The Gift and the Artifice of Self (Part 2)

Just to sum up a little bit of what we said so far, and we've repeated this on the retreat: disenchantment comes partly because of the pervasive flattening of either biological or psychological reductionism -- reduced to my neurophysiology, or my past history and events, or sociologically reduced to social conditioning or whatever. There's a flattening in that reductionism. Or there's a kind of inhibited capacity for enchantment that comes out of certain spiritual emphases, whether it's in the Buddhadharma or in other traditions, Advaita Vedanta or whatever it is. The emphasizing of the universal, the self as process, the self as nothing, always regarding the self as empty, etc., or this oneness, whatever it is. The teachings or levels of perception that emphasize the universal, versus that emphasize and include the particular, the particular person, what is my individual personhood, if you like, and a regarding of that, in and through the particulars and the events of my life, all of them, regarding that as divine, and even more than that, as necessary to the divine, necessary to God. My particulars, my person, your person, your particulars, your struggle, your dukkha, all the aspects, the infinite aspects that make you up are somehow necessary to God. God needs you to go through this because, in a way, through you going through that, he/she/it goes through it. It's part of the growth of and the being of God.

And then also there's this disenchantment, as we talked about in another talk, because of -- this is less obvious, more insidious -- this relative balance between self-aspiration, self-orientation and intention, or self-serving orientation in terms of healing or psychological growth or this or that, or self-empowerment, or self-expression or whatever. It might use the language of 'the divine,' but it's actually about self, or mostly the leaning is about self, rather than leaning more towards the divine, and the purpose, the intention, the aspiration, the reason for practice, for healing, for all that, one is really grounding it and orienting it towards the divine. The balance is more that than towards the self. We could use those as if they're two separate things, or there's a way of really integrating the two, but oftentimes a person might think that's what's happening, or want to think that's what's happening -- that it's really about God, and they use that language -- but so quickly, as I said in other talks, it slips back to a self-project, or there's not really the fullness in what was sensed in the orientation in the first place. That it really was always just about self, it was just a self-project -- this is very, very common.

So these are some of the reasons, which we've touched on now several times -- I'm just repeating -- that constellate and condition and hold in place a disenchantment, actually of everything, but in this case we're focusing more on the self and other. We could ask, given all that: what needs re-enchanting? When we say "to re-enchant the self," what do we mean more fully by that? What aspects or dimensions of the self need re-enchanting? I would say actually all levels of the self need re-enchanting. I'll explain what I mean by that, because I mean it in two different but related ways that I've touched on in another retreat. All levels, if you like, of what I've called in another situation the 'vertical spectrum of the imaginal,' all the images of a self or other -- I might feel myself or see myself through this image or through that image, and it's as if they exist on a spectrum. All of those images need re-enchanting, need seeing and feeling as divine. We need to see and feel them as divine.

For example, a practice like receiving divine light or love, some of the things we've touched on in this retreat, some of the practices, ideas we've put out -- that this receiving of divine light and love is received by all images of the self, anywhere on that vertical spectrum of images, of the imaginal, of the self. All levels on that spectrum, and all levels on the spectrum of the fabrication of self-sense. Sometimes, you know, the self is fabricated intensely. It feels very solid and very contracted. Sometimes the self feels like this atomistic process. That's fine; that's slightly less fabricated. Sometimes the self is a much more universal, cosmic self. Sometimes a self is a nothingness. Sometimes a self is experienced as barely there at all, barely fabricated, very ethereal, very unformed, very tenuous, refined sense of self. Sometimes the self is felt and sensed in this -- whether it's imaginally or because of the degree of unfabricating -- the self is already felt as divine and already light.

But all these levels, whether the imaginal levels or the levels of fabrication on the spectrum of fabrication of the self-sense, all of it, we need to play with, in practice, seeing and feeling all of these different levels as divine. And/or, we could say, practice is where we, for example, receive light and love from the divine. Again, all the different levels, both imaginal and (whatever the word would be) fabricatory. All of them, from the most solid and the most painful and contracted, to the most blissful and divine and barely there at all. Again, this is one of those things that the more one has played with emptiness practices and seen in practice this spectrum of fabrication, and played with unfabricating, and moved up and down on that spectrum, and really seen the degree of range of the fabrication of (in this case) perception of self -- much more flexibility in moving up and down these spectra and seeing it all as empty and playing with it in these ways.

Somehow or other, and in time, all these levels need to get included, seen as divine, felt as divine, and receiving divine light and love, etc., in order to re-enchant the self. So all levels, but also we could say all aspects of self and other. I mean things like our emotions need re-enchanting. Our desire needs re-enchanting. Our dukkha, our suffering needs re-enchanting. Our imagination needs re-enchanting. Our mind -- and I mean 'mind' in the broadest sense, citta, heart, heart/mind, soul. Our creativity needs re-enchanting. Our meaningfulnesses need re-enchanting. By that, I mean they all need to be given legitimacy. And because of this confusion that we talked about in the different cultures, not all our emotions are given legitimacy, and not all our desire is. By 'given legitimacy,' I don't mean acting out, or being lost in, or anything like that. Given legitimacy: "There is something that is a treasure here. There is something sacred." It might be coming out, we might be relating to it in a way that's contorted. It might not fit the picture I have of what is legitimate or holy. But all of this needs to be given legitimacy. It needs to be given permission. It needs to be given space to grow and expand and move into.

