Nature 7

This is nature's seven, and we're working on a rhythm of a sequence of 12 presentations, which are punctuated by a 13th, which we call an interval. And then we start another 12. And we do this in such a way that the 12 lectures, instead of making a straight line, instead of making a sequence like a ruler, we follow the way in which nature happens and our line curves so that when we finish four of these 12 part Cycles. We will have made a seasonal circle. We will come, will have come full round. The trick. The knack is not to complete that circle, not to close the circle, but to step up so that we cycle instead of circle. There was a couple of hundred years ago a mathematician named Gauss, Carl Friedrich Gauss, who perfected the method of increment by one and one only so that you get an analytic structure instead of a ritual circle. And so we're doing that here in our education. We want to come back to where we began slightly different and thus real. Whereas if we came back exactly, we would not know that we had been anywhere. This is what is meant by, um, one of the puzzling phrases, one of the key phrases in John Archibald Wheeler's A Journey into Gravity and Space Time. One of our pairs of books that we're using, we're using journey into Gravity and Space Time, and we're pairing that with Marie-Louise von Francis. Projection and recollection and Jungian psychology. Reflections of the soul. And we're just using this pair of books like goalposts. It's a, uh, it's a threshold towards which we're moving. We're not using them as texts at all. They're no reading assignments. There are no tests. The whole use of books is advisable because our minds have been fashioned by books. Our civilization has been fashioned by books. Our history is a complex function of books of codexes that have been used for about 2000 years. And we're trying to mature ourselves so that we do not stay in the circle of our minds, so that we do not stay in the circle of a civilization that evidently doesn't work. And so that we can move beyond the limits of a history which has proven apocalyptic. And all of these large structures are accompanied by a tremendous concern on the personal level. We simply want to stop suffering Away from situations that we didn't create. And so in many ways, on many levels, the education proceeds with a strategy towards not achieving some objective or even range of objectives, but to engender in us a process of inquiry that frees us from the very conditions that have imposed themselves upon us. So we're, in a sense, not learning a subject, but we're learning how to learn. And this learning how to learn has a wisdom to it. We have to respect the fact that we don't know where we began. It's not that we don't know. It's that it's unknowable In some ways, the phrase that was used in 20th century physics about 20 years ago taken from many different sources. The truth of our beginnings are unsayable. They're unspeakable. Language doesn't function on that primordiality. By the time language comes in, a lot has happened. And so our education is this cycle. The first 12 weeks in the cycle are nature, and the second 12 will be ritual. And when we get to ritual, we'll talk about objectivity. We'll talk about what can be done, what it is that we do. In fact, we'll become very specific. We'll talk about how important it is And how the wisdom tradition of those men and women who were successful before us of not only paying attention to what we do, but to be extraordinarily, existentially aware while we're doing it, so that what we do do happens, and that this objectivity is a very important to us. But right now, we're not yet developed enough in our educational inquiry to talk about such things. We're talking about nature, and we're trying to appreciate more than to delineate. And we have used at the very beginning another pair of books. We used a selection of Henry David Thoreau's writings, and in particular in those writings, two essays on walking and commensurate with reading. Thoreau on walking. We were asked to take a walk, take a random walk from wherever we live, and walk around our neighborhood and come back home, and to later on record that walk to write it up. We were also then, after several weeks, asked to take that same walk, but to index it with a fundamental element like earth, air, fire, water, metal, and to take that walk and to notice one of those elements wherever it is, that it would occur during that walk, and then to take a third walk and the third walk would be in the opposite direction, a different direction from the first two walks, and that that third walk should be taken barefoot so that those three walks beginning with a randomness occurring next with an index element, a single index element, and the third an opposition movement, that those three walks will serve us for the rest of the education as a beginning matrix out of which we can develop a very considered quality of attention. I don't say intelligence yet. I don't say ideas yet, because that is towards the end of this year, before intelligence, before thinking becomes mature, feeling becomes mature, and sentience precedes intelligence And before Ascensions experience becomes very learning of the way in which Existentiality is aware. And so before intelligence, there's a feeling tone, sentience. The heart is very wise. But before the heart is wise, the body is very alert. And so existential bodily awareness precedes the sentience which precedes intelligence. And what gives bodily existence? Its capacity for awareness is apparently