Nature 1

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Differential Consciousness (2000-2001)
Presentation 1 of 105

Nature 1: Tao Te Thoreau
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, January 1, 2000

Transcript:

This is Nature 1, and this particular cycle will be somewhat different from all the cycles I have done before. In the past these cycles were delivered for you in a graduated way so that you could learn. And this cycle is being delivered from me so that I can understand what I don't know. It's important for me to establish at this particular juncture, some of the liminal qualities of what this education has achieved. And so, I'm going to just open it up as wide as I can and do the best that I can from myself. And this is for my, not so much humility, but my ability to see how far this education got to from its inception in 1965.

In 1965, in San Francisco, when I went back to school after being out for a couple of years, I realized that my undergraduate career of five years at the University of Wisconsin wasn't going to stand me in very good stead of getting into graduate school, largely because I had worked my way through undergraduate training and had a very low GPA. And so, I had to take the graduate record exam and, unbelievably to me, passed with a high enough score that they gave me not only entrance to graduate school, but they gave me the prize teaching assistantship. And so, I began to think for myself that since they had given me this paying, paid position, it allowed me to design a course and to teach it. And so, I was not only a graduate student, but I was a graduate teacher - immediately. And the course that I decided to do was one of my favorite subjects then. It was on the Hermetic Renaissance, the Renaissance in Florence from the time of Marsilio Ficino until Ficino's death around the time of the late 1490s. So, from the 1430s to the 1490s, the great period of the Italian Renaissance. And I found that when I was delivering that particular course, I had been assigned also a teaching position as the graduate assistant for Professor Fine. And Professor Fine was Alvin Fine, who was the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco with a congregation of five or six thousand people who had had a heart condition and was forced to retire and, of course, would not retire and became a humanities professor. And so, he was new, and I was new. And within about three weeks he had a relapse on his heart condition, and I was told I had to teach his courses. There was a graduate seminar on Maimonides, a graduate seminar on Martin Buber, and an undergraduate course on styles of cultural expression. So, all of a sudden, I had four college courses to teach, and I was 24 years old, and I was reading about a day ahead of the graduate students and about a week ahead of the undergraduate students. And I began to realize that education, as it was set up, was severely compromised by all of the legal and academic encumbrances. And because my own pet course was on the Renaissance, on personal education, on the way in which human beings were tutored to evoke their great cosmic energies, the contrast of then and there, from the Florence of the Medicis to the San Francisco of the 60s, was a very painful comparison. And in fact, the situation in the 1960s in Berkeley and San Francisco is well known the world round, it came to a crashing halt, and education was impossible to carry on towards the end of the 1960s. In fact, San Francisco State, where I was at, was completely shut down. But my professors would not allow for this to continue to occur. And so, I was chosen to be the scapegoat graduate. And so, in 1968, I was the only person out of 20,000 students who graduated and had more than thirty professors at my master's orals. And because they were on such a wide spread of things Tang poetry, Celtic illuminated books, and the novels of William Faulkner, it was open season. And I had about a five- or six-hour interrogation with this mob. I realized then that education was an impossibility under the circumstances that were there. And for the next several decades, I have tried to find a way to make education the personal, cosmic, reverberating experience that it really can be.

In order for this to happen, though, there needs to be two different cycles that are brought together into an interface. The first cycle has to do with nature. The second cycle has to do with consciousness. And nature is such a peculiarity. We assume that we know what nature is, and right away this is a sign of ignorance. We will see, increasingly, that nature is not there; that nature does not occur with any location whatsoever. That the primordiality of nature is its mysteriousness. And that mysteriousness is the only traction that we have. And I used to call, in the 1960s, I used to call this the "Paleolithic confidence." The Paleolithic confidence was not that you understood reality, but that you participated with nature so that life could go on. And so, this course begins with that Paleolithic confidence. We must learn to suspend all of the judgments, all of the identifications, all of the assumptions that we have. And in order to help that, I will use a special kind of English, a kind of an English that is designed and practiced like an art form, to dissolve the assumed forms and the assumed relationships that are there in normal English. And so, I will speak a variant of English, a 21st century variant. I don't know what to call it, but this dialogue will eventually occur to you as being very useful.

I want to start off with a comparison of ancient wisdom and modern insight. This is the ceiling of the sarcophagus room for one of the pharaohs, Rameses the sixth [Ramses VI]. And on the ceiling are all of the celestial coordinates for the entire cosmology of the ancient Egyptians. And in the center dividing it are a pair of cosmic women - Nut the sky goddess - who spans the entire arc of heaven. And this was the cosmology put over the Pharaoh's room. If you turn this upside down, you get a structure that looks very much like the bay, the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle.

None of this is intentional, but intention is a paltry thing compared to the mysteriousness of reality. They are connected because they are connected and not because they were intended to be connected. Intentional connections are flimsy. In fact, in philosophy, in aesthetics, trying to make an appreciation of a work of art on the basis of intention is called the intentional fallacy. So, we're not going to commit the intentional fallacy in education. It's not important to us whether somebody knew or not. Metaphysical systems are not important to us, nor are any kind of doctrinaire or ideological understandings or stances - any credos. All of this is to be kept suspended, and that that suspension allows for a very peculiar process to happen. The process is called 'beginning'.

