Ritual 1

I hear by the sound of the machines that they're ready for ritual one. I'm trying to step up the energy and the pace, and with ritual, we come to a new level. It's a different phase from nature. Part of what happens in ritual is that the changes of nature become living action. Living action. So that ritual has to do not with something imprisoning, but with something life releasing. And as usual, the modern world has its topsy turvy. And it's curious because at the very end of an aeon like we are living through, it not only is topsy turvy, but it's backwards so that you get in a period of social degeneration, like we have something which is diagonally wrong. It's wrong on two different scores. It's coordinates on the plane of imagery are exactly opposite and reversed from what is real and what is true. And so we have a very curious condition in our time. In order to understand ritual, I have to be very cautious, to present it in such a way that the stereotypes do not come into play. But the stereotypes could come into play from two different kinds of angles. And so it's a delicate presentation for me and for you, because you must attend, as I attend to the emergence of our concern and not to label it as some kind of subject, we're not going to study rituals. We're not interested in that. What we are interested in, and you can signal those people outside, if they want to come in, they can come in. What we are interested in is the quality of emergence into existence. How does one occur out of zero? And why is it that one occurs whole and not in some partiality, some graduated fractional. Though one has a fractal differentiation, it doesn't have a fractional emergence. It emerges whole, so that the most convenient traditional phrase is that existence is. And that there is no such thing as non-existence. The is not has no state of existence even in a partiality. When it came time for the culturally deprived, ideational, ignorant Christian Middle Ages to present its strongest symbols, like in the illuminated Celtic Irish texts of the eighth and ninth centuries, say the Book of Kells, which is the greatest of them. The way that evil was presented was never in the symbolic page, never on the page. Evil was presented in the margins as a demon, which looked like a burnt out stick figure. It had no flesh. It had no vitality whatsoever. So that the understanding was that evil is actually an appearance which vanishes into nothing and does not occur in life at all except in illusion, by mistaking appearance for reality, and that the greatest appearance for reality evil is to conceive that life ends with death. And that death is opposed then to life, and that life is something and death is something, and that in this polarity we struggle in a losing battle because we all must die. This kind of pessimism is an ISM and never obtained for primordial man. Men and women in primordial conditions never believed in death, nor recognized that death was an opposite to life, nor further pessimistically in a pessimism that death controls the destinies of life, that all things must die. The clear occurrence from nature is that life occurs and reoccurs again and again, world without end, so that the concern ritually of men and women on the primordial level was not to overcome death. But To sacrifice a portion of life in sympathy, in recognition, in invitation by participation, that life should return again. And so, one of the earliest of the writers who took issue with the idea that especially human sacrifice was an evil io. James and the Origins of Sacrifice, done in 1933. He has in his final chapter The Institution of Sacrifice, an interesting statement. The fundamental principle throughout is the same the giving of life to promote or preserve life, Death being merely a means of liberating vitality. Consequently, the destruction of the victim, to which many writers have given a central position in the rite, assumes a position of secondary importance in comparison with the transmission of the soul substance to the supernatural being to whom it is offered. This may be done simply by applying the blood to a sacred stone or pouring it out at its base, or an altar may be erected and a priest employed to make the presentation according to prescribed rites and so forth. So that the misconceptions that our culture and our degenerate civilization have at this particular juncture are inside out and backwards. And the fearfulness that occurs both in life and at the liminality of its transition is mistaken for a death abyss from which one must cringe. One of the most charming things that Joseph Campbell said about mythology was that it must include the invitation to go to a beyond death realm, to get us to agree to go. Uh, this is a an interesting and rhetorical presentation of a deeper and more profound actuality. Rituals are concerned with existence. Not existence vis a vis non-existence, But existence vis a vis cycling return, so that the return cycle has a quality primordially of being eternal, and one of the most interesting of all the books to come out of the period from the 40s through the 70s, a period in which the 20th century was taken up with psychological, um, imagery and psychologizing spirituality. In that time period, one of the most interesting books was by Mircea Eliade called The Eternal Return, and later on in the course next year, we'll take a look at, um, some of Eliade's work when we get to history. Because the problem of eternal return becomes a mythic resistance which forbids historical maturity from happening. And so, in a very paradoxical thing, what is absolutely indispensable in the integral cycle of our existence. And of maturation and a cosmological personal way. And so all of the traits that our education is able to delineate in ritual, myth and symbol in these next three great phases, all