This Fire, This Longing (Q & A)

Okay, so just as usual, this is being recorded, but if you're not comfortable with that, just let us know, and Mark will pause the recording. Anybody, please? Yeah, Nic?

Q1: differences in imaginal practice on retreat and off retreat

Yogi: I have a question about working with imaginal figures off retreat. There's way less time to sit, and there's less samādhi in the system, and you're less in touch with the energy body. It just feels like a very different experience doing it off retreat than on retreat. If I'm honest, I spend more time with images not in meditation when I'm off retreat, in terms of reflecting on images that come maybe once quite intensely, and then spending more time actually reflecting or writing and thinking about them. That feels very rich as well, but I'm just wondering if that kind of flattens them or what the difference is ...

Rob: The difference between ...?

Yogi: Well, between meditatively being with them a lot while sitting.

Rob: Yeah, thank you. That's really good. Could everyone hear that? Yeah? I think the question is it seems easier to access images meditatively on retreat when there's more stillness and time to meditate. Off retreat, Nic's saying she's spending more time reflecting on an image or writing, etc. I just go back to the soulmaking sense. How is an image best brought to life in the soul, best have its power in the soul? How is it best honoured and revered? One could spend a lot of time in meditation, and that's all, you know? That would be one extreme. Maybe that's not what it needs, and maybe there's something in the meditation that's missing. I can't quite read the writing here [laughter], but I think it might even be touched on in the talk tonight. It's like, in a way, images ask something of us. Exactly what they ask, or exactly what the responsibility to them is, there's no formula.

Sometimes it might be that it's actually a mental reflection. Sometimes it might be some creative work. Sometimes it might be doing something different, and sometimes it's much more internal. I don't think there's a rule for that, but it's listening and seeing, and seeing where the soulmaking is. I can certainly think of certain images that maybe have come up once or twice, but they're alive for me. You know, they're woven into my life.

And then one can be creative. So when Andy had the question yesterday, and I said I have this jazz musician image, probably meditatively ... actually, no, maybe it's come up more than once for sure, but one of the important things there, because there was a little bit of grief about leaving that world and having that opportunity for that music to come through that way, one of the things that was really helpful was bringing that in in a very subtle way to my life. I think I shared this in a talk years ago. I might be sitting in an interview with someone, and just remember that image, just really, really lightly in the back of the psyche, so to speak. But it begins colouring the interaction. Now, the other person -- I'm not suddenly [imitates instrument] [laughter], and they go, "What are you doing?" "Shh, I'm doing my thing." [laughter] It's really, really subtle. Really subtle. But there's something then in the way I feel myself in response, and something that is free in a particular kind of way or nuanced in a particular kind of way. What I'm doing then is I'm bringing to life that image in a whole bunch of directions.

For me, it's like a lot of Dharma work is about freeing us up, freedom, right? And then with imaginal work, I feel that we also have a duty or we have duties. An image, as I said, often asks something of us. It's not always clear what it's asking and how much actual physical manifestation is being asked. Some images, they do require -- I'm doing this differently; I'm changing a life direction, even something really big, all the way down to something really subtle, like the jazz musician thing. But it's coming in even beyond that to even more subtle: it just exists internally, in my soul, but there's a reverence there, and all it's asking for is the reverence. I may feel it in my body, it comes into my psyche, but the duty is in the reverence, in the respect, in the seeing the divinity of, yeah?

Now, all this can be worked in -- some of it in meditation, but some of it's actually asking for, as I said, life becomes image, image and life meet, and that's where the work is. It doesn't necessarily need to be ... you know? Does this ...? The other thing, and I said it in response to Andrea yesterday, but I'll say it again. I feel, as time goes by with imaginal practice, that short periods of meditation, if you're doing this kind of work, twenty minutes, ten minutes -- "Blah blah blah. Oh, I forgot to send that email or whatever it was," and then actually a little bit of contact with an image can have real power. It's this moving in and out, and being able to access more. Yeah? So it's not necessarily that I need to get back on retreat and have all that time. I think that's probably more available than you might imagine for you, yeah. Does that answer? Yeah? Okay, good.

