Nature 4

Transcript (PDF)

Differential Consciousness (2000-2001)
Presentation 4 of 105

Nature 4: I Ching Transcription Blues
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, January 22, 2000

Transcript:

This is Nature 4, and the title of this lecture is I Ching Transcription Blues. We have a tremendous promise and difficulty at the same time in the 21st century, and the difficulty for us is that the English language that we learn to speak in the 20th century is no good anymore. It just doesn't function in a kaleidoscopic enough way to carry the meaning which we are all beginning to perceive and eventually conceive. Our capacity to enlarge our range of perception and to complicate our arena of conception, is rising giant step by giant step and almost month by month now, throughout this year and the next one, we're going to find ourselves increasingly beggared by a language which doesn't match our capacity to express. And so, I have worked for a long time on this particular issue and this problem, this promise. And I thought I would give you some indication today of some of the roots of the language which I'm using for you, just for about ten minutes or so, and then we'll get into the lecture by proper.

I brought one of the earliest volumes from my library, Flash Gordon and the Red Sword Invaders. And it was published in 1945 and it has my signature in it. So, I've been doing this for at least 55 years and a literate level. And I wanted you to get a sense of how peculiar the language that I'm using might be. I went back to some early poetry, and I thought I would give you a couple of examples of your speaker's use of language forty years ago. This was a poem written in Chicago when I was 17, and very much an existentialist beatnik bum. It's called Subterranean Elegy, and this is the earliest poem that I could find. So, my language starts at this kind of blank zero.

Wintry street.
Blue cold
Fluorescent boulevard lights.
Orange electric eye.
Boulevards concrete.
Low glaring orange electric eye.
Blue snowy concrete.
Orange guiding lantern.
Early spaces, occasional traffic.
Surreal loneliness.
Grand, modern, space age.
Low slung, subterranean, eye.
Indifferent non-feeling.
Boulevard and I,
Built for mechanical things and aesthetically cool.
We sit and we wait.
We ever watch that orange eye.
We wait for it to blink.

So that's about the time that On the Road came out. This is the same writer two years later, at 19, having undergone a transformation by landscape instead of a Chicago urban existentialist beat scene. This is an American Indian quest visionary tone in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Wandering together on vague Sierra paths
Dramatic parapets, bleak amid canyon dimensions
Far above the plunge, clear water.
Outer edges, greens and granites,
Tarry a moment.
Those windy places, those long moments.
Bent, stooped in the rushing updraft fluttering hoods ever hooded with hickory staff anomalies.
20th century being in the world way out there in September Sierras.
And we gnarled and weathered,
Ever quiet,
Ancient pines rooted in sheer granite, Hokusai.
Vigilance and vistas and visions,
Dynamic history.
That primordial push that tears up and walks with big steps,
Or makes us attentive and passionate apprehension.
Listening in on ourselves and our privilege.
It is now time to open sealed orders.
We have been writing them for 14,000 years.
Oh, thrice greatest Hermes.
You are my blood, and my nerves.
Confirm my reality among the stars.
Go outward bound and be,
So that I am to be
And you are, and we will have been,
Before and since.
Fine raging blood and nerves of that heritage.
Feininger's silhouettes in autumn Sierra Nevada
Silhouettes.
Peaked hoods, the broad flap of capes
Beneath our Lincoln green cowls, a roaring silence
Out on jagged bastions jutting into sky.
Water dreams.
A jubilant Tao in North America.
Apollo at the Cape.
Psychedelphia on both coasts.
Ah, yes, Goethe, we guard against ghost stories.
New American Eagles and fledgling flights where there have always been,
Shrieking shapes of witches trees.
Singular red angles against blue noon sphericaliness.
This deepest sky above pastoral meadow.
Sweet valleys, romantic foothills.
Fruited plains, surreal inscapes
Above those gulfing greens, picnic parlors.
This deepest ground where we grow.
We are standing now, stooped in the updraft, intense.
After the taking of honeyed lemon tea, we turn,
Pushing on again, wandering in the larger pattern silences.
Shrouded in whipping black and Lincoln green,
Into a wilderness.