The first word in the mosaic Pentateuch Bereshit [Book of Genesis], has a gerund quality, and it means beginning. It has the connotation of 'in the beginning' or 'while beginning'. That there is an ongoingness and what is ongoing in the beginning is a movement, a movement of a face over the waters of the deep. And this movement of a mysterious countenance over the waters of the deep is productive of a quality that we would call 'time'. So that temporality, time, is a first dimension. It's a defining dimension of movement. And so, we will learn to use a word derived from the classical Greek. The word is dynamic. The classical Greek word was 'dynamis' that there is a force, and that time is a force. Time is a first-dimensional force. And what time creates is the dimension of an amperage of ongoingness, a movement. And that this movement has spontaneously, immediately, a blossoming quality to it. And what buds and blossoms out of time are the three dimensions of space, so that the four-dimensional continuum that we're used to thinking of as space-time is perhaps more properly called time-space. And time-space has, as we will see during our education, a fruitful fertility to it. Time-space loves to not only bud and blossom, but to flower, and that in the flowering of time-space a fragrance called life occurs, and that this is rather universal. That life is not a special condition of time-space, but life is in fact the fragrance of the very structure of time-space. Life is indigenous to the universe, and that organic molecules occur with such universal regularity that you can almost assume that anywhere in the universe, organic molecules are a part of the time-space materia which are there.

And this brings us to the question of what is matter? What in the mysterious of nature is matter? And perhaps the best kind of phrase to begin with is that matter is a knot of light. That light as an energy, light as a quality of time-space, movement, dimensions brought into not a dynamic, but an energy. The Greek word dynamis was always complemented by the word energeia. So that energy and dynamic go together. The dynamic has a forceful quality to it, which establishes movement so that later on one would have an understanding of the universe in terms of thermodynamics, that heat as an energy also has a movement, a dynamic, and therefore there's something called thermodynamics. And in nature one can learn to understand this. The energy of light occurs in such a way that its movement, its dynamic, its speed, is a base of enfoldment and unfoldment for time-space, so that the speed of light is actually a very trustworthy base upon which to understand the way in which time-space, or space-time is fluidly moving in terms of its reality and coagulating into matter and dissolving back into energy. And that this pulse everywhere is characteristic of what we are going to be looking at.

In order to help us, though, we're not going to go to the language of thermodynamics or the language of relativity, but we're going to go back to the old Chinese understanding, the archaic Chinese understanding. Before Chinese civilization occurred, there was an understanding, and that understanding has a primordiality for us. The main word in the Chinese understanding has been co-opted so often that it's almost lost its meaning by this beginning of the 21st century. And yet it's such a mysterious word that the meaning can be teased back into the mysteriousness that it really conveys. The word is Tao.

Tao in the Chinese has always a connection with Te. Te is an emergence of unity whole out of Tao. When Lao Tzu writes his 5,500 characters, the book is called Tao Te Ching - The Book of Tao Te, not the Yin Yang Ching. And so Tao Te has a primordial relationship to it. It's the relationship we will see between 0 and 1, and that this zero and one is extremely difficult to approach and to appraise, because our tendency through an intellectual miseducation is to identify a sign or a symbol with a correspondent thing, and thus we tend to identify zero as belonging to something and this is a fateful error. Zero is an emptiness. And we will see that that emptiness is not the same as nothing, but that emptiness is quite useful. As Lao-tzu says, the usefulness of a cup is its emptiness, its Tao. The openness that is established has a usefulness beyond the world, beyond the mundane.

In Paleolithic wisdom, not knowing what things are, but understanding that your participation in the ongoingness of nature gave you life, allowed for life to happen. The oldest way of appreciating that your participation is real, is, as we would say today, true. That what you do will hold and will sustain life and give for you a continuance. The old Paleolithic wisdom was to establish as much of a form as you could, and then allow for that form that was established to be filled with the mystery of nature. This form reoccurs all the way through the Paleolithic, all the way through the Neolithic, and on into our own time. It's the motion of the sumi-e brush that goes to make a circle and doesn't complete the circle, doesn't finish, doesn't close out the form, but leaves an openness. It's the weaving of the Navajo rug where one thread is left untouched by the color, by the color scheme, by the woven pattern, and is allowed as a spirit trail to lead off the composition and out. It's always an openness. It's the table set to honor through the meal, the family, the community, and has an extra place set for the unknown guest. It is this quality that is universal and goes back to Paleolithic times.

The end of the Paleolithic wisdom came when the great constructs of rock circles began to disclose that what comes into that openness, what comes into that space that is made, is primordially sunlight, the light from the sun. If you look at the way in which Stonehenge, for instance, is arranged, its complete orientation is towards the midsummer sunrise, the arrival of light at the apex of its energy. And one finds this again and again. In Santa Barbara, outside in one of the old Indian caves, you will still find the seasonal diagram hieroglyphic that allows for a dagger of sunlight to come in and point and reach the center only at sunrise on the solstice, and you will find in any medicine wheel, in any kind of a primordial form, this capacity of letting the sunlight occur all the way through to the center, so that light, especially light for the sun, the day, the light of the day, and understanding in a mysterious way that there is such a thing as another sun, another star, and another star, so that one could find a way to experience the mystery of nature from the standpoint of creating forms that do not contain things, but creating forms that allow for sacred space to occur, and that that sacred space is filled at an opportune juncture with the energy of light.

