The Gift and the Artifice of Self (Part 1)

As human beings now, almost all of us move in, if you like, many different sub-cultures of the larger culture. And it seems to me that, in a way, our larger culture is a mix. We've inherited a mixture of historical cultures, so that we've inherited the perspectives of the Western (so-called) Enlightenment and scientific materialism and that kind of reductionist modernism that I've been referring to, of modernity, etc. Yet, still lingering -- less ostensibly in their religious forms, but still lingering -- is the kind of ethics or value system of Christianity.

So that in regards to the self, the views we have of selves, of what a human being is, the sense of our selves and the parameters of our selves, the larger culture is actually confused, just as a result of history. As I said, we've inherited this reductionism that goes with science. We've inherited all that I've pointed out about modernity. But within that, or part of that is an emphasis on individualism. It's a very individualistic culture, and a humanist culture, in terms of what a human being is, the range of that as not really including the divine so much.

We've inherited all of that, and these ideas of virtue or value or 'sin,' if you like, even if we don't use that word, that come from the Christian tradition. For example, pride is a sin, and humility is a virtue, whether we don't consider ourselves Christian at all. Those values in regard to the self, self-effacing. Not blowing one's own trumpet too much -- we don't like that when we see it in other people. We try not to do it, because we know others won't like it in us. There's a kind of humility which is often a false humility that runs through the culture, at the same time as being an individualistic culture, a culture of who's going to win, who's going to lose, of trying to pump up the individual in various ways, of the individual feeling alienated from society. All of this is wrapped up together, and it makes quite a confusing mix for us to have inherited in relationship to the sense and the view of self and other.

And then within that, in, say, spiritual cultures, and particularly the culture of Buddhadharma, then we have this notion of no-self or not-self, or the self is empty, and this is, for a start, a difficult teaching for people to understand. I think it has lots of degrees of depths. There are many ways that we can talk about the self being empty, in this way and that way, and they're not the same, and as I said, levels there. But what happens within Buddhadharma culture with that is that there's a suspicion of self, quite often. Or we tend to dismiss. Someone surrounded by, saturated by these kind of teachings and attitudes tends to kind of maybe lean their orientations in life in a way that self and the enchantment of self will sound suspicious. Maybe self and all that it involves is a little bit denigrated and dismissed -- or a lot. It happens less now as we have more psychotherapy imbuing Dharma teachings or a lot of Insight Meditation teachings. But still, there's a tension here that comes from the complexity, because of the mixed messages in our cultures about and in regard to self, and the sense of self, and the view of self, and what a human being is and all that, so self and other. I want to talk a little bit about re-enchanting self and other, and a little bit about what might be involved in that. We've touched on some of that already.

Just to say, as something relevant: there are accusations from some, especially of a more secular persuasion within the Dharma, a secular agenda within the Dharma, that almost view the whole point or one of the main thrusts of Buddhadharma, what the Buddha was saying, state that most important to the Buddha and the teaching was this kind of shattering of any notion of soul, or self, or divinity. That was the Buddha's central project originally, and then what happened historically, over time, is he died and that message got lost, and then, lo and behold, foolish humanity brings back in old ideas that he would have utterly rejected in his secularism, and ideas of selves and souls and divinities and all that. So the Mahāyāna and the Vajrayāna teachings are regarded as a pollution and a devolution -- as opposed to evolution -- of the teachings. There are impurities coming in from other systems, from a human lack of honesty and stiff upper lip, etc., and clarity, and steel in the face of our real existential situation.

All this is there. Now, I've touched on this before, but hidden in there is an unacknowledged fantasy, an image of the Buddha, of the Dharma, of the history, what Nietzsche calls the "glorification of origins": a thing is more authentically itself at the beginning of its so-called existence, and then it's downhill from there. The glorification of origins, or the glorification of beginnings. All of that is fantasy and image. Now, we can point that out. We could also play the game a little bit, if we want to play this game of fantasy of origins, and say that rather than concepts like 'divine,' 'divinity,' 'God,' 'angel,' 'self,' 'soul' (whatever these words that we use now and that we're seeking to give permission to and re-enchant), rather than those, we can say actually it's the realism and the reification that is so much at the core and at the basis of a lot of contemporary Dharma, as well as many other spiritual traditions nowadays, contemporary spiritualities. That's more of a return to self, if you like, and God, to use these words in their larger context.

