Nature 8

This is nature eight. And I want to start with a quotation from the Tao Te Ching. This is section 47 and it bears the title. The two Chinese characters seeing distance. Seeing distance. You may have to be more attentive to hear my pronunciation today because of my voice. Not going through doorways. Knows this world. Not looking through a window. Ways. Sights. Heavens. Dao. For one who must go out. His increasing distance means increasing littleness. Therefore, the spirit Jen does not go those ways, yet knows does not stare yet names, does not force yet completes. This is only paradoxical language if one is limited to an integral mode. This in fact is very simple differential language, not descriptive of anything because a differential language presents rather than represents. All descriptions are Presentational. And so a descriptive ideal is only half the story at best. A presentational mode is more characteristic of how can we say it? The Chinese call it Tao the fundamental. And here one is taxed by language. If you say fundamental ground. We conceive that there is some kind of base. The Dao has no ground in the sense of a base. And to give it the posit of existence actually commits a mental error which is undetectable by the mind. The fact is, is that Dao occurs before existence appears, and so reality has both a zero and a one set. A paired set which characterizes its. I have to use the Greek term here. Aletheia. Its truthfulness. We know. We know today from contemporary astrophysics that on the largest scale of the universe there occur what are called quantum fluctuations. These quantum fluctuations happen in incredibly short, almost unbelievably short durations of time. The figure that is given is ten to the -44, which puts it into the realm of femtoseconds. Femtoseconds are quadrillions of a quadrillionth of a second. It's the time. Durational frame within which molecular reactions take place this year or this past year, 1999. Caltech's Ahmed Zewail received the Nobel Prize for chemistry for perfecting a laser technique of taking, quote, photographs of molecular reactions that run from 10 to 100 femtoseconds. One can actually see the atoms splitting apart or coming together to make new molecules. And this quality of quantum fluctuations occurring as the most fundamental tapestry of reality. Occurs everywhere, not only in the universe, but as we should more likely style it in the cosmos. That is to say, in the great spread of reality, in femtosecond time durations, particles are coming into being and vanishing again out of pure emptiness all the time, everywhere. And it is only occasionally, when conditions are right, that these ephemeral particles gain a stability. And the realm in which they gain a stability is the realm that we call the universe. The Chinese would call that Tay. And so out of the Tao, Tay occurs spontaneously, or as they used to say in the Zen development of the koan, the koan mu all forms are empty and emptiness is a form which means that in the complementation zero and one exchange. Their operative centers so that Dow's center, whatever that happens to be. Operates in the center of the T continuum and the center of the T continuum. Complementarity exchanges with and operates in whatever is the center of. Dow. This is known in Asia in the High Dharma as the sacred exchange of selves. It's the only reality of fertility. It's the only way in which creation. Actually occurs or can occur. We saw in the very first lecture that the way in which the I-Ching has a pair of continua, one continua, are the changes that take place in a yang. The other the changes that take place in a yin and the yang and the yin are polarized, yet they're polarized in such a way that the center of the yang progression can exchange with the center of the yin progression, and they work in each other's continuum, so that when you see a symbol of the Tao, you see the Tai chi symbol, the circle of dark in the teardrop of light is the dark center which is exchanged, and the center of light in the teardrop of dark is the complementarity exchange. What's curious about this? That the Chinese 5000 years ago already understood the figure? Apocryphally who understood this was fushi. Fushi understood that there are a limited number of changes which yang or yin can go through, and the bare minimum number of changes is three. The yang. Can have a beginning. It can have a middle, and it can have an end. It can occur at a beginning. It can occur in whatever middle or in-between there happens to be and reduce, fold all of those middles, all of those in-betweens, into one called the middle. And then it can be the end. So that the only experiential ecology that can occur in T at all is a beginning, a middle, and an end. We recognize, of course, that this is a plot line. If you can plot something from its beginning through its development to its end, you then have a line, a mythos, a plot line. You have a journey, a characteristic line of development from its origin through whatever complications it has to its end. Fucci saw also that there