of those characteristic traits must be held lightly, because all of them must be let go. And one of the most enduring qualities of courage in consciousness is to understand that you do not let them go into oblivion, but you let them go. From being crutches, which before in an integral way, they were not crutches, they were life supporting. But when it comes to differentiation, the life supports become crutches and must be let go. So that one comes to a very deep wisdom in the e jing, one of the reoccurring phrases constantly peppered throughout the text. Heaven suspends its emblems that the symbols of integration. Celestially are suspended. They have no connection and no supports. They only have a connection de facto. When we must pay attention to images and symbols, then they must be connected for our tutorial experience to mature to a point of transformation where we can look with clearer, more penetrating vision and see that there are no lines connecting anything. That the cosmos has a suspended matrix held together by harmonies and resonance, and not by the sticks and lines and joints and glue. To use a 1940s simile, the cosmos is not a tinkertoy construct. But the ego never has confidence beyond the tinkertoy level. The ego insists that what's practical is that things must touch, they must be joined, and you can't have something suspended. You've got to have something underneath it, holding it up. And so the ego's idea of identity is something which is held up because it's post and beam rooted to the ground. Only mature consciousness understands that the ground is part of a 7948 mile diameter body that's suspended in space, and there's there are no post and beams holding the earth up at all, nor the sun, and especially not the stars. Today's title is Star Bearer's Bears, star bears. And it comes from the two great star constellations around the North Pole the Big Dipper, Ursa major and the Little Dipper. Ursa minor. And those two bears. The Big Bear and the Little Bear. The mama bear and the baby bear hold as parentheses the North pole. The North star. Polaris. Only man has been mature long enough so that his tradition includes a symbolic expression which shows that our North Star, Polaris, nicely held between the two bears, Theirs was not always the North Star. In fact, some 5000 years ago, the North Star was a star called Thuban. And so certain was man's wisdom at that time that all of the great Pyramids, Cheops and Kephren have passages at just the precise angle, so that at the equinox of spring, through bans, light shines all the way down to the sarcophagus in the center of the pyramid. Not the sun, not the moon, but the North Star, the polar star, which when those pyramids were built, the polar star was too bad. And one of the peculiar qualities is that Thuban is in a constellation called Draco, and Draco is the dragon. And this dragon has a sinuous motion that curls around an area that doesn't have a star, but it has a locus of no dimension. And that locus of no dimension is also a pole. But it's a pole. Not for the Earth. It's a pole for the stars, arranged in a celestial equator, a circle that has its center where the head of the dragon curls around and looks back at the body. And that ecliptic center is the center of the path of the zodiac, so that the star patterns of the zodiac had an ecliptic center, which was the north pole of the celestial pattern. And that north pole of the celestial pattern remains there, where the head of the dragon curves around. There are five stars that hold a position like this. And those five stars at the head of the dragon. The Arabs, in their lore, used to call that the five camels, or sometimes the principal dancer and the four stars as the the lute players who play for the principal dancer and that principal dancer. That's the point of the head of the dragon that holds the whole celestial pattern together. That star was named in Arabic Al-raqqa's or in Latin, Arrakis. And if you read Frank Herbert's great science fiction epic Dune, Dune's name as a planet was Arrakis was from that. That dragon, that constellation of the dragon of Draco in ancient Sumerian mythological cosmology, was once united to another serpentine, um, constellation. That constellation now called Hydra, and that those two serpents were in fact one great serpent that was a serpent of chaos, that had the entire ribbon of the celestial order swallowed within it, so that it was not available for men to differentiate at all. And that ancient Sumerian chaos god goddess was called Tiamat and the hero Marduk. His great task was not to slay that primordial serpent, but to cut that serpent into two. To take the unity of the Primordiality and to portion it out into a Paradise. And when Marduk cut in two Tiamat, Draco curled around the North Pole and Hydra curled around the equatorial circle, so that one then had an equatorial circle and a North Pole. And for the first time you had an order to the universe because of the action, heroic action of man, that there was now a coordinate system. There was a zenith coming down to an equator and supposedly hidden from man, a nadir in the netherworld like the zenith, so that the equatorial zodiac was the horizon of existence. And underneath was life after death, and above was celestial life. And on the plane, the planet, the plane of the equatorial quality was life. On Earth. Our life was an interface between the celestial heavens and the nether world that was hidden from us, so that our life took place upon a plane, which was a liminality created by two halves of a single sphere that came together, and that only as long as man was capable of sacrificing were those two spheres of the netherworld and the celestial world, held together so that life was real. Because of those two halves, those two hemispheres were not held together. Then they would