The Image of Ethics (Part 3)

Okay, so again, we're looking at how Soulmaking Dharma and soulmaking practice can be used as an approach to ethics -- Soulmaking Dharma, both in terms of the philosophy, the conceptual framework, and also the nuts and bolts, sensitivities, sensibilities, and capabilities amassed and developed in soulmaking practice, how all that can be bought to bear on the whole question of ethics. And at the beginning of these ethics talks, we outlined seven or eight needs that I felt an ethical system should have, seven or eight items on a wish list for an ethical system or an ethical approach. And one of them was dimensionality, and we've started to talk a little bit about it, and I want to spend more time talking about that today, that particular need: the need to root ethics in some other sense of some other dimension, something deeper, higher, another level of being, something like that, and the need to have recourse to some sense of dimensionality or some other level to justify, explain, etc., with regard to ethical choices, with regard to ethics as a whole. Why ethics? Why this ethics? Why that choice, etc.?

And one of the things that's happened historically is that a certain kind of dimensionality provided by what we would call 'images,' or what we have come to call 'images' in Soulmaking Dharma, 'imaginal images,' a certain kind of dimensionality given historically by angels or daimons, or whatever one may call them -- we still call them as well 'imaginal figures,' angels, daimons. That kind of dimensionality they provide as being intermediate between human being, let's say, and the transcendent, ineffable, completely beyond of the ultimate Godhead, the divinity, of the Buddha-nature, of the dharmakāya, whatever you want to say. And that whole dimensionality that they provide just by being their intermediate. And we talked about how they reflect the attributes of God, of this otherwise completely transcendent being of whom or level of whom one cannot ascribe any attributes, to a level of the attributes of God, the angels, the daimons as refracting, reflecting, radiating those attributes of God, and our possibility as human beings, our birthright as human beings to be called by angels, and to also learn about and get closer to the attributes of God through the angels, and also to reflect and refract those attributes of the dharmakāya. Remember that etymology of the dharmakāya: a body of dharmas, a body of qualities, a body of attributes of a Buddha, of a cosmic Buddha, one could say, in the Mahāyāna. And that we can reflect, express, manifest that through our relationship with the angels, the images.

But come the Protestant Reformation, their insistence, their central insistence on the ruling out of any intermediaries between human and God. And then come further the Scientific Revolution and the rise of secularism, the steady, slow rise of secularism, that we are left in a position nowadays of needing to legitimize angels, images, daimons as, let's say, teachers or guides of virtue, of value, of ethics. So we've needed to put the whole thing in a new conceptual framework that takes into account and addresses everything that has come between, let's say, the Middle Ages, the medieval theology and thinking, and the thinking at the time of the Buddha, and what we have now in contemporary Western societies, so that I can say, and I can share, when I did share about a sense of praying to the angels, that has maybe quite a different sense than it might have had, taken literally, hundreds of years ago, perhaps.

And I can share that, and I can say that sometimes I can sense that. Sometimes I can sense that. I'm being very careful with the language here. Sometimes I can sense that I participate in the being of those angels, but that likewise, they participate in my being. And looking more carefully, more closely, I can sometimes sense that I participate in their thought, the thought of these angels. I participate in their sensing, in their action, in their speech. And again, likewise, they participate in my thinking. The angels participate in my thought. Sometimes I can sense that, that they participate in my sensing, especially when there's sensing with soul. The angels then are participating in my sensing, and I in theirs. They participate in my action, in my speech and communication. Sometimes I can sense all that. And the whole thing has both a sense and a concept undergirded by the imaginal Middle Way, or including the imaginal Middle Way, neither real nor not real. So neither real nor not real, but yet I can pray, and yet it is still powerful. My prayer is powerful. So the ontology here and the epistemology here is different. And we've had to kind of then shape that because of everything that's come between, partly resting on a lot of what's come between.

So I want to look a little further into this whole question, this whole area or element of our wish list, item on our wish list, need list, of dimensionality. And I started outlining four ways that dimensionality might have been provided in the past. And I want to pick that up again. And the point here, just to be sure -- well, it's definitely not a history lesson. But the question is more, what can we learn here? What might we learn? And 'learn' in the best sense -- I mean 'learn' in terms of, what does it imply for our way forward? What might we take from that? What might we have to modify? And as well, what might Soulmaking Dharma offer to these ways, to these possibilities of dimensionalizing, of providing some recourse to some sense of dimension? What ways might Soulmaking Dharma and that whole conceptual framework modify some of these attempts or ways of providing dimension, dimensionality? So that's really the point. And so we talked about these four.

(1) One of them was what we call, what has been called voluntarism. In other words, God commanded it. So why is this thing right or wrong to do? Because God commanded it. It's there in the Bible. And this is necessarily a dimension (and it should be obvious) because God, by his nature, in this way of thinking, is a being of a different dimension. And so if God commands it, the command of God, the Word of God is automatically something coming from a different dimension. And that's all the grounding you need. All the sense of dimensionality -- still, be clear, there's a very clear dimensionality there. Notice here the epistemology: God commanded it. Well, how do you know? Well, it's in the Bible. So the epistemological recourse (what's the authority about knowledge? Remember what 'epistemology' means: what knowledge can I trust?) is a reliance on scripture.

Now, to some of us that sounds like completely ridiculous or archaic. But it's very much there in the Buddhist tradition, and there are plenty of Mahāyāna texts, certainly in the Tibetan tradition, probably in the Indian Mahāyāna as well, I'm pretty sure -- in fact, almost certainly, there will be texts devoted just to epistemology. In other words, as I said, epistemology, we need to base our understanding of emptiness and our process with emptiness on an epistemology. Okay, you had this meditation experience. Something faded. If you're doing it that way, how do you know you can trust that knowledge? Or you used your logical, analytical meditation, and you saw it must be empty. How do you know you can trust logic? These all need to be epistemologically grounded. And always, in these Mahāyāna texts on epistemology, there's one category of epistemology, one category of valid knowledge, which is scripture. It's just, "Well, it's in a sutta. The Buddha said it." So that's always regarded that way. To some, this sounds, as I said, completely archaic and a little ... even silly. But it's actually very, very, common among most Western Buddhists, the recourse to, "What did the Buddha say?" And finding something in a sutta. "But da-da-da-da-da-da," and it goes back to "the Buddha said." I've touched on this elsewhere. It's a sensitive subject, but I just want to point out: in this voluntarism, what we're calling that, as trying to provide dimensionality, there is this epistemological basis in scripture, and the Buddhist tradition has had that very strongly for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's still alive and well, certainly in Asian Buddhism, and actually very much in Western Buddhism, Western-born and Western Buddhists as well.

And the ontology regarding God here is usually a kind of very simple reified God: "God just is. Definitely, God exists." Sometimes it's a more sophisticated ontology in which God kind of exists more than anything else exists. And very occasionally, it's an extremely sophisticated ontology, in the medieval -- actually ancient, going from Pseudo-Dionysius, etc., and Plato, in fact. Well, its roots are there. With Dionysius, you get this recourse to scripture as well, so it probably started -- and then maybe Philo, actually, even earlier, Philo of Alexandria. Doesn't matter. Anyway, the nature of God is beyond existing and not existing, and it's a quite sophisticated sort of negative theology that's incorporated. But usually, people who put a lot of emphasis on this just very simple voluntarism -- "God commanded it, end of story," about what's ethical and what's not -- usually the ontology regarding God is very, very simple, almost startlingly, naïvely simplistic, usually.

Okay, but something's quite interesting about this voluntarism, because after the Middle Ages, from the start of the Protestant Reformation, something also was central in the thrust of the Protestant Reformation and what they, again, insisted on. And a lot of what they insisted on was based in a theology of God's total and totally free sovereignty. In other words, God's sovereignty, God's power, was completely unimpeded by anything at all. God was free to make the universe any old way. In a completely irrational way, God could have said it's ethical to kill, and lie, and cheat, and steal, and commit adultery, and not respect your parents. He could have turned the Ten Commandments completely upside down (apart from the first one or two; they're actually about God). So God is completely free. What they were reacting to here was a tradition from Platonism and even Pythagoreanism that there's a kind of order in the universe, a rational order, so that the whole creation, if you like, of the universe had to follow, had to be ordered in a certain way. It was inevitable, inevitably flowing or emanating from the very nature of God, was that the universe had to be a certain way. And within that, ethics and the good life and virtue -- they all had to be a certain way.

So the Protestant Reformation -- a lot of what they were insisting on was really based in a really strident reaction to that idea: God is not impelled or constrained or trammelled to create the universe in any way at all. There's no rational order that kind of rolls. It's completely God's will. And that's a totally free will, totally free power and sovereignty. So there's no rationality in the sense of a cosmic order, or a rational cosmic order (in the first sense that I think we touched on the other day; I'll come back to that today). There's no cosmic order that implies or underlies ethics. It's just God's will. And that's a completely free will. There's nothing at all, in any way, that limits or constrains God's power. And so, the whole thinking of the Protestant Reformation was thinking partly from that very germ -- "We have to think of God this way" -- and Ockham, William of Ockham, and people like that, and then following that. Nothing at all to limit God's total, totally free sovereignty and power -- which also meant, as we touched on the other day, there's no place, then, for ceremonies, for ceremonies to make anything holy, or to be in part necessary for our salvation. There's no place for sacraments. There's no place for intermediaries, as we touched on. There's also no place for human action and human development to bring about salvation. Salvation is something completely God-given, completely dependent on the will or the whims of a totally free God. Nothing you can do as a human being to change that. And there are no intermediaries, no sacraments, no ceremonies that can help, no development of character, no development of virtues, etc. Nothing at all to limit the sense of God's power. Everything completely dependent on God's power. And with that, as we touched on briefly, no ceremonies, no sacraments, no intermediaries, no priests, and no special human action.

