Practising with Death and Dying

Tonight I'd like to offer, to share just a few reflections on death and dying. I suppose, in our culture primarily, if people are going to broach the subject of death, talk about it, there are a few kind of primary or most popular directions through which they approach the subject. One is, of course, just the fact of impermanence -- the fact that we, our lives, like everything else, is impermanent. And that awareness, or the primacy of that awareness, is really spread throughout the culture, I would say. Somewhere or other I've said before, you know, it seems to me it's the dominant theme in modern poetry, certain modern English poetry, and in some way or another, have to do with the poignancy of impermanence, the tragedy of temporal finitude, the ending of things, the fragility of things, the loss, the poignancy and heartache of separation and loss, and the need to acknowledge that: this is part of life. This is what we will meet. This is what we will face, our own and others' death; of course, even the cherry blossoms falling from the trees and all that. So there is, in the dominance of that theme, in a lot of modern poetry, modern English language poetry, there's a lot wrapped up there. There's a sort of gentle encouragement to open to it, but there's also, basically, a whole metaphysical stance about what's important, about what's real, about what's perhaps the only thing that's really real, about what it means to live life truly, openly, with an open heart, with open eyes. So, of course, that's huge. Can we open the heart to that? Can we bear that poignancy, loss, separation from those we love?

And sometimes, whether it's in poetry, or whether it's in the Dharma, you know, this emphasis on impermanence can have, as I alluded to just now, a whole other level which is really a metaphysical level, and a metaphysical stance, an assumption of what the Buddha would call nihilism, what the Buddha would call annihilationism, and criticize it very strongly, together with its opposite pole of eternalism -- criticize them both very strongly as extreme views to be rejected and avoided: the idea that everything ends in death, that we disappear in death, that there's nothing left, and its contrasting, paired view that the soul just goes on forever, lasts forever in time. But often nowadays, even in the Dharma, there is this kind of undergirding of this: in the drawing attention to the impermanence and the poignancy of loss and separation, it's undergirded, again, either explicitly or implicitly, by a whole metaphysic, and a whole metaphysical assumption and position that's taken as truth, which is basically what the Buddha called nihilism, annihilationism -- that that's the end. There's a complete erasing of our existence. Okay, you can say, "Yes, well, the atoms that make up our body will be recycled," etc., and whatever actions and speech we've done will somehow ripple out onwards in time, but basically there's a soil underneath there, a whole layer of sediment (better), of nihilism.

But anyway, impermanence, one way or another, or in both ways, is one of the main or most popular, understandably, sort of directions with which to open up and approach a conversation about death. Another, much more in the wider culture, less in the Dharma culture, of course, is a kind of eternalism. So, rooted in teachings about heaven and hell, and existing forever in heaven and hell, and maybe with some intermediate, or rather, sort of provisional stopping-over places like purgatory, where you get sort of purified before going to heaven where you'll stay forever, or you'll stay forever in hell until ... etc. That's a kind of eternalism, not so popular these days in sort of widespread culture. But still, I think, quite popular is the notion and belief in some kind of afterlife which lasts forever. And what has become fairly widespread, quite widespread, is that in this afterlife which lasts forever, there is a reunion with one's family. And so again, just tracing that historically, its beginnings can be traced in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Someone called Lewis wrote a sort of picture of life in Virginia, in the USA, at the time of Thomas Jefferson. And this was one of the things that was beginning to emerge then: less this idea of heaven and hell, and more emerging this idea of an afterlife, that sort of the hell bit was dropped, and so the worst of all possible fates, hell, burning in hell forever, that was sort of shorn off things. And what was left was, for many people, this idea that after death we are reunited with our loved ones, with family. This is still very popular. Of course, there are probably quite a few people who, that very idea of being reunited with one's family forever, is exactly a version of hell. [laughs] It's all dependent, of course. But just tracing ideas. There's an idea of an afterlife, immortality, somewhere or another. That's part of the quite common themes or tropes or approaches to the question of death.

And then, of course, a third one in Buddhist circles will be reincarnation, or more usually rebirth in Buddhist circles. I've said this before: in the Pali Canon view, rebirth, the whole teaching of rebirth, was mostly terrifying. The idea of just literally endless, forever in time, just being reborn, getting ill, dying again, going through all the misery of people you love dying -- just repeating that over and over again, maybe in more or less favourable rebirths, and some of them, a lot of the levels of rebirth, pretty miserable. Pretty miserable -- not the level of comfort and ease and medical security that we have these days for the most part in the West. So the whole teachings about saṃsāra and endless rebirth was essentially terrifying. If you were really, really lucky, or rather, if you had played your cards right, which you didn't actually know whether you had done in the past -- somewhere in my infinite number of past lives, I may have been a really devoted meditator and exceptionally altruistic, and maybe at some point that will earn me a rebirth in a high heaven, for a while, until I die from there, and then I'm on the roulette wheel again. So the whole teaching of saṃsāra and rebirth in that sense was actually terrifying.

Nowadays, most Westerners, most Western Buddhists -- it's a certain demographic within Western Society, Western Buddhism, and most of us are used to relatively comfortable lives, relative security regarding getting ill, and even if we do get ill, there's pretty good care, pretty good, etc. So the whole idea of rebirth is like, "Oh, great, we get another chance," or "Oh, it goes on for more," or "I wonder what I'll be next time," or "Maybe we'll meet again," or that kind of thing. It's got quite a different flavour to it, and sort of the assumptions behind it give it a certain tenor that's quite different than it probably had in Pali Canon Buddhism. What the Buddha was teaching was "Get off that wheel. End rebirth. Can you not see just this infinite roulette wheel, and round and round and round, birth and misery and death, birth and loss and death, birth and brief happiness and death, and illness and sickness, and old age and infirmity, and loss and separation?" He said, "Get off the wheel." Really staring at that infinitely -- infinite number -- was just horrifying. So it's got quite a different tenor and tone; mostly it's picked up with quite a different tone and flavour in the sort of modern Western notion of it among Buddhists and among non-Buddhists. Anyway, that would be obviously another kind of typical or common way of approaching it, certainly within Buddhist teachings -- approaching the question of death.

[11:36] I don't want to really approach via any of those angles tonight. There's also another possible approach, which is, for instance, some of you will be familiar with some ideas and recent discoveries and theories in quantum physics, for example. I talked about this in some other talk fairly recently, but I just can't remember where it was.^[1] There's something called quantum entanglement, which some of you will know what that is. It's when two subatomic particles -- for instance, two photons, or it could be anything -- become entangled, which essentially means that they're connected to each other. And perhaps, for example, if one has a certain kind of quality -- for example, what they call 'spin' (it doesn't matter what that means, but let's just say 'spin'), an 'up-spin', then the other one will have a 'down-spin,' and they're entangled in that way. But what 'entangled' really means, or the fuller implication of what it means, is that when something happens to this particle, it affects what happens to its entangled partner, its partner particle, and it happens instantaneously, even over massive distances. In other words, it's not like this partner photon signals something to that partner photon. It just seems to happen instantaneously.

So this was an idea that came up -- actually it was Einstein that uncovered it as an implication, and just said, "This is ridiculous." How could it be? Two things were wrapped up in it: one was that you could have this instantaneous communication over vast distances -- in other words, that information or a signal seemed to be travelling faster than the speed of light, which for Einstein, for his theories, was completely axiomatically taboo. It was impossible. And secondly, wrapped up with this (we don't need to explain why) is that it also meant this thing that we've been emphasizing many times over the years, that the object, the photon, doesn't exist as having this spin or that spin, this property or that property, until we observe it.

So there are two implications wrapped up in it: that an object, a subatomic particle, its thing-ness, it's not a defined thing before we observe it. Again, it's not just that we don't know what it is: "It is a defined thing, but we have no way of knowing what that defined thing is." It's actually not a defined thing. It's fuzzy. It's indeterminate. It's indefinite. It's not a 'thing' as we call a 'thing'; it's not a real thing. And secondly, that there's this possibility of instantaneous connection between, you know, over potentially billions of miles, billions and billions of miles, light years and light years.

And so this idea came up. Einstein pointed it out, and Niels Bohr said, "Yes, that's actually right, and we're going to call that quantum entanglement. That is a prediction out of the theory." And Einstein said, "Well, that's ridiculous," for both of these reasons that he explained, that I've just gone into. There was a debate about it, and then Einstein, together with two other physicists called Podolsky and Rosen, wrote a paper in the 1930s, I think it was, and in a very clever argument, suggested that this was actually the downfall of quantum physics. It actually proved that things could not be fuzzy before they're observed; they could not be dependent on the observer, on the way of looking. Things are things, independent of the way of looking.

It was a very smart paper, but there was nothing really anyone could do with it, because they proposed an experiment which would decide it. Or was it later? It was a physicist called [John Stewart] Bell, an Irish physicist, later, at some point, proposed the experiment. I can't remember the exact history. But anyway, Bell, also very suspicious of this idea from quantum physics that fundamentally things don't exist before they are observed. It's like, "What a ridiculous notion." And it was really, really anathema to both Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, and very much to Bell, who was very, very critical. He would say, "There's something rotten at the base of quantum physics."

And then I think it was in the early eighties -- actually it was before that -- a fellow whose name I cannot remember. But there have been a series of experiments, basically, going back, I think even starting in the seventies, that actually found a way based on -- it's called Bell's theorem, really brilliant piece of thinking. [He] proposed the theorem, but there was no way of experimenting it. Someone in California, whose name escapes me right now, picked up on it and did an experiment which seemed to actually refute Bell's and Einstein's intuitions. It said, "Actually, sorry, things are not definite. There are no things before observation."

