Nature 12

This is nature 12, and we're ready to reach a saturation with nature and make a transition to ritual. And the movement from nature to ritual is the most primordial transition that we can experience. In fact, it occurs before experience is able to happen. Ritual has the quality, as we will see, of existence in ritual comportment. Action deposits existence in a very special way. Existence always occurs. It never not occurs. Existence always is. And one of the most pernicious errors that our species is prone to, which we will make a point of today, is that you cannot factor what is not into what is. It doesn't compute. It is not rational. But this does not mean that you cannot factor zeros into sets with ones. And this is very difficult. I was searching earlier in the week for an image to convey this to you, of how zeros can be factored into life. And I was stepping into the Crescent Street post office in Beverly Hills, and they had a little. Bowl of individually wrapped life savers. Individual zeros. And I thought lavender and pink. Individual zeros happen in reality, but not in existence. So that zeros, when they are factored in, constitute an indispensable ordering of the real, but never participate in existence as an is not. And this is extremely difficult to follow. It's arcane to appreciate, and it is absolutely crucial. It's the difference between our survival and our extinction at this point of our history and our development. And this is why the language that I'm using to teach structures itself in generation around the poetic and not around a rhetoric, and that the watershed is best exemplified by a little apocryphal story I can tell you from the 1960s. One of my really good friends in the 1960s, an attorney named Richard Hodge, who as a young man from Wheeling, West Virginia, was the most spellbinding young preacher in that whole part of the United States for maybe a generation or so. He was an extraordinary extempore speaker, and by the time he was 15 or 16. He was on radio and Wheeling, West Virginia, and he was just cause celeb. He breezed through university. He went to law school at the University of Chicago and got a J.D. degree. And when he came out to the San Francisco area, he was immediately snapped up as a deputy district attorney and Contra Costa County. And within a couple of months, Charles Geary brought him into all the major cases the Huey Newton case, etc., and Dick Hoge became one of the most powerful lawyers in the whole San Francisco of the 1960s, not just because of his legal acumen and his wonderful contacts. He was the first one to sign the original rock bands to million plus dollar contracts when that was unheard of. He was the one who signed the Steve Miller Band with Capitol Capital Records to the first million dollar plus contract in recording history, before they even had recorded anything. But what was special about Deck Hodge was his ability to deliver a rhetorical address that was spellbinding. And remember one day he came in and he said, I've just been up to Ukiah with some friends, and I found the greatest speaker on the planet. He said, I was dazzled. And for weeks, every Sunday, he and a bunch of the young attorneys and rock stars would go up and listen to this guy. And the following year, when it hit the front pages around the world, it was a case in point. The great rhetorical speaker was Jim Jones, and his congregation ended up in the Jonestown Massacre in South America. There is a built in regression to rhetorical excellence that must be guarded against by patients, and by the peculiar qualities of a poetic man lives or dies on the basis of whether he can generate poetry. Oddly enough, it is poetry as a differential and integrating style of language that allows for man to be civilized in a nature which accepts him, but he would not be able to accept nature without his poetic and his rhetoric eventually, slowly and Honorably cements him, seals him, cuts him, abstracts him off from nature to the point to where he will commit suicide, even on a mass level of 900 plus people men, women, children, you name it. The problem is an ancient problem. And it has been faced by many of the classic civilizations in antiquity. And the two great examples that we are taking are the examples of the Chinese and of the Greek language civilizations. In the Chinese, which we'll look at for just a moment, the Chinese tradition was founded dynastically upon a poetic which is so ancient that its roots are lost in a Phantasmal era and the Shah dynasty, the first Chinese dynasty, is lost in what we call metaphorically, the mists of antiquity. Except that we know that in the Shah dynasty several symbols appear that were not there in Pre-dynastic China. One of them is the chariot. The other is the development of the initial appreciation of jade. And the third is the ability to work with metallurgy to the point to where there were the beginnings of making implements. So powerful was the metallurgical prowess that the first really great dynasty in China. The Shang. The Shang dynasty displayed the Shah dynasty in such a complete way that it almost obliterated the Shah. Origins of dynastic China and the Shang dynasty were military warlords who specialized in making bronze implements that expressed in very powerful, masque like decor. Their command. Their authority over existence. Their authority over life and the Shang dynasty was expected to last forever. The implements like the bronze tripods and the ting, the cauldrons. All of these Shang bronzes are the symbols of this great prowess of controlling the transformation of metals. Of the earliest kind of alchemy. And yet the Shang dynasty, after hundreds of years of uncontested authority, fell to people who had no respect for their military metallurgical authority whatsoever. The Zhou dynasty came in not on the wings of the transform of metals by an authoritarian human impress over nature, but by something as simple as sophisticated