Ritual 9
Presented on: Saturday, May 30, 1998
Presented by: Roger Weir
Differential Consciousness
Presentation 26 of 104
Interval 2
Mundaka Upanishad
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, June 27, 1998
Transcript:
This is interval two. And perhaps help us to just go through the way in which this course unfolds itself. There are phases which modulate, which means to say that there are not stages that just numerically follow each other. Stages that follow each other are condemned to a cardinal sequence, which limits us to a very simple conclusion. We will have to find a final purpose integrally. And while this is all right for most of the qualities of life, a cardinal counting sequence is a sabotage, a self-sabotage, when it comes to wisdom. Because a cardinal counting system never gets to its end. You can always add another number. You can count one, two, three, four, five into infinity.
But what is not included in a cardinal sequence is transformation. And a wisdom education always has transformation. It always has a turn, a shift, a change, a transformation. And generally, that comes at the middle. So, this education counts forward to the middle and then makes a great turn and comes back again. But when it comes back, it comes back not as counting in reverse, which would be a regression.
So, most cardinal mentalities would count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, and expect to blast off. And it never happens if you limit yourself to a sequence of cardinality, when it comes time for a transformation instead of a transformation you simply have a turnaround and you enter into an automatic regression, which accounts for most of the ignorance in this world. It's not that people want to be ignorant or stupid, it's that we are because the very mode of living makes a rut, which leads to that inevitably. And so, there is a different kind of learning. There's a different kind of education.
And today we're looking at The Mundaka Upanishad which is all about the higher knowledge. About the knowledge, which is different from that knowledge, which you can count on in a ritual way. That knowledge which changes. And that the change that happens is that the exterior world now becomes an interior world. It begins to interiorize. And the vehicle by which the exterior world becomes an interior realm, that vehicle is language. Language is the key. And so, our education, which has looked at ritual for 12 weeks will have 12 weeks following the Saturday's lecture on myth. And myth is all about language. How it works. How it functions.
But I think it might be interesting to go back and review how ritual and myth, why they follow each other and how they fit together in the pattern of the whole. And for this, I need to go back about 28 years to a statement that I wrote in Canada, in Calgary, Alberta. When this educational cycle was first being applied on a very large scale. When I was developing it in San Francisco, we never had more than I would say, 30 or 40 people at any one time in any of the courses. Whereas in Calgary, we had 3 or 400 at a time. And so, it was a large-scale industrial application.
This was the statement that I wrote as an introductory cover in the summer of 1970.
In this humanities program, the idea is to fill in the gaps and interrelational spaces that have naturally developed in the contemporary world as a residual of increasing specialization. This specialization has taken the predominant form of well-defined subjects and accurately delineated processes. The universal application of the scientific method to entities and logical analysis to procedure has benefited everyone by presenting reasonably clear pictures of the world. In this act of focusing, however, the background has been eliminated. The interconnecting tissue of the things and their movement has disappeared, not from reality as is so ignorantly lamented, but from man's microscope perspective. This humanities program restores the consciousness of this background and the requisites of human character commensurate with that restoration.
Now I wrote and talked in a more academic form as a professor 28 years ago. But the import of this still holds. And perhaps I can express it in this way. In order for us to learn anything at all, we have to be engaged, not in looking at points and details of a subject, which is then given instructionally to us. That kind of instruction allows us to follow a recipe of limited criteria to a very simple intermediate conclusion. It's good for cooking, for baking. But an education really worthy of it is rather on the level of a chef. Not someone who is following the Betty Crocker instructions of how to make a simple mediocre cake from the box. But a chef who starts from scratch and makes from natural ingredients a creation which is uniquely there that time on the delight of eating it is a unique event. And so, this education is like that.
And so, the technique is to develop, not a subject with increasing clarity point by point, but to develop, what's been characterized as a field of inquiry. A field of inquiry is a space of consideration, which is of indeterminate and indefinite size. It can be as large as we wish. It can be as enriched as we would like. And what I attempt to do in this education is to completely transform an initial set of parenthetical circumstances by increasingly widening the parentheses until they multiply and enlarge. And in the confusion, in the cacophony, of too many sets of phrases to be kept track of you stop trying to keep track of it. And allow unknowing to happen.
In other words, one of the great requisites of learning something new is to not pigeonhole it in terms of something old. I think the phrase used a couple thousand years ago, don't put new wine into old wineskins. It'll burst them. And so, something new learning something that you didn't know. Perhaps exploring areas that you didn't even realize could happen or could exist requires first of all, a sense of not knowing. And our temperament, our character, that we have been trained to have, inculcated to have, assured that we must have in order to survive, in order to operate in this practical world. In a world of dollars and cents. Of bucks and profits. Of portfolios and expectations. Of children. Of estates. Of jobs. In this kind of practical world, we have to know things. Know what we're talking about. But in education you have to not know. You have to come to a point where you realize that you're not sure of what this is, of what is happening. And so, I try to overlay my language so that it stops being a cardinal sequence of points, which are instructional and that you can follow. Because you recognize, Oh, yes there's that, there's that then there's that. Oh yes, well that makes sense. Oh yeah. Well now we know that. Well, we know nothing if we follow that model. And we especially do not know the unknown. We cannot explain or the future at all.
And so, the very next page in our outline is a meditation that begins with the words,
No future exists without real education. No future exists without real education. Future, as an existential possibility relies on an extended past enduring through a present order. Without an extended past, without a present an order, no future exists. Even an idea like the future connotes experience and understand the woven into a transmissible continuity, which most certainly is the reality of education.