is an essential, mysterious quality to Dao, and that mysterious quality of Dao also operates within the continuum at its center, so that when you get an exchange of the center of Yang and the center of yin exchanging, another essential characteristic comes into play a fourth element. The fourth element is the abstraction of the beginning yang young or beginning in the middle. Young. The middle. Young and the end. Young or Indian and extraction of those three. And put together into an abstract perfection. The Puritan or the Puritan? Now this makes sense if you can visualize. That a characteristic of a three location plot line means that in order to develop. A perception that is relative and kept within the hierarchies that you're working with. You need to have three elements in each of the Determinants. They can be the three elements of space length, height and width. And in fact space in its three dimensions works like this. It works as a locus. It works as a locus of three dimensions for the way in which the progression of the yang or the yin is disclosed in the three different locations. The unbroken line of the yang is put into the context of two yin lines, and the yin line is put into the context of two yang lines, so they mutually define each other so that you do not bring something outside of this primordial pair, this primordial polarity. You don't bring something from outside into play in making the delineation of its mythos, of its plot line, so that the Yang line appears at the bottom, in the middle, and at the top of the two yin lines when it's in the middle. It has an ability, through equanimity, to exchange with the middle of the yin. Here again, this is the Tai chi symbol, the exchange. When that exchange happens, the three positions suddenly and spontaneously give way to including a fourth, a fourth, which is an abstract perfection which in no way would have occurred before, but now it does occur so that you have in the total. Ecology of the world of appearance. In the universe you have a double quaternary. And this double quaternary is interspersed in such a way is to make an eight fold path. As it were, an eight fold structure in the musical scale of the Western world, it's called the octave. In ancient geometry it was called the ogdoad, and you can write eight as two cubed. It's a peculiar quality to realize that in the universe, when all of its elements are operative, perfection also comes into play as a discovered actuality on a par with the elements, the partial elements that went into eliciting perfection. Now, we have discovered, by looking at this for the last eight weeks, that we can now say that the mystery of nature, nature as a mysterious process, an ocean of change, includes a process which eventually invites abstract perfection itself to exist on a par with the fragmentary steps, the partial Procedures that go to make up. What we call the universe the the oneness of of existence. And our next section. When we look at ritual, we'll see that all human rituals have a sense of the truth of this. What is the truth of this? Whether it's on the level of quantum fluctuations or the eliciting of perfection out of the total, the completed cycle of partiality, it amounts to the same thing that the world of appearance is not a world of deception, purely as long as one keeps it marked in your attention that what you're dealing with is a dramatic incompleteness. A world of appearances is not automatically deceptive. That the mystery of nature is that appearances are useful and can deliver. Truthfulness, in fact, can be the only source of manifesting perfection. One of the mysteries of nature is that the Tao has no perfection whatsoever. Only this world has perfection, and the perfection is elicited by completeness, so that the mystery of nature includes another pair that operate all the time, one of a completeness of a cycle which elicits its perfection and the fact that perfection cements or objectifies the the completeness. As long as one understands that there is never a single cycle, but always minimally a pair of cycles that link together. The progression of these links at one time in ancient the ancient Hellenic world, not classical Greece, but Homeric Greece. About 3000 years ago it was called the the Great chain of Being, or sometimes was called later the Golden Chain of Homer. That all of the links of completed Cycles in this world linked together into a continuity and that that continuity. Is the flow of appearance which is capable of eliciting perfection itself. And that that completeness and perfection, when they occur together, have the. Ability to disappear back into the original zero ness, which occurred before the. Universe itself happened. One of the curious things about this is that while. Completeness has as its origin a zero ness, perfection has as its disappearing. Transform beyond the end has instead of zero, it has infinity, and that infinity reoccurs as zero, so that you get a monumental sense of a great stream of reality that constantly renews itself. Keeping to the Homeric Greek, this