Nature 6

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Differential Consciousness (2000-2001)
Presentation 6 of 105

Nature 6: Psychotic Box Canyon Time
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, February 5, 2000

Transcript:

This is Nature 6 and I might remind you that there is a process of inquiry that has a particular nature that's in operation here. And the process is one of letting our effect, our gravity, as it were, precede our existential quality so that the arbiter of what is practical is not what is determinable in any kind of absolute static way, because that static objectivity, which we were taught to call practical, is impractical in terms of reality. The expansion of the universe is not just the expansion of the molecular existentiality of gas clouds and galaxies. It's not just those that are expanding, but the gravitational field of the universe is expanding much more rapidly and in much greater volume than the galaxies intergalactic gas. The volume of the universe is increasing trillions of cubic light years every second, because of the expansion of the field of gravity. Into what? Not into anything. But as it expands, it creates both time and space. And so, our sense of what is natural needs to be tutored and this tutoring is not just the refinement of relativity or quantum mechanics, but the refinement also of an earlier form of ourselves. And as we will see, the earlier forms of ourselves go back in resonant waves.

And in fact, in just a few weeks' time, one of the books that we'll be using, we use pairs of books. And the next set of a pair of books, one of them is Jane Goodall's Through a Window. Through a Window. She spent 30 years with chimpanzees. And chimpanzees relate to our genetic heritage from a point about 70 million years ago, and already through Jane Goodall's work, we can recognize many traits, many capacities, that we would have previously called exclusively human occur already in animal populations 70 million years ago. So, like gravity preceding the actual physical galactic structures and gas clouds, the early resonances that are still operative in us precede our species. In fact, precede the entire genera that would include all earlier forms of man, so that when it comes to trying to be practical, we need to be very circumspect as to what is practical. And the educational forms that were used in the past were, in a very severe sense, truncating us and creating a neurotic tendency even when they worked optimally. And it was very easy to slide into a psychotic box canyon vis a vis reality. And this education, this form, and this process, this structure, is meant to obviate that kind of neurotic tendency and psychotic outcome. So, this is a completely new form of education, but takes its cue from previous forms that men and women in past ages developed for themselves.

Today's lecture is entitled Psychotic Box Canyon Time. It's a phrase that came to me one time. I was reading a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. It's called Martian Time Slip. It's about somebody who goes psychotic on Mars and has a very difficult time, because there's no nature that's Earth-like at all on Mars. So how do you adjust? So, if you go mad on Mars, you're going to have a tough time getting healed. But it's also because of Dick's genius that what happens in a psychosis. And he was almost a bona fide clinical schizophrenic himself - he knew whereof he spoke. He managed to survive and continue because he was a master at - I have to use a rare English word - the taciturn grimace. He was the most severely reticent smiler that I ever met. If you got him to twinkle one eye in an instant, this was a loud guffaw from Philip K. Dick.

He realized that in a psychotic situation, what happens is that space closes in and time stops. That the psychotic becomes trapped in a box canyon where time doesn't go forward and all the coordinates of spatiality collapse into confusion. And one of the therapeutic tabs to beginning to come back from that, to heal from that, is to get time flowing again so that something, anything, happens. It's not a question of something nice happening. In those kinds of dire situations, anything that can happen. And this is an object reminder to us that time is not the fourth dimension, but the first. That the three dimensions of space flower out of time, much like the aerial structure of the lungs fills with breathing, and the lungs fill out so that it's the rhythm of the time of breath that creates the space of the lungs in a way. And that there is a rhythm to breathing - one can breathe in and then one can breathe out - and that the pulsing of space, according to the metronome of time interval-ing is one of the most fundamental qualities of reality. And this shows all the way through like a core, so that even in the most sophisticated, meditative, yogic initiatory qualities of learning the body, disciplining the body, breathing prana and its rhythm, its temporal cycle, its spatial generating pulsating rhythm are fundamental. And of course, one can learn that not only does one breathe in and breathe out, but as you breathe in, there is a moment before you breathe out and after you've stopped breathing in, that's a picosecond of a pause, and that you can expand that pause so that you can make breathing a three-part process. You can breathe in, and you can hold not by holding your breath, but by holding the momentum into a moment where time no longer has its interval-ing registry for, not a count of one, but an opening. So, if you breathe in for three counts the fourth count you can just simply let occur and then breathe out for three counts. And in this way, you can modulate and you can learn also that as you breathe out you can also before you breathe in, let another interval go by so that you get a four-part cycle. You get a cylinder-like cycling that factors in a pair of intervals with the pair of breathing, and in this way, presence and prana weave together and make a fabric of attentiveness which is much more real than simply the physiological, than simply the static registry of materiality.

