Ritual 4

This is ritual four. And we're we're trying to approach an understanding without using ideas. We're trying to characterize ritual action without recourse to the myths that are generally woven into action so much as to be unable to ordinarily be analyzed apart from them, as it should be, except that one can never learn, then differentially if you can't analyze. And so we're trying to unbraid the way in which action and language between ritual and myth. And we're doing so by trying to come up through nature to ritual, rather than looking back at ritual through the experience of myth. And this is very difficult to do. It takes a quality of differential witnessing to be able to carry an analysis of ritual action by itself. And generally in our time, this activity, this characterization of action in its own structure, without the implicit meanings and without the benefit of language is usually called structuralism. Structuralism, and one of the great thinkers who brought structuralism into play was Jean Piaget, who was a psychologist and an educator who was interested in very, very young children. How do children initially come to their conceptions of space? How do children come to their conceptions of time, of geometry, of anything? And so, Jean Piaget, a whole shelf full of books, of looking at the structure of how little tiny kids first achieve Their ideas of things and how those ideas come out of the actions, the activities, the play, the dramas which they do. And just a little later, then Jean Piaget, another Frenchman with an impeccably great differential consciousness, Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced structuralism into anthropology and his appreciation of how a structural analysis of the activity will disclose a foundation which was always betrayed when it was incorporated into language and language into meaning and meaning, into something even higher, like a symbolic idea, and how difficult it is to, once you have become acclimated to these more sophisticated layers of the world, to unhook all of their meaningfulness, all of their rote, habitual inclusiveness, and to just come back to a primordiality of just doing and witnessing what it is that you do. And how there is a deep mysteriousness in action which itself delivers a structure before there's any mind to give it, ideation, before there's any meaning, before even there's any language. And it's a very rare individual who is able to look at the activity of human beings with a kind of bracketed seeing, so that you see exactly what it is that they're doing, and don't pay any attention to what they're saying or to what they're thinking. And in theater, this is generally the kind of a critique that would have come from someone like, um, uh, Lee Strasberg. Strasberg, who's fantastically scintillating, feisty, alert glance, would see exactly what it is that you're doing. And that that emphasis on ritual comportment being the fount of dramatic, uh, meaning that the action done is the true foundation, and it's not so much what you say or even how you say it, but it's the veracity and virility of what you do. And if you carry your doing in a continuity, it's compelling. A torrential cascade of, uh, deeply aware doing pulls in all of the attention and focuses it there in the flow of that action, in its Doing. A humorous presentation of this was in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, where Tom Sawyer's aunt has made him have to whitewash this fence, and he wants to play, and he can't play because he's got to whitewash this fence. And so Tom Sawyer goes into this whole activity of really enjoying making the beautiful swashes with the brush and the dipping of the white. And pretty soon all the boys in the neighborhood are paying him little bits and pieces of their things to get a chance to paint that fence, to whitewash that fence, to participate in the concentrated activity. And this is how ritual actually occurs. And this is where its foundation is. And part of the mysteriousness that's in nature gets disclosed in the repetition of ritual actions, because it's never quite the same action, though a repetition of specific activities with deep intent, with high kinesthetic awareness makes it very close. Close enough so that what you get if you look with a completely clear witnessing consciousness, you see that what actually occurs is not a repetition, but like a laminar quality, so that the layering goes on and the flow becomes like a laminar flow, so that ritual forms are very much like the kinds of forms that Charles and Ray Eames used to make laminated furniture, where there would be dozens of layers of thin ply and glue, and you would get these laminar shapes that would be very strong and they would hold ritual forms are that way. And the laminar flow of ritual form has in its existential veracity it has an index. And what it indices is life. So that ritual makes life Integrable without ritual life would not be integrable. You wouldn't be able to integrate. And so it is the laminar flow of ritual layering of as close to exact same, not cloning, but laying it on again and again. Right there, right there, like a major league pitcher who knows how to throw it exactly in the same part of the strike zone every single time, and can do so so that one can vary it ever so slightly and still be close. And such a pitcher is unhittable because they can also change the speed, which is not noticeable until you try to hit it. This kind of laminar quality to ritual is the very essence of what karma really does, not what karma is as an idea of karma, but what karma in its doing is constituted as. So that ritual activity is a dynamic intermingling, laminar flow which is karmic, which the mind thinks is causal and it's not causal at all. It is