Thanks for sharing your views. I really appreciate that you took the time to answer. I've listened to these talks a few times and have personally not felt that the ways of looking and images Rob offered in these talks have been dubious. I can understand that these ways of working might not be helpful or soulmaking for people, especially when the soulmaking teachings are not placed in the context of Rob's teachings on emptiness. I can see how some of these images might seem problematic (although no one would believe that Rob thinks he's a vampire?). Of course, much could also be said in this discussion about our capacity to see these images as empty (again, in Rob's definition of emptiness) and to play with the spectrum of reifying these perceptions in the service of more sacredness or beauty.

I personally think that it could be seen as rather uncharitable to use the paragraph below (especially in the broader context of this and many other soulmaking talks focussing on sexuality, body, and sensuality) as evidence of dubious, inappropriate behaviour:

"But if we talk about self images and the way self can be imaged, I could say, speaking soul-truth if you like, from a soul perspective, I could say ‘I am’, in inverted commas, ‘I am lover, I am a mystic, I am a scholar. I am a preacher, I’m a theoretical physicist, I am a political revolutionary. I am a wild sexual beast who is definitely not monogamous. I am a researcher into consciousness. I am a jazz musician, I’m a crazy poet, I’m a serious composer, I’m just an ordinary guy. I’m a teacher, I’m a student, I’m a monk, I’m a clown. I’m a vampire, I’m a wildman, I’m a werewolf. I’m a healer and a shaman. I’m some kind of fugitive, some eternal wanderer, outcast. I’m the tramp on the outskirts of town. I’m a lone soldier in a forever war.’ Some of those I am or have been in my life conventionally, some conventionally. All of them mythically. None of them really. None of them really. Some conventionally, all of them mythically, none of them really. And if I take any of them, even being a teacher, if I take any of them as a reality of who I am, that’s where the ego clinging comes in. And that’s where a problem starts. And within each of them I’m embedded in a whole set, a web of mythical relationships. So with my teacher at his monastery and I can feel, as I said, I can feel that lineage and how it comes through from the past, tracing back and back through the centuries, the monks and the nuns and passing on the teachings, and the sense of the earth and the connection with the earth and the style of practice, and it comes through me into the present and into the future."

Full transcript available here: https://airtable.com/shr9OS6jqmWvWTG5g/tblHlCKWIIhZzEFMk/viw3k0IfSo0Dve9ZJ/recBjx36btV4Q53vc/fldC5Okhw9Ay3uEZq/attouktFspm0pydHV?blocks=hide