Nature 5

Transcript (PDF)

Differential Consciousness (2000-2001)
Presentation 5 of 105

Nature 5: Gravity and Projection
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, January 29, 2000

Transcript:

This is Nature 5, and it means that we're ready for our second step in our first cycle stage. We're doing an inquiry, and this inquiry has a graduated progression, which slowly transforms what could be steps into a stair. Instead of just walking step by step and making a line we rise gently, and this sense of movement by a stair also has a slight curve to it so that the stair curls, and eventually at the end of the year, we will have risen exactly one level by a single complete spiral. One of the earliest paintings by Rembrandt has in the very center of the painting, just such a one-turn spiral stair. And on one side of the painting is an old woman cooking at a big open hearth, and on the other side is an old man studying with a huge gothic window. And Rembrandt shows this old pair, who live in the space generated by this single spiral stair. And it's a most beautiful way that the young Rembrandt showed that he was really somebody, really an amazing character.

We're doing an education that is classic and yet in a language and a language mode, which is new, it's 21st century. And so, I'm trying to sensitize us, myself as well as you, to keep my language not facile and not mobile. Those are very tricky kinds of qualities to want to maintain. I'm way too wise for that. I don't want facility and I don't want mobility. But what I'm aiming for is a kind of a jewel-like scintillation, the quality of iridescence where the iridescence of meaning of the language is available to you. So that when you listen to the tapes or later on, if you come into possession of some of the videos or through your memory of being present there, you will always be able to hear or see or remember something new, something that you hadn't heard before. And so, the iridescence is not just that the language form and the diction style and the syntactical rhythm is artistic in the sense of making multiplicity available in a super complex vehicle. But it has a technological side that by my using this kind of 21st century language, you will eventually be able to scientifically, technologically go back into the delivery and cue in angles and dimensions of discovery that simply weren't there before. This is a superior consciousness, not just to be able to explore the complexity that is there, but to develop beyond facility and beyond mobility, to generate angles of vision from scratch that are completely new, that were never there before.

What was the phrase in the old Star Trek? "To go where no one has gone before." All of us are going to be able to do this. This is a kind of language that scintillates, and it'll take a while to get used to it, but when you do, you'll discover that you simply hear more. And in hearing more, you will be able to hear even more. And it's that kind of a jumping quality, a jumping quality which has a certain recognizable sweep to it and that this sweep, like the curl of that stair, gives a grandeur to this kind of a language usage so that the language is no longer just an art, but is a cosmic happening.

Part of our education is to have foundational streams of interest running behind the scenes. One of the most interesting is that we use a selection of films so that we have four quarters for two years, and during each of those quarters, I recommend three films, so that during a year you would have 12 films and the entirety of the educational inquiry, you'd have 24 films. The three films for Nature, the first one is by David Attenborough, Life on Earth, Richard Attenborough's brother. And it's simply a beautiful natural history, an overview of the complete spectrum of natural history, from David Attenborough's presentation - very nice style. The second is a film which apparently is unavailable now, and so we'll have to just pirate a copy so it can circulate. It's a film, The Race for the Double Helix [also known as Life Story]. It's about the discovery of DNA, starring Jeff Goldblum and one of his most beautiful roles. The errant, apparently lustful, stupid American who really is quite a scientific genius, is beautifully portrayed by Jeff Goldblum here and it's wonderful because one of the odd paradoxes is that James G. Watson was exactly that kind of character. And the fact that James Watson today is one of the most distinguished professors in the biomedical field doesn't belie the fact that as a young man, he was a very lustful trickster. And the film brings that out. It's almost like a documentary, but it's a quite a fine presentation. Not only the personality of James Watson, but the fact that he was paired with a mad Englishman named Francis Crick. And he brought out the worst in Crick, and that meant that the best occurred. One of the paradoxes in higher mathematics is that if you have two defective systems which you run side by side in parallel and you shift back and forth between the two, you will always come out with a true synergy. There was a Spanish man from South America who made this paradox, and I'll bring you an article next week on this peculiar paradox so that two mis-systems working synergetically together always produce an accuracy. It's quite amazing.