agricultural alchemy. The forerunner of the Zhou people was the Master of the grains that could be edible in China. Houchi and the Zhou dynasty, when it was founded, changed the whole way in which the Chinese civilization looked at transformation. It was no longer a transformation based upon man having a mandate from heaven to stamp his authority on nature, but on man recognizing that he was the bridge between heaven and earth, and that as an equanimity between heaven and earth, he participated in the exchange between heaven and earth, and in this way acquired his position in nature, and his position was not one of authority, but one of human hearted centeredness. Jen. And so the Chinese understanding of Jin as a third part of what needed to be kept track of. Yes, heaven has its dao and earth has its tay, but man has his Jin. And it is the human heartedness that lies at the very center, the apex of Zhou Dynasty China. And towards the end, when the Zhou dynasty had suffered a catastrophic failure after a couple of hundred years of dealing with propping up this failure, Confucius occurred. And in Confucius in the Lunyu and the Analects, the focus is on Jin, not to the exclusion of Dao, not to the exclusion of Tay, but as the synthesizing third the Factor, which brought taught as a set into play in terms of which man can live. And so the Confucius Kung-Fu Tzu, the Confucius emphasis upon Jen came to rest not so much in the Analects, but in two Confucian classics, the Great Learning and the Mean in Action. The mean in action is Man's Jen, active in a universe where Tao Te worked together, that while Tao and Tae work together universally, it is only in man's life that they work together when they are put into a set by man's Jen. And if we do not have the strategic perspicacity to keep taught grouped effectively together, then that binary will not work for man. And man becomes more and more estranged from nature, both from heaven and from earth. And tries to compensate it by those techniques of authority. Nature will obey us. Or, as Ahab says in Moby-Dick, man, I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. In the 21st century, our confreres on this planet have seemingly invincible power over nature. That we can mold things on the level of molecules and on the level of atoms. Corporations are writing their names in atoms on such electron microscopic bits of silicon has to be almost impossible to even conceive. And yet it can happen with all that, we are very close to extinction. We are just a few snaps of the finger away from eradicating ourselves as a species, because there is a compensation that happens when the zeros of Dao and the ones of Tae are not kept in a binary language, they tend to produce a bug list instead of a program. And when that bug list grows, it grows because of complexity. It used to be I remember, I remember the early computers in in Berkeley in the 1960s. Um, in some of the Lawrence laboratories, as some of the computer guys said, you know, we we're running into a problem. The more sophisticated and proliferation our activity, the longer and longer the bug lives, so that our errors grow geometrically while our capacity just grows arithmetically. And it took a readjustment in computer programming to get out of that bind. And one of the geniuses in that was a man named Dijkstra. And his manual of programming, when it came out in the mid 1970s, began with a chapter zero. You have to position your presence before you start your application, before you start your countdown, you have to be there. And being there is a matter of Dao, not of Tay. And if you are, then you are factoring in that binary set. Then the Tao Te worked together. Then Jen has an equanimity which is applicable. Otherwise, the mind takes over in a compensatory fantasy ization and finds more and more defects not only with nature, but in particular with others. They don't measure up, and I can't get anything done because of what you don't do. And eventually it even becomes self-reflective. Oh, I'm at fault. I can't measure up in the West. About the same time as Lao Tzu. To the figure in Greek language. Thought who came to deal with this was named Parmenides. In Plato, Plato's development I once did, a whole series of 27 lectures on Plato, took every dialogue, went through it patiently, outlined it patiently. This is the first 13. One of the most puzzling of all of Plato's dialogues is called Parmenides, and the Parmenides has within it philosophic conundrums that have to do with ones and zeros. It has to do in Parmenidean language with what is and with what isn't. And the crux of the whole orientation is that is and is not never occur existentially in the same way. Is not. Never is. So that there is a disjunctive ness to their polarity, which is important. And that man cannot imagine an it which is not, though he tries mentally discursively to do so all the time. That figure, when personified, becomes a golem, becomes a Frankenstein. And that is the most serious flaw in our species, because it's a flaw in the procedure of the symbolic integrating mind. And without differential conscious vision, counseling the mind not to go that way. Parmenides word actually means root. In the Parmenides, the goddess, um, the goddess of deep universal wisdom, tells Parmenides there are two roots, and one of those roots don't go. The other root, the root of what is. You can go and you can develop. But you need to develop a strategic sense of smarts about what's happening. And that strategic sense of smarts has to do with a language being founded on a poetic and not a rhetoric. One of the most difficult things to appreciate is that the temporarily precise rhetorical language that makes points, which you can understand now and you can confirm Then is a deception that reality cannot be pinned down ever. And to suppose that it was at any time is a fantasy position. In Parmenides, the goddess says there are two routes of inquiry. Only one of these attends