Yeah, is it Dave?

Q2: orienting practice for the self or for the divine

Yogi: Yeah. Something that particularly resonated in the talk we heard last night was the question, "Who are you doing it for? Is it sort of for the self, or for something beyond, God or something beyond?" It resonated partly because I think the most soulful that I've felt in my life is when there has been that devotion, a true devotion to something beyond. But certainly at the moment my practice is very much for myself, driven by a particular yearning for healing. For example, if a loving image approaches, I will sort of imagine it touching the part of me that physically hurts, and then I can feel the resonance going, because it's like I've taken the autonomy away. I just wondered what guidance you might have on how, when there is that yearning for something from the self, how to open up more to the devotion.

Rob: Thank you. Everyone could hear that, right? I think there's quite a lot in the question. It sounds like there are a few strands there, so let's see. A lot of these distinctions that we've been making, they serve a purpose in that they highlight something that often isn't highlighted if you don't make the distinction. I think I said yesterday, I think a whole talk was on this distinction that we didn't give on the retreat, but. What often happens, I find, is that people feel they're doing it for one purpose, and it has the language of 'the divine' and da-da-da-da-da, but actually it's just for the self, or more [for the self]. It's a spectrum. Potentially even the other way around: that one is talking in terms of that, but actually somewhere in one's soul, so to speak, one is doing it for a greater purpose that maybe one can't quite articulate clearly. So I'd just be cautious about too much dichotomy there. That's one thing.

The second thing is, like we've been stressing, souls are different, needs are different, past experience is different, and the needs that come out of past experience or wounding or imbalances or all that, and the order in which things happen is different. It's not like, "First you do this, and then the rest of the path is all about that." It might be. But it might also be you have periods where it comes back and forth, and there are periods, sort of levels of healing the self or the body or whatever, and then it opens up, and then it's mixed, and then it ... All of that's good. I wouldn't be too suspicious of that at all. If you are, if a part of you really wants it to be for something bigger, you can always hold this healing in the context of serving something. That's more in the back of your mind: "Right now, this needs healing." Sometimes people come on a long retreat here, for example, and other people in their life might say, "Oh, they're so selfish." Of course, they wouldn't say that if a person was going to lie on a beach in Bermuda for six months for some reason. [laughter] I don't know why. Anyway. But a person can be on retreat here and really have the idea that "I'm doing this. I recognize that I need to build my strength, my equanimity, my capacity, my steadiness, my heart, all of that. Yes, I need to heal, and it's for something bigger." I certainly know long periods of time I've spent on retreat have been with that always in the back of my mind. So there's a mixture, yeah?

About the autonomy. These words we've been using, 'otherness,' 'autonomy,' etc., if the image is healing me, and it's for my healing, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have autonomy, the image. This image is other. It's not just part of me, kind of [patting self on back] "Oh, some other thing is patting me on the back," when I'm pretending it's ... you know? It has this sense; I can see that it's me, but it's also more than me. It's beyond. So that's the autonomy. I'm not sure why that would be lost if it's related to in terms of healing yourself. Can you say a bit about that? [11:47]

Yogi: I suppose it can feel like there's something sacred, something in the image, and then I've noticed sometimes it almost feels like it's being forced by -- I don't know, let's say an intellectual part of the mind. And it's gone from what I would see as imaginal practice into something that doesn't resonate as much. It feels forced.

Rob: What comes to my mind is the thing that we said about the heart's relationship with it. The mind can come in, "I've got an agenda. I'm going to do this, this, this, and it's going to make me better," or whatever. The yearning is coming from the same place in the soul. It's going either through the mind or through the heart, so to speak. So when you notice that happen, just pause and see if you can come back to your heart's yearning and your heart's longing for healing. That will open it up in a different way, probably. Does that make sense? So it's just a matter of recognizing when that goes on and finding that heart-longing, and coming from there. There's this attitude that we're talking about -- surrender, humility, etc. Does that make sense?

