The Image of Ethics (Part 1)

Tonight I'd like to start talking about ethics, and in a way, really pick up some of what I was speaking about in the "Sila and Soul" series^[1] -- I think it's nine or ten parts there. Some of what was gone into and explored there, I'd like to elaborate certain elements of that, pieces of that, and extend what we said there. So these talks on ethics are very much based on those "Sila and Soul" talks. They're presuming them, and they, as I said, elaborate on certain strands there, and extend it, and I hope, take it just a little bit further, at least. Ethics, as I said, is one of those subjects that's infinite, that I don't think we should ever finally arrive at a full stop and answer where we're completely satisfied, so whatever I say in these talks is really just a snapshot of this time in my own studies and reflections regarding ethics, and particularly regarding their connection with Soulmaking Dharma and practice. It's just a snapshot now of what could be and what should be, I think, a never-ending exploration.

I'm doing it now partly because I'm concerned there won't be another chance. Obviously, I hope there will, but I hope, if not, or even if there is for me, that others will explore this whole area and these themes further, more deeply, more widely than I have done; and develop the Soulmaking Dharma, and in lots of ways, but also in relation to ethics and the ethical aspects of directions within Soulmaking Dharma; and that others will also study other ethical philosophies, and perhaps there could be fruitful dialogue in the wider sense at some point. Pretty much everything I say here rests on an understanding and a digestion of what I said in "Sila and Soul", what was said in "Sila and Soul" -- elaborates and extends that. I won't repeat the explanations and the vocabulary that I introduced in those talks, in "Sila and Soul" -- or very, very minimally. So I'm assuming that you're up to speed with that.

And why now? Well, because it seems obvious to me that there's an urgent need in our world at present, right now, at this time, to rethink and to reformulate ethics: to put it on a firmer foundation, foundations, to make it more coherent, to make it more central to our lives, and also to make it something, to allow it to be something beautiful, something attractive, this whole domain, this whole area of exploration. There's an urgent, urgent need for that. And, I might say, valuable and important as offering mindfulness to the world and to different demographics in society and the wider world -- valuable and important as that is, of course, I would say an even more pressing need, an even more urgent and more basic need is to open up and revivify the whole exploration of ethics and offer something there in terms of education, formulation, as I said, practice. That strikes me as a very urgent need. It also strikes me after the "Sila and Soul" talks that I was perhaps a little too restrained there, a little too modest, if that's the right word, with respect to what I think -- what I now think Soulmaking Dharma might actually offer to the area of ethics.

Sometimes, I think I said, there are people get very excited about Soulmaking Dharma, and I almost find myself taking the other pole of like, "Well, you know, let's see. It's not for everyone," and "Nah, you know, it's great that you're excited," and I tend to take the pole of the more sort of unenthusiastic partner there. But perhaps, in retrospect, I was, as I said, a little too restrained, too modest, in regarding what Soulmaking Dharma might offer, might inject into the ethical, the discourse about ethics and how it might open it out, and how it might, what it might give it, and what questions it might bring to bear as well. So, in many ways, this talk is a kind of, as I'll explain, it's a questioning about what we need in ethical systems, but it's also a kind of proffering or putting forward, or advocating of Soulmaking Dharma as possibly a really potent and viable injection into the way we think about and relate to ethics -- an injection into the wider society, not just Soulmaking Dharma practitioners. It's a little more positive as a stance perhaps, at least I'm hoping -- a little less restrained, a little less modest. [laughs] It'll probably be still quite restrained and modest! Anyway.

One of the things I think I touched on in the "Sila and Soul" talks was the very real danger, I think, that ethics, the whole area of ethics, slides or has already slid to really become a question of law and legality. Ethics as an area of philosophy has slid or is in the process of sliding to law and laws that debate -- rather, the debate about it, I think, has slid to almost a debate about laws, for the most part -- law ensuring, as best as possible, whatever that might mean, that everyone's right to pursue what they want to pursue is protected, as long as it does not infringe on others with similar rights to pursue what they want to pursue in society. So the whole debate and question, the whole way we see ethics, kind of slides to a question of what laws do we need to put in place, or what behaviour do we need to ensure, that will in turn ensure that, as best as possible, everyone's right to go after and do what they want to go after and do is protected, as long as or to the degree that it doesn't infringe on other people's similar rights to pursue what they want to pursue.

So that's the kind of ideal of this kind of thinking, this level of thinking about ethics where it's really slid to a level of thinking about law, legality and rights. And, of course, this makes sense, and it's a good idea, and historically, it came -- I think Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, was one of the people behind it at the time of the English Civil War, an utter brutality and chaos and violence and bloodshed, and so thinking about ethics in this way and offering that as a kind of idea was a really good idea. And it makes sense, at a certain level. But one of the things I want to point out is that it's a limited way of thinking about ethics and it will be limiting. Not to mention, of course, the fact that it's not very well implemented in our societies: the rights of the rich to pursue what they want to pursue seem protected often above the rights of the poor to pursue what they want to pursue -- even if they're just the rights to even basic human needs, etc., or the rights of one ethnic group over another.

So it's not very well implemented, both in terms of economic status and other, you know, race and other social status things, but just as important as that -- and this is what I want, a big part of what I want to go into -- there's no basis underlying that whole ideology. There's not a sufficient basis to decide between someone claiming, "This is my right to pursue this," and someone saying, "Oh, but that infringes on my right to do that." The theory, the philosophical theory, the ethical theory just stops at this kind of unidimensional, flat level of rights and law and has no deeper structure or ideation on which that level rests. Without basis, it becomes very difficult to actually go into certain thorny ethical difficulties. Nothing's in place to help us there, and so ethics slides to a kind of law, and underneath that law is a kind of moral nihilism -- a vacuum, a kind of moral vacuum where higher ethical sensibilities, in particular, higher values and ethical discourse should or could be. The whole thing is a slide to a kind of contest or conflict between so-called 'rights' -- my right to do this, your right to do that. And there's no good, really good, well-thought-out or deep, let's say, deep basis for deciding between these conflicting rights, or even there's no basis for approaching the issue ethically any deeper.

[12:30] One of the things I'd like to, or one of the ways I'm sort of thinking about these talks, is asking the question to myself and to you: "What do we need in an approach to ethics? What do we need in an ethical philosophy?" And using that question of what we need to sort of help direct us and navigate us through a lot of different possible ethical theories, and seeing how Soulmaking Dharma and Soulmaking Ethical Dharma might supply us with those needs and navigate us through what has become a kind of quagmire without signposts. I could say 'need,' I could say 'wishes.' But one thing, first of all, generally speaking, is it's not primarily, I would say, that what we need is guidance about what to do, or we need guidelines, instruction, moral laws about what to do. It's certainly not only that we need that, but maybe not even primarily that we need that. For reasons I went into briefly on the "Sila and Soul" talks, I don't think any ethical system -- utilitarianism, Kant's ethics, Habermas, the sort of open dialogue idea, open communication idea -- no ethical system is actually able to inform us, to actually give us that information of what to do in every situation.

There will also be moral antinomies, as I explained at quite a lot of length in the "Sila and Soul" talks. Sometimes a person wants: "I just want to be, I just want to know what to do -- I just want to know what's right and what's wrong. Tell me what to do. Give me a list." And sometimes that need, or that felt need, to know what to do may just be coming from a kind of ego-fear. Sometimes, or as well, it can be just a lack of full engagement of the soul with these questions, a lack of full engagement that's actually open to the difficulties -- for example, the antinomies between different values. So if I feel agitated regarding some ethical choice or ethical situation, can I tell the difference between -- let's call it 'ego,' for want of a better word -- a kind of more superficial level of my being and its concerns and its agitations, and an agitation that's more rooted at a soul-level, if you like, is a deeper agitation? Or do I just have an aversion to any level of agitation, any difficulty, whether it's at an ego-level or a soul-level?

So I don't think, generally speaking, that's what we actually need. Now, oftentimes, that's how we think about ethics, or that's how it's come to be kind of amputated as a subject, and ethics becomes, as philosophy, it becomes, "Okay, let's get a system or a way of thinking about that will tell us what to do," and that's how the discourse has shrunk, etc. Rather, I think, generally, what we need is related more to the question: what is worthwhile? What is really worthwhile in life? What is it, as I asked that question on the "Sila and Soul" talks, what is it that makes life beautiful? What is it that opens up and supports and gives life to a beautiful life, gives the beauty to a beautiful life? What is it that brings a sense of depth to our existence, that makes life worth living, that makes a life really worth living, that brings some sacredness -- including a sense of sacredness regarding the human being, who one is, what one is, as a human being; and sacredness regarding our relationship with others, with society; and sacredness regarding our relationship with the world, the earth, with nature, with the cosmos? Because we are human beings in a cosmos. We are human beings on earth, as well as we are human beings in society.