a mysteriousness in nature. That nature is indeed mysterious. And so, paired with Thoreau, our second book was the I Ching. So the I Ching and Thoreau were the first pair. And Wheeler's book on gravity and space time is paired with Marie-Louise von Francis book on projection and recollection. And we're going to go to a third pair of books, Jane Goodall's Through a Window. Jane Goodall, who spent 30 years or more observing chimpanzees observing a species which predates us by about 70 million years, and how she discovered that even at that early stage, not only pre-homo sapiens pre-neanderthal pre-homo anything, even our forerunners long before that. A chimpanzee culture has a lot of human traits. We will see through her window That there is a tendency for male chimpanzees to patrol the boundaries and defend the territory against other males, whereas female chimpanzees occupy the centers of the territory and are able to leave one territory and to go into another territory and occupy the center of that territory, so that even 70 million years ago there is a gender quality to cultural functioning, and that this has nothing to do with anyone's politics or sociology. It's built into the way in which existence has a quality that interchanges and interlocks, and it goes back even to the beginnings before physicality happens. And that's what we're looking at now. Now with the I-Ching, we saw that the ancient Chinese indeed found a way some 5000 years ago to engender a kind of a language, not yet a discursive language, not yet a symbolic language capable of powerful ideas, not a mythic language, not a language of feeling, but a quality that goes back to something more primordial than a mythic language. And that is a designation of existentiality, a designation which in one form is like a signaling. In another form. It's like following signs that occur and that the signs only gel as a route, or even more simply, as a trajectory. If there is some kind of navigation happening. And one of the archaic Greek words for this semita meant sign. And this word meaning sign occurs in one of the earliest of the Greek cosmic thinkers. His name was Parmenides, and he wrote a mystical poem, and the standard translation of the mystical poem is The Way. And in the poem of about 500 lines, the development falls into a double attractor paired quality, where he talks about the way of truth, and that the way of truth is complemented by a paired way, which is the way of seeming, and that the way of truth. The Greek term that Parmenides used was aletheia. Later on, aletheia in Plato. In Plato's Greek becomes a word meaning the truth, in the sense that it is the oneness that cannot be further divided, and thus is true, and that we must accept that truth, so that for Plato, aletheia is an undividable unity which, when accepted by us as such, is the criteria for what is true in Parmenides several generations before Plato. Parmenides is a contemporary of Aeschylus, the founder and creator of Greek tragedy. He is a contemporary of Pindar, who was the most mystical and individual and lyrical of all the great classical Greek poets, and they occur very early on. They're born in the 500 seconds BC. Parmenides is the Greek expression of what in China was the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, and roughly about the same period of time that Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, the Book of Tao and Te is very similar in structure in delivery to Parmenides way of truth and way of seeming that the the seeming ness in Parmenides, the seeming ness comes because of an emergence of signs of schemata which can be followed, and when followed, a navigational route finds its way, and one is delivered not only to a destination like sailors seeking to navigate, as Homer says on the swelling back of the Wine-dark sea, to find one's way from place to place, but that in the archetypal sense of the early Greek, they call them presocratics, because they wrote before Socrates. One of the most powerful presocratics was a man, a mysterious man named Anaximander. Anaximander. And he said that there is in actuality an arc, that is to say, not an arc archetype, but an arc as in an original, that there is an original, and the original meant the form made by going the route that has all of the signs together congealed, so that one then has the form of the journey to where you were hoping to go to, where you were trying to get to from wherever you were starting to, wherever you needed to get to, and that there was a kind of a quality that there is in the mysteriousness of our lives. A journey to our own truth, to the aletheia of our lives. And that our life journey, our navigation through this world, is a journey which is marked out by schemata, by signs, and that what the wisdom rests in is not second guessing or projecting, but to recognize the symmetry, to recognize the signs, and to be able to move from sign to sign so that our route, our quest. Our journey is true in the sense that it arrives. And so the arc for this kind of journey through life, in tune with the mystery of nature. The arc of that was Homer's The Odyssey. And so we have the Odyssey as a book, which we can read, not to read as one of the pairs of texts, but a book which underlays like a denominator. Many pairs of books. We will go through three pairs of books every 12 lectures. So three times 12 is 3636 pairs of books. But the Odyssey underlays all of those 36 pairs. All of those 72 books. I know it sounds strange, but it's like the 72 wise men of the ancient Hebrew