Refractions: Of Body, Sensuality, and Sexuality (Part 3)

To say in different words something I think I've said before, perhaps on a few different occasions, it's important, I feel, to question and to be mindful and to be on the lookout for our own shadow as we proceed on our path. It's very easy to look at someone else's path, some other tradition, etc., and see their shadow, their weak spots, their unexamined areas, their blind spots, the places where they're out of balance, etc. More relevant, more important is to look at our own shadow, and the shadows of our own tradition, and our own trajectory, and our own path-making.

I'm using the word 'shadow' here probably in a slightly different way than you might have grown accustomed to. I'm using it in the sense that any time we throw light on something, any time any object or event or thing is illuminated by a light, by consciousness, by exploration, any time a light illuminates something, that thing, or that whole process of the light and the thing, casts a shadow. To open something up to questioning is to illuminate it, to bring consciousness to bear, to look at it from different perspectives, and all this creates shadow. Shadow is not the places just rejected by trauma or something in the psyche. It's actually what happens any time consciousness brings itself to bear, so to speak, or is put in relationship with anything. A light and an object causes a shadow, if you think just about the physics of it.

In other words, insights illuminate, but they also cast a shadow, the shadow of insight. Each insight, each perspective that insight brings, or each insight that is a perspective, casts a particular shadow, or a shadow in a particular direction, has a way of shadowing in a corresponding direction to the insight. Imagine: here's the light of insight shining from a particular direction on an object -- a stone, a tree, an animal. And there's then a shadow behind that stone, tree, animal, in relationship to where the light is coming from, right? That's just how light and shadow works. Similar with insight. We can talk about the shadow of particular perspectives or the shadows of particular insights. So the whole Four Noble Truths is a kind of insight system. It's a perspective. It's a set of insights, if you like. And it casts a lot of light, a lot of illumination, but it has a shadow to it or shadows to it, blind spots, things that, by virtue of that very light that's shining from a certain direction, are then cast into darkness. Just the insight of not-self, no-self -- fantastic insight, really liberating -- will cast a particular kind of shadow in relationship to the self. Or the movement of renunciation. Or the whole movement to simplify. It can be so helpful to simplify: "Regard it as just papañca, proliferation. Let go." And it brings a certain blindness, certain blind spots in a certain corresponding or, if you like, corollary or opposite direction. What's the shadow of simplism? What's the shadow of the teachings of no-self? What's even the shadow of the Four Noble Truths?

This is important. I mean it in that sense, in a very kind of wide sense. For me, wherever we are, whatever we're opening up, whatever we're exploring, however we're moving, there's this possibility of shadow, shadows, and there's an ongoing kind of exploration there. It won't ever end. We don't ever get to the end of shadow, so to speak. It's created by the very process of consciousness itself. So this is important to know and important to include in our ongoing journey.

So in relation to what we just finished in the last part of the talk, elaborating on and describing this emergence of sexuality as a sort of area of delineation that then became interesting, and became filled out, and became complicated, and added a new complexity to the self and the notion and the felt sense of self, and that whole movement, the historical movement of that, which Foucault was tracing and we were talking about in different ways and elaborating on, adding to what he said, we said this proliferation of delineation, this increase in complexity, increase in the psychic interiority of the self and the whole sense of what the self is, that proliferation is a double-edged sword, we said. We have to be careful with that. We can see that it is a movement of soulmaking, a movement of this expansion, widening, deepening, complicating, enriching that the eros-psyche-logos, the dynamic of soulmaking and those three facets, kind of do to each other or involve each other in. And it can also be a snag, a snare, a trap, a net of entanglement for ego. So it's a double-edged sword.

Now, in terms of shadow, what I mean is that it may be easy to look at all this and just look at it from what we could call the perspective of a kind of lazy Buddhadharma, the response of a lazy Buddhadharma, and sit here in a very relaxed way, almost lazy and almost sloppy, say, "Proliferation, you see? That's papañca. That's exactly the translation of papañca. Self-proliferation, sex, these things bring dukkha. They only bring dukkha. Let go, let go. Be simple. Let go of all this business about self. Let go of all these delineations. Let go of all this exploration of the complexities of sexuality and all that. Let go. Be simple. Shrug it off." And basically there is this shrugging off, and the seduction there of the simplism, the seduction of the promise of peace, but the seduction also of simplicity. And really, the encouragement is not to engage: "Don't engage with the process of soulmaking and the complexities of soulmaking," which will involve a rub; which will sometimes involve a rupturing of vessels, as we've said, the breaking of the vessels; which will involve friction and heat and confusion at times, and expansion and stretching of the soul, of the vision, of the concept, etc.