So, these are just some of the indications of how, 40 years ago, the struggle with language and myth and history and symbols and art and ritual and nature and science and all of it at that time was just a complete jumble. It was an impossibly complex medicine ball that had been thrown at us, and it just simply was something that bowled you over. The complications of sensitivity and penetration and consciousness, and the inability to have any understanding of what is going on. No orientation whatsoever. A kind of a fractal jungle without knowing about fractals. This education came out of an attempt to try to find a way in which myth and symbol happened together. The initial insight was the experience that we have somehow goes in here, and we get images in here that are related to what we're doing out here. How does that happen? What does that mean that that's evidently one of the structural angles that characterize us. We live and we have images of our living, and our images sometimes are of possibilities like in dreams, that have never happened, they may never happen. How does that occur? Do those images then come from an interior experience? And what does that interior experience have to do with the exterior experience?

And so, the problem came that symbols are like an objective ridge of the mind that plunge steeply on both sides into a pair of canyons. And in those canyons, one canyon is the canyon of myth, of oral language, of being able to have experience uttered from some kind of natural, mysterious origin, and on the other, the steep side of a visionary language which plunges into the uncharted dimensions of consciousness that in between nature and consciousness, the ridge of the mountain range of symbols somehow is a place where we find ourselves again and again. Though we didn't begin there, it's a place where the wondering becomes crucial. Where there is a crisis of needing to understand. No longer just wanting to, or hoping to, but to need to understand. How is it that the mind, curiously, is an objectivity so strong that its form reshapes the world. How is it that we do this, that we inhabit this?

And in the long decades of struggling to find how to inquire about this, how to investigate, how to go about understanding, how to appreciate, one of the reoccurring qualities was that the only traction we really have is not in our mind. And not in our experience, but in something called nature. That nature is the basic comportment out of which we occur. And about 30 years ago it became clear that this was not true at all. That the objectivity of the body, as opposed to the objectivity of the mind, the mind's objectivity in symbols, in ideas, in conceptions, in understanding. The body's objectivity was in its existential position as a body in time and space, but that the essential quality of that body was that it was active. That the actions of the body, the body in action, was where the objectivity was. That existence, on the most basic level, on the most primordial level, was not so much that an existential body stands where it is, but that it continues to stand where it is. Not so much that it is suddenly there, but that it is born, that it emerges, that existentiality has an emergent quality. In fact, most of the world's languages that have a primordial quality of talking about existence use verbal forms. They use gerunds to express existence. Not that something is, but that something emerges, and that it continues to emerge, and that this activity of ritual is where existence has its objectivity. And that ritual objectivity then, can be trusted, and somehow the body in its ritual comportment aligns with the mind and its symbolic objectivity. That the body and the mind definitely are related. They have, as it were, a kind of a paired quality to them, and that ritual and symbol link together. But what links them together is not that the body and the mind touch, but that the body and the mind have a relationality through the mythic level of experience, through the mythic level of experience which is expressed in language. And that mythic horizon, that process - not an objectivity - but a process. That mythic process tends to be feeling toned and quite intelligent that the body is very smart. The body is extremely intelligent, but in its ritual comportment it doesn't use its feeling-toned intelligence so much as it uses the trustworthiness of ritual tradition. That the comportment has been stylized into cycles, into sequences, into sets of activity which can be repeated. And this repetition, this ritual cycle, follows not the feeling-toned intelligence of experience, and not the objectivity of the mind, but the ritual cycle follows nature. That nature evidently has such a peculiar relationship to existence. That existence, having emerged from nature, keeps the tone of the mother, and the child who exists has the tone of the mother. That nature is like a mother for all of us, and all of us are like her children. And that this basic quality of nature and ritual linking together makes, finally, an idea in the mind, a symbolic idea, that there is a flow of nature and that there is a vertical, an emergence, verticality that occurs in the midst of this flow. And that if you would symbolize this in the most, simple stick line drawing, you would get a horizontal line and a vertical line meeting. And that horizontal line and that vertical line meeting is the earliest Chinese character for mountain - shan.

