Dharma Seed - An Ecology of Love (Part 2)

Let’s go into this a little bit more. We said love, although it’s undefinable as a concept, we can say at least that it needs to include mettā, or it does include mettā and eros. So let’s take the mettā first. I’ve talked, and in the Dharma, of course, we talk a lot about mettā, so I don’t want to dwell too much on that aspect, but just say a few things about the mettā dimension of love, the mettā kind of love. A couple of obvious things. Firstly is that mettā is not just a feeling. It’s an intention. That’s one thing. In other words, we intend to wish well, rather than I feel a certain feeling, to someone. So that’s one thing. I’ve talked a lot about that, people talk a lot about that, so I don’t want to emphasize that, don’t want to dwell too much on that here. Second obvious thing is it needs action. In other words, again, it’s not just a feeling: I’m sitting on my cushion with my heart feeling juicy and moved and rich because of the feeling of mettā and love, very radiant and expansive. It needs action. It can be a feeling, but it needs to translate in our lives, in acts of kindness and care and compassion. That’s a second obvious thing. People who have been around the Dharma will have heard that before. Not just a feeling, and it needs action. It’s not just a meditative experience. Third obvious thing is that mettā tends to spread out. Because what’s included in the definition of mettā is universality and unconditionality, it will spread out to all beings. In a way, when we go through the one traditional way of doing mettā, go through the categories – self, benefactor, friend, neutral person, difficult, all beings – basically what you’re really doing is gradually spreading it out, spreading the mettā out until everyone, maybe everything, is included. You’re just making it easier to get to that ideal of universality, breaking it up into stages in the practice. So those are some obvious things about mettā. Important, really important. It will tend to spread out and become universal. Less obvious about mettā, and probably not really realized unless one has done, say, a long mettā retreat and learned to work quite skilfully with the mettā, is that mettā tends towards a sense of oneness and equality of certainly self and other, but actually of all things, of all others. So self, other, world, tend towards, as you get deeper and deeper into mettā, more oneness and equality. What mettā is actually doing is fabricating less perception. This is not obvious unless you’ve really done a lot of mettā practice, learnt to work with it skilfully, and learnt, actually, to understand something about meditation and fabrication of perception. Deep mettā practice, as it gets deeper, it fabricates less, and less and less as the mettā gets deeper. It tends towards an unfabricating of perception. Now, as it goes through that, meditatively, for a meditator doing dedicated mettā practice, deeper and deeper, the view or perception of self/other/world/nature, etc., goes through a range with that decreasing fabrication that comes organically from deepening mettā practice. That range is actually predictable, believe it or not. In other words, I can have someone on long-term retreat doing mettā and learning to work with it well, and guarantee that at a certain time in that process, certain perceptions, certain experiences, will open up for them. Kinds of oneness will open up. Firstly the sense of ‘me’ and this ‘other’ begins to become one, the heart essences begin to fuse in kind of one radiant heart. That’s very typical. But even more than that, and what I want to emphasize right now, is then a wider perception of mettā will open up at some point. This is all quite predictable. Everything is held in a kind of cosmic love and compassion, a universal love and compassion; everything is taking place in that. And then, even more than that, as that deepens, all is love, the fabric of everything is mettā or is compassion. These are, as I said, predictable and common for people who do, say, really dedicated mettā practice, get deeper and deeper. Rarer is for someone to go even beyond that with the mettā practice, because you have to actually, again, understand something and tweak it a little bit, but mettā can go beyond that, into even less fabrication and towards the Unfabricated. But there’s a movement here. There’s a range as it deepens. We could say there are certain typical pit stop areas, if you like, of the way that the perception, the view, opens up. Very beautiful and very touching, and very important to have those openings, those mystical openings of perceptions. But they’re characterized by being universal, and also being predictable, as I said. There’s a limited number of them, if you like, that are characteristic, on that range. One of the things about all that, in that sort of spectrum of deepening mettā practice and the perceptions that arise from it, is that sometimes what I see is a person can go through all that, feel very touched by it all, deeply, profoundly touched, and yet no engagement or activism comes out of it for them. They don’t become (quote) ‘engaged Buddhists,’ or really seem to engage much with the whole predicament of environmental crises and climate change. All this, like, “Everything is love. All the universe, all the trees and the grass and the sky, it’s all love, it’s all one, no separation,” somehow there’s not the kind of care that comes out of that that results in activism and engagement. So that’s really interesting to me. It’s really interesting. Again, I don’t want to dwell too much on the mettā aspect of things, the mettā kind of love in this talk. But why is it sometimes not enough? A person’s had this wonderful, mystical opening, and even getting established as something that’s quite regular in their life, and yet somehow, something’s not coming out of it in relation to the crises that we face in the natural world, with regard to the natural world? Why is that? There’s probably a lot involved there, but it may be, I just wonder whether, because we’re talking about a sense of the infinite, this infinite love and the universality of it, it may be that one feels then, in that view, in that sense that opens up, that mystical sense, that the particular manifestations – whether it’s this person or that person, or even my self, or that forest, or whatever – the particular manifestations can be lost from the infinite, without any diminishing of the infinite. That’s characteristic of infinity. You can subtract things from infinity, and you still get infinity. Something in the infinity and the universality of the experience means the particular manifestation can be lost from the infinite, without diminishing the infinite, so it’s okay. The whole thing, that whole movement, that spectrum of deepening mettā actually moves towards equanimity. Again, people don’t always realize this. But deepening mettā moves towards deep equanimity. Equanimity is characterized by coolness, by not being perturbed. The Buddha used the words ‘the imperturbable.’ Not being disturbed by gain and loss and those kind of things. So there’s something in this very beautiful, mystical movement and mystical opening of perception that sometimes can have a cooling effect on the activism and the engagement. Sometimes. Only to say that that kind of opening and perception, beautiful as it is – and, I think, as important as it is for the being and the sense of existence – sometimes is not enough to support and stimulate engagement, activism, in regard to the natural world. Okay, so there’s mettā, and I said we’re just touching on that. But what I want to emphasize more in this talk is the eros strand or kind of love, aspect of love. So recall this definition that I was starting with, which may have sounded a little strange or unusual. It may have sounded unerotic, actually. Eros as the desire to connect. Eros is this desire to connect. Let’s add one more piece to that definition, because as some ancient Greeks pointed out, always with eros there is pothos. That’s another Greek word. This pothos, within, so to speak, the eros, what’s characteristic of pothos is it always wants more, more, more: “What’s beyond? What’s next?” So we can expand the definition of eros to the desire to connect more, the wanting, the urge, the intention to connect more. Now, that – this pothos aspect of eros, this wanting more connection – creates or instigates a dynamic. This is what I really want to emphasize. It instigates a dynamic of the opening of the perception, of the view of the erotic object, the other that I love or am attracted to, or in this case, nature. It instigates a dynamic of opening up our perception, our view – which, again, means idea and sense of nature, in this case – in a different way. In other words, it will keep wanting to open up our perception and our sense, our view of nature, in different ways. It opens up and enriches the sense of the ‘other’ that I feel this erotic charge with, the other there’s this erotic connection with, in this case nature. It opens up and enriches the sense of nature, adds dimensions to it, deepens it, infuses it with image and fantasy. This is what I want to call – it gives it a vertical sense; other dimensions come into our sense, our perception, and our idea of the erotic object, of the other, of nature. Because of this pothos within the eros, because of what eros involves, it starts involving more of the psyche and the imagination, and that changes the perception. When we define eros as, and when we see this is what’s happening when there is eros in relation to anything, this desire to connect more, then it’s like the eros, we could say, if we flesh out what that means, we could say it wants to push through and beyond boundaries. So it manifests in a movement or a desire to penetrate more what it loves, its object. Eros manifests as a movement of desire to penetrate more, more deeply, more fully, if we use the words (quote) archetypally ‘masculine,’ in inverted commas. The words are implying a kind of phallic thrust: to penetrate more deeply and more fully. This wanting to push through and beyond boundaries, penetrate more deeply. Or if we voice it in a more archetypally (quote) ‘feminine’ way, the