So no development, no dedicated, intense development in a monastery or anything like that made any sense. Salvation comes only from God, and therefore, with that, as a kind of corollary with that, there's this elevation of ordinary life. There's no longer a 'better' kind of life: the really good life is if you can become a monk or a nun, and give yourself completely to God, or be a priest, or whatever it is. Or time in church -- it's the time of the sacrament. That's the blessed space, and something else is not. So there's this elevation, then. It's like, with the wiping away of any place for ceremonies, sacraments, intermediaries, human effort, human striving, human action, with the wiping away of any place for all that, then ordinary life necessarily kind of expands. The place for ordinary life necessarily expands to fill that vacuum, if you like. So there's the affirmation of ordinary life, the elevation of ordinary life that comes with and after the Protestant Reformation. These things don't happen overnight. They're gradual. That was there from the start, right from the start. And Luther cancelling his monastic celibacy vows and marrying, etc., and the whole Protestant work ethic, etc. -- it's all tied into this.

Now, the elevation of ordinary life might sound to us at first like, "Oh, that's really non-dual." Then you have a really (what we would, in Dharma language, call) 'non-dual' approach or view, because everything kind of sounds like, everything kind of becomes holy. Ordinary life becomes holy. It's very Zen, almost, or some schools of Zen. But it's interesting. It might sound non-dual, but it's actually totally and radically dualistic in its theological origin. There's this infinitely powerful God, and then anything else, anything human beings can work to develop or strive to grow in themselves, etc., is irrelevant. So it sounds non-dual, but actually it's coming from a radically dualistic theological origin. And so, just to also make a sort of side point, sometimes people think the Protestant Reformation was in objection to, or in reaction to, the sort of corruption in the priesthood, etc. But actually, it wasn't primarily. That wasn't the main point. The main point was the theological point, as I said, going back to William of Ockham, etc. And it was about God's power, and not wanting to limit God's power.

If we think about this idea of voluntarism today, there are people in the world who still think that way, from very many different religious traditions. "It's just right, or it's just wrong, because it's there in the scripture." And taken very simply and concretely like that, and there's very little other thought about ethics or other grounding needed for ethics. And of course, at the same time, in our world today, there are, I don't know, billions, probably, of atheists. Atheism is very prevalent. So such an idea as voluntarism to ground ethics is completely not a viable, sustainable idea nowadays, for many people. And as I said, usually, when there is a voluntarism alive today, it's usually interpreted, again, through a kind of radical duality of human and God, and a kind of literalism. And if you remember back, it must have been in the "Sila and Soul" talks, probably near the beginning, and I sort of did a little exercise kind of comparing, let's say, someone who was a fundamental terrorist, a fundamentalist religious terrorist, and comparing their views, which can sound -- a very superficial hearing can sound like, "Oh, well, they're saying and thinking some similar sort of things that soulmaking, soulmakers seem to say," and just sort of debunking that by going and pointing out the differences there. So if you remember that (I'm not going to do it again, but if you remember that), two of the problems with that sort of fundamentalist stance, and then two of the differences from Soulmaking Dharma, were exactly that: the radical duality of human and God, which is not really entertained -- it's very difficult to entertain that within a Soulmaking Dharma context. I mean, you can, but even that's within a backdrop of, it's not really radically dual. You're just sort of temporarily entertaining something that's really hard to sustain within the bigger framework of participation and creation/discovery, or dependent on way of looking, and all that. Radical duality between human and God, and literalism, are two of the main differences.

So I suppose this voluntarism could be reinvigorated through the imaginal, through the Soulmaking Dharma framework, and reinvigorated imaginally with notions of duty and things like that, because they are elements of the imaginal in our framework. But again, have to be really careful if one chooses to play with that, because it really needs all the elements of the imaginal: neither real nor not real, not literalist, this participation, creation/discovery, humility. We ran through all that in those talks before, in the "Sila and Soul." It really needs all the elements. So maybe not impossible, but harder today, and certainly I would be a lot less nervous about it if, as I think most people, a lot of people would be nervous about it, perhaps, but I would be less if it was within a Soulmaking Dharma framework, with all the protection, and the softening, and the flexibility, and the wisdom of the Soulmaking Dharma framework itself, and all the elements of the imaginal. Anyway, that's one we talked about: voluntarism.

(2) The second one we talked about (I'm taking them in a different order tonight than last night) was, we talked about the cosmic order, and the cosmic order, the order of the cosmos being something that implied and guided our ethical stance, our ethical responses to life, and our ethical direction, and our development of our ethos. So you get this in Plato. You probably get it (I don't know much about it) in Pythagoreanism, whatever it's called. Anyway, but certainly you get it in Plato. So the cosmic order itself, once we see it, we can't help feel drawn towards the higher, using the lower elements of the order as kind of -- not really rungs, but something like rungs. Or they draw us up. Let's put it that way: they draw us up to the higher, towards the ineffable divine. So you get that very much in Plato and Platonic philosophy.

And then you come to someone like Augustine, St Augustine of Hippo, and so very much influenced by Platonic philosophy. His Christianity was a moulding, his theology was a moulding, really, of Platonic and Christian elements. He writes something -- so now, talking about cosmic order, looking at the possibility of notions of cosmic order providing a kind of dimensionality for ethics, providing a sense of other dimension or dimensions which can ground and explain our ethics. We talked about it. So this is from Augustine, from his De civitate Dei. He says:

Bodily loveliness [so attractive bodies] [is] made by God, [but] is nevertheless temporal, carnal, and a lesser good; it is wrongly loved if it is loved above God, the eternal, inward and lasting good. Just as the covetous man subordinates justice [the value of justice] to his love of gold [think of someone who doesn't care about justice; he just wants to steal gold or get rich, or whatever it is] -- through no fault in the gold but in himself -- so it is with all things. They are all good in themselves, and capable of being loved either well or badly. They are loved well when the right order is kept, [loved] badly when this order is upset.... Hence it seems to me that the briefest and truest definition of virtue is that it is the order of love.^[1]

There are two elements there that he's stressing: an order in the cosmos, in terms of a ranking of what's higher or lower. So to rank the value of justice above gold, above money, above getting rich, is appropriate valuing. Hopefully, most of us would tend to agree with that. To rank gold above justice, to love, pursue getting rich above justice -- quite common in the world -- is the wrong order. We're loving things not according to their order. So order and love, cosmic order and love, go together. There's an order of things, and there's an order of valuing that completely corresponds to that thing. And our love needs to be ordered with those scales of the cosmic order of things, and their value that goes with it.

So one interesting exercise would be to kind of consider how that compares and contrasts with Hartmann's scale of values, and for example, the transgressions that Hartmann talks about, transgressions of lower values being more grievous transgressions than the omission or neglect or failure in higher values, so that if we fail to stretch or aspire to some really high value, that's not such a big sin, in Hartmann's ideation and notion, than it is to transgress a lower value, like steal or kill or whatever it is. And in just that little paragraph, Augustine is a little too short, because then we wonder again about things like how Augustine's conception will -- would that eliminate the possibilities of antinomies at the same level? You know, what do we do with that, in Augustine's conception? Because there will be certain values that exist at the same level. Or maybe he's suggesting there aren't. Anyway, that's an interesting kind of exercise. I'm not going to go into elaborating on that. But it might be interesting for some of you to explore.

So first of all, I just want to say, how do you hear that passage from Augustine? Do you hear the kind of beauty of the ideas there, or do you hear it as some kind of Christian oppression, anti-physical, anti-body, anti-sexual, etc.? I can, certainly. I didn't grow up feeling oppressed by Christianity because I didn't grow up Christian. But I can hear the beauty in it. There's something very beautiful there, very generous, almost, very lovely in what he's trying to put out there, this ordered love for things, corresponding to their place in the cosmic order, in the hierarchy, and therefore their value.

[33:25] But how different, you know, is modern conception? Just notice how different is our modern conception, the sense of the cosmos as only ordered by its meaningless and purposeless physical laws. We have a sense, most people these days, of living in an uncaring, purposeless, and meaningless universe, without divinity or dimensions other than the physical laws. Physical laws are a kind of dimension. As I said the other day and before, you know, the laws that describe an electron's motion under certain forces are kind of another dimension, or can be seen as another dimension. The mathematical laws that describe an electron's motion can be seen as another dimension other than the actual material thing of an electron, or a muon, or a gluon, or a pion, or whatever particle, quark. Physical laws can be discerned as another dimension. That's all there is in terms of order and dimensionality. So for us citizens and children of modernity and postmodernity, the only order in the cosmos is, really, the physical laws. That's the only order in the cosmos. As John Caputo, philosopher, says: "[Science] is all the metaphysics [you're going to] get [or you're allowed]."^[2] I think his stance is very anti-metaphysical, as was popular until very recently, I think. And that idea came or grew as a consequence, it developed as a consequence of Descartes and Galileo and others, and their decision regarding what is real, what are real objects of knowledge. We touched on that.

