Refractions: Of Body, Sensuality, and Sexuality (Part 1)

I'd like to say just a little bit more about our relationships with and our views, conceptions of, and our experiences of body, sensuality, and sexuality, and just say a little bit more in the service of opening up the discourse, opening up the questioning, opening up the exploration, and opening up, hopefully, some avenues there. Before I get immediately on to that, I just want to say something else that's related. The reason I want to say it is because it's so easy to listen or read teachings and approach them from within a certain set of fixed assumptions. Sometimes we're not even fully conscious what those assumptions are, or we may be conscious but they still go kind of unchallenged; they're not really questioned. So eros, we have said already many times, may be sexual. It may be non-sexual eros. It can be very, very subtle, extremely subtle. And it can be very, very intense, eros. Whether it's sexual, whether it's not sexual, the eros can have that whole range of, if you like, the force or depth of it, subtle to intense, and can be what some people would regard as extreme. The eros running in a certain direction in a person's life can seem to others like, "This is pretty extreme," their devotion to their beloved, whatever that beloved is.

The devotion of an artist to their art and the dedication that that takes, etc., can seem extreme, obsessive, etc., ruthless even, all that, out of balance. Or the devotion, the eros towards a lover when one is in love. Or a religious eros, the devotion to the religious beloved, whatever form that takes. Easily when the eros is very strong, and it can seem, from a certain perspective, to be extreme, it's easily pathologized by others. Either way, when the eros is towards, for example, eros for the transcendent -- "I want to know the Unfabricated," and one in some cases stakes one's life on it as the Buddha did -- either when it's that kind of eros or when it's towards, from another perspective, from many perspectives, the intense eros towards the transcendent, from most modernist perspectives of our culture and kind of non-religious culture just seems very easily pathologized as some kind of crazy thing: "What are you wanting?", this 'something' that sounds like a 'nothing' for a start, sounds very abstract, and it seems to be away from life. From the other perspective, a sort of more renunciate perspective of certain religious traditions, the eros towards a human being when one is in love is also pathologized: "This is delusion. This is crazy," etc., or the eros towards the world, etc.

So pathologization, pointing the finger and regarding others as pathological because we don't share their erotic attraction and certainly not the intensity of that, this happens very easily, this pathologization, either way, in either direction, from either camp, if you like. And what happens there so often is in contrast to this sort of extremity or intensity of the erotic movement and opening. Moderation is elevated. So "moderate in all things" or whatever the phrase says. This is regarded as healthy. Anything immoderate or extreme is pathologized. That may have its place sometimes, and may have a certain wisdom to it. But what is the consequence, or what are the consequences, of moderation being elevated? How easily moderation can become mediocrity. Moderation may breed a kind of mediocrity in terms of what opens to us, what we can discover, what we can create. Remember, discovering/creating is the movement of soulmaking. Mediocrity in terms of what soulmaking is then available to us and opens for us is one of the potentially negative consequences of this elevation of moderation.

Why shouldn't one be extreme in one's eros for the transcendent? Why shouldn't one be extreme? Why shouldn't one burn with an intensity for knowing the Unfabricated, for knowing the divine or the Deathless, the divine beyond all concepts, the Deathless beyond all concepts, beyond space, beyond time? Certainly as I just said, the Buddha was extreme in his desire for that. Or in regard to any kind of religious erotic movement or desire or longing or calling, yearning. For example, someone who wants to become a celibate monastic or is a celibate monastic, for so many people, for some people who don't share that, who can't really resonate with that longing, it seems like such a strange movement. It's true that one may be desiring to be a celibate or a monastic or to go beyond the world, to know the Unfabricated, out of fear, out of some kind of closing, rather than the opening movement of eros. Certainly true. But I mentioned Thomas Merton the other day. He was this beautiful writer. He has an autobiography of a period in his life, I think up to the time he became a monk, a Trappist monk. Now, at that time, the Trappists were an extremely strict order. Their rule was very strict. Not only were they, of course, celibate, but I think they couldn't actually speak, so they had to communicate -- when necessary, about only very necessary things -- in sign language, I think. It was known as one of the two or three most strict of the monastic Catholic orders.

He describes in this book, The Seven Storey Mountain, his partial autobiography, the growing longing in him and inclination to become a monk and to give himself to that life. He visits monasteries, and he talks with spiritual advisors and priests. Oftentimes the priests didn't share that extreme longing, and regarded it as a bit too extreme, etc. But at one point he says, I think with one of his spiritual advisors or a priest or something, he says, "Father, I want to give God everything. I want to give God everything." Because the priest was asking, "Why can't you choose a kind of easier order to go into, less extreme, less renunciate, less sort of hardcore and full-on?" He said, "Father, I want to give God everything."^[1] And so easily that view is just not resonated with, not understood, and regarded as pathological.

I also remember for myself when I was living as a musician in the US. I was in a PhD programme in composition, and teaching at the university there. I made the choice to give that life up, and the plan was to ordain as a monk after doing a year retreat at Gaia House. People asked me, or I met people and they would ask me, "What are you doing?" and this and that, and I would explain, "This is what my plan is." And in quite a lot of the cases, the person I was talking to, their face would drop, or their jaw would drop, and a sort of look of horror and disgust would come over their face in reaction to this idea of living as a monk or dedicating oneself to a celibate life and renunciate life away from sense pleasures, devoted to what, as I said, probably seemed like just some abstract longing and life of loneliness and all this; who knows what they were thinking.

[10:35] But this view comes out of not understanding, just not resonating, not having the soul aflame in that direction, in the direction of what we might call the religious, knowing God, whether it's the Unfabricated or other directions of religiosity. The eros there is limited when people pathologize that or judge it as extreme, that kind of desire. Their eros in that direction is just very limited, and therefore they don't value; they can't see any value in that. So often, as I said before, what happens is we prioritize something called 'balance' and something called 'psychological health.' These, first of all, we have very limited views, very socially constructed views of what 'balance' looks like and what something called 'psychological health' looks like -- views that are congruent, basically, or informed or influenced by our contemporary society and world-view. Limited views of something called 'balance' and something called 'psychological health,' which of course are related. And sometimes these almost become ends in themselves: "I'm practising my meditation for psychological health." Not that that's not important, but does it always need to be limited to a view that puts that first and that sees that as the end or the only legitimate end? We've talked about balance before, and actually the importance in navigating, but sometimes we prioritize -- I feel sometimes we overprioritize this idea of balance and being balanced. We have either a static picture of what balance is, or we've just elevated the whole ideal of balance. Maybe there's a place and time for being really not balanced: I am falling, I am climbing, I am out of balance as I run towards something, whatever it is, as I dance. Maybe I just fall. I fall or I stumble or whatever, and it's part of the erotic movement.

