The Jungian commentator James Hillman suggested that ‘soul’ needs nurturing as well as ‘spirit’ in human life. Our FBA Podcast , “Poetry, Soulmaking and Meditation,” Paramananda uses deeply meaningful poems to show soulmaking in action, and explains how the process can be brought into your meditation practice.
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Poetry, Soulmaking and Meditation
(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - Paramahannanda is gonna be talking on poetry, soul-baking, parents and meditations. Paramahannanda. - Okay. - She is there, they're done. - Okay, hello. - Hello. - Hello. - Now I'm gonna stand up, I think. I'm just kind of more energetic. Okay, the first thing to say, quite unusually, quite unusually, we have written this talk. Unfortunately, I can't read it, because of my eyesight, so the fact that I've written it is kind of largely irrelevant, what are you gonna get? Probably not much, but like, I've written. But I am gonna see if I can get the text put on the census website, so that will probably be a bit more of a coherent and structured version of what you're gonna get now, which is probably gonna be a bit more of a random person, and the other provider, there's a few poems in it, but obviously, when you do poetry from memory, it's probably not gonna be worth it, perfect. So just those two providers. Okay, so I've called this talk, "Perchy Soul-Mate" and "Meditation." And I'm kind of assuming, I think it's probably fair enough to see most of you have some kind of sense of poetry, and that's where I have to do this sense of probably some sort of sense of what meditation is. So I'm gonna start off just by saying a little bit about this idea of soul. In this, I'm largely taking my cue from James Dilman, the archetypal psychologist James Dilman, but also from, you know, probably over the last 15 years or so, sort of working with this idea of soul in my own meditation, and also in teaching meditation, so. And why I want to talk about it, and why I want to talk about this in poetry, is I feel that both of these things, poetry, and this human-esque idea of soul, have personally been very useful for me, very enriching for me. So that's why I chose to talk about this. Okay. So the first thing to say about soul, or the hillman's use of soul, and my use of soul following hillman, is that it hasn't really got very much to do with the Christian idea of soul. Okay, so we try and put that aside. So whatever pre-subposition of your ideas, you have about what soul might mean. So if you can just put them to one side. So a hillman adopted this term soul, really as an alternative to the word psyche. Okay, even though psyche as a term has very deep, mythical roots within the Greek, he felt that psyche had become, what can we say, had been sort of taken over by psychology in particular, and by a kind of medical model, and even more recently, perhaps, by a sort of scientific idea. And he feels, and I've been quite right, this doesn't do justice to the richness of psyche, it makes psyche into a pathology, it makes it into something that needs to be cured, or treated, or analyzed, or understood in a very particular way, which hillman feels, kind of takes the richness out in the term, yeah. So he's using it as a sort of alternative. You can say a poetic expression of what we might understand as psyche. I don't know what you understand by that word, that in itself is quite a difficult word as well, but anyway, so he's in soul as a replacement. Hillman himself comes from a Jungian background, he was trained as a Jungian analyst. He hasn't worked as an analyst for very many years. He's faced against the essayist in the commentary, writer for these days. And so he comes from background, a Jung, but I think it's fair to say, he differs from Jungian notes. I think he would say that he goes at Jung over emphasis, his process of individualization, who's somehow made, by doing that, kind of made the soul telelogical now, a better sort of purpose. I think he would also say that in general, psychology almost strands of therapy, the psyche has become more or less exclusively seen as something that's interior, so inside the head. And Hillman would very strongly object to this meeting of what he's called in soul. He would say that soul is a property of, it's not a thing in itself, it's a quality of things, not only is it a quality of human beings, it also be to be a quality of objects in the world, animal or in animal, but to be a quality of a theory, to be a quality of nature, family nature. And it's also a quality of the world itself, in terms of what a world soul. So you can speak about the world itself having something for the soul. So very broadly speaking, as of how broad he's speaking, we can sort of identify soul with less feminine. And this is in contrast, and really, we can only start to understand soul in contrast to its sort of plurality, which Hillman calls