So one of the shadows of Buddhadharma -- and it almost comes with the package of the Four Noble Truths and what I was referring to as the medical model, and this emphasis on peace and letting go, etc. It's a treasure, but it comes with a shadow. Especially nowadays, part of that shadow is what I call 'simplism,' and the seduction of simplism, and a kind of non-engagement. What will happen if we adopt that approach, if we sit back in that kind of lazy posture there of what I'm calling a lazy Buddhadharma, then there will not be, there cannot be the soulmaking with respect to self and individuality and personhood and persona, and these things that we've touched on in the past. Self as a whole direction, avenue, doorway, movement and manifestation of soulmaking just cannot happen, nor sex, nor sexuality. Why? Because we've just gone back to this simplism, and shrugging it off, and calling it all just papañca, proliferation, and just self equals a bad word: "Didn't the Buddha say there's no self?", etc.

[10:24] And in that, if one adopts such a posture, one is not recognizing something we touched on right at the beginning of the retreat and we spent a lot of time expanding, elaborating on that: the soulmaking process, the soulmaking dynamic, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, involves, and in part works by, making delineations. Delineations become clear to the perception of the sensitive soul, of the sensibility that is refined through eros, through interest, through arousal, etc., through contact and desiring more contact -- emotional sensitivity, perceptual sensitivity, sensual sensitivity, mental sensitivities and delineations of the concepts, etc. We can call it papañca and proliferation, and yes, there are all kinds of dangers involved in it, as we're pointing out, but it is also intrinsic for the most part to the soulmaking dynamic.

I can't remember if I've said this, but even when one moves towards the simplifying of less fabrication, states of oneness and jhāna, etc., and moves on that trajectory of lessening fabrication towards the Unfabricated, there is still a very subtle and important delineation-making going on. According to what? According to the Four Noble Truths: where is the suffering? Where is the release from suffering? What is involved in supporting the suffering, in what we're calling clinging, and everything, all the subtlety of what's involved in clinging, and letting go of that. All these subtle delineations are involved in that particular movement of soulmaking towards the Unfabricated, towards the different levels of oneness, etc.

But generally speaking, adopting that kind of lazy Buddhadharma posture or stance in response to all this and the complexity and the demands, really, of all that, what the soul is being called to, what the soul is calling us to in relationship with sexuality, in relationship with sensuality and body, and also in relationship with self, self-notions, self-constructs, self-views, self-images -- to adopt that lazy posture would be not to recognize the intrinsicness of delineation, not to rise to that challenge, not to meet it, not to open it, not to be bothered really. So the soulmaking dynamic, we need to realize, involves delineation-making, all kinds, and more subtle and more complex delineation-making. Not as some sort of anally retentive accountant categorization process, and boxing everything into neat boxes, and being too picky about that, but it includes that. And the soulmaking process will include and will affect the sense of self, the view of self, the idea, the concept of self, the sense of other, the view of other, the idea and the concept of other, and of eros. So all this, it's included. We can shrug it off, try and be simple, etc., decide not to engage, criticize it by labelling it with Dharma concepts of papañca and self, etc., defilement and all that, but the soulmaking process will involve delineations and will include and affect how we view, sense, and think of self, other, and eros (which means sexuality, as well, as a part of eros, as a dimension or strand of eros).

You know, in recent years there's a growing movement of opening up, and making more visible, and opening up for discussion and questioning not just the possibilities of sexual orientation, the definitions and what's allowable in terms of sexual orientation, but also in terms of gender definitions and delineations, and a kind of refusal to be limited by the two possibilities given to us, male or female, that are handed to us, if you like, seemingly obviously. So there's a possibility of being polygendered, if you like, or both, or neither, or something completely different. This whole movement of opening those discourses up around sexual orientation, around gender, delineations and definitions, identities, etc., opening it up, questioning, talking about, and refusing to be nailed into just two delineations there -- I wonder whether that whole movement of opening that's happening more and more, I think, in recent years, if that could also be seen as a soulmaking movement. It's the movement of eros-psyche-logos doing exactly what it tends to do, and that can be an individual movement, of course, for the individual in relationship to those areas and those delineations. The soulmaking comes into contact with them, and it doesn't fit. It wants more. The vessels need to be broken. And it can also be a cultural movement. So soulmaking can happen on a cultural level as well. So I wonder about -- that's one way of seeing what's going on there. Quite aside from all the sort of political issues there, there could be really at heart there a soulmaking movement happening.

And in imaginal work -- just repeating now what I've said before -- if I'm open to the imaginal and the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal realm, if I open to receiving that, and letting it lead me, and just not constraining it, the whole restriction of gender there just doesn't apply. So one may be the gender that one typically thinks of oneself as, or the opposite gender, if you even think of opposites (that would be to reduce it to the whole male/female, only a double possibility there). One could be a hermaphrodite. One could be no-gendered. Whatever. One isn't even constrained there to biological, physical actualities. Maybe the imaginal eroticism that one is witnessing or being part of is heterosexual, or homoerotic, whatever. Maybe not even involve human beings, or partly human beings, or whatever. One, as I said before, might be penetrating or penetrated, and that may not correspond to biological actualities, etc. The imaginal realm is opened that way. And, as I said before, with all imaginal practice, really, one of the questions is: what wants to manifest in the actual life, in the lived life, and how? So there are all these imaginal possibilities, and some may not need any manifestation or expression in the life, and some need some kind of manifestation which is not obviously related at first sight to the image, and some need more obviously related manifestations.