So we can very easily hear or meet someone, or even in the instances of our own eros, look at ourselves, and see what, from certain perspectives, looks too intense; it's too extreme, this eros in whatever direction. It's like, "What about balance? What about psychological health?" I don't want to dismiss that. Again, please, all teaching is contextual. I'm a little bit responding, as I said, to what can become just kind of quite entrenched, often unconscious, but quite a lot of the time not quite fully questioned views, not quite fully revealed: "Well, why is it that I have this assumption, and is it really a necessary assumption? What's it based on?", etc. This prioritizing of balance and psychological health, whatever those notions come to mean for us, in contrast with another approach, which would be a little bit in line with what we're saying: it's like, let the eros lead. What if we trust the eros, and trust even the directions that it wants to go in, so that it will make soulmaking, and forge ahead, and open, and penetrate, and search, and discover, and burn through in the directions that it wants to? And if that's towards the transcendent, beautiful. How does it want to? Where does the eros want to move? And trusting that. And trusting that, as we've been describing, at some point in that process, just because of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, and that mutual insemination, mutual fertilization, mutual widening, enrichening, and how that will start moving out to touch everything else, the directionality of the eros and the directionality of the soulmaking will spread.

As I said, if one then opens to the Unfabricated, for instance, or even before one has opened, it starts spreading; something happens. Why? If I don't dampen the eros, if I don't block the movements and the expansion of psyche and logos, it will do that. So another view is actually to trust that, and trust being off balance at times, and being extreme, and people thinking you're weird, and this and that. There's a different kind of imbalance that comes when the eros is blocked, or the psyche is blocked, or the logos is blocked. Then, as I said before, some people entering the monastery or becoming deliberately celibate or whatever it is, or chasing some transcendent Unfabricated, because the eros is dampened, it's a movement of contraction, of fear of eros: I'm afraid of sexuality, the body disgusts me, I'm afraid of human relationships, whatever it is. Or the logos is cramped or whatever. This could be, as we said, in any direction. What about trusting eros, and just opening the space for that soulmaking dynamic to do its natural thing -- which will be, like water, will be to find its direction, multiple directions where it can flow. Or like fire.

This seems to me important, just in the way we're hearing and viewing all this. But as I said, I just want to spend a little time talking a bit more about how eros, in its insemination, its ignition of the soulmaking dynamic, involving eros-psyche-logos, will affect the views, the relationships, and the experiences of body, sensuality, and sexuality. So transforming, opening, giving dimensionality to all that. Because of what we said about the potential endlessness and open-endedness and multidirectionality of the movement of the soulmaking dynamic, these aspects of our existence -- body, sensuality, sexuality, along with a lot of others -- are potentially infinite. So the way the views can be transformed, the dimensionality given to them, the new openings of perception and view, and sense and actual experience, and what these things mean to us, and the place they have, that is potentially infinitely openable. In other words, wherever we are now, wherever I am now, there are some unforeseen insights, experiences, views, conceptions, openings, relationships with body, with sensuality, with sexuality that I have no inkling what they are right now. It's unknown to me now. It's part of the 'beyond' of the eros, of that whole soulmaking movement: I just don't know. So in this field of potentially infinite opening, we can only obviously say a little here, partly due to time, and partly because of the fact that, relative to infinity, whatever we say is only going to be a little.

[19:24] Okay. So we could take this in any order. Actually, before we even get into it, just to say: notice that even if we have a strong desire, a strong eros flowing through us for the Unfabricated -- "I want to know that. I want to open to it. I want to taste it" -- in the traditions of Buddhadharma, in Buddhadharma understanding, we can't, in that desire and in supporting and following that eros for the Unfabricated, we do not -- the way of the Buddhadharma, the way the Buddha taught to know that is not to ignore or cut off or kind of beat down the body and the senses. Absolutely not. So there's mindfulness of the body. It's the first foundation of mindfulness. It's absolutely integral to the Buddha's path, careful attention and particular kinds of attention, mindfulness of the body, to the body, and to sense experience. So there's attention to sense experience. Mindfulness of body, mindfulness and attention to sense experience. And in some, as we said in the last few days in some of the talks, in some traditions of Buddhadharma -- more the tantric traditions -- also with regard to sexuality, sexual energy, it's regarded, for example, as a vehicle; it's something we do engage. We don't ignore it. We don't cut it off. We don't beat it down. We engage it as a vehicle, because we can gather and collect those energies and channel them in certain ways in the energy body, and this allows certain openings of the perception, particularly in the tantric schools, and opening to the clear light mind. But certainly in Pali Canon Buddhism, the emphasis is you're not ignoring the body, you're not cutting off, you're certainly not kind of beating it down, but there's mindfulness of the body and certain kinds of attention to the body and to the sense experiences.

However, the purpose of this mindfulness to the body and to sense experience, and the attention to them, it serves the understanding of the dependent arising, the fabrication of the perception of the body and of sense experience. In other words, it's not for revelling in the body and sense experience and sense pleasure. It's not for a glorification of the body. It's not to see the beauty or even the miracle of the body and all that. It's actually -- at least in my reading of Pali Canon Buddhism -- why are we mindful of the body? Why are we mindful of sense experience? We're mindful in certain ways to understand the dependent arising of the very perception of body and sense experience. In the mindfulness, wrapped up with the mindfulness, it's in a context of practising ways of looking that actually fabricate less perception of the body. So, for example, the jhānas, the progression of the jhānas, you could say what they really are are progressively unfabricated perceptions of the body. The first four jhānas especially, it's really about the body and the perception of the body. The body is, rather than being perceived as this solid material structure, starts to be perceived as fine material form, what the Buddha calls fine material form.