stream that encircles the world was called Oceanus, that is, the original ocean. Um, not that this world has some vast river on the periphery of a flat side, but that the realm of this world is completely encircled by an undulating quality of continuity which both manifests itself and completes itself in a world of appearance, and then transforms into perfection within appearance, and then disappears mysteriously back into the real. In China, this was known as the dragon, the Great Dragon. The Chinese dragon is very similar in its appreciation of this grand realistic ecology. It has. The ancient Chinese has a deep similarity to the very ancient Iranian, so that the Chinese and the Iranian back about at least 4000 5000 years ago, have a very similar. Origin have a similar. Uh. Uh, how can I say it? Occur in the same nourishing meal. The original, uh, idea of qi in Chinese is the steam rising from rice. That this world in its life cycle is nourishing to us because we are of it. Um. The Japanese word for rice includes a radical, which is the number 88. And in Japanese it always means that this rice that you eat has gone through 88 hands to be produced before it comes to nourish you, so that the East Asia understanding is that reality nourishes us because we are of it, and that there is a vast, complex ecology which links together, and the point at which you are able to appreciate it is the point of your nourishment. And so the key becomes real for you when you are participating in its nourishment. The very moment of your inhaling the vaporous nourishment of the rice. Steam is the point at which you come into play in this ecology. So there is an existential moment. There is a participation of the French phrase by Lucien Lévy-bruhl. Participation. Mystique. There is a moment of participation where your participation not only gives you nourishment, but you continue. You gift that continuum with your participation so that someone else will have their moment later on somewhere else. So that there is an ecology of mystery to nature. It's not simply that nature is mysterious, because we don't understand it. That's a very minor mystery. Nature is mysterious because we do understand it, and we understand that we must add that moment of existential to participate with the Tao that has emerged into day. Exactly at that locus. So that our. Only sin is to refuse to participate in reality. What did Zorba say once in Kazantzakis great novel? And they put it in the film. If a beautiful woman calls a man to bed and he will not go, God will not stand for this. It's that The moment of exchange is the only existential. Moment in appearance where it could be real. And so one must have the humility to not prejudge it as unreal because it's just appearance. So that one of the deepest qualities of civilization is having the sophistication to remember, to save the appearances, to keep the drama going. And when it comes time for you to act, perform, it's a it's a curious quality. There was a time when Western civilization completely collapsed. Completely crashed into almost a primordial jumble again. This was in what used to be called in Victorian times, the Dark Ages, the six hundreds to about the 1100s AD. Towards the end of those dark ages, in what's called the high medieval realm, one found in a place like England. The reappearance of a cycle of mystery plays. And it's that cycle of mystery plays that were the origin of the Renaissance rediscovery in figures like Marlowe and Shakespeare, and the recovery Discovery of the true structure of civilization all over again. For out of the mystery plays of the medieval period came the remembrance, the Renaissance, the remembering that there was such a polarity as comedy and tragedy. The comedy and tragedy always go together. They're always paired. But that comedy and tragedy do not come out of mystery. They are a pair which is like a tie juxtaposed to the Tao of Mystery. Mystery plays were never comic, and they were never tragic, even though the subject matter of some of the mystery plays could have been comic or could have been tragic. The mystery plays were always episodes in the life of Jesus. But they were never presented as comedy tragedy. They were always presented as mystery. The point being someone like Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe understood that while comedy and tragedy are archetypal Tae appearances of the drama of life, the deeper background drama of the Tao of Nature manifests itself in terms of mystery, not comedy and tragedy, so that the mask of comedy and the mask of tragedy indeed should always be hung together on both sides of the stage of A Playhouse of this world. The Globe Playhouse had comedy and tragedy as masks. The appearance quality of ourselves is always a subjective role which we play, which we must play, which we in fact do play. But this role, as we will see when we go through ritual and through myth, if we play this role to completeness, it transforms at the moment of its completeness to eliciting a perfection. And when that elicited perfection, anneals