So again, not constrained by a certain conceptual framework of what it is, or what's allowed, or a certain image of what it must be and what's allowed. All these aspects of self, they need to be seen as divine in their, if you like, origins, their roots. Not necessarily their origins in time. 'Roots' is a better word. Given legitimacy, given space to grow, to expand, to move into, and seen, felt, as divine in origin. That's the work of both the conceptual framework but also of practice, practising ways of looking.

[10:45] We can just touch on a few of these, perhaps, now. Desire, I mentioned desire as one of the aspects of self, one of the elements of self, if you like. And I've talked about this in other talks in the past, and I hope we'll talk more in the future about this in much more detail, the possibilities there. Henry Corbin, for example, talks about longing as being (I can't remember the word he used, but) almost like the driver, the engine, of the human being, and there's a kind of nostalgia, if you like, for the divine. So he doesn't mean nostalgia as in, "In the past, we were with the divine before the Big Bang," or whatever like that, but a non-temporal nostalgia. Something in our being knows a closeness with the divine, and we long for that again. Jakob Böhme, a very influential mystic from the sixteenth century, he used words like 'purity' and 'innocence' because, in a way, he was surrounded by a culture that put so much emphasis on the impurity and the fallenness of humankind. He used words like, there is in us still a purity and innocence, and it longs for, it desires, what he called the holy or the paradisal element. It longs for holiness and paradise, and that holiness and paradise is inner. It's within us, the core of our being, but it's also outer, in the world, this world as heaven, this world as Buddha-realm, as we've talked about.

So there's a desire for that. We have a desire that is holy. We have desires that are holy, that are divine in origin, that need to be legitimized and given space. As well as that -- and again, I've talked about this on other retreats -- there is, if you like, the desire that comes from the daimon, desires that we see in ourselves that don't fit the usual Buddhist, for example, or Christian pictures of what it is that we should desire. They seem darker, or we can easily confuse them with greed, or we think they're deluded, or "That's just clinging," or whatever. I'm not going to go into this now. I'm going to mention these as, if you like, two different kinds of desire -- this transcendent desire, if you like, that Jakob Böhme was talking about, something in us that is transcendent, that yearns for the transcendent, and also the desire from the daimon.

The whole question with all this and the question of desire is the question of eros, what I've been defining in other talks and retreats as the desire for connection, and that having a quality of inexhaustibility, a quality of always wanting more, what the Greeks used to call pothos within the eros -- always wanting more connection, this movement, insatiability, if you like. Very easily, we just put all of that into the camp of craving and clinging and greed in a kind of Dharma language. Are they the same? How are they different? Maybe one is a treasure, one is the pearl of great price, or part of that, and other ways of relating to that actually make it problematic for us. Certainly the relationship is not simple between eros and clinging, craving, greed (whatever word one wants to use). It's so important for us as human beings to really actively ask these questions, and not just to receive something from a culture which then becomes stultifying, constraining, actually does not work -- certainly for enchantment, but doesn't actually work in our life.

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the fathers, I think, in the Orthodox Christian tradition, he said:

[For] the thirst of human souls requires some infinite water; how could this limited world suffice?^[1]

So again, the 'thirst of human souls' being the seeking for the transcendent, for the oneness with God, but also this desire for the daimon, whatever it is -- sexual, or something else so easily seen as ego or lower nature or this or that, or clinging/craving, put into a bad camp. Maybe both kinds of desire, both the transcendent and what comes through the imaginal and the erotic in that way. If I have a limited world-view and a limited self-view, that won't be enough for us. We require infinite water. So there's this need for respect for our desires, for changing the view of our desires, re-enchanting the desires, and also, within that, recognizing that there's a kind of infinity to the desire as well. It desires the infinite, but there's an infinitude to desires as well, in terms of what they are in a deeper sense, what they're conveying in a deeper sense.

[17:18] I said also the mind needs re-enchanting. So, aspects of a human being, our mind -- and again, 'mind' means heart, psyche, citta, mind. We talked about in another talk how some views actually regard the human and the divine mind as being on a continuum, so that the human mind, at its core, at a deep level of the human mind, is actually one with the divine mind. Certainly the human imagination is also, again, on a continuum with the divine imagination. But if we say 'mind,' then it includes our emotions, our imagination, our creativity, etc.

