Presentation Q2-1
Presented on: Saturday, April 4, 2015
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Future and The New Past
Presentation 14 of 52
Presentation 2-1
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Transcript:
We come today to the 14th presentation in this yearlong learning excursion. And because we're looking at dimensions that include consciousness, we want to appreciate that there are rhythms of energy that occur when we take all of the dimensions of the cosmos into consideration. And that that sine wave of the energy frequency that records has a middle and then it has middles of the symmetry of the two halves making a quarter set of a year. And we recognize that four seasons together as a set constitute another way of expressing a year. Just like years will accumulate in sets. And we couldn't have a decade. Or ten decades being a century. Or ten centuries being a millennium. So that time, for us, long ago, had its rhythms. And its rhythms were seasonal even in pre-Paleolithic times. We followed the animals and then we tamed the animals. And in taming the animals we also were taming the plants, the minerals, the metals, and ourselves. And out of this, out of the hunting gathering bands that came together, would make a crossroads of gathering that was made into farming. The hunting that was made into livestock raising. And so, you had village life. And villages growing more or less successful or not. And so, the sets of culture founded on tradition have a very special tandem interbreeding constituency.
Our presentation notes for this week, for today for 14.1 in terms of pages reads in this introductory way,
As custom forms the ritual base and mythic experience of the social world, tradition forms the symbolic individual led structure of this world. Custom and tradition join to exercise the social fabric that leaders organize into the integral success they plan. This is simply the social world.
That social world is always with this in that quality of taming that becomes developed to the point of conquering. And at the point to where there is conquering there is a transition from culture or interpenetrating cultures that are within can distances. And what comes out of that interface is civilization. Where the villagers have expanded and coalesced their structures complexified. Their customs, um, exaggerated in an interchanging. And so that you have the beginning of cities. Cities do predate civilization. But those cities are still culturally led, traditionally and structurally identifiable as cultural in their essential structure and quality and presentation of life and interaction.
What changes and cements, lassos and tames, that cultural complexity is the development of written language. And it is written language that tames and then conquers in civilization. We're living at a time in a generation where written language has become digital. Long since used to endured by regurgitating custom and reforming and revolutioning tradition. So that we look to the digital technology of written language to carry us into a further conquest adventuring.
In the early 1950's, it very quickly came to a head out of successes in the late night, very late 1940's, uh, the great culminating success in the late 1940's was February of 1949 when a two-stage rocket, a modification of a V2 from World War two was made into a WC rocket and the second stage was a corporal rocket. And that two-stage rocket in mid-February 1949 went 250 miles into space. Farther into space than the International Space Station. That was two thirds of a century ago. So that those persons, that community of engineers and technicians, visionaries and so forth that had grown up, matured when science fiction had leapt into view. Not as those romance novels of H.G. Wells. Or those fantastic novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but into science fiction magazine like Amazing Stories in 1926 presenting what was then called scienti... scientifiction. One word. That as it matured in the 1930's became science fiction. That in the 1940's all of the early prophetic visions of the romance novels, the scientifiction, the science fiction came to be giant leaps in transformation of technology like the atomic bomb. Like the jet airplane. Like the mechanical and then electronic computer.
So that by the early 1950's there was a theme. At the very forefront, like a BioShock of civilization. And it can be described in a phrase, the conquest of space. In fact, there was a book published in early 1950's, 52-51, that era called The Conquest of Space. It was one of a set of four. And they all were articles and one of the popular, most popular magazines of the day in the United States Collier's. Carlor...Collier's Magazine, like The Saturday Evening Post was read like Reader's Digest by almost every family. And in Collier's were these illustrated with diagrams and photos of these visionaries who had built the whack corporal and had suffered quietly the canceling of the whole program within which that two-stage whack corporal rocket was placed because the head of the Department of Defense at the time, James Forrestal, under President Truman, committed suicide by jumping out of the 16th floor of his hospital room in Washington, D.C. Because he was obsessed that his mind had been telepathically taken over by aliens who are related to those aliens that were found in the crashes of Roswell and a couple of other less publicized for very good PR reasons of living aliens. And as the head of the MX775 program, the suicide of Forrestal alerted everyone in that military industrial complex that something seriously is afoot as Sherlock Holmes would say. And so, they canceled it.
