Ritual 8
Presented on: Saturday, May 23, 1998
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is ritual eight, which means that next week we start a new pair of texts. Every month we shift from a previous pair to a new pair of texts. And by using pairs of texts, we walk our way through a very difficult sequence. You'll see today where the origin of the word system came in fifth century, Athens and a system requires a calibration. And without a calibration, there's no way for a system to be complete, ever. And so we take pairs of text and the next pair will be Jessie Weston's great From Ritual to Romance and Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North. Ms. Weston's book was the origin of T.S. Eliot's great poem, The Waste Land and she is one of the world's best mythographers and Basho is the originator of haiku and his Zen travel logs are world famous, but you might also look ahead because the ritual sequence will come to an end with ritual 12, and we will shift from ritual to myth.
And so you might look ahead to the first pair of books that we're going to use in myth and that'll be three weeks from today. And the first two books there, one of them is by Jane Ellen Harrison, who was the great female classical scholar at Cambridge University at the beginning of the 20th century, who was perhaps the greatest classical genius of her day. And her students all became very famous classicists in their own right. Her book is entitled Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion. A prolegomena is something you study before you study the subject. And it's about 500 pages and it's been in print for about 90 years. It's never gone out of print because it's the best job anyone has ever done about Greek mythology. She not only tells you who's who and what's what, but she puts it into its relational calibration so that the entirety can be understood and seen.
And the Greek Olympian mythology has to be seen as a series of 12 gods and goddesses. There are six gods and six goddesses. They're perfectly balanced so that the Greek mythological Olympian religion was a 50-50 equanimity between gods and goddesses. And in order for us to understand this, we have to use Jane Ellen Harrison, because she's the first person to really put it together in a way that could be understood in the modern world. She saw that the very nature of Greek insistence on balanced form led to a psychological impasse. They insisted that there be a complete equal balance and they became fixated that it must be balanced.
And so any iota of imbalanced [inaudible 00:03:58] considered an irrationality that had to be gotten rid of, but when you have a perfect balance all the time, you end up in a kind of religious limbo. And the whole purpose of one of our texts that we've been looking at for the last three weeks and again, today is Euripides Greek tragedy, The Bacchae, because when you insist that divinity be balanced all the time, then any kind of life vicissitude becomes an imperfection that God condemns by necessity. And so life becomes a torrential anxiety, a constant source of threat because it is never perfectly balanced.
And so man becomes God's warrior to punish life for being unbalanced. And you can see that the psychological situation of the classical Greeks in the time when they were supposed to be the origins of our civilization was fraught with difficulties that were insoluble and they were never solved. And anytime that tradition was passed on, it's insoluble problems were passed on along with it. So we're going to use Jane Ellen Harrison's Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion to begin the myth section, to look at the six gods, the six male gods, and the six female goddesses, who were supposed to be in a balance and they were not paired at all. Hera was supposed to be paired with Zeus, it never worked out.
The mythology of Zeus is a telephone book of philandering. The most crucial pair would have been Ares and the goddess who comes down to us in the Roman name, Venus, Aphrodite. Mars and Venus were supposed to be the crucial balanced exchange. Mars, the god of war, Venus, the goddess of love. And of course, their disjunctive meeting was always a source of metaphysical, of mythological, of religious irrationality in the ancient world. In the Renaissance, when Botticelli did the famous painting of Mars and Venus at rest, you see Venus looking [inaudible 00:07:19] at the sleeping Mars, and one sees this kind of clever, conniving, conquering ability that she has exercised over him and you see his complete disregard for her in his completely slovenly way of sleeping it off.
And in this way, Botticelli in a very subtle way, showed what Renaissance Neoplatonism understood very well, that there was no balance in heaven whatsoever because of a structural impossibility and the only hope was the future to refine and make a possibility, not only for man to have a balanced life, but for heaven to come into a balance it had apparently never had. And so one sees in this kind of subject matter, a very peculiar mythological propensity towards irrationality, but this is only in the Greek mythology, and it's only there in the Roman mythology because the Romans took over the Greek mythology. The Romans being a kind of one-sided conquering people simply swallowed Greek culture whole, they never digested it.
And when the Roman empire became Christianized, the ill digested Greek mythology that lay in the gut of the Roman religious experience completely undigested was passed whole on to Christianity. And the Christian Roman empire spent almost all of its early centuries, arguing about the fine points of mythological irrationality that were never solved and never resolved because they were structurally disjunctive. The Romans never understood it, and they were never much bothered by it. But the Christian Roman empire found that in its response to the irrationality that was there in the structure of Greek mythological addictiveness to complete perfect harmony all the time, which could never be had caused it to fray again and again, and to become split and split and split.
What would you pair them? What would you pair as a second book with Jane Ellen Harrison's Prolegomena to Greek religion? I've paired with it a book by Diane Wolkstein. She did a translation of the most ancient mythology that we have any written record of, The Sumerian. And her translation is of one cycle of Sumerian mythology, the mythology surrounding Inanna. And the Sumerian mythology comes from about 4,000 BC, whereas classical Greek mythology is about 500 BC. It comes down from the archaic, Messinian Minoan Greeks about 1500 BC and they get it from the Middle East of about 2000 BC. So in a very peculiar way, Greek mythology in its classical phase is about 1500 years old at the time that the classical Greeks get it, but the Sumerian mythology is more than 2000 years earlier than the very origins of Greek mythology around 2000 BC.