But what we find is we go into a field of inquiry. That's constantly enriched to keep us off balance so that our state of not knowing becomes not only a simple state at some period of time on a certain Saturday but becomes extended in duration until we get used to it. Until we learn that we are not going to perish. We're not going to die. We're not going to go crazy. And we're not going to blur. We're not going to lose our attention. We're not going to lose our capacity to want to go on just because we don't know. When we have this capacity to extend our unknowing indefinitely, this is a meditative state. It's a meditative state of being sensitized to possibility. Instead of following some kind of path, which is delineated for us by someone else, we in our motion create our own path by walking it. And every step that we do take becomes this step to be taken. So, there's this kind of a quality.
Now we began with a field of inquiry, which was being enriched constantly. And in this age, you have to work in distractions. You have to work in the sounds, the sights, the feelings of being nauseous, because you didn't eat the right things, the uncomfortability of having to be somewhere else. And you're trying to work this in. All of this can be worked into the field of inquiry. So that your attentiveness is not just focused on the subject matter but is to the reality of the situation. We work everything in. If the painting happens to fall towards me, I will just work it in. If I fall off the stool, I will try to keep speaking from the floor. If I suddenly decide that I have nothing more to say, I will shut up and close the books. And that silence should be worked in. Even if I turn delinquent and I refuse to talk. That refusal is a part of the enrichment of this field of inquiry. Your inattentiveness, whenever it occurs is a part of this. So, everything is not grist for the mill. This is a misunderstanding. We're not grinding anything up. That aspect of ourselves that grinds is the addiction to cardinal sequencing projected onto anything else. And that addiction is what produces not only mediocrity, but it produces tyranny. And whether it's the tyranny and the form of a Nazi empire, of an arrogant ego, of a stubborn willfulness on just basic animal level, it's a detriment to learning. One cannot learn.
Now when the field of inquiry is enriched what is that initial field of inquiry? It's a state of not knowing. And so, we cannot begin with things. We cannot begin with anything, any thing. Nothing that could be identified. Nothing that could be labeled. Nothing that would be amenable to being processed in some cardinal counting way. And so, we have to go deeper, not only deeper than language, but we have to go deeper than counting. And as it turns out numeracy, the ability to count, is much older than language in a written form. A written language comes maybe 3 or 4,000 years after the ability to write numbers.
The entire envelope of cardinal sequencing is like a habitual metronome of inculcation that naturally sabotages the ability to speak creatively. The ability to hear something new. And so, it was a great struggle for men and women when the ability to count and to write that down, the ability to write spoken language down. When those abilities first came it was a great problem in the men and women of those ages, struggled mightily and succeeded. And passed on those capacities to us. Not in some Lamarckian kind of way, our DNA does not record learned characteristics. The learned characteristics occur in the educational matrix in the process, the cycle, by which we learn. And so, the learning capacity turns out to be something which is larger than the scope of nature. Larger than the scope of integration. Larger than what we could count. More comprehensive than what we could say.
So, our education, our field of inquiry began with nature. With the stipulation that nature does exist. Nature is not in the things that exist, but nature is some mysterious process. It's a matrix of change as the Chinese used to say in ancient times. And out of that matrix of change comes spontaneously the existent things of life. It's not a creation out of nothingness, but it's a creation out of mysteriousness. And in order to present this, we used a technique which was a modification of the technique that traditionally and historically was used to generate both our minds, the arrangement of our minds and the arrangement of the culture and the civilization to which we belong. Because our starting point had to start with the practical issue that we have all been trained in a very specific way, a very specific set of ways. And we have the minds within the culture, within the civilization, that have been based upon a cardinal sequencing, a kind of a numerical based language. Just think for a moment when you were a child, they told you, you must do this. You must not do that. You must do this and such and so. And if you get into an argument, you have to make your points, number one, number two. All of this is an indication of how addicted we are to ignorance a complete addiction. Not only from within, but from without. And because there's a direct correlation, the inner addiction is directly correlated to the exterior addiction so that they confirm each other. And the knot that holds that illusion is the conviction inculcated in the mind and inculcated in the culture also, that identity is the basis of reality. And this is a lie. Identity, if you put it into its simplest logical form is a equals a. And when you do that, you realize that the statement a equals a in logic is called a tautology. It's a short circuit. It's a rut. A equals a, and that a equals that a and that a equals that a. And so, one is caught.
One of the great characters in the early part of the 20th century who used to sit in her salon in Paris, Gertrude Stein, who used to tell people like Picasso, that one has to be ware of identity. And she used a beautiful phrase. She said, a rose is a rose is a rose three times in order to break this rut of identity. Because by saying a rose is a rose is a rose. You have a beginning statement, a rose. A middle statement a rose. And an ending statement a rose. And when you have a beginning, a middle and an end, that archetype is not the logical archetype of identity, a equals a, but it's the archetype of the story beginning, middle and an end. And so, you transform logic into myth. You transform a delusionary logical Adam, the identity formula, into a three-part mythic formula. And when you do that you realize that all that you're doing by saying a rose is a rose, is a rose is making a comment. It's not a statement, which is logical, but it's a comment which has mythic qualities to it. And out of this one can generate a great deal of other things.