Later, people pointed out, "Ah, well, there could be a way of explaining those experimental results in another way, so we need to take care of those kind of possibilities, shut the door on them, make sure we're really getting the result that we think we're getting." So Alain Aspect did an experiment, and then very recently, there was another experiment -- again, sorry, I can't remember the names (doesn't really matter) -- where they basically did the same experiment and used the light from two different quasars. Quasars are ultra-high-energy galaxies, billions and billions of light years away. So the light is coming really from near to the birth of the universe, just after the Big Bang. Using the light from so long ago, for some reason I didn't understand from their explanation, that was supposed to take care of some of the possibilities of some other factors intruding and distorting the results. And what they found was the same thing. So all the experiments looking at this have proved the same thing. It proves two points: one is that indeed objects, things, subatomic particles are not definite things. They are not things before observation. What they are and how they are, as we've gone into, depends on the kind of observation, the way of looking. They are fuzzy, indeterminate, indefinite, empty of inherent existence.

And secondly, it proves that space is not what it seems. Over really astronomical distances, two particles can be instantaneously connected, and there's no signal travelling between them. And the implication is what we think of and how we sense space is just not real. Space itself is, at some level, an illusion. So, massive implications. Time, also -- not what it seems and what we think. And there are lots of other results and experiments and theories, in both relativity theory and quantum theory, that also have, and even more so these days, disrupt, shatter our sense [of] an independent existence of space and time -- that they are real, and that the sense, the normal, common-sense sense we have of space and time is the reality of them. No, the common-sense sense of space and time, the way we typically think about space and time, what we assume about them, is not real, is illusion. Exactly what's going on, it's unclear, but it's very clear that they're illusion -- our usual sense of them is illusion. Space is not what it seems. Distance is not what it seems. Things can be intimately, instantaneously connected, entangled with each other over vast distances. Doing something here makes a difference over there. Doing something over there makes a difference over here, because the space is not what it seems.

One could pick up those kinds of ideas, and say "Okay, what does that imply about notions of death and separation?", but I actually don't know exactly what that implies with regard to death, and our experience around death and dying. So I'm going to leave that. Those are the kind of four most normal areas, normal ways of approaching, and actually I want to see if we can approach with a more phenomenological approach, via our experiences and what appears to us -- a phenomenological approach, and an inquiry into that, and experimenting with that. I mean, we could pick up this quantum piece, because it is the case that, you know, beliefs, inherited beliefs, inherited ontologies, and again, we're talking about ontology here: what is the ontology of space? Does it inherently exist? What is the ontology of a subatomic particle, allegedly the most basic building block of matter -- what's the ontology there? It is the case that inherited beliefs and conditions shape and limit our experience, what appears to us. And remember the word 'phenomenon' means 'appearance.' Might it be that if we start taking ideas from physics or whatever, and using them to question our inherited beliefs, that that might open up our experience with death? Yes, it might. I'm just not quite sure what to take exactly from that other than the most sort of vague notions of interconnectedness and whatever.

[23:37] As I said, what I'd rather do tonight, what I'm going to do tonight is take more of a phenomenological approach, starting with our experience, and approach it that way, inquiring -- and especially the phenomenological approach as it pertains to, as it emerges from Soulmaking Dharma and sensing with soul practices and openings. So what is our experience when we approach death -- our death, someone else's death, the whole question of death and dying -- through, with the support of Soulmaking Dharma, but with the support and through the modalities of sensing with soul, and the kind of openings that sensing with soul brings?

In that phenomenological approach, as much as the phenomenological approach that has to do with just ways of looking and emptiness, both of them recognize that ideas, logoi, conceptual frameworks are always involved in our experience, and that they condition experience. So there's always idea, conception, logos, conceptual framework involved in any experience, and it has a conditioning, shaping, fabricating, and limiting influence, effect on our experience. An intelligent and more powerful phenomenological approach has to acknowledge that, has to recognize that. And, of course, it works the other way too: our experience, if it's repeated enough and powerful enough, starts to change our ideas, our logoi, our conceptions, conceptual framework, and that's all part of the whole eros-psyche-logos dynamic, that notion.

So phenomenological approach, as much as it comes out of and is born by the sensing with soul approaches and openings, recognizing that ideas and logoi are in our experience, and inevitably, and that they condition experience; recognizing also that there's the possibility of our flexibility with our ways of looking and with the ideas that are in the citta and in the way of looking at any moment, and the interest in that flexibility of ways of looking, and the conception that's in there at any time, and what that does -- what that does to experience. So this is really the kind of tack that I want to take tonight.

In terms of ideas, of course, we must acknowledge that we have or we are the bearers of a mixed inheritance. As much as we're the bearers of a mixed inheritance with regard to ethics, as we were talking, of values, and all that, with regard to ontology, with regard to epistemology, we inherit from the culture ideas and perspectives and the actual sense of things. With regard to death, too, inevitably, we also receive a mixed inheritance -- a kind of hodgepodge of ideas.

I don't know if I'm making too much of this, but it's just that it came up the other day, and it was something I noticed when I was first diagnosed with cancer, going to the hospital and going to the oncology ward for the first time. It was really in the oncology ward, so it was after my operation, in fact -- so a few months after I was diagnosed with the cancer. And there was some talk, or there was a sign or something, or a piece of paper, and it was talking about different departments within the oncology department, and one phrase [that] really struck me was the 'end of life pathway': "The patient is on the 'end of life pathway.'" And even now, at the hospice, even the hospice nurse talks about 'end of life,' like it's a phrase now. How little I heard the word 'dying' or 'death.' In fact, I'm not even sure if I ever have heard a doctor or nurse utter those words, actually, come to think of it -- 'passing on.' I'm not sure if I'm sensing something here. It's not a big deal, but I'm mentioning it. Or rather, "It's not a big deal" -- it potentially is a very big deal, I think. I'm not really sure whether I'm sensing something underneath that that's actually an expression of something.

Is the medical institution avoiding those terms? I'm not sure. And if it is, what's going on? Is it because avoiding words like 'death' and 'dying,' and even the sort of old-fashioned now 'passing on' or 'passing away,' is it that life is all there is, so they talk about 'end of life'? An 'end of life pathway' seemed a little even more kind of bizarre almost to me, sort of jarring, as if the choice of terminology, I wasn't sure whether it had really come from the hospital administrators' sort of flow chart of how they need to manage all these patients. So they have a flow chart of where the different patient goes into chemotherapy, into radiotherapy, or after that doesn't work, then they're on this, and then they're on the 'end of life pathway,' and whether that's just a term reflecting more their management solutions than actually a sort of existential position. I don't know. But there seemed to be the sort of avoidance of the terms 'death' and 'dying.' Is that because life is deemed as all there is, and death is not seen, in itself, as something, an event, a momentous doorway? Even if it might be a doorway to total non-existence, it's still a doorway. If you just avoid that sense or that whole notion of it by using different words, 'end of life' ... I don't know. It may be irrelevant.

As I said, I think undeniably we have a mixed inheritance, as we do for so many things in our culture, and probably going back to India at the time of the Buddha, the Buddha had a mixed inheritance, and Tibetans have a mixed inheritance, and Tibetan Buddhists, and all that. That's just part of living in, you know, not a sort of totally original Palaeolithic culture or something, I imagine, anyway; I don't know even then. And we inherit, then, a mixed bag of beliefs with respect to death. Religious beliefs and traditions -- even if we're not religious or whatever, that comes to us from that stream. But also secular or non-religious beliefs. And yes, I use that word very deliberately, secular beliefs, non-religious beliefs, because usually they're not positions about death that are actually thought through with any great intensity or originality. They're something we inherited from the sort of evolving and emerging secularism of our culture over hundreds of years, and they're beliefs. They're not knowledges. They're not logical deductions that one has carried out on one's own. They're not certainties. They're, as I said, not even rigorously questioned with a lot of intensity or vitality or originality.

So we have, all of us probably have -- most of us probably have, better to say -- this mixed bag of beliefs, some religious in origin, some secular in origin, around death. And I think it's, again, important to acknowledge, important to realize: what's going on with me? What goes on, what steers and shapes and colours, and, as I said, limits my sense of things (in this case, of death and dying)? And it's also, again, since being ill, I've run into, or I'm witness to, all kinds of expressions that reveal different attitudes and beliefs around death, and sometimes this very mixed bag is apparent in a single utterance that someone might make. So I'm thinking of two people now, both of them staunchly -- even aggressively -- secular, and both of them said a similar thing. Both were given pretty serious cancer diagnoses, but not necessarily fatal. Both of these pretty staunchly and aggressively secular men -- one was in his fifties, I think, when he was diagnosed, and the other was in his seventies, a person in hospital -- and both of them said "I feel cheated" when they got the diagnoses. "I feel cheated." Both staunchly secular. And you think, "Well, how does that work?" How can you feel cheated if you have this kind of aggressive secular position? Who is it you feel cheated by? What is it you feel cheated by? Where do you have a sense of an expectation to eighty years of life? What's going on, again, in the mixed bag of beliefs and inheritances there that you could feel cheated at the same time as espousing a kind of secular view, atheistic view very strongly?

So that's interesting in itself, these kind of strange bedfellows that go to make up our view, our beliefs, our sense of things, our responses to things as basic as death. But there's a second piece here: "I feel cheated" also indicates something about one's relationship with existence, and one's view of existence. How different -- "I feel cheated. I'm owed something. I expect something about the duration of my life" -- how different that is from a sense, a view, an idea, but also a sense, a soul-sense of life and death and illness as gift. Life, illness, and death as gift from the divine, and somehow, to the divine. How different that is than "I feel cheated. I'm owed something, and I didn't get it. I was expecting something. I expect something, and I'm not being given it," versus life and illness and death as gift from the divine and to the divine.

Now, I mean this as a sense, again. All this, all that I'm talking about, and most of what I've been talking about in this series of talks, and all the Soulmaking Dharma talks, is really based on experience. You can hear that, and for someone who's outside of that sensibility, who hasn't really had experiences that open up the sense of things, the sense of self, the sense of other, the sense of the cosmos, the sense of death, and all that, the sense of illness, through imaginal practice, through sensing with soul -- it's just so alien, and disturbing, and alarming. "The sense of your death and your illness are a gift from God -- how does that work? Your early death, and your difficult illness, and your painful illness, and all that limitation are a gift -- what are you talking about? It's an affront, and a nonsensical notion." But for someone who's practised, that kind of thing, and that kind of blossoming of the sensibility and the very sense of things, including one's illness, including one's early death, can be there as gift from God, from the divinity, from the dharmakāya, and gift to the dharmakāya. And gift meaning mystical gift -- mystical gift from and to the divinity, to the dharmakāya.