spirit. Again, quite a particular idiosyncratic use in the word spirit then. So Hillman has these two sort of priorities. He has soul on the one hand, which he identifies as a feminine, and he has spirit on the other, which he identifies as a masculine. But in saying this, it's very important not to fall into the trap of thinking this has got anything to do with gender, it's not gendered in this sense. We might very broadly say that women tend a little bit more to a soul, men tend a little bit more to a spirit perhaps. But I don't think that's very useful. It's not a very useful way of looking at it. What I think is a bit more useful is that we can say soul tends towards body. So in a sense, soul is about the guts of us. It's about the internal kind of process of us. And we could perhaps say that spirit has more of an affinity with mind. Spirit kind of likes the idea of pure mind. And I might say a bit more about this later, we'll see how it goes. So anyway, I hope that we're saying more about this sort of a soul, sort of a niche or just try and get a finder, the language a little bit, yeah. So coincidentally, two weeks ago, I was listening to the radio, I was listening to, I want to say Johnny Ma, he was the guitarist with a Smith, I don't think the word was the other one. Start of the week is that Andrew Ma, Johnny Ma's brother, Andrew. (audience laughs) It was quite an interesting, I had this guy on it, I think it's named Ian McGillcrest, I think his name was, he was a psychologist. And he was talking about left brain, right brain. Now usually I'm very uninterested in this sort of way of talking that doesn't interest me at all. But listening to McGillcrest, if that was his name, had a far more sort of nuance reading of this than he usually gets. And it was very interesting what he was saying. So he was saying, in any, he was saying there's a definite anatomical and neurological split between the two hands of it. But this doesn't mean that one side of the brain does one thing and the other side of the brain does the other thing. He was saying, in all activities, both sides of the brain are involved. But that involved in quite different ways. And he gave an example, which I found rather touching that in a way. He gave an example of a bird, a little bird. I thought I read a little bird. (audience laughs) And trying to pick up seeds between pebbles, you know, presumably quite small pebbles. So it was doing this very delicate and focused activity. So he was saying, this would be done by the left side of his bird's brain. This is a more rational sort of focused side of the brain. And he was saying that at the same time, this bird, this little bird, has to keep an eye out for predators. So it also needs, at the same time, needs is a lot more open to a wider, broader awareness. And he was saying, well, this would be more of a right side of the brain. So I found that quite interesting. And he went on to talk about how increasingly, he felt, I don't know how he created it, or whatever it matters. He was saying, in modern culture, more and more, I've got to get the size of the rational side, which is a left, isn't it? The rational side of the brain is becoming more and more dominant in our culture. And he was saying the interesting thing about the rational side of the brain is that it doesn't know what it doesn't know. It doesn't have a sense of what isn't in its own preview. It doesn't have a sense of what's outside of it's particular perspective. And this is quite unlikely other side, this broader side, which kind of knows as another way of looking at things. So he was saying as a real danger in this, because as we've become more and more this side, is that the right side of our brain, as we've become more and more, okay. - That's the right side. - That's the right side. We think, we exclude more and more. We think that's all those in the world, yeah. Our concerns, our focus concern, become more and more excluding of anything else. So our view of the world, in our view of the way we behave in the world, and we're in the world, becomes narrower and narrower, comes more restricted. And I won't go into some of the consequences of this, but you can see this very much as a sort of consequence of this to some extent, you can see very much a sort of consumer capitalism. We'll basically consider our own stuff on the whole. Anyway, why this struck me, one of the reasons this struck me is it had, it was very similar to what Hillman says about spirit and soul. So Hillman says about spirit and soul as a spirit, which you could identify more with a rational side is not really interested in anything outside of itself. So when we're completely in the frawl of what Hillman would cause spirit, we're very directed, we're very clear. We know just where we want to go, but we're not really interested in anything else. In this sense, you can see it as a reflection or related to the sort of heroic, it's related to the sort of