tradition. When when Alexander founded Alexandria, his great pet project was to build a pair of structures. One structure was going to be the Royal Palace, and the other was going to be the Royal Library. And in between the palace and the library was going to be a raised walkway. And that raised walkway was known. When it was built, it was known as the Royal Road, that the palace where the king is and the library where the books are, was the only realistic way in tandem to work. Wisdom, like with what really is to work with reality and the successors of Alexander. After he died, in fact built the palace and built the library. And when the library was almost finished, they found that one set of wise books were missing. They had translated all of the wisdom of the world from Ireland to India and put it in the library, but they were missing the Jewish books. They were missing the Pentateuch, the prophets. And when they sent to have those books translated, they were told that it took 72 translators, because no one man knew enough to translate. And it took a minimum of 72 different men from those angles to put the jewel of the true translation into a language. And so, in a way, the Odyssey underlies those 72 books. Those 72 perspectives of a jewel. What is that jewel? Shankara once called it in India, the jewel of liberation. It is a moment of integration of all of the facets that count. That are brought together. And they're brought together rather like a spherical implosion in an instant, on a single point. Some of you recognize that this is the form of a nuclear weapon, of an atom bomb, the implosive force from 72 different angles of explosion into a single point to a pellet is what an atom bomb a nuclear weapon is all about. It's very similar to the way in which a concentration of life and feeling and intelligence creates a moment of enlightenment, a transcendental explosion, not an explosion to destroy, but an explosion which paces itself as consciousness. And so our course of inquiry has a whole year of building patiently this integral of an implosive sphere of capacity, and a second year to see what kind of conscious energy is released by such a successful endeavor. But if we took just the Odyssey, we would limit ourselves to the way in which the classical Greeks attempted to do this some 2500 years ago. And so, in keeping with the pears. I'm using Herman Melville's Moby Dick paired with the Odyssey, so that you have a choice, one or the other. The Odyssey is very much a nature mystery goddess initiation. It's a feminine journey, whereas Melville's Moby Dick, in a very complimentary way, is the masculine version, the masculine journey? Now Homer's pair to the Odyssey was the Iliad, and the Iliad is indeed a Masculine journey into what was called in antiquity a Pyrrhic victory. You win, but in winning you have destroyed everything of value. The point of the Iliad is that it was the successful outcome of the wrath of Achilles against the Trojans, and indeed all the Trojans were killed. They were all massacred, except a few who fled, and under Aeneas eventually founded Rome. And when Rome conquered the Greek world, they simply pointed out to the Greeks their own Homeric basis and said, it is due to this karma from the Trojan War that we come back. And in the just desserts we take over your entire world. We take a look at the Odyssey and we take a look at Moby Dick as year long books, year long readings consistent with using pairs of books. And as I said before, we're trying to hold lightly the forms of our minds, the forms of our feeling toned experience, and at the same time to lightly hold the culture, the civilization, the history, so that the external and the internal, what it is that we are, what it is that we contain, how we have been schooled and conditioned and tutored and dreamed and all of that with how it is that we are surrounded. Context, given a background, a history, a world, and that these two must be dealt with together, just as in Lao-tzu and Parmenides some 2500 years ago. There is in Lao Tzu the sense that the Tao, which cannot be talked about, emerges into a t, which can certainly be talked about, but that when one is talking about T, the first rule of language is to use a polarity structure in enunciation, that it's very deceitful to think that one can say one thing when it's really always a polarity paired quality, so that there is a seeming ness to individuality in the world, and the seeming ness is that, well, what is its pair? Or what is its polarity? What is on the other side of it? I remember one time having a having a meal with the rector of the Daoist sanctuary some 20 years ago, 30 years ago here in Los Angeles, and we were at a Chinese restaurant. Of course, they serve oranges as dessert. And I was peeling the orange when he said, why do you not eat the orange peel? And of course, I immediately took a bite of the orange peel. Being in that mode, it was very digestible. And he said, it's the other side of the orange. So we're we're eating the whole fruit. We're eating the other side. And when we do that, the seeming ness evaporates into aletheia. The appearance by evaporating leaves. Truth. That truth is not something that one finds, but it is that which is disclosed by deception evaporating. And this was in fact the old test in primordial metallurgy. It was called the process of cupellation. There was a sort of a and a crucible that, when heated, would melt, and eventually the temperature would vaporize all of the impurities so that they were absorbed into the crucible. And the only