But even that word, 'mystical,' is so problematic for some people. And for some people it just means nonsense (I've talked about this elsewhere^[2]), something that doesn't make sense, or to do with mystery. But we're not talking about mystery in the sense here of the sort of mystery of why there is existence at all, why there is a universe, why are there human beings, because behind that sense of that kind of mystery is a sort of baffledness, like it's just completely arbitrary. That kind of mystery and that kind of question, "Why is there anything at all?", "Why does anything exist? What a mystery," actually, it's already assuming a kind of purposelessness, in the question. It's not really a question. It's just already assuming a kind of purposelessness, and calling it mystery -- just this sort of arbitrary, seemingly arbitrary, arbitrariness of the fact of any existence of anything. But here, mystical and mystery, as meaning having dimensions, having unfathomability, inexhaustibility, beauty, all of that. And how different, "I feel cheated. I expect this many years or whatever it is," versus the whole movement of life and death, gift -- the gift of life and the gift of death, receiving that gift and somehow giving it as well, giving my life, giving my death, and that being a very different kind of gift, a mystical gift.

[40:46] What I really want to go into tonight a little bit is just a few, a few possibilities of the many possibilities of what can make death okay. What can make death okay? And even that sounds like a bit of a stupid question, because what do I mean by 'okay'? I don't just mean a kind of a shrugging, "Oh, well. Death? That's just life, right? Life goes with death; it's just life. So that's it, we all have to -- you know, that's the deal." I certainly don't mean -- or I mean much more than that. I mean also much more (and it should be already clear) than just bearing the kind of tragedy of loss: "It's just okay, because I can bear our tragic existential situation. I can bear the poignancy of it. I can bear the fragility of life. I can bear even my personal losses and the grief that comes with that in my heart."

So yes, that's a part of it: "Can I bear it? Can I hold that?" But what can open the whole question up more, the whole issue, the whole panorama, the whole horizon of death up more, without reverting to beliefs in rebirth, or eternal afterlife, or whatever? So this is what I want, to just offer a few things, share a few things, among many possibilities, that may be ways of opening things up, opening the sense of things up. And of course death is difficult when it's our death we're contemplating. I mean, very usually, that's a difficult thing, of course; sometimes not, and for different reasons that may have nothing to do with deep insight and deep opening. But death is difficult when it's ours, generally speaking, and, of course, it's also difficult when it's someone else's, when we love someone, and there's the looming -- their death is looming. Their death is coming. There's the imminence of our loss. So it's difficult in both those directions, of course, and I want to say a little bit about both.

So what makes death okay? It should be clear to most people that accumulating a lot of money is not going to make death okay. Accumulating a lot of pleasant experiences, or having more pleasant than unpleasant experiences, is also not going to make death okay. Sometimes what's more common is people kind of -- again, it might be not so conscious, or not so articulated, or it might be -- that accumulating experiences makes death more okay. So we have this idea of -- what is it called? Bucket something [list] -- the things I want to do before I die, the experiences I want to accumulate. Or even a sense of someone perhaps being told they have a terminal diagnosis or something like that, and it's like "Oh well. I've done a lot of really good things. I've done a lot of really interesting things. I've travelled here," you know, whatever it is: I've accumulated experiences.

So for some people, that's a kind of something that they look to to make death more okay, and it might be, to some extent, that that works a little bit for some people. It might also be, and what I've noticed is, again, this sort of like "Oh, well, I've had a long life," or "They've had a long life" -- or at least it's as long as, or longer than, the average length of life. And if it's less than the average, then potentially they can feel cheated. But if it's longer than the average, then they're, "Oh, okay" -- there's some okayness there. And again, that may help a little bit with some perspectives. You can see how in modern culture we have very little, very little wiggle room to really open up the sense of death, and how we might feel about it, think about it, and die.

And, of course, practising noticing impermanence, reflecting on impermanence, letting the fact of the impermanence of all things impress upon you -- a lifetime of doing that will also help with regard to death. Very often stressed in some kinds of Dharma, insight Dharma as well -- the central sort of reflection that's stressed and that's practised. Of course that may help. It may well help. It should help. But it may also be quite limited, just repeated reflection on impermanence, the repeated impression of the fact of the impermanence of all things. It may also be relatively limited what that can do, in terms of how we actually end up feeling about our death or the death of a loved one. So, definitely helpful, but may also be limited.

And then sometimes you get the other view -- and it's, again, typical in some streams of Dharma: "There's no self really. There's no self that dies. There's just a process of the aggregates. And so, because there's no self, there's nothing really to fear in death, because what the self really is is just this process of the aggregates in time -- the physical and mental aggregates." I've said before: to have that as the only view of self and existence is -- well, I don't know what the word for it is; just narrow, certainly, but kind of silly, really. It's not adequate for our psychology. It's not adequate for life. It's not adequate for death. It's not adequate for relationship (which I'll come back to). It's not phenomenologically adequate. As a temporary mode of relative kind of perspective that can be used as a provisional truth and a provisional way of looking, it can be helpful at times, on its way to something deeper, for sure. But as a kind of primary way of orienting to the dukkha and the pain of death? Hmm, yeah, not so sure.

If you ask me, and I have actually shared this elsewhere, written a little bit about it, what is it for me, as I'm approaching death, what is it that makes my death okay, much more okay, like a whole different level of okay, so that the word 'okay' doesn't really even do it? What is it that opens out the whole sense of death, and brings a level of beauty and peace there? Now, I've shared this, as I said, before, but I think I can divide them into perhaps four. (1) One is emptiness practice and understanding, by which I do not mean limited at that view of 'the self is just the process of aggregates in time.' I mean something way beyond that. I mean a practice and understanding of openness to the Unfabricated, the complete, transcendent Beyond, the Deathless. No subject, no object, no time, no world, no this, no that; beyond all perception. That sense of that realm or dimension, as the Buddha sometimes called it, that does something, the timelessness of that. It does something.

Sometimes, as I've shared, there's a sense of that being just there as a holy other, transcendent other, and sometimes a shining through existence, through this existence, this world of temporality, and thing-ness, and subjects, and objects, and selves. But it does something, either way, both ways. And similarly, seeing the emptiness of time, the emptiness of past, future, and of present -- the complete emptiness of time, the emptiness of any present moment -- there's something about that. There would have to be, of course; death is impermanence. It's connected intimately, obviously, with notions of time, senses of time. You see the emptiness of time, and that does something that opens up the sense of death.

And, of course, as I've talked about recently and before, even going beyond the Unfabricated, where we're open to appearances that are felt and sensed and known as empty, magical, and divine (we talked about this earlier in this series somewhere or other) -- empty, magical, and divine appearances, and in that, with that, shot through all that, in the magic, the emptiness, and the divinity, is a sacredness. And that sacredness, that sense of sacredness -- it comes right out of emptiness practice. The sacredness that comes out of emptiness practice, the sense of sacredness that comes out of emptiness practice -- that makes a huge difference. There's so much power in that, in relation to death. And as the Buddha said with a few different examples, you know, one moment of knowing that is worth a hundred years of ... and then he gives a lot of examples: pain-free life, a hundred years of knowing that. I think he says even knowing impermanence. One moment of knowing that. The whole sense of existence is -- something happens; it's turned inside out. Those aren't even the right words. But in that, the whole relationship with death is different, is opened out, is pacified and made beautiful. So, for me, that's one real way or direction or approach which really changes the relationship with death, makes it profoundly okay.

(2) And the second is related to what I said earlier about this sense of gift, and at all different levels, receiving gifts, or having received gifts, gifts showered on oneself, and also given gifts -- so at every level. And I can see in my life, I've been given a lot of gifts. I never felt growing up -- despite all the craziness and difficulty and dysfunction (to use an out-of-date word) in our family and upbringing, and all the intensity, intense sort of craziness there -- I never felt that I would go hungry, or go without a roof over my head, unless I ran away. So just that level of gift. And the gift of education, and the gift of ... so many gifts. So at that level, but also the gift of life itself. And the gift of what's given particularly to me, and particularly to you -- your particular gifts. And wrapped up in my particular gifts and your particular gifts is your particular dukkha. They go together often. Well, certainly, any gift I'm given, or any deep gift I'm given, seems to bring with it its kind of concomitant, accompanying dukkha; it's wrapped up in it. And I can see that I've been given certain gifts in this life, and certain abilities and capacities, and whatever you want to say.

So all these senses of gift, and the sense of giving, of having given, that that has been important. It's been so important to me to give, again, at lots of different levels -- just to practise generosity, but to give of my gifts, and to give to the world, and to give to the future, and to give of the beauty I sense, the beauties I sense, to pass that on, to communicate, to let something come through, to share that. So all these different levels, and what I talked about -- I think it was in the talk on pain -- that kind of thing, this sense of gift received and given. That sense of existence, and even, as I said, even the illness, and the pain, and the dukkha, and the early death as being part of what I received, part of what was gift to me, and part somehow that I'm sacredly giving back -- or in a sacramental way, giving back. That whole sense of life also does something to our sense of death, I think, very much, I feel, very much.

[57:14] (3) And then a third way is the sense of having done, having tried to do, one's duty, having tried in one's life, even if one hasn't really understood it, or had the words or a conceptual framework that will hold it and carry it, not been able to articulate it, only dimly sensed, or maybe not even sensed at all -- that one has tried to do one's duty. One has let oneself, and worked, so that one's life refracts the daimon, reflects the angels out ahead that call to one, that govern one's life. So this sense too. And one can never succeed in that 100 per cent. We said the reflection is never completely perfect -- 'virtually'; there's always falling short. But one has tried, and let that lead one's life, devoted oneself to that, put that as primary -- even, as I said, if one doesn't think in these terms at all, that one can hear something like that, and understand, "Yes, I can see that I've done that, or I've tried to do that."