The third film is Iceman, done by an Australian director and co-produced here by Norman Jewison. Fred Schepisi, the director, is quite excellent and Iceman is about a primordial 40,000-year-old man who's revived in the late 20th century. And what we're trying to do here at the beginning of our education is to look at nature, to see that we were never primitive. We were primordial, but we were never primitive. Our species, when it occurred, was already sophisticated beyond belief, and that the species of men and women before us were already sophisticated enough to do rather well on this planet, in this world, for several million years, without any outside help whatsoever. And they got us here as a species so that our species actually has a paradoxical name. We are called Homo sapiens sapiens. We're not only sapientiae, we're not only wise, but we are wise about wisdom, which is a peculiarity. It means that we're not wise in the sense of identifying alone, but we're wise in the sense of letting wisdom occur where there is nothing to point at. And so, our wisdom is about all the things that count, and also about the uncountable background. The original zeroness. And one of the works that we use towards the end of the nature series, which runs for 12 weeks, the 13th week. Not to be superstitious, but I don't deliver a regular course lecture on any 13th. What I do is I take that aside and I make an interval out of it. And so, I will lecture on one of the spiritual classics of the world. And so, during our education, we'll have eight of those so that every three months it's like every season is punctuated by a holiday from the sequence that we're following, from the steps, from the stairs, so that we not only have this curl of the spiral, but we have the dimension of the space within which the spiraling takes place.

The first interval will be a lecture on the Tao Te Ching, and I'm using my own translation of the Tao Te Ching, which will be made available for those who would like to invest $30 in it. This is from the 15th chapter, and these chapters are made several hundred years after the document was delivered. The original Tao Te Ching is just 5,500 Chinese characters in what could be called mathematically as a cascade in the Vajrayana. The meditation is that of the Sakyas and it's just a waterfall. There's a difference between having a row of candles which are lit one from another, and to say who can distinguish between the flames. There is in fact a yoga to distinguish between those flames, but in a cascade, no one can distinguish between the drops of water in a waterfall. In the Hermetic West, about a thousand years ago, the Bishop of Lincoln in England named Robert Grosseteste. His very name meant Big Head. Robert Grosseteste informed his student Roger Bacon, one of the greatest alchemists of the 1200s. He pointed out to a rainbow in the English landscape, and he said, every drop of rain in that rainbow is itself a rainbow. No drop of water is just in the pink or blue or green. Every drop of water itself is a rainbow. So that the ancient hermetic understanding was that every photon of a star contains the entirety of the star. Every spark of the divine has every aspect of the divine. Nothing is left out. And it was a caution against settling for the atomization of materiality as being a criteria for spiritual differentiation. It was just a caution.

So, there were no chapters in the original Tao Te Ching. A couple hundred years later, this was given the designation Chapter 15. I've translated the two Chinese characters. Each chapter has two Chinese characters, a pair, and we'll see that characteristic of wisdom. Wisdom language always pairs and pairs in such a way that you could see the shadow of this first pair as another pair, and thus have a square. Or there's a space in between the pairedness, which doesn't record as anything at all, or in particular. And yet in that space, in that interval, is a relationality that is meaningful. Chapter 15, I translated the two Chinese characters as Revealing Te. The title of the book, Tao Te Ching. Ching just means book. Tao we're familiar with. Te means what you can name, what you can count. Tao is what cannot be named. This is Revealing Te - revealing the oneness, revealing. He writes, in translation, "Ancients themselves completely accomplished. Masterful. Subtle. Spiritual. Profound. Resonant. Such completeness cannot be categorized. Since it cannot be categorized, so, trying to make intelligibility. Be reluctant. O like winter wading a stream a cautious Oh, having neighbors on four corners. Circumspect. Oh, spirit phantom elusive. Oh like valleys mysterious. Semblance. Turbulence. Turbulent water gradually purifies. This quiet gradiently moves in life. Keep this Tao.

And so what is important to us, at the beginning of the 21st century, is to remember to factor in the zeros. That whatever it is that we can count, has a common denominator of a zeroness, which is not only shared by all things, but is also shared by non-things. One of the most sophisticated logical exercises ever undertaken. About a generation ago, a Dutch programming genius named Edsger Dijkstra wrote A Discipline of Programming. It was one of the most precise logical exercises the world has ever seen, on level of Kurt Gödel. And one of the most beautiful things is that the chapter headings begin with zero, and chapter zero is "Executional Abstraction". Chapter one, then, is "The Role of Programming Languages," and only later do you get, in chapter two, to "States and Their Characterization". So, we don't even get to existentialities until chapter three, a similar kind of situation happens.

This was published just a couple of years ago. It's a math book on Fourier Series and Integral Transforms. Fourier was one of the heroes of France in the heydays of the French Revolution and the following era, and he was decorated with magnificent gold icons, and he was considered a treasure of the state. He's one of the first mathematicians to find out a way to characterize the transformations in such a mathematical way that you can keep track infinitesimally of any kind of process that you would like, disappearing into infinity. And in this 1997 math book, it starts with chapter zero, "Notation and Terminology". And when you get to chapter one, chapter one is just simply called "Background: Inner Product Spaces". And it's only by chapter two that you get to the Fourier series. But chapter two is the third chapter in the book. Like the third chapter in Dijkstra's book. The Great Modern [Companion] Encyclopedia of the History of Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences also begins with part zero, the introduction, and only later do you get to the ancient traditions of the Babylonians and of the Egyptians.