But the engineers, the scientists, the visionaries, the science fiction vision people persevered and these four volumes, led by The Conquest of Space. Even a film was made of The Conquest of Space. And to date those four volumes in The Conquest of Space, the first color science fiction film was made in 1950 taking a story from Robert Heinlein's classic collection of short stories put together as The Green Hills of Earth from the standpoint of the moon. Because Heinlein, who had been writing all during the 1940's, The Future History of mankind saw that the watershed will be when mankind learns to live, be born and grow up on the moon. To be able to look back and not see this or that plot of Kingdom or Empire, no matter how large, even global. It's only that up there in the sky, like our moon now. The Earth as a moon. The film was called Destination Moon.
And the lead fourth book in that set of four from Collier's Magazine was about the coming mission to Mars. That three great interplanetary ships would be built in space, not on the Earth blasting off. They would be multistage, giant rockets carrying whole groups of human beings in each one and that they would be the first expedition to Mars. That was 60 some years ago. And now we're told that we might have, uh, four astronauts tiptoeing to Mars by 2035, some 20 years in the future from now. This is called on any street, a shell game. That the cringing from some kind of primordial fear has curdled the very creme de creme de la creme of vision into the cottage cheese like pabulum that is being fed as if it is new.
If that's not strong enough, in very early publication, 1960, uh, based on a workshop of 1957, about the time that Sputnik went up. A little satellite that went beep, beep, beep, and everyone said, oh my God, the space age is here. Well, is it here? A conference was held in Mexico, in Cuernavaca, which was an international place of vacations, learning, uh, getting together. And two of the stars at that Cuernavaca 1957 conference, uh, put into the title of this 1960 publication Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. The psychoanalysis was presented by Erich Fromm. And Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki. Eric Fromm hearkens to something that D.T. Suzuki said and then it was taken down and then published. And the phrase tuns this way, "The person may talk about freedom, yet the machine limits him in every way. For the talk does not go any further than itself." This is true of the written form of that talk. Posting tweets, email, ebooks, etc.
"The Western man is from the beginning, constrained, restrained, inhibited. His spontaneity is not at all his but that of the machine." Faster and faster. Down to nanoseconds. Down to Picoseconds. Down to Attosecond. We can watch the atoms quiver on our computer simulations.
"The machine has no creativity. It operates only so far or so much as something that is put into it makes possible. It never acts as quote the person, end quote."
When Erich Fromm came to his term, to his presentation, he was outlining very briefly and quickly the way in which psychoanalysis came out of the 19th century into the 20th century. And right then at the watershed in 1900, Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams harkened everyone that, uh, this is a new therapeutic technique. It is an analytic scientifically of the psyche of man. And what is lost in that is the Greek foundation for the word psyche. In Greek, literally, classically it meant butterfly. It meant that the innermost quality of a human being is their psyche which has been reemerged out of a cocoon that was made by the nutritive cycle of a caterpillar that feasted on the vegetation, cocooned itself within which it dissolved completely. Into a plasma which reconstituted itself, restructured itself into the beautiful, winged butterfly that, when coming out needs to dry its wings before it can colorfully fly and be.
And this simile was in fact the way in which a classic therapy set of techniques would be heightened by an analytic. Out of the mythic. Through the symbolic. Raise to an analytic. That the symbolic mind would be able to categorize and identify and make that structure clear to itself in several different ways. It could be a reflection of itself in this mirroring of itself. It could be the clarity of a logically consistent structure that was freed from errors.
And one of the things that came into play at the time as Fromm writes so beautifully.
It is necessary to emphasize how different this idea that knowing oneself transforms oneself. How different this idea is from the concepts of scientific psychology in Freud's are in our time. Where knowledge in itself remains theoretical knowledge and has not a transforming function in the knower.
