Nature 2

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Differential Consciousness (2000-2001)
Presentation 2 of 105

Nature 2: Ask and Ye Shall Deceive
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, January 8, 2000

Transcript:

This is Nature 2, and it means that the process has already begun and we're busy now understanding that we're not making an alignment. Our minds, our cultural inculcation is to try to put two episodes or two dots together and join them by a line. And this is always a deception. Shapes like that are geometrically nice on paper and they falsify life and create a corrosion of character. And so, we're not going to follow those kinds of plans.

Our concern today, the title of the lecture is Ask and Ye Shall Deceive. It's a, probably an errany [?] version of one of Jesus' sayings. It's full of the quality that you find about 4500 years ago in the original Zarathustra, that evil is not bad, evil is a deception. And those who are practice evil are deceivers. And this deception is countered by truth so that it's not good and evil, but it's truth and deception that form a polarity and that there are in Zarathustra 4500 years ago. There are qualities of helpers - there called the Amesha Spenta, the holy ones, the holy spirits who help us to understand. Many thousands of years later, in India, those six amesha spentas become the six paramitas, the six perfections, the perfections that are structures that help us to understand for wisdom. In China that six quality was always a quality that came into an interplay not from a sixness, but from a pair of threes, a pair of triads, a pair of trigrams that make a hexagram. Later, many thousands of years later in the Renaissance West, when he was struggling to understand the cosmic forms, a man named Kepler was the first man to do the mathematics that computed accurately that planetary orbits are not circles, but ellipses. Kepler wrote a little monograph on the snowflake, because the six-pointed quality of the snowflake is a universal form, like the hexagram, like the six paramitas, like the six amesha spentas of everywhere and world wisdom. One finds not an alignment that has an influence, not a causality. They learn from so and so, and they learned, but rather a collecting together a grouping by a discovery method, whereby the basic pairedness of polarity that holds in this world is made available to a transform, and that the transform changes polarity into complementarity. So that instead of there being polarities that generate a magnetoelectric or electromagnetic force between them, polarities which can be disjunctive so that they do not like to meet, or polarities that are conjunctive and meet only because of an electric current, or because of an energy tension. There is another kind of understanding that's not of this world in terms of what we would expect, but is of this world in a transformed way, in a hidden way. And that's where the polarities exchange their centers and become complementarities.

And we're taking a look today at the I Ching. And the I Ching is based on the Chinese understanding of the fundamental complementarity, not between yin yang. Yin yang is always a polarity. That's how they function. But the complementarity in the I Ching is between Tao and Te. And this is why the greatest acutest angle of vision into the I Ching was that by Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. The Tao Te Ching is not the Yin Yang Ching, it's the Tao Te Ching. And that that complementarity between Tao, which is not a thing, and Te, which is always a thing between the zero ness of Tao and the unity, the oneness of Te, there is a complementarity. They together form a set and that set is very peculiar, it is always mysterious because one member of that set does not record. And that's the Tao. Tao never records. And one has to speak allegorically or metaphorically until you can master the sense of transformed nuance. So, if we speak of Tao as it that "it" has to be in quotation marks, it has to have a parenthetical quality to it. It has to have a paradoxical undertone to it. In the Greek West, in the ancient Greek West, a very similar understanding was present. A pre-Socratic sage, they called them Presocratics because they were before Socrates. And before Socrates There were several esoteric wise men in ancient Greece. One of them was named Parmenides. And Parmenides looked exactly like, amazingly, exactly like a William Blake God. Long white hair, long white beard, long flowing white robes. And with this kind of gothic, mysterious quality. He wrote a mystical poem which was always called The Way. And it's very similar to the Tao. And The Way of Parmenides was to confute the mind's insistence that a logical form be primal. And in Parmenides he pointed out that the ultimate polarity for which logic can found its working on is a disjunctive polarity, and that disjunctive polarity is a truth and deception. In logic, if there is any way for deception and truth to be co-mingled at all, a logic will not function, it will not work. And because of the disjunctive polarity of Parmenides, the generation that followed Socrates, most of them became what were known at the time as Sophists. Sofia - wisdom. Sophist - people who taught wisdom. The elegant, beautifully dressed, well-spoken Protagoras. Or there were many of these Sophists, and they were all phonies. None of them could teach wisdom. And so, the term Sophist is a disparaging kind of a term. It means false teachers because they always confuted the true disjunctive polarity of truth and deception and mulched them together because they did not understand that zero does not record, it doesn't happen.