thing that was not absorbed was like a little button of molten gold at the base of the bowl. Now, if you take that crucible and that process of cupellation, and you turn that crucible over and enlarge it to the horizon of the earth, the sky is the crucible and the sun is that molten gold. And one notices here that that sun has a root. It has a root through the sky. And when it gets to the horizon and sinks below the horizon, the whole stars come out. And this starry crucible, the stars are those schemata that Parmenides was talking about that one can Navigate by the stars better than navigating by the sun. You can find your way at night in early Mariner history better than you can at day, so that there was a sense of there being a secret wisdom to long, deep journeying that you did such things by night. In fact, the term Jung used it often nekyia a night journey, a secret night journey. And in fact, the old Egyptian wisdom, the Egyptian wisdom, which was commensurate with the Chinese wisdom, was to learn how to go not only through the nighttime of this world, by the stars and their signs, and the secret route of navigation through that. But there was a complement to that, not just the day, but the netherworld. That there was a not just a pair, but that the mystery of nature is that Paradise itself has pairs there a pair of pairs. And not only is there a sun by day and stars by night, but there's another pair of life and afterlife and the journey through the netherworld. The route. The following of the schemata of the signs through the netherworld was the way in which to come back into life again after death, so that the Egyptian Book of the dead is more properly translated as the coming forth by Day. This quality of finding one's way, of finding one's way through the route of the mystery of nature in the seeming ness of one's own life, to arrive at the Aletheia, the truth which can no longer be divided, has no parent quality. That one arrives at Dao. One arrives at truth. One has as one. As Homer says in the Odyssey, one has one's day of homecoming. You are able to come home, and the broadest, deepest real sense of that. Now, in the Tao Te Ching, I've translated, and we're going to use the Tao Te Ching as the the book for the first interval, And I prefer, as you might suspect, my own translation of this. I've translated what comes out as chapter ten of the Tao Te Ching. They're always a pair of characters at the top of the designation of the chapters. This going back to Han Dynasty times. I've translated those two characters by a World War Two phrase. Can do. And it reads like this. Sustaining discipline. Body embraced. Unity can not disintegrate. Concentrate. Key Conduces the gentle. An infant's tone washed clear. Profound intuition. Non-defaulting. Thing. Loving people, ruling country. Practicing non-busy heaven's gate open, close like a mother bird. Bright openness for corners. Penetrating can be her mystery. Birthing. Presence nourishes. Presence. Birthing but not owning. Doing yet. Not claiming. Raising yet not ruling. This is called profound T. In Parmenides way of appearance, of seeming, he uses a term which is familiar to us because it comes down as the English term Physics. Physics. It has a sense of emergence, and Parmenides means to say in his mystical poem that the emergence of the bounded comes out of that which has no boundary, no boundary whatsoever. Later on, a contemporary of Parmenides of Pythagoras used the term in a philosophic sense for the first time he took the term out of Parmenides. The term in Greek Pyrrhus, meaning limit. Meaning boundary, and Pythagoras called it limit. But for Parmenides he meant boundary in the sense of language that when a language moves along a defining route from sign to sign and completes its journey, the form that has been made by that language going along that route, that form, then, is a word and that you have a definition. So that a definition is being able to follow the boundary, the route of meaning of something well enough and complete enough so that you know what that journey of meaning is. Then you know that word. Then you can use that word. Then your vocabulary has truly been enlarged. And Parmenides meant to say that his attentiveness to language was such as to deepen language so that we knew By having gone through the roots of all the boundaries. What are words meant in every aspect of their application? For Pythagoras, being trained by the Egyptians for 22 years and by the Iranians for 11 years was a little doubtful. He didn't have the same kind of Greek confidence that Parmenides had. Parmenides had confidence in the clarity of the mystery of nature, whereas Pythagoras did not have that confidence. He instead put his trust upon a mathematization of form. In other words, his emphasis was on intelligence, on Ensemble, whereas Parmenides emphasis is on the mystery of nature. So Parmenides and Pythagoras are at complete opposite yet resonant poles of pre-Socratic philosophy. Pythagoras understood that numbering and mathematizing was the way in which one got forms that one could trust, and they were trustworthy because they did not have any meaning related to this world at all. They had an abstracted meaning, which was eternal. Whereas Parmenides was a nature mystic, that if one went through all of these journeys of the words, one could then speak a poetry which delivered out of the seeming ness of the world into the truth of ourselves and that we were deliverable. In fact, the term itself deliverable, that we were able to be delivered out of the