heroic ego. So if you think about someone like a killer in Homer, he's very kind of directed, he's not really interested. He's not really connected into the world. So this is a consequence where you just get kind of spirit. On the other hand, soul is a lot more open. It's soul compared spirit. It's not compared spirit, where spirit finds a very hard to bear soul and we'll see why this is relevant. It's like it's emerging, hopefully. (audience laughs) We know. It might get sort of a hang there. (audience laughs) This is fine, this is fine, so. You're gonna have to think of this talk more as soul. It's a soul that's kind of fairly vague and meandering. It's kind of circles around things and it's not really that interested in things down or come into conclusions, so I don't know if you're gonna get any conclusions about me anyway. Anyway, so what I was thinking about soul, and this is very interesting to me. I think my main access to soul has been kind of through poetry. Partly through meditation, and I'll talk about that a bit later, but probably most strongly through poetry. So to try and give you a bit of an idea, a bit of a feeling, and this is all we're ever gonna get of soul, we're not gonna pin it down or define it. It's from the point of your spirit, this is very frustrating. Spirit wants to pin everything down and have it clear. Actually, you can't ever do that for a hopeless idea of soul. One of its characteristics is always kind of a bit vague. It's always kind of like shifting kind of a bit amorphic. So I think one way we approach it, actually before I do the poem, I mean another, I think it's important to not think of soul as a thing. It's not a thing. It's a quality of thing. And so, press, if you think about food, we sometimes, interestingly, we sometimes have this tone of his soul food. And I think what's meant by the soul food, although we've been taking it rather than literally in the way. But press what's meant by soul food, it's something that is deeply nourished. Food that nourishes this. In the Jewish tradition, I think it's probably fair to say soul food very often, especially with chicken soup, isn't it? And chicken soup, if you kind of smell that chicken soup, it's what it is, it's resonant of the mother. Yeah, it's resonant of the family. It's resonant of the tradition. So it kind of connects us back. And this is a aspect of soul. It's kind of connecting us down into the psyche, into family, which of course are always in the psyche, if you see what I mean. Our psyche is partly populated by family and ancestors and race. And soul is something that connects us down. It's a bit like if you go into a building and have a response, some buildings are very soul food. You go into certain churches even, or certain flat oil places in nature. And they have a sense of kind of connecting you into the past. Connecting you down into yourself and into the roots of your life. Where you've come from. Anyway, and equally, I've been quite a nice example, I think, to the music. There's not necessarily James Brown, I don't think, which is more fun, you know, but any music can kind of be soulful. And the example always comes to my mind because I love both of them. They did an interesting enough... Interesting enough, for example, you'd give this Alefix Gerald and Billy Holiday. That's too, too fantastic singing. But you could say Alefix Gerald, if you know her, she's basically spirit. She's based a lot in light, in open, joyous. And Billy Holiday is kind of down here. I don't know, she's got... Do you hear them sing the same song? I've got recordings of them singing the same song. I didn't know this, but one of the joys of iPod is that sometimes you get them to play songs because it plays the same versions and you've got more than one version of the song. So I've been hearing them lately singing the same songs and there's such a different feeling to that song, such a different sense. And, of course, you know, great singing, I think. You know, they have always had a bit of both but you could say to Billy Holiday they definitely got more predominantly sold, Alefix Gerald is predominantly spirit. Interestingly enough for me, this is an aside, not one being the text. Interesting enough for me, Alefix Gerald's been so cool because my father was completely obsessed with Alefix Gerald, so it takes me right back. So I sold, of course, you can't have the same time. I've been down for for many, actually, listening to Alefix Gerald the rest of the experience but generally speaking, I think we can make that distinction. Anyway, here's up the poem and this is one of my favourite poems, a couple of my favourite poems before I'd sort of indulge myself tonight. This is a couple, this is one of my favourite poems and this is Shane's theme of poem. And Shane is here, he's a very, you know, he's a very soulful sort of poet, I think you could say. And we'll have a poem and then I'll say it, maybe I'll say it