So when we said, "This is the only thing that's real," then it becomes, "Well, this is the only way in which the physical universe is, that the universe is ordered." They go together. If we just decide, "Only these kinds of things are real. These kinds of things are secondary. These kinds of things are really, really tertiary." So even colour was something secondary, because it's something a human perceives. Again, it's not an objective, independently existing reality like mass or length. This was the thinking pre-relativity, pre-quantum mechanics. And they decided what was real. And then you're just left with a flat universe, only ordered according to physical laws. But Augustine wants to put love and order together, love of virtue and order together, love of things and the cosmic order together. And with respect to love, we do have strong feelings. We have strong love and strong eros in relationship with what we sense as deep, high, holy, divine, as having another dimension.

So this initial marriage, that correspondence that Augustine wants to make or emphasize, re-emphasize, between our love for everything -- we can love everything; we need to love it in the right order. Our love needs to be ordered, corresponding to its kind of intrinsic value, which corresponds itself, naturally, to its place in the cosmic hierarchy, in the cosmic order, the hierarchical order of the cosmos. Actually, just briefly as an aside, there seems to be an order in reading the Pali Canon and the sense of the cosmos there. The word 'cosmos' means 'order,' by the way, from the Greek. But reading the Pali Canon, getting a sense of the cosmos, we see it's a very different cosmos than most Westerners post-Enlightenment would consider, post-Western Enlightenment would consider themselves or feel themselves, sense themselves, take themselves seriously as living in. The Pali Canon cosmos seems to have different levels of being, divinities, and it seems to be ordered by karma and rebirth and transmigration between levels. You can be reborn in the Brahma heaven level, and then in this hell, or the Avici hell, or whatever it is.

So these different levels -- but still, there's a hierarchical order of a kind, but still, the whole thing is kind of purposeless. The cosmos itself is kind of purposeless, and not basically or overall good. And that would be a fundamental Augustinian and Platonic notion, I think, certainly Augustinian: that the cosmos is good, and its ordering is good. In the Pali Canon cosmos, there's some kind of order, there are hierarchies, there are different levels of being, etc., but the whole thing is essentially purposeless, and not, as I said, fundamentally, or taken overall, regarded as 'good'; the cosmos is 'good'; God's work is 'good.' That's not really there.

So we've inherited -- mostly from the West; we don't really inherit Pali Canon cosmos, most people. Maybe some do, but most people in the West, again, when we think, this is the sense of order we have in the cosmos: this absence of hierarchy. And it's no wonder, it's hard for most of us these days to seriously entertain Augustine's sense of the ethical life, the ethical life as one that loves all things, but loves all things in an ordered way, according to the sense, according to where they are on the hierarchy, where their value is, and loves, values things -- and loves the value in things -- in a hierarchically ordered way. It's very hard to seriously entertain that whole conception. So that if we, in our modern and postmodern predicament, if we're not already sort of fallen into its abyss, we sort of teeter on the brink of postmodern nihilism, both in terms of metaphysics and in terms of ethics, because we don't have that kind of dimensionality. So thinking about this cosmic order as a possible dimensionalizing and rooting and kind of guidance for ethics, support for ethics.

And you know, I think that even the vaguest sensing with soul, the sort of slightest movement into a sensing with soul, with regard to nature and things of nature, even the vaguest sense of that, the vaguest sort of exploration of that -- can get a sense that something like a mass species extinction that's going on right now, species extermination, almost runaway climate change, that these are -- even the slightest, vaguest sensing with soul, one would have a sense that these are sins against the order of the cosmos. That would be there, because even the vaguest sensing with soul, we're going to have some sense of the holiness of things, and the sense of dimensionality shading into divinity, and all of that. Species extinction, climate change could be felt as (whatever the words you want to choose) sins against the order of the cosmos. It's greater than the sin against the possible use of humanity, that if this bacteria in the Amazon or this fungus that's only found in such a rainforest or such an ecosystem, or whatever it is, or if that gets lost to humanity, or if humanity has less pasture land and less drinking water. Even greater, perhaps, than the sin to humanity of that loss, or the suffering for animals, there's a sense of a sin against the order of the cosmos, something that goes so deep as a sort of affront and pain to the soul.

Of course, all three concerns -- the concern for the plight of humanity, and particularly the poorest in humanity, the marginalized, and of course, the concern for the suffering of animals there, with their extinction, and also just the way we treat animals, industrial farming and all that -- of course they're there. But there's something almost of a different order of pain when we sense that we are sinning, we are involved and implicated in this massive, imponderable transgression against the order of the cosmos.

Anyway, so we can have a sense of an ordered cosmos, ordered hierarchically like that, very much. We can have that sense in sensing with soul. But in Soulmaking Dharma practice, we can also, even deliberately, move between entertaining any kind of, for example, cosmology, like Augustine's, a cosmology like the sort of flat, modern, postmodern one, a cosmology like the Pali Canon one. The cosmopoesis can come first. We can just entertain a certain concept or a certain vision, and a sense, if you like, of what the cosmos is and how it is ordered. And with practice, you can just move between that and see what opens up, see what happens, see what then the sense is. I put in an idea of the cosmos, and I put a cosmological idea in, and see what happens to the actual sense of things. With enough Soulmaking Dharma practice, and all the sensitivity and receptivity and meditative skill that's developed there, we can actually move, if you like, between different cosmoses, deliberately, and see what they do: what they do to us, what they do to the heart, what they do to the soul, what they do to the very sense of things, the very sense of matter -- all of that.

But going back to, picking up what Augustine wrote here, and he took the example of bodily loveliness or bodies, and then very easily we can -- or in certain religious traditions and others, it can be like, bodies are not holy. He's not quite saying that. He's putting it on a hierarchy. But with Soulmaking Dharma, the question is whether this body -- whatever body I'm talking about, mine or my lover's, whatever it is, or even someone who's just attractive to me -- the question is whether it's sensed with eros, whether it's sensed with soul. Remember, 'eros' is way more than sexual attraction. I'm sensing this person's body with eros. There may be no sexual attraction in it whatsoever, but there's eros there, in our sense of the word 'eros.' So in Soulmaking Dharma, the question is whether this body is sensed with soul, is sensed with eros. And when it is, when there is eros (in our sense), and that is allowed to ignite and instigate and catalyse the soulmaking dynamic, psyche, and logos, then there will be a sense of divinity in and through that body.

Again, it's so important; I really want to stress this -- here we have a sense of, there is a sense of a kind of ordering, and our love being commensurate and correspondent to that kind of hierarchical ordering in the sense of divinity. But the place, the position of something -- this thing or that thing, or a body or bodies -- on that hierarchy does not rest in the thing itself alone, independently, inherently, intrinsically. It comes in participation. How am I relating to it? And when I relate and sense with eros, when I sense with soul, then the divinity is right there, in and through that body. And therefore, it takes a high place on the hierarchy. It's not the thing itself. It's what's co-created, co-discovered in sensing with soul, in the relationship with the thing. This is really, really key in terms of ontology and how Soulmaking Dharma is going to, or can approach this -- all this question of dimensionalizing and cosmic order -- and actually, kind of open it up or shake it up in a different way, reorder the sense of order, if you like.

So let's linger with that a little bit, and the questions of dimensionality and ontology, because grounding our ethics in the dimensionality of a cosmic hierarchy, like Augustine, usually assumes, or usually kind of subsumed in that is a naïve ontology, an ontology which, still, most people today carry of independent, objective existence: this thing or that thing. And a person nowadays, most people don't believe in any kind of cosmic hierarchy or whatever, but there's a naïve ontology, assumed or subsumed within, as I said, of independent, objective existence. This order (if we're talking about this cosmic order), this hierarchy has independent, objective existence. And that, with the Scientific Revolution, and then the Western Enlightenment, seems trashed. That whole notion seems completely trashed. How can a person believe in that, such a hierarchical cosmic order as Augustine's talking about, after the Scientific Revolution, the Western Enlightenment, after they got really embedded in the culture, and they developed within the culture?

However, as we've talked about many times, now, today, with the developments, for example, in quantum physics, with our understanding of emptiness as I would understand it, with the developments recently in Western philosophy over the last fifty years or more -- all of those, or any one of those, kind of delivers or opens for us the possibility or possibilities of ontologies which don't assume independent, objective existence, but rather may involve or do involve more a notion of participatory ontology. We participate in creating/discovering reality. So John Wheeler, the great twentieth-century physicist at the forefront of so many developments and streams of development within quantum physics and general relativity and other areas of modern physics in the twentieth century, talked about a participatory universe, or the participatory universe.^[3] This is the nature of our universe; it's participatory. And let's make this really clear: it doesn't mean, "Yes, we take part in the universe, we participate in the universe just by existing. And by breathing, I breathe in the universe, I breathe it out. I eat it in, I shit it out, whatever it is, drink it in, I pee it out. We participate in society by expressing ourselves and voting." It doesn't mean that. We're talking about -- what he meant, and we mean -- something much more, again, radical and fundamental. This subatomic particle, this so-called 'fundamental particle,' this quark, this electron, this muon, this pion, this photon -- where it is, what it is (a wave, a particle), whether it is a 'thing' at all (in any sense that we can really use the language of a 'real thing'), how fast it goes, how much it weighs -- its very beingness is dependent on the way we look, the way it's observed. It's dependent on the observer. We participate in the creation of the most fundamental constituents of the universe. It's why Wheeler calls it the participatory universe.