So that when we look at the Sumerian mythological cycle of Inanna, we will see a complete different understanding to balance on the level of mythological divinity, because Inanna, in her cycle of completeness, must descend to visit her twin sister. Her twin sister, who was the ruler of the underworld, just as she is the ruler of the upper world. Man lives in between the upper world and the lower world, the pull of heaven and the pull of the netherworld. We have to be careful not to call it hell because you see, that's Greek mythological, Roman emphasized, Christian misunderstanding. The netherworld is not hell, it's after life. It's the world of the below this plane of life, which is related to the plane above this worldly existence.
So the plane of our life is here in a cross section at the diameter at the equator of a huge sphere. The upper part is the upper world, the lower part is the netherworld and those two have to fit together otherwise you do not have a sphere of reality. And so at the very origins of Sumerian mythology, some 6,000 years ago, we see that Inanna's journey is a journey by which balance is achieved without the addictive need for quiet equanimity all the time. And when we get to it, you'll see what a fantastic understanding there was 6,000 years ago, because Inanna is able to do and undo in a series of seven levels of journeying, both ways and she reinstates the wholeness of the sphere of upper and nether worlds so that the plane of human life has a stability.
And so we're going to look at Jane Ellen Harrison's book, Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion, and pair it up with Diane Wolkstein's, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Ancient Sumer. So you might want to take a look at those two books. We've talked about how the pairs pair up. If you take a pair and you put it with another pair, you get a quaternary, you get a square. And a square turns out to be a very primordial structure. It turns out to be a frame of reference, literally. A square is the frame within which one can see a picture. And our cultural bias, our mental bias, our feeling toned bias is all for establishing a feeling of wellbeing.
A sense of being able to plan ahead or to remember behind all in terms of the frame of reference, all in terms of the picture of what we can see, that this makes sense to us. This is the framed picture and we're comfortable with that. It turns out to be a bias, but can only be noticed as a bias in our time, because it's only in our time that men and women have had the experience of being able to go off the planet to go into weightlessness of around the earth orbit and to experience that our ordination of up and down, left and right, forwards and back, that the sprayer of reference is due to the gravity of a planet and its natural orientation. And where we too have grown up as creatures in open space, we would not have had that propensity to feel comfortable with a frame of reference.
Our comfortability would have been in terms of a free form mobility that has no need for orientation. And it turns out that the most archaic levels of the ways of tradition on this planet already knew of that, but had no way to explain it in the physics that we have of orbital flight weightlessness. And so they used a kind of hidden language, which made gestalts that were not really visible to the eye, not really comprehensible to the mind. And so these hidden illusions to a deeper reality beyond the frame of reference, beyond the quaternary of the square, that there was a deeper reality that you had to color outside the lines to get in contact with.
For the classical Greeks, who were looking out just for a moment, because in terms of Euripides, The Bacchae, in terms of this book that we're using now, Greek tragedy is all about what happens when your frame of reference is cracked, when something fundamental in your frame of reference is broken. To the classical Greeks, to anyone who is needful for the frame of reference to be perfectly balanced, any crack in it allows for energy to leak away. And it means, literally, that you're going to suffer decompression, you're going to suffer a loss of meaning, because there's no easy way to repair a cracked frame of reference. It's as if the very structure of orientation in the mind and in the body are broken and how do you heal that?
And so Greek tragedy was a medicinal artistic form made specifically to address that problem in that particular place in classical Greece of about 2,500 years ago. It was meant to show that you cannot repair the mind first. The frame of reference, once it's fractured, you have to go back to the body first and only then can you heal the mind? You have to heal the body first before you can heal the mind because the body has a prior objectivity, but the body's objectivity is not in terms of ideas, not in terms of symbols. The body's health is in terms of what it is able to do consistent with the cycle of nature. The body has to have its ritual activities consistent with the way in which nature sure works. Only then can the body heal. Only then can a fractured frame of orientation be annealed and brought back into a wholeness, which then gives the mind a chance to heal on the basis of the restored body.
But it turns out as we saw, because our education began with nature, of course, nature is more primordial than the mind, it's more primordial than myth. So symbol and myth have to take a later developmental stage backseat, but the body also, ritual also turns out to be after nature. Nature comes first. And so our education began with 12 lectures on nature, and we saw that one of the problems for us is the predisposition to prejudge nature in terms of projecting onto it, things. We, by the nature of our minds, by the nature of our language, by the nature of our ritual comportment, always project onto the flow of nature, that it must be in things. So something's natural if it's organically grown.
Something's natural if it just comes from the ground. And all of this is a projection of the mind, all of this is a stylization of predisposed kinds of language. All of this is a ritual comportment that has developed over thousands of years and all of it is not only problematic, but not necessarily true at all. If you're in weightlessness in interplanetary space, nature is still happening, even though there are no things there to project it upon. The things there, the quote things, happen to be energy patterns. There's still gravity waves, there's still magnetic waves, there's still electricity, or even it turns out to be hydrogen atoms and then the occasional helium atom and some kinds of hydroxyl molecules from supernova, and who knows?