fly apart and life would have no place to be. Existence for us would have no place to be rooted. And ritual is concerned with this kind of primordiality. It's not about sex. It's not even about food. It's about reality. It's about reality manifesting ritually in existence. The. The first thing. Before a nice night out. Before a good meal. Even before air existence must be assured. It's the most primordiality. And that's what all of this is about. Ritual is about ensuring that man, as he lives, continues to remember to put the members and elements of the rituals back together, so that his part in this ecology of the real is held in place. And so the remembering re Hyphen membrane is the most primordial quality of ritual, and it has nothing to do with memory as some kind of intellectual function. It has everything to do with the function of the body regaining wholeness that the members of the body regain a vitality in existence. And so the archaic resurrection mythology of the Egyptians, who built those pyramids, letting Thuban come in at the appropriate time to the sarcophagus. Their understanding was that Osiris is put back together. He is not killed and that's it. He is dismembered and must be remembered, and that only ISIS can do that. Nature gives the gift of life, but the goddess ISIS gives the gift of remembering life so that it reoccurs so that rebirth, resurrection is a feminine function. And it's curious because in most primordial ritual comportments, the Big Dipper is a feminine bear. The mother bear in Greek mythology was Callisto. Callisto. And Callisto, because of accepting the embraces of Zeus, angered one of the goddesses who wanted her to be eternally punished, and Zeus, who cared for her, put her in the heavens and she revolves in a cycle throughout the year, in a cycle of being supine and then being upright, and then being on her back and then coming back around. And this eternal quality of the great feminine bear and her integrity is that the base, the base of the Big Dipper, the two brightest stars, the Alpha and the beta, uh, Ursula, Ursa major, always point to the North Star. That is, they point to the North Star at the time in which that ritual transformation shifted from Thuban to Polaris. And there is a quality where one begins to understand that it's difficult to talk about rituals without myth. And yet we have to do that because if we confuse the mythology with the ritual, we will never understand ritual. And so one of my deepest qualities here is to present ritual without, with a minimum of recourse to myth and symbol, to let the ritual occur and develop itself without recourse to telling the myths or firming them up in some integral with the symbols, and to present the ritual without the symbol. Knowledge is very difficult to present. The myth, um material later than the ritual is very difficult and yet Sacrifice. Sacrifice means making sacred prayer and sacrifice are a ritual comportment long before any language blossoms or any symbols are known. One of the simplest ways of understanding this is a Tibetan hand prayer wheel. This was given to me about 25 years ago by a member of the Sakya clan, who in Nepal are the ones, the only ones authorized to make prayer wheels. Only the Sakya clan can make prayer wheels, and inside, as a prayer is a mantra. You do not have to know what that is. It is the ritual action of the spinning, of the recycling of the recycling and recycling. It's that ritual action that generates the resonance of the holy, that makes the sacred part of the frequency of existence, so that a time space becomes blessed by the ritual action, the ritual comportment, because its waves, its frequency, its energy, vitalizes time, space into a holy life, not a holy life as opposed to a profane life. All life is holy. Albert Schweitzer used to have a little sign at Lambarene. Respect for all life is observed here. And when people would come from Europe to visit Schweitzer at Lambarene. They were always sort of put off by the fact that what happened there was that all of the sick and disease people were brought there to be tended to, that Schweitzer was, in fact, a doctor, and he dealt with death and disease all the time, and that there the healthy people left Lambarene, and that Lambarene was a site of the courage of life to engage the diseased and the dead with respect, because the point was that the death was not real, that the vitality of life can be transformed in such a way that it carries itself through and comes back again. And Schweitzer was profound enough to be able to to understand this and do this. He also was one of the first. People or at the very dawn of the 20th century. He was the most outstanding European theologian of his time, and he spent his time writing a book called In Quest of the Historical Jesus. And he found when he published that in 1900, at the same time that, um, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, Schweitzer's book on the quest for the historical Jesus, found that Jesus as a man was unknown, that the Christ mythology and symbolism so overlaid the Existentiality that there was no way to know a historical Jesus, because the man did not occur and exist in the civilization that claimed that that was its Center and Schweitzer had a crisis of consciousness, and he quit being a minister. And he went to study medicine. And when he achieved his medical knowledge and degree, he camped out at the edge of European civilization. He went to Africa because he found that was as far as European civilization. European Islamic civilization extended. And Lambarene was right on the edge of the liminality of civilization. And that's where he camped out to explore the sacrifice that made existence holy again, participated in the rituals that brought back by a prophetic openness that life would reoccur again in all of its reality. And