And one of the things I want to emphasize, finally in this talk – I’ll just throw it out now as well: it may be that vivid, outlandish images don’t arise as objects for you, or much. But the imaginal never goes away. Or it never goes away for good. Only at points in meditation does it go away. It never goes away. It pervades life. Fantasy, imagination pervade our life. They’re part of the texture of our life, and this is something we can wake up to. So whether you take a lot from these talks, and you decide to explore it a lot, maybe it’s now, maybe it’s soon, maybe it’s way later; whether you take very, very little, or nothing at all; whatever the reactions you’ve been having to what we’ve been saying over these talks, whatever reactions, there are always assumptions and concepts operating that are underneath that, shot through that. When you explore, the assumptions, the concepts regarding images are part of your exploration. And if you don’t like any of this talk at all, the assumptions and concepts that are operating regarding images are part of your reaction. They’re part of what’s causing your reaction, part of (there are other reasons for having different reactions). So that’s true in regard to the imaginal. It’s also true in regard to perception in general. Whenever there is perception of anything, whenever there’s any appearance, any appearance of anything at all, there are concepts and assumptions in play. They are operating, and they have a tremendous effect. They’re fundamental. They affect our practice, our path, and our life. So concepts and assumptions are really where a lot of the power is held, for better and for worse. So that’s what I want to focus on today, concepts and assumptions around all this, conceptual frameworks.

Now, I know very well that some people don’t like talks about conceptual frameworks, and find it kind of abstract. I wonder if it’s possible, then, if you have had some images or something that’s touched you, to bear that in mind as we talk today so that it’s not so abstract for you. And some people don’t like conceptual talks because they assume that they “don’t do” concepts: “I’m not an intellectual. I don’t do concepts.” But I’m not talking about big intellectual theories that one can articulate eloquently in some sort of philosophical discussion. I mean, that [is] included, [but] what I’m talking about is the more pervasive, low level, often not very conscious concepts and assumptions that pervade the mind, infuse our perception – about life, about reality, about ourselves, about whatever. So to assume that one doesn’t have concepts is a very – I mean, it’s wrong, it’s erroneous, but it’s also quite dangerous, because it’s usually the unconscious concepts, the unconscious conception, the views that are the most powerful. And some people will need talk about concepts and conceptual frameworks to justify some of what’s been said in the other talks. It’s so strange and outlandish, unusual from what we’re used to hearing – what’s the basis for that? How do we justify that? How do I justify attempting this kind of direction in practice?

As I said in, I think, the first talk, if my conception of the Dharma is just about being mindful, being with what is, etc., if that’s how I see the Dharma, then all this talk of images, the imagination and the imaginal, it’s going to sound ridiculous. Because I’ve got my Dharma in a box that assumes a lot about reality and what the purpose of the Dharma is and all this. It’s going to seem pointless. And that’s why I went to lengths in the first talk to actually reframe the whole way we’re looking at the Dharma, and look at it in a more open and I think a deeper way, one that gives out to more depth. Look at it in terms of emptiness and ways of looking. The whole Dharma is a dance of ways of looking. Skillful ways of looking that open things up, bring new perspectives, and reveal the emptiness of things. So being mindful is one small part of that. It has its place in a much bigger context, rather than being the be all and end all.

