From Mindfulness to Divinity: Towards the Tracing of a Phenomenology of Soul (Part 2)

So when we adopt what we are calling our phenomenological approach to practice -- which means when we think of meditation and practice and inhabit it as the exploration of how different ways of looking lead to different appearances, different experiences, different perceptions, so there's this investigation into the dependent arising, the fabrication of appearance/perception/experience of self, of others, of the world, of things, external, internal things, etc., all of that. The exploration of how different ways of looking condition, give rise to, fabricate differences in appearance, different appearances. When we adopt that phenomenological approach as a way of conceiving what meditation is and as a way of directing our practice and thinking about practice, then that will unfold a kind of stream of discoveries and insights whereby we understand dependent origination, the Buddha's teaching on dependent origination, more and more deeply, more and more thoroughly, really going, unfolding, unfurling for ourselves the mystery of that and the beauty of that teaching.

And in the process of that, part of the process of that is the development of the skill of learning to fabricate less. So we encounter, we open to states of less fabrication of perception, less fabrication of experience. And with time, and in practice, we extend our range on that spectrum of lessening fabrication, and we develop the kind of meditative skill, or art, know-how of moving up and down on that spectrum and broadening that range. Through all of that, or as part and parcel of all of that, we encounter as stages of lessening fabrication different kinds of onenesses, as we've said before: the oneness of a kind of cosmic consciousness, or universal awareness, or infinite space, infinite nothingness, oneness of materiality, oneness of love, all kinds of oneness, others. We also encounter -- eventually, hopefully -- we open to the Unfabricated, what's beyond even those kinds of oneness. And we can even go beyond, so to speak, the Unfabricated, to recognize the emptiness of all things, absolutely all things, so that we see the emptiness, the thorough emptiness, not just of the self, but also of all things, all objects, including the aggregates that make up (in one system of Buddhist psychology) the kind of elements of the process itself. We see those, too, are in themselves empty of inherent existence. They are fabricated as well. We see the emptiness of space, of time, and even the emptiness of the Unfabricated.

And following this trajectory of deepening insight and the beauty of that path, we come to a position, a freedom where we have liberated ways of looking. We are left only with ways of looking to play with, and a range and actually a potentially increasing range of ways of looking. But there are only ways of looking, is a way of putting it. And so, in that journey there, there are various experiences of divinity that will emerge for us as palpable experiences, what we might call 'divinity,' that emerge at different stages of that process or different stages of the insight opening, different stages of the perception unfabricating, and that whole journey. So these kinds of oneness can be perceived and felt as perceptions of divinity, absolutely, and they usually are by practitioners. I'm very struck by that as a teacher, how people (I've mentioned this before) often start talking in theistic terms when they open to this universal sense of compassion that seems to be woven through the fabric of the cosmos, etc., or this infinite consciousness or whatever.

Then there's the divinity of the transcendent Unfabricated that's also part of that journey, and the experience of the divinity, of another kind of divinity, where all is divine because one has gone beyond, has seen through any duality between the fabricated and the Unfabricated. We see the emptiness of that duality eventually, and it collapses, so to speak, so that we can regard or enter into a way of looking that sees all things as not separate from an awareness that is beyond time and beyond space, and not mine, and then everything is sacred. There isn't this hierarchy of Unfabricated over fabricated; all of it is divine. But it's all, in a way, beyond time, unlike the other onenesses of universal awareness, or infinite consciousness, or universal love, that seem to exist eternally, in the sense of for an everlasting time. So on that route that I've talked about and written about much before, we could say that there are these kinds of divinities that emerge for us, are revealed to us, we discover, and if you're listening carefully, you will notice that that includes both the transcendent kind and what I was calling the immanent kind, because it does involve the oneness, the divinity here, pervading, woven into, not separate from the things of the world.

So that kind of direction of unfolding of divinity includes both transcendent and immanent experiences of divinity and conceptions of divinity, but they're all universal divinity. They're all experiences or conceptions of a universal divine, some or other kind of universal divine on that trajectory. Now, any point on that trajectory satisfies something in the soul. Opening to universal love -- that really satisfies something in the soul. Something in the soul -- we might say something in the psyche, in the citta -- really is touched by that and really is satisfied. Is it finally forever satisfied with that? No, but something is satisfied. And the fantasy that gets woven around that journey and that movement to these different stages of realization, the eros in relationship to these different, if you like, 'beyonds' that we're yet to encounter, the fantasies and the eros in relation to these experiences of universal divinity and concepts of universal divinity, those fantasies and the eros in relation to all that is soulmaking in the sense that we have been talking about it. So these unfoldings, these openings, these relative unfabricatings, and these deeper movements of insight, openings of insight, satisfy something in the soul, and in relation to them, soulmaking in the sense that we have been talking about it on this course is also involved.

Now, if or when we really understand for ourselves the emptiness of all things, the thorough and radical emptiness of absolutely everything -- certainly when we see that for ourselves, but even if something in us intuits it before we've even seen it, or even something in us has faith in that, that can also be quite powerful. And what happens, or what can happen, is that such an insight, or even if it's only an intuition or faith, such an insight -- by 'intuition,' I mean just a not-complete realization in the being, in the perception, in the experience, and in the understanding -- what that does, that realization of the radical, thorough emptiness of absolutely everything, it softens the divisions that we tend nowadays in our culture to make between the real and the unreal, because we understand: there is no objective perception that is not fabricated. There's no object of perception that is not fabricated. We only can really buy into that division of real and unreal when we believe that the 'real' refers to something, or we are vaguely implying in our thought that what we think of as 'real' is something unfabricated. Going deeply into emptiness, we realize: I cannot find an objective perception that is not fabricated. It's all empty.

So this, because it softens the division between real and the unreal, this is the least that emptiness does to open up a permission and a legitimacy for exploring the imaginal, because there isn't this hardcore distinction between the real and the unreal, the real and the imaginary. Now, it's not quite that simple just to say, "Everything is empty. Therefore, everything is equally real, or real in the same way, or unreal in the same way." At a certain level, that's true. In other words, the ultimate ontological status, the ultimate kind of reality that everything has is that it's empty, so that ultimately they are the same. But, so to speak, on other levels, there are differences. Of course there are differences. So there are some kind of differences in what we call ontic status, in the kind of reality that's possessed by, let's say, a physical object on the one hand, and an imaginal perception on the other. It doesn't imply just because everything is empty that the imaginal has the same kind of ontic status as physical objects. Ultimately it does, both being empty and thoroughly empty. But they're not quite the same.