In the Greek word, that 'laying in' of the light, the life-giving energy, that laying-in was called epiclesis, and all forms that were sacred were made to receive that offering. And if you hold the hand in just this way, it is exactly the way in which one would in ancient Egypt have reached to receive the ankh, which every ray of sunlight gives. And so, this form of receiving, of holy openness is a respect for the mystery of nature. And that whatever forms that one makes through dance steps, or rock formations, or petroglyphic symbols, all of this is to make forms that receive the light, receive the starlight, the sunlight. This receiving, once it's received, there is a resonance and that resonance we will talk about as being an integral. It has an integral quality in the sense that it belongs to the sense of unity, so that Te in the Chinese conveys the existential quality of unity, the quality of one, the oneness that when Te occurs, existence happens, has happened, and that Te emerges out of Tao and is paired with Tao is always a sense.

Later on, the word that the Chinese came to use from India, the ancient Sanskrit word tathata was meant in India to be a non-metaphysical sense of the vastness. In India, the term tathata was always paired with shunyata, so that shunyata and tathata together in India were what Tao Te were in China together. And you can see and appreciate that there's a paired quality here that the quality of pairedness occurs with such depth. Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching we cannot say anything about Tao. The name that can't be named is not the primordial name, but what can be named at its deepest, it's paired. And so, Te has a pair to it. Te is paired to Tao in terms of Te, but from the mysterious term from Tao, Te is a unity; Tao is unpaired. It occurs as a pristine zero. Whereas Te always occurs in a relationality to Tao, and so t itself is paired and yin yang is the pair of Te.

So that from the standpoint of where we happen to be, of where we happen to exist, there is a pair Tao Ta, and there is a pair of Te, yin yang. And when we go to make a quality of wholeness, we understand that there is a pair of pairs that form a square. And that square, that squaredness, is not limited to a Greek sense of geometry, or a Mayan sense of geometry, or an Egyptian sense of geometry. To the Chinese, one of the sayings from the time of Ho-Shang Kung about 1800 years ago that you can always tell when you meet a Taoist, because he will have square pupils in his eye. That the true Taoist has square pupils; that his seeing-ness always has that refined frame of actuality, but that if you were to push with a symbolic penetration, you would never discover the fourth corner. That it does not exist in the same way that the other three corners exist. Yin and yang exist; Te exists; Tao does not occur with anything that could be identified as existence. So that Tao is always mysterious. So that though the Taoist that you would meet out in the mountains and streams without end would have square pupils, you would see only three corners. There would be a shaft of light that would always be there. And that shaft of light - we call it light; a Taoist would say that this is a movement of qi. This is an energy movement. So that later on, after about 400 years after Ho-Shang Kung, when Chinese aesthetics was trying to find a way to express the principles of good art, of good painting, one of the six principles, the first principle was that good art always has spirit-resonance, life-movement. Four Chinese characters that mean that spirit-resonance, life-movement. And that the brush in the hand of the artist always produces on the rice paper, on the bamboo, with the inks, always produces, if it is art, a spirit-resonance, life-movement. The spirit-resonance is like the energy; the life-movement is like the dynamic. So the energy and the dynamic going together. The dynamic that's involved there, that dynamic has to do with the way in which space occurs, and the energy has to do with the way in which time occurs. Time is an energizing. If one winds up that vector of time's movement into a spiral, one gets a spring, one gets a stored sense of this quality. And in fact, the storing of energy, that energy can be stored, is one of the most extraordinary things about the mystery of nature.

When Benjamin Franklin was first doing his experiments with electricity about 250 years ago, he used a kind of a jar called a Leyden jar from the Netherlands, which could store the electrical energy. That you could take lightning from the key dangling from the kite in the thunderstorm, and that electrical energy that came could be stored in a Leyden jar, and you could later on take the node of that jar - Franklin used it to humanely kill turkeys at Thanksgiving. That Leyden jar occurs in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptian Pyramid Texts. It is the symbol that is the complement to the ankh. The life symbol everyone knows. Everyone has seen the ankh, and everyone understands the reception of the ankh and the giving of the ankh. The symbol that goes with it, it is called the djed - D-J-E-D. The djed is like a pillar with concentric circles and this was an energy condenser, a collector. The ankh gives life. The djed pillar absorbs that energy that will give life, and that djed pillar, like a Leyden jar, could store energy. So that energy is not just wild, though it is wild in the mystery of nature, but that we are of such a nature that we can learn to store it.

