Ritual 2

La la la la la la la la la la la la la la. Those are sounds of the Rigveda, from the Agni Kaccayana, the Agni ritual, the ritual to fire. And this is rituals to and on the fire. Always one of the most primordial of all ritual centers that comportment. And in our time the fire, the divine flame of that center, has turned upside down, not in a destructive way, but in a surprisingly new creative way, because that ritual center that's been there for a half million years or more for man is now upside down and becomes the flaming exhaust of the rockets and the spaceships that are going back to the stars. And so there are mysteries in our time and in our lives, and we live on the creative side of a threshold of a cusp that swept over the planet the last 30 years. And we are the ancestors of the future. We are those who are a fabulous generation who will become probably figures in mythology. And I think I'll have a place as some little mascot in the gods of the future. Because I'm tenacious, I don't give up and understand continuity. There's a quality that we need to appreciate today. And I would like to ask your participation just for a moment. I usually don't do this because it involves our bodily activity, and that evokes a whole development called the pratityasamutpada, the chain of dependent origination, the end of which is only an enlightenment. And that means somebody has to then stay with you until that's done. And I know that we live in a fast age, but it's still a very complicated process. But let's try to hold our arms up just for a moment like this, with the with the hands open like this. This gesture is in the Western tradition called the Orans orans orans. And this is the most ancient of all. And as you cup your fingers up a little bit, this is the way 5000 years ago, that you would have seen the hieroglyph in Egypt at the beginning of the dynastic Egypt. And in between these cupped hands like this would have been the solar disk, and these hands would not have come out of a human figure, but out of the ankh, the symbol of life, the symbol of life that each ray of the sun holds, and gifts to the world, to plants, to animals, to men, to minerals, to the entirety of the world. And those each ray of light holds one ankh and gifts it. And that ankh was firmly embedded in a figure hieroglyphic figure Gear of a piece of equipment. It's called the Jed. Jed and the Jed was a condenser of energy, and may well have produced primeval electricity 5000 years ago to light the interior construction of the pyramids. As we hold our hands like this now, and let's just quietly bring them together. And as you do, the space between the hands as it condenses becomes palpable. And that palpability we know today as presence and as the hands come even closer and you touch the bottoms of the palms, and you bring the fingers, the middle finger, to a closure. That figure is not a circle, but a vesica piscis. This is the birth in the presence of the form of material condensation into existence. So this is the birth of existence. And to change this slightly one slightly parts the middle fingers so that they do not touch. And this is the openness that allows for the divine breath to come into our form, our space and vivify it. Thank you so much. So that after many thousands of years, how many thousands, maybe 10,000 years in Buddhism at the time of the historical Buddha, when the hand was raised like this, it meant fearlessness because one was in the oscillation of reality. But if you pushed the middle finger slightly forward like this. That was the teaching mudra. That was the giving of teaching. And that teaching was always carried by oral language. Not written, always oral language. And so we come to ritual to today to try to appreciate how primordial men and women of our species inherited a wave form of achievement in forming existence, forming presence, making form. And it came to our forebears in Homo sapiens sapiens from other Homo groups like Homo erectus or Homo Neanderthal or Homo habilis, going back several million years. And from there, even farther back into other primates. Some 250 years ago, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and one of his discourses wrote that we need to investigate the early primates, like chimpanzees, in order to understand how deep the ritual roots of culture go. And indeed, in our own time, Jane Goodall and several others investigating other primates Dian Fossey Birute, Gilda's gorillas and chimpanzees found that the roots of ritual culture go back more than 70 million years so that we inherit not just a genetic lineage from our parents and our grandparents, and so on, or even from our species. But there is a broad, resonant context of close to 80 or 90 million years of which we are the focus. We are the writing pen that in that focus is able to carry that on. And we have come through a threshold that was unimaginable in nature, unimaginable in nature, in terms of this world, but completely in keeping with the mystery of nature that belongs to the universe. That is to say that we are home. We are at home among the stars, and we belong wherever it is that we are. And so our particular generation has come to a cusp in appreciation. Yes, we must still understand how our kind are still rooted in the rocks and minerals, the plants and the animals of this world. But how? This world is a grain of sand in the bank of stars along a river of eternity. And so we are at home everywhere. And there is a saying in Sanskrit. Paro kasama deva. It means the gods love what is out of sight. And so deep wisdom for our kind, the wisdom of wisdom. Our species, Homo sapiens. Wisdom man. But it's doubled. We have wisdom about being. Wisdom about being wise. Homo sapiens. Sapiens. We understand that yes, form is knowledge, but open form is wisdom. And one of the concerns that we will see again and again is that ritual, when it is good, does not close off, but encloses just enough to give form, but is open minutely to let the lightning and thunder come through. Dylan Thomas once said, A good poem has spaces in. It has chinks to let the lightning and thunder come through. And it is a quality of appreciation. It is a courtesy of the spirit not to close the circles of perfectly. And we understand that if you make perfect mechanically closed circles all the time, then you get the smooth running gears of a mechanism, but you do not get life. And so the vitality of life carried by the first tool that our kind, cognizant