The body becomes rapture in the first jhāna. It becomes happiness, so to speak, in the second jhāna. It becomes exquisite peacefulness, tender, exquisite peacefulness in the third jhāna. It becomes just stillness and still light often in the fourth jhāna. Very, very refined perception of materiality. And then in the fifth jhāna, that perception of solidity and what the Buddha calls 'obstruction' is unfabricated even more, is dissolved even more, so to speak, is transcended even more, and there's no perception of solidity, materiality of body at all, and one enters the fifth jhāna, the jhāna of infinite space. Then that, too, is refined through the remaining jhānas, all the way to beyond the eighth jhāna, to an experience of total unfabrication in the transcendent, in the Deathless, in nibbāna.

So one is moving there, one is using mindfulness and an understanding of fabrication, practising different ways of looking, of which mindfulness is one. Actually, mindfulness is several. If you read the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, it implies ways of looking. But what they have in common is that they fabricate less to different degrees, and through that we understand fabrication. The experience is moving beyond the body and beyond sense experience. So what this means is, yes, absolutely not ignoring, not cutting off, not beating down the body and the senses, but we're using mindfulness and attention to body and senses for very specific purposes, in a way to kind of go beyond them to the Unfabricated. What that means, though, is that there's limited value given to both the body and sense experience, limited value in that transcendental inclination of Pali Canon Buddhism, of the Buddha as he originally taught, to know the Deathless, to know the Unfabricated, to know that sphere, that dimension, where the eye ceases, etc., and the perception of forms ceases, etc., as I quoted.^[2] There are many passages.

So all this means that yes, we pay attention to body and senses, but they have limited value. And the stress is on not desiring for the body, and not getting attached to the body and to the senses and sense pleasures and experience. Therefore, body and sense experience have limited place given to them in the construction of the path in Pali Canon Buddhism. Even though they might feature very centrally, the place given to them is actually quite limited because it's just serving this other movement. And I'll point out that there's a limited, if you like, view, interpretation, and therefore sense of and perception of both body and sense experience. Yes? So the whole view and interpretation is construed within the framework of a transcendentalist path, and so that actually, if you like, limits and constrains the very sense and perception we have of both body and sense experience, because experience/perception of both will be limited by view and concept and interpretation, etc.

For example, related to all that, in the first foundation of mindfulness, there's a passage on contemplating what the Buddha calls the unclean parts of the body -- the liver and spleen and kidneys and bile and blood and pus, synovial fluid and all the rest of it. Again, in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, in the sutta on mindfulness, the foundations of mindfulness, there's the encouragement to contemplate the body as the elements of the body, the classical elements of earth, air, fire, water.^[3] One way of understanding that, the simplest, kind of less contorted way of understanding that is at that time, conceiving in terms of elements was actually just like what we would consider now conceiving in terms of atoms: look at the body and consider it as just a group of atoms. There's probably calcium there in the bones and potassium and who knows, all the stuff that bodies are made of. So this view of the elements classically, we can interpret it and take it in different directions which do different things. There's always a certain view; a certain spin will take the perception and open it in different directions. But one way is just to think of it: what the Buddha was getting at there was this was the view of materiality back then, that it was constructed of four basic elements, and it's something similar to our kind of deconstruction. The intention was a kind of deconstruction then of the body, this thing that we tend to get attached to and think, "Wow! How wonderful!" It's saying, "It's just the elements." It's like our saying, "It's just a bunch of atoms," in the service of less attachment, etc.

[29:31] Emerging from our heritage in Pali Canon Buddhism, and the transcendentalist thrust there that's not always acknowledged or realized or given emphasis or place to in modern interpretations of the Dharma and teachings of the Dharma that still try to place the Pali Canon at their basis, this causes all kinds of confusion and contradiction, etc. So one is in regard to the body, but also in terms of the senses. In the Majjhima Nikāya, in the Alagaddūpama Sutta, which is the Snake Simile in the Middle Length Discourses, the Buddha says: sense pleasures, don't go chasing them.^[4] He's really reining in the eros with regard to sense pleasure -- certainly reining in the craving, but he doesn't make the distinction with regard to eros, so it kind of all gets shoved in one basket, so to speak.

He says sense pleasures are like fleshless bones. It's like throwing a bone with no flesh, and just sort of blood-stained, to a starving dog. It just gets the dog a little bit excited. The dog will gnaw and chase and chew on this bone, but it's not getting any satisfaction there. So the sense pleasures, the Buddha said, are like fleshless bones. They're like carrying a flaming torch of straw. So imagine a collection of straw, and you're holding it, and it's aflame, and carrying that against the wind. What's going to happen there? Your hands are going to get burnt, your face is going to get burnt. He continues, "The sense pleasures are like a pit of burning coals," which you're dragged through. They're like borrowed goods -- you might enjoy them, but they're temporary; you have to give them back. They are -- even more extreme and more strong in his analogies -- the sense pleasures are a slaughterhouse, he said, or like a butcher's block, a block of wood where a butcher will cut up the meat, the carcasses. They're like a stake of swords -- in other words, those stakes sticking out of the ground with sharp ends. You're just going to get impaled there. They're like a snake's head. You get bitten, and there's a poison to the bite.

So this is really, really strong language. "They bring suffering and disappointment. Sense pleasures are perilous," he says. It's very rare -- I do know teachers who talk this way, but one teacher I'm particularly thinking of, it's very tongue-in-cheek as well. But it's pretty rare these days to use such extreme language or even extreme kind of thrust of teaching regarding sense pleasures, certainly in the Insight Meditation tradition and other Buddhist traditions that I'm aware of. Why is that? Even among monastics. Why is that? Of course, and some of you might know, and we've alluded to it a little bit, tantric texts in tantric Buddhism reverse this, reverse this teaching in regard to sense pleasures. We'll maybe say a bit more about that. Let's see as we go on.

This teaching around sense pleasures in the Pali Canon, the current of that and the tenor of that kind of informs and very strongly influences our current attitudes and views within the Dharma, of course, but actually ends up with quite a confused sort of unintegrated, not very coherent teaching in relation to sense experience and sense pleasure. There are reasons to that, which we'll come back to. Now, especially regarding sexuality -- and sometimes it's just avoided as a topic, of course, in a lot of Buddhist teachings -- but actually, there's this kind of attitude and view permeating it, and yet it's mixed with other attitudes and views, and we can't quite reconcile the two -- certainly regarding sexuality, probably regarding all senses pleasures. And we could say more, but let's stick to our themes, because it's the same with romantic love, etc., which we've touched on.