eros, this desire to connect more, will manifest as a movement and desire to receive, embrace, open more and deeper. So both, both the penetration deeper and fuller, the opening more and deeper and fuller. Both are there, archetypally, if you like, more masculine, if you like, more feminine. So eros in relationship with nature, if we talk about an erotic connection with nature, I’m not just talking about sensual – enjoying the waves lapping on my feet or the warm sun on my skin. I’m not just talking about this sensual nature, enjoying food and all that. I’m including that, of course, because that’s one level of connection, one level of perception and experience. But not just that. Emphasis on ‘not just,’ because of what eros is. It will keep insisting on expanding its object, expanding what nature is and what it means, how we perceive and feel it – the conceptions of nature, the images and fantasies of nature, the meanings and meaningfulness of earth and nature, the experience of nature, the experiences of nature, the sense perception, appearance, view. All that, eros insists on expanding it, over time. So it opens depths and dimensions for the psyche, for the soul. It involves psyche and soul more and more. It opens these depths and dimensions for the psyche and soul of view, of conception, of sense, of perception, of experience, of any ‘other’ that it’s involved with, the eros – in this case, the perception, view, sense, conception, experience of nature. It won’t be confinable, our sense of nature, our view of nature, and our eros in regard to nature. It won’t be confinable for very long. This process happens at different rates, for different reasons. I won’t go into all that. But it won’t be confinable indefinitely, let’s say, to, for instance, enjoying the moment’s touch of the breeze on the cheek, and the colours of the flowers, and the colours of the sky. So our love of nature won’t be confinable, because of this dynamic of eros. It won’t be confinable, either, to a wonder or wonderment and appreciation of the intricate interconnectedness of the web of life. All that can be there, absolutely. But it cannot stay at that, if the eros is allowed to penetrate and open more and insist more on its dynamic and fertilize. It will continue to seek, to grow more connection, to have more connection, to expand and deepen, enrich and give more and more kinds of connection. So it swells and stretches something more. Growing, expanding the experience and the knowing of nature, both in penetrating and in opening – in opening up a breadth of what we love and embrace, and also these other dimensions, the height, the depth of what I’m calling verticality. What I mean really by ‘verticality’ is the perception of dimensions beyond the so-called purely sensual or the purely material in the way that we usually think about it. Other dimensions and perceptions begin to infuse what we love, what we have an erotic connection with. Eros involves – again, that word, ‘involves,’ ‘turns with,’ ‘draws in,’ ‘to turn with,’ ‘to mix with,’ ‘to inseminate,’ ‘create together,’ ‘to give birth to’ – it involves more and more of the psyche, the soul, and the being. It infuses both the psyche and the other, the erotic object – in this case nature, earth. It infuses them. Those are not separate, actually, by the way, ultimately speaking, the psyche and the object. This is one inseparable thing that we’re talking about. But it infuses them, or inseminates, or fertilizes them, with this ‘more,’ other dimensions, perceptions of dimensions beyond, let’s say, the purely sensual, purely material; beyond anywhere where it has arrived at. This is particularly what I mean by the vertical dimensions of perception, beyond the purely sensual, purely material. I’ll give examples to expand what I mean. But included in all that, in this kind of infusion and impregnation, if you like, of the psyche, but also of the object, of the imaginal other, of the erotic other, it includes the experience, as I said, of the other, the imaginal sense of the other, the perceived sense of the other, and also the idea, the conceptual framework. [20:24] So it’s not just the psyche, so to speak. It’s also the logos, if we want to use another Greek word – the conceptual framework, the idea. Again, whether conscious or unconscious, verbal or not, whether thought or not, consciously thought or not, logos really means all that. When I use the word ‘conceiving,’ I really mean all that. But these two, psyche and logos, are drawn in and involved and expanded by this dynamic of eros, in and with eros. Let’s explore a little bit what I mean here, what I’m getting at. This opening up of the sense, the view – meaning the sense and the idea, the conception of the other, of nature, of earth – it can happen in a range of ways. This opening up that I’m talking about that happens through the erotic dimension can happen in a range of ways. Actually, in a number of ranges of ways. We talked about the universal way that mettā opens things up. It can also open up in a way that’s more retaining of particulars; it doesn’t tend to dissolve things, dissolve