All kinds of things, but they're not things like we're used to saying things. And so our education did not begin with the mind or with language or with the body, but it began with nature and we saw that nature is mysterious. That the wisdom way that can be trusted and carried upon is to understand that nature is not static at all, but constantly moving and that this movement is like a sea, like an ocean of change. And that this ocean of change has a lot of possibilities, but what happens when a possibility gets taken up, the possibility has a response to it. It's not just the possibility, but the response to it. And so as soon as a possibility in the ocean of change is responded to, that response links them together and that linking together is what causes structure to happen.
And when you have structure, then you have something that exists. So that nature turns out to be a fantastic miracle show all the time. When anything is done in reality, nature responds to it by giving it the mysterious juice to allow it to be. So what we glibly call things as being natural are really things that are in existence and existence is a ritual stage, not a nature stage. So that nature we saw can best be understood as a zero, not as a nothing. That zero really participates, really counts. One has to factor it in all the time. But nature as a mysterious zero works with perfectly the oneness of existence, the oneness of life, the oneness of the ritual comportment and that zero and one together work together like a binary language, just like a computer binary language.
And almost any detail can be expressed in that interplay. But the interplay is not between a one and another one, but between a one and a zero. So that in order for ones to be fertile, to be able to do more, they have to be open to the zero coming in to play with them. And that openness of ones to the zero mystery means that the ones cannot be painted solid, they have to be stippled in. That when you stipple things in, it leaves a lot of room for play, it leaves a lot of space for the possibilities of articulation. And so the wisdom traditions in the ancient form of our species, were always hold things lightly because they're going to need to change in order to live. You can't expect a baby to always remain a baby, it needs to grow up and be who that baby is.
And so one loves that baby and holds that baby, but holds it with a lightness to allow for the play of possibility to lead to its growth. And so the deepest concern of life is that it be able to grow, not just continue as in some sequence of accurately repeated ones, but an interplay of ones and zeros, all the way of openness and structure all the way. And it's this interplay that becomes important for life. Euripides Greek tragedy, The Bacchae is the last great Greek tragedy. All the Greek tragedies are about the frame of reference that fractures, but Euripides Bacchae is about the way in which the whole idea of fractured frames of reference happening, itself being fractured.
It isn't about a particular frame of reference that's been fractured, but about the whole idea of putting together a fractured frame of references in the first place that is at fault and that's why it's the last great Greek tragedy, because it made an issue out of the very issue and showed that there is no possibility whatsoever for the classical Greeks to heal themselves, to heal their bodies, much less their minds, because they were predisposed to a disease that led to death. They were preoccupied addictively with disease and death and madness, and there was no way to cure them of it, short of taking them all the way back and dissolving them in nature again, and repopulating the earth with completely new kinds of people brought up out of nature completely.
And so one finds everywhere in Western civilization, from the time of the classical Greeks, right up to the present day, wherever this hidden and sometimes not so hidden problem is there, men and women in order to find their health, extract themselves from the given culture, from the given civilization and go off to try and find some utopian solution by going completely back to nature and starting all over again, as if intuiting that in this Euripidean way, this is the only way to heal this. That it's a built in problem and as long as you hold the constituents of that built-in problem, it will occur. And so we have to learn to dissolve it all.
What dissolves it? Here's a quotation from a book on Zen that has a statement, page 79 center, a little section called Constancy, "People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems by constancy." That there's something peculiarly real about constancy. Not constancy as in reiterating this point again and again, so that you have a series of dots, but constancy, this is Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, that I sat under in the 60s in San Francisco. It's not the constancy of reiterating something, that would be a ritual comportment to it, to do it over and over again so that it maintains itself like a sequence of dots. Rather, what is meant here in that constancy is that it has a continuance occurrence that's never interrupted.
Sometimes in the ancient Middle East, it was called prayer without end. If one prays a single prayer that never stops, there is no way that you can be profaned. And so prayer without end was a form of this constancy that perhaps the better English term is a continuum. That if there is a continuum occurring, a seamless continuum, It has both properties. It has the property of endlessness of nature, but it also has the property of oneness of existence. It has the zero and one together. And so a continuum became in certain wisdom traditions, the Greek, the Indian, the Chinese, the Persian, it became a way to understand that this continuum of ongoing occurrence was always a guarantee that you were working your ones and zeros together and that life was Holy because it was aerated by the mystery of nature and thus was real. The exception to this in the ancient world was the Egyptian.
The Egyptian predisposition, which is finally the root source of the Greek addiction. The Egyptians saw this in a different way. They saw that it was in fact, a series of dots strung together, endlessly that constituted for them, a continuum. Best expressed in their conviction that Ra, the great god of the real. Resurrects himself every day as the sun and as the sun rises every day, that day becomes real. And that if we join with Ra and we rise each day with Ra, we become real. And that those days, once they are real, they're eternally real and they link up with all the other days so that you have an endless boundless sequence of days occurring, as they say in Egyptian religious mythology, Ra is the lord of the horizon.
