Presentation 51

We come to the next to the final, the last presentation in this series on 2015, The Future and the New Past as long. As there is the illusion of a now a present moment that illusion founds. The polarization of time into past and future. Dominated by. The present power. That now illusion thought in Sanskrit thought is cheetah. Sita. Sita Gita. Is the taproot. Of everything that is wrong. With our species. To vanish. That particular now idea seed. Disperses. Faster than immediately the illusion and the accompanying delusion that creates a chaos. Spawned by our species. In nature and in consciousness. That particular seed. That. Takes the now. Away. In Sanskrit. The word for it is a body. The thought of enlightenment. Which, in order to erase the seed of wilful power in the now, we control the past and we control the future because we are controlling everything from now. It does not become negated by coupling to it a polarity of the opposite. But by vanishing it. So that that particular. Time polarizing seed of now when it is vanished. It leaves. On scalable openness. Which to those still acclimated to that old world. The now is. Empty. Vacant. One of the ways in which that can be expressed is in. In Los Angeles. Here are. 50 years ago, 1966, a professor at UCLA. Professor Chicago was the head of the Oriental Languages Department of UCLA, and he greeted. A new arrived. Buddhist monk who is named from Viet Nam was a Tiananmen. Cnn's father had been also a monk and an abbot of a monastery. In. That. And yet Tiernan himself. Was a very special kind of a character who came not just to America, the United States, but to Los Angeles in particular, because of a vision. And eventually became the Abbott. Of a whole group of houses under the aegis of the College of Oriental Studies. But he also became the pivotal person in the whole ecology of all of the Buddhist groups. Not only in Los Angeles, but in the West. Became a prominent figure. As Chicago gave him in 1966, this Japanese calligraphy. In Japanese, the word is pronounced moo. We would say it's an emptiness. The way in which it is inscribed gives the most famous koan in Zen. Also called moo. Because of this expressed by this. Emptiness is form. Form is emptiness. Which doesn't resolve. By any polarity, no matter how you manipulate it, but it vanishes. Buy a quality, buy a tone. That we would characterize and do characterize. For thousands of years and whatever language. That word is presence When presence comes into play, the illusion of the present. Vanishes. And at first it vanishes. So split. Secondly, that it's almost not discernible. In fact, is not discernible because there's nothing. There is nothing. To discern. What occurs. Remembering in retrospect. Is precisely that nothing happened. That's known as freedom in the largest scale. Tiernan presented me from. He has a book, Zen Philosophy. Zen Practice in 1975, published in a suburb of Berkeley, Emeryville, on the San Francisco Bay, where all the Buddhist publishing was being done at that time of especially Tibetans coming from the West. And they were affine to Japanese coming, Vietnamese coming Chinese, Burmese, India. It's dedicated to Mr. Rodger, where best wishes for Bodhisattva works author and Chinese characters, as well as in a signature. August 6th, 1976. Which is when I moved the body sat for center in bookstore that I had opened and founded. After. Resigning from a tenured university professorship in Canada. And moved the body sat for books to chin On's garden is called Temple Bell Garden because it was a huge piece, Bill. Canons father and those monks, most of them at the peril of their lives, collected the guns from the various competing factions and armies in their area of Vietnam. And all of those guns were sent to Annan, and he had them melted down and made two very large peace bells out of them. One of them he put at a conspicuous visual juncture of the shared garden between a whole number of houses that now was the College of University Studies, and the other was put at the point. Overlooking Los Angeles, Long Beach Harbor. At the very crest so that that peace bell. When wrong would be heard. All through the echo of those hills and that harbor as the gateway for Los Angeles metro, having the major port in the West with the East with Asia. And the complement to that was there in that garden. And so with a lot of monks of different kinds and academics of Asian studies, I headed a group that linseed oil and beautifully the wooden structure which held this temple bell and was moving my Body Sutra center there. When vandals took an umbrage to this incursion on our Yankee turf by Asian devils. Torched that structure and it burnt to the ground and left the bell and a field of surrounding ashes. So I moved my concern to Hollywood Boulevard at the center of the chaos and was there for a number of years. The vicissitudes. Our interesting. Because we're looking at here in the 51st presentation. The way in which two very powerful. Long suppressed. Major world structures have come alive again in a vengeance way. They are China and Islam. And their target is European usurping civilization that made colonial patsies out of all their peoples for who knows how many decades and generations and centuries. And especially with. The United States, America as being the power inheritor at the present. Now, of that control that empire. So we're looking at. The pinnacle of presence. In Islam. And the pivotal transform in China. Briefly, this is not a university academic presentation at all. I