Certainly that idea that all of this, at its core, is divine, we are impregnated with the seed, with the word, with the logos of the divine, or that it's on a continuum with the divine, that is a metaphysical concept, a view. But it's one that we can actually entertain in practice, if not one that we can intuit through practice. [We can] actually have a real sense that we create it, and then we see what happens when we entertain it, when we employ it, engage it as a way of looking. But we can also intuit it or discover it. It feels like, yes, I sense that to be (in inverted commas) 'true.' I sense that I'm discovering this perspective, or this metaphysical fact, if you like. That particular idea is, again, in many different traditions. For Corbin, there's really one fundamental creative matrix for all experience and all sensation, and that is this divine mind, and particularly the divine imagination, because humans partake of that. Human imagination, especially when it's trained in what he would call 'imaginal,' is on a continuum with the divine imagination. In certain ideas of the World Soul, very similar, or certain versions of the Buddha-nature teaching in the Dharma.

This seeing of various aspects of our being, of our self, of our humanity, our mind or whatever it is, aspects of mind, this seeing them as divine is different (I hope this is clear), it's different from seeing them as anattā, as not-self. Many of you will hopefully know this: there's a whole practice of regarding the mind, or regarding thoughts, or regarding aspects of mind, elements of mind, as not-self, as anattā. Very, very important and skilful practice, really an avenue into a lot of depth. When we regard things as anattā, when we adopt that way of looking, there's this disidentification, not identifying with this or that, with the mind as a whole, or with aspects of the mind. There's a disidentification, and the freedom that comes with that, but there's also something else that happens, which many of you will recognize. There's a kind of prying loose of our automatic tendency to value, to believe in our thoughts and also what they say about us. So when we regard them as anattā, we don't tend to believe them so much, and we also tend to not identify with them and not take them so personally in terms of what they mean for us, about us, about what's going on with us, even, more largely.

So this is a practice, this seeing things as anattā. It's what I call a way of looking. To always do that, to always see every aspect of mind as anattā, would be a little silly. It's a practice. It's a way of looking. Again, we're back to this flexibility idea. We go in and out of that as a potentially skilful way of looking. It's potentially extremely skilful, extremely fruitful. But the question is, when is it helpful? When is it actually the wrong thing to do, to view things that way? To try and view that way always would be silly. We move in and out, and it brings much deeper insight regarding emptiness. It doesn't only bring a disidentification in the moment and prying loose of the valuing and all that -- it also brings deeper insights. But still, we move in and out of it according to our sense of when it's helpful, when it's skilful. Just the same with this way of looking or playing with conception of the divine origins of the self, of the mind, of our images, etc. We move in and out of that view. We need to navigate that movement in and out. We need to navigate our way, find our way with this flexibility of views. It would be silly and probably, you can imagine, pretty dangerous to always regard everything that moves through my mind, any element of my self or mind, as holy and divinely inspired and all that. There needs to be some pragmatism and wisdom here and sensitivity. This is really important.

There's another issue connected with all this that has to do with, if you like, the order in which we regard different aspects as divine. What is light and what is good, it's easier to see that as divine. But seeing what is dark in us, and what is (quote) 'bad,' or seems bad, to regard that as divine -- would it be safer to really cultivate the good, and see the divinity of that, and develop what is light and pure (so-called), and then, on that basis, with that resource, having cultivated that, then to begin to learn to see and to practise seeing that which is, if you like, darker, or the 'bad' in us, as divine?

Certainly Carl Jung thought so. That was the order in which it was quite important that things happen. But still, he emphasized the importance to see the divinity of darkness, to open to the dark gods. He wrote, I think it's in Answer to Job, "The guilty man is eminently suited and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation." This is kind of old-style language; I hope you can get the gist of what's being said here.

The guilty man is eminently suited and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room.^[2]

If we're talking about really fully re-enchanting, the dark gods need to find room. They need to be re-enchanted. The aspects of ourselves that we would usually shut out of a spiritual view -- "That's not spiritual. That can't be divine" -- they need a way in. His emphasis is that the good needs to be seen as divine first, and actually cultivated first. In his language, we need the development of the Christian virtues, or we could say the pāramīs of the bodhisattva -- generosity, and patience, and compassion, love, etc. But we also need insight, and insight into emptiness, so that we don't start identifying too rigidly with all this, concretizing it, reifying it, making it real, shrinking around it, clinging to it as a fixed reality.

[26:24] So yes, many people hearing this will need to spend quite a bit more time on developing what is light and so-called 'good,' and the classic Buddhist pāramīs, etc., and qualities, and the insight into emptiness of self and emptiness of those qualities themselves. At some point, it's like the being, the soul, and the understanding have the capacity and the skill to start regarding much more, beyond what is obviously light, obviously (quote) 'good,' regarding all of that -- the dark, what seems 'bad,' what seems greedy or this or that -- actually starting to find the divinity in that. Sometimes it doesn't happen in that order. Mostly I would say that's one of the things that allows it to be stable and safe, etc., but things ain't that simple for everyone. Other people do things, some people do things, in all kinds of orders, or it's just not so linear.