If we look at the Chinese for a minute and look at the way in which the Chinese understanding of, how is it that the flow of nature is intimately emergent to the qualities objectively of ritual, action, existence? We talked last week and the week before about how, 5000 years ago, the great cultural hero of China, Fu Hsi, understood that there was a cycle, a ritual cycle, that follows the natural ecology. That nature, evidently in its process and flow, has a movement, and this movement has some kind of sequence of imagery which is able to be experienced by us mythically and symbolically, and also ritually. And Fu Hsi cycle was to watch a thunderstorm in the mountains. That by observing all of the phases of a thunderstorm in the mountains, he came to understand that there was an eight-part cycle. Eight images captured the way in which this thunderstorm in the mountain occurred, and that in that cycle was the basic quality of ritual reality. And so, in the I Ching in book two called the material, very quickly, in this single volume edition on page 266, one has the sequence of earlier heaven or the primal arrangement. These eight phases, these eight stages, which have the image of mountain, the image of wind, the image of water, of lightning fire, of lake. That all of the receptivity that invites the image, the creativity that generates it, that with these eight images, if put together into a certain sequence of the arrival of the thunderstorm in the mountains, the rain, the collecting of the water into the lake. And finally, again one sees in the reflection of the lake, one sees the image of the mountain again where it all began. So that in Fu Hsi's ecology, mountain - which is designated shan, or keeping still - that there is a quality, a metronome of ritual comportment, which has its beginning not as one, but its beginning in zero, its beginning in Tao. And the first place that the Tao shows up is that it has a relationship which is characterized by keeping still, symbolized by the mountain. So that thousands of years later, the major school of Taoism in China was the Maoshan Daoist School. Mao mountain, outside of Nanjing and Maoshan Daoists have been in business for about 80 generations. Master Ni in town here, was in that lineage. My own teacher, Kai-Yu Hsu, was from Nanjing, and a variant of that. He was from the urban school, not the country doctor school like Master Ni, but the urban school, the Nanjing school. And that school paid attention not so much to the acupuncture and the herbs and the medicine but being cosmopolitan - Nanjing was the capital of China many, many times - the Nanjing Taoists were sensitive to language, so that my teacher's teacher was Wen Yiduo, one of China's great poets at the beginning of the 20th century. And that lineage goes back all the way to Fu Hsi. And I'll bring next week my Taoist degree from Kai-Yu Hsu in his own calligraphy. And you can see that the lineage still happens because there is an attentiveness that language used in the right way. What is the right way? Language used so that conscious vision exchanges with the mystery of nature. And instead of the mystery of nature being the plunge on one side of the symbolic objectivity of the mind and the ritual objectivity of the body, the plunge shifts gear and goes over to the other side, to the infinity of consciousness. Instead of the zero Tao base of the mystery of nature. The shift, then, is to the infinity of consciousness, so that the infinity of consciousness exchanges places with the zero of the mystery of nature. And we call that shift a transformation. Not a transcription, but a transformation. And the reason for the lecture having the title I Ching Transcription Blues is that transcription runs into a problem all the time because it cannot recognize its own axiomatic basis. It is impossible for a logic system to define its own axioms - you need a subsidiary system to do that. And of course, then you get into a real problem with what Bertrand Russell called the theory of types, and you get into set problems. And one of the really great minds who wrestled with this, he was a contemporary of Lewis Carroll, who wrote the Alice in Wonderland, a man named Charles Sanders Peirce, who was a good friend of William James. Harvard boys. I mean, from little boys, they were raised around there. Charles Sanders Peirce was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 19th century, he wrote the most startling book on Sir Isaac Newton's Fluxions his calculus. I have a copy of that in the library.

So that these qualities become mysterious and also become visionary, because in a logical way, zero and infinity can exchange places in any expression, and you do not lose meaning. So that a transform has the ability to not only respect meaning in terms of universal law of integration, but to develop further meaning indefinitely without losing place, so that there is a form which expresses this. The form comes from the ancient Egyptians called the infinity sign. And when it was first made in ancient Egypt, it was like this. It's like an eight, that is to say, when it's abstracted, it becomes an eight. But the original sign was a series of these interlocking together, these infinity signs locking together. And they were not infinity signs, but they were cobras. So that one finds, contemporaneous with Fu Hsi in China, you find the Ancient Pyramid Texts in Egypt, about 5000 years ago, and the way in which conscious energy was styled is a frequency of interlocking cobras in infinity signs standing up that they are no longer in the flow of nature, but they are stood up in the Ogdoads of conscious form, so that later the cobra in that form was excerpted and put on the crown of the Pharaoh, that one - the Uraeus - that one then masters that energy and has that capacity.

There was another form that was used when the Coffin Texts came out, and that was to use a zero with a bar on top of it. And this eternity sign is what is clutched in the claws of Horus when that spirit bird flies over the supine body of someone about to be resurrected. The sun gives the ankh, the light ray gives the life energy, but the rebirth energy comes from eternity. It's to be expected.