Parmenides, in his mystical poem, in his ancient Classical Greek, said, what is, is, and what isn't, isn't, and the is-not-ness never is. The Sophists never understood that. And just as in China, there were many people who did not understand the Tao. Many. And the originator of the Tao in the sense of Chinese civilization, was a sage named Fuxi, Fuxi. Later, when the Chinese became much more humane in their cultural civilized outlook, they always paired Fuxi with a woman named Nuwa. Around 1900, there was a British explorer named Sir Aurel Stein who went to the middle of the Gobi Desert and he was the first person in a thousand years to go into this once flourishing city, Loulan. Loulan had been a victim of the radical desiccation of the landform, and the caravan routes that went through the Gobi Desert were completely abandoned for a thousand years. And so Loulan literally was covered with sand. And the only thing that pointed to where Loulan was were the ghostly clumps of sand gathered around the rooted wrecks of tamarisk trees that were planted in rows on the major thoroughfares of Loulan. And Sir Aurel Stein went there, and he found, because no one had ever touched them, he found treasures there. Books, paintings. And being a 1900 British Empire explorer, he managed to get all of it crated and all of it shipped back to London. The great tradition of the Elgin Marbles. And so, the British Museum received all of this material, which was largely unpublished until about, about 20 years ago. The Japanese publisher Kodansha put out three huge tomes, all boxed. They were one thousand dollars each when they first came out, and they went out of print, and they went up to four or five thousand dollars. And now you can't find them. In the first volume - I have a set of these - in the first volume you find a tapestry from Loulan which shows Fuxi and Nuwa together, and they are this primordial mother, father of civilization. But their bodies are not humanoid at all. Their bodies are serpents. And the serpents are intertwined together so that you get this double helix quality of Fuxi and Nuwa. And when Fuxi and Nuwa are together like this with the serpent entwined double helix body, it looks for all the world like a hermetic caduceus. And Fuxi and Nuwa are holding the two implements. One of them is a plumb bob, which helps locate a centeredness, and the other is a right-angle square, which helps to make that angled form. And of course, the Masonic Brethren, when they saw these Masonic symbols from the center of the Gobi Desert, said, we knew all the time. No one knew all the time. No one knew at all. The quality that's there in Fuxi is that he lent this quality of being able to understand that there was an angle, that there are two elements that come together, like two lines that make an angle, and that what is workable are not just the lines, but the angular space in between, that the space is as useful as the lines.

Fuxi is the originator of the Chinese trigrams, the set of eight trigrams that go to make up the hexagrams of the I Ching. So, he is the founder of the I Ching. He is the maker, he is the architect, he is the designer of the thing. And it's interesting because the I Ching trigrams are made on the principle of a mutually exchanging polarity that has this ability to have a mutuality because of their primordial origins in Tao Te. The trigrams of Fuxi indicate that there are two modes of the same movement. There is a movement which is continuous, and there is a movement which is interrupted. There is a staccato quality to movement where there are pauses. And there is a movement which is continuous, which has no pause. The movement with continuity is a line. The movement with the pausing, that staccato, is the broken line. And out of that pair, out of an unbroken line and a broken line, out of that pairedness, comes the whole structure of the I Ching.

Fuxi, in trying to understand how can one convey not in terms of symbols of an unbroken line and a broken line, but how can one convey in terms of the kinesthetic actuality of a life movement both of these modes - continuity and discontinuity. We know from our century that the discontinuity is what actually creates quanta. The quanta occur because there is an ability for a discontinuity to manifest itself as a quanta, as something that can be counted. Whereas the continuity which is unbroken essentially only occurs in one variety, and that is unity. It always is only unity. It is the discontinuity that makes multiplicity possible, makes definiteness possible. So, in a very peculiar way, and five thousand years ago, when Fuxi was first meditating on this, it struck him as very peculiar that it is the broken line of the yin that evokes things - invites the actuality of things. And so, yin was characterized as receptive. Receptive because it evokes its mutuality, not its opposite so much, but its mutuality that the openness, the broken receptivity of the yin accepts is able to take in. And that's why things can occur in their discreteness, in their quanta at all. So that it is the yin that, through the power of receptivity, evokes the world of things, and thus the yin has a mothering quality in that she births from her openness the things, the quanta of this world.

Whereas the yang, and standard translations of the quality of yang as creative are somewhat sexist in the early 21st century. It isn't that they're creative - the yin is very creative. It's closer to say that the yang is procreative. The procreative quality of the yang is that it's the unity of the yang has an ability to have its center of movement exchange with the center of yin. That the very center of yin is an openness, the very center of yang is a fillingness. And so, there is a quality in that pair, in that polarity, that makes it fascinating and thus, most of the Chinese commentaries in the I Ching have to do with yin yang. Whereas for Fuxi, it was not this quality at all. His understanding had nothing to do with yin yang, but how can one make a form, a workable form, out of pure continuity or out of pure receptivity? If you have an unbroken line for yang and a broken line for yin, you have falsified both of them. You have made a Symbol projection. In fact, a symbol retrojection function as if it were primal. And it certainly is not that at all.