And in this way, one learns a very ancient secret that you must leave spaces of presence in the pulse of life. That life in its physicality includes the spaces that are important because they do not register. They participate in the calibration as if zeros were now functioning, and those spaces create the possibility of orders of powers so that instead of just getting a cardinality, one also has an ordinality and it's the ordinal complementarity to cardinality that allows counting to develop into language, into literacy. That literacy, that experience put into language, develops a sense of presence that goes along with the pulsing of the physiological cycles of natural life. And that the origins of this go back much farther than the discovery of any yoga. They go farther back than even paleolithic men and women. They go back to versions of our species, and even farther, to versions of primates from which our species and its whole cyclic development came from in the first place.

So, there is a very deep quality of mystery to nature and we're well advised that along with the mask of tragedy and the mask of comedy, to keep a third mask one of mystery and the education in this first cycle, the first season of the first cycle, the first year of how does nature work in such a way that it starts from this mysteriousness of time occurring and flowering out into space and gelling from the energy that occurs from that rhythmic pulsation that that energy can congeal into stored deposits of materia like protons and electrons and become mass, and that everything spins out of this incredible choreography. A choreography of a dance of reality, which includes life not as some special condition, but as the normal phase of its expressiveness. So that life occurs everywhere in the universe quite naturally, quite normally. And we are invited then to understand that because tragedy and comedy, which is highly stylized, the major choices of symbolic civilizations do not at all exhaust the reality, and that primordial men and women were, in effect, much wiser because they always chose to follow the mystery of life rather than to cringe before the tragedy or forget it all with the comedy, so that the mysteriousness of nature invited our primordial forebearers to enjoy what a man, a Frenchman named Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who in 1910 published a book. It was translated in 1926 as How Natives Think, and Lévy-Bruhl was a great influence on Carl Jung. And it is one of Jung's great exponents, Marie-Louise von Franz, her Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology, that's one of the pairs of texts that we're using at this part of nature. So Marie-Louise von Franz, in writing about projection and recollection in Jung's psychology, and that Jung's psychology greatly enlivened because of someone like Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who understood that there was in primordial people - in 1910, they still used the English term primitive because of the French term primitif, that primitive peoples did not think like we do, and in fact did not relate to life in terms of thought, but related to life in terms of nature, and that it was specifically the mysteriousness of nature that they related to. And they related to it by what Lévy-Bruhl came to characterize as the law of participation - participation. Participation mystique. That there was a sense that one was incorporated into the flow of how nature happened, how nature worked. And that when we were a part of that flow, no matter that we didn't understand the details at all, we were a part of the flow and we were okay, that life could continue. Nourishment happens. We are real and thriving obtains.

Lévy-Bruhl in writing about the 'law of participation', points out that there is a very peculiar quality. When we participate with nature. There is a correlation that occurs, and that correlation that is occurring contributes to the way in which the energy pulsing, almost as if they were like waves, almost exactly the same way as at the turn of the 20th century physics came to understand, mathematics came to understand, that energy does not occur in little drops so much, but occurs in fields which are generated by waves, and that there were two kinds of those waves, one were waves of electrical energy and the other were waves of magnetic energy, and that they blended together, they wove together and made a phenomenon known as electromagnetism, and that the waves of electromagnetism actually were understandable. They were understandable in terms of a pulsation, just like the pulsation of breathing or of life. And an old Scottish mathematician named James Clerk Maxwell doggedly worked out with some writings from a very scruffy Englishman named Michael Faraday and came up with the equations of electromagnetism. Faraday had been literally a poor boy on the streets of London. He was self-taught in everything. He was apprenticed to a very famous man in England who ran a scientific laboratory named Sir Humphry Davy. And Sir Humphrey's wife would not even eat at the same table as this scruffy little Michael Faraday. But scruffy little Michael Faraday loved so much that a nobody like him could learn all these wonderful things that he used to give lectures in London every Friday night to whomever came, and he's the one that developed all of the basic information and ideas about electricity and magnetism that allowed James Clerk Maxwell to make the electromagnetic equations, some generation or so later.