upon truth. Only one of these achieves finally has the ability to achieve that truth. Where the division of pro and con no longer applies is no longer possible, and that the disjunctive ness. Is apparent. And at that particular point, what is revealed, what is disclosed, what is uncovered that should be accepted as truth. And it becomes truth upon acceptance that the undividable is this accepted becomes truth. It's not true in and of itself. It's true when it's accepted and the acceptance of it is our gen. Factoring in the zeros, factoring in the Dow, so that one of the deepest statements that can be made is that truth is meaning accepted. This is extremely difficult to apply in terms of a logic, because the conviction is that there must be an abstract standard by which true and false can be polarized and separated and sifted, and the error there is to insist that an is not has a place in some kind of designation which is countable and as realistic as the is. Parmenides says this cannot be, it cannot be. Not that Parmenides says it, but in his poem The Way of Truth, the goddess says this to old Parmenides and Plato. In his dialogue, the Parmenides has the young juvenile Socrates, whose major teacher was a woman. A Pythagorean named Diotima has him being tutored by the old Parmenides. The old Parmenides looked like a William Blake god. Long white hair, long white beard, flowing white robes, the mystic genius of a little town in ancient Greece. Ilia and the other great philosopher from that city was known as Zeno. He was the one who was credited with all the great paradoxes that if Achilles runs a race only half way, though, he's the fastest man alive. If he runs only halfway and stops and then runs halfway and stops, he will never finish the race. That there is an infinity of actuality. We would call it today. There is a fractal realism. That happens in ratio ING, and that this is a quality of the real and not an artifact of some idea of the mind, whereas the fact that one can cut so fine that it no longer counts. That the gap no longer will occur is a projection of the mind, which is an error that leads to all the tyrannies that there are. Man's authoritarian quality is convinced that this niggling little bit is a throwaway and that it doesn't count, whereas nature is exasperatingly exact. The zeros always count, and the closer that you get to them, the more they count. In the Parmenides, the goddess says. Of is not that. It's so definite that is not does not occur That discourse is unable to proceed in any kind of rational way if man insists on using it. This caused a tremendous splash in the Greek language mind, and it's evident everywhere, because when you look at classical Greek writers of the early fifth century like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus and Pythagoras, they never use a term which we know today as rhetoric. They never mention it. Their sense of what human beings do to rationally Understand reality is brought into a word poiesis. Poiesis is to make, to create poetic. We get from that. Whereas by the late fifth century, when you get into writers like Euripides or the beginnings of Aristotle, you begin to find that rhetoric occurs and occurs as the dominant form of certainty of education, and that the way in which one man becomes a certain is that he masters a rhetorical style, and by this art of persuasion brings into being the belief, the piestus, the certainty, the actuality. And all of this led to a brittle crystallization. Of the Greek psyche that broke the dialogue, where Plato brings it to the fore is called the Gorgias, and this great edition is by E.R. Dodds, who, when he realized what he was working with, went from Plato's Gorgias to The Bacchae of Euripides, which we will use later in the course. And in fact, he cemented these, cemented these two works together by a classic work, Greeks and the irrational. The Gorgias is a dialogue which concerns one of the greatest sophists of the age, a man who was assumed to be the shining star of Greek rationality, the new rationality where man really had the power over nature. And we don't have it. It doesn't exist now. But Gorgias was famous for doing a book on rhetoric and philosophy called On Not Being, on Not Being. And his basic contention was that there is a way to be persuasive by factoring in the not-being quality into one's presentational language mode, and that the important thing was to convince others persuasively on that. That was all that man really needed to keep his place in a rational society viable, and that nature would follow in this train. So close are the mysteries of rhetoric and poetry that in the standard works of Aristotle. Aristotle's rhetoric and his De Poetica are translated in the same volume they are put together. Aristotle's poetics is about one fifth the size of his rhetoric, because he was convinced of the rhetorical power, and indeed one finds in it that the power of man is that there is a rational craving for good, and as long as we can effectively persuade the best and brightest to go our way and that obtains, then that's the best of all possible worlds. And this is a delusion. And it's a delusion that led to an impasse. And the pride of the Aristotelian application of rhetoric was that, yes, it's good to recognize impasses, because then we can find a way out of those impasses and that this is the pride that goes before the fall never occurred to them. This is a extremely important kind of equality, and one which we're going to take a look at in some detail today. Later on in the Parmenides way of truth. The goddess tells man tells Parmenides has Parmenides say that there is a kind of a hubris. There is a kind of a pride that comes. To mortals knowing nothing, wander to headedly, and that this engenders a. The Greek phrase translates as a backward turning. We would call it regression, that a autonomic regressiveness sets in without man's mind even noticing that it has set in, because he