kind had. The earliest evidences of use of fire come from China, come from discoveries outside of present day Beijing. Peking Man 500,000 years ago used fire so that we have had this capacity. It's often spoken of as a tool, and a tool is an objectification of ritual. And fire becomes very interesting because it has three primordial sources. The first source is from heaven lightning striking, making fire, from which one can conserve an element of it. The more rarer form is the percussion of stones to make a spark, but the overwhelming occurrence of fire was always by friction of wood. And there is a hidden quality. If you have a base stick, a base board with a concave opening and a sharpened pointed, not too sharp, not too pointed stick that comes into that hole and you make that stick turn in that hole. It will generate fire. If you do a slight modification, you have to cut a slight channel from that concave hole, and that slight channel carries the heated little elements of powdered puffed tinder and allows it to drip hot into the rest of the tinder and ignite it. And so you must always leave a kind of a trail of. In Navajo weaving, it's called a spirit trail. Every pattern of the rug has some thread that goes off the pattern, and this spirit trail allows for the spark of fire to kindle for man. And so all good ritual has that carries a an opening which in sophistication more and more is hidden, hidden in such a sense not to make it esoteric so that most people don't get it, but because the gods love what is hidden. And so it's in honor of the divine that man learns to be sophisticated in hiding the openness so that when man is fictively inexperienced and artificial in his ritual, he doesn't see the openness. He only sees the closedness and becomes addicted to trying to manipulate rituals to make them work. And this is the very essence of a black magic. It's a trying to make rituals which manipulate, which compel, and which do the work, whereas anyone who is real knows that the gift of life comes through the openness and not through the compulsion or the compelling. So there is a quality of ritual that we must learn to appreciate. And fire is the first ritual Will center. And so the Agni ritual and ceremony in ancient India is a case in point. And as you heard from the chants when the Sanskrit of the Rigveda is chanted, it sounds very much like American Indian. And it should not surprise anyone, because most of the American Indian populations came from Asia in two great waves, the last one being about 12,000 years ago down the Mackenzie River, the thaw and the ice. It's very difficult to travel in the spring and summer time because it's just the tundra becomes muck. So you travel in the winter and you travel along the Mackenzie River and you arrive in places that are still inhabited by people who remember how that happens. I remember once asking some of the Blackfoot elders what they tribe used to do in the winter time, and they said, we always used to go to Banff Hot Springs and sit out the cold winter. And that's why the white men built their hotel there, because they knew that was the great spot, and that we had done that for 10,000 years. There is a quality of American Indian ritual, which is very Asian, and there's an interpenetration of the two. And I'm going to try in the next couple of weeks to allow that affinity to occur as naturally as possible. It doesn't occur because someone has a powerful idea and delineates it by that idea And through discursive, convincing language conveys that idea to you. That is artificial. It's not real at all. And anyone who has brought themselves back to the Paleolithic comportment, where you have to literally learn to walk again, understands that you cannot use ideas and discursive language to characterize the ritual foundations of reality. The Agni ceremony that was recorded in 1975 by a very wise scholar, Frits Stahls, planned it for years and went to India. And as soon as this ceremony, as soon as the rituals began April 12th, 1975, just 25 years ago, he wrote. This is a world famous scholar at that time, and he came immediately to understand that he had to set his learning aside. I began to realize that there were many basic things I did not know. There are many basic things I did not know. I came to understand only then what is meant when we say that ritual is activity. And the Sanskrit word for activity is Karman, the root of which is karma. So that karma is what ritual is all about. It's the activity. It's the action. In Greek, it's called. The pragmatic is pragmatic. It's the practice. It's what you do. But as we will see, as we get deeper into ritual, it's what we do. Do not what we hope we're doing or think we're doing or expect we're doing, or the appearance of what we're doing. But what we actually do do carries a karmic sequentiality. And because that karmic sequentiality is universal, it has a corresponding resonance everywhere that things occur, so that the animals and the plants and the minerals feel our karmic actuality, and we in like way feel theirs. So that when someone in a ritual puts on an animal skin, it's not being primitive, it's being primordial. Now, the 19th century Victorian anthropologists taking a cue from Charles Darwin, who was horrified when his ship, the Beagle went around Tierra del Fuego and he saw the abject primitiveness of the natives and was afraid. He was scared that man had come out of this. The Tierra del Fuego Indians, who literally cowered in the mud, afraid at everything, and just able to go out and get bare subsistence in moments of overcoming their fear of the world having almost no language. Whereas at the same time that Darwin was filled with fear, another Englishman, Alfred Russel Wallace, was living with the Amazon natives, and he was loving the primordiality of the young boys of like the Pomo Indians, who in their naked nudity, were at home in all the complexities of the Amazon jungle. And we're happy. And he learned to take his clothes off and be naked with them, and learned that primordial man was quite different from primitive man, so that the 19th century concept that our beginnings are primitive is a misplaced calibration. When we were primitive, we were apes. We have been very primordial for several million years, which means that we are the inheritors of a fantastically elegant Workability that comes into play whenever our ritual, whenever our karma becomes formed in such a way that there is a hidden thread