'Self' in the Mahāyāna means not just personal self, but also phenomenal self, the self of phenomena. 'Self' really means any belief in this thing, whether it's a human thing, or an inanimate thing, or an atom or whatever. 'Self' really means the belief in that as having inherent existence. It applies not just to human beings, but it applies to phenomena as well. Personal self and phenomenal self, both are empty. But it's that return to the phenomenal self, to the kind of belief in a basic reality of things, whether it's an atomistic reality, or just the reality of the existential situation, the reality of matter, all that conceived of in a certain way. That is the return of self. Words like Life with a capital L, or This, they are the God of secular modernism. They're kind of trump words that trump everything else. They're four-letter words that get used actually vaguely but as if they're something real and as if we're talking about the same thing.

So it's the realism and the reification, one could say, that is more the return to self and God. And it's evident in all these different kinds of teachings, and the conceptions of the path, and the goal, and the almost ubiquitous language of 'what is,' of 'bare attention,' of 'being with things as they are' -- a phrase that the Buddha did use, that one. He didn't use 'bare attention,' but used that phrase 'things as they are.' He meant it in a very different way. He meant 'things as they are' as 'things are empty.' 'Be here now,' 'life as it presents itself' -- we've touched on this before. But we could say that actually it's in the realism and the reificationism that teachings are polluted, if we want to play along with that game of fantasies. The most important thing is to acknowledge fantasy -- fantasy of Buddha, fantasy of Dharma, fantasy of history, all of that.

[10:37] So it's complex, within this confusion that I was alluding to earlier, the confusion of cultural messages and cultural inheritances. It's confusing. And then we talk about, as we've been unfolding on this retreat, different types of enchantment. If we talk about enchanting the self, we don't mean just what we called spiritual enchantment, the kind that sort of dissolves the person into the universal oneness, or the universal onenesses of this or that flavour oneness, that don't put an emphasis on the particularity, but move towards the universal. We've also been differentiating from what we called, a bit clumsy-sounding, immature imaginal enchantment and mature imaginal-based enchantment.

So all this is complex. When we come to the question, or try and unfold, or find a way forward with a re-enchantment of self and other, it's complex for all those reasons, and complex because we have psychological needs, you could say. There are certain psychological paradigms mixed in with all that, about what constitutes a healthy self or psychological self. These, too, are historically conditioned. Again, we tend to think this view that we're now at with modern psychotherapy and history, depending on your allegiance to different contemporary psychologies, we tend to think that's real, whereas a notion, say, from medieval times or ancient times about what a self was, and what constituted a self or a healthy self or unhealthy self -- this is vastly different now, historically. Vastly different. We just take it all for granted as a reality, as this subtraction story of shaking off prior illusions, encrustations, unnecessary veilings of what is a basic truth about self, reality, health, all that, psychological health. Into this complexity, as well, is the whole delicate, complex question of psychologies, self-notions, psychological paradigms, etc. Somehow we need to kind of include all this and navigate among all that in talking about re-enchanting the self and the other. I can only do a little bit of that in this talk.

One of the characteristics of modernity, of the dominant view, if you like, of the culture in the West today is that self and divinity have become separated, or rather, in the dominant view -- and this goes back even before modernity, to certain entrenched dogmas in Christianity; there was a separation of the human and the divine. In the more mystical traditions, that separation was either never agreed upon, or different practices and different teachings came in to re-wed the human and the divine, in lots of different ways and at lots of different levels, both as a starting conception and as something to move towards. We'll maybe touch on some of that.