So, our education, while it began in nature develops finally through ritual into myth. And we found that the movement through nature has to be guarded against premature codification. We have to understand that nature has to be kept open continuously. It's like a field of inquiry that has developed continuously. This continuous development of openness takes practice because the whole tendency, we have been taught to come to a conclusion. How can you know anything unless you come to a conclusion? And the conclusion means being able to define anything in terms of its identity. Now you can see how tenacious this rut of ignorance is. And The Upanishad that we will take a look at today, some 2,500 years ago already addressed this problem because it's an ancient problem. Men and women have struggled successfully with this, not only the problem, but the whole set of circumstances within which this problem has its roots within and its tenacity without. It's like a monster which grows from within us and extends outward. And so, it seems that the entire continuity of the world makes sense only when we satisfy the feeding of this beast. And the fact is, is that this is the dragon to be slain. This is the serpent, which is told to us in a tautological image, that it is the reality of the psyche. The difference between a serpent swallowing its tail, which is a rut, and a serpent which has a transformational middle so that it forms an infinity sign is a basic ancient wisdom motif.
So, our education needs to keep its openness initially so that the cycle of the education does not swallow its tail. Does not form a complete closed circle. It means that the keeping of a field of inquiry continuously open extends all the way through the cycle the whole first year. And our course is a two-year cycle. The entire first year is an integral cycle of how nature develops and out of the natural openness, out of the spontaneous mystery of nature comes life and the things of life. The atoms, the cells, the molecules, all existence as things, literally rains out of this mysterious ocean of nature. This mysterious ocean of a process of nature.
And so ritual is the first level where objectivity happens. And we learn and going through the nature section to constantly keep it open. And what helped us was that the nature course phase began with two classics of openness. The first was The I-Ching from ancient times and the second was some of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was one of the most open human beings who has ever lived. I have in my library somewhere a book of a contemporary yogis from India, and they dedicate their book to the Sage of North America, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was such a magnetic kind of a human being that when Walt Whitman met him in a hotel in New York City, no one was there to record their conversation. But Whitman had just published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. It was about a 30 some pages and very egotistical. The next edition of Leaves of Grass is very cosmic, very non ego. And you can tell that the conversation with Thoreau woke him up. That Whitman changed from being a man interested in being interesting, to really interesting being who was more than just a man. And Leaves of Grass went on through a third edition where it just simply opened the field of inquiry. The field of inquiry for Whitman was, what am I? Who am I? What am I? Who can I be? What can I do? And Leaves of Grass is like a cosmic box that opens and opens until no remnants of boxness are left.
Towards the end of his life the old Whitman said, mother nature seems to favor only two things. She likes freedom and she likes variety. And that's what she likes. I when her children are free to explore variety indefinitely, she's happy. And so, the mysteriousness of life is well founded, not in existent things that have identities, but in nature, which has a process of continuous openness. So that in order to know something, you can't point to it. You can't define it. Those are intermediate processes of ignorance. To be able to count, to be able to define, to be able to establish identities. These are the accomplishments of children who are ill prepared for the mysterious scintillating qualities of reality. They will never find their way, not even to themselves.
So, our education, while it began in nature, recognized that we have to keep a continuous openness, which means we have to deal practically with the limited minds that we've inherited, because they've trained us this way. Who? Our teachers and their teachers, teachers back for thousands of years. Our parents and their parents, back for thousands of years. And that the training of those minds and the el...inculcation of body habits, of ritual compartments are larded together, glued together with an exterior culture, an exterior sense of history, an exterior civilization that on every account seeks to align itself with the inner prejudices, with the limited rituals. So that we would never have any way of knowing better if we did not have the courage of heart to open up to the unknown. To allow for ourselves to have moments of not knowing. To allow ourselves to be accepting of learning something, which we don't understand. We don't initially understand it at all. And we have to wait for a while. We have to let the quality, the appreciation, the sensitivity of unknowing deepen in its own way. And deepen it does. And it has an own way.
But what dices it up all the time, what shreds it, is that we have interior almost like a bread slicer that anything we put into it gets sliced exactly in the same way. Sliced by identities. Sliced by identifications, which lead to conviction that this is what this is. Sliced by many of the prejudices that we have talked about. And the funny thing is, is that every time we look at a loaf of bread in the exterior culture and civilization, it's always sliced. And so, we say, we must be doing the right thing and do our slices match their slices? Yes, they do. Then we have learned haven't we, then we fit in. And this is exactly the way in which mediocrity sinks like a mud to the level of ignorance. And the state of the world is in this mode continuously. To break out of this, to emerge through this takes a patience for a while. The old wisdom story in India was that the Lotus grows through the mud. And only when it surfaces out of that murky pond into the light of the fresh air and the sunshine does it open.
And The Mundaka Upanishad will tell us about the seven rays of the sun that transform the condition that was there in the ignorance of the world. The Mundaka Upanishad from 2,500 years ago, 25 centuries ago, is the place where the phrase originated the blind leading the blind. That's where it first appeared. That the state of the ordinary world is that the blind are leading the blind. That none of them can see. And so, none of them could each other for seeing because none of them see. The famous parable that came a couple of generations later in the time of the Buddha was an elephant being examined by blind people. And that it was impossible for them to agree because one of them is touching the trunk. Another is touching the foot. And another is touching the back. Another the tail. Another the ears. And they're all describing what their experience is with this. And of course, none of them have the capacity to see the gestalt of the whole.