What horizon? Of the horizon of endless days, of days which constitute a line so long that it's millions of years and it sounds beautiful. And it's human application, it's completely mantic, because it is a false continuum. It's always this kind of dots in a row, but look here, he was a [inaudible 00:33:59] syntax for a moment. Lookie here, you Mariners on this sea of mystery, wherever you have a sequence of dots, even if it's infinitely long, what is the gestalt tendency is to link them together in some kind of line. Anyone who sees dots will automatically try to make a figure out of the line. It's as simple as looking at the night's sky full of stars and trying to link certain patterns of stars together with lines and then you have constellations.
The addictive need to cut line figures out of heaven is a disease. The need to see astrological Zodiac figures is an illness. As Kierkegaard once said in one of his books, "An illness, a sickness and a death." Does God draw lines in the heavens? Are there lines between those stars? And if you were in a different star system, would the lines hold? They would be completely different. And those lines only hold from the perspective, from the angle of the earth and orbit around this sun, and not only that, but they change even here with this limited perspective. Our North Star is Polaris, but in a couple of thousand years, Polaris will not be where the North Star should be. The position will be held by some other star, by Vega. And in the past, it wasn't held by Polaris at all. Deneb was the North Star at one time.
And before that, others and others and others, and if one goes back millions of years, there have been several thousand North Stars. So what are your constellations? Where's the firmness in that? And so out of this comes a peculiar illness, that one is dead certain about something which is dead, certainly dead. It's a complete madness. And to think that that's the standard of reason, puts you into a double bind. Your madness becomes the criteria of your reason and the attempt to cure that madness means that you're going to go irrational. And this was exactly where the classical Greeks got themselves into. They painted themselves into this psychological corner and they couldn't get out. And the Romans who swallowed their culture whole, ended up in that same corner, that same frozen angle of vision and they passed it on to anyone else who touched them.
It's a peculiar. We use the term today, a conundrum. A conundrum means a philosophical problem that cannot be solved because the two aspects that go together to make the problem are linked subtly in such a way that if you change one of them, the other change is just as much. It's like one of those Chinese puzzles out of grass woven that you used to see where you put the two fingers in and the more that you would pull the tighter it would be, that's a conundrum. The only way out of it is to delicately disengage both sides at the same time, easy enough to do with fingers with a little Chinese toy, but what happens to your psyche? What happens to you when you have to disengage both aspects of your sense of reality at the same time? You will automatically experience that as going crazy, as dying.
And this was the whole point about Dionysus in The Bacchae. You have to have the courage to go crazy in order to see that your addictive prototype of rationality was crazy and not this. That the craziness that you fear you fell into was actually just the continuity of life, the continuum of reality. That you don't end up bound and gagged in a straight jacket, thrown into a padded cell, but you end up back in nature. You end up primordially natural all over again. That's the whole point of The Bacchae. That the women in The Bacchae have the courage to pass through the threshold of madness and go back into the reality of nature. And the men are absolutely terrified of even approaching that threshold much less going through it. And so you have a kind of a gender war that goes on.
The men are afraid to do something different and cling all that much more to what they say the way things should be and the women understand more and more primordially that it's this way that's being emphasized that is what's wrong. And so the very fabric of life is torn, not just the frame of reference on a ritual level or even more poignantly, the fracture of the way in which language gains meaning because it's reference hold. If words can mean anything if they're not tied to the reference, how are you ever going to use language at all? What comes out? What is a language that has no fixed reference? It has two names, the apocalyptic religious name is glossolalia, speaking in tongues. But the normal human name for it is gibberish. Who speaks gibberish? Babies.
All babies, no matter where they're born on this planet begin speaking gibberish. That they acquire any particular language is a cultural stylization that's a mythic level and it has nothing to do with nature. It also turns out to have almost nothing to do with ritual, except in referentiality. Babies speak gibberish happily, they're not crazy. They're very happy. And when babies jabber, anyone who loves that child knows that they're okay because that jabbering is the very source of the play that makes the mystery of the zero of nature come in and share with the oneness of life.
It's a sign of good health for babies to jabber. If they're quiet, if they're silent, then one worries. But if they speak gibberish, no one worries at all. So that the projection that the loss of referential meaning in language is some apocalyptic madness death-end is a complete fantasy and it means that somebody is infected by a disease called civilization. Let's come back after the break and we'll take another shot at this. (Silence).
Let's come back to Euripides in passing, we have a technique that we're using. In evolution, when our forerunners got up off all fours onto two feet, it changed the whole way in which evolution was able to develop. So we're going onto two feet, only we're going onto pairs of texts, instead of trying to read a book, to learn from a book, because that whole archetype is flawed. The use of a book, a single book to teach you is a flawed structure. It wasn't flawed initially. Initially, the discovery of the codex was a liberating thing. For the mind, for the men and women of that day, and for a long time, but not any more.
The book now has become something to thumb with authority and to accuse you, because you're not living up to reference 1,312,000 on page 450. The doctrinaire regression of the book has been a source of a great deal of trouble for the last 500 years especially. But we can't get rid of books, because our whole mind is built on the use of language in this form. We can't get rid of books, because the whole civilization that we inhabit has been structured for several thousand years on this basis. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. So we're going to do an end run around the problems of the book by doubling it up, by pairing it. When you take two dissimilar books and you pair them together and you consistently use that methodology, it breaks the habit, it cuts the conditioning, and you get the advantages of the book without the disadvantages of the indoctrination.