One of the most powerful ideas about 2000 years ago in India was the development of the idea of the alayavijnana, the storehouse consciousness. That there is such a thing to our capacity in mind that we can store energy, and that the energy is stored by images of experience that are condensed and folded by yoga and dhyana - meditation - and that this folding of images into symbols and that symbols can be further folded into very compact, very powerful symbols, and that those symbols are not just the images and types, but the archetypes. And those archetypes can be stored in the alayavijnana, the storehouse consciousness. And that one can then apply that just like the energy from a djed, or the energy from a Leyden jar.

The fact that there were prehistoric batteries working with copper djeds that would allow for weak currents of electricity in ancient Egypt, should not come as a surprise to anyone. Although it wasn't until Franklin's time that it was understood, that this universal, mysterious energy, this mysterious fluid. In Franklin's time, it was called phlogiston. It was some mysterious universal fluid. And it was Franklin who first named it accurately and described it as electricity. And that mysteriousness, that mysteriousness of energy, that electricity, when it occurs, is like a flow. We're familiar with electric wiring being out of copper, and that the electric current flows along the copper line. And as it flows along that copper line, it's almost as if time is put into that electric flow. And as time flows, electricity evokes the blossoming of its complement, which is magnetism and the magnetic current blossoms all along that electrical line. A very small current, you get a very small magnetic field. A lot of electricity, you get a very large magnetic field. And that magnetic field is not in some kind of metaphysical sketch, static, but it spirals along the line of the flow so that electromagnetism is the true energy. They are always together like Tao Te. They are all always like yin yang, always like tathata and shunyata. That electricity and magnetism always occur together and are a universal form of energy.

We know today that there is another pair. The weak energy and the strong energy. The strong energy that holds nucleuses of atoms together. The weak energy that is there externally from the atoms that helps make molecules. And that one can, through very complicated mathematics, come up with a resolving of magnetic, electromagnetic, and the weak and the strong. When the first integration was done, it was called electroweak. And then the strong was put together and all of the powers of the universe in that pair of pairs. And yet something was left out. Gravity. That there was like a fifth power, a fifth energy. A one, two, three, four, five - a quint-essence; a fifth essence. And this also occurs in the archaic Chinese, the understanding, even 3000 B.C. by Fu Xi, the old dragon man. The man whose long fingernails and long hair, long beard seated on a leopard skin covered stool and staring with those eyes. The original shamanic sage of Chinese civilization understood that in that cycle of forces, in that cycle of energy, the working thumb that helps hold all of them together so that there is a hand, a quintessential hand of grasping in the acceptance mode or delivering in the placement mode. Not so much grasping as clinging or having, but integration in that pair of receiving and dispensing. And Fu Xi understood that there was a quality that mediated that fifth essence, mediated between four others. And so, while the Greeks had four primordial elements earth, air, fire, water, the Chinese had five. Five elements Wu Xing - five elements, and the fifth element was metal - metal, metal.

That the quintessence of nature in its mysteriousness is not that it's there, but that it's transformable. The mystery of nature is that it is not something, but it can be almost anything, so that we occur against a base of reality that's not determined but is undeterminable because it's not bounded. It has no limitation whatsoever. So that we are real in terms of the transform. And that transform spectrum is endless. There is no end to it. And so, for convenience, when we seek to try to find some kind of ascription language to describe nature we come in while it's already ongoing, and we call that the beginning. But the beginning is an ongoingness that Barishit. And in this sense the classic Chinese understanding was that Tao cannot be counted; that while those elements that can be counted from today onwards, they're not so much elements, but they're phases. And that five-phase energy cycle always began with Tao, but unnumbered. One occurred in the second place with Te, and in the third place occurred us. Our human heartedness called Jen, Jen. So engrossing that Confucius - Kong Qiu - spent almost all of his discussion on Jen, assuming that one cannot talk sensibly about Tao, and that Te is so overwhelmingly evident that only by relational inference can one talk about it, and the first occurrence where one can have a discursive discussion. A language where discourse is possible is in that third phase, where we are in Jen, in human heartedness. And so, the Lunyu, the Analects of Confucius, are all about Jen in its relationality through Te to Tao. And because Jen is at the middle, in the center, the Confucian order of the five phases puts the earth at the center. So that you have, in that five-phase element cycle, you have wood, and fire, earth, metal, and water. But it doesn't run in a circle. It goes from wood to fire to earth at the center, and then back down to metal, and then over to water, and from water back to wood. And so that energy cycle moves in that kind of a pattern where the center mitigates it. Later on, sophistications happen to where the centers return to twice. After each two movements, one comes back to the center. Later on, you would have something like wood, fire, earth, metal, water, earth, in that kind of an hourglass. But the basic quality in alchemical Chinese wisdom is that the center is not earth, the center is metal, the quintessence is metal, and that one has in metal the element of the transform.

Let's take a break and we'll come back.