haven't done that for 40 years. But paired with them is a third figure on Ray Burke's on. Who had. He was descended from Polish Jews who had long since moved to France. And so he Bergson was a French supposedly brilliant. He had a sister, Mona. Her name was Mina. But when she became the wife of the founder of CO, founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult organization from the 1890s, about the time that H.G. Wells was beginning his science fiction vision novels that with W.B. Yates and a man named When Wescott MacGregor Mathers form the Order of the Golden Dawn to ex accelerate what had just begun to be touched in the Renaissance some hundreds of years before, was now going to be revved up so that some kind of a hermetic response from the occult realm could take care of the encroaching industrial military corporate complex that was beginning to be felt everywhere in the world by the 1890s into the 20th century. And exactly at that time the major transform of presence. Beginning in 1905 and accentuated by the time of the First World War. In the person of Albert Einstein. The general theory of relativity and then the specific theory of relativity, which brought spacetime out of the separation into a continuity. And the only way to apprehend that continuity was to drop out of a present polarity into a presence. That the universe has a wholeness to it. And that space time has a continuity. That space time is a four dimensional continuity that not only structures the universe, but provides its dynamic. Einstein's incredible revolution came exactly at the time when Andre Bergson, with his major books Time and Free Will, two sources of morality and religion, and eventually creative evolution. But his powerful book came and its translation, duration and simultaneity, where he said, Einstein is an incredible genius. The German Jew, which the French Jew Bergson understood and a very special way. One would call it esoteric. One would call it hidden. But it was a very deep insight that the reception of Einstein's theory of relativity, the equation E equals C squared, had been misunderstood. Just like Einstein had been touted. For the right theory, the right equation, but the interpretation of it was skewing off and it was a mess. And so. Bergson in writing, Duration creative evolution is the time is a. Deray It's it's not measurable. It doesn't have certainty as an ID requirement at all. Never did. That's a foisted illusion. And so Bergson went to bat for Einstein. For his theory. For his equation. For his genius as a spiritual being. As a man of great penetration. But to fight off philosophically all of the misinterpretations. And so Bergson being French, being one of the most famous men in France, in Paris, in philosophy, he had been very close to the old William James. And they had understood each other extremely well. But Bergson came into maturity in the France, especially in the Paris, when a revolution in art was happening. And that the opening salvo in that revolution can be pivoted around. Claude Monet And it was Monet who began to use his painting, his art not to present form, but to present the presence of emptiness that was populated by a freedom of all forms based on color and on the ability for us to fill in the missing outlines, the missing IDs, and to be given the freedom of recognition that all of these brush strokes in this particular pattern and colors and so forth is a sunset on water. And out here are the ships and so forth. And so Impressionism came into play and there were so few people who were able to enjoy Monet that he took to going out on excursions and painted with his good friend Renoir, who understood very much. And as Monet painted landscapes, Renoir painted nudes, that they were looking at the way in which the fount of deep wisdom. Is in women and in seeing the landscape in its. Deray in its continuity. Men love to find solace and achievement in thinking. And for them to give up an idea is very, very difficult, almost unheard of. But women very frequently have solace in pairing. Not to look for it in thinking, but to look for it in conversation and talking and sharing presence. And it's that quality. That was the source pool, the soil out of which, for instance, Plato's dialogues came. He didn't write treatises of ideas. He wrote dialogues of interchange, which he learned by participating, by witnessing the way that Socrates worked, taught. Did Philo Sophia love of her wisdom. Because Socrates teacher was. Duties of Mountaineer in the northern Peloponnese, right off the coast of the Gulf of Corinth. And her teacher was Pythagoras. Whose communities of wisdom were distinguished because men and women were not just equal. They were in a living complementarity. And Pythagoras, who had learned for all of us growing up from a kind of a Greek sophistry, and then went to Egypt for 22 years and learned from a male soft sophistry of the ancient Egyptians and then went to the masters of Egypt at that time to Persia for 11 years and learned the mastery of men. He. Married a woman named Ciano and moved out of that whole stylization to the Wild West of Greece. At the time it was called Magna Graecia, larger Greece. He went to southern Italy, not Sicily, and in southern Italy, founded the first Pythagorean communities. He stopped teaching ideas and began to engender the way in which conversations together in a community over a lifetime are able to erase the fever, to allay that fever of ideation, to take thinking out of its control of the now and free it, to participate in the very