The Image of Ethics (Part 4)

Let's continue our exploration, inquiry, explanation, and unpacking of some of what Soulmaking Dharma and sensing with soul, practices of sensing with soul, might bring to the whole domain of ethics and how we think about ethics, how we relate to ethics, and our ethical choices, our ethical life, how Soulmaking Dharma can really include ethics, and how it might support our notion of ethics, our idea of the ethical life, perhaps in ways that it needs supporting these days. And indeed that's where we kind of started, with this idea that perhaps there are some needs that we can identify, and we listed seven or eight needs that any sort of approach to ethics, system of ethics might have to incorporate somehow these days. At least, that's how I would think of it. And so we've gone through a few, and they're all completely interrelated and imply each other, involved in each other, but today I'd like to explore a little bit the need related to the sense and the idea of what a human is, what a human being is, and what a human being can be. [2:00] So how we think about ethics and how we approach ethics must somehow impinge and affect, hopefully in a helpful way, the sense and the notion of what a human being is, and what a human being can be, that that whole idea and sense of our humanity is very much, and should be very much tied in with our sense of ethics, so that the two (our sense of ethics and our sense of our humanity) should imply each other, should feed each other, should support each other, should be congruent with each other.

So just to make sure that all this doesn't just sound like a sort of very waffly exercise in sort of abstract philosophy, or worse, sort of history of Western society or Western philosophy, I wonder if we can really get a sense, help to get a sense of really grounding what we're talking about, what we're attempting to talk about today, in a real, lived sense, in a real, experiential feel for, "Oh yes, this is what we're talking about, and this matters." So perhaps most people, hopefully, most people who should be listening to this talk have had enough experience with Soulmaking Dharma practice that they've, for instance, had even just a couple of images, perhaps, that have really touched them deeply. The whole experience of the way the imaginal opened up, and how pertinent it was to their particulars of their life and their situation, and the sense of beyonds there, and the sense of the other elements, and duty and beauty and eros, and loving and being loved, and eternality and reverence and grace, and all of that. Most people listening, hopefully, will have had at least one or two experiences where the soul has been really impacted. And in that, as we've said, because when an imaginal image is allowed to do its things, the soulmaking dynamic is not interrupted, not blocked, there's the image, and as an erotic-imaginal object, so to speak, and then the self will also become imaginal. So hopefully, most people listening will have had that kind of experience, maybe even once or twice, where the whole imaginal constellation has begun to subsume the sense of self. The self becomes sensed with soul, imaginal, so to speak.

And so if you can remember back to those experiences and the sort of profundity of them, and the sense of "Oh, wow, wow. This is really another order of sense of things than I'm used to, a different order of a sense of self than I'm used to" -- different even than emptiness or dissolving in jhāna or mettā, or whatever it is. See if you can just get a sense of that. Is that possible, to remember that? You don't have to invoke it completely, but just remember a little bit about it right now. And then if we can perhaps delineate a spectrum, at the other end of this, at one end of the spectrum you have such an experience of your humanity. So not just a sense of yourself; what I want to point to here is your sense of your humanity -- that in that, when the self was brought in and involved in the soulmaking dynamic, and the self became imaginal, and the self was sensed with soul, yes, there's a different sense of self, but with that, too, there's a different sense of your humanity, your depths, who you are, your relationship with divinity or Buddha-nature, and the cosmos, and all of that. See if you can just remember the sense of your humanity there, the sense and the logos also of your humanity there, as part of the sense of self that was there when you were sensing your self with soul.

So maybe that's, on a spectrum, at one end of a spectrum, and at the other end is just the normal, perhaps, sense of self, sense of humanity (that's more accurate), the normal sense of humanity that we, most people walk around with, move around with today in our culture of Western secular modernity -- just the normal sense of what the human being is, the normal feel of that, the normal idea of that. Of course we could go further, when someone's full of self-hatred, etc., but let's just stay with that sort of norm, that norm of Western modernity. Stay with that norm of Western modernity, that sense of your humanity, of our humanity, at one at end. And at the other end, this sort of sense of humanity when the self is sensed with soul, part of an imaginal constellation, self/other/world.

Maybe in the middle, for some, there's a sort of grey area, or not so much grey area but a continuum, let's say, where (depending on what circles you move in, etc.) there may be a sort of prevalence of kind of (I don't know what you call them) New Age ideas, etc., about angels and being shamans or witches, and that sort of identification, and maybe even practices and rituals, etc. Also maybe the sense of your humanity that you might have had if you take seriously the bodhisattva vow, or if you're in a ceremony of taking the bodhisattva vow, and feeling the self as bodhisattva with that aspiration. Perhaps that affected the sense of your humanity in some way, perhaps, or the idea of having Buddha-nature or being Buddha-nature. There are many possibilities. And at the risk of being contentious, let's put that in the middle. More what I'm pointing to is more just when there's a sort of idea of something, and maybe a kind of practice, but it hasn't really turned the soil and ignited in the way that you know that soulmaking practice can. So there's a kind of something, there's a kind of different ideation that's supported by the people around you. Maybe there are ceremonies and rituals and certain language, etc., maybe certain practices, maybe a change in experience. But it's not quite of the order of what we're talking about when soulmaking practice really ignites, and the imaginal really gets going, the authentic imaginal.

So we have this spectrum: the norms of secular modernity, this sort of middle ground where certain ideas are sort of doing something in the psyche -- maybe certain practices, certain rituals, certain ceremonies, certain communities and languages -- and then the soulmaking sense of one's humanity. Can you just linger with that spectrum, either the two ends or the whole spectrum? And just compare. Compare the senses of humanity -- the ideas, but also the very sense of one's humanity. So this is what I'm talking about. It's not abstract. We're really talking about something that's not just in the realm of ideas or philosophy or history. It's really got to do with that, and that degree of import and impact to the human being, to you, to me.

[11:00] And then I wonder, as we go through the talk tonight, if you can hold that remembered sense, or those remembered senses -- the remembered sense of the normal human sense of your humanity, or that contemporarily normal sense of that, and also (or alternating with) your remembered sense of your humanity when you were profoundly touched by an imaginal practice or soulmaking sense or sensing with soul -- just lightly in the back of your mind, the back of the citta, as a kind of reference or references, throughout this talk, throughout the listening. Just to really make sure, as I said, that it's anchored in a sense of the import and realization, a palpable realization of the import of what we're talking about. We're not talking abstractly here. So just as much as possible, very lightly in the background, I wonder if that might help digest and assimilate and empower, really, the listening.

So this is the wish list item I want to look at today: the sense and the idea of what it is to be human, and what a human being can be. And last time we talked about dimensionality. And we gave out these four ways that are a sort of dimensionalizing of ethics, or are providing of something or other in another dimension to secure, to found, to root, to ground ethical thinking, and the ethical justifications in four areas, four ways, principal ways in which that was given in history. And we looked at how Soulmaking Dharma kind of could modify them, or what it would have to say about them, etc. And so, one of them was, as we said, actually a non-dimensionalizing -- the utilitarian. Or commonly, for some people, a kind of Buddhist notion: just decreasing suffering. That's the most important thing. That's the primary issue and the primary purpose: decreasing suffering, or increasing pleasure or happiness, and without really spending any time differentiating between the different kinds of suffering. So that was one of them.