And then one more thing about all this. I think, you know, again, the distinction is important, because they highlight certain things, but also, not to take any distinction too literally as a dichotomy, a duality. If I follow imaginal work in the ways that we've been talking about, inherent in that, intrinsic in that, is a sense of divinity. If I just keep going with it, that divinity will spill over in what we've been calling cosmopoesis, etc., which you've tasted a little bit of. So even if the imaginal -- like right now with my illness, some of my imaginal work is of a healing ... you know, angels and birds, like I shared, come, and they're healing me. But I really feel that in healing me on the soul-level -- who knows what will happen with the physical body -- but in healing me on the soul-level, it's a healing of the world. Why? Because of that divinity in the imaginal, and opening up to that, and because of the spilling over, the perception of the world is healed, and that's the healing of the world that we're talking about. Re-enchanting the cosmos -- why? Because a disenchanted cosmos needs healing. Do you understand? But the healing is through the perception. So again, it's like, there's a kind of natural -- let's call it evolution, but again, things can happen in all different orders -- that we can trust here, that kind of integrates these things and melts the dichotomies a little bit. Yeah? Okay, good. There's quite a lot there.

Ramiro, please.

Q3: relationship of image and idea; why some people long for soul and soulmaking though it's not supported or legitimized in the culture; the way fire manifests differently in different souls

Yogi: Can you clarify the distinction between image and idea? Idea, not in the sense of the kind of thought useful to solve a problem, but in a deeper meaning. And another one ...

Rob: He's cheating! [laughter]

Yogi: What's the role of faith in this process of re-enchanting the cosmos?

Rob: Can you say more about that?

Yogi: Yesterday, listening to the talk, you were saying about the longing for the divine. And I have experienced that very deeply. It takes that longing, but something very, very painful added to that, not finding resonance in the culture -- that longing not being legitimized by the culture, by the people I'm related to, friends, family, etc. It's just striking to me, why I had that sense that didn't have support at all or resonance. It's just that question: why that sense, and why follow that sense when everything around either is indifferent to it or hostile, or tries to squash it?

Rob: So part of your second question is why that was arising for you, how it could stay and sustain itself despite all this?

Yogi: Why for some people that is something that comes to life, despite not being supported or even thought by the environment. [inaudible]

Rob: I don't know the answer. Or rather, one answer could be that souls are different. They want different things. Some people, no matter what's around them, the fire of the longing for divinity or whatever you might say, it is there, and it's burning, and it's clear, and they feel it. They feel the vulnerability, the pain of that, really, the pain of the longing, but it doesn't diminish. It's just like some souls are like that. Another answer could be that all souls are like that. I think fire, eros, desire, burns with different qualities in different souls. Some people, it's just their character to have it very visible, and you can see it's very fiery. Other people, their fire is much more like an even, sustained fire, but it's actually hard to put it out. So I think fire manifests in different characters in different souls.

But a second answer would be that everyone has that fire, that longing, and what happens is different people, different souls, are more or less vulnerable to what's around, and to that being blown out, or smothered, or hidden, or dampened or something. Or again, there are wounds from the past, or just the cultural conditioning is so forced, or the threat around it is so forced. This is all related, even, to the confidence one has in oneself, and also in one's ideas. In some circles, there's quite an aggressive dismissal of those kind of things, and ridiculing. So part of this is how self-confident is a soul, how resilient, how tough, how independent of a thinker. It's not just about faith; all these things feed each other. Do you see what I mean? But basically, I don't know. I mean, it's clearly the case that what you're describing happens, and in other situations it doesn't happen. Some people don't seem to have it at all. Exactly what's going on, I don't know. For myself, it's also something I think about. I think about it as a teacher a lot, but I don't -- right now, for where I am, I'm just cautious of saying one or the other. I don't know if that's helpful, but.

The first question, yeah. I'm hoping to at some point give some teaching exactly on that, on idea and image, because I feel that implicit in an image is also certain ideas.^[1] So we tend to think of them as separate, but actually they're interrelated. Always when there's an image, there's actually idea wrapped up. Even in the way that I would conceive of insight meditation, you're actually playing, as part of the way of looking, with a subtle ideation, a subtle conceiving. That's really important. So all these things are mixed up. There's not such a clear, separate division between the two. I don't know if that's enough for now.