[17:42] So actually, I think this is what ethics needs. Very generally speaking, first of all, ethics needs that: we need to think about it in a broader way. We need to approach it looking for something much broader, something which has been, as I said, amputated from the whole exploration, philosophical domain of inquiry and the whole conversation. It's what matters in that sense, about living a life worth living, in that direction to a life of beauty. This is, I think, most generally speaking, what's needed to save ethics, to redeem it, to re-elevate it and open it out again into a really flourishing subject, an area of exploration that's actually then commensurate with our problems, capable of addressing the immense problems we have now as a species, and the immense problems we're causing other species, and the immense problems we have in society -- that's actually adequate to that task. Very generally speaking, we need to move from the question of not only what to do, but what makes life beautiful? What makes life really a life that is worth living? What is "the good," to use the ancient terminology that I talked about in "Sila and Soul"? This is more than just law, and it's also more than economy. We think the economy matters, because if the economy is okay, then, you know, people will be okay, because then they'll be able to pursue what they want to pursue. So if we take care of 'the law' and 'the economy,' then within that everyone can decide for themselves what they want to do, and what they feel is important. So we need more than that. We absolutely need more than that, and I'm not the first person to recognize this and to say something about it, of course. But, on the other hand, I don't think it's possible any more in modern or postmodern society to impose this or that, X or Y belief or activity, as 'this is what you must do,' to impose ethically, to be an ethical person. We have the law for that limited area, but further than that, it's actually no longer possible to impose X or Y from the outside -- this belief, this activity, etc.

[20:48] So what matters? What makes life important? What makes life, rather, deep, beautiful, meaningful, worth living? These are the questions that need opening up again, I think. And, as I said, that's related to a sense of sacredness -- going into the sacredness of the human being as well as sacredness of the earth, the cosmos, and our social relations. But with regard to the human being, we have to also not be completely naïve. Perhaps, you know, looking back at the sixties, a lot of people felt love and flower power, and it was all a little naïve in terms of what that could really accomplish -- what it was supposing of human nature, and also what could be accomplished without a more sort of sophisticated practice and philosophy.

So on the one hand, not wanting to be naïve about human being, the nature of human being, but also not wanting to be pessimistic about human beings. And I want to come back to this as one of the themes that's quite central as well. It's quite a big ask. And also, you know, we touched on this with Buddhadharma as well: just following the five precepts could be regarded as only a kind of safeguard for society. "If everyone did that, then society would be a safe place that would allow people to do what they want to do, and if part of what they want to do is get awakened, then that's good" on the one hand, or a kind of minimum safeguard for personal liberation on the other. So we're really talking here about ethics as ethos, as I explain in "Sila and Soul," as something that's much bigger and has to do with meaningfulness, and making life beautiful and worthwhile, and that whole question, and the sense of sacredness.

What we need is a way of navigating that area, an instrument, something like a compass, and we need training and education, how to use such an instrument. We need to open up what ethics means beyond just taking care of law and economy, to try and ensure everyone's rights are kind of not trampled on by someone else's actions, but we also can't impose everyone goes north-east or whatever. We need a way of navigating, methods of navigating, an instrument, something like a compass, and training, education how to use that instrument. So a way of orienting that's different than a prescribed direction (as I said, not everyone going north-east), or a prescribed direction together with proscribed directions, prohibited directions regarding material things, material activities. Do you understand the difference there? Because rather than saying this actual activity or this thing is wrong, that one is right in itself, in themselves -- these things, those things, those activities, we prescribe this one, and we proscribe that one, prohibit that one -- we need a way of orienting, so it's not so much the thing in itself, the activity in itself, but a way of orienting to this whole question. And it might be for, let's say, the least capable in society, it may be necessary that they are limited to prescribed and proscribed directions. It may be.

But there's also this question, you know, what's innate capacity and innate limitation with regard to ethics, and what's possible with education? It's a tricky question, and has history far back as -- well, before the Enlightenment, when they took a certain stand on that, and they believed everyone was tabula rasa; it was just a matter of education. It's tricky. But might it be possible for there to be a more widespread education at some point? This might sound very elitist, but might it be possible for there to be a more widespread education that offers and teaches us, trains us in ways of orienting, in a practice, practices that help us orient in the realm of ethos, in opening up that sense of life and navigating well? Opening up the sense of beautiful life, deep, meaningful life, and navigating it well, knowing that that might be different between different people, to a certain extent.

[26:50] And I think part of that, part of what immediately is kind of required and suggested by that way of opening up, or by that way of thinking about ethics and opening up the idea of what we're actually after there, what we actually need in the most general sense -- what comes immediately is the possibility and the need for a relationship of love and of eros with the virtues, with the values, as I talked about in "Sila and Soul," and as I'm going to go into in a minute. Then this opens up, in many ways, how we can think about and explore the whole domain of ethics. Things like sins of omission start to have their place. Emotion with regard to ethics starts to have its place, but a more mature place. I'll come back to these things.

So if I think about what's my sort of wish list, if you like, for an ethical system or an approach to ethics, a way of thinking about ethics, or what do we need, what does it seem to me that we need as a species right now, in terms of approaching ethics, thinking about ethics, constructing frameworks for ethics, I would say, partly, what I've already said: that it needs to be, ethics needs to be more than law -- more than law, and more important than law. And ethics needs also to be more than just an idea of my rights, your rights. It needs more than just an idea of our individual rights. More generally, as I said, it needs to open up beyond this whole question of what to do: "What should I do? What's right here?" ('right' in a different sense there), and more to this question about how to live: "What is a beautiful life? What makes a life really worth living and have depth?" So it needs to be more than law, more than that question, more than law, more than rights. All these things are connected. It needs to allow place for this idea of sins of omission. There are sins of emission as well, but sins of omission -- that we can neglect to do certain things. It needs to expand that notion and give it place, give it space.

These are a list of things that I'm going to weave through, I'm going to try to weave together through the talk, and they'll be coming and going, in and out as we go through. It needs, as I said, also to include emotion, but it must be more than just emotion, and it must give, as I said, mature place to our emotions. So that's a third thing, or fourth, depending on how you're counting. (1) So not just 'what to do' is one. (2) More than laws and rights, I'd say that's two. (3) Have place, space for sins of omission, three. (4) Fourth is including emotion, but not reduced to emotion, not limited by emotion, and giving mature place to emotion. That would be four. (5) It must include love and eros, as I said. That would be five. (6) Number six: it must have dimensionality. This is really important. We mentioned this in the "Sila and Soul" talks, but for ethics to work -- and, of course, all these needs and these requirements of this wish list, all the elements are connected; that's why I can only weave them together, rather than present them separately -- something needs to be sensed as or granted a higher dimensionality. And in which, in that dimensionality, in which meaningfulness and purpose and sanctity actually reside. And without something being sensed as having or granted or believed to have or felt to have a higher dimensionality, it's very hard to make any ethical headway, to say anything meaningful or justifiable about ethics, because the justification of whatever we do in ethics needs to be rooted in another dimension. Even if you say, "Don't kill," you say, "Why?" The "Why?" needs to go to another dimension. And, as I said, meaningfulness, purpose, and sanctity kind of organically, intrinsically reside in some other dimension. We need to sense ethics that way, even if sanctity is something kind of secularly conceived -- it doesn't matter.

This is a big subject, and I want to go into this. What does that mean? How has it been attempted in the past? How might we attempt it now? But attempts without dimensionality, as I'll explain, usually just fail, have failed. Attempts to explain ethics without dimensionality, to promote an ethical system without dimensionality -- they've just failed. So that's six, dimensionality. And then (7) seven would be, and must be connected if we're talking about dimensionality, is questions of ontology. You know, why can you claim something as having a certain dimensionality, and therefore intrinsic meaningfulness, purposefulness, sanctity? You need ontological and epistemological arguments for that, justifications for that. So woven into all this are questions of ontology and epistemology -- as always, unavoidable. And, certainly as Buddhists, we need to go beyond the limits of an ontology of just emptiness as an answer to everything, as I explained a little bit the other day in one of the other talks.^[2] So that would be seven. And (8) number eight would be a sense of what a human being is: what is it to be a human being, and what can a human being be? All this is tied together, these eight items on the list of needs, what an ethical system needs nowadays, what I think an ethical system needs, what we need as a species these days for an ethical system. Eight things. They're all tied together. They're not really separate, in a way -- one implies the other, drags in another. And so, yes, as I said, I can't really go through this in a linear way.