So there is this tenor, this voice, this thrust of the teachings right there from the early teachings. I think it has all kinds of consequences. Some people regard the Buddhadharma, in a lot of the different traditions, as being quite misogynistic. You'll know in the Theravādan tradition there's quite a controversy -- there has been quite a controversy and heated debate in the last few years around whether nuns can be fully ordained, and whether they can have a status of full ordination in the order within Buddhism and an equal status to monks. Quite a lot of charged and heated polemic and debate around that. And quite rightly, I think, there's a case that some people would say there's a kind of misogyny running through a lot of Buddhist traditions. I don't think it restricts itself to the Theravāda, and I've certainly heard all kinds of stories about women, even teachers of mine, being in monasteries when they were young women, trying to practise with their meditation and develop their practice with a lot of dedication, and many of the monks treating them with a lot of disdain and disrespect, and even more than that, just -- I remember one teacher telling me that they basically look at you like you have the plague, and as if all they see is someone who is distracting them from their path because you're in the form of a temptress, etc. Again, so much you hear this kind of fear and avoidance, the contraction of view and contraction of eros that we were alluding to earlier.

I wonder sometimes if actually the misogyny that's there has its root in something -- or partly, at least -- in something more fundamental, which is just a kind of stance of being anti-sensual eros. It's like sensual eros, eros regarding/in relation to sense experience is something that there is no place for in a certain communication of the teachings and a certain movement. So there can be eros for the transcendent, and there can be eros for the Buddha to a certain extent, in terms of soulmaking and imagery, etc., but there's a kind of anti -- what would you say? -- a cutting off, a dismissal, a refusal of place to and a fear of sensual eros, sensualist eros, if you like, eros with regard to sensuality. And out of that, that partly as an even more fundamental level may be fuelling misogyny. I don't know, but I wonder. Because in some visions or images, if you like, even if a person doesn't think that image and fantasy operates for them in regard to the path and awakening, it's almost as if the vision, the fantasy, the image and the concept of awakening is exactly a life without eros. That's what awakening looks like. It's a life without eros. The flame has gone out. And there's certainly no eros towards sensuality or with regard to sensuality. There's no eros even for the Unfabricated or for any other kind of contemplative opening, because that has been realized. So there's a sense, an image, a fantasy of awakening as: what it looks like is a life without eros.

[39:42] And I've touched on before, oftentimes in teaching Insight Meditation, etc., if one even mentions or gives any instructions around what to do with sexual images or sexual energy that arises, [there] might be in the sort of less tight (if you like) traditions a kind of soft and generous and somewhat open: "Just notice them, just allow them. That's okay." But implicit is, "Don't encourage them. For heaven's sake, don't encourage them." They're not -- I've said this before -- sexual energy, sexual images, etc., they're not given any positive place on the path. They simply don't really fit. The only way they fit is in the sense of, well, they're just something else to be open to in a kind of attitude -- which is relatively popular -- of Dharma as being open to all things. They're just equal to anything else, and our job, like with anything else, is just let them go. Let them come, let them go. Underneath all that is, well, it's better if they don't arise; it's at least less hassle if sexual images and sexual energy doesn't arise.

But regarding that and regarding sense pleasure, sometimes it seems to me or has seemed to me -- and I know that other people feel this way, and it's rare for them to actually be able to articulate it to themselves or to another -- there's a kind of confusion, especially regarding sense pleasure even more than sexuality, or there's a kind of lack of coherence or integrity, often, in our thinking about this, in our view, in our sort of conceptual framework. So we might say, for instance, contrary to what the Buddha taught for the most part, we turn it a little upside down, so we say very often to meditators: "Don't chase meditative pleasure. You might have a blissful sitting, but don't try and make it happen again. You might fall into a jhāna, but these are really things you want to be careful not to get attached to them, and don't try and repeat it," etc. Whereas almost every day in both monasteries and retreat centres, extremely pleasant-tasting food. A lot of time and energy goes into preparing that for the retreatants, for the monastics, etc. If someone who is dedicated to the Dharma shares about, "I'm going to go skiing at such-and-such a place," or whatever it is, it raises no eyebrows. It's just, "Oh, well, that's going to be a pleasant sense experience. It's going to be fun and pleasant." Completely the opposite of what the Buddha originally encouraged, which is this, "Yeah, strive to attain jhāna. Strive for that bliss. This is something worth striving for. Develop it. Don't fear it," whereas in relation to wanting sense pleasures -- nice food, nice sights, sounds, etc. -- he was very dis-encouraging.

We've mixed up the emphases the Buddha placed on these two things, and where we should actually strive for and put effort into, and where we shouldn't. But even more generally, there seems kind of a confusion in our minds and a lack of -- could we say 'integrity'? 'Coherence' is perhaps a better word. So if we're wanting to kind of lessen our confusion, increase or support a sense of more coherence, more making sense in terms of our vision and our concept of the whole path and what that really means for our life -- because we can have a concept that makes sense, and then when it comes to our life we're not really living it. We're talking about people who really love studying the Dharma, and are involved in the practice and whatever, but actually these things don't really hang together very coherently in terms of what the teachings say and what one might communicate with others and what makes sense, but then how one actually lives and the choices. There's a lack of coherence and a lack of integrity, often, for us there. So if we want less confusion, if we want to support a sort of making sense of the whole thing, integrating it into our life and feeling that we have integrity and there is coherence there, then this means getting clear about a few things, or becoming more clear regarding quite a few pieces here.

By 'clear,' I don't primarily mean 'clear seeing,' as in I see clearly what's there, which implies a notion of reality. Maybe 'clear' and 'getting clear' and 'clearing' means more something like 'clear a path.' Clear a path for movement. What movement? The movement of soulmaking, the movement of eros, the movement of creation/discovery, etc., that we've been talking about. So yes, there's some clear seeing in terms of distinctions and delineations like we've talked about between eros and craving, etc. But more, it's like, what's blocked for us, and when does that blocking not serve? That kind of thing. So clearing a path. But also clarity of delineation, etc.