itself to the completed appearance, the completed appearance elicited perfection together are able to transform into the real, so that while comedy and tragedy characterize the appearance limitations of a global playhouse, the deeper drama of the cosmos takes place within another pair, another set which do not have masks. One of those is mystery. The mystery of nature, which has no mask at all, has no face for man to see. What does the the old Torah statement of Moses? Uh, no man may see the face of God, but the adjunct to it is that while no man may see the face of God, The mosaic adjunct was the community. When the community is together, may mirror the face of God and the community by being together in that completed way will elicit the face of the perfect within that community, so that the mirror of the completed community can show the face of God, which is the ancient Judaic reason for maintaining community. Not for sociological reasons, not for political reasons, and especially not for religious reasons, but for reality purposes. For Shakespeare, even more than Marlowe. Although Marlowe was really the first to to to begin to get the sense. Mystery has its power in history. The community, in evolving its completeness, generates a history so that the smaller pair is comedy and tragedy. The global playhouse. But the deeper pair is mystery and history. The cosmic, the cosmic drama so that when you count them all together, there are a pair of pairs. There's a great square, and that square is the presentation liminality of our capacity to know. Beyond that square. We have not only no way of knowing, we recursively, spontaneously, immediately start a whole new cycle of seeming of seeming ness to the ancient Hindu mind. This means restarting the complications of the universe all over again, starting a new yuga, starting a new time cycle so that what we've discovered about nature is a very vast appreciation that while it is an ocean of change, the change itself, as it comes down to where we are, has a limited number of stages within which it can manifest itself as appearance. Because there are pair of plot lines that weave together. There are one, two, three, four, five, six, so that there is a paradigm of a hexagram, a hexagon, a six sided quality of not just a form, but a process which gives shape to form as it begins to congeal, and that that six quality elicits a seventh and eighth, so that there are Mysterious forms that occur which are characterized by fundamental numbers one through eight. And if you can count one through eight and knew what those numbers not only represented, but what they presented in a differential way, you would then in that completed set, have an ability to appreciate something beyond the limits of what you can know. And that is the unknowable, which is also unsayable, which can be designated a number. And that designated number is nine. Beyond which you start all over again at one, but with the proviso that it's at a higher power, so that tan is also a one and a zero, but this time together as a designate. Now this can get very complex if you go into diagrammatic metaphysics. And so we don't go that way because it's a thankless task of trying to make straight lines out of the beauty of the nourishing pasta, spaghetti, which reality really serves up to us. And that is to say that nature never contains those plot lines. In reality, those straight lines beginning, middle, and end only occur at the very tail end Of the completed integral cycle in the mind. Those lines only occur in the mind and only in the mind in its integral mode, never in the mind in its differential mode. How do lines occur in nature? They always curve. They always curve. And we have learned late in the 20th century and now early in the 21st century, that there indeed is a deep mysteriousness in the world of appearance in the nucleus of atomic structure. Those curved lines always maintain parity. They always have a parrot quality. But in the very peculiar energy realm just outside the nucleus. But before you get to the electron structure. In that realm known as the weak electro realm, parity is not observed. It's broken, it's violated. And it took the irreverence of several jokester physicists like Richard Feynman to be able to. Have the chutzpah to proclaim that parity is not there on the realm of the electroweak force. In the realm, especially of things like neutrinos. Were the name that Enrico Fermi in the early 30s gave to mysterious, mysterious particles that carried some little iota of energy. When a neutron changed into a proton and an electron in this little missing iota of energy. Fermi came to understand that the proton and the neutron were different sides of the same particle, called the nucleon, that a proton curves with an axis going down so that its curve goes counterclockwise, and that a neutron with its axis going up curves in the opposite direction, but that in the electroweak realm that parity is broken, which means in a very simple way, that the realm of neutrinos is left handed. It is a chirality to the