And so Fuxi, forty-five thousand years ago, in the China of the classic origins of Chinese civilization, the northern rice lands, came up with a realization. Instead of presenting an unbroken line by itself, which would be using the unbroken line as a sign, as a correspondent sign, it stands for and thus represents. Whereas the very notion of standing for, of representation, was at the time of Fuxi a patent deception. To use a sign to stand for a thing when you're trying to talk about primordiality before things even occur, is a falsity and a deception, which the mind in its symbolic designation does not pick up, cannot pick up - the mind doesn't pick it up. What picks it up first and signals is not even intuition. The first thing that picks it up is the body. The body picks it up. And we'll see that our education, we begin with nature and our second phase is ritual. And nature is about the mysterious, whereas ritual is about things, existence. And it will take us six months just to take a look at this pair, at the mystery of nature, which does not record in things and yet is real. And existence, which does record always in things, and definitely has, as the Chinese say of Te. Te is the power of unity. It is the power of establishment. Te has this quality that when it is evident it's operative and not only do things happen, but things are. The is-ness. Later in India, in trying to find a Sanskrit word for the is-ness of Te, the High Dharma Sanskrit used the term tathata - tathata. Sometimes translated around 1900 by the young D.T. Suzuki as suchness - suchness. Has, not stuff, but suchness. There's a that to it, there's a this to it and that the that and the this can be vacated can be a thing which its place in space, its moment in time. Moment is momentum. It's time momentum. It's time moment. It's space-place can be vacated. And when that is vacated, that locus of no content in a space-time is called in Sanskrit shunyata - emptiness. And that shunyata, that emptiness, is a disclosure that all forms are formal against a background which does not record.

So, the theory is a deep complement. There's a complementarity to all things, but their complement does not record, it only records, as it were, in the negative. It records in the fact that it doesn't record. So that if you make a form, a form which has a masterful, elegant continuity all the time except one place, at one moment. If nothing occurs in that place at that moment, you will have disclosed the Tao. You will have disclosed the background which cannot be made into a thing. And so early wisdom for men and women, thousands of years ago, was to make forms that disclosed, that disclosed the mystery, and the proof of it was that nothing records at that juncture, at that moment. That one makes a holy place. And in the center of that holy place, one puts no altar. And the fact that no altar appears there is the proof.

I remember one-time Manly Hall told me of, in 1923, he went to Japan, and he went down to the the great Tiantai temple, Mount Hiei, Koyasan in southern Japan, and there was the temple that was made there about the late seven hundreds AD, with all of its massive stone steps going up through this huge garden park area. And at the top was the great temple structure. And to get into it, you had to bend down because the architecture put a bar of wall there so that you had to come in graciously and there was no light. And he was pleased, he said, to find it was empty. There were no Buddha statues there, because what was important was that nothing be there. So that the original Buddha was not exemplified by a Buddha but was exemplified by not being exemplified. And so, the original name that he used for himself was not Buddha, but Tathagata. Tathata. Suchness, gone. That that time, that moment, that space, were still real but nothing recorded there. That there was nothing carrying over from before. And there was nothing retrojectively from after filling that space that the Tathagata was the emptiness that was real, that was there as a marker of disclosure that the Tao does not record and therefore is real.

For Fuxi, in order to try to express this - and he was doing this twenty-five hundred years before the Buddha. The historical Buddha is midway between us, and Fuxi. And Fuxi is the first figure on this planet to find a way to express the disclosure of nothingness so that it was real in our comprehension. Comprehension not representation, but comprehension. And so, instead of symbolizing the yang by a single line, he made three lines, two of them broken and one of them unbroken, so that the unbroken line was the standout of the three. You had two broken lines and one unbroken, and therefore that trigram was the beginning of the yang. And paired to that was the beginning of the yin, where you had one broken line and two unbroken lines, so that what counted was that line that was different from the other two, so that the line was not representational, but what it did was present the disclosure, so that the trigrams of the I Ching are disclosure presentations. And out of this comes the English usage of a word which is a quite untrammeled still, and that is presence - presence. Tao has presence but does not record. Whereas our cultural bias is that the ultimate should be some very powerful thing, unbelievably powerful, some 80-mile-wide flying saucer spaceship that can just squash a whole continent. Those are the real guys. They're not.

Lao Tzu in the tenth section of the Tao Te Ching - I translated the title of the section as "Can Do" an old World War two, American English - can do.

Sustaining discipline,
Body embraced unity cannot disintegrate.
Concentrate qi conduces
The gentle an infant's tone.

For Lao Tzu the baby is that freshness of the disclosure presence of the real. The baby is as much not there as it is there. And therefore, has Tao. Also has Te. Whereas the mother-father quality, the yin yang quality, the creative, receptive, procreative, receptive all of that is a choreography of a dance that's important in this world but is not primordial. That the primordiality is in the mystery of nature where disclosure reveals that at certain junctures and moments, nothing happens, nothing records at all. And the fact that one can have a universe where there are actualities of openness, of emptiness, is a great discovery. It is an incredible discovery.

