The World and More: Immanence, Tantra, and Transcendence (Part 1)

Let's continue, then, with our weaving of this tapestry that we are revealing, creating together, even. Continue weaving together elements and themes and threads that we've touched on before, introducing other threads, making connections, moving back and forth over the same areas, and bringing more out, strengthening connections, etc. If we look particularly -- following on from what we've been talking about -- at the weave, the connection, between erotic soulmaking and our relationship to Dharma, and to notions of awakening, visions of awakening and what the path is. Included in that, we said, must be also then the relationship to the vision, the view, of the world -- which means the senses and sense experience, which also means eros; included in that itself, what is the relationship with eros itself, and that comes out of soulmaking, if you like, that is necessary for soulmaking but also that is furthered through soulmaking. And as an element of that, the view and relationship with sexuality.

So in going over this again and bringing out certain elements and tying elements together, I also want to a little bit look at some parallels or point out some parallels and connections with other traditions. And sometimes that's other Buddhist traditions -- particularly the Vajrayāna traditions, tantra, but also other Western traditions, etc. As a footnote to that point, actually, just to say, the Insight Meditation tradition, which I consider my root tradition, if you like, is an evolving animal. It's an evolving tradition. It's actually relatively new. I mean, you could point to its birth in the twentieth century perhaps in Burma and Thailand. There's a case for that. But as a tradition, there's a case for saying it's relatively new, and there's definitely a case to be made for the fact that it's evolving. And looking back at that short period of the Insight Meditation tradition since its emergence or inception, we can see very clearly, if you look at the Pali Canon texts, for example, that the Insight Meditation tradition has thus far been quite selective about what it takes from the Theravādan tradition. It's probably more catholic now in what it takes, more wide in what it takes, than it was, say, thirty years ago when I started, more than thirty years ago.

So part of that selectivity has to do with cultural congruence, and what Westerners feel comfortable with, or what Westerners can buy into, or what it was thought that Westerners can buy into, in terms of beliefs and cosmologies. Part of it has to do with that. And some people are very trenchant in their view that this needs to be upkept as a selection process. But not just in terms of cultural criteria, cultural congruence criteria, but also, for example, a teaching like the jhānas and samādhi, which was so, so central in the Pali Canon -- so much so that the Pali Canon, in the texts when they write it out, it doesn't even bother to repeat when the Buddha mentions again; just "as in this sutta," "as in this sutta before," and just references you back, rather than repeat it all again. So you can see that only quite recently is there an emergence of interest in the Insight Meditation tradition in the practice of jhāna, and recognizing that as a really valid and valuable current of practice, stream, thread of practice. Or how little emphasized, for example, the contemplation of death is, despite it being so central in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, which is regarded as the central text of the Insight Meditation tradition. So, we could say a lot about this, but how narrow is the selection of the Insight Meditation tradition from the broader Theravādan tradition of texts and practices and teachings.

In addition to that, the Insight Meditation tradition was born or came out of what had influenced or the teachings received by the teachers in the Insight Meditation tradition, the initial teachers and then teachers since then. So it has mixed in with it a good dose of particularly Sōtō Zen, the tradition of Shunryū Suzuki and others. And also -- and this, again, you can trace it back to a certain time period -- a sprinkling of Dzogchen, Tibetan tantric teachings. But there again, it's very selective, what is taken from the Dzogchen teachings or Mahāmudrā teachings. They particularly only take -- usually, let's say; usually what is taken is teachings about the nature of mind, and the way it seems they are congruent with teachings about resting in awareness and non-doing and so-called non-contrivance, etc., and the unfabricated nature of awareness and all this.

So teachings on the nature of mind form an element, a strand within tantric teachings, in tantric Buddhism, and there are different levels of the teachings of nature of mind. What you see when you really go into this is tantric teachings a little bit taken out of context, for one thing, and also taken at different levels and brought in to mix with or find another language for certain Insight Meditation teachings. This is just good to know in case you don't, and also as a precursor to what I'm going to go into a little bit and what we've already touched on in terms of corollaries and parallels with other traditions. But also, I'll come back to this point later on: that the Insight Meditation tradition is evolving. It always has been evolving, and I would say that's a good thing. So that was a little bit of a preface.

But let's start with a couple of lines from a Buddhist tantric text called the Ḍākinīvajrapañjara. Now, all these lovely Sanskrit tantric titles, because of the nature of the Sanskrit language, they can be translated in many ways. We could give a translation there, "the dovecote of the diamond sky dancers," potentially. Or "the indestructible net of the ḍākinīs," or "the diamond ceremony of the ḍākinīs." Many possible translations. I think, though I'm not sure, that this tantric text is a commentary on a basic tantra called the Hevajra Tantra (I'm not sure about that). It says:

By passion [or through passion] the world arises. Through the removal or the giving up of passion, it [the world] is destroyed.

Through the removal or the giving up of passion, the world is destroyed. And then the second line says:

By thorough knowledge [by thorough knowing or by thorough gnosis -- that word, gnosis, again, that we used before: by thorough gnosis] of the diamond passion, the mind becomes vajrasattva [a diamond being].

By thorough knowing and gnosis of the diamond passion, the mind becomes vajrasattva, meaning a diamond being. Now, all these words that can be translated differently in the title, and even words like 'diamond passion' and 'diamond being,' these have in the Vajrayāna teachings -- partly because of the Sanskrit language, and partly because of the multidimensional nature of those teachings and multifaceted nature of the teachings -- the very vocabulary itself has this what's called 'polysemous' nature. That means multiple meanings, multiple levels of meaning. So what is a vajrasattva? What is a diamond being? What is this diamond passion? And as we saw, the titles can be translated in different ways, like a jewel, like a diamond reflecting different facets, giving different faces of meaning, of hint, of inclination, of depth, of beauty. So just to say, a vajrasattva is, like imaginal figures -- which a vajrasattva is, so to speak, in our language; it's an imaginal figure, it's an imaginal daimon -- it has an infinite depth of meaning as an imaginal figure, a diamond being, as does diamond passion indeed.