a little bit bad. So this is the gutful muse. I'm sorry, I'm fine if I'm just going to spend it just to have a better moment, just to remember. Late summer and at midnight, I smelled the heat of the day I smelled the window at my window over the hotel car park. I breathed the mudded night hairs of the lake as I watched the young crowd leave the disc itself. Their voices rose out, thick and comforting as all the bubbles of feeding tent center that day at dusk. The slimy tent, once called the doctor fish, as this slime was set to heal the wounds of fish that touch it. A girl in a white dress was being courted out among the cars. As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughter, I felt like some old pike all bad with swords, wanting to swim in touch with soft, mild light. So when I think of that poem, the first thing that strikes me, you know, strikes the latter poem is that it's a very, very moist. A lot of its imagery has got to deal with wetness and moistness and slime. And this is characteristic of soul, soul tends to be moist, it tends to be sort of damp, where spirit, by contrast, tends to be hot. It's associated, you could say that soul is kind of associated elementally with earth, with water, where a spirit element is associated with fire and air. You could say one has a tendency to descend, to go downward. And the other has a tendency to ascend, to go up one just as those elements. And water always sort of finds the lowest point. So we've got, so this, so, and also we've got in his poem, we've got this, we've got the image of the wound in a way. We've got this wounded fish in a way, for me anyway, a symbol of the soul. But birds, for instance, tend to be moist, symbol of the spirit. So we've got this sense of the wound, we've got this sense of longing and a lot of longing in that poem. You've got this image of a pipe, which is the most predatory of all fresh water fish. And if anybody looked in a pipe's mouth, it has rows and rows of very, very sharp teeth, very pointed teeth, yeah. And then you go, "Hold pipe, or badge with swords, want it to swim in touch with soft mouth and light." Well actually the mouth of a pipe is very hard and dangerous. So we've got this very sense of longing. I think this is another characteristic of the soul. It's this kind of longing soul kind of longing in a way anyway. So anyway, it's a poem, I hope, you know, it gives you a bit more of a sense of soul perhaps, that kind of way, I mean, to my mind is a very sort of soul kind of thing. OK, so it's going to say a little bit, it's a little bit that this idea of soul making, what I mean, and what one might mean by this sort of idea of soul making, how, why don't they let me do it, for how we can sort of allow it to come about in a way that does itself in a sense. I mean, this poem by Heenie really, that poem by Heenie is quite a good example in my mind. Of soul making, and I think actually all poetry, poetry in itself is an example of soul making. So what I poet, one way you can see what I poet is doing is turning towards his own experience. And if we turn it towards his own experience, something comes out of that. So there's a distinction that I find very useful, this is another distinction that comes with Elman. He makes this distinction between what he calls event and experience. And he's using event, Elman does this a lot unfortunately, I don't know. He's using event in the sense of most of us would probably use the word experience. So event for him is just about everything that happens to you. So you go through life having all these events, and he says rarely, and I think probably arguably increasingly rarely in his way of thinking do events become experience. So events, events, experience comes out of turning towards and being with events. So this is the process of soul making, the process of soul making, this process of being able to come into relationship with what happens to us in a particular way. So I think for most of us these, I don't know how to generalise this, but I think we could say more and more culturally speaking we're interested in events. So you know, we're interested in going to sort of exotic places on holiday, we're interested in some of us, some of us are interested in some extreme sports, now we're interested in movies, we want, we have all this kind of info, and usually, not always, but usually very often we just go from one event to another, we just go from one event to another. And we can't get enough of them, you know, we can't get enough of them. And we sort of more and more, at least in the West, take this way of living, take this way of being in the world as normal, but of course it's not normal, not if you look at human history, both human beings in the past were born in some little hamlet, some little village, and they spent their whole life there, they never went anywhere, they never saw action movies, they never did extreme sports, they never went to exotic. And