of openness that occurs on the divine, gifts us with the vitality of spiritual fire, and also with the fire of life, and that fire of life, that use of light becoming life comes because of a quality of chanted oral language, the way it occurred one time in the phrasing of a man who became known as Saint John. In the beginning was the word, and the word was light, and the light became the life of men. It was a very sophisticated way, 2000 years of saying something that was primordial, the way in which that light, those arcs on each ray of the fire of the sun, that solar gift of life in that way, the way in which that light becomes life, is that comes through the food, the nourishment, and that primordiality of nourishment. The primordiality of nourishment is not the hamburger, it's the breast milk, or it's the semen, it's the milky milk and semen. It's that whole thing. And so the soma juice that was essential to the Agni ceremony was always a fermented milk using herbs, using rare Himalayan herbs, whether it was stalks or creepers, is still up for grabs, but the pounding of the juice of the herbs added to a milk emulsion gave it a fermented quality so that it was like a natural wine. It was like a primordial wine. And so the intoxication of the soma goes with the appreciation of the gift of light. And so Agni and Soma always go together, light and life always go together. And we recognize again something that we discovered in working through three months of nature, nature when it occurs, so that it is palpable to us. The deepest that understanding can go is to witness, and the deepest of all is the one and the zero, and out of that set. That binary set comes all of the detailed actuality, that negative and positive, that zero and one, that all these primordial paradoxes deliver, and that they do not have a difficulty in overcoming their polarity. So that one has to force a reconciliation. That kind of psychological understanding is actually 19th century. And just because it is primal and figures like Freud or Jung doesn't make it doesn't make it real. A polarity, when it is turned. Becomes amenable to a complementarity. And it becomes naturally available when that polarity is turned 180 degrees, then the complementarity flows. When the polarity is turned 90 degrees, one begins to have many possibilities, and it's there in those 90 degree angles, the angle which is the prototype of the way to see the angle of vision. We still have that phrase so that someone who knows that paradox on its deepest level is that one doesn't have two elements, but four because paradox pairs, so that you have a pair of pairs so that there is such a thing as a primordial Memorial Square, and that primordial square has all four angles of vision. It has all four directions. It has all four angles of elemental focus that come to a center. And so there is a quality to this. When he was understanding that he had to set aside all of his scholarly learning and he was really learned, Stahl said, I came to understand only then when we say ritual is activity. Ritual is not a thing that can be easily understood if one has only access to texts. More importantly, whatever text may say, language does not explain such activity. It is we who ask for explanation in terms of linguistic expressions for the ritualist, action comes first and is all that really counts. Now a curious convergence became apparent as he began to realize this and allow himself to participate in the ritual as activity, rather than trying to characterize it in terms of textual refinement of language. He began to do it. There's a photograph of him in here, where he had taken off his Western clothes and had put on the white cloth that all of the South Indians were using, knotted on the right side. Unlooked for all the world, like one of the people, he writes. A curious convergence became apparent. And the same held for the cameramen, the photographers, the sound engineers. All of them were absorbed into the participation of the ritual, the activity, the emergence of which is not to establish meaning, it's not to establish value, but it's to establish existence. And that before there is any valuation, before there's any meaning, existence occurs. The Chinese word for it would be tay tay, the power of something to be, and that its ontological existentiality is primordial, and so that the fundamental concern of ritual is that existence be real, that did occur. Whatever. Meaning it might have. Whatever valuation it may, uh, acquire is actually secondary. And he writes this. Textual scholars find it hard to understand how much I learned about Vedic ritual by seeing the cameraman, the director, Robert Gardner, who made the film 80 Hours of Film, who until then had known nothing about it, set about to film it. And despite the time we had spent preparing for the event, setting up the camera angles, setting up all the values of the light and everything. Despite all of that, the rites generally took us by surprise. Because when they participated, they found that they flowed in as an absorption Into the activity that the activity absorbs, and it absorbs in such a way that when that activity is formed, with the hidden openness included, when the activity is over, wherever you go in your life, whatever you're doing, there is an emission. There's a radiation of the efficacy of that activity that is with you, stays with you, and whatever it is that you do, it has that undertone that the participation is extended like an energy frequency. It's there so that there is such a thing as textual studies of the doctrine of vibration or ritual in an oscillating universe, worshipping Shiva and medieval India. The whole thing about energy. Energy itself is a frequency that has a definite form. It has a form where the energy wave goes above and it comes below. It has a median thread that may not be an average that actually occurs, but that hidden thread holds the paradinas. It holds the awareness of an energy wave of a frequency. It also holds the way in which the star constellations oscillate around the equatorial plane of the ecliptic, that the sun's motion through the heavens makes a plane of an ecliptic, and the ecliptic is a sequence of zodiacal constellations of stars, 12 in number, that oscillate and make together an energy wave. That is the year. The year of nature. The ritual year. Because the ritual year always follows the year of nature. But the deeper ritual year is not just the ritual year of the year of