[35:10] There's a little bit of an introduction. Some of what I'm going to say now, tonight -- we'll see how far we get, but some of it may well still sound introductory to a superficial listening. You kind of might feel, "I'm waiting for the meaty bit." Some of you won't, of course, but some of you might be. To a superficial listening, it might -- I'm not sure -- it might sound a little bit introductory. But if you understand the basic sort of theme or what I'm trying to get at here, or offer, which is "Why should we get behind the approach of sensing with soul?", I want to advocate -- the basic theme is an advocation, an advocating of the sensing with soul approach to ethics. But if you understand that theme, perhaps even already, you'll have immediately heard what we said already is completely wrapped up in that theme, and there are already some very good reasons that you can hear in what we've already said in reasons why sensing with soul would be a good approach, a really helpful approach, one really helpful approach to ethics. Okay?

I mentioned this aspect about the way we think about ethics needs to be more than -- we need to prevent this kind of slide of ethics down to questions of law and rights. It's interesting some of what happened in the XR rebellions, extinction rebellions, recently, and how some people on the street, there were a few voices saying, "These people, XR activists, etc., they have no respect for law and order. They don't care about law and order," and that sort of protest. Let's go into this a little bit. Law and order are -- or is, if we take them together -- law and order in a society is definitely a value, if we use that language that Hartmann uses. It's definitely a value. But its rank as a value in the hierarchy of values is always going to be subordinate -- it has to be subordinate to the ethical values it upholds and supports. The rank of law and order as a value, if we take them together, has to be subordinate to the ethical values that law and order are upholding or that they support.

So, you know, law and order were healthy, robust and respected in Nazi Germany and in Mussolini's Italy -- two cultures with a lot of law and order, as far as I understand the history books. But ethically, the whole thing was on a very, very -- I mean, 'dubious' is completely -- completely unethical foundation, completely ethically wrong foundation. Therefore, the law and order there were not valuable, were anti-values. Law and order is not in itself a value. It depends -- let's put it that way -- it depends on the ethical values that it's trying to uphold. The purpose of law and order is to uphold ethical values. Somehow, as I said, they've kind of got divorced. Law and order has kind of got divorced from ethics, so that people are valuing law and order, in and of itself, regardless of the ethical questions or the ethics that that law and order is supporting -- whether they're good ethics or bad ethics.

It was interesting when Yanai was in court for one of his XR actions not too long ago. I think at some point in the proceedings, Yanai was allowed to present his case, which he tried to present an ethical case, ethical grounds for breaking the law, breaking law and order. And the judge at some point made the response to everyone that "This is a court of law, and not a court of ethics." Now, it sounds like this judge was actually pretty good, but his hands were tied, and he made a very valuable point. It doesn't sound like he really drew out all the implications or maybe even all of what he felt about that limitation: "This is a court of law, and not a court of ethics." Now, he might have really wished that it was a court of ethics, and have been able to really come down much more on the side of the XR protestors being tried there.

But basically, it was not set up -- they were not equipped to have an ethical discussion or an ethical court. We are not, in our society, equipped to have such. There's no basis. There's very little dialogue. I mean, people debate whether using stem cells is ethical or not, or euthanasia -- what's it called? -- "dignified assisted suicide," etc. Again, it's back to this question of, "What is it right to do? What ought I to do? What ought I not to do?," that kind of level of discussion: "What is right? What is wrong? What ought I to do? What ought I not to do?" And as Charles Taylor puts it, the 'ought to do' -- what he's calling, at least, the 'ought to do' -- has become divorced from the 'good to be'. The 'ought to do' -- that becomes the limitation, the circumscribing of the ethical investigation: "What ought I to do?", as I said before. And that whole question has been divorced from the much deeper question, if you like, of "What is it good to be?", and this whole notion of the good and the beautiful.

This question of "What is it good to be?", which is this question of what makes a life really worthwhile, what makes a life a beautiful life -- that has been jettisoned from philosophical discussion, from ethical discussion. They're divorced, and then they're jettisoned, and that brings problems. It brings huge problems, and one of them is the problems it brings of this divorce of questions of law from questions of ethics. Now, I don't know what the judge was thinking or feeling, but maybe someone will have the kind of courage, at some point -- someone in that position will have the courage, or we will have the courage to admit the gap, admit the gap there, admit the hole, admit the kind of yawning, nihilistic abyss above which the sort of pomp and power of the law courts attempt to suspend themselves. It's resting on, you know, either nothing, a kind of moralistic nihilism, or very, very thin ice.

[43:59] And this is connected to the whole question about my right to do this and your right to do that, my right to do whatever it is -- my right to go on holiday, my right to enjoy myself after work, my right to whatever. So much gets dragged into this, into these kind of claims of rights. Now, it might be, soon, that my right to fly for a holiday is reckoned legally or recognized legally somehow, ethically and then legally, as less of a right than the right of others to have a home that's not flooded, or not on fire, or in drought. The right for others to live in a habitable planet might be regarded as a right that trumps my right to fly on holiday when I feel like it, after I've worked hard. It might be that that day comes, and it might be that that day comes sooner -- I hope it does, sooner than later.

But even then, even if there is that (which there isn't now), that switch of the degree of rights, the height of rights in public opinion, and that gets enshrined in law somehow, and the wider ethical mind state, and then law -- even then I would say, it's still not an adequate and fertile basis for ethics. Something is missing. It's still just about those rights and the sort of competing rights, contesting rights, and then a decision that this right actually always trumps that right. Even then, still then, it won't be adequate, and it won't be fertile as a basis -- just that question about rights.

And you can see, even at that level of competing or conflicting rights, there's so much dishonesty and distortion that comes in when people talk on that level, and that, to me, betrays the fact that we're actually lacking a means of approaching ethical questions. We just have this conversation about rights, but there's no actual way of approaching ethical question -- the means, the practices, the way of thinking about it just becomes "my right vs your right," or "your right vs my sense of those people on the other side of the world and their rights." So much dishonesty and distortion. Partly, that betrays not something so much about human nature perhaps, but just our lacking of a means of approaching ethical questions.

So some of you may know this, but there was -- I think it was a sub-group of XR; I think they were called Heathrow Pause -- or no, that was something else. Anyway, there were a couple of groups who tried to shut down airports, or prevent airports or planes from taking off and landing, to draw attention to the huge and often unnecessary amount of carbon emissions that come from flying. And they attempted in different ways to stop the functioning of airports for a few hours, or a day, or two days, or whatever it was. And it was, I'll say, 'interesting,' but it was also kind of alarming, and also totally to be expected and kind of normalized, the response of the airport authorities and others.

I think one situation was at City Airport in the middle of London, and a lot of activists went there and just sat in the lobby and sort of blocked entrances and things like that, in an attempt to stop planes flying for a while. And the sort of ... what I'm going to say is dishonest and distorted rhetoric of the response and the statements from the City Airport authorities, who talked about needing to ensure the safe running or the safe operation of this airport, and then gleefully reported that they had ensured that when the police had cleared the protestors. There's a just completely normal and expected kind of language, and trope, and attitude, and response, and it hides so much, because the use of that word, 'the safe operation,' is a deliberate deflection and distortion. It links the XR protests with terrorism which, if you've read the news recently, apparently they were linked anyway by a police organization called Prevent, and now they've retracted that link. There was in the rhetoric, in the spin of the responses, deliberate deflection and distortion as if "XR protestors are like terrorists; airport functioning is safe."