And so, an education like this puts you into not knowing continuously. Drops you into the middle of incomprehension continuously until you get used to it. And when you get used to it, some kind of transformation happens. Some kind of change begins to happen. Not only interiorly, but that the exterior world changes also. This is called alchemy. This is called the way in which reality regenerates itself. Because we will discover that life not only occurs, but it occurs in a rebirth mode. But the rebirth of life doesn't follow the way in which life occurred. It's a transformation in the very middle of life. In the midst of life. And if the transformation happens at a juncture that normally is called death, then one has an afterlife. And so, death ceases to be the polarized outcome, the identity polarity that pairs itself with birth. Instead of a dull cycle of birth and death over and over again with no freedom, no variation, no change. One has a transformational note of rebirth and one has life again. Or one has an afterlife. And so that moment of death becomes transformed. It is no longer what the world said it was what your mind was convinced it must be. It's no longer a slice, but one has the gestalt of the entire loaf of possibility. And life and death instead of being polarities become complementarities. They yield to each other in their flow. And so, an afterlife becomes the most extraordinarily ordinary event. And rebirth becomes a quality.
The mechanism by which our minds were habituated to accept slices only and identify them because the culture accepts slices only and not wholes. The vehicle by which that was beaten into our ancestors now for 2000 years was the book. The book was used to hammer in the conceptions of identity. The conceptions that lead to these kinds of tautological habituations. And the only way to free ourselves from them is to transform the book. Unless of course you have the opportunity for a whole life to extract yourself completely from the culture and civilization, to have no further contact with it. And to abstract yourself from your own mind. Now, if you're a super Yogi like that, then you don't need this technique. And you can immediately go to go, and you don't have to go to jail, and you can collect $200. You don't have to play the game of disenchantment. Otherwise we do. It's a way of desensitizing ourselves to a habituation that is so deep that sometimes it takes a full couple of years to even realize that there is a different quality to yourself that can come into play. Or sometimes it happens in just a few weeks. Sometimes it happens in just the space of one presentation. At this point, we can't call these lectures because they're not lectures. In the sixties we used to call them happenings. It has become a habitual rut. We can't even say it happening anymore.
I remember being thrown into lecturing when I was 25, having to take over for a, my major professor had a heart attack, and I was the prize teaching assistant, so I had to take over his courses. And when I first began to struggle in the classroom and couldn't lecture. I moved the classes out to the beach. It was that San Francisco state. And we weren't that far and walk everybody out to the beach and sit there alongside the shore and the waves. And there to discuss was that first lecture was an a, in a graduate seminar and Martin Boober. To try and get across that I in thou is not a polarity. The I in thou is a co-operative discovery relationality where God and man discover new things about each other all the time. And the that's why is such an important relationality. That the thou learns as much as the I and discovers as much. And that's why the relationality is that of family and not have some pecking order. And the crux of that comes in a, a little letter. It appears in The New Testament because they, the Roman, scholars used to think that it was written by Saint Paul. And it's not written by St. Paul at all.
The Greek in The Epistle to the Hebrews is of such a radical nature that there's only one ancient writer whose Greek is anywhere near that. And that's, Philo. Philo the Jew from Alexandria. In The Epistle to the Hebrews mistakenly put as a letter of Paul into The New Testament. It was a letter written by a Rabbi in Alexandria to the congregation of people who were not yet identified as Christians, but who were Jews who understood Jesus. And one of the statements in there is, "God has never said to any angels that you are inheritors of this house." Angels were always messengers. They were hired hands. But man as a part of the family, men and women inherit the house. They're the children. It's a whole different quality.
The tyranny of the book was just coming into play at that time. The Greek word for book is codex. And the first codex in the world was made by Cicero, who was the greatest lawyer of his day. In the Roman, at the end of the Roman Republic when it was becoming the Roman empire, just before it became the Roman empire, Cicero used to use his crib notes for law cases arranged in little sheaves like a book. Before that written language was always on a scroll. And you had to unravel the scrolls, like The Dead Sea Scrolls. So that The Dead Sea Scrolls are an image, an archetypal image, of the way in which the language was for a couple thousand years. But when the book came in, the book changed that and the book for a couple thousand years has been the archetype of the way in which language is used.
Now, the way in which the scroll was transformed was instead of opening it at the middle one open at the beginning of it, one opened it at the middle. And you unraveled it this way, both ways. So that you were not addicted to that linearity. But when you do it that way you have to read in an unknowing way. The way that we're doing the same transformation with the book is to pair it up.
And so, our education moves by pairs of books. We still use books, but we pair them up in such a way that we use The I-Ching with Thoreau. We use The Portable Thoreau. They never were paired before. There was no precedent for that. There's no way that anyone has a habitual pairing of Thoreau and The I-Ching. And then we use pairs of books all the way through the education to learn to disengage this habitual inculcation of identities and prejudices and expectations, which do nothing but confirm us in the ruts of ignorance. And so, the whole technique of this education is to learn to dance, not step by step, but in a free form, kind of dosey-doe.
Let's take a break and we'll come back.
END OF SIDE ONE
Let's come back here and let's start again.
One of the techniques of breaking habit is to cut oblique angles into the expected. The unexpected turn is a very interesting kind of way. It's a technique. I suppose in our particular generation, the Sufi story or the Zen story, or the Hasidic story, is a way of delivering this kind of oblique juxtaposition. That turns things that changes. Why is that so? Because the disjunctive shows us the way in which the polarity of is and is not never meet. The world of truth and reality never meets at all in any way. Never interfaces with a non-world of lies and illusion. One of the proofs of this pudding is that you can reach a state of meditation where in the clarity of your presence there is no trace whatsoever of any of the effects of ignorance that you had previously. No trace at all. There are no soot vapors. There are no eraser marks. And it just simply doesn't, doesn't register at all anywhere.