Still, this seeing of the deep emptiness of things, or trust in the deep emptiness of things, conviction in the deep emptiness of things, and the thorough emptiness of all things, gives, as I say, the very least that it gives in relation to the imaginal is some opening, permission, legitimacy, freedom, and flexibility to explore the imaginal.

Now, I actually think, or for me, the ontology is interesting. What exactly can we say in our ontology about the kind of reality that an image has in our sense, versus what is imaginary? The imaginal versus the imaginary, versus the psychic, a dream or an image that is actually a kind of (what we call) extrasensory perception, picking up on something that then happens in the future or whatever exactly as one imagined it. And what's the difference between that and physical objects or mental objects, thoughts or emotions or whatever?

To me, that's all very interesting. People at different points in history have, either with a lot of intelligence or not so much intelligence, more or less kind of value in terms of the use that comes out of it, have offered different systems of ontology and explanation, but these change over history. And on what authority could we ever even finally discover (quote) 'the truth' about this? To me, it's still interesting.

And something that happens when we really realize something about conceptual frameworks, about logoi in general, and truth, and we realize that no conceptual framework, no logos is going to capture once and for all and universally the whole truth of things, of existence, even of one dimension or aspect of our existence -- let's say, the imagination, or even emotion, or whatever, or eros, or even materiality, I think. Once one realizes that kind of level of emptiness, then to me, it's possible to explore and play with, entertain different conceptual frameworks, different logoi, different ways of looking. In other words, different ontologies and epistemologies here and cosmologies.

Rather than just shrugging at our inability to find a final truth, and then ending up just by default, as I've said, reverting to whatever is the most popular world-view of ontology and metaphysics in our culture, instead of just shrugging and reverting, we can actually be quite creative with this, enter into and entertain different logoi, different ontologies, different concepts and conceptual systems, because one realizes something about conceptual systems and truth in general.

In addition to these points, we've also said that if we just observe our life and our experiences, honestly, openly, without too much constricture in our logos, etc., and what we actually observe -- in other words, if we're quite open in what we're paying attention to; so there's another kind of phenomenological approach here, or an aspect of our phenomenological approach -- we begin to recognize and acknowledge that eros is in our lives. There's something called eros, which isn't really the same as craving. It's a kind of desire, but it's different than what we might call craving. We need to make a delineation. Something is there that's operating already in our life -- maybe a lot, maybe a little. Fantasy operates in our life. Soulmaking operates in our life. These are delineations that need to be made once we start looking at our life. And making delineations, as I've said, actually opens them up further, enriches them further, like prying something open, putting your foot in a crack in a door, and being able to open up a path. We recognize and acknowledge the inevitability and the necessity of eros, of image, of fantasy, of soulmaking.

Then (as we said, repeating now) we can begin to explore. And what do we notice? As we said, we notice the perception of more dimensionality, more dimensions in the erotic object, in the elements of the erotic constellation, the imaginal constellation. We notice dimensionality, dimensions, meaningfulness, beauties, timelessness, unfathomability, all these aspects of the soulmaking erotic-imaginal. And all these aspects (dimensionality, meaningfulness, beauty, timelessness, unfathomability), we could say they are all aspects of a sense of sacredness. We could use that word. So we start to encounter more and more of a sense of sacredness. And why more and more? Because the soulmaking dynamic, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, tends to expansion, fertilization, enrichment, complication, multifacetedness, widening, deepening, etc., so that involved in that, implicitly involved in that is the senses of sacredness, and because that's woven into the soulmaking dynamic and the expansion of eros-psyche-logos, the senses of sacredness are also enriched, deepened, widened, complicated, given other facets, given other dimensions.

So they're widened cosmopoetically -- in other words, more and more, the sense of sacredness spills over to infect (in the good sense, the way laughter is infectious) the whole cosmos, so to speak. It widens in that sense. It also widens in the sense that the kinds of sacredness, the perceptions of sacredness and what sacredness means to us widens, the senses of what we might call 'divinity' widens. Yeah? So there are at least two ways it widens there. And all this, again, is something that we notice. If eros is doing its thing, if it's igniting the soulmaking dynamic and eros, the interplay and the mutual reciprocal feeding, and nourishing, and supporting, and fertilization of eros-psyche-logos, we begin to notice this, to become sensitive to what's happening here. And as I said, implied in the eros-psyche-logos movement and dynamic is that it spreads to involve everything -- all aspects of that that are elements of that dynamic, all aspects of our being, all aspects of existence, and the kinds of divinity. So self, other, world, eros, all those involved as elements of the imaginal constellation, of the erotic soulmaking constellation. And kinds of sacredness, as we said, kinds of divinity, universal versus particular, or universal and particular gets included, starts to get ignited -- both those faces and kinds and directions of experience of divinity and concept of divinity, both the personal and the impersonal etc.

Infinite potential here. Unlimited, endless, boundless possibility here because that whole process creates. It's creative. It's endlessly creative, if we don't block it, if it is not blocked, as we've talked about. There's the creation/discovery of perception, of images, of imaginal perception, of ideas, of delineations. All that means that that process will be endless if it is allowed to be. And why have we harped on and on and on about the soulmaking dynamic and the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, and what it involves, and what it implies, and what it does, and how it works? Why? Because if we understand that movement, that dynamic, that process of soulmaking, of what we're calling eros-psyche-logos, then because we understand it, or to the degree that we understand it, it actually informs our practice. We then understand how to practise, what to look for, what might be needed, what might be being left out, and why something feels like it's (quote) 'going wrong,' or we feel stilted or stultified or blocked or stagnated or whatever it is. So understanding the logos means that we can understand how to practise. That means how to think, how to perceive, what to look for, how to work with images. All this, or a lot of it, is implied in just understanding this very large or large-scale conceptual idea of the soulmaking dynamic. And that's partly why we're going on and on about it.

So eros involves (literally), it brings into its bubbling cauldron, and stirs in, involves, it turns, it brings in to turn with, to stir with the elements of soul, self, other, world, as we've said. And eros will, in that, increase and expand and deepen and enrich the sense of the divinity of the beloved other, the erotic object, whatever that is and, as we've said, of the self and the world and eros itself. And again, this is what we notice. And there are all kinds of different ways it can do this, different possibilities.

