Ritual 5

This is ritual five, and you can see how difficult it is to be prepared. And part of the yoga of this education is to prepare yourself to be prepared. Otherwise learning is impossible. And when learning is impossible for the kind of minds that we have and the kind of social context that we have, the only alternative is neurosis. It's not that those people are neurotic because they're this, that and the other. It's that every one is neurotic who doesn't learn at this stage of the game. So somebody needs to tell you it's either shape up or ship out. And it's as simple as that. And you can remain in a daydream if you would like to. But this is a very jeopardized world. And to be daydreaming when there are predators loose is not advisable. So part of the discipline is to prepare yourself, to be ready to come here on time, to have your stuff opened up. And I will do my best to be here for you. We come to two new people today, a man and a woman separated by 1500 years of time. Lady Murasaki from the year 1000in Japan and Euripides from the year 450 BC in Athens, Greece. And I'm using them together as a pair, because they present us with the ritual insight of why it is that if we are not prepared to be prepared, we will become fodder for power games without end. In the Japan of Lady Murasaki, the Heian period, the Han dynasty, it was a purely masculine power game. So regressed That even the clan boundaries were dissolved in favor of warlords. The only thing that mattered was masculine power and the conniving constantly the jostling in those kinds of hierarchical, fearful tourings of the way in which human life would only be possible if you could keep yourself under the overflow level of transgression against rules. And so you find a central state, a formal bureaucracy. That was frightening, staggering. There was only really private wealth, and there were warlords. And finally there was just the warlord of warlords. And one had to be very careful, very cautious. In Euripides day. He lived at a time when Athens had bankrupted itself in a long, protracted war with Sparta, not just with Sparta, but with all the little Greek states that didn't want to be co-opted into the Delian League that was run by Athens. And next year in history, we'll take a look at Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, which was the record of that. And after several generations of Cold War. A similar thing happened in Athens that happened in the United States of the Cold War period. The finer sensibilities of people became numbed out. The acclimation to power games and arcade distractions instead of real life engendered a population of people who finally were unable to tell the appearance from the real. And in this mode, the only authority became the state, the tyranny. Finally, in Athens, it was the council of 3030 wealthy men who decided whether you lived or died. And one of the men that they killed was Socrates. Because he was educating. He was teaching the young men to not believe in the gods of the state. To not believe in the authority doled out to you. To tell you what to do. Because we can't use you if you don't follow our authority. Do you understand that? And Socrates was killed because he was educating. Because learning is the cure for that disease, that illness. Learning is the therapy for a neurosis. Learning is the cure for a psychosis. And so education is not a very marginal kind of sideline thing. It's the synthesizing core of what is real. So that beyond generals there is someone called a teacher. Beyond the CEOs and beyond this whole range of power figures is someone who can teach in the sense of deep therapy, of curing so that you become real in your own life. This is what it's all about. This is what is happening here. And that it happens in such a throwaway venue, in such an out of the way, obscure way, in no way characterizes its reality. It's just the temperature of a junkyard age. It's a graphic Expression of the condition of the patient, which is terminal. So Euripides and Lady Murasaki form a pair. They're a they're a goalpost pair through which we can sense a threshold of victory. A Promethean victory, a a victory of stealing the fire of the gods of the state. So that the sacrifices of the young and yourselves, and your friends and your relatives no longer takes place at the altar of the state. But that that sacred fire comes individually and personally to you and your own life, And that the altar of ritual comportment is no longer some kind of massive Nuremberg rally. But is the quiet confidence that your life is meaningful because you are living it in that way? It is not the acquisition of the individual and society that is a false, neurotic characterization and in no way ever true. It isn't one against the many. It isn't me against the tyranny. That whole characterization is a ritual regression made into a tyrannical, misleading, um, phraseology. And so the way out, the therapy, the cure lies in learning language all over again. From the original, from the primal. Because no one can keep a hierarchical bureaucratic state, warlords or whatever in place without a language either coercively terrifying you into obeying, or a language even more subtly insidious of co-opting you before you even know it into the game plan. And so it is the transform of the language that is the key, by which one learns to stop pounding and making noise and to learn how to sequence notes and place them in sets so that you can make music. And so man the musician instead of man the pounder of noise, instead of someone taking their shoe off and pounding a table. As Nikita Khrushchev once did. When Adlai Stevenson was trying to convey to him that there are very complex, subtle issues with human freedom, he took his shoe off and Khrushchev pounded the