple of things about ritual, actually.

I have to tell another little story here. You're supposed to get, for the cancer I had, typical or standard treatment is six months of chemotherapy. And I persuaded the doctor -- because I knew it was stage IV cancer, and knew the prognosis was very poor -- I persuaded the doctor if he would just continue giving me chemotherapy after the six months, and reluctantly he agreed. But after two more months, I actually developed an infection. It was called a sepsis, which is very dangerous, as some of you will know, when you're on chemotherapy, because chemotherapy depletes your immune system. So you have this infection which could rapidly spread and just kill you, because you don't have an immune system up and running strongly, because the chemotherapy has knocked out your immune system.

So after about eight months of chemo, I ended up in hospital with this sepsis, and the doctor was really quite concerned. He said, "Absolutely no more chemo," etc. So he said, "No more chemo," and I had to take a break. I took a break, and he didn't want to give me any more after that, understandably. He was very, very concerned. It's a long story; I won't go into parts of it. I found another doctor who was willing to give me more chemo, and he, on the other hand, was more anxious: "You better start it soon, because if you wait too long, then the cancer's just going to come back." But in that time that I wasn't on chemo, my body also started to recover from the chemo, from the effects of the chemo, which is really quite toxic and depleting and damaging on all kinds of organs and systems in the body. So I was beginning just to feel a little more human and a little better. And it had been, as I've shared in other talks, really quite a lot of dukkha going through the chemo, not just because of its effects on my body and my energy -- it made me feel sick, and diarrhoea, and all the rest of it -- but also, I've shared elsewhere,^[7] just how difficult it was to go into that chemo ward, and the soullessness of it. I've shared this elsewhere; I'm not going to go into it now.

So in this period where I had been now, I think, almost three months without chemo, two months or getting on for three months, and some people, this doctor and some other people, were really anxious for me to start chemo again. I could really feel a part of me that was really, "Oof. I really don't know if I can." It was really, really hard to envisage putting myself back in that soulless chemo ward, and putting my body through that. Primarily, it was the soullessness. And then I remember working with Catherine one night, and we were working together on soulmaking and stuff. I asked, "Could we do a ritual?" Because I had decided I would go back to chemo, but it was a big deal. It felt like a big deal and a big ask of myself.

So we did a ritual one night, which I sort of devised. I can't remember exactly now, but we had a little crucible, and I cut some of my nails from my fingers, my fingernails in there, and a bit of my hair, and a bit of facial hair, and a bit of dead skin that I peeled off and put it in there. Maybe a bit of saliva, I think, I put in. Body hair -- I can't remember -- eyelashes, or just the hair from my arm or something, at different body parts (as you know, the Buddha kind of enumerates them in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta), and just put these in the crucible. And then -- I don't remember the details -- offered this crucible, offered my body up in anticipation and in ritual preparation for re-entering chemo, and relating, trying to relate to it soulfully, in a soulmaking way, in relation to the challenge and the dukkha of that, and the coming challenge and dukkha of that. And sort of burnt those body elements, parts of the body. There were other aspects I can't remember, sort of choreographing the ritual. I don't remember. I remember they included some aspect for my mind and perceptions, because it was actually -- that was what was quite difficult, as well, as I said, in the chemo ward, and the soullessness, and the plastic, and the atmosphere in there, and what people talked about, and what people didn't talk about. I've shared this elsewhere.

Anyway. The point is, we made a ritual, and Catherine and I did that. It was very beautiful, and really helped me take that next step and re-enter chemo. But one of the things I was wondering about, and then after this kind of image of a ritual that I was just describing before in the sensing the pain with soul, there's this question that I've had, and I think I've put it out other times. A question I have is: when does the materialization in ritual actually increase and support the soulmaking, and when does it decrease the kind of soul-power and the soulmaking? To me, this is a really, really important question, because in the meditation I described a little while ago in this talk, it was an image of a ritual. There was no action. I was just sat cross-legged, etc., in a meditation posture. I was meditating. There was no materialization of anything. In the sort of pre-chemo ritual with Catherine, there was the materialization.

So when does a materialization enhance the soulmaking and the power and the soul-power, and when does it decrease it? And why? Why? I think that's a really, really interesting question, and it parallels questions, for instance, like when I described, you can get a sense in meditation of your energy body moving in certain ways, or dancing in certain ways, or whatever, or vocalizing in certain ways, or roaring or whatever it is. When does it help that that's actually materialized, concretized, acted on? And when, actually, does it disempower it to do so, when it actually has much more soul-power, much more soulmaking power, when there's no materialization, concretization, actualization in physical reality, on the physical plane, of that image of what's happening in the energy body, or what the energy body wants to do? I think this is a really, really important question, and that we need to be open to both, and able to do both, and able to do both artfully.

But when is this one going to be more helpful than that one, more soulmaking, and why? Going back to Neoplatonism, I think Plotinus held that action is always inferior to contemplation, but I would disagree. You know, we do include rituals on our soulmaking retreats, and we have included movement, and hopefully we'll include vocalization and other things at different times. But still there's this question: when to act and materialize? When to not? And why does it help sometimes and not others, and at other times the reverse is true? So that's one question. It's an ongoing question. I think it's a really interesting question.

But a second thing I was wondering about, following that meditation experience I described as an illustration, a possibility for working with pain, I started to wonder whether giving is always a necessary ingredient of soulful ritual. Is giving always a necessary ingredient of soulful ritual? So I started to wonder, you know, about the Eucharist, for example, at a Catholic Mass. In that image, there was receiving. There was the sense of being given something, and receiving something, and the sense of reverentially giving it back. And all of it was a kind of ritualistically receiving and being given, and then ritualistically giving it back, all of it with a lovely sense of reverence and beauty. But I wondered: is that always a necessary ingredient for a ritual? Or one of the ingredients that's more empowering for a ritual?