In regard to the self, I mentioned on -- I think it was the Path of the Imaginal retreat, and perhaps a few times -- Corbin's phrase "the angel out ahead." So this angel is always out ahead, appears to me, appears to you. In his view, I think, sometimes we have one angel, but sometimes it seems like there are more, but certainly in our view there's more than one angel. It's an image that appears to us that's always beyond reach or, so to speak, is always itself growing, evolving, changing, taking a step further away from us as we move towards it. From another perspective, it's moving towards us. There's this infinity there to the angel out ahead. We never reach it. But the pothos is included in our erotic relationship, as it must be, with the angel out ahead.

In the Jewish mystical teaching, they talk about the selem, the image. The image is like one's counterpart, if you like, one's angelic counterpart. It's what Corbin's referring to as well. And in some traditions -- for example, the Eastern Orthodox tradition of Christianity -- they talk about imago dei. The human being is being made in the image of God, as it says in Genesis.^[1] So this selem, this angel out ahead, is not universal. It's mine. It appears to me in a certain way. It's the soul showing me something about myself. The self comes into relationship with this. Somehow it's my self; somehow it's not my self, but it's divine, and it's particular, and particular to me, and particular because it has particular characteristics, unique characteristics. And in the Vajrayāna tradition, in tantric practice, there are the practices taught of identifying with the deity. One visualizes this or that deity, usually that the guru has given one, the teacher has given one, and then practises identifying with that deity to different degrees, and becoming that deity in the imaginal realm, in the image. And that practice, the imaginal practice, is based on -- should be based on -- the understanding that I am empty and this deity is empty. Both are empty. We share an essence of emptiness, a nature of emptiness.

In a way, as I said, as this gets more subtle, we can, if you like, recognize ourselves as image, recognize ourselves as images. And something in these kinds of teachings -- in the Greek Orthodox, or the Eastern Orthodox tradition -- I'm taking from a writer called Panayiotis Nellas, and he says this teaching that, if you like, the archetype that speaks to us, the angel that is present for us, this being made in the image of the divine is both a gift from the divine (or a gift from Buddha-nature, the gift of the Buddha-nature, if we play with the wording and the language a little bit) and also a goal, something we move towards.^[2] It's this deification of the self -- theosis, I think we called it on a previous retreat. Again, of course the ego can grasp this and hear it completely the wrong way, etc., or it can be heard with that beauty of understanding that knows the emptiness of things, recognizes image as image, and makes pregnant with dimensionality, with beauty, with meaningfulness all the riches of the imaginal our self, makes our self pregnant with all that.

So it's not just the guru or the teacher that is in the image of the divine or the manifestation of the divine, or the Buddha or whatever it is; self is as well. And this is something we can open to, move towards, play with as an idea, as a way of looking, let into our lives so that the whole sense of self gets to have more and more of that imaginal dimension. We recognize ourselves as image, with everything that's implied by that word, 'image,' in the way that we're using it, as imaginal image.

Meister Eckhart wrote:

We must become heaven on earth so that God can find a home here.^[3]

Now, we could interpret that, what he wrote, as on the level of saying, "We must become heaven on earth" -- in other words, we must create the kingdom of heaven on earth in the sense of behaving with morality and kindness, so that morality and kindness in society creates a kind of kingdom of heaven here on earth, and then God has a home here. Absolutely. That's a really important level of interpretation there.

But there's also what we might call a theophanic interpretation: we must become heaven on earth, we must become, I must in my perception see myself as heaven on earth, as temple, as not separate from a world that is heaven, as divine. And then, seeing myself that way, living that way, God has a home here. And then maybe out of that the social manifestations of creating the kingdom of heaven, or the Saṅgha as bodhisattva in another language. That will follow, perhaps, from that theophanic interpretation, from that interpretation of the deeper implications of what Buddha-nature means. So much here, and again, we're revisiting themes that we've touched on before, but so often for people, the self is missed out. The imaginal dimensions of the self are not filled out. Either there's a reification -- or actually, there's always a reification: either a kind of grandiose reification, but more often an inferior, a flattening and constricting reification. That's why I'm mentioning this. Something so beautiful is possible for us here. And it's not, of course, the other way around: that we're just interested in the imaginal self at the expense of the imaginal other and the world and all that. But to include all of it.

St Thomas Aquinas said:

All beauty yearns to be seen.^[4]

Actually, I think the Latin said something like, "All beauty yearns to be conspicuous." I think that's closer to the original. All beauty yearns to be seen. All beauty yearns to be conspicuous. And there's a recognition, through the spreading of the eros, through the allowing and the exploration of the eros, of the beauty of the self, the beauty of what we are, of what is manifesting through us, with us, in us; dimensionality of the self as well as of the other and of the world. All beauty, the beauty, the treasure then, all beauty yearns to be seen. And what does that mean for the way we see, and what does it mean for the way we live? Am I going to, as Jesus said, am I going to hide my light under a bushel?^[5] What is my light? What is your light or lights?

So yes, to include the self, or naturally there will be a tendency for the self to be included, drawn into, involved, to turn with, to mix with this divinization process, self and the other and the world, seeing the beauty, the divinity and all of that in that. This is what we refer to as the art of perception, the flexibility in that and the possibilities of perception that can open up for us with practice. This is amazingly the case. Of course, if one isn't practising, all this sounds completely abstract, far-fetched, theoretical, silly, and (quote) 'metaphysical' nonsense, etc. With practice, so much is possible, even for someone who comes at this starting with quite a narrow, let's say, one-dimensional, flatland, materialist view. Just practise. Just allow things. Just be a little flexible. Just play with perception. See what happens. See what happens to the experience. See what happens to the senses of self/other/world, etc. See what happens to the understanding. Truly remarkable.

So eros, as I said, left to do its thing, or encouraged to do its thing, supported to do its thing, will spread into every direction, dimension, aspect, facet; draw everything into that soulmaking dynamic, so that the eros itself will come to be also regarded as divine -- not just the self/other/world, but also the eros. One begins, through practice, opening up to a sense, moving in and out of a sense that human nature, my human nature, your human nature reflects and is rooted in divinity, the divine; that we participate in the divinity's eros. My eros participates in the divinity's eros. My awareness participates in the divine awareness. My mind and the divine mind, my soul and the divine soul, my soulmaking dynamic in the divine soulmaking, my eros-psyche-logos in the divine eros-psyche-logos. And not just by virtue of sharing in a universal essence, but also through the particulars. We've touched on this so many times, especially, I think, in the last retreat. Through actually feeling the necessity of my particularity, of your particularities, and the particular events, and the particularities and uniqueness of your personhood, necessary to the divine unfolding, to the divine movement of eros-psyche-logos, to the divine mind, however we want to say it, the divine soul.