has set it in motion with the conviction that this will balance the books. This will work that by expressing both is and is not together, that one overcomes The difficulties that there would be in the initial description that what is is and what isn't isn't. And that man becomes clever in ambiguity, thinking that this will suffice in nature because nature will not care. Whereas the mystery of nature is not at all synonymous nor real on the level of ambiguity. And that ambiguity really leads to a dismal swamp. That evokes the need for an authoritarian tyranny, both in the strong ego of the floundering individual and of the dictator, for the floundering state and on every level in between. And it is this error that is handled initially by not founding the educational language on a rhetoric, but on a poetry poetic. And so I use a poetry, I use a poetic language. And I've been trying for the last 12 weeks to disclose to you and sort of a gentle way, bit by bit, that this language has been developing for a long time and was refined enough to be able to carry and float the entire vision by 1966. And this is the kind of poetry and language that I used in 1966. This was a long poem called Saint Francis Matrix Sutra. It began with a reflection in the last third of our century, a time of prelude for the coming of interplanetary man and society, and thereafter of interstellar man. A gathering of wisdoms has been summoned. We have summoned ourselves to understand and to control the massive terror that is our inherited condition. That summons is continued with the careful language appropriate to the structure of character and of consciousness that is, of poetry. These structures also appear as an architectonic of a tradition that measures its cycle in much longer units than centuries, if in frequent moments they support that tradition rather than speak to our time, it is purely a question of final allegiance. And so, in the San Francisco of 1966, this kind of a poetry, this kind of a poetic, this type of marshalling of language was already available to your speaker. It began in a fashion more strict than you are used to. A sense are made researching into the phenomenology of the self. Fashioning the Quaternary circle. A strict formation of total freedom, and eventually found its way about two thirds of the way through to this kind of a paean to the city of San Francisco. Saint Francis was the patron saint of San Francisco, is the patron saint of city. 1966. O trembling towards a certain eagerness, nearing unknown sagas and interstellar epics, since I must burst into deep space with Apollo leaving this city of Saint Francis below, leaving the rooted ancestral planet behind. Leaving in the Atlantic. Blue morning leaving. We're leaving O city, what can I tell you of my struggling ways? Manifesting my particles from spirit waves in nuclear transformation. Still in progress, becoming vitalized in primeval plasma, proteins still jolting into process with night soft passion, achieving consciousness and now, even now, burst. I am a holy structure built with diverse converging. I leave my pacing at sunrise. But you must stay behind. O city. And so this education that you have, some 35 years later, is based upon at least a third of a century of complimentary, conscious and natural poetic language, exploring just how this might be, not by some master plan projected with authority, but by patiently learning and unlearning at the same time. It's a double process that, as we learn, we must unlearn at the same time. And it's almost as if the structure of DNA discloses the strategy, because the two strands of DNA move in opposite directions, a momenta opposite. They're not a reconciliation of opposites, but it's momentum that are opposite, but that the two strands do not occur in the classic mirror function of the way in which the Hermetic caduceus had them. That was an artifact of the abstract mind. It's an error. The two serpents do not come together in that kind of mirror fashion. That mirror mind is a deception based upon mentality instead of reality. In the Chinese tradition, the great classic critic of that was Huineng, the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism. The old Fifth Patriarch, Matsu, was dying, and he wanted to pass on his robe and bowl. And so he decided to hold a koan contest. And whoever could write the best short koan on enlightenment would receive the bowl and receive the robe and become the sixth patriarch. And of course, the senior monk wrote this beautiful koan that talked about how when the mind's mirror is cleaned of dust, the image will be pristinely pure. And the kitchen boy, Huineng, who was only about 14 years old, wrote underneath it in a scrawl. What mirror? The mind has no surface. And old Matsu saw it in the middle of the night, gave the robe and the bowl to the teenager, and told him to get out of town. The rest of the monks would kill him. And so he went for 35 years and lived as a day laborer, until finally he emerged and became the most poignant Chinese mind since Lao Tzu. There is no mirror, and the double helix of DNA moves in a parallel strand that has a regulated angle of 36. It's a 36 degree quality of incline, so that every ten repetitions, every set of ten, you come back not to a circle, but to a loop in a spiral. That wisdom works by a spiral structure that has a doubled quality, not a mirrored quality. And we'll come back to this after the break. What do we know so far in our education? We know that patience and not caution is an appreciation of nature. Caution sounds good, works bad. I was reading a a book the other day of a woman who works with level four viruses, the most deadly on the planet. And her teacher told her, it doesn't matter so much what you do in working with these viruses at this level, as long as you do it quickly. He who hesitates is lost for sure. We have come to understand that the mystery of nature appealed so much to primordial men and women that for