[19:16] So the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, the soulmaking dynamic, as we mentioned almost from the beginning, it will eventually open everything up. Or rather, it will tend towards opening more and more up, more and more of our experience, more and more of the facets of being. That's its natural inclination because of the way it works. Included in that, part of what it opens up is body: what the body is to us, what the body means to us, how the body appears to us, how we feel it, how we sense it, how we think about it, how we conceive of it. And this opening up of the body through the soulmaking process is inevitable. It must be included. The opening up happens in very obvious ways and also much less obvious ways. So already we've touched on some of this, and already this is part of what we're kind of presenting here and teaching. Already, for instance, starting with what we were calling the 'phenomenological approach,' and just what is the actual experience of body, already this leads us to the sense of what we're calling the 'energy body.' Yes? So just adopting a phenomenological approach, and backing off such a tight, rigid ideation about what body is according to whatever dogma we've been indoctrinated with, whether that's modern secular materialism or scientific reductionism or something else, whatever, some other more religious view, adopting the phenomenological approach, just giving a bit more space in terms of the conceptual strangleholds there, what begins to become clear to us is the sense of the energy body.

And as we play with that perception and different ways of looking, play within our phenomenological approach with different ways of looking, and tune in different ways, and bring our sensitivity and our curiosity to this experience of the energy body, the very range of experience of the energy body starts to open. So there is already, in that approach and coming out of that very basic, simple approach, simple exploration, there is already an opening of what the body is to us, and what the experience and the idea of the body is. But then at some point, wrapped up with that or in addition to that, the body can also become image, let's say, so that we realize there are imaginal dimensions to our perception of the body. This can happen directly and indirectly. In other words, the body, our body or the body of a lover or the body of someone else, can be for us the erotic object. So included in their personhood or whatever, or just the body per se, mine, yours, whatever, the body as erotically beloved other. In that way, the body gains imaginal dimension. The perception of the body gains imaginal dimensions, directly through the erotic relationship with the body, or something else is the erotic beloved and there's a spilling over, an expansion of the soulmaking sensibilities and inclusion and involvement to include and involve the perception of the body, as part of perhaps the cosmopoesis. So we realize, as we do with all perception, that there are imaginal threads; imaginal dimensions are involved in our perception of the world and of body and of everything.

We can talk about imaginal body just as we can talk about imaginal earth. We can talk about the imaginal perception of body, the imaginal perception of earth. But whether directly or indirectly, the body, in being included, wrapped up in, drawn into, involved in the soulmaking process, gestation, digestion, vortex, whirlwind, in being included in that, the body becomes more than it was yesterday, more than it was last year, more than it was to us before. The body becomes more like everything else that is included in the soulmaking process, and gains dimensionality, and gains beauty, and gains sacredness and all the rest of it, multifacetedness, complication, all that. The body becomes more. It becomes alive in more and other ways than we tend to think of it in our usual, culturally given and sanctioned way of thinking and looking at the body: that body is either alive or dead in a sort of obviously biological way, but it becomes alive in other ways, becomes more. It's given, as I said, dimensionality, multifacetedness that it didn't have before.

And that 'moreness,' or gaining more, or being given more, or more being discovered there in the body, happens in two ways I'd like to delineate between. One is the body as object, the object of my sensing, my perception; the object of my vision, of my touch sense, of my smell sense, my taste even, my hearing, all that. Also the object of my thought and the object of my imaginal perception. All of that. And of course those three are interconnected. But the body as object becomes more, becomes alive, is given dimensionality. And also the body as subject, meaning the body as sort of place, gathering place, if you like, or locus for ways of knowing. Subject is what knows, as opposed to object is what is known. Body as locus of ways of knowing.

And those ways of knowing, again, they're more, more than I knew yesterday. They may be new to me as an individual. This body, and through the body, through the soulmaking process, through the erotic-imaginal, ways of knowing are open to me, that opened to me in that process, that I hadn't known before, that I wasn't familiar with before. Or ways of knowing that are new to the culture. Yeah? So it might be that those ways of knowing were known to perhaps ancient cultures or certain indigenous cultures in this or that place in the world, but they might be new to this culture, or they might be new to all cultures. But again, because of the soulmaking process, there's not this contraction of ways of knowing in some kind of dogma of "Only this way of knowing and that way of knowing are legitimate. Everything else is a delusion, a projection, a fantasy in the bad sense, an immature wish-fulfilment, confusion and ignorance," etc. There is not that epistemicide and epistemic cleansing that we said before. Rather, there is an opening of epistemic potential. But the body becomes more as both object of sense, thought, image, etc., and as subject, as locus of ways of knowing, potential ways of knowing.

