Interval 5
Presented on: Saturday, March 27, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Interval 5, which means that we've completed 5 phases so that we have an opposable thumb to complete our hand. We should now be able to, for the first time, be able to grasp. What is it that we're grasping? If we're only grasping a conception we're not using the thumb, we're just using four fingers. It's curious but all you can do is hang on. All that the mind can do is hang on to this world. It takes consciousness to be mobile enough to use tools to take us out of this world. And that's what consciousness is, is like the thumb. And it goes beyond clinging. And in Buddhism, in ancient Buddhism the word that would express what we today call resistances, the ancient world was "claysa". "Claysa" meant impurities, errors, and they were do to clinging, the clingingness. Not the grasping so that one would comprehend, but the clinging so that one is always desperate to not loose contact. And that clinging makes of its implications, these "claysas", these impurities, these imperfections. So that the clinging is "tangha". "Tangha" is the origin of not only clinging but the desperation of clinging. And this is the seamy underside of desire. So that desire in ancient times was not at all life affirming but was life regressing because it was clinging, in a non-conscious way, desperately, to a limitation.
And as long as we were in a Natural condition, desires were fine. In Nature desires are a part of the way in which existence continues. But when the capacity to add a transform, a transform which carries us further, carries us beyond, beyond so that we can fly, we no longer are limited to the Natural frame of reference, but are able to inhabit further states, further states beyond Nature. Then desire has an underside which comes into play which was rarely in play in Nature, and in existence was just a part of the polarity of its structure; not at all apparent. And in experience on the Mythic level, on the tribal feeling level, it actually enhanced because it gave highlights, it gave shadow highlights to the forms, to the perspectives, and added a certain kind of beauty, a dramatic dangerous beauty. But in the mind, the underside of desire, the "tangha", the clinging becomes powered up exponentially and desire becomes greed, desire becomes lust and desire becomes anger.
And so what was in Nature rather harmless, in fact enticing like the mascara shadow over an eye; in Mythic experience it's an allure, but in the mind with its abstractedness, its losing of its capacity to participate peacefully in the episodic dramas of experience, the abstracted mind seeks to make this in a high powered way, a doctrinaire imposition which will integrate the world in its terms. And so the power of the abstracted ego turns the beauty of Natural desire into greed lust and anger. And the whole structure is dependent upon a sequence, a sequence of causality.
And so in the classic understanding, we're using India as an example just temporarily (we could use many examples). So the old India understanding was that when you have the capacity to abstract, it's then that you need to discipline the mind. Up until then you can just live. The varieties and vagarities of experience are self governing to a large extent and people who live a natural life with each other in Nature learn that there are episodic threads of experience that are life affirming and one should have those and braid those together to make the cable of tradition and other experiences lead to frays and dead ends and split ends and some not attractive, others absolutely inviting of death. And so that Natural selective process on the Ritual and Myth level becomes obviated with the power of Symbols. And once the power of Symbols are there, then we must learn to transform. We must learn not to let this abstracted impulse power of the ego to sweep us away with doctrinaire conceptions that largely are dealing with anger lust and greed.
Now that tripartite iconography is usually symbolized, if you look in the India tradition when this was brought into iconographic expression, it was the end of the Gupta Age, about the 700's AD and it was the beginnings of Tantra, the origins of the Vajrayana which matured in Tibet actually. And those three qualities were a snake and a rooster and a pig. And if you look at a Tibetan Mandala, like the wheel of life, in the center are those three icons, those three figures that chase each other interminably. And what's interesting is that anger, lust and greed chase each other interminably without end, without a break. Because they're related in such a way that they are three structures of the same impulse; the impulse to cling with four fingers and the refusal to bring consciousness into play. And so essentially what is not only wrong or erroneous in clinging, but positively evil; there's a difference between something that's wrong and something that's evil. The evil is that it is anti conscious and anti life. It makes of that person who gives into that, a killer. Not only a killer of beings but a killer of value, a killer of meaning. And we live in a time, in a society, where the planet is a nightmare of killers on the loose everywhere on every level. And life itself is not safe. And so in such conditions, other parts of the Cosmos which are in harmony, sense a disease, and as the Bhagavad Gita says, God does not permit this condition very long, always sends a Krishna, always sends someone to transform and to pinpoint exactly where it is that this goes wrong.