I'm not saying that's a good thing, but I'm saying it's very different and it's a very different way, has a very different effect on the psyche, so the problem with going from one thing to another to another, is that we never actually spend time with these events. So I'd suggest that one of the things that meditation offers is the opportunity to spend time with what's happened to us, yeah, just to be with the events of our life, just to sit with the events of our life. And this is roughly, I think, what a human would call soul making, and it's roughly what I would sometimes meant by using the term 'the turn towards ice beer', so in meditation we're primarily interested, at least from a soul perspective, we're primarily interested in just being with ice beer, and coming into a kind of intimate relationship with ice beer and being intimate with ice beer, and this is an old poem, and it's an old poem because I think it's a fantastic example of this, what I mean by it. To some extent, all good perches is this. All good perches is trying to turn events into experience, trying to turn it into, the thing about experiencing this sense is that it's ultra individual, if you like, it's got, when we come into something with dare, it becomes more than individual, so this is what happens when a poet works on something that's happened, you know, a lot of poetry is about very simple things, but because they dwell with it, because they kind of sit with it, it becomes something that has a resonance, has a kind of universal resonance, at least a wider resonance, so anyway, this is late, this is Christopher Reed, and this is late, and I say a little bit about this, maybe I'll most firmly self-own. Late home one night, I found that she was not yet home herself, so I went to bed and waited under my blanket mound till I heard her come in and hurry upstairs. My back was to the door, and without turning round I greeted her, but my voice made only a hollow, heart-froated, cuh, cuh, cuh, cuh, which I was unable to translate into words, and anyway, that was forced to carry, non-plus but not distraught, I listened to her undress, and I went side-by-round to the far side of our bed, and this would come, of course I'd forgotten she'd die, I raised my arm while I normal cuddling correct, and felt the bed and mattress welcome her as she settled and rolled towards me, but as I went to capture her, it was already too late, and she had a whisked, clean away, so that's from a recent inspection in Christopher Reed, which are all the whole books about grief lost, and in particular about the loss of his wife, and I think it's fantastic, it's a home for her, what I've been calling soul-making, I've tested it on, because the thing about it is that if you take that phone and you take the collection as a whole, and you sit in that phone, it tells us something about turning towards, it tells us that turning towards isn't about understanding, it's not about trying to understand, it's about experiencing more and more detail, this gives us a very important clue to the whole essence of our practice, because most of the time we instinctively turn away from what's painful or difficult, and you could say the fundamental insight of the Buddha was that that turn in a way causes us more suffering in the long run, that that tendency to turn away, even through, but isn't a turn in a way, just turn in a way, and put it in full grass, or a version, this is one of the ways we turn away, a big way we turn away is by coming up into the head, by thinking, by rationalizing, this is spirit, the spirit wants to understand things, it wants to understand things because it wants to deal with them, it wants to deal with them, put them behind it and get home with life, and of course it's something that we set for that, but when we do that, if that's all we do, we increasingly leave parts of ourselves behind, we're increasingly kind of numb parts of ourselves. So you get in this poem, Christopher Reed, sitting with, writing about, experiencing more devou, and so it's grief becomes something which can be communicated, shared, and connected with, you know, I say this down in the trying room, you know, that our basic, our basic choice of suffering is not whether we have it or not, we're going to have it where we like it or not, our basic choice is what we do with it, and I suppose I'm suggesting that if you're a poet, part of what you do is you wrap poetry about it, and this is soul making, if you're a meditator, part of what you try and do is sit with it, you try to sit with it, you try and turn to it or you try and bring a sense of awareness and tenderness to it, you don't try and get rid of it, because it's a fantastic little poem, it's a very cool one, when sometimes when you eat a poem, I just say something to you, you know, just strike in a particular way, this is the case of this one, the first reading, as I thought Christ, fantastic, you know, and