If I don't include all that, and if I don't allow and explore eros, image, and soulmaking, and all that, if my mindfulness is either without eros or with a very limited eros, a limited allowance of what we're calling psyche, image, and logos, then such a mindfulness may indeed open up experiences of divinity, but they will also be limited (correspondingly limited, and quite predictably limited too). Certain expected experiences or manifestations or faces of the divine will come out of a mindfulness that's limited and excludes a lot of psyche or logos. You get the divinity of this, and the sort of almost a kind of flatland divinity of this, 'this moment,' 'this life' or whatever it is, or the divinity as flow, as the process, or the divinity of oneness (because that can also come out of mindfulness with certain limited psyche and logos as we've talked about already; I'm not going to go into this too much), or the Unfabricated, the divinity of the Unfabricated. That's certainly possible if we keep out at least the conscious exploration of image, and consciously restrict our logos there in relation to soul.

But if we understand fabrication deeply, really deeply, really thoroughly, that whole spectrum of fabrication, we go through the Unfabricated, so to speak, beyond the duality of the fabricated and the Unfabricated, we are granted permission to fabricate, if you like. It opens up that possibility. Fabrication is empty, and there's no duality, there's no hierarchy there. But not recognizing the play of eros and soulmaking and fantasy in our lives, and not then allowing and exploring, it limits in quite a narrow train (as we described) our experiences and our concepts of divinity. And dependent even on how we're picking up practice and our conception of practice, it might be even limited in terms of how far it goes along that narrow track of what divinity can be, because certain ways of practising, as I said, are actually quite unlikely to unfold very far down that track. But if we acknowledge it and we recognize soulmaking, as I was saying in the previous talk, we recognize that fact in our life, the necessity, the inevitability, we explore it, and the eros-psyche-logos dynamic is allowed to expand and encourage, and it's not blocked, then the sense of divinity starts expanding in all kinds of directions. The sense and experience and concept of divinity starts expanding and emerging in all kinds of directions and manifestations.

There's a line -- I only know it from gospel music. It's quite a common thing to set to music. I'm guessing it comes from a psalm in the Old Testament:

My soul doth magnify the Lord.^[6]

Beautiful. In a way, now, understanding the soulmaking dynamic, eros-psyche-logos, we can exactly understand one possible meaning of that: yes, soul, my soul, soulmaking doth magnify, does expand the divine, the Lord. Yeah? We create and discover, and we create/discover, the Lord, the divine. The soul does that. Why? Because that's what the soul does, and that's what it loves. It loves soulmaking. Now, of course, someone can hear that, "See? Yes, it's creating, it's fabricating this divinity." We've already said many times that whole criticism or objection would be based on this implicit realism. There is something -- probably this [knocks on something] -- that is supposedly not fabricated. Someone voicing such an objection is always harbouring some kind of fundamental realism, even when they say they're not. But we cannot find anything that is not fabricated. There's nothing that is not fabricated. So the objection doesn't really stand. It has no ground.

And we understand, through the exploration of emptiness, through the exploration of fabrication, dependent arising, the phenomenological approach, what we're calling our phenomenological approach, that the mind and the way of looking is not separate from perception. Perception is not separate from mind and way of looking. "My soul doth magnify the Lord." This soul is not separate from the Lord, is not separate from divinity. What we're calling the soul, the thing that does soulmaking, the process of soulmaking, is not separate from the divinity that emerges with it. I understand this. And we can go a step further and say that with a deep understanding, and deep development of the phenomenological approach and the skill in meditation, the art of meditation, playing with ways of looking, understanding emptiness, understanding dependent origination, one possible way of looking that emerges -- extremely profound, extremely potent and beautiful -- is that the mind, or awareness, or the fabricator, if you like, the mind that fabricates, is not mine. It's anattā. Not only is it anattā, it's empty in itself. It has no inherent existence. It is, in a way, beyond time. It doesn't exist in time. So it's not mine, it's thoroughly empty, and it's beyond time. That mind is operating in me, if you like, in you. That's Buddha-nature. That mind, that awareness is Buddha-nature. It doesn't belong to me, it's thoroughly empty, and it's beyond time. We could say in some understandings of what Buddha-nature means, and the way I would like to use Buddha-nature, that's Buddha-nature. That's at least one aspect of Buddha-nature: exactly that mind, the divine mind in other language, the divine mind, not mine, thoroughly empty, and beyond time.

And it's this, we could say, in this way of looking, this profound way of looking as one option, it is this Buddha-nature and divine mind that fabricates all perceptions. That's what's fabricating, that mind. Both physical perceptions and imaginal perceptions, and perceptions that combine the two. And those perceptions are empty. And this divine mind is not separate from those perceptions. And that is in us, if you like. That's not quite the right language. We are in it? We participate in it? That is the root of our mind, root of our perceptions, the nature of our perception? This is a possible way of looking. Once one is able to see that awareness is anattā -- that's already quite a deep level of emptiness practice -- going further and deeper, that mind and awareness is thoroughly empty, too, has no inherent existence, and that it is beyond time, not separate from the objects, and those are empty too. So this becomes, with a lot of emptiness practice, as I would conceive this, becomes possible as a way of looking. My soul doth magnify the Lord, or God's soul magnifies God. The Buddha-nature's soul creates the Buddha-nature. Can you get a sense? I know I'm talking about something deep here, and a possibility of a very deep end of practice, but can you even get a sense of the beauty, and the potency, and the depth, and the magic of such a view, of such a way of sensing existence?

The eros, allowed to do its thing, supported to do its thing, will discover and create divinities, both transcendent and immanent, as we said, universal/particular, impersonal/personal. Actually an infinity, an infinitude of possibilities for the faces of divinity, the experiences of divinity, and they're all available. Rather, they're all potentially available. Not so much this kind of divinity at the expense of that permanently, a transcendent Unfabricated at the expense of the divinity of immanence, or a divinity that involves no perception, no image, etc., at the expense of the kind of faces of divinity that come out of the imaginal. Certainly in the moment of transcending perception and all image and all perception, in that moment of what's called the cessation of perception, at that time it is at the expense of image, sure. But eventually one can just move and have all of this available. This kind of divinity is not at the expense of that kind of divinity permanently. It's not permanently at the expense. We don't have to choose between these two.