As we mentioned earlier, wrapped up in all this, or with all of this, is the relationship with, the view of, the possibility of re-enchanting or enchanting our suffering, our dukkha, in life. Like a lot of this, this is a delicate question. We have to tread delicately, sensitively here. It's complex. In the totality of the teachings of this retreat, from both Catherine and I, we'd like to present different perspectives on this and give due respect to the complexity here. Let's go into it a little bit, or from certain angles. Again, I hope you can hear some of this in the context of, if you like, a response to at least what I perceive as the dominant paradigms existing. But I want to tread carefully here.

One thing about re-enchanting the self and re-enchanting the suffering, our suffering in life of our selves, one thing is that judgment and enchantment do not go together very well at all. When we judge ourselves, or when we judge ourselves for suffering, and maybe seeing repeated patterns -- "Still doing the same thing, still making the same mistakes. After all this practice, I still have the same problems" -- and there's a judgment of that and self-blame, then the possibility of enchanting the self and enchanting the view of the suffering is obviously diminished. Similarly, it works the other way, as a lot of these things do, mutually dependent: the less enchanted we are with the view of the self and the suffering, the more likelihood there is to judge ourselves and judge the suffering. When there's judgment, almost by definition, it's hard to see the beauty, the depths of beauty of the self.

This piece about judgment and self-blame, it's actually quite interesting when we go into views of self and suffering and healing and the enchantment of that. Sometimes what happens is a person has a strand or strands of suffering in their life that seem to last a long time, seem to be painfully persistent over years and decades. Then they're exposed to some psychological paradigm or work or idea, and they come up with what they believe is an explanation for their suffering, for the persistence of those patterns in their life. It might be certain wounds in the history, in the family -- these are causal. Maybe a situation, ongoing situation or an event, caused even a change in the neural mechanisms, etc. And there this person now has an explanation for their suffering, and more than that, for the persistence of their problems or patterns or failures or whatever in life.

That explanation is believed, and the believed cause of the suffering is no longer the self: "Ah, it's because that happened. It's because [of] this event or this ongoing set of conditions." The cause is moved from self-blame to something that's not me, something other that happened to me, that was forced upon me. There's less self-judgment and self-blame. Then they find themselves feeling better -- the problems loosening, the patterns loosening, the problems alleviating a little bit.

Does that mean that that explanation is necessarily true, is necessarily real? Or is it that what's happened is just the shifting away from the self as what is to blame? The alleviation of the self-judgment is what is actually healing there, that is actually the element that's causative in the healing. What's actually going on? Because the self-judgment, the self-blame, can be part of a kind of cyclic mechanism that holds the whole patterns, and dukkha, and problems, and failures, persistent failures in place. It's the self-judging. By whatever explanation, that's relieved, and something begins expanding and moving. There's essentially a re-storying that happens, an alternative narrative. Instead of, "I'm hopeless. I'm a failure. It's my fault," etc. -- which may even be implicit, almost sub-verbal -- there's a re-storying of the past away from self-blame, and this is actually what liberates, maybe.

What's going on there? These re-storyings, in different cultures, can be vastly different. I remember years ago when I lived in the States and I was studying music. I used to go around to a friend's house, Hikaru. He was Japanese, from Japan. He was also studying jazz guitar. We used to play together. We used to jam together for hours. My Japanese was completely non-existent, but his English was really not very good at all. So our conversations were quite limited. He was generally a very buoyant personality, but one day I went over in the evening and he was clearly really down. I was trying to understand: can I do anything? What's going on? In his English -- he did have some English, and it wasn't that bad, really -- he said, "It's my ancestors." He didn't mean, "It's my family, or something that happened to me in my childhood." "It's my ancestors." He was talking from a whole different paradigm, a whole different set of beliefs that was clearly still used and operative in Japan. "It's my ancestors," he said.

But that view of it was clearly something that enabled him to get a little distance from it, to not self-blame, to make him okay with this dukkha that was there. So are these different views of what's causative for my suffering and my patterns, or my difficulties or persistent difficulties -- are we talking about truths? If I explain it like this, and then that helps, does that mean it's true? Or are we actually talking about the power of beliefs, of interpretations? Are we seeing how the view and the interpretation of something has an effect (which is part of the theme of these whole teachings that we're giving)? What's going on there?

[36:12] Re-storying is part of healing. It's a big part of healing. We can have a naïve understanding of what's happening there -- just believe, "Now I've seen the truth." Or actually a more sophisticated and I'd say honest understanding -- re-storying, re-fantasying, re-imaging, recognizing that this is necessary and part of our humanity, part of enchanting, part of our psychology, and certainly part of healing. Even when we see, for example, this person, I can see them, or they tell me about how they're caught in this painful triangle with a friend and an authority figure, and then they report something in the past of a similar painful triangle with a sibling and a parent, and the current situation and the pain of that seems to be replicating past family relationships and triangles and difficulties, etc. It seems to be replicating. We can easily think, "Ah, yes. The cause is there. The cause was in the instance in the family, in the past." But not necessarily. That's not proven. It's not proven that implies that the family, the prior historical one, was the cause of the thing that happened later in time.