But in the dominant contemporary paradigm is this, either a separation of the self and the divine, if there's any divinity, sense of divinity, or concept of divinity left at all in the general picture of what a human being is and what the cosmos is. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in his massive tome, A Secular Age, one way he has of defining what constitutes secularism is that it's characterized by, it's a time in the evolution or the history of human society where it's quite possible for many (if not most) people to have a goal in life of flourishing -- purely human flourishing. In other words, one can live one's life, and really everything in one's life, one's work, one's relationship, whatever else it is, the food one eats, it's all seen from the perspective and with the goal of only human flourishing.

He says at a certain point in the West, in the last hundred years, that became quite possible and quite acceptable for that to be the orientation to life that many people were able to have. So it's the first time in human history. I don't know if that's true, because actually reading the Pali Canon you get the sense that there were certain sects or teachers who promulgated just such a view. How popular that was in the wider society, I don't know. But this is his almost defining characteristic of secularism, or one of them that he uses. I think it's quite interesting. This word, 'flourishing,' has become so popular in some sociological and psychological and political discourses. Purely human flourishing -- in other words, with no reference or need to have a relationship with divinity, or the flourishing is something that is a flourishing of something more than the human. It's what Taylor calls 'self-sufficing humanism': the human as conceived according to modernity, with that kind of flatness and exclusion of divinity that we've been alluding to repeatedly, and living one's life for the sake of flourishing within those parameters of purely human flourishing. Very, very normal nowadays. It's very normal in our society, characteristic of secularism.

This is interesting historically, again. When Freud wrote his Civilization and Its Discontents, he said there are two purposes of civilization or culture. One is to protect human beings against nature, and the other is to adjust the mutual relations of human beings in different ways in terms of laws and things. Protecting against nature and adjusting the mutual relations. Maybe, let's say, thirty years ago, or some decades ago, a lot of politicians and sociologists would probably have said, "Well, we've done these now in the West." I would put a huge question mark with that, whether we have been so intent on so-called 'protecting ourselves' from nature that now we are actually more in danger from climate change, and loss of species, and environmental pollution and degradation. And as to our mutual relations, it seems to me that also needs quite a lot of work. But a lot of people would have thought that way, and said these two that Freud pointed to have been done, and so the purpose of civilization was then allowed to expand, and added this human flourishing. So the very purpose of our civilization nowadays (and we are much more protected from nature; a lot of our mutual relations are taken care of, etc., so despite all of the lacunae there, the glaring problems that remain there), what came in as an, if you like, implicit or explicit purpose of culture was this goal: culture or civilization served human flourishing, humanistic flourishing.

But again, what does it mean? What does it mean, this word that's so commonly used now, 'flourishing'? It's become popular. "May you flourish, be allowed to flourish," etc. What does it mean? What is it assumed to involve? More than just the basic requisites -- food, and home, and these kind of things, and water. Again, even in the US and the UK, even these requisites are not guaranteed to every member of society. The thrust of this talk is not about that, but over and above the requisites, what is human flourishing assumed to involve, and what is left out or actually overlooked in what it means for a human being to flourish, or what is a part of human flourishing?

It's worth pointing out that historically, arenas, or containers, or forms, or avenues that care for and provide for, and allow and nourish soulfulness, historically they have been part of the stable civilizations and cultures of the human past for millennia. The modern West is, historically speaking, strange in its lack of emphasis on soulfulness, in the way that it doesn't really integrate that need into its forms, into its rituals, etc. It comes in anyway; it can't help but come in. But it's not really consciously thought about or provided for, probably, I would say, in the best ways that are possible, because it's simply not part of the dominant paradigm and discourse. So it gets squeezed out of public spaces. It gets squeezed out of public discourses and public activities and engagements and all of that.