here, in 2000, 100 years later. Exactly. That's possible now. Just now. Possible for the first time. A long time. When Marduk cuts that primal serpent in two, a pair not into half. That's a misstatement. That's a mythological mythology, which is a misstatement. It's that the unity, the T of existence achieves a separateness. One of the pairs is circular and equatorial. The other pair is zenith and polar. And because the polar has not only it's paired with the equatorial, But that zenith polar has a hidden polar polarity with the nadir, so that the North Pole invites that there must be. There should be. In fact, there is a South Pole. So that the pole is not just a pole. The pole is an axial, an axis, so that the center of the equatorial plane is not just a point above it, but is an axial centrality. It's a core. Sometimes it's called a soul core that goes all the way through the plane. But we know from our investigation of nature that a line has a beginning, a middle and an end, and that the natural Seriousness. The deep truth of a line is that it's not a line, but that it's a vector. It's a movement. It's not a movement of the point. It's not a dot that moves, that makes a line. A line is connecting the dots. It has a geometric. It has a liminality has its own place. And we'll see. It has its place in symbols, has its place in the mind. But in the mystery of nature, there are no lines. Mother nature doesn't connect dots at all, ever. She doesn't have to. And that that vector, that axial reality in the mystery of nature extends even beyond the so-called poles. For us, it's a line between the North Pole and the South Pole, but in actuality, there's an axiality that extends infinitely indefinitely. And because it's axial, it means the equatorial plane is not static at all, but rotates. And that that rotational energy is generated in harmony with that axiality so that there is a quality of mysteriousness where the rotation has within it a quality in life of having slight. We call them now because of mathematical physics, we call them perturbations means there's slight inconsistencies and those slight inconsistencies go all the way back to the origin of the universe. They're sometimes called density. Variance. The primordial plasma fireball congeals into galaxies and stars and planets because it initially had those kinds of density propensities. Otherwise, there would be no matter. There would be nothing like protons, neutrons, electrons, planets, and galaxies. All of that comes because of a slight out of phase reality. And because the reality is slightly out of phase, it's out of phase in a pair of ways. It wobbles up a little bit and it wobbles down a little bit. And the up wave and the down waves coming together form the polarity that cinches matter into being. So existence wouldn't occur without that. So that the deep ritual wisdom was always that there are two different waves that go together to weave energy. There's an ascending wave and a descending wave, and when they come together and weave together, that gives you the ribbon of the real. And that you can't know that sitting quietly and lecturing. You have to get up and dance. But you can't dance in some abstract way or with earphones, listening to the latest rap stuff that the rhythm in that dance, that ritual comportment has a primordiality, and that the cue comes from the stars, and that the way in which the stars move in a pair of rhythms, ascending and descending like an energy frequency, also then occurs on Earth, and when it occurs on Earth in us in that way, then heaven and earth are annealed together by our sacrifice of contributing our participation. And life is real. Life is real on the level at which we are able to live and be ourselves and have our being. And that ascending and descending wave has something to do with the sinuousness of the dragon, and not only the dragon of Draco and Her pair in the great Earth equatorial circling of Hydra. But that that primordial oneness of that dragon is there in the Milky Way, and that the great Milky Way, which runs in a great diagonal to the coordinates that we have here with our equator, our sun zodiac, and our sun zodiac oriented plane of the ecliptic is diagonally cut by the Milky Way, so that we see the original primordial dragon in the Milky Way against the starry expanse. And one can see, almost like some great heavenly bonfire in some hidden horizon far from us. The smoke from that bonfire arises as the Milky Way in the night. And that that if you kept track of the Milky Way's movement during the course of an entire year and its sinuous movement, there is a hump in that dragon's body that approaches closest to the North Pole and approaches just once during the year, and that's during the spring, and that the spring equinox. You could draw a line from Polaris to the Milky Way Dragon. That would be the shortest line in the whole year. And that's how you know when the year begins. But you have to be able to look at the starry expanse for several million years to be able to see that and know that. And we'll come back. To our pair of books to begin ritual, Black Elk Speaks and Sandpaintings from the Navajo shooting chant. Gladys Reichard and John Neihardt's rendition of Black Elk speaking, and we'll come to those in detail next week. One of the deepest qualities from Black Elk's people, he's Sioux, Oglala Sioux, the High Plains Indians, a very hugely developed and one of the books of the Oglala ritual. That's one of the very best by a man named William K powers Uep. It's on the sweat lodge. It's interesting to note that when the sweat lodge and the traditional wisdom sweat lodge was 100 willows, that the 100 willow sweat lodge being woven and put together over a pit where there should be a fire. But in the ancient tradition, there was no fire there. There was a space so that there