And when we talk about differentiating between different kinds of suffering, we're not talking about, for instance, your child gets upset in the supermarket when they want, they see some candy, sweets that they want, and you say no, and they start crying, and they're suffering. And in your mind, it's like, "Well, they're suffering now, but I'm saving their teeth later, and their metabolism, and possibly their brain from deteriorating into ADHD, etc." So we're not talking about that kind of comparison of suffering. We're not talking about, as I think Ajahn Chah said, we're not talking about the suffering now, comparing a suffering now that just ripens in more suffering, compared to a suffering now that brings about or enables less suffering in the future.^[1] We're not talking about that kind of comparison.

We're talking about more things like, as I said, gave the examples the other day, or given examples in the past of kind of like, you know, why chemo was so difficult to me. Going into a certain chemo ward in a certain hospital felt very, very difficult. And I pinpointed it: it was a soul-suffering more than a body-suffering. Body-sufferings -- there were plenty of body-sufferings wrapped up with chemo. Something caused a suffering in my soul that was really, really difficult to deal with, the hardest thing to deal with, to me. And then I was trying to explain we had set up this ritual with Catherine, when I was going back to chemo, and just trying to find the right soul-orientation to it, and had this little crucible, and was cutting fingernails and bits of hair, and pricking myself, so bits of blood, etc., bodily elements in there, giving them up, and the question of whether giving is a part of soulful ritual, a necessary part of soulful ritual. But there was something which I actually can't remember -- I was thinking, well, what about my eyes and my ears and the mind, and what that has to encounter in there, that that feels like a wounding to the soul? So there was something in the ritual, which I just can't remember now, that captured the soul-suffering, and the suffering for the mind, for tomorrow's mind that would go into the chemo tomorrow, for giving up, this giving of elements of my body today. There was something for the mind. I can't remember. But anyway, what we're really talking about is different kinds of suffering, like how there's a way of approaching ethics that just ignores any difference between different kinds of suffering -- soul-suffering, for example, versus bodily suffering, sufferings of meaninglessness versus physical pain, etc. We talked about that.

What I want to say now is that refusing to make a differentiation between different kinds of suffering, refusing any hierarchy of sufferings, that they're actually sufferings of a different level in the being, that refusal in utilitarian ethics, or for some people, their Buddhist-based ethic is just about reducing suffering; in utilitarianism, just about increasing pleasure and happiness and reducing unpleasant, reducing suffering, reducing pain. What I want to say is that refusal of differentiating and hierarchizing suffering corresponds with a flattening of the human being, a refusal to acknowledge and to conceive and to sense that a human being has also dimensions. And these different kinds of suffering are, if you like, wounds at different levels of or different dimensions of the human being.

If we talk about that other potential dimensionalizing, which is an attempt to dimensionalize in what's called 'voluntarism,' just that God said so, usually that's conceived with, the human being is quite flatly conceived. And it goes very much with a post-Reformation theology without intermediaries. And the human is just flatly conceived. The dimensionality comes in the radical duality, and in the huge distance between the human being and God. But the human being themselves, or humanity themselves, is actually quite flatly conceived, usually, in that voluntarism philosophy, basis for ethics.

If we take the attempt to provide dimension for ethics in the cosmic order, then the vertical cosmic order, the hierarchical cosmic order, usually always goes with a sense of the dimensionality of a human being -- that a human being, in themselves, or is themselves a being that is characterized by having different dimensions, different levels of our being, different levels of our soul. Whereas the horizontal cosmic order, which came to prevail and predominate, historically, much more over a notion of a vertical cosmic order, that horizontal cosmic order, again, unsurprisingly, brought with it, concomitant with that was a notion of the human being, a flat notion of a human being, much more in common with a lot of aspects of our contemporary notion of human being. [20:57] Not completely, because there are other complications historically: for instance, our interiority. These are things that came later and came with -- well, they also have a long history. But generally speaking, we can say there's a flattening, in the sense that I want to talk about, of the human being.

And if we try and offer rationality as a possible dimension, other dimension in which to ground and to which to have a recourse for our ethics and our ethical thinking, then it depends on the metaphysics that goes with the whole idea of rationality. So for Kant, for Hegel, certainly for Plato, rationality implied a dimensionality of the human. Certainly for Plato and Hegel, it certainly implied a kind of dimensionality of the cosmos, kind of, in very different ways between Plato and Hegel. But they're implied in that idea of rationality. Again, it corresponds, there's a correspondence of the human being to the cosmic order. And to open to the cosmic order, and then to set one's life up erotically, really, in correspondence with that order -- that's rational, that's rational human behaviour and rational human thinking, in the larger sense of the word, for Plato. And for Kant, the rationality had a kind of numinosity to it, because it was part of our essential nature, part of what God had given us, part of what it means to be made in the image of God, etc.

But with our current, dominant use of what we mean by 'rationality,' just what's called 'procedural rationality,' again, at first, it might have been, "Oh, this is God-given. This capacity is God-given." But now, over time, through history, and with increasing secularization, I'm not sure how different people view rationality, and how capable it is of providing that other dimension that ethics needs. And it almost never really does. No one would ever really claim that, for example, say, this is where a human being's dignity lies, in their rationality, because then someone who's brain-damaged, or got some impaired mental functioning in terms of their logical, rational capabilities, if a person was strict with the view that rationality provided that dimension, then we would treat them with much less respect, etc., which is generally not what we do in certainly Western courts, in terms of human rights, and that kind of thing.

[24:27] But the question here, again, what I want to focus on today is, what do all these different ideas and attempts at dimensionality -- how do they influence our sense of what a human being is and what a human being can be? We looked, too, briefly at the history of the Protestant Reformation and their rejection of any intermediaries between humanity and God. And that meant a rejection of angels as well, of course, angels as intermediaries, which means, in our language, no images, no daimons to refract the divine attributes. If you think of a kind of pure, bright, intense, white light, and it reaches a prism, and then it refracts into different colours, all coming out at different angles, different wavelengths, different frequencies coming out at different angles, maybe that's one way of understanding: "Ah, this pure, white, undifferentiated light of God -- it has all these different attributes, or these different colours and wavelengths in it, but the prism refracts them differently." The angelic world refracts them differently, so we can separate them out, so we can digest them more, see their beauty more. It's almost like the white light is definitely beautiful, but then this rainbow of other colours -- we see more of the beauty of the divine, the Buddha-nature in it. And we see it in a bigger way. We spread it out through the prism. And perhaps that's a way of thinking of what the world of the angels does, and what images do.