But our education has the ability to come back again and again, through many oblique juxtapositions. And yet all of them are not shards of some fragmented presentation, but they are facets of a jewel. Because this kind of education is like the cutting of a jewel. And indeed, that was an ancient metaphor. And one of the phrases that was used in ancient India at one time was the jewel matrix. The jewel matrix is all of the endless facets of delight that occurred together in the most enriching field of inquiry possible known as reality.
Now, starting next week, we're going to go into myth for 12 weeks. And our initial inquiry into myth, our field of inquiry, will be generated by Inanna. Hopefully through the translation of Diane Wolkstein, but there are other translations you can get. And Jane Ellen Harrison, The Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. That is before you study Greek religion, here's some things you should know before you even begin to study. So, this is chapter zero for a study of Greek religion. This is everything you need to consider before you began. And it was written about a hundred years ago.
And Diane Wolkstein just translated Inanna, but it was written about 2,400 years ago by a young princess, the daughter of Sargon of Akkad. Sargon is the man who made the fertile crescent. He's the first one to link the Persian Gulf with the Mediterranean sea with a caravan route that arced up along the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. Up into what is today, Northern Iraq and Syria. And then came back down onto the coast of the Mediterranean sea where ancient Canaan grew up. Where the ancient Phoenicia had its origins. And so, Sargon of Akkad about 4,400 years ago was the man who first linked the civilizations of India and Sumerian with the civilizations of Egypt and the Mediterranean, what became Italy and what became Greece. In very ancient times they were quite different. His daughter was the greatest writer of her time. And for at least, maybe a thousand years...
Pardon? Let's stop for a second. What is it? What do we need? Let's just stop for a second. This is called just working it in. To work everything in. Is the hair okay? The posture? Demonstrating the interruptions are not interruptions, they're a part of the way in which the process happens. Sometimes in The Vajrayana it's called crazy wisdom. That Tibetan phrase for it as Lamrim. It means riding a horse with no saddle. Having no boundaries. Having no sense of identity at all, because you don't need it. You don't need to identify. You don't need a saddle. You can go bareback. You can even ride a horse that does exist as a horse.
The first time that that was discovered was 2,900 years ago in ancient India. The most powerful sacrifice was the horse sacrifice. The original Vedic authors who came down out of central Asia, for them the horse was the power. In Dravidian India they had no horses. There were no horses. If you look at the sculptures and murals and friezes and paintings that survive from the ancient Harappan civilization from Mahindra Daro and from Harappa about 2,500 B.C., horses do not play a part of that civilization at all. But for those central Asian nomads that immigrated into India who brought with them, the caste system, who brought with them the origins of The Vedas, for them the horse was all powerful. A man can walk maybe 20 or 30 miles in a day at the most. And with a horse you can cover 100 or 150. And so, someone on a horse is right away, a broader, more powerful kind of a presence. And so, the horse sacrifice was great in The Vedas, but there came a time after about 600 years of The Rigveda and that successor as The Yajur-Veda and later on The Atharva-Veda and The Sama-Veda.
The successors to the Vedas were The Upanishads. And the very first Upanishad is about the transformation of the horse sacrifice so that is no longer about horses. It's about an inner gestalt that only ostensibly begins with horses. But the horse was transformed in The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad. The horse is seen as the cirrus clouds in the sky are the mane of the horse. And the sun is the eye of the horse. And the wind, Vayu, is this energy that the horse is generating. And you as a meditator ride this horse of the cosmos. And your inner sense of balance, your kinesthetic equanimity, is the way in which you stay in the saddle of that horse.
The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad. Even the name tells its origins. Before there where Upanishads, in between The Vedas and The Upanishads there were a whole series of developments that registered in what were called Aranyakas. An Aranyaka is a forest teaching. One of the ancient epithets of the Buddha was that he was forest gone. In other words, he had mastered concentration to the point of vanishing. He had brought the capacities of integration closer than identity. So that there was not only A equals A as the fundamental norm, but he had brought the two A's together since there was only A. Why the shortest of all the wisdom literature in The Mahayana's is a Prajnaparamita Sutra that has one vowel, ah. But he had brought it even smaller than that. He had internalized the A, the single A, the ah so there was nothing showing.
This capacity, this ability to bring to the vanishing point is, belongs to someone who has forest gone. Someone who has a forest teaching. Because in ancient India the forest was not just a pleasant little grove of trees, the tops of growth here and there, but it was the wild unknown. It was the jungle as well as the evergreens, as well as the deodar forests in Northern India. It meant the wilderness that was still wild. It meant the wild world. The wilderness world.
In one of Robinson Jeffers poems, he has the beautiful phrase that the Sierra club used to have as one of their mottoes, "In wilderness is the preservation of the world". Because wilderness is nature unspoiled. Wilderness is nature without any kind of emendation. With nothing added. No artificial anything. So, someone who is forest gone is someone who is able to come back into the wilderness of pure nature and be only there. And nature being a zero-based mystery does not register even one A. And on that level of participation, one becomes mysterious.