So one meaning of vajrasattva in the Japanese Shingon tradition is just a tantric practitioner, someone who is moving on that path, opening that path of the empty imaginal, in our language. So a tantric practitioner is what a vajrasattva means. Vajrasattva is also the high bodhisattva of the Buddha, if you like, or an element of Samantabhadra is a primordial cosmic Buddha that has to do with action, not just meditation. And vajrasattva is also connected with saṃbhogakāya, which I think [we talked about] on the last retreat, The Poetry of Perception. We can actually translate, in terms of systems, we can translate saṃbhogakāya as the mundus imaginalis, the world, the realm of the imaginal. So there's a lot, and there's much more in that word, vajrasattva. It's a tantric deity, really.

But let's explore these couple of lines from the Ḍākinīvajrapañjara. So the first one, "By or through passion" -- rāga; we touched on that word in the first talk, I think, of this retreat -- "through passion, the world arises. Through the removal or the giving up of passion, the world is destroyed." This, I hope you can already -- I don't need to say this, but I'll say it anyway -- I hope that it's clear that that is referring exactly to our understanding of dependent arising, dependent origination, through what we're calling 'clinging.' By passion, let's say 'by clinging,' the world arises. Through clinging, in all its multiple richness and spectrum of depth of what 'clinging' means (we've been through this before; I'm not going to repeat here), through clinging the world arises, the world of fabrication, the world of things, of self, other, objects, space, time, etc. No clinging, no arising of the world. Through the removal, the giving up of passion, of clinging, when we learn through skilful [meditation], through the art of meditation, meditation on emptiness, etc., to attenuate the clinging in the moment, really drain it out, so to speak, of the plumbing system, the inflation system of dependent origination, through attenuating avijjā, through attenuating the push-pull with experience, through the removal, giving up of passion, of clinging, the world is destroyed -- meaning the appearance of a world is destroyed, is not fabricated.

So that first sentence of the Ḍākinīvajrapañjara couplet there is really just reiterating in a very succinct way the whole of the Buddha's teaching of dependent origination, emptiness of the world of perception, fabrication, dependent arising, dependent fading, and out of that, the understanding of the emptiness. The second sentence there: by thorough knowledge, by gnosis of the diamond passion (vajrarāgaparijñānād), through the thorough knowledge of the diamond passion, the mind becomes vajrasattva, becomes a diamond being. Could this be referring to, or one way of reading it, is exactly that -- that if we let go of clinging, but then knowing that everything is empty, and allowing (in our language) eros and that erotic connection (which we also know is empty, because we know that everything is empty, and because eros stimulates soulmaking, which knows image as image), then what arises is this diamond being.

A vajrasattva is a Buddha who arises with his/her maṇḍala. So Buddhas in tantric Buddhism and bodhisattvas go with Buddha-realms, Buddha-fields. They go with worlds. They're not separate from the world, their maṇḍala, what is around them, which is their perception, the world that they perceive. So to become a vajrasattva means to become a tantric practitioner, means to become a diamond being, an empty being who knows an empty world that is divine, divine appearance, the maṇḍala of the world of divine appearances.

This second sentence there can be -- yes, the first sentence reflects the dependent arising, the dependent fading, which we know from at least my understanding of Theravādan Buddhism what the Buddha taught there, and Mahāyāna Buddhism. And in the second couplet, the Vajrayāna tantric understanding of a Buddha's tantric fabrication of a divine and empty world.

Let's pull a few more pieces out of this. I recall that quote from Jung in his autobiography: "Eros is a kosmogonos," he said.^[1] Kosmogonos is a fancy Greek word. It means a generator of cosmoses, that which inseminates, gives a seed for a cosmos. "Eros is a kosmogonos," he wrote. In our language, we would better say -- in the language that we're using, with the definitions that we're using-- desire is a cosmogonos. In other words, desire -- whether it's craving or whether it's eros -- clinging, desire, is a cosmogonos. Because of this understanding of dependent origination, with the movement of clinging and the whole breadth of what that means, desire will give rise [to], it will fabricate cosmoses depending on different aspects of what's involved with that. Desire or clinging is a cosmogonos. Craving, in our language, when it's craving, one of the aspects of craving we delineated before and drew attention to is that craving is based on realism, on the assumption and the perception and the conceiving (even if it's unconscious) of the reality of the self at any level. So even a process view of the self, or a self as just vast, insubstantial awareness, it's still a realism there. There's still a level of self-view operating.

So craving, in our language, in our delineation, in the way we're using language, craving is based on a realism of self and of world and of object. So that when there is realism what we get, what is generated in this cosmogonic process, through desire, through clinging, when there's craving, when there's realism, we generate a real world and all the rigidity of that, all the contractedness of that, and all the kind of imprisonment that goes with realism and the perception and conception of realism, and thus all the dukkha, etc. That's one of the essential ingredients of what delineates craving from eros in our language. When the kind of desire in the cosmogonic movement there is what we're calling eros, then what we get, as we've been outlining, is not the imprisonment of a realist sense of the world, of self, other, world. We get, rather, a non-realist self, other, world, and also eventually a sense of a divine and non-realist self, other, world. This is the cosmogonos there. When the eros is the cosmogonos, and not the craving, then the cosmos that we get is a divine and non-realist self, other, world.

Going back to the Pali Canon, and the Buddha delineating bhava-taṇhā as what can be translated as 'craving for becoming,' or 'craving for being.' That word, bhava, I know some people try and make a distinction, but actually in Pali and Sanskrit, it can mean either 'becoming' or 'being'; there isn't really that distinction there. Being and becoming. And if you understand that time is empty, same, same: being, becoming. So bhava-taṇhā, the Buddha delineated, can be rūparāga, meaning 'desire for the perception of form,' or arūparāga, which, if you like, is a more subtle bhava-taṇhā, a more subtle craving for being or becoming, in what's called the immaterial realms or the experience of the formless jhānas. So this was a defilement in the Pali Canon. And, if you like, there's, as we've said before, a progressive sort of escaping from this. Most human beings have desire for material forms and what the Buddha called the 'cords of sense pleasure and sense experience' and all that.^[2] To have just a desire for the rūpa-jhānas, what the Buddha called fine material form, the realm, the level of fine material form -- which, if you know the jhānas, this really makes sense; the body is experienced as exactly that, much more refined form, energetic form (which we've drawn attention to with our talking about the energy body, etc.). That's, if you like, an improvement, a move away from the gross entanglement of sense pleasure and materiality and what's called the 'material realm' in the Pali Canon.