But in the Protestant Reformation, there was this refusal of intermediaries, therefore refusal of angels, therefore refusal of a dimension that refracted the divine attributes, and a refusal, then, of seeing ourselves also as, in turn, reflecting and refracting those divine attributes through a sort of ladder from the divine, from the Buddha-nature into the world of devas and angels, and into human being. [27:02] So this rejection had a lot of influence in history regarding what the human is, a lot of impact on the notion, the sense of what a human being is, and on their relationship to God, and on their relationship to the cosmic order or the cosmos. So what is a human being? You know, if we talk again, tying it in with something like species extinction and the crime of species extinction -- so yes, of course, that's a crime against the individual animals, uncountable numbers, uncountable suffering of individual animals. And yes, of course, it's a crime against the species, if we can say -- can there be a crime against a species? We talked about Polly Higgins, etc., and the crime of ecocide, hopefully making it into international law. So yes, is species extinction a crime against animals? Yes. Is it a crime against the species? Yes. Is it a crime against the cosmic order, or even the planetary order, the order of life on earth? Yes.

But is it not (I feel it is also), or can it be regarded as a crime against humanity too? Species extinction is a crime against humanity too, not just because we are probably biologically dependent on many of these species and the way they work in the ecosystem. What I want to focus on more now, right now, is because of our potential soul-connection with other species and with ecosystems. 'Ecosystem' is such a cold, scientific-sounding word; let's say with forests, for example, with coral reefs, with oceans. One way of understanding what a human being is is that they're profoundly connected. Our soul as a human being is profoundly connected with other species, other ecosystems. They are theophanies that we are called to witness, to open to, to sense with soul, to know their beauty, to know their depth, to know their divinity. And that potential soul-connection -- because of course, it's often really not realized, that potential; we don't feel these things as a crime against humanity, or not enough people do, not enough human beings do. But maybe that potential soul-connection, that capability to sense with soul and feel species and ecosystems that way, is (whatever you want to call it) deep or high, part of our humanity. It's an aspect of our soul, a dimension of our soul.

Or even like light pollution, the fact that it's so difficult to find a place in the northern hemisphere, in the Western world, where one can really see the stars well, and lie down on the earth at night, and open up to the magnificence of the heavens, and mystery there, the sheer scale of it, the radiance, the depth of it. Is the fact that there are less and less, or a shrinking amount of places where one can actually see that many stars -- is that also a crime against humanity? Or noise pollution. There are so few places outside, or a shrinking amount of places where the dominant sound is not mostly the sound of some kind or other of internal combustion engine basically burning fossil fuels, loudly, as opposed to the sound of birdsong, or wind in trees, or whatever it is. Are these crimes against our humanity as well? What does it mean to be a human being? What is a human being? What can it mean to be a human being? What should it mean to be a human being? To me, these are really, really important questions.

[32:36] So we talked about the Protestant Reformation. I certainly don't want to vilify the Protestant Reformation, because a lot of really good stuff came out of it, as much as a lot of difficulty in terms of wars and things, but also in terms of, as I said, trying to trace historical threads that have their origins there. Martin Luther, instigating the Protestant Reformation, in a way, had a very, let's say, pessimistic and poor view of the human being. And it's so poor that the human being was totally reliant on divine grace, in Luther's view, in the Protestant view. There was very little a human being could do to work towards or ensure their own salvation. There's a total reliance on the free will of God to save us. And with that (and we touched on this the other day), the sort of flip side of that, the corollary, what that really means is that there's very little place for the cultivation of ethical virtue. That loses its place as anything that's going to move you closer to God, or open up the sense of the divine for you. So any kind of extra striving on the path of monks or nuns, or whatever it is -- it's all pointless. And ethical virtue itself, the whole notion of the virtues, kind of gets undermined. The whole notion of cultivating and aspiring to the virtues gets undermined in terms of salvation, as does any notion of ritual or sacrament or any other extraordinary activity. [34:37] There's very little place then, again, for the love or the eros, for that sort of extra reaching that souls are capable of, supererogation, this going beyond.

So at the time of the Renaissance, you had people like Nicholas of Cusa, and Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and they held, or they were promoting a kind of more exalted view of the human being, and wrote a very beautiful text about that. And Luther was really moving in the opposite direction. And he emphasized the fall, meaning the fall of Adam and Eve eating the apple, getting expelled from the garden, the fall. And that was central to his theology. Of course, that fall, and that expulsion from Eden, that was always there in Christianity and in Judaism. Even when people espoused a more exalted and exalting view of the human being, there was still always some mention of the fall. But Martin Luther insisted that that was -- he placed that very centrally, the fall, and that human being, human nature, was completely corrupted by original sin. It was completely corrupted. Why? Again, the flip side of that is, then, the necessity of total dependence on redemption through God, through Christ. Salvation only comes through God. There's nothing in us that we can rely on, develop, work on, etc. So paraphrasing a historian called Jill Kraye now, she says:

Man [or humanity] was therefore unable to make any contribution to [one's] own salvation. [It's all up to God. And then she continues:] In Protestant thought ... the spiritual impotence and depravity of post-lapsarian man [that means post-fall, post-expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and that just means this is how we are. The fall, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is just something that's happened. You're born into that. You're born into original sin. The spiritual impotency and depravity of post-lapsarian man] became a central doctrine. [And then Calvin, who was very central in this movement of Protestantism:] Man's high opinion of himself, according to Calvin, had to be deflated, and he had to be convinced of his own corruption and debility. For only then would man realise that he was lost and hopeless without divine grace.^[2]

And I mentioned the other day Michel de Montaigne. And he too, though he was a Catholic and not a Protestant, similarly, he was also kind of set about to take humanity down a rung, a good few rungs in one's sort of self-assessment. [38:31] So Jill Kraye writes:

Montaigne was concerned to destroy man's presumption and lower his excessive estimate of his own worth.

So one of the upshots of that for ethics was very, very significant, because Protestantism, the Reformation, has brought much less place and much less regard for ethics and virtue and their cultivation, because it's all dependent on God. A little later -- to read you something, Melanchthon, a Reformist thinker, again, stressing the fall, stressing the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, but he did something very interesting. So he almost separated out the realm of ethics -- in fact, he did separate out the realm of ethics from the realm of religion, theology, because this came as part of a movement of Protestant theology, was a separating out. First there's no place for ethics, and then ethics comes back in, but it's separated from any connection, real connection with divinity or divine aspiration, or something like that. This came from Melanchthon:

[So] ethics [quoting again from Jill Kraye] had nothing to do with the will of God or the remission of sins; it was exclusively concerned with rules governing external action and civil society. Conversely, theology had nothing to do with these ethical rules.

You can see, then, this recourse to trying to dimensionalize ethics by placing it in relation to God in some way or another, in relationship to divinity in some way or another, gets totally shattered here, as they get pulled apart. Ethics has nothing to do with God, nothing to do with religious aspiration, nothing to do with salvation, even. Jill Kraye again:

By delineating these two different spheres of influence, Melanchthon was in effect applying Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms to ethics.

So Luther had this idea: there's a kingdom of Christ, and there's a secular kingdom, and they co-exist. They're not in different places or different times so much as they co-exist. Yes, we live in civil society, but that's not the kingdom of Christ. The kingdom of Christ can be something that is kind of constituted by some members of civic society, civil society, but it's among them and their relationship to each other and to God. There's a separating out of two kingdoms in Luther's thinking. So:

Luther distinguished between the sacred kingdom, in which true Christians are ruled by Christ through the Holy Spirit, and the secular kingdom, in which non-Christians are ruled by political authorities through laws and coercion. Since the secular kingdom is also established by God and is necessary in order to preserve society, Christians must obey its authority, provided it does not impinge on their higher loyalty to God by interfering in matters of faith.