unmeasurable scales of life. So a pleasure. Dialogues. Are not tragedies or comedies. Their philosophies philosophy. For Bergson, having been a close friend of William James, having understood Einstein and being himself a genius, found that there was a group in the Paris before him that had just freshly come into play with a new release. That like Monet's brushstrokes that were there of color and of light. We're there now in the way in which a structural angle was rearranged called cubism by Picasso and Braque and Juan Gray. But in the emergent quality of genius was a group headed by a pair, husband and wife. Their last name was Delaney. His name was Robert. Her name was Sonia. And the genius of that pair was with Sonya. Sonya Delaney, who, along with Georgia O'Keeffe, is perhaps the pivotal tuning pair of wisdom and art in the 20th century. Her way of expressing was by emphasizing the simultaneous ness. Of the way in which art being dimensions beyond the ID being dimensions of the prismatic persons who when they are together, have a community of freedom which is fertile. And so the simultaneity of Sonia Delany begun about 1909. By 1922, Bergson had understood that his DeRay, her simultaneity, was able to express what Einstein's genius had released in a theory, in a contemplation that it was not, as any theory is any theory. It's not meant to interpret in terms of measurement alone, in terms of ideas, individual based on identifications of certainty as on winning the victory of an argument. This is a dialogue. That expands to a community of recognition, out of which then comes the freedom of realization which will come to after the break. Let's come back to. A concern. Not so much a conclusion, but an enduring learning. Certainly not immune from arguments and from ideas. But arguments and ideas are. Insoluble and unresolvable. Because they're illusionary in the most real sense. They they're useful as tools. In realms where tools are valuable and useful. The seed of now. Not negated, but vanished. Is a characteristic of the way in which the most precise measurements are made and calculations are confirmed. But they have utility and usefulness. In dimensions that context them. That are the proper scalar of learning as distinct from integral only testing, grading, hiring, tooling. Let's come to the seat for a moment. We're looking at Islam from the Beacon genius of Ibn Arabi and China, from the beacon wisdom of Wang Yang Ming and European maturity in Henri Bergson. And all three are recently and the last couple of decades re emerging. There have been more books in the last 25 years on Ibn Arabe, in European languages, in English, especially French and English, than in all the many centuries sets. Ibn Arabi was born in 1165. In 1965 he was 800 years old. There were a handful of books on Ibn Arabia in English. I was there. I was teaching. That's all there were. And the really good couple or so were considered academically esoteric. Only a few Cambridge or Oxford scholars were even able to understand. This is 2015, almost 2016. Less than a couple of percent of Ibn Arabes writings have ever been translated into English. They're like 98% unknown. Wang Yang Ming has only a couple of books recently, especially a woman scholar. Here is. The frontispiece facing the title page of the Columbia volume of her work on Gangling. Who was the shining star of the resurgence of China in a new dynasty that was so bright that they use the Chinese word for bright Ming, not Ming Ming. It's not Beijing. It's Beijing. And Wang Yang Ming was the Renaissance genius of the Ming dynasty who reached back in his genius. A little bit difficult for him because he was born into a very powerful family. He became a very famous general, one of the great military generals in Chinese history. In his time when he was a governor of a province in China, the center of his place. Nanjing had been the capital of China for 1000 years. Taken over by a series of rebellious renegades who masked ships and came down the Yangtze River and were able to take over Nanjing. They had scoped it out that it was unprepared for a surprise attack and they took it over. And so Wang Yang, being being one of the wisest men in history, began to move like a monet, painting all kinds of military groups rushing around the landscape and the rebel prints, thinking that they were going to be suddenly surrounded, withdrew his troops into fortresses within Nanjing to fend them off and preserve their power, which was now. And it gave Wang Guang Ming time to really marshal his forces instead of these little groups, these little Monet splotches. And he made a grand entrance into Nanjing and was victorious. But he was the most famous philosopher in China of that whole age. He was the one who, for the first time was able to knit Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism into a tapestry of immense scope. One of the qualities that allowed him to do this, his he was able to stop looking at a landscape scroll. Kind of appreciation of personal. Transcendental. Expression and to be able to put together the creative evolution the. The array of presents. Like being able to see that there is such a thing as a not just this scroll of a picture of a landscape, but of a whole long scroll that could be unfolded to show that the landscape of a Zen very long scroll is the continuity with all of the changes and all of the vicissitudes showing that the viewer is the traveler through this entire continuity and gets used to seeing in terms of presence everywhere all the time so that space