table. He said, nyet, nyet, nyet, we will bury you. There is a life and death struggle, and either they will win or they will lose, and we will live. And if they win permanently, life itself will die, because the power now is the power on the level of molecules and atoms. And when you have atomic molecular power of tyranny, life itself is at stake, not just is some one free. And so this is very serious concern. And yet the seriousness of the concern has to be held lightly in the play of a drama of discovery, which is really what education is all about. And in that play of the lightness of the drama, of discovery, in the gentle accrual of nuance, time period after time period, slowly acclimating, one wakes up, one sobers up. You come to a threshold where you begin to appreciate that you are changing and that as you are changing, the world itself becomes discoverable in new ways. Obviously, it is changing also, and to the extent that anyone achieves a therapy, anyone achieves a cure that resonates throughout the whole structure. So it's an ancient principle. It's one of the first things that sentient beings gaining intelligence understood that in a darkness of a cave, if a single spark of fire is kindled, it lights up the entire cave. This quality of education, this quality of kindling. The inner spark also has its complement in that you kindle an exterior spark as well, because insight interiorly without an applicable practice to go with it at all times. Becomes deceptive and generates its own kind of meta neuroses, its own kind of abstract quote wisdom, which is but a simulacra. It's a golem. And that's the worst kind of deception, worse even than the tyranny foisted upon you is that kind of deception which you engender yourself and will defend to the death. The insistence that you're not doing that. That, in fact, is exactly what you're not doing. And it's that kind of a paradox, that kind of a conundrum that makes learning so impossible generally, so that true education comes from beyond the world. It comes from beyond the integral. It comes from beyond the natural cycle, and has always been considered considering its beyondness as a gift. So learning is a gift. And a teacher who teaches who bestows that gift never mistakes that. It's they who are giving the gift. They're just a portal, not a channel, but a person, A personal, a personal calibration, like an artist who produces the works of art. And so teaching is an art. Learning is an appreciation of an aesthetic activity and has nothing to do with politics. Nothing whatsoever. So that university systems that have academic political structures are a complete psychotic dis involvement with learning technically. Being a doctor of civilization. This is my prescription. Start all over again. Learn to learn how. The first thing is to learn to go over your head. Don't just be where you understand what's going on all the time. Get over your head so that you are aware that you're involved in an activity which is more than you can corral with your mind, more than you can corral with the authority, more than you can corral with your willingness to delegate. Well, I'll let this happen. And so much you have to be overwhelmed. And you can see how pernicious it is, because the lightness of the play of that overwhelmingness is often mistaken, and you can see how often it is mistaken, even by those who would like to do it often mistaken as well. It's not very important, really. Not that much is happening. And the reply from the ages is is that so? In Euripides day, the problem was classically in a curious combination that was almost insoluble, and the combination to be put in Euripides terms, in the terms of the day in which he operated. There were two distinct ways to comport richly to life. One was the way of Apollo, and that was the way of form being achieved through high art. And the other was a dionysiac way, which was all forms dissolved through the ritual of dissolving boundaries and limits, and one of the first of the great modern philosophers to understand this. To understand this pair, this Apollonian and Dionysian pair, was Friedrich Nietzsche and his, um, his great first book, The Birth of Tragedy, about how how did Greek tragedy happen? How did it occur? And at a time when he was first writing this, he was a young professor at the University of Basel. His idol had been for many years Richard Wagner, the great composer, the opera composer, And in fact he dedicated The Birth of Tragedy to Wagner, and the Birth of Tragedy came out exactly at the same time that Wagner laid the cornerstone of the Bayreuth Festival building that was going to house the performance of the ring cycle. And Wagner's insight visionary educator. His tutorial spirit was Aeschylus, the founder of Greek tragedy. And so Nietzsche was all bound up with trying to understand and doing the best that he could. And The Birth of Tragedy is one of the great books of the world. How do you combine an Apollonian form with a Dionysian dissolving of form? And Greek tragedy is the resolution of that problem, of that conundrum. But so subtle and comprehensive is that solution that unless one has come to it in a primal way, unless you have come up through the mystery of nature into the ritual establishment of existence, one can not understand what Greek tragedy did, what it was, what the achievement was, and the misunderstandings abound. There are whole libraries of comment that are useless on Greek tragedy in almost every Western language. Writers. Incredible. Even someone like an Aristotle completely ignorant. For the shapes of ritual are not the shapes of ideas. And in fact, ideas are not the shapes of assumed ideas. And we talked last week about how ritual boundaries are generated by a laminar flow, a repetition, a laying in, not