So there's separation, saying: yes, yes, you have to follow the laws and even the coercion of the ruler of your society. But that's only to preserve society because God said that's good too. That whole realm of ethics has nothing to do with your relationship with God, nothing to do with theology. [42:55] So one of the things that Luther had really, really objected to, as much as he objected against the Catholic Church, he also really objected to scholastic theology and the influence of Aristotle, and particularly Aristotle's ethics. Again, he regarded it as the worst enemy of grace. So you get this polarizing. It's like, if you want to totally prioritize grace, divine grace, and dependence on divine grace, then you totally dismiss any place for ethics. And if you give a central place for ethics and ethical aspiration and virtues, and perhaps that has, even, a road to growing into God, to theosis, to divinification, divinization, to all that, then you're shrinking the power of God and the place for God's grace. So Luther was very anti-Aristotle and Aristotle's influence in the Middle Ages, in scholastic theology, Thomas Aquinas and all that, because of this, because of how he saw it compromising and limiting our dependence on divine grace, whereas Melanchthon came in and completely separated ethics and theology, and then was able to sort of reclaim a place for even the ancient pagan philosophers like Aristotle, etc., separate from one's relationship with God, so that ethics and that kind of ethical philosophy

governed the external actions of those who had not yet been enlightened by the Holy Spirit [as Jill Kraye says] and helped ... preserve the peace and order of civil society.

So this, I think, is extremely significant. The divorce of ethical from religious questions, which again, means no dimensionality rooting the ethical sense, only rationality stepped in there, in the procedural sense, in the flat sense. And in a way, the whole Western Enlightenment and secularism came, partly had its roots in the very Protestant Reformation. It didn't start as secular at all. It started as an attempt at increasing religiosity. But there were ideas there that, as seed ideas, when they grew and their consequences were extrapolated over time, had enormous consequences, both for religion in general, and the religious sensibility, and religious ideas, but also on society and on ethics.

Interestingly, Melanchthon hated Plato, because more with Plato is the teaching that one can -- as I said, there's this kind of ladder, rational order to the universe, and one's sense of the virtues, and one's sense of the values corresponds to that ladder, a bit like Augustine. And one can climb up this ladder by purifying the virtues and moving closer to God, closer to a vision of God. Melanchthon thought that was literally the invention of the devil, as if you could live by that kind of rationality alone, without Christianity, and without divine grace, etc. But as I said, Melanchthon's sharp delineation, splitting between ethics and theology -- they weren't just separated apart -- allowed even Aristotelian moral philosophy to become reintegrated into the sort of standard Protestant education. Enormous, enormous consequences of all this played out, developed gradually over quite a while.

[48:03] So in the Protestant Reformation, this emphasis on the fall, on the expulsion from Eden, on original sin, and the rejection of mediation by priests, by any elite, rejection of the sacraments and the sacred, and all of that meaning that salvation is, as I said, completely and only dependent on divine grace. All this, in terms of what it means for humanity, wrapped up in that is a total and radical duality of God and human, between God and human, which is completely and utterly different, and that's that. There's no ladder in between. There are no dimensions of our being. There's no possible way of moving closer. There are no intermediaries, as I said, that refract and reflect and function as theophanies in the world. It's all dependent on divine grace.

So again, if we bring in Soulmaking Dharma here -- so we have grace as an element of the imaginal, but in Soulmaking Dharma, in contrast to this Protestant teaching -- "Everything is dependent on divine grace. That's all there is. You can't do anything" -- in Soulmaking Dharma (interesting if we reflect on this), we have this grace as an element of the imaginal, this sense of inexplicable gift. I'm given this image, or given this sense of things, and I couldn't really engineer it. I'm not the master of it. It's inexplicable gift from the divine. That element is balanced by other elements, like we need to have an energy body awareness, develop an energy body awareness. This is something we can do. Just the very idea that an image is a way of looking implies that, "Oh, there are ways of looking. We can play with our ways of looking. It's dependent on us." So those two elements or nodes of the lattice. Also, the autonomy -- not just of the image, but of the self, that we have to assent, that we participate; the fact, the node of create/discover, the emphasis on creation, not just discovery -- all of these balance the node of the element of grace. Instead of the Protestant one, "It's all grace," you get this much more balanced, fluid network.

And if we entertain the idea, or if soulmaking gives us the sense that our eros, my eros, right now, is divine -- maybe my psyche, the image, my capacity to have images, my soul, the logos, the thoughts I have, the insights, the conceptions -- either entertaining that idea, or actually, those senses and ideas arising naturally through the soulmaking practice -- it is divine, and it's from the divine. And again, either entertaining the idea, or it arising naturally from soulmaking practice, that our egoic and neurotic shapes are kind of impoverished echoes or impoverished reflections of divinity, of angel, of image. [51:46] These ideas and these senses very much provide a counter-weight to a reliance on grace, on the guru, on whatever it is, on the divine, completely. And yet, it's not totally up to me either. It's not just a matter of me becoming a master of soulmaking technique, imaginal technique, practice technique.

But of course, we have to point out, those ideas and those perspectives -- that my eros is divine, comes from the divine, that my egoic, neurotic shapes are really just slightly distorted, impoverished reflections of the divine, of the angel, of the daimon, the image -- of course, it's really important to point out and to be aware that those ideas and perspectives could be corrupted. They can be corrupted. They can be faked. We can be mistaken about that, just like there were corrupt priests in the Catholic Church at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and the Protestant Reformation was pointing fingers and objecting to that. But actually, as I think I said the other day, that wasn't the main point of the Protestant Reformation. It wasn't an attempt to weed out corrupt priests: "Oh well, let's have a whole overhaul while we're doing that." Actually, the fundamental idea was theological. The fundamental point was a theological revolution, reformation. And that was this emphasis on the total power of God, on not imprisoning God's total freedom and power.

Just so, in Soulmaking Dharma, the fundamental point is on the possibility, through disciplined practice and sensitivity, to create and discover as sacred and as divine, as rooted in divine, and as divinizable -- in other words, with a conception of ontic roots, and with lived possibilities of human being, but to create and discover, as sacred and divine, anything. The fundamental point of Soulmaking Dharma is the possibility, through disciplined practice, and the kind of sensitivity that goes with disciplined practice, to create/discover anything as sacred and divine, especially including human being -- what we're emphasizing today, because the sense of human being, the sense of human being has, through modernity, and even through humanism, secular humanism, the sense of 'human,' humanity, has become flattened. First it was divorced from a radically different God, like we said, in the Protestant Reformation. And then, with the gradual rise of atheistic secularism, through different stages, many stages, including deism, as some of you probably know, it was simply flattened -- not even just divorced from God, because God became non-existent. So 'divorced from God' made no sense. It was simply a flat view of a human being. All this had enormous, enormous effects on how we feel, sense, and think of ourselves and our humanity.