In a way, both the divinity that opens up through the imaginal, the divinities that open up through the imaginal, and the divinity of transcendence in the way that we've been using the term 'transcendence' (the Unfabricated), they are both transcendent, but in slightly different ways. So we can, again, talk about two kinds of transcendence: one is the transcendence of what we've been talking about, the Unfabricated. It's beyond concept, beyond attribute, as the Buddha said. It's beyond any perception, etc. It's just this thoroughly transcendent in every respect. But there's another kind of transcendence that pertains to the direction of divinity that opens up in the imaginal, and that's the transcendent or the beyond of the potential space, so to speak, that the eros-psyche-logos dynamic can expand into -- the transcendence or a kind of transcendence of being infinite, of infinite potentiality, infinite potentiality of the variety of theophanies, the endless possibilities of soulmaking, of psyche, image, therefore perception, and logos, conception of divinity. The endless possibilities of creation/discovery.

This kind of transcendence, in this direction, is the transcendence of the not-yet-seen, the not-yet-sensed, the not-yet-known. Here is my beloved other, and I look at them/him/her/it, and I see them as either an image, or as a multiplicity, as potentially a multiplicity of images. And maybe I'm familiar with this person who has become alive for me as an image, and I can look at them or be with them and sense that kind of simultaneous presence of the different imaginal perceptions of them, and yet still, there is the not-yet-known that I haven't come to yet, that if the eros in relationship to her/him/them is allowed to remain, and allowed to grow and do its thing in the soulmaking dynamic, there will be other facets, other images. So there's the transcendence of the infinite, of the not-yet-known, the not-yet-seen, the not-yet-sensed. The eros-psyche-logos dynamic creates that kind of beyond or transcendence, and actually needs it, as we've said before. Discovers and creates othernesses, and those othernesses remain, and are still created and discovered, even after realization of the Unfabricated in that other kind of transcendence -- if we don't collapse the logos, if we don't put a logos there as a wall, as a limit to the soulmaking process.

As we've said before, and have been at pains to really stress on this retreat, eros can incline towards the Unfabricated transcendent, and eros can also incline to soulmaking fabrication, fabricating in a soulmaking way. It can incline towards unfabricating, that whole spectrum that we talked about towards the transcendent and the onenesses and all that. There's eros in that direction and in relation to that. And there's eros in the direction of fabricating for the sake of soulmaking, soulmaking fabricating. Historically, this movement towards transcendence, or the idea of a transcendent God, is so often put in opposition to the movement towards immanence, and God being here, and manifestation, and earth, and the concept of that.

I've been reading recently someone, Arthur Lovejoy, believes actually, in a way, a lot of it's -- actually I would say it's just natural; once we realize what soul is and what soul does, then it's natural that that would happen -- but that there's been such a conflict that's been historically common. He traces it to a kind of double directionality in Plato that he didn't quite fill out, but it's there also in Buddhadharma. In different traditions and streams of the Buddhadharma, you see this inclination one way at the expense of the other. Usually these days it's to the realm of manifestation and objects and 'this' at the expense of the 'that*,'* the transcendent other, but historically, it's been very different, etc.

So there's often this opposition between the two inclinations and movements of eros, towards the transcendent, the unfabricating, and the soulmaking fabricating. Some traditions, and I would like to think now within Buddhism, and also in other traditions, streams, for instance in certain Kabbalistic streams in Jewish mysticism and Hasidism and different traditions, talk about or in different ways conceive of, just include that double movement, that double movement of the eros.

So there's something that goes towards the dissolution, the oneness, into the transcendent, into the Unfabricated, and something that brings God, if you like, brings the divine, brings the Buddha-nature into manifestation, into the perception of the world and into the embodiment in the world. So a contradiction between these two I don't think is necessary, not at all necessary. As I said, we don't have to choose one over the other. Interestingly, we could say that each of these two movements has what we might call its 'near enemy' (to use Buddhist language). We talk about the near enemies of the brahmavihāras. The near enemy of mettā is attachment. The near enemy of compassion is ... actually, there are a few near enemies, but you know that phrase. The near enemy of the inclination and eros and movement towards the Unfabricated, we could say the near enemy is vibhava-taṇhā. It's this craving for extinction, for non-being, for disappearance, turning everything off. Deep sleep, as the phrase goes, is the poor man's nirvāṇa. It's the poor man's extinction of perception.

So the near enemy of that movement of eros is craving for non-being, for extinction, disappearance. The near enemy of the soulmaking fabrication would be papañca. The near enemy of that movement of eros to soulmaking fabrication, to the imaginal, would be some kind of combination of what we were calling bhava-taṇhā, identification. It's got a realist basis of self or some object. The reality of self or object is assumed in that kind of grasping at becoming or being this or that. A combination of that and sense desire, when what is perceived in the senses is conceived flatly, one-dimensionally, without the erotic-imaginal. So each has its near enemy. Vibhava-taṇhā on one hand, and papañca or bhava-taṇhā and sense desire on the other hand.

But we can open up to include, allow, and encourage this double movement. We could even say, and we could even see and enter into a mode of conceiving and perceiving, that that very double movement is divine, is the Buddha-nature. The very eros towards the Unfabricated, the movement towards transcendence, and the movement towards divinizing the world of perceptions, the immanence, the soulmaking fabrication, that double movement is divine, is the divinity, is the Buddha-nature. That double movement discovers and creates the divine and the Buddha-nature, as we said, but it also embodies the divine or the Buddha-nature.

To put it in classical terms, some of you will know about the distinction between being and becoming, but something here, because of the creative 'becoming' in the soulmaking dynamic and the movement of eros, that it allows both the 'being' aspect, if you like, the timeless aspect of the divine, and the 'becoming' aspect of divine -- God as creative and being created, Buddha-nature as both transcendent and timeless and also becoming in time, created and discovered and manifesting, outpouring in time. Love doesn't just want to melt into union, into oneness, to dissolve into unity. Love doesn't just want that. In a certain language, God or the Buddha-nature doesn't just want you or things to be absorbed into her/his/its essence, whether that essence is conceived timelessly, atemporally, or temporally. It doesn't just want that. There's some eros, there's some wanting certainly for that, that dissolution, that kind of transcendence of that, and to preserve the otherness, as we said, that eros does. It has this inclination, this necessity to preserve otherness, the perception of otherness, and actually to create more otherness.

The ideas in some traditions -- and again, I think it's in Kabbalah and some other traditions -- of 'drawing down the divine influx,' so to speak. That's the phrase they use, drawing down the divine influx (take it metaphorically). But that drawing down allows a preservation of otherness, of particularities, and particularities that are necessary to the divine. That's part of the drawing down. It's not just making everything into an oceanic oneness. Preserves the necessity of the particularities, as we've said so many times, even while perceiving an essential oneness. So yes, we know oneness. Yes, it's there. But it certainly doesn't erase in the perception, but either erase or demean in the conception, the necessity of the particularities, the uniqueness, the unique manifestations, the unique expressions of the divinity through you, through me, through this, through that, through this or that perception of self, other, thing, world, action. So it allows for and encourages the particular theophanies, the particular faces, manifestations, expressions of the divine, of the Buddha-nature.