What about this notion, when I use this phrase of some thing, some element of our self, or some image, having its roots in divinity, having its origins in divinity? I don't mean its temporal origins. What about archetypal causes as an idea? Not the only possible way of interpreting things, way of explaining, as "the cause is in the past human history." Maybe the cause is archetypal. Maybe this triangle is archetypal. Now, of course, one version of that is the whole Oedipal thing, but I'm not necessarily talking about that at all. But it's putting the causes, or entertaining the idea that the causes are not purely human and historical and concrete in origin from the past, etc. If I don't allow that kind of causality, then I will be fixed only on a certain range of possible causes, because that kind of archetypal causality is simply not in my frame. The image is primary, that as an idea -- you've maybe heard me say that in other talks, other retreats. If I exclude that idea, then my frame for possible causes can only contain so much. I automatically make an assumption, an explanation, and it seems obvious.

Years ago, I remember in this psychology class or something this photo that psychologists took and showed to people and asked them, "What do you think is going on here?" The photo was a street, clearly in London in the seventies, or not necessarily London -- it was a UK city in what looked like the seventies. The photo was of people on the street and the relatively busy high street. Within these people walking around and shopping and whatever were two figures. One was a Black man running in a certain direction down the street, through the people. Behind him, about 10 or 20 yards, was a policeman in a police uniform, a white policeman in a uniform. They said, "What do you think is happening in this photo?" Most people said a policeman is chasing a criminal. Part of the thrust of what they were trying to get at was the sort of implicit racism, etc., but also something about frames in here. It actually turned out, what they said was actually this was a photo of two policemen, a Black plainclothes policeman that you see there in front by 10 or 20 yards of a white uniformed policeman, chasing a criminal who is not in the picture. He's out of the frame.

So a certain causal interpretation of what's happening is constrained or conditioned by the frame. By 'frame' here, you can see that it's perceptual as well as conceptual. So, similar in relation to suffering and healing and causality there. Of course, we can see that the images that arise for us have their origins in the past as well. They're not completely out of the blue, autonomous, from beyond, no relationship to our life. We see that that is the case too. Any exploration of imaginal practice will see that. But if I only regard images as being a result of the past, then that won't give them that divine dimension that we've been saying is so important. Could I see, could I extend that? Yes, of course, images arise from the past. But not only.

Maybe even extending it further, an even more radical idea: maybe my past also has its roots in divinity, its roots in archetypal causes, if you like, its roots in archetypal images. So this person who seems to be replicating an early family pattern, it's not that that early family pattern was a cause of what's being played out now in other relationships, contemporary relationships, but both are actually mirroring an archetypal cause. Where is the causality here, and what's going on? This is a whole opening up, then, of our whole sense of existence. Not just images [that are] intrapsychic, but the events of our life are archetypal, are divine, in origin. They have their roots in divinity. That's a much more radical and far-reaching idea. Something of the divinity of everything is much more deeply integrated into the view. So we can talk about a mirroring there -- maybe not even a causality in the divine, but more like a mirroring. The archetypal, the early family, and the contemporary, all these events and experiences and whatever, they're all mirroring each other. Where is the causality here?

This is interesting, if we just stay with this idea of causality now, because it actually has a tremendous bearing on this question of re-enchantment of self and dukkha and other aspects of our being. We could say maybe there are three or four notions of causality that are possible. (1) We can, of course, have a sense that the past, something in the past, some thing or event or some set of conditions, caused the present. The past causes the present. Of course, that is the most common -- if not the exclusive -- understanding that we tend to have of causality, the exclusive notion of causality. Past causes the present. Of course it does. What else does? Past experience, past event, causes present event, present experience.

(2) But there's also a notion of the present causing the present that's possible. I mentioned in another talk this idea of non-locality, this instantaneous fact, discovered experimentally, that even over vast distances, astronomical distances, two particles can actually affect each other instantaneously. The present, if you like, causes the present. That's not the kind of thing I'm talking about right now. More I want to talk about or emphasize the understanding that's necessary for a Dharma practitioner: to understand how views in the present fabricate the perception in the present. The conception and the view, the way of looking, in the present, in this moment, fabricates the perception. This is not something that happens in time. It's a dependent arising. We understand the teaching of dependent co-origination, as the Buddha said, paṭiccasamuppāda -- how the present causes the present. We start to wonder about that word, 'cause.' But that's the second way of a notion of causality.

(3) A third possibility is the idea that the future, the notion that the future causes the present. A future event, or something in the future, so to speak, causes the present. Again, there's a parallel in modern physics. John Archibald Wheeler proposed certain experiments where you could actually see this, or the possibility of that. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking more about the idea of telos, the Greek word telos, of what Corbin called "the angel out ahead." This image that we have that's calling us to something. It's not so much about foretelling the future, but it's calling us to our destiny, to our future, to our fulfilment, to our living out an embodying of an image, our individuation, all of that. So, causality from the past, causality from the present, causality from the future, and that as a notion or an idea.