But an improvement over an attraction to the fine material realm of the first four jhānas is an attraction solely to the arūpa-jhānas, the formless jhānas, the immaterial realms.^[3] And then eventually even that -- this is one of the last bastions of craving, of taṇhā, for what's called a 'non-returner' in the Pali Canon, the third of the four levels of awakening, and with the arahantship or full awakening, even that craving for being, becoming, experience of the arūpa-jhānas, the formless or immaterial realms, even that is let go of.^[4] There is this movement, as we've said before, transcendent movement, gradual, transcendent movement to the Unfabricated, to that which is even beyond the formless realms in terms of its degree of unfabrication.

So there's a sort of, yeah, weaning off -- that's a good way of putting it -- a weaning off attachment to being, let's say, in any sphere whatsoever. And so this right there is a shape given, an articulation given to what Robert Bellah called this movement of 'world rejection' that's characteristic of a lot of religions of a certain period, and it certainly was there before the Buddha, so he inherited that. It wasn't the only teaching that was around in his time, so he had his pick of what he could -- just as in ancient Greece there was a pick of world-rejecting movements and religions and philosophies, and those that denied any kind of world rejection and were flatly material, etc. So the Buddha chose that, really, chose to incorporate that, to keep that, to sanction that in his initial presentation of the path there.

And there's a movement through this progressive weaning -- what's usually progressive; sometimes you read a very sudden ending of that bhava-taṇhā, craving for being or becoming. There's a progressive weaning to the ending of rebirth, to the ending of being and becoming, once and for all, in any world, form or formless. There's this transcendent thrust. But either with a kind of tantric formulation or conceptual framework, or the kind of parallels we're talking about, the language of eros-psyche-logos -- there are a lot of parallels between those two; I wouldn't make them equivalent, and I'm not interested in doing that for myself, but there are parallels there -- could we then talk about, having said all that, a non-realist becoming, a non-realist bhava, being or becoming? So that yes, the self is fabricated, and the world in a certain cosmopoesis, the imaginal self and the imaginal other. There is the becoming of that, there is the being of that, but it's a non-realist bhava, with the cosmopoesis there that goes with everything that we've been talking about, and it's part of the tantric maṇḍala and the tantric view of divine appearances, etc. So that there's, again, a distinction between craving and eros, and there's a distinction between realist bhava-taṇhā and what we might call non-realist bhava or becoming and world.

So as I said, this Vajrasattva, this diamond being, implied in that is this imaginal realm. He's a Buddha that's associated with the saṃbhogakāya, with the imaginal world opening up, the seeing of all appearances as divine. And these tantric Buddhas, Vajrayāna Buddhas and deities and bodhisattvas, they are not separate from the maṇḍala they appear in. Non-duality there, subject and object. And included in that, and absolutely as a premise, as I've mentioned before, of tantric practice, is that self, world, and other are thoroughly known as empty. Tantric practice should take place or take its launch from that understanding, and be imbued all the time thoroughly with that understanding of the emptiness of self, the emptiness of the deity, and the emptiness of the perception of the world, of any world.

What does this mean, 'diamond passion'? The word vajra, diamond, again, it has multiple levels of meaning and facets of meaning. But one of its implications is, like a diamond, it's supposedly indestructible. So, 'indestructible passion.' It also implies 'empty.' So when we say something is vajra this or vajra that, it implies already that it's empty of inherent existence, and implies, too, a kind of holiness, a sacredness there. Indestructible passion, empty and holy and, if you like, everlasting passion. What is that? To me, we could make a parallel there with what we're calling eros. And I've said many times now, can we notice in the imaginal practice, in the meditation, when there's eros around -- and there always is eros to some degree with imaginal practice, even if it's very subtle -- can you notice or begin to notice the sacred and divine nature of eros? Meaning just the perception of sacredness and divinity, the aroma, the intimation, the feeling of sacredness and divinity -- whatever that means or however that is communicated in the imaginal terrain, in the practice, however it's communicated to you, however you pick up on that, whatever the expression or manifestation there of sacredness or divinity is. There are many, many ways that that can be presented to us, that we can get a sense of that. Many. Infinite, I would say, in fact.

And sometimes it comes in a very clear way: it's actually personified, if you like, in the image itself. I'll share something. There's a background to this image that I think I might have shared in a previous retreat; I actually can't remember. It belongs to a series of images, moving kind of slowly over a period when I was on retreat, and practising with them, and sort of pacing myself with them, and they sort of evolved. One thing led to another, slowly, over some days, weeks, even; I can't remember. So one whole set of images -- which I think I shared, but I could be not remembering correctly -- involved a burnt man, a man who is horribly burnt, and receives a healing bathing from a holy pool, from a kind of beautiful goddess, very pure, bathing in pure waters, and very loving, very healing. He is horribly burnt, and a sort of outcast because of that. And he is so burnt that he is incapable of tending to himself and bathing himself, so she bathes him with this beautiful, pure water. There's a lot of grace there and mercy infusing her healing, infusing her being, a lot of tenderness, lot of compassion, a lot of grace with that.

Somehow, at some point in this image, it's not just his face is kind of melted from the burns, but his arms are too. They're kind of melted into his sides, so that he can't even raise them. They're always pressed to his sides. His whole body is fused, if you like, as one large surface of burnt, scarred flesh. And in that, in this sort of -- if you can imagine a body looking like that, kind of smoothed out, if you like, with this fusion, fused together with burnt, scarred flesh, his whole body began to look to me at some point like a lingam, like a huge phallus, or those divine phallus sculptures, etc., that you get in different cultures, or just like a huge phallus. And then, after a few days, another image linked itself to that image of the lingam that was evolved from this image before, or kind of handed over to another image almost. And here there was a goddess that was connected with that first goddess, let's say, that was bathing the burnt man. This goddess now -- is it the same? Is it different? I'm not sure. She was passionately making love with and erotically embracing and being penetrated by this lingam. The lingam is actually slightly bigger than a tall and wide human body, so it doesn't make sense anatomically, biologically, etc., but it's an image, so we have room for that.

