Nature 3

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Differential Consciousness (2000-2001)
Presentation 3 of 105

Nature 3: Thoreau's Walking Path
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, January 15, 2000

Transcript:

So we're using a language that is rather self-referential, and we have to alert ourselves not to keep the autonomic switches of correspondence on, because we're going to go deeper than where correspondence holds. The the deepest correspondence is a equals a. And if you put correlation on the level of A equals A, there's a logical certainty. But you can also notice that the cycle of meaning is tautological. You're just defining A in terms of A. And what's questionable there is the equal sign. So, we're using a language which is a practiced contemporary form of an ancient diction and syntax. It's the kind of language that would have been heard in primordial peoples, not primitive peoples. They were never primitive. Those men and women who tens of thousands of years ago were effective enough to get us here. So, they were never primitive. But primordial peoples have a characteristic. When they wish to say something real, they put their language in a cadence, and that's what a storytelling cane is for. This one happens to be from West Africa, from Cameroon, and it was the way in which the speaker kept a metronome on the cadence so that his language could be delivered, and largely that language, in the Cameroon for this, would have been the mythology, the mythic language, the telling of the stories, the telling of the myths. I remember once, about 30 years ago, I was teaching a whole 16-course program in Canada, which I had been contracted at that time to design, and what was holding that 16-course program that I was designing together was a tandem of programs, one on symbols and one on myths, and that connection of myth and symbol, those two courses from the late 1960s, were the taproot of what this education is all about. And at… when I went up to Canada, I discovered that there was a very famous tribal storyteller who was in his 80s at the time. His name was Hansens Bearpaw and he was Blackfoot. And though he was blind and rather infirm, he still was able to tell the ancient Algonquin myths in the correct cadence of the language. And so, I brought him in, not to the university - I had discovered that the university had been there since the early part of the 1900s, and it never graduated an Indian. No Indian in Western Canada had ever had a college degree. And so, one of my pet projects that I assigned myself was to address that problem. Why is this? And in a Gandhian fashion, to solve all the steps and stages. And finally, before I left in [1975], I saw three Blackfoot tribal members get their college degrees, one of them a woman. And when Mavis Running Rabbit held up her degree with that big High Plains smile, that was worth it. Hansens Bearpaw was brought into the Indian Friendship Centre in downtown Calgary because I extended the education out into the community so that the community met the tribe rather than the tribe having to come to the fortress of learning. And Hansens Bearpaw delivered in his blind, old croaking cadenced way, the original telling of the myths. The primary one there was the myth of Morning Star of Venus, who was connected to White Buffalo Woman and connected into the way in which the mystery of nature is a presentational non correspondent flow, which can only be gotten by getting it, and that there's no way of understanding it in any other terms than the sheer Tao Te of the event. Now saying that, and I'm hearing in my memory here the old croaking voice of Hansens Bearpaw, who knew no English at all, and when he got into the cadence of the myth of Morning Star, his language flowed in a very familiar way to me because I had been working on that kind of language since I was a little boy, and it was like a confirmation. It was a realization that when language is not concerned with a truth as in a logical form, but exemplifies truthfulness in an existential way, that language has a very distinctive tone. Homer used to call such a language winged words.

Our great ancestor in humanizing English, Geoffrey Chaucer, was famous in his day for reading his poetry aloud to the various courts throughout Europe. He was the merchant purchasing wine for the King of England. And so, he was very privileged. And wherever he went, he dealt with the highest levels of court society. And wherever he went, he read from his works out loud. And the principle there was a living language that the words on the page needed to be deliverable, so that the oral delivery, the oral presentation, was primordial. It wasn't the reading of something so that the reading was correspondent to the text. The late 20th century was hypnotized by the idea of a text, and a book is not a text. It has nothing to do with that. The text is an idea of the book. It is a completely separate issue, philosophically and realistically. The original use of the book - the Greek term for it was codex - the original use for the book was to have a non-sequential referent to a contemplative language, not a mythic language, but what would have been called at the time a magical language. A magical language transforms the world in which it occurs. When you hear a magical language, the world is changed by the hearing. It's changed by the utterance. In a truncated fashion this is called naming. When - to use the old Genesis myth - when Adam names the animals, the world is changed because they now have names. The world is peopled, and those animals are a part of the human community which we, when we have names, participate in.

One of the old Algonquin religious confirmations was that when a man has learned the names of true things, they then speak in a language which he can understand. So that Hiawatha knows the language of animals and of plants. He can converse, and he can ask, so that it's like primordial Paleolithic men and women who knew the world, not through a filter of ideation, nor yet through a mythos of storyline models, but from the direct existence, from the primordial contact of the direct existence, existence to existence.