We're using the I Ching to begin our education and pairing with it, because in a sense, one of the deepest ways to respect truth is to use universal structures. And the paradox is one of the most trustworthy of all universal structures. With a particular insight that pairs themselves pair. So that when you get a pair of pairs, that's where you get the square. And it's a peculiar aspect about the square is that it has four-ness and recently, translation of this book, The Universal History of Numbers, about 650-700 pages. And here's a quotation from The Universal History of Numbers. It took the man about as long as I've been working on this education. He hitchhiked his way all over the world for decades and finally put it together. Here's a quotation from that book.

"As a result of studies carried out on a wide range of beings, from crows to humans as diverse as infants, Pygmies, [and the] Amerindian inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, psychologists and ethnologists have been able to establish the absolute zero of human [number-]perception. Like some of the higher animals, the [human adult] with no training at all [(for example,] learning to recognize the 5 or the 6 at cards by sight, through sheer practice)," with no training at all, "has direct and immediate perception of the numbers 1 to 4 only. Beyond that level, people have to learn to count."

It's a universal quality, we cannot see directly in perception, as long as we are body mind aligned.

Forget it. It's my friends playing. Have you not seen Buckaroo Banzai? It's Lord John Whorfin. And I'm sure in the miserable annals of the earth I will be duly inscribed.

We cannot see directly more than a square referentiality at any given time. As long as the body and the mind Are in play, and they are the pair structures that give the integral any traction at all. So that integration cannot function beyond a square. But 5000 years ago, the Chinese and the Egyptians both understood, being men and women like ourselves, both understood that something else happens in Egypt. There was a quality that came into play, which later on the English word quintessence describes. A fifth essence, a quintessence. The thumb comes into play with the four-ness of the fingers. In China it was that the center also must be counted. Not only do you count the four corners of the square, but you must count the center, and that the center is not at the end, but that the center is at the center, so that you count one corner, two corners to the center, three corners, four corners, so that the Chinese have this kind of a Z, this zigzag form, that there is a quality which both the Chinese and the Egyptians understood. And that is at the centers of objectivity there is an ability for centers to exchange. And when they exchange, the centers function in each other's continuum. That there is like a male-female fertility that results in something new, and that the transform is birthed out of a rebirth. It's a quintessence that comes not out of nature but comes out of consciousness. It comes not out of the square of things, but it comes out of the space that is not only inside the square, but outside the square as well. And that eventually one could see by holding the meditative image close and then letting it go back slightly slowly one could see that the square does not contain the center, but the square is overlaid upon a background that is both center and exterior without break. That the square of attention that the form of body mind, integral synergy does not obstruct the infinite zero Tao background at all.

And so this great discovery, both in China and India about 5000 years ago, that our integral forms are not cookie cutter stamps that cut out shapes from reality, but that they occur in some kind of relationality within an infinite ocean of spatiality, and that the cutting form must then take place in a movement which is time-based, and so that the movement of time is the writing pen that carves out form, and that the body and the mind, when they're aligned, they can make that form quite indelible, as long as they exist and maintain their tandem.

What came as a great surprise is that there has to be a transform shift to a completely other mode. Otherwise, those forms decay instantly as soon as the body or the mind cease to be there. Both the Chinese and the Egyptians discovered, to their great surprise, that there is a form that exists not in integration whatsoever but exists in a completely complementary process called differentiation. That in the infinite differential, the form that obtains is like the crystal jewel prism of the person. And that the spiritual person is not a form in ritual or in symbol but is an art form that occurs because there was a shift of transform out of the structures of integration.

We were told 40 years ago that you have to find yourself by very powerful integrations. That is a lie, no one ever found themselves by integrating. What you find is the certainty of mental forms and the certainty of bodily movements. But you do not find the spiritual person. So here is a little poem by Wallace Stevens called The Snowman. We'll take a little break explaining this.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Let's take a break.

Let's come back to the careful language of conscious personal form. Conscious language has an eternal denominator rather than the zero denominator in nature. In integration it always achieves form against zero. Whereas in differentiation it achieves form against infinity. It's a slight difference, and the difference creates what we call reality.

Here's a poem called Zen Canyon.