And so in between The Vedas and The Upanishads are The Aranyakas. And The Aranyakas are those oral instructions from largely men who reached the end of their lives. And the life cycle in The Vedas was that you go through various stages. You're a child. You're a youth. You're a householder and so on. Until you come to the last stage of life, which is an elderly person who needs to disengage from life, to disengage from the responsibilities. And occasionally there are old men who lived long enough that they had gone through all the stages. They had done everything and undone everything that they could, and yet they were still alive. Those old men went to the forests. And some of them discovered a most profound kind of wisdom. They were through with the sacrifices that working men performed in order to have successful lives. They were through needing the rituals of family and needing the relationality of friends and organizations. And they went alone into the wilderness and yet lived and lived for years.
And so, there grew up a very small trace element of humanity in ancient India, who were these teachers who were in the forest, they were in the wilderness. And that occasionally someone would run across an intractable problem with their existence. And they could go out and they could find these people. And they could study with them if they could find them. And the transition from those individuals who went for themselves and those individuals who taught others is the transition from Aranyakas to Upanishads. The Upanishad is an education seed. It's the beginning of teaching someone else that you don't do this for you to find out that you do this so that others may find out. You don't cook this food for you to eat. You cook this food for them to eat. So that the education seed in ancient India for wisdom was that you do not do this for yourself at all. It's not for you. You may not eat of the food that you prepare. A teacher may not learn, have the self from his teaching in the ancient India wisdom tradition. It is all for others. And one of the stipulations of not teaching yourself was to keep from identifying yourself as the teacher. To keep yourself out of the role model, I am the teacher. You are the student.
So that in The Upanishads there is this definite tone of that the teacher is in the teachings only and it does not register. So that The Upanishads have this curious kind of flavor. And right away on the first Upanishad, The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is huge several hundred pages. And so, it's called The Brihadaranyaka, the great breath forest teaching. Brihhad means that you have to have so much breath to utter The Upanishad that it takes sometimes days for it to be delivered in its entirety.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. And it's there that one finds the transformation of the horse sacrifice into the meditation on the world as the horse. And that you are the rider because of your kinetic quality of equilibrium within. And that that inner balance was the saddle. And out of this developed a quality that was different. Before a yoga was an asana of the body. Now it became an asana of the mind. And the minds asana was not an, a contortion of a posture, but it was in having no posture whatsoever. That's the minds equilibrium is to have a focus where there is no posture possible to be labeled. Where there's no identification that is conceivable. And so, one has to disappear from the whole realm where correct postures count. Where someone could count on, what are the marks? Have you done such and so, right? It becomes irrelevant.
But in order to do that, one needs to make a very careful, subtle transformation. You have to morph from the world as it really is to equality that never occurs in the world at all. Because vanishing from the world is not included in the world ever. They're disjunctive. They never made. And so, someone who refines themselves well enough to not be in the world is not in it at all. And yet to teach one has to be able to come back into the world.
How can you come back into the world and not be of it? So, what comes back into the world is merely the language that's happening. The speaker of the language is not there. It's only the language happening. And that language that is only happening becomes a transformation of the kind of language that the world recognizes as the language. The world recognizes the myth. It recognizes the language of experience. It recognizes the language we're feeling. An image are the basic constituents. A language where we talk about things and the reference of words are things. Where the language is a language that has a grammar. And it has a phonetic. And it has its vocabulary. Whereas a transformational wisdom language who knows what the grammar is. Who knows what kind of vocabulary there is? And so, one of the characteristics of a spiritual language is that it as a cascade of interlocked phrases without end. And one can recognize it by such. That that cascade of phrases is overlaid in such a way that is as a seamlessness that undulates is simply the happening of it. The delivery of it.
Sometimes this is referred to as an ocean also. But that kind of metaphor is a little difficult at the beginning. Usually, the metaphor that in ancient times was used is that you progressively shave away the reference that you would normally expect in such a language. You learn to unhook this word from that thing. So that the words began to have a life of their own. And when they have a life of their own, if they don't have to mean things, they still carry an odd quality. They still carry an affinity with meaning. And when the meaning doesn't have to refer to external things, their meaning turns to the inner world and words, instead of meaning things start to try to mean images in the inner world, which stand for a thing. And so, language changes from a language about things that you can count, like a businessman counting. We have ten goats. So, we write down and we have the goats on this piece of clay. And if we sell a goat then we're down to nine goats. That kind of language, that kind of inventory, is about things. But a language of just the images of goats. Now you're just carrying the image of goats. You're not counting the creatures, but you're counting the images.
In myth language begins to turn from the world of things, from ritual items to mythic images. And as it turns to mythic images it tends to want to have those images be things. But one of the curious things about mythic language is that images float and they only have meaning as correlation to things. As long as there is a construct of a context. As long as there is some kind of a pigeon-hole where those images can stay then they retain their meaning in terms that would be recognizable when you count things in the world. When you take the egg carton context away from images and let them float free, they tend to be like lost children and tend to look to see which of these other images they're related to. And association begins to the extent that the ritual cookie cutter designation loosens. And as image association takes over it turns out that it has its own laws of development. Its own gestalts that occur. Regardless of the way things are arranged in the world. And so, dream associations of images are quite radically different from the way in which corrals in the external world for animals well-kept. All the horses in the stable are usually in some kind of individuals stalls, if you can afford it at all. But in a dream, a dream stable can be almost of anything. And the more one gets into this, the more dreamed images differ from the world.
And so, The Upanishads when they came to teach wisdom, when there was a teaching of wisdom, the teacher had to be careful that there was no image of them in the minds of the students. The first thing to guard against. Because as long as the students had an image of the teacher in their minds and then they could see the teacher, they would make this little automatic correlation that the image in their minds was that person there speaking. And as long as that scenario played itself out one can learn nothing at all about anything, much less wisdom. Much less, the most arcane and subtle of all wisdom and that is to discover the mysteriousness of one's own person. zone.