One time, in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Carl Jung talked about a very poignant moment in his life where he had awakened from the slovenly drift into neuroses, he had overheard his parents talk about how he was probably going to have to be committed. And he immediately discovered that when you directly confront with your full existence a neurotic pattern, it gives way. And if you continue to confront it, it gives way all the time. It must give way. It's like a solar wind from the Te of one's existence exudes that. And Jung wrote, he said he discovered this while sitting on a rock, a very large rock outside of his Switzerland hometown. And as he got into the thought of the efficacy of this, he said he experienced a moment where he became one with the rock that he recognized that he was no longer this German-speaking Swiss young man fraught with difficulties, but that he was rockness. And it gave that young Jung a chance to have a deep sympathy with the wisdom of Asia. Not so much with China - Jung never appreciated China directly, always learned it from his friend Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the I Ching that most of us have used for all these decades - but with India and with Japan. And later, when Jung visited the United States before the First World War, he was giving The Terry Lectures at Yale University. He wanted to not see the United States of the European declension of people, but he wanted to see the American Indians, namely the Pueblo peoples in the American Southwest. And when he went there, he found a direct correspondence. As just as he became rockness, he recognized that he became Pueblo. The word means, the people. It means the human beings. And it is universally inclusive of anyone who is in that mode, that mode of Te. And that mode of Te is an instantaneous emergence out of Tao, an emergence out of nature pristinely so that only one objectivity obtains, and that is the unity of existence, the everythingness, the allness. It is an artifact of the mind in inexperienced meditation to experience that unity as an ocean. It's not an ocean at all. That oceanic feeling of everythingness is the lingering rapport from the mythic level that still obtains.

But the pristine allness is an objectivity which makes clear that this is a universe. Universe, there's only one thing that is real. And that therefore we are all ratios of that real. All of us are related to each other because of that unity. And that though we are separated by degrees and orders of multiplicity spectrums, at the deepest denominator, we are all real together in that oneness. And the conviction is that a language which is visionary - we don't use the term magic much anymore, haven't since Chaucer's day - a language which is visionary, makes conscious the time-space not as an addition to time-space, but as a dimension. Consciousness makes a fifth dimension with the four dimensions of time and space, so that you get a five-dimensional gestalt, a five-dimensional matrix. So that in the ancient Chinese understanding in the I Ching, which we're using along with Thoreau. We're using the I Ching and Thoreau as a pair. We're pairing together. We're pairing two books together. We're taking the I Ching, and we're taking The Portable Thoreau. We're using pairs of books because when Te, when unity spontaneously occurs, in its occurrence, it must be real, and its reality is that it is related, it has a ratio to an uncalibrated Tao. So that Te always occurs not by itself - its unity is always in spontaneous relationship to Tao. So that Tao Te occur. The Tao does not record, can be given a designation zero. the Te records in unity and can be given a designation one. So that there is a mystery involved. The mystery is that reality, in its existential universe, always occurs as a set of zero comma one. Whereas the zero does not occur, nevertheless it has to be recognized, and it's only in vision that one factors in the zero in a recognition so that vision, a visionary language, is the language of recognition, of re-cognition, of recollection. It's the language of a function which we know, colloquially, as memory, so that consciousness has everything to do with a memory function. And one of the deepest qualities of language in its memory is its use in drama.

Here's a book by Barbara Stoler Miller, who was at Columbia University for many years, Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa. And this is extremely interesting and important because Kalidasa was the first Sanskrit classic to be translated into a popular Western English. The man who did it, Sir William Jones, was involved in India with the East India Company. The East India Company built their fortunes on tea, on Indian tea, and acclimating the British Empire population to having tea every afternoon at four. And on that basis, it was like a tax on the population of the Empire to drink tea. And because tea and India and the British Empire were intimately connected with Boston, Boston is the first place in the United States that the Oriental wisdom came in on the coattails of tea. So, there was a second Boston Tea Party, and Asian wisdom came in by the coattails. Now, it's very curious that Indian wisdom should come to Boston, to New England, on the coattails of tea, because that's the way in which the original high Dharma of Buddhism went to China. It went to China in the very same way it went on the coattails of ships carrying merchandise to South China. So that Indian wisdom came to the United States and to China in exactly the same way it came courtesy of business. And one of the earliest Boston recipients of that Indian wisdom, not the wisdom right away of the great Vedic wisdom, or the great understanding of the Upanishads - that was to come later - but the plays of Kalidasa, especially Shakuntala. And it was Ralph Waldo Emerson's father, William Emerson, who was in charge of one of these learned societies where people read out loud together and that's where Indian wisdom first hit the United States. Amazingly, exactly, at the same time as the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1804. And Emerson became the model for Henry David Thoreau at the most crucial period of his life. And Thoreau matched his existence with Emerson for a couple of years, so much so that it was like Jung discovering that he had rockness, Thoreau discovered that he had Emerson-ness.