The mathematics of it was worked out by people like Max Planck and Paul Dirac early in our past century, and it was astounding that mathematically it works out. One can come to understand. In fact, the first person to really, seriously come into possession of the comprehension of complementarity in the past 20th century was Niels Bohr. And when Niels Bohr really understood what presence and quanta were all about in their complementarity, he put the Tai Chi symbol on his family crest. He's a Danish man who put a Chinese symbol of Fuxi on his family crest around the time of the close of the First World War. It's a very difficult quality to convey, and the two prized students of Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger. Schrodinger, famous for Schrodinger's cat dilemma, and Heisenberg for the uncertainty principle, are both versions of the way in which is, is and is not, is not. And twenty-five hundred years ago, not long after the Buddha's final teaching, what they call the Parinirvana. He didn't die because someone who is a Tathagata doesn't die. But the emptiness, the not their reality continues in a different harmony. And at the same time within a generation of that Plato writing his dialogues of how it is that a pointed conversation that has operative two polarity principles. They're called pro and con, for and against. Someone holds the pro position, someone holds the con position, and you argue. And you argue a single point, a single issue. But the argument proceeds by steps, by phased form stages where everything that can be said at this stage is said now, and we don't carry anything over to the next stage, and that in fact, there are not an infinite number of stages of that pro and con dialogue dialectic, but there are a limited number of them. And after a specific limited number one comes to a meeting of pro and con. It doesn't matter which side you start from. Both come to a synergy to a moment in space where there is no way to divide any further. Pro and con no longer occur. It's not that you can't find a pro position or a con position, it's that they don't occur. And Plato's classical Greek cult, such a moment, aletheia - that's truth. That diaresis, the division of position, the polarity of logic form in its exactness, can no longer have any traction. They don't have any fuel of actuality to continue with.

And that that truth, that aletheia, is true because its disclosure presence has occurred. Not that you have come to a truth, but you have come to the fact that nothing occurs there at all. And so, Plato's great dialogue, the Parmenides, one of the most difficult philosophic works that anyone ever wrote. It has a famous theme running all the way through. It's called the Third Man theme. Yes, you and I are arguing with our professional acumen intact, and we come to understand that there was someone else operative in this dialogue. There was a third man theme, and we didn't know. It's like in one of T. S. Eliot's great lines in The Wasteland he talks about you and I, yes, but who is that third who walks beside us?

A quotation from Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition. When Scott went to the Antarctic, he had the glorious British Empire courage but forgot to be practical. He didn't take dogs with him, and they got to the South Pole. But then coming back, they had to haul their own sledges. And of course, they all died. But they all kept diaries. And when they were found the next year, in the spring, every single one of those diaries, each man was convinced that there was somebody else with them, and they didn't know who he was. There was an unknown person with them, and all of them independently cooperated this.

There is a helper spirit who is real but does not occur. And so, at the culmination of Greek philosophy, when after about eight hundred years of trying to understand the esotericness of Plato in Parmenides with a lot of Pythagoras thrown in. The last great original mind of the Greek world, Plotinus, in delivering a special kind of a lecture in his own home in Rome, used to have in his students the Emperor Aurelian and his wife, and many of the Roman senators. He delivered a lecture on our guardian spirit, our tutorial spirit, that we have a quality to us which is real but does not record in this world. Records only when we bring ourselves to a place of presence disclosure that at the very center of ourselves is an openness of spirit which is real but does not occur in this world.

In this way, ancient Fuxi understood that if you have an unbroken line and then two broken lines, this is the beginning of the yang. And in order to keep the continuity of that, not the correspondence, not the representation, but the movement towards full disclosure, you can have that unbroken line moved to the middle. So, it's in between the two broken lines, and then you can have it move to the top. So that Chinese symbolism moves up, from the bottom up. And as you have this line at the lowest part, then in the middle and then at the top, if you abstracted all three of those yang lines together, then you would get the pure yang. So that the pure yang does not occur in this world in a polarized way, but occurs, as one would say, in a disclosure way. So that pure yang is a disclosure presence. The same for pure yin, does not occur in this world, but pure yin is definitely a guardian spirit - disclosure presence. But whereas the broken line surrounded by the unbroken lines, there is a point where the unbroken line in between the two broken lines and the broken line in between the other two. When you get to the middle where the moving operative, not correspondence, not representation, but where the disclosure symbol has reached its middle point exactly there in that double column. And it's even wrong to say double column because they're a pair. Because they're paired, their centers can exchange. And so, the center of the yin progression exchanges with the center of the yang progression. And they function in each other's column. And that's why the tai chi symbol has the two circles, the dark circle and the light, and the light circle and the dark. It's the exchange of selves. It's the secret center exchange that makes complementarity real. It's not the realness, though, of yin yang. Yin yang exchanging is a rare moment of mutuality in time, a rare occurrence in space where two get together.

But in eternity, Tao Te are always in complementarity. They not only have exchanged centers, they are exchanged completely. And this is why it's always mysterious. This is why nature is mysterious. Not because we don't understand it, but because we do.

More after the break.