womb of the world into a rebirth of our eternal self, our true self, quite different from the Pythagorean emphasis. Now we're going to take a break and come back. But I want to just bring this one more point in Lao Tzu and Parmenides contemporaries, the Chinese and the Greek, very, very similar, if you could put it into a sentence, what's the deepest conviction of Parmenides? It would be that reality is a continuous whole. That it's very continuous ness is what guarantees its whole. It comes down eventually in religious doctrines as the phrase world without end. It's a Western conviction. It's one of the deepest convictions of all in the West. Where, as in the East, in the Far East, in China, the conviction is that once one has gone through all of the phases, you factor back into the Tao without leaving a trace. Let's take a break. A pair of perspectives. One of them, the conviction of East Asia that vanishing is a reality. That the figure of a sage of a Shen. Is that invisible spirit who inhabits the landscapes of mountains and rivers without end. And in an odd way, the Daoist conviction that there is a realm of mountains and rivers without end is very similar to the ancient wisdom of the West, that there is world without end, and thus eternity exists within the world in its continuousness, so that the continuous whole is what is real in Western wisdom and the vanishing completely and perfectly in the East. And given this pair of perspectives that were held about 300 years ago in the West as diametrically opposed, the conviction in the West 300 years ago, in the 17th century, that those two worldviews were diametrically opposed, is inherited from a scholastic prejudice. And that scholastic prejudice is founded on Aristotle. And does not occur in the pre-socratics. Now, one of the most peculiar things about Aristotle is the well known quality that he frequently makes errors. In fact, he makes errors when he's quoting texts verbatim. So there is a a little bone to pick with Aristotle because of this. Um. In the 20th century. When it became apparent that the Dow had an expressive quality for the mystery of nature, that the West again met unflinchingly in the development of nuclear physics, such that one of the Early nuclear theorist Niels Bohr actually put the Tao Te Ching on his family crest, and the pair of his students, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, were both famous for uncertainty principle and for Schrodinger's cat paradoxes, both of which are very similar to Taoist quandaries or riddles of existence that would have existed in Chinese lore back in the seventh century. In fact, the great Chinese genius of the 17th of the seventh century, Huineng, was famous and is famous for all time of being someone who brought in his time the apparent Seeming paradox of East and West together in such a way that the paradox became again a mystery. The paradox in Huineng's time was the conviction from India. That there is not only a moksha, an extinction, but that there is a mysterious reoccurrence until the entire cosmos is brought to its fruition, and thus rebirth is assured until every last sentient being in the universe is enlightened. A daunting task, to say the least. For Huineng. He was the first Chinese genius who mastered the Buddhist conviction of rebirth through the bodhisattva ideal of helping until everyone is enlightened, and that the universe shall not be closed off into any moksha until that happens, and that if one chose moksha from one's for oneself, this was in fact a selfish act. And when he brought that Indian, Buddhist, Western conviction, because the Mahayana is definitely a Western outlook, the continuity of the whole, the continuous whole, Israel brought it into juxtaposition with the Chinese Taoist conviction that vanishing without a trace into the Dow is quite certain and real. And so his writing, uh, his writing was actually someone who took notes down verbatim. Huineng never wrote anything. Most of the high dharma teachers in world history never wrote anything. It was just the record of their their speaking. Because of the way in which a written language can be so easily subverted. It's much easier to deceive someone with writing than it is with speaking. And so an oral language is a more trustworthy, um, immediacy for truth telling truth saying, which is why I compose orally as much as it can be. Winnipeg's. Final speech. It's called the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. Ended the whole patriarchal line. Six patriarchs in China and 20 some in India. And his speech. His sutra was such that the sutra, which in Sanskrit means thread, that this thread had come full circle and had ended in openness, that there was to be no seventh Patriarch, that anyone who ever understood after him. Each one of them were seventh patriarchs, so that Winnig broadcast the High Dharma into the airwaves, as it were, and anyone who would ever then tune in by tuning in. You are the seventh Patriarch then and there. And so it was left completely open. It was left as a cosmos of openness, and there was no more possibility of closed circles. So that those who followed Huineng, often, instead of devoting themselves to what in Indian Buddhist tradition, was very fine intellectual filigreed discourses turned to humor and to poetry and to art. And you find after Winnig that the Chinese Dao tradition flourishes spectacularly right away in poetry. The quality of Chinese poetry leaps into universal world class. The generation that felt they had at least four, maybe 5 or 6 of the greatest