And where it goes wrong is in the very center of a Mandala. In ancient India, to keep the example, the Mandala was called the Shri Chakra Mandala. And at the very center of that Mandala is a dot. We talked a couple of weeks ago about triangularity and triangles. In the Shri Chakra Mandala you find nine triangles superimposed on each other in such a way that the five and the four become a symmetry around a dot. In Hinduism it's called Bindu. It is a vanishing point. But in the Gupta age, in India, there was a deep misunderstanding. And the deep misunderstanding was that the dot was a thing that was not. The Bindu was a vanishing point with the emphasis on the point. And this is a very subtle error, is a high Dharma error that makes all the difference between something that affirms life and something that is destined to kill for death. It's a life or death decision. And while it's clear in the Bhagavad Gita, in the Gupta age it was no longer clear. Because the clarity of mind that it took to understand had become too complex to manage. Because in the intervening thousand years, India had developed a fantastic sense of logic. And India logic by the end of the Gupta age was so refined that intellect became a jungle. It became refined and refined and refined until Indian philosophy resembled what one would see in a Hindu Temple; filigree upon filigree, detail upon detail. Almost like a kind of a fractal jungle of iconographic confusion. And those men and women became lost in the jungles of their minds.
And so the development of Tantra was to side step, to do an end run around the mind which had become a sand trap of abstraction. And the whole basis of Tantra is that love, rather than insight, is an energy that cannot be corrupted in this way. Because love knows instantly when it is being abstracted and will not accept it. Whereas the mind is structured and built to be abstract and doesn't notice that it's turned into a killer; has no way on its own to tell. And so love becomes an interesting energy, and related, deeply related to love, is the conscious ability to go beyond vanishing. To go beyond the point. To explore the new world where conscious time space opens a new hand and presents it. Presents it to be met by another hand, the hand of the Beloved.
Two of the worlds greatest poets addressed this particular anvil of the heart. The heart which must learn to find someway to circumvent an insane mind. Insane not by craziness, but insane by a jungle of infinite exactness which baffles. And those two poets that we look at today, one man and one woman, Rumi as the man and Emily Dickinson as the woman. And both of them in their own ways in their own times bequeath to us, and for the rest of the History of this particular star system, two of the finest collections of poems dealing precisely with how love renews; not because the mind understands but in spite of the mind's understanding.
If one looks at the collection of Emily Dickinson's poems, three big volumes from Harvard University Press, some two thousand poems of hers were discovered after she died. In her own lifetime she published seven poems, and little newspapers in Western Massachusetts. She hardly ever left the little town of Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born. I think she went to Boston a few times to get her eyes checked; she had trouble with her eyes. She went to Philadelphia once to visit a friend. And other than that Emily Dickinson never left her home town. It used to be said that she was a New England spinster, but one has come to understand, in the last seventy years of scholarship, that she was a deeply passionate woman. And that her love was so deep, it was difficult to find some registry of it, because she was conscious that she should not cling to things but exchange herself with something beyond. That kind of love is very difficult to find if you limit yourself to a town of 7,000 people for your whole life. And because she was not published, those in the wider world that would have found her and loved her, never knew she existed. There were a couple of people, taking advantage of her literary genius, who wanted to use her talents for their own ends. They never lasted very long because she had no ambition; she had no place for that kind of clingingness to register, so that she couldn't be bought by promises of money, fame, grandeur, importance. They actually didn't mean a thing to her.
Aside from her three volumes of poetry which were edited decades after she died - she died in 1886 - are three volumes of her letters. Those six volumes comprise the collected works of Emily Dickinson.
It's curious about Emily Dickinson because in her letters you also find poems, you also find indications of where she was going, and one of her poems from the beginning of the American Civil War - 1862 - and remember that many figures in the Western Massachusetts of her day were deeply involved in the underground fleeing of refugees from the South. Many American Blacks found freedom in New England by being sheltered and brought through a tunnel escape route that ended up in Western Massachusetts. And figures like Thoreau and Emerson and Emily Dickinson were deeply involved in this kind of activity. So by 1862 it was apparent that something radically clinging had destroyed the American vision. And that it was a lack of consciousness deeper than geographical politics. It had something to do with misunderstanding human nature which includes consciousness. That our reality includes, not only the entire realm of nature, but the transcendental beyond realm. In her day it was called transcendental.