One night bird sings on a twig
Its notes vanished down the canyon
A thin warble into foggy distance
I peer after it expectant
Moonlit shoals of mist drift
Again the bird sings freely
The music dwindles into the gorge
Again I strain after it, hearing what I see.
The singing stops.
The twig bobs empty.

We will see towards the end of this year in a work, a great work of art like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, that though we exist in time, there are moments of eternity that can occur. There are not spaces of moments which are eternal like, but actual eternity occurs within time. The Greek word for this was epiphany, and Virginia Woolf understood this very well. The mystery of consciousness is that it is completely interchangeable with the mystery of nature. So that the zeros of nature and the infinities of consciousness can exchange with each other and function in each other's continuum, so that in eternity there are moments of time. And this is part of the mystery of nature. It's also part of the mystery of consciousness. That time can occur spontaneously in eternity is perhaps even more of a surprise than that time has eternal moments or not eternal moments, so much as spaces of complete eternal openness that occur and do not interrupt the flow of time. And yet we are such that we can use the interface of both in their exchange, and we can meld them together so that, as Virginia Woolf brings out in most of her novels, there is such a thing as a stream of consciousness which makes psychological time, which can be of plastic and pliable duration. A moment or two can be worth a whole year or two. And so whole decades can be folded into a few seconds. So that we occupy a very curious, not a position, not a moment, but we occupy as ourselves a quality where, when the common denominators of Tao are factored into existence, consciousness can come and play there without it being noticed at all in the continuity. And so, time-space is very peculiar.

We're using Thoreau along with the I Ching because Thoreau lived at a time in a place in the New England of the early 1800s, where there was a sudden thrusting of an Asian wisdom that had never been appreciated or understood in the West, because there just wasn't any kind of relationship to it for several thousand years. And we talked last week about how the Sir William Jones translation of the Bhagavad Gita came through the international tea routes and surfaced in the Boston of about the late 1790s. And that there were Boston Brahmins for the first time. There were people living in Massachusetts who all of a sudden had an eternal glimpse from a Bhagavad Gita calibration of language that occupied a center of their New England sophistication without losing a hitch. And they were astounded that this was true, that this could happen. And the leader of those original Boston Brahmins was the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson - William Emerson. And his father first read the Bhagavad Gita just before Emerson was born, so that Ralph Waldo Emerson emerged, was born, into a very peculiar time shift, a wisdom shift. It was an odd occurrence, and when he was born in 1804, Emerson was raised on one hand to be a very proper New England preacher. And yet running all through the family was this Bhagavad Gita eternal quality emphasized, as I pointed out last week by one of the women in the family, his Aunt Mary, Mary Moody Emerson. And I brought this 1998 volume, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendalism, a family history. And pointed out that for someone like Mary Moody Emerson, the eternity epiphany of the Bhagavad Gita allowed her to take herself momentarily out of the time-space in which she was living and to occupy spontaneously and instantly a different time-space. And when she did so, she recognized that she was living in the earliest of Christian communities, when Christians were still Jews, when they were Hellenistic Jews. And it was such a startling quality that though she was an extraordinarily beautiful, attractive woman, she never married because she considered that she was investigating the mysteries of nature and the mysterious qualities of transcendental consciousness, and her favorite student was her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson. And when Emerson became 30, he had this respect for her that he would write an essay which would express his thanks to her, and the essay became one of the great documents in American Studies is simply called Nature by Emerson. And when it was published a year or so later, in 1836, it completely took that world by surprise, though there were individuals who understood somewhat that this was possible, for some people, it suddenly became a cultural ideal, that nature was an extraordinary peculiarity, and that if we are purely natural, our pure nature can spontaneously exchange with pure consciousness. And so, they began to experiment with lifestyles and with personal comportments that would allow this to happen. In Nature, this is how it begins. Emerson writes,

"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also."

And it was like a manifesto. It was a clarion call. It was a kind of a Boston Tea party not about tea, but about the emptiness of the cup. It was saying, there are a number of us living within contact with each other, can we not investigate this? And later, chapter one of Nature - that was in the introduction, Emerson's introduction - chapter one begins simply, "to go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me." So that there is a sense of a lingering presence where the person in solitude has a context of resonance so that their person is not alone, though there is no one else there. And that in those resonances of our person, our past versions of our person, still able to be concurrent because they have touched eternity. That time and eternity under special conditions are exchangeable.