time becomes like a ribbon of creative possibility. Wang Yang Men did that from the late 1400s to the early 1500s in China and made the Ming as bright as the tang, which had been the high point in the past. Had reached back and brought something that had destroyed the tongue because its emphasis was on the Dow. And on Buddhism, thinking that this is the creme de la creme and that these together would make and they did make the tongue, but it had left out the Confucian. The chow and the tea and the chee were taken care of. But the Gen and the E. The organization of the ideas, the symbols, the E in terms of a human heartedness gen had been left out. The Confucian aspect had been left out in the tongue and it had been a devastating. Motive for one of the most horrendous catastrophes in human history. It politely scholarly is called the en lushan rebellion in the Tang, the high tongue. The population of China was about 51 million people in the so called en lushan rebellion. 17 million Chinese were killed in a few years. A third of the population. That's a nuclear war 4500 years ago. Because they had left out the need to have a triple braid, not just to resolve that polarity of Buddhism and Daoism. Well, they're not really a polarity in the first place, so they're very resolvable once you have the genius vision for it. But the Confucian to be woven into that takes a special kind of genius, which why young Meng had my major professor at San Francisco State, Gaius, who was from Nanjing. And he assured me, he said it's always a traditional center of Daoism outside of Nanjing. The highest mountain is Mao Shan, which is the home of one of the greatest Daoist lineages, going all the way back into the beginnings before the Qing Dynasty. Before the Han Dynasty. In Los Angeles we had a master de who came from the Mao Zedong Daoist tradition, and when we were talking one time he brought out the big family scroll and they're unrolled On the floor was 76 generations of knees. Not just Ne Huang Chung, but his two sons of 77th generation. And I was glad to share with Anthony that I loved the long scroll of his generations and etc., etc. and he put my fingers to my cheek and looked at me. He said, I didn't know Americans came in this variety. Confucius Kung fu. Took the Dao of the E chain and opened it up so that it was possible to have an ideation and an identification that was not stifling, but cooperated with the emergence of real freedom. And to do this, Confucius is the one who wrote the commentaries on the E chain that are a part of the. Ever since then. They're called the ten Wings. The original etching is just like that cauldron of nourishment that is able to bring out the patterning of the universe. But the ten wings of Confucius Kung Fu made the teaching available in a way that it had never been available before. And one of the aspects that came out of it, there was a Chinese genius at the time named Chung, who was the inheritor of Lao Tzu. There was a genius named Su Chen who was able to make sure that all of the structuring and everything the yin Yang school was able to at least be taught to a lot of people. And yes, it was superficial, but superficial in a way that very easily could be opened to the DAO today. That is that power for Dao to emerge. And when it's emerging, it will be what it will be. And one can delight in that fertility. But at the same time as Trunzo and Suzanne was Mencius mancuso, who is really like Changsha, the inheritor of Lao Tzu, Mencius as the inheritor of Confucius. And Mencius, the book of Mencius as a Confucian classic. The Confucian classics, once they were structured, set up a way in which dynastic china stopped being a tyrannical Qiang Warrior Society or a kind of a usurping dictatorship. By the short lived emperor who built the Great Wall of China, among other things, and took his own name, Jin, and said, From now on, your mind, your chin, nis, your Chinese. All of this was obviated when the Confucian classics came in to structure in a Confucian way and were able to bring the Tao Tay with the Gen E together so that the key flows in a creative duration. That pattern served China until 1911. 2200 and some years. It had a crisis in the tongue, but it was a crisis because the High Point had failed to remember that kung fu is important because the gen, the heart and the ideas, the E, the symbols need to have a free communication, a dialogue if they need. Otherwise, the Sahara doesn't open up. There's no access. It gets skull trapped in an ideational only realm of power and control and jealousy. I would rather die than lose. Ibn Arabi. Towards the end of his long life, he lived to be 75. He was born in Spain. He was born in Murcia, which is in the south of Spain, Andalusia, and grew up in Seville. Sevilla. One of his last works is the Tree of Being. This is a translation done just a few years ago subtitled, An Ode to the Perfect Man. Here's a couple of sentences from the blurb on the back. Printed here, the Cosmos is a tree which is sprung from the seed of Kun. It's interesting because in Chinese kun is the receptive and you imagine. The female. In. And from this seed has sent down roots into the deepest underworld. Set up a trunk and spread out its branches to embrace east and west with the topmost branches penetrating to the highest heaven. So that this tripartite, this triple tree with the roots coming into the trunk that sustains the root structure with the branch structure and is able to be seen as an ecology. That has presence that's alive and well. Thank you. These qualities. In