particulars in a universal sense. There’s really a range there. There’s a spectrum of how much things dissolve in the universal, and how much the particularity is retained in this opening up and adding of other dimensions to the perception. So that’s one range. Another range is just how obvious or subtle is the manifestation of this. Some manifestations of this deepening and enrichening and sort of complicating of what we love through the eros, some manifestations are so subtle that we may not recognize them. You may not recognize them in your own experience, or it may get lost from what I’m saying; you can’t find it, can’t understand what I’m saying, sometimes they’re so subtle. There’s a range there from very obvious to very, very subtle. Let’s go into it a little bit. Maybe there’s just a vague perception or intuition or sense. And really that’s a key word, ‘sense’; the word embodies or encapsulates a lot. So I’m not talking here about just ideas, ideas that are kind of just intellectual, divorced from experience. I’m talking about things opening up that are sensed – sensed perceptions, palpable – and opening up as sense perceptions in a way that affects us, that have an effect on our heart and our life. But maybe the kind of opening that happens is just kind of vague, a vague perception, sense, intuition, that nature or materiality is somehow more than just material in the modernist sense – little bits of atoms, meaningless and moving randomly, and just sort of solid little billiard balls, and that’s all there is that’s real. Maybe it’s just a vague sense that nature or materiality is more than just material in the modernist sense. Maybe, as I described in relation to mettā, there’s a kind of universal, sense of universal oneness of love or in love: everything is in or is love. That can open up as I described. That can also happen in relation to awareness: everything is in awareness or is awareness. These are very, very common openings for people who are dedicated to meditation. Often, with those kind of openings, with a person who – as I described on the mettā retreat – has this cosmic love holding everything, often at that point a person who has never, ever used languages, a theistic language of the divine or God, will start using it. It just seems the most natural thing in the world and most obvious thing. It’s almost like, “This is what we’re talking about.” So, very, very common, even for a person who never used that, shied away or didn’t even like much that kind of language, a bit suspicious of it. Very common at that point in the opening of the meditative perception and experience. At that point, people often start talking theistically. But it may be that nature and things, all things, are imbued with, there’s a sense of their being imbued with or reflecting or expressing the divine in other ways. Not just this universal love or emptiness; in all kinds of other ways. An example: maybe even, for instance, for some, perhaps, theoretical physicists, the mathematical, physical laws that govern matter, and particularly the elegance of these laws, the beauty, the mathematical beauty, their economy, their symmetry – this somehow, well, it actually is another level than the matter itself; laws are not the matter. The laws are another level. That is another level, another dimension of the matter, if you like. That, for some theoretical physicists, is somehow an expression, for them, of the divine, of divinity. Maybe, and often it’s the case, that the divine, the sacred, is there as a sense, as a perception, as an idea, but it’s very vague. There’s a sense of not really even knowing what that means; there isn’t a formed conceptual framework or definition for divinity or sacredness, but somehow there’s a sense of the sacredness of earth, of nature, in this case. There’s somehow the sense it’s not just a kind of one- dimensional reality or existence. There are more dimensions to the sense and the perception. Somehow there’s the sense that the kind of meaningless mechanisms of biology and chemistry aren’t all there is to nature and to matter; they are not all that we can know and feel and sense. There’s something, vague as it is and undefined as it is, the sense of divinity or sacredness, there’s something that’s gone beyond the typical view of modernism in how it views matter and nature and the cosmos. What’s characteristic here to all of this is these dimensions of existence – really dimensions of perception that open. We said there are various, there are all kinds of possibilities – infinite really. Mettā has the characteristic of opening up a certain series (kind of, as I said, predictable, and in a way, limited number), a series of a range of openings up of these dimensions of perception of sacredness, of divinity. But characteristic of a deepening erotic relationship with any other – whether it’s a lover or wife or nature or whatever it is – characteristic of a deepening erotic relationship is that it involves image and fantasy in the perception more and more. [28:50] Eros and psyche, if you like – and by ‘psyche,’ I’m really emphasizing the imaginal dimension of our