Faraday, in his desire to convey the simplicity to men and women from the street about the arcane mystery of nature, once put all the processes together and called it how a candle burns and the ecology of just simply lighting a candle and having it burn, explained all of the arcane mystery of the energies of electricity and magnetism to people on the street. It is Maxwell's equations that were the basis of how Einstein re-experienced, a primordial situation where he learned that the mysterious presence that occurs in a complementary pairedness happens because one has come to a point of confusion, of not knowing, and it's this most important interface, the interface where in a temporary way, one has a bout of confusion that when it would happen in a deeply complete way, would produce a psychotic breakdown, happens in miniature, where one is completely despairing for a moment vis a vis a situation, a problem, a relationality that one cannot understand. And Einstein went through a period of psychotic box canyon time vis a vis the Maxwell equations in the late months of 1904. And out of his panic and his momentary despair because all of his coordinates that should have made sense to him. He was born in 1879, so he was just 23 years old. He was raised in a Germany which was characterized by a man named Bismarck.

Everything will be proper and indexed, labeled, and you will obey these labels. And so, Einstein's formal world completely collapsed upon himself, and he came to understand, in the presence of the pause of a miniature psychotic breakdown, that he did not understand at all then what time really was, what space really was, what mass really was, what velocity really was. What really are they? And it is out of that sense of primordial wonderment that Einstein came up with the special theory of relativity in 1905. And it took a while. I remember as a boy being told that originally there were only six people in the world who understood what Einstein first was talking about, and they couldn't find the other five. That there was such a undercutting of the presumptions that the they used to call them in the, in the 60s when you would get into these Zen type logical arguments, the game of parentheses, that somebody would say something to you and then you would point out to them the presuppositions upon which they were making that statement, and that we can't even get to that statement until we deal with all these presuppositions. And they would reply to you. Well, your list of presuppositions also has presuppositions in here. And you would get into these arguments that would be sort of like silent karate movements. And graduate students in philosophy became brilliant at not saying and you were very wise because, well, they never made a mistake, they never said.

And this, this kind of psychotic box canyon time did not serve that generation very well. And because there is always a compensation, and the compensation in the 60s was somehow to bust loose from this choreography of silent sophistication into some kind of transcendental ectasis. And by that one was one regained nature, one re-participated with the energies of life in its universal mysteriousness. And out of that came a penchant, a predisposition for a pharmacological answer to the breakdown of intelligent discourse. And this is very much extraneous, very much extraneous.

When primordial men and women participated with the mystery of nature there, their participation brought to their attentiveness that the cycling of nature has its rhythm, and that if one learns to move in that rhythm, it is the rhythmic participation that's important and not the content. So that the dance steps of the ceremony were the encoding of the intelligence and not the images that were put into the ceremony. And so, it was the modulation of time signature that was the first sentience. And this is very important. Because if you do not dance yourself, you have no attentiveness to the fact that if you shift your time mode in your dancing, your kinesthetic quality is morphed and changed. And so, the saying at one time, the primordial people's response to the 60s was don't trust anyone who doesn't dance. It's only in doing the dance of life in mystical participation, that one gains the feel for how this really works. And it doesn't really work because of a connectedness in some kind of causal way. But it works because there is no causal web that stops the resonances from being protean on levels not yet even imagined.

And so, one of the most powerful volumes that was published in the Bollingen Series is this volume, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, which pairs an essay by C. G. Jung - the essay on "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle," and the second work is by Wolfgang Pauli, "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler'.

A moment on the Bollingen Series itself. Jung himself was like one of these incredibly energized analysts. He literally analyzed thousands, if not tens of thousands of people over a long lifetime. And one of the people that he helped was Mary Mellon, the wife of Paul Mellon - very wealthy family. And in order to show their gratitude, the Mellon's asked Jung, what could they do to help? And he said to set up a fund to publish a whole series of books which were classics or books that were indispensable to understand the maturation through this therapeutic process. And so, the Bollingen Series was set up, and they published about 100 some volumes, many of them multiple volumes. One of them that's still going on is the Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, given every year in Washington, D.C. Another set was Ancient Egyptian religious texts that were bunched together six or so volumes on the Pyramid Texts and many other works.

So, this Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche is volume 51, right at the center of the Bollingen Series. The translation of the I Ching from the German of Richard Wilhelm from the Chinese, taking Wilhelm's German and translating it into H. G. Baynes English, was published in the Bollingen Series, so that the I Ching, which is one of the books that we started off with, is a Bollingen volume. And if you look at it on its title page, it says Bollingen Series 19. So, the whole Bollingen Series is of interest to us at this particular standpoint, and the fact that Jung's synchronicity, the acausal connectedness, should be paired with the writings by Wolfgang Pauli. This originally was published in Zurich in 1952, and it was near the end of Pauli's life. He lived from 1900 to 1958, and one of the connections for us, one of the synchronicities for us is that towards the end of his life, Pauli was linked with Jung, and in fact a lot of Pauli's work was then made much of an archetypal psychology. But the first work by Pauli was concerning Einstein. When he was 21 years old, he wrote The Theory of Relativity, published in the Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences (Encyklopädie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften), volume five. And it's monumental because it explains the theory of relativity before all the complications of the theory of relativity had been worked out. The complications that during the 1930s and 1940s became so bloomed and blossomed in complexity that even by the early 1950s, it was almost impossible to make any kind of clear, simple statement about Einstein's theory of relativity because it had ballooned and blossomed in its evolution and development into one of the most complex understandings of the universe ever promulgated. And it was of enormous interest because it was the exact complement to the prevailing theory of the universe before Einstein.