The American poet James Russell Lowell recorded in one of his letters to someone that the young Thoreau was so good a mimic of Emerson, that if you weren't sure, you've thought for a moment you were talking to Emerson instead of Thoreau. Now, this is an old magician's trick. This is the way an ancient magician would become other than his persona. He would become the Rock. He would become the owl. He would become the wind. When Elia Kazan was finding an ending to Viva Zapata! he had put in the film at the end. Zapata's not dead. Every time we see his horse in the mountains, we know he's up there someplace. And when we need him, he'll be back. King Arthur is not dead. He's just sleeping in one of these magical sleeps, and the king will return. It's this confidence that we re-occur because there is no way for us to die. That in actual sober universe reality, death does not occur. What occurs is a season, a cycle which has its season, where there is a transformation. That nature is not so much there, existence is there, but nature reoccurs so that one of the deepest confidences that Chinese wisdom has, in the I Ching, is that what is realistic in terms of our honesty with reality is that change occurs. And that change is not happenstance, but that change has its phase form disclosure, and that we can appreciate it not through ideas, not through the looking down through a logical mind, but through the rapport that is established by a direct, not a correspondence 1 to 1, not an A equals A - that's not a communion. The communion is 1 to 0. When our oneness meets the mysterious nature zeroness directly, then we together form a set of the real. Exactly at the same time as Kalidasa's Shakuntala Sanskrit wisdom was coming into Boston was the American aping of a German philosophic movement called transcendentalism. A man named Immanuel Kant had written a monumental book about 1781, the Critique of Pure Reason, of going to the distilled purity. The transcendence of the ideational complexities of a worldly mind to the transcendental purity. And that that purity was a pure vision, a pure consciousness. And if one takes a look at the later Ralph Waldo Emerson library catalog - it exists - you notice that he owned hundreds and hundreds of books. The author who is most represented in Emerson's library is Goethe. He had more than 135 books by and about Goethe and this was 150 years ago. He had maybe 20 times as many books on Goethe as he did on the next most popular author. Now, Emerson, being the model for Thoreau is interesting to us because Thoreau, when he was 20 years old, and he came into contact with Emerson in this direct way. Thoreau was wise enough, he was primordial enough, he was profound enough not to present his oneness to Emerson's oneness, but he presented his zeroness to Emerson's oneness. Now, this is a very curious thing, but it's exactly what great acting does. A great actor presents their complete, pure openness to the role so that they become that role and nothing else. A great actor in a great role, Anthony Quinn as Zorba the Greek. You don't see Anthony Quinn anymore. You see Kazantzakis Zorba. When he gets full, he must dance. Where as Anthony Quinn would have fought. It's a curious quality. How did Thoreau come to, at age 20, to hold a zero so pristinely? It's a very curious quality. One finds very few people ever in history who have that kind of quality. One of the peculiar qualities leading to that was that when Thoreau was a little boy, he fell down some stairs. His, one of his relatives says it took two pails of water to revive the young child. When Thoreau came out of that, there was something a little different about him and his quality of being able to almost instantly learn something other than himself, focused on language, which is very interesting. He didn't focus on existentials, but he focused on language, because language in a way is a parallel to nature. Just as nature is a process, language is a process. And when someone masters a language, their language flow fits with nature so that the mystery of nature inhabits the syntax and diction of that language. There is such a thing then, as a mythic language, which is so powerful that it becomes the voice of God. Or if one prefers, the voice of the gods. That mythic language is a divine voice from nature, whereas a visionary language is that divine voice in a conscious time-space is a different mode related languages. Related because myth and vision are also processes, and when you have a conscious visionary capacity flowing, in ancient times it used to be called the gift of prophecy. The prophetic consciousness flows with a language that's similar to myth, but radically different and those two processes flow with the mystery of nature so that you have a triumvirate, you have a three quality, you have a triad. But the triad is not of things. It's not a triad of dots. It's a triad of parallel flows. If you're going to symbolize it, you would never use an equal sign, you might use three. And that in math is not that something equals something else, but that this is actual.