So there's a possibility now of different, non-naïve ontologies that don't assume objective, independent existence, but rather assume reality is participatory. Existence is participatory in this very deep sense. So Soulmaking Dharma practice both leads to and involves, I would say, loving order in this way, loving what is sensed as highest or divine, or whatever words we might use, in the cosmic order, and it recognizes, it's based on this order, this sense of order, sense of divinity, sense of what is, let's say, highest or deepest or whatever, is neither objective nor subjective. We've gone beyond such naïve polarities of ontological thinking. So it loves order. It loves the high, and the deep, and the divine, and the dimensionalized. But it recognizes that order is neither objective nor subjective, and provides also the training to be able to sense in that way, to sense the divinity, to actually sense it, to really have that impact the soul, to recognize it. Provides the techniques, the practices to do that, and also to feel, to sense, to open to, and handle the eros that comes with it. So all of that, Soulmaking Dharma kind of allows and supports, both in philosophy and in practice.

And it doesn't need to only transcend the object: "This is just a material object. This is just a form. I want the Unformed, the Unfabricated." Yes, that movement and that possibility, I would say, is very much a part of what we're including in Soulmaking Dharma, but it doesn't only need to do that. That's not only where the highest is, in the more Unfabricated. I don't only need to transcend. It's just one of the possibilities. And it certainly doesn't do away with transcendence and dimensionality and just flatten the cosmos, or just kind of assume the reality of a flat cosmos. [55:48] Very loosely, there's a kind of historical parallel to this with Erigena. Again, Platonically influenced, influenced by Pseudo-Dionysius, and I think he was a monk, an Irish monk. And quite a radical, novel theologian. And there's a very loose parallel here, let's say, but humans, he would say, are created in the image of God, which means that they can, so to speak, think God's thoughts. If we use our mind well, if we use our soul well, then the thoughts that we have will correspond to God's thoughts, because we are made in God's image. And God's thoughts are the structure of the universe. So it's, again, a very Platonically influenced theology. So that if we use the soul or use the mind well, the order we discover through using our soul and mind well in the universe is just the order that God created and intended. Very loose parallel.

With the sensibility of sensing with soul, what it does is it opens up our trust for our sense of the divinity in things, of the Buddha-nature in things. Use whatever language you like here. And that trusting of our sense of the divinity that comes with sensing with soul, sensibility, automatically comes love and reverence towards that sense, towards what we sense as divine, automatically comes ethics, a steering of the ethics and ethical stance, and an ethical rooting in that sense of another dimension. But it's, again, neither objective nor subjective. It's participatory. There's a much more sophisticated ontology recognized here, it's based on.

I remember -- I don't know, it must have been, well, certainly in the last year -- I was in the chemo ward, getting chemo in the hospital. And I was sitting next to a guy who also had pancreatic cancer, metastatic pancreatic cancer, and we talked a little bit while we were getting chemo. And he was on a slightly different chemo drug than I was, but essentially the same. And we both knew that we were in a process of dying. His process too was quite drawn out. And we both, of course, knew the debilitating and limiting effects of chemo on the body and on the life, really, limiting very much what's possible with the life. So we talked a little bit, and he sort of shrugged and said, "Well, as long as I can still get around the golf course." And I was struck by that. Not that it was very unusual to hear that, but I just noted that in his shrugging and the way he said it and the whole tone of what was conveyed there,

there really didn't sound to me like there was much eros or dimensionality there. "Mm, as long as I can ... yeah, it sucks, chemo, and I can't do much in my life, but as long as I can get around the golf course." It didn't sound like much eros or dimensionality.

But I want to relate this to what we just said about order and objectivity and subjectivity, because golf might be, it might be, I suppose, an erotic-imaginal object for someone. For me, it would be much easier, it is much easier to see football that way. But let's say football. It might be that there is, there can be an erotic-imaginal object. I can have that sense, and there's dimensionality and divinity there, and even a sense of duty, if one, let's say, plays football, plays golf. If we talk about, for me it's easier to -- I can't quite see it in golf, or even -- I'll talk about football because I can see the beauty of really great football, soccer. I mean, it's just startling, breathtaking sometimes, really great football. What human beings are capable of, a sort of balleticism, the athleticism, the gracefulness with power, tactical shrewdness, the extremely quick thinking -- I just sort of, how does the mind do, think so quickly to make these very sophisticated and reactions like that? The levels of perseverance -- all of that, I can really sense with soul, or potentially sense with soul at times, really great football. And there's the sense that this is refracting the angels. There's something in football or soccer that can be, at times, and it could be translated to anything, perhaps, that is somehow refracting the angels. So I'm just using the football example. It's much easier for me than golf, which has never really appealed to me at all. But the point is, it's not intrinsically in the object or the activity, but it's in the subject/object relation, the sense of the angelic function of something, or the possible angelic function of something, and then everything that goes with that. And a person might have, "I need to continue with this thing," whatever it is, because there's some imaginal duty or duty to the daimon, duty to the angel. And there's a dimensionality there. So it's not intrinsically in the object or the activity, but it's in the subject/object relationship instead.

Now, someone might hear that and say, "Well, then a serial killer, for example, could claim that that was soulmaking for them." But let's, again, bring a little intelligence here, and be careful here. The soulmaking image, the genuinely imaginal soulmaking image, for example, if one felt one's duty was to play football in life or whatever, the soulmaking image, if one felt one's duty was (yeah, we'll use the example) to play football, and that through that activity, oneself and others could have a sense of angels coming through, then either that soulmaking image -- it won't actually be football, I would say -- or there will be a sense, if it is football, if the actual image, imaginal image, involves football, there will be a sense there, a feeling that it doesn't need to actually be football. It's something in the image of football that one might have and have a sense of duty in relation to. It's something in there -- say, its 'message' (but I don't like that word, although it's related to the word for angel; 'angel' means 'messenger'). But what the image is showing is something more general. So if it's a genuinely, authentically imaginal image that's making one feel that "I need to do this" (let's use football as an example), it either won't be football that is the image; it won't be an image of football that's making me feel like my duty is playing football; it will be something more general. Or if it is football, there will be somehow implicit in the image and the understanding of the image, the soul's understanding, relationship with the image, the knowledge will be that the duty is something more general; it doesn't have to be that.

[1:04:30] So translate that to the serial killer, could claim it's soulmaking -- it doesn't really work. If the image does seem to be only football and seem to say only football, it's probably not imaginal. It's probably a reified ego-image. So if someone is getting images of serial killing and then claiming, but it's only images of serial killing, and the duty seems to be serial killing, it's not going to be an imaginal image. It won't work that way. But it would be a reified, ego, pathological image, not an imaginal image.

When something's genuinely imaginal, there is this sense of meaningfulness, divinity, angelic function, etc., dimensionality. I didn't really hear that in what he was saying. As I said the other day, it's completely taboo to say to someone, "There's a hierarchy of values, and you're not really paying attention to that. You're not really ordering your life in relation to a hierarchy of values." Or even to say, "There's a hierarchy of way of relating and way of sensing different things, and you're not doing that." It's taboo in our culture. And this also has to do with, very much to do -- its origins lie in the Protestant Reformation, this kind of affirmation of ordinary life. Some things now seem unquestionably to be part of a worthwhile life, or constitute part of a worthwhile life, or lay claim to be. "This makes this thing, or doing this makes a worthwhile life. It is the good life, the beautiful life." They seem unquestionably, in our culture, to be so, often. But we don't often realize that it's historically contingent.

So for example, it was only in the eighteenth century, or beginning in the eighteenth century, only beginning in the eighteenth century that affection for one's spouse and children -- which of course was always there; there's always been affection between ... obviously not every spouse and parents and children, but generally speaking there's been lots of that. As long as humanity has been around, there's been affection for spouse and children. But it was only really beginning in the eighteenth century that it then started to be considered really important, really one of the things that makes life worthy, and that this is a significant constituent or qualification for a worthwhile life, a beautiful life. So it just came from this elevation of the idea of the ordinary life. But as I said, we don't realize the historical contingency there, and something has gotten entrenched. And also what's gotten entrenched is this taboo of questioning what makes a worthwhile life, and whether you or I are really living a worthwhile life or orienting our lives that way. That becomes socially taboo, to suggest that, to bring it up, to question someone else that way.

Okay, so then, historically, there was, as I said, this idea, long-standing idea from ancient times through the Middle Ages, etc., of this hierarchical, hierarchically ordered cosmos. And then, with the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, there was a collapse -- or for large segments of the population, one couldn't really entertain that idea any more. What there was instead was an emphasis on order in the universe. But it wasn't hierarchical, as Plato and Augustine would have it. So moral philosophers like Locke and Hutcheson also emphasized order, the order of the universe, but not hierarchical order. The order they were talking about and tried to invoke as a support for a kind of dimensionalizing, another dimension, a support in another dimension for ethics, was a much more Cartesian order, from Descartes: this idea of the universe as a clockwork of interlocking parts that were designed by God to work in a way, these parts of the mechanism, for the mutual preservation and flourishing of, I think, human beings. I'll come back to that. And again, I have this question of what 'flourishing' means, so that's also very contingent on the philosophy and the sense of dimensionality, and all these things are tied together.