Now, included in all that is being clear, delineating between the three or four possibilities that we already talked about of ways that the path and the vision of awakening and the concept of awakening construe our relationship with sense experience. So for example, just reviewing now, we talked about one very common view is: there's sense experience, maybe sense pleasure, and our job is to cut the papañca, cut the proliferation, cut the veil of images and thoughts and concepts around sense pleasure, cut it, remove it so that we can just meet experience, quote, 'barely,' 'nakedly,' 'directly,' etc. There's this myth, really, of bare attention -- something the Buddha never talked about. Then there's either this construct of 'being with what is,' 'meeting the touch of life,' 'meeting life,' 'open to the touch of life,' whatever it is. Or there's this kind of movement to atomistic reductionism -- you cut papañca, and you're just with the sort of micro-moments of vedanā and perception and all the rest of it. Both of these -- either the myth of 'what is' and 'the touch of life,' or the atomistic reduction perception/conception -- are realist. We've said all this before. But that's the first kind of group of views: cut papañca, and practise bare attention to sense pleasure. Then it's just a moment of pleasantness, and there's nothing else with that.

A second view has a broader and deeper meaning given within it to the word papañca, and the whole movement there is not to 'the touch of life' and the atomistic 'reality,' but rather beyond all that to the Unfabricated, to the transcendent beyond all sense experience. So here's sense pleasure or sense experience; cutting papañca really means unfabricating, and for the sake of that transcendental thrust, the opening to, the knowing of, the realization of that sphere, that dimension where the eye ceases, where the ear ceases, where the perception of forms, the perception of sounds ceases, etc., that we talked about -- the Unfabricated, the Deathless.

[49:04] In contrast to those two, a third construal or conceptual framework regarding the senses and their place on the path and in the vision of awakening contrasts papañca with what we might call 'psyche' or 'image' or 'fantasy' (as good terms in our vocabulary) -- with soulmaking, basically. Papañca versus soulmaking, erotic-imaginal engagement with the senses (or, in the language of tantra, with skilful fabrication, the fabrication in which tantrism engages). So there's a deliberate fabrication of perception, enrichment of perception, multidimensionalizing of perception, etc. Eros, the imaginal, and soulmaking comes in to enrich, imbue, complexify, widen, deepen, and give dimensions to the perception of and relationship with the senses, whereas the first two construals -- cutting papañca and being with bare attention, or cutting papañca as the movement completely beyond the senses to the Unfabricated -- these do not allow that. In those thrusts or those visions of what the path is, they do not allow the erotic-imaginal and the soulmaking with regard to the senses.

But with respect to all that, what we've been saying is, first of all, to acknowledge that soulmaking already happens. No matter what view you have, it will come in one way or another to our path and to our relationship, our view of ourselves and all that. What we need to do is acknowledge this, acknowledge the presence of eros, fantasy and soulmaking in our lives, in what we love -- and if we love the path, that means in relation to the path and to awakening. Acknowledging that, and then delineating that as we've done, making these concepts and then seeing what that does and what opens up in terms of perception, and also being clear about what we talked about, the degrees of fabrication. So in other words, there's a place for this bare attention, a small place. And there's certainly a place for the whole spectrum of unfabricating. There's a place for skilful fabricating, for beautiful fabricating, for soulmaking fabricating. And there's also a place for the different directions of eros -- towards the senses, towards beyond the senses, the Unfabricated, etc.

So all of that kind of, to me, creates more coherence, more sense, allows us to actually have more integrity with respect to all this, and for all that to be integrated more into a vision and a fantasy of the path and a relationship with sense experience, which we can't avoid. We can only transcend sense experience for certain periods of time in deep meditative practice, but otherwise we live in the world of sense experience. That's what the Buddha meant by 'the world,' sense experiences, he says. That's his definition of 'the world.' It seems important: can we really open up a conception and a vision here that does justice to really how we're living, for a start, but also to soulmaking, and to the movements of eros in the soul, and the opening, the discovery of the sacred, etc.?

Now, if we're talking about eros and soulmaking, eros implies soulmaking, soulmaking implies eros, and both of them imply a sense of beauty. Beauty and the senses, of course, go together. Sometimes we can, again, almost be a little simplistic or naïve or unquestioning in our assumptions around what beauty is, and what its place is or isn't, and what it is when it's in the realm of the senses. So eros implies beauty and a love of beauty and an attraction to beauty. We've touched on this. What we love in regard to beauty and in regard to soulmaking and that whole movement of eros is the intimacy with beauty. We love the connection that's involved when the beloved other is beautiful to us and there's that soulmaking. We love that. We love the sensitivity and the tuning. We've touched on all this.

But what actually is beauty? I've actually written about that, so I don't want to go off on a whole big too-long tangent on all this. I'm not going to say too much about it. But actually it strikes me as a really important question: what do we mean when we say 'beauty' or we find something beautiful? So this is an experience we have as human beings. We can ignore it. We can try and put it in the dustbin or whatever. But we have the experience of beauty as human beings. Can we reduce beauty to just pleasantness? To me, they're just not equivalent. Pleasant sensation does not equate to beauty. Any time you feel touched by beauty or in awe of beauty, have a look. Look more carefully. Is this just about pleasant sense experience? Even if it's art, is it just a pleasant arrangement of colours and proportions on a painting, or pleasant sounds and their temporal arrangement in a piece of music or whatever? Is it really just about pleasantness? What's happening when we're really touched and moved and kind of opened by a sense of beauty? To me, this is a really interesting question, a really important question for us as human beings.

Is it that there's some kind of resonating going on between us, or between the soul, in the soul with what is beautiful, with the beloved other? Is it that this, whatever it is that I'm finding beautiful, is mirroring something in me? What's going on? Is it that I recognize something? And if it is any of that, is there some kind of sense of belonging when there's beauty, like I somehow feel like I belong to something, and I'm not even sure what that thing is? Maybe I don't have a sense of it. Maybe it's just this sense of dimensionality that opens, and I belong to that dimensionality. Or maybe it's a divinity. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's an archetype. Maybe it's clear or not at all. Maybe it's just a very vague sense; often it is. One of the things I would like to actually insist on -- and again, I'm not going to go into this now too much -- is that a sense of beauty implies a sense of depth. Now, some people would do their utmost to try and refuse that notion. But I think for us when we have a sense of beauty -- I'm talking about a sense that really touches us, when the heart and the soul and the being is touched by a sense of beauty -- there is there a sense not only of our own depths, but also the depths of that which is beautiful to us.

This is very much connected with the whole movement of eros and soulmaking. We've said eros needs this depth, this dimensionality, this unfathomability of the object. And that's part of what gets fabricated with the imaginal or is inherent, if you like, in the imaginal, is this unfathomability, is this dimensionality and depth. So something here about unfathomability and depth, wrapped up in beauty, wrapped up in the erotic relationship with anything.