nature on whatever part of the world we live, but to include the divine realms of the stars so that that is an energy wave of sidereal energy wave. It incorporates the stars. And we talked last week about how in that zenith of that heavenly canopy, there is a pole star. For us, it's Polaris. Now, 5000 years ago it was Thuban And how the Great Pyramids, Cheops and Kephren and Mycerinus all have an angle of opening from the sarcophagus room at the center, all the way out the spirit trail, the open thread all the way out so that the light of Thuban could bring its ankh thuban, which was in the constellation of the dragon called Draco in Latin, and that the celestial dragon of Draco vis a vis the world gave its ankh of light to the sarcophagus room exactly at the spring equinox. But that constellation of Draco positioned between the two bearers, the pair of bears, the Great Bear and the Little bear, Polaris being one of the stars in the Little Bear, Ursa minor, and the two stars at the base of the cup of the Great Big Dipper of Ursa major point exactly at Polaris, and in between them is the sinuous serpent, the Draco, the celestial serpent, the dragon, the winged snake. But it's interesting because not only is there that because they're in the dragon is the center, the celestial pole that is the exact center of the plane of the ecliptic, and that those three constellations are there at the zenith of that plane of the ecliptic. That is a dragon, a celestial dragon seen from our world. But even deeper is the mystery that there is Another dragon. There is not just the dragon of this world, but there is the dragon of Heaven itself. The Milky Way, and that the Milky Way has a very curious aspect. In the recent issue of Sky and telescope, one of the astronauts, one of the European astronauts, French astronauts who went out to repair the Hubble telescope. And they were outside. And he said they when they came in, they had some moments where the shuttle was on the night side of the planet, and the starry expanse was just so brilliant at 360, 370 miles up that they looked out and all the astronauts, the seven astronauts, almost like an ancient ritual. Seven astronauts looked out and he said, we were astounded to see that the Milky Way looked like the smoke from God's campfire coming up from the world, but they were high enough up that they could see that it not only went from the world, but it went behind the world. And that was the entire starry expanse that the dragon of the stars is the Milky Way. The Milky Way. And when you ferment the Milky Way, when you put the spirit into the Milky Way, there's a curious quality. The sinuous movement of the Milky Way, as seen from the surface of our planet, has its own kind of equator, has its own equatorial quality. And there, among the humps of the celestial dragon, the hump that goes farthest up to the North Star, whether it's Thuban or Polaris, doesn't matter much for this phenomena, that that highest hump of the celestial dragon marks a line when it comes to the polar star. If you drew a line down, it would be almost exactly the place where the vernal equinox occurs in terms of a computation of what the effect on our seasons of these starry expanses would be. And so there is a quality which the textbook mind calls geometric deity, that there is a geometric city that one can learn to plot out and diagram and make meaning out of this and that this is how man learns. And this is all footnotes many thousands of years after our Forebearers learned everything about participating in the mystery of nature without characterizing it in any textual way. We don't have to be told what it means if we really do it. We still have the vibrating, still oscillating smarts about being real because we are real, that we can feel the oddness of the absorption and the admission and the emission so that there is a quality here. Even scholars publishing from Princeton University Press begin to understand the cosmogonic vision of an oscillating universe finds itself reflected in the patterned actions of ritual, the paired dynamics of emission and reabsorption govern everything, it would seem, from the disposition of divinities. And it goes on from there. This process, characterized in wiser anthropological language as the ritual process and one of the greatest of all the ritual scholar writers, Victor Turner. The subtitle is Structure and Anti-structure. To know how to make a structure, and to know how to leave it open so that it will dissolve into an anti-structure that is not a structure of man's, but a structure of hiddenness which only God sees and only God needs to see. Only the gods need to pay attention, and that for our ritual of making structure. It is a theater, it is a drama. It is a dramatic action, and its closest affinity is play. Here's Victor Turner from ritual to theater. The human seriousness of play that in our play we begin to understand that there is a dramatic form that comes together and that if we're wise enough, we let the dramatic form continue, even though our performance is open and over, the openness carries through. After the performance, after we've left the theater, that our lives then have that resonance. And so another one of his books, The Anthropology of Performance, that ritual is a performance. And even his wife Edith wrote an article on Ndembu Dumbo Ghost Doctors and their rituals of curing for the Tulane Drama Review. There is everything to do about the dramatic ritual presentation of form paired with the living frequency of divine resonance. There's nothing primitive about this, and we'll come back after the break. Our process here is a ritual that is, we. We do this every Saturday, and what makes it real is that it happens, um, with unbroken continuity. As long as I maintain the continuity, The form will hold not only as a form, but the form will hold enough so that the openness is still open. If I were to break the continuity. There is no power of resolution in the cosmos that would be able to tell the difference between the spiritual openness and my break. There's no difference at all in that gap, those gaps. And so in order to keep it singular, to keep, to keep the openness singular, I have to maintain a continuity without break. Um, in, uh, some areas of the West, this is known as prayer without end Or in the Vajrayana, there's a Kadampa sect that is completely non-public. They are never seen in public, and they have maintained a deep samadhi unbroken for hundreds and hundreds of years. 