So, what I'm pointing out to you is that our education does not begin with one. It begins with zero. And that zero doesn't record. And just because it doesn't record doesn't mean it isn't real. So that there is a mysterious quality, and we're trying to alert ourselves to this context of mysteriousness, that nature is mysterious, not because we don't know about it. Nature is mysterious because we do know about it. And she is mysterious. Here are the opening lines of a poem. It's called The Idea of Order at Key West by great American poet Wallace Stevens. Some of the most famous poetic lines of the 20th century.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water Never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer in the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

About as precise as you can possibly say it. Exquisite. And in this is a mysterious quality, because this poem was written in the 1920s, the late 20s, early 30s, the poet Wallace Stevens was at the time the vice president of Hartford Insurance company. He used to commute in Connecticut to his office, and he would write the poem of the day in his memory, in his mind. And when he got to his office, the executive secretary took the poem for the day - the first order of business.

About that time, there was a monumental development in mathematics and physics. The development of quantum theory. The development of relativity theory. And one of the books that we're taking now comes from a man who mastered that whole world. His name is John A. Wheeler, and the book that we're going to look at from him is A Journey into Gravity and Space Time, published by Scientific American Books. And we're going to pair with John Wheeler's A Journey into Gravity and Space Time, a book by a woman, Marie-Louise von Franz, called Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul. And we're going to put von Franz and Wheeler together as a pair. As a pair - I used to use the word text, but I think since deconstruction theory, we might have to even modify that. Just a pair of books, and that the whole idea of pairing books is a strategy to overcome the limitations of the book, the limitations of the text without jettisoning. Because if we jettison the book prematurely, we are left adrift in a very precarious kind of ignorance. The reason being is that this entire civilization that we inhabit has a history of about 2000 years that is all built on the book. And we have a psychology of mind. We have a mental conditioning which has been deposited there in terms of the book, so that inside and out we are immersed in a very heavy acid of book-ness. And by prematurely coming out of it, we can, of course, acquaint ourselves via an internet streamline hypersonic activity, but we will never understand the mind and the civilization, and we'll have to start all over again from scratch. And that means not scratch of going back 100,000 years, but going back several million years in evolution. And there's nobody that I see capable of doing that.

One of the great skeletons found in Africa about 10 or 15 years ago, was of a young man. He was about 17, lived 2 million years ago. He was a five foot eleven at 17. And the skeleton showed that he was like a superior athlete already. He didn't belong to our species at all. He belonged to a species called Homo erectus. He was a formidable hunter two million years ago, because he could outrun game and he could throw rocks probably as good as Crocodile Dundee. So, unless you're ready to be really a super athlete in some kind of primordiality, we have to deal with the books and we have to phase ourself out of the bookish mind and the bookish civilization by a technique of end-running around the limitations. And it takes a while to get used to that. Yet we can do it, and we can do it in about two years' time. So, bear with the fact that we're using books. We're pairing books together, and we're pairing books that never should have been paired together. Marie-Louise von Franz and Wheeler, amazingly, probably should be paired together. Marie-Louise von Franz was born in Munich and raised in Austria. She was a prodigy as a girl. She learned Greek and Latin, probably as good as anyone has ever learned them in our time. And she became a helper for C. G. Jung, and over the years he came to trust her, perhaps more than any other person, to intellectually trust her ancient translation ability, but also to trust her as a magnificent human being, able to navigate the perils and the promises of a therapy. She herself was analyzed by Jung for about 20 years, about the same time that Aristotle studied under Plato. When Marie-Louise von Franz was asked to give advice about an effective therapy, her quotation was "work very hard on your own psychic life and hope for a synchronistic happening in the clients. In this way, everything is kept open and alive, and there are no set rules, so that if you try to apply a therapy to someone else, you've already committed several fallacies that are indelible. You as a separate you, cannot help someone else as a separate someone else. There's no way that that ever jives." There's always a fictive veiled quality of miss-resonance, which in its tension provides an energy background which is converted into a mass of false ideas, which is severely debilitating to all. And there's no way it's called idiot compassion in the High Dharma. There's no way that a 'you' can help someone else because that you doesn't exist and they as someone else doesn't exist, and there's no relationality between them. And so, the whole thing is bogus on every level. So, Marie-Louise von Franz was extremely cautious in a Lao Tzu way. She knew that you do not strive to pull intelligibility out of someone who was then repressed and reluctant to have this done, and that somehow you do this. It just doesn't ever happen that way because it's not real. But there is such a thing as resonating together. There is such a thing as relationality, and it's the sensitivity of this education to make the quality of this kind of relationality available. So, I do my part here, and you can tune in, and tone in, in any way that you want, and I will revise and recut what I'm doing all the time, so that eventually you will find some facet that appeals to you, and you can use that then to re-curl the entire process in your way. This guarantees that there is no such thing as a disciple, or a chela, or a teacher, or a guru. A guru, incidentally, used to mean just someone who points, points the direction. It's over there. That's all you can do.