[55:38] And several times over the past four or five years, we've used this idea of telos, and to think teleologically, or to conceive teleologically, and the telos of the human being -- for instance, the angel out ahead, calling me. And so in Plato, there's a kind of idea of telos, of the human moving towards, rising towards, if you like, the world of what's called the 'intelligences,' the world of ideas, the realm of ideas, which we talked about in the *"*Sila and Soul" talks, the realm of forms. In some versions of Platonism, Neoplatonism, there's an idea of the human, of humanity. But in others, there's also included the idea, your individual form, the ideal version of you. We talked about that in "Sila and Soul." And that's there in the whole metaphysic and cosmology of Platonism. And again, to be rational meant to see that, to acknowledge it, to feel it, and to be drawn, naturally, through seeing it and through love of it and through eros for it, towards, moving towards that. So there's a certain telos. There's a certain natural movement of humanity. This is our destiny, if you like -- that's another word for telos.

And Aristotle came along after Plato, had a different idea of telos, eventually more biological, if you like. But really, there's an Aristotelian telos as well, the idea of a natural inclination or a goal of our nature. We naturally move towards whatever. [57:36] So those whole ideas, that we naturally move towards the angel, we naturally move towards God, that we're built for this, that this is the natural inclination, the natural way we will grow if we don't distort that -- those ideas, again, were decimated, severed, beginning, really, I think, with William of Ockham and others. Often it's presented, this thing, as a kind of argument between what's called 'nominalists' and 'realists,' as if it's a philosophical argument (some of you will know this), like the argument about universals and particulars. Are universals real? 'Table' as opposed to 'this table.' 'This table' is clearly a real thing. 'Table' as a universal -- is it a real thing, or is it not a real thing? It's presented these days as if all the fuss was about that, some kind of pretty abstract-sounding philosophical argument. Actually, it was fundamentally a theological argument again. And again, it had to do with refusing to limit God's power, God's fiat. Fiat means 'let it be, let there be light' in Latin, God's ability, through God's will, to just decide what happens, wherever, whenever, however. So the theological idea was, nothing should limit that infinite and endless possibility and power of God's fiat, the enaction of God's will.

So if there's a natural telos for the human being, or how a human being will naturally grow if things don't block it, etc., that's actually a limit to God's fiat, because then their growth, or their salvation, their liberation, their nirvāṇa, whatever you want to call it, their realization, their awakening is something that's not entirely dependent on God, if there's a human telos. Do you hear how significant this is? But it came from a theological argument about not wanting to limit God's fiat, God's power. And then eventually, again, over time, that very idea became a seed for this kind of mechanistic universe, because it was only a kind of flat and mechanistic universe that was compatible, really, fully compatible with the sort of endless and infinite freedom of God's fiat, of God's power. It's complex. I'm oversimplifying, because it's also the fact that, with the idea of the mechanistic universe came also the encouragement for humans to exercise their power, technology, and we talked about Locke and the instrumental stance, and human control, human fiat. So it's complex. But still, there was something in the seed idea that had all kinds of implications relative to the -- or rather, implications had consequences about and on our sense of our humanity, therefore our sense of our self, our sense of our souls. No more possible -- the telos of the soul, the calling of the soul, this idea of an angel out ahead completely ruled out. There's a radical duality between God and the human soul. Can't have these, in that view, you know, this idea we have -- "The angel is me, and it's not me," ruled out. Or that there's a spark of divinity in me, or there's a natural inclining, natural inclination, growth, natural reach to the divine -- all these would be impossible views.

So again, in Soulmaking Dharma, what we've done, or attempted to do, is to rehabilitate, to redeem notions like telos and also ethics, obviously, but with, again, a different ontology and epistemology. We need a different ontology and epistemology in order to make sense of these ideas. We can't just go back to the Middle Ages or ancient Greece or whatever. So, a different ontology and epistemology, and with practice, with the subtleties and sophistications of practice, and what that opens up, and the senses that that opens up in the being. And the practice, the eros, with practice, with care in practice, the eros opens the psyche and the logos, the ideation as well, the idea of things, and the idea of human being.

If we just linger, there's this -- I don't know if 'pessimism' is the right word -- regarding morality and human nature that came (or the group) with the Protestant Reformation. And then, historically, jumping forward some hundreds of years, there was even more this pessimism regarding morality and human nature that came with Freud. We touched on that the other day. You know, the influence of Freud's ideas in Western culture, they're quite pervasive. And then getting into the twentieth century, and World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin -- there has been a kind of trend of pessimism regarding morality and human nature. That's one of the trends.

There's also been a kind of pessimism, if we want to use that word, regarding human beings' capacity for ontology and epistemology, and what we can hope for there. In a way, starting with Kant -- I mean, it goes way before Kant, really, but really, in many ways, what he did philosophically really started to undermine, in a way that became much more popular, undermined the belief that we could really know things as they are, or know reality, and to have a kind of pure knowledge of things. And since Kant, it's grown even more with -- well, with postmodernity and other thinkers, and lots of things.

So again, Soulmaking Dharma comes in, is born in that, in that kind of crucible, in that kind of soup, in that kind of opening of the historical contingency. And part of what Soulmaking Dharma says is, you know, not that it's possible to prove absolute truths about ethics or about ontology or about epistemology, about human nature. But what is possible through Soulmaking Dharma is that we can, in practice, and in concept, conceptually, relate to these areas (ethics, ontology, epistemology) so that they are fruitful, so that they are meaning-making, and so that they make possible for us a real sense of a genuine ethical nobility and beauty, without one fixed view or truth either: "This is the way things are." Neither totally objective nor subjective, again, but participatory, so that it becomes possible through Soulmaking Dharma, soulmaking practice, to have this sense of dimensionality, to have a sense of dimensionality that's potent and trustworthy, and a sense of nobility.

So it's interesting (I think I just said it very briefly in the jhāna retreat): I think, probably, as practitioners of Buddhadharma, it's the history of Buddhadharma that's most relevant to us, but just as much, maybe even more so, the history of Western theology has such an impact on how we sense our existence, how we sense the cosmos, how we sense our humanity. And you know, with all kind of good intentions, the kind of secularization of ethics brought about a view and an idea that there are no dimensional or transcendent principles or values or virtues. And what's more, there's no possibility of knowing any such dimensions or values. This becomes almost axiomatic. And then the question becomes, how do we organize society so that each person can pursue what she wants, he/she/they want, and protect their right to do that, to pursue what they want, and their right to decide what it is that they want? How can we organize society in that way, without causing civil war or breakdown of social structure? Starting with good intentions, the secularization of ethics, and the removal of dimensionality, removal of the possibility of knowing any such dimensionality, or even the refusal to believe that they exist, then ethics gets transposed to this, "Okay, how do we organize societies, so that we all don't just claw each other to death, and there's just chaos?"