If we allow eros, if eros is full and vital, if there's, say, a lot of libido, it brings a lot of liberation. We get liberated in multiple directions. There's an openness of what liberation means if eros is allowed and if eros in relationship to Dharma is allowed -- all of this that we've been talking about. And the Dharma is an erotic object for us, a beloved other, and there can be the soulmaking dynamic in relation to the Dharma, the eros-psyche-logos in the Dharma. The image, the fantasy, the idea of what the Dharma is needs to open up. Just when we allow eros, it will need to open up. And, as I said, we will at some point need an endless Dharma, a Dharma that, as one of its characteristics, is almost axiomatically endless, open-ended, able to morph, to take on different shapes, explore different facets, present different facets for our exploration; a Dharma that can expand. We've touched on some possibilities -- I think it was four possibilities for ways that Dharma can be endless in that way. And each of those has many, as well, or implies many, an endlessness.

So maybe some of you with backgrounds in philosophy can see something here, and we could have a little fun. You might be able to see how, through a kind of phenomenology of eros or of soulmaking, we arrive at what a lot of people would call 'metaphysics.' Through the very exploration of eros and the imaginal, just letting it do its thing, in the natural movement we arrive at the kinds of concepts and perceptions that are usually labelled metaphysical.

Someone with indeed quite extensive training in philosophy sent me an email a while ago. She's been having some recent inquiries into her relationship with materiality, she said. And she realizes this is probably not the most (I'm paraphrasing what she said) commonly held default position either, but there is usually a "mix of wonder and bewilderment, depending on my general mood, that something such as matter even exists at all. Even philosophically, I do not have a good 'explanation' why in the mutual unfoldment of subject and object and time and space these gross, solid forms of 'measurable matter' appear at all. Do you?!", she asks, exclamation mark.

What she's talking about there, subject and object and time and space, this is really getting down in her practice to the sort of most basic conception and perception, as one realizes that any kind of subject implies any kind of object and time. So the most basic, most subtle subject -- nothing near a personality or anything like that; really subtle. Just a bare, subtle, refined, perhaps vast awareness or moment of consciousness as a subject, [and] any kind of even very subtle, very refined object of that awareness, and a present moment in which it happens. One understands the mutual dependent arising of those three: subject, object, time, this tripod at the most basic level of dependent arising, and how, out of that, time is implied. Rather, not the present moment is implied; present moment implies not the present moment, implies past and future, some thing this object can change, can be, other than it is now. All this is implied. I'm not going to explain it now because I've explained it elsewhere before. But this is a sort of basic, mutually dependent, tripodic structure that we discover when we go deeply into dependent origination.

So she's saying even that, it's like, why should there be measurable matter? Actually, measurement is part of it, because as I said, there's 'this' object in the present in relation to something that it could be 'other.' A 'this' implies an 'other than this,' and an 'other than this' is either in space or time. So time, space, subject, and object are kind of woven into each other, mutually implicating, mutually dependent, and measurement is part of that -- things differing, therefore measuring. And again, I've talked about this elsewhere, so I'm just going to mention it briefly now. But why matter? Why the perception of matter?

"Often it seems," she continues, "almost unrelated to non-material experiential realities" -- so she has a lot of immaterial experiences, as well, in her meditation -- "as if it's somewhat incidental to some extent, the material. And yet it is a fact of experience one constantly 'bumps into.'" She's making a joke there. "Constantly 'bumps into,' so to say. This position is not necessarily believing in a self being other than materiality, identifying with non-material factors instead. It's rather an acknowledgment of this utter mystery of how different dimensions of being in fact overlap and fit together fairly well, most times at least."

So she's wondering something about matter: "How strange!" Of course, from a different starting point, a non-phenomenological starting point, some people start with the belief in matter and then deduce consciousness and experience from that. There are a lot of problems in that point of view as well. And she has a background in philosophy, and phenomenology in particular. From what we've been exploring right now, in a way, she says, what's the explanation for the phenomena of matter, the appearance of matter, of diverse forms of solidity and substantiality, as well as insubstantiality? From what we've been exploring -- and just having a bit of fun now -- the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, because of what it does (I'll put this in quotes) 'explains' it phenomenologically. We would expect diversity of perception, wouldn't we, just in what it does: it creates, as we've explained so much before, in the perception, in the experience, multifaceted, multidimensional, etc., so that the dimensionality of one aspect, such as substantiality or solidity, will begin to open up. The spectrum of solidity, perceived solidity, will begin to open up, and materiality is one portion of that spectrum of perception.

Why I'm just having a bit of fun here is because, historically, metaphysics -- as I was saying in the previous talk -- explains, it's regarded as explaining and deriving from some kind of abstract postulate, like the One or God or the Good or whatever, explaining and deriving the many from the one, or diversity or materiality, or immateriality or immaterial levels of existence.

By the way, just in case you get the wrong idea, which people often do with these kinds of things: like the Buddha's teaching on the dependent origination, the Buddha's teaching of the dependent origination of the perceptions of forms, dependent origination of mind, perception of vedanā, of subject, object, time, these metaphysical ideas, the ideas that come in certain branches of metaphysics, are not kinds of explanations of a temporal process or descriptions of a process of creation unfolding in time, really. They are more, if you like, logical derivations or implications, if you like -- the implications of the divine, the logical necessities of what follows from divinity being divinity. So like the Buddha's teachings of dependent origination, they are not really temporal explanations, explanations of a temporal process. So that should be clear as well.

For example, if we conceive of the divine as infinite, then as Sanford Drob explains in a Kabbalistic context, in order for the Ein Sof -- which is the most transcendent aspect of the divine; it literally means 'that without a limit,' 'the boundless' -- in order for the infinite to be truly infinite, it must be actual and concrete as well as potential and abstract. It can't just be transcendent, because then it's not infinite. There are other possibilities that it needs to manifest if it's truly infinite. Therefore, its essence as an infinite being necessarily propels it into creating a world. There's a metaphysical explanation there. Or if we take the divine or Buddha-nature or God or whatever as an awareness -- and again, an awareness that's not limited to not knowing itself, a kind of infinite or unlimited awareness -- then that must include, because it's not limited, it must include self-knowing. Actually, even to properly talk about awareness, I think it would include that. Then that self-knowing actually also implies the barest sense or the barest beginnings of a division of subject and object. And as we said before, because of dependent origination, that must involve or include a sense of time and a present moment.