(4) Fourthly, and connected with the whole thing we were talking about with the ethics talks in this series, that one has lived in a way that's tried to be, or one has aspired to living a really worthwhile life, a life that is worth living, a beautiful life. One has aspired towards the Good, with a capital G, towards what really matters, a sense of what really matters, and taken the trouble to find out what that is for oneself, and to get one's bearings, even in times of confusion and being inundated with other pushes and pulls, and indoctrinations, and advertisements, and peer pressure, and all kinds of things -- risks and threats. That one has lived in that direction; one has tried to live as much as possible in that direction.

[1:00:15] Those four things, for me: (1) emptiness in that much fuller sense, (2) the sense of gift received and given, at all those different levels, and all those different ways, (3) the trying to discern and to do one's duty, duties, refracting the daimon, (4) and the attempt to live what really constitutes a worthwhile life, and a sense of that, a beautiful life, a really Good life, with a capital G -- for me, those are some of the principal things that really make a difference. And of course, all of those are actually connected, those four kind of directions or approaches. Especially they're connected through, of course, soulmaking practice and the sensing with soul sensibility -- the sense of refracting one's daimon, doing one's duty; the sense of life as gift, gifts received and given at all these different levels; the sense of living in the direction of what's sensed as a really beautiful life; and the emptiness of it all, the very 'neither real nor not real' nature of all of that. All of that comes together and is intimately woven together in soulmaking practice and sensing with soul sensibilities.

Actually, just to add something to that list, because most of what's in that list of four things, four supports or openings that transform the relationship with death, most of what's in there are kind of currents, and efforts, and movements, and openings over a lifetime, or over, you know, years, really -- directions. So just to add to that something which I've already shared in another talk. I think it was in the talk on dyad practice, "Soulmaking Dyad Practice"^[3] -- I think it was there; doesn't really matter. But there's the possibility of being so touched by a soulmaking experience, having an opening in imaginal practice or sensing with soul where one's profoundly moved by a sense of grace, a sense of eternality, a sense of participating in something so unfathomably beautiful and divine. And remember, when we use that word, 'participation,' in this context, in the context of soulmaking, and we use it as one of the elements of the imaginal, we're really meaning something much more, much more profound than what its usual meaning points to -- 'I participate in this or that' -- something almost impossible to articulate: mystery, profundity, and sacredness in the sense of that participation.

Just having those few minutes of experience transforms the relationship with existence and with death. It could be in dyad practice, or in a group soulmaking practice, or it could just be solo with a so-called intrapsychic image, or it could be sensing with soul -- some experience, perhaps in nature, where there's the sensing with soul, and the soulmaking imaginal perception. And one feels as if so much grace bestowed on the being -- the wonder, the privilege, the profound, sacred privilege of opening to something so divine, to the divine in that way. Just being touched by that, having that grace come, participating that way, having that sense of privilege, it changes the sense of death, because of the grace, because of the privilege of participation, because of the opening to eternality, to timelessness.

And that kind of experience is very different than what I was talking about earlier, at the start of the talk, of trying to accumulate experiences, because the attitude and the impulse to accumulate experience tends to be restricted to one dimension, tends to be flat, and then, therefore, it needs more and more experiences. It always needs more experiences, because the eros there is limited to one dimensionality, because it's not, for some reason -- either because of the limited logos, or for some other reason -- not allowed to open up more dimensions, and to open to more dimensions. It cannot penetrate and open to dimensionality. The pothos in the eros, that which wants more in the eros, cannot go, so to speak, deeper, into other dimensions, other aspects, facets of what it wants and what it loves. It has to go, so to speak, horizontally, on the same level, for more and more experiences: "Now I've been there in my travels -- I have to go there. Now I've been there, I have to go somewhere else. More travel -- been here, been there, flown here, flown there, seen this, seen that," and so to speak. We've explained this in An Ecology of Love, I think, Path of the Imaginal, plenty of other places.

When the eros is allowed to open up the dimensionality, open up the logos, open up the psyche, and when there's that really profound experience of an opening to some soulmaking experience, or the imaginal, sensing with soul, then, in contrast to this kind of accumulation of experience, it has such a humility in it. There's a real humility in it, partly because of the sense of grace, of inexplicable gift. And with it, there's also a sense of "This is enough." This gift is enough -- that glimpse, those couple of minutes, that opening to something, that sense of deep participation, that sense of the privilege of that opening, that bestowal of grace. There's enough. That gift was enough, those two minutes.

And that makes a difference in relation to death. There's humility in a sense that "this is enough" that comes with the grace. And there's a sense, you know, because our experience fades, of course -- experiences are impermanent -- experience fades, but somewhere in our being, even when that sense of things and that experience feels inaccessible, it's not apparent, we can still be left with: "I know something, because I have tasted it, I have experienced it. I know something," even when it's not, at some later time, apparent or accessible. And this knowing in the being -- "I know something about existence. I know something about a human being. I know something about life, and that's something that I know, even if I can't quite articulate it, I can't really encapsulate it in words" -- it does something to my relationship with death. It's enough, and that makes death much more okay.

So there's also that that I would say is really important. There's certainly the importance of the currents in one's life, these longer trends and longer strivings and longer devotions, the sense of the whole life, with all its beauties, and all its difficulties, and challenges, and travails, and tragedies -- all of that as gift received. And all the gifts given at so many levels of one's life. This is a longer-term devotional trend. And the sense of trying to do one's duty, trying to discern and do one's duty; trying to seek out and sense: "What is the life that's beautiful, that's worthwhile, that's really Good?" And even the journey into the experience of emptiness -- all these are longer-term devotions and trends. But I just want to add to that that there's also the possibility, and I think the very important possibility, of just these openings sometimes with soulmaking practice that are so profound, and so imbued with grace and beauty and a sense of the privilege of participation -- whatever we want to call it -- and the divinity of things at such a deep level. Those moments -- not so much longer-term trends -- but they're moments, minutes or whatever, sometimes hours, but sometimes they're just really a few minutes, and those experiences potentially can make a huge difference in our relationship with death. It's enough. I've had that, and just those two minutes are worth more than a long life or a hundred years of health or whatever it is.

[1:11:35] So that's just a little bit. I want to come back later on and share someone else's experience or approach to their own death. There's so much to say, we can only say a little bit. But, of course, like I said, sometimes it's another person's death, someone whose death is very difficult for us. And sometimes we encounter people who -- what language could we use here? -- we feel they've lived their image. They've refracted their daimon (to use that language). We feel that. They've lived their image. They've refracted their daimon. They lived in a way that echoes, mirrors, and does the duty of their daimon, of their image, of their -- again, if we use this language -- individual Idea ('Idea' with a capital 'I,' in the Ideal realm), individual form, their Ideal person. There's different language. And when we have that feeling about someone, we are touched deeply by them and their life, and touched by that whole, what we feel we are sensing there and witnessing, because we sense the divine and the deep soul is coming through that person. I'm thinking of someone like John Coltrane, for me -- early death, but somehow just did what he was here to do, so devotedly, so beautifully, really living his image, doing the duty of his daimon. It touches profoundly, and we have the sense something is going on here that has to do with (your language) divinity, whatever, God, deep soul. And the soul loves that. The soul loves seeing that, witnessing that, sensing that.

And, of course, when we have that sense about someone else, when they die, you know, naturally, the grief then is deep, for the very same reason: the soul loves that. There's so much beauty there, so much being touched by the divine, so much sense of divinity coming through. When they die, the grief will be deep, for just that reason. But in a way, you know, we have them still too. We have them still after death, because, in a way, they are eternal. Their image has impressed itself on us, so they can be an image for us, with all the elements of the imaginal, including the eternality and the timelessness. They're already image, and that image lives on with eternality, with timelessness. So we have them. Yes, there's a loss. Of course there's a loss. And of course there's the grief. But somehow we still have them.

Bach's St Matthew Passion is a really gorgeous aria. I think it's sung by -- I don't know -- the baritone or bass or something. But the character is, I think, Joseph of Arimathea, some of you will know from the gospel stories. He agreed to bury Jesus, or he volunteered to bury Jesus after the Crucifixion. And the lyrics of this aria, it's in German: "Mache dich, mein Herze, rein, ich will Jesum selbst begraben," which, in sort of slightly archaic English, translates as "Make thee clean, my heart, I will bury Jesus." That's the only lyric of the whole aria. "Make thee clean, my heart" -- make yourself pure, my heart -- "I will bury Jesus." And, again, I know people have different histories with all this, but for me, there's just so much love and soul, certainly in the music, but also in that very sentiment: "Make thee clean, my heart, I will bury Jesus."

What does it mean to bury, in this case, to bury Jesus, bury someone we love, bury someone whom we feel they lived their image, the divine came through them? What does that mean, "to bury Jesus," to bury this person in my heart, in my soul? This is a real possibility for us, that we can do that -- bury this person in the heart, in the soul, really, that they somehow live in me, live for me, as image, as icon.

So, yes, all the grief. I really don't want to sort of say, "Oh, this erases the grief. It'll just be no problem." But there's a whole other possibility that can open up. I mean, if we take that lyric there, "Make thee clean, my heart, I will bury Jesus," what does "make thee clean" mean in Soulmaking Dharma? "Make yourself clean" means the purity, purify. And what does that mean? In Soulmaking Dharma terms, it means fullness of intention. That's a purification of our intention. It means all the sensitivity of the poise of sensing with soul, and even the preparation for sensing with soul. It means the elements of the imaginal -- the humility, the reverence, grace, the participation, the autonomy, also, of self and other, the beauty, the eros. This is all part of "make thee clean," all the elements, but particularly fullness of intention, particularly humility, particularly sensitivity, particularly the imaginal Middle Way. That's also a purification. As you know, when that starts to either reify, or go the other end where images are dismissed, then we don't have the container for the power of the imaginal sort of rippling out and opening up more and more horizons. Something will get limited, stuck, rigid -- like the view of reality is stuck, in either a realism or a kind of dismissive nihilism.