And eventually that goes so far as to become a kind of game theory -- sort of game theory theories of society or ethics. It's not even ethics any more, you know, like the prisoner's dilemma. I want to get what I want, so should I trust other people or not? Because I know that they want to get what they want, and that probably conflicts with what I want. Or it might conflict with what I want. Should I believe them? Should I not believe them? Should I trust them? Should I not? Should I team up with them or not? And people think about this now. This is how to think about society. This is how to think about our social predicament. Or you get explanations of altruism like Richard Dawkins's 'selfish gene' -- was so popular in the 1980s. Altruism, in that view, or what looks like altruism, is actually an illusion. It's just the biological or evolutionary strategies for survival of the gene -- not even the human being. So the nobility of human altruism, it doesn't really exist. What's really going on is this gene is trying to ensure its own survival. It's the selfishness of the gene. It's a whole sort of evolution of thinking that ends up with ideas like that, and 'game theory' notions of ethics, of society, of economy.

Going back, Descartes, Locke, Kant -- for them, rationality and the capacity for rationality of a human being was part of what conferred and secured dignity for a human being -- their very rational capabilities, their capacity for rationality. And the Western Enlightenment, even more, kind of implied: "Let's not put our belief in superstitions about gods and all this. Let's realize our own dignity as human being." Again, as time went by, the notion of the human being as having a kind of intrinsic dignity -- or even of most human beings acting in a dignified way most of the time -- seemed to get very thin, especially as we moved into the twentieth century. Perhaps the idea of a sort of innate human dignity seemed to fail, or seemed to be an illusion. Can we have, can we provide, can we find, can we create/discover another basis for rescuing our sense of human being, of human worth, of human nobility, of human possibility, of human essence and depth, and the notion of our place in the cosmos?

And again, that's part, very much, of what Soulmaking Dharma and practice does. It's one possibility, one way of opening up, deepening, rescuing the sense of human being. It's one possibility. But it's tricky, you know, because clearly, we just need to look in the newspaper, turn the news on, and it's hard -- dignity, human being, nobility, possibility, depravity. So it's tricky, like the whole question of shame that we touched on the other day. I'll actually revisit it a little bit now. We talked about naming and shaming, and how that's kind of -- well, in spiritual circles, certainly often, some spiritual circles, or at least the ones I move in, it might be very looked down on, but you know, when we read what the Buddha has to say about hirī and ottappa, it's clear that they have a social dimension. And his emphasis on them very much draws on our place in society, and our connection with others in the community. Hirī and ottappa are very much to do with that. And there might be, just reflecting on this a little bit more, it might be that naming and shaming may be a part of what keeps a society or a community or a culture healthy, and ethically healthy. When there's naming and shaming, it's like, "We are clear that this is wrong, and that you have done wrong. And it's clear. We're making it clear for everyone to see." That's part of making the ethics clear. So it has a function. And it's also a kind of sign that the ethics is clear, perhaps. And conversely, our shying away from naming and shaming may be due, in part, to our postmodern barring of a unanimous ethical view, and partly a sign of our of ethical confusion, lack of basis.

[1:15:27] So I don't know. Maybe, in terms of society and community, naming and shaming have their place, or can have a place. But again, you just have to hear or read or sometimes witness how that can move over into something that's completely horrific -- a naming and shaming that has become completely abusive and run away with itself. It's tricky. But in a way, it was implied in our wish list for ethics, there needs to be a place for shame and guilt, as the Buddha said, for hirī and ottappa. "Guardians of the world," he called them.^[3] So we want, we need a place for shame and guilt. Yet to me, it needs to not be everything. It's not everything about ethics. So I was a little -- slightly taken aback to read the Buddha say, "All virtuous deeds spring from hirī and ottappa, spring from shame and moral dread."^[4] All virtuous deeds spring from shame and moral dread. All virtuous deeds -- leaving no place for eros, for our eros for virtues and values, or indirectly through an imaginal figure. So I would say, we need place, too, for love and eros, as I said before, with respect to virtues and values and ethics. There's needs to be a place for shame and guilt, but it's not everything. It doesn't take up the whole space. Can we integrate shame and guilt into our Soulmaking Dharma conceptual framework, into our view, as soul-questions, as soul-issues -- see them, feel them, work with them as soul-questions and soul-issues? Can the whole of ethics be approached with soul first, with an idea and a conception of soul first? And the scope of that.

So is that what I called the other day -- I think I called it 'superficial shame'? I mean, it may not feel or seem superficial at all. It may feel like it goes to the core of one's being, so deep the shame. But from our language, is that superficial shame? Because it seems deep, but it actually doesn't involve soul. Is that superficial shame an impoverished reflection of a soul-shame? So it's an important question, because it might be. But I don't know. Probably not always. Still important to ask.

And I think I used the phrase 'healthy shame,' again, drawing on Hartmann, etc. But I didn't mean to make a distinction between 'healthy shame' and 'soul-shame.' I'd say healthy shame is soul-shame. If we really open up what we mean by Soulmaking Dharma to include, to incorporate ethics, and if we really approach ethics in a way that Soulmaking Dharma is really integrated into that approach, and we say healthy shame means soul-shame -- in other words, it has a sense of the dimensionality and divinity of our duty to images, to our images. Healthy shame is soul-shame. So any time we feel shame that is healthy, what we mean by healthy, it's a soul-shame, because it's got this dimensionality, divinity, and sense of duty in it, duty to images. And healthy guilt is soul-guilt, because again, it's got this sense of dimensionality, divinity, of eros, of duty to values and virtues as ideational-images. Sure, we can approach all this area of ethics and shame and guilt without soulmaking conception, soulmaking practice. But what if we actually bring it right in, really incorporate it, really embrace that whole domain with the Soulmaking Dharma conception? And healthy shame is soul-shame. It will have that sense and that feel to it. There's dimensionality and divinity here, and duty that I've let down. And healthy guilt is soul-guilt. Dimensionality, duty, divinity, eros to these ideational-images, to these ideas, values, virtues.

And again, when I said the other day, sometimes people who are a bit more (I don't know what to call it) -- you know, who do engage in psychological work and spiritual work, and work on their psychospiritual process, etc., and a bit more conscious, what they call 'conscious living,' and there can be a sort of, of course, kind of included in that, very naturally, is (to some extent) an orientation and a devotion to virtues and values. But it's limited, without a person even kind of realizing it, because their whole conceptual framework doesn't involve a sense of dimensionality; doesn't invoke, it doesn't incorporate a sense of dimensionality, and/or the eros is blocked, and the eros is limited. So yeah, they're sort of warm and kind and, as I said, not arrogant, whatever else I said. But it's somehow just -- it's not really on fire. It's not really full. The soul is not really stretched that way. The eros is not really ignited. It's not really soulful, and it's because the conceptual framework that's being entertained doesn't have an integrated and central place for dimensionality, and maybe the eros is blocked or limited in some way. And this prevents the ethos. It prevents the whole sense of ethics from its fullness.

[1:22:21] I don't know how that sounds. Does it sound, I don't know, stern, or strict, or judgmental, or forbidding? We have these kind of Puritanical associations with even just the word and the area of ethics, so I don't know how that sounds. But what I really mean is, the ethics and the ethos is prevented from its full beauty, from its sense of divinity, from its unfathomability, from its mystery, because it's not seen as integrated with soul. It's not seen as part of soul. It's not ensouled.