left, which is made up for by a most mysterious, spontaneous perfection that is elicited out of the quantum fluctuations of the Tao. Because this can be mirrored, because it can be reflected, parity is restored and the reflection in the appearances. Again, had we junked and discredited the capacity of appearance to participate in the real, the loss of parity in the electroweak force would have vanished the universe just as it began to form atoms. Let's take a break. And see. What this comes to is that nature has a mysterious quality. And it explains. Or rather than use that old fashioned language explains, it illuminates for us why intuition works, why insight works. And it's not just that the that the mind is intuitive. The body itself in its kinesthetic awareness, senses presence and absence And a great deal of the charm and the travail of love come from these capacities. I remember one time, a long time ago, being in the High Sierras, up near the Continental Divide. I was going up to a lake, Moose Lake. It's at about ten eight, which is about two miles above sea level. And all of a sudden I stopped and I felt this eerie quality. And I was only 19. I couldn't place it. And I felt in dire jeopardy. I thought, this is stupid. I'm out here all alone. I'm at least 5 or 6 miles from any other hiker. Maybe even more. So I scanned the landscape, and over on a ledge was a mountain lion watching me. How did I know? The body feels kinesthetically the reality of the situation. And later on, primordial, not primitive, primordial men and women always took care to make sure that their rituals linked that mysterious truthfulness of the body in nature to the truthfulness of the persona, the character who we are in the flow of our lives in the experience of our lives, that the mythic horizon of our lives must be in sync with the mystery of nature, and that can only be bridged by accurate ritual, by doing things right, right doing right action, right comportment, so that for primordial men and women, it was very important for them to know how to sustain and how to maintain this bridge between the mystery of nature and the truths of their lives, the experiential feeling toned level where myth occurs and happens, where the process of language occurs so that the Capacity for language to disclose is intimately tied to the mystery of nature. And the mystery of nature is not some sacred message that's uttered to us. It's rather in the silences. It's in the zeros. It's in the unspeakable hiatuses. To which we must be attentive. That we hear, as it were, metaphorically here. Those sources of actual disclosure. But we'll see in our education that while the mysteries of nature, while Dow is tied to zero in the integral. When we get to consciousness that zero always factors out as infinities. It comes out with the unrelenting proliferation of infinities. And if we do not go through a transform that acclimates us to this new dimension, if we insist on carrying the old wisdom of the integral into differential conscious realms, we miss everything, we reduce everything, and we become a prey to all of the true chaos that comes out of that. So our education takes great care to show why it is that traditional wisdom, tribal ritual, mythic images. All of this, yes. Is appearance. All of it must be saved. There was a British literary critic who was a sometime Rudolf Steiner, named Owen Barfield, who wrote two great books. One was called Saving the Appearances, the other was called Poetic Diction. We are acquiring the patience that patience to allow for the factoring of zeros and integration to take place, so that the process of nature in its mysteriousness and the process of language and its feeling toned. Individual characteristics are able to flow together and are held lightly together by a thread, which begins with the truthfulness of the body in its comportment, in its ritual, in its dance steps, as it were. So that when it comes to the mind, we'll see that the mind is like a pair with the body, just like language and nature are paired. Myth and nature are paired. So too ritual and symbol are paired, and a great deal of later what becomes Correspondences to the symbolic mind are rooted in the parity of the kinesthetic certainty of the body. For instance, in acupuncture Chinese medicine. Here's a great classic Western volume on it, published by MIT some years ago. The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine, Systems of Correspondence, and the German Manfred Borchert goes into great lengths to point out the efficacy of the correspondences of the symbols in the mind to the body locations, but with the proviso that it is an appearance realm. It's a way of seeming, and you cannot expect to find something there. Liver three or something. Spleen 12. There is nothing there. But the efficacy is there because of a relationality which has a relativity which holds. And in this world, that's all one needs. It holds in just the same way gravity occurs, because two masses have a relationship to each other, no matter where they are. And if this one moves ever