You know, Mircea Eliade, when he was when he was a young man, he was an intellectual prodigy. He lived in the attic of his parents' house, and he had somewhere around five or six thousand books when he was a teenager. He used to carry stacks of books up to his attic, and so he figured out a way to get a trip to India, because being a young European intellectual, he wanted to go to India. And so he wrote this beautiful letter to the great professor Surendranath Dasgupta, who at that time in Calcutta was writing the great five volume A History of Indian Philosophy, published by Cambridge University Press. And so Dasgupta brought Eliade to Calcutta on the scholarship, and as soon as he got there, of course, Eliade, being just a teenager, made a play for Dasgupta's daughter, which you don't do in classic Indian homes. And so Dasgupta dealt with him in a classic Indian way. He deposited him in Rishikesh with some professional yogis, and the yogis did what they always do. They broke Eliade into little smithereens. They broke his psyche. They broke his health, they broke his psyche, his everything. And he spent about a year as a basket case and slowly found that he came back into focus, even though he didn't know how he did that. So, he learned at the same time, that there are two different qualities that do come into focus together. One of them is the quality of yoga or integration, the other is the quality of shamanism or being fragmented differentially into the cosmos. And that both those come together. And two of his very powerful books, one is called Yoga, the other is called Shamanism. And of course, the weekend shamanistic hucksters know nothing about yoga and the weekend yoga hucksters know nothing about shamanism, so they never get the synergy. They never get what Eliade by 21 understood that if you don't do both together at the same time, there's no reality. It doesn't happen.

When he went back to Romania at age 21, after that experience, Eliade was so different that almost no one talked to him. He was too super real for anyone to relate to him. And so, of course, he began to speak French instead of Romanian and said, to hell with you and his beautiful way. Final little note. Eliade's great student is a woman and she's still alive and her name is Wendy Doniger and we're going to use her translation of the Rig Veda later on in the course. Penguin Classics publishes it, and Wendy Doniger is still alive. She's like Marie-Louise von Franz was to Jung. She bears that relationship to Eliade.

When Eliade was two weeks from retiring, his office at the University of Chicago caught fire, and all of his lifelong collections of things burnt to the ground. And being a very wise shaman, yogi master, he just simply walked away from it, because that's the way his life ran. And what was left out of those ashes is the resonant rhythmic clarity of his students and readers, especially Wendy Doniger, who was an incredible woman. We're going to use her work. Like Marie-Louise von Franz, who points out right away that her usage of the term projection is quite different from the way in which it originally happened in Western psychology in Sigmund Freud and Freud's original use of it is in a book, it's published as volume 13 of the standard edition of Sigmund Freud. The book is called Totem and Taboo. And Totem and Taboo is Freud's first and only real excursion into the primordial. When we come back from a break, we'll take a look at the way in which Freud used the term projection, which Jung revised projection, and the way in which the context of the Freudian use of the term projection in early anthropological work was not seen by Jung. And so, we have a usage which tends to slide every time we try to use it in a psychological way. And so, we have to use it in a different way. We have to use it in a way in which the boundary of definition comes out as zero.

Let's take a break.

Let's come back, and let's come back to the context of our education, our inquiry, our excursion. As long as we have only a method, there are limitations that will entrap trap us in ignorance, without us ever knowing that we've been entrapped in our ignorance. So, a method alone is not enough. And if we put a focus on content in some pragmatic way, there are also pitfalls there. And it's only by a pairing that we're able to make any kind of - I hate to use the term progress because it's been so compromised. Let's use the term progress with the proviso that it also connotates egress. One of the nicest things that Joseph Campbell was able to say, he said "myths help us to egress as well as anything else." They help us to agree to go instead of clinging to life at any cost. There's wisdom in when the time is there to go, that the egress is a part of the process and that the process is not only time honored, but it's eternity blessed. So, it's 100 percent out of our hands at that point.

Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching, in my translation. What comes down is chapter 14, "Praising the Profound". And he writes, looking, presence unseen is named colorless. Listening. Presence unheard is named soundless. Reaching presence beyond grasp is named Incorporeal. Thus these themselves not subject to objectivity, therefore deeply paired in a unity surface, not clear bottom not obscure continuously, continuously. Oh, no one can name.