But the carbon dioxide emissions from flying is not safe, and doubly so in an airport like City Airport, where it's mostly really very rich people and corporate executives flying here and there, where they don't need to fly, to Manchester -- however long that is on the train, a couple of hours or whatever it is. The emissions are not necessary. The emissions are not safe. We know that now. Carbon dioxide emissions are not safe. Was there anyone whose safety was affected, whose actual safety was affected by that? Any of the passengers whose safety was affected by that XR sit-in protest? It's a spin. "Safe running of the airport." You might as well talk about the safe running of Auschwitz, and wanting to ensure the safe running of Auschwitz! Okay, it's maybe extreme, but there's a parallel there. How ridiculous that sounds. If someone, an SS officer, was wanting to ensure the safe running of Auschwitz, the safe emission of unnecessary CO~2~ into the atmosphere, usually by very rich people who don't need to fly -- I don't know, the safe running of Auschwitz gas chambers is like the safe release of CO~2~ gas into the atmosphere. It's just a bigger gas chamber.

[51:39] Even more kind of insidious, I think, in terms of the not complete honesty and distortion that gets roped in through certain kind of common tropes, is that XR protests were preventing normal, hard-working people putting food on their table and a roof above their heads, and normal people who want to go about their normal lives. I heard this on a TV debate. I don't have a better idea about how the consciousness, how the alarm can be better sounded, how the consciousness can be changed in relation to climate change and species extinction. I don't have a better idea than XR. I have a lot of difficulties with how XR does things, or what it decides to do, but I really don't know a better idea. Speaking as someone who's been involved in environmental activism for a long, long time, written countless letters, tried to pursue it along the lines of democratic process -- it's a so-called democratic process. I don't have a better idea. But then there's this trope in response: "These XR people are preventing normal, hard-working people putting food on their table, having a roof above their heads, normal people who want to go about their normal lives." Is that even really true? It's really a question: is it really true? Did the XR protests really prevent hard-working people putting food on their table, that there wasn't food that evening, or a roof above their heads? Is that really true? And I'll come back to it, because it might be. In a couple of cases, it might be. But what proportion of cases, and is it really true? It's just a trope. It's a spin.

And regarding normal life, it's like what if so-called 'normal life' brings very abnormal disaster for others -- as abnormal as the fires in Australia? 'Normal life' brings abnormal disaster for others, and then for myself in my normal life too. 'Normal life' was pursued in 1938 Nazi Germany by a lot of people: "I just want to go about my normal life." But there's a bigger ethical question here. Mass extinction, mass extermination of species is not normal. It's not normal! It's by far the most abnormal thing that has occurred on earth, since the earth has been here -- maybe apart from the beginning of life, perhaps. Maybe that was more normal. And there's something even more insidious going on with this particular trope, because almost no one wants to say, of course, "Yeah, well, pff, I don't want anyone to be deprived of food or to lose their job, because there's this gig economy." And some people, in this gig economy, where you have no benefits, no safety net at all, you're just -- not a slave, but there's very little safety net there for you, and that has become a reality: gig economy and the economy of austerity.

And so it might be true that for some people getting blocked by an XR protestor, and then they're late for work, and they get fired, and they had a gig economy job, and they're really on the edge, and they're living at that level of poverty in society, and that level of vulnerability; of course that might be true. But one, how many people does that affect? But more importantly, what has happened in this trope is the protestors, the people who are disrupting, get blamed actually for decades, decades of systematic political socio-economic policies of austerity and the gig economy. They do something, and they're blamed for the potential results on that, where actually most of the conditions are resting in decades of socio-economic policies -- again, which rest on very, very shaky ethical foundations. So yes, certain XR actions, I think, could have been better thought out in terms of the demographics and the areas and who exactly they would affect. I really do think that. But there's also something a little -- well, more than a little sneaky and insidious, dishonest, disorienting and distorting about what has become quite a typical kind of response. It's such an easy trope, and it's hiding something.

[57:27] But the larger point again is about our ethical thinking needing to be more than law -- the slide into "it's just about law," and that's all we can kind of talk about. Or this slide into "ethics is just about rights. What are the rights and how do we protect people's rights?" And all this, as I said, if we expand the conversation, the idea of what ethics is, then it opens up areas to what used to be called, I think, in the Catholic Church, 'sins of omission': it's neglecting to do something. So this, actually, for me, has quite important implications.

Just as a sort of thought experiment, when you compare -- let's take Nazi Germany as a sort of setting for this thought experiment, and compare ethical transgressions. Person A speaks out. During the Third Reich, during the reign of the Nazis, he/she/they speak out against Nazi policy and ideas, publicly and at the risk of their life. Privately, they're having an extramarital affair. Okay? They're married, but they're involved with someone else, romantically, sexually. That's Person A. Person B is completely faithful to their partner, their spouse, but does not speak up about the Nazi policies, Nazi ideas. After the war, they may say, along with so many others, that they disagreed with Nazi policies, and they thought Nazism was terrible, but they say that after the war, when it was safe.

Okay, Person A, Person B and what they do -- they're not antinomies. The point here is to ask and kind of see how you, I, each of us, tend to assess ethical misdemeanours. What's your reaction to Person A, your ethical reaction and assessment of Person A, compared to your ethical reaction to Person B? Person A spoke out at the risk of their life, but they were having an extramarital affair. Person B was completely faithful to their spouse, but did not speak up until after the war, when they said they disagreed and thought Nazism was terrible. And maybe they did disagree and think Nazism was terrible, but during the Nazi reign, they did not. Just to ask and see how you tend to relatively assess those ethical misdemeanours. One of them is an omission, a sin of omission -- the second one, Person B.

And this also, as I think I pointed out in "The Necessity of Fantasy,"^[3] in the five precepts as they're usually presented, negatively, there's no place for a sin of omission, so that actually walking by, on the edge of a lake, and someone drowning there, to just keep walking mindfully by, and then the person drowns, or someone else has to save them or whatever -- technically speaking, that's not an omission. That's not a transgression, an ethical transgression, a sin. One's still keeping the five precepts, technically speaking. Of course, Thích Nhất Hạnh has added the positive side to it which is very, very helpful. But technically speaking, the Buddhist precepts as they're usually thought of, in terms of the five precepts, don't leave room for what we ought, what we can rise up, how much we can rise up ethically and extend ourselves to the higher virtues.

[1:02:14] Now, what if we translate that, this hypothetical scenario, these hypothetical ethical transgressions, these two kinds of transgressions there? Person A's transgression in terms of their marriage; Person B's transgression in terms of their sin of omission, what they have failed to rise up to. What happens now if you translate that to our situation now, where we know about and somehow even participate in a kind of wilful extinction, extermination of millions of species and climate change? We know that's going on, that those actions, those policies are perpetuated in our time, by our societies -- just as in Nazi Germany it was clear what was perpetrated. People said they didn't know about what was going to happen to the Jews, and the Gypsies, and the homosexuals, etc., communists. I think most people knew. So translate that to our situation now.

This phrase, 'sins of omission,' can mean different things. But what I want to point to here is that we need to open up, I think -- we're talking about needs now: what do we need to bring? What does an ethical system need to have? And it needs to have a place in it, a space in it, spaces and places in it for the possibility of aspiring to higher values and virtues, for the recognition that it's important and it's good to aspire to higher values, higher virtues. There's limited space for that in ethical systems that are not based on virtue -- or I wonder that. I wonder if there's limited space for those kinds of aspirations or of the recognition of their importance, and that it's good to aspire, in ethical systems that are not based on virtue. I wonder. I'm not sure if that's correct, but it may be. These ethical systems based on virtue make that much more clear. Let's put it that way.

If we go back to the legal thing, I think I've moved -- I've lost count now since I got ill; I was living at Gaia House, and I got ill, and basically I moved out the morning of my operation. That was it. I never went back to Gaia House since then. I think I've moved four or five times since then, renting one place or another. And I'd never rented in England before, because I lived in the States, so I don't know if it's an English thing or what. But I've had four or five places, and three different landlords, I think. And while it's very clear that none of my landlords have acted illegally -- they've always kept within the bounds of the law, in terms of how they do things, or raise the rent, or limit things in this way or that way -- and one could say, from a certain point of view, that they've acted ethically, or they haven't acted unethically, one would be very hard pushed, you'd struggle to find anyone that would say these people have acted virtuously in being a landlord, during their dealings with the tenant.