correspondent, because each layering bears a relationship to any other and each other layer of a correspondence. That is to say, they are all Resonances of the same object, the object being constituted by the laminar flow of all the resonances together, so that the boundary, the karmic boundary of ritual action, is the repeated doing of it itself, and primordial men and women understood that our body is just that. Our body is not this outline. Our body is not just the sack of tissue and blood and bones, but our body is the laminar flow of our life in its karmic activity, and that this karmic activity is so integrable that it can, if done right, integrate Everything or anything into that laminar flow so that the individual does not occur, but the people occurs, the tribe occurs. Humanity occurs not only humanity, but all the animals, all the plants, all the winged, all the legged beings all occur within a oneness, which is life itself. When this was first being mooted by very sophisticated Europeans in the middle of the 1800s, the very first book to come out on this was a two volume set of books called Primitive Culture by E.B. Tylor. 1865 1871. It was the beginnings of anthropology. It's the first book is a book on anthropology. It was the the beginning, the beginning of the study of man as a primordial. Or then they still use primitive as a primitive being. What were our primitive foundations? What were we like when we were children of nature? And of course, all of this emphasis, all of this came into an ideational lead because Tylor used ideas to understand and didn't position himself into the ritual activity. So he came up with a synthesising idea that somehow it's the fundamental principle is animism. And that the deepest foundation of the study of anthropology is to understand the animistic qualities. And Tyler being British, being a tremendously forceful kind of a writer and individual. The British anthropological tradition gained enormous ground and came to rest in a an enormous work by a man who is more famous for an even larger work, Sir James George Frazer, who's famous for his Golden Bough. A big 13 volume set that took many decades to make. But his first really comprehensive work vis a vis anthropology was called totemism and exogamy. Exogamy, exogamy. You know about monogamy? Exogamy. It means outside of the family. And what came into play here was that there was an idea which was posited by an American. Early ethnologist, not yet an anthropologist. His name was Morgan. Uh, Henry Stanley Morgan, Studying American Indians, and he came up with the idea of kinship that there are familial relationships, kinship, and that there is something about kinship groups that are clustered around very peculiar families. There are families of blood. So that kinship has exogamous outside rules that you need to marry outside. You need to have sexual relations outside of the immediate family. But it was found that it isn't just by blood, but it's by primordial image also that one cannot marry within one's clan, determined by a totem, I told him image and that while the totem image can be expressed symbolically, it can be expressed mythically and almost always is. The fact is, is that the totem emerges out of the ritual comportment. And that people in the same clan having the same totem belong to a set to belong to a grouping like a blood family. So that totemic images. This. This book is the supplement to Totemism and exogamy. Totemic. Totemic 1937. So he worked on it for half a century. All of these things. The first edition of the totem work was early in the 20th century. What was important Was to understand that the body in its activity engenders or, to use a better term. Generates primordial images, and that later on those images are talked about in a mythic horizon. But that mythic horizon is already existentially established by the ritual. The mythic horizon narrates the journey of the movement along a kind of a horizon, but it doesn't establish the horizon. Myth is not primordial. Ritual is primordial. And so one has to be very knowing to see that the ritual comportment establishes a kind of a flow, and to appreciate that that flow is actually an energy frequency and that each people, each human population of people have their own particular energy registration, their own frequency. And they know if someone is not of their frequency, they can feel it, they're aware of it. They see it in how you do any particular action. All of our people tie our moccasins this way. They tie them the other way. There was an episode of Star Trek where they had two aliens from the edge of the galaxy, and they had faces that were half black and half white. It's an image from the Vajrayana, from Tibet in Tibet, and it's called the Gyalpo. And the Gyalpo is a dualistic figure that can never integrate and always likes conflict. Black and white in halves. There was a. And in the Star Trek episode, uh, Captain Kirk tries to bring them together, these two guys and says, well, you're so similar. I don't see why you should be, you know, fighting. And they both look at him and say, can't you see he's light on the left side? I'm light on the right side. We could never get along. We're totally opposite. We're totally different. That kind of duality covers like mud, the very base of life that would be able to generate out of the paradox that polarity in its preparedness is very fertile. But that duality is a dead end, and duality is always foisted upon the world of the body by the mind. Duality is an idea, one of the most pernicious ideations around the source of great tyranny. Whereas the poignancy of ritual as a laminar flow, establishing the vitality of life gets its cue from the mystery of nature, and understands that all life has emerged as a unity