So there is always a conceptual framework operating. There’s always an interpretation of what we perceive. Whether it’s material [knocks on something], so-called, or imaginal or whatever. Always a conceptual framework, always an interpretation. And it’s always significant what that is – how it’s operating, what it does, how it spins things. You can see this in lots of areas in our life. The conceptual framework determines also what arises sometimes. Take, for example, the area of emotions and, for instance, difficult emotions coming up, or emotional healing. The conceptual framework of catharsis: “I have something stored in me from the past that can be released, perhaps in meditation or in other work. It’s somehow in there, and it can be released, and then I’m somewhat healed of it.” That’s a conceptual framework. If one dares or has the skill in practice, you can actually play with adopting that framework and putting it down, adopting it and putting it down. And see what the difference is. The conceptual framework of catharsis starts creating itself. It’s not a neutral factor. It brings more experience of catharsis. It’s not independent. That’s a whole big subject, and I don’t want to get into it right now, but that’s an example. It’s not simple; I don’t mean to make it sound so simple. But the same is true of imagination. There’s usually – in fact, there’s always – some kind of conceptual assumptions, framework going on. So if you read the Pali Canon, there’s all kinds of appearances happening to the Buddha and other monks and this and that, and they get interpreted as devas, angels or spirits. In Thai Buddhism, contemporary Thai Buddhism as well, very happy with that framework. Of course spirits come, devas come in deep meditation. If you have skill, you talk to this angel, and you perceive them – this tree has a spirit. It pervades a lot of Asian Buddhism. Now, of course, in the West, most people think, the zeitgeist is, it’s just a bunch of Asian superstition. But there are different concepts operating. In Tantric Buddhism, the concept of imagery and imagination is wrapped up with such a complicated and sophisticated notion of what the path is, and what a Buddha is, and it has to do with being reborn through aeons and aeons, and then achieving Buddhahood, which is this almost unbelievable state of existence that most Westerners (well, a lot of people I know, certainly) find very hard to get your head around or really comprehend, entertain as a reality. And there’s visionary experiences, and in the West, a lot of what underlies the kind of spirituality that relates or holds visionary experiences is a philosophy called Neoplatonism. It’s pervading (did pervade) Western culture. Nowadays, people talk very easily about ‘the unconscious,’ following from Freud and Jung and others. But how easily ‘the unconscious’ comes to feel or be sensed as some huge repository of terrors and demons and repressed fears sort of waiting to come up and overwhelm me or attack me, full of dangers and darknesses, etc. The very concept of ‘the unconscious’ as some kind of thing or repository stimulates fear, can stimulate fear. Last talk we talked about, you know, that’s why I placed the emphasis on the relationship with any image when it comes up has an influence. When I have fear here, it colours and shapes that image. And that image is also shaped, it’s mutual, the image and the mind state. There’s a mutual colouring and a mutual shaping there. We’re not talking about something independent, a ‘the unconscious.’ It doesn’t have that kind of inherent, independent existence. The way of looking, as always, always, always, is integral. There is nothing independent of a way of looking.

It’s not that any of that is wrong at all. I’m really not wanting to say, “This is right and this is wrong.” I’m saying maybe there’s another way of looking at this, another way of conceiving this, which is: could we conceive or see it in terms of different ways of looking, different modes of presence? So I entertain, I adopt for any time a way of looking, or a mode of presence, to use Henry Corbin, Islamic scholar, his phrase, a mode of presence. And that opens something in a certain way. It brings something in a certain way. Oftentimes in our culture and these kind of cultures, spiritual and psychotherapeutic, etc., we regard what comes up as an image as somehow a part of me or an expression of me. And if they’re a bit wounded or a bit weird or a bit dark, we say, “Well, can you actually change that image a little bit and make it a little bit more wholesome, a bit brighter, a bit more beautiful perhaps?” And we say, “Can I heal that image? That image needs healing. I’m going to make something better, and make me better in the process.” So if there are dark crows and dark shadows and dark beating of dark wings in a dark corner, we say, “Can I bring a bit more light? Can I colour that a bit more light?” Or that voodoo guy that rips out your heart and eats it – maybe we can encourage him to become vegetarian or something. Or that outcast, lonely wanderer – maybe let’s introduce some friends into the image, and he can have some company, be a little less alone. And with that, oftentimes – again, not to say any of this is right or wrong; we’re just talking