beings, the capacity to perceive imaginally – eros and psyche start to involve – again, that word, ‘to turn with,’ ‘to turn around’ and ‘mix with’ – start to involve, and fertilize, and impregnate, and stretch, and expand, and nourish, and enrich each other. So the eros, this dynamic of eros, kind of starts to complicate the object that it loves, unlike mettā, which tends to simplify: I erase all perception of differences between people, like and dislike, and everything goes towards universality and simplicity and oneness. Mettā tends to simplify and dissolve particularities. It tends to unfabricate, moves towards the Unfabricated, towards unfabricating. Eros, on the other hand, complicates and fabricates what it’s connected to, its object. It tends to complicate and fabricate more in the perception of nature. Involved in that is more and more image and fantasy in the perception. Now, still, with the eros, it may still be vague. There may be a vague imaginal sense. That can still be part of the eros as well, or what the eros opens up in the perception. Or it may be, to some degree or another, more specific: this body, the body of myself or the body of another, is the Buddha. One may perceive that. One may train in that perception, or sense or train in the sense, the perception that everything, all the world, all the nature, the cosmos, is Buddha-nature. It’s the expression, if you like, the maṇḍala of the dharmakāya, the primordial Buddha-nature. These are very classic tantric ways that the perception opens up and can be trained. Or it may be that this body or the body of another is perceived, is sensed as angelic, as angel, as well as – or, rather, in and through – the human. The angel comes through, in and through the human; the angelic comes through, in and through the personal, the human, the material. I’m using ‘angel’ and ‘angelic’ here not just as a metaphor: “Oh, he’s such an angel.” I don’t just mean a sort of stand-in word for something else: “He’s such a nice guy.” More than metaphor. Something deep and profound and moving and other. Another dimension is infusing the perception, the sense, the idea, the knowing of this thing. And it’s retaining the particulars of the human and the material and the manifestation, rather than dissolving it. It may be, similar to that, that this person, or this thing, or even the whole of nature, or a specific tree or a river, etc., is a specific theophany, a specific expression of God, a face of God, a showing or an appearance of the divine. That’s what that word, ‘theophany,’ means. All kinds of possibilities here. Maybe, as I alluded to earlier, it’s through a skilful use in meditation of the imaginal sexual erotic, through practising that skilfully, that the divinity of another is sensed more and more deeply and richly and beautifully. That divinity of the other that is perceived, that starts to spread – spread to the environment, and to the cosmos, in fact, in a very specific way that’s characteristic of what’s infusing the sense of divinity and characteristic of that other with which there was the erotic-imaginal sexual meditative practice. Then there’s, perhaps, to use a certain language, a very specific perception of the World Soul pervading nature, pervading matter. All kinds of possibilities here. I could just go on endlessly. But what’s characteristic here is the penetrating beyond a one-dimensional, the opening up beyond a one-dimensionality of perception, opening up of a multiplicity of dimensions, sensed or intuited, perceived, discovered, or created, in the perception of the other, the erotic other, or in this case nature. On the one hand, with all of this, what I’m talking about, these kind of openings, there’s the opening up beyond one-dimensionality, the opening up of other dimensions in the perception. On the other hand, those dimensions are not separate. So we’re not, there is not, in this kind of opening, a separation of divinity and matter, or there is not a denigration of matter in relation to something transcendent and divine. That would be another extreme: either it’s one-dimensional, or there’s this kind of divide between what’s divine and what’s just matter. Characteristic of the kind of openings that I’m talking about and the kind of deepenings that I’m talking about, in the direction of the sacred and of the sacred sense, through both mettā but particularly eros now, is this not one-dimensional, opening up the dimensions, and not the separating of those dimensions. So in and through and with, infused. In the alchemical, the Western alchemical tradition, they talk about the alchemical task being the spiritualization of matter and the materialization of spirit. Now, of course, that was interpreted and explored and practised in different ways. But what I want to say here is that spiritualization of matter, materialization of spirit, is possible through perception, through opening our perception. That’s something we can practise. That is, in fact, what I would say practice is. Spiritualization of matter, materialization of spirit – the alchemical task is possible through perception, in and through perception, as