So we do love deeply when we see, or sense, or when our sense of someone is that they have lived their image, refracted their daimon. It touches us deeply, and then because of that, yes, there's a deep grief, and we want that grief; we don't want to get rid of it. But at the same time as the grief, alongside it, for the very same reason that there's such deep grief, there is the gift of their impression on us, which has already been made. They've already impressed themselves as image. They've impressed on us. And in that sense, we can bury them, so to speak, keep them -- a place for them as image, as icon, in our soul, in our heart. "Make thee clean, my heart, I will bury Jesus." I don't know if you can -- can you hear all the soul and all the love in there?

And again, with the help of Soulmaking Dharma, we can take this and interpret it in different ways that really open it up, and open up our sense of life, our sense of death, our sense of, in this case, the death of another. And it's also the case with all this that, yes, as I said, there will be the grief there, but something is -- I don't know what the word is -- redeemed? Is that -- not quite the right word. But in other words, it's not just loss. There's gift here, even in the death. The death is gift. The death is loss, and therefore grievable, of course, and grieved, of course. But even what seems tragic -- so, Jesus's death, very early death, or John Coltrane's death, very early death -- what seems tragic can then have, as well as the grief, as well as the tragedy, have this whole other level that it opens up, which is gift and beauty, and an opening that sometimes may not have been there, even, without the death, so much.

Clement of Alexandria, one of the early theologians, Christian theologians, for him, 'providence,' the way the divine -- or translate it into Buddhist language -- the way the dharmakāya kind of takes care of us, with providence (that's what that word means):

Providence does not prevent evil [prevent bad] from [happening; does not prevent early deaths of those we love, etc., or ourselves], but seeks to overrule it for an ultimately good end.^[4]

Providence does not prevent the bad from happening, but seeks to overrule it for an ultimately good end. Now, we could hear that as just a doctrine, as something we're asked to believe, and there's a certain view. But again, I think with Soulmaking Dharma practice, actual practice, we can open up an actual sense. This is our actual sense. We go through; we don't push away the grief, or close the heart, refuse to feel. That doesn't just become, "Oh, it's fine! Everything's fine!", "Oh well, impermanence," "Oh, now I've got this shiny image and everything's fine." With all that, there is somehow, in the middle of it, in the midst of the difficulty, with the difficulty, around the difficulty, there is this sense of somehow providence is operating here; somehow this is perfect.

And I think I wrote in my blog something about having a sense that my illness and even my early death is perfect.^[5] This was a few years ago. And someone said they really didn't like that. I can't remember their reasons, but it might have been from a certain religious upbringing they had or something. But the way they were hearing it was as if it was a dogma or a philosophy -- everything is perfect: [flippantly] "Oh, everything is perfect!" It's a whole different, kind of much more superficial level. You can hear the brittleness in it: "Just try and view everything as perfect!" It's silly. And you can tell when it's brittle; it has a brittle feeling to it, or it has a kind of -- sometimes it's not brittle, it's just a little bit kind of almost deluded, like this person is just not in touch with the dukkha, or the grief, or the tragedy, or the loss, or whatever, or the pain.

I'm not talking about a philosophy here. I'm not talking about a religious dogma or anything, or a view (in the poor sense of the word 'view'). I'm really talking about soulmaking practice, sensing with soul. In this case, what I shared was sensing my own illness, and the prognosis I was given, and the difficulty, and the physical dukkha, and the full knowledge of likelihood of dying early, soon, in the next couple of years. Sensing that with soul, and out of the very practice, not out of a kind of cheap idea or religious teaching or philosophy, but out of practice, then -- well, I don't know what language to use -- a mystical sense that everything is perfect. And not in a way that got rid of dukkha, or put me out of touch with dukkha.

And this sense also that everything is perfect that comes out of practice, again, like seeing the emptiness of things, if its fruit is then inaction -- "Oh, everything's perfect, so I don't have to worry about social injustice, and racial injustice, and environmental injustice, and all the rest of it" -- something's wrong. It's coming more from some idea, in an undigested way. It's not been digested in practice. It's just an idea. Something's -- you can feel it: it's just off. But this kind of sense of the perfection of things, this kind of sense of some mysterious providence working through tragedy, putting it in a bigger arc, a bigger trajectory, a bigger picture, a bigger unfolding -- the sense that comes out of practice is not brittle, includes the dukkha very much, and the softness and the sensitivity of heart, and the openness of heart, and does not lead to inaction and not caring. So I'm really talking about a sense of things and a view of things that comes out of practice -- not a sort of easy idea.

[1:27:47] And like I said, most of the stuff I've been talking about, certainly in this series of talks and other series, it needs to be approached via practice, rather than just hearing and not practising, listening and not practising, and just hearing some ideas or whatever, or hearing some far-out sounding experiences. It's only going to cause problems, or have no effect whatsoever. But if there's really that soil of practice being turned, then you have a very different understanding of what we're talking about here.

So of course, I mean, in the examples I gave -- Jesus and John Coltrane and stuff -- it's, to me, clearly special people who you really get a sense: "Wow, something's going on there. They're really living their image," or whatever language one would use, "the divine is really coming through." But this opening up, and -- I don't know what the word is -- redeeming, redeeming of the sense of the death of a loved one, it's not only for special people. It happens, it can happen -- it should happen, actually -- it can happen in any relationship we have, in any deep relationship we have, because in deep relationship, the other becomes image for us. In deep human relationship, the other becomes image for us. Deep relationship has imaginal dimensions. I've talked about this before, in a way.

So let me try and explain something and see. Hopefully I can explain it. In a way, this relates to stuff I talked about in the Four Parables of Stone and Light series when we were talking about soulmaking dyad practice. But, in a way, like I said, it actually applies -- this is part of the phenomenology (in other words, part of the actual experience), I would say, of any deep human relationship, any time we really love or we're really devoted to a relationship, we have -- if we can explain it a certain way, maybe you can see it visually in your mind, if that helps. So we have the kind of what's agreed on in society, contemporary society, we have one level of the relationship: there's this human being and that human being, and the relationship happens in time. And if I know this person long enough, then there are my old acts, or rather the acts between us, the things we've done and the interactions we've had in the past -- so temporal, but in the past, and I still have access to at least some of them, if not many of them, through memory. And of course, in an ongoing relationship, there are new actions, and interactions, and dialogue, and all that.

So you have one level, and it's the agreed-upon level of what human relationship is: it happens in time, between two human beings who are actually conceived of as flat, not dimensional (other than being dimensional in the non-soulmaking ways we consider human beings dimensional these days, conventionally in the culture). We can see that, if you can make a diagram in your mind: human and human, and two lines between them -- old actions, let's say, and new actions. And all of that is on a temporal level -- it's unfolding in time.

But if on your little mental diagram then, above each of those humans, human A and human B, in this, whatever relationship they have -- maybe they're just really good friends, whatever it is -- in a way, there's the image (let's just keep it singular for now). There's an image of human A and an image of human B. And human A has a sense of their own image, their own daimon. So, again, it's another dimension of their being. But human B also has a sense of their daimon. And then each human has a sense of the other's daimon, so to speak.

So as I was saying, in soulmaking dyad practice, you can play with this a little bit, but really what I'm pointing to is what's there anyway in human relationship. So you've got now a diagram with human A and human B, and then whatever we're going to call image A and image B, above, correspondingly, human A and human B. And that level of the image, as I said, when someone's living their image -- that level is a timeless level. And then the level in time is new and old actions, interactions.

But actually you've got relationships, or let's call it strands and directions of relationships, between every corner here. You've got two kinds of strand of relationship from the conventionally human to conventionally human level (the new and old interactions make two). You've got human A's interaction with their own image, and you've got human A's interaction with human B's image, and human B's interaction with human A's image. And then you've got the images' interaction with each other.

Now, all of this kind of becomes much more, let's say, discriminated and discrete and apparent when you really explore soulmaking dyad practice, as I unpacked a little bit in that long talk on "Soulmaking Dyad Practice" in the last series, in the Four Parables series. But this is a way of thinking of what's actually going on. So it becomes more apparent in formal soulmaking dyad practice, but I would say actually it's there in any deep human relationship where there's love and devotion to each other -- that all these levels and all these possible connections between different levels are going on.

Now, in some people that think this way -- and they're quite rare these days -- they use the terms 'image' and 'analogue.' So there's the image level, or we could say the daimon level, the angel level of a human being, and then what we've called up to now the human level is called the analogue. In a way, the terms don't really matter. We could say image and analogue. Image is the timeless, and the interactions between the analogue level happen in time. And image-to-analogue level happens sort of between the timeless and time.

I hope that makes sense a little, but let me say a bit more about that. Why is this important? Because, as I said, I think this is what goes on in human relationships anyway. So usually in our culture, in our culture's language, the word 'image' is considered a secondary phenomenon. We say "an image of this or that," and 'this' or 'that' is primary. So it's an image of the tree; it's not the real tree. The real tree is the real thing, and the image of the tree is a secondary thing -- it re-presents something more fundamental or something real. But as we were talking about just yesterday, I think it was, in fact, Plato had that whole ontology reversed, the hierarchy reversed, so that the ideal realm was considered by Plato more real, and this world was a re-presentation, an attempt at reflecting/refracting that more ideal world. So the image, in that way of thinking about it, is primary, and the analogue, or what we called the human, is secondary.