a cloning. It's not an abstract cloning process that happens. It's like making it from scratch every single time. And every single time that you do it, you bring some of the scratch into play, some of the zero into play in that one, so that there is a kind of a leaven of the oneness by the zero ness, and that leaven is an open quality, an openness that gives to the layering a dimension of elasticity, so that the laminar boundaries of ritual action create forms that are elastic. They're plastic, they assume, like water, whatever shape the container is. And so men and women who do that ritual comportment are participants in a micro layering boundary energy flow that becomes objective. And so ritual objects are never statically there. They're always vibrationally there. So that one reaches for a ritual object like this sitar. And you do not reach for a static object, but you reach for a vibrational focus that has all kinds of resonant possibilities, and that those resonant possibilities are capable of being indexed by a set design. And when that set design is brought into play, we call that a composition. And that composition is the strongest way of seeing the great photographer Edward Weston, in one of his daybooks wrote that phrase. He said, composition is the strongest way of seeing. That you cannot see something objectively. By looking to see only that thing, you have to see it in its composition, which includes the way in which you're looking. The camera of Edward Weston was not a mechanical recording of something statically there. It wove itself into the resonances of the laminar flow of the energy boundaries, such that the photograph became harmonic with that whole resonance set, because the sets of resonance make a harmony. And one of the qualities and the discovery of music when Euripides was a boy. He died in 406. He was born about 484 81. He was born about the same time that Socrates was born. They were born the same year that the Buddha died had his parinirvana. They were born at a time when Pythagoras was old. And it was Pythagoras who found. That the sets of sound contain hidden within their relationships, their ratios, certain pairs of sounds that went together and led to harmonies and certain sets of sounds that were dissonant. And so one learned to follow the ratios of harmony in generating melodies, And that the true key for that, the true pitch referent for that was the human voice. That the human voice had a very trustworthy quality. It could, in its solo lyrical lilt, keep the resonances into a harmonic flow. And that this was the very essence of what an Apollonian form is, that the individual personal voice sings the lead, and there's a mellifluous consonance to all of the laminar flow energy, so that what is sung really happens because nature, like water, will take any form and will take that form. So there is such a thing as someone speaking a magic language and nature not only listening, but hearkening to that. So that man on that level is a creator by his saying so in the right way. And from that comes the word poiesis in Greek to make, but especially to make viva voice by saying it in that way. So that truth speaking makes truth. Truth is not objective anywhere in the world. It's not statically there. It's not a goal to be found to be picked up. But as the consonants of consonances from all the resonances that are real in ratios that are endless because of a continuity that's unbroken. That's high talk. Yeats used to call it high talk. And we can speak now in English language that has a very high talk, a high talk that strides through whole star systems. Now, for sure. Euripides lived at a time where Aeschylus had brought together this Apollonian voice for form, as an actor who would condense in integral sets of resonance the dramatic action on a stage. And it was Aeschylus who made the first Drama. The first play, The Supplices, where an actor spoke and the resonances of all the human world, became focused upon that stage. All the world's a stage. The theater was a special theater in Athens. It was called the Theater of Dionysus. And it was huge for its day. It was large. The diameter of the proscenium was 90ft, and you had these wide open concentric stone steps going up to the back, and this huge 90 foot diameter beginning stage. And in this vast civic Openness where the entire value of the civilization came to this anvil of decision. A single human actor strode out in mask and robe into Peter Brook one time in a trying to express what drama was, wrote a book entitled The Empty Stage. The single figure, with a voice of personal expression of the real, brings all of the silence of the world into listening. Kent's powerful teacher was once called the word because of that capacity, or the memory of what the Buddha said always was referred to. Thus have I heard Because it is a dramatic actuality where language not only engenders the world, but indexes the way in which our participation to it becomes real. And so drama had this Apollonian quality, this quality of weaving everything into a pattern which could be discovered dramatically here in this theater. And yet in the background, underneath, up above, seething all the time, was the exact opposite of it, the Dionysian. No boundaries, no form, no categories, no polite societal conventions at all. And most profoundly, the Indonesian Non-conviction principle was that social mores are a veil keeping us from our own raw, real nature. That the human categories of this, that and the other have no real tenacity. When you get down to the animal level, where we really come from, our animal bodies, our animal instincts. And so the Dionysian ethos was to dissolve all of the false appearances of the cultural furniture and get down to the bare openness of the raw, uninhibited