Sir Isaac Newton's theory of reality had obtained since the late 1680s. His Principia Mathematica, 1687, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, both in the special theory of 1905 and the general theory of about a decade later. Over about two generations completely eclipsed the Newtonian idea of the universe. Newton's basic idea included an assessment which was exactly the opposite of Einstein. Newton said that there was a certainty, and that the certainty was because there is an absolute space and an absolute time. And what is relative is the speed of light, whereas Einstein turned it into its converse that it is the speed of light that is absolute, and that time and space are relative, and in fact, they are relative in such a way that one cannot talk about time separate from space and so the theory of relativity brought time and space together and wove them into space time. So that one of the books that we're using now, along with Marie-Louise von Francis' Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology, is a book called A Journey into Gravity and Space Time by John Archibald Wheeler.

Wheeler is 89 now, still alive. Wheeler was Richard Feynman's teacher at Princeton. Wheeler was there at Princeton because when Einstein left the German European Theater, he went to Princeton, to the Institute of Advanced Studies, which collected many emigres at the time, and the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton became the center of intellectual exploration of this new universe. And it was there that Einstein and Wheeler and later Feynman, and many other individuals worked together. Wheeler is the one who coined the term black hole. He is one of the most outstanding and least understood and appreciated figures. He is the basic author of Gravitation - still the text on gravity. And it's a text that has survived for almost 30 years in university physics. His At Home in the Universe shows the smiling face of Einstein at the top. And as I pointed out, At Home in the Universe begins by a double page of showing the seven Sibyls of mysterious antiquity. And in fact, A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime itself begins with a mystical poem. So that Wheeler is an extraordinary individual.

His relationship with Pauli is that Wheeler comes at the deep flowering of Einstein's theory of activity and relativity. And Pauli comes at the beginning. And even though his writings were very influential all the way through, increasingly he came to understand that there was an archetypal shift before Newton, and that this shift had not been appreciated previously. And the shift came - Newton wrote in the 1680s, he died in 1726 - so he wrote in that 1685 to 1725 era. The man who is responsible most for Newton, having the mathematical sophistication to apply it to the universe was a man named Kepler. And it is Kepler who is singled out here by Pauli in this volume. And it is Kepler who published, in 1608, a book which was called The New Astronomy. And it was the great revolution in human thought. Newton's Principia Mathematica mathematizes, and puts into general usage, what Kepler in The New Astronomy first developed, so that Kepler's new astronomy is like the special theory of relativity, and Newton's Principia Mathematica is like the great general theory. What Pauli compares to Kepler here in the early 1600s is how radically different Kepler was from - he took a an English thinker at the time named Robert Fludd, who was a great occultist at the time, and showed that Fludd depended upon an old metaphysics that claimed presage because it was traditional and could be traced back to ancient times.

What Kepler brought out was that, that whole metaphysical lineage was based upon a visual perceptual activity that was not necessarily true and in fact was only a special case of limited reality, and that the mind trained by mathematics could go beyond that limitation, could go outside of that theater, that stage of images. And it is Wheeler's contention that Einstein developed one of the great perceptions, the perception that Pauli in his theory of relativity, had already in 1921, had posited. The quotation is very short. "The theory of special relativity was the first step away from naive visualization." If you're following a metaphysics, a philosophy, based on very clear visualization, you're in a psychotic box canyon time, and there's no way for you to know that. It takes a martian to tell you.

Let's take a break.

Let's come back to, not so much a consideration, but an engagement with not just the materials, an engagement with ourselves appreciating the materials. We've learned by the beginning of the 21st century that everything counts, and especially many aspects which cannot be counted must be considered as part of the choreography. Here is what has been numbered as chapter six of the Tao Te Ching in my translation to help us come back not only to the material, but to ourselves, engaged in a relativity with that material.

The chapter has two characters at the top, and one character translates as completing on the other character translates as form, so that the set of the pair 'completing form'.