And he goes on to say that psychotherapist when it all began were seeing hundreds upon thousands of patients coming into psychotherapy wanting to, um, get rid of some impediment or other. And that all of this, uh, really came to rest in the emergence of Freud in his wish to arrive at insight into the real nature of a person. Wanted to break through the conscious thought system by his method of free association. Free association was to bypass logical, conscious, conventional thought. It was to lead into a new source of our personality, namely the unconscious. That what is doing the therapeutic is a psychoanalyst who had already achieved facility in this and now was partially doctoring, partially healing the patient of not only this or that impediment, but the very structure that allowed impediments to occur in the first place.
I hope you're following this. This was more than 100 years ago. About as far as it could go.
Then it was noticed that Freud was insisting that what clarifies is the ego. And it clarifies itself by learning to distinguish between those customs and traditions that have asserted themselves from the past from carryovers that we should not have kept viable at all. And that they were drawing energy from the way in which the ego is able to conquer what is unconscious. And that this impediment patterning filter is the superego of the social order. That custom is getting in the way of structuring traditions so that it really works much better. And what happens when it works much better? The ego has more leeway to tap the unconscious reservoir of energy. And to change whatever super ego social customs are getting in the way of this more refined tradition. And that the structure then is going to be more of the ego getting the energy of the unconscious and carrying through.
And all of that as it was achieving a kind of a festival of victory the First World War broke out and smashed entirely that construct. Right away, it became apparent to some psychotherapist that this was a faulty analytic and that the major fault was thinking that the unconscious is kind of like just energy. Like electricity. You just make more plugs. And string more wires. Have more stuff. Well, we have radio, don't we? Oh, oh, we have radio. Oh, streetlights. Oh. Automobiles.
In 100 years ago, 1914, one of the prize students of Freud, a Swiss named Carl. Carl Gustav Jung remembered that he had fell ill psychologically. To such an extent that he was, uh, almost incapacitated and overheard his parents talking about how he, they might have to send their son away to an asylum. And he realized he was in imminent danger of losing his freedom. Of losing his whole person. Not because of a problem, but because of an exigency. A crisis. Like the First World War was something that could not be ignored. It was war on an increasing scale that showed that it was going to be not just even of continents, but it's going to spread everywhere. It was clear. The phrase was if this goes on. And the implication was the whole world is going to be a stage. For a more mature, virulent kind of war. Which it is.
What got through to Jung was he remembered in his adolescence of curiosity over primitive things. Over seeing some American Indian artifacts in a museum. Some African artifacts in the museum. And had made for himself a little totem God. And then wanting to keep it secret because its whole power was in its sacredness. He had put it in the cross beam of the attic of his grandfather's house, grandparents' house in Zurich. And he remembering that, retrieved it. And within literally days he was, quote, cured. It began to be assiduous in his studies. He began to be attentive in his, uh, social world and eventually not only became an MD, but he became a Ph.D. He became a psychotherapist who understood that this very large problem of the psyche is because the unconscious is not like some electricity, which you can just tap into or magnetism which you can just tap into and then manipulate and use however you want to, and your identity, identification, ego conquesting but that the unconscious was rather dangerous. Especially for an ego that unconscious was antagonistic in the extreme. Which turns out to be, to put it politely, demonic. To put it less politely, apocalyptic. And that it, that's exactly what the social world was had broken down into. And out of it came this scramble to try and and make something work. And all of those attempts as the years went on in decades went on were like, trying to put bandages on a broken limb.
When Fromm in 1957 was that the conference with D.T. Suzuki he was in proximity to one of the most sophisticated Asian sages of the 20th century. And Suzuki had, uh, learned, uh, languages. It was a prodigy as a youngster, and he not only learned Chinese along with his Japanese. But he learned some Sanskrit. But he learned English very well. In fact, as a young man taught English in Japan at, uh, uh, schools. But he also sat as a lay monk in a monastery. And his r?shi died. And the new r?shi that came in, whose name was Soyen Shaku found that D.T. Suzuki could translate his writings from the Japanese into English.