interchange. A Misconceived as the orgy. Isn't what that's about. It's about the rawness of existence happening on its veracity, and not just in polite terms of its distributed, supposed proper functions that for existence to be vital, it has to have the oneness of the vibrancy of the illness, the existential. And that the chopped up way in which the social conventions allow it to be expressed must at some point be set aside. Yes, we need these 364 days a year, but on this day we're going to set them all aside. This will not be a day that's ordinary. It will be other days. Or there'll be a period during the year where this whole week, this Mardi Gras, this day of the dead, the the, the celebration of in between time forms the end of an old year. And before the beginning of a new year, there's an intercalary calendar. By place where the rules don't hold. We don't have to obey on those days. We don't have to fit in. We don't have to distribute ourselves politely in terms of accepted social functions. We can be just existential on the most primeval of relational levels. And this was the Dionysian ethos. After half a century of genius, of Greek tragedy, the last great Greek tragedy was written by the dying, exiled Euripides. And that's the one that we're taking in our course. It's called The Bacchae. It's a Apollonian Greek tragedy about the god of dissolving Apollonian forms so that every aspect of the theme, every aspect of the motifs, every nuance of it, has a paradoxical quality. At the same time as presenting it as a Greek tragic Apollonian form, it's dissolving it at the same level, at the same instant. And what makes Euripides incredibly great is as he does it perfectly all the way through, on every level. Every time something is made, it's unmade to that same extent. So if there is a yoga in Euripides, that would have been the coveted ornament of India had they have known of him at the time. Unbelievably great, because the precision is without any glitch whatsoever throughout the entirety. Even its language, its cadences, the vocabulary, the choices of words, the characters which by now, after half a century, was more than just one character. More than two more than Sophocles great invention of a third actor. And one has to understand That these actors were always against a background. The actor was a form against a background, which was a series of masked beings called the chorus. So it was actor and chorus. So that when you came to Sophocles great development of three actors in a chorus, you had a quaternary on stage you had a great square of dramatic. All the angles were covered, all the sides were filled. How can you go beyond that? And that's what Euripides specialized in, was going beyond the sophoclean square of absolute great equanimity. How do you go beyond Sophoclean equanimity with a relentlessly Torrential equanimity that always goes beyond. And that's what Euripides did in The Bacchae. He made a form that dissolves itself to the extent that it makes itself perfectly all the time, but goes beyond because you have much more than just three actors in chorus. He, for the first time uses the audience as a part in the dramatic action. He shows that we are not looking into a gorgon's face that would terrorize us. We are looking into a mirror by which we can finally see accurately an image of ourselves and change it if we don't like what we see. One of the puzzling threads all the way through this. One of the almost impossible things is that, however high the Greek tragic language became, and by Euripides day at the time of The Bacchae, it was so sophisticated it was unbelievable. The language held all of its time the same primitive form called the dithyramb, the goat song, cadence and language. And what do goats have to do with consciousness? Why is it that a goat skin would be such a fabulous kind of a costume? When one sees the Apollonian ideal of Athena, the warrior goddess of wisdom. She carries also an aegis, and that aegis was made out of goat skin, and inside that aegis was a serpent. And that was the key route of her reality. And we'll come back to that after a break. How do we combine something that is as evanescent as fire with something that is firm as iron? And that combining that origin of metallurgical skill. The first metal to be used with copper could just be beaten. You didn't have to do too much with it in terms of metallurgy. But by the time you got to iron, it was you had to use the fire, the refining fire. You had to go into an alchemy. And that refinement, that refining fire, that Dionysian or better variation of the word, the dionysiac, the dionysiac quality, the dionysiac dimension that refining fire when applied to language changes language from rhetoric to poetry. So that there is such a thing as a. A study done about 18 years ago now by the great Charles Segal. Segal, published by Princeton Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides Bacchae. As long as language is rhetorical, it has to observe and obey the rules of form. And out of a rhetorical language base, one can build a politics. Build a precedent based on law, which yields ideas of form for society, for people that become governments, kingdoms, political structures, the state. But when there's a transform from rhetoric to poetic, when language becomes capable of carrying the refining fire within its form, the forms then become transformational. And instead of just establishing form integrally, you have a transform which can generate a differentiability, and that differentiability achieves form in a different way from which it did before. Before it achieved form by coming together and being something that was there. Now it achieves a differential form that is able like a lens to focus so that you get a whole spectrum of possibility. An