Now, if we think for a little bit or consider for a little bit different styles of meditation, even just different styles of -- let's just say Insight Meditation for now. Many of you will know of what's called the Mahāsi style, taught by Mahāsi Sayadaw in the beginning of the twentieth century. It was really one of the absolutely dominant influences or streams within Insight Meditation for many years. One of the very first influences in the construction of Insight Meditation was Mahāsi style. Sometimes it was almost an exclusive prevalence of that or domination within how Insight Meditation was taught. And certainly when I started in the mid-eighties, the Insight Meditation scene and circle and retreat centres and retreats and teachings were all very dominated by Mahāsi-style teachings, alongside others -- Ajahn Chah and a sprinkling of Zen, etc. But Mahāsi style was very dominant.

In that style, there is, I would say, this is very precise noting of moment-to-moment experience, and tends towards a narrow focus of attention. It's a very penetrative, intense application of continual mindfulness to sense experience, and an emphasis on bare attention, that notion of bare attention. Moment-to-moment, intense sustaining of the mindfulness on the sort of particles, if you like, of experience there. I would say with that that there is either no, or let's say very limited eros there. There's either none or very limited erotic possibility there. Why? Because sense objects are not unfathomable.

In that whole presentation of the path and that whole way of teaching and that whole presentation of the concept of what one is trying to do, sense objects are not unfathomable, and we've said eros needs an unfathomability. There is an assumption there in that whole presentation of the teaching related to Theravādan Abhidhamma, which tends towards atomistic reductionism -- is, actually, a whole set of teachings of atomist reductionism that was so criticized by Nāgārjuna in the Mahāyāna teachings on emptiness. But there is an assumption that this atomistic reductionism that's happening through my very probing, narrow focus of sustained, moment-to-moment mindfulness on the particles of sensation and sense experience and mental experience, there is an assumption that this atomistic reduction reveals reality. Yes? When I'm paying attention in this way, this so-called 'mindfulness,' this so-called 'bare attention,' by its very label, is regarded as penetrating to reality. And that assumption supports that kind of attention. That attention reinforces that kind of assumption. It's a kind of attention and a kind of assumption that stops the eros and therefore the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, because there's not this unfathomability that eros needs.

There is a sense of beauty there, but the beauty comes [in the intimacy]. People love ... well, actually some people hate it and some people love it, whatever, people have ambivalent relationships to that way of practising, but part of the love of the beauty there is more what I was relating before: it's in the intimacy, in the connection, in the sensitivity. That's what people love about that path. I don't know whether anyone can really love that kind of atomistic reductionism. So there is some degree of beauty, but the eros there is actually very limited.

In recent years, the sort of predominance and prevalence of Mahāsi style in the Insight Meditation tradition has waned. It's become part of what informs, and there are retreats that would just be that, and certain teachers who just teach that way, and practitioners who just practise that way, but more it's just kind of waned and taken its (I would say rightfully) more modest place mixed in with other concepts and approaches to practice and teachings. Then also more recently, in recent years, a kind of elevation of the idea of Insight Meditation and practice as being most authentically, or one is most truly practising when one is practising (quote) 'non-doing,' or 'just receiving experience,' or 'opening to experience,' and sitting in or walking in a 'non-doing,' standing in a 'non-doing' and just receiving experience. I would actually say, if we're asking about eros and sense experience, that mode of conceiving and practising and the assumptions there also limit or there is a lack there of eros as well within that way of practising. Why? Because again, there's a tacit assumption of the reality of 'being,' 'being' as opposed to 'doing,' that this is somehow real and reveals the way things really are: "Doing would distort the way things really are. This non-doing or being or receiving reveals the way things are." And that reality, that barrier there prevents eros. So where there's a fixed reality-view, the eros is limited -- in this case, in relation to sense experience in that mode of thinking about practice, in that mode of practising.

Secondly, we could also point out that -- if you remember, we used words like opening and penetrating, with the kind of sexual connotations that they have, to describe the erotic movement: opening to the erotic object, the beloved other, penetrating it more, wanting more opening, wanting more penetrating. Here, in this mode of practising, this kind of receiving, opening to receiving experience and so-called non-doing, etc., the erotic movement is limited to one of opening. In the Mahāsi style, it tends to be limited to one of penetrating (not always), and so that style is, if you like, more 'phallic' in its thrust, and this style is more open. Either way, this style limits the range and the style of erotic movement there. But perhaps most importantly, the reason why it lacks or limits the eros is this way of practising, so-called non-doing and receiving, opening to receiving, it tends towards the perception of oneness, not particularity and not the retained otherness of eros. It tends instead towards oneness. In other words, if I just sit and I really practise -- as much as it seems to me, if I don't realize that it's a bit of an illusion; as long as I sit and I believe in so-called 'receiving' and 'opening to receiving' and 'non-doing' -- what will happen is it will unfabricate sense experience to a certain extent, and it tends towards less of a perception of separation and distinction, and towards more of a perception of oneness of all things.

Sense objects then are not unfathomable. They don't have an infinite dimensionality of depths, in that sense of unfathomable. Because, at some point in doing that kind of practice, we recognize that rather sense experiences are universally one with (probably) awareness (that's the most likely thing; sometimes love), one with a kind of universal awareness or love. As this practice goes deeper, before one hopefully realizes that it's actually based on a mistaken conception and illusion of non-doing and realism, at some point we have the perception and the sense and the kind of recognition that all sense experience and all sense objects are universally one, most likely with awareness, with a universal awareness. So that's the way that that practice would go as it deepens and one dedicates oneself to it, in which case they are then fathomed. I've fathomed their true nature: they are awareness in their essence, or they are love in their essence, even if the awareness or love is infinitely vast in space or in time. In other words, this awareness seems to have no limits in space or in time, and this love seems to be infinite in space and in time. There's a certain kind of infinity there, but I've reached the bottom level of the dimensionality: it is awareness or it is love. So sense objects are then not unfathomable; they don't have this unfathomability. They reach a fathoming. They reach a level beyond which they don't go deeper.