So this course has built into its very technique of ongoing-ness an ancient strategy of freedom. That is to interrupt the process before its subconscious addictive indoctrinating qualities get a foothold, before they get ingrained. It can be done, but it takes an assiduous application, it takes a continuity. It takes the sense, the ancient sense of a continuum. If we just see this as a series of points, as these pairs of texts or these books as little points along the way, and then we have to link them together somehow, it's never going to work. In fact, and I say this advisedly, I was a college student for nine years on the university level, I was a professor for 10 years on the university level, I have a right to say this, the university education anywhere in the world today is an addictive process.
It is a disease engendering process, but there's no way to enter the job market without it, and so one has to have a way to disengage from that process and still learn. Can it be done? Of course, it can be done, and this is one of the ways to do it. What are we pairing with Euripides' Bacchae? We're pairing a book from ancient India that came out about a century before Euripides, but was put together in Euripides' time. It's one of the sermons of the historical figure known as the Buddha. We talked about how his career as a teacher was about 45 years, he taught publicly for 45 years in ancient India, and when he passed on, people gathered around who knew him and they were recollecting. He was on a mountain area called Rajagriha, and they decided that people who remembered what he had said, and memories were trained in those days, had better write down what they had heard so that future generations would be able to hear his words or read his words out loud and hear how he would speak, because he had a very characteristic delivery.
In his day, he broke up the habitual language of ancient India. The habitual language of ancient India in his day was completely woven into a preconception of language and mind and ritual that was based on the Vedas, and ancient Vedas. The Rig Veda, the Atharva Veda, the Yajur Veda. So that the personality of the historical Buddha's day was completely woven into a Vedic tapestry, but one of the qualities of the Vedic tapestry that was woven into was that there were four classes of human beings and you could not change class. The ancient Sanskrit word for class is varna. If you were born a Brahmin, you were always a Brahmin. If you were not, you could not become a Brahmin. If you were born outside the class structure, you were an untouchable. You were not a part of the social fabric, you never would be.
So the historical Buddha was a revolutionary in the sense that he undid that entire tapestry of caste structure, but in order to undo it, he had to undo the whole Vedic referential for language. So he used language in a completely new way, but the old way was the only way that people could hear. They were conditioned to have someone tell them exactly what things were. But if you spoke freeform, they couldn't hear it. Is that familiar? If you play any one of these tapes for someone that's never heard it before, they won't hear anything, because there's no memory function that's brought into play yet. Because our educational method teaches us to project imaginatively, but not to exercise the compliment which is memory at all. Memory is based upon hearing.
There was a narrow wedge of human beings who were raised on radio in the '30 and the '40s, who have tremendous mnemonic capacities, but they have very healthy imaginations. In ancient India, the use of the ear to give a mnemonic ordering structure so that the play of imagination had structured guidelines for its play to come out fresh each time. So that when they wrote down what the Buddha had said, all of the discourses begin with the same phrase, every single one of them, there are thousands of them. They all begin with the phrase, "Thus have I heard." That this is what I heard, and the Buddha's language was a very specific style of language. He would innumerate exactly so that people were used to hearing in this way, but he would go back over and review exactly the same way only then he would add one more element to it.
So he would repeat himself in a given lecture or a given sermon, is what they called them, the term sermon comes from sirmione, it means an inner meditation of language, that's all it means. In Sanskrit, the term was sutra, which means thread, it means following the thread. He would use the technique, which had been conditioned by the Vedic habituation, but he would change it by a revolution, that we know in late 20th century mathematics as a very, very effective change. If you change only one element, one element and only one each time in a repetition, it engenders a completely new possibility in the way in which the scope of what can be said matters. I don't want to go into the math of it, but it's a mathematical analytical technique and very powerful. First developed by a mathematician named Gauss, G-A-U-S-S.
So the Buddha would give a lecture, he would give a sermon, he would give, when it was written down, a sutra, and the sutra had this technique of repeating exactly what had been said, only changing the last item by adding something fresh. But as he would go through the lecture, he would make this repetition maybe 20 or 30 times, so that you would get total 20 or 30 new points each time. That eventually, if you heard enough lectures, say you heard the Buddha speak 40 or 50 times, you would have 40 or 50 times 20 or 30 new things. All of a sudden, you have over 1000 new items that you would not have been capable of hearing before. You would have built up a vocabulary that's free from doctrinaire ritual, and after a certain point, because the doctrinaire ritual language is limited, it only has a couple thousand elements at best.
For instance, to read a newspaper in English takes about 5000 words, that's all the vocabulary you need to read a newspaper in English. Not just in English, almost in any language. In Chinese, if you know 5000 characters, you're considered literate in Chinese. In fact, one of the standard early texts for Chinese published at Harvard was called [Finn's 5000 00:12:34]. Professor Finn made 5000 characters in Chinese and that was it. If you knew 5000 characters, you knew Chinese. If you knew 5000 English words, you know English. It's enough to get by. But to the extent that you teach someone 5000 new words in English, so that they have an operating vocabulary of 10,000 words, they're not just twice as smart, they're about 1000 times as smart.