(4) [47:41] We could also talk about a fourth option that's kind of overlapping with the third: atemporal causality. What exists, if you like, in us but also for us, but exists, if you like, beyond time, atemporal, and exists for us as blessing and as challenge. Beyond time. It exists in us and for us. You see, if we pay attention to our lives, the gifts that we have also bring with them challenges. We need to learn, to grow into, to develop skill and art in relating to the blessings and the gifts that we are given, because they also bring particular challenges with them. But what exists, if you like, as a kind of cause, atemporally, beyond time. The integration of that and the consciousness of that happen in the linear time and through the linear time of our lives and our consciousness unfolding, but, if you like, they come from or they exist beyond time.

So there are four possible notions of causality -- three, or four, depending -- but the causality from the past is by far the dominant idea, almost universally accepted. I've seen and experienced a Dharma teacher gives a talk, and talks about how the past (perhaps trauma in the family or this and that) causes the present; how the difficulties, the dukkha we have from the past, or even intrauterine, or in the struggles of the embryo -- sometimes I've even heard in the struggles of the sperm to reach the egg -- all of that is a cause of what happens later. The past causes the current experience, and in that explanation -- that supposedly is an explanation and an understanding, and there's a kind of liberation that comes with that -- it's a certain view of causality and of dukkha. I think this is very, very significant. What do we do with causality and time, and how does that affect time? What does it affect in terms of both our sense of suffering and liberation from suffering, but also the enchantment or the possibilities of enchantment of suffering and also of self? Let's stay with this a little bit.

Probably since Freud -- I don't know; I imagine starting with Freud -- and nowadays, I'd say most psychoanalysts or certain psychotherapists, certainly psychoanalysts, would, in their relationship both to dreams and to images, construe them as coming from the past. They have their origins in the past. So the dream is conveying something, some pain, or triggered by something in the past, whether it's in a purely mundane, uninteresting way, or something deeper from the past. That goes for dreams and images. The origin, the causality, is in the past -- maybe the past as it runs into the present, but from the past. So I just wonder what happens, as in so much of what we're talking about, what happens if we just can have enough wiggle room, enough space inside the consciousness and flexibility, to just suspend that assumption, that the images that come to us are coming from the past, that the dreams that come to us are coming from the past?

Actually, in terms of dreams, you may have seen this. How often we dream something, and we see many dreams, if we pay attention not just to what happens in the days before -- because certainly dreams pick up the remnants or the fragments, the debris, the flotsam and jetsam of the days before, and use that -- not only that level of past, but also the deeper past and wounding and all that. Dreams pick up not just the past, but they also kind of indicate and usher in the future. They open to the future. There's a forward moving to dreams, let's say.

This could be something very banal: I ordered something ages ago, and it just hasn't arrived and hasn't arrived, and then I have a dream, and lo and behold, in the next one or two days, the thing shows up after all this time. Or, more common, something like I see an old friend once in a blue moon, I hear from them once in a blue moon, we get together once in a blue moon. I have a dream from them, and one or two days later, in the next couple of days, they call. Or something deeper for us, something more complex, something like a dream comes and it has perhaps a particular kind of religious feeling to it, if we use that language. Or it has in it a particular kind of creativity, let's say. We dream in that way, and the dream touches us and moves us, perhaps. There's a beauty to it; it goes deep. And then one or two days later -- or a short time later; often that one or two days seems to be characteristic of this forwardness of dreams -- a short time later, there's an opening or an advent, an arrival of something in the being related to the essence of that dream or that image that I had. Or there is at least, a few days later, the beginning or an initiation into some opening -- a new spiritual direction, a new practice, a new kind of creativity, as I said, that's really something that then unfolds over years, but the beginning happened just shortly after the dream. So there's this, dreams as opening to, indicating the future, ushering in the future.

What does this imply? What might this imply? And what is the self when we have these kind of dreams and these kind of images, 'premonitory' if that's kind of the word? What is the self? Is it just the result of the past, just the result of my family upbringing and societal conditioning, just the result of my genes and biological evolution? Of course it involves all that. But only part. Only some levels, perhaps. If we pay attention, if we're open, and if our frame is open enough, we can see we are visited, we are summoned, we are called by visions, by dreams, by angels, if you like. In that, we're connected to the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal realm. We're connected to the angels of that realm. We're not separate from that dimension of existence, that imaginal realm.