But basically, what we have here is an order that's horizontal and flat, and not dimensional. There's not a hierarchical order. There's just a flat order of the cosmos. And with that goes an idea of good, of moral good, of 'the good life,' as being only happiness or pleasant sensations. So the good life and the beautiful life is not one which is directed towards the highest, oriented, let's say, 'upwards' on the scale, or on the rungs, on the staircase of the cosmic order. But what is good is only pleasant sensations and happiness. And this was claimed to be a result of 'naturally' -- I'll put that in inverted commas -- a 'natural' observation of biological and physical systems. This is what human beings want, maybe animals too: only happiness or pleasant sensations. Jeremy Bentham, who was regarded as the father of utilitarianism, basically, that's the philosophy: we're only interested in happiness and pleasant sensations. I'll come back to that. But he said, or wrote: wanting anything higher than just simple, pleasant pleasure, pleasant sensations, natural, pleasant sensations of the body, etc., and happiness, wanting anything higher is just pride. Or it comes from superstitious fear.

So again, we talked about Charles Taylor commenting that a lot of these kinds of philosophies were parasitic. And when Bentham wrote or said that, wanting anything higher in life is just pride or superstitious fear, motivated by pride -- you want to think you're better than you are, or you want to think human beings are better than they are -- or superstitious fear of being punished, or something like that, by God, and Charles Taylor points out that this idea that Bentham said, this kind of rhetoric, the judgment of Bentham there, is actually parasitic on the Protestant Reformation's well-established ethic of ordinary life. So this elevation of ordinary life, this affirmation of ordinary life, had already become well established, versus any kind of hierarchical ethics with regard to virtues and values. So Bentham could say something quite polemic like that, but it was already resting on a kind of well-established ethic of ordinary life, let's say. You don't try and rise above gross sense pleasures. So there's a shift in order from vertical to horizontal, and with the view of the horizontal order comes also a kind of flattening of what the goal is of ethics, what we need to take care of in society, but also what we need to aim for in ourselves, what we should be aiming for in ourselves -- nothing high, just pleasant sensations, just simple happiness, 'natural' happiness.

So this is quite interesting, I think. This is very interesting. And post-Reformation, there was so much, often, really quite vitriolic rejection of, for example, asceticism, and of high moral goals. For example, the ones that would be espoused by some really devoted religious or spiritual practitioners. There was really a quite scathing rejection of asceticism and high moral goals. Now, some of that, of course, was related to this elevation and affirmation of ordinary life, and this de-dimensionalizing of the hierarchical cosmic order. But some of it, for example, coming from Montaigne or Hume, came more from a kind of psychology where there's like, "Oh, I need to give myself a break from these high moral standards, and this pushing oneself, and the striving to be good, and striving towards high virtues." So the thrust in Montaigne and Hume is often, "Give me a break. Don't be proud. Get real, real about what a human being is, and what a human being should strive for, and the capacities there." And that attitude is very common today as well, and you can hear it in a lot of Dharma voices as well. And sometimes it goes with a kind of despising of what is lofty, a kind of despising of what is noble. (I'm using the word 'noble' as in 'aspiring highly,' with the dignity of aspiring to high virtues and what's beyond reach. I'm not using 'noble' right now in Hartmann's way of using it; we talked about it in "Sila and Soul.")

So I wonder, actually, quite what's going on here. And I wonder if, in fact, that whole attitude reflects an anti-libidinal stance, reflects a refusal of eros. (We talked about it -- pretty sure it was in the Eros Unfettered talks. It might have been in another series.) Actually, is my philosophy, my Dharma, my ethical thinking, my ethical philosophy and practice, my whole life, is it actually driven by a refusal of eros and a kind of anti-libidinality, fear of libidinality, or an imposition of a limit on it? Or is it held, this whole philosophy, in a very limited range of eros and libido? Someone who holds this kind of view doesn't like the idea of the very lofty striving, doesn't like the sort of 'noble,' despises it in some ways, more "Give myself a break. Get real. Don't be proud." Sometimes, such a person is very friendly, relatively warm. They enjoy socializing, they enjoy a glass of good wine with a good meal. But all of that -- the friendliness, the relative warmth, the enjoying socializing, the wine, and a good meal -- that's not what we call 'eros.' You can have all that, and it looks like, "Oh, the person's living, enjoying company, and they're enjoying interaction with human beings, and they're warm, and they're enjoying simple pleasures of life: food and good food, good wine, whatever, in moderation."

But there can still be all that, and it's held within an anti-libidinality. The striving ascetic who may be living in solitude, or seeking out solitude, doesn't go for the good wine, etc., seems a little aloof, maybe -- the striving ascetic may have much more eros, much more libido. So I wonder, sometimes at least, is it actually this that they're objecting to, that they're shrinking from, that they're uncomfortable with -- the eros and the libido that go with lofty aspirations, moral aspirations, and the elevation of that, or the striving towards what is elevated? Is it actually an objection to, a recoiling from, a fear of the eros and the libido, a refusal of that that's driving things?

So that's, to me, a really important question. Again, what's the psychology, what's the soul-style that underlies, in this case, the ethical style, the picture of the Dharma, the range of the Dharma, the vision of awakening? Talked about this before. There's something particular about anti-libidinal stances and anti-libidinal positions of soul, or imprisonments of soul. Because if the soul loves soulmaking, if that's the sort of axiomatic principle -- the soul loves soulmaking -- it must love eros and be okay with eros in order to let the soulmaking [happen], in order for soulmaking to happen, because soulmaking needs eros. So anti-libidinality is kind of a locking of the soul, preventing it or limiting the range of its soulmaking, and therefore limiting the range of what it can sense, what it can view, how it can conceive, how it conceives whatever -- ethics, Dharma, human existence, etc. So that's one thing I'm wondering about.

But also, the second thing, very importantly as well, is that with a Soulmaking Dharma approach to ethics, then, there isn't an insistence on an absolute material standard or demand regarding ethics and virtues. Rather, Soulmaking Dharma really only gives us, hands us a kind of request or invitation to a process, to a practice, to a training in approaching questions of ethics and ethical situations. And that training, I would say, is not more difficult than either Montaigne or Hume's trainings in philosophy, in literature, in introspection. Both of them are -- some people regard both of them or one of them as great introspectionists, masters of the art of introspection. So it's not that ethics imposes an absolute material standard or demand. It's an invitation to a process, a practice that brings a different relationship with the things of the world, and different ethical enactions, virtues, etc. But you can get a sense, with all this, of how there is perhaps a suppression, or at least the absence, the disallowing of eros and love -- maybe a total suppression, or a partial suppressing of eros and love in relation to ethics, in relation to values and virtues.

[1:23:13] Francis Bacon was, I think, a Puritan, was certainly very influenced by Puritanism. And he's one of the philosophers who was regarded as really -- and we can see historically -- he really emphasized a sort of instrumental stance: science, knowledge needs to give us power, power over nature, power to do, power to make this work, technology. And it's just worth pointing out that originally, there was a real religious reasoning and motivation behind this instrumental stance. And I said he was a Puritan, or certainly very influenced by that Puritan outlook. So science is, in this view, the correct and God-willed view and use of things, correct also because it brings human dignity of having rational control. Rational control over things, in relation to things, gives a human being dignity. But it's also the correct and God-willed view and use of the things of the world, for our preservation, and for our pleasure and happiness, so that the instrumental stance was seen as, initially, still religious, religiously rooted -- an instrumental stance, meaning how we approach the things of the world. How can we use them, make them part of our technology, technologize them? The instrumental stance originally was part of the way we serve God in creation, by preserving ourselves, and by preserving God's horizontal order. And there's also the injunction there to treat things as instruments, not as ends in themselves. So you can hear the kind of Puritanical tenor of that. [1:25:23]

I want to briefly read something. Again, Charles Taylor writing about this:

The instrumental stance in modern culture ... is supported not just by the new science [that's the Scientific Revolution] ... not just by the dignity attaching to disengaged rational control; it [was] also ... central to the ethic of ordinary life from its theological origins [onwards].^[4]

I'll explain: as time went by, the theological origins got forgotten, and the whole theology got jettisoned from all this. But it was

central to the ethic of ordinary life from its theological origins on. Affirming ordinary life has meant valuing the efficacious control of things by which it is preserved and enhanced as well as valuing the detachment from purely personal enjoyments which would blunt our dedication to its general flourishing.

So there's the religious, Puritanically influenced emergence of the idea of the instrumental stance in relationship and in the context of horizontal order that God designed. But then what we have, when the vertical order is abolished, and a horizontal order takes primary place in the cosmology, in the view of things, then that horizontal order is not an order of divine signs, of divine forms and ideas. So in other words, it's not that this thing or that event or that person is a refraction of an angel, a sign, a theophany of an angel, an expression, a manifestation, or an attribute of God, etc. That's all gone. Rather, the order that we're talking about is parts of a machine. Things become not that, not diaphanous reflections and refractions of particular aspects of divinity, particular attributes of the dharmakāya, the Buddha-nature, the divine. Rather, they become parts of a machine whose parts work together to bring about God's plan. It's quite a different view.