Because they have been able to go head, shoulders and waist and ankles above the ceiling of what is communicable, of what is possible to say, what is possible to hear, what is possible to understand. You can hear and say and understand as much as everyone else, and that much more. That much more is not just additive, but it's exponential. It isn't just 5000 words, 5000 new, which means it's 5000 times the 5000. You've added 250,000 possibilities, you've added a quarter of a million possibilities to the 5000. All of a sudden, you're off the scale. You're no longer an IQ or 110, IQ of 130, super IQ of 150, you have an IQ of like about 8000. Do you get it? It's like you have jumped completely off the scale, you've gone into a completely new area.
So that someone who gets to that point, it's called a takeoff point, it's called a threshold of freedom, because someone who has learned to do that, to change their language possibility to that extent has enough intelligence and insight to know that they could do that indefinitely. One of the prodigies of the English language is Shakespeare, he had a working vocabulary of 50,000 words. He could make language dance on the head of a pin anytime he wanted to. When they collected the sayings of Shakespeare together after his passing on, all those friends got together, they were mostly very cultivated actors, but one of them was a writer, Ben Jonson, and they collected Shakespeare's writings together just like the Buddha's friends collected his writings together.
In the first Folio of Shakespeare includes a play called Troilus and Cressida, Chaucer had written a long poem on that, Shakespeare did a play on Troilus and Cressida, wonderful play. A play that could be transposed out of the English Renaissance, a saw a version where it was set in World War I with the Allies and the Germans in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida play just like that, because it's universal. Ben Jonson in the introduction to Troilus and Cressida in the First Folio has a caution to the reader. He says, "This man had the finest language imaginable, memorable for eternity. That you may find more wit here than you may have brain to grind it upon." That the way to learn Shakespeare is to learn, to learn, because there's no end of the refinement that's possible with Shakespeare.
He refines infinitely, that when one carries language to that point, one has total complete freedom. The Buddha in ancient India had a language that was like Shakespeare's, it was refined to infinity. When you learn to hear how the Buddha spoke, you have an infinite mind. Just like when you learn to declaim like Shakespeare wrote, you have an unlimited mind. The genius of the Renaissance finds its sky in the language of Shakespeare. You don't find any other writer who approaches that at all, except for his friend in Spain Cervantes, and Cervantes language is all about the lonely ridiculousness of seeing the possibilities and never being able to get there. Don Quixote was the Knight of Mournful Countenance because he can see that freedom, infinite freedom is possible, but he can not get past the reoccurring dull repetitive stylization of projections where he sees windmills as giants that have to be fought, and scullery maids as princesses that have to be rescued. He can not see what's there, he can only see in the stylized pre-cutout cookie-cutter stamps that are projected on life.
So Don Quixote, as Cervantes says at the very beginning, "Here's a man that read so many books that his mind dried up and turned to dust, and this dust blew away and left Don Quixote." Cervantes, someone asked Faulkner, once said, "How do you write so many great novels?" He said, "I read Cervantes every year." It's this quality where language, once it has reached a certain threshold, once it has gained wings, that language is free. Homer is another one like the Buddha or Shakespeare, Homer's language was called in ancient Greece, winged words. Because Homeric Greek has an enormous vocabulary, large enough to take you out of the stylization, and as long as Homer was the basis of Athenian education, the classical Greeks of Athens were stupendous, they were fantastic.
There was a generation that walking around in the same city you had people like [Thucydides 00:19:30] and Socrates and Herodotus and Aeschylus and Sophocles, and they were neighbors. Everybody on the block was great. Then they exed out Homer, they'd been the basis of education for 100 years, since the Reforms of Pisistratus, and when they exed out Homer, they said, "This is old fashioned. This is the way things used to be, we want something new. Because we're no longer just a city, we're an empire." Athens had become an empire. They said, "We have the ships and the mercenaries, and we can send a mercenary army under our command anywhere in the Aegean, in fact, anywhere in the Mediterranean East. Everybody better pay us our due."
A little tiny city landlocked called Sparta said, "These people are too big for their britches, we're going to organize an opposition to them." So every other little town in Greece joined together as an army under the Spartan generals to fight the Athenians under their generals. That war lasted for three generations, and when it was over, everyone in Greece was bankrupt and almost all the young men were dead. Euripides comes at the very end of that horrible generation. The Bacchae is about how that madness of supposed arrogant empire had affected the entire population, both those who were for it and those were forced to be against it were both sides consumed and wasted and thrown away, and they never came back.
Athens after Euripides' time became a university town, and it was never anything more than a university town until the 20th century, when it's become a commercial hub again. It spent 2300 years as a little college town, it was reduced to that. In India, the historical Buddha used his language to give the repetition that people were used to hearing, but he added something new each time. So that when you go through about the 15th or 20th repetition, and there was something new all the time, by inculcated expectation, you were ready for something new each time. So that when you heard the Vedas read in the old repetitions, you expected to hear something new at the end and when there wasn't, you experienced it as something wrong. So that you had weaned yourself away from the old habitual addiction to doctrine and had learned a new addiction, if you like, an addiction to something new, to something free.