That consciousness is a part of our reality, and that only when you have the five phases of a conscious time space, do you have a field rich enough for a spiritual person to step out of and Be. And that the human person who steps out of a five phase richness of background is always supernatural, is never a product of the society, is never a product of some kind of identification schedule that can be listed, qualities, abilities. That every person who ever really was, was beyond description. And that's how they matured. They matured in this way of grasping that they were not limited by anything they could cling to. And so the Spiritual Person is by conscious nature, free. And so freedom became a deep issue. Became an issue, not as some idea of freedom, but freedom became the characteristic of the person who is real. And so the understanding in a poem like this poem, by Emily Dickinson - 1862. She writes:
Within my garden rides a bird upon a single wheel
Who's spokes a dizzy music make
As twer a traveling mill.
He never stops but slackens above the ripest rose
Partakes without alighting and praises as he goes,
Till every spice is tasted. And then his fairy gig
Reels in remoter atmospheres, and I rejoin my dog
A great critic once said of Emily Dickinson, that when she began to get the power of her condensation, she learned to condense beyond the forms that were identifiable. And later in her life she wrote a single quatrain that took this particular poem as its seed, and she made a New England haiku, 120 years ago. It reads:
A root of evanescence
With a revolving wheel
A resonance of emerald
A rush of cochineal
It's a hummingbird, who not only has come and sipped a flower in its wheeling wheel of green and red, but then zipped and vanished into the distance.
The critic C.R. Anderson, who became attuned to Emily Dickinson when he wrote a work, a critical commentary on Melville. He wrote a work on Melville in the South Seas, because it was apparent that Melville had discovered something that all of the other writers up until his time had missed. All the other writers up to his time looked to European models of reality, whereas Melville went out on the high seas, went to realms that the Europeans never knew, the Greeks never knew. And lived with cannibals on South Sea islands where he learned a deeper more profound sense of human reality that had mysteries beyond those that European minds had addressed themselves to. And so Anderson's book on Melville in the South Seas showed him to be someone who had shredded the veil of the European heritage and had come to understand something primordial. The primeval energy of man who had never faced any civilized mentality whatsoever.
And then he wrote the study of Emily Dickinson because he picked up, his antennae were up and he realized that this woman who never left New England also had that sense of wide open completely outrageous radical freedom, where she was primordial and she wasn't at all identifiable. Can you believe that? And he says of this little poem on the hummingbird, that its root of evanescence is the trail, the spirit trail into the vanishing beyond. He writes: "The aesthetic problem of imitation is raised at the outset by the word evanescence. A word that in her day had not yet acquired the modern abstracted sense of fleeting or transitory, but held strictly to the root meaning of vanishing, as the lexicon that Emily Dickinson had in her room defined evanescence as 'all we secure of beauty is its evanescence'." All that we can trust in Beauty is that it's evanescent. And the dictionary went on to define it: 'evanescence as a disappearance from sight by removal to a distance'.
And as there is an exterior disappearance from perception by distance, there's an interior disappearance from conception by penetration. And Emily Dickinson was one of those Zen masters who understood that both these occurrences happen in a diagonal line of radical freedom, together. That it's a symmetry. That reality always registers in symmetries when it deals with existence. Anything that exists, like an evanescence, even vanishing, that vanishing could only exist in a polarity that has symmetry. And so the inner vanishing happens at the same time as the exterior vanishing.
I once wrote a poem called Zen Canyon, thirty years ago at Tassahara Zen Center. Reads like this:
One night bird sings on a twig
Its notes vanish down the canyon
A thin warble into foggy distance
I peer after it expectant
Moonlit shoals of mist drift
Again the bird sings freely
The music dwindles into the gorge
Again I strain after it hearing what I see
The singing stops
The twig bobs empty
And so Emily Dickinson has this American Zen quality. She's the first. It never appears anywhere in American Literature before her and no one knew this until a long time after. Because no one realized until the late 1950's that it was even there, because no one had ever heard of Zen until the 1950's. And the first great appreciator of Emily Dickinson was Jack Kerouac. The first one to pick up a volume of her poems and walk around at night on the campus of Columbia University and realize that he'd been blown out by this so called spinster who'd never left a New England home town. And he was deep into his Dharma bum Buddhism, and she blew him out; which is the origin of On The Road. Because the only thing you can do then is the exact opposite. You can either stay exactly only where you are, but then the realization starts to occur to you, where are you? Your body is here but are you that body? Your mind is here, are you that mind? Where is the you in you beyond what you thought? So that it makes perfect sense, perfect sense to wander freely, continuously. Wandering freely continuously is exactly the symmetry of staying precisely only where you are. So that wandering continuously precisely becomes a yoga just like a Samadhi going into the deepest asana realization.