[22:13] So the self is regarded a certain way, and the whole movement and what it is to be a human being, the movement of one's life between birth and death. It's all regarded in the dominant way a certain way, and then within our different sub-cultures, and all this complexity. But this levelling, this only human, this secular humanism, and the way in the culture in which the human being is now regarded, compare that to something I heard a few months ago, that in Burkina Faso in Africa, in the tribes in the countryside, in the rural villages, when a woman is pregnant, at about six months, the village elders or the tribe elders call the woman to a kind of council, a meeting, and they put her into a trance or she goes into a trance. They address themselves, the elders of the tribe address themselves to the baby in her womb. While the mother is in a trance, they ask the baby, "What do the gods want to manifest through you?" That's one question. And the second question, "What needs to change in the village to make space for you?" The mother, in her trance, is spoken through by the baby. The elders listen, and they take it in.

Can you hear the way that the human being is being seen, the depth of the respect, the beauty of that? And how such a notion, such a depth of notion simply has no space in our contemporary society, just by the virtue of the structure of the society, but also by the virtue of the structure of the thinking? Compare that kind of reverence, orientation, respect, openness, sacredness of the human being, of the self being born into this world, being born into the world of society and manifestation, being born into its individual place within that society, and its calling. All of this is there. Compare that with what has been exposed by various Western philosophers and social critics over the last few hundred years: a kind of individualism, but one that's actually manipulated by capitalism, by the market economy. We are regarded as, if you like, pawns for the advertising industry, for the whole way the economy works. Consumerism is necessary, all these things. Michel Foucault talks about the objectification of subjects. The human subject, the human self, becomes an object in a kind of power play. And the depth of one's humanity, what it means to be a self, is effectively disregarded, reduced in the most complete way, almost, sometimes.

Before Foucault, there was the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer that I alluded to earlier, that talked about the culture industry -- the way that a whole industry was being set up through capitalism that really manipulated individuals in lots of different ways. Very, very different scope, range, sense, view of human beings. Again, compare that with Islam, where they say the cardinal sin is the forgetfulness of who one is. In other words, to forget the sacredness, the depths, the range, the divinity, if you like, of the human being, of the self, of your individual self, and your individual callings, if you like, all the aspects of your self (we'll go into that), that's actually the cardinal sin, this forgetfulness of who one is.

In the teachings of Buddha-nature in the Buddhadharma, it's like, if you like, your 'true self' -- if one uses that language -- or your essence, or at least your capacity, is for divinity. The self, the human being is something much, much more in its range and dimensions than this flatland version. Again, in the Christian tradition, they talk about the imago dei, being made in the image of God, and the possibility (in the mystical tradition) of in my human self, in your human self, in my mind, in my heart, in my life, in my actions, there is the possibility of imitatio dei, but more than that, the incarnation of Christ, the mystical incarnation of Christ, in the depths of my mind, in the depths of my heart, in my soul. There's a transformation, a transubstantiation that's already there in potential, and at one level in actuality, but it can be incarnated in the fuller sense of that word, 'incarnated' -- brought into manifestation, brought into this world of materiality as we see it, in the different ways we see it.

So in modernity and nowadays in our Western culture, we get mixed messages regarding the self, and the individual, and individualism, just as we get mixed messages -- and this is all woven together -- about desire versus greed, and how desire is trumped and greed is bad. And sexuality -- mixed messages, hugely confusing. All of these are aspects of self. I'm going to come back to this. So we're getting mixed messages about all kinds of things. And yet, many people, maybe they won't articulate it or something, but you could say we're suffering from this disenchantment that's, if you like, integral almost to modernism. We're trying to enchant the self. Somehow people are living with these paradigms; oppressed, constrained by these paradigms, constrained by structures in society; and somehow, of course, something in them wants to re-enchant the self, wants to have an enchanted sense of self and other. People do find ways of doing that, or limited ways of doing it, or they'll do it on occasion, or when you're in love for a period of time, etc. But somehow trying to enchant the self, without allowing a sense of depth and divinity (that's not allowed).