There is a wonderful insight here, and that is what cannot be named, and what can be named occur in a pair. And this pair we would call in our kind of English, a set. And this set, is a set of zero comma one, and that Tao Te always occur together in the sense that whenever the unity of Te occurs, Tao is also not occurring, and therefore is real, that it does not occur that it that zero maintains its zero. This is a part of what is real, and to fill in prematurely or surreptitiously, or in some clever way, to fill in the space of the zero to make it something which is not, is a grave error, is faulty, jeopardizes the entire orientation.

In one of the most massive tomes written in the desperate center of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness has at the apex of his striving, of his angry wrestling with the impossible life conditions that they were suffering at the time. Being and Nothingness, in its vast tome comes to a section called, in translation, "The Hole". And later was excerpted and was the theme for one of Sartre's magnificent, truncated, terse philosophic books called The Transcendence of the Ego. And in Being and Nothingness, in the section called "The Hole", Sartre comes to understand that what is compulsive for us is to cover up nothingness with anything at hand, because the perception that nothingness could be nothing is a severer jeopardy than death or madness. And so, the ego is commissioned by its faulty destiny to cover that hole immediately with anything, even with fictions, so that we do not experience the abysmal loneliness of nothing at all. This quality of covering up the zeros by fictitiousness is what's at stake in projection. And this quality of projection is not only fictive and doubly fictive but is triply fictive. It's not only a veil that would cover something, it's a veil covering nothing at all. And so, there's a paradox. There's a double paradox that's involved there. But the triple paradox is that we are convinced that we must believe in the fiction. We must believe in that. That it is a desperate case and that it is more important than finding truth. Because the hidden before there's even a presupposition - the hidden pre-presupposition - is that if we come into contact with that nothingness, we will experience oblivion. There won't be even the odd 1 in a gillion chance that we could come back after death, or that there might be a heaven, or that there might be an afterlife. Oblivion means nada, tilde, nothing. And it's that intuitive leap that goes faster than the mind that gives the authority to the ego to cover that up is protecting us from coming into a realizable contact with oblivion. And yet, slowly but surely, men and women like ourselves - for thousands of years - discursively have found ways to talk to each other about disclosing, not by finding, but by disclosing that out of that contact does not come oblivion, but comes an infinity which is truly cosmic.

The gown that Athena wore - her house on the Acropolis in Athens, the Parthenon, Parthenon. Parthenos means Virgin. Athena the Virgin. She is not a virgin in some kind of Freudian sexual sense. She's virgin because she pristinely presents the interface of life with zero and gives the wisdom of infinity. Her gown, her chiton, her Greek cloak, her peplos, as it was called, was about forty feet long, and it had embroidered on its entire surface, all of the mythological images of the Greek pantheon. She wore the veil of the pantheon of mythology. And the women of Athens, once a year with great reverence, went en masse, up the Acropolis into the Parthenon, and took the peplos off and took it down the five miles to the harbor in the Piraeus, and washed it and cleaned it, and every year brought her clean clothes back to her, back to her. Her nudity, which underneath that she was in fact nude, but nude, like the goddess of wisdom in her pure zero vanishing equanimity. And once a year, for that period of the day - of carrying the peplos and the women washing it and bringing it back clean and draping her - Athena was nude in the Parthenon for that day. It was a special day. And that image of the nude zero equanimity, goddess of wisdom in her home in the center of the city, harkened all the way back to the goddess Inanna. Who we will look at her mythic cycle in the myth section. Where what was important about Inanna, the goddess of heaven, is that she could go from the zenith to the nadir. She could visit her sister, who was the goddess of hell. But when she went to visit her, she had to divest herself of the seven symbols, the seven things, her veil, her scepter, her crown. She could only get to the center of the netherworld, pristinely nude. And so, there is a great mysteriousness about the wisdom of nature is that at that poignancy, nature is precisely in exactly zero.

We know today that this is a deep truth about mathematics and physics and astrophysics, and it just simply is a quality that is talked about in a Scientific American book, which we're going to use as a text - Journey into Gravity and Space Time. And if we look at the table of contents where the chapters are listed, out of the 13 chapters, the exact center - chapter seven - "The Boundary of a Boundary: Where the Action Is". The boundary of a boundary is important because in Western thought, the whole idea, the whole concept of a definition is that one traces a boundary about something when you have finished with its bound, then one has defined, and then one knows. But the boundary of a boundary must be zero. Otherwise, there's no accuracy in mathematics or physics or anything. And so, we have here our author, John Archibald Wheeler - he was the giant at Princeton in the physics department. He was the teacher of Richard Feynman. He was one of the developers of the atom bomb. In his book, he mentions Athena, under the Latin name for her, Minerva, in desperation, at the very center of his book, in desperation. Why desperation? Because we're getting into deep water in terms of reality when we come to need to apply realistically reality towards the achievement of the cosmic. And it turns out that the cosmic and the personal are very related. They're resonant. They are harmonics of each other. And so, he writes, "In desperation, we turn to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, for the key to the magic grip of gravity." That gravity is so mysterious that there is no powerful idea or set of ideas that can understand gravity without going into the mysteriousness of nature. And it turns out that there's a deep complementation that happens. He writes here "for the key to the magic grip of gravity. Mysteriously she says [Athena says, Minerva says] 'the secret of the grip lies in the boundary of the boundary,' and vanishes." She says the secret of the grip lies in the boundary of the boundary, and then she vanishes.