You could say, of course, that that dimension is an element of the self. But you could also say we are an element, an aspect, of that dimension -- both. And integral to that dimension (we mentioned this in other talks) is that the self is not just limited in the ways that we usually feel our selves to be spatially and temporally. The self is more than just something spatial and temporal: "I exist here, and I exist now, and I exist from this point to that point, birth to death," or some would say even longer than that, beyond death, etc. Something in us, something of the self, a dimension of the self, exists beyond space, beyond time. We are not only trapped, or only -- to borrow Heidegger's phrase -- thrown into linear time, the inexorable marching of time, in his case towards death or whatever. Sure, there's time. Sure, that's a fact or a dimension, an aspect, of a certain dimension of our existence. But we're not only that. You get this sense of the self, our being, being more than just spatial and temporal. Not just trapped in time, nor actually just trapped in space as it is usually conceived.

Again, repeating something I said before in another talk: both in the meditative playing with the lessening of fabrication, with unfabricating, with that spectrum of the fabrication of perception, both in that or through that, both through imaginal practice and entering into iconic images and magical and tantric worlds through these practices that we're doing and imaginal practice, both that and the experimenting with the fabrication of perception in meditation, time collapses, if you like, if we want to use that word, or explodes, or we have different tastes, different glimpses, different openings to eternity, to what is timeless. Through all of this, and this forward-lookingness of dreams, this premonitory aspect of images, all of that, we recognize that a dimension or dimensions of the self are beyond space, beyond time, and that in different ways as well.

Regarding this, we talked about Corbin and the "the angel out ahead," and this idea of images, this telos, this future calling us to something, or something beyond time then finding its way into our life as blessing, as challenge. Listen to something from Henry Corbin. He says:

The ritual celebrated by man [by human being] in the temple of his being is his own metamorphosis [his own transformation, transubstantiation], the bringing to birth within himself of that Form of himself which conforms to the angelic archetype.^[3]

This is the angel out ahead. Through imaginal practice, this ritual celebrated by a human being in the temple of their own being is your own metamorphosis, your own transformation into that angel out ahead, the bringing to birth within himself/herself of that form of oneself which conforms to the angelic archetype. He gives a capital to the F of Form; there's a kind of Platonic idea there of something inherently existing, which we're playing with as an idea, but not holding to as a truth (we can also see the dependent arising of that).

But note also a difference here with, say, a lot of tantric practices in tantric Buddhism, where the ritual celebrated, the angel or deva or deity visualized and practised with and imagined, is actually pre-prescribed. I've touched on this before. In Corbin's version of Islamic practice, the angel is, so to speak, conformed to the individual, to the person. The archetype is not universal. So this angel out ahead is very particular to me. You also get that in Jung, the individuation, that an archetype is something we never actually experience. What we experience is individualized images that appear to us conditioned both by the archetype that we can never know and the way that forms the image, but also by my personality and cultural conditioning, all kinds of things.

[1:01:36] But something here needs opening up in the view, to say this over and over again -- in particular, in relation to suffering, and in particular in relation to the self and the suffering self in this case. Taking that direction from what we've just talked about from Corbin and in tantra, again, Nietzsche refers to seeing "the madman" -- in other words, your craziness, your difficulty -- "as the mask and speaking-trumpet of a divinity."^[4] Back to that idea of persona that I mentioned on other retreats. My personhood, including my craziness, my struggles, my weirdness, my eccentricities, and my suffering, "the madman as the mask and speaking-trumpet of a divinity." Per + sona, what sounds through my personality, my dukkha, the particularities of my life. How do we tend to view and conceive of our madness, our suffering? It's often not as the speaking-trumpet of divinity, or if a person does that, it tends towards some kind of mania, and it's over-literalized, it's reified, it's clung to, there's too much identification. So there's an art here. We're going to come back to that. Delicate, tricky. It involves skill, navigation, insight.

But in all of this, again, to pick up something I mentioned earlier, we see so much the tendency of reduction to what we call a secular humanism, in the way that we regard what the human is, the way we regard our suffering, in the ways that we regard what healing actually is and involves. There's this reduction to secular humanism that has become so endemic, so saturated, so sedimented into our modernist view. Healing the past, I would say, is only one level of healing. Healing the past is only one level of healing. It's only one conception of what healing can extend to and embrace. For us so often nowadays, that's what 'healing' means, psychologically at least. What about the healing of the imaginal? The healing of concretizing? Liberation from concretizing, liberation and healing from any fixed singleness of vision, singleness of view -- whether that's physicalism, or on the other extreme, a kind of New Age reificationism of angels or whatever it is. Any kind of fundamentalism, religious or secular, secular humanism, whatever it is -- liberation from all that, and a liberation of soulfulness and soulmaking. That's another level of healing, the liberation of soulmaking and soulfulness, the full liberation of the spaces and the depths into which that soulmaking can expand.

Now, over time, over a lot of practice and a lot of work -- well, usually over time -- maybe a person experiences both levels of healing: the healing of the past and the difficulties of upbringing and societal conditioning and schooling and family and all that craziness, and this other healing, the healing of the imaginal, the healing of the fixedness of view, the healing of fundamentalism and the rigidities, and the healing, the liberation of soulmaking -- the fullness of that, or the allowing of more and more fullness of that. A person experiences both, opens to both, goes through both, and looks back, and may feel that this second kind of healing -- the healing of the imaginal, of the soulmaking -- actually, of the two, this is the wider healing, the deeper healing, the more radical healing, and maybe often even the more necessary healing.