a practice, as a training of perception. Like I said earlier, some of the manifestations of this kind of opening of these dimensions in the perception, in the sense of nature, are very, very subtle. So, for example, the garden coordinator was telling me a little while ago he needed to get some harvesting done very quickly for some reason, in the garden at Gaia House. He put up a note, and asked anyone who wanted to help for an afternoon. It so happened that I think mostly who came were women. He showed them what to do, and they were in silence because they were on retreat, and kneeling together and harvesting. I don’t remember what they were harvesting. He was there with them, also harvesting, and then just looking around him and seeing these women, kneeling on the earth, and harvesting the fruits of the earth. He said it was so beautiful, something in that sense, and how traditional it was – the tradition of actually women kneeling on the earth and harvesting, hands touching, knees touching the earth, together, the community of that, the connection of that with the earth; the tradition, through history, into pre-history, even, of that. There are very subtle – there’s another dimension. There’s actually an imaginal and fantasy dimension that was infusing his perception in that moment and giving it beauty – in this case, of the nature, and of humans, and also of tradition. A sense of tradition is often a part of the imaginal, just as a side point. The imaginal infusion in perception often amplifies time. It can also give a sense of eternality. It often does give a sense of eternality. But also amplifies something about time and tradition, and the place of the self now in time, and as part of the trajectory of tradition. That’s quite a subtle example of this kind of enriching, complicating, fabricating and adding of other dimensions to the perception. Another example: a friend told me – I asked her the questions I asked you at the beginning, and she hummed and hawed, as I expect anyone would. Then she related something that she’d heard George Monbiot say in a talk once, something – I don’t quite know the details – something to do with the fact that elephants used to roam in this part of the world, and then were made extinct, etc., and were driven south. But elephants used to roam, and so be part of the dynamics or the mechanisms of evolution of lots of things, but actually of certain trees and the way that they were able to grow in certain ways in response to the evolutionary pressure of these elephants sort of moving around, eating what they liked to eat. So there was something about that, and he was explaining a result now that we see in our environment, of certain trees able to grow in certain ways, actually, surprisingly, is a result of elephants being around, even millennia ago. Now, that explanation – or I don’t know what it is, anecdote or fact – could be heard in a couple of ways. One could hear and appreciate, going back to the very beginning, hear and appreciate the intricacies and the complexities of the dynamics of evolution over vast timescales. It’s just like, “Wow!”, all that working together, all these different forces. But one can almost hear it and have a sense, an idea, of that as something purely material. There’s a kind of very complex machine of different evolutionary forces, biological forces, going on. This complex machine, different parts impacting other parts, and out of that, you sort of get the evolution of this or that, and the dying away of this or that, the survival of the fittest and all that, the more complex ideas of evolution. But basically it’s a kind of mechanistic understanding – incredibly intricate and complicated, and vast timescales, involving a lot, including a lot in that, including the totality of the ecosystems. So one can hear it that way, kind of purely material/mechanistic. Or, imbued with image and fantasy. Because when I asked my friend about this, she answered that something in that relation about the elephants and the evolution of certain trees, when she heard that, it invoked in her, it made present, in the here and now perception, an imaginal sense of nature. The very sense and perception of nature here and now, as she was looking at the trees around her, it made present and evoked those elephants and their movements somehow. It was almost like they were very subtly at the back of the perception. They were infusing the perception. Particularly, she said, a sense of “wildness and majesty,” both of which – wildness and majesty – are kind of imaginal words, fantasy words. There’s something in this that the biological had kind of got amplified and enriched and extended itself into the imaginal and the fantastical. The imaginal and fantasy had sort of infused this. So the whole thing, the sense as she looked around her at the trees, around her in that moment, was alive in a different way than a purely mechanistic and biological way. It had a kind of multidimensionality to it. Subtle, very subtle. Subtle infusion, but strong nevertheless. Subtle but strong. Actually, that was the second time I asked her those difficult