So, you can appreciate how difficult it is to teach wisdom, because when you rely only on what you can make clear, you are deceiving. So that a wisdom teaching language must have spaces that occur for real and not just there gratis because of a clever designation. This is very difficult to do, and yet it's the simplest achievement for our kind. Our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, have always had this capacity. The earliest oral delivery of language to bring wisdom forth in a people was the storyteller. And so, storytellers, archaic ancient storytellers, their style of language is instructive for someone who would seek to teach in this way. The storyteller's language has a quality where cadence occurs in a rhythm. I will bring next week a storytellers cane from West Africa, from Cameroon, and you'll see that it's a pliable cane with a top that is used to tap the cadence, the rhythm of the language, and that the imagery weaves itself in the rhythm in such a way that descriptive nouns will fall on the beats and in the interval in between, in that you make where the cane is not making its cadence point, but the mind experiences as a trance. And it's only after great untangling difficulty that one comes to understand the kind of beggared mind that was given to us by the stupid situation of the 20th century. It reduced us below animals. It made us into lemmings, where any kind of wisdom teaching was expected to produce trance, and it's just the stunned, stupid mind that gets tranced out. Whereas the primordial men and women were not tranced out at all. They danced with their beings to the cadence.

Chief Dan George once said, I never trust a man who doesn't dance. There is a quality also where the delivery of wisdom requires a language which raises its saturation of meaning and then lets it be. Doesn't force the issue into an expected continuity keeping it yang all the time is very foolish. And the same for yin. There were many times in the 60s in the Berkeley San Francisco arena, where very sophisticated conversations were wordless, and the gestures were meant to convey inscrutable encyclopedias of esoteric subtlety. And it looked like parlor karate matches. I remember one time a black student who was a businessman who had signed up for a Pythagoras seminar, and he just got completely fed up, and he slammed his books down, and it stunned the room. He stuffed them into his briefcase. He rose with all the gravity of a man who was just pissed off and left the room. And for about 12 or 15 minutes, everyone just sat there stunned. And finally, the professor said he stole our energy, and he said it so meekly and so defenseless that one realized that this was a dead end. It was the kind of philosophic discourse nonsense that someone who was trying to paraphrase Wittgenstein might fall into. That kind of silence is not indicative of anything, except that you don't know what to say because you don't know what to hear. You're not listening. And so, the art of listening is as important as the art of speaking. And so, in a wisdom teaching, the speaker must listen at the same time. Not to himself, but listen clearly to the spaces where words do not need to go.

I remember one time in a kitchen in the mid-60s. There was a, there was a rock group that was living at our place, the Steve Miller Band, when it was first new and Chuck Berry was there, and he said, it's the most beautiful wisdom comment. He said, you know, he said, you white boys are pretty good, but you make a mistake. You try to play every note. He said, miss a few. If the audience is with you they'll fill it in. It was it was so simple. And so there it is.

Meanwhile, back in China. And we are talking about big time China. The I Ching was always difficult to understand, and it became covered up with a sledge with a sediment known as the Chinese Civil Service exams. They were instituted by the same man who built the Great Wall of China. And the Emperor Chin, he was the kind of guy who said, now everybody who will ever live after me here will call themselves after me. And because his name was Chin, they became Chinese - Chinese. He was a no-nonsense character, and no one could follow him as an individual so the power group that followed him established the Han dynasty. And they were the Roman Chinese. And they survived intact about the same length as the heyday of the Roman Empire, with a little hiatus in the middle because there was a little trouble, as you can expect from power groups.

The Han Chinese established in their dynasty that there was a pecking order of merit that was established by a single exam system, the Chinese Civil service, and it lasted until 1911. It lasted for twenty-one hundred plus years, unchanged. You read, all of you will read in the same books and take the same exam, and however well you do, we will have gotten the best right and the best will be given these positions, and the worst will be forgotten. The I Ching was the first thing you did and the last thing you did. It was the parentheses. But because it was a state exam for dynastic purposes, it was covered again and again by commentaries that stressed passing the test. Maintaining the dynasty. Paying attention to power groups. Getting into hierarchical attention. And so almost all of the commentaries on the I Ching and Chinese history are worthless. Libraries full. And people who prided themselves on being experts on the I Ching were really automatons.

So difficult was this that the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is like a dagger of sunlight. It's a shaft of an angle of vision that reaches to the very resonant center of the I Ching, where nothing records, where only disclosed presence occurs. But the Tao Te Ching itself was manhandled in the generations that followed, until it also was covered with argumentative opinion. The Greek word for that kind of thing was doxa. Opinion becomes even professional. We get the English term doxology. This is how it is. You have to learn it by rote. And so, memory itself becomes bastardized in just being a recall mechanism for an indoctrination tone, so that you can pass somebody's exam to get some kind of living position. All of that is bogus. It is bogus in the deepest sense, not only artificial because it's an artifact that's made up, but it's made up by ignorant people for nonsense purposes. And so, the entire ecology of it is stupid. So that early on, more than twenty-one hundred years ago, there were groups of individuals in China who were trying to understand what's real here. What is it that we are doing? What's going on here? And at the core of all of this, at the very center of our concern is Tao and we don't know what it is. And there was a group clustered around a young prince. He was a member of the royal family. He was very low on the pecking order, so he was never going to be emperor and so he could be trusted. He wasn't going to become emperor and kill you later on for what you had said when you were younger.