7 or 800 years. Meditation without end. Not as a habitual response, but as a comportment of the deepest quality of responsibility that the form should hold, not just to establish that man has power, but that the form hold so that man's power is open to the gift of life. And so this quality of existentiality is foremost in ritual. It's not to get power. It's not to get military victories. It's not to have wisdom in the sense of a product. None of that. But to guarantee that life, life's gift, will be receivable by us. Because only in that consecrated form is it. Is the receive ability existential? Otherwise, yes, there is receive ability, but it's not existential at all. It's transcendental. And there comes a great development that occurs for our kind about 5000 years ago, where our forebears had to understand that we no longer need do ritual comportment, because the openness must be where the closed form was before, and the singularity of the openness must be exchanged with the reality of oneness, and that is, of the spiritual person. So there is such a thing as the inside out of ritual wisdom, which is the high wisdom of differential consciousness, that instead of there being a form whose continuity leaves only a oneness open, there is in differential consciousness the oneness of the spiritual person and the rest of the universe is completely open. In Sanskrit, that spiritual person is called the Purusha. And the earliest of the Vedas, which language founds the Agnicayana and all of the other Vedic ceremonies. The earliest Vedas are called Aparoksha, meaning not from human effort, not from humankind. It means literally non-human, but it doesn't mean inhumane. It means that it's a divine language. And that that divine language comes in a divine way. It's not spoken in words or phrases, but it's actually a sound without end, so that only the human seeing of it gives it the proportional quality of being phrases and words that God's speech is a sound without end. It has no punctuation at all. It has no dividedness into words so that words names are our way of hearing God's voice. And so the originators of the Vedic language were called Sears. Sears. Poet. Sears. Wise hearers who not only hear, but the word see her. They see what they hear. What do they see? They see the way in which the existential forms occur discretely so that they are real in terms of the world. So that this is a very peculiar spiritual practice. And without that practice, there is no possibility of the mind having realization, or rather, to be more precise. Yes, the mind could have realization, but there would be no body there to record it. And the realization would be purely transcendental and would never occur in time space. Which takes us back to the primordiality of ritual, and that men and women understood? Yes, we we need to do this. We need to receive this. And our receptivity is proved out by the occurrence that when our rituals are over. We're able to carry that and re radiate that back into our lives, so that our lives are enriched by the coherence of what we were able to receive, and that this is the staff of life, actually. So that light and life are mediated ritually to a very deep extent by a center around a center of fire, around which the resonant context of energy that make time and space vivified occur. And so this is a of basic concern when when the ritual resonance wears off, as it does as one goes through this world, that ritual resonance wears off so that it must be replenished. It must be redone so that there is a there's a reoccurring cycle to ritual that we must remember to do, and that if we remember to do it and to keep it healthful, then we will always replenish that energy, that vitality. Occasionally someone loses their way and loses the resonance and loses the vitality. And there are occasions when whole peoples lose this. We lived at a time when the entire planet lost it, except for a few hidden continuities. It was completely desecrated. Trashed so that most of the people alive on this planet now wouldn't know wisdom if they heard it. They wouldn't know the difference between a con man and a sage, and no way to tell, because the forms of receiving are so perforated that the very openness of the divine seems to them like nothing at all. Truly a demonic situation. But as the Bhagavad Gita makes clear, God will not permit man to wallow in this. Always the reminder comes that you can begin from nowhere and from scratch. You can reconstitute all of the wisdom, but the first thing that needs to be healthy is the body. Not some game plan of ingenious cleverness of the mind, but life for everyone in their bodily comportment towards existence that must first be brought. So health first. We're using pairs. Pairs of books to obviate the condition of text. Because texts lie for us now. There were many ages where texts were very trustworthy. They're no longer trustworthy at all. And yet our minds and our civilization, the inner and outer aspects of what we find ourselves immersed in, were generated out of books, out of written language. And so we're using these in a new way. We're reconstituting ourselves by using paired books, whereas a single book was used before. This is a different tack to take. It's a ritual comportment that leads to a quality of civilization that was never seen before. It's a quality of civilization that's not limited to this planet, not limited to this world is good minimally for an entire star system. And once you're on that level, star systems relate to each other in such a way that there is a. The phrase is a celestial choir. As the Book of Job says in one point, there is a time when all the sons of God sing together as if the morning stars were a choir. That kind of condition. And we're coming back to that in our lifetime. We'll hear that choir again. We are, in fact, singers to be the pair of books that we're using now. At the beginning of ritual, we're using Black Elk Speaks. This is a rare first edition from the early 30s from the Oglala Sioux, and we're using Gladys Reichard and Francis Newcomb's sandpaintings of the Navajo shooting chant, trying to use male and female together as conscientiously as possible so that there's no gender bias in the presentation, because the ritual comportment for its openness to occur in singular unity needs an equanimity which continuity alone does not provide. Only the equanimity of like a equatorial plane through the entire species, through the