And in 1893, Soyen Shaku went to Chicago, to the World Congress of Religions, and it was there that he made such an impression. He was one of the few Asian r?shis, Zen masters, that they had ever seen in person. And he was here in town. But what was more amazing was that he had the advice of someone who was literate in English and one of the intellectual leaders in Chicago at the time, Paul Karas who was interested in bringing East and West together in a new kind of vision and publishing books on it. He set up a publishing, uh, company in Chicago called the Open Court Press. And eventually he convinced Soyen Shaku to let the young Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki leave Japan and go to the United States.
He first had to have his first satori. His first entry into, not the unconscious but what we would call initially a super conscious. Instead of a field of nature, a field of infinity. And when you accomplish that just hours before he was told by his Zen master that if you do not have this breakthrough of satori, you will have to commit hara-kari because you've gone too far you cannot live in a human world anymore. You have de-acclimated yourself to that extent, but you have not realized where, who, when, you are. Not now, but always.
Just hours before the hara-kari, he came to, is the phrase politely. And he wrote that stepping out of the zendo where this had occurred, he noticed that all of the trees and the moonlight were transparent. He could see through them. And he looked down at his own body and he could see he was transparent too. So, his r?shi now they let him but sent him to Chicago. By 1957, that was in 1897. He had spent 60 years as one of the international global world masters of wisdom, not only of how to teach and how to write, but how to heal in such a way that the ego super ego, id unconscious energy itself is a fictitious structuring.
And when we come back from a break, we'll see how that interface between Suzuki and Fromm coming in 1957 was right at a time where a last gasp of the science fiction vision was to set up going to the moon.
Let's take a break.
END OF SIDE ONE
Let's come back. Let's come back to the catastrophic world of 1950. The middle. The pivot. The axis of a time form. Carries an inordinate rush of energy from this. Eventually you can come to understand that time is energy. That space generates structure. But that time is energy. Is generative for that structure to complexity.
One of the qualities that we have been talking about. How in 1950 there was a sea change in several ways. One of the ways showed up for Carl Jung. After having spent, uh, more than a generation in developing a new approach to the mediating central, pivotal quality of symbols. For Freudian symbols were a combination of structure. And the acquiring of symbolic written language by civilization came increasingly clear that the ego in possession of that would be capable through analysis to, uh, correct everything and tap the unconscious. For Jung, the unconscious had been a challenge. Fraught with, uh, peril at least initially. In Jungian analysis the first large structure that you come to emerges from the unconscious is the shadow.
In 1950, you noted a catastrophic ending of a whole development of, uh, almost 2000 years. And that was a papal bull from the Vatican that in colloquial English translation is the assumption of the Virgin Mary making her divine. The last vestige of being human was ironed out so that she was, was, totally divine. She was totally godlike. For Jung, it was catastrophic. She was no longer a woman. No longer a human being. And fit in with making Jesus not really human, just a divine, universal figure of divinity. And now the mother too.
This paired with Destination Moon that we're going to be able to put together an interesting kind of a crew to be able to go to the moon and begin the exploration of what Heinlein called The Future History that he had written down on request from his editor Joseph W. Campbell Jr. in, um, 1942. Heinlein at the time was nearing the end of his science, early science fiction writing. Because he would be tapped by the Navy. He was a retired naval officer because he had contacted contracted tuberculosis. And though he was honorably discharged, he was technically quite able and administratively quite astute. And he was eventually put in charge of, uh, the development of some very advanced things outside of Philadelphia, like the development of radar and so forth. And he chose as his helpers, two science fiction writers. One an old friend of his L. Sprague de Camp, and the other very young, promising Isaac Asimov.
Heinlein's Future History saw that they were going to be very big problems. In fact, that the development in 1950 of sending someone to the moon was the beginning of the end of a phase that would be obviated. And he was the only person that predicted a long hiatus before a return to the moon. And his Future History from 1942 visionary looking ahead, he saw that it wasn't until 2075 that there would be the first mature human civilization after great travail. After incredible difficulties.