Yogi: [inaudible] 'Image' has more connotations of visual perception, not of idea, concepts. At some point I cannot distinguish them. Sometimes images don't come for me, but some idea is very bold, like beauty -- not having any image of something beautiful, but having the idea.

Rob: Very good. This is sometimes why I use the word 'fantasy' instead. Let's put it this way: the amount of sensual content in an image (which doesn't necessarily mean visual -- it could be sonic, it could be bodily or whatever), the amount of sensual content in comparison with the obviousness of the ideational content, that can vary. As you say, certain ideas, it's like we have a fantasy -- I mean, liberation is an idea. The Buddha is an idea and also an historical image. The path, it's lived, it's felt, we feel it, but it's also an idea. Anything that's meaningful to us, that's alive, that we love, that moves us -- an idea of it is wrapped up, and that's alive to us as image. But the image might have very little sensual content, or it might have a lot. Does that make sense? You can tell, again, that there's soul in the image of the idea, the image around, the sort of corona of fantasy around that idea, by all the same ways: I'm moved, I'm drawn, I love it, it gives me beauty, it gives me a sense of depth, there's sacredness in this. All that is telling me something is alive as image, but what might be alive as image is an idea, or what might be alive as image is just the sense of the body and the body coming alive in a certain way. This word, 'image,' is very broad, and it overlaps with idea, definitely. Is that okay? Good.

Yeah, Suzanne? [23:32]

Q4: art, soul, and re-enchanting dukkha

Yogi: If I remember correctly, you mentioned something in the talk last night in regard to creativity. The way I remember it was you said something like all of our dukkha should be soulmaking. Does that sound ...

Rob: I'm not sure about the should. I might have said that, but if I did, it was a slight accident.

Yogi: Could you rephrase that?

Rob: Yeah, I think, if I remember, it was more the question of -- first of all, is our dukkha soulmaking? And is it possible to open up enough -- we're back to idea. Catherine was talking about re-enchanting dukkha. It's like, what's my idea that goes with my dukkha? Whenever there's any experience, there's a way of looking at that experience. Included in the way of looking is a net of ideation, most of which we don't even realize is going on. So for instance: here's this dukkha, "It means I'm a failure." Sometimes that's not even verbalized. It's kind of carried around as a psychic weight. But it's an idea, and it's doing something to the whole sense of the dukkha and what unfolds from it. Probably, almost certainly, such an idea -- even if it's very subtle -- will make that dukkha not soulmaking.

Yogi: Okay. I may have completely interpreted what you were saying wrong. But it reminded me of your three-part talk that included "Buddhism Beyond Modernism."^[2] It was such a relief for me hearing that talk because, as an artist, I find that there's not a lot of room in the Dharma for being an artist other than a particular kind of artist. I heard that and I thought, "Oh, it's okay. What I'm doing isn't necessarily anti-Dharma." But sometimes it can just be so painful and difficult to be the kind of artist that you were referring to, I think, also last night, somebody who works on projects that are long and very laborious. I actually stopped painting for a while and was living a very simple life, and I look back on that now, having gone back to painting again, and think, "Wow, I think I was so much happier back then." [Suzanne and Rob laugh] "Why am I doing this?"

Rob: This being ...

Yogi: "Why am I painting still?" And to me, the Dharma is the thing that really brings such depth and meaning to my life, but I also still associate with or identify with being an artist. I just have a hard time reconciling those two things -- being somebody who practises meditation, and the kinds of things I try to teach my students about letting go and being spontaneous, and the kinds of things I think that you were encouraging here in terms of movement, allowing yourself to free yourself up, and then working on these projects that can be really -- a lot of striving is involved, a lot of precision is involved, and it's not like a Tibetan sand maṇḍala which gets blown away at the end. It's like, this is meant to be kept as an object.