She is kind of rubbing her whole body ecstatically and passionately and lovingly against this lingam. It's very sexual, very erotic in that sense. And she gives herself. There's this kind of total opening and abandon. She gives herself and her whole body to it. And despite the seeming physical impossibility because of its relative size, she is penetrated by the lingam everywhere, every possible entry point biologically, but even ones that don't make sense biologically (and this is a more intuitive sense in the image, rather than a visual sense). So penetrated through her eyes. What does that mean? I don't know. It's a poetic sense. Through her senses, through her whole body, everywhere at once. And she is on fire with desire -- not literally afire, but her desire is wild, it's fluid, it's fiery, it's full, and it's full-bodied. It's also insatiable.

There's something I recognize in the image as I'm working with it, about her and about her desire, and there's this quality of insatiability to her eros -- or should I say, because it's not that she's unfulfilled or pained by the dukkha of desire, by this insatiability, but it's just that her eros is inexhaustible, and there's no problem with that inexhaustibility; it's part of the divinity. It's holy, and part of its holiness is its inexhaustibility. And she is devoted to this lingam. She is devoted also to the erotic meeting, to the surrender, to the passion, to the eros itself. And so in this image, in this imaginal practice, I sometimes feel as if -- we've talked about this before, about how the kind of identification can be mobile in the imaginal practice. So at times I feel very vividly as if I am that lingam, feel the goddess kind of rub herself against me, open to me, etc. At other times I become the goddess, and feel it all as if from within her body. And at other times, I seem to feel both together. A lot of love here. There's a lot of love and beauty in the wild passion. And I, too, am filled with a sense of worshipping there, and worshipping this that I was witnessing and participating in.

And I'll say one more thing about the image, because I also felt, again, very strong -- something goes deep and firm in some kind of ... I want to use the words 'nuptial commitment,' emerging through and in this particular erotic-image that I could have just regarded as, "This is really weird. This is really out there." Partly why I'm sharing it, all these kind of images (I've said this before, and it's worth saying again), is just because for a lot of people hearing this, some people will just say, "That's just weird. I can't relate to that," but other people will be hearing, and I want to cast a different light on images that may arise for people that initially they are fearful of, or they think they are weird, or they think it's pathological or unhealthy or this or that, and actually say: maybe there's something holy here if I can just let go of that stranglehold contraction of my initial mind-programming to regard it as abhorrent, or too weird, or "What will it mean about me?", or "I'll become kind of deranged or an uncontrollable monster," or something like that. I'm partly sharing all this at the risk, of course, of people thinking I'm weird or whatever like that. I know that I'm not, because people talk to me, as well, and they share. And I just want to really open it up, and kind of normalize something, and open the range of what practice is, and prevent a kind of pain that happens when people just start fearing their own mind and the images that arise, and assuming something pathological just because of what the culture or certain sub-cultures (religious or secular) have indoctrinated them with.

Going back to the image, there is this deep feeling, strong feeling, of something going deep in me, and very firm, like a kind of devotion, but a kind of commitment, a nuptial commitment. Somehow, through this particular image, I can't even say to what exactly, but I feel like I'm binding myself in like a wedding ceremony somehow. It involves me. I'm drawn into and I somehow assent to some kind of commitment. And I'm not even sure exactly what. It's not that it could be anything. And whatever it is is something that I haven't been committed to fully before, so it's something new. In some ways, it seems in this image to be a commitment to the earth, to nature, and to protecting her. And I think I shared this before: in fact, at some points in the image, it goes off into other images and imaginal figures that I've had from the past -- this wrathful deity nature-protector; I think I shared that one. But there's also a commitment here in this image to this goddess. I'm somehow committed to this goddess. And also, in that or with that, I'm committed to this erotic embrace and this penetration, that lovemaking, whatever that means, all the levels of that.

And then later -- this is relatively early in this sort of practice for me -- I had the intuitive sense that the very meaning of this image and of the commitment, it can grow and it will indeed keep growing and expanding because of eros' tendency to extension and expansion. And again, and just to mention, at times that whole image has started to include the imaginal perception of the world and the birdsong as sacred text, and other kind of cosmopoeses, particular kinds of cosmopoeses spilled out of that.

But there was an example of the -- well, there's a lot in there I shared for different reasons, but two main ones: there was the clear sense, personified in the very image, of the inexhaustibility of eros, and that inexhaustibility being one of the aspects of the holiness of eros. So there's a sense of the holiness and the devotion and all that of the eros, and then a particular dimension, if you like, or aspect of that holiness, was the very inexhaustibility, this infinitude that we've been referring to that has to do with divinity. Divinity and infinitude go together in all kinds of ways, perhaps in infinite ways. Very different from what the Buddha called [taṇhā]. This word, taṇhā, actually means 'thirst,' and it has the implication of an unquenchable thirst. So this inexhaustibility of eros has a holiness to it, unlike the unquenchable thirst of taṇhā. Can they be mistaken for each other? Do they somehow overlap? Can one transform into another? Yes, we've been through all this before.

So that's one element of why I shared that image, and also this sense that there's devotion, divinity, and duty within an erotic-image. Maybe that's an element pregnant within the meaning of 'diamond passion,' to go back to that tantric word, the vajrarāga, diamond passion, and the duty and the divinity that come out of that knowing. By the thorough knowing of diamond passion, one becomes a diamond being, vajrasattva, empty, divine, and with this purpose, the bodhisattva there. So as I said, a Buddha in Vajrayāna and Mahāyāna teachings always comes with his Buddha-field, his Buddha-realm. A Buddha or bodhisattva comes with that, comes with the maṇḍala, with the world of divine appearances, with the divine world. And we can see, tying that into what we've been saying about eros and soulmaking and cosmopoesis, that that's exactly what we expect. When there's the diamond passion, when there's the eros, and we thoroughly know that, and know the image as image, self and world are divinized in our perception.