sphere of all the possibilities of the species, and so the balance is not masculine and feminine, as in polarities. That's kindergarten. It's the equatorial equanimity of the entire sphere of the possibilities of our existentiality. And when that is lost, as it was for Black Elk, um, he writes towards the end of Black Elk Speaks, he was touring Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, dancing before Queen Victoria, dancing before the courts of the Royal and Europe being a side show figure, and he writes all the time I was away from home, across the big water. My power was gone and I was like a dead man moving around most of the time. I could hardly remember my vision, and when I did remember, it seemed like a dim dream. He noticed because his powers of curing atrophied to the point to where he began to doubt that he could even cure himself. Now, this quality in Black Elk, this quality of having had a great vision given to him when he was 8 or 9 years old. Is paired up with the sandpaintings of the Navajo shooting chant. Though Gladys Richards sage helper was a medicine man named Manuelito, the genius, that religious genius spiritual genius that I'm singling out to go with Black Elk. They're from the Navajo people is Hosteen clan. Who also knew Gladys Reichard and who the co-author Frank Frantz Newcomb wrote a biography of him, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Hosteen class, Navajo medicine man and sand painter. And the photograph in 1942 of Hosteen clan. I'll bring a photograph of. I have a beautiful photograph of of Black Elk taken in Denver in 1945 at the end of the Second World War, and Manley Hall took the photograph and big sepia, and he gave me the photograph of a black elk bringing a blessing to the whole world. And I'll bring that photograph next week. Hastings Clough was someone who never lost the power individually, but he saw that he could not convey it to his people. As Black Elk said of his people, the hoop of the nation was broken. Meaning that the continuity of the ritual comportment was so perforated they could no longer tell when something spiritual was being said to them from something that was just a momentary hiatus or distraction. And this, of course, is a demonic Situation, and it's the only reason for the discipline of continuity is to forestall that ambiguity from occurring. No other reason at all. There's no virtue in just doing it. I've lectured a thousand Saturdays in a row not just to do it or show I'm a tough guy. It's irrelevant. But were I not to continue that, that form would not hold because I would no longer be able to tell when there was a openness of insight, when there was that space, that little space that allows the teaching to be real. That in your seer capacity at some moment, even if it's just in a picosecond, they'll come a flash. Where you see that you will see that what you hear is true, because your receptions of it has a radiative complement to it in your life. And to just say, well, such things are synchronicities is a psychological begging of the whole issue. That's not it at all. It's not an acausal connective principle. There's nothing to do with that. It's called playing for real. And when men and women play for real, the whole cosmos is vivified. We carry that completing quality as if the missing keystone were not a keystone that we put into the arch of understanding, but it's a keystone whose space we leave open, and when we're wise enough to make it all and leave the opening, then those forms, as well as those openness work together. And life is not only good, but it is real and real for animals and real for plants and real for an entire star system and whatever resonances there are. And so we have that. We have that as a promise. The quality of realization, as I showed here from the author of the Agni volumes, these huge volumes that came out from the University of California Press in Berkeley in 1983. Somebody's retiring from the S.E. Rykoff company, put out the 300 plus dollars at the time to get this set into my hands, and I've used it for 17 years. It's a good investment, prorated. That's $1 $110 a year, $20, something like that. Gladys Reichard, also one of those women anthropologists early in the 20th century, in the 20s and 30s, especially in the 40s, who didn't go as a 19th century Victorian anthropologist to study the beliefs of primitive people, but took her whole person and allowed herself to be absorbed into the life of the people. They took her in and made her a part of their homes, of their tribe. And so She used her reflective, symbolic mind to understand what she had participated in before she understood it. Just like my urging you that if you just come, just do the Saturdays, there will come a threshold where the understanding will emerge, because the integral will happen because it's a natural function. You don't have to have diagrams and you don't have to have an expert teaching. It just needs the reality of the continuity to be unbroken. And yoghurts called tapas. And as long as that tapas is maintained, the wheat will grow. Gladys Reichard, one of maybe 7 or 8 women anthropologists who got their inspiration from a man named Boas, was at Columbia for a while, had come from Germany and understood that the new world is really new, and had decided that he wanted to immerse himself in the openness of the world, but realized that he himself was somewhat compromised by his great academic background. But he trained a whole population of young women to go out into the field and become a part of the field. Boas reminds me in anthropology of the later Louis Leakey, all of the people who did further resonance of Leakey were women. His wife, Mary Leakey. Jane Goodall. Um. Birute. Galdikas. Dian Fossey. A whole number of them. Gladys Reichard was one of those women who went out, and she understood because she had done it before. She thought about it. She didn't go out to write papers. She went out to be with the people. And so, in one of her rare little monographs published in New York, 1944, in the midst of the Second World War, she writes, I undertook in 1930 a detailed study of the various branches and phases and other subdivisions of a single popular living Navajo chant, the so-called shooting chant. I have now now analyzed the material gathered since that time, and have compared it with the rest of the extant material on Navajo religion defined that the expected unity exists, but that it must be found not in an extension of