Which brings us to Rumi. Rumi was that symmetry to Emily Dickinson. He always, once he was awakened, wandered freely. So that even when he was there in time/space, his free continuous wandering was a motion that led him to found the Mevlevi Whirling Dervish Order. And the Whirling Darvishes, if they were not conscious beyond, would become dizzy in the first minute of spinning. Try it. Stand anywhere - Kerouac once said in his poem about the golden mystery of the Universe, he said it was Friday afternoon in the Universe. Try standing on any Friday afternoon in the Universe anywhere and try physically spinning. See how long you will last. The Mevlevi Dervishes spin hour after hour after hour. They never loose the pivot. A ballerina would be jealous beyond belief to have such a point. Because in the midst of this spinning, the Mevlevi Dervish sings in deep syncopating beat, the songs of Rumi. They are meant to be recited in the continuous whirl of unmoving presence.
Let's take a break.
INTERVAL 5: RUMI & EMILY DICKINSON
PART TWO
We're braving the edges of the mind. And when you get into that proximity of the mind, all the warning signals come up because the whole integral cycle wants to protect its integral. It has done nothing since creation but integrate, it has never ever differentiated. And so at the farthest reaches of the mind, where there would be edges to the mind, there is only a terrific chaos. Sometimes in the early Star Treks, where the Enterprise would get to the edge of the Galaxy and there'd be this barrier, they couldn't go beyond. It's that sort of thing.
Or one of the most poignant presentations of it - one of the great African authors, Amos Tutola, in The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town writes it this way, the chapter entitled Abnormal Squatting Man of the Jungle: "Having confined my journey on this path for about one hundred and twenty twinklings without either meeting or seeing any kind of living creature on this path, I stopped by a small rock which was near the path. Then I climbed it and put my Juju bag, food bag and other property on top of it. Then I sat down and after I had rested for some twinklings, I loosened my bag and took out one big yam, one roasted meat, ground pepper, palm oil, two flinty stones . . . . . . ." and he makes his little supper. And then the awareness of the night and the jungle impinge upon him and he writes: "When the night met me on this rock and I could not see well, my first mind told me that as I could not travel further, it was better to sleep on top of this rock. But my first mind had hardly advised me like that, when my second mind interrupted. It said that it would be a great punishment to me if I slept on this rock that night because a cruel man of the jungle who was squatting about in the night was living near the rock." And of course later on he's debating with his first mind and his second mind and Tutola writes: "But to my fear and embarrassment again my second mind had hardly advised me like that and I had agreed to its advise, when this cruel squatting man of the jungle blew heavy cold to my face and breast unexpectedly and then all became as stiff as dried sticks at the same time. Now my first and second minds could not help me decide anything as before except my memory." And he goes on and he has to deal with the cruel squatting man of the jungle.
It is a jungle. Because there are no edges to the mind, there are only liminal terrors, which are there as artifacts of not ever having been explored. It's like a terrain which has no place on any map and so it falls away swiftly into nothingness - it goes off the map. In fact the saying was 'it goes off the map'. It's the same condition that the European mind came into contact with 500 years ago, that there was an edge to the world over which one could fall off. And on the edges of all of those early world maps one finds terrific creatures, monsters in the sea.
And so this quality, this quality of Vision as being precarious, very perilous, is actually world wide and you find it in every culture and every tradition. Rumi talks about the jungle, man's existence as a jungle, and one has to beware of these dimensions of existence. In that bewaring, one becomes aware that Love occurs in a completely different form. It is no longer the comfortable familiar feeling toned form of experience, but now becomes a radical surreal mystic mode of consciousness. An Irani friend of mine and myself translated for today's lecture, three poems of Rumi on the mysteries of Love. And the first one reads like this:
In Love my ascending Soul separated from me
Through such loving Soul is saved from oneself
Loving primordial the Soul so created never is this that an essence reached
In loving ascension Soul as a load stone magnetized my nearness to her
Again it was she who made my Soul loose
Which lost was found then with her
When again my Soul came to herself, Love's web wound again in her coils
From such essence a nectar was offered from all impurities was she freed
There is its sign threshold of beginning beyond any ultimate one's still
Reaching
What is not understood by the literatures who are pretending that
They are poets, is that poetry is a High Dharma Art. It emerges out of Vision and not out of experience. Its language is not referential to things but expectant for discoveries. In his famous theory of poetry, Wallace Stevens called it the momentous world of poetry. He said "a world so vast that straight lines are seen to fall." And in this amplitude he once in a poem called it "theatrical distances."