When you didn't get it, you said, "This old, there's something wrong with it, it's missing something. It's missing something new at the end." So the 5th century of the BC eon, everywhere that one looks is a century of complete turmoil to language being efficacious on a scale that hadn't been seen for several thousand years. In order to find that kind of revolutionary tone, one has to go back to the beginnings of written language itself several thousand years before that. When you go back to that period, you find ... If you go back to 2500 BC, you find for the very first time human beings who are capable of weighing the religious mythological cycles in a way that they lead to a freedom of personality, because it's not the same when you read those mythological cycles, it's not the same as when you just hear them.
When you hear them, it's the language that gets the flex. But when you read them, it's the mind that's flexed. One finds about 2500 BC the first time that great written structures that we would call art today are composed, and the greatest literary artist of that age was a woman. Her name was Enheduanna and she was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the really great king, the one who made the Fertile Crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. We still have a portrait of him in metal, in gold. Maybe if I can remember it next week, I'll bring in a photograph of that face of Sargon of Akkad, and when you look at the face, you can see already a noble physic, because the mind had changed.
Before that, people were wooden in their facial expressions, because they were just as they were expected to be. They were exactly as they were trained to be. If you were born in such and such a caste, or you had such and such a gild, if you were someone who made pottery, you were always someone who made pottery, your children would always be someone who made pottery. So people were wooden in that sense that they were not there as a scintillating personality completely free. When you look at the face of Sargon of Akkad, you see someone who is completely free. Not just because he was king, but because he had a personality that was wide open. Because his only child was a girl, made no difference to him at all. He educated her as good as you can be, and she turned out to be the first great literary artist in the Western world.
She's the one who wrote the Inanna cycle. She wrote the Gilgamesh cycle. She's the author who founds the whole genre of epic poetry, and Homer is participant in that cycle. Cervantes becomes a later, much, much later participant of that cycle, 4000 years later. So now you can see there's a design, why are these books chosen? Why are they paired up? What do they have to do with each other? It's because they make structures, but their structural relationship is not connecting the dots, but intuiting possibilities of gestalt. Not of training yourself simply to see how the lines connect the dots, but of learning to see quite freely many possibilities, many gestalts, some of which have no lines at all, but are just collections that hang together because they move together.
In mathematics, that's called Hamiltonian space. Any point in Hamiltonian space is an infinite collection of focuses and locuses that all move together, but because you see it that way, because you write it that way, you can deal with space in a completely new way. It doesn't have to be just one point. For instance, the center or a star system is not a star. The center of a star system is the bary-point, it's the center of gravitation around which all the bodies in that star system revolve. It just naively seems, for instance in our star system, it seems that the sun is the center. One make a great deal out of Copernicus who says, "The sun is the center, not the earth." The sun is not the center of the star system, that's as ignorant as saying the earth is the center. It's just replacing one thing by another. There's no understanding of celestial dynamics at all.
The very center is the focus of the gravitational unity done into a system, and the pivot of that system is the true focum from which one can gain a realistic understanding of where things are. The center of our star system is a couple of thousand miles off the surface of the sun. All the bodies in the system have their pivot there at that barycenter, but there's nothing there except the focus. So ancient wisdom traditions came to understand a long time ago that the way that you honor the mystery of nature is to put no graven at the center. If you want to honor God, don't make a picture of God. Not any given way. What's the phrase? "I will be who I will be." So that the possibilities are left wide open, that's the zero base being factored in.
The Bacchae is all about classical Greeks who could not stand that. They had to have a structure that was perfectly balanced. There are 12 Olympian gods, there are six males and six females, and they are supposed to be in complete balance and equanimity, and only when that is balanced is there a possibility of anything being stable and real. This is not so at all. When one looks to see what was the patron goddess of Athens, the city is named for her, Athena, Athena is the goddess who has the eyes which are so level that they're like the sea horizon at its vanishing point. She has eyes the color of the sea, gray sea eyes that see so evenly that they see as the vanishing horizon of heaven and earth.
So the classical Athenians wanted to really sure their power, so they built a temple for her. We're going to build Athena's house called the Parthenon. That building is going to be absolutely perfect in its balance. But the architect who was commissioned by Pericles, the big cheese, Pericles the head of Athens, the machine boss of the power of the empire, he said, "We want the most perfect house for the most perfect goddess here in town." But the architect was of a new outlook, of an outlook that Euripides would have had, of an outlook that Plato would have had, that you can't have static picture card perfection and think that that's real. So the architect of the Parthenon built the Parthenon according to the new mathematics, and there's not a single straight post and beam connection in the entire building.
All the columns are slightly tilted in to distribute the massive weight of the roof, so that it would stand and not collapse. So the Parthenon was, for at least over 2000 years, stood in perfect apropos, because it was not perfect in a static way. It was a living structure, is what Buckminster Fuller with the geodesic domes used to call that tensegrity. That you distribute the tension of the architectural structure throughout the entire structure. It's like someone whose posture is not to imitate some kind of photograph of a posture, but whose posture is the body in its wholeness brought into that expression. Someone whose body whole is brought into an expression, that expression has resonance. Whereas, if you're imitating a picture or a mirror image, you have a flat photo cutout of someone. It's like the actors and actresses in films today, they don't know how to be real, and so they're picture perfect, they make nice little static photos and their images are nice, but they don't move, they don't play.