So there is, again, in the wider society, there's this shrinking away from the idea, or the attraction to higher values and higher virtues, and the place for that as a possibility, and the kind of encouragement to aspire and to reach out to that kind of thing, to that kind of level. There's "we just need to keep within the bounds of law." There's a sort of minimum, a lowest common denominator, and then that's regarded, "Well, that's ethical, right?" Sometimes ethical is a bit more than the law. But there's a shrinking here. So I don't know -- I'm not sure that it's the case that this kind of thing is not possible in other ethical, with other ethical systems, but something about a virtue-based ethical system that makes it more apparent, that invites it, that sets it up that way. So going back to Hartmann's hierarchy of values, and still with the notion that the higher values will need to rest on the lower, and including the knowing that there will be inevitable antinomies between different values, particularly values at the same level. But that kind of virtue-based system, value-based system, still keeps this, what I'm calling sins of omission, that whole notion, open, and this possibility and encouragement, stimulation, an invitation to aspire higher, to higher values, higher virtues. So different ethical systems open in different ways, or they open more or less.

Not too long ago, I overheard a conversation between two people, who each of them was a relatively new parent. It was a man and a woman. They weren't a couple. So they were each in a partnership, and each had a young child, one young child. And they seemed to agree, very easily, that very close bonding between mother and child, where the mum rarely goes away, and breastfeeding is continued until late, etc., these kind of things -- that that kind of very close bonding, they seemed to agree, would guarantee that the child, when grown, would not cause harm in the world.

And I just wondered whether that was a bit naïve. You know, peer influence becomes huge as time goes on, as does the influence of advertisement and social and cultural norms, including ethical ones. And I can think of a family, actually, that I've known the children in that family, the parents and the children, for a lot of years, and the children, since they were babies. They're now mostly in their twenties, and they have all become very nice. They're very relatively well-balanced psychologically, they're polite, they're clean, their personal hygiene is okay, they're not obviously unkind -- there's a degree of kindness there. They're very okay, it seems, with expressing affection with their parents, and in their social relations, etc., so that's not a problem, etc. But they don't think twice, for example, about flying many times a year. They're quite wealthy. And they don't think twice about what that might contribute to the suffering of others, human and non-human. And there is also, it seems to me, very little interest or impetus, interest in or impetus towards the higher virtues. This is not quite what I mean by 'sins of omission,' but it's related.

So is it enough, this idea that we won't cause harm if we have (which they did) very affectionate parenting with a lot of good, healthy physical contact with mum and dad and all that, taken care of, pretty good family dynamics, all that? The affection from and healthy attachment to mother or primary carer or whatever is probably not enough to bring about the kind of ethical maturity the world needs now. We may need moral education, which as I said, is kind of gone away. It's been ruled taboo. It's hard to find in our society. We may need further moral education, whether it's by the family or whatever. And the role of education and moral education might be huge, but as I said, in our society, we lack any but the most basic moral education, and even that may be less really a 'moral' education than one about conforming to norms and obeying the law.

So what is it? What do we need to open up a range of possibility, the impetus and the interest in the higher virtues, as well as this whole notion of sins of omission ("I've neglected to do something")? More moral, some kind of moral education that is not in place at present in Western societies. And that needs to be based on probably a very different way of framing and relating to ethics than is there presently. The two issues -- the lack of education, and the lack of a good way of framing and relating to ethics -- they're completely related.

[1:14:13] So, of course, when there is the possibility to aspire, when that's opened and deemed important -- the possibility to aspire to higher values -- when it's recognized as something good, then actually love and eros for virtues, for the virtues, and love and eros for ethics becomes possible and becomes normal, because there's that possibility of a beyond, that possibility of extending, rather than just a kind of disgust at what one sees, what one deems or decides is unethical, or a kind of sentimentality -- a kind of disgust or sentimentality you'd get in tabloid newspapers, Daily Mail or whatever. It's all pretty limited ethically. I mean, not only is it completely sort of trammelled in just one direction -- pretty obvious what they're going to oppose or not -- but it's very limited in terms of the emotionality in it. There's no real place there for genuine love of virtue or ethics, and genuine eros. So I'm saying that, again, this, as I said, is part of the list, part of the list of needs: ethics needs to become an area and a domain in relation to which we can and do feel love and eros, and plenty of it -- and beauty and all, because that's all going to be tied in if I'm using that word 'eros' in the soulmaking sense. I'm not only saying this because I think ethics is an interesting subject, and I love it; it's that exactly that is the appropriate relationship with this subject. If we're thinking about what is a beautiful life, what is a life worth living, what is a life with depth, and dimensionality, and meaningfulness, and with this possibility for higher virtues and the beauty of that, and the extending myself, then it's exactly eros and love that is an appropriate relationship with that whole domain, with that whole subject.

I remember in the "Sila and Soul" talks, I played a little bit with and I offered different etymologies connected with the word 'virtue.'^[4] I don't know if I mentioned these two. These two may be a repeat. I was talking about the etymology of the word, or the kind of phonetic relations -- not etymological relations, but relations of sound, which may not be etymological, but nevertheless, as I explained in those talks, can still function as part of a complex of association, so that we associate the word 'virtue' subconsciously with other words. So, either way; it doesn't matter.

But two I want to point out here, etymologically or not, or associatively, phonetically, in relation to what I just said. They may be repeats. I don't know; I can't remember. So the use of the word 'virtually,' the colloquial use of the word 'virtually,' we talk about being ... well, let's do it the other way around. We talk about 'virtual reality' -- so related to the word 'virtue,' virtual reality, virtual media -- as an image of something (so electronically or on the internet). So we can say 'virtual' is related to 'image,' and 'image' may be related to 'virtue.' 'Virtue' may be related to 'image,' etymologically or phonetically. And this is what I want to get at: that virtues, being allowed to be imaginal, allowed to have their imaginal dimensions, so that a virtue ... well, let's do the other one. So there's this 'virtual reality,' which means an image of something, a virtual this, and so virtues becoming imaginal, being allowed to become imaginal.

'Virtually' also means, colloquially, "It's virtually this" -- it's almost that. "He was virtually" whatever. "He was virtually dead," or virtually whatever -- 'is almost something.' It's approaching something. Both these meanings -- a kind of image or virtual reality, and this almost something or approaching something -- both of them imply the idea of an image, an imaginal something, imaginal virtue, and our lives and our behaviours, as possibly approaching that, possibly reflecting, refracting that image or an ideal reality, and as we said before, an ideational-imaginal, an ideal reality in the sense I explained in the Four Parables talks, and this imperfectly approaching instance of that ideal reality. Here's the ideational-imaginal reality of this virtue, and we always imperfectly approach it, in the instances of our behaviour. That's the instantiation of the ideal reality, of the idea. Virtues become imaginal, and our behaviour can be imperfect images of and almost approaching that. Both of these allow and imply that eros is a possibility. When there is an imaginal beyond, when there is a higher dimension, something I can't quite reach, but I'm trying to reach, both of them, this etymology or playing around with the word 'virtue,' suggest to us then the dimensionality of virtue, and also that eros is a possibility in relationship to that.

Allowing virtues and values to be ideational-images, the ideational-imaginal, implies and brings automatically, or involved in that, there will be eros then for those virtues and values. As I talked about the other day, when I was talking about people saying, "Oh, you have so much willpower," actually, maybe it's more a matter of eros: eros for certain virtues, values, and eros for, in that case, the ideas that wanted to be expressed, eros for the future Saṅgha, etc. Love and eros, more than willpower. I also said sometimes, of course, in a long creative project, in a long-term relationship, in parenting, there are going to be times when you're not feeling that eros. And the same when we come to ethics, and our relationship with virtues and values. Of course there's going to be a time when we don't feel the eros, when it doesn't feel juicy, when we don't feel inspired and called to what's more beautiful. Of course. But we can still, as in a long-term creative project, if we have the right relationship to it, as in a long-term intimate relationship or friendship even, as in a long-term parenting, even if we're not in touch with that eros, we can still be rooted in the knowing of something. We know, firsthand, for ourselves: "This is meaningful, for me. This is part of my duty. I love this. Even when I don't feel those things, I know them. This has eros." And you can see how many of the elements of the imaginal are there.

This connects with another of the needs I mentioned, that the way we think about ethics needs to include more than our emotions -- needs to include more than just our moral feeling, even. So we need to have our emotions. In other words, I think ethics is not just a matter of cold rationality. Some people do present such systems, and I'll maybe talk about that later in another talk, but I think our heart and our heart's responses are part of what should be involved in our instrument, in our compass. It's an element of our compass. We need emotions and moral feelings, but we need also more than that.