When Thoreau went to Harvard, he was young, 17 years old, just turning 17. It was discovered that he was a genius in languages. He learned Greek so well that by the age of 20 he could translate Aeschylus from the Greek into English. The Huntington Library, here in Los Angeles, in San Marino, has the original manuscript of Thoreau's translations. Translating Aeschylus is notoriously difficult. Thoreau not only translated Aeschylus, but Pindar, who's like steep, mountainous Greek syntax - almost impossible to translate. He carried his Homer around with him and read the original Homer and in one passage in his journals, he said, I'm beginning to realize why Alexander the Great carried the Iliad around with him all the time in a jeweled case. Because Alexander's teacher, Aristotle, had given him the Iliad, not the Odyssey, the Iliad, because the Iliad is the way in which an integral form can be put upon the character of human beings. The Iliad's language is all about the geometric city which shapes character on the balance of the action, which is at the center of the choreography of the complete drama. The action in the Iliad, which is at the center, is the death of Achilles great friend Patroclus. And because of his monstrous rage that his friend Patroclus was killed, Achilles savages the hero of Troy and breaks the spirit of Troy and led to the Greek victory. But the reason why Patroclus was killed was because Achilles was pouting that day. Agamemnon had taken his girlfriend Briseis, and so on that day, Achilles was not fighting. He was pouting. And because he was not fighting, his friend Patroclus was undefended in a flank and was killed by a shaft that came from behind. Homer has a graphic way of describing deaths in battle. He describes in one place that the sword ran through the back of the man's skull, so that his death cry clenched the teeth and the cold blade. We don't have to wait for Sam Peckinpah, or a Shane Black script. It's this quality in the Iliad where the language is perfectly balanced so that a British scholar named, H. T. Wade-Gery once did a diagram of the structure of the Iliad, and it was perfect pairs of brackets that came right into the center. And when you got to the very center of the Iliad, right there when Patroclus dies, is the fulcrum upon which the entire epic is based. So that the Iliad is all about integration, it's all about what comes when you have to work in, when you have to weave in the karma of your actions and your dispositions, and that, yes, you can do that, but that it takes a yoga to do that, not a yoga so much as in a yoga, but it takes a sense of composition to do that. The American photographer Edward Weston, in one of his day Daybooks wrote, "Composition is the strongest way of seeing." When you see, when you look to compose. Consciousness flames out of that. One becomes conscious because the whole contextual structure occurs to you in its unity, not just its unity of existence, but its unity of process flow. And when you can keep track of the specificity all at the same time, of all of the objectivities and of all the relational qualities, when you can keep the pluses and minuses and equals, as well as the ones, twos, threes, A's, B's and C's. When you can keep all of that gestalt, however extended it becomes, when all of that can be kept in one composition, the mind wakes up out of symbols into consciousness. It wakes into vision. And when it does so, it's unused to a different mode of comportment. It was used to a mode of integration since it crawled out of the seas of inorganic matter, and all of a sudden something radically new occurs - a differential consciousness, a differential mode. Because vision doesn't look to tuck things back in, but to open things further out, so that one of the characteristics of vision is that the more you look to see, the more penetrating your vision becomes. The more you see because you learn to see while you're seeing. And so differential consciousness has a quality. You can see infinitely if you had about world enough and time, if you have that patience, if you have that strength of pursuance. Because consciousness is a complement to the mystery of nature. And what we're looking at now is the mystery of nature. We're looking at a peculiar way in which the mystery of nature occurred in a flash about 200 years ago in Boston and one of its suburbs, one of its distant suburbs, Concord. The road between Boston and Concord, sometimes called the Concord Road, very often called the Lexington Road. And the Lexington Road, was the road upon which the red coated British troops marched, and from where the first shot in the Revolutionary War was fired, and exactly where that first shot was returned was the front yard of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the outskirts of Concord by the bridge - Lexington Road Bridge. So that we have a fantastic plunging of arrows of disparate traditions that would have had nothing to do with each other, suddenly focusing, exactly here at this place, at Concord, Massachusetts, that came to a flaming focus about 1821 in the person of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote a poem on the mysterious wisdom of India. It's called Indian Superstition. It was never translated until the friends of the Dartmouth Library published this in 1954. [It] was undiscovered. No one knew that it existed. And right away, at the beginning, one finds in the Emerson of 1821 a very curious development. It's the first time that an American consciously mentions the Bhagavad Gita. Not just Shakuntala, not just Kalidasa, not just the, the general wisdom of the mysterious Orient, but the first exact references to the Bhagavad Gita. His lines, "Nor are less inspired and bold in later time flowed the full melody of Sanskrit Rhyme." Sanskrit rhyme because all of classic Sanskrit is presented in a specific language form, and that language form, that couplet form happens to be exactly an aligned poetic form with a form of Hebrew that occurs in the wisdom literature. The wisdom literature of Hebrew and the classic Sanskrit of its wisdom literature are paired lines, couplets, so that the first line gives a spontaneous, direct existential, and the second line modifies it somewhat by giving it a relationality so that the couplet presents in line one the existence, in line two the mythos, so that every couplet has this quality of existence and movement of relationality, so that the literature, whatever it is, steps by this paired set. The mystery of nature cannot be given a designation but the parallel to the mystery of nature can be given in its mythos, in its mythic process, relationality. And so primordial men and women learn to pair ritual and myth together - the steps of the foot in the dance to the flow of the rhythm of the dancing. And when the foot existentially, and the rhythm of the dancing are together, it has a quality of folding in without leaving a trace to a language which speaks truth of the mystery of nature. We talked about last week of how no one knows how to find the zeros, but we did know hundreds of thousands of years ago how to arrange what we could so that the zeroness occurs, is invited in.

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

One of the curious things about this storytelling came from the Cameroons, when this was made about 25 years ago or so, is that the head of this storytelling cane is Egyptian and this is the staff head of the crozier that is carried when you make the journey through the netherworld. So that the people in the Cameroons, even late in the 20th century, still carry a 5000-year-old symbol. And this symbol is the sculptural presentation of the Eye of Horus. And the Eye of Horus is the visionary eye, which is able to penetrate the netherworld to see that juncture, which one is aiming at through the composition of one's transformation in the netherworld to meet the rising sun, so that you will rise with Ra into life again.