Pairing leads to a pair of conditions which are very interesting. One is an angle. So that seeing, vision, has an angle to it. There's an angle of vision. It's like light shifts and transforms by the angle of incidence. Our seeing out, shifts and modifies by an angle of incidence of our seeing our perception. And that angle also is paired by a square. When all the angles, when the four angles are covered, then you have a square. We're going to call this the square of attention. The square of attention is the frame of reference. It's the canvas upon which the imagery will play. And that imagery we'll call the image base. And we'll learn that the image base occurs along a time movement in space, and that its occurrence is such that it occurs for us in an image base. And that that image base is the original soup out of which we get our alphabets of images. Long before there was alphabet soup, there was image soup. And out of that image base flow, out of that stream of images, will develop an intensity that flames into language. In order to help us appreciate the architecture of this kind of learning - an education that learns to learn. Not an education that learns a subject and is tested, how well do you know it? But an education that delivers increasingly the capacity to learn, so that one becomes wise in the sense that you are able to know more and yet we'll see that there is a liminal ceiling on knowing beyond which even there we can go.

In order to help this paired quality to occur we're going to use an ancient tool which has been around for the last two-thousand-year period called the book. But we're going to use the book in a new way. We're going to pair books together so that we're using the Chinese I Ching to begin with, but we're pairing with it another book. This book, The Portable Thoreau, so that the I Ching and the portable Thoreau are going to be a pair, which we will begin with and establish, and we need another pair to go with them. And the other pair I'm going to choose will be Moby Dick by Herman Melville and The Odyssey by Homer. Don't worry, there are plenty of women in the course. We get to a certain point in the development of the course almost all of the wisdom will come from women. What we're using here, though, even though it looks like men, we're using a masculine and a feminine way of moving through time in a life journey. And life's journeying on this planet has a particular quality it has a seasonal phasing. It has a four-season phasing to it. So that the natural year has four seasons to it. And we'll see that that four season quality will enter into the education also. We'll have four seasons during this year. And in the second year we'll also have four seasons.

The first season, not the season so much of spring, but of winter. Nature is like the season of winter. Because it's in the winter that the true origin of the movement begins. The power of the summer solstice is graphically there like daylight, but the much greater power of the winter solstice is like the mystery of nature. It's like the mysteriousness of night. In the night, though the sun is not shining, all of the thousands of other suns, those stars are shining. And so, the winter solstice has also a very peculiar quality. It's only vis a vis the other stars that we can tell that our star, our sun, has renewed its journey at the winter solstice, and that the heat and light are going to increase; the length of the day is going to increase. And so, the quality that's there at the winter solstice is the quality of return. And Tao - I hate to call it Taoism - Chinese wisdom understands return. That return, that the cycle re-achieves beginning-ness and lives again, occurs again. That return. And in that five-phase energy cycle, the whole understanding, the appreciation of return is what we would call factorable, and that is that the multiplicity of the universe is factorable back into Tao. That Tao, Tao reoccurs. It doesn't reoccur in reality. In reality, Tao never not occurs because it never occurs. And language gets beggared by this kind of a sense, until we recognize that in the sense of return, there's a mystery which in life is called reciprocity. That multiplicity can return back to its primordial zero, its primordial zero-ness. Because multiplicity at its most multiple, is infinite. And that infinity is factorable into zero, is in fact a perfect factor, because you can factor infinity into zero and leave no trace. In any logical computation, infinity and zero can exchange places with each other and leave no impairment. This quality of the factorability of ultimate multiplicity back into Tao zero has this notion of return. And one of the great themes of the Odyssey and of Moby Dick is that there are life journeys so complex, so stored with images and symbols as to make them almost apocalyptic. And that one can still return from all of that and return, not to a resolution of the apocalyptic multiplicity, but return back to the purity of primordial before the beginning-ness that that is a part of the mystery of nature. That there is an absorption of energy and dynamic that is perfect. And that this perfect absorption is the way in which the mystery of nature is expressed in its, in its, what would we say? We would say fullness. We would use that term, fullness. And we will see in our first year that out of the mystery of nature comes a movement that has such a dynamic and such an energy that the entire universe is styled out of this and made, and that in this integral, as it comes to a point of ultimate return, a very ultimate mysteriousness happens. The movement of time comes to a rest; comes to rest. That the dynamic flay of material comes to an equanimity. Not an equanimity of static, but an equanimity of infinite movement. Endless resonance without a time factor, without a time movement whatsoever. And we will see that nature comes to rest at the spiritual center of sentient beings. That we have that privilege of harboring within us an anchoring of the entire choreography of the universe. It can come to rest; it can come to a harbor; it can weigh anchor and be home.

One of the earliest of all of the Gnostic materials that one could look at, discovered in Egypt at Nag Hammadi, is that mysterious document that has the primordial Jesus saying, enter my rest. Enter that peace. Like the Upanishads that begin with om and end with shanti - peace. That there is this choreography and nature, and its integral comes home to stay, and that staying is not permanent, but something more indelible than permanence. Permanence refers to material, whereas peace has a spiritual quality to it, an equanimity.