The Mundaka Upanishad is about a quality of person, which is extraordinary. It is described in this particular way. This is from the middle of The Mundaka Upanishad. "That person indeed is divine. He has no visible form. He is both within and without." Notice that the emphasis here is not to choose an image over the thing. It is not to choose an inner value over an outer value. It's neither. One has to pair them together, tie them together and set them both aside. And when you set them both aside, it leaves a double space. And if you get the technique of leaving a double space, you have a correspondence of an inner openness with an external openness. And you have the qualities on it for a moment of a tandem of opennesses. And when opennesses are paired like that, they don't go into an identity of that openness then this openness. They simply become openness itself. And they do not register as A. It's not that A equals A then reduces down to A, but that they register as no letter at all. Just simply as a space. As an interval. An interval that has not only no thing in it, but it has no time in it either.
And so, it can be expanded in terms of time so that its duration is of any duration. It doesn't matter whether it's a few seconds or if it's all afternoon. And with practice, it turns out it could be extended indefinitely. Here's how The Mundaka Upanishad records at about 2,500 years ago in ancient India. "That person indeed is divine. He has no visible form. He is both within and without. Unborn, without breath or mind. Radiant and farther than the farthest imperishable."
So, this zero-based quality is not an inner quality, which one finds in preference to something worldly. That's very much an addictive kind of prejudice that stupidity teaches the ignorant. There's no preference that one has a prized inner value, and that the outer world is of disgusting inferior value. That already is playing a very dangerous kind of egotistical arrogant game. It's not that at all.
And so, The Mundaka Upanishad is a teaching which relies upon, Mundaka means razor. It means a razor. It means that shaving way to superfluous is a process that can be carried on till a point of transformation is revealed. And the point of transformation is that as you shave ever finer, you realize that you could go on shaving more and more, more and more finer. You become very good at shaving with this capacity to critically integrate, to critically get rid of the superfluous. Until a very clever insight occurs to you. That's the largest piece still remaining is not something to be shaved, but the razor itself. And that by setting that razor down one, not only sets this last biggest piece down, but you set aside the compulsion to keep shaving. And it turns out that the addiction to further shave becomes in a very advanced equanimity, a much bigger problem than getting rid of one more small, minor, subtle thing. Oh, well, I'm not quite sitting right? My left little toe is not exactly placed as it should be. This kind of quibbling is an ignorance in itself. And letting go of that, stopping being concerned with that is a very great letting go. And what comes out of that is not a space in the mind, but that the inner quality of the world, the inner world, the whole mind itself becomes spacious. All of a sudden, the entirety of it is space. And it turns out that the external world also becomes pure space.
Someone once said in ancient China, in the 8th century was a Chan Buddhist madman who met a friend of his who had also become a Chan Buddhist madman. And when they met each other they started laughing. And someone said, well, why, why are they laughing? And someone watching this said, well, you know, neither of them was there. And they laughed because both of them disappeared at the same time. It was like two open doors facing each other. And these two figures later on, instead of laughing at each other, because it was so difficult for someone to conceive that they were laughing because, well, if they're neither there, how can they continue to laugh? So, they were transformed into two masters pointing at the moon and laughing at the moment. And usually because the Chinese are very homespun about wisdom, they don't like wisdom to be like an India it has to be extremely refined. It's very important that the guru is really elegantly refined in China. It's important that he's a peasant. So, they're show with brooms, sweeping. Handmade brooms. And they're like maintenance men, who janitors, who was sweeping up and they paused, and both of them are pointing at the moon laughing. And then later on the Japanese Zen tradition, in order to make this really refined, to keep the razor they're going really sharp they reduce this down to A. They say it isn't two men, it's just a finger pointing at the moon. But of course, the Japanese in doing this reducing it down to a finger at the pointing at the moon they miss that it's a pair of fingers that point and that the moon, the full moon, is not a vanishing, but a fullness. Because the full moon is an image that shows everything. And it turns out that nothing and everything, infinity and zero, take each other's place. They dosey doe with each other without there being a slightest hitch in reality.
So that the vanishing point, The Upanishads, already find that when you vanish, when you become that pure invisible person, all of a sudden, the world occurs. Here's how it reads in The Mundaka Upanishad. I'll read the verse that we had and then the following verse and then you can see. Notice that we're returning back to it a couple of times, and we're going further. This is called accumulated penetration.
That person indeed is divine. He has no visible form. He is both within and without. Unborn, without breath or mind. Radiant and farther than the farthest imperishable. From him issue breath and mind and all the organs. Wind, fire, water, space, and the earth that bears everything. His head is the fire. His eyes the sun and moon. His ears are the quarters. His speech, The Vedas disclosed. His breath is the wind, his heart, the universe. And with his feet, he is indeed the inmost self of every living.
All of a sudden instead of just vanishing into nothingness that interior spiritual presence transforms into everything without any effort whatsoever. The later, later the great writer on yoga, Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras talks about the way in which there is an effortless being. There is a struggle in the world because it involves muscles and tension and polarities and this and that and identities and everything else. But in the spiritual realm, the resonances of spontaneity are complete and pervade. They involve wholeness in every aspect.