so slightly, this one is affected. The here and the there are relative. This is where the relativity really is. And the changes in the relative positions of these masses give rise to gravity waves And the fact that there are trillions upon trillions, quadrillions upon quadrillions of all sizes and orders of objects, all moving, makes the universe a seething kettle of gravity waves. Every infinitesimal movement of a mass has its reverberation in ever so slightly redistributing the universe. When John Wheeler, whose journey into gravity space time Scientific American book that we're using, wants to look at a farewell, look at gravity. Chapter 13, he puts two Chinese symbols the bee, the symbol of heaven, and this form, the form for the centering quality of earth. Not not so recognizable in our acquaintance with China, but very recognizable in our acquaintance with ancient Egypt, because a part of this is the top of the djed symbol, the djed hieroglyphic from ancient Egypt, which is the essence of a condenser, a condenser of energy, a powerful symbol integrator that brings the mystery of nature through the existential forces of physicality all the way through relational Language processes where a correspondence could be gelled into a symbolic form and held there. I remember an old an old man came to me one time in Hollywood. He wanted to bequeath me his entire collection of Egyptian artifacts, and he was convinced that these DJed symbols were actually objects that were primordial condensers for electrical energy in ancient Egypt, and were used to light the interiors of the pyramids. And he was absolutely serious about it and convinced. And who knows? Wheeler uses these in his final farewell. Look at gravity, these Chinese symbols because there is a quality here. Not that the modern physicists learns from China or from Egypt so much, nor that there are correspondences so much, but that in our conscious differential burgeoning into infinities everywhere we have learned the humility to collect what infinities we can even temporarily, and put them into an approximate form and use that. And even though it's not precisely true to every decimal place that one would wish, it's good enough, as Wheeler says, the quantum electrodynamics Renormalization of all the infinities in the equations comes out to an accuracy of ten decimal places, which in the physiological universe is pretty good. If you have an accuracy to ten decimal places in time space, it's good enough. One of the qualities that's there, as we will see in the second year of our inquiry, is that possibility spectrums which are open ended are not to be feared, and relentlessly proliferating possibilities are not a sign of madness, and a plunge into the infinite is not being lost forever in some chaos. To a traditional, integral, mind based Is only on the certainty of the body. All of these are signs of approaching madness. If not death. And so, with all the respect that we have for the tribal wisdom, for the primordial understanding, nevertheless there comes a time when we must not just add to that. The simple adding would make a lie of it, but to allow for the transform to do its operation and bring into play aspects that we simply didn't know about before. In the same issue of Scientific American, January 2000, where Ahmed Zewail. Femtosecond chemistry Nobel Prize is shown. The Nobel Prize for math is to two Dutch men who did the math to renormalize the breaking of the symmetries, the violation of parity in the electroweak realms of nuclear physics, and the way that they did it was diagrammed here in the issue that the photon, which is the carrier of electromagnetic energy in the electroweak realm, in that atomic, yet not nuclear realm, the photon is one of a set of four, one of a set of a square of particles, three of which were so heavy. That is to say, they weighed in at so many electron volts that they weren't discovered until the late 1980s. One of them carries a positive charge. One of them a negative charge and one a neutral charge. The W positive and negative. The z neutral. The z0 particle. When one conceives of light being carried not just by a photon, but by this square of particles in that nuclear realm, the electroweak realm, one would have a breaking of parity, a loss of symmetry, a complete junking of all the possibilities of any hope for rational discourse and disclosure in the universe except for an odd event. What is elicited are four other particles that occur together as a set. They're called scalar particles, and these four scalar particles are absorbed by the four particles, the photon and its three companions. Except with one proviso, the photon itself doesn't absorb. So three of the scalar particles absorb. They renormalize. Everything about this set this group of particles so that no matter how much parity is actually broken, it is smoothed out by an elicitation of a scalar, or as one would say in physics, a gauge renormalization. This happens both on a local level and on a cosmic level. The Tao of Reality gifts us with the balance only exactly to