So this question: what is the image of ethics? What is the image of ethics that we are operating with, that we are living our life with? What is the image of ethics? Something kind of necessary -- it's necessary to care about ethics? It's necessary to talk about them and have a good, solid basis. Something necessary but kind of boring, maybe stern, maybe punitive, something that has to limit? It limits us by its nature. That's what ethic does. It limits what we can do and say, and all the rest of it. And then it itself is kind of limited in its scope. Or it's a kind of preliminary basis. "Sīla -- okay, taken care of that, then samādhi and paññā," for example. So is it that? What's the image of ethics? Or is it something soulful, something beautiful, something infinite in its reaches and its callings, something we love, something we have eros for, something soulmaking?

What does the word 'magnanimity' mean? I'm not sure. It probably means different things, and it has meant different things at different times, and maybe means different things to different people, magnanimity. Sometimes it just means 'generosity.' I mean, it could mean other things as well. But the etymology: magna + animus, 'big soul.' What supports a human to grow into magnanimity? 'Big soul' means more than a big heart, big-hearted. This person, that person, "Oh, they've got a big heart." What does it mean to have a big soul? What might it mean to have a big soul? I wonder whether, to fully honour human life, for it to have deep dignity, for our sense of our humanity as well to be deeply honoured, it must include a kind of love and eros for something that's more than my human life, certainly more than my survival, something of a different order -- again, something I'm willing even to sacrifice my life for. Again, we have the etymology of the word 'sacrifice': 'to make sacred.' And to me, if there's something that I'm willing sacrifice -- my pleasure, my well-being, my happiness, even my life for, the actual prolongation of my life -- this is part of the realization of that, the sense of that, the love and commitment for that, whatever that is. But it's another dimension, other than just my life. That's part of what it means to fully honour human life, I'm wondering, for life to have deep dignity.

But that love and that passion, again, that love and that willingness to sacrifice, it's like when we talked about passion. It depends on what the thing is. Just to be willing to sacrifice for some cause -- well, it depends what the cause is. Just to be willing to sacrifice for some sense of this or that -- it depends what the 'this' or 'that' are, and the sense of it is. This is related to everything we're talking about: dimensionality, and the other wish list elements, and other list of needs about ethics, and related to what a human being is, what a human being can be, what a human being should be. In ancient times, they had what at some point came to be called the 'honour ethic.' And so this, in a way, only applied to certain strata of society: warriors, or maybe knights, and rulers, whose life was oriented to and centred on and governed by this honour ethic, about honour and glory. But the central element of that was a willingness to risk one's own life for the sake of. And the honour ethic -- there was a hierarchy there that was regarded as -- someone who was living that way, who was bound by that kind of honour ethic, their life was at a different level than others, who were concerned only with their life, their ordinary life, and prolonging it.

[1:28:45] I think Hannah Arendt wrote about this and modified it and talked about the 'citizen ethic' in modern society, and that as a kind of parallel of the honour ethic, that relative to sort of work and labour. And she was saying, and others have said, modern culture is really defined by -- what constitutes modern culture is this turning upside down, this pooh-poohing of the honour ethic, and the sort of evening out, demolition of the hierarchy there. Again, this flattening of a hierarchical view, and the affirmation of ordinary life: work, production, family, spouse, and children. And higher aims and strivings are criticized. [1:30:16] Yesterday, I pointed out the historical contingency of our taken-for-granted sense of ordinary life and its import. Before the eighteenth century, that wasn't really seen and felt and thought of in the ways that we typically do now, and most people kind of agree on.

So it's interesting. Some of you have probably come across this sort of thing. I'm sure most people have. But if you are looking for alternative cancer cures, that sort of thing, and there are different websites, and people discuss things, and sometimes they say, "I've got cancer, and how much I want to live." And very, very common to hear something like, "I so want just -- I want to live. I want to be here. I want to survive to hear my daughter's first words, my baby daughter's first words, or see her take her first steps. And I'm scared that I won't be able, or it grieves me that I won't be able to, that I might not be able to be there for that, or her first day of school, or her graduation from college, or her marriage, or her children, and my grandchildren -- I won't see them." [1:32:48] And very common to hear that as justification, as a reason for "why I want to live longer," even though the so-called quality of life, which usually means the relative ratio of pleasant to unpleasant, is poor. But that thing is important. That thing is more important to see, to see ordinary life, to witness ordinary life in my family. That was given that much import, put forward as a reason to live, as something that made life worthwhile, that qualified as an orientation and a wish, that qualified as the worthy life, a kind of worthy life.

This was not thought before sometime in the eighteenth century. And we have to understand, it wasn't the case that everyone secretly felt that way and saw things that way, and it was only until the oppression of the church was lifted that they could then just admit it. And all this time, they were actually feeling that way and viewing that way, and viewing their existence that way, and viewing what was most important that way, but they just couldn't admit it out loud, so they hid it, kept it secret. That wasn't the case. They actually didn't think. People actually didn't think that way. It didn't qualify as something of that import, as something that would qualify as 'the good life,' the beautiful life: "This is something that makes life worthwhile. This qualifies as me living a life that's worthwhile." The view of life or existence, and the sense of what was most important, what qualified as making life worthwhile that way -- it's historically contingent. It's hard for us, or for many of us, it would be hard to kind of even grasp, to even stand outside that view. It's so taken for granted. This affirmation, elevation of ordinary life has become so pervasive, so entrenched. I'm pointing out its historical contingency, but what does the fact of its historical contingency imply? What does that actually imply? What we take it to imply actually depends on our view of history, our view of the process of history. That's another question. I've gone into that in other talks in recent years, but still, it's worth acknowledging this. It's worth realizing this fact of historical contingency. How we interpret it is another matter. But I think it's important to be aware of it.

But as I said, at a certain point, or over time, there evolved a demolition or a flattening of hierarchy -- hierarchy of values, hierarchy of strivings -- actually, an inversion of hierarchy. There was the affirmation, then, of ordinary life -- work, work production, family life. And an inversion, because higher aims and strivings were put down, were criticized. To some extent a flattening, and to some extent an inversion evolved of that original hierarchy, that original hierarchy of values. In Francis Bacon, in a way the founder of the Scientific Revolution, or one of them, and for him, science was not the higher pursuit of knowledge, the higher quest to penetrate the mysteries of the universe or the cosmos. Science was for the sake of technological power over nature, in the service of ordinary life. So all these trends and movements and developments in history, or through history, made it less possible to have, conceive of, feel a certain way towards something higher or more important than life, than preserving one's life, than ordinary existence (work, production, family). And again, the question I have is, what does that do to our sense and our idea of human being, of our humanity?

And again, with Soulmaking Dharma, what does that offer us or open out in terms of a possibility for what we might sense and feel and conceive of as higher or larger or more important than, say, having a long life, or surviving physically, or having more pleasant than unpleasant sensations, or reducing pain, or whatever? Soulmaking Dharma should, if one's practising right, go right to the heart of that question. And it should open out a sense of that. For me, very, very potently and clearly, it should. And what Soulmaking Dharma practice opens -- that should be one of the things that it opens: the sense of something or things, or (whatever you're going to call them) dimensions or directions that are higher, larger, more important than my living a long life, than my survival, more important than my not being in pain or reducing pain, or whatever.