In The Mundaka Upanishad we find a quality which when W.B. Yeats tried to translate. He translated ten Upanishads with a friend of his. When he translates The Mundaka Upanishad he begins at this way. "Lord's inspiration of sacrifice. May our ears hear the good. May our eyes see the good. May we serve him with the whole strength of our body. May we with all our life carry out his will, may peace and peace and peace. Be everywhere." Notice here that Yeats, the master of symbolism Yeats. The great mythographer. Yeats the magician. The visionary. The great artist. Yeats begins here in such a way that it's difficult to see how The Mundaka Upanishad will come out of this.
Here's the translation made a couple of years ago. The world's classics edition. Here's how it begins. "Brahma arose as first among Gods'. Creator of all. Guardian of the world. To **inaudible word or two** son. He disclosed the knowledge of Brahma and all knowledge its root."
In fact, in The Mundaka Upanishad there's a quality of this infinity sign doubling back. This transformation that makes a double attract a paired node. So that instead of having an identity, that one is worried about and needs to defend and hold onto, there's a concourse of actuality that's free and capable of variation spontaneously at all times. This quality, The Mundaka Upanishad indicates that sometimes the son becomes the father of the father. That it's not just a doubling back to where you were, but it's a doubling back before you were. And that this quality is indeed mysterious. Because if you double back, not just to where you were, but all the way to origins, those origins are not a beginning point they're before any beginning point. And if one can dip back into that mysteriousness of zero-based wilderness nature, you come forward in such a way that never had happened before. So that you not only have a future, but you have a surprising capacity. You have a capacity to have a new past. You are not limited to some cardinally numbered past that has happened and no one can change it.
Part of the unfortunate ignorance of the younger generation today is that they feel that something is history when it's dead and done with. Oh, that's history. You're history. That's dead and done with. Only an ignorance would conceive of history as being that way. History is a differential, a liveliness where one can recreate the past as one creates a future. They both are capable of being done together.
One of the great 20th century artists Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past explores this capacity in his initial final volume, The Past Recaptured, he tries to go back and recapture the past. And he discovers that it changes. That as he gets really good at remembering, he remembers more than what he did. And in doing so in large as the past, he doesn't just net it, but there's something more that happens. And it turns out that that capacity is developable, and one can come back on not only have a future but having a new past. So that the present that you are becomes enormously expanded and different. You are in the present, not just some kind of perfection of what already had happened, but you enlarged what had happened so that the present has much more possibility than you could have even imagined. And thus, the future is asymptotically wide. Asymptotic is a mathematical turn...term of increasing increasingly. So that the ancient phrase was world without end. What is blessing? Blessing is not just to do good and have something right, but to inherit life eternal in world without end. This is how it was phrased.
The Upanishads in India form a whole phase of development. In between the great poetic codifications of life and The Vedas and the rather esoteric seeking for oneself in The Aranyakas through the open largess of teaching. And The Upanishads, which were meant to be taught indefinitely, since there was no teacher ego involved whatsoever, there also became no student ego involved. And so, The Upanishads when they were written down, they were given to anyone who could hear them. And so, The Upanishads were the first all-weather education in ancient India. They were there for everyone.
And later The Upanishad of The Upanishads became The Bhagavad Gita. It became the archetypal way of doing this. The Bhagavad Gita is all about a teacher and a student, Krishna and Arjuna. Who in talking with each other discover that both are infinite and belong together infinitely. For not only does Arjuna discover that he is capable of an eternal action in the world, Krishna discovers that he is capable of delivering a teaching, even though he is not there. Even though he knows for real, that Arjuna is not there. Nevertheless, the teaching still obtains. It still happens.
In The Mundaka Upanishad there's a quality. There are three chapters. And each chapter has two sections. They're called kondos. So, there are pair of kondos three times, it has this kind of structure. And if you put that all together, it's six. Two, two, and two. So, that there's a hexagon, there's a hexagram quality to the structure of The Mundaka Upanishad. Each of the sections has this facet. It's like a, it's like a horizon of understanding. And there are six of them and they juxtapose together. So that one gets a jewel with six facets, each facet of which is an infinite horizon. So that the jewel does not register as some thing either out there or in the mind. But it registers as an infinite cosmos that has no inner and outer. Or on the other hand has both inner and outer. And that there's no prejudice between either way. One can enjoy the world and be spiritual in it. As well as enjoy not being in the world and being spiritual out of it. So that those dichotomies, those false dichotomies of identifying ignorance also disappear. And so that great gulf between those who are ignorant and enjoy the world on those poor wise and abstract themselves from the world, that that difference disappears. Because not only does identity led to these kinds of habitual categorizations, but difference also leads to that. And one learns to dissolve both.
In this way a great deal of misunderstanding is circumvented. For instance, a lot of the teaching that has come down about The Mundaka Upanishad has come down through Indian monks who identified the razor as the razor, which shaves the head of the devotee. So that one is a shaven head monk. And that this is all about a monks ascetic qualities as if that were superior to someone who is living in the world with family, with friends and so forth. That kind of prejudice is also due to illusion. That the teacher needs to be some kind of transcendentally effete, elegant speaker who never drinks a beer. This is indeed ignorance. And it's part of the quality that the inculcation of ignorance for thousands of years has left with us. Orig...a residual that when it vanishes leaves, no trace whatsoever.
We could go on with The Upanishads probably. If you would like the best history of Indian philosophy was Surendranath Dasgupta who was the first teacher of Mircea Eliade. When Eliade at 19 wanted to go to India to study because he wanted some adventure. And a very...
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