Rob: Yeah. I can say something, but I'm not quite sure how it ... oh, okay, I see how it might connect with the first part of the question, I think. Yeah. I remember teaching in France -- this was years ago -- and doing a group for artists (it was a Dharma retreat thing), and just hearing from them. The group split into two -- I mean, in answer to my sense or my perception of whether they were doing the art for the process of it (and people would destroy a painting, a really good painting, and just destroy it because it's just for the flow, just for the process), and others for whom the art was for the result, yeah? Now, I don't remember if it was equally in two; it probably wasn't. I know where I was as an artist. I think everyone's different with this. I'll maybe say a few things. Actually, I'll backtrack before I share the personal thing.

Again, we're back to ideas and Dharma ideas of what liberation is and what it looks like -- so ideas about flow, ideas about being in the here and now, ideas about not striving, ideas certainly about not getting stressed out. These are really, really dominant ideas in Dharma culture. Zen art is, as far as I can tell, always very quick. It's like [whoosh], done. [laughter] And if you have a moment's thought in that, it's impure, and then you throw it away or whatever. It's like, "So what?"

This is the personal part: each person decides what they want, but I think it's really important to realize the power of ideas, how dominant those kind of ideas are in Dharma culture. It's because Dharma is rooted in the Four Noble Truths, which is about less stress, less suffering. Here's the personal bit I'll share. And it's just me, you know. Everyone is different on this. Again, you need to find what works for you. But when I first started, I was playing music, and then I first started to want to compose. I read a book by Natalie Goldberg called Writing Down the Bones. Some of you will know it. Her idea was just play, and do a piece on this, and do a piece on that. I started doing that, but the idea was really not to care about the result at all. It was really liberating for me, but what happened quite quickly, though, is that I felt what came out, I really liked, and it was really important. And then quickly, from that, it became very, very -- what's the word? -- it wasn't like a free, light process, composing and writing. If you saw me at the piano writing, "Where's the damn pencil?!" [laughter] It doesn't look mindful and calm at all. I don't care! [laughter] I honestly don't care. Why would I care about something -- who cares about that?

Yogi: Because of the suffering that's involved.

Rob: Okay, but that goes back to the other question: "What do you really want?" You know, there are other kinds of suffering involved in that. You have to look at what the suffering is, because when you put something out into the world creatively, a lot is about "What will people think?" I'm not saying that's the case with you. But what level of that is a kind of just ego-suffering? Some people want a peaceful, unruffled, stress-free life, and that's why they practise. Great! Go for it. But that's not what I want, personally. I'm not saying anyone should be like me. But I'm just saying -- and I think I said in one talk -- some people will care more about the art than about anything else. That includes how stressed they are, or the cost it takes to do something like a long-term artistic project. There's something in the soul about being creative, about embodying that, and there's something in the soul of the product, the product as image, the artistic painting or whatever it is, sculpture, composition -- that has soul, too, and the soul of the artist making it, and the struggle it involved. Now, I can reify that and cling to it too tightly, just as we talked about, too much realism. But for some people, it's the soulmaking, it's the art that matters more than the being peaceful, and if it costs me, it costs me.

Yogi: There was a time in my life where I said, "I don't care if I die painting. I just love this so much." And then I got really sick, and I could have died. And it was like, "It's not that important." [laughter]

Rob: Okay. I really hear you. But again, I would still say, some people that same thing happens to, some people the same thing happens to with death looking at them, and they say, "It is that important." It's up to you: "Why am I doing this?" This is a bit related to Dave's question. Something starts with a purity of intention, and over years of being an artist, this is really the case (or Dharma): either we've lost track of the original intention, we've lost even recognition or being in touch with why I'm doing something -- whether it's practice or whether it's art -- or it gets infected with some other intention which is self-aggrandizing in some way, even subtly. This will make the process less soulmaking, less beautiful, less all of that. I just don't buy the -- there's a lot of personal opinion here, but a lot of the art that is made with that ethos about being stress-free and quick, it's like, pfff.

Yogi: I know! [laughter] I don't want to make any kind of judgmental statements, but it's also ... there's more to art than just that.

Rob: Yeah. So again, I'm aware I'm sitting up here, the microphone is here. I'm very cautious. There was something else. It was about the realism thing. I'm cautious about just, when I state an opinion, it becoming too authoritative. You know? So I really want to make a distinction. I have a certain kind of soul, a certain kind of personality, certain kind of inclinations. That's my business. What I'm more interested in is drawing attention to ideas and ways that we get kind of indoctrinated without realizing it, and then, please, it's everyone's, it's your soul's journey with this. You can make a very different decision or direction from me, and that's really, really important. I have to be careful, and especially when it's things I feel passionate about, what's opinion and my style and what's actually more universal, etc.