The two journeys are another pair of books that are not taken just for a month. We're just taking the I Ching and Thoreau for a month, but we're taking the Odyssey or Moby Dick for the whole year, and these are reading journeys to help us choreograph the entire year. And the readings are not to be read all at once, but to be portioned out just three or four pages at a time. Maybe a half or two thirds of a page per day, so that the whole purpose of these reading journeys is like keeping a diary, only it's the obverse of keeping a diary. It's to keep a reading pace so that we acclimate ourselves to the form of the book. By acclimating ourselves, patiently, to the form of the book we will allow for this form to disclose to us a quality of language which we need to use. It's true we're going to go beyond that quality of language - and in the 21st century, we'll go way beyond that quality of language - but we cannot go beyond that quality of language without a transformed mind and a transformed civilization. And this civilization will never transform until it saturates the book-mind and it's book-history. And when that's saturated, the movement beyond will be instantaneous, not in a metaphysical sense, but that the next step will disclose itself in the doing, not in the planning. No one can plan for the quality of consciousness beyond the book. It's not plannable. You can't have a diagram of it.

One of the qualities of contemporary physics is that if you can make an imagery of it, you haven't understood it. This is that openness. It's that space of epiclesis of ancient time. It's that reaching for the rays of life that will be delivered and will be there. You cannot grab them, you can't force them, but you can accept. And so that the strongest composition of integration for us is finally acceptance to make a form that includes an apex of acceptance. And so, this is an education to sensitize ourselves to all that we can do towards preparing ourselves to leave off at a certain juncture. We can only go that far, not because we're not clever enough, but because we know when to stop. That we stop when the openness has been secured by the forms that we can make.

The Odyssey is a feminine journey though the protagonist is a man. Odysseus is very unusual. He's the most unusual man ever. Homer says, this was a man of many minds. He never had a single mind. He had what we would call today a fractal mind. Every usage of his mind opened up more usages of his mind, but he didn't do it in terms of some kind of fractal geometry. He did it in terms of disguise. He was constantly disguising himself. It's Odysseus who conceived of the disguise of the wooden horse, so the Greeks could finally enter Troy and win the Trojan War. At the beginning of The Odyssey, Homer says, he cries out in an openness to receive, to receive the language from her, from that muse. From the way in which the feminine muse delivers that mysterious freedom of language. He says, Sing, muse, tell me of the man of many minds. But all of the junctures of movement, all of the moving parts of The Odyssey, are women. They're all women. Whether it's Calypso, or Nausicaa, or Circe, or Penelope, whoever it is, Odysseus cannot move until he comes into an interface with a feminine, with an archetypal style of the feminine.

Whereas in Moby Dick it's a masculine journey. And in Moby Dick, the masculine journey of Melville is a journey that leads one outside of the frame of reference of Western civilization. Herman Melville, who when he was a young man went out from the Atlantic coast of New England - went out from New Bedford, an island off Massachusetts - went out on a whaling voyage for several years. Those American whalers of the early 19th century were like the spaceships to come. They went out for years at a time. They went out of sight of land for months at a time. And like the spaceships to come, the experience was extraordinary - Extra-ordinary - in the sense that when you got out of sight of land long enough and got out of the feeling of the land and its gravity long enough, and you not only got your sea legs, but you got your wild legs. Melville, as a young man, jumped ship with a friend - a friend of his named Toby - and went to live with cannibals on some South Pacific island for a long time. Many, many, many months and came back, returned, returned back to a civilization that he not only couldn't live in any longer, but that he could look through. He could see that it was completely artificial and conventional, that it had no reality in nature whatsoever. That its politeness, or its severity, its fears, or its hopes were extraneous to nature. All of it was extraneous to nature. And so, as Melville wrote his famous account, Typee, of living with these cannibals, and becoming an accepted member of the tribe, he also deepened his ability to see through the civilization that he was in. And he wrote another, and another and another, until he had a string of about five bestsellers. All about this escape to the paradise of the South Seas, or to the wild islands outside of western civilization. And as he went further and further into the success as a writer and got more confidence in his language, Melville reached a point at which he could no longer come back into the civilization. He'd become acclimated to the wild energies of the primordial. And the work that did that was Moby Dick. Melville wrote Moby Dick and the Western Hills of Massachusetts, the Berkshires. And as he wrote, Moby Dick, the only human being that he could talk to was a man who was on a writer's retreat. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in the Berkshires about 3 or 4 miles from where Melville was, and Melville, after writing for days, would walk over and visit Hawthorne, who was writing The House of the Seven Gables. And so, Melville dedicates Moby Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne, because he was the only human being that he could talk to. And towards the end, Melville could not talk to even Hawthorne. He ended up in a cul-de-sac of penetrative wisdom, where there wasn't anyone he could talk to at all. He wrote two books after Moby Dick that were more and more mysterious. In fact, one was called Pierre and the Ambiguities. The other one was called The Confidence Man, where the devil is this gambler on a riverboat on the Mississippi River who can change shape and disguises, and who loves to get people into quandaries where they get angry and jealous and fight, and he likes that. Pierre and the Ambiguities and The Confidence Man were a terminal end for Melville as an author. They almost never published him again. He spent the rest of his life, in fact, he couldn't earn a living. He became a customs inspector in New York City, at the harbor, the port of entry, port of New York. And when he died, he died alone in a little two-room apartment. Almost nobody noticed that he was dead. People had forgotten him for decades. He had a little table in that apartment. And in the drawer was the handwritten manuscript of Billy Budd. No one had ever seen it. Moby Dick is about the masculine journey that goes over the edge of civilized credibility. He writes in here at the end of the first chapter, which is simply called Loomings - Loomings. What looms? Mysterious shapes loom out of the mysterious seas, like an iceberg that looms out of the night and sinks the Titanic. Loomings has this quality of eeriness to it. And here is the end of the first chapter.

"Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, or short and easy parts in genteel comedies and jolly parts in farces - though I cannot tell why [this was] exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which, being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment. Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it - would they let me - since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place in which one [lodges in]. By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome, [the great flood-gates] of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air."

So, Moby Dick is a relentless masculine journey into the center of the masculine, whereas The Odyssey is a journey into the very center of the feminine. Homer had done his masculine journey when he wrote The Iliad, and his return back to life was writing The Odyssey. When you hear The Iliad intoned in classical Homeric hexameter Greek, The Iliad has this somber, unforgiving, parallel structured economy of language that, like a drumbeat of an execution squad, just delivers you, irrevocably to the massive tragedy of the entire thing. The Odyssey has a classical Homeric Greek where every inflection is changed, is transformed. Instead of there being this drumbeat cadence of overwhelming bricked-in-ness. The Odyssey is a light tripping step, as if someone is learning to skip along and hop along again, and that the vines of life are luxuriantly growing again, and one comes back to home in the sense that one can live again. These two journeys are a pair, and they're a pair we're going to use during the entire year so that even though we use a pair of books and every month, every four lectures, we change that pair of books. They're not a pair, but they're paired with this pair. There's always a square of attention. So that if you're alert about this, there's a massive understanding that's available. There is not only the reading of a book for its edification and its pleasure, but beyond that is another dimension of the paired texts. And behind that is this great foundation that there's always a square of attention that's operative. And because the pair is shifting and changing in a periodicity. Every moon we shift to a different pair that's out front of this pair that lasts for the entire year. There is a quality of understanding that is built into a discovery, which is built into this very situation. And yet, in a moment's notice, we can come back. We can come back to something like The Portable Thoreau. And we're going to read two little essays, two little, short things that are only ten pages. And both of them have to do with walking. One of them is called "Walking." The other is called "A Winter Walk." And in connection with this, our first assignment in the course is to take a walk. It's just as simple as that. From wherever you live, to just take a walk around in your neighborhood, and return home. In that simple exercise, all of the secrets of the world are there. Everything that you need to know, everything that you don't even know that you need to know, as well as everything that you don't know that you will never need to know. That's the fine print. On the obverse side in Chinese. in the characters. Thoreau begins "Walking" this way.

"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with the freedom and culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, - who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land... A Saunterer, a Holy Lander. They [who] never go to the Holy Land in their walks as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunters in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word sans terre, without land or a home."

And so, Thoreau's sense of taking a walk is that when you have tidied up everything in your life and signed over everything that you need to, and junked everything that you need to, then you're ready to take a walk. To go for a walk without a sense of ever returning, so that the excursion is now your new home. And the fact that after such a walk, after such an excursion, that you come back and reoccur at home is a great surprise to you. That that actually occurs, that that actually exists, that that is possible to do is startling. There's a whole branch of mathematics on the basis of a subject called random walks. And out of random walks came a whole understanding of Markov chains, which led to a deep penetration of the laws and theories of probability. And one understands, finally, there is no such thing as chance.

One of the most insightful contemporaries of Melville - they never met, they would have had a fantastic conversation. Charles Sanders Peirce wrote a book called Values in a Universe of Chance. Peirce was raised by a father who was one of the most esoteric and comprehensive mathematicians of the United States at the time. Charles Sanders Peirce's father wrote a commentary on Newton's Calculus that still stands as one of the most difficult books to understand, and Peirce grew up, coughingly, on the campus of Harvard, and it was the same kind of situation that William James grew up in. Little William James also played with his brother Henry James, because their father was very much like Charles Sanders Peirce, his father an intellectual egghead who forced the boys, and the daughter, the sister, the girl, Alice James, to speak Greek before they could eat their food in their highchairs. It was a time when the United States was intent on leaping out of the wilderness and leaping into the forefront of world civilization.

Melville is like the first J. D. Salinger casualty of that whole work. But he survived to write. Whereas someone like William James died when he was about 22 years old in Rio de Janeiro and came back to life and was a completely transformed man and was no longer the William James who had grown up in Harvard. He had a complete mental breakdown. He was hospitalized in an insane asylum in Rio de Janeiro. He had asked, he had begged to go along with an expedition to the Amazon jungle - Louis Agassiz [Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz]. And because of the position of his father, he was allowed to go ahead. And the further he got away from Harvard, from Massachusetts, from the recognizable home structure, from the civilization that he understood, the more precarious and brittle it occurred to him that he was and he completely snapped, he broke. And when he came to, he found that he was still alive and that he had no idea of who he was. Yet, he knew that they called him William James he knew he wasn't that. So, he begged Agassiz to let him go on to collecting material. And for six months William James and a native guide went out into the Amazon jungle along the Rio Negro River. And when he came back out, he was a completely different kind of human being from anybody that anybody had ever seen in Harvard. His brother Henry was so taken by this that Henry James went on a wisdom quest in consciousness to go to the very outside edge of civilization. He went to England; he went to London; he went to the very center of European civilization to live right on the edge. Camped on the edge of the outside consciousness of European civilization, and discovered there the infinite curlicues of a consciousness of infinity. Somebody wrote a commentary on William Henry James one time and called it "The Ordeal of Consciousness." But it's like William James and Henry James, or Charles Sanders Peirce or Melville.