And often that enchantment comes, as I said, through -- we're given, in some ways, a vast set of toys to play with, because of what modern society and technology allows, but in another way, a very thin, meagre palette and set of tools and toys with which self can be re-enchanted. One tries, so many people are trying to fashion a unique, interesting self, my self as an individual, to somehow do something to fashion and create what appears to be "This is me, and I'm unique, and I'm interesting," etc., when actually there might not be that much interest there. Because the whole view of the self is constrained, it can't be that interesting. What are we given to do this with? Well, there's consumption. There's consumerism. You can buy these clothes, or you can create a certain look, or buy that car or whatever it is.

So we are rich; we live like kings compared to people in the past. Our standard of living is equivalent to what royalty would have experienced in the past -- probably way beyond that. Yet, at one level, we're poor. We're poor in terms of if we just receive what we are given in terms of our view of who we are, what the self is. We are poor and not able to re-enchant deeply within that paradigm and with those opportunities that we're given. In fact, the opposite happens.

This is a kind of Marxist phrase. I'm not a Marxist, and I don't really want to harp on about that, but in a way, there's the superficial self-sense, seeking enchantment through basically the manipulations of consumerism, being manipulated by it, being a pawn in a larger game, but given enough of a possibility for trying desperately to fashion something interesting, so that our money and consumerist thrust can try and do that. But actually, all that trying, at that level, just goes back to create the superficial or to preserve a superficiality of the self-sense. Because the self-sense is superficial, we try and re-enchant it; we have very limited possibilities for that, and those possibilities actually keep the self-sense superficial. So we're caught in something here, potentially.

[33:49] Add to that this further very common idea. It's quite a modernist idea. One wouldn't recognize it as such, but we have this idea of the authentic self, the real me. We feel, we're told that we need to be authentic, and that there's a true me. We really feel that at times. I have that pulling me one way, and on the other side, this social pressure because of the way the society is set up, and the lack of inner depth to what a human being is conceived of and felt to be. So the other pressure is, "What do others think?" As long as I don't have that access to the depth, what others think, and the social anxiety and the pressure to conform or not be judged or this or that, is huge. These things pull in different directions: I've got to be authentic to my self, there is an authentic self that I need to somehow be true to and in touch with, and on the other side, "What do others think of me? Is it okay? Am I okay? Tell me I'm okay. What can I do and manipulate and spend on to make others think I'm okay? How am I in the eyes of others? Am I enough? Am I singled out as faulty in the eyes of others?" All this, again, I'm just saying, it creates so much tension and, if you like, creativity-inhibiting confusion and constraints and tension around this whole wish that we have for an enchanted sense of existence and of self and other.

I'm just repeating now, but we talked about if I see the self, if I see what a human being is as only really a product of biological evolution, that this is what we get down to when we're talking about what's real -- you're a product, and your behaviour and your choices and the way you perceive is all the product of evolution, or the product of neurology, of your neurophysiology. Now, for some people, that view can be enchanting. But if we're only that, it's probably not that enchanting. If we're regarded with a reductionist view, a biological reductionist view, it's difficult to have a sense of a really enchanted self. Reductionism inhibits that. Enchantment needs this beyond. We need to be more than that. So of course biology and neurophysiology and evolution, all of that, historical conditioning, everything. But there needs to be something beyond, something more than, in order for a sense of enchantment, as we said right from the beginning.

Again, in Dharma circles, it's so common nowadays (if we're talking about the view of self and other), this sometimes dogmatic conclusion or assertion that the Buddha said, or the truth of the self, what the self really is is a process, a biological process and a mental process. Sometimes, in some cases, the mental process is reduced to a biological process, a neuronal one, etc., a brain process. But the self is the process, and sometimes people say, "I've cracked what the Buddha was saying. The self is process. This is the true nature of things. Anything else is a bit of a delusion. Self is a process." Now, I would say that's a certain level of a meditative view or a way of looking, a perception that's available to us, to feel ourselves as process, moment to moment, aggregates arising, of sensation and vedanā and perception and consciousness and intention. And useful at a certain level. A certain level of freedom will come out of that.