Yogi: I think in the past there were probably a lot of shoulds on my part, because I couldn't reconcile the two. It's like, "How can I do this when this other thing that I believe in so much says that doing this is striving and it goes against a lot of the philosophies?" That's why I'm saying hearing that talk was very refreshing for me.

Rob: Yeah. I'll just add one more thing about the striving. If you read the Pali Canon, there's a lot of striving in there. There's a lot of encouragement to strive. There's a sutta somewhere or other where the Buddha was talking about different kinds of equanimity -- different kinds of pain that arise in life and for a practitioner, and then different kinds of equanimity or ways of letting go. One of them is something like the pain of the practitioner who isn't yet realized, but who yearns for realization. All the other ones, he gives, "He should let go this way, he should let go that way." Here he says, "Yeah, it just goes with the territory." So the modern version of don't strive, let it go, da-da-da, it belongs to some cultures and belongs especially to our Western culture where we have such a painful relationship with self, and it all goes together. But in the original teachings, there's a lot of emphasis on striving, and the acknowledgment that yeah, it's going to rub, it's going to hurt at times. He just says yeah, accept the pain, and when you realize, it'll be better because ... [laughter] you'll have what you're longing for. He doesn't say, "Let go." It's complex. Our relationship with striving, what's coming into our striving, what ideation, what self-image and all that, it's not so simple, I think especially in our culture and for our divergent personalities, you know?

Yogi 2: I just have one little thing in response to that. I was just thinking that in Dzogchen, there's a lot of emphasis on non-striving as well. In Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā, in Tibetan Buddhism, there's a lot of emphasis on non-striving.

Rob: Yeah, that's true. In Advaita Vedanta and lots of traditions ... Yeah, the whole thing with striving/not striving, it's not right or wrong. It's always a question of what's helpful, what's skilful. If someone says, "Just rest in the natural state," which is a classic Mahāmudrā or Dzogchen teaching, "Don't strive, just rest in the natural state," how able is a person even to do that? Even given it as an instruction, it will have a lot of different levels to the capacity to do that. It really has its place as a teaching, but always the question is, "Is it helpful to me? What's coming out of it?" I also think, historically, Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā are kind of presented in a way that's very different from the context of what's around them, in the classical way of presenting where there would be a lot of striving, a lot of preliminaries, a lot of prostrations, and a short period of time would be spent doing Dzogchen. It's not like that's a total teaching; it's a gear they shift into, maybe for 10 per cent of the time, if that, and the rest of the time there's a lot of striving and devotion. Again, I think in the West, we're hungry for teachings that just say, "You're okay." [laughter] That's important, but it's a question of what's really helpful, and that varies. I think it's complex.

You know, even on a micro-level -- I'm just saying this to everyone now -- on a micro-level, it's like modulating effort in practice, when to back off and be much more receptive and open, when to bring a bit more ardency and diligence and fire. In alchemy, there's a phrase, "He/she who masters the fire masters the work." So this fire, this intensity and effort -- well, in alchemical times, they didn't have a switch, did they? But it's like learning what kind of fire is needed right now. Sometimes it's backing right off and just being open and letting things come, and dropping the striving as much as one is able. The thing about that is there's always striving at a subtle level that we don't actually recognize. But learning how to modulate that and how to do that in a caring way and appropriate way is really, I feel, there's so much that could be said about that at all different levels in practice, in terms of long trajectories and also moment to moment. It's complex.

Do we need to stop? What time was the ...? Is there any quick question? [laughter] If there is such a thing. I will promise you will get a quick answer. [laughter]

Ava? Yeah? [41:18]

Q5: at what point in the jhānas is the perception of energy body no longer present

Yogi: Energy body and states of samādhi -- I wonder if you would say there's a limit to the skilful use of the concept of energy body. What happens with the energy body when the perception of space -- would you still see the idea, the concept of energy body as skilful, or would you say [inaudible]?