Only one occurrence continues and that is of the Lover continuing Loving. Because the witness, the ego, the artifacts of the mind do not carry through. They don't transform. They need to remain - they only breath in integral air. They cannot breath in the space of differential consciousness. And that's why in differential consciousness forms are never compact because they're not integral forms at all. They never were, they never will be. They are differential forms. So that their existence is not as things, nor are they things of the mind. Neither the body nor the mind have any dibs on differential forms.
And so one struggles with a language to speak and this struggle is the way in which a Visionary magical language churns itself into expressiveness. And occasionally one learns to speak in a new way. Like the language spoken here in these lectures, this is a new language. It's for a different millennium. It's for a whole different quality; it's not for people still living in cultural sandboxes - or even a patchwork quilt of snipped snippets of various cultures put together as some kind of pastiche. But it's a language that carries English beyond its integral origins, beyond its integral tradition into an explored territory, into a terrain that is characterized by infinite openness. It's meant to go out into the stars, into star fields and be at home there; be at home where the there is not noticeable in any kind of geographic sense whatsoever. There are no rivers, there are no mountains, there are no trees. And in vast stretches of duration there's not even any time. We belong in that freedom, that scope of freedom.
And so this education is meant to prism at this particular time, a population who are free to be free. And it takes awhile for that kind of language to have its effect, its resonance, because the usual habitual way of hearing it is with ears that are still tuned to things. And once a transform like consciousness is operative, the clingingness to things becomes definitely an underside that jeopardizes.
The second poem of Rumi:
Let no intellectuals be among Lovers
Exactly when Love is such sweet Beauty
Keep intellectuals away from all Lovers
Keep the steam of gyms far from breezings
If an intellectual enters shout no passage
Should a Lover enter whisper hurrah
That intellect sits thinking with reasons
While to seventh Heaven Love goes
Intellect debates which camel for Hadj
Lovers top their mount of purity
Love approached
Her hand and my mouth
Forget poems
To Sirius we go
So that a differential Visionary language challenges the world and everything and every mind in it. And those who are sharp enough to get that point take umbrage with it. And so the bearer of a new language is always seen as a danger and indeed correctly so. Because like a thief that speaker has come to take away all of the habitual security that there is. Not only in things but in minds.
And so it takes a great courage of heart, it takes a lovingness in order to continue. And in fact one sees even in such an early assay towards freedom as the first Buddhism, one finds in the very first generation of the first Buddhists a tendency to conglomerate into monkhoodedness. And to miss the point of freedom. So that one finds even in the first generation of Buddhists the saying 'The Buddha, The Dharma, The Sangha'. Which is a traditional formulation that seeks to pull in. But a transform has already been operative, so what is pulled in is subterraneanly clingingness. And that began to show up. And in the hundreds of years after that first generation, increasingly it showed up.
Until finally a Malado King in India named Asoka - he was part dark Indian Dravidian origin and part Greek Western origin and his genetic mixture made of him a splotched skinned semi albino. And because he was so marked, he was left out of the palace intrigues of all the other powerful brothers who eventually killed each other off until only Asoka remained. And he became King of India - inherited the entire Marion Empire. And had an insight - from someone who all his life had been an outsider; he hadn't belonged in any tradition exactly, he hadn't belonged in even his own family exactly. But he knew that his belongingness was not a definition of his Person. And so in his hands, Buddhism began to change out of its monkish integral into a complete far flung quality of openness. So that when Asoka became King, he disbanded the armies completely. And for fifty years of the rest of his reign, India had no army. He built roads, like the great Northern Road that goes across the top of India, planting shade trees and medicinal plants and food stuffs, and making rest stops for men and beasts. And at the passes coming into India he put pillars that became famous, because he carved very simple sayings - they're called Asoka's edicts, there are only a handful of them - laying, not the ground rules for behavior, but posting Visionary invitations to participate in something that everyone was doing; a Lovingness that had kind compassion as an integral of deep mental acuity. And Lovingkindness and mental exactness together, when struck together, are the sound of compassion.