And so, Prince Liu of Huainan had a group that met in his home, just like Plotinus would centuries later. And around 130 BC, they put together twenty-one treatises on Tao, and it's called in Chinese the Huainanzi. The Huainanzi is almost, it's not completely translated into English at all. Hong Kong University Press has this translation of a few chapters of the Huainanzi, the big translation made by Evan Morgan starting in 1922. It's called Tao the Great Luminant: Essays from the Huainanzi. The Aldous Huxley Trust, the Shrine of Wisdom put together a translation of a part of it called The History of Great Light. And there's a chapter nine, it's published by the University of Hawaii Press, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought. A study of Wu Wei non-action. Of doing and not doing together as a set. So that there was a deep understanding in this group, in this Huainanzi group, a very deep understanding that when you put together a set of Tao Te you have a complementarity that plays itself out in cultural dynamics, and a very peculiar way. You have in one mode relationality, and in another mode, you have rationality. You have ratios and relations. In the ratioed real, you have the forms that hold. And in the relationalities, you have the processes that work. And so, the concern, especially here in the Huainanzi, is what processes actually work given this yin yang Tao Te situation, what processes actually work and what forms actually hold.

Chapter six of the Huainanzi - the translation of it in English is, Peering into the Obscure. Peering, the Chinese, means to say that there is an aspect of looking where you do not just look to see, but you look to continue to look. That's peering. And when you're looking to continue to look, you're not impatient at all to see, but you're very patient to let occur to you whatever is there. And what occurs is not only the is but the is-ness doesn't occur. And you pay attention to that also. So that your awareness, instead of having a focus of the eyes on a thing. You complement that by having a kinesthesia about the context which is completely wide open.

Wallace Stevens once wrote a poem called The Snowman. Paraphrased, he wrote, one must have a mind of winter. To pierce through the icy glare of the shagged junipers in the lonely wind of winter. And to see what is there and the not that is not there. There is this kind of equality where they go together. They're not just a tandem, but it's a pair. It's a set, as we would say. And the set always includes zero and one. But even saying that is deceptive, because when you get really into wisdom, the and counts as much as the zero and the one, and you have falsified what is actual, what is real. It isn't zero and one. It's zero one as a set, as a pair. As the masculine form of rationality is that they are put into a ratio, whereas the feminine form of relationality is that they have a relationality which is mutual, and that both those comportments weave together all the time and that's why time counts and space holds. Otherwise, it wouldn't happen, nothing would happen. There would be no is at all. It wouldn't occur. The fact that it in fact does occur is a kind of a proof of the pudding. And the fact that there are opennesses where nothing occurs is the complementary proof also.

In the Huainanzi, in Peering into the Obscure, peering, they later, about a thousand years after this Asian wisdom became super subtle in China. In the super subtleness of it, about twelve hundred years after this, there was a great great philosopher named Zhu Xi and Zhu Xi brought in a reform called Neo-Confucianism. He said, in effect, we've been following these prescriptions for twelve hundred years, and we've built up all of this gunk of assumption, and all of this is suspect. And so, we must bring in something into play. We must take a cue from our Buddhist brethren who are not Confucians, who are not Taoists, and factor in their technique to our Confucian outlook with an undertone of Taoism, and by having all three together, by having a tripartite kind of an outlook, we will save ourselves from a lot of these formal fundamental errors that we assume belong to sophisticated knowing. We have become gilded genius idiots with all of these assumptions, which have been carrying on so long that the time forms when they were made, when they might have worked, are so old and out of fashion that they could no longer work for us at all. And so, Zhu Xi inaugurates a whole new dynamic into Chinese thought. A whole new dynasty came into play. And about four hundred years after Zhu Xi, one of the greatest of all Chinese sages, Wang Yangming, perfected a new way to disclose presence, found a way to make Neo-Confucianism so subtle that it became Taoist again.

A translation of one of his books in English, The Way to Acquire Wisdom. Here's a translation of a couple of lines from Huainanzi, chapter six Peering into the Obscure, talking about ancient times when Master Kwong played the white snow melody. That is to say, the lute was always the accompaniment, the storytelling cadence put into a musical mode, a pentatonic scale, a five note scale, a pentatonic scale stringed instrument that accompanied the language so that the cadence not only was like storytelling, but leapt over the mind's tendency to codify and signalize and symbolize into a visionary consciousness that used insight to see the set presentations, the zeros and ones that are there all the time, the form and the background at the same time.

All of that, all of that was lost to Chinese civilization during the Mongol invasion periods. And there were times in the Yuan dynasty when the Mongol emperors simply could have cared less about traditional Chinese wisdom, and all of the musical accompaniment cadence of ancient Chinese language was lost. And when the Yuan dynasty was replaced by a real Chinese dynasty, the Ming - the Ming dynasty. The bright, the brilliant, they were back. They sought to try to find what were the origins of the way in which this wisdom language was delivered, because without the musical note cadence, one didn't know how to say anything, right. The disclosure presences, which are subtler than subtle, didn't happen. And all that one did was you got more and more refined in metaphysical, esoteric knowing, and no mystery happened, and it had no effect in reality. All you did was that you mystified man so that you could lord it over him. But it didn't do anything to evoke reality out of Mother Nature. She didn't give you life.