So this cosmic order, again, it's just one dimension. It's what we might call 'horizontal.' It's a clockwork kind of ecosystem view. And it's horizontal, if we think about it. It's still horizontal, the way most people think about it these days. Still might have the top of the food chain is whatever -- this animal or whatever -- but there's no difference of dimensionality. Even though we could draw a food chain, between the bottom and the top of the food chain there's no difference of dimensionality there. There's only a qualitative difference in terms of who eats whom, and how much. The whole thing's actually horizontal, the way we think about interconnectedness these days, and ecosystems. The cosmic order is just this one-dimensional, horizontal kind of clockwork machine. And if that's the case, if that's the view, then something like species extinction is not really a problem unless it affects the functioning of the ecosystem, unless it affects the functioning of the whole, unless the function of the whole is impaired, unless the working of the clock is affected in a way that is problematic enough for us, as humans, because of our investment and our dependence, or that is problematic for large other parts of the mechanism -- in other words, the whole mechanism itself might be impaired.

So the reverence there for order is not reverence in a kind of soul or religious sense. It's a kind of marvelling, perhaps, at the intricacy of the web of life, the web, the awe at the horizontal order of the cosmos, whether that's regarded as being designed by God, or just evolved purely materially without God. It's not reverence in the way that we would use that term. It's the whole mechanism's functioning that is important, rather than each of the individual elements being holy just because they are connected to and related to the divine through their places in the order, as they would be in a hierarchical, ordered cosmos, each thing a sign, a theophany, a showing of one or other of the attributes of God, each expressing an attribute, an aspect, a quality of the Buddha-nature, of the dharmakāya, of what in Platonic terms [is called] the 'intelligences,' the thoughts of God, each thing a sign, a form, a refraction, an expression of that. [1:31:30] We think about species extinction in a horizontal view of the cosmos: it only matters if it either affects us when we lose that species, like the bees -- people often say, "Oh, if the bees go, then the pollination will go, and we'll go hungry." Isn't there something else about, in our care for the bees and the plight of the bees as a species, as species -- something of a sense of their necessity, their beauty? And that beauty has a dimensionality and depth, as we talked about before when we talked about beauty in other talks, other series.

So in a hierarchically ordered cosmos, each thing has its value, has its place, and it is a refraction of God, the divine. But in a horizontal cosmos, "Yeah, we can lose this species, that species, and that whole thing, as long as it doesn't affect the whole ecosystem -- or us." And note, also, how totally anthropocentric was the view and concern of those who kind of promulgated this horizontalizing of the cosmic order when it first emerged, and its relation with ethics. Adam Smith, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham -- this idea of everyone's happiness being prioritized -- but who's the 'everyone'? It's very anthropocentric. Actually, it was even more circumscribed than that, I would say, but anyway.

Okay. So there's voluntarism. There's the notion of cosmic order, in different ways, that can give dimensionality and underpinning to ethics, and we talked about how Soulmaking Dharma might come in and, as I said, modify, support different versions of that.

(3) Rationality was another one we mentioned, so rationality as a kind of dimensionality. For someone like Kant, Immanuel Kant, rationality, which was for him connected with morality and our freedom, were -- they're just facets of the same thing for him. But to be rational was more important than to be happy, than to have pleasure. So right there, you sense this -- he's establishing a dimensionality, a dimensionality in rationality. Rationality is more important than to be happy or to have pleasurable feelings. So rationality as an attempt or a way of providing dimensionality for ethics, and an ability to -- again, what are we going to root our ethics in? What are we going to have recourse to? What is it going to be supported by? It needs to be made sense of in another dimension, by its relationship with another dimension, by the implications streaming from another dimension. And so one of them could be just rationality, as it was for Kant. [1:35:22]

Now, rationality in the usual way that we would understand it this way, it's just our ability to think clearly, our ability to make conclusions, deductions, etc., our ability to be logical -- that as an underpinning of ethics, as a dimensionality of ethics, that human (well, presumed human, maybe human) capacity to do that. But rationality, as we conceive it in that way, is actually a kind of skill. Unless we're just following a rule that's devised or discovered, rational rule that's devised or discovered by someone else, then for us to be rational is, actually, we're relying on a skill that we have developed as human beings, partly that we've been taught in school, etc. And we think, "Okay, that's interesting." If you want to make that a dimension, and then comparing with soulmaking practice, isn't discerning soulfulness or discerning whether something is soulmaking, whether this sense of virtue is more soulmaking than that, that that value is more soulmaking than that -- discerning the soulmaking, the soulfulness in regard to an image is also a skill. Most people would think, their first reaction on such a thought, "Yeah, but you know, soulmaking, the skill in soulmaking is much, much harder to develop than the skill in logical thinking, in rationality." That was my first thought.

But then I thought, well, maybe that's just because of how we've been educated, that that's the norm, that we're taught from an early age, and there's a great deal of emphasis in our culture placed on being able to think clearly, rationally, etc., in that sense. So that becomes the norm, and therefore that seems to us much -- I'm not sure if this is right, but is it that it's just an education? It seems much easier to use our rational intellect in our culture, seems much easier than to kind of learn all the subtleties and sophistications of Soulmaking Dharma practice. I'm not sure. It's really a question.

But it's interesting to note that John Locke was also sceptical. So he was a big promoter of human rationality, this capacity to function and use our thinking mind as a basis for ethics. He was one of the main promoters of that. But at the same time, he was also sceptical of most humans' ability to be instrumentally rational regarding ethics. So he believed as well that God's law, as it was written in the Bible, as well as God's threat of eternal punishment or eternal reward in hell or heaven, was actually a help from God, a help to humans to make the right choices, because though he was principally promoting rationality, he was also sceptical of humans' ability to actually be rational in an instrumental way. So God, in God's mercy, seeing that, God actually then put out these promises of eternal reward if you are ethical, and promises of eternal punishment if you are not, and that helped human beings make the right choices.

So that's very interesting. A point I also want to make is, here was a new idea: to base ethics in the dimension of rationality. And even the instigator of that ideal was, "I'm not sure if everyone can do this, actually. I think ideally everyone would, should be able to do this, but I'm actually not sure." So we have recourse to another idea. Maybe also with the soulmaking approach to ethics. It's like, yeah, ideally, it would be great if everyone could be taught Soulmaking Dharma and soulmaking practice and actually learn that. If the whole culture was so radically, extravagantly, wildly different that that was the case -- and still, have the thought, "Hmm, not sure, not sure that everyone would be able to do that." I don't know. It's a question.

So I think I mentioned this when we just introduced the notion of rationality as a dimension, as a possible dimension, the other day. But again, drawing on Charles Taylor, he makes the distinction (I'm not sure it's his, originally, but it might be) between two uses, or two meanings, of the word 'rational.' (A) There's what we might call procedural rationality, and (B) substantive rationality. So I'll just explain those briefly. Procedural is what I just referred to. It's the ability to use the mind, use the process of logic and clear, rational thinking to deduce something, to decide something. There's a procedure, rationality as a procedure, a way of using the mind, instrumental rationality. On the other hand, substantive rationality is more what someone like Plato and people much earlier than John Locke really meant by rationality. It was really that there is an order to the cosmos, and human beings, to be rational means to perceive that order, perceive that hierarchy, and to conform one's being, one's whole mind and soul and heart and eros in correspondence with that order of the cosmos. That's what it meant to be rational. To perceive and to order one's life rationally meant in correspondence with this cosmic order. So that's substantive rationality.

So the word 'rationality' has meant very different things, and it's come to be used. If we say 'rationality' as a basis, as a dimension for ethics, it's come to be used in very different ways. So for example, Philo of Alexandria is a very significant figure because he was the first person to combine the Platonic philosophy with the Jewish religion. And so he was actually kind of disregarded in the evolving stream of Jewish theology, but in Christian theology he was absolutely seminal, first person to kind of integrate those two -- the Platonic and the Christian, the New Testament and the Old Testament. Sorry -- he did the Old Testament, but later, people incorporated the New Testament. Anyway, he thought that, again, the human mind, because it's akin to God, it's like God's mind (so Erigena picks up on this idea much later, but its origins are kind of with Philo, a little bit, I think). The human mind is akin to God. It's like God, because it's made in the image of the divine logos.

So it's interesting. In the New Testament, John's Gospel begins: "In the beginning was the logos." In the beginning was the Word.^[5] And that idea of logos actually comes from the Platonic thinking. It comes very much from Philo. It gets picked up. I don't know who originated it. It's not quite clear where it came -- anyway, this idea of human being, being made in the image of the divine logos, which means the divine reason, the divine rationality. That's all rooted in the Old Testament, in Genesis, where it says God made man b'tselem elohim, in the image of God, in the image of the divine.^[6] And later, in the medieval times, Maimonides interpreted it very much, I think, in a procedural way, actually. In other words, that we are given this rational functioning, and that's what it means to be in the image of the divine, made in the image of the divine. We can use our minds in this procedural rational way.

With Philo, I think it probably meant something different. It meant we are made in the image of the divine logos, the divine reason, and therefore, we have, to some degree, a capability to receive and discover the truth about realities beyond time and space -- in other words, about what exists higher in the cosmic order, the angels, the intelligences, the levels of divinity. So Philo is using a more substantive notion of rationality there. They're very different. Procedural rationality, procedural meaning, and substantive, very different meaning of the term 'rationality.' But also through history, you get, I think, times when they're often used together.