our categories and classifications, but rather in making new ones entirely new ones, all of which must be allowed great flexibility. Do not put new wine into old wineskins, so that every time, every time a new understanding occurs, a new form must be made, so that each time someone participates in a ritual, they are doing it for the first time. If they're really comporting completely, it's all completely new again. Whenever I come here and sit here and in lecture. It's spontaneous, it's original. It's first time. Even though I do complex notes, I don't use these to stylize because that language would be deceptive. Even though what I write is as true as I can make it, it would be a de facto function of phone calls to nowhere. Hello? Hello. There's no one here. It's a quality. Where? Shunryu Suzuki called it a beginner's mind. Zen mind. And the beautiful calligraphy on the cover of his book. Originally, he took four sumi e brushes and put it in his hand so he had four brushes. And he did the Japanese character with four brushes at once, and it looked like the sacred knot of a musical score that, instead of being a musical score and a horizontal, was put into the Japanese character for that beginner's mind. I remember. I remember when Tassajara was first bought the rural adjunct to Suzuki Roshi's San Francisco Center, and Tassajara had been an old hot springs in the 20s, California. And I wanted to go and see that. And the road at that time into Tassajara was more rocks and pits than it was road. And the car broke down around the White Mountain campgrounds, up about 5000ft, and Tassajara is way down at sea level, further inland. So in the morning, there were so many mosquitoes there that I decided I might as well just get up and walked all the way down to Tassajara. And as I walked and dropped in altitude, the heat built and a closer to Tassajara, the California dogwoods began to overshadow the trail so that the light coming through the dogwood leaves was curiously leaving lavender shadows. And pretty soon one could smell that dizzying, lemony wilderness California scent and the parched quality and the gentle, parched determination, not determination, but the continuity of samadhi to continue to and to emerge. And as soon as I came onto the Tassajara grounds, like some kind of undersized vector of pureness. Out of one of the buildings came a monk, and he was carrying a clear glass tray that had a clear picture of cold water and a clear glass. And as he came, he came like a ballet, and poured this glass of water. And I reached for it and drank it down. Well, you don't have to go to the zendo. And that quality of actuality, that ritual of exactness, where it couldn't have been more beautiful, has a resonance without end, that the world would never last long enough to exhaust all of that, so that there comes a transformation outside of nature into the supernatural, where you don't have to repeat rituals ever again. Having done it once, it's done forever. But before our kind learned about that, we had to repeat the rituals in a regular way so that life would get rejuvenated. We were children of the cycle, and it's true. There came a time when we were free to be once and forever and have that have that now as part of our heritage. But in a time like this where it has to be taught to billions of people, again, just the ABCs, it's important to go back to the Paleolithic groundings and show how you put the colors onto the rocks by mulching it with your saliva and blowing it on your very hand. On that. When you take the hand away, the negative imprint is what gives the comprehension. And that without knowing to put your hand up, you would just have a blur of saliva pigment on the rock. But because you knew to put your hand there and stencil it, and you knew then that you could blow that onto the hand, and you could put just that hand onto the rock on the other side of the cave, and you would have the pair both what is and what isn't, but understanding that the stencil is not a thing. It is something which could be and on purpose was left open. And this is the deep wisdom that's there in all good ritual. The use of the saliva, the mulching of the color by one's mouth as if it were an act of nourishment, of chewing the color but not swallowing it, of using your breath to spray the color out the pigment out. In those days, there were no additives and there was no danger of being poisoned by this. The. Story that is told of Hosteen Clore by Frank Newcomb, who, with her husband, ran the Great Trading Post on the Navajo reservation. There is a there's a little town called Newcomb named after their family on the Navajo reservation. She relates in her biography of Hosteen class that there was a moment where she was driving alone with him out in the really wild areas of Navajo land, and suddenly a small tornado formed out of the overhanging clouds. Out in Monument Valley and touched down on the very road that they were driving the narrow road. And they were alone in the car, and she got scared, and she stopped the car. And to her horror, the tornado, as they will sometimes do, followed along right along the road. The heat differential of the of the pavement was enough to keep it on track right for their car, and Hastings got out of the car and went to the side of the road and picked some herbs and mulched them in his mouth as he walked towards the tornado, and she said he stood about 100ft in front of the car, and at the last threshold he spit at the tornado and it split in half, and half went up into the air, and the other half drilled itself into the ground outside the highway. And he came back and just got in the car and sat there, and she said he was just an old Indian again. All of a sudden, it's that like, that is the only time that man needs that power. And anything longer than that is the ego trying to cling to it and to have it. And only phonies want to have it. What do you really do with it? You give it away. The time when Hastings Law came to Los Angeles in the late 1930s, he stayed with Manley Hall for about 2 or 3 weeks, and. They gave him a beautiful room with a very nice bed. But like Crocodile Dundee, he didn't sleep on the bed. He slept on the floor to keep his posture. And so Manley said he wanted to do something for Klein. So he said, well, what would you most like to do? And he said he would like to see the ocean. So they drove him. This is in the 30s. They drove him up above Santa Barbara. And Manley said he became like