This is the most basic sort of structure of conception and perception: barest subject, the barest object, and the barest sense of a present moment. And already involved, or already implied in that, because of dependent origination, already implied there is actually an infinity of the not-yet, of becoming, of therefore the generation of otherness. Just in saying that the divine is infinite awareness, it implies this not-yet, this generation of otherness, etc. Or again, playing with the metaphysical way around of doing it -- so to speak, top-down -- if we say the divine is love, God is love, as you might have heard, or Buddha-nature is love or whatever, well, love needs a loved. I need a lover and a loved. Again, there's this duality or at least polarity there. Needs an erotic object, an other. It won't collapse that duality of loved/lover. It needs to preserve the otherness, the erotic tension there. And if we say the divine, the Buddha-nature, is infinite love, then one could say, from a metaphysical direction, say then it needs infinite objects of love. An infinite love needs infinite objects of love, and so there is diversity. Or again, we could bring in our understanding of how the eros-psyche-logos dynamic works, and it works for the divine eros-psyche-logos dynamic. When there's divine eros, when there's the eros of the Buddha-nature, it will unfold multiplicity, multidimensionality, etc., as we've been exploring on the whole retreat.

So a phenomenology, an exploration through observation of our own appearance, and through playing of our own appearances or what appears to us, phenomenology of eros, soulmaking, and the imaginal -- which means practising with it, which means really exploring in practice. Otherwise, this is just going to sound, all this, and if you've just landed into this talk without having listened to all the prerequisites and the talks that came before, this is going to sound completely and utterly abstract, I imagine, etc. But a phenomenology in practice of eros, soulmaking, and the imaginal means, as we said, that we start experiencing the divine in the dimensions of the erotic-imaginal. We start to experience, as we said, my eros is divine. We start to experience my, your participation in the divine eros, that my eros is the divine eros, and that the soul is divine, or the soul echoes or mirrors or participates in the divinity, in the Buddha-nature. These are metaphysical assertions, and they sound like metaphysical assertions. They're also spiritual intuitions. And even more, what I'd like to emphasize is they are phenomenological inevitabilities. In other words, this is exactly the kind of experience that will unfold for us inevitably if we allow the soulmaking process -- exactly what sounds like metaphysical assertions, because of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic and everything we've explained about that. And with the infinite potential of the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, and the endless possibilities and expansion of that, the necessity of discovering/creating otherness and all that we've explained about that.

What we arrive at, then, putting all this together, is something equivalent to the metaphysical explanations, but backwards: starting from our appearances, starting from our experience, starting from a phenomenology, expanding into a sense of divinity, and then what our eros and what our soul is, the perception of that, and then they actually become almost equivalent or interchangeable explanations. In other words, to try and say it succinctly, when we recognize the presence of eros in our life and soulmaking, we start to recognize the necessity, the inevitability of that, and we allow it and explore it, we give a place to eros, we pay attention to what it does and its movement, what it does in the psyche, what it does in perception, then we notice something like this eros-psyche-logos dynamic interplay, mutual insemination, mutual expansion, widening, enrichening, deepening, and we notice that this whole soulmaking process -- ignited by eros, driven by eros -- creates and discovers, and creates/discovers, different facets, dimensions, perceptions, and different experiences. It creates/discovers more in relation to whatever it comes into contact with, and it will draw more and more into that vortex, into that creation/discovery, into that revelation. So there's a movement towards every possibility being opened up gradually, every possibility of perception, of experience, of conception, of facets, of dimensions of a thing, of a perception, etc. If there's a spectrum of possibilities, the whole spectrum gets filled out. If there's a range there, the whole range. If there's a corner or a direction that isn't yet involved in that soulmaking transformation, the transformation that soulmaking instigates, then that corner will start to be filled and involved.

And one part of that, included in all that is the sense of dimensionality, as we've been saying, and part of the sense of dimensionality -- along with other aspects -- is the sense of divinity. And one of the aspects whose divinity is eventually seen is the eros itself, so that the sense and the concept and the perception of my eros is the eros of divinity, is divinity's eros, is God's eros, is the Buddha's eros and the eros of the Buddha-nature, becomes one of the available senses, one of the available perceptions of eros. And then one could say, from a phenomenological point of view, one says my eros is creating/discovering all these aspects, facets, all this whole range of perception including, for instance, the perception of solidity, materiality, forms, etc. My eros is creating, opening, revealing all those dimensions because of the soulmaking process. But because in this unfolding one also has the experience and the sense that one's eros is the divinity's eros, is the Buddha-nature's eros, one could just as well arrive at -- from the phenomenological perspective -- the equivalent statement that the divinity's eros is creating/discovering all these facets, all these dimensions, all the experiences, all these concepts, including, for example, the sense of solidity, substantiality, materiality, as well as immateriality.

So from the phenomenological perspective, we have come to something pretty equivalent to the sort of seemingly abstract, top-down statement of metaphysics. The divine eros, or the divine soul, or the divine mind, or the divine awareness creates/discovers all these facets, all these dimensions, all these what are then experiences for us, materiality, etc. Something that sounds pretty equivalent to the metaphysical explanation, we've arrived at it starting from phenomena, from a phenomenology, starting from just our experience, from what appears to us, observing that and letting that lead us, letting that grow. So we have come from, through, and in our own experience, our own unfolding, we have come to the same realization that we might read if we pick up some ancient metaphysical text or not-so-ancient metaphysical text. But because it's through our experience, and from our experience, and we're living it in our perception, through our perception, it does not feel abstract. We feel, we sense, by virtue of the way we're arriving at it, that we're participating in this. It's real, it's tangible, it's palpable, it has an effect on the being, and it's happening through us; we're participating in this divine eros, in this beauty, this magnificence, in this wonder. Not abstract at all. And yet it's the same realization, it's the same insight, if you like, that we can articulate. We've just arrived at it from a different direction.

That's why I said -- and I'm not sure if it's the best metaphor, but I can't think of another one right now -- the usual metaphysical way of going about things is putting the cart before the horse. That which can pull us, for me, more convincingly and more in a way that really makes a difference to our life, is -- not that we're excluding conception, but more than conception and all of that is the phenomenology, the experience, the exploration, the recognition, making delineations, the allowing, the encouraging, the supporting, the inquiring, the investigation in practice. So again, I'm just playing a little bit, and I'm not really attempting to explain the existence of matter. I don't know that I see a necessity to explain it. [laughs] But maybe better than explaining is an exploration of these things and of experience, and what happens when we recognize the necessity of soulmaking and we don't take these things as 'truth.' We have a conceptual framework that can hold these things without regarding them as rigid truths. There's a whole different kind of metaphysics or direction into metaphysics there, the metaphysical.