from the unknown. In one of the great sections, while he's writing about animism, Tylor, because he was a genius, is trying to figure out the doctrine of souls vis a vis these animistic beginnings, and sees the array of evidence always shows him in all primitive societies, primitive human groups. There was they all shared a similar conviction that there are two things which everyone has. One of the things that we all have is our life. But the other thing that we all have is we have a phantom other self. Tyler because he is a Victorian, uh, anti-Christian scientist. Still, Christian understands this. That. As both belong to the body, why should they not also belong to one another? Life. Our life form and our phantom form. Since they both belong to the body, why should they not also belong to one another and be manifestations of one and the same soul? Whereas the deeper appreciation of it is that they are not one in the idea of a soul, but they are one in the oneness, the Tay of existence. So it's not so much that they're unified because of an integral high idea, but that they are generated originally in a unity. And this is the carrying of conviction in primordial peoples. It makes the peoples primordial rather than primitive. If the integral is dependent, until you mature enough to have a high symbolic ideal, then those people are primitive and they are going to have to get rid of their primitive beliefs, get rid of their primitive lives, get rid of everything, and educate them until they become just like us and have the same idea. Then they're civilized. The Victorian conviction in England was that, yes, Mr. Darwin may be right about evolution, but we have arrived. We have emerged onto the shore of civilization and we are no longer subject to evolution. And of course, the First World War scrambled that. And this is only appreciable if that is turned upside down, and that it isn't some high ideal that unifies and integrates. Yes, there are high ideas which do integrate, but they're able to integrate because the language generating meaning has interiorized in an integral way. But that language would not have an integral interior quality if it weren't there in the body in the first place. And the body? The physical existentiality emerges whole because the unity of nature has already accepted that the zero has already accepted that the 1st May occur out of it, not that one is created out of nothing, but that the zero and one are a binary indeed, that they occur together, and that all life is one, because that's how it actually and realistically occurs. And the later filigree from that oneness into the different species, into the different types, into all the, the different qualities that are there are only on a basis of an apparency. Always Sharing the same common denominator. What is that common denominator? That they exist so that the existential is not a category of ideation, but an actuality. That existence is a founding phase and has a oneness, as it were, so that the very principle of good ritual, that it establish a laminar flow, a layering, and that this layering then is in effect an energy wave, which by its repetition creates a laminar strength so that energy becomes form, energy becomes mass, energy becomes matter in just this way. So that one of the strongest bodies that exists in the universe are a people whose ritual comportment is shared among themselves, and that it's very healthy and the laminar flow of their ritual bodily form as the people holds it holds in existence. So that the looking from the outside, as if to see that these people are objective because of the stuff they have, or the tools they have or don't have, is a miss of apprehension completely and misses the Primordiality someone like a Claude Lévi-Strauss, able to see clearly into this and understood that finally, one of the most Primordial of all images that occurs. An image eternal is the alternate faces which one has in the laminar flow of your life, and this is where the mask comes from. The mask is another realistic possibility of you, just as valid as the face you would see reflected in the water. This face is only one aspect of my laminar flow, and I can bring out of my bodily comportment an image which I could wear as a mask, which is another facet of myself and is fully integrable into my life. I can wear that mask not as a mask, but as another legitimate role, whose image this is and who I am. Also at the beginning of one of his great books, Frank waters, who wrote the Book of Hopi, also wrote a book, a very large book published by the University of New Mexico Press about half a century ago called Masked Gods. And Frank waters, in the preface to Masked Gods, writes about when he was about 8 or 9 years old, and he saw his, uh, his first, um, uh, ceremony with the Hopi people, and he was up, uh, just below Third Mesa in a February time. It was the sole ceremony, the determining by, uh, a triangulation with the morning stars position in the celestial heavens of the point at which winter is going to turn and spring will follow and come. But even though you can't grow anything out on the earth, in the plateaus, you can within the protected shelter of the Kiva, nurture a single being seed into its first sprout. And so the soil ceremony is making sure that the powers of regenerative nature are working again this year. By seeing that first sprout in the midst of what would ordinarily just be winter, and Frank waters being 8 or 9, sitting on the back of a buckboard when this was happening, turn of the century still there. And he said he was shocked and terrorized in a way, because he saw tribal men whom he thought he knew were wearing the masks of the Kachinas. And when they came in, the group of the men now become kachinas with the gourd rattles