Whereas, if you look at a Bette Davis or some actor from the early films, everything about them is real, has resonance, because they themselves are real in that. So the Parthenon was that kind of building, it would have still stood today perfect in that kind of dynamic tensegrity, except that in a war between the Greeks and the Turks, the Turks threw their dynamite in the Parthenon and it blew up. But the structure was so strong, that enough of it still stands that we see the building, even though there was enough dynamite to blow most buildings to bits. The structure was strong enough to withstand that kind of blast.
Euripides and the Buddha both are using a new kind of language to wean away minds that had become diseased because they were clinging to dead forms that were no longer going to be able to work for life. The Buddha, through adding a new element every repetition and gradually weaning you towards freedom, and Euripides who tore up the Olympian religion, the Greek mythological tapestry by introducing as the basic protagonist a god who is not on Olympus, Dionysus. He's not one of the Olympian 12, he doesn't fit in. He's the 13th. He's an extra ... Is he an extra cog? No, he's a god who has no cogs. He doesn't fit in at all. In fact, what Dionysus presents is an irrational openness that the classical Greeks would have interpreted immediately as the worst threat to their stability.
What is the worst threat to your stability? If you're in this static rationality, the worst threat is chance. Because you can't fact chance into rationality, and so Dionysus became the embodiment of this wild card chance that life is always throwing into our best plans and how are we going to deal with it? You've got to learn to corral life, to train it, to make a kind of a servant out of living things, to domesticate everything so it fits into what we want. Plow the forests, bring them to the ground and plant the little rows of things that we want. Kill all the wild animals and breed only domestic things that we want and only in those scales that it turns out that even if you do all the plants and animals, now there are the viruses and bacteria and they're still wild.
That chance, because it's always a balance that the more you try to corral life, the more the rest of life becomes an adversary to you. You become the enemy and life always wins, always wins. That's the ending of the Richard Attenborough film on Gandhi where Gandhi's using Ben Kingsley's voice, reads from one of Gandhi's journals where he says, "Empire builders have always thought that they were the latest, greatest, best, permanent, and they have always lost. They have never won and they never will win." Because the mystery of reality is much more powerful than any galaxy, much less any kind of a cultural stipulation. Much less than even any kind of star system.
So let's listen to the Buddha's language for just a moment and then we'll come back next week and shift over to Basho and Jessie Weston's Grail origins. Herein monks, a monk flows along contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly conscious of it, mindful, so as to control the covetousness and dejection in the world. He feels along contemplating the feelings in the feelings, ardent, clearly conscious of them, mindful of them, so as to control the covetousness and the dejection in the world. He fares along contemplating the mind in the mind, ardent, clearly conscious of it, mindful of it, so as to control the covetousness and dejection in the world. He fares along contemplating the mental objects in the mental objects, ardent, clearly conscious of them, mindful of them, so as to control the covetousness and dejection in the world.
And how, monks, how does a monk fare on contemplating the body in the body? Herein monks is a monk who has forest gone, or gone through the root of a tree or gone to an empty space, sits down cross-legged holding his back erect, arising mindfulness in front of him, mindful he breathes in, mindful he breathes out. Whether he is breathing in long, he comprehends, I am breathing long. Or whether he's breathing out long, he comprehends, I am breathing out long. It goes on this way and this is his training, but we talked a couple of weeks ago that the revolution here is not in breathing. The breathing in and out, that yoga was Vedic, was around over 1000 years by the Buddha's time. But hidden deep in this particular variant of the yoga is the mindfulness, Satipatthana Sutta mindfulness that not only is one breathing in, but before one then breathes out, there's a pause.
When one breathes out, before you breathe in, there's also a turnaround, there's also a pause. If you factor that zero of those pauses into the oneness of the breathing in its double cycle, then you have a new square of attention that has breathing in, a pause, breathing out, pause. Now half of the ritual steps are nothing that you do, now you have opened up the entirety of the cycle to half the mystery of nature and half the ritual of existence, of breathing. Now you have mixed zero and one together in a four-part cycle in the quaternary, that's available all at the same time in a single intuition. What happens there is that none of the attention stays at any of the four points, at any of the four sides, so what occurs is the picture in the middle.
If the picture in the middle is you purely and simply following each of those phases, breathing or pausing as they occur, you will get a frame of reference that has no picture. When you get a frame of reference that has no picture, there is an immediate intuition of something deeper than image. You thought pictures always had to have an image, and now you discover, maybe for the first time ever that you can have a frame of reference that's empty. That it holds without an image, this is the first step of a pure mind. Mind as it really is, without any images occupying it.
When that happens, one is on the way then to building up a sense that maybe all of the steps that one is going through in this breathing in, pausing, breathing out, pausing, in that ritual comportment, maybe those steps also are filled simply with the images of breathing or pausing or breathing or pausing. If you can get by with an empty image-less center, maybe you can let that resonate so that you have empty stages and there's no breathing and no pausing. Then the frame of reference in the picture altogether becomes seamlessly open, that's called nirvana. More next week. There'll be tapes in a minute or so.