We'll come back to this. But already, previously on this course and on other courses, we've already presented things and tried to open up the sense of the body and what the body is. For example, with the teachings on the energy body and our trying to stress and trying to insist on an inclusion of the whole spectrum of perceived substantiality of the body. In other words, if we talk about energy body, it can be extremely refined. It can be it's almost like you could put your hand through the body, or it's just light, or sometimes even beyond that -- it's just empty space, etc. All the way down to really dense, solid perception of materiality. All of that spectrum is included in what we're calling the energy body, for want of a better word (sometimes I regret the way I name things; I feel like I could have chosen better words, but anyway, it's there now). Including all of the spectrum there, really getting familiarity with that whole range and everything in between.

[29:14] Sometimes this encouragement to do that is a matter of kind of rebalancing where there's too much tendency one way or another. For instance, occasionally there are people who keep tending just towards the very sort of airy, more refined, less substantial sense of the body, and it will be good for them to dwell a bit more, have equal range, and play in the more solid, more kind of densely material, heavy sense of the body. But for me, the encouragement to have that whole spectrum there is really not only for the sake of so-called psychological health or psychological balance or whatever. Yes, that's important sometimes. But really, for me, the more important thing is for the soulmaking. Because of what the eros-psyche-logos dynamic wants in its natural inclination, to open in all directions and include everything that it can possibly come in contact with, it wants to have all that spectrum. It wants to inhabit and fill out and sacralize all that spectrum. And part of what it wants and what it achieves by doing that -- and, for me, part of the whole purpose of all this teaching and all this work -- is to widen our senses of the sacred and, if you like, the divine, if you're okay with that language; widen our senses of the sacred so that the sacred is not just limited to the ethereal, the insubstantial, the white light, etc. It's also right there, the divinity is right there, as we've touched on before, in the density, in the solidity, in the so-called darkness of matter.

So we can again look at different cultures, whether they're spiritual cultures or the wider culture, wider Western modernist culture, and say, what's the typical sort of leaning here? In the wider culture it's certainly towards density. Probably very few people in the wider culture have regular experience of a sort of light body or anything like that, and would probably get quite alarmed if suddenly they did have that. That's my guess. Conversely, there might be certain traditions of spiritual teaching and practice where they emphasize much more the light body and almost putting down the more dense experiences. But can there be [both]? What I think we're interested in is both. Both the dense ends and the more refined, more insubstantial, more ethereal ends, and everything in between is open to be seen through the erotic-imaginal, filled with soul and soulmaking, and thus sacralized. And it's also just one is familiar with that whole range of experience. So we've talked about that in terms of opening up the body. We've already said this.

We've also drawn attention to -- and again, with the way we're talking about the energy body -- that the felt sense of the space that the body is or occupies is larger, potentially, phenomenologically, it's actually larger than what is obvious to the visual eye or what is obviously physically measurable. Yes? In other words, the sense of the energy body can extend either a little bit beyond the visible, physically measurable physical body, or actually quite a bit. But the space of the body, or the perceived and conceived space of the body, is also something that we have expanded in the way that we've been presenting these teachings. Soulmaking tends to include and involve more of the body space. Again, it's part of the whole eros-psyche-logos tendency of expansion, isn't it? When there's a movement of soulmaking, when there's soulmaking in process, it will tend to expand, to include, to involve more of the body space, or the sense of the body space to have more area to it. In fact, in our kind of definition, if you like, of what imaginal practice or mindfulness of images involves, if you remember, it involves by definition the whole attention to the whole energy body, mindfulness of the whole energy body. We're including that in what soulmaking is, what imaginal practice is in the way that we're talking about it. And if it's not there, it's something that one can open towards or encourage or lean towards or support in order to kind of, let's say, support and give good ground to the soulmaking process.

By the way, in connection with that, if we refer back to what we were talking about yesterday with regard to soulmaking in sex, whether it's actual sex or imaginal sex, what that then means is that if we want to support sex that's soulmaking, sex that's soulful in our sense of the word, then that soulmaking needs for the attention not to contract to a small area -- for example, the area of maximal pleasure, whether that's the genitals or whatever it is. Because of what we just said, soulmaking tends to include more of the body space, and expand that, at least to a certain extent. If we contract the area of attention, let's say, just to the genitals or wherever there's sort of maximal sensual pleasure, which would be a typical maybe movement of the attention, that's not going to support soulmaking. It needs us not to contract that, or it's supported more by not contracting that, as well as, as we pointed out yesterday, not contracting into a kind of craving for pleasure or craving for sort of achieving a goal of orgasm or whatever it is. If there's contraction in those ways, then soulmaking won't be supported so much, which means, in other words, that the imaginal perceptions of the whole experience and the imaginal dimensions that are discoverable or revealable in the whole experience will be diminished -- whether that's of the other, the beloved other, of the sexual partner, of the imaginal other, of the self in that moment, and also of the eros and the sexuality itself. If there's contraction, either of the area of attention too much or into a kind of goal-driven contraction there, then the imaginal perception, the imaginal dimensions of other, self, and eros are diminished, are contracted as well, are limited and not supported.