the extent that that gifting of the balance is required. So we learn again, an ancient wisdom principle. You cannot expect a complementation from the mystery of nature until you have completely saturated an existential level, and it is one of the powerful requirements of ritual to make sure that your actions saturate the doing that what you do do actually gets done, that you do not crimp on the activity to the extent that you crimp on it that you are reluctant about it. To that extent, you impair and actually negate the possibility of the mystery of nature coming into play and giving a gauge symmetry even to the asymmetric actions of uniqueness. So that when we get to ritual, we'll see that one of the most haunting qualities. Let's use the ancient Greeks for a moment. One of the most haunting qualities in early civilization was the fear of becoming too abstract and not being dedicated enough to be complete in one's ritual comportment so as to elicit the mystery of nature, to smooth out the reality of the complete integral. It works out as simply as this. The rise of the need for Greek tragedy was due to a fracturing of the psyche, of the mind, of its symbolic capacity. At the very beginnings of classical Greece around four 5460 BC. By that time, the classical Greek civilization had ground its writing stylus to such a fine point that that point broke unless you used it with a complete force and energy to make sure that everything was included. The last great Greek tragedy which we will use in the ritual section. Euripides Bacchae is the most eloquent doctrine, the most eloquent document perhaps ever written in any language to the need to include not only the highest tragedy, but an opening which allows for the mystery of nature to come back into play. Later we will use a Greek comedy. One of the finest of all the Greek comedies, Aristophanes Birds, which does for comedy what Euripides Bacchae did for tragedy. Euripides Bacchae as an archetypal tragedy, and Aristophanes Birds as an archetypal comedy. Both invite the mystery of nature to come into play as a gauge scalar, balancing to something that would have otherwise been an intolerable violation in the universe. Man's mind abstracting prematurely by thinking that it was complete because it had done its work, and the mind itself is incapable of understanding that its abstract completion is not the whole story, that abstract completion does not invite the mystery of nature. So one of the great books on Greek logic is called The Greeks and the irrational by E.R. Dodds. One of the great truths of classical Greek civilization is the mystery religions that were operative and in play. And no one, Plato, Aeschylus, no one exempted themselves from participation in the mysteries, whether it was the mysteries of Orphic religion or the mysteries of the Demeter. Persephone at Eleusis. The Greek mystery religions are the gauge scalar renormalization of Greek tragedy. Greek philosophy, Greek lyric poetry, as in Pindar, what they learned we must in our own time learned also. The Chinese have their version of this, the Egyptians theirs. When it comes to correspondences, when it comes to the appearances of this world, the polarities of this world. Analogy is always brought into play by polarity. This classic work from about 35 years ago. Polarity and analogy. Two types of argumentation in early Greek thought. Ge r Lloyd was an Aristotelian specialist at Cambridge. The Need to know that polarity has its limitations beyond the capacity for polarity, and analogy to function is a realm of the unsayable, the unspeakable, the golden Pythagorean silence. It is this realm that Lloyd points out is there in Parmenides way of truth. And we talked about a month ago of the old Parmenidean, the long, white haired, white robed Parmenides, looking like a William Blake prophet 2600 years ago. What is, is and what isn't. Isn't. And there is not, never is. And the is has a polarity where it is only appearance. Parmenides calls it the way of seeming. It is only seeming up to its completion, its saturation, and then at that point of its completion, its saturation, then it is not only complete, it is true. It is perfect. And immediately the mystery of nature comes in and bestows that reality upon it. So that reality is always a sense of gift that is given to us. It's always a bestowal. Reality is never found by accuracy. It is always bestowed as a gift. The truth of which for us is to be wise enough to accept it. So that acceptance, we'll see, is the last stage of integration. Someone who does not know that is uneducated, in fact is unteachable will never learn wisdom. Those people start counting from one all the time, whereas if you count from zero, you know that the possibility of an infinity proliferation is to be expected and not daunting at all. Now let's, uh, let's come back. I don't want to tax my voice too much, so I'm going to somewhat cut it, but I want to bring this into play. As well as there being a way, a way of seeming, a realm of appearance which wends its way towards a completion, as well as there