Americans of that time period were obsessed with not only belonging to European civilization, but they could not get rid of the fact that the primordial nature of the American wilderness was an integral part of their makeup, that they had been raised and imbibed the wilderness, that there was a zero nature, natural to them, and every equation that they figured in carried the zeroness with them; carried a kind of a Zen with them, so that they did not belong in the sense of belonging to the tribes that they went back to Paleolithic wisdom. And indeed, this is the quality that's there in a Thoreau. Because Thoreau, in a way, is like a John the Baptist of that whole movement. He's the first one to go completely beyond that pale, but he did it in a most incredible way.

Thoreau, by the way, was an intellectual genius. When he was at Harvard, he made his own translation from Aeschylus at 19. If you know anything about classical Greek, Aeschylus is the hardest classical Greek, even more so than Pindar. While, Pindar is acrobatic in its classical Greek, Aeschylus goes off the graph. He uses a kind of a language that is so mysterious that it goes like the lark ascending out of sight. You don't know what you're saying. What have you just said? You said something so terrific that the gods themselves are puzzled because man has eclipsed their ability to control him, because his language sensibility has deepened beyond myth and deepened beyond symbol. Has deepened to a penetrative vision where he speaks a new language never heard before. Thoreau was able to translate that, not just translate it, but to come into possession of it himself.

The only man who could understand the peculiar Thoreau that had come out of this was his neighbor in Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson. And he said, my dear Henry, the only thing you can do is to keep a journal. You will have to tutor yourself. There's no one to teach you. And so, Thoreau set out upon the wildest excursion of all to tutor himself to keep going outside of what he knew until he got used to the fact that he lived largely outside of knowledge. He lived on the other side of what could be recognized. And in that wildness he discovered that he was completely natural in nature. And said of himself, I am such a being now that I am a surveyor of snowstorms standing with the forest of trees. For I believe that someone should be able to do this, to give the consciousness of the snowstorm to the grove. And in this, Thoreau became like one of those augurs of ancient antiquity, older than ancient, archaic antiquity. He became one of those prophetic figures who sees exactly what the divination is. And in ancient wisdom, those who could see what the divination was were not the interpreters. They simply delivered in all of the mysterious language of this Delphic Sibyl. The mysterious language of visionary penetration beyond the confines of the mind and nature. And Thoreau discovered that this was what he was doing. He had a couple of admirers. One admirer in England sent him a whole box of Asian classics. Man's name was Cholmondeley, Thomas Cholmondeley. Pronounced in English chum-lee. And Cholmondeley sent him a box of about forty of all the Asian classics. It was the first time anyone in New England had ever seen the Bhagavad Gita in a translation. Emerson read Thoreau's copy. And it had the Upanishads, had the Buddhist Sutras, had the Rig Veda. It had all of the classics of Asian wisdom, and Thoreau read it as if it were his own writing. And you see in his journal - in his journals that run and published to twenty volumes - the progression of a man who is able to not only step outside of himself, but to step outside he who stepped outside, and found that there is not an infinite sequence of such steppers, but that he had stepped finally, to a quality that Plato says, he had discovered through his teacher Socrates, who had discovered through- Socrates had discovered through his teacher Diotima, a woman like an ancient sibyl, sage, muse. Diotima had taught Socrates well enough that Socrates conveyed it to Plato without even intending for it to be conveyed. It was a tone; it was a timbre; it was a sense. That the veils of disguise are limited in number. They only extend so far, and that there is such a thing as being able to finally work oneself free. And that what happens in freedom, an absolute freedom and wildness, their nature occurs, and one finds oneself in nature.

The great Zen master D. T. Suzuki told by his teacher Soen Shaku, in response to D. T. Suzuki saying that he received an invitation from America, from Chicago, from Paul Carus. Doctor Paul Carus was going to make translations of classics of Asia, and he wanted someone who could do a translation of the Tao Te Ching into English from Chinese. And 20-year-old D. T. Suzuki knew English and Chinese well enough he could do the translation, but in order to go and do that translation, his Zen master told him, you must have an experience of enlightenment. Otherwise, not only can you not go, you will have to kill yourself. And D. T. Suzuki said, right up until the very last minute of the last hour, he failed. And when he finally, in the zendo, this is around the end of the 1890s, when he realized he had completely failed and that he would have to kill himself, he said he got up and he walked outside the zendo, and he noticed a curious thing. He said, I noticed that all the trees were transparent, and he looked down and he said I was transparent, too. And so, he was let go to Chicago and translated the Tao Te Ching.

More next week.

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