Eros is actually, as you know, more than an emotion. And eros, again, I mean eros in the whole soulmaking sense that we use that term, eros. So yes, we need emotion, but we need more than emotion. And part of what's 'more' is we need eros, and partly we need a hierarchy of values, or some sense of a hierarchy of values. I want to come back to that. I want to spin that a little bit differently as we go on. But what that really means is we need a conceptual framework. So we need emotion, but we need more than emotion. We need eros. We need a conceptual framework. And we need a way, ways of orienting, ways of practising.

So, more than just emotion to guide us. Obviously the value of something like passion depends on what it serves and what the intention is, just like we talked about law and order. Passion is an emotion, but its value, actually, its moral value, depends on what it's serving, and what its intention is. Loyalty, I'm not sure if it's an emotion or a stance, but it's connected. The value of loyalty, or even passionate loyalty, also depends on its object. A football supporter, completely loyal to their team -- that has a certain value, but a pretty limited value in terms of how valuable that passion is and that loyalty is. Sometimes you see, you know, grown men, and the only place where they're really expressing any emotion, or any place you'd see them crying might be in relation to a football result. You have to wonder what's happening there. What's happening with the heart? Why so limited? Why so strong in this area, and so limited in other areas? And what value does it have really, if it's just about whether a football team loses or wins or whatever?

So the value is dependent on the value of its object. And, of course, you know, for instance, the value of the loyalty of an SS officer (again, just take Nazi Germany as an example) to Himmler, the head of the SS, that's highly questionable what value that has. I say this because sometimes I run into people who love the sound of soulmaking and even start playing with images and stuff, and seem to kind of shrink their sense of what's important there down to passion, in the sense of passion as something really important. It's not important. Just the emotion of passion is not inherently important; it depends what it's connected to, what it serves, what the intentions are, what its objects are.

[1:27:18] I want to say something, as well, just in connection with the emotions again, because, as I said, I feel like they're very important. They have a very important place in terms of our ethical sensibility, and how we're going to approach ethics, and how we orient and navigate in our ethical -- the instrument, our soul-instrument regarding ethics. But we can also sometimes overdo that and not see, kind of blind ourselves a little bit, blinker ourselves to other things, if we put too much emphasis on the emotion.

Take, for example, the idea, the very beautiful idea of grief rituals and grief ceremonies, which some of us have been involved in and are starting more widely now, say with regard to species extinction or climate change. And it's interesting. Those grief rituals, a person might come expecting a space where they can really grieve and wail and cry, and it be okay, and it be kind of supported and mirrored, and there's a shared space for sort of intense, deep grief, grieving emotion. But what people can find, and what I think you will find if you attend a few of these things, is that a grief ritual may not lead to or support an emotion of grief. It may not at all be because anything weird is going on in the dynamics, or it wasn't a trustworthy space or a safe space. It actually depends how the ritual is done and how it's held.

Oftentimes, rituals kind of distil -- a ritual distils something, and contains it, and connects levels. A ritual connects levels, or some ways of thinking about a ritual is they connect levels, and this is very important for soulmaking. For example, we connect matter and the imaginal dimensions or the dimensions of divinity, and that's kind of the transubstantiation of objects and matter. That's something that happens in, or can happen in a ritual, and it's very powerful for the soul. And as I mentioned the other day, it may involve giving and receiving and grace. And these elements, this distilling of something, this containing of something, and particularly this element of connecting levels, and also this giving and receiving and grace -- all of that may not lead to a sort of opening of a floodgates of, in this case, grief. It depends what the ritual is trying to do and how it is set up and kind of what levels it's aimed at. This is actually quite important, I think, for soulmakers to understand.

I think, you know, is there a place for both? Spaces (call them rituals or ceremonies or whatever) where there can be collective grief, and the depth of that grief, regarding species loss, extinction, extermination can be felt, you know, and held together in a safe space, and recognized, and valued, and moved through. There's feeling the grief, opening to it, and the importance also there of the heart's capacity expanding, because as I said many times recently, there can be so much grief there, and part of the work that we do in meditation is to actually expand the heart's capacity, that it knows it can feel this terrible, awful, seemingly bottomless grief -- a lot of it's not even mine -- and the heart is big enough, and knows how to let that move through, and how to hold it well.

So can there be, can we have place for that kind of space and ritual together? And do we know how to set that up? And can there also be this contextualizing of grief through ritual? And ritual that, more in the way that it's holding the space, and the way that it's understanding how we human beings and those taking part in the ritual are relating to the whole situation, and the species loss, etc., is contextualizing it, and contextualizing it with dimension, and imaginally, and contextualizing it for the soul -- not just for the heart. And that might be a lot more calmer, a lot more sober, a lot more even silent, but out of it might come strength, power, stamina. Theoretically, just having the grief and opening to it, one moves through the grief to be able to be empowered, to act, etc. -- yes. But, in a way, there's openness and strength from both these kinds of rituals. Potentially, there's openness and strength, power, and stamina through both these kinds of rituals, but they come in very different ways, and then they're given to the being in very different ways -- the openness, and the strength, the power, the stamina. So emotions are vital, but they're not enough. They're not enough.

We're talking about the main thrust of exploring the possibility of soulmaking practice as a basis and as an approach to ethics, and that can happen in two ways, as I explained in the "Sila and Soul" talks. One is through values and virtues becoming or being allowed to become image: imaginal images, ideational-imaginal images, imaginal ideas, whatever we're going to call that. That's one way -- the values and virtues become imaginal, so to speak: imaginal ideas. It can also come through an image, an imaginal figure, and that imaginal figure implies, or implicit in that imaginal figure are certain values and certain virtues. In that implication, it already implies their sort of holiness, kind of indirectly, but working with the image can also lead to our manifesting those values and virtues, our eros for those values and virtues, and then our life refracting, expressing those values and virtues, in its imperfect mimicry and echoing of the image, and the duty from the image or duties from the image.

[1:35:14] So if we talk about ethics in terms of virtues -- we talk about virtue ethics -- then, you know, virtues rest on a sense of values, rather than an actual system or an enforcement of law. So virtue, I think, rests on that sense. It's the sense. It's really on my sense of values, rather than a kind of rational system or an enforcement of law. That's the kind of tenor of virtue ethics. And so the soulmaking approach would also most easily fit with virtue ethics, as I explained. And then again it rests on a sense of values, rather than a rationally worked out -- a system of a rational explanation or guide, or some kind of enforcement of law or code or guidelines, ethical guidelines.

And a sense of values, just extrapolating really here from a lot of what we said in the "Sila and Soul," a sense of values really involves sensing them with soul -- in other words, this ideational-imaginal, this sense of the ideational-imaginal. And sensing with soul implies all the eros and everything else, a sense of beauty, and devotion, and duty, and meaningfulness, and all that, all the elements. So then ethics, in that sense, implies and needs sensing with soul, to a certain extent, with respect to the values. So let's go into this a little bit.

When we sense the things and the beings of the world with soul, values are there, and reverence is there, as elements of the imaginal. When we're sensing with soul, values and reverence are there just because they're elements of the imaginal, so there's a natural ethical relationship with them to whatever we're sensing with soul. However, there will always be something, some object, or persons, or whatever, left out of our sensing with soul until we notice them, and give them attention, and they are subsumed into the soulmaking dynamic. It's also true that some fantasies involve 'enemies,' what we might call 'enemies.' So, a question: what becomes of our ethical relationship with those people who are our imaginal or fantastical enemies? If I've got an image of a warrior protecting the earth from enemies, what about our ethical relationship with those enemies? Here, we can talk about imaginal duty, and the refraction of that -- what our duty is in relation to a certain image, but also the theatre-like nature. We've gone into all this before. But, in a way, those enemies need to be subsumed; they need to become imaginal as well, otherwise there's a danger of reifying that, reifying the enemy too much.

[1:38:59] This is important to understand: it's too much to expect anyone to be sensing with soul all the time, and with respect to everything. It's actually impossible to be sensing with soul with respect to everything, because 'everything' is a category that's going to get bigger and wider when the soulmaking dynamic kicks in, because it creates/discovers, more things, more aspects. So that's impossible anyway. But it may be, as sensing with soul becomes more normal and more digested, that any situation or thing that we attend to, or with respect to which we have to make some kind of choice, like an important choice or major, a choice that feels major or important for us, it may be that that situation becomes sensed with soul, and that, therefore, our relation with it becomes ethical, because it's reverential, etc.