poets who ever lived in China all clustered together. And the most famous of those poets was Li Po, and Li Po considered that he was a distant relative of Li Air, who was Lao Tzu. So they belonged to Lao Tzu's family, and so Li Po's poetry was a post Huineng. Development of the high drama and poetry, interestingly, had a genesis in a poetic form known in China, ancient China as the Fu. The fu was a very long poem, like a mythological cycle. And when you read the 3 or 4 examples of fu that have come down to us, they read almost like the mystical poem of Parmenides. They have the very same tone, the very same flavor. In fact, in the West, when you look at the inheritors of that parmenidean mystical poem, you find that there are resonances that are there right away in poetry, like Pindar, that Pindar's poetry is very informed in the parmenidean way, and that the structure of Pindar's lyrical poems, they're lyrical because they concern the mystic person. Ostensibly, his poems are odes to those heroes at certain athletic events or certain games, and he would write these mystical odes to the winners of the athletic contests. But embedded into those poems is this parmenidean deep dharma, Western, archaic Greek wisdom that the real and the seeming have an exchange between themselves, so that in this world of seeming ness there is a mysterious center of the real that operates in this continuum. One doesn't have to go to another world in order to experience the real. It's here, but it's here at the center of this world. It's here at the equanimity of this world, and not an equanimity that is in any particular place or in any particular time, but that in any process, in any object, whether it's a process or it's an object, there is in that process and in that object a equanimous dimension that can be approached. And when approached, there is no more polarity, there's no more structuring by the juxtaposition of opposites, and one finds this also in the Chinese tradition. The great example that Li Po and his time gave was that of the moon. The moon is there in the starry heavens, and its reflection is here in this water, in this lake and this river, and that the reflected moon has a beauty for us. And in raising our cup of wine and drinking. To make a poem on the reflection of the moon, that poem is as real as that moon. So that the Chinese tradition of literature called when the tradition of literature. Um, the classic critical text in that is called when Fu sometime included in the Bollingen Series. We talked last week or the week before about the Bollingen Series. Lynch's when Fu and the translation of that tradition of making poetry was called The Literary Art of Carving Dragons, that there is, in the language of man, an ability to get to the equanimous essence of any process and any object, and one establishes contact with the real there, and at the same time, something as limited as ourselves, as time dated as our physiology, as spatially limited as our body, has the ability to also participate in eternity, so that there is a transformational bridge between the world of seeming and the world of truth, and that exchange between them. That transformational node is a very much the metronome by which the rhythms of both seeming and the non rhythm of aletheia find their synergy and come together. So that we come to a very strange thing in 20th century physics. After Niels Bohr, after Einstein, after Heisenberg, after Schrodinger. When we come to someone like John a Wheeler, the man who named Black Holes, one of the developers of the first atom bomb, the teacher of Richard Feynman, he in his book that we're using, journey into Gravity and Space Time, says, how is this abstract world of curved space time geometry wired up to the everyday world of tennis balls and falling weights of spaceships and planets, of stars and galaxies? The answer is simple yet wonderful. Space time. Geometry is wired up to the everyday world by a geometric principle of fantastic innocence and power, a principle that says. The boundary of a boundary is zero. This boundary principle reaches out, guiding hands from every region to the surroundings of that region, and in this way space time grips mass, telling it how to move. In this way, mass grips space time. Telling it how to curve the boundary of a boundary is zero. This is very powerful. It's like going back and reading in Tang Taoist high class creme de la creme. Literature. One hears again exactly the peculiar poignancy of a Bruenig, or Aleppo, of the echoes of Alausa. Echoes of Chwangtse Zhuangzi, who used that great apocryphal story, that Daoist arc title story of the butcher, the Taoist butcher who cuts up the sacrificial ox and whose knife is ever sharp. And when the Emperor questions him, why is your knife always sharp when everyone else's knife gets dulled? Cutting up the sacrificial ox, the Taoist butcher says, my knife cuts in between the sinews, the muscles, the joints, the bones, and not touching anything. No wonder it is ever sharp because it never touches anything. It goes between everything. And so that Daoist sense that there is a root, there is a root of such a high energy that one can go in between the objectivity of the ordinary world, that the ordinary world is structured in such a way that there is a more subtle world. To use an old metaphysical tone, there is a more subtle world that is so refined that it slips through this world without leaving a trace. Now, one of the curious things is that the electromagnetic equations of James Clerk Maxwell. Solve in two different