uncounted Millions of years, the forerunners to our species and those who came from our species before us for hundreds of thousands of years, understood that when you shift into ritual, when you do what you do to live, the forms that work are forms that create a space of acceptance. Our machine is still working. Ominous sounds. So that patience rather than caution. And the patience is because forms of acceptance take a while to generate. You can't just grab and have it. In fact, you can never have it. If there's a lesson in patience, is that you can never have it so that it isn't that you put off patiently getting it until you have the right moment and then you grab it. Patience is a. In Sanskrit, the term is a paramita. It's a perfection. It's that you learn that you never grab it, but that you can cup a pair of hands and receive it so that life is always a gift. The mystery of nature is that life is always a gift. Not that life is rare and only happens on this planet, but that whenever it happens and it happens all the time, everywhere, distributed, coeval with the universe, it is always a gift because of the mystery of nature and that the forms that succeed in life are forms that can receive the gift of life. So we'll see that the wisdom in rituals for men and women, much more experienced than us with Primordiality was that they always took their time to make a strategy of acceptance permeate the entire structure of what they do. Even with that kind of caution, one can get sidetracked if you start counting from one instead of counting from zero. And it isn't. That one counts from zero so much, but that zero is a presence which gives a context so that starting has a finite beginning and a development, and a finite ending, or a finite transform. Whereas the conviction of the abstract mind is that you can count into infinity with impunity, and you cannot do that, it cannot be done, as the goddess tells Parmenides, it's impermissible. It doesn't happen. Nature doesn't work that way. That while there may be an infinitude of numbers, the wise thing is to put some ellipses and then put an n. To let the probabilities, though they are infinite, be expressed in a way in which they are recognizably infinite and not in some deceptive way, with duplicity assumed to be handled. The assumption that man can handle voids and infinities as if they were old news is a real danger for our generation. Voids and infinities are not handleable at all. And so it takes not a humility of caution, but a humility of patience. And this is what the mystery of nature teaches us. And so in education like this gives us the strategic sense to patiently build forms that hold acceptance, not that forms that hold authority. And that you can't build a bank account of authority and then expect to draw on that to even out life. It just isn't possible. One of the most sophisticated of all civilizations, The Chinese at the apex of their development at a critical period where finally the Zhou dynasty was about to give way and eventually became the Han dynasty. The Han were the Chinese Romans. Very powerful. Very powerful. But in between, the tail end of the Jo and the beginning of the Han was the most autocratic ruler in Chinese history. The man who made the Great Wall, the man who codified the Chinese classics into the examination system that lasted until 1911. It lasted over 2000 years, in which the ritual comportment of the best books, the Chinese classics, were put onto a sacred shelf. Everyone will study these and therefore we will have a homogenized quality of gauging value and excellence. And we will have only the best people in the top jobs according to this sieve. And having established that he burnt all the other books that were in China. The few copies that remained were kept surreptitiously out in the countryside and gave rise not to wisdom being at the court, but wisdom being out in rural places that no one ever goes to, that there are people out there who still know, who can still read. So difficult was the codification of the Chinese classics and so fraught with historical Difficulties. They were called Cheng. Cheng not meaning so much book like Shu, but Cheng meaning canons. These are the accepted texts and only these. And you will study these. And in that cycle, you will begin with the I-Ching. Go through the classics and come back to the I-Ching beginning and end. And how well do you do on those exams? That's your pecking order. Why is there a pecking order? Because there is a hierarchy that has one man at the top. The Emperor's service is the only socially real service there is. Everyone works for him. Why? Because the mandate of heaven only comes at one contact. Point him and him alone. And so the rationale for a universal dictator is flawed, wide and millennia deep. Even though all the cautions were put into place whenever there was a new universal emperor, he had to perform a pair of ceremonies the Feng and Shan ceremonies, to go to one of the five sacred mountains of China, usually to Tai Shan in the Shandong Peninsula area, and to go to the top alone and perform those ceremonies to receive the mandate of Heaven, and then to come down at the base of the mountain and give his code of rules to the people, because he carries the mandate of heaven and one understands a Moses like scenario going to the top of the sacred mountain alone, getting the royal commands and bringing those down and delivering them. And that in this codification. The whole authority, the whole hierarchy, seems to gain its place in its position. And yet there are mysteries involved in that, and most of them are mysteries of nature. Most of them are mysteries that have to do with the fact that you cannot factor Dao into the way in which Tae works. That binary set of one and zero works as a set, but it doesn't mean that you have commandeered zero. There's nothing like a individually wrapped life saver. Zero. That you have. You never have it. And that's why the forms of