And after a while, the Ming dynasty, powerful as it was, fell. And when it fell, the Qing dynasty coming in were the northern Manchus they were not really Chinese either. And when the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, 1912, the workmen there at one of the gates in Beijing, taking down the sign of the Qing dynasty. And they're going to throw it on the fire. These guys are out. No more dynasties. We're going to have a republic. We're going to have all this. They thought, wait a minute. And the workmen, without consulting anyone else just by talking among themselves, said, you know, these guys were tough, and they were around for hundreds of years, we better save the goddamn sign. Let's put it up in the top of the gate. There's a space up there. So, they took the Qing dynasty sign and tried to put it in, and it wouldn't go in. What's wrong? And some of the workmen went up on taller ladders, and they brought out the sign from the previous dynasty that those workmen had come to the same conclusion, and they knew that they were Chinese.

There is a continuity of what happens mysteriously where one knows this is true. You're in the lineage of actuality, and that you belong to the truth of the way in which nature actually works, factors in, to what we do. The forms that we make have the backgrounds of the mystery operative in such a way that they mutually exchange centers, that there is a mysteriousness. So, Peering into the Obscure, the Huainanzi chapter six says, now take this blind music master and commoner's daughter. Their rank was lower than that of the director of hemp. It's like a ropemaker. Their authority lighter than floating feathers. They didn't have any dynastic power at all. But by concentrating their essences and disciplining their thoughts, discarding all concerns, and gathering together their spirits, they merged with the nine heavens and stimulated their most subtle essences. And so ordinary men and women can become magical beings, can become spirit beings, can become Shen - Shen. Can become complemented by a guardian spirit. By a tutorial spirit.

We talked about, a little bit about Plotinus earlier. When Plotinus was teaching in Rome, and he had delivered this very powerful presentation on the Guardian Spirit, someone suggested that, was there any technique, was there any ritual that could be done that could make an evocative form where Plotinus' guardian spirit could manifest? And so, they looked around. They found some Egyptian magus' - Plotinus was from Egypt - and they brought them to Rome because one of his students was the Emperor Aurelian. You can do things if you have students like that. And they searched around, and the Egyptian priest said, well, we have to have sacred ground. And they were they were stunned because the city of Rome, with about two million people, had no sacred ground. Everything had been desecrated so many times it was just terrible. This is about 260 AD. And they finally found that there was one spot in Rome that was still pure, and that was the central portico of the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. That the Vestal Virgins had for nine hundred years kept that ground pure. And so, they went there. Egyptian priests did their little evocative form making, and everyone was stunned because Plotinus' guardian spirit was not of a spirit, like an angelic spirit, but was God's presence. That Plotinus had gone so far in his refinement that God was his guardian spirit. And they were stunned at this. They had never seen that before. Someone who is of that kind of spiritual refinement is never alone. They are always a part of a set of the real where nature's mystery is with them all the time. It's one of the themes of the Odyssey.

Homer in the Odyssey. One of the reasons of coming back for his homecoming is to tutor his son, Telemachus. His son is in the Odyssey. His son is 21 years old, and Odysseus is determined to come back and help his son be the kingly person. In ancient times, the king was not a crowned figure of authority. The old Chinese saying is, sagely-ness within, kingliness without. Your comportment to the world cannot ever be sage-like it has to be kinglike - kingly or queenly, because the world has no way to recognize sage-ness at all, but can recognize royalty, nobility that the world can do. But it cannot recognize sageness because sageness doesn't record. It doesn't record at all. There's nothing that's there to record. And you have to be alert to know that this was important, that nothing happened. There was no lightning. Nothing happened at all. There were no dreams, there were no insights.

The famous wisdom story of how Milarepa passed on the Vajrayana to Gampopa. Gampopa, who had been the most brilliant intellectual of his day, and went to study with the old Milarepa, the most high-powered Vajrayana teacher probably ever more so even than Padmasambhava. And Milarepa, recognizing Gampopa's great capacities, had him go and sit by himself. And when you have something, come and see me. And Gampopa, the first night had this spectacular dream, he had image after image. It was like a Cecil B. DeMille feature in full color. And he woke up Milarepa about four o'clock in the morning and told him this dream. And Milarepa said, no, that's not it. Go back. And for about eighteen or nineteen days, Gampopa had more and more subtle, spectacular, unbelievable dreams and visions and thoughts. And each time, Milarepa rejecting. Finally, he pulled up his robe and showed him the calluses on his behind. He said, you have to apply yourself. It's not easy. Wisdom is not easy. And Gampopa, crestfallen, the expert, the fantastic spiritual teacher silenced went back and had no dream. No visions. Nothing. So, he realized he had failed. And he went home. He went back to just being a professor, a teacher. And he heard a couple years later that Milarepa had died. And he stood up after the news and walked out thinking he will never become enlightened, because there's no one more sophisticated. There's no one like a Milarepa to teach him. And so, he let it go. And he stood in the threshold of his doorway, and he looked out and the plane was covered with the huts of students. There were about twenty thousand studying with him, and he realized that he had received it because it wasn't an it. He was practicing the presence. And that's what you do. You don't get a degree. They don't give you anything rolled up. They don't give you cash. There's no cash. That's where the phrase son of a bitch comes from.