When you think about Soulmaking Dharma practice as a sort of process or guide for ethics, you think: "Okay, it's primarily, then, in that language, primarily procedural," because we're really talking about, again, a practice or a procedure, just like using our minds logically is a kind of procedure that we can be trained in, that we have some innate capacity for, say, definitely to think logically, for the rational procedure. But we can be trained, and some people are extraordinarily trained in their ability to use the rational mind in that procedural way. So if we think about Soulmaking Dharma practice as a process or guide to ethics, approach to ethics, you think, "Oh, it's primarily procedural, I guess," because you're doing this practice, and you're using the practice to support or discriminate or arrive at an ethical choice.

But I guess Soulmaking Dharma practice approach could also be regarded as substantive, if we borrow Charles Taylor's terms. If we entertain a logos, a conceptual framework that eros is epistemologically significant, that in John Milbank's words, it's "ontologically disclosive."^[7] And we talked about this the other day. It's really, really important. If we entertain the idea that truth is this journey rather than a final arriving point, and that, together with other navigations, eros has epistemological significance, because it can open up for us the levels of truth. It's the engine for that journey. And we're understanding 'truth' in the participatory way, of something that's create/discovered rather than just discovered. So if we entertain a conceptual framework that involves a different view of eros and gives it a kind of place, an important place in our ontology, in our epistemology, and if we think of truth in this way as more of a journey, an infinite journey into the truth of things, and we appreciate that it's create/discovered, we participate in that, then also we might see Soulmaking Dharma as substantive, as related to something that's true. But the whole notion of truth and how that relation comes about is developed quite differently than one might usually think.

So Origen was one of the great early Christian theologians, and he wrote something like:

The soul of man has an intuitive longing for God [actually this is quoting now from someone writing about Origen, a guy called Chadwick. And Origen was insistent; he won't] believe that this yearning [that we have, this eros that we have] can have been [somehow] implanted in [a human being's] heart [and soul] unless it is capable of being satisfied. [And then, interesting point:] Just as each faculty of our senses is related to a specific category of objects, so our nous [which we can translate as our ... let's call it our 'soul-knowing'] is the correlate of God.^[8]

So we're set up to move into truth, and our eros is actually implanted by God. And it wouldn't be implanted as divine unless it was capable of being satisfied. So again, we can translate that into soulmaking terms. Soulmaking is never finally satisfied, but it gets satisfied on the journey, the infinite journey of soulmaking, the infinite journey into truth. Again, in what he's saying, we can have the sense, we will have the sense, as we develop soulmaking practice, of our eros being divine, having its roots in the divine, being given to us by the Buddha-nature, by the dharmakāya, whatever words you like. And in the movements of soulmaking, as the soulmaking dynamic opens, further levels, aspects, beyonds, dimensions open, that eros is satisfied. And then it moves again. But there's something in the infinite movement that is not unsatisfying at a deep level, but profoundly satisfying. So again, we take these ideas, and they have to be understood differently and modified through the understandings and the conceptual framework of Soulmaking Dharma.

The procedural rationality, what Taylor calls the procedural rationality, the Western Enlightenment assumed that that kind of rationality and a throwing off of superstitions, and being 'natural' in terms of just what was a 'natural' human pleasure, being 'natural' without imposing religious dogma and ideas on top -- there was an assumption that that kind of rationality and naturality would bring pleasure, happiness, and would also bring the universal good. And obviously there's some truth to that, definitely -- a lot of moral progress came from the Western Enlightenment. But this kind of faith in that kind of rationality was shaken, I think, by Freud, in terms of, is it actually possible for that rationality to really rule in the psyche, in the psyche full of other horrors and repressions and kind of bestial, uncivilized impulses and movements and realities abiding in the id? That started to question things a little bit. By the time World War I was finished, the First World War was finished, the absolute carnage and devastation and incredible loss of life there, people started to really question whether rationality itself, or rationality alone, was enough, and whether it would just deliver pleasure, happiness, and the universal good.

In the Western Enlightenment thinkers, it was also assumed that disengaged rationality, that sort of stance of the scientific method, that through that, a person adopting a disengaged rationality towards their existence would obviously see the bigger picture. And in seeing the bigger picture of things, they would let go of their selfish interests, because they can see the bigger picture. Again, there may be some truth in that. But others said that no, turning and tuning to nature is what allows us to see a bigger picture and let go of selfish interest.

I don't know. Maybe the bigger picture is only ever as big as the conceptual framework's big picture. Maybe what really will rule is the conceptual framework. And in the Enlightenment, there was a certain conceptual framework of what the big picture of the universe was, and what man's, human beings' place in that universe was. So maybe it's the conceptual framework that will limit what the big picture is. How big the big picture is depends on how big the big picture is in the conceptual framework, more than anything. [1:54:50]

And then again, it's interesting: in the Soulmaking Dharma, we have this theory or idea that the soulmaking dynamic, the dynamic of eros-psyche-logos will mean that the conceptual framework, whatever conceptual framework we entertain -- there will be a breaking of the vessels, just through the expansion and the stretching that come with the soulmaking dynamic, the stretching of the walls, of the structures of the conceptual framework, and the image, and the idea of things, through the expansion and deepening, fertilization of psyche and logos and eros. There will be a breaking of the vessels, a stretching of the conceptual framework, and maybe a breaking of the vessel of the conceptual framework. And a new conceptual framework has to be create/discovered, created/discovered. So that's in the Soulmaking Dharma's sort of metaconceptual framework as well. So there were a lot of assumptions in the Western Enlightenment. Some of them were borne out, and some of them clearly, historically, were seen to be misplaced or only partially valid.

For Kant, for Immanuel Kant and others, human rationality was God-made -- God-given and God-made -- and was also, as I said, in the image of God. I think that's what Maimonides took that to mean. But for Kant it certainly was. And human rationality was also, for Kant, the same as our freedom. Our freedom was bound up with our being rational. We are moral, rational agents. That's our fundamental, true nature. With Hegel, who came a little later, human thought and art and religious explorations and expansions of religions, human endeavour in all that is just an expression, a movement of expression of a larger progress or movement of what could be translated as 'reason,' what often is translated as 'reason.' And that's a divine thing. So whether we take the Kantian view -- human rationality is God-made; it's part of what it means to be made in the image of God -- or the sort of bigger, Hegelian view that human thought, human rationality, human art, human religion are expressions of a larger movement of cosmic reason developing itself, growing, expressing itself, and that is a kind of divinity.

So these were prevalent and very powerful views, but then historically, what happened was, rationality was held up as important and offered and assumed as a dimension for ethics, as a supporting dimension for ethics, without any reference to God. So the God bit got jettisoned, got cut off. Similarly, the notion of hierarchical order was dismissed and replaced with an interconnected, horizontal order that was designed by God, and then eventually just a horizontal order without any reference to God. There's a movement through history, so we're just left with rationality -- meaning instrumental rationality, what Taylor calls 'procedural rationality,' our ability to think logically. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said:

[Rationality] which knows no principle [will not] raise me above the beasts.^[9]

So there's this question. It's a very important question: is rationality -- our capacity to think logically and clearly and make deductions -- is rationality sufficient as a dimension for ethics, as a soil for ethics, as a dimension that actually provides recourse for ethical thinking and practice? Is rationality sufficient? So we still have to decide: what are the aims of rationality, what our rationality is trying to judge? So is it that we're just, for example, trying to judge, as the utilitarians would say, just increase pleasure, increase something called 'happiness' and decrease suffering, without trying to discriminate among all the varieties of happiness and suffering, and put them in some order? And why? And if we say, "All human beings are worthy of respect," then why are we saying that? That has to be given some, again, basis in another dimension. Why are all human beings worthy of respect? For Kant, it was because human beings are -- that's the true nature of human beings: they're rational, and that's God-given, and that's in the image of God. Rationality itself had this kind of almost semi-numinous quality. It was something almost holy. It was a thing, for Kant, almost of another dimension.

So we need some kind of metaphysics. I don't know. Would people have that view of rationality today? That it's a kind of divinity or divine dimension, or even a higher dimension? Just our ability to be logical -- is that enough grounding for ethics? Do we need, does ethics need a better or a more sophisticated or a more powerful or more convincing metaphysics? For example, why are all human beings worthy of respect? Because of the spark of divinity in them, because of the Buddha-nature that they embody, carry, express, because they are theophanies, whatever it is. But anyhow, the question I really have: is rationality sufficient as a dimension? Because nowadays, we think of rationality in a different way than Kant and Hegel, and even Locke, who made it something thinner than Kant and Hegel and came before that. Still, I'd say, well, okay, but there's this other level of God as well, pointing. If we've lost all that, do we not need a better metaphysics to justify, why are all human beings worthy of respect? Why are all human beings equally worthy of respect? How are we going to ground that?

So again, as I said in the "Sila and Soul" talks, someone like Richard Rorty will try not to have dimensions, very hard -- they're absolutely ruled out, flatly and explicitly. There's no recourse to any other level of explanation or meaning or dimension or anything like that. But he ends up kind of talking in circles or betraying himself, because actually, his writing slips. He betrays himself in that. It's impossible not to. So I think, I wonder: is rationality sufficient? I'm not sure. We still need some kind of metaphysics, even if it's a metaphysics of the numinosity of rationality, somehow. But then that implies a dimensionality that perhaps even suggests another dimension. So again, Soulmaking Dharma will provide, does provide other metaphysics, other groundings, other dimensions, but in, let's say, an ontologically novel way. [2:03:58]

Okay, so we had voluntarism. We had cosmic order. We had rationality.