As we've been saying, eros starts to involve, it implicates, all the other elements and facets of our experience, of our world, of our self, other, world, etc., and draws that in. Through the diamond passion, one becomes a diamond being in a world of divine appearances. And in what we've been saying so far, eros will bring, when it is unfettered, so to speak, when it's not blocked, when eros-psyche-logos are not blocked, when it is allowed to expand, fertilize, etc., when they are allowed to expand and fertilize each other (eros-psyche-logos), there will be, eros will bring, will give rise to, will stimulate, a widening, deepening, multiplying, manifold sense of divinity.

The senses of divinity will widen. Our sense of divinity will widen, deepen, and grow more manifold. So we could start with any erotic object, or eventually any object can become erotic for us. We may start with a human other. We may start with a purely imaginal being that's a beloved other, the erotic object. We may start with eros towards the transcendent Unfabricated, the Deathless, nirvāṇa, the Ayin of the Kabbalah, the nothing, the transcendent nothingness of the Godhead. We may start with the world, either the world conceived as matter (matter is what we love, matter is what we feel this erotic connection with), or the world conceived of as appearances, or just one thing -- this tree, that forest, whatever it is. And also the erotic objects can be mixtures of all these.

So again, there's this manifold possibility of where eros can go, and then what it can make divine, and even then mixtures you will get. The erotic object can be a mixture of these kind of elements. In fact, because of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic and because of cosmopoesis, there will be, I would say, a natural tendency, a natural movement to the mixing of these facets, so that each object becomes multifaceted and its very divinity is multifaceted. The soulmaking dynamic, the eros-psyche-logos expansion, insemination, movement, widening, deepening, in relation to a human other, for instance, we begin to perceive them, sense the divinity of them, in them, through them, etc., in their humanity, and then that spills over into cosmopoesis, to the world. We've been through this.

Or we start with the desire, the eros for the transcendent God, for the Unfabricated, the hidden God, the apophatic movement. And at some point, perhaps after the realization of the Unfabricated, experiences of cessation, and that sort of thing -- but perhaps before -- there's a sense of that divinity. The sense of divinity widens, it deepens, and it particularizes, so it's not just in this oneness that pervades in different ways. We can know and we move towards knowing and wanting to know the divinity, or God, if you're okay with that language, or the ultimate as transcendent and immanent; as universal and as personal; as circumscribed in itself, separate, if you like, from creation, and without any circumscribing, without limit, without borders, infinite and in everything, or everything in the divine or God or whatever; in everything in the same way, and in each thing in a way unique and particular to that thing. So all these directions, and all these mixings and multifacetedness, multidimensionality of the sense of divinity. But eros will naturally tend to widen, deepen, multiply the senses that we have of divinity, that we can feel, perceive, know, etc., making manifold, more manifold, ever more manifold of our senses of divinity.

And how to navigate all this? I'd just call on what we've actually already touched on. Again, I'm just weaving things together here, going over what we've already gone over, with new stitching, perhaps new colours, making new connections. There can be eros towards the Unfabricated, eros that longs for the transcendent other, eros that longs towards different levels of oneness that perhaps we don't know yet, etc., or are only getting to know. And that eros needs a skilful development of the art and an understanding of working with clinging, letting go of clinging, as we've talked about (what we're calling 'clinging,' that whole spectrum), and learning to move or to be moved along, down on the spectrum of decreasing fabrication. That's a skill and an art that we can develop, an absolutely beautiful and precious thing that is to develop all that range. So there's that kind of eros towards the Unfabricated, to different kinds of oneness, etc.

And then there's eros, if you like, directed towards the world, towards the senses, towards selves and others and the world of sense experience and things. This kind of eros, for the particulars and the not wanting to transcend, this will -- in just saying what we've already said in other language -- it will re-enchant the world and the senses, self and other, in the cosmopoesis and all that. There's a divinization, if that's the right word, of the world and of the senses.

A while ago in one of the talks, I said we can reconfigure some of the original teachings, kind of add a whole other level here that might echo, if you like, or sound almost like tantric language. But now we can say something like what I said before: knowing the emptiness and eternality of the imaginal, or knowing the emptiness and the timelessness of the imaginal, the world is re-enchanted. With the world re-enchanted, in a world re-enchanted and empty, one is free to become impassioned. Eros is free to flow, to ignite. Impassioned, infinite things open infinitely. Knowing the emptiness and eternality of the imaginal, the world is re-enchanted. In a world re-enchanted and empty, one is free to become impassioned. Impassioned, infinite things open infinitely.

So it's really saying something about how eros is woven into the imaginal and soulmaking, how that re-enchants and divinizes the world. Knowing, seeing, sensing the emptiness and eternality there allows more eros. And everything, infinite things, even more things than we even realized were there, more aspects are revealed to us, and they open infinitely, they gain dimensions and dimensionality. And as we've said before, that sort of quasi-tantric aphorism, you can turn it around, because there's always going to be mutual dependent arising between such elements. So that eros is what re-enchants and what reveals to us the timeless level of the imaginal, that sense of the timelessness. But in fact, they're all mutually dependent. So eros re-enchants; the opening up of things gives rises to eros, to more eros, because there's more that's attractive there, there's that beyond, sense of the beyond, and that stimulates more re-enchantment, etc. So all those elements, mutually dependently arising.

And in terms of navigation, what's this asking for? I'm just drawing out one element of our conceptual framework again, as it's so worth getting clear about. It's asking for us to understand this whole idea of, if you like, the choices we have in regard to fabrication and degrees of fabrication -- to understand that, and to make choices about navigating, and develop the arts of unfabricating, if you like, to different degrees, and expand our range with that, and develop our capability with that through the understanding of dependent origination and the skill in practice and the art of practice there with emptiness, etc. That's one direction. Another direction, you could say, is what we might call skilful or tantric fabrication or soulmaking fabrication, and actually recognizing: this is fabrication. Of course it is. But it's serving the purpose of soulmaking, and it's non-realist. So there are those two: the decrease of the fabrication, the attenuating of the fabrication, and the deliberate fabrication for the purpose of soulmaking.