Words are tricky here, but also ontologies are really important here. Now, for what I want to say, actually, we could have either ontology: we could have the image level, what we're calling the image level as primary, and the analogue or human level as secondary. Or we could reverse that, and consider the human the primary and the image secondary. In a way, it doesn't make much difference. But I do think in the overall kind of scope of Soulmaking Dharma practice, there will come a time, inevitably, where, at times, that hierarchy, the sense of that hierarchy, gets reversed, and you can play with that, or you can even deliberately play with entertaining such an idea, such a notion. Or it will just get reversed anyway in the natural unfolding of soulmaking practice, for a time. And again, it's then not clung to as "This is the truth. This is the way things are. This is the correct conceptual framework." It becomes part of a flexibility, a range of flexible conceptual frameworks that we can work with.

One of my favourite composers -- I think he's a great composer; he died just a few years ago -- Peter Maxwell Davies, has, I think, a really stunning, stunningly beautiful -- very complex, but stunningly beautiful piece, called "Image, Reflection, Shadow." It was for a quintet or sextet. "Image, Reflection, Shadow," reading his liner notes, what he meant by that was, or it came to him, seeing -- and somehow it's sort of played out in the music, his notion here -- but he saw a seagull over sunlit water by the sea where he lived. He used to live on one of the islands off of Scotland, and he composed a lot of music there, which really has a lot of the atmosphere of the sea, and the space, and the whole magic up there.

Anyway, "Image, Reflection, Shadow" was this seagull flying low over the sea, and the sun was out, so it was both reflected in the water -- there was the image of the bird for his eyes; and there was the reflection in the water; and there was the shadow of the seagull on the water. And as I said, somehow that became a sort of paradigm for the music somehow or other. But maybe these words are better -- image, reflection, shadow. So 'reflection' or 'refraction' may be a better word than 'analogue' for some of us. We are the reflection or refraction, potentially, of an image, daimon. And 'shadow' meaning, with that connotation of relative darkness, that even our distortions are somehow poor and blocked vestiges or echoes of an original emanation. Like a light shadow -- it's a vestige; it's what's remaining of light that's blocked by something, or partially blocked by something, but it's also an echo of light, if we can speak of that, because it's light reflected off from other places where that thing is not in the way.

We've talked about this before, but even our mistakes and our neuroses and our malfunctions can potentially be seen as related to that original emanation from the image. So we get the reflection, the refraction when we're more true to that image, but even our messed up stuff, our distortions, can be seen as poor and blocked echoes or vestiges of that. Actually, in fact, image and whatever we're going to call it, refraction or analogue, are mutually dependent -- they affect each other. It's not entirely or strictly speaking a one-way emanation process from image to reflection/refraction, from image to analogue, from image to human. We understand, as part of the Soulmaking Dharma understanding, that they affect each other; there's a mutual dependency there.

And another thing about this idea before I say what's this got to do with death, etc., is -- in a way, I've touched on it, hinted at it, I alluded to it -- we could, and I did when I said "Can you imagine a diagram where image is above?" You draw the image above the human, just to get a sense of all the different lines between the different corners -- human A, human B, image A, image B, whatever. Of course, we could, I suppose, conceive the relationship between image and analogue here, in spatial relationship or spatial constellation, as like 'above, below,' or 'below, above,' or 'around, within' or 'within, around,' you know. The image is within the human, or below -- it comes up from the depths, the dark, rich depths of the earth -- or it comes down from the luminous heights of heaven, or whatever. We could conceive them in spatial terms like that, in any of those spatial terms.

But much better, I think, is probably to jettison the idea of a spatial and a temporal location or existence of image or angel or daimon. I've touched on this before, sometime in the last year or so. This is really, really important. Perhaps the analogue is the manifestation in space and time -- a partial and refracted manifestation in space and time -- of what is non-spatial, non-temporal, what is timeless: the image. So this image has a kind of a timeless existence. The angel is neither spatial nor temporal. And the analogue is this refraction or reflection into time and into space of what is not spatial and not temporal. And again, we can say all this, "Okay, blah blah blah -- it's really metaphysical, far-out metaphysical ideas." But is it not the kind of sense we have of things if we just open up soulmaking practice, that at some point this is the kind of sense we have of things? And this is there in a germinal way, at least, or a non-articulated, non-discriminated way in relationships where there is love, and they're deep relationships, and they're intimate relationships, and we have that. That's all mixed up, and it's just our culture doesn't have the language or the conceptual framework that supports that kind of articulation or discrimination.

[1:45:27] So what I want to ask now is: what happens to this whole constellation of relationship (which means the sense of relationship) after one person dies? Because, actually, in a way, most of the fabricating constituents of the sense of, let's say, the person who dies, for the person who remains alive -- most of the fabricating and the creating and discovering constituents remain: the image of the other, the memory of past interactions, actions, and even potentially, new interactions, but mediated by a purely -- well, if we could say -- a 'purely' imaginal consciousness. So of all the kind of strands of connection in our little diagram, it's only the analogue-to-analogue, human-to-human level of new actions, new interactions that doesn't remain, that seems to have gone after death. Most of the fabricating, the creating/discovering constituents of the sense of the one who has died, and what makes our sense of them, is actually still there, remains after their death. Actually, I don't know -- are any of the constituents really fully separate from any other? I don't think they are.

But as I said, if, in fact, a human person -- you know, what we mean by 'human,' or what we sense of a human person, what we can sense of a human person -- is really or more fully comprised of what, in this sort of scheme I've tried to (probably very clumsily) explain, is called image and human, or image and analogue. In other words, that's really what a human being is, and that's really the sense of what we have as a human being, what we have of human beings, human beings that we love. If it's really that, then the question is, "Does death change that much?" Or is it potentially that death changes only a small portion of the actuality of human relationships? Because the image-to-image, the human-to-image, and image-to-human, and the memory of human-to-human level, old actions in time -- all that remains.

So I hope I've explained it clearly enough. I probably could have done better. But again, it's so different than how we've grown up, what we've inherited in terms of the way we think about human being, and the way we think about "what am I in relationship with?" and "what is a person?", because there's no room in our culture for this imaginal level, or this idea of somehow this person is refracting something timeless, and the relationship is multi-stranded and multidimensional between two human beings, and a human being is multidimensional. This is very unsupported as a notion in our culture, so it might sound completely bizarre, or even ridiculous, what I'm trying to say, if you can follow it, even.

And I certainly don't mean, again, to say, "Oh, just see things this way, and then there'll be no grief." And it's certainly, I hope it's clear, not the same as saying, "Oh well. They'll die, and you've got your memories already. You've got your memories, at least." I'm saying much more than that. Right now, in relationships with the living, if we open our sense of that, if we can sense with soul, with the love, and you see, sense them -- what's actually there, what's already there, in your sense of human being, when they're sensed with soul? And then what does that do to the sense of death or the sense of loss?

It doesn't, it won't take the grief away, but it will give something that, in a way, we prevent ourselves from receiving and being open to and having, or we are prevented by the culture, by the linguistic and conceptual inheritances. Someone we love dies, and there are still all these different dimensions of relationship there, that were there when they were alive too. It's not like now they die, and now they're moving in space and time somewhere in the spirit world, and maybe we can communicate with them through a séance or something. While we're alive, these other dimensions are there, and if we acknowledge these other dimensions, and these other connections between dimensions, and, as I said, the different strands of communication, of love, of connection, of seeing, of intercourse, while we're alive, we start to have a different sense of how much we've lost when a person dies. Image is with us. Image communicates with us. We communicate with image. Image communicates with image. Memory becomes image.

So think about this sense of human being, again, this sense of human person and personhood, and what is it to really be a person? What is it not to limit the sense of what a human being is, and what a human person is, and our personhood? A lot about the Dharma is about deconstructing the sense of self and all that, seeing its fabricated nature, stripping it down. And that's so valuable. We can talk about completely unfabricating the sense of self, or a less fabricated sense of self. Or really the most basic sense of self, just the barest sense of a subject, of an awareness, the barest sense of an object, and the barest, the most basic -- 'the most basic' is a better word than barest -- the most basic sense of time, of a present moment. And that's sort of the most basic level of self-fabrication, this side of the Unfabricated. And then you fabricate, fabricate, fabricate, and one way we can fabricate is towards papañca -- crazy ideas about ourselves and others and relationships, and all reified and tight, tied up in knots with it. But there's also fabrication that's skilful. We've talked about the soulmaking fabrication, the fabrication of soulful image and the imaginal.

So I don't know about language, but we could say, you know, actually, one is a self whenever there is any perception of objects, whenever there's any subject/object -- even the barest, like just a nothingness, and an awareness: subject/object, object/subject. But we are -- I don't know what the word would be -- we are persons, full persons, only where there is relationship of some complexity, with some sense for us of meaningfulness and depth and dimensionality of our persons and another's. And that relationship -- it may be relationship with a physically manifesting sentient being, someone who's alive with us, or an animal. It may be relationship with a divinity, an angel, so-called purely imaginal, imaginally manifesting. Or it may be something in nature, what's supposedly non-sentient. I don't know if that's the right division of language -- self and person. But subject and person, maybe. We are persons when we are in relationship, when there is relationship, as I said, of some complexity for us, with some sense for us of meaningfulness, of depth, of dimensionality, of our own personhood, and of the other's.

So even when there's just the beginnings of that, of meaningfulness, of depth, of dimension, even just the beginnings of what we would say, the 'elements of the imaginal,' perhaps, then we're more than subjects -- we're persons. You can use the word 'self' for the whole spectrum if you want. But both subjects and persons are empty. They're dependent arisings. But as always, and as I keep stressing, the fact of emptiness, the fact of their emptiness, the fact of the emptiness of any conception, and any sense, and any view of subject/self/person, means that actually we are free to view that way, because all views are empty. We're free to view that way. We're free to pick up that view if we want. And the question is: what does it lead to? What does it open for us, and what does it limit?

As I said, if I love someone and I think "Oh, they've died or they're dying, so I'll use my Buddhist history and practice, and I'll regard them as a process of the aggregates," it just does not do justice to our relationship, to their personhood, to their life. It certainly doesn't do justice to soul. It's phenomenologically incomplete. What will it lead to if that's my only view: I'm always trying to, or thinking I should see the other person as a process of aggregates?