acceptance are always open. And that's why wise rituals by men and women are always graphic in terms of describing the coordinate locus, the locus of directions, the four directions on a plane, and opening those four directions on the plane to the zenith that if you do a dance sequence, it's shift to a dance sequence for a moment. The the ocean, the High Dharma, North American plains, sun dance ceremony, the ocean. The dances Searches are performed by societies, women's societies, and societies based on dances learned from like the prairie chicken or the most powerful of the societies, the the Horn society, the warrior men, the killers, the its Kenai. The only time that there is a dance for everyone together is as if that ocean, that sun dance ceremony, has been performed for seven days and the opening is assured. Then on the eighth day, the men and women can dance together. The whole tribe then can dance together because they dance in the space of acceptance that has been made before. But even though the masculine fraternity of the killers, the hunters who, when it comes to protecting life, are licensed to kill those each night when they come out in that masculine line with those crosiers, those staffs that are curled at the top. Those staffs are the emblem that they will kill, if necessary, to preserve the life of the people. And yet it is not the warrior men in their line who go through all of the ritual steps. They establish four times in each of the four directions, making a total of 16. They weave the plane of the surface of the planet together and present that to the sky. They open that, but the guarantor of that is the holy woman. It is the holy woman that guarantees that she hidden away outside of the circle of the teepees. She has made sure even before the ceremonies begun, even before the summer season. Of the ceremony has come. She made her pledge in the middle of winter. And it was her pledge. In the middle of winter. In the blizzards. The bleakness of February. That she first liked Jane Goodall observing. The chimpanzees in a moment of thunderstorm, torrential downpour. She writes that she simply stopped recording. She turned in upon herself. And it was just. It was endurance. But it isn't just endurance. There is a participation in the mystery of nature, and the classic word has come to be used in our English, and our time is presence. There is a presence that occurs. The presence does not occur in time. It occurs in a pause in time. A couplet from a poem I wrote once in the presence of the pause. The Holy Ghost steers the star chorus home. There is a quality where that presence that curls back from time, curls back from space, curls not into nothingness, but curls into the dough, curls into the zero ness. And that we occur. That the zero ness of reality does not harm us. That our structure is such that we can accept the astonishingly, blindingly torrential vastness of the void because we're osmotic with that kind of presence. And we say then that someone becomes spiritual because they become charged, charged because they've accepted into their structure that infinite openness. And so they have a charisma because of that, not because they have psychic energy, that their discipline has made some kind of metaphysical psychic energy which they throw into their body, and now they've got it. Wallace Stevens, in one of his poems, said, these are the kinds of heroes that time granulates dust. Well, Robert Soot, it's nothing less than nothing. There is a quality that we will come to see in ritual. Where, because the ones and zeros always occur as a set in the root of what is that? There's always both a balance and an exchange. And we'll see that one of the most primal of all qualities of good ritual is that it in genders, reciprocity. It's the exchange, the reciprocity. That's important because the reciprocity founds itself all the way down to the reciprocity between the one and the zero, and that primal binary set of what is. And in the completeness of the reciprocity, when everyone in that ceremony has a reciprocity with everyone else. That community, then, is the form of acceptance. And it's the community in that acceptance mode that receives the gift of life. So it isn't that a leader does this. A leader in reality can do nothing except for themselves. We see this filtered through a mentality that is so addicted to structures of authoritarian hierarchy that when the idea reoccurred 250 years ago, in the person of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that he could dissolve himself into an openness on Lake Geneva, where he didn't exist Anymore. He had rowed himself out onto Lake Geneva and this Titanic. A man of such intense honesty that Rousseau's confessions are one of the hallmarks on the planet of self. Divulgence of the actuality of one's character. Even deeper than Augustine's confessions. Rousseau's confessions are the most transparent disclosure, a lot of it uncomplimentary, a lot of it really grisly. Not for bad things that he did, but for the qualities of character that are unacceptable even to himself. But by disclosing all of that, Rousseau reached that general quality of bridging heaven and earth out there on Lake Geneva. And in the equanimity of that inhabited acceptance, Rousseau received as one does not only the gift of life, but the instantaneous penetration through a veil of ideation to the reality, the visionary reality beyond it. And out of that, out of that came the great philosophic works of Rousseau, challenging the hierarchies of collective authority. Who says, out of that came the social contract? Out of that came the whole tradition, that there is such a thing as the heroic human individual. Not that they are the leaders, but that they remind everyone to be reminded. On the whole development of Western revolutionary thought. The last 250 years owes itself to that genesis, right there in Lake Geneva. That Frenchman who was relentlessly honest to the point of almost