And then, kind of at one point of that spectrum, if you like, is what we might call, what most people would call 'mindfulness' or maybe even 'bare attention,' where there's a sort of very slightly reduced level of fabrication compared to, say, a normal consciousness -- reduced from, say, more papañca, but a little bit less than normal consciousness, or depending on the intensity of the mindfulness and all kinds of things, and what else is included with the mindfulness. But that, if we just delineate it as sort of it's just a point on that spectrum of fabrication and how we're going to orient to that in practice. And it's very useful at times: you go into a mode of bare attention, go into a mode of simple mindfulness, it has its place for certain things, for certain disentanglements, etc. But the whole path as I would, as we're trying to present it, encompasses much more, and really that's just an incredibly small sliver that has a certain limited usage, and a certain limited possibility for soulmaking, a certain limited possibility for deepening insight, etc. But it's there and it's useful. To shrink the path to that, in my mind, would be an enormous shame, because you would be cutting off so much possibility. This is important. That understanding, and developing one's arts of movement in those different directions, those different places on the spectrum of fabrication, is important for our navigation in the wider sense, in the wider picture of what practice is.

As we said before, and as you can already hear from this, all this implicates and involves the senses and sense experience and sense pleasure, and our relationship to all that. Let me read you something from Nietzsche again, just a little passage. He says, he writes:

In the main, I agree more with the artists than with any philosopher hitherto: they [the artists] have not lost the scent of life, they have loved the things of "this world" -- they have loved their senses. To strive for "desensualization": that seems to me a misunderstanding or an illness ... I desire for myself and for all who live, may live, without being tormented by a puritanical conscience, an ever-greater spiritualization and multiplication of the senses; indeed [he continues], we should be grateful to the senses for their subtlety, plenitude, and power and offer them in return the best we have in the way of spirit.^[5]

Translate this into what we've been talking about.

What are priestly and metaphysical calumnies against the senses to us! We no longer need these calumnies [these threats and teachings]: it is a sign that one has turned out well when ... one clings with ever-greater pleasure and warmth to the "things of this world" -- for in this way [one] holds firmly to the great conception of man [let's say human beings], that [a human being] becomes the transfigurer of existence when [she] learns to transfigure [herself].

So can you hear in what he's saying what could be very much construed as exactly what we've been talking about? And if we substitute for the word "transfigurer of existence" transubstantiation, alchemy, things we've talked about in the last retreat: through relating, through an erotic connection with the senses, and letting that eros-psyche-logos dynamic do its natural thing that it wants to do, there's a transfiguration of existence, in Nietzsche's terms. There's a transubstantiation of self, other, world. There's an alchemy that happens in the perception.

There's a comparison, again, between tantric practice and emptiness practice, the tantric practice of seeing appearances as divine. We sense experiences as divine. What reaches us, what we perceive, what we open to, what we fabricate through the senses, in the senses, to see that as divine and empty. So when there is a fading through insight -- for instance, really getting into the practice of regarding things as not-self, or things as empty -- there's an attenuation of avijjā at that point. So ignorance, avijjā, usually regards things as self, and usually regards things as having inherent existence. When I engage a way of looking that regards things, for instance, as not-self and as empty, the world of appearance -- the things, self, others, and the whole world of appearance -- will fade to some extent. But, for instance, one can in practice, with the development of practice, learn to sort of engage that, incorporate that knowing of emptiness, so that things fade a little bit, but they're kind of loosened up, and they lose some of their substantiality, typically, but you're not leaning all the way on that insight into emptiness.

So you're kind of modulating it, like the gas and the clutch pedal on a car. You're just modulating, so you're retaining perception and imaginal perception of divine appearances. Either they naturally appear as divine, or you can just choose to perceive them in different ways as divine. You're lightly knowing the emptiness; you're keeping that there in the perception. There's a degree of unfabricating, but you're not letting them fade completely. You're not saying that fading is the 'better thing.' You're not turning away from the senses, or denigrating the world of form, of perception, of experience. You're playing at that midpoint, mimicking the Buddha's perception, a Buddha's perception, who is able to know emptiness completely and still perceive a world of appearances, of divine appearances. Transubstantiating the world, transubstantiating the self and the sense experience.

And that's captured in Vajrayāna iconography in the yab-yum, the erotic coupling or union of the Buddha and his consort, the Buddhas and their consorts. We talked about this before. I think it's so beautiful and so profound, I'm going to repeat it now -- the prajñā being the female, usually characterized by the female (prajñā means 'wisdom'), and upāya, the skilful means. So at one level the compassion; at another level of meaning, the maṇḍala of appearances, of divine appearances. So the wisdom knowing aspect, the wisdom that knows emptiness, and the awareness that perceives, and the maṇḍala of divine appearances are represented as in erotic sexual union, penetrating, the co-mingling of the two represented iconographically with the sexual union there.

In other words, the wisdom consciousness, if you like, the prajñā, is the wisdom knowing. And let's keep that 'knowing' plural, because, remember, if I really have wisdom, what I have is multiple ways of looking, and infinitely expandable ways of looking. That's what I end up with if I really understand emptiness, if my prajñā is really developed. There is not therefore the epistemicide, the shrinking down, saying "mindfulness reveals things as the way they are" or "classical Newtonian science reveals things as the way they are," or whatever it is. There is not that epistemicide, what we're calling the 'epistemic cleansing,' these kinds of words. There is this opening, because incorporated within that wisdom knowing is a whole range of ways of knowing. I heard also that the fabulous word or phrase 'epistemic disobedience,' just refusing to go along with this cultural indoctrination in the West of what qualifies as a way of knowing reality: "This is knowledge. That's reality. There's only one way of getting them," or if it's a Dharma, shrinking of that into mindfulness or whatever. I heard someone say, "Do you want your reality with or without additives?", and the teaching there is supposedly that if you want the pure, real reality, "without additives," that's what is given to you by mindfulness, and apparently mettā as well. Is that really a full enough, deep enough, radical understanding? Is there not a misunderstanding wrapped up in that?