One of the most interesting of all the studies of Puritans. A man named [Theodore Dwight] Bozeman published this from the University of North Carolina in 1988, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension and Puritanism. To live ancient lives, to live individual lives in community, so that that community is as archetypally close to the primitive Christian communities as possible. Only to their surprise, when they got really to the primitive Christian communities, the real beginnings, they were not Christian, they were Jewish, but they were not Jewish in the Orthodox or Reformed sense, but in a kind of Judaism that was forgotten in the world, even to Judaism, Hellenistic Judaism. That had been forgotten by everyone because it was inconvenient to remember that there were common shared roots that went deeper than the traditions. The Jewish tradition going back to the past, the Christian tradition going into the future, the Christian tradition to seek perfection, the Jewish tradition to keep the perfection, and the middle ground was forgotten and lost and blanked out and re-occurred in moments of time to specialized communities, but in a ritual or symbolic sense when they were in a Puritan phase. But when it got to the transcendental phase of Emerson's time, when he was mature, it suddenly became conscious and the first conscious explorer of that was Henry David Thoreau. Not Emerson, not even his aunt, but Thoreau. He's the first one to put the rucksack of prismatic person consciousness on his nude back and walk into the wilderness of nature to see what would happen. And when he did so, he recognized, because he was doing this in the late 1830s, he recognized that what he was doing was an ancient American Indian vision quest. That that's what he was in fact doing. That his going into the wilderness this way, was going to have a vision to let nature disclose to him the truth about himself, and that that truth had something to do with primordial mystery of nature that was indeed there, but could step aside, as it were, and allow for a transcendental pure consciousness to occur in its place, the infinity instead of the zero. And it happened for Thoreau when he was just graduating from Harvard. He'd gone to Harvard for four years. He'd studied languages, he was a language specialist. He knew Greek well enough to translate Aeschylus. He knew Latin well enough to translate Virgil. He knew all the continental languages. Suddenly, Thoreau began to understand that a visionary language is radically different from a traditional language, that a traditional language sustains a mythic modeling feeling toned imagery, whereas a visionary language discloses that the images can quiet down, and what one has in the mind are not images, but complete openness, and that when one looks with an open mind to nature, it's like two open doors that allow a concourse of mystery to occur.

And so, Thoreau became tremendously curious of what could he do to help this along? And Emerson's first advice to him was, I wondered, do you keep a journal? Because the ancient quality of introspection occurred in two pristine forms. One form was to keep a personal record of your life a journal, not an autobiography - that's a refined form that would come out of that - but just a simple journal. The other concomitant form to that, the journal is a communication of community, whereas the singular form of it is the spontaneous mystical poem. And in classical antiquity, world round, planet wide, was always the same. One of the litmus tests of whether the form, the differential form, the prismatic spiritual form of the person, was functioning was that that personal prism would act as an operator upon the facility of language, and you would be able to write an original, spontaneous spiritual poem. Called, in ancient usage, a hymn, a hymn, or called in Indo-European language, a gatha, a gatha. Or in India, because the pronunciation was slightly different from the Old Iranian, it was called a gita. A gatha, a gita, a song, a spiritual song, and that several thousand years before the Bhagavad Gita was such a thing as the Gathas of Zarathustra, the first kind of form where the magic language that had constellated itself, both in Egypt and in Chinese as spells, magic sayings that worked as transforms, those magic language forms matured to an artistic form. The artist always emerges out of magic. The magic that has exchanged centers with nature, so that the true spiritual artist is as at home in nature as they are in visionary consciousness, in magic. And the proof of the pudding was, can you write a spontaneous hymn? And so, the earliest form of a personal achievement was the ability to write a spiritual poem spontaneously on the spot. And this, of course, of perhaps in world history, two examples of great spiritual poets in the West, Saint Francis of Assisi, and in the East, Milarepa. Able to write original, spontaneous spiritual poetry and have it ring true in the sense that someone hearing that is lifted out of the mythic flow and transformed into the visionary flow, which refines itself as resonance of the art. That that poem is the person present in that differential language, and that was always the criterion. So that you find Thoreau trying not only a journal, but poetry, trying both forms to see what would happen. And for him, the journal was the form that became most expressive, his poetry not as expressive for him as the journal. For Emerson, it was the essay rather than the journal or the poem, and Emerson's essays are a transform of art that is retrojected back to a symbolic form, so that the essay is a symbolic form Having a poiesis given to it is where he's shown.