So, there's a quality of set-ness where one and zero occur together, and they occur in such a way that transcendence and passion occur together. Transcendence and passion. Not both. It's not a both and. In the 60s, that was worked to death. It's not a both and, and it's not an either or. But that transcendence and passion bleed into each other in such a way that beginnings mysteriously is possible.

There was a beautiful book written by Suzanne Cahill. Her father was the great professor of Chinese art at Berkeley for many, many, many decades. Her book is called Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China, not only in medieval China but in classic China. The Queen mother of the West is Xiwangmu. And Xiwangmu is an Iranian lady who lived alongside of a lake in far western China. And the first emperor to hear of her was Han Wuti. He's the most powerful emperor of the Han dynasty. So, their first name, their last name, their basic name was always the dynasty. Han - Han Wu Ti. Ti is heaven. The heavenly power of Wu - nothing. And so, he sent a deputation to go to the Queen mother of the West. He's the greatest man in the world. He should get together with the greatest woman in the world. And those guys sent a peach tree to him with a note saying, this is the peach tree of immortality that the Queen mother bestows upon you, but it only blossoms once in three thousand years. So that's it. Wu Wei.

There's a quality to the I Ching that has that tone to it all the time that was covered up by the Chinese civil service exam. Covered up by the Western pretenders who did their studying on those documents and thought they were experts. They weren't experts. They were experts in Ching commentaries. They were experts in Han dynasty politics. But, there weren't any experts on the I Ching at all.

Outside of Beijing, In the western hills, the White Cloud Monastery. The Taoist, the best, the oldest ongoing Taoist monastery still there. They survived all of the generations, all of the decades. All of the centuries. All of the dynasties. Its only competitor were the Mao Shan dynasty of Taoist masters who were outside of Nanjing. Shan means mountain. Mao Shan Taoists. Their lineage comes to Los Angeles in the presence of Master Ni. He's 76th generation Mao Shan. But when the Japanese invaded China in the World War two times, they leveled Nanjing, and they completely leveled the Maoshan Taoist structures so that none of them were left. But the White Cloud Monastery in the western hills outside Beijing was there. And actually, an American got a Taoist confirmation there. The only one, his name was Khigh Dhieghm and you'll recognize him, he was the villain in a lot of motion pictures. He was Wo Fat in Hawaii Five-O. He's my good friend for many years and did the I Ching calendar for many years that was published. And Khigh Dhiegh wrote an 11th wing, a commentary on an exposition of the dynamics of I Ching for now. And it's interesting because it's an 11th wing. The wings are the commentaries. It's like Homer's winged words. It's a language that's raised to the level where it flies off the page and carries you with it because of a, because of a participation with the mystery of nature. The French phrase that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl used, participation mystique. The mystical participation with the mystery of nature brings a Tao capacity into your rationality so that your rationality is no longer limited to an egg crate, an identifiable knowing, but it is wide open to the complete set of the real. Such a person then speaks and hears winged words.

Homer, when he talks about Odysseus coming back to help his son Telemachus, says to his son and the only servant who was faithful to them, the old Emmaus. He said, now when we go into the hall tomorrow, be sure and lock and bolt all the doors from the outside. Until Telemachus says, but, father, there are one hundred and five of them. And Odysseus says to his son, we will have allies. And Telemachus says, father, who? Which allies? He says, father Zeus and Athena will be there. And Telemachus says, father, these are mythic figures. These are myths. Odysseus grabs his son by the throat and says they'll be there. And they were. It's this quality where the presence of the divine is a participation in the mystery of nature, and we must not mistake existence for nature. Existence, as we will find, is a ritual comportment that is founded on forms that hold in what we do, and in processes that continue the relationality, so that what we do links together through these processes and we have not only life, but we have the materia of atoms and molecules and elements and stuff. All of this is difficult enough to appreciate, but it's almost impossible to teach unless one has a cadence that delivers sets of zero and one all the time consistently. Because it's only by the consistency that one learns, almost like in a kinesthetic sense of winged words, to not stay on the page, to come off the page into life. And we will see, that in fact, when language flames into its process, the light and heat and sometimes smoke of that occurrence is what experience is. An experience flames out of existence in just that way, if one takes the arrow and rubs it into its socket, there will be that intensity, that divine passion, that transcendence, that together make that spark of the real happen. And that's what a real education is for. There are many generations and centuries where it's not necessary. It's just something that's really exquisite for the few. But in times like this, where there's nothing left, there's nothing that's ever going to work again. We have to make it all from scratch. And so, we have to learn not only how to cook, but how to hunt again. And that's what's going on here.

More next week.

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