ways. They solve in a positive way, and they solve in a negative way. And because they came out in the 1870s, the Victorian English, of course, paid only attention to the positive solutions. We want results. But those equations solve in the negative also. And if you follow the via negativa of those equations, you come not to the way in which electromagnetic energy styles matter and energy in this world's universe. But you come to magnetoelectric energy, which operates at about 10 billion times the frequency of this. Which means that the space in between anything is 10 billion times as much you could. You could drive whole galaxies through an atom and never touch a thing like the trunk of a butcher. So that there is in reality such an array, such a bouquet of fantastic vastness that it is rather stupid to become depressed. It means that you're choosing a trace element to lean on when everything else is rather edible. What Margaret Atwood once wrote a novel called the the The Edible Woman, challenging the way in which this world is very, very strange and stupid. Um. There is a quality in Wheeler's writing. The boundary of a boundary is zero. He goes on to explicate and to say that if one realizes that there is no dimension To the starting point, because the point can be anywhere in the continuity. In fact, in Euclid's geometry from Alexandria some 2300 years ago, the very first statement in Euclid's geometry even then is that the point is a locus of no dimension. It has no dimension. It only gains dimensionality when it moves. And when a point moves, one has a single dimension. One has a time dimension to it, and out of that time dimension, the three dimensions of space blossom. So that time and space indeed are four dimensional continuum. But because one drawing a boundary begins from a point that has A00 designation. Zero coordinates. And if you move that continuously all the way through back to itself, one comes back to that zero. As Wheeler says. The moving point collapses back into itself, leaving not a trace. And one recognizes in this kind of a statement that here, one of the great nuclear physicists of the late 20th century is talking dowas talk. That's exactly what Lanza said. It's exactly what Zhuangzi would say. It's exactly what Huineng and Li Po, and on and on. The Daoist tradition is very clear about that. Quite clear about that. And just in the same way, the Hermetic tradition in the West is very clear that the continuity without end is real. That life is not a phenomenon that has some precarious beginning and some nervous extent, and then ends, but that life is eternal because it does not have a beginning point. It doesn't have a time dated dimensional factor that defines it, so that life is essentially mysterious and not at all definable, that its boundedness ends in zero every time we become precise, but that that zero also works equally well in any kind of logical Expression or permutation of expressions. If we take the zero to be infinity, it works just as well. Zero and infinity are exchangeable exchangeable because zero and infinity are equanimeous. And this is something very difficult to appreciate and understand. And it takes a very developed conscious space time in order to appreciate that infinity has indeed this quality of zero. It's not some daunting ness that one can't imagine. The problem there is with the limits of imagination. Neither zero nor infinity can be imagined, and we'll see in the development of our education that imagination is a function that develops in myth. In mythology, Mythography has everything to do with image and image base. And it's true that that's integrable into the mind, into symbols, into ideas. But if you pursue that integration with dedication and care, um, you eventually come to an integral that yields exactly what Hennig said 1400 years ago. It yields exactly and precisely Dao. There's no trace of appearance whatsoever. There's no more root of seeming ness. Now, Amenities to come back to him. Parmenides made it clear that there is a disjunctive ness in this fundamental polarity, which is important. It's important to remind the mind, but that consciousness needs to be circumspect about this point. The mind will have a tendency to fudge and to assign to project, as it were, to project a valuation. And its basic fall is to project a valuation on zero to make zero count. When Parmenides is very clear, zero cannot be counted. Nothing is not countable. So that he said, what is is and what isn't isn't. And they never meet that. There's no junction whatsoever, and that it is an illusion to make them exchangeable and interchangeable, so that one then tries to factor a nothingness into life. This indeed is called nihilism, and the the conviction that one can factor the horrific, vacuous nothingness into life is exactly that nightmare that haunted Colonel Kurtz. Both in Conrad's novel and Coppola's film Apocalypse Now. Nothingness is not factorable into life. Its whole value is that it doesn't factor into life and thus never participates into this way of seeming. There is no zero. There is no infinity into sameness, which makes it always limited, so that the way of seeming in this deep, high wisdom is that it always is a condition. It's always conditional. The way of seeming always does have a beginning. It always has a middle. It always has an end, so that the way of seeming does follow mythological prototypes, mythological threads, and that while there are innumerable variations, those variations tend to cluster around archetypal patterns, and that one can be