Valley spirit, not death.
This is called Mysterious Woman.
Mysterious woman herself, the gate.
This is called Heaven Earth route.
Constantly, constantly seems to reoccur.
Using itself. Non-effort.

There's a quality, an appreciation dimension. Wu Wei. It's not, not doing, but it's doing with the zeros factored in. So that you get an ordinal sense of complexity. And it turns out that there's not an unlimited ordinality to complexity before the patterning begins to have a rhythmic structure to us, which is appreciable by insight as completing form. In other words, the mysteriousness of nature when you become participatory not only to what is, but to the intervaling, the zeroing ratios that cannot be counted but still participate. When you become acquainted with that, there is a quality where there are levels that constantly reoccur and that these levels occur as a set themselves, and that you could continue that set, but there's no need to continue it after a certain threshold. And the threshold is 64. A set of 64 items. And a half of that, 64 is 32, half of that 32 is 16. And if you keep going by halves, you eventually come down to a primordial pairing. Which are front and back of a unity which itself emerges whole from zero. So that the way that one emerges from zero is such that one and zero together are a set and occur as in reality, a pair even though only one of them can be counted. And that on such a simple seed, the whole understanding of pairedness, that the oneness of Te is paired never occurs. Its unity is that it is a complementarity. Not from the beginning, but even before the beginning. It wasn't something posited in chapter one. It was already evident and operative in chapter zero. In the preface of existence, zero was already operative, Tao already occurring.

So that the level, the first level that one can count, there is already a pairedness. And so deep is that pairedness that that pair also is a pair of pairs. It's like in your breathing, in that kind of sadhana, the breathing in and breathing out are paired, but the presencing of the pauses within and without are also paired - occur as a set. And that those two sets, literally, it's more than just two and two, making four. A pair and a pair, a pair of pairs two squared not only make four, but it can be stated as a square. It's a profound realization that the frame of reference generates out of zero. And that the unity occurs as a primordial pairedness, and that is so deep that that pair of pairs. And when four is paired on that level of eight, you have a median one, two, four, eight. So that if you went pairing 8 to 16, 32 and 64, you get to the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching by eight trigrams, which come out of a Tao Te originating set where only Te can be enumerated.

And we began our course, we began our investigation in nature with the Tao Te Ching, because it gives us the most primordial clarity for how that set of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, how that seven leveled set of waves of manifestation actually occur. The seven occur, but the primordial Tao is so fundamental that it is real before occurrence becomes objective. So that there is a quality of mysteriousness before the set of seven occurs. And when you get to the eighth level - this is ancient wisdom - when you get to the eighth level, a reoccurrence happens where the originating manifestation occurs, but on a different power, with a different level, has a different power to it. So that the ancient wisdom statement 2000 years ago would have been the eighth reveals the ninth, and the ninth is not a ninth beyond the eighth, but the primordiality of the zero beginning. Of the mysterious beginning. So that the whole set of an octave, an eight completeness like a musical scale. If you run it through the eighth is another 'do', but it's one level higher in that that octave now has been able to shift a pitch, shift a tone, and it shows up most prominently when you dance. You have to make an adjustment for that so that 'do re mi fa so la ti do' is indeed an octave. Is what is a set of making notes that occur together in a scale, but whose articulation depends upon the ability of those notes to be taken out of that scale and rearranged and rearranged because an intervaling ordering reality is also operative within the set.

For boys who are older than 5 or 6 decades, you remember that you learned in the seventh grade to set type. It was just one of the fundamental things that education used to do. And you had all of the letters out of little bits of lead in the case. And the biggest case of little lead letters was E, because it's the letter used most in setting type. But the largest case of all right at the beginning was the blank leads that go in between the words. And you had to learn in setting type. You held a little metal tray in one hand, and as you made the composite of spelling the words from these bits of type, it was like learning to type only typing by placing the lead letters there. You had to always put the punctuation intervals that had nothing on them, and so you learned to float your expressiveness with zeros woven into the alphabet that you were using to make your language. And it was the most graphic, simple way of understanding how Tao Te works.

And of course, the icon for little typesetters was always Benjamin Franklin, who was the first to understand the deep wisdom of that aspect of setting type. And he was also the discoverer of electricity. He's the first person to contact that primordial power in the universe and understand it and store it and use it. And it's Benjamin Franklin's work on electricity 250 years ago that set the stage for everything that has developed since then because he learned how to weave his Tao into his Te all the time. In fact, you get a completely different readout of American history if instead of starting with George Washington, you start with Benjamin Franklin. If you count from Washington, you start counting from one. If you count from Benjamin Franklin, you count from zero. And you get what I call Hermetic America. It's slightly, majorly different. This course makes sense in terms of that heritage.