questions that I asked you at the beginning and sort of probed a little bit into that with her. The first time, she gave a different answer. She said that what she had heard, she had a sense of the trees fighting back against the elephants, “Like they have characters,” she said, “like they are warriors fighting back, and I, too, am a warrior fighting back.” So that sense of things was infusing her sense of nature and the whole relationship with nature: “I am a warrior fighting for nature.” This person is very engaged in environmental activism and Dharma. That’s much less subtle than the first one. It’s much more obvious that that is infused with image and fantasy. So it can be very subtle, relatively unsubtle, or very, very obvious. One yogi who often looks after the plants at Gaia House was saying to, I think it was the garden coordinator again, saying, “Listen to this plant, listen to this plant.” He was touched and struck by her language and the way she was relating to the plant. It opened, again, for him, this sense of another dimension of perception there, another dimension of beauty, in fact. This all has something to do with dimensions of beauty that are perceivable for us. But for him, her sharing with him that way of relating opened up this sense of the beauty of other dimensions, this perception of other levels, of dimensions other than a purely modernist idea of materiality. So again, that’s a more obvious example or instance of the kind of thing that I’m talking about. So eros involves or ignites image and fantasy in the perception, in the sense of the other that it loves, of its object, and in this case of nature. We could say it activates image/fantasy, activates the archetypal. Because of what we said, it always wants more (the pothos in the eros), when it attains a certain degree or level or kind of connection, it will enjoy that for a while, and then it will want more, more. In this way, it opens both the psyche and the sense of the object, and those two are not really separable. In this wanting more, it opens more the psyche and the object. This is what eros does. It’s just what it does. It’s how it works, or at least it’s my theory that it’s what it does. It’s what eros does if it is not hindered, either by clinging to a certain image or clinging to a certain idea, a certain logos, a certain conceptual framework, so that it cannot push and expand. It’s just simply what eros does in relation to anything, so including a lover, including the Dharma. If the Dharma is something we love, and if we have, so to speak, an erotic relationship with the Dharma, it will do the same thing to our understanding, our conception, our image of what the Dharma is. It will keep opening it. So it does this in relation to anything it has an erotic relationship with. It will do it with the very sense of what connection is and means. What does it mean to connect? Obviously we can connect sexually, physically. But the dimensions of connection are being opened, the meaning of the very word ‘connection.’ So what’s involved in the very desire of eros starts to open up through the dynamic in the eros itself. Even the idea of eros itself gets opened up through the dynamic of eros, through this pushing, this pothos within the eros. So any definition, even definition of eros, is a boundary. A definition is a boundary, is a limit. It forms a limit. Because eros pushes through and expands, it will push through even that definition of itself, that boundary, that limit. It will expand or push through that, expand that definition or push through it to other levels of definition, other possibilities. Hence, eros is undefinable, because it’s divine, or it’s infinite in that sense; there’s no end because of the pothos in it. So eros-psyche-logos, they mutually inform and influence each other. They grow mutually, together. They fertilize and inseminate and impregnate each other, if you like, ad infinitum, endlessly, or rather, potentially that is endless. Where there is this eros, it wants to connect more, and in that wanting to connect more, it discovers or creates more of the object, by fertilizing the psyche and the imaginal and the sense perception. In that, then, it connects with and experiences, I see and experience and sense, if you like, a larger, an expanded object, an expanded other that I love, an expanded sense of earth/nature. Because I sense, intuitively, this divine level, then my logos has to expand with that. If I just say, “Oh, divine, that’s silly. We know now, because we’re modernists, we know there’s no such thing as the divine,” then my logos has no room for that expansion. So it hinders the whole movement. But if there’s either enough force or I’m not too rigid, either in the image or the logos, that I’m clinging either to a certain image or a certain logos of nature, then the logos has to expand as well. Then, in meeting a different object, encountering and discovering these other, richer dimensions of what I love – in this case, earth, nature, whatever – in meeting that, there’s more eros, and there’s more to be enthralled by and in love with and connect with, and more desire