And this question: we talked about providing different, or attempting to provide different dimensions, or not providing any dimensions. And the question today is, what is the result of any of those dimensions, or the refusal to provide dimensions? What's the result with respect what we might call 'anthropology,' our idea of what it means to be a human being, what we've been talking about today? What is the result also, of course, for theology, for our sense of divinity or Buddha-nature? What's the result for our sense of existence? So the different ideas of dimensions, or the refusal of dimensions, will influence, will have an impact on, certainly, theologies and the sense of existence, but also on the sense of human being. And of course, it works the other way: different sense of human being or theology, or whatever, will provide or disallow certain dimensions and non-dimensions for the ethics.

I haven't talked much about Aristotle in this series. I talked about him at least a little bit in the "Sila and Soul" talks. But Aristotelian virtue ethics were, as far as I understood, ground in a notion of the common good of the polis, of the city-state, the nation -- basically the city-state, like Athens or wherever. A virtue had to be something which contributed, or at least didn't take away from, the common good of the city-state. (Actually, he left out slaves and whole other strata of that society, so it was even a smaller view.) But I was curious. Is the dimensionality there -- is it in lateral number, in how many people? Or in the service of the nation or the city-state, as if that's a kind of transcendent object in itself that provides the dimensionality? Is that related to the citizen ethic, perhaps, that Hannah Arendt was talking about? The question is, what does it do to our sense of human being, and our humanity?

Or if we think about Pali Canon Buddhadharma, and the kind of cosmology of karma, of rebirth, and the rationale of simplification, and these as reason for ethics: "Well, if you act unethically, you'll get a bad rebirth. You'll reap bad karma. If you act ethically, you'll reap good karma. And if you act ethically, the complexities of your life, and also the agitations and the busyness of your mind, will simplify. And that simplification will allow practice and samādhi, and then paññā, and then liberation." And you'll see, the purpose of the ethics is revealing something here as well. In that way of understanding Pali Canon Dharma, there's a kind of pragmatic reason for ethics. There's a pragmatic reason for sīla in concern for one's karma in that, with that kind of cosmological notion, and also because it will simplify the consciousness and the life. And that will allow meditation and insight and liberation. So it's practical, but there's no ontological dimensionality of grounding for the ethics there.

Actually, something similar -- you get it in Locke, partly. In John Locke, there's a kind of grounding in a rational, pragmatic hedonism. A lot of people really objected to what he was writing. In a way, you get that in Epicureanism. It's like, just follow the pleasure. And in good, charitable interpretations of Epicureanism, it's like, it's just like Pali Canon Buddhism. It's like following the jhānas. I'll take this pleasure over the pleasure of senses. And then the second jhāna is a better kind of pleasure than the first, etc. And one goes up the rungs of the ladder, letting go of what has come before, because I've got a better pleasure, until one actually lets go completely, because one's reached the highest kind of pleasure. And then one lets go into the kind of so-called 'pleasure' of nibbāna. [1:43:59] So there's a kind of rational, pragmatic hedonism, which people vilify John Locke for, and also Epicurus for, and Epicureanism, at least. But it has its parallels in Pali Canon Buddhism. But the grounding is, that's pragmatic rather than what we could call 'ontological.' There's no sense of the Good, or this higher order that's giving us our ethics in some kind of parallelism. I mean, it might be, we could say, rebirth in a Brahma realm is a kind of deification, so it becomes an ontological thing. That would be stretching it a little bit.

Again, if we take the dimension, the possible dimension of rationality, rationality as a dimension, and just to point out, people think of this in very different ways, so that for some of, say, the German idealists -- Kant and others -- rationality might have had, our capacity for rationality might have had this quasi-numinous character, quasi-holy character. It's a kind of divine faculty or divinely given, certain faculty, so that rationality itself was potentially, in our words, a kind of almost erotic-imaginal object, perhaps. What do all these ideas do? All these ideas about dimensions and non-dimensions -- what do they do for the sense of human being, of humanity, of our humanity? In Platonic ethics and Platonic cosmology, as I said, almost every level of being is refracting and reflecting somehow the Good, the divine. It's existing in an analogous way. The world is analogy. The world is sign. The world is partial expression, is refraction, reflection, in a kind of hierarchical order, of the divine, of the Good, of the ultimately good. And we can approach that. We can climb that ladder. We can 'read the cosmos,' if you like. And that reading of the cosmos, that soul-resonating with the theophanies, with the signs and the forms and the refractions and reflections of the Good, the divine, allows us to draw closer to the divine. And we ourselves can become analogies of our image, of our angel or our daimon, and in that way reflect, refract the divine, grow towards the divine. So there's also this eros and inevitability of this transcendent good, this transcendent divine.

As human beings, we're connected intimately in our being with that divinity, with that Buddha-nature, dharmakāya. But we're also separate from it. We're separate and not separate. We're in the image and likeness. We're analogy. My life, if I live it with soul, is an analogy to my angel. It's a reflection of my angel, which reflects God, which reflects the Buddha-nature, which expresses an attribute of the dharmakāya. So there's both. We're separate and not separate. But we're connected in this very intimate way, by analogy, or potentially by analogy, in our being. And there's this possibility of direction, of growth towards the divine, or 'theosis,' as they call it in the Orthodox Church. And so you can hear that whole way of thinking about dimensionality as a grounding for ethics. But it construes the human being and our humanity in quite a powerful way that's quite consistent, or inadvertently consistent, much more similar, let's say, to what we've got in the Soulmaking Dharma, or what can possibly open out for us in Soulmaking Dharma practice, the senses we can have that open. Rather than the ideas, we start from the senses that can open through practice -- again, the phenomenological approach, rather than starting with metaphysics.

And when we look at all this, whatever valid reason or support or dimension for ethics one tries to provide, it tends to be related to the conceived purpose of ethics, for sure, but also the conceived purpose of life. If we think about Pali Canon Buddhadharma, the principal given reasons for the purpose of ethics are very much connected with, well, what is the purpose of life? What is purpose of existence? It's to reach nibbāna. And in these other systems as well, if you think through that.

And then, as I said, there's been this divorce of ethics from law. But does the way we think about ethics -- certainly, it's related, as I said, to the conceived purpose of ethics. The way we try and provide dimensionality for ethics is certainly related to the conceived purpose of ethics, and the conceived purpose of our existence. What does that imply about how we set up the law, and the purpose of the law, and how we conceive of the law? All this is connected. And depending on how we think of this, the connection's still whole, so it will follow through to how we think of life, how we think of ethics, what dimensionality we give, then how we think of what the law is actually trying to accomplish, what the legal system is trying to accomplish -- all this: connected.

Again, if we just ask this question: what's possible? Not just what's possible for us as human beings -- what's possible in terms of viable, valuable, and tenable ways we can conceive of and sense our humanity? What's possible there? What viable, tenable, and valuable ways are there for us to conceive of and to sense our human being today, now? So much is going to depend on that. Whether we feel blessed, and our sense of existence is blessed, and the sense of the cosmos is blessed -- all that depends on these questions, depends on these directions and decisions, orientations. If I want to live with a sense of blessedness, how can I support that possibility, really, genuinely, deeply, robustly?