Now, along with the I Ching, we're we started by using Thoreau. We used Thoreau because he is an example of a civilized person who is able to go back into a paleolithic primordiality vis a vis nature. He had an advantage. He was sophisticated because he lived, was born, brought up in Concord, Massachusetts, very near to Boston, very near to Harvard University, where he graduated. And he was sophisticated. He made his own translation of Aeschylus from the Greek at 19. He was a linguist in 7 or 8 languages, but he also was born and grew up in a Concord, Massachusetts where it was easy to go out into any field and find Indian arrowheads. That the physical archaeological presence of the paleolithic American Indian people was just below the surface, if not right on the surface, so that Thoreau lived at one of the most magical interfaces of sophisticated Harvard classical Greek education and American Indian vision quests into the mystery of nature. And they were there.

And the metronome between those two, the synergy between those two fields, like an electric or magnetic field. The synergy for him was in walking. Walking. One of the greatest yogis of the 20th century in India, Vinoba Bhave, who was the inheritor of Gandhi's whole satyagraha development, was known as the 'walking saint'. The walking saint. He wrote once that walking was the correct pace of thinking. Plato's whole education was based upon walking. It was a dance choreography that was transformed into walking together through a garden, so that the walk became a choreographed kind of extended dance, where it wasn't a dance of quickness for the movement to accrue on some kind of stage in a piece. The Greek term for that was chorea. The chorea had an archetypal fundamental form to it. It's still evident in the great early poetry of Pindar. Pindar and Aeschylus are contemporaries. The beginnings of what we would call classical Athenian Greek culture come from that era: Pythagoras, Aeschylus, Pindar. And Pindar's poetry all has the same kind of structure that the chorea dance has. That you carry in movement all the way through a cycle of development to a certain point, and then instead of completing it, you turn and go back all the way through that cycle, and then you come to another stand so that the beginning starts anywhere, moves around and turns before it comes there, so that you leave a gap, an opening, a space, and you come all the way back through and you stop just before you finish. So that the beginning, the middle, and the end are open there. They're blank lead pieces so that you have an articulation at the beginning, at the middle and the end. Nothing occurs there. But because you did a double circumambulation form, you now have a ninety nine percent pure cup that holds all the space that that cup could hold, but that that cup is open to the mystery of the universe. Now, this is particularly poignant because the form of language put into experience sequencing - the Greek term was mythos. The form of a myth is that it has a beginning, it has a middle, and it has an end. It's called a plot line. You cannot have a plot line unless you have a beginning point, some development which has a middle point, and an end point. The story has to begin, it has to have some center of its development, and it has to have an end. Otherwise, it's not a good story, not a good plot line.

That that plot line, that linearity that you can draw between those three points. That's the origins of geometry in the sense of what you can draw as a line. But the chorea dance movement is specifically the other side of that. It is a mystic language that has no beginning, it has no recordable middle, and it has no end. Now, John Wheeler, in his Journey into Gravity and Spacetime, talks immediately at the beginning about how the boundary of a boundary in mathematical physics must be understood to be zero. And once one understands that, then you can begin to have the sense of not only Tao Te, but the way in which Einstein's space-time is actually a time-space, time being the first dimension, and that that-time space generates another dimension, a fifth dimension, a quintessence called consciousness. And that there is such a thing as a conscious time-space, which is a five-dimensional field of reality which changes everything. Especially because in Einstein's space-time, one of the foundations is that there is no instantaneity in the universe. Everything has a time in which it moves, in which it happens, including the ultimate time, the fastest time, the speed of light, 186,279 miles per second. But in conscious time-space, instantaneity is the familiar intelligence of reality. But it will take us a whole year to develop ourselves enough, to get enough stamina, to get enough attentive depth of penetration, to be able to go into consciousness because the ideas of consciousness are completely puerile. Most of what passes as sophisticated ideas of consciousness are just, frankly, lack of experience, no firsthand experience.

So, we have a pair that we began with the Hang Chang and Thoreau, and especially in Thoreau, his two essays on walking. One of them is called A Winter's Walk. The other is simply called Walking, reprinted separately many times. So that Thoreau's sense of walking in nature and the I Ching's sense of ordinal ordering in nature go together. And they were our beginning. But in order to interface these two books as a pair, in order to bring them together as a set, as a pair, I put the most simple assignment possible at the beginning, at the middle, and at the end, so that these two - have to use an alchemical term for a second - these two are annealed. They're electroplated together by that activity, and that activity was to take a walk, to take a walk from wherever you live around your neighborhood and come back home. It's as random as you can possibly get and as practical as you can possibly get. And even though there's a huge literature on random walks. Random walks in biology, random walks in their applications in the physical and biological sciences. And there are many things that can come out of this. Markov Chains and so forth. All kinds of higher mathematical developments come out of something as innocent as a Thoreauian random walk in a Tao Te Ching nature.