Again, we're back to this question of order: do I need to do the healing of my past before I open to all this soulmaking and re-enchantment business? Oftentimes that's the assumption. But I actually don't know. I think it varies. It really varies. It's a delicate, complex, individual question. But I would say that rather than an order being universally necessary -- that's certainly not true -- or even in an individual case, it's more a case of asking: what needs to happen here?

The fruits of each kind of healing, or gaining the fruits, or a successful healing (if we can even use such a word), that's actually dependent in each case -- whether we're talking about healing the past or healing the imaginal, etc. -- in each case, it's dependent on the development of certain skills, certain capacities, certain insights, certain abilities, psychologically and in relationship. The fruits of each depend on that, rather than "first I need to do this, and then I need to do that." Each one of these healing dimensions needs a whole host of capacities. If we're talking about healing the past, it involves compassion, it involves the different flavours of compassion, it involves learning how to feel our feelings and tune into them and hold them and have the capacity for them, psychological discrimination. Many kinds of skills and capacities come together to allow that healing of the past. I've talked about that in other places; I'm not going to go into it now. But the same thing with healing the imaginal. Each of them is dependent on different capacities, rather than "this needs to happen, this kind of healing, and then that kind of healing; this kind of grounding, then that kind of grounding," or whatever.

As I said before, in regard to healing, or in regard to our suffering, or in regard to self, so commonly there's this reduction to some kind of secular humanist idea, or a reduction to secular humanism. And even in regards to art and our relationship with art. Oscar Wilde wrote, "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."^[5] Now, for some people, that would be like, "What?" "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," he wrote. Huh. What's going on there? Well, there are a couple of meanings here. 'Genuine' is from the Latin genuinus, and it actually means 'inborn*.'* It's different than what we usually take it to mean. Inborn. So all bad poetry springs from inborn feeling, i.e. (we could interpret what he's saying this way) as my personal feeling. All bad poetry is usually too personal. It's too conceived in terms of the secular human, not something beyond the human, or divine, or whatever. "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." It's too "me and my history," or whatever it is. There's something too simplistically, one-dimensionally human about it. But of course, 'genuine' has this more common meaning to do with authenticity as opposed to artificiality. Again, that also, I think, is implicit in what Oscar Wilde wrote. "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." This idea that we have to be authentic and true to what is authentic, and what is so-called authentic carries much more soul and weight and importance than what is artificial, what is artifice.

I'm going to quote Nietzsche again. He wrote, "The worst of all tastes, the taste for the unconditional" -- now, that needs a little unpacking. He's already starting something that's a little complex there. By "the unconditional," he doesn't mean the Unconditioned, the Unfabricated, in the way that some Buddhists might use that word. He means, the word is conceived in a certain way that leaves no space for art, for the emptiness of things, and for the creativity to come into relationship with things. So it's just unconditional; it cannot be conditioned by our creativity, or realized to be a dependent arising. "The worst of all tastes" is the idea that wants this or that or anything -- or concept, or self, or whatever -- to not be empty, to not be open to the art of creative interpretation and shaping. This is the worst of all tastes, he said. He goes on:

[It's] cruelly misused and made a fool of until a man learns to introduce a little art into his feelings [and] even to venture trying the artificial: as genuine artists of life do.^[6]

To introduce a little art into his, into her feelings, and even to venture trying the artificial -- this encouragement, again, to not be shy of artifice. You could see that in mettā practice, very simple. If you like, we're acting as if something were true, as if a certain view was true, or entering into something -- I may be angry, and I'm saying, "May you be well," etc. There's a little bit of artifice there. Actually a lot of artifice in some instances. I'm not pretending that I'm not feeling that, but there's a place for [artifice]. You see as we get more into understanding and experiencing the fabrication of things how much our experience, our feelings in this case, emotions and vedanā -- actual sensation of pleasantness and unpleasantness -- is shaped and shapeable by the view, artifice and allowing artifice into our feelings, our emotions, and our vedanā. We learn to shape and reshape and refabricate even basic pleasantness and unpleasantness. What is unpleasant, very often, we can learn how to convert that into the pleasant, just by shifting the view. And we see how much the view of something contributes to its shaping. For example, seeing the divinity of my emotion, allowing that artifice in, actually shapes the unfolding of that emotion.

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1. St Nicolas Kavasilas, The Life in Christ, as quoted in Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997), 29. ↩︎

2. C. G. Jung, Answer to Job, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 98--9. ↩︎

3. Henry Corbin, Temple and Contemplation (London: Routledge, 2013), IX. ↩︎

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, tr. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 135. ↩︎

5. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume 9 (Boston: Aldine, 1910), 220. ↩︎

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