then this is Gilbert Solentino, he says, this isn't interesting enough, it's called a matomy, called a matomy, because portions of the heart die are dead, they are dead, cannot be exorcised or brought back to life, they're dead, do not disturb yourself to become a whole, go down into the darkness and sit with them once in a while. So when I came across that poem it was a kind of relief, so it's a sense of relief because I think very often in our practice, we're kind of driven, we take up spiritual practice, not spiritual practice, we take up spiritual practice because we want to mend ourselves, we kind of fall into this practice, what Hillman is trying to release society from, you know, this conceit that we have these days of thinking that everything should be able to be healed, should be able to be integrated, should be able to be dealt with, and what this means is it's very isolated, very hard and isolated or numb very often, and very disappointed, it's not going to happen, but this poem to me is very tested in the poem because it says a dead but cannot be exorcised, they can't be got rid of it, there's no religious rights by which you can get rid of them, they can't be brought back to life, it's a very interesting image to make, it's just sort of there, portions of a heart that die by a cause, and of course it's a strong relationship in my own particular history, I mean it's a poem because this is the exact way we are, the experience of losing someone that we love, when we lose someone to be loved, a dead and no longer there, but of course, they are still there, they can't be got rid of it, they can't be exorcised from our psyche even if we'd like to do that, but they can't be brought back to life, and what we can do is sometimes, and if I can go down into the darkness, it's sick of them once in a while, that's what we can do, I was reminded, when I was thinking of this, I was reminded, I mean it has a lot of residents to me about this whole idea of ancestors, this is something, a game of thing, our cultures lost more and more with these in the sense of ancestors, which play such a vital part in so many cultures, they have a sense of ancestors, they're kind of there, they're dead, but they're there, they're still somehow active in the world, just as the days of somehow often very active in our psyche, they're still active, they're dead, this is years ago, this wonderful film about Madagascar, traditionally in Madagascar, they bury the dead above the ground, they have these tombs above the ground, and one day a year, they open up these tombs, and they take the dead out, these dead are wrapped, dead are wrapped in cloth, and they take them out as a treat, but they're going to dance around them, so I think it's a recently deceased person, they're dancing around with this decay corpse, if someone has been dead for a long time, I just dance, I dance around with a bag of bones, and I do this as a sort of treat for the dead, once a year, once a year, they get them out and never get down, and it's just so wonderful, so again, it's a sense that these things are still active, and I think so much of, again, this is a hillman, this is here to the hillman, my criticism as well, as a modern psychology or this, some vertices, they want to sort of cure everything, I want to lay the dead to rest as they are, but this isn't quite how it is really, this isn't quite how it is, this is a kind of the ego, the spirit wants it, because they interfere with your life, they interfere with getting on, they can't hold you back, you don't want to waste your time, and they just want to get on with your life, you know, so this is a sort of heroic, in a sense, it's not really, you know, the dead is dead with skin on the life, you know, and this is a novel for me to say about souls, as contrast, the spirit in a way, how many it is in term of peace, is that soul has a very strong affinity with death, has a very strong affinity with death, but spirit doesn't really have a very strong sense, it's not really interesting, I was saying that spirit in a way is identified with the heroic, I think it's very interesting, very few heroes grow old, heroes and die young, archetypedly speaking, and I think this is because it has an archetype, it cannot sustain us with the age, it's not a sustaining archetype, you know, the heroic, it's sort of thrusting once it's gone, it's kind of appropriate perhaps, when we're young, but it's not really a sustaining archetype, it doesn't really hold us as we age, as we ourselves start to face decay, it doesn't really hold, and it's interesting, you don't really get old heroes, you know, you get, I mean, I suppose, what when I was thinking about that, what came to mind was Don Quixo, of course, who is a fantastic example of a hero, archetyped, where it's gone obscure, of course, he isn't here, and of course, that is a very soulful figure, but he's very deluded, he doesn't realize he's a soulful figure, he