was a hole where there should be a fire. And that earth that was cut out of that hole was taken 100 steps away in the appropriate direction to the east. And mounded there. So at this hole and that mound were a pair. And on that mound. Was where the refining fire was, the refining fire, which was tended by a holy woman. And what she cooked, there were stones. So she heated the nourishment of the uep, which was stone raised to heat hot stones which were individually carried by a ladle back, and placed in the hole in the middle of the sweat lodge. So that the men in the sweat lodge arranged around, usually arranged from the left. Sunwise motion. And the ritual point man. The ritual leader. Would take pinches of sweet grass and place them on the hot stones, and then ladle water, and the steam from the water would make the sweat lodge. None of those men made that fire. None of them attended to or sustained the fire that heated the stones. That was done outside so that this line, this openness, this path that was not a line, it was not a paved path. It was just the vector made by walking to and fro. So that the heat of the centre came from a paired complement to the whole. And in a way, this is always a quality of primordial reality in its ritual comportment. And next week we'll take a look at the at the Agni ritual. The fire ritual of ancient Vedic India has very similar intelligence. So that the only element that one can bring to such a situation, the ancient yogic teaching in India is quite clear. The only thing that you can bring is fuel. Not food. Not the heat. But fuel for that fire. And so the earliest Upanishads or the great Brahmanas talk about fuel in this way, that all that you can bring is the fuel for the fire, for that process to occur. And that is a part of your sacrifice to bring that fuel, your reappearing, your reoccurring here on Saturdays is your fuel. That's your commitment. That's your dedication. And my complement to that is being here in a very trustworthy fashion. Continuously. I've been doing these Saturday mornings for thousand Saturdays in a row without a break, but they're not in a row. If you take a look at the motion of the planet going around the sun and the whole star system moving with many other star systems through a galactic dimension, there are great spirals of complexity that have occurred in that generation. And my tapas, my yoga of doing this continuously is so that your fuel will always have a fire, and that that refining fire made by us together really occurs. There are many ways to do this in a grand style and make lots of money. Make lots of disciples. Big time stuff. It's irrelevant to the generation of reality. It doesn't matter how small it is. One candle in the darkness of the universe shines so bright it can be seen 10 billion years away. It's not about size, and it's not about efficiency. It's not about fame. And it's not about attracting people so that when they come, they get knocked out and stay. People knock themselves out for ten minutes and then drift on to something else. That's the nature of this age. This is the most degenerate that this planet has ever had. People are more ignorant now than they ever have been at any time in the past, or will be at any time in the future. This is a nadir of stupidity. It is a gross beyond belief. And the childishness? The lunge for identification is so gross that even the rocks are embarrassed to be in the same existence. And so the rocks turn away. We're looking at ritual in a comportment. Comportment of of activity, of action. And that that activity has an interpenetration of energy waves that weave together to make a texture of frequency. And in order to help us ritually to establish this To allow for the emergence of that polarity to record. Really, we have a mask assignment, a pair of masks, and this pair of masks objectifies because ritual is all about objectifying, of making objectivity, of making a recording of the movement of time and the dimensions of blossoming space into a an existence where life can vivify it and reality occurs. And to help establish for us in our learning. We're going to make a pair of masks. One of them is a mask of food. As fuel for the body that comes in. The other is a mask of feeling, which is the body radiating out. The emission and the absorption of nutrition and of feeling. So that mask of food should be first and a month from now, by the time of ritual five, all of those who are participating bring your mask of food and then a cycle, a lunar cycle later, a month later, at the time of ritual nine will have the mask of feeling. And then for what would be ritual 13 a month later, which is the interval. Interval two will pair. All of the mask will bring all of the masks together. Now those masks, what do they objectify? They objectify the way in which a wave of ascendancy and a wave of descendancy interpenetrate together and make a ribbon of the real, which is not a line. The kind of ideation that geometric sizes. Nature and existence and feeling and imagery and symbols into lines is diagrammatic and deceptive. Diagrams are only useful as approximation tools. The map is not the territory. And what we're doing as we're generating something in actual actuality rather than just ideation. So that that mask of food. Should be the face of that of that foodstuff. Watermelon, corn, whatever. Your choice. It should give a face, not a personification. That's a very inept word. It's a deceptive word. Personification. It infers that person hood person ness is an adjectival Adjunct to some kind of identification, and all of that is spurious. None of that is real. None of that is ever true. And to search for an identity is fool's gold. It's irrelevant what identity one could determine or find. Identity is something that the soi disant otherness projects onto you. And you believe that