But it's only a way of looking. It's only a certain level of perception. It's not ultimately true. It's not ultimately true the self is a process. I've talked about this in other talks; I'm not going to go into it now. It's not ultimately true, and that perception of the self as a process does not yield for us the deepest freedom. Absolutely not. Nor is it particularly enchanting as a view of the self: "The self is a moment-to-moment arising in a mechanistic flow, a conditioned arising of a moment of sensation and perception and neuronal functioning," etc. We can try and enchant that view of process, and talk about words like 'flow,' and bring in river imagery and all that kind of stuff, maybe, to a certain extent. But there are problems with that. It's not ultimately true, it doesn't bring the deepest freedom, and doesn't really open up the capacity and the range of possible enchantment.

Then there's another kind of view that the self is really one with cosmic awareness, or one with cosmic love, or one with God, or the self is nothing, the self is a total illusion or whatever, and that's the real nature of the self. That, also, I would say, suffers from the same three lacks. It's not ultimately true that the self is one. It's a level. It's a deep, mystical experience, a level of perception. Important, beautiful, as is the perception that the self is nothing, absolutely nothing. But it's not ultimately true. It's wonderful and important to have that as a perception, as a level of perception. It's not ultimately true, it's not the deepest freedom, and it will not open up the deepest and the fullest enchantment.

[40:36] What is necessary for re-enchanting, for really full, really deep, really wide re-enchantment, and delivering us from what is not ultimately true, what is not quite deeply freeing, is the flexibility of view that I keep harping on about -- flexibility of self-view, and the insight legitimizing and underpinning that flexibility. All these different kinds of meditative and mystical experiences, moving in and out, and understanding how they arise and how they disappear, understanding the fabrication and dependent arising of both self and perception. Then you start to see what's really true is this very flexibility, the flexibility of self-view. And it legitimizes that flexibility, and the moving in and out of, and the adopting of different self-views. There's an insight here of what actually is ultimately true. We need a conception and insight that allows, supports, and actually insists on a flexibility of self-view. It's this that most fully allows not just the biggest freedom, it's congruent with the ultimate truth, but also it most fully allows the re-enchantment.

So we can add to this, if we ask this question, "Okay, there's all this confusion and this disenchantment in our world-view, our view of the cosmos, and our view of self, our sense of self. And to have a soulful re-enchantment of self and other ..." (Whenever I use 'self' in this talk, everything that I say about self applies to other, as well -- other selves, both as an idea but also as applicable in practice; I can practise viewing an other in these different ways.) So what's needed in re-enchanting self and other? One of the things is a view and a conception of personality and of the personal relevance of what arises for us -- in other words, both within and without, in terms of the ideas of fate or destiny, including the difficult. Somehow that needs to get included (I'm going to come back to this). That also needs to get included, not erased out in a universality. We somehow want a kind of enchantment that really includes and even emphasizes not just the universal but also the very personal, the very particular, and the personal relevance of what arises for us inside and outside in our lives. Included in that is the difficult, is the dukkha. So that view allows and supports a sense of or senses of sacredness of the person and of the personal relevances of what arises for us, so that the events of our life are somehow integrated into a whole view of sacredness, of the sacredness of the self, of the person.

Does the conception of the self, view of the self that we're entertaining, or the wider view of the self, but also the conception of its relationship with experiences and its relationship with the cosmos in time -- so all of that: conception of self, conception of its relationship with the experiences it goes through in life, and also its relationship with the cosmos and with time -- does the conception we have of all of that allow a transformation in our relationship with suffering that becomes soulmaking, so that suffering becomes soulmaking? Does our conception of self, its relationship with experiences, and its relationship or constellation with regard to the cosmos and time, allow a transformation of the relationship with suffering (with our suffering, all kinds of suffering), so that that suffering becomes soulmaking? And how fully does it allow and support that transformation? How deeply does it allow and support that transformation?