and the evergreen ruffs on the ankles, and all the mobile areas and all the headdresses and the masks, he said. I understood these were no longer the men I knew. These were the gods. That man has the capacity and the power primordially to inhabit not only the animals and the plants, but the gods. And later on, the recovery of that realization. Not so much an idea, but a realization of the full spectrum of man's ritual bodily inhabitant. His full life laminar includes the animals and the gods also, and in the Renaissance the rediscovery of that. The realization, the remembering of that is in Pico della mirandola on the dignity of man. And he says, the old Hermetic Realization some 1500 years before him, and in on the Dignity of Man. Pico says that man was not given a specific niche in life, but that all of the creations gave a portion of themselves to man. So that man is that capability of going down the central core shaft and being any part of life whatsoever that he would choose to be for whatever purposes he needs at that time. Man is not only ambidextrous, but that he has a rainbow, kaleidoscopic, and can be anything, for he has a the donation of the secret part of all things. And that man is not the measure of all things in a kind of sophistic Protagoras way. But man is the measure of all things. In a recalibration capacity, he can tune himself to any level of life and existence and participate with it, and so not only understand it, but be it, and by being it exchanges with it so that it is also then incorporated, integrated into then his life and what he does. And in this way the powers of the minerals, the powers of the plants, the powers of the animals are not powers, as someone would have the idea of power. It's not that at all. It's that their existential veracity, in a resonant way, nourishes and enriches his own energy frequency, which is not his alone, but is that of the people of whom he is a part. And in this way, human populations grow in their resonant strength to the point of exhibiting a harmonic, and that when human beings are primordial enough to live a harmonic, they have a correspondence with the entirety of the universe, the universe as a whole than resonates with them. Not only is man the measure of all things in some superficial idea, but that he participates in the unity of the universe and knows this, and in that participation sees that the energy frequency of himself as a part of that people whose energy frequency then gets into a harmonic with the universe itself, and the entirety of the energy flows as a single, complex laminar, whose form then is unique because it pairs itself with the zero mystery of nature. And at that point, um, what occurs is a. We misunderstand it so much because our language is beggared by false ideas of it. Men and women achieve freedom, freedom, the freedom to live realistically, not the freedom of choice, but the freedom of reality. The freedom of choice is a is a fool's gold. Who gave you those choices? What are those choices? Why do we have to choose who chooses? All of that? Is perniciously superficial compared to that kind of wisdom? I used to call it, because the first evidences that we have of it are from what we call the Paleolithic. Paleolithic wisdom. And there was a great Frenchman again, investigating all of Paleolithic art, all of the art from all the caves back 35,000 years to about 13,000 years ago now is about 13,000 years and the oldest back some 20,000 years plus before that. And saw not just the animals which are reoccurring or the hands which reoccur and we're going to talk about, but that occasionally there are abstract marks, markings that occur in all of these paintings and all of these galleries. And he tried to bring all of the abstract markings from the entire corpus of Paleolithic art together under one page. And when he did so, he discovered that they make an a total gestalt, what he called the Paleolithic star. They make a starburst form of focus without any lines connecting, but all of them clustering together into what he called the Paleolithic star. And curiously enough, I remember the first time I saw André Leroi-gourhan Paleolithic star computation, and it just so happened synchronistically I guess I was reading a book on early catacomb art, the Catacomb of Callixtus under Rome, the earliest of the of the catacombs, because that was cave art too, only from about 2000 years ago, before they were Christians, when they were still Hellenistic Jews. So that you Saw the earliest drawings of Moses or Jesus. They were always accompanied by the Paleolithic star above their head. It was unbelievable that there it was again. There's no way that those men and women, those persecuted Jews to become Christians in the time of Nero in Rome, knew anything about Paleolithic cave art of 30,000 years before them. They came to the same expressive image. And that image is that there is a celestial gestalt, which is like an inner guiding star, which accompanies someone who has the supernatural ability to convey the laminar flow of vision Back into the actions and activity of a people who become universal in their energy frequency, who establish again a harmonic, and that that occurs spontaneously. They don't have to know. They don't have to have a causal connection. It occurs again precisely that way, because that is how it happens any time, all the time, wherever it occurs. Truly a mystery. More after the break. The ideas that compromise us are so dense by now as to be a force of formidable ness. It's really difficult. The 20th century was in default because it had too many powerful ideas. And so it became, in an odd way. A phantom mimic of medieval civilization which had too few. And so the late 20th century was very medieval and a very odd way. And