that must be me. That I have certain numbers tattooed on my skin. And I'm number 864 B. That is truly robotic nonsense. We are not the identities assigned to us by any level of societal complication whatsoever. We are not even our names, except as actors. And in a very deep way, that mask of food helps us to objectify without personification, and the mask of feeling brings the brightness of that objectivity into evidence, an evidence which then can be considered later, and we will later in our education, have amplitude for considering in many phases of sophistication what we have achieved, what we have done, what we have midwifed into emergence. And by the time we reach the history section late next year, late in 2001, we will have an opportunity to differentiate the very process that has beggared the civilization that died and shredded itself when we were young in our own lifetimes. Because the ultimate enemy of these kinds of forms is the historical process. Because as mysterious as nature is, as oceanic, as mythic language is as transcendentally, effervescent as vision is. History is a more powerful process. And to mistake it for some kind of chronological metronome that dates things that are dead and gone, as in the current phrase your history is an ignorance of unbelievable effrontery. It is looking towards that engagement with history that we save our masks, we save the written expression of our walks and all of the other projects and all of the other designs and things that we will do writing haiku, making paintings, many different things. We save all of this so that we will have materia upon which to do our histories. Because the assignment in history is to write a history of the previous two years. And if you're attentive to it at all in any kind of composition, you realize that history being the seventh section, it means that if you have assiduously done the inquiry journey of the course, that by the time of the end of history you will have had seven quarters, and it will mean that the three months before you began this course is a part of the history, so that there is a precise there's a presage of a season before you came in, before you knew that you were going to be here, which also counts, though we didn't know at the time how to count it, which means that things are not only what they are statically, but they are in their ecology of occurrence and also in the resonance, so that the resonance of something consciously is a part of the ecology of its integral. And understanding this graduates us from counting ritually and from arithmetic symbolically. To that great art, which was known by its title 2500 years ago, as the people who followed it were called mathematicae. Those who know, and only the mathematicae, have any differential spectrum upon which to suspend themselves to deal with the ocean of history. Egos have no chance whatsoever, because they're not even in the game. In fact, because egos take it as a game, they become. Two bit players in arcade games and cannot even deal with vision, much less history. And so everything becomes reduced down to a level where arcade games can happen. And that is regressive mythologies posited into pseudo rituals. And so one ends up by thinking that if you burn the right color and number of candles, you can stop the sun from rising. The ridiculousness is beyond belief. And in a way, when we're coming from this stance, from the beginnings of the mystery of nature into ritual, We come with great respect for ritual, but when it flows, Regressively ritual becomes a repository of all the stupidity of pseudonyms. And so there is a great paradox that the very actuality that is deeply objective of the root of existence becomes the place where all of the pseudo appearance also lodges itself. So that the real becomes covered by a patina of false paint. And one of the most profound spiritual collections of poems from the first century of the Common ERA, the first century AD. The Odes of Solomon, written in Alexandria by some very high derma arcane early seer in the 13th ode of Solomon says, go to a mirror. And now, looking at yourself there, wipe the paint from your face. And when you do, you will find an openness unsuspected by you. And when you see in the openness unsuspected by you, someone else's face, then you will understand yourself as you really are. Which is that in our primordiality we have an exchangeability with others Rather than an identity where we are both sides of the equation. In reality, there's an exchange of place with others. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a much deeper than achieving identity. It's a golden rule of transformed alchemical gold rather than of greed. Gold. The egotistical version of that is do unto others before they do unto you. You heard that. In his great Hollywood novel, Budd Schulberg and What Makes Sammy Run, Sammy Glick says, never promote a promoter. And his other great phrase was what's mine is mine, and what's yours is negotiable. So there is a there is a patina of illusion and delusion, which is many layered, which interferes with our ability to come to the objective ritual actuality, so that the time honored way is that you cannot make a straight line, you cannot make a bee line, you cannot make a direct vector. But the circumambulation around allows you to approach. It's like coming into a planetary system. You never fly your starship directly at the planet. You always come into sync with the orbital reality of the star system, first of all, and then the planet in its star system, relationality, and finally into the actualities of all the celestial dynamics. And you curve into. And that's the closest way. And it turns out that that kind of a curve coming in is also the curve, which is most identifiable as the primordiality of the way in which life differentiates. It's