If we have sensing with soul as the basic definition of virtue or ethical living, the basic approach, let's say, it will not rid us of the inevitability of antinomies between values at the same level. That can't happen. I mean, it may rid a person of an antinomy that they have between two values. Sometimes, when I explore it, when I bring the soulmaking sensibility and practice to it, and I actually find that X is more soulmaking for me than Y, even though someone else may have the reverse sense -- they might find Y more soulmaking than X. But if everyone was trained in Soulmaking Dharma practice, and approaching ethical choices and virtues through it, that person's choice, even though the other person disagrees -- they choose X, I choose Y; they choose X over Y, I choose Y over X -- if everyone was trained in Soulmaking Dharma and that approach to ethics, the person's choice would still be respected as valid, if we got a sense that it was honestly and authentically sensed with soul. So what I'm trying to get at here is, explore this: is it possible that sensing with soul could become a more widely established practice and basis, even, for ethics? I mean, that might be a total pipe dream, but I'm just exploring the theoretical possibility, at least, or the theoretical side of the possibility.

Part of the problem with ethics, as I said, ethics as we think about them now, is that when we don't have a notion of dimensionality, when we don't have a sense of dimensionality, or when any idea or notion of dimensionality has been refused, has been shut out, disallowed (as is quite common and quite popular these days), then actually, there can be no shared ethics then. There's nothing then to prevent someone's ethics from being purely contingent, learned, arbitrary. Someone says, "This is my right, that's your right. This is how I think about ethics, that's how you think about ethics," but it could be held, as I said, for purely contingent or arbitrary reasons, or held principally, in other words, for what are actually not ethical reasons at all -- it's something amoral. Not immoral, as in 'wrong,' but amoral. It just has nothing to do with morality. So without dimensionality, it's hard to justify, and it's hard to even know where a person's so-called ethics are coming from. And so ethics is exactly prey to postmodern nihilistic relativism, because of this absence of dimensionality.

[1:44:07] Again, if we pick up a few strands from what we talked about here and in the "Sila and Soul" talks and put them together, if we combine Hartmann's notion of that firmament of values which has an objective existence, but has a kind of range and width that usually or almost always exceeds the kind of focus of any age, of any culture, or any individual, and that also contains within it numerous antinomies; if we combine that idea of the firmament of values with really a demand for a sense of dimensionality -- I'm going to come back to this dimensionality question in more detail later. But if we combine this idea of a firmament of values with that, to avoid this kind of postmodern nihilistic relativism with regard to ethics, ethics needs to be rooted in something. So I'm talking about wishes or needs -- let's say, a demand for some kind of sense of dimensionality. What will give us that? Well, the soulmaking, sensing with soul gives us a sense of dimensionality, implicitly. It's one of the elements.

So we can get a sense of dimensionality for this or that, or of this or that virtue or ethic, or even just this or that action that we're thinking about, from the Soulmaking Dharma practice, and with all that that implies about the ideational-imaginal. Those two things -- the firmament of values which does have a kind of objective existence, a sense of dimensionality, a sense, an actual practical, practised sense of dimensionality -- and we add the notion that we can trust the disciplined or trained soul to sense the ethical and to be touched by it, to want to move towards it, to have an erotic relationship with it, and to want to manifest some or other of those inherently existing values. In other words, the duty, as well, is part of it.

So if we combine all that -- this kind of trust in the Soulmaking Dharma practice, a demand for a sense of dimensionality, which we can get also through the Soulmaking Dharma practice, and still this notion of an objective, hugely ranged firmament of values -- if we combine all that, then there is an objectively or independently existing ethics, to a certain extent, which we can discern epistemologically, through the practice, by our careful sensibility and sensitivity; something which can be trained, and maybe in different ways, and maybe there are other ways, apart from Soulmaking Dharma practice. But certainly including by training in soulmaking, and a recognition of, and a familiarity with the elements of the imaginal -- these are the things; this familiarity and recognition of the elements of the imaginal, tell me when I'm on the right track, when the whole thing has become soulful. It's got that sense of dimensionality. But also, then I can trust this. I mean, still there will be antinomies, and differences of opinion and inclination and feeling between different people, of course, but antinomies exist anyway for individuals within themselves. Antinomies are unavoidable in ethical life, as I stressed in the "Sila and Soul" talks. They're unavoidable. But if we, ourselves, and society are aware of both the independent existence of this value-firmament, its wide range, the inevitability of antinomies, both within and between individuals, then at least a more understanding and harmonious existence in society might be possible.

If we, and most, or a lot of other people in society, are aware there is this independent, independently existing value-firmament, it's got a huge range, there will inevitably be antinomies, both within myself, and within individuals, then at least we can have more understanding, and a kind of more harmonious coexistence in society. I mean, of course, it might also be, I think it probably would be the case that if soulmaking training and sensibilities were almost universally trained -- let's just dream that for a minute -- in members of society, that certain seeming antinomies would be universally understood to be not really antinomies but oppositions between, let's say, moral or soulful values and amoral values that are kind of ego-values or greed values -- not really antinomies at all. I mean, for example, I don't know, like the expansion of Heathrow Airport.

So again, the relationship with emotions -- notice one can have strong opinions and feelings regarding a value without a sense of soulmaking and soulfulness there. There's no dimensionality, and therefore, in that way of approaching things, in the soulmaking way of approaching ethics, then it wouldn't be trustworthy. Just because there's an intense feeling, just because there's a strong opinion, without that sense of dimensionality, and without also the beauty and the other elements of the imaginal, it's not trustworthy. It's not fully trustworthy, in that way of thinking about it.

This is hard -- I mean as a dream; if we're dreaming this or proposing this -- because to kind of proffer that as desirable, to say, "It would be great if everyone approached ethics, or at least a lot of people approached ethics through sensing with soul, from the Soulmaking Dharma practice," that would be -- actually, to insist on, or at least to say is desirable, basically a new epistemology. You're basically insisting on a new epistemology. You're saying it's better to have a new epistemology, at least for the domain of ethics. And for any new epistemology to take root and spread, and even come to be a norm one day in the wider society is quite an ask, and a pretty rare thing. I don't know, perhaps the last sort of major shift of epistemology was the shift of the scientific materialist world-view and its epistemology, hundreds of years ago. An epistemology is already dominant in a culture. We inherit it, and it's hard to question it.

[1:51:57] Still, though, trying to place a new ontology first -- in other words, before the epistemology; in other words, just saying, "This is ethical. This is the truth," before an epistemology, before a way of teaching people how they might recognize something as more valuable -- in other words, just presenting an ontology, "This is more valuable than that," would probably be harder than opening the epistemology in the area of ethics: actually, "How might one sense for oneself that this is more valuable than that?" So, in this hope, wish, fantasy, dream, ridiculous impossibility, pipe dream -- it's a big ask. Shifting ontology is huge. Shifting ontology just sort of out of the blue and kind of cold is probably very hard before we've shifted an epistemology, or offered the possibility of an epistemology. And by 'epistemology,' I mean the practice by which one comes to experience things and sense things for oneself, palpably, to measure between different values or different ethical choices.

The other day, I can't remember which talk it was on -- probably the one on ontology -- we talked about the possibility of opening up and moving forward our sense of ontology and epistemology by allowing and giving place and importance, significant place to eros; in other words, almost partly basing ontology and epistemology on eros. Of course, that's an idea that a lot of people would very quickly object to and be horrified by. I read, not too long ago, a paper by -- I don't know if he's a philosopher or a historian of philosophy or something -- anyway, a guy called Wayne Hankey, who I must say, I'm not a huge fan of. And it was a paper really quite polemically critiquing John Milbank, the theologian/philosopher I mentioned the other day, who's associated with what they call the radical orthodoxy movement these days. I want to read a little bit of what Wayne Hankey says, and what he criticizes in John Milbank's approach. And as I mentioned the other day, John Milbank's approach seems to have a lot of affinity and overlap and commonality with what we've been working at with the Soulmaking Dharma, but he's done it in an Orthodox Christian context and through very different channels of Neoplatonism, etc., through Western philosophy and theology. So he's done it through very different channels than we have, but to me, it's quite exciting, and the little bit I've read so far and what I've seen on YouTube and things, I'm quite keen. Anyway, I read this Wayne Hankey paper, and I'm going to read a little bit his critiques. In trying to sum up what he's attacking here in John Milbank's approach, he says:

Theory belongs to composition and is not separable from it.^[5]

I have to translate a bit. He means really that theory is something that we can create. So again, we have this 'poiesis' common with our notions, and this possibility of creating conceptual frameworks, etc. It's definitely not exactly the same. There are probably quite a lot of differences between what John Milbank is saying and what we're opening up, and he, I think, still very much sees his project as very much in process. But anyway:

Theory belongs to composition [in other words, it's a creative/artistic endeavour] and is not separable from it. The requirement that we join in the cosmic and divine poiesis [creativity, artistic creativity], governed not by truth but by desire, means that there can be no theoretical distance or objectivity. Theory occurs as a necessarily incomplete moment within praxis.