being a spatial locus which develops primordially out of a time dimension. There is, because of the curvatures, the curvature of space time itself, which is why lines always curve in nature, that this curving, this this curvature brings about a capacity not only for renewal and spiraling, but that it actually Obtains in the fundamental foundations, the particles that carry the forces and the material of the universe. A photon never goes in a straight line. Every photon spins, does a great spiraling so that its line of sight, its vector, its radial vector is always a compressed spiral. So that spin as well as rotation there similar is always a quality, and left handed and right handed are always in symmetry, unless for certain intermediate circumstances, like the electroweak realm of the intra nuclear forces. So that. Right handed and left handed. Chirality, as it's called, holds everywhere except in transitory processes that are very close to calling out the gauge symmetry. Spontaneous healing gift of the mystery of nature so that one of the principles of ancient wisdom. When you come upon a unique event, a one of a kind, unique event, you're very close to the gift of spontaneous gauge symmetry from the mystery of nature, which is why the Chinese Taoists always prized the unique rock, the unique piece of wood. It was a one of a kind specimen that puts you right on the threshold, right on the liminality of the opportunity to experience the mystery of nature, gifting us with a gauge symmetry that was unexpected. The wisdom, then, is to not to speak, not to say any further, not to look any further, but to accept. And that disclosure of accepted becomes the criteria in the high drama for truth. For truth. That is to say, you want a definition for truth. Truth is meaning accepted under those unique conditions. It is this kind of certainty that ancient wisdom held as an axial dependability. There was no way to doubt it because it went deeper than doubt itself. True and false. Right and left. Hot and cold. Moist and dry. All of the list of the opposites. All long since vanished into that uniqueness that occurred once and only once. So that all the way, many thousands of years, sometimes tens of thousands of years, sometimes hundreds of thousands of years later, we need to remember that there are unique events in the universe, and they are just one acceptance away from a cosmic symmetry. And when they enter into our realm, our lives. This is a moment of the high regard for a hiatus of doing, for a suspension of thinking, for a deep regard, for silence, for a moment. As Virginia Woolf said in we're going to use to the lighthouse by her in our symbols section. She says in two of the lighthouse that though Mr. Ramsay was an archetypal philosophy professor specializing in logic, where he would go only one step at a time, and he had gotten through P and Q on the verge of getting to R, but he couldn't quite be sure, whereas Mrs. As Ramsey understood that there are moments of eternity that occur all of a sudden within time. And those eternal moments are a gifting. The Greek, the Greek term for the laying in of those moments of eternity into temporal situations, was called epiclesis. So that the highest wisdom forms were always those forms that were very close to completion and yet open still for that unique moment that would invite the perfection of the completion of the gifting of spontaneous gauge symmetry from the mysteriousness. Hence the archetypal Zen diagram, the sumi circle that begins with great vigor and ends with very precise, not closing. So too we'll see in our education, in the small, in the intermediate, and in the large, we use a language style and a form of understanding that does not close any boundary, but always leaves open so that those links. Have a capacity for acceptance. It's true. This places a burden upon us. The burden is we're very often not knowing. We're very often somewhat confused about everything. What is he saying? What's going on? What are we doing? Why do we come on Saturdays? But the fact is, is that by assiduously playing at this, we transcend the game liminalities of the situation and approach the mysterious dramatic potentials. And they're beyond the comedy and tragedy stages which most of our lives are entrapped in. In this highlight game between comedy and tragedy in this world, we become privy to being absorbed, truly absolved, into the greater ecology of mystery and differential history that finally we will understand yields a cosmos, a cosmos, as the Tao Te Ching says. Section 58 tuning into change. Presence administered. Subtle. Subtle. Presence. People. Simple. Simple yet. Administration. Prying. Prying. It's people. Grasping. Grasping. Misery. Oh, harmony. Flow phases support. Harmony are misery. It's phases happen on on who knows its limits. It never ceases. The norm becomes malformed. Goals become unpropitious Gen confused. Its day is assuredly long. Therefore spirit gen squares, but not injures. Angles but not hurts. Precise but not strict. Shining but not glossy. It's as much as I can do.