So coming back to teachings we've given for a while, there's the whole teaching about fabrication -- there's unfabricating, and there's skilful fabricating and unskilful fabricating. The question is: what does it lead to? All of it's empty, so we can pick up anywhere on these spectra, and adopt a view. And the question is: what does it open for us? What does it deliver? What does it give us?

I hope you followed this. I probably could have explained it better. But it would be, I think, very common to think, "Okay, well, that's all a metaphysical theory about what a human being is and about an image, and an analogue, and a level of angels, and all this stuff." Is it though? Or is it more a phenomenological account? In other words, it's how we experience persons in relation to our person anyway, when there's love, where there's a real depth of connection, when there's a soulfulness in the connection, and when we have a sense of a relationship that we're devoted to.

We've been, gradually, over the course of history, recent history, indoctrinated to believe, and then to experience, in line with a view of what a human being is, and what the cosmos is that -- some of which we traced in the recent talks on ethics, "The Image of Ethics" -- what was actually started from metaphysical theories, from philosophies, from theological moves about not having intermediaries, and about the elevation of ordinary life, and not having hierarchical order of the cosmos, which then got replaced with a horizontal order; all those philosophical, metaphysical, and theological moves had repercussions, which we very sketchily traced through history, so that what we feel now as normal and non-metaphysical -- we feel like we're just seeing things as they are, naturally, without any overlay, or distortion, or through metaphysics and all that, and philosophy and strange religious notions, but actually, it had its roots in, as I said, in philosophy, metaphysics, theology, and religious notions. It also had its roots in the gradual birth of the modern novel, this view of humanity, its emphasis on particularities, on ordinary life. And the modern novel, one of its main origins, seeds, was journals written by Puritans who had this view of a very personal, unmediated relationship with God, in a non-hierarchical universe, etc.

So all this, what we tend to think, "Oh, you've just described some really complex, bizarre metaphysics as some kind of weird idea that you're trying to superimpose on the way things really are." But maybe our sense of the way things really are is actually (A) an indoctrination, an inculcation, an inheritance from something that started from metaphysics, theology, philosophy; and (B) our sense of the way things are is not actually an accurate report of the way things are for us. Look closer. Sense closer when there's love and the relationship is really alive that way. Again, is it not the case that at least the germs of what I'm trying to talk about here are actually already there in the sense we have of things? And there's something that we've inherited that just makes us rule that out, or not take that seriously, or not see it, even, not sense it -- not discriminate, discern, and articulate it, and then, in that way, give it support.

So we lose someone to death. They die; we're left. And yet, it may be that a lot more is possible in terms of the continuing sense of relationship, connection with them, than we tend to think; that a lot less of the real whole of what was there in our relationship, what flowed in our relationship -- a lot less is lost of the whole than we thought; that much more is still open, still possible, still alive, really. And yes, there's still grief, there's still loss, there's still the pain of that, there's still the wishing it weren't the case, perhaps. But to open this up, it's almost like we have to allow ourselves to see, and the sensing with soul will really help to open up this sense.

[2:04:57] So those are a few possibilities. I want to share something from a close friend in relationship. So just tracing -- she was okay for me to share this; I asked her. Slightly different -- well, quite a different journey and approach to loss of a loved one; in this case, my being given a metastatic diagnosis, pancreatic cancer, which is pretty much always fatal. It was shortly after I got that diagnosis, and with all the implications that we knew, that I was going to die from this, probably quite soon. So these are parts of her report I will read. Again, what I'm really showing here is how can this terrible, deep grief and loss at the death of someone we love -- how can that be opened up in a different way? How can the soulmaking and the sensing with soul help and support that to be opened up in a different way, to get a different sense of that, different possibilities?

So I'd got that diagnosis. We knew what it meant, and the implications of dying -- that I would not be cured from this disease, that it would kill me, relatively soon. And so she was quite upset and quite distraught. I'll read parts of her account. So this is in her words now:

"Can this become soulmaking?", he gently asked ['he' is me], reminding me through his question that this was possible, and what I wanted. "Thank you. Yes, it can," I said. Recognizing in that moment I was a little stuck, and in some vague contention with the reality of the situation. And while contention felt better than collapsing, it definitely wasn't soulmaking, and so perhaps this can be my question now as we embark on this leg of the journey.

And then she kind of just lists her awareness of what this leg of the journey would involve and imply, and the dukkha and the loss, and all of that. So:

Can this become soulmaking? In theory, yes, it can. And what will support that? Remembering this question, for a start, and recognizing that caring for the dukkha in this way could be a fitting and beautiful offering to my beloved friend. [In other words, caring for the dukkha through soulmaking.] My faith tells me this is possible [her faith in soulmaking -- she's done a lot of soulmaking practice], but I do not know what this will look like as we face this time, or if I am up to the task. But I can see that the question itself offers a frame, a way to orient to the time ahead, whatever it may bring.

So I really want you to hear the wisdom in this. It's all about the skill in the approach, and the wisdom in the approach. There's this difficulty, stuckness, and contention, collapse, then just contention. Then this: "Oh, well, can it be soulmaking? Yes, it can. I have some faith in that." So that's already a big step. And then, "What will support that?" And the question, "Can it be soulmaking? What will support the soulmaking here?", itself, that question, as she says, "offers a frame, a way to orient to the time ahead, whatever it may bring" -- whatever the time ahead may bring. She continues:

And as I let the question strike me, I light up. My sense and my posture straighten naturally, and I line up as if I'm filled with trillions of iron filings that line up before a magnet. "Okay," I recognize, "this is helpful." [She's using the energy body sense as telling her she's on the right track.] Taking on this question, "Can this become soulmaking?", I am already much less in contention with the reality of the situation, and my loving desire is switched on again towards what I most love: soulmaking. This lining up, as well as being strengthening and helpful, seems to make my human heart at once incredibly vulnerable, impactable, and tender, and at the same time, steady, bright, and unwavering, as if allowing this question to strike me has the effect of beginning to shape me into the kind of organism that might be able to perceive all of this soulfully.

See the art and the skill here? Just, "Can this become soulmaking? What will support that?" And that question, together with a little bit of faith, starts to do something, starts to shape her into the kind of organism, she writes, "that might be able to perceive all of this soulfully."

I sense myself at a threshold now where the conventional sense of myself, who is looking forward in time to the painful and demanding journey ahead, gets the sense of more possibilities with this inevitable dukkha. Something in the air is attractive to me, and my soulful antennae, my soul antennae are piqued. More is possible here. [She realizes more is possible here.] And staying close to the emotional impact of this news, I feel first what I might still call a contention with reality: "I don't want you to die." I don't want my beloved friend to die, because I don't. But I let myself sense this without collapsing around it. [She lets herself sense the contention, "I don't want you to die," without collapsing around it.] And then comes the desire. [Okay, it's the other side of "I don't want you to die."] I feel a strong desire, a desire for him to be well, and a desire for him to live forever: "I want you to live forever." Not cutting that off for being ridiculous and unrealistic; just letting myself have it -- so human, so understandable, so passionate. And very close to this desire, I feel a kind of objective helplessness of being human beings in the face of death.

Okay? So there's so much here. There's the contention, the 'don't want,' then realizing there's a 'want' that's the flip side of the 'want.' Not dismissing the 'want,' even if it sounds ridiculous: "I want you to live forever." How could that possibly be? Unrealistic. Letting herself have it, letting herself have that very human, understandable passion. And then, close to that desire -- and very naturally, and there should be -- this sense of helplessness: we're helpless as human beings in the face of death. She continues:

As I sense the current of the desire in my body [this desire: "I want you to live forever"], it comes through this vulnerable and utterly human spot in my heart, and that narrow spot in my heart starts to expand with the current. And as it expands, it is also illuminated. And as everything gets brighter in the whole citta, I am stopped in my tracks. My senses are arrested by a beauty that I start to sense. [Something is happening here, and a beauty is opening up, and it's arresting.] Right there, not divorced from the pain and reality of the situation, not losing any of its personalness, right there, he and I are being woven into image, a soulscape of extraordinary beauty. Horizontal time is relieved from being the whole and the only truth, and I am somehow being loved by this whole scene, by the whole image. ["He and I woven into image," and "horizontal time, not the whole truth." The whole scene is loving her; that's her sense.] And the grace of this (until now) only unwanted suffering, the grace is apparent and makes me humble. His illness and imminent death: not reducible to a single meaning for him, for me, or for the Saṅgha. This perception is so blessed, so blessèd. The pain is not necessarily taken away, but it is happening within a soulful cosmos where dimensionality and meaningfulness are shimmering with a startling beauty right here in the tragedy and loss, at once deeply human and utterly beyond. Can this become soulmaking? Yes, it can. And I bow.

[2:14:28] So this was the first stage, actually, of a journey with this whole ensouled relationship with death. It started to really open something up. A little while later, she had a dream. In the dream, there was a black snake coming out from down under a kitchen counter in the house where she grew up. And she was sitting in the dream with her family, and everyone was sort of horrified: "Oh, my God, it's a black snake! That shouldn't be there!" At some point in the dream, it shifted to, "That's not wrong, somehow. It's not wrong that this snake is there." At first, it felt it was wrong, and then somehow it didn't.

So in the way that sometimes what is immediately disturbing to the mind, the usual mind, or the mind thinks, "That's wrong, that can't be right," in imaginal practice -- in a similar way, that shift happened in the dream. And the next morning she took that image of the black snake into her meditation practice, and let it become imaginal, helped it to become imaginal, and found that the snake loved her, as it would if it becomes imaginal -- that's one of the elements of the imaginal -- but also that the snake itself seemed to kind of contain multiple images. One of these images related to, or kind of related to, then, my death, and her feelings about my death. So again, at some point later on, there was again, this, "I don't want you to die." And again, she really let herself feel it. Letting herself have this, "I don't want," loosened something. Really letting herself have this, "I don't want you to die" -- it loosened something, without dissolving the "I don't want." Right? We can loosen things so that they dissolve, completely unfabricate, or we can loosen things enough, with a slight unfabricating, so that they actually can become more soulmaking. So it's like a cry out to the cosmos: "I don't want you to die. I don't want you to die."