to the point of vanishing from himself for a moment. And when he reoccurred when he precipitated out of that Zen, he was a different man, not totally different, radically different. And it took a while for it to work itself out. And one of the convictions that Rousseau came to at that time is a conviction just now gaining its parlance, is that the individual authority figure is also inadmissible in education, that the that the guru, the authority figure, the wise man or the wise woman, that wise person, that that is a limitation which is projected by the mind as if it were the final word, the ultimate pattern. And it's not that. What's deeper than that, much deeper than that is the one zero binary perennis, which means that the most effective education is done by a pair of teachers, teachers paired. And so being French got it that the archetype in the French language tradition for that pair of teachers that are possible were Abelard and Heloise, Heloise and Abelard in the 1100s. Abelard the most incredible logical mind of the century. In the 1100s, No one was more logical than Abelard. It was an incisive to the point of devastation. And Heloise. No one was more eloquently feminine, but also intellectually almost precocious. When the two of them fell in love, couldn't do anything about it. He was a priest. He was a monk. He couldn't do that. She was forced to become ensconced in a convent and to become a nun. And they were. They were held in this disjunctive ness by the social hierarchy. But their love continued in their letters to each other and matured. And so the letters of Heloise and Abelard are an archetype for the future of a pair of teachers, who are much more real in the honesty of the binary of actuality than any one individual. And Rousseau knew that one of the last letters that Abelard wrote to her, he said, I'm dying. And the monks and priests will carry my casket to be buried by the doorway of your convent. And when they come in front of the convent, I want you to rush out with your women and take possession of my coffin and my body, and take it into the convent and hide it. Because I want to be buried with you. And when you die, bury yourself with me in my coffin. And so, Rousseau, French genius as he was, wrote a fantastic novel that swept the age called The New Heloise, and at 600 pages blew out French society and was the direct spring out of which the French Revolution came. That those guys, no matter how powerful they are, are fictitious and are only there as long as we believe them. And by bullying back our beliefs, they lose the projective energy which they need to thrive on those vampire sons of bitches. Sorry for the language. Too much 60s. So those in authority, those hierarchies always have false enclaves of readjusting, of moving everything into new times. Just like in this previous decade, everything was computerized and everything is now cemented so that the computers are part of the hierarchy of power and authority, as if they were assimilable. They haven't read their Dijkstra. They don't get it. The same thing happened in China in the Han dynasty. There was a crisis. And in 51 BC, there was a conclave held by the powers of the Han dynasty. All the Erudites were brought together. Their number was fixed at 12. 12 literati who handled the classics, which were the basis of the universal examination that were the key to the dynastic hierarchy that lasted, no matter what dynasty was in power for over 2000 years. The Comprehensive discussions in the White Tiger Hall is an English translation published in Leiden, A Netherlands 19 early 1950s, two volumes. Hard to find. Nobody reads them anymore. Hardly anyone. But if you want to know, then you find out what are these things. And you go and get them, and you work them in and out of these discussions. In the White Tiger Hall, 51 through 76 BC, came a quality of realization that there was something missing in the authority. And what was missing in that authority was that language has, like nature, a mystery in it. And by 302 A.D., a man named Lu Kai wrote a book on the art of letters. The Wen Fu fu was a poetic form, an extended poetic form like My Saint Francis. Matrix Sutra is a fu in American English. When is the tradition of letters the learned sense of language not learned, so that you know the footnotes, but learned so that you know enough to put the books down and live out, discovering the resonances of what you were able to read and write. That those further resonances are where the ones and the zeros come into play as like a tuning fork. And in Lucy's when fu in 302 AD, the realization was that there is a powerful mystery in nature which resurfaces because nature and myth are parallels. They're like the double strands of the DNA. They don't cycle, and a reconciliation of opposites like that in some mirror clever metaphysics. All of that is junk. It never would go anywhere. You can't go anywhere with that. But when they course together. The old saying used to be like falcons that hunt together because falcons always hunt in pairs. When they flow in a pair like that together, Tao and Tae. Balance themselves on the axial presence of our gen. Our human heartedness makes an axial basis upon which Tao Te finds a way to continue its cycling and includes us. But the mystery is that this is not a structure that has a plan. It's a mystery that's disclosed by it happening. And if it doesn't happen, then nothing is disclosed. So that the emphasis in life is that one must live it. What is the secret of life? You must live life. And when you live life and have this quality of factoring in the mystery of airing out. So there are osmotic processes that happen, then coursing through one. Are these gifts? Gifts of life. Gifts of intuition. Gifts of realization. In China, about 150 years or so after Lucy's Wenfu at a critical period, Period in Chinese history. The period of the Three Kingdoms. From which comes the great epic novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Comes the literary mind and the carving of dragons, a raising of the Wen Fu tradition all the way back to its genius that it had a thousand years from this and Lao Tzu, and for the first time in a thousand years, instead of there being just 1 or 2 hermits out in the wilderness who could read Lao Tzu, there was suddenly a population of men and women who could read Lao Tzu and did and set up utopian communities in the Chinese mountainous communities in Sichuan. And they were a threat to the whole structure of authority, because they were showing that life works very well without these dynastic authority structures. They were utopian communities, communes that were working. And of course, were seen as a threat. But they were also seen as a promise. And there's always a figure who tries somehow to factor the cure back into the disease. And the man who brought this great movement in sophistication brought the Dow back into dynastic form to try and make a disclosure form, make an acceptance form, a dynasty that would be open on a monumental scale. Was the founder of the Tang dynasty, and the Tang Dynasty is like the apex of sophisticated Chinese civilization set up by Tang Taizong, whose name was Li Shimin, who came from the same family as Lear, who was Lao Tzu. And the poetic. Upon which all that was based became manifested in the poetry of Li Po. And Li Po's poetic syntax in Chinese is one of the finest ever made. If you go to the Greek language tradition to try to find a poet who speaks as comprehensive with mystery as Li Po and Chinese, you go back to Pindar or Aeschylus. You can't find it later, because the later Greek language mind is so compromised by Chilean ism by sophistic cleverness that it can no longer presents itself patiently enough to have a penetration into the mystery of nature. What they have instead are more and more elaborate ceremonies of reconstructing the metaphysical expectations of what you need to be awed. And of course, that's insufficient to live by. It was apparent to Greeks in Greek civilization that this crisis had happened and was there, but it was not apparent at all to the conquerors of the Greek civilization, the Romans. They swallowed the thing whole, and they never knew that they had swallowed poison bait. So when the Latin language Which mind matured with all the expectations of that classical Greek sophistic hubris. It became the Roman Empire, and they thought that they had it covered. And especially they thought they had poetic language covered. No one was more careful than Augustus Caesar. He was very careful. He had Virgil commandeer all the epic, poetic language of the time in the Aeneid. He recognized through good advisors that a poetic not only does poetry, but it does prophecy. All visionary language, all magical language. Works by a poetic works by a transform. And so prophetic visionary language also had to be commandeered, and Augustus Caesar took care of that too. All the prophetic writings in the Roman world were gathered together in Rome in one place, in the forum, in one single place, one temple on the Capitoline Hill, and it was penalty of death for anyone to have any scraps of prophetic writing. We have a monopoly on it, and we will tell you what is sacred in our time. Meantime, you must be cautious that you don't offend us. And all of that happened. All of that really happened 2000 years ago. And we talked a few weeks ago about how Ovid pulled the plug on that whole thing by showing that there's not just an Aeneid possible as an epic basis of civilization, but there's something called the mystery of nature that works itself out in metamorphoses, in linked transformations, and that those linked transformations work not by rhetorical authority, but by free poetic. And though they exiled Ovid to the farthest reaches of the Black Sea, he never set foot in civilized land again. He was exiled to barbarian lands, meaning people who didn't speak the language so that he couldn't talk to anyone. Do you get it? They couldn't read him. He was exiled to a life of gibberish, which was the worst penalty, much worse than death, because he had challenged the authority of their commandeering language and their hierarchy. What's the essence of the devil? Not that he sins. It's not the devil because he has sex or because he gambles or drinks or whatever. He's the devil because he lies. The liar. Because that opposite of truth is the lie. And if you are imbued, addicted to the taste of lies, you will never find the truth. Because there's no way in which to find the truth. And so the hierarchy, the authority, is preserved pristinely forever. Or so they thought. It's only good until someone cracks the form. And it's a peculiarity of this universe that it only takes one person to crack the form, and the form will never again hold energy. And so when Apuleius wrote The Golden Ass, the transformations of Ovid put into a picaresque Rest mode about 130 AD. Applies transformations. Flicked the whole Roman ecology of state language with a little minor pinprick, from which it never recovered. And a contemporary of Apollonius was Valentinus in Alexandria. And right away you begin to get a transcendental, otherworldly kind of Gnostic mythology that even though in itself was a kind of a metaphysic, or, as Madame Blavatsky used to call it, a metaphysic. It starts out really big, and by the time the evening is over, there's no taste. Why? Because those closed circles Vanish and pale, and you have to have a new a renewed fix in order to keep the taste there. That's the addictive part of it. And so that kind of power only survives as long as people keep wanting it. And as soon as people don't want it, they lose the taste for it. And there's nothing that crumbles an empire faster than a population of people who are bored with it. That's how we'll get out. We just won't care that they have all the power in the world. We'll just go and live a different way. More next week.