if you look at a lot of the science fiction, it's all medieval. It's like reliving that ethos. And so we're guarding against that by not letting powerful ideas come into play. They can ruin our day. So I'm trying to keep the language flowing in such a way and in such a horizon that the really powerful ideas will bounce off this, and you'll be able to have at least a chance to experience not only experience, but to have some activity occur before experience is felt. We talked last week about that great woman, ethnographer Frances Dinsmore, who did all the books on American Indian music, maybe a dozen different tribes, and spent her whole life doing this. And because she was paying attention to the music and not the mythology, she was the first one to pick up that all tribes, when it's really important, will put in made up vowels to pad out the music mythological language so that it fits the ritual rhythm, and that what was more important, what was primal, was the energy rhythm of the ritual and not the mythic continuity. It mattered more what you were doing than what you were saying you were doing. And the veracity of shared doing is so profound that it's the very essence of love. A shared ness of doing is an act of love. And so it was a great deal of primordial love in men and women who live on that very realistic existential, that existential laminar flow of an energy, harmonic harmonic with the universe. And there is a beauty. There is a beatific. Absorption that occurs and all primordial peoples experience that and wish to bring that into play. And know that because of the nature of deception, not just because there are demons who deceive, or evil genies who would like to deceive, but because the accidental quality of materiality, when it isn't incorporated into the laminar flow, becomes like granules Fuels that scatter the energy and we go out of kilter. And so we have to constantly come back and renew. We have to do those annual rituals again. We have to do those lunar rituals again, because we have already, in that short duration of time, veered off. And so it's constantly like reforming one sense of accuracy of participation weaving. And this is where the weaving comes. Weaving oneself back in and making sure that that laminar flow has the energy frequency of the real, which is not a calibration to some recorded limited thing Which means that there is no sense of identity because it's not important. The participation is the index, not the identification. Whereas the abstract mind is convinced that identification is the ultimate test of true and false. And this the body. Is caged if it believes that, in fact, not only caged, deluded. And we have lived through a time where bodies were imprisoned by super powerful minds that paid no attention to life, and used identity criteria as cookie cutters to stamp out and throw away anything else, and most lives were decimated by this and turned into pablum. And the social level of pablum that obtains now is the direct result of that. Whereas primordial men and women are very smart, they get existence and they maintain the existential reality quite well. There is a I mentioned this morning a figure in American ethnography. I mis pronounce his name. It wasn't Henry M Morgan, but Lewis Henry Morgan and his development of the idea of kinship. We'll use that idea for just a moment. The idea of kinship, kinship and the social order that there was, in fact, um, two different kinships kinship groupings. One came from one's life, the other came from what eventually was developed as a kind of a political. Religious. Shadowing of life. This was not exactly right. Lewis Henry Morgan's deep insight with the northern New York State tribes, the Iroquois League peoples, the Seneca and and those people, there was a deep understanding that it it's not a political religious, not a political hyphen religio. It's not an ideational pairing to life, but it comes from a visionary differential capacity of high consciousness, which pairs itself with the existentiality of existence of our bodily life, so that vision and body go together as a new binary, and that this in no way obviates the body's primordial binary complementarity with nature, so that vision and nature can displace each other without losing the veracity of existence. That the supernatural is not anti nature. The supernatural is a mysterious higher order of nature and not its opposite. And this becomes profound when the issue of death comes in, because the mind tends to think that death is the antithesis of life. Whereas the primordiality in good ritual is the realization that death is a part of the supernatural and belongs with life, not in terms of nature, but belongs with life, in terms of vision. That the netherworld or the other world or the overworld, that those domains are not against life at all, but that they complement life In a way different from the way in which nature complements life. So that you have a very difficult thing to understand. Unless you use that square of attention, that square where there are four phases that make a gestalt at any one time. And that if you move to include another phase, extend it further than the last phase does not disappear. It doesn't go into unconsciousness, but it goes out of the attention. So the square of attention is what one is able to formulate as the picture, the plane upon which images record. So that when vision comes into play, nature comes out of play in terms of the square of vision. And that happens when ritual becomes the foundation. As long as nature is the foundation of the square of attention, the mysteriousness of nature carries it all the time, everywhere. But as soon as one has the capacity to bring into one's attention that further phase of vision the supernatural, the