Now in Homer in The Odyssey, and The Odyssey was always the the other half of The Iliad. The Iliad is about the wrath of the masculine that gets to the breaking point and causes a tragic infraction upon reality, which evokes a counterpart. It evokes a projection not just from individuals, but from civilizations. That whole cultures, as well as individuals and whole civilizations that are patterns of cultures have the same kind of compensatory imagery, archetypal symbols. that happen. And The Iliad is all about the Trojan War. It's all about the masculine wrath of Achilles, who does not simply kill a man, but savages him beyond the bounds of any justice, of any even war-like action. And how that produces a reaction, a response, a complementation, which condemned the Greeks to universal death the few who made it home, the few of the victors who made it home, could be counted on less than one hand. All of the rest of them died. They died ignoble deaths because they had evoked from the gods a hatred. And the last one of the three who made it home, old Nestor the Wise, made it home because he excerpted himself from the decision to continue the war under the conditions that had happened. Menelaus, because he was initially justified in the sense that it was his queen who was taken, who was kidnapped, and the only other one who made it home was Odysseus. And so, The Odyssey was a complement to The Iliad. It was how do you go back home once you have infracted nature by a tragic incursion of the masculine violence which evokes in a very deep way the disdain of Mother Nature herself. Odysseus makes it back because he is able, alone among the masculine men in the entire Greek world, he alone is able to look into the eyes of Athena and tell the truth. Her eyes in Homer are sea gray. They are the color of the sea. On one of those days where the sea and sky are almost the same, almost just a slight different shades or tints of the same gray. And so, the horizon vanishes at an almost undeterminable point. And her eyes have that within them so that no man can look at her because her eyes are so evenly balanced in this kind of eternal horizon of the vanishing gray of reality, that only Odysseus is able to look into her eyes and then tells the truth. His normal persona, his normal mask in the world, is to make up fictions all the time. And so, Homer says of Odysseus, he's the man of many minds, that he's always lying. He never tells anyone the truth about himself. He does not even tell the truth to himself about himself. And the only point where the truth comes out is when Athena catches him near the end of The Odyssey and doesn't scold him, but reminds him that his petulance is congenital, except that he has the wisdom to know that at this juncture you do not lie. You do not lie to the Goddess of Wisdom when she is looking with that vanishing horizon of the zeroness, because that would mean oblivion for you. And your only action at that moment is not only to come clean, as it were, or to confess, as it were. Those are paltry things compared to being real. And Odysseus is able to do that, and thus he wins his day of homecoming because of that capacity.

So that when Wheeler writes, "the secret of the grip lies in the boundary of the boundary" coming out of the mouth of Athena, she vanishes. And Wheeler expects us to be cultivated enough to know that at this point only truth will be said. Nothing else. But he points out, "From her enigmatic smile, we know her words somehow divulge the very heart of the mystery. But how can we translate her cryptic message into anything loud and clear? 'The boundary of the boundary,' Minerva said. Then we'll start by remembering all that we know about a boundary." A circled, "A directed, or 'oriented' line - a one-dimensional" movement. A line has a single dimension. In fact, a line that is constantly self-avoiding is one of the mathematical definitions of a not. "A directed or oriented line - a one-dimensional manifold - has for its boundary the starting point and the terminal point, both zero-dimensional. Convention counts the endpoint of a line as positive as, 'payoff'; The starting point as negative, as 'debt incurred' to start the line. A two-dimensional manifold, a bit of oriented surface. Cut out of a sheet of paper by a single circuit of the scissors, has for its boundary the directed line - the one-dimensional manifold - traced out by the scissors. And that directed line itself?" The edge of the sheet of paper thus cut. "What is its boundary? Zero! Zero because whatever the point at which we consider that line to have started," on that edge of the paper, at whatever point, "that is also the point at which the line terminates." So that they collapse into zero. "The debt incurred at the starting annihilates, consumes, eats up the payoff at its endpoint. Otherwise stated, the zero-dimensional boundary of the one-dimensional boundary of a two-dimensional region is zero."