These kinds of Junctures are apparent to the wisdom eye. They're apparent to the visionary eye. They are also there, real, but do not record as existence in nature. The mystery of nature has something to do, has a lot to do, with the consciousness of vision. And one of the qualities that we will look at in the education is how a frame of reference is built up. A frame of reference which has four phases. And when those four phases are all operative together, the gestalt never goes into a pentagram. It stays within the square. So that the first phase, when you have that big picture, when you have that integral frame, when the mind and symbols complements myth, ritual and nature, and you have that square of nature, ritual, myth and symbol, when that integral is formed, it is full and does not supersaturate. Instead of super saturating, it transforms. So that nature being the first phase transforms, gives up its place, and ritual shifts and becomes the initial phase and makes a new frame of reference a new. I use the phrase please - don't steal it. We'll we'll tie your big toes to Galapagos tortoises going in the opposite direction. This is a sacred language that's taken 40 some years to perfect - square of attention. That there is a square of attention which is the strongest composition that occurs in any integral mode. It never goes beyond that. Reality goes beyond that, but not the square of attention. So that when nature gives way to vision, vision joins. And so, the new square of attention is, ritual, myth, symbol, vision. And that square of attention is a transformed vision. Square of attention. Attention becomes transformed. How can this be? Because the mystery of nature yields her place to consciousness. And so, there is a quality of graciousness. And vision always carries that sense when it has its purity. It always has its humility and gratefulness that Mother Nature is willing to let us go, in the sense that we now can live in a conscious time-space by our visionary capacities, which now function as a new nature, hence rebirth, hence remembering. When Isis puts Osiris back together, she remembers him. His death is a death which fragments him into 14 pieces. And when Isis brings the gift of rebirth, the gift of life with the rebirth of Ra rising, then Osiris is remembered and put back together and lives again, with the proviso that we'll see later when we get to symbols.

So, I'm using a special language. I'm using a visionary form of English which has its antecedents. The original antecedents are there about 700 A.D., with the appearance of the old English epic Beowulf. And Beowulf is the first work in English. It's the Homeric English of our language tradition 1300 years ago, and Beowulf's theme is a curious theme at the time. It takes the old Conan the Barbarian, swashbuckling hero, that mythos, and blends in with it. The unfamiliar, then nascent and very radically transformed Christian humility. So that you get a swashbuckling, heroic figure in Beowulf who must have woven into his mythos certain values that never belonged there originally and thus required a vision to weave them in. It was a new element. That weaving in Beowulf happened again. That weaving in Beowulf that happened in the ancient Old English time of the Venerable Bede, happened again in New England around the turn of 1800. It was a curious event that occurred, and the key to it is the transition, the transformation from Puritanism to Romanticism to transcendentalism.

Three different modes, three different styles of living which ostensibly don't go together at all. And the one that doesn't go with the other immediately is the Puritanism and the romantic hero. The romantic hero is the Beowulf, sans any Christianity whatsoever. You call us out. We fight. You put a resistance to us. We kick it through. But we do it in such a way as not just to defeat you, but to take away your possibility of returning. So that the romantic hero is a figure which changes the way in which evil can happen. It takes away its day of homecoming, of ever coming back again. The hero is not just a military figure who wins in a battle, but is the one who rescues the ethos from the threat permanently. So, the hero is a very, very mysterious kind of a figure and is a romantic figure, whereas the Puritan strain has of an equally mysterious quality to it. And American Puritanism, of course, comes from largely the English or the continental Puritanism, which is early 17th century, which follows right on the coattails of a very sophisticated kind of English that occurred in Shakespeare. And in between Shakespeare and Beowulf, between Shakespeare's Renaissance English and the Old English of Beowulf, weaving the then New Christian ethos into the swashbuckling, um, primitive mythos. In between there is the great figure of Chaucer, and it's not so much a work of Chaucer's that can be pointed to, but Chaucer's English. the work which we will use later in this education that comes from that time period is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and we'll use the translation that J. R. R. Tolkien made, because Sir Gawain and the Green Knight occurs in Middle English. There's Old English, there's Renaissance English, and in between is Middle English, spoken in the 1300s, its heyday. Chaucer lived in the 1300s. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written in the 1300s. In the 1300s, the English language changed radically. Its Old English form was a kind of a celestial mandate imposed upon man. That Christian ethos was imposed upon the old heroic ethos, so that Beowulf is sort of a force fed, kind of a synergy. Whereas in Chaucer, the English, the Middle English has a human quality to it in the sense that it's the language that's spoken in the family. It always has a family tone to it that is not just mother, father, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, grandfather, grandmother, not just that kind of a family, but that all of us are friends together in our humanity. We belong together because humanity is the tribe of unity. So that there's such a thing as mankind. So, in Chaucer, his phrase for it was, I write of a fair field full of folk, I write of human beings, I write of the family of man. And that relationship between Beowulf of Old English and Chaucer of Middle English is reflected in the way in which the I Ching structure comes down in Chinese civilization. The original I Ching was like an Old English Beowulf. It was, as the Chinese say, a heaven arranged pattern put upon our life here. Whereas the revision to it was the man-centered, the human-hearted-based, I Ching. And the I Ching that comes down to us comes from the human-hearted version. The old Heaven primal arrangement gave way to the human-centered family of man arrangement. And that family of man arrangement in China happened with the founding of the Zhou dynasty. Sometimes you see it written in the old script Z-H-O-U. The Zhou dynasty. They came into power about 1100 BC. The Zhou dynasty I Ching is contemporaneous with Homer. The Trojan War happens about 1122 BC. So that there's a synergy between one of the books that we use for the whole year long. The background string that keeps all of the beads together and forms a 'necklace of learning'. That's also copyright, 'necklace of learning'.