a frisky boy again when he saw abalone shells on the beach, and that he cupped them. And when he. Manley realized it was so valuable to him that he got a whole box of abalone shells for him, and claw carefully packed them up and shipped them back to the reservation. And he said, they're valuable because there was a time when Navajo land was the bottom of an ocean, and that there are still traces of seashells at the tops of many of the buttes. It was always very difficult to get up a 3000 foot butte to get these seashells. To have them there was like a amulet of the ancient truth, of the land, of their land, of their home. Now, it's interesting because the Navajo people, in terms of language, have no relation linguistically to the Pueblo peoples that share that land with them. The Hopi, the Zuni, their language group, is Uto-Aztecan. It's akin to the language of southern Mexico, whereas the Navajo language is Athabascan. It's akin to British Columbia, Alaska. So that the Navajos are recent immigrants into that land, into that land form. And so they're very careful to maintain their sacred ritual comportment to the land. Hence the great value of the abalone shells for them. But for the Navajo, what makes that pilgrimage possible and what makes the habitation of this vast land huge? One of the largest reservations in North America is the horse. And so the Navajo is a tall, thin man who prefers always to ride the horse. And the Hopis and Zuni Pueblo peoples never ride horses. They are short, squat walkers, and they can walk forever. When Thomas came to stay with me in the late 70s, early 80s, and here in Los Angeles, he was on his way to the United Nations to deliver the Hopi prophecy about the gourd full of ashes. He said it was not uncommon for Hopi men to walk from Third Mesa all the way to the junction of the San Juan and the Colorado Rivers. There's a long, long way to go by foot. And of course, they would have gone there, too, to read the ripples in the sand. The banks of the San Juan, when it goes into the Colorado, have a shifting pattern that the Hopis who have been there so long, they can do divination by reading the rippled patterns every year in the sand. This this quality of being so much a part of the mystery of nature that the disclosure is instantaneous. What is not instantaneous is to patiently begin to understand what it means, so that in ancient divination in the West, the ancient divination held all the way into the formation of the of the Roman Empire. And in the first century of the common era, first century A.D., that whole tradition was fractured, and it never again worked. But up until that time there was minimally a pair of people who did the divination. There was somebody who was the seer of what it was they were called in Latin augurs, the auguring, the seeing of the bird patterns, the seeing of the shapes of the liver, whatever it is, whatever needs to be augured. But the augurs never did. The interpretations. The augurs only saw and were like fair witnesses who reported exactly what they saw, precisely, pristinely, only what was seen. And the interpretation was always then by someone else, who then became the soothsayer or the diviner, and that only when it was fractured were the two were the pair confused together, and they were pretenders who thought that they would do divination by themselves. The ego by itself can never divine. It never knows the difference between fantasy, fantasize and realization. So one of the careful qualities of good ritual was always to preserve the realistic comportment towards Existence and the mystery of nature. Existence as a oneness. As a unity. Un proportioned. Un distributed. That existence all existence was a unity, so that in the ritual the animals, the plants, the minerals, all of it were included. Man does not do this for his people, his group, his species, but for life. For all life. Deeper than all life. Even for the so-called inorganic materials which were considered living by all primordial peoples, everything is alive. And the fact that everything is alive together in that oneness, that existentiality was an unbroken unity, and the mystery of nature was an unknowable unknown. Zero openness. It was not an openness that was empty, but an openness that was so full that only an open quality of the totality of existence could receive the vivification of it, so that the primordiality of ritual is extremely simple. And if any of the elements of the ritual are treated as stage props that are brought together by a diagram or a design or a plan, that's what Madame Blavatsky used to call metaphysic. You don't collect materials to tinkertoy together a ritual. And so the ancient qualities of ritual, whether it's in India or it's in Indian America or it's in China or it's in the Amazon On jungles or it's an elusive in southern Greece. Always there is this sense that the mystery of nature in its openness and the continuity that makes existentiality of existence one, that there's a reciprocity so that the center of the openness comes to inhabit and play in the world, and the center of existence comes to register in the openness that registry is God, not that there was something, a thing before, but because the reciprocity occurs so that the divine is in life and gives breath to and light to existence, and that something of us registers in heaven, there's this kind of reciprocity. And because the reciprocity is on this primordial level, no one mistakes their worldly face for who they are. This face, which changes with years, is actually a mask. And what is ritually more primordial is the mask that one makes to wear in the ritual. And that those ritual masks then register as existential comportment, the types of which are actually eternal. So when you're making your pair of masks, you're making a mask of food, a mask of a food, and you're making a mask of a feeling. And in two weeks, bring your mask of food. And in six weeks bring your mask of feeling. And we will have a show and tell of just presenting the mask, not to get the meaning, not to talk about it philosophically. I can use that kind of discursive language as good as anybody alive. It's irrelevant to what's going on here. What's going on here is that we participate in the mystery of nature in such a way that something of ourselves exchanges with something that enters into play. Surprisingly, that is the seal. Not that we toe the ritual lines, but that that complementation happens. More next week. Thank you.