China. Were that the problem was not so much and Confucius and Daoist coming together, that was understood. In China, in the Han Dynasty. A grand son of Lhasa. And then Chung's was the prince of. Why not? Who gathered a conference group, a community. Instead of taking a part of the hand hierarchy of power. His community talked among one another and brought the quality that had emerged from Confucius and Lao Tzu, Confucianism and Taoism together. And that record of their conferences selected out is the Why non Xu. Finished about 130 VC. When Buddhism came into play. In China. It tended to vanish the Dow ism and the Confucianism along with every other ism. And one might say not to conquer them, but as a matter of concourse. So that when a teacher finally came to China, his name was Bodhidharma. So. Monster. They usually say there are seven sages in China and this boat of the journey of wisdom and six of them are at one end of the boat and Bodhidharma is put on the other end because he's the realization vanish or par excellence. And if you put him in with the other six, the other six accordingly. Vanish. So it was a difficulty of bringing into play. The problem was then not Confucianism as it was later with Wang Yang Ming or in the Tang, later with its power structure by the third generation from the founder of the Tang tongue tied sung. They had all that was necessary. The realization of a genius who took Bodhidharma. And brought him into play in such a way that though the frontispiece of this translation of the Lank of ATAR Sutra has Bodhidharma as a frontispiece. Done in a traditional Chinese way. The new Chinese way was by Muji that did a different presentation of him instead of being a Zen portrait. This is a Zen maha journey. It's a mahayana, not just a Zen, but a mahayana portrait of the concourse. This is studies in the length of a Torah Sutra, and the two volumes are the first time in English. That the like Avatar Sutra was finally recognized as being the way in which Buddhism was transformed from the vanishing of capacity of the Buddha into the continuity of the Body Sutra and the length of a Tara Sutra about the time of Plotinus about the two hundreds A.D.. Translated from. Not just the Chinese, but the Sanskrit as well into the English by Suzuki. And the study's published by Suzuki. He and his English wife, Beatrice Lane. Beatrice Lane says, Och, who loved cats and wearing kimonos and wrote her own scholarly excursion into understanding Chinese Buddhism. But sustained decreases for decades and decades. And all this was commenced in the late 1920s, came to fruition in the early 1930s. And Suzuki himself lived to be 96. There is a famous study that was done with a dialogue between PT Suzuki and the psychiatrist Erich Fromm, with a interlocutor, Richard De Martino, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. 1957 workshop in Karnataka, Mexico, and published in 1960. I remember when it first came out. This is when I bought this Coronavac. At the time was a community. Of persons from all over the world who lived together, Erich Fromm and Ivan Ilitch, etc., etc. and Suzuki went down to visit and was recognized right away. Like later on, Christian and Birdy would be able to speak very openly with David Bohm, the physicist, because they were speaking in a continuity that was recognizable and realizable mutually. The lack of a Torah Sutra was the favorite sutra of Bodhidharma coming from India, where he recognized that the real structured beginning of the Mahayana in India was due to the seed of ash for Gosha. With his short little book, The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana about 90 A.D., whereas the length of a Tara Sutra about 100 years or so later was the bouquet of the garden that came from that seed. In China. Buddhi Dharma is followed by someone who understood the garden in such a Chinese way that he could demonstrate. He was he was from such a low lower class that it didn't even register as a as a scavenger. He earned money for he and his mother by gathering wood and selling it and so forth. His name was Huaneng. He became the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China. This is a photograph of the body of Huang, who died in 713 A.D.. Who used a very powerful yoga to petrify his body into consistency of coal. Like petrified wood. This is petrified. This is a photograph of the petrified body taken by Joseph Needham. Yes. The author and founder of the 20 volume Science and Civilization in China, the master of Granville and Keys College Cambridge. This was taken photograph was taken in the late 1930s. The quality of presence being dimensions of freedom. That have a visionary field of infinity within which they work. And within that field. Zeros are not the end of it all, because one can count from the zeros plus one. But at the same time, one can count minus one. And they're both very useful. And those arithmetical progressions are extremely useful. And their usefulness is because, like, the cup has its usefulness in the openness of the cup, not in the stuff that makes the cup. Its utility is that it's open. If zero were not open, infinitely numbers would not work. They would not have any tenacious properties that one could develop an arithmetical, adding, subtracting, multiplying division, powers of numbers and so forth. So that infinities have a complementarity with zero. A zero field and an infinite field are in a complementarity which has a third field, a field of realization, which is of learning. That you are and always have been free. More next week.