Now Asoka transformed Buddhism out of an 'ism', out of a monkness, into a preparation field, an enriched field of Universal possibility. And in that field of Universal possibility, in a couple of hundred years, developed a new kind of Buddhism that was so new that it wasn't even called Buddhism. They called it the Mahayana - the Great Vehicle. Meaning that the entire Cosmos was a field where the vehicle of goingness in loving compassionate kind acuity was the only way to have mobility. And in that Mahayana, it was not so much a Buddha at a hierarchical center in the past, but it was a Bodhisattva quality in the non hierarchy Cosmic freedom of any possible future. And Buddhism turned itself inside out. And instead of finding the quality that they had found originally in hating to continue with the sham of life which led only to death sickness and despair, the Mahayana invited beings to be free of reoccurring life without end. The Great Vehicle.
This kind of transform is a conscious time space which has nothing to do with tradition except that it respects tradition as one of the phases by which a mind matures enough to realize that it is not the final word. It is not the crossing of the T's, the dotting of the I's, the period to the statement of what's what. Rumi in his discourses - it's entitled discourses in translation. Here's a volume, it translates the discourses of Rumi. The title in the original is "Mehe Fa Mehe" - "In It Is What Is In It". That there is a cycle that does not perpetuate itself, but a cycle which vanishes in upon itself and reappears out of that seemingly nothingness. And in this kind of a cycling, which includes an intervalling, a space of freedom, the geography of re-ocurrant openness, of exponential infinite worlds. The only realities there are completely free spiritual beings who explore and continually refine their learning by exploring more and thus participate. And it's in that mutuality of participation that the Cosmos shines like a jewel.
All of this would seem metaphysical were the traditional ears to hear that language. When one comes to Rumi's Mehe Fa Mehe, he has this kind of little gem:
This is merely words, you that have that light, but you do not have humanity. Seek after humanity, that is its true purpose. The rest is mere long windedness. When the words are elaborately decorated, the purpose is forgotten. A certain green grocer was in love with a woman. He sent messages by the ladies maid: I am like this, I am like that, I am in love, I am on fire, I find no peace, I am cruelly treated. I was like this yesterday, last night such and such happened to me. And he recited long long stories. The maid came into the ladies presence and addressed her as follows: The green grocer sends you greetings and says come so that I may do this and that to you. So coldly the lady asked? He spoke at great length answered the maid but this was the purport. The purport is the root of that matter, the rest is merely a headache.
Rumi is so radical in his freedom because his language is never traditional, it is not mythic at all. He takes the mythic narrative line and ties it into bows. And he put these bows as like an enormous bouquet, the poem, and dumps them in our lap. And we're given a gift to open these bows and as we do we open and there are the ribbons of language which in another mode could well have been decorations for ceremonies of ritual. But here they are bows that disclose to us that we are not dancers of ritual but we are holders of bows and know it. And thus we become dancers, not in Ritual, but we become festooned in Art. And so Rumi's poems invite us to Art and not to Ritual. The Whirling Dervish Order is not a Ritual brotherhood on monks. They are a constellation of beings who move so incessantly that space/time has no place to glom onto them and eventually caves in on its own limitedness. And they spin free of the orientation of the confines of space/time and pivot in consciousness purely.
This quality in Emily Dickinson comes through in her beautiful sense of poetry - poem 271:
A solemn thing it was I said
A woman white to be
And where if God should count me fit
Her blameless mystery
A timid thing to drop a life into the mystic well
To plummetless that it came back
Eternity until
I pondered how the bliss would look
And would it feel as big
When I could take it in my hand
As hovering seen through fog
And then the size of this small life
The Sages call it small
Swelled like horizons in my breast
And I stared softly, small?
Spiritual Person's live in the Cosmos. They don't live in a geography that's on any map. They never have. And that transform is magnetically contagious and they pass on to us. So that the Art, the form of the work of art, is like a shimmering constellation that only seems to be a thing. And exploration of it increasingly yields the discovery of further possibility until one begins to recognize and remember that this is not a thing. That this is a focus of freedom.