The Freudian ego conquering the super ego society by tapping into the subconscious in the science fiction vision had long since been not only suspect but all of the usual suspects bunched together. And in 1956, a penultimate science fiction film was made about that. It's called Forbidden Planet. On a star system around the main sequence star Altair in the future by human flying saucers, much transcending the speed of light and sending out expeditions to check on exploratory crews came to check on the crew of an exploratory many populations rocket the Bellerophon, and they discovered that there were only two human beings left out of the entire company. All of them had been killed by unknown energy monsters. That were identified by the doctor at the time, the forerunner of Doctor McCoy and Star Trek by about nine years. And the doctor who put on a brain enhancing instrument helmet that one of the surviving scientists, a philologist, a studier of languages, ancient languages, all languages, and their meaning had found the secret laboratory of maturing young beings from this species called the Krull. Who had raised themselves to an interstellar exploring civilization. And then in one night, all of them, every single one of them had perished. Some 2 million years before. The scientist played by Walter Pidgeon. A kind of a William Shakespeare's Tempest figure says, even the cloud piercing adamantine towers had crumbled into dust in all of those, uh, long millennia Aion upon Aion.
And it was discovered that you could put on the learning helmet transparency and that a surge of consciousness and energy would come in to expand his mind. And then he almost was killed by it. But that had doubled his IQ. Later on in the complications, the doctor realizing that they were up against something that was not only invisible and monstrous beginning to kill the members of this spaceship crew, like the members of the Bellerophon, put on the helmet and discovered that there was something that the good philologists had not understood. That there was such a thing as monsters from the id. And the philologist says **inaudible word or two**. What do you say? And the doctor says you have tapped into the unconscious that is there for all sentient life forms only you were not prepared for it. And so, your shadow has come out. And whatever form, it takes, as much energy as it takes to eradicate all social competition to you so that you alone can stand surviving. And only those who are obedient under your aegis will survive and everyone else will be not only killed, the phrase in the film that's used they were torn limb from limb. They were shredded. An entire civilization exed out in one night. 1956.
The very next year in 1957 this conference and going to Mexico between Erich Fromm, D.T. Suzuki and a number of others gathered together to try to understand that a meeting of East West is a way of bringing a parenthesis, a symmetry to the planetary scope of mankind, together in the sense that one needs to explore the interchanges that are possible now between East and West together. And that all of this occurs as Fromm writes
Freud's picture of man was in essential features the picture which the economists and philosophers of the 18th and 19th century had developed. They saw man as essentially competitive, isolated, and related to others only by the necessity of exchanging the satisfaction of economic and instinctual needs. For Freud, man is a machine driven by the libido, regulated by the principle of keeping libido excitation to a minimum. He saw man as fundamentally egotistical and related to others only by the mutual necessity of satisfying instinctual desires. Pleasure for Freud was relief of tension, not experience of joy. Man was split between the intellect, his intellect, and his effects. Man was not the whole man, but the intellect self of the Enlightenment philosophers. Brotherly love was an unreasonable demand. Contrary to reality. Mystical experience a regression to infantile narcissism.
When it was published in 1960 it came surprisingly at the time right at the beginning of a massive tendril root spreading coming to understand that the interpenetration of all of this complexity of rootedness was supporting a very massive structure of aspiration that carried with it both promise and apocalyptic at the same time. And along with East and West was the challenge of apocalyptic nightmare ending and a millennial transforming aspiration. And one of the phrases at the time that was used was a Latin phrase ad astra per aspera. Through great difficulties to the stars. Ad astra per aspera. The best translation of it was done by one of the great astronomers of that, uh, age. He had begun publishing. He published the first book on galaxies in 1921. A little monograph. His name was Harlow Shapley. He translated it and uses the title for his last book on Rugged Ways to the Stars. The Latin phrase that going to the stars means that one has to do a steppingstone through the seven levels of the planets to reach that realm of the stars. And that this is perilous requiring great endurance and incredible learning. And immense at times seemingly impossible compassion, which includes passion. That all of this was a difficulty that became exacerbated as one lived.