And he goes on to say that "When we change the last sentence [slightly, just] a bit, we get another true statement: the one-dimensional boundary of a two-dimensional boundary of a three-dimensional region is [also] zero." So that we have a very peculiar quality involved. We have at the very core of understanding nature, a mysteriousness which reoccurs not only time and again. That would be fictive to think that it reoccurs time and again. It occurs with a continuousness that is deeper than continuity. And so, we must be mysterious ourselves and our comportment. Otherwise, we do not have any kind of a relationality with its reality. And so, Wheeler himself, even though he was the distinguished astrophysics professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, where Einstein was, where Feynman was, he entitles his autobiography, At Home in the Universe, and the very first thing that one finds [in] At Home in the Universe, before the first pages, are the seven Sibyls of antiquity. And when you turn to the first chapter, its whole section is called 'Science Smiles from Minerva's Smile'. Now he has to be forgiven somewhat for his classical faux pas because he was a physicist, after all, and not a classicist. It's not Athena who smiles, the goddess who smiles is Aphrodite. It's Aphrodite's smile that is incredibly important here. It's Athena's gaze that characterizes her. The deeply erotic goddess of love is erotic, not because of other figures and dimensions but because her smile charms truth out of us, there is a moment of truth that is charmed out of us by Aphrodite's smile. What is that truth? That truth is the deepest response that we are capable of. Not of having something, having someone, but of giving ourselves completely to the other. That the core of love is the secret exchange of selves and nothing to do with having.

So that there is a kind of a high dharma quality. In Sanskrit, the term for having like this grasping was tanha. And tanha is misleading and the beginning of the chain of dependent origination called pratityasamutpada. And it is the way in which the cycle of ignorance recycles itself continuously, and that if this cycle of dependent origination is broken anywhere on the cycle of the entire cycle vanishes. It's not that the cycle is broken, it's that it vanishes. It doesn't even leave a trace. There are no wisps of burnt-out demonic things that show that there was anything at all. It just simply is. Where does it go? That goes into oblivion. What can go into oblivion is any fictive made-upness, and anything that is real comes out from oblivion as an infinity. It's zeroness transforms into infinity without a single hitch. There's no moment of time whatsoever. So that deep wisdom, whether it's in the ancient mode or in the contemporary mode has this kind of mysteriousness. And that's why the course emphasizes that we're not misunderstanding nature. We're not saying that nature is mysterious because we don't know. Nature is mysterious because we do know quite accurately.

Now, Wheeler also is one of the co-authors of this textbook on gravitation. It's been used for 30 years in universities that use English language around the world. It's still the textbook on gravitation. There are very few science textbooks that last even two years, much less 30 years. So, he is extraordinary. And yet one of the qualities that's there - journey to gravity and space time, at the very beginning, as he put Sybils in his autobiography, he puts a mystical poem at the beginning of the Scientific American book. What would he say? He does, in fact write,

Many a fair young friend, oh Gravity
By smile and happy word
Has made my heart beat faster,
But with you my love affair
Has never ended.
You grow ever more beautiful
With each passing decade.
You lead the way
To a new and higher lookout point,
And behind yet another mystery
You reveal hitherto hidden simplicity.

Who first held up to me the mirror,
Oh happy Gravity.
Guardian of so much wisdom,
That gave me a first glimpse of your charms?

Beholding the nudity of the reality goddess of nature and as soon as one hears mirror in this context, one is reminded that there is a very deep quality of connection with Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology. I guess I didn't bring it with me. I'll bring it next week. The dust cover, the dust jacket of the book is one of the scenes from the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. Pompeii in 79 AD was covered by volcanic ash and preserved instantly the entire city. It was Pompeii was sort of like the Carmel [California] of its day for the Romans, and it was just preserved in situ. And one of the houses that was found intact, it's called the Villa of the Mysteries, because on the walls are these ancient frescoes that have vanished everywhere else from the classical world in bright color. And they are panels of mystic initiation of the mystery religions of antiquity. And the one that Marie-Louise von Franz had chosen for the cover of this showed an old master of wisdom looking very much like what Socrates looked like. Not quite as handsome. Socrates, oddly enough, Socrates looked like the old Jean-Paul Sartre. He had sort of strange eyes that didn't quite focus together, and he had a frog like quality to his features, and both Sartre and Socrates look like odd wise frogs. Frog men that couldn't quite see straight. So here on this dust jacket is this ancient initiator who is looking away. He is looking away because he is not going to participate in what event happens. He is directing his attention elsewhere, specifically so that it does not participate in the weaving of the event. But what he is holding is a polished silver bowl. And this polished silver bowl is a mirror, but it is a concave mirror so that it is able to show several images, but specifically two images in the same focus at the same time. The young initiate who's looking into the silver bowl directly, is seeing his own features, his own face in that silver bowl, but immediately behind him and behind the seated sage, behind that pair, is a third figure who holds out with his arm, a mask of Selinus. Selinus is the old, jaded satyr whose bulging eyes, whose fierce face shows the ingrained habit of a lustful determination of pleasure only now. More, better, now, me. And so, this mask, this face is held at such a way that it is also reflected in the silver bowl montaged on top of the face of the young neophyte. So he is able to see that behind this gentle young man's bucolic face is lurking this potential mask of ingrained, worldly tanha. It is a moment where the mirror discloses not a double reflection in the sense that here's me and here's my reflection, but a double reflection, and that the reflection is double, so that there is a possibility of a moment of break between the pairedness of image and thing to see that this image can be made more complex by other things that contribute to that image, and that they are quite distinct from you. And it's a moment of epiphany when one can realize that all of that is not me. Only a part of that is me, and therefore I am distinct, and I am different. I am free from the correlation of this mirror representation. And so, representation is brought into suspect. It's important in wisdom.