Rob: So Ava's asking about the idea of energy body when you get very deep in meditation and the actual experience of the body dissolves, and then even beyond, so there's nothing but space, and then beyond that when the space dissolves. Yeah. Formulaically, the Buddha said the first four jhānas are what's called rūpa-jhānas, because they're body jhānas. They're actually experiences of the energy body; that's a way of thinking about it. Part of the reason why I tend to emphasize energy body right from the start, it's like, where we're heading towards is actually different frequencies of experience of the energy body, or different qualities within the energy body, and they correspond with different jhānas -- I mean, even before that. The whole of samādhi can be, instead of focusing on a small point and then somehow getting to this energy body thing, you could start it right from the beginning with energy body.

As you move through the jhānas, the body becomes rapture, if you like. That's the energy body flavour, and this grossness of the body is dissolved, and there's rapture in this space. Then this body becomes joy, and it's drinking joy, or it becomes peacefulness, or it becomes stillness. Then you get, if you're doing classically jhāna, then you get to the realm of infinite space, the jhāna of infinite space. One way of looking at that is, in the first four jhānas, as you go through the jhānas, the vibration -- we're back to this spectrum of the energy body, very solid or very subtle. As you go through the jhānas, the vibration gets more and more refined. The quality of the energy body gets more and more refined, so that the stillness of the fourth jhāna is an extremely refined state. It's an extremely refined perception. The vibration here is very, very subtle. It becomes so subtle that there's no body there at all. It's just space.

I could look at that two ways. I could see that that's the end of the energy body, and now we're talking about just mental perceptions. That tends to be how the Buddha looks at it. Or you could say, at that point, the perception of the energy body, or the characteristic of the energy body, is one of space. What does it feel like here? It feels like space. It's characterized by -- I could put my hand through it; there's the absence of any kind of sense of substance. Beyond that, yeah, I wouldn't call it really energy body, because you're not even talking about spatial stuff. Although maybe the sixth one with the awareness, it could kind of have a very subtle sense of a body of awareness, but not in any solidified sense. But yeah, definitely after that, no way. Does that ...? Yeah? Okay. Okay, very good. We need to end, so let's just have a little quiet together.

Post-Q & A response: navigating duty and responsibility in soulmaking

I just want to say one more thing. It's partly in response to something that came up, and partly in response to a note that I can't quite read or understand fully. It's a question about responsibility -- I'm sorry for taking more time; I just feel it's important -- the responsibility that we have to the soul, if you like. Sometimes with imaginal figures or with the sense of devotion we have or longing we have, these are movements of the soul, and they come, they knock on our door, they ask of us something. It's not always clear what they're asking, and we don't know, "What is my responsibility?" And sometimes we get a sense of what it is. Two things: one is the holding it lightly. That doesn't mean not engaging, or not following through on that responsibility, but holding it lightly in terms of self-reification and realism. The other thing, as I said before, is like, using the sense of soulmaking as one's guide there. What is my responsibility? How do I feel that? How do I follow through on that? Is what I'm doing in trying to follow through on my sense of duty there, am I on the right track? Again, it's energy body and the sense of soulmaking that we can trust there. If something gets too tight, or it feels dead or something, we get the sense that we're not on the right track, something's a bit off. Always part of the principle is this, "Am I clinging too tightly? Is it becoming a realism?" And also, "How is my soul with this? How is the stirring in the soul?" We can trust that when it feels soulful, when it feels soulmaking.

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1. One place Rob explores ideas in imaginal practice and sensing with soul is the series "Between Ikon and Eidos: Image & Hermeneutics in Meditation" from The Mirrored Gates, https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/?search=between+ikon+and+eidos, accessed 2 March 2021. ↩︎

2. The three-part series includes these talks: "Questioning Awakening" (12 Nov. 2014), https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/26010/, "Buddhism Beyond Modernism" (19 Nov. 2014), https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/26007/, "In Praise of Restlessness" (25 Nov. 2014), https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/26009/, accessed 19 Sept. 2020. ↩︎