Homer's Odyssey as the complement to the Iliad is the wrath of Achilles, which extends you out so that you are cut off from your humanity and you have to find a way to come back home. And the Odyssey is the return, the homecoming. The center of it is not Odysseus, but his day of homecoming. This return quality is the quality that's there in the Zhou I Ching, so that in the primal I Ching of Fuxi, 3000 BC, the issue is not so much return, but what is the structure of heaven? What is the mandate of heaven to which we must pay attention to? Whereas, in the Zhou I Ching, the center of commitment is to be there with the return of the energy cycle, that when you go through the five-phase energy cycle, at the fifth phase, you return back to the first one. So that there's a human commitment to reoccur, to return. And thus, the image that is most beautifully there is that of the baby. The baby is the return to life. The maturity of the beings coming back in through the children, through the baby, that the baby is that center. Whereas in the primordial I Ching of Fuxi, you don't find that image at all. What you find in Fuxi in the original I Ching is the pristine ecology of nature as it happens without us included. This is how nature works. This is how the cycle of nature happens. And because it happens in exactly this way, it's not so much a return, but it happens in this way once eternally, permanently, and gives its eternal impress. It will always be that way.

So that the Zhou I Ching has a human-hearted quality to it, to the Chinese word - Jen, Jen. Jen, it's very similar to the Chinese word for people - Ren, Ren. There is a quality in the Zhou I Ching, the Book of Zhou where the trigrams, which in Fuxi's heaven primary pattern came together and made a permanent gestalt, an eternal form, which is always there. The Zhou I Ching is how to modulate oneself so that all the phases flow, and the return is through the circulation. So that the Chinese sense shifted from so much the mandate of heaven to the way in which the circulation of man's energies are healthful. The primordial insight into the Zhou form of the I Ching is the Tao Te Ching. And in one of my... one of the works that we use here, the Tao Te Ching, using my translation of it, this is the way in which Lao Tzu - I entitled this… this is chapter 14. The original Tao Te Ching had no chapter headings. It was just 5500 characters in a cascade, but it was portioned out about the time of Mencius, not in Confucius's day, but about 350 BC, it was portioned out - praising the profound. And here's how my English presentation of Lao Tzu runs.

Looking, presence unseen, is named colorless. Listening, presence unheard, is named soundless. Reaching, presence beyond grasp, is named incorporeal. These, thus themselves, not subject to objectivity. Therefore deeply paired in a unity. Surface, not clear. Bottom not obscure. Continuously, continuously, oh no one can name.

This quality of Lao Tzu is the quality of a cyclic circulation that reoccurs so that there is a rebirthing quality, there is a remembering quality, that is there, not there in Fuxi, but there in the Book of Zhou, in that kind of I Ching, is there in Homer. So that Homer and the I Ching, in the Zhou version are contemporaneous about 3000 years ago. That whole swath of planetary wisdom at that time was concerned with how do we recycle reality so that we are included, including our life qualities, so that we do not die, but reoccur? We reappear. And for several thousand years, that was a problem. It was a central issue with wise men and women. How is it that we reoccur? How is it that past lives are real? And one of the issues that was there, in the American 1800 version of Puritanism, was a conviction that they had, that they were living again. But that they were not living this life again so much as they were living an ancient, pure life again. And a beautiful study of this particular odd phenomenon by a man named [Theodore Dwight] Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism. They were convinced the American Puritans, verging on the romantic hero transcendental - all these qualities come together - they were convinced again that, it was not that they were trying to purify this life, so that this life was good so much. They were trying to purify this life so that the ancient, pristine quality of their reality shined through them - shown. And so, one finds, especially in the Emerson family, a conviction that they were in the front row, on the first violin chairs of this whole prophetic actuality. And the Emerson family had a female sage. The aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson, her name is Mary Moody Emerson, and she was ignored up until this book came out. This book came out in 1998. Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. Aunt Mary. And this book came out, just like the book on Emerson's India poem about the Bhagavad Gita. This book came out because the author, Phyllis Cole, found that she had written an almanac, and found the almanac intact. And when she went through the almanac, she discovered that Mary Moody Emerson was like an ancient sage. She was like the teacher of Socrates - Diotima. She was so pristinely contemplative that her English language form disclosed a magical syntax that allowed for one to presence eternity in its remembered actuality. And Aunt Mary was the one who carried on the family tradition because Ralph Waldo's father died when he was just a little boy. He didn't have the benefit of the man who founded, in Boston, this beautiful society to bring these classics in, to educate the Americans of around the early 1800s were in a particularly high gear of redoing civilization completely.