Now we're going to do something that develops that random walk that you took. And if you didn't take it, then you have a walk to take. To write up that walk to give yourself a Thoreauian type of permission just to write up what that walk was. And then we're going to align with that a second walk and the second walk will be take that same walk, but with a perceptual cue of one and one only element. The most simple set of elements that we're familiar with is earth, air, fire, and water. But because we're attentive to the Chinese, let's add a fifth element metal. Take that walk again but be alert and attentive to indexing that walk by one element only. Pick one of the five so that that second walk will have a quality. It's a quality that was developed in mathematics by a man named Gauss. And that is, we're going to experience a very sophisticated kind of analysis without even knowing how sophisticated it is, by changing by one item only the structure, the analytic, as one would say, of how our capacity for experience transforms into an idea. And it'll take us all this year to investigate all the nuances, to get the nest really made, so that we have that cup, that nest, that form of acceptance that's still open to the mysteries because we will never have closed it off. We will never have used or utilized a projective presupposition on any grounds from any place at any time to close that off.

One of the old American Indian concerns was always to sing and bless a newborn baby from the top of the head, because the bone of the cranium, the skull has not yet closed, and there's a soft spot at the top. And by keeping that open, we keep ourselves open to the energies of nature, so that when we sing our songs or later in a more sophisticated way, when we think our prayers, they're able to go out and blessings are able to come in. Not so naïve, the Maharashtra Chakra is exactly such an osmotic gate. We would call it in molecular biology, an ionic channel. That's exactly what it's called. Not for channeling, but for allowing electromagnetic impulses to osmotically move through the membrane and communication to happen. If that's closed off you get into a Philip K. Dick psychotic box canyon time, and it's hard to find a Martian who can cure you.

So that second walk also keep track of write it up. And then because we need to have not only a beginning walk and a second walk, we need a third walk. The third walk we're going to use an ancient technique. This is an Indian, this is a karma yoga technique. Karma means doing an activity, putting the pragmatos into play. Not a throw of dice. To think that it's just chance is to misunderstand. There's no chance whatsoever. In reality, chance is in reality, change. And if you know the theory of games, you can transform any chance into a game and learn how to play it so that change happens by the way in which you tell the story. It's not that you make it happen, but it's that the way the universe is set up, it will go along with you. There's a sport in Canada called curling, it's played on ice and you have these two poles, these two goals, and you bowl these pumpkin looking metallic wooden things and at the other end your partner has a broom and they sweep the ice to make the ice warm so that it heats up on the surface so that a little thin film of water forms and the bowled curling item will follow the sweeper's broom, and you can bring something which is off center right into the goal. We're using that kind of a technique. We're learning how to curl because space time curves, it always curls. And if we sweep it in the right way, if we leave it open and clean so that nothing is there, the thin film of osmotic possibility always favors us. It's not a matter of gambling. God doesn't throw dice. He always wins.

The whole Mahabharata is about Yudhishthira who doesn't know how to throw dice and loses his entire kingdom, even loses himself. One of his wives asks, how can you lose yourself? Because he lost her after he lost himself, she says, how can this be that you lost me after you lost yourself? But the whole point in that structure of the Mahabharata, of that great Indian epic, of which the sixth parvan is the Bhagavad Gita, the whole understanding is that Yudhishthira, to be king for real, must learn that you do not gamble. There's a science of dice, and when you master it, you never lose. You never lose. It's all over. You always win.

This quality we want to bring into play with the third walk and the third walk, whatever walk you took in the first and the same walk in the second with the single element, in the third walk go exactly the opposite way barefoot. Leave your shoes and socks off, and go exactly the opposite way, so that we will have three walks at the end of three months. The first walk truly random, the second indexed by a single one only element, and the third a kind of a reverse, but a reverse that has an obverse quality to it. It will be a reverse of the first walk and an obverse of the second walk, because one of the old wisdom - it's a Pythagorean mystical community mudra. Yes, there were mudras in Greece also.