I read a poem a long time ago about a Japanese print maker named Hiroshige. He was so torrential in his life and his energy, he made more than five thousand Japanese prints. He kept three different sets of printers busy continuously, like churning the Dharma Chakra constantly without stop. And at the very end of his life, his last print was a great huge triptych, a print so big it was three times the size. It took actually three men to strike the print off the blocks. And it shows a snowy mountain range in night with snow still falling. The only color in the print at all is the indigo blue of a river running asymmetrically through the bottom of the work. And if one looks closer one finds in line squiggles, the blankness of a trail that threads its mysterious way in and out through this night snow mountain range. And after many years, one can pick out six travelers carrying their burdens of straw or firewood or grain in this night without end, in this mountain range. Not on the well traveled Tokaido between Tokyo and Kyoto that runs along the Southern route but on the great Kisokaido, the mysterious mountain trail that goes way off into nowhere and only comes back to Kyoto seemingly out of random wandering.
This is a poem entitled Hiroshige's Kiso Mountains and Snow:
Someone old genius vast non waste eternal snow fall night
Blue blood stream from distance to distance
Moving full of life, waterfall to rock gurgle rushing
Indigo poetry fed poet
Poet's Vision
Hiroshige at last closing out the arrangement
Nature naturalized by spiritual depth and placed deep by skill
Of brush knife ink six men nearly invisible in a white world working
Full burdened somewhere out there walking
More than a hundred trees clinging huge
A grown artists spread triple
Who's mountainous flanks plunge gripping into the cold water
And recede into a long night's falling silence sighed
The San Francisco Renaissance. It's a quality where language learns that there is a broken syncopated beat whereby the dance step of Ritual hitches itself into a kind of an overlap where one step never quite ends before the next step already has begun. And you get a staggered overlay of continuity which has no natural punctuation whatsoever and you get the phenomenon of a waterfall of words. Or sometimes in Japanese prints - the early artist who portrayed this beautifully was Hokusai, who would have some Zen Master before a waterfall. And the waterfall is coming out of an almost perfect circle of rock. And there's just the cascade, just this openness of circle and this cascade of water and the Zen Master drawn in such sharp lines that each line incises itself individually and doesn't touch any other. And this kind of constellated figure poised there, articulated not by bones but articulated by spaces in the lines. So that like some phantom prism of consciousness, there is the figure of Hokusai coming through the work of art, meeting us who have somehow gone through that work of art and have met him.
And so Art becomes this kind of mystical threshold where we exchange places. We experience that release to the conscious time space beyond where we have emerged. We've changed places with the artist. And whether it's Tutola or Emily Dickinson or Rumi, everywhere on the planet men and women have been wise about this. Not wise about a "This", but wise about Wisdom. And so it's like Wisdom squared. Our species is called Homo Sapien Sapiens - we're wise about being wise. We're exponentially getting it. We get it that we are to get getting it. Not in a Clesa Tangha sort of a way of clinging, but a grasping in a motion of expressive freedom.
This comes across as an understanding of human society where freedom is a dimension of the real and not a political expectation of some kind of criterion. It has nothing to do with that level. That level belongs to when tribes were big and had kings. There are no Kings in starry fields where an energy source might be nine billions light years away. There are no Kings, but there are constellations of freedom and exploration in possibility that include us whenever we do that.
The third poem by Rumi that we translated reads like this:
Amid my blood has Love many gardens
In beauty incomparable and many affair
Intellect rants six boundaries no way out
Love replies I've been many times that way
Intellect sees market shares and bargains
Love markets the beyond in many
Many hidden mystics rely so in Love
Leaving their pulpits yet end on a cross
Yet so lovers suffer so insides throw
Intellectuals hearts are dark and deny
Intellectual rants step into nothing
There are thorns
Love replies that thorn is intellect in you
So silence
Pick the thorn in heart's extance
And so see these inner gardens bloom
Shamsi Tabrisi covered with clouds of words
When your son rises words disappear
Sufi tasool comes from the rough weave of the peasant cloth. Not a tight weave at all - full of space - and warm because of that. Because the warmth does not come because the fabric keeps the weather out but because it allows for our warmth to be a part of the fabric. And one cloaked in this way is safe in any storm. More next week.