But returning to what we're talking about mostly today, in terms of opening up the body and what we've already touched on, we've already a little bit, I think, alluded to in different examples of the way that different organs of the body and different body parts can become ensouled -- for example, the hands, or the feet, or the genitals, or the intestines. They are ensouled in the sense of given imaginal dimensions, given imaginal beauty, imaginal place. They are seen and felt and sensed to reflect, to echo, to mirror, to express not just the personal and the human level but also the archetypal, the daimonic, the imaginal dimension and the imaginal figures expressed in and through the organs or body parts, or the body parts expressing, being those things. There are all kinds of possibilities here. I actually can't remember now what examples we've given over the different retreats, but really so many possibilities. I think we talked about the possibility if you massage someone's feet or something when they're ill, or an old person, and how those feet and those legs might take on whole other imaginal dimensions -- for instance, they become Jesus's feet, or connected somehow with Jesus's feet, or something like that. That would be one example.

[39:10] Another very, very common one many of you will probably be familiar with, I imagine, is just how sensitive the hands are. So how easy it is, especially with practice with the energy body, to feel healing energy streaming from your hands or from the palms of your hands, how easy -- or relatively easy, let's say -- that is, or maybe relatively common. We could say that's an energetic perception. Of course it is. It's also an imaginal perception. They're both mixed there. And it's a lovely, lovely thing to practise. Sometimes, you know, sitting with someone who's suffering in one way or another, and they don't even have to know, and one just turns the palm to them. It's a way of radiating healing, perhaps as they're talking, perhaps as you're sitting silently, perhaps as you're talking. There's a whole other level of the interaction going on there that's bringing these imaginal dimensions and the blessings of healing and connecting bodies and all of that. So if you haven't played with that sort of thing, you know, it's really a lovely possibility, and I would encourage that. Of course it could be from anywhere in the body -- the whole body, or the heart centre, or whatever.

So many possibilities here. We talked on the last retreat -- I'm not sure how many people picked this up; it's part of what I was referring to as the problem of inertia that we sometimes have as human beings and as practitioners, but the possibility of actually moving in the meditation. Meditation doesn't have to be static. So either the physical body is moving and it's visible to others if others are there, or the physical body is still, but the energy and the imaginal body is moving, and one is really sensitive to the feeling of that. That might look like a kind of slow dance thing, or it could look like anything, or one adopts certain postures that may not be typical postures because something is being expressed through the energy body and through the imaginal body. What would it be, for instance, to play with that kind of thing with sensitivity to the whole energy body, feel the whole body and really attune to that, and feel the movement of the hands and sense the movement of the hands as music? Again, there's this synaesthesia that we referred to in the last retreat, the retreat on the Poetry of Perception. We think music is a sound thing, and hands just moving is, you know, a bodily-kinaesthetic sense, and perhaps a visual sense as well. What is it for, in the hands moving, that they're somehow making music? Yeah? So maybe they want to move, and the hands do a slow dance, or a fast dance, or whatever it is, and it's music. What is that music? Celestial music? Divine music? The music of the deep body? The music of the earth, of the soil? All kinds of possibilities here for the expansion of the body in terms of its parts and its organs, etc., the expansion of our sense, our perception, our ideation of it.

So the images of the body, the psyche with respect to the body, and the ideas of the body, the logos of the body open up in all this, in the soulmaking process, but also the eros, the third of our little trinity there, also the eros of the body opens up. This might mean for some people that there is more eros and more libido flowing through the whole system. The system is open to more eros. We can see that as a divine influx -- one is open more to the divine influx of eros. One can just see it as, if you like, the inevitable mechanics of the soulmaking process, as we said: as the eros stimulates and opens the psyche/logos, there is the reciprocal stimulation of the eros, and so there is more eros, there's more attraction, there's more beauty, there's more divinity, there's more dimensionality, there's more yumminess, there's more sensitivity -- all of that, and so there is more eros. The eros that's running through the psyche and through the body is opened. And with that, the erotic sensibilities of the body are also opened. The images of the body, the ideas of the body, and also the eros of the body and the erotic sensibilities of the body -- all this is opened.