about different ways of conceiving – oftentimes the images that come up, we quickly interpret them to do with my past: “This image is an expression or result of my past. Something that happened to me in the past is now constellated as an image. It’s a wound, a memory, a this or a that.” Or “This image, whatever it is, is a representation of some factor in me. This lion is a representation of my strength or whatever, or a drive, a psychological drive.” We reduce it to some kind of concept. What’s common in all of those is that the image is regarded as part of me somehow. And then my job very easily becomes, in that conceptual framework, I want to integrate these things, these disparate characters. I want to integrate them and make myself whole. I want to move towards wholeness and balance. Very nice. That’s very nice, to be balanced and whole and integrated. It’s a nice image of what the spiritual path is taking us to: wholeness, integration, balance. It’s very nice. And through all that, my growth, my development, psycho or spiritual, my growth, my development is engineering the whole thing. All these images, all this is brought into, is corralled into the project of me and my growth, my development. It’s hard for us to somehow say, “What if I just don’t think that way?” And again, it’s okay, all that’s okay. It’s fine and has its place. But I want to talk about different ways of looking, different ways of conceiving, as well, and how different ways of looking and conceiving will bring, inevitably, different openings, different directions, different unfoldment, and eventually, a different sense of existence – different senses of existence depending on the conception, depending on the way of looking. A person might say, “Yeah, but what’s the right way? What’s the right way to see images? What’s true?” If you go into this deeply enough, at some point, that question begins to sound very, very naïve. Is there a right or a true way to see images, the imagination? Because of what we said about understanding emptiness and dependent arising. It depends how I look at them, what happens, what arises. They’re not something independent. So a ‘right’ or a ‘true’ way doesn’t really exist. Now, usually humans are not kind of comfortable with that. That’s not steady ground to be standing on. Usually we prefer dogma: “It’s like this. This is the truth. That’s it. It’s simple. It’s like this. Or even if it’s not simple, it’s like this.” We prefer the security of dogma, usually. So in everything that I’ve been talking about, there’s no claim of reality – which is quite an unusual thing. There’s no reality claim here. The only claim is that different ways of looking are possible, and they will open different things. Self is empty, images. Self, images, conceptual frameworks, none of them are true. None of them are ultimately true. They all become just ways of looking. So having said that, what if we try and drop the usual assumptions at times, move out of the usual assumptions that we might have regarding, say, images? This imaginary, imaginal friend that I might have, or imaginal lover, or this imaginal Jesus that comes to me, or whatever it is, what if I don’t assume that that’s from some unmet need in my past? “It’s because I didn’t get enough love or friendship or whatever in childhood, that I now need to form and project this.” Very easy one would make that kind of assumption. What if I just hold that assumption for now, don’t make it? And even what we very readily assume about the causes for this emotion right here, right now, that I may be struggling with. Or my particular behaviour, this pattern of behaviour. So easy: “I am like this, or this is like this, this is arising because of the past.” It’s such a ready assumption for us in these circles. What if we don’t just plug in that usual assumption straight away? Or “He, she, I am like this, or this behaviour is manifesting in him or her or me because of ego.” Again, a usual assumption. Is it possible to drop those kind of assumptions? Is it possible to just imagine, just entertain an image? The poet Robert Duncan says, “While you are imagining, you can’t believe or disbelieve. Believing and imagining are really incompatible.” I very much appreciate his attempt to sort of open a door and sidestep an issue about what’s real and what isn’t, and about just avoiding this whole area of conceptual frameworks. It might be true at a certain level, [but] you go a bit deeper into it, and you realize it’s actually impossible to just imagine. It’s actually impossible to just do anything. It’s impossible to just perceive, to just be. All this is not – it doesn’t really stand up to closer scrutiny. There are always concepts and views woven into, underneath, supporting what we perceive, whether it’s in the material world or in the imaginal. So let’s reframe, or a possibility is, let’s reframe the whole conversation. Can we talk instead not so much about what is right or wrong, but about entertaining ideas, entertaining certain ideas? The word ‘idea’ that we have is from the Greek. It’s related to the word eidos, which actually has to do also with the way we look. We look through ideas, so to speak. Oftentimes it’s not conscious, but these ideas, they function, these conceptual frameworks, they