Anyway, back to this tantric iconography. There's an erotic sexual union, interpenetration, between the 'wisdom knowings' (put it that way: the knowings that know emptiness, and thus have a range of ways of knowing, know that there's nothing but that, really, and even they are not real), the erotic union between the wisdom knowing and the world, the world of form, of matter, of senses, which is recognized to be empty and divine. And, as I said before, in the Buddhist iconography, this Buddha and his consort, the bodhisattva and the consort, are not actually separate. They together make the Buddha. They make the Buddha, male, female, neither, both, whatever. Not separate there. There's not a separation of the wisdom consciousness, the wisdom knowing, and the world, the senses, the world of form, of matter, of the senses. All of it empty, all of it divine.

And within that, actually, if you know the teachings a little bit, there's room for the transcendent aspect of the gnosis, the transcendent aspect of the Buddha's mind, beyond appearance, beyond any form, beyond anything that can be said of it or predicated or attributed to it, the Unfabricated, and at the same time there's room for the immanence and the revelation, the discovery of the divine in and through, in different ways, the world of forms and experience. You see this also mirrored -- just making parallels here -- in Kabbalistic teaching, the Jewish mystical teachings. There's the eros between aspects or faces of the divine, aspects or faces of the Godhead. They're called the Sefirot. Some of you may know some of these teachings. But for example, between the Sefirot of Tiferet and Malchut (which is also the Shekhinah that you've maybe heard of) -- in other words, between the divine transcendence there, and the divine presence in the world, the immanence, the Shekhinah, there is an erotic connection. There is an erotic love, an erotic union. So right there, spelled out in all these mystical teachings in very erotic language and depictions, it's saying between the transcendent and the immanent there is eros. Between the wisdom knowing and the world of form, matter, senses there is -- look -- sexual union. There is this erotic connection.

Or to take another teaching from the Kabbalistic tradition, again, from the two Sefirot, Chochmah, which translates as 'wisdom' or something like that, and is associated with a kind of level or dimension of being or a world of pure conception. If we go back to the teachings about dependent origination and fabrication, the simplest conception is just any kind of self, any kind of knower and any kind of known (a knower always needs a known), and any kind of time, just the present moment. Just knowing and known and time as the barest pure conception, you could say that's the seed in Chochmah. And that seed fertilizes Binah, another Sefirah, the third Sefirah, called 'mother,' the celestial mother. And that Sefirah has a kind of parallel or is associated with a dimension of being, a level, a world of what's called 'knowing.' Don't take this temporally, but it's the initial, the first forming, if you like, of objects, of perception or beings, the first appearance of distinct, finite creatures, the realm of angelic or (quote) 'spiritual' beings, the mundus imaginalis. Maybe there are parallels there. But again, there's this erotic union depicted between the transcendent, pure conception, if you like, and the world of appearances, the mundus imaginalis, the world of forms, etc.

Again, eros and the imaginal wrapped up together there. And you can also see some parallels here with teachings about dependent origination, and any fabrication needing, as I said before, some elemental, incredibly subtle conception there -- the pure conception, perhaps, of Chochmah -- and how that gives rise then to the world, not necessarily in a temporally discrete progression there. What's interesting in the Kabbalah about this last erotic union is that human practice is necessary to restore these two Sefirot, Chochmah and Binah, the wisdom and the mother of the world, if you like, these two, Chochmah and Binah, to restore them, to restore their erotic union, to restore their lovemaking, to turn them back face to face after a mythic rupture within the divine itself. What's necessary is human practice for what's called the tikkun olam, the restoration, the healing of the world. It's also the healing of the divine. So through human practice, these two faces of the divine come back into the erotic embrace of lovemaking, of sexual union, for which they were originally intended: the wisdom, if you like, the father that's pure conceptuality that generates fabrication, and the world that is fabricated there, the world of forms.

So you get in this teaching that human practice is necessary somehow to divine and cosmic healing and completion. Human practice is necessary. And then wrapped up in this teaching, as well, is also the fact that this breaking of the vessels is part of this whole mythology, a psychology, a metaphysic, a multi-levelled, multifaceted teaching. This breaking of the vessels that I've referred to repeatedly, Shevirat ha-Kelim, if that happens repeatedly, on different levels of being, and in our own psyche and souls, if that happens repeatedly, every time that happens, the Chochmah and the Binah, the celestial father, if you like, and the celestial mother, the wisdom and the appearance of forms, are turned out, turn their faces from each other, looking in opposite directions, away from their erotic union. And so every time that happens -- because it happens repeatedly, this breaking of the vessels -- that rupture in the erotic union happens, and it's up to us, it's up to the human being to restore that lovemaking between these aspects, directions, faces of God, faces of our being. Interesting to me. I don't know if you can hear the poetry and hear how many resonances there are in terms of ideas that can fertilize soulmaking further.

In tantric practice, as I mentioned before, there's a kind of mimicking of a Buddha's gnosis that can see emptiness and has some aspect that's completely transcendent at the same time as immanent appearance. A Buddha is the only kind of being that can know fully the emptiness, with the wisdom there, and perceive appearances and forms, etc. So tantric practice is a kind of skilful, artful mimicking of that Buddha-gnosis. And within that, there's this understanding that it's referring to, the Buddha-gnosis is referring to something, a cosmic dimension. This jñāna, this gnosis, is something cosmic and divine. And at the same time, it's not other than our very minds. Our very minds, at one level, are the Buddha-nature, are the Buddha-mind, are the Buddha-gnosis already. And it's not separate from, not other than, our minds and this world. That maṇḍala, the divine appearances, is this world perceived differently, perceived through the lenses of gnosis, perceived through the lenses of imaginal perception when the eros is allowed to fertilize, perceived through deity practice in tantric tradition.

So because it's not other than our minds, and because it's this world that is being created and discovered as divine and revealed that way, there is this aspect to all these teachings of participation. In the Kabbalah, human practice is necessary for this healing of the divine and restoration of the erotic union between the faces of the divine. And that's part of the healing of the cosmos as well. Participation is woven into these teachings. That idea of participation that I've touched on before and drawn attention to is woven into these kind of teachings. Some years ago, I'm sure I would have heard all this and it just -- these kind of things just sound like completely abstract metaphysics or some ridiculous kind of mythology. Now it's so resonant, so alive and multifaceted, these kinds of ideas. Anything but abstract. Anything but kind of abstruse or slightly strange, disembodied metaphysics from another era. What is it (as I hope I've said before on this retreat) to take ideas and let them be seminal, let them be seeds in the psyche? Through entertaining them, can we translate them into ways of looking and into imaginal perception? An idea actually seeds the imaginal and fertilizes the eros, and the idea and the image start mixing and giving birth to other images or other dimensions of image. Not abstract metaphysics, all this Vajrayāna stuff and the Kabbalah stuff and Neoplatonic stuff -- to be practised. They refer to practices, to things and experiences that we can actually open to in practice, in our lives, and refer to ways of living and ways of seeing, ways of looking, viewing.