magical, then the magical, the vision, the supernatural participates in a new square of attention whose foundation is not nature, but ritual. So that vision As an operative function is intimately linked up with the body. The body is a trustworthy foundation, so that it's altogether pernicious for someone to have the idea that the supernatural obviates the body. That's not true at all. It's never true. It brings the body into another square of attention, where the supernatural occurs with it, so that you have then, in terms of a kinship, not only families by blood, but also families by spirit and the spirit families are clustered around those deeper images which, instead of just being images, the English word that's really apt. Are types Totemic types where a people, regardless of their family or their tribe, or their blood types, or even the eras in which they live, if they share a clan, if they're members of the Turtle Clan, if they're members of the moiety of a group which includes the totem of the deer, all of those people are related in a spiritual family. It's not a political, not a political hyphen. Religious. It's not a religious typology. It simply is a visionary pairing to the ritual level of the blood families. And just as there is a kinship by blood, there's a kinship by spirit. And one does not know initially with a stranger whether they're related to you or not. So that a stranger is deeply ambivalent to a ritual tribal ethos, because the stranger can be beneficent or malevolent equally. And one has to find this out. And the only way to find this out is through tests of whether they absorb into your energy frequency, into your clan's frequency. You know, they're not part of the family. They're not blood relation, but they may be spirit relation. In which case, uh, you better not cook them right away. So this is a curious quality where the stranger Primordially is of great instant interest. Captivating. Who are they? And our ethos and our time? The alien is that stranger? We don't know. Maybe they're cooking us. So there is an interesting quality in kinship, where there are pairs of kinship groups which braid together, and that this. Braiding, this. Weaving of moieties together produces to carry the. The language metaphor produces a fabric which is capable of carrying the images in a very special way. Not only are the images carried in a blood way. They're also carried in a spirit way so that images have a blood existentiality in terms of their reference to the material relatedness, but they also carry a hidden relatedness in terms of spirit. And one has to learn to see deeper or see at an oblique angle in order to tell whether that is happening or not. And if you are able to see, just use the language for a moment. If you're able to see spiritually, then it's the blood relation which is oblique to you, and you have to figure that out by modifying how you're looking. It's like a bird which is trying to see an object clearly will move its head slightly to make sure that it can can see. And a similar thing happens when a human being tries to see accurately, especially into a distance, like the stars at night, and you try to look through the atmosphere. The stars are twinkling because there are different thicknesses of atmosphere. Almost all the time is scintillation. And those who are used to looking at the stars develop a quality of seeing, which in astronomy has always been called um, uh, averted vision. You learn to not look exactly at the object, but to look all around it all the time so that when it averages out, its winking averages out, you actually see it much better than if you looked at it objectively, which is a case in point, because if you use the mind to try to make an identification, you will not see anything except what the mind projects. And the mind, because it is finding what it is looking for, is convinced that that's that and makes that tautological connection and thinks that that is real. All that that has done is that it fortifies illusion into the delusion. So that one has to be in the world, but not of it. One has to be seeing clearly, but not directly. And so all good ritual comportment has this kind of averted gestalt where you don't do anything directly, but you do again and again and again. This laminate, layered approach that comes very close all the time so that you get the gestalt, the sense, and you get it not in terms of the mind, but in terms of the body. The body becomes familiar in relationship to it, and that familiarity is the first quality, that there may be family here, that there may be a familial relationality. And that's what kinship is. Most primordial peoples live with the animals. If they have domesticated animals, the animals live with them. They live in their house. It isn't that these are dirty animals that shouldn't belong in a clean house is that a healthy house has its animals. And the thing that still hangs on is that pets are exactly that. It's a universal phenomenon. Not only can't humans have pets in that kind of a thing, but pets can have pets. I knew a dog and a rabbit one time that were bosom buddies because they were raised together and they were not happy taking a nap unless they were snuggled together, and then they were okay. They were fine because that was family to them. And the rabbit used to get in all kinds of trouble because other dogs initially seemed like, you know, possible cousins. Whom I had a Buddhist dog one time. Named Chana. And she was convinced that that skunks were part of her family. So she would chase them to get close to them. And of course, they would spray her. And she never learned because she was convinced that, you know, they belonged with her. And so she always smelled of polecats. And always was rubbing her snout in the dust