thinks he's still a hero, and of course It's slightly prophetic, as he's, you know, slightly, well, I was very poignant, you know, very poignant when that happens. Anyway, I'm not doing it for my whole time. I don't know, I may just start it, I'm not. (audience laughing) I've got, I did want to talk about this one. I'm a complete, my drug of choice, these days is a radio, among others of it. And I sometimes listen to the BBC World Service, it's a service in a bit of the night in the day. I have these wonderful programs on there, you know, they're here on Facebook and Reddit. And I had this fantastic program last week, you know, it wasn't, well, it wasn't kind of, it was terrible, but it's actually a very, very moving. And it was about the number of children killed on the road in the world. I can't remember the number of millions, it was this huge brutality of children killed every year on the road. Not so much into that country. And they focused on this, and they, so I can't even remember what country was, but they focused on a country in Africa. And they had this interview with what would call a lollipop man across from the guard, you know? To someone else. - Yeah, he was great, wasn't he? - I was fantastic, he was wonderful. - Yeah, he was fantastic, he was moving. And so his job was to get these children over with this great highway that had all these trucks pondering through it. And there was no crossing, he just had to go out there and, you know, had to wave for a kind of gap in the traffic. He'd get these kids across in hopes of trucks trying to slow it down a bit. And it was really dangerous, you know? And he was speaking about this job and it was just so moving to him. - You're saying my children? - Yeah, my children. And he obviously had this little love for these children. And he obviously had a real sense of pride in the most positive use of that. A real sense of pride in this work and this job and so it's something really worthwhile. And it just struck me, it's exactly what a Hillman, Hillman would call a calling. I don't know why I found it so effective. It was effective, it was something because of this guy in Africa, he's probably getting paid for it to do nothing for doing this job, you know? He's risking his life. And he's got this wonderful love and sense of meaning. He obviously had this real sense of what he did with meaning for. It's just a life of man, you know? I thought it's so different for most Westerners, you know? Most of us, you know, wouldn't do a job like that, you know? And of course, if you start to think about it has all this sort of archetypal, obviously he wouldn't use this term, but he had all this sort of archetypal resonance, you know? So for a very, for some reason, I thought of Virgil and then taking people through the house. He was ferrying these children through this sort of little portion of power and getting them to the other side, you know? A very strong, very strong thing. I mention this because this is another example that this is kind of, he had a sense of soul. Let me say this guy, he had a sense of soul because he could see the importance and the love and the meaning of what he was doing. And I think this is why we're interested in this idea of soul, because what a soul is trying to do is trying to connect us down into the meaning of a bank, in the meaning of our actions, in the meaning of our life. But this meaning is quite different from understanding. It's a small flavor or a taste or tone in the way that we see life in the way that we being like. And I think, for me, this is really at the heart. This is really the heart of meditative practice. This is what we're trying, we're not even trying to do. But this is kind of why one might meditate to allow oneself to start to relax into or sink into or descend into, this kind of meaningful ground of our beings, you know. No, it's quite a lot more of us than to say, but I won't. I'll just try and make it a bit more relevant in a way. So I think from the point of view of meditating, we can say we need both sort of elements. We need a bit of spirit in meditation. I'm not so rubbish in that way, so we don't need that. We need some spirit. We need some fire in this sense. We need some sense. And we also need this sort of soul, which is just more moist, meandering, ability just to be with things as they are, this ability to sit with things that turn towards things. Suzuki talks about putting out the weeds and planting them at the root of the plant, and putting them at the root of the plant, or composting. So as a game as I did it, we need to sort of let things kind of compost right down to turn a vent into experience. We need this time that's sitting with, you know. So we need this, and kind of slightly paradoxically perhaps. I would suggest that slightly paradoxically, we find spirit in body. I say quite a bit, slightly paradoxically. As I said before, in a way, cells very much associated with