Not only does the hand present itself with a front and a back, but the back can be upside down and when you turn it around, the front is upside down also, so there's always a square of possibilities. And not only do the pairs line up with front and back, upside down front and back, but the diagonals also line up as pairs so that there are possibilities of relationality. And any really good logic always makes sure that you understood the entire square of its expressive possibilities. Meaning comes in a set, and one has to understand all the fundamental permutations, all the possibilities of its operative exercise. The tradition anciently was to give you three corners and let you find the fourth. If you couldn't find the fourth yourself, then you were not accepted any longer. That is to say, your participation had come to a psychotic box canyon time, and you should know that. It wasn't that you were thrown out of the situation, but that you yourself threw yourself out of the situation by not being able to continue. And part of it is because students would make up something to go in that fourth place, whereas there is nothing there in the fourth place at all. It is the contrapositive of what occurs, and so it doubly does not occur. And generally, the fourth element then was doubly mysterious.

This is very difficult to appreciate and understand. And it was something that Einstein had to work with. And one of the keys for Einstein was to understand the work of a man named Lorentz. And Lorentz is famous forever for a transform that he made in mathematics of how to relate a stationary frame of reference to a moving frame of reference and make a conversion between the two. And that if you do not know how to do that, it is forever a non-understandable relationality. And Einstein was saved from his little miniature psychotic breakdown by the Lorentz transformation. He was pulled out of it and was able to do the special theory of relativity at the age of 23. He was ever after that, reluctant in a conscious way, to never talk about how he thought mathematically. Never again in his life would he ever talked to anyone to reveal the actual workings, because he appreciated, he respected the mystery of not saying of this non-doing this Wu Wei. Very, very sensitive to this. Similar to Thoreau, who characterized himself one time as a surveyor of snowstorms. That he stood in a grove of trees and gave of himself to the entire grove so that they could conscious time-space be together in a snowstorm.

It's very similar to the way in which the I Ching began, with the iconography in an ecology of a rainstorm in the mountains, and all eight trigrams are the little vignettes of the stages of that rainstorm in the mountains. But particularly is that the beginning of that rainstorm in the mountains is just the activity of the rain emerging out of Tao. This is not a pure yin, to think of it as yin, is a misunderstanding. Tao is not yin at all. Yin as part of the paired set of Te, and we talked about that in the first couple of lectures. You can go back through and listen to them.

The quality that the Lorentz translation [transformation] made for Einstein was he was able to relate two seemingly incommensurate frames of reference together, and that what was relative between them was time elapse. Not time as a thing, but time elapse. So that even the words in English convey a relationality which is fundamental. A moment we can call a speck of time related to momentum, which is the force, which is the way in which the movement of momenta occur and carry and convey with that all of the attributes of space-time. They flow in that pattern and it's not that they're carried by anything else. There's not a something else. In Einstein's day it was called the ether. People were looking for the ether, which was never found. It was like in Franklin's time before electricity was understood, they called it phlogiston, that there was some mysterious substance that carried all of this. And Franklin learned to stop listening to the mischaracterization of poor education, and to stop looking for phlogiston, and to work with the electricity as it was. Einstein did this for space-time, and he was the first person to appreciate that there was nothing whatsoever carrying everything completely, and that this entire woven fabric of space time has curvature curves. And we will see at the beginning of next year that because time-space curves, consciousness also has curvature, and can be understood. It has a mysteriousness for sure, but not what was supposed.

Now we're helping ourselves to try and appreciate, to recollect ourselves by a certain kind of language that I'm using. A language style, a language form. The form is that chorea of just beginning and going through an expressive cycle. And just before coming to a closure where one would have a point that you would then take a note. This is what is being said, that I curl back from that. It's like curling, just like curvature. And I don't complete it, but I go back the other way and try to go back the other way in some consistency so that you could get used to the choreography so that the ideas do not occur as conclusions to sound bite geometry, but float freely and openly as a field of inquiry, so that what we're doing is we're generating a field of inquiry that never reins out. It never posits itself in some kind of residue, so that we become hypnotized and look to the residue to find the meaning. You cannot find the meaning of life in the sewers. Yes, there is something there, it's not that important.

So I use from time to time, poems to bring this in. And I want to give you a few lines again from Wallace Stevens. This poem was about a musical instrument called the oboe, and the way that you play an oboe is on its side. It's called Asides on the Oboe, and it is one of the most mystical of all American poems. He writes,

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

That obsolete fiction of the wide river in
An empty land; the gods that Boucher killed;
And the metal heroes that time granulates -
The philosophers' man alone still walks in dew,
Still by the sea-side mutters milky lines
Concerning an immaculate imagery.
If you say on the hautboy man is not enough,
Can never stand as a god, is ever wrong
In the end, however naked, tall, there is still
The impossible possible philosophers' man,
The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up.

More next week.

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