(4) And the other one was just the view that we ground ethics just in the simple idea of reducing suffering and increasing pleasure and something called 'happiness.' Reducing suffering -- you know, that sounds very Buddhist. These other ideas sound much -- certainly voluntarism; I may say, "No, the Buddha said," is still active for some people. But cosmic order and rationality, not really. But a lot of Buddhists would just -- that's how they view. That's the most important thing. That's what guides ethics. That's where we're grounding ethics: just in a fundamental principle of reducing suffering.

So let's look at this one. Again, there are some assumptions here. Adam Smith's regarded as the father of modern economics, the father of capitalist economics. He and others assumed a potential harmony of interest. If everyone just pursues, if everyone just simply tries to increase their happiness, increase their pleasure, then society and economy will structure itself in a mutually beneficial way, because there's a potential harmony of interest between human beings. So I don't know if everyone agrees with that. There's, again, certain ways it could be true. I'm not sure what Karl Marx would think. And there are ways we could see, "Well, hmm. That really doesn't work. It's not true, sociologically speaking, economically speaking, politically speaking." But in terms of ethics as well, what about antinomies, which are defined as exactly not a harmony of interest, but a conflict of ethical pulls, conflict between values -- whether that's within a person or between two people or groups, or whatever it is? And what about hierarchical comparisons? Even more important -- there's this complete flattening, with this kind of view, of any kind of means to evaluate or create, or discover or create a sense of hierarchy and hierarchical comparison between different kinds of suffering, different kinds of pleasure, different kinds of happiness.

So if we say, "Reducing suffering is the most important thing. That's our compass. That's our purpose. That's the highest value. That's all we need to think about in terms of ethics" -- so a lot of Buddhists would, if you pushed them, they would say something like that. And I'd say, "Well, why? Why is reducing suffering the highest value? Why is that the compass, the purpose, the most important thing?" Because as we pointed out in the last talk, and previously in the "Sila and Soul" talks, it depends on the view of suffering, which depends on ontologies and all kinds of things. So for example, if I'm a staunch materialist, then actually, it's hard for me to justify this idea that reducing suffering is important, because really, what suffering is is just a kind of -- it has no reality in itself. It's just the movement of particles in the universe, just like anything else is. So again, reducing suffering, making that the highest value, or increasing pleasure, increasing happiness -- I have to base that in something else, in another level of ontology, another dimension, to justify it somehow.

It also doesn't really help. Reducing suffering -- it seems, "Okay, that's simple. It's really simple. That's my compass in life. That's what I do as a Buddhist," perhaps, or whatever. "That's how I decide things." But it often won't help very much at all in deciding what to do in a situation. "If I do this, this much suffering will follow. If I do that, that much suffering will follow." But actually, we need an infinite kind of arithmetic. Who the hell is going to know the full consequences as they play out in the web of existence? This affects that, and that condition affects that condition, and this incoming condition affects how that condition progresses or not, or what it affects. There's an infinite arithmetic required to then discern which action in many, many cases.

And I think even more importantly, what about this question of hierarchy of suffering? Certainly, this infinite calculation that's needed -- that's kind of impossible. But what about this hierarchy of suffering? We still need to acknowledge a hierarchy, even if it's just individually determined -- it's this person's hierarchy. This suffering feels worse to bear. This suffering has not so much impact as that kind of suffering. Even if it's individually determined, we still need to acknowledge that there's a hierarchy, and somehow have a way of sorting through the various kinds of suffering. What about the sufferings of meaninglessness? What about the suffering of a lack of soulfulness in life, of soullessness? What about the suffering of having a sense that I'm not really doing my duty? I have no idea what my duty is, or I do know what it is, and I'm just not doing it? How does that measure up in the hierarchy with physical pain as suffering, or with dying early and having a relatively short life, or not being able to go on holiday? How do we demarcate, delineate, measure? There is hierarchy, even if it's personal. So I think this one, we really need to think a little harder, if that's what we say: "Oh, it's just about reducing suffering."

Jeremy Bentham, who promoted utilitarianism, this idea: it's just about maximizing happiness, pleasure, and minimizing unpleasant. So that kind of idea -- and it can be, certain interpretations of Buddhadharma, it's just about reducing suffering. It's just very, very simple like that. That's the kind of view that's held and the answer that will be given, whether it's just the self suffering, or self and others, and kind of more Mahāyāna, supposedly Mahāyāna kind of view. So the interpretations of what reducing suffering means, and what the motivations are involved in reducing suffering, reducing unpleasant, because this is what human beings want: just reduce the unpleasant vedanā, reduce suffering, increase the pleasant vedanā. This is a kind of small, flat psychology. It won't do. It's too poor. And the idea that we can kind of successfully compute that kind of total suffering from one choice and total suffering from another choice, sort of massive, impossible project of one-dimensional arithmetic -- it just doesn't really stand up.

So with the Western Enlightenment, there was a very strong current within it: 'utility only,' meaning people desire, basically, 'natural' desire -- it's a normal, natural desire for people to desire pleasure and happiness, and the absence of pain. And then any conception of the order of things is completely irrelevant. Only the consequences in terms of pleasure and pain -- that's what was important. That was the almost -- not slogan, but something like that. So 'utility only' -- nothing about cosmic order or anything like that, just the consequences in terms of pleasure and pain. How can we maximize pleasure and something called 'happiness'? How can we minimize pain and unpleasant? Actually, that whole philosophy and that whole ethical philosophy is really an attempt at a non-dimensionalizing. There's no dimensionality there. So I'm not even sure whether I should have included it, but it's actually a non-dimensionalizing. I'm including it because a lot of people think that way. But the very sense we have of a hierarchy of sufferings -- again, even if it's individual, if mine isn't the same as yours, the sense we have of a hierarchy of sufferings implies, it suggests, it hints, it points at some kind of dimensionality, some kind of ordering of values. And utilitarianism completely ignores that, completely ignores any possible relative hierarchizing of values. And if things are in a hierarchy, it's because they're rooted in, they somehow correspond to a dimensionality. The sense of a hierarchy of suffering itself hints that. It points to, it suggests.

You may have heard a teaching in the Buddhadharma (it's, I think, fairly common): you realize you're falling. You're falling without a parachute through space. "Oh my goodness, agh!" You know, massive dukkha, falling. Then at some point, you notice, there's no ground. There's no ground. I'm just falling, but there's no ground. Therefore, there's no problem, because I'm not going to smash into something and die. So falling, but there's no ground. And often, that's given as a teaching. Sometimes it's (I think) given as a teaching on emptiness or groundlessness, but actually when you go into what's being taught there, it's more a teaching about impermanence. But either way, that doesn't matter; what I want to get to is something else here. What if the meaning, the highest meaning in life was to recognize that there is no ground, so there is no problem? So there's no suffering. And maybe, if you want, you can add that to help and show others that, so they realize there's no problem, that's the highest meaning in life: to recognize that there's no ground, so there's no problem, therefore there's no suffering, free of self, and then to show others, to help others see there's no ground, so no problem, so no suffering. How does that sit with you? Just imagine that. Just people falling through space, really afraid, then realizing there's no ground, and then explaining that to each other, so eventually, everyone is just falling through space, and without a sense of problem, without dukkha. Just linger with that as the highest meaning of life, moving towards that vision, that moving towards that vision is the highest purpose in life. Just imagine these beings falling through empty space, but none have a problem with it. That's the goal. How does that sit with you?

What I want to say here is, if you feel called to defend this view of the meaning of life, the meaningfulness of life as reducing suffering and helping others to reduce their suffering, look closer. Just look closer. Is this goal of, for example, realizing there's nothing to do, nowhere to go, and then there's no suffering, and that we're just falling through space -- just falling through space, but there's no problem. We help each other see there's no problem. Is this goal of not suffering, helping others see no suffering, what I want to ask is, if you look closer, if you linger with it and look closer, doesn't it have some other appeal too? For example, when we're not worrying about the falling, when we just realize that we're just falling, going nowhere, nothing to do, no problem, then we sense the beauty, or the radiance, or the Buddha-nature, or the holiness -- if you don't like that word, the mystery -- that the appeal of the 'less suffering and help others to suffer less' has something that's hiding behind it that's not being articulated, that is hidden. So you might have to stay with that a little longer.

But this is one of the sort of central, I don't know, contentions, insistencies, explorations, theses of Soulmaking Dharma. There's something often unexpressed, unarticulated, hiding behind the view we have, the conceptual framework we have of Buddhadharma -- for example, the way we explain it to ourselves and to others -- that's not quite fully illuminated or fully even self-honest, let's say. And Soulmaking Dharma tries to expose that and point out: there's something hiding behind it. There's something that's not being articulated here, usually. Or at least that it needs another level. It needs something more than the ending of suffering, even if that's the ending of suffering for all beings. So this is one of the areas where Soulmaking Dharma comes in and tries to open things out, give more of what might be needed, offer more of what might be needed.

So voluntarism, sense of the order of the cosmos, rationality, decreasing suffering, increasing happiness -- these are some of the ideas, some of the ways a sort of dimensionality or rooting of ethics has been offered, and the varieties of them through history. And again, just using them as a sort of framework, really, to understand something, open something up, see what Soulmaking Dharma and practice can offer into this question of ethical philosophy and practice, and the dimensionality that's needed there, the dimensionality that we need to ground and root our ethics.