Just because it can be represented, just because there is an image for it is no criteria for its reality whatsoever, nothing to do with it. In fact, it's immediately suspect. This quality of projection is very important because the Jungian usage is a development from the Freudian usage and Freud's definition, his usage, originally of projection occurs in chapter two of Totem and Taboo. This is the standard edition of Freud's works. I think there are 24 volumes. This is volume 13, so it's right at the middle. He immediately says at the beginning that, of course, these words are not European words, that they are in fact Polynesian words, and that they come out of anthropological research in the South Pacific. And in fact, totem and taboo are two powerful words which are used by Freud because he says that the words in the Indo-European languages that would have functioned this way have disappeared so many thousands of years ago that we no longer even have them.

And so, he uses these words. Now totem occurs with a special power in Sir James George Frazer. He's generally known for The Golden Bough, a big 13 volume work, and many other enormous works. But his four-volume set, Totemism and Exogamy: A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of Superstition in Society, was the place where it was developed. Published in 1910, a fateful date in European history. 1910 - we remember many things about 1910. The earliest publication, this little pamphlet, Notes and Queries on Totemism, published in London, 1901. And it's in here that we begin to see,

"Totemism is the name given to a religious and social system which has been found amongst savages in many parts of the world, especially Australia, North America, and Africa. A totem is a sacred object, generally an animal, less often a plant, an element, or even an inanimate object, of which the whole species is revered by a tribe or clan. The tribe or clan takes its name from the totem."

Taboo, from the South Pacific. There are little books like this Pelican study on taboo. The first writer on taboo to present it in a realistic way was Herman Melville. Herman Melville, who, when he was a young man, completely crazed by the apparent nightmare stupidity of the world and decided to do one of two things he was going to kill himself, commit suicide, or he was going to just sign on to a whaling vessel and go off to the ends of the earth. And he says, in the beginning of Moby Dick, instead of leaping onto my sword like some distinguished Roman, I took to the high seas like some wise Greek. When he was out on the whaling voyage, he, and a buddy of his, a man named Toby, jumped ship on an island inhabited by cannibals. And Melville lived with the cannibals for a period of about a half a year before they were 'rescued' again. And of course, when he was rescued, he had become acclimated to the primordial way of life, where totem and taboo were not matters of definition. They were realities of comportment that established existence in the context of mystery. And his first book was called Typee, about his experiences of living with the cannibal tribe. He went native in the deepest possible way, and it slowly, over a period of 4 or 5 years, began to occur to him more and more not only that, he did not belong back into Western society, but that Western society was crazy. That it was truly, monumentally insane and that he not only didn't belong there, but that no one belonged there. And so, he wrote Moby Dick as the epic of not belonging in the fictive world that is taken to be our home and it is the great masculine voyage of the tragedy that this is what reality quote is all about is that we're told that we must adjust to this world, and this world is fictively not there at all. And were we not to insist upon it desperately, like Sartre's covering of the hole all the time, it simply would not happen. And so, it is a continuous addiction, agreed from a consensus that makes all of this world even possible. Moby Dick is one of the books that we have as a yearlong reading. The other one is The Odyssey. It's a masculine or feminine comportment during the entire year, during the four seasons, the four-stage cycle, to give us a way to journey with yet another way. And the readings are in the course outline week by week. It's not meant to be something that you sit down and read through, but it's meant to be like a yoga that you take 4 or 5 pages each week, weekly. And I called this the principle of the snowshoe, that we are on such deep powder that by trying to take a step without snowshoes, we're going to sink in. We're not going to have any mobility at all, no facility whatsoever. So that by distributing the weight of our existence on snowshoes, on this distributed pattern, we will find that we are able to walk with that primordial wisdom, the ability to find our way back home, and that there is indeed a home. It has nothing to do with what we were told. Not only is no one at home where we were told, there's no one there.

More next week.

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