So I still don't know the answer, actually, but it's something -- I'm just sharing an ongoing question with you. It is interesting. I got interested in it and started to look up the word Eucharist and the etymology. 'Eucharist' actually means 'thankfulness,' 'thanks.' So it implies a gift. And of course there's the gift of the body and blood of Christ that one receives in the Catholic Eucharist, so there's the gift to us of the body and blood of the Christ. There's also the gift of his peace, of Christ's peace, when he says, "My peace I give unto you."^[8] Beautiful. So there's the gift of that kind of dimensional, divine, sacred peace, and all that that can be pregnant with, the dimensionality of what that can mean -- Christ's peace, given to us. "My peace I give to you." But there's also in the Eucharist, as far as I understand it (I didn't grow up Catholic), there's a gift from the congregation to each other, that they give that peace to each other. They give the peace they've received from Christ to each other. So there's giving and receiving.

This is part of what I was wondering, and there is that in different ways, and maybe more in the Eucharist that I'm unaware of. It's also interesting -- another word for Eucharist, or another word for that similar kind of ceremony, at least, in other Catholic denominations and traditions, is Communion, Holy Communion. 'Communion' is something like 'union with God' -- not so much oneness or union, but being together. So there's communion with God, or communion with the church, with the body of Christ. So the body of Christ also means the church. There's a giving of oneself in communion.

Another word for Eucharist is Mass. And 'mass' is from the Latin messa, which is from the verb mittere, and mittere is 'to send away.' So in English we have 'dismiss,' and we also have words like 'missive,' or 'mission' -- we're sent on a mission, or a missive is something we send. So there's a dismissal at the end of the Mass, and that's where it gets its name. You're sent away with the priest's blessing and with having received the holy sacrament. And so we become, in that sense -- perhaps one interpretation is that we who have received what has been given to us in ritual, this gift from God, we then go out as gifts from God to the world, to others and to the world. So we're giving ourself, we're passing on that gift. We are the gift that's passed on.

So, I don't know, but it's an ongoing question, and since ritual, I think, is very much a part of soulmaking practice, and I'm very interested in it, and what's involved, and what's important, and developing that. We don't have set, prescribed, formulaic rituals; we haven't so far. They're always, in fact, created there and then on the retreat. So we've done them -- sometimes they have spontaneous elements in them. So we don't have one ritual, or even several rituals that we repeat so far. So far, I like it that way, but I'm open. I'm very interested in this, so I was partly wondering that. I don't know the answers. Is receiving and giving a necessary part of ritual, or is it an ingredient, a possible ingredient of ritual that can be very empowering?

Last thing, and, in a way, connected to what I just said. I am, actually, open to the idea of having, developing set, ritual formulae that then get repeated. I'm certainly not closed to that idea. But I do think there's something for this capacity to create and discover rituals that are new, for the soulmaking. But connected to that, also, I described that practice, that imaginal practice, that sensing the pain with soul, but I really want to communicate, in a way, what I really wanted to communicate is illustrate a possibility and get a general sense of what may need to be involved -- some or all of what I pointed to in terms of the poise, etc. I think what I really want to say is please don't assume that imaginal practice is formulaic, that there's a formula. Sometimes it might seem that way. But for me, it really needs to, I think, for its full flourishing and the fullness of its possibilities, it needs to retain a sense of improvisation, and opportunism, and openness, and flexibility.

So some of those earlier practices I described with the insight ways of looking or whatever, we could say they're more or less formulaic. Actually, even then, there are lots of improvisatory possibilities and variations. But I think when we come to imaginal practice and the art of that, that art, careful of getting into a sort of formulaic way of thinking: "First I do this, and one, two, three," like that. It's so often the case if I'm working with someone in an interview that I have an intuitive sense at some point -- it just comes that this or that needs to happen, X or Y needs to happen, or something needs to be put in relationship with this image or whatever. But that "X or Y needs to happen" or whatever it is, is often not something I've actually thought of before or mentioned in talks or systematized in the teachings. So, to me, part of the beauty comes in the improvised, open, attentive nature of the way we approach the practice, with this flexibility. And there's grace there, because one gets an intuitive sense, "Oh, this needs to happen, or this needs to get emphasized, or I need to put this image in relationship with this other thing -- another image, or a particular dukkha, or whatever it is," and they're not things that one has thought of before, formulated. And that's part of the grace. That's the 'discover' of the 'create/discover.' That's part of the humility in relation to soul as well.

So yes, we certainly can talk about what goes into making a crucible for soulmaking work with dukkha. We can talk about the elements of the imaginal. We can talk about -- what did I call it today? -- the poise of soulmaking, of readiness for soulmaking. We can talk about what goes on in there. But there's not necessarily a certain order, and there might be other things that get left out, or things that occur to us, that are given to us as graces, so that the whole thing really becomes an art that's partly improvised and not just stuff that I'm doing, that's coming from my will. It's in relationship, so to speak -- in relationship to soul, to angel -- we are given. And part of what we're given is an intuition, or intuitions, about what might be included, what might need to happen, etc. So yes, of course, this is part of the balance. There is a place for working, for my technique, for art. But there's also the place for grace, and the other, and soul, and then the infinity of soul as other, and the notion of receiving from soul what we hadn't formalized, hadn't occurred to us, hadn't figured out. It's not a technical step. So, both. There's a balance. There's a straddling of those two aspects or moments, directions.