function to create what we see, to frame it, to shape it. So what if we entertain an idea, knowing it’s just that, it’s just an idea, it’s just a conceptual framework? And instead of the usual one of integration, we entertain an idea which does not have anything to do with integration? We just drop that concept. Not about integration, not about wholeness, and not about balance. For some of you maybe who might be familiar, a lot of what I’ve been saying over these talks might sound similar in some areas. You might say, “Oh, that sounds like Gestalt psychology,” for instance, a psychotherapy, a very beautiful therapeutic tradition, where one empathizes or enters into imaginal figures, identifies with them and acknowledges yes, this is mine, too, this is me, too, this is part of me. Beautiful, beautiful practice, very insightful and lovely, but there’s a difference in now what I want to lean towards. Arnold Beisser was a student of Fritz Perls, who’s, I think, generally regarded as the father of Gestalt psychotherapy. He said, “The Gestalt therapist believes that the mature status of man is a single, whole being, not fragmented into two or more opposing parts.” What if we don’t adopt that assumption, and actually rather move towards its opposite? In practice, you have an image, and we talked about, can you identify with that? You can sometimes enter into that image. But that’s a temporary entering into. You can also regard it as it’s not me, it’s completely other, it’s alien. There’s a relationship here of self and other, if you like. So, aware in practice of the relationship and being flexible with that. In what I want to move this bus towards, we’re not, or I’m not, so interested in taming these characters, taming these figures. You’ve heard “invite them in for a cup of tea,” if you have a demon. “Invite the demon in for a cup of tea.” This voodoo guy does not drink tea! He probably drinks blood. [laughter] It’s a different thing we’re talking about. What if we move more towards wanting to enliven these things, to animate? ‘Animate’ from anima, another word for ‘soul.’ I threw out a couple of times, what if we don’t reduce them – “This image represents that or whatever”? So if we talk more in terms of figures or animals or persons that come to me as an image, a person might say, “Well, yeah, yeah, sure, but couldn’t you just talk about qualities, or factors of mind, or in the Ridhwan tradition they talk about essential aspects? Wouldn’t that do just as well?” And maybe in a certain way it would. But when it’s ‘essential aspects,’ you get the image more of like building blocks that one is trying to collect and then put into a sort of framework, and have all your blocks filled out, again, in the sense of, it can lean towards this model of integrating – integrating everything to this self moving towards wholeness and balance and completion and all that. Working with ‘images’ may, just a little bit tip it towards this person, self, and that person, image, may be equal, may have an equal reality. It equalizes, or potentially can equalize, the self and image. Self, the whole notion, as we talked about over two talks now, can die down, can open out, can be fragmented, undermined, made multiple instead of singular. And there are different kinds of love that come into the whole field when we’re talking about persons or figures rather than qualities. There’s the possibility of what I was saying, dialogue, the shift in perspectives and values. The whole thing can open out in a more multidirectional way, and can bring quite a different kind of freedom. Quite a different level of freedom is possible. So not so much interested in reducing. It’s like when you see a play or a film or a novel or some art, and it’s all reducible to some explanation – that kind of art or theatre, it tends to be quite flat: “He represents this, and she represents that.” In this kind of mode of practice – which I’m wanting to suggest, open as a possibility – the concepts behind it are not typically reductive, the sort of usual scientific way of thinking (not all scientific thinking is like that). Rather, it’s moving away from sort of atomizing things, and saying, “This is this, and that’s that, and they’re separate,” and moving more towards making things more rich, more complex, more elusive. Can’t quite get to the bottom of things. Can’t quite figure out this character completely, this image. It’s not a world of neat definitions, of a system of neat logical clarity. It’s more like an art. The whole thing becomes more like art. Not so much tame, but wild. Not so predictable. Maybe dangerous in some respects. More full of awe, awe-full. So we talked last time about the difference between poetic or iconic images and narrative images. We can make another distinction: poetic and iconic images versus an idol. An icon versus an idol. An idol – I mean it in the sense of we’ve reached the finality of something: “That represents this. Or that image really is a this or a that.” We’ve finally deciphered something: “Ah! Got it now.” The whole world of images is not really like that. A myth is not like that. A myth is not an allegory. It’s something, we can go deeper and deeper, never reaching an end, always something more, levels of depth and resonance unfolding. Meaningfulness unfolding, amplifying. And this movement gives direction, gives what we called ‘soulfulness.’ And somehow in all this, it seems to have something to do with me and my fate, and my character, and my death, and my self. You can make an idol out of an image. You can also make an idol out of a conceptual framework. So scientific materialism becomes, “It’s the truth.” Or evolutionary biology or neuronal biology or whatever it is. But even the Dharma as we usually know it can become an idol, a conceptual framework whose tools are mis-taken, taken wrongly, to be ultimate truths. So you say, “Because of the self, we do this. Because of the kilesas of greed, hatred, and aversion, this is what happens. We basically crave pleasure and seek to get away from unpleasant.” These are all reductive explanations. The five aggregates we were talking about in the first talk, very helpful; it’s a reductive explanation. It simplifies. It’s a simplification designed to simplify. Immensely helpful at times. And in other situations – we were talking about sexual and romantic or whatever – completely the wrong framework. Takes you in the wrong direction. They’re tools and frameworks, not realities. They’re not realities. And everything that I say today is not a reality either. This conceptual framework I’m suggesting one can open is not real either. I’m not saying it’s real. So we’re moving away from this notion of nice growth for the self and integration and balance and wholeness and all that, away from reducing, away from taming. Away, also, from reducing in a kind of categorizing, a taxonomy: “Ah, yes, the lion represents power” or whatever, as I said. Or when you see someone do something, say something, “Ah, yes, that’s the lion archetype” or whatever, this taxonomy, categorizing people often want to get into when you talk about archetypes and images. But if you’re just boxing things, you put it in that box and then forget about it, taxonomy becomes taxidermy, which is the stuffing of dead animals. It’s nothing. It loses its life. It loses its animation. Rather, moving in the opposite direction: entering into, amplifying, feeling the resonances, enlivening. If a young man says, “I want to become a monk,” and you say, “Ah, yes, that’s the monk archetype,” well, so what? What does that give you? Nothing. It’s just a messing around with language. What if we, again, entertain, play with an idea, an eidos, a way of conceiving? And this is a very subtle dance here; there’s a tightrope I’m walking. The deeper the insight into emptiness, the easier it is to play with such ideas. What if we entertain and play with the idea that images, these images or archetypes are causal? They actually cause something. So that young man, when he says, “I really, really want to be a monk,” it’s not so much that he’s sitting there pondering and weighing up the probability of freedom or well-being if he chooses this path over that path. It’s not some rational machine that’s operating. It’s actually the monk archetype, the archetype of the monk. It’s a primordial archetype. That is very strong in him, and it’s calling. It’s knocking on his door. It’s pulling him. It has a power and an attraction. So playing with a different idea of things. What if we, again, entertain and play with the idea of the angel or the demon has a certain autonomy? I threw this out over a couple of talks. It’s not a part of me. It has an autonomy. This is Henry Corbin – this is beautiful: “It’s not your individuation, it’s the angel’s individuation.” Not my individuation, my growth; the angel’s. Not mine. It’s not to be integrated. It’s not even that me and this demon or whatever are entering into a partnership, necessarily. So there’s a shift here in the way of conceiving that gives power, respect, and honouring of images and what might come that’s probably been lost in Western culture over centuries. Starting in the twelfth century, getting even more undermined in the Western Enlightenment, the seventeenth century, and even more so with the growth of modernism and all that that involves. And modernism, the belief in scientific materialism and atheism and all that, it’s still the dominant popular culture. It’s the world-view that we move in, despite the philosophical/scientific breakthroughs, quantum mechanics and post-structuralism, etc., of the twentieth century. It’s still the pop view that we believe is the reality. And sometimes it seems only the artists or the poets that hold up the power and the autonomy of the image. We talked about T. S. Eliot, who talked about “the burden of what one must bring to birth,” feeling the burden of it. And Rilke. I can’t read the whole poem.1 It’s too long. But he’s describing a storm approaching, and then he says: [36:30 – 37:12, poem] “What we choose to fight is so tiny. What fights with us (he’s talking about the angel) is so great…. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. I mean the Angel,” he says. So working with images, entertaining more this direction, the question becomes not “What can you give me? How can I integrate you?”, but “What do you want? What is it that you want?” To paraphrase James Hillman, if we’re playing with regarding the image as highly intentional and as necessary, that it presents a claim on us, it has a claim, a moral, erotic, intellectual, and aesthetic, and it demands a response. It is, in his words an “affecting presence.” It affects us in the heart. We talked about this with love. “It seems to bear an instinctive direction for a destiny. Such images mean well for us. They back us up. They urge us on. They understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves. They expand our sensuousness and spirit, and they love us.” This message-bearing experience of the image, and the feeling of blessing that an image can bring, recalls the Neoplatonic sense of images as demons and angels, which we said means ‘message-bearers.’2 Very different way of thinking of things. So not viewing it as me or part of me; it wants something of me or from me perhaps. It influences me. It exerts a power in my life, on me. It has needs, this character, that animal, whatever it is. It perceives in a certain way. It sees things in a certain way. It has its own ideas, eidos. It has its aesthetic style – different, maybe. Its own style of values, of morals. What would it be to see, to entertain the idea that I am here to serve that? I am here to serve that angel, that daemon. Very, very different. In this entertainment of this conceptual framework, the psyche, if we use that word, these images, they’re bigger than the human. They’re not ‘in me’ as part of me. They’re bigger. We are in that. And they have their own autonomy and their own demands. James Hillman again – if we entertain that kind of framework, then our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. It is not my individuation, but the daimon’s; not my fate that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons

entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for the soul.3 That’s a completely different way of looking at things. There’s something – we use the word; I don’t know what else – religious in that. It’s bigger than the humanist perspective. And at the end of my life, what will be important to me? I have a sense. It will be my sense of, “Did I do my duty to those angels and daemons that were asking something of me, no matter how difficult what it was that they were asking?” That’s what I feel that I will be feeling into on my deathbed. That’s what seems to matter more than anything else. And it’s not separate from life. It’s infused in life. So if we say they have demands – we’ve already touched on some of this; I’ve already thrown a lot of this, hinted at a lot of this before. And we talked about the friend whose mother died some years ago, and reframing that for her in the sense of your duty to your mother to let her love and her generosity flow through you, and how meaningful that was to her. And your mum wanted that. She wanted this to come through you. She wanted you to be a certain way. Someone else was telling me recently they have a long relationship with Thích Nhất Hạnh, their teacher, and long exposure to him, and was watching some videos. He began – as it will be when there’s a strong teacher-student [relationship], the teacher becomes, and the student as well, we become for each other images. We become full of imagistic resonance. That’s what happens when there’s eros, when there’s love, when there’s meaningfulness. We become alive with the imaginal, through us, in us, in the perception. He became for her an image. And she said she felt it in her body, the sense, in the image of him, she said “I really felt it in my body, the sense of his inner authority, coming from his alignment and his devotion over the years.” And that image in him helped her to connect with hers. But more than that, she said she really sensed, and the sense that he (this image of Thích Nhất Hạnh) expects her to step into that authority, her authority, for herself. He expects that. He wants something. And she had a sense of him as a benign authority making a loving demand. It felt beautiful and very helpful. Which is great, but still, that’s kind of familiar language, familiar direction. Wonderful and beautiful. Could co-opt that into the project of ‘me and my growth’ and ‘my development.’ But, for instance, that voodoo guy, it’s a little unclear. What does he want? And can I really co-opt him into my plans? Or that image of the cave and the furnace and the work, and the master and the apprentice, and the creation of the work of art or the sculpture. What’s in that for me? What does it want from me? It’s different. And again, not reducing. There’s no ‘why’ here. These images, as I said I think it was last time, they’re atemporal, eternal; they’re not historical. You could see them that way. It’s not that they are reflecting my history. That voodoo guy is not reflecting that yogi’s history. And it’s not that that voodoo guy has a history: “He’s like that because something happened. He’s a little angry, so he manifests in this wrathful way.” He doesn’t have a history, and he’s not my history. And nor are they there compensating some one-sidedness in my character or bringing me balance. They’re not there because of what I lacked in childhood. That soldier who is involved in some war forever, the wanderer who’s eternally wandering alone – what do they want from me? Because it’s not obvious quite what they’re bringing me, what I can get from them.