body. The spirit tends to move more associated with mind, but from a meditative point of view, a practical point of view, what I've suggested is that we try and find the spirit in our practice, in the posture of our practice. So when we sit, we try and sit with spirit. This means we try and sit with a sense of dignity, a sense of energy, a sense of uprightness, a sense of purpose, and that's in the posture. It's in the posture, we find it in the body. And as I say, and we look in the attitude, in the mental attitude, we try and find spirit. We try and find soul. We try and allow that to be soul, which is really the essence of soul from a meditative point of view, which can't really make it happen. Spirit, our spirit is then wants to say, okay, I need soul, how can I make this happen? We can't really make it happen. This is the fall into spirit. We must be made to soul that. But we can sit, we can try and encourage a mental attitude of kindness, really. I think really it just comes down to something as simple as that. Our basic mental stance is one, just of kindness. As soon as we want something to do meditation, as soon as we want something to do, if we're in spirit, we're being a prawl of ideas like insight, enlightenment, pure awareness. This of ideas, ideas of the spirit. The only has very nice quote ways. There's something like the spiritual point of view where it posits itself as superior and operates best within a fantasy of transcendence among absolute and ultimate. So if you find yourself, there's a bit much to take in and then one bite in there. But when we find ourselves wanting something, when we find ourselves wanting something, we're usually in the prawl or in the grasp of spirit in that sense. And as far as possible, mentally, we don't want to go there. We can find it in our body, we can find it in our posture, in the dignity and strength of our posture. That can be the spirit. And in our mental attitude, that's where we're looking for a soul, which is, I'd say, it's kind of softness, it's kind of open. It's kind of willingness to be with. Okay, I've got to do that. But, so I try and get that out completely different. [laughter] It wasn't completely different. It was quite different from, I knew I was about to read it. But anyway, I was trying to get the text, because that's actually, I think, the text is fine, and you have to know the text. It's probably a bit more coherent anyway. Some ways, I think we're going to end with one last poem. That's that one. I've dropped it, can't really drop it. Anyway, I think we're going to end up with a Ryoking poem, simply because I've had a Ryoking in his old monk, you know, who's this boy who wasn't old all the time, but I think of him as an old monk. It's someone that, if I don't know if it was about the last 40 years of his life, he lived a very, very simple life. 17th century, I think in 17th century, lived in a very small little heritage. I think it was like one, you know, very small anyway. Back, basically. He was renowned for enjoying the company of children. The play wasn't in some. He was snowing in a lot of the winter. He was a snowing son of a man, Japanese. In the spring, he had come down, and he used to just spend his time playing local kids. He said that he was never refused. A game of go, go to Chinese, Japanese board game, and vote for them. He liked a bit of sake, and he did a bit of meditation, and he wrote poems just what he did, and a fantastic poem. And when he was 70, I think he was 70, already quite proud. He had a few years to live. He fell deeply in love with a nun. Of a 28th edition, I don't know how you pronounce an imitation. And interestingly enough, as a mutual female, I have done the second book of the last year, and he wrote some beautiful love poetry for you. And it was her, actually. I mean, some of you with no reopening, but he's regarded as a national treasure in Japan. He kind of encapsulates this particular sort of soulful quality of Japanese culture. And he loved to do it. It was his nun after his death, who was largely responsible for collecting, and getting his parents published. He wasn't interested in his life, you know, in comparison. It was a beautiful, beautiful poem. Anyway, so I end with one of these. So very self-proclaimed. So when I think of this, I think of this old man who wrote this poem. When I think of this poem, it's an old man who wrote this poem. It's an old man who wrote this poem. It's an old man who wrote this poem. It's an old man who wrote this poem. It's an old man who wrote this poem. It's an old man who wrote this poem. It's an old man who wrote this poem. 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It's an old man who wrote this poem. It's an old man who wrote this poem. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. [Applause] We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhastaudio.com/donate. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]