One of the great figures at the time who was a Freudian, not a Jungian, was Erick Erickson, who had worked for more than a generation, almost two generations. He lived into his mid-nineties. Like D.T. Suzuki who live to be almost 97. That he had seen that there was some kind of a epical sea change right around or just right after the year 1500. And that a whole different discovery of the life cycle was set into motion. And what set it into motion was a figure who understood that his being a priest in the Roman Catholic religion was a structure and an identification that had been increasingly obviated by the emergence and the renaissance of the rebirth of classical learning, showing that they hadn't been ignorant pagans after all. They had been immensely sophisticated men and women. And that what had evolved devolved into a church structure that was literally a super ego that used egos as mask figures in its own dramas and they were interchangeable. And that figure he chose to write his first book about, and that was Martin Luther. Who stopped being a priest monk. Dropped out of the Catholic religion and along with a nun who had dropped out of the religion, got married. And began to understand that there is a different dimension of life because the life cycle requires that one have children. It isn't about satisfying needs that instinctually are there and one has to deal with them. But it is about living the complex life where there is not just a polarization of male and female, but a symmetry of the human. That not only lives, but in the life cycle begins to have various stages, as he called them.
And for the rest of his writing life, he wrote book after book after book with long years of research and thinking and so forth in between, and eventually came out with an eight-fold stage cycle, life cycle. And he published a, um, volume. His last book is called The Life Cycle Completed: A Review. 1982. His Publisher was W.W. Norton. The Norton family in New York was, um, founded as an independent publisher because one of the Norton, uh, daughters was, um, a poetic genius. And, um, one of her great achievements was to be able to translate out of Rilke's German into an English that carried Rilke's poetic greatness and elan. And, uh, one of her great early works of translation was, um, an incredible poetic set called Sonnets to Orpheus. And, uh, M.D. Herter Norton making this translation in the 1920's began not only Norton as a publisher, but eventually led to the appreciation that there is still very great poetry being written. Understanding one of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, and her translation runs that it is so evanescently transcendent that one must be able to jump through that flaming hoop like Shiva energy emerging into the real.
And he writes, Rilke in translation, "Easy for a God to do, but for me. I can hardly catch my breath." The poignancy comes here because the life cycle completed was the completion of the life of Erick Erickson but someone who was symmetrical to him all this time was his wife, Joan.
And so, 15 years later, in 1997, Joan Erickson brought out The Life Cycle Completed Extended Version with new chapters and a ninth stage of development. It isn't just the eight stages. Or like in the learning civilization of my development, the eight phases that become dimensions in ecology of consciousness, finally, but there is a ninth. The ancient Hermetic way of expressing it was a short treatise. Its title is, um, The Eighth Reveals the Ninth.
And in the ninth, which is a great complementarity brought to a new fruition, a fruition which is fertile. And that fruition is fertile enough to generate a new dimension of space, a tenth. And the ancient Hermetic treatise ends with a poetic worthy of Rilke and Sonnets to Orpheus, "What one discovers in the night is that you can hear the choirs singing in the tents." That in that, as we call it now, hyperspace, all of the star systems sing together.
This kind of a quality that Joan Erickson brings out. She manages to show that what her husband had worked at so long seems to have a pair, a tuning pair of sets that some of the stages are in this set. Those following are in this set. And she calls this first set sin tonic synthesis integral. And she calls the second set dis-tonic. Meaning that what for her in Freudian terms, that what comes to maturity is that the difficulties become something that one has to expand one's living compassion to, um, not to mediate, but to endure as a part of life. And that the ninth stage is old age. After all of the challenges, if you have met them of life, yes, but you are very old and you will die. And that the challenge of the ninth stage is to maintain your humanity in the inevitable slow avalanche of decay. Losing facility. Losing bodily. Losing mental. That this is also a part of the life cycle.
