 So I don't know where the hell I am. I am all confused. I've just lost my job. Everything is happening. Where do you look when you feel that way? The place to look is not only to your feelings, not to your interpretations, or not ask help from a third person necessarily, but ask yourself what were you in the image? What, where's your imagination? That immediately locates you somewhere. In your, in the psyche. Whereas the introspection doesn't help at all. Chasing one's shadow, questioning, why did I do this? Why do I do that? And why did they do this? An instant turmoil. The Hindus call it Vrita, turning the mind on itself like an ant hill. But when you have an image of an ant hill, you know where you are. You're in the middle of an ant hill. They're going in 50 different directions at once, but the ants are doing something. It seems desperate to me only because I say it shouldn't be an ant hill. But an ant hill has an internal structure. Now we're talking about the muck from last night. An ant hill has an internal structure. It is an organization. So the gift of an image is that it affords a place to watch your soul precisely what it is doing. Of course, if instead of the language of concept, the ant hill is your confusion. And then you think, oh, I always get confused when somebody leaves me. I get confused. When I get rejected, I don't know where I am. I just walk in a thousand different directions. See, that's a kind of interpretation of the ant hill. Instead of that kind of language, which implies how important you are, it's all about you. See, it's about me walking in a thousand different directions, and I don't know who I am and I'm rejected, and I'm lost and so on. It's back to subjectivism, and you're not really talking about the ant hill at all any longer. You've left the image. Instead of that, you can talk to the confusion, to the confusion, in the language of the image, which is an ant hill. The ants are swarming. Some are going up. Some are coming down. Some are carrying eggs somewhere. Some are taking care of, I don't know what, carrying a dead one. There's a great deal going on, if you begin to imagine an ant hill. Let's see what the ants are doing, and I'm not thinking about confusion anymore. I'm watching the phenomenon, but I said last night about being interested and seeing phenomenologically what is happening. I'm no longer caught in my own subjectivity. Oh, me, oh my, you know, I'm confused, I'm lost, I'm going in a thousand directions. Instead, I'm watching an imaginative figure. I'm fascinated with what's going on, and this attentiveness is quieting to begin with. It's quieting. I can see it scientifically, watch as a naturalist does. The phenomenologist of the psyche is also a naturalist of the psyche, watching the way it produces what it produces. I might see the ants suddenly all eating each other up. It's no use saying this is a destructive scene that's happening. I have to wonder about purposefulness, too. Let's watch. Maybe the psyche is taking care of the problem by itself. We don't know in advance. We have to stick with the image, stay in the imagination. Uh oh, they just started crawling on my feet. Eating my feet. I can't stand it. They're crawling up my legs. I'm going crazy. That's that fear of, you know. Now the image is vividly coming to life. Still, stay with it. What is your reaction? I can brush them off. I can run around in circles. I can get a dish of honey to attract them elsewhere. I can sing them an ant song. You see, I can do something in relationship to the actual thing that is happening. But what I don't do, won't do, is interpret the ants. You saw that move? They're crawling up my legs. I'm going crazy. That shift from image to interpretation, and that makes you crazy. You see that move? When the ants are crawling up my legs, now instead of doing something, brushing them off, stepping aside, making a move in the imagination realm, you say, I'm going crazy. And it's that move from the image into a thought that I am, that is where the craziness begins. Yes. The sentence is, I'm going crazy. So it could be any of two or three things. But the craziness comes from losing the image and getting back into what's happening to me. The point is, I don't want to blanket, you know, and just blanket out interpretation. There are ways of speaking to the images and with the images that do favor them. And I think the best way of talking about it would be, does the image like what you're saying? Is this really responding imaginatively to the image? It would be the same thing you do if you go to the gallery or the museum and you're looking at some paintings. And you look at a painting and you say, my goodness, that reminds me, that's so much like what Soutine did in the song. So does the painting want to hear that youth comparing it to Soutine's painting of 20 years? It doesn't want to hear that. It wants to be looked at and seen what's there. And I think that if we can talk to the images so that they like what we're saying. If we say to the image, boy, you got some, you're knocking me out. Or why is there so much green in here? This green is, you know, or something. So you're responding to what's there rather than making some kind of historical comparative conceptual move. You see, it's again the sense that the image is alive is a person that has intelligence. Right, has integrity. And what you say, it has to appreciate. And if we do that with images, we could begin to do that with a lot of other things, such as rooms and animals and rocks and lots of other things. And that's called animism. And that's a no-no. See, that's a no-no, because that puts soul into places that our religion has said there isn't any soul. Or it's called anthropomorphism. What's that? It's a no-no in our orthodoxy. Oh, no, I would think that my personal, if that's what it's called, opinion, it's already pretty clear that it's not a no-no. There's a little poem that Robert Bly quotes a lot from David Ignatof, something I can't, I never can remember any of these things, but it's two lines about being able to look at a mountain without thinking what it means to me. Well, not as the primary concern. That's not the primary concern. Of course, you're involved with those ants or whatever, but you're not after... First of all, you're not after meaning. Again, another thing we're hooked on, what does it mean? Not only information, but meaning. When you look at a painting or a building, you don't ask what does it mean? Or when you listen to music, you don't ask what does it mean? You listen to the music. And the moment you start asking what does it mean, you're into a program, program music or something. So, can we move away from that being hooked on meaning? What does it mean? Now, this is a difficult one, because the systems of psychology are all give us meaning, and we want meaning for our lives. I don't know what we're after. Let's just stay with what we tend to do is look for meaning in things. And if we can look at the dream without going after its meaning, which is very difficult, because every morning I wake up with a dream, I'm still hooked on meaning. That kills the dream. The dreams fade the moment I go at it with that net. Yes? The way of thinking about the world, that I feel changes your relationship to everything. And that is that if you can be an animal, human beings could get to the point where it's not us and them. It changes your whole approach to life. Right. And there's something in that movement. In March last Sunday, there was something about the way people, they were changing the way they were approaching reality. I wasn't thinking. By looking at animals in a different way. So it wasn't whether, well, would you want your daughter to die because of a lab animal? Would you want your daughter to marry an animal? That's absolutely right. I'm delighted you said that because that is the other side of the animal. It isn't merely the old Girl Scout code which is take care of the poor suffering imprisoned animals. It's something more than that. It's a philosophical change that we're not the center of the universe. And it's a beginning of a move away from our human subjectivism. And it's very important. Because there isn't a single, you know, all the philosophies that decide what animals are from St. Thomas to, that's a whole other chapter. But anyway, all the way up to Heidegger, no animal would vote for any of those philosophies. They all declare animals to be senseless or, you know, it's a long history. So the change of the sense that they have rights is a sharing of with something non-human. It's getting out of our humanism. That's very important in that sense. So it is very similar to paying attention to the images. And I often talk about images as animals that they have feet and they walk and they talk and they make moves. Yes, just the last paragraph here. The interpretive move, I'm going crazy. They're crawling up my legs, I'm going crazy. The hermeneutic move made the craziness. Who says you are going crazy? What you actually feel is the ants crawling up your legs. Then there are other questions to be put into this scene. I mean you have to locate yourself in it. Extend the terrain a bit. Not a lot, not too much, but a bit. Have you stepped on the ants? Have you tried to cross their path? Have you put your foot unknowingly into an ant hill? Step away. It's a certain animal movement, an animal sense of living. This is the active relation to the image that we want to get going through therapy. I don't want to stand here with these ants on my legs. How did that happen? I saw I make an animal move of some kind, rather than necessarily an interpretive move.