to get rid of the the odor. And a good thing that she had black, curly fur. She was one of these larger, uh, terriers, almost like an Irish wolfhound semi terrier. And it was very interesting. But Chana, being a good Buddhist, always had compassion for every skunk that she met. Good ritual brings that familiarity into play in such a way that the energy frequency begins to glow, and when it has that glow out of that incandescence, images spontaneously occur. And not only do images spontaneously occur, but when you get used to just letting the images occur, when you get really easy with that effortlessly, at some time when the pressure is special, a type will occur. Not an archetypal symbol, but an archetypal type will occur. And that is your that's your totem. That's where you belong. For me, it's the deer. And when I realized that I was about 19. Nobody ever told me such things. I mean, I grew up in the most uneducated, middle class middle, nothing imaginable. And when I discovered that I was related to deer on totemic level, I was curious. Well, how how how is one a deer? Can hardly even frame the words. So I would go out into the forest and Sequoia National Park, the giant sequoia forest, to learn to be a deer. Never knew. No one ever said, hey, you need to know how to be a deer. And the ultimate test was I talked about this last week. Can you move through the forest like a deer? Not only run. That's something. But can you move? Can you walk like a deer? And I remember when my daughter was four, I took her up to the sequoias to to get used to that family quality of being deer people. And we were walking around what is called up there, Crescent. Meadow. And we're walking around the meadow quite, quite large, maybe about 5 or 6 city blocks long and 2 or 3 wide. And as we were walking, we were practicing walking like deer. She's about four years old, and we were walking along with that characteristic deer gait. And out of the meadow came a doe and her fawn, walking exactly in that stochastic rhythm. And they walked within about 5 or 6ft of us and walked back up the hill, and she was just giggling silently. And she said, dad, they saw us, but we were deer. Huh? I said, yeah, we were deer, so it was okay. We belonged in the same forest with them in the same way, so that we were not strangers. We were not aliens. We were not other. And that the forest had absorbed us to the point that we were coexisting with the animals, which meant that we were coexistence with the trees to all the plants, the birds, that there was a harmonic then that struck like a descending series of notes in a chord, where the lowest note when it sounds, completes the chord. And you know that that's that, that that's complete, that that's how that sound in its set. Works out. And that if you could play all of the notes together in that chord, however many there are for us, we're used to the comportment of eight notes. The Chinese are used to five notes, pentatonic scale, and there are other scales. In fact, there are infinite number of scales. There are infinite number of musics available in the cosmos. They will never be exhausted. There are more scales than anyone could even count. So there is music without end. If you hear the notes in a chord sounded together, that chord evokes the type of the universe, the universe itself. That's the archetype. There's only one at any given time form. And because there's a new one now, because there's a new time form, and the new archetype of the new time form is a spiral spirit, like the whirling galaxy, that spiral spirit speaks to us, although it's early and almost everyone's asleep. It's only a few seconds after midnight in the new Year, and it takes a while for people to wake up. Enough to get real enough to be able to hear the cord and see that, um, not image, but see that archetype of the wholeness of the universe existentially. The chord is also the name in geometry of the diameter of the circle. And that chord transfers transfers from the geometry of the circle to the energy of the music because of movement. If you have a circle of this size, the chord extends from this finger to this finger, and midway would be where the center of that circle is. And if you have a line of movement through that center of the circle, that line of movement, that equatorial Line is a horizon and the two farthest points making the chord. The line segment of the chord through that circle. If you move that circle along the axis of that equatorial movement, and at the same time rotate that chord around the center, those two points moving in that way will describe not a circle, but a sine wave. They make in their journey around the circle. The ends of the chord rotating around the center will make in that equatorial movement a sine Wave, and that sine wave is an energy frequency. All over the universe, energy is a frequency. And so if a ritual circle is maintained by a certain set chord of a people and generated in a time flow as a whole, it will make an energy wave that registers. In reality, it will be an energy that registers as material matter. And that's how a people make life real in a world of things. And you can see the very simple and yet very profound wisdom that men and women have had for hundreds of thousands of years. Even millions of years. Not capable for millions of years of understanding that sinusoidal wave form of the gestalt in temporal continuity, but understanding that if those two movements are paced together, the circumambulation in irregularity and the movement laterally in irregularity, if those two regularities are brought together, it produces an energy of harmonic. Which evokes a participation in the mystery of nature. It's not like you're trying to guess what the mystery is, and then make rituals to fit