And then she also realized that if she was either a good Buddhist or a good existentialist, she wouldn't have this thought, "I don't want you to die." And again, the "I want you to live forever," and how ridiculous that sounds from a sort of Buddhist perspective or an existentialist perspective. And with all this, she noticed something else: that her sense of death, her sort of almost subliminal sense of death was a kind of a big, black, empty space. And she realized -- a very subtle discrimination -- "Oh, this is the usual sense of death in the cultures that I move in. Either it's a kind of nihilistic nothingness -- just a big, black, empty space, the end of personhood -- or it's a kind of spiritual big, black, empty space, a kind of universal emptiness of oneness or essence." And she's like, "Hmm, my logos here, what I'm used to thinking, my habitual conception and notion, is part of my sense of death here. That's being brought in automatically, and it's colouring, it's shaping, and forming, and limiting the view I have of death -- either to the standard secular view, a kind of nihilistic view, or a kind of spiritual assumption of this dissolving into universal emptiness, whatever." Realizing, "Ah, conditioned by the logos," as we talked about right at the beginning tonight.

And that realization, "Ah," that there's some conditioning by the logos, by the imported, habitual notions here that I get from the two main cultures I move in, mainstream secular culture and the culture of Buddhadharma or spiritual circles -- realizing that fact of the conditioning by a logos, by an idea, imported, habitual, unquestioned ideas, in realizing it, that lost its grip, and the sense of my death was allowed, and death itself was allowed to become more imaginal. She also realized something else: that there was a notion that if she could accept the pain, then she would be at peace with it, or she should be at peace with it. So there was a lot realizing about what the imprisoning logos was, what the limiting logoi were, and where she'd got them, in fact, because the acceptance and peace with it also comes from Buddhist and spiritual teachings. And it was that realization that loosened something, and then the sense of death could become imaginal. And then she said there was a sense:

Then I got the sense that your death is eternal. It's always here. My friend's death is eternal -- it's always here.

So it was more than -- it certainly wasn't not wanting death, but it's more than accepting death. And as it was allowed to become image and become eternal and always here -- "Your death is always here" -- then she got the sense, and the very palpable and moving sense, "Your death loves me." Of course, from a mainstream, conventional, typical perspective, "What on earth does that mean? Your death loves me?" But when things and events become imaginal, when we sense them with soul -- even with things and events; not even talking about insentient, organic beings like trees, but things and events, your death -- when it becomes imaginal, when they become imaginal, they have personhood. They have intelligence, and autonomy, and love, and eros.

There's so much skill here and beauty in the way of working -- very difficult, but then so much being touched; the soul being touched by this sense of "Your death loves me. Your death loves me," and "Your death is eternal; it's always here. It's always already happening." The death has become image, with all the beauty and all the gifts that are given to us when we sense something with soul, all the gifts that that opens up in our sense of something.

In a way, that was a second stage. And then something happened, perhaps more long-term, in her logos, in the ideation that she carried around, that death is not only an impersonal thing. And more importantly, that impersonal depth is not more true than personhood -- so, as if that big, black, empty space, from a spiritual perspective, or from a nihilistic perspective, is somehow more true. Well, actually, she's talking mostly in a spiritual context: sometimes we're taught to see that emptiness is more true, the Absolute is more true than personhood, etc. Now, with these experiences, she's saying, "Uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh -- impersonal depth is not necessarily more true than personhood." It opened up something more permanently in her ideation and perspective and her logos around death.

So this becoming image of my death, becoming imaginal, and my death loving her, a little later on, enabled for her, her death to become image for herself, to become imaginal image. So here is this third stage: she's describing a practice she did actually while she was taking a flight. She was practising on a plane, and her death became image. She writes:

My death as beloved other, as deity, as enchanted, the most fulfilling perception. I love the image of my death. She is here as beloved other, the most intimate other. She knows me so well. I feel loved in a way I have never before known. [So my death is here as beloved other, the most intimate other who knows me so well, and I feel loved by this, my death, in a way that I have never known.] I love her, and I ask, "How can I come closer to you? I want to know you more."

So there's the eros, and eros in a way that is going to allow the whole eros-psyche-logos dynamic to ignite further, open, expand, complexify, deepen. And she writes:

I contract for a moment in judgment as fellow passengers on this flight throw away their plastic cups after one drink. I contract and lose sight of my death [of the sense of the image of her death.] The destruction of the planet, and our ignorance, seemingly more real than my beloved. But I see my heart is lost for that moment, and so I light a candle at the altar of my beloved, and I kneel.

So again, just to highlight the skill in working -- something distracts, something contracts her; in this case, she's on a flight that she had thought a lot about even taking, given the climate crisis, and decided to take it, decided on the balance of things, it was the right thing to do. And her soul-call, you know, felt this the soulmaking choice to do. And then contracting at this throwing away of plastic so easily. That distracts her and interrupts her process; there's a contraction of the being, and she loses the image. And she's like, "Okay, okay, I recognize what's going on. Can I, so to speak, light a candle at the altar of my beloved and kneel?" So there's the taking care of what I called the other day "the poise for soulmaking," that enables us to open to soulmaking, to image. And then she says:

Tears upon my return, and the settling of the disorientation that came in the contracting. I love you. [She's talking about her death.] I love my death. I love you. You feel like the most meaningful relationship I have ever had, in so many ways. It is as if you were there before I was born.

Again, from the mainstream point of view, this all probably sounds completely mad -- someone talking about the image of their death: "I love you. It's as if you were there before I was born."

You define my existence -- not in the existentialist or literal ways of being an end point; your reality status is not end point. That designation flattens you, and in so doing, one would not see your beauty. You are more a beginning point, if anything.

But careful: there's no implication here of the usual beliefs of afterlife or rebirth or whatever. She's not talking about 'beginning point' in those senses -- the beginning of the afterlife, the beginning of the next birth or whatever.

You are the most beautiful image I have ever seen, and the death of my body in time seems like one tiny image within your numberless dimensions. I can hardly believe it. It is not that physical death is insignificant; it is indeed one image in the wings of your magnificence, but you are so much more. You, my death, are resounding right through the cosmos. You are so intimately personal to me, and yet you seem to ring everywhere in many spheres, all at the same time. You know me as a point of time and space, and you love me as a human more closely and precisely than anything. And yet you also intimately mirror a multitude of other images that seem to exist in multiple other realms.

So the whole image is, again, doing exactly what we would expect if eros is allowed to galvanize and open the soulmaking dynamic: the eros-psyche-logos then mutually fertilize each other, complexify, etc., take each other deeper, wider, further. She continues:

This is different from the personal and seemingly eternal death in Carlos Castaneda [I don't really know that, but she's referring to it], where one can consult this intimate companion about how to love one's life, knowing that death is always here at your shoulder. My death is not principally a point in time, although related to the point of space and time of my physical death. And nor is my death an annihilation, and nor is she impersonal. My death is somehow my fulfilment, and meeting her now, I am called to my fulfilment. But this fulfilment is now, an eternally now, when she is known in erotic-imaginal meeting. I am drawn to this fulfilment, but it is not a fulfilment of accumulation of qualities. [It's not that kind of fulfilment.] It is a fulfilment of knowing my place as soul in a sacred cosmos, so completely woven into all dimensions, and that guiding divine being is my death.

Here, death as idea is soft and elastic, and death in time is one image in the divine theatre. It is not about making my physical death unimportant or relativized or small. To say 'small' would contrast it with 'big' or 'bigger,' and this is not the correct word for what is more, or more than one image. Logically, one should be able to say that the collective of multiple images is bigger than or greater than one image, like ten is more than one; however, in eternality, and in the imaginal Middle Way, 'smaller than' and 'bigger than' do not make sense. This is not governed by logic. Size and proportions only belong with the arising of time and space, and the appearance of this world. This lack of proportions is somehow very significant. And this is very different from the results of Buddhist reflections on death, as I have practised them at least. This reflection does not rouse my passion as an urgency for a path of practice in time.

That's how we usually, or one of the ways we usually teach reflection on death: to arouse urgency for practice, a path of practice in time. But she says it's not that.

But it does rouse my passion as a tremendous eros for eternality, for timelessness. It does also bring a steadying of my heart, but I wouldn't say it is an equanimity born from understanding, and including the 'whole picture,' and being able to see the conditions of the world of time and space from a great view. [It's not that kind of standard way -- one of the standard ways we reach equanimity: seeing the whole picture, stepping back, taking a larger view of the conditions in a large span of time and space.] Rather, the steadying comes from the mind easily concentrating because this is the most compelling, meaningful, and loving encounter. There is no effort to steady the heart.

We could unpack this a lot more, I think, and explore the steadiness and equanimity from lots of other aspects too. She touched on some of that in other talks and things about eros and equanimity and stuff, but there's a lot to say here. But she says:

My death smiles at me as I recognize this. My duty is to re-enchant death.

There's so much here in terms of the skilful ways of working, in terms of the ways something can start as a difficulty. Just asking the question, "Can this be soulmaking? Can it allow it to open up, get a different sense of it?" Then that can be added to by an image that, at first, seems to have nothing to do with it -- a black snake -- and open further. And then we get a very different sense of things, very different sense, in this case, of my death, of her friend's death. And then that kind of gave her a confidence and a platform, or, if you like, it was a spark, that, in its turn, allowed her to sense her own death with soul, for her own death to become image. And that opening up all this sense of beauty and dimensionality there, sacredness -- in terms of her death, but also in terms of the whole cosmos. So much that's instructive, I think, in all this. I just wanted to include that for that reason, as well as what I had shared earlier -- just, as I say, to offer some possibilities for opening up our sense of death and dying, whether it's our own or another's. And what can we bring to that? How can we meet that with soul, genuinely? And what happens, what might happen, when we do? These are real possibilities for the soul, possibilities that make a real difference. So important, so there for us.