As just one of the smallest examples of that, of one way this can happen (because it can happen so many ways), one of the ways the eros opens, if you like, and with that the perception of bodies opens: I remember being at a course with one of my teachers who is a monk in the States. I can't remember what we were -- it was a half meditation, half study retreat, and I think somehow we were talking about renunciation, and maybe it was the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta; I can't remember. He was talking about the ways of contemplating the unattractiveness of the body and ways to let go of it. I think we were looking at the passage from the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta on the unclean parts of the body. He was saying how you can use that if you're bothered by sexual desire, etc.; you can contemplate the unclean parts of the body, and that will dampen your sexual fire there. Someone in the group said, "Oh, yeah, but I work as a nurse on the surgical team for transplants. And you know, when someone is waiting for a liver transplant, and we get the call that someone has died in a road accident or whatever and they're a donor and the liver is on its way, it's in the ambulance right now, it's like, okay, operation time. There's this anticipation for this liver to come. It gets delivered in this blood bath." It's literally in a sort of basin soaked in blood, because it needs to be in the blood. And something which would, to most perception in terms of what the teacher was saying there, would be absolutely disgusting -- a liver soaking in blood, raw liver soaking in blood, she said, "It looks beautiful. This is going to save a life, and there's a real beauty, and the sense of the miracle of it," etc. So there was an acknowledgment -- very good teacher, acknowledging, yes, dependent on the way of looking. He didn't use that language, but ... I'm pretty sure [laughs]; I'd like to think that was acknowledged there. It was a long time ago. But anyway, there's the dependency on the way of looking.

But we've given examples, too, of the erotic-imaginal and the sense of feasting on the flesh and feasting on the organs and drinking the blood, etc., of the erotic beloved. In that sense, the erotic relationship with the body has gone far beyond this sort of clean and unclean parts and yucky and what often teachings say: "It's all very nice on the surface, but if you really saw the inside you wouldn't like it." It's gone way beyond that. There is this expansion of the eros in the eros moving through, moving through the perception, moving through the body, and also in the ways that it perceives the body as attractive and what it is. You know, like I said, I think, when we were giving those examples, there's no danger here of actually becoming a cannibal or something like that. We're really talking about something that's very respectful, very beautiful, very loving, strange as that might sound to some people, imbued with holiness, but a lustful holiness, a lusty holiness, a full-blooded erotic holiness with much more range to it. That's just one small example. Many, many ways there.

So in other words, yes, there's this contemplation of the unclean parts, and usually we think, "Yeah, it's all very nice on the surface, but you'd be pretty put off in terms of the eros that you feel towards someone and their body if you could see inside." And then the nurse was saying, "Well, actually, it's not that simple." That was acknowledged. And then we're adding a whole other level to that as well. There are so many possibilities here. I'm aware I'm painting in quite broad brushstrokes the whole movement here, but there are so many possibilities.

[49:25] Freud, at one point in his theorizing, said that the human infant is characterized by polymorphous perversity. It's a great-sounding phrase, polymorphous perversity. The human infant is polymorphously perverse. Part of what that means is the whole body of the infant is erotically sensitive. The whole body is, if you like, an erogenous zone, and an infant will naturally be inclined -- perhaps at different stages and all that -- to seek to gratify its eros (in his view, its desire for sense pleasure) through the different parts of the body and the whole body in all kinds of ways there. So there's the necessity of training, via the parents or the nanny or whatever it was back in those times, training the infant, and then kind of internalizing through that training and through what Freud called the superego -- the sort of almost like moral supervisor, if you like, in relationship with the ego -- the training and the superego/ego dynamic lead to a kind of contracting or shrinking of that polymorphous perversity, that sort of unrestrained and all-inclusive eroticism. It's contracted through the training of the upbringing, and through the psychic structure, the superego, contracted psychically, perhaps squashed down into the so-called unconscious, and also physically in terms of there's a shrinking of the ways the body feels eros most easily and what's available there in terms of the way eros moves in and through the body, where and how, etc.

Now, Freud -- you can hear in the very language that he used, polymorphous perversity. Perversity implies something bad, twisted, abnormal, negative, problematic, all that. But Freud, in his view of human nature, regarded this as really necessary. So we are basically wild animals. He was following on from Darwin and all that. We're basically wild animals with massive instinctual force that needs to be tamed, controlled by the strictures and the structures of civilization and upbringing and all that, and even the structures and dynamics of the psyche internally. So polymorphous perversity, it's part of the sort of Freudian theoretical legacy there. Now we're saying soulmaking will open everything. The eros-psyche-logos dynamic will open everything, including the body, including the eros, in all kinds of ways. So we might say in its opening up of the body and of the eros and of the sexuality, etc., what it kind of supports and opens, we might say, is a polymorphous erotic soulmaking, a polymorphously erotic soulmaking, and a polyvalently erotic soulmaking. 'Polymorphous' may mean it can change and kind of manifest this way and manifest that way. 'Polyvalently' might mean it can be situated here or there, the eros, the arousal, the erotic connection, in all kinds of locations, if you like, physically and psychically.