So [to] translate that, basically in our terms, it's saying, "This is terrible -- if you follow your desire, eros, and not something called 'truth,' and you create theory or create conceptual frameworks guided by your eros and desire, then there can be no theoretical objectivity, and it's just something that occurs as a stage, as an incomplete movement, direction, thrust, and temporary stage within practice." In a way, that sounds very similar to the kind of logos of, logoi in the Soulmaking Dharma. But then he doesn't like this at all. Wayne Hankey doesn't like this at all. He continues:

What belongs to theory is self-consciously constructed within poiesis, [practice], and desire in order to stand against modern theoretical truthfulness.

So there's, again, in our language, this kind of stand-off of this notion of the emptiness of ultimate truth and any singularly, finally true conceptual framework of things, and then our participation in the creation and discovery of theory and conceptual framework and logoi, etc., using all the aspects of our soul and our eros, and that stands against and kind of in opposition to what he's called 'modern theoretical truthfulness,' in terms of classical thinking about 'there is an objective truth.' And he continues:

When we know that "We know what we want to know," will to know in accord with desire, and cannot submit that desire to knowledge, or knowledge to truth, the nihilist gap has already opened.

So again, I'll try to [translate]. When we understand that knowledge and even truth is something that's guided by desire whether we admit it or not, whether we're conscious of it or not, that eros comes into our decisions about what is true, what conceptual frameworks we pick up -- when we know that, and when we, rather than see that as a problem, when we take it on board and go with it in the deepest and fullest and richest and most soulful way that we can, and when we "will to know in accord with our desires," he said "and cannot submit that desire to knowledge, or knowledge to truth" -- in other words, we leave totally aside any requirements that the desire guiding our knowledge be limited by something called truth, etc., or objective knowledge -- then "the nihilist gap has already opened." The gap of "You can think anything, believe anything ethically, philosophically, religiously," etc.

So just to say, I wouldn't agree with that "cannot submit that desire to knowledge, or knowledge to truth." There are, as I said in the talks on the Four Parables series, and just touched on it briefly the other day, there are limits to the eros. There are other constraints in our movement towards truth, and one of them is just this power of predictability that we talked about in scientific provisional truths, for example. That kind of tells me that I know something. It predicts, like Newton's laws predict -- we gave that example. But also dependent fading is telling me, is a prediction that tells me there's something valid here, a provisional truth.

But he said, if that's the case, if we know what we want to know, and we "will to know in accord with desire" (in other words, we let the eros lead), then "the nihilist gap has already opened." But I would say not, the nihilist gap has not opened if the desire is disciplined, if it's disciplined desire -- by which I mean that it's rooted in and shaped by a really sophisticated and deep and careful practice like soulmaking practice. Then the eros there is disciplined. It's not just desire willy-nilly, random desire that would open the nihilist gap. This is something else. This is actually disciplined, and so that gap doesn't open in the way that Wayne Hankey thinks.

[2:02:32] So what does open is a truth that's neither objective nor subjective, because this kind of trying to cling to a purely objective truth or notions that truth is something purely objective, completely, independently objective, it's very hard to kind of sustain that any more, as I explained the other day. But with the inclusion and incorporation of eros as a guide for our conceptual frameworks, for our logoi, for our ideas, for our notions, for our provisional truths -- the discipline of eros when it's in practice in a soulmaking way, in a sensing with soul -- then we arrive at something that's neither objective nor subjective. We arrive at truths, logoi, conceptual frameworks that are true, but neither objective nor subjective, which must be part of a new definition of truth, because the old one of something purely objective is very hard, as I said, to hang on to. And then it's not a nihilistic free-for-all. And in the area of ethics, similarly -- it's not a nihilistic free-for-all.

When we talked the other day, when we were talking about an ontology, or ontology or epistemology based partly on eros, and how eros might be redeemed, along with other aspects of our being and affects -- might be redeemed and given place in a sort of more sophisticated and more powerful and more far reaching ontology. So we talked about truth being not something one finally ever arrives at, but more of a journey. We talked about this notion of truth that Descartes had, that true or real things are just what's clear and discrete and easily comprehended by the mind. And how if we don't buy into that definition, and if we also see that truth may be more a journey, and there are provisional truths in science as there are in Dharma, and there's a whole journey there. Eros doesn't leave us with clear, discrete things, easily comprehended by the mind, but opens up their dimensions, and their shading into divinity, and their unfathomability, and their complexity, and multi-aspected nature. All this taken together, again, suggests that eros may be, in John Milbank's word, 'ontologically disclosive,' may have a status that is ontologically disclosive. In other words, it tells us about the truth. It tells us about reality. It leads us, and it opens -- 'disclose,' to open, to open up for us what might be 'truth,' but 'truth' in inverted commas, because truth is understood differently than in the sort of, well, let's say, definitely in classical modernist terms. So eros redeemed and given ontological and epistemological value regarding objects, but also regarding conceptual frameworks. This, to me, is a really exciting and important possibility, way of opening up our thinking and validating it, perhaps more positively -- validating eros, validating our soulmaking experience, validating what's possible there.

Last thing, I think, for today. It's interesting, just sticking with this idea -- we're talking about the possibility of soulmaking practice as basis or an approach to ethics. That can happen different ways. And what might it be just to dream into the possibility of that being more widely spread in society? And part of that, what would be needed there, is a recognition of the necessity to give some ontological and epistemological value, or value regarding ontology and epistemology to eros. And the notion of participation, and the notion of 'truth' that is not a final, ultimate, objective, independently existent truth, but a journey, and a continuous opening up of provisional truths, and participatory.

Last thing to say is interesting in this connection. I told this story in some other place, for some other reason, but years ago, my colleague, Stephen Batchelor, he was scheduled to teach a retreat on ethics. Ethics was the subject, and no one signed up for it. It got zero interest. And of course that wouldn't happen these days, because he's just very famous, so people would go just for his name, but I thought that was very telling, the fact that no one signed up for that retreat, because clearly no one was interested in ethics. And in a way, ethics can seem like a very boring subject. Again, if you go back to John Milbank, when I read that quote from John Milbank the other day, 'boredom,' if you remember, was in his list of what was kind of disallowed as having any ontological disclosive status. So eros, anxiety, boredom, trust, poetic response, faith, hope, charity, and so forth are disallowed -- ontologically disclosive status, he said.^[6] Well, one way of understanding a lack of interest is also something is boring. People don't sign up because it's not interesting, because it seems boring. Boredom also can be understood as a lack of eros. When there's boredom, there's lack of eros; when there's eros, there's no boredom.

But if we now just expand a little bit on this idea of the ontological and epistemological value of eros, potentially, then it might be that, again, what's happening is boredom, as an absence of eros, is telling me -- at its best, I mean, boredom at its best: "I'm bored with this." It's not because I'm not open to being erotically engaged, I'm not open to being mentally and soulfully engaged, but boredom at its best. It might be telling me, "There's not enough here in these ideas or this presentation or this picture of how things are. There's not enough truth value or truth possibility here," let's say, if truth is a journey. "There's not enough truth possibility." So that the usual way we think about ethics -- again, why people didn't sign up is possibly because how they thought about ethics was "It's just not interesting. It's actually boring," because the way it's presented, flatly, as a question of right and wrong and ought to do, without this other dimension, or these other, whole other dimensions, and this whole other depth of richness and soulfulness around the question of: "What is it good to be?", "What is the worthwhile life?", "What is the beautiful life?" It might be that people were sensing in that there's not enough truth value. When it's limited, when the ethics as a subject is kind of trammelled and amputated and dis-dimensionalized in that way, there's not enough truth possibility here, and that, actually, is where the boredom sense is coming from. There's also, one could say, there's not enough erotic possibility; they're linked together, and that's where the boredom is coming from. There's neither enough juice, nor enough truth possibility in the way we usually conceive of ethics.

Okay. Let's stop there for tonight.