We often hear that the French Revolution was a greater revolution than the American Revolution in terms of world history. The American Revolution of 1776 was one-upped by the French Revolution of the early 1790s. But the revolution that hardly anyone talks about that not only one up, but 1000-upped the French Revolution, was the American Revolution of 1800. The American Revolution of 1776 was a military confrontation that resulted in a brokered plan called the Constitution, and the presidency, and the Congress, and the judicial system. Whereas the Revolution of 1800 was Thomas Jefferson's version of revising the I Ching to put it human-centered. We're not talking about constitutional powers, we're talking about freeing human persons. In one of his letters to Madison, Jefferson wrote, he said, "in history we've often seen groups of men and women who have struggled through to community freedom among themselves, but they have been like drops of rain in a desert that soon evaporated them in a generation or two or three. And what we're after is to free human beings not in little pockets or packets of handfuls, but by the millions, continent-wide." We want to see what man will be like if he opens up into complete freedom. Not the freedom that's there in a peculiar, truncated ideational sense. Not this freedom, which is mistaken for freedom of choice, but this complete differential openness. So that the cosmic nature of people is let loose to interchange in the world. In the Almanac of Mary Moody Emerson, one of the most peculiar qualities was her conviction that there was a mysterious feminine who was essential to Christianity, who was completely left out of Christianity, and that the Christian masculine emphasis on doctrine was a natural skew that developed because the whole feminine comportment was excluded and left out, and she felt that she had, she had re-embodied that missing ancient life. She didn't know she was talking about Mary Magdalene. She was a beautiful woman. She never married. Not that she wasn't asked or sought after, but because she got deeply into this ability to make herself transparent to the world so that what she presented more and more as she matured, she presented her zeroness to other people's persona. And a lot of people couldn't get her. The one who learned best was Ralph Waldo Emerson - he learned from his aunt. And when Thoreau, at age 20, started to mimic Emerson and he met Mary Moody Emerson, he used the Emersonian open personality and he got what Aunt Mary was saying really well, really well. And later in 1857, after Thoreau had been keeping a journal for 20 years, he wrote, he said, "I realized today in the forest that my bride has been nature." Which is curious, because the whole theme of Kalidasa's Sakunthala is the theme of the Sacred Woman, the Holy Princess, who gets adopted by the sage in the forest, and he takes her in as his daughter, and he makes sure that she finds a realism in her relationality with the world. And that's what all of this is about. And that the memory theatre of Kalidasa in ancient Sanskrit that came into Boston around 1800 at the time when Puritanism was being transformed into Romanticism and very quickly into Transcendentalism, and all of it awash with Jefferson's Revolution of 1800. You get a complex gestalt whose composition is so delicate, almost no one has seen the completeness of it, even here in the 21st century - it sounds astounding, it's like news. So, I'm just a reporter. Forget the gurus. We're not even ready for gurus.

For Emerson and for Thoreau though, the figure of Mary Moody Emerson was like the favorite aunt who was, like, very wise and that, like you learned from. But the woman who really embodied it was named Margaret Fuller. And Margaret Fuller is one of the most unsung of all the geniuses of history. They just put out a Portable Margaret Fuller to go with The Portable Thoreau. Just now. They're catching up with Margaret Fuller. Margaret Fuller was the one who realized and recognized that there is the need for a community publication that tunes all of these disparate people so that they can recognize each other and come together in a community. And the publication that she was involved in was called The Dial, The Dial. And it had antecedents. It had utopian newsletters like The Western Messenger. In Egypt, in Ancient Egypt, the Holy Land is in the west, not the east. In the west, where the sun rises, where RA rises. In High Dharma Buddhism, Amitabha, the Pure Land is in the west, so that the west, not the east, where the sun rises is one thing, but in the west is this quality where the rebirth is positioned to happen even at its beginning. Because when you're in the netherworld, it's too late to start that. You have to start your rebirth, sun rising with Ra, at that particular moment, that moment of sunset seeming death. You have to prepare for that. And so, one's life then becomes a purity preparation. You prepare not so much for an event, but you prepare to be prepared. And so, you get this exponential quality, this composition, not by the mind in its integral, but by consciousness in its differential. The differential consciousness is so complete that it prepares the mind to be prepared. And so, the transcendental quality is that consciousness must even shepherd one's own mind. You have to mature one's own mind - untrain it, and discipline it, and mature it. And that this is not just something that one person does, but it's what we all do when we're alert to this, so that there's such a thing as a community. And it's that community which forms a different level of culture, that what culture is all about, then, is the development of the tradition of this wisdom seeking together.

And so, Ralph Waldo Emerson is known very much as the Apostle of culture. His transcendentalism is all about how this level of community and of cultural concerns prepares people to work together towards this further preparation. And when Thoreau was doing his imitation, his becoming Emerson for a while, he was shocked out of that because he fell in love. He was astounded. He met a 17-year-old woman named Ellen Sewall. She came to visit the Thoreau household for a couple of weeks, and she was just, she was a knockout for him. He couldn't believe it. There's a, I'll try and find a photograph of her. I think you should know that these are not, these are not peculiar looking women. The next door neighbor to him, Elizabeth Hoar, has some of the features that Ellen Sewall had. You can see that they were extraordinary. But what happened to Thoreau was that he all of a sudden realized that nothing in his Emerson had any orientation in love. That it wasn't anything about the community. It was something about him being taken out of the community and dropped into a mysteriousness. He wrote after meeting her for five days in his journal, he said, there is no remedy for love, apparently, but to love more. And so, when she left, when she had to go back home, Thoreau and his brother John, who had fallen in love with her also, realized that the only thing for them was to do a trip on the Concord and Merrimack rivers to do a boating trip to work it out of their system. Early American cold showers. And what's curious is that they did that trip exactly in a week, in a Sabbath-set of days from Saturday, because it's of Jewish origin, to through Friday night. And that Sabbath-set, that week, became Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. And day by day by day, until you get to the Sabbath, the seventh day, the Friday, the evening Seder. That one understands that what Thoreau got here was the pristine form of timekeeping consciously that was there in, not ancient Judaism, but there in Hellenistic Judaism, because Christianity came out of Hellenistic Judaism. The first Christians were Hellenistic Jews. There were, there were, there was no one called Christian whatsoever until at least the 70s AD. Before that they were Jews, but they were Hellenistic Jews, which had a very particular kind of a tone which is ignored not only in Christianity but in Judaism. No one talks about it.