called, geometrically, that spirals from the chambered nautilus. The spiral doubles each moment so that it goes out asymptotically, and one can come back in in the same way. And this, this quality of spiraling circumambulation is a quality that all deep ritual has, that we are not making a closed circle through an identifiable diagram of an equator, but that as we move along the emerging developing vector, which will circumscribe this equatorial motion. We come back a little bit different from the starting. And so we're making a spiral and not a circle. We make a circle in the sense of talking about it in terms of initial objectivity. But the deeper understanding is that we're doing something else, but it translates to a mystery. And the mystery in existence is that though the language speaks of firmness in a stasis, the firmness in the stasis is understood to be that the entire ecology has been in motion, has changed, And this double awareness is this paradox of preparedness is what gives rise to the sense of awareness in the first place. And we need to learn to differentiate between consciousness and awareness. The body can be very aware, if repeatedly aware, without consciousness being brought into play. And that kinesthetic coordination, noticeable in the dance of life, is a sophisticated basis upon which the mind learns to integrate and to form ideas. And though that is transformed beyond belief literally in high consciousness, nevertheless that transformation would not be possible, would not ever happen without that integral having been first achieved. And so the body is really the root of all blessedness. And when you look at the sacred language of primordial ritual, what do they say? The language says in many variants I am holy. When I stand here, I am holy. When I move and repeat, I am holy. When I stand here, I am holy when I move. So that the permutation, there's a permeation all the way through, which occurs in the field and manifests in the form in a condensed way, but it's not an attribute of the form. The form doesn't make it happen or make it real. The form intensifies temporarily for as long as the form holds. Intensifies the valuation of the field so that if I cut my hand, my hand makes a form in the space, in the air. It intensifies. The space has the dimensions, and the intensification of the dimensions are here, so that ritual forms are made, are circumscribed, are done. Those activities, those ritual movements, those comportments to establish forms so that one intensifies the field, so that becomes available then as a delimited arena. For further activities. Further integrations. In the Sundance, the Algonquin word for it is Ocon and the Ocon. Though it takes place over an eight day period. The entire generation of the relation of the field of life to that Sundance is made not in the summer, not during the Sundance, but is made mid-winter. And it's made usually because the Sundance is, um, High Plains, North American, um, version. It's usually made out on the prairie in the midst of a winter quiet at, um, at latitude 52 degrees north, which is the same as like Stockholm, Sweden, where the sun dance originated in, say, early February. In midwinter, after a blizzard, the temperature plummets so low 4050 degrees below zero that there is a curious phenomenon that as soon as it warms up just a little bit to say like 30 below, um, frozen rivers seem almost to let off steam. So that there's an effervescence in this inhospitable cold that shows one that transformation and shift of objectivity still happens even beyond belief. And it's in that kind of environment that a holy woman will make a vow to sponsor a sun dance in the summer for the summer solstice. And it is her prayer in midwinter, in the pause of that torrential atmosphere that would freeze all life that is kept by her personally intact with her awareness for all those months. And during the Sun Dance, she occupies a teepee outside the circle of teepees of the tribe. Um, for Algonquin peoples, you're always welcome, no matter what your tribe. If you're in the Algonquin Nation and for instance, Blackfoot, Sundance is always invited. The pagan and the Stoney and whatever other Indian tribes that are are related. It's a language affinity. But however large that circle of the tribes teepees are, the holy woman is in a teepee outside the tribe circle. Just like the tender. Like that woman who tends the sacred fire for the uep. That fire is outside of the sweat lodge. Her teepee is outside the circle of the tribe. And what she maintains is a continuity of her prayer that her commitment was in the form of a prayer. Though it can be put into words, the prayer Actually is expressible in words, but the prayer is in a ritual comportment of intent, and she maintains without wavering that intent. And it is on the basis of her unwavering intent that the yoga of the sun dance works. And we're man not to be able to participate as a whole in this kind of ecology and make such a form work. The people would perish. They would become worse than animals. They would become demonic scramblers of all value. As we see our planet inhabited today by literally billions on this level, Rakshasas rather than Asuras. But all of that can be regenerated back into a pattern of life, of life affirmation, as long as it has a real beginning, as long as it has a realistic place where the pivot actually happens. And when that occurs, eventually the entire movement of existence orders itself into that harmony, and it becomes. I hate to use the phrase, but it's an apt phrase. It becomes inevitable so that the confidence of the future order is based upon the pivot of the personal courage. And so that personal courage needs to take place. There is a quality that the holy woman uses, which is deeper than language in her teepee outside of the circle of teepees, and the circle