familiar with the patterning of these archetypes. I want to read out. I tried to write this in a kind of a prose poem, flow of language. And here's how it turned out. Nature moves as time. Movement generates space itself. Not just place or locus. Not yet. Thus, a point is a moment without dimension. A seed locus in space. Without movement. A stillness of place. The archetype of integral object like quarks, which are points that never seem to occur alone, or individual points like to accrue to become a succession of dots which can be linked in lines or trajectories of carrier carried movement. Force forces like magnetism or electricity or gravity. Nature. Lines. Forces. And in waves. Whole fronts of points like crests. Clustered generating fields. So that nature is a vast ocean of changing waves and fields and lines of force and clusters of interwoven crests that become matter like a hydrogen atom, which when looked at. A hydrogen atom has a proton and an electron, and in a very mysterious way, the electron is always a captured force that's in an orbital related to a centered mass, the proton. So the proton and the electron together going together so that matter. Essentially the hydrogen atom. In its most basic primitive form, there are other forms of hydrogen. There's a deuterium and tritium adding a neutron or sometimes even a pair of electrons. But the fundamental building block of matter is that a proton and an electron together? It's a it's a center and a process in a capture mode, an orbit. Um, so that nature accrues and orbits. Accrual focuses with forces. And she does it this way. It's like a nude integral centering with wave energy clothing or a veil, so that nature in her mystery is always a veiled dance of a nude, um, integral. And this is a, this is a, a quality which one finds in Parmenides poem, because in his poem, the teacher of the wisdom which is there in the poem is a goddess. In Sanskrit, she was known as Prakriti, Mother Nature, Maa, Prakriti she. She is the goddess because at that level there is only one. Um. There was a great mysterious novel written by a friend of Kipling's H. Rider Haggard called she, and in the novel this mysterious she is, she's given the epithet She Who Must be Obeyed. Because she is eternal. She can renew herself in the special fire. What fire is that? That she renews herself so that she has eternal life. She's immortal. That's the fire of transformation Mother Nature is able to go Into the transformative crossover that fire that consumes this world and delivers it where not to ash, but to reality, which can also be delivered back here so that she who must be obeyed. She is this goddess. The earliest name for a goddess in the Indo-European languages is Anahita. It's the most ancient name. When nature has this dance, this dance of the veils of the orbital energy brought not into points, electrons are not so much points, but that they are carriers of a movement, And that movement carries the electrical energy. When we come to the great treatise on the I-Ching, the Takuan, one of the deepest, most expressively plain discussions of the Dao, occurs here. The Tao Te Ching is sort of an angle of insight into the I Ching and the Takuan um, written, uh, probably about the time of Lao Tzu. Uh, I would think that written by Confucius. Kung fu. He writes this movement and rest have their definite laws. According to these firm and yielding lines are differentiated. Events follow definite trends, each according to its nature. Things are distinguished from one another in definite classes. In the heavens, phenomena take form. These are the somata, and the route through the Somata would be that heavenly form in the heavens. Phenomena take form on earth. Shapes take form in this way. Change and transformation become manifest so that change and transformation characterize nature. Nature's mystery is like an ocean of change. But here in this world on Earth, the change and the transformation are indexed by polarity. And that that indexing by polarity yields a correspondence so that things in this world have correspondences embedded into the patterning of their roots through the real. So that knowing this, then the human body is very much like a universe, and that one can come up with systems of correspondence like acupuncture or Daoist herbalism, that Chinese medicine is based completely upon, the correspondences being not real but actual together in their shared seeming ness, so that if one looks for. Point 36 on liver, there ain't no such thing, but it functions in a In seeming correspondence way, as if there were. And so that the application of an herb in sympathy with that will work in this world. Because they both share the same seeming index, so that the mind needs, in its power of abstraction, to pay attention to the fact that if everything is in a fiction, the fictions work for those fictional people. Faulkner once said that when he realized that his characters, as he put it, his characters cast shadows, he stopped writing Potboilers and started to write literature. Don Quixote is as real to us as anyone who lived in the 1500s. Perhaps even more so. It's a secret. It's a secret wisdom. That one needs to garden one's fictions and not throw them away just because they are fictions. Because fictions in a fictive world have efficacy. True that. You can push that to an ultimate, and they all evaporate without leaving a trace. But when you are able to do that, you won't need those fictions at all anyway. In the meantime, they're often very good traveling companions. More next week.