The good news is that that in itself is an identification based on an integral only extension. What is diastolic is not diastolic or a dystopia. But a differential set of dimensions that open not only to a complementarity as a ninth but to a hyperspace that conveys the emergence of a fertility so sublime that even a zero field is fertile to have a vacuum energy out of which spontaneously time itself can emerge and spring free. Because time occurs instantly then generate the dimensions of space. And a space-time not only continues and not only establishes for the first and only time but does this so often, so subtly, that it is the tapestry of reality breathing. There is a great deal to understand.
When he was 42 years old D.T. Suzuki fell in love with an English woman, Beatrice Lane. And Beatrice Lane D.T. Suzuki married. This is, uh, Mrs. Suzuki. Beatrice Lane Suzuki, holding one of her many pet cats in her kimono. And later on, one of the things that they enjoyed doing together by that time, he was a professor emeritus in Kyoto from Otani University and world famous, traveled all over the world with her. One of the things they set up was a compassionate caring for animals. They're not just pets. And it's not just the pets one should care for, but animals.
The qualities that Suzuki put together in his Manual of Zen Buddhism. Uh, I brought a first edition of it from 1935, but the reprint in the, um, 1950's by Grove Press is the one that I remember buying myself at the University of Wisconsin about 1959. And in a Manual of Zen Buddhism D.T. Suzuki goes into the origins of one of the perfections in the Mah?y?na, the great Way. One of the p?ramit?s, the first p?ramit?, which in English translation is patience. Patience and a depth in a profundity as the patience of Job. And The Book of Job was written to convey that seed of perfection that is there in the patience of Job to withstand the sudden swift loss of everything in his life except his life and accept the diseased body on a heap of ashes. And his ill beleaguered wife pleading with him, curse God, and then we can die. And Job replies, even in face of three questioners who in their ego pride, are able to say, you're hiding something and something is hiding from you. You must have done something because God will not do this unprovoked. You are guilty of something. You are shaming your wife for something. You have lost everything for some reason that you are not facing. Will not face. Here's this possibility. Here's this. Here's this. And in all of that, Job maintains not only patience but patience which rises to another perfection.
In the Mah?y?na the patience is called Kshanti and what it rises into is called Vireo. It's the virility of endurance. And when this is apparent that this is what is real for Job a voice in a whirlwind aays I'm with you always. You are right. And everything is not only restored but doubled and tripled for Job and his wife.
In Manual of Zen Buddhism D.T. Suzuki for the first time translates all the way back the beginnings that the perfection the p?ramit? in the Mah?y?na that patience, that Kshanti, was once a very long time ago. One of the yogic lives of the Buddha that he relates secretly that he was once a prince named Kshanti who endured and who brought the whole quality of perfections into that set of six that they have. That's adamantine in the sense of a stable geometry anywhere in the universe and can emerge originally from infinity. Hence, it's called The Mah?y?na. The great Way. Yes, there is a Dharma in the universe, relentlessly so. Like a karma. But there is a high drama in which all of that evaporates. Not leaving a trace.
In India it was a great sage named Valmiki. He's called Valmiki because in the Sanskrit it means someone, a great sage in the forest who sat so long that the white ants built, um, their hill colony over him. And Valmiki enjoying the birds singing in the forest. Until a bird is shot with an arrow by a hunter and spontaneously Valmiki utters something in Sanskrit and immediately the hunter is evaporated and leaves a wisp of soot that vanishes. And Valmiki realizes that he has come out of the anthill. And that the structure of what he has uttered in Sanskrit is the very symmetry of Sanskrit as a language which is poetically creative of reality.
In Sanskrit that couplet is called the Rk. R-k. Related to Rg. R-g. And that the whole Sanskrit poetic creativeness and remembering key is that all high dharma writing is in those pairs of pairs that when you bring a pair of Rks together, you get a ?loka. You get a quatrain, as we would say in, uh, English. And out of that comes a structuring that can be a poetic development leading way past Rilke. And to what's occurring and will occur beyond now.
More next week.
END OF RECORDING