that at all. It's the disclosure that this practice of gestalts hums and you experience the quality, the kinesthetic quality of a divine music. Such that one could dance to it, though to outsiders they see you pirouetting in silence to yourself. You are whirling like the Mevlevi dervish. And you never get dizzy because your center is always in motion anyway. The reality of our star system is just that all of the planets form a cord around our star, and they're all rotating, just like those, uh, points on the circle, and the entire star system is moving through the galaxy in just that measured way. So that in effect, we are all in a movement choreography that if we could make an intellectual ideation of stasis come true, the whole planet and star system would leave us behind like that, and you'd be left alone in empty space and truly disoriented. Hey. But fortunately, not even the most perniciously, ignorant and evil fall off the planet. Much less get left by by the motion of the star system so you can see how deeply compassionate God really is. Save them. They may be useful fodder even, because everything is transformable. It's all transformable because whatever polarization there is, there is the capacity of an exchange of centers on the basis of the chords, equanimity, because that's the way reality happens. So it isn't that you have to keep your fingers crossed and your ideas pure and hope that it's going to happen. That's that's crazy. That happens because it does work that way. It occurs that way. And so the, um, the quality of the true is actually a disclosure rather than anything else. It's a discovery rather than an achievement of willful accuracy on the basis of identity or identification. So ritual is extremely important not to get right but to do it. And so our mask making the mask of food and the mask of feeling are two points on the same circle, which together establish a chord which can rotate in tandem around a true center, which moves in a continuous way. Because we come every Saturday, and our occurrence here gives it a periodicity of movement in time, which is the only thing that would be missing then. So we are sealed in the reality of what occurs by our very doing of it. And we haven't even gotten to ideas. We haven't even gotten to language yet. So that veracity goes bone deep. And generally, the supernatural achievement of weaving itself back into life is carried by the image of wearing your skeleton on the outside. Some of the most profound, um, ethnographic collections of shamanic wear have the elements of the skeleton sewn to the outside of the buckskin. That one has been turned inside out that the supernatural is not some weird phase of nature, but is the inside out of nature. And that nature allows itself to be turned inside out because it's mysterious, because it isn't just one way, regardless of how addictive that particular idea is. Nature is one way, and by God, it's got to be that way. To be real is a pernicious nature allows herself to be turned inside out any time, all the time. It's one of her acts of love. She opens her interior to our penetrative sharing because that's how life really happens. And it happens that way all the time, in fact, continuously so that the layering, though it happens ritually at certain junctures of the year, certain seasons of the year, or it happens at certain crises within a life birth, sexuality, puberty, uh, marriage. Um, crisis, death. Those passages, those seasons and those passages together occur in this gestalt where The laminar flow is absorbent of both kinds and also both kinds of blood and spirit, so that it's a very complex, um, the word for it instead of an outline is a boundary. So the boundary of ritual objectivity is this laminar flow made into a deep resonance that may have several hundred thousand layers. So it's a tremendously rich, so that a really good ritual comportment is fantastically brocade and brocade in such a way that it has a jacquard quality to the imagery that it's both blood and spirit at the very same time, and that you can, with ambidextrous play, be dealing with a blood issue that's really necessary to survive, or a spiritual transformation that's really joyous to behold. And it is ambidextrous. Whether you're holding on for blood's sake or you're beholding for spirit's beauty. And that all that occurs together so that there's a richness to ritual which we are well advised to appreciate, not to identify, but to appreciate. And. It's this quality of performance that makes of ritual a dramatic form. And we're going to start a whole new pair of books, and we're going to take two dramatic forms that are some of the most exquisite ever made on the planet. One of them is we're going to take a woman who lived a thousand years ago. Lady Murasaki in Japan. The tale of Genji. It's a woman who is the most educated woman in Japan. At the time, she was more literate than any 15 people. And The Tale of Genji is her tale of how a masculine prince is raised into the laminar flow of the appreciation of life by all the women that he meets. Whereas the men are interested in swords and dynasties and kingdoms, they're interested in life and relationalities and love. And he is raised in that way so that he becomes a stranger to the materialistic, Militaristic, paternalistic society, and he becomes absolutely a prince of life. The Tale of Genji and paired with Lady Murasaki's court ethos rituals of a thousand years ago. In Japan, we have Euripides Greek tragedy The Bacchae, the last Greek tragedy, because with this, the whole form of Greek tragedy became so fine a point that anyone who tried to write with it again broke the point off. It was the last Greek tragedy written in exile by the ultimate Athenian. And we'll take a look at these next week.