of the eros there. The more desire, it pushes again, expands, penetrates further. Other dimensions open up, both breadth and vertical depth, and the logos has to expand again. So there’s this infinite possibility of informing, influencing, enriching, complicating, insemination, fertilization, impregnation, growing together, expansion, all that, nourishment. ‘Enrichment’ is a good word. Richness and beauty and kinds of beauty are expanded. There is a multidimensionality that comes into the sense of the other, in this case of nature – not just ‘material’ in the modernist sense. Buddhists often talk about interconnectedness. There’s a lot of talk and emphasis, and also in engaged Buddhism, about interconnectedness. But often the idea and the sense of interconnectedness is actually not vertical. It’s horizontal interconnectedness that’s being talked about or put forward as a really important value. And it is important, obviously. But what’s really being talked about with interconnectedness is a kind of material interflow or porousness of the material: the air that moves in and out of my body, the food, the sense of porousness and non-separation – interconnectedness at a material level, horizontal, at one level. We talk a lot, both in ecology and in Dharma, of course, about origins and causes. But those origins and causes of this, of nature, or this tree, or this ecosystem, are regarded horizontally. They’re on the same level as they exist now. In other words, material entities or whatever, in the usual sense, in the past, usually (origins are always thought about in the past, typically), on the same level, on the horizontal level, are the origin and cause of nature now, of this thing now, this ecosystem now. So this interconnectedness is both temporal, over time, from the past to the present, and also spatial, so connected through air and food and everything, trees breathe and all that. Temporal and spatial interconnectedness, but it’s horizontal. There’s an absence of the vertical dimension from the conversation, at least, if not from the sense. Something like Joanna Macy’s beautiful teachings, and one of her teachings about ‘deep time.’ Sometimes she says to look at your hand and see how that’s evolved from – I can’t remember. I remember doing it, but I don’t remember the specifics. You know, the fish fins or pterodactyl wings. The important point is the connection through time, deep time, what she calls deep time – in other words, just very, very long time, or potentially it can be interpreted that [way], very, very long time – and the mechanisms of evolution, that this hand is somehow connected with all those other material instantiations of biology. So that’s one way of relating to it and hearing that kind of teaching that she has. But compare that with a sense of this material thing, whether it’s my hand or a tree or nature or the environment, whatever, rather than horizontal, what about saying it echoes or is an image of the divine? I see and perceive and sense echoes and images of the divine. Or in what I love, in this object, in nature, nature as echo or image or expression of the divine. That has a more vertical sense to it. The material reflects, as I said, or expresses, divine dimensions. Some of you might use the language of the ‘source’ or the ‘root’ being in divinity, or in divinities, or archetypes, or divine images. The source of this nature, so to speak, is in the divine or in some divine image. Now, that use of the word ‘source’ is not, absolutely not, (A) it’s not an explanation, and (B) it’s not temporal. I say, “This tree or nature has its source in the divine, its roots in the divine, its feet in the divine,” as some people say in some traditions. That’s not an explanation. And it’s not something, as we usually think, “God created the earth at time zero.” It’s not temporal, and it’s not explanation. Rather, it’s a way of seeing. It’s a poetic sense, a poetic sensibility. The more that eros is allowed to do its work and to have its dynamic, that way of sensing things, that way of looking at things, that poetic sensibility, will open up. It will come from the eros and bring with it more and more soulfulness infusing the psyche and infusing the sense of the object, the world, nature. Infinite possibilities here, infinite possibilities for discovery and creation both. It’s open. Sometimes this sense of horizontal interconnectedness, as much as Buddhists and particularly engaged Buddhists tend to emphasize it, sometimes people talk about that and have a sense of it, and sometimes it’s not enough. Either [it’s] not enough for the psyche and the fullness and richness of what the psyche really wants, or not enough to support and stimulate or catalyse engagement.

Consciousness of sensation or thought occurs when an individual becomes aware of a particular sensory input or mental activity, and this awareness is often followed by an emotional or affective response, which can range from simple feelings of pleasure or discomfort to more complex emotions such as joy, sadness, excitement, or frustration.

Allow eros to add complexity and creativity to our worldview