So rather than polymorphous perversity that is something that is there intrinsically and then needs to get squashed down, you could say what we're suggesting is quite the reverse: that the soulmaking process, the expansion, enrichment, complication, etc., of eros-psyche-logos, which we keep going on about, actually begins to open the erotic soulmaking of the body and of the psyche so that there is this what we might call (if we just play with the language) polymorphously and polyvalently erotic soulmaking, meaning that the whole sense of eros and the body as a location and a vessel, and a point of contact of the eros, and an object and a subject of the eros, that becomes multifaceted and multidimensional and delineated in different ways. In other words, the body presents and the eros of the body grows new facets, grows new ways, things that we haven't even thought of before, things that we hadn't been sensitive to before. Facets, dimensions. Delineations, again, going back to what we said before. Delineations get made. Because the eros-psyche-logos dynamic inevitably will include the body, it has to include the body at some point, and it will do it more and more, there's an increase in the facets, a multifacetedness, a multidimensionality, an increase in the delineation, a kind of polydirectionality of the eros, an increase in the modes and the surfaces and the subjects, if you like, of the eros within one body, and the directions. Again, as I said, I'm aware of painting in broad brushstrokes, but just to give you a sense of the principle involved here, I think, is the most important thing.

Now, if we say, as we've said before, in the way that we're conceiving of all this, there's potentially or theoretically no limit to the soulmaking process, to the dynamic of eros-psyche-logos and the way that expands, deepens, widens, etc. If there's no limit to the soulmaking process, it implies there's no limit to the ways the sense of the body can open. If the body is included in the soulmaking process and gets involved in that, then there's no limit to the ways the sense of the body can open because there's no limit to soulmaking. Which means that the images, perceptions, ideas, understandings and experiences of the body, no limit to the way all that can open. Images, perceptions, ideas, understandings, and experience of the body, there's no limit to the way that can open. But also no limit to the sense of the body, as I said, as a site for myriad and diverse ways of knowing, ways of perceiving. That's also potentially infinite in the ways that it can open, the body as a site for myriad and diverse ways of knowing and ways of perceiving. And again, we've touched on, for instance, my friend saying she senses with her ovaries or her ovaries have intelligence, or knowledge coming through the imaginal tongue. All kinds of possibilities here.

And if it's potentially infinite there, the way that the body can open up as a locus, as site for myriad and diverse ways of knowing and perceiving, we can't know, I can't know, I don't know what the future holds, what ways of knowing might open up for me, for you, for humanity, because it's infinite, because the soulmaking process will make delineations that don't even occur to me right now or you or us. We'll gather sensitivities. We'll open up visions and senses and knowings there. No limit to the ways the sense of the body can open, potentially, because there's no limit to soulmaking.

[59:21] Included in that is a kind of statement, if you like, about the logos of the body -- in other words, the conception we have of the body. So often we consider the body and the mind, or the body and the soul, are different things, but as the soulmaking dynamic opens up more and more, what it does is it opens up different views, different potential views. If we go right back to the beginning of the retreat, what we were saying, what that eventually means in the way that we're trying to present things and open things up is that then there is this potential to move in and out of different views, to entertain different views. So the statement that the body is not the soul or the body has no soul is just one view. I can enter into that, can see that way, can sense that way, can think that way. Sure. But it's only one view, and there are other views. If by 'soul' we mean -- if we go back again to the beginning and the kind of glossary thing we were doing -- soul is, we could say, that which knows and senses soulfully, that which knows, sees, and senses soulfully. You think, "The body doesn't have that," or one goes to a purely material view of "There is no soul. There's just matter, and if you connect things the right way chemically you kind of get consciousness and thought and stuff." That's just another view.

So with the soulmaking and with the reflection and the intelligence and the understanding there, we have the capacity to entertain different views. The range of views that we can entertain, the range of concepts and conceptual frameworks that we can entertain, sort of plug in, expands with the soulmaking, with the practice. We're not believing in a single or ultimate truth or reality: "This is how things are. This is how the body is. This is what matter is." So there's something here about the very idea, the very logos of body. But there's also something here about the body, if you like, as logos, meaning the body as a structure or structures of knowing, and the expansion of that beyond just the sort of five senses that are given to us by contemporary psychology (the Buddha had six, but actually there are systems that have seven or eight or nine, and sometimes I've heard up to twelve). So the body as logos, as a kind of locus, if you like, of structures of knowing, more than the ones that we are just given by current neurophysiological science or whatever.