What Thoreau found him inhabiting, like he had inhabited Emerson, was an ancient wisdom that appealed to him in such a way that he could read something like the Book of Daniel or the Book of Job, and he understood that exactly, spontaneously, because he inhabited that kind of wisdom. He inhabited what was called at that time the wisdom of Solomon. He understood the mystery of love. Solomon's epic is not a long epic like Homer or like the Mahabharata, but is The Song of Songs, the exponential, The Song of Songs. It's about love. It's about being taken out of the tradition, the recognition, and dropped into the mystery of love. So, one doesn't just sing the myth, but one sings the song of songs, which is the magical transform. Not only is the world never the same again, but that reality has disclosed that it is always new in this mysterious way, and so that consciousness, when it is alert to its own antecedents, its own origins, its own transform, becomes super aware. It becomes aware of its awareness. And Thoreau discovered, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his brother John never quite got there and understood. But Thoreau did. So, when he published that book, it wasn't just the record journal that he kept on the trip, but he reworked and reworked and reworked everything that he knew or thought or felt back into it, until the book was like a fine ball peined craftsman's thing. And when it was published in an edition of 1000 copies, only eight copies sold. And he had to eat crow in a big way. He had to buy back all the other copies, which he put up in the attic where he slept in the home there in Concord, and he wrote in his journal he said, "I now have a library of over a thousand volumes, 992 of which I've written myself." Now that's where the phrase son of a bitch comes from.

He discovered something in writing of that book, though, because he - remember he was in love while he did it - that his marriage to reality had to do something with the state of love. And when Ellen Sewall rejected him, he didn't feel bad or find someone else, he went deeper and found that nature was his bride. And he found it because the process in writing the book suddenly disclosed itself to him. He kept notebooks, folded sheets of paper that had like a folded cover on which he kept in the pockets. He had his clothes tailor made so that they had wide pockets to hold these notebooks of his. He had a special pocket up here where he put his spyglass. He didn't have binoculars. He had a spyglass. He had a special little pocket where he kept a measurer. He measured everything all the time, everything, and kept this detailed notebook. And so, he learned to do a kind of a truncated language, almost like stenography in the notebook, which no one else could read. Then he would transfer the notebook material to his journal, where he would expand it - sometimes 2 or 3 words would become pages. Then he would use his journal as the sourcebook out of which to write his books, so that the books were the result of several transforms, several stages if you want, several phases. And all the time, the shepherding language form was to make sure that the notebook version was pristinely there in response to nature. No mitigation whatsoever. Not only no mitigation by the mind, but no mitigation by the body. It was as if nature was speaking to him. It's a not-channeling. That's a different thing. That's a psychic thing. This is different. This is the Hiawatha thing of letting the trees speak to you. They do not speak in a language that we would recognize as a language until we learn that language, and what they speak in then, is a directness out of which emerges existence itself. The language of the mystery of nature is the language of pure process, pure time occurrence before space gels. And of course, this was exactly making sense to someone like Thoreau. He's a graduate of Harvard, translating Aeschylus at 20. When he read Kant and Goethe, he understood European transcendentalism accurately, more so than Emerson. Emerson was always the friend of philosophy. Thoreau was always the prophetic sage, even deeper than philosophy. Wisdom itself. Not just a lover of wisdom, but the embodier of wisdom, he's a wisdom being. Very different, very, very different. When the old Emerson finally was taken to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, he went there with John Muir, young, vigorous John Muir, who wanted to show him Yosemite. And Emerson was so old that his handlers - they had handlers then - his handlers forced him to sleep inside. And Muir wrote, he said, "the loneliest night of my life. Here I am in Yosemite at last with Emerson, and he has to sleep inside. And I'm alone out here under the stars." It's that quality. Whereas Thoreau never went old, he literally radiated his persona into his journal so that he lives there in that journal. That one reading in Thoreau's journal, you remember him in such a way that you perform the Isis function, and he comes back slowly, day after day, year after year, back into vibrant life again and is there.

I didn't bring it with me. I had a book by a Gandhian political general who dedicated his book to the sage of North America, to Henry David Thoreau, because he taught us all again that yogis are real in their works, that books are not just records of something, but they can reconstitute because if they're written in a hieroglyphic sacred language, the reading of that brings it back into play again. That books remember reality for us so that it occurs again. No one's dead. Everyone's here. And if that happens for one or two or three, it means the entire heritage of the planet is contemporaneous. Which means that you can get really mature if you want to. That's what this is all about.

More next week.

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