integral form loves to be opaquely iron like there, whereas a differential form loves to be like a like a lens, like an ability, like the eye itself, like the shape of the eye is made to see differentially. And it's important to have a quality where your focus is lightly played on all of the possibilities. And if one maintains a kind of an equilibrium so that the distribution of all the possibilities is more or less of equal designation, then the spectrum itself becomes objective and is able not just to be the differential of a lens, but the entire spectrum itself becomes a super lens that shows possibilities of possibility. So that the lens is the personal, the spiritual, and the lens of the lens is the cosmos. God's eye. Sees through an infinite variety of our eyes, and on that infinite variety, everything is possible, including spiritual victory over abject evil. Even that becomes not only possible, but becomes Active. And so there's a great ambulance hidden for so long that one would have forgotten it, that increasingly comes into play so that the insight, instead of it just being a tearing penetration for a single moment, becomes more and more the glow of certainty that all of this works. And that life not only is good, but life is good and real. So one of the qualities that our education, our inquiry into preparing to be prepared. One of the qualities that begins to come out now is a hidden joyfulness, that Existence has secrets within it that enable it to lend its processes of objectivity to being transformed further than we could have imagined. All of that becomes somewhat veiled from us, to the extent that we do not see vibratory, that we reduce things down to just stuff, so that the static seeing of the world thinking that it's objective because we can pound the table with a shoe, is exactly the kind of ignorance that good ritual obviates, that the Dionysian poetic informs and says, no, that's not true at all. Nothing is all cut and dried. The view that everything is cut and dried is because of a deadness within you, not because of anything that's real in the world. And so one has to see that Greek tragedy, in its Dionysian poetic, was meant to crack the hard shell of stupidity that lards up our seeing of life in its existential openness. That if one comes to the frozen, static delusion that baring breasts is immoral, then the whole idea of breastfeeding babies becomes a forbidden practice. And this is the stupidity that ends in killing life. And so the Dionysian poetic is to shatter that ability, to falsify the coverings of life so that life can breathe and live, and babies can suckle shamelessly in public. So that Greek tragedy as a ritual comportment, had a grand strategy of challenging the frozen ice of convention by shattering it, not in some kind of slow, refined way, but in a quick bludgeon of penetration so that the ice is shattered forever, can never re coagulate so that the the purpose of a Greek tragedy was to make sure that all of the dramatic action led to a single puncture thrust, a single penetration through. We have to use some street jargon here, through the crap to poke through, to show you that that's not a stopping place, that's not going to corral you. That's not an ultimate reality. It was only a projection. Which you yourself generated. And you yourself can go through that as if to use an ancient simile that a really good teacher used one time, as if you were a thread of continuity, passing through the eye of a needle with which to sew new garments. It's a metaphor that carries just unbelievably beautifully. Incidentally, it was used once in a moment of high Dharma ritual in ancient India. Um, there was a, there was a fabulous Buddhist Yogi and. His name was Nagarjuna. About 700 years after the Buddha died. And he used that eye of the needle in a demonstration at one time of penetrating through the whole societal confusion and the tapestry of ignorance that obtained, even in the India of 302, 50, 300 A.D. that was still a lot of stupidity. And Nagarjuna coming into town one time. Had one of the Maharajahs send an envoy to him to see if he was a true wisdom teacher, and to ask him if he would come and deliver wisdom teaching. And the envoy brought um, as was done at those times, brought a glass of water for refreshment. And being a disciplined, uh, mendicant, Nagarjuna carried, um, the four things that a mendicant could carry at that time one sandals, one's robe, one's begging bowl, and a needle usually kept in the upper part of your robe. And this needle was ritual. Tradition from the Buddha that you carried this needle with you because, uh, Every spring after the monsoon, you would go to the dustbins of castoffs when people were spring cleaning, and you would take parts of thrown away fabrics and you would sew yourself a new robe for the season, for the year, so that every year you had your own patchwork robe, which you yourself had sewed with your own needle. So you were you were allowed in your yoga a needle to go with your begging bowl and your sandals and your robe, and the needle and robe went together like the sandals and the bowl went together a pair of pairs. So when the envoy from the Maharaja came to Naagarjuna asking him to deliver a wisdom sermon because he wanted to check out and see whether he was worth supporting or not, whether he wanted to have him in his kingdom. And Nagarjuna took the needle from his robe and dropped it into the glass of water and motioned to him to return and show this to the Maharaja. The Maharaja didn't understand High Dharma, but passed on the idea that Nagarjuna was some great sage because he was just. He was succinctly able to penetrate all the way through, but he never understood the high Dharma message that Nagarjuna could go naked in the world and didn't