Now, these two men, Emerson and Thoreau, lived together for two years. Thoreau moved in for a little over two years to Emerson's house. And Thoreau, as the younger man, began to do what all artists do, they begin to sketch in the manner of the master. And Thoreau became so good at imitating Emerson that all of their best friends began to comment that even Thoreau's nose began to look like Emerson's nose. How can this be? James Russell Lowell said, I saw Thoreau, and I thought it was Emerson. I had to look again to see that it wasn't. But was it? And this exchange of selves, this not a displacement of one by the other, but an exchange. That that horizon of exchange does not take place in any variant except absolute equanimity, and that in that absolute equanimity, the universal energy flowing along that horizon of equanimity creates a perfect spiral. Magnetic quality, which sweeps out of time into eternity, gives you that interlocking cobras of the ancient Egyptians, gives you that kind of tai chi eternal motion. In India it was called the dharma chakra. The chakras of the body are okay for a kind of a Hatha yoga. But in order to a Raja yoga, the King's yoga, you don't stay in the body. If you stay in the body, you maintain a good posture. The Dharma Chakra is other than that. And that turning of that dharma chakra like the turning of the Tai chi. Like that infinity cursive energy wave of the interlocking cobras of the Pyramid Texts that form, that energy, is what Thoreau was all about. Trying to detect, trying to appreciate, trying to bring forward.

And in Walden, there's a beautiful recording of some readings from Walden by Archibald MacLeish, who was the poet laureate of the U.S. for a while. There is a quality in Walden where Thoreau realizes that Emerson had come to a threshold, had come to a brink, and that he had simply not jumped off but had angled back to reweave, not in a regression, sort of a way, but Emerson wanted to make sure that this was an enlarged part of human capacity, so that culture was enlarged. So, Emerson became an apostle of culture in a way of carrying that fire back and making sure that it was in the hearts of the home. Whereas, Thoreau stepped through the portal that Emerson outlined. In Nature, there is a famous section where he records - Emerson - "if the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God that had been shown! But every night come out of these preachers of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

Now, in the depths of the 20th century, the complete obverse of Emerson's observation in Nature was used. Not that it would be wondrous for men if the stars shone once in a thousand years, but that it might be apocalyptically catastrophic if the stars shone once in a thousand years. And it was the original story by Isaac Asimov called Nightfall, published September 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. It's the quality in the early days of the Second World War that was like the complete inside out obverse of the 1836 of Emerson. When Thoreau went through it, he began to realize that an energy that was working in him had nothing to do with imagination. He knew about imagination; he knew about imagery. And that imagery can be aligned in sequences so that there is even such a thing as an image base. Like a cartoon strip is a very primitive form of an image base. Egyptian hieroglyphic text is a much more sophisticated. Chinese characters, as language is an even more sophisticated version of that, and we can go on from there. Here's what Thoreau records, very unlike Isaac Asimov of 1941. Here's Thoreau in 1840. He simply records "divination is prospective memory." He began to understand that there was a power mode of operative, personal, conscious humanity that had something to do with memory. For Emerson, memory was what it is commonly for people in our generation, it's the past. Whereas for Thoreau, it was like not only to live ancient lives, but to live all lives now, at the same time if you wish. That the spiritual person can become such a dazzling jewel that all of their lives, past and future can be lived now, and that such a kaleidoscopic being exists, and that he might be the harbinger of such a vision. And so, he writes, "there is a kindred principle at the bottom of all affinities. The magnetic cultivates a steady friendship with the pole, all bodies with all others. The friendliness of nature is that goddess Ceres who presides over every sowing and harvest, and we bless the same in sun and rain."

Ceres, from which we get the English word cereal. Ceres is the goddess of grain. Ceres is the great goddess. Her original name in Indo-European was Anahita, or Anahit, comes in many different versions. She's the mystical Queen Mother of the West in China, Xiwangmu, she reappears again and again. One of the qualities of her in ancient Siberian shamanistic iconography is that she rides a reindeer. She is so ancient that she doesn't ride a horse or a camel, but she rides a reindeer, and in a way, the obverse image of Santa Claus with his reindeer is an ancient inside out version of the goddess of the world who gives fruitfulness in season. That is, she becomes the mythic model of the image of how life returns each spring through the mystery of the earth, giving life, again and again, and who is able to be not only the goddess of grain - want us to understand it deeper - but she is the goddess of our ability to tame the plant realm of the planet, that we can tame plants. And then at the same time as we tame plants, we learn to tame animals. And at the same time, as we learn to tame plants and animals, we learn to tame minerals. And so, medicine and agriculture and animal husbandry all occur together and it makes the Neolithic cultural combine, and it has a feminine quality to its matrix, whereas the Paleolithic had a masculine quality to it.