So the body as, if you like, a womb of epistemic structures, a womb of modes of knowing. As the soulmaking process, as the eros-psyche-logos dynamic meets and subsumes matter, flesh, body, then there is this womb, this potential. The body is, we see that it's a kind of womb or an area of potentiality, if you like, of epistemic structures, of possible modes of knowing that can emerge, that can be born out of that. It's what the body is as subject, if you like. And with the whole imbuing or filling out of the sense of the body imaginally, the imaginal perception of the body, and that sensitivity there, and the beauty of that, you know, the body, the sense of the body, the perception of the body can become greatly expanded in all kinds of ways, alive and multidimensional in all kinds of ways. This body can become a landscape, a soulscape that is alive with its own intelligence, with its own will, with its own soul, if you like. Body as soulscape that we can enter into, the multidimensionality of that. Very different way of perceiving and conceiving of body.

For some, that might be already the experience and already quite obvious: body has its own intelligence. And again, I don't just mean how clever it is that the blood can transport immune factors to a site of a wound or whatever it is. I don't mean just a kind of metaphor of intelligence there for something that's actually quite blind and dumb, a process that's just evolved through the kind of forces of a dumb, blind, natural evolution, survival of the fittest. I mean intelligence, different kinds of intelligence, and I mean soul, and I mean will and desire. For some, that's already obvious and already part of the experience, and for others it might sound like this is a completely preposterous idea and it's really, in terms of actually being able to perceive the body that way (one's own or someone else's), very, very distant as a possibility for some people. In a way, it doesn't matter either way. What matters really is: what's the next step for the soulmaking? With the intelligence of the movement of soulmaking, where does it want to go next? And is there a block there?

So we can ask that for the individual: where does the soulmaking want to go next? What does it want to do, if it's with the body right now? What's the next opening for that individual, for any individual, me or you or whoever? Do I need to stay with a certain opening for a while and get used to that before something else starts pressing and insisting on opening? What am I blocking? What's being blocked and how, through the image, through the logos, whatever, a block of the eros? We can ask it individually, but also culturally. What is the next step? What is the next step for the soulmaking? Where does it want to move? What does it want to expand? What does it want to enrich, widen, deepen, complicate?

With regard to the body, then, the body becomes, if you like, infinite. Or the body, you could say, is infinite. By that, I don't mean spatially infinite, and neither do I mean that the body is infinite in the sense of being interconnected with all things -- the butterfly wings in China affecting the breeze and whatnot, or breathing in the air that the Buddha breathed on his first sermon or whatever. I don't mean infinite in that sense, interconnected with all things. I don't mean spatially infinite. I don't mean being infinite awareness or infinite love or whatever it is in essence, that the body is that. I mean 'infinite' more in the sense of endlessly revealing, endlessly opening up for discovery, for creation, creation/discovery, new facets, other facets, dimensions, aspects. Body as endlessly revealing, as infinite in that sense.

So really we're interested in what the body becomes, what it becomes through this soulmaking process. Also, of course, what the self becomes, what others become, what the sense of a human being becomes, what animals become, or plants, or what the cosmos becomes through the soulmaking process, and can become, what matter becomes, what divinity becomes through the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, what it becomes to us, to our experience, to our perception, to our conception. That's a different question than what it is, interested in what the body is, which presumes more of a realist notion: "It is this, and I'm going to discover or prove to you or insist on my version of what it is." In terms of the energy body, you get different systems: "There are these chakras, and they're placed here," and then another system in some other tradition would say, "No, no, no. There are this many chakras, and they're placed here, and they're this colour, not that colour," etc., or "These are the channels that flow, the energy channels through the body, not those channels." Or someone insisting on the sort of classical scientific reductionist view of matter, its one-dimensionality: "That's the reality." Or even what's quite popular in some more modern ways of thinking is kind of systems theory, the body as a system. So it's not reduced to a sort of basic element there, but it's a system. It's still a kind of limitation there, and insistence on reality, and a kind of reductionism. Even as much as systems theorists protest that they're not reducing, there's still a kind of reduction to physicalism there.

But we're interested in, I'm interested in what the body becomes, or what the body can become to us, just as I'm interested in what the self can become, what the other can become, what a human being, what animals, what the cosmos, what matter can become, what divinity can become, what nature can become. If we talk about the body, what it becomes as a felt field of experience -- again, that whole range; what it can become as imaginal object and imaginal subject, what it becomes as object and subject; and what it can become as a locus, a field, a womb of ways of knowing. How can the body be experienced in perception as an object and as a subject in its epistemic potentials or with its epistemic potentials? And again, for me, the interest here is certainly not only, but not even primarily, for the sake of psychological health or balance, but the interest is in what does the soulmaking want, what does the eros want. To me, that's interesting individually and culturally, both. And one of the movements there is a movement out of being restrained by a kind of duality between soul and body. There's, as I said, this opening of views to more plurality and more flexibility of views, so that one view is body and flesh has intelligence, intelligences, has desire, has eros, has soul, has will. And the sense of the body, the experience, the perception, the conception can be expanded. We can discover more and more.