Another strand or a related strand of Jewish mysticism that sort of emerged in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, really, talked about a double movement. And so there's the movement to what they call 'nullify' the self and nullify matter and form in favour of the Godhead. In other words, to realize the emptiness of self, the emptiness of matter and form, and to become, if you like, 'nothing,' and to dissolve into the Unfabricated, we could say in our language, into the Ayin in the Hebrew, in the Kabbalistic tradition, the nothing of God, the pregnant nothing of God, the infinite nothing of God. So this one movement is the nullification of self and matter or form in favour of the Godhead, and the second movement of the double movement is to bring about an infusion of the divine, of the divinity, into the material world, through religious worship and ritual and ethical action (what's called the mitzvot in the tradition). So there's a double movement there. There's what's called the upper unification, 'annihilation' in their language, of the self and of the world, this emptying, a dissolving into the transcendent, infinite, unfabricated God. And paradoxically, that upper unification, the ability to do that, enables a drawing down -- or I would like to say to the degree that we're able to do that, we are more able to draw down, in their language, the divine essence into the vessels of the finite world. And this drawing down and ability to draw down is called the lower unification.

That kind of teaching is wrapped up in all kinds of language that, for a lot of us now, will be really quite loaded and charged, and sometimes for some people scary, etc. There are also elements of that language that I would like to really not actually incorporate, just because it makes either too much of a duality, or this or that. So for example, they talk about 'leaving the bodily sheath,' and the 'divine will,' and 'divine commandments,' etc. So leaving aside all that kind of language, and taking something central from that because of its parallels to what we're talking about.

You can see there, for instance, the parallel, or you can see that double movement, in what we're describing as tantric practice. Typical tantric practice with a yidam, with a tantric deity, there is first the dissolution into emptiness, the knowing of emptiness, and then the emergence from the emptiness and the imagining, if you like, of the deity, and even the becoming of the deity. And then at the end, dissolving it all back into emptiness. There's the drawing down, or even becoming a vessel of the divine in this drawing down of the divine essence. But that's enabled and shot through with the knowing of emptiness. Yes? Enabled by or shot through by the knowing of the emptiness and the fading of things. There's also a parallel with imaginal practice just as we've been talking about: working with an imaginal figure, working with a daimon, and feeling a sense of the duty to that, and the way that the sense of the divinity and the dimensionality of divinity of that figure, of that daimon, of that imaginal figure, and then the sense of duty -- can you see that too? I know it's image as image, it's empty, and that kind of enables me to listen, feel, sense this sense of divinity and duty. It's all wrapped up together.

And then the question is, how does that duty embody? Is it just in a sort of inner devotedness? Or is it somehow spilling over into the world? Careful of this literalization, concretization, but you can see the parallels there. And in alchemy. I can't remember if I've used this phrase before on another retreat, but there's an alchemical phrase sort of summing up the goal of alchemy as the spiritualization of matter and the materialization of spirit. Again, you can see, hear, echoes of these different streams of tradition reflecting each other, different traditions and the way they express things kind of paralleling or mirroring each other or kind of groping towards the same thing. Spiritualization of matter -- this nullification of self and matter, recognizing it as empty and as divine that way; and then the materialization of spirit, meaning something like the drawing down of this divine essence into the vessels of the finite world, the divine influx.

And actually, in both the Kabbalistic Jewish mystical teachings and in the tantric teachings, in the Vajrayāna teachings, there's a kind of double perspective, if you like, going on. It's made very clear in the Kabbalistic teachings. And this double perspective, it's almost like holding two perspectives -- so not just a double movement, but a double perspective held as well. And this double perspective, to me, ensures a thorough non-dualism of the teachings. Even sometimes we're used to Advaita teachings, teachings on non-duality, etc., and unwittingly, they can actually create another kind of duality. In teaching that "There's nothing to do. There's nowhere to get. Meditation is pointless. You don't need to do anything," they don't say much about ethics and all that, and there's a kind of almost like denigrating of effort, of striving and that kind of movement there, and avoidance, or rather missing of the divinity and the particularity, etc., we've touched on. But with this double perspective, to me there's a more thorough non-duality.

So one of the perspectives is: already recognize that everything, all, is already divine. It's already all one. It's already all perfect. The essence of everything is divine, and the illusion of separate things that are not divine, or separated from the divine, is exactly that: it's an illusion, because essentially all is one and already divine. It's one perspective. And the kind of complementary perspective that we express, or better, we create and we manifest, the divine; that we are therefore necessary to the divine. And this implies to me a whole other level of participation: that we are participating in the divine. We create, we manifest the divine. We are necessary to the divine.

But holding those two perspectives: "It's all already perfect. There's nothing to do. Any illusion of separate, non-divine things doesn't recognize the essence, the shared essence, the oneness of an already perfect divinity, that everything is already just divine," and at the same time the complementary perspective that "No, we need to create and manifest the divine, and we are necessary to the life of the divinity, if you like, to the soul and the soulmaking of the divine." But both the tantric kind of framework and the Kabbalistic framework and these kind of teachings, they're related to practice. They absolutely imply and demand practice. They're not abstract metaphysical teachings that have nothing to do with our life.

I want to continue. Let's stop here for now. I want to continue then talking a bit more about historical processes with different traditions, but also how that has affected sexuality in particular, and maybe some other elements. Let's stop there for now.

---

1. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 354, 353. ↩︎

2. SN 35:117. ↩︎

3. MN 9. ↩︎

4. AN 4:131. ↩︎

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trs. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 434. ↩︎