For Thoreau, he becomes, he writes, "the friendliness of nature is that goddess Ceres who presides over every sowing and harvest, and we bless the same in sun and rain. The seed in the ground tarries for a season with its genial friends there; all the earth and grasses and minerals are its hosts, who entertain it hospitably and plenteous crops and teeming wagons are the result."

Now, one can say, can use the kind of phrase, a nature mystic. But in the very same way he is a transcendental, conscious mystic. Also, that the two are not two, but they are exchangeable in the sense that their centers have a common equanimity. And so, for Thoreau, unlike Emerson - Emerson is interested in weaving what he found back into the tradition, back into culture -

Thoreau kept going farther and farther out, and as he went farther and farther out, he became… we have to watch ourselves in language we can't say unconsciously. We can't even say subconsciously. He discovered in himself that he was leading the pattern of ancient lives. He was leading the life of an Indian sachem, a wise man who went to the forest to learn to speak the language of the trees. His emblem was the scarlet oak leaf. He drew a scarlet oak leaf; the scarlet oak leaf has these big cursive angles to it. Big deep bays and then big cursive angles that come out so that it looks like a the most dynamic form of a splotch of a leaf, but beautifully. And he in his journal said that he saw whole bays and great navigational headlands for universal exploring in a single scarlet oak leaf. So, he became a pioneer for that undiscovered country. And the further out that he went, he recognized not only that he was leading the life of an ancient Indian sachem, but also the life of an ancient Bhagavad Gita spirit warrior. And suddenly it occurred to him, because he was living in the 1840s in an America that was heavily churchgoing in a Hebraic way. He found that he was living according to a Sabbath cycle, not the Sabbath cycle of the church going on Sunday, but the Sabbath cycle of ancient Hellenistic Jewish time cycling. And that's why he went on a vision quest with his older brother John, and they spent one week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. They spent a Sabbath cycle on the flow of the rivers, so that he could experience and record in his journal that basic language, that basic feeling-toned, mythic language of the experience, and then transform it through his symbol, vision capacity into a work of art - the book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

And he spent several years in this process doing it, and meanwhile learned for himself that there was a transfer activity, which he became masterful at. He had clothes specially made that had pockets. One pocket was rather large to carry his notebook, another specially made to carry his spyglass, others to carry pencils. His profession - he made his living like his father did, by making pencils. And he would record in these notebooks his basic response. Then he would take these notebooks and rerecord them, enlarge in the journals, and then later he would write his books from the journals. His books, and his lectures came out of the journals. So, it was a three-stage process. It was a ritual myth, original language. It was a ritual symbol, journal language. And it was a symbol, vision, artistic language that produced the books. And his first book was This Sacred Sabbath on the rivers of the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, with his older brother John.

And as I mentioned last week, he did it in a state of love. Both brothers had fallen in love with the same woman, 18-year-old Ellen Sewall, and she finally rejected marriage with both of them and years later married someone else and lived a very happy life. Thoreau never knew how his brother would relate to that, because the brother died very soon after that. But for Thoreau, more and more he understood that his bride was nature, and he records that many times in his journal. That he has become wed to nature, not in the mother sense of the original mystery of nature as like a mother to us, but in the cosmic sense of the yet to be met cosmic partner. And you find in Thoreau again and again the sense of astonishment that this was happening. One of the most beautiful transmissions of Thoreau's cosmic intelligence about the person was when he met for an afternoon in a New York City hotel room, he met the young Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman, who was a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, had just published a little volume called Leaves of Grass. And if you look at the first edition of Leaves of Grass, it's very unremarkable. And after meeting Thoreau and you look at the next edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman is so cosmically resonant that he becomes another sage like Thoreau. And you recognize in the later editions of Leaves of Grass, where… what does Whitman say? "Am I a multiplicity? Very well, then, I am a multiplicity. And I stomp freely through the cosmos."

More next week.

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