[1:09:33] So both these styles, the Mahāsi style and the sort of -- I don't know what to call it -- the style or way of non-doing, if you like, or the way of (quote) 'receiving,' all that, tend to actually limit the eros with regard to sense experience, through the whole way of thinking, and through the way of practising that comes out of that way of thinking and then reinforces that whole view and that whole relationship with sense experience. So there cannot be the erotic soulmaking in relation to the particularities of sense experience and that unfathomability that's part of that, etc., and otherness that's part of that, that's part of the direction of a certain kind of soulmaking.

This, to me, again, it's like: what are we trying to do here? How is our conception of the path and the way we're practising limiting certain possibilities, whether that's the possibility of a deeper understanding of dependent origination and emptiness, whether that's possibilities of degrees and depths of freedom or directions of freedom, or the possibilities of soulmaking and opening to sacredness, etc.? So these questions, to me, are really, really important considerations, really important. So easily we can bring in assumptions, or rest on a practice and a view of practice and of path and awakening, rest on assumptions that are not fully checked out -- all kinds of assumptions.

So in relation to sensuality, the experiences of the senses and the beauty there -- I would say beauty -- what is our relationship there? Is there a place for beauty? What does that mean? We could be talking about art here, any kind of medium of art. We could be talking about nature. We could be talking about whatever. But as I said, is the beauty that we feel in relation to art or music or whatever it is, is it only sensual? Is that's what happening for us, that there's a sensual pleasure because of the arrangement of these colours or these sounds or whatever it is? Is that what beauty is? It's just reducible to sense pleasure, and I'm best served by giving a bare attention to the object of art, whatever that is, or the thing that's beautiful, and then just enjoying the pleasing effects of the arrangement of these elements of the artistic work in time and in space -- the colours, the form, whatever it is, the proportions there? What happens to our sense of beauty if we actually do manage to kind of squeeze it down to that mode of relating to the object, to the art or the beautiful thing?

What happens also if we, just as with images, if we reduce whatever this beautiful thing is, whether it's something in art or something in nature? What happens when we reduce it to "it means X," "it represents specifically, exactly X or Y"? What happens when we reduce it to a kind of monovalency of meaning? What happens to our actual experience of beauty? Beauty seems to me, as I said, to involve -- yes, of course, that's part of beauty. If you make art, you know: of course it matters, the proportions, the timings, the spatial patterning, the colours, whatever it is, the timbres. This matters greatly. You can't talk about the art separate from those elements. And it may well mean this and that, but to reduce it to either of them or both of them, it will kill the beauty. Beauty needs this kind of something unfathomable in the depth, some kind of dimensionality to it, some -- I would say -- inexhaustibility, including of meaningfulness. In other words, I can't quite capture everything about it. Beauty and eros implicate in each other, and soulmaking and all that, and it has this 'beyond.' I can't quite capture or define or reduce it or whatever.

This, as I said, to me, it applies also to our relationship with nature -- for example, landscape or whatever it is, or a tree or something. Or consider going for a walk in autumn, and there's the autumnal scene there with trees of vividly bright colours, etc. One can be really moved and touched, of course (I hope you know this) by the beauty there. Sometimes it moves us to great depth, this kind of beauty, for instance of an autumn scene. Is it just that they are pretty, vivid colours? Sometimes we talk as if that's what the beauty consists of alone. How much can that really touch us? How much depth and beauty can that have? Or is it only that we're amazed at the biological wonder of it? How amazing that trees evolved, and with the light and the photosynthesis, and then the chemical changes occurring with the changing light and seasons, making the colours certain ways, and that's amazing. Or even, in the autumn scene, the poignancy of impermanence: here is decay, here is death, here is the cycle of life and death, and the poignance of that to the being. Or even all of those -- pretty, vivid colours; amazing biology and evolution; and the poignancy of impermanence that the autumn scene speaks to us. It can be all of those, and yet I would still say that in a -- at least what I'm calling a sense of beauty, and really what I would like to say is in the relationship with the sense experience there -- it can be all of these, but something more, I would say, is there when we're really touched and we really have this sense of beauty. Something else can be there, and hopefully is there, because we don't cut it out.

So in our relationship with sensuality, it's like, what can be there? What needs to come in in order for beauty to be there? Something that we can't quite define or capture, some other depth, if you like, dimensionality. Not the monovalency, not the reduction, not just plain or mere sense pleasure, pleasing sense experiences. Yes, that's all fine. Those levels are included. But more. So I would say, you know, if we want to include a sense of beauty in our lives and on the path, and open it and have it be alive and give it place, and if we're interested in soulmaking and eros -- which, as I said, always include a sense of beauty -- then it's actually necessary that in our relationship with the senses, in our relationship with sense experience, we don't reduce the view to "this is simply seeking and enjoying pleasant sense experience," and either that's what we want or that's what we dismiss. There's not a reduction. We don't see it that way. We don't conceive of it that way. Or we're not, as I said, denigrating the senses because we only want the transcendent beyond. There's something else that's possible here in the relationship with the senses.

[1:19:19] Again, we're talking about how can we understand, acknowledge, recognize, practise, live in a way that allows soulmaking, allows eros, understands differently in our relationship with sense experience so we don't just dismiss it or feel guilty or whatever, and we don't flatten it, which would actually kill the beauty and kill the soulmaking. We actually acknowledge, get interested in, allow and support this sense of dimensionality which is available to us in relationship to the senses, necessary for beauty, and necessary for eros and soulmaking. In that, something in the whole relationship with senses and sense experience and world transforms, opens up -- and in so doing, our whole sense of the path can as well.

The German philosopher Heidegger, twentieth century philosopher, traced the etymology of the word for 'beautiful' in German, das Schöne, and he traced the etymology to scheinen in German, which is the root of the word for illusion, Schein. So that's interesting. He's tracing the notion of 'beautiful' to the word for 'illusion.' Now, we could hear something like that and put it straight into a kind of narrow, for some streams of the teaching very typical Pali Canon-influenced interpretation: yes, sense beauty is illusory, and that's what we get from this etymology that Heidegger's pointing to. Heidegger, one of the things he was accused of was a very dubious etymological playing with things, so it may or may not be the case, but again, what matters more to me with playing with words is what comes out of it, and the soulmaking. Because we could hear it that way: sensual beauty is exactly illusory. It's illusory. There is sense experience, and there is the experience of pleasure, or pleasant or unpleasant, in regard to the senses, but sense beauty is illusory. The beautiful is related to illusion.