So eros allowed, unblocked, unfettered, unhindered. The psyche, the logos allowed, unblocked. That whole complex, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, is allowed, and there's the perception of the divinity, and it will -- if it's allowed -- start to include that double directionality, the double movement towards the transcendent and towards the immanent, and the multiple faces, the multiple experiences and concepts of divinity that will come out of that. And included in that is the sense of the divinity of eros, as we said. And all of that could be a kind of explanation as well for the ascent of eros historically, within culture and also within religious traditions, within both secular and religious cultures, since there was this, at a certain point in history, this kind of dominance of the transcendent thrust at the expense of -- well, a constraining of eros, let's put it that way, and certainly a constraining of sexual eros and how it was regarded, and the movement towards asceticism certainly at the time of the Buddha and in the Abrahamic religions, etc. This ascent historically that we said can be viewed of eros, that can be viewed as a kind of cultural movement of soulmaking.

In the Kabbalah, which comes many centuries after the Old Testament, in the Kabbalah the highest what's called Sefirah, which is like an aspect of God -- there are ten Sefirot in the Kabbalah, and they are aspects of the divine. The highest one is called Keter (I think it means 'crown'), and it's higher than the other ones -- for example, Chochmah and Binah, which translate as 'wisdom' or 'conception' and 'understanding.' So the highest one is called Keter, and it has a double meaning in that it can mean both Ayin, which is 'nothing,' it can mean 'nothingness,' but it can also mean 'will' or 'desire.' So the very highest aspect of the divine -- again, we're talking about the ascent of eros historically -- the very highest aspect is desire, the eros of the divine. So in the whole conception of what divinity is and what aspects of divinity are the highest, the desire is right up there, and sometimes equated with the transcendent nothingness, the Ayin.

We've also seen, I've also described, how the Sefirot or faces or aspects of God are portrayed or symbolized or given in the image and the logos there, they are engaged in sexual union. So different aspects of the divine, of the manifestations of the divine, are portrayed as being in sexual union, or needing to be put back into sexual embrace, sexual relationship, into lovemaking. That is an image, which means that that symbol, that 'image' in our language, has many dimensions, many levels of what it symbolizes, and resonances, etc. It is basically an image in our language. And there's also this teaching, as well as that. So there's the highest Sefirah, the highest aspect of the divine, has the meaning of 'desire.' There is this portrayal of different aspects of the divine being in erotic embrace, or needing to be reinstated and re-supported to enter into erotic embrace with each other. And the fact of ways of conceiving of and living and seeing our lives -- not just our meditation, our prayer, our ways of looking, but also the embodiment and the action and, if we extend that, including our sexuality, our lovemaking -- seeing, sensing, conceiving our lives as serving and participating in the eros, in the lovemaking, in the sexual lovemaking, we could say in the sexual soulmaking, the erotic soulmaking (not just lovemaking, but soulmaking) between the transcendent divine and the world.

So our lives are implicated in that, our actions, our perceptions, our meditative trainings and openings, serving and participating, the eros, the erotic soulmaking, the sexual lovemaking between the transcendent divine and the world, between the divine that's transcendent and the divine that's, so to speak, in and through the world. Two faces of the divine. Our lives are involved and implicated, and we can see that way, we can feel that way, we can think that way, we can live that way. And again, as we've touched on in the Buddhist tantric traditions, in the Vajrayāna, there's this symbol of yab-yum. It's everywhere. The Buddha, or this Buddha or that Buddha, in erotic embrace with his consort. But actually the whole thing is the Buddha. The Buddha is the couple in erotic embrace. And again, that has many levels of implication and symbology there, but it includes something about -- as we've touched on before -- the eros between, if you like, the transcendently divine mind, the jñāna, or the Buddha-nature, at least one aspect of that on the one hand, and the maṇḍala, which means the appearances, the divine appearances, on the other.

So there's this ascent and movement historically, there's this ascent of eros, the ways we think about it, and its movement towards being placed really centrally in the symbology of the path, in the thinking of the path, etc. We have been on this retreat thinking and conceiving of eros -- which I shouldn't need to say it at this point, but eros implies for us soulmaking and the imaginal -- we've been thinking and conceiving of eros as basic. We just conceive of that as something really basic. But even this, we're playing.

Hegel said:

A so-called basic proposition or principle of philosophy, if true, is also false.^[7]

So we're playing with the idea of eros as basic. But eros is not basic. It's not fundamental. It's a dependent origination. It's empty. And you can see in your life how much of a dependent origination eros is. There's actually nothing that is basic. There's nothing that is basically true. This is the understanding of emptiness, thorough emptiness. There's nothing that's basic. There's nothing that's basically true.

We've been playing with the idea of eros as something basic, soul as something basic, and even the divinity of eros and divine eros as something basic. We've been playing with that. Why? Because it's soulmaking. Because it's fertile. So that even if we know that there's nothing that's basically true, we know that eros is not basic, fundamental, we can still say with William Blake, "Eternity," he wrote -- by which he doesn't mean an infinite stretch, like a really, really, really, long time; eternity, that which is timeless:

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.^[8]

That eros. We could read that -- the eternal, the timeless, the Buddha-nature, the divine mind, the divine soul, which is ours in our depths -- our minds, our souls are rooted in that, are that, you could say, or we participate in this, we participate in this Buddha-nature, divine mind, divine soul -- that eternity is in love with the productions of time. Talking about the eros, again, between that timeless transcendent and the world, the appearances, the productions of time, perception, experience, appearance. We participate in that eros, in that love. We are that. The world is that. Eternity is in love with the productions of time. We're not separate from that love. We're not separate from that eros. We're in it. It's in us. It's through us. It's poetry. Seeing that way is poetry, is writing a poetry in our perception. It does something to the being, to the experience -- soulmaking.

---

1. Genesis 1:27. ↩︎

2. Possibly from Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997). ↩︎

3. Original source unknown, but quoted in Matthew Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003), 295. ↩︎

4. Original source unknown, but quoted in Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men (Novato, California: New World Library, 2008), 228. ↩︎

5. Matthew 5:15. ↩︎

6. Luke 1:46. ↩︎

7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 13. ↩︎

8. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vxiii. ↩︎