of teepees is centered around the the Sun Lodge. The Sun Lodge, which is covered by, um, usually an evergreen type of a weaving of branches and all the poles of the Sun Lodge are held together by a single column, and that single column is a tree which has a forked top, and only men who have fought in battles, life and death battles. Only those men of the tribe who have done that have the right to go out together and find that tree. And when they go out together to find that tree, they go out as a hunting party. They go out as a war party. Because what they're warring against are the resistances of chaotic dismemberment that would forbid the tribe from having a real ceremony, a real ritual. And so they use the courage of their life and death struggles together to go and find that tree. And then they sit around that tree and they sing their war songs instead of with violence. They sing it as prayers. They sing it so that they transform the violence of the war songs into the equanimity of the prayers that they're going to take this tree as a sacrifice. And then they together cut that tree down and bring it in on a wagon, the same kind of wagon that you would use to load the dead from a battlefield on, to carry them off. They bring the Sundance Lodge Center pole and and raise it. And when those men have finished raising that pole. All of the other members of the tribe, anyone who has a prayer of hopefulness, of beseeching, of blessing, whatever other prayers anyone else in the tribe have had, have been written and put on to the ends of long poles. And as soon as that Sundance Lodge Center pole is placed in a vertical, as soon as it has the verticality, all of the other poles with the prayers on the end are knotted together and lodged at the top, and that becomes the structure of the Sundance Lodge, so that the prayers of the people are clustered together. The hopefulness is integrated there ritually. But the holy woman who is outside of the circle of Chiefs centered on that Sundance lodge, she does not utter a prayer. She keeps a silent continuity of communion month after month after month, and when it comes time for her to objectify her guarantor power, she does not utter a prayer. She does a ritual action that is deeper than the tongue of man could tell. She takes the dried buffalo tongues, the buffalo being the animal of the most application, the sustenance of life for high Plains Algonquin Indians. She takes the dried buffalo tongues, and she cuts them into the communion sets that will be given out to people in the tribe. If the ceremony proves to have a focus of courage, she will then counter that act of courage in the face of death and suffering. She will counter with the healing of that suffering by giving the portions of the dried buffalo tongues. And in this way she gives the nourishing fuel for those animals that sustain life who bring the fuel for the domestic shape of life. And someone in that tribe, some male, must By his courage of life and death, disclose to everyone who was there, but most of all to she who was not there, who was attending through continuous prayer, comportment a ritual comportment, not a language comportment. He must make a residence which she feels, and that she then can bring the buff dried buffalo tongues into play for the population, and that male ties himself, ties his body through antler skewers embedded in the flesh to long rawhide, a pair of long rawhide ropes that are fastened to the top of the Sundance pole, where all the prayers are, and he must pull himself free. And in doing so he will create tissue scars for the rest of his life is a very painful thing. He cannot utter a human sound. If he does, it ruins the entire integrity of the ritual. He must not make a human sound, but because of the intense suffering, his sacrifice. Will call out sound. So placed in his mouth is an eagle bone whistle, and the only sound he can make is the labored, suffered breathing that makes the shrill cry of the hunting eagle from his mouth. If he utters a sound as a man, the whole ritual is ruined, and so he must pull himself free by these skewers, with only the sound of the eagle whistle to denote his suffering. And when the eagle whistle stops in that silence, the holy woman knows that the tribes life is worth saving, and she gives the healing buffalo tongues so that truth can be spoken again by every member of the tribe. It is as secure a ritual in comprehension as any ceremony ever made on the planet, and it dates back to about 12,000 years ago. It dates back to a time when those people came from Asia and carried with them that high North Asian wisdom of ritual with them. So much so that when you look at the Tibetan and Mongolian or Northern Chinese ritual comportment, you find many similarities. You find physiological similarities between the peoples. The DNA runs very similar. It's difficult to appreciate the profundity of ritual by shunting it off to Idealisation. And so I try, in this three month period, not to give you ideas of what ritual is about, but to present the fundamental experiences and comportments so that you can begin to experience for yourself the profoundness that is occurring, that we have the capacity to occur. We can make the mystery of nature objective, and we have this power, and we share this power with all other living beings. And we'll see next week that in India, man is not descended from animals. The Chandogya Upanishad of 2600 years ago is very clear. Man is the essence of plant Because that is the essence of life. And life is the essence of the universe. And as life is the essence of the universe and plants the essence of life and man, the essence of plant speech, the essence of man and om is the essence of speech. And so this ritual prayer. Om Arapata Nadar begins with that. Omar Nadar. Hail to the jewel in the lotus. Agni. Next week.