Compare that with a deeper understanding of fabrication, the more tantric view, the soulmaking view, and the view that allows the erotic-imaginal. There we acknowledge, if you like, the fabrication, and that the beautiful is created and discovered. It's created by the eros-psyche-logos dynamic giving more dimensionality, giving more multifacetedness, etc., in relation to that. But because of our deeper and more kind of integrated understanding of what fabrication is, and what it involves, and the inevitability of it, and the place of soulmaking, and the necessity of that, and the place of eros and all that, there is no problem that the beautiful is connected with the illusory or the fabricated. No problem at all. We understand this is expressing a deep wisdom and a deep way of integration. It unfolds the possibility of a path. It opens a door of a wider avenue of practice, of creation and discovery, and of sacredness.

One of the things I've been thinking for quite a while -- again, if we're staying with art and beauty and all this, staying with that for a sec -- is that in a lot of modern Western poetry, there was a kind of point (I'm not sure exactly when it happened) when the emphasis shifted really to things. It's like the important thing to have in a poem is things. In other words, don't talk about your feelings. Certainly, for heaven's sake, don't talk about metaphysics or spiritual realities or that kind of thing. Talk about things. Depict things. Give us, quote, in a different sense, 'images' of things. So that's the sort of most dominant, I would say, tenor or fabric of a lot of modern Western poetry. It's really based in things.

The message there to budding poets is, "Tie everything to sense experience. Tell us about things. Don't tell us about your feelings. Tell us about things. And your feelings will be communicated indirectly, in and through what you say about things." But the things there are so often just kind of imagined purely materially. They are conceived of purely materially. There's a kind of one-dimensionality or flatland view of things, and therefore of sensuality. That view of things is also tied together with a view of things, and human beings as well, of their fragility, the fragility of these things and the fragility of human beings, the ephemeral nature of both humans and things.

All that is wrapped up, of course, in a kind of assumption about the reality of our existential situation, our death and our finitude, all of which -- fragility, ephemeral nature of things and solidity of things, and the sensual being the important thing, the finitude and death, etc. -- all of these are taken as realities in the unspoken backdrop, so that so often what the poem becomes is just about things, and about holding things and others as dear, because that's all we have, given our existential situation. We have these flat things and humans, and these things can become dear to us, but it's all against a kind of tragedy -- though not in the classical sense -- of our existential situation of finitude, of death, etc., and of one-dimensionality.

How different the view of the image of things and the image of human beings. There's a whole current -- some of you may be aware of this; I don't know -- there's a whole really dominant current in, let's say, professional modern poetry in the West that kind of ties all this together. These are the kinds of poems that are acceptable or taken seriously, and others won't be taken seriously, and it's all based on a certain world-view. It also tends towards a kind of deflationary art, oftentimes, that I mentioned the other day. In a way, the view of art and sensuality and life and what's beautiful and all of that reflects the culture's sort of conceptual framework and logos regarding reality, regarding the senses, regarding things, regarding apparent existential situations, regarding what a human being is, etc. It reflects the dominant world-view there, and actually the lack of eros and soulmaking within the wider culture. I mean, to me these things are really important. They might not seem relevant to you; I don't know. But to me, poetry is a very important art. It's extremely important. Music, all these things, and the relationship with nature is really key.

What then is given, for example, to our relationship with nature if we can open the view of all this in regard to our sense experience, in regard to the eros and soulmaking, and let that in, the dimensionality, etc., and the non-realism? What is given to our relationship with nature, and therefore to the environmental movement and the ecological movements, if we open our view and if we understand this soulmaking dynamic and eros-psyche-logos and everything that we've talked about? I would say that whole relationship with nature and also the environmental movement is given other levels. It opens up in different ways. The environmental movement is given other ways to enter the discourse, so it's not just about one-dimensional nature in a materialist sense that we're somehow trying to elevate in value, and so we can only speak in terms of their humanistic values, or instrumentalist, as resources or this or that. There's very rarely any talk of sacredness in relation to nature (or anything else apart from mainstream religion) because that's kind of gone out of the discourse of the world-view. And I wonder -- I've talked about this before in those talks, An Ecology of Love, so I'm just moving very quickly here because we need to end -- but I wonder, you know, can we dare to talk that way and dare to open up that kind of view and relationship with nature?

In understanding all this and what we're talking about on this retreat, we see the soul, the citta, is not separate from the beauty, from the divinity, from the dimensionality, from the unfathomability of nature. We open those dimension and that sense of sacredness, and then that can open the whole discourse around the environmental movement, etc., which sometimes just seems so stuck on one level. If we go back to what Heidegger wrote, the illusion in beauty or the fabrication, the realization that fabrication, if you like -- which is tied to the word 'illusion'; we say something is a fabrication -- the acknowledgment of that, the realization of that, the entering into that does not at all demean the beauty that is fabricated there. Beauty is not separate from us. There's some whole other level of participation being alluded to here. What does it mean to participate in nature? Yes (I've touched on this before), there's a whole other level here in the soul-level, in the soulmaking level, in the erotic movement, in the recognition of fabrication and the recognition of the creation and discovery of beauty and dimensionality.

So 'illusion' is only a kind of derogatory word when we're harbouring an assumption somewhere -- usually at the back of our mind, if you're used to these teachings, still harbouring something at the back of the mind, or at the front of the mind if you're not familiar with these teachings on emptiness, etc. 'Illusion' is always put in contrast to some assumption that there's something that's not illusion, there's something that's not fabricated, some experience, some bare experience, etc., that's not an illusion. But there isn't. The only thing that's unfabricated is beyond experience, beyond the senses, beyond any form, beyond any 'being' of an object. So there's not this supposed non-illusion to which illusion is compared and found to come up short. When we realize that, then the fact of fabrication, the recognition, the admission, the entering into that is not a demeaning. There's something -- can you hear it? Can you grasp it, what this is inviting us into in terms of responsibility, but also in terms of the awareness of the multi-levelled participation we have in the cosmos, in divinity, in being? Opening up the preciousness there.

---

1. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith (New York: Harcourt, 1998), 401. ↩︎

2. SN 35:117, quoted in Rob Burbea, "'The Holy Life' (Part 1)" (7 Feb. 2017), https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/40187/, accessed 27 Sept. 2020. ↩︎

3. DN 22. ↩︎

4. MN 22. ↩︎