This is what needs to be included and involved in a soulful re-enchantment of self and other. At an even more subtle level of what 'self' means, just as subject rather than object -- just as consciousness, if you like -- what does it mean to re-enchant that subtle level, just consciousness, that level of self as subject? Again, purely the complexities of neurology -- there's a certain enchantment in that, but how full? How deep? Again, some ideas of Buddha-nature, some versions of the idea of Buddha-nature in Buddhadharma teachings, some philosophies in the West, certainly in Neoplatonism and other currents through Western history, but also in the German philosopher Hegel, etc., the human subject, in one's subjectivity (meaning in one's consciousness), that, too, is regarded as divine, as included, and there's a view that can re-enchant it by giving it other dimensions and divinities. We'll come back to this.

As I said a few minutes ago, somehow an opening of the view, the views and the conception of self, of what a human being is, and a flexibility of views and conceptions of self and other -- this is necessary to re-enchantment. This is, again, something from Nietzsche:

The belief that regards the soul as ... a monad, as an atomon [meaning as one thing, as indivisible]: this belief ought to be expelled from science! It is not at all necessary [though] to get rid of "the soul" at the same time.^[1]

In other words, we don't need to get rid of this idea of the soul, but it's the idea of the soul as just this, and it's one thing, and it's rigidified and fixed, and there's a singleness of view.

But the way is open [he continues] for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis.

Then he runs through a few different possibilities, such conceptions as this and this and this, and "soul as subjective multiplicity." So again, this sense of plurality of soul, and plurality of views of what the soul is. He's saying don't throw the baby out with the bathwater; we can extend and give a range of meanings to what we mean by 'soul' that might be very fruitful. It's like, run screaming, or cry "That's illegal!" when people use words like 'self' or 'soul'; actually, concepts, when they're skilfully handled, when they're related to with insight, actually open things up. I'll come back and say more about that.

He continues with this. Opening views up this way, he says, the "new psychologist[s]," by precisely that act, by opening up the notion of soul, "condemn [themselves] to invention." They condemn themselves to invention. In other words, you have to be creative in the view and in the perception. We're back to this idea of art and creation. He says, by precisely that act, "condemn [themselves] to invention and -- who knows? -- perhaps to discovery." Again, this ambiguity about creation and discovery, right there: invention and discovery through the skilful and open use of a concept like 'soul.' In another place, in another book, actually, Nietzsche says:

Some souls one will never discover [so some selves, some souls of one's self, if you like, one will never discover], unless one invents them first.^[2]

Deep understanding of this fact of we create and we discover. We create and we discover the soul, the self, the other, etc.

So we need this kind of elasticity, as I said, of the concept of the self or soul or whatever, in order that this soulmaking dynamic -- the eros and the psyche and the logos; the eros, and the image, the imaginal sense, and the conceptual framework, in other words -- can feed each other, fertilize each other, open each other, expand each other, enrich each other, deepen each other. It's all there in the elasticity of the logos, of the conception. When that's elastic enough, then we can fall in love with the self, and the sense of the self -- whether it's self of other, or self of self -- can become endlessly deep, complex, enriched, filled with image.

If a human being is regarded just from the reductionist point of view of biology or cognitive science, mechanistic reductions, then the image of self dies, because it no longer retains that element of mystery, of inexhaustibility that an image needs to have to stay alive, as we've talked about in other talks. There needs to be a kind of undefinability as part of that mystery and inexhaustibility. There needs to be an undefinability of any concept, whether it's self, or love, or the divine, and also Dharma. There's an undefinability to it that allows an endless moving into mystery. It always has a beyond, an inexhaustibility, and that's necessary for the soulmaking. For any of these concepts -- self, love, divine, Dharma, etc. -- anything that matters deeply to us needs to retain a certain amount of undefinability, mystery, inexhaustibility. Reductionist explanations, summing up, will not allow that. So undefinability and mystery as something fertile -- not just something you say, "Oh, it's undefinable. It's just a mystery," and we shrug and turn away, or we just say, "That means it's nonsense, because it's not definable or it's mysterious." More than that.

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 20. ↩︎

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, tr. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 37. ↩︎