need robes at all ever again. Greek tragedy evolved as a massive ritual comportment at a time when the city of Athens was becoming so powerful, not only economically powerful, but intellectually powerful, and they were simply outstripping every other city in the world by leaps and bounds. There are times when intelligence focuses and makes discoveries and moves ahead. This is the year 2000, but in most places of the earth, it's it could be 1700. People are still living on all kinds of social levels, but there are a few places in the world where people are living 50 or 60 years ahead. A phone call a month ago from a friend who was the head shuttle controller. He went through this course a number of years ago for the shuttle program at NASA. He said, we're living in the middle of the 21st century. Already our concerns are star system wide already. We keep track of of tools and probes and things that have already left the star system, like pioneer ten and Voyager two. We're already star system wide. We're planning on on that scale. But what if the qualities of a civilization is that it has to for its stability? It has to be founded like a great vertical. It has to be founded on a great horizontal, a cultural horizontal. And you have to have a culture wide enough and broad enough to hold a vertical that goes that high. So in order to have a star system, civilization, a stellar civilization, as I call it, you have to have a planetary culture. You can't do it with a national culture. It's not big enough, not complex enough. Even a culture as complex as the United States is not rich enough to support a stellar civilization. Athens was a case in point in its time. It got a level of sophistication that was larger than the culture was able to sustain, and the Athenian culture was very broad given that time base, because they had colonies on what today is the Turkish coast, Ionian Greek, some 12 or 15 colonies which were part of this league that Athens led, and there were many other cities. And so it had as broad a base as they could manage. But it wasn't broad enough at all to hold the vertical intelligence that they were engendering. And there was by the time of 450 BC. Already this earthquake where the verticality of the intelligence was going. To topple and destroy the entire culture. And so there had to be some way to enrich the cultural base. And Greek tragedy was that to make the foundation more firm so that the intellectual precociousness would not drive people crazy. By abstracting them from the veracities of life. Madness is very subtle. It's not doing something that's loony that everyone can see. It's not knowing that you're living in a way that's incommensurate with the real. And that more and more, everything that you do and say and R is irrelevant to what's real. That's madness. And so Greek tragedy was an attempt to awaken in the very population that we're most subject to that kind of madness, to reawaken them, a respect for life, to show that what breaks in Greek tragedy is the prideful arrogance of assuming that your way of life is better than life itself, that your understanding of co-opted power and society because you have the power, the money, the position that your right in life is wrong. And Greek tragedy was meant to puncture that arrogance that that is really crazy. And so Greek tragedy was a Dionysian poetic meant to remind the very people who were arrogant that life is quite real and formidable, and that you are not exempt from. It's not just pressures or instincts or desires, but that existence itself has a veracity in life, and that sexuality is a part of that. Babies and breasts belong together. It's not news. That's how it is. And that the veils of societal expectations are pressures, not existence. And so Greek tragedy was meant to convey again and again in a layered way. For you didn't go to see a Greek tragedy, but you went to see a set of Greek tragedies. They were always presented in trilogies, and the trilogies always had a fourth play that went with them, called a satyr play. Satyrs are horny, goat footed men who are after the maidens all the time. That's what they do. Thereafter them all the time. And they play the pipes of Pan. They play the pipes, the special pipes of Pan that confused the ear so that you weren't sure what you heard. In fact, the pipes of Pan created panic. The voice of Pan was a sudden, irrational shout that broke your confidence. It was an aural war cry of the inevitable massiveness behind your exterior calm that shattered it forever. Um, in ancient times, when you were, you went to war. You used this classic technique to break the resolve of your enemy. The greatest warriors had incredible war cries. In our century, Edgar Rice Burroughs put that into the triumphant call of Tarzan. When Tarzan beat his chest and cried out the entire jungle. Knew that's the master. You don't mess with Tarzan, even if you're an animal. And Tarzan, like Hiawatha, could speak with the animals and they were his friends. His war cry was not destructive of existence, but destructive of the conflicts that would come up in a plot of arrogant egos to try and manipulate something. Take the diamonds, take the gold, whatever it was. And Tarzan always won. Well, in ancient times, the war cry, the cry of the great warrior was accentuated. Um, in India it was always accentuated by conch shell and that hoop of the conch shell, that high toned, penetrative, clear note of the conch shell was like a lightning bolt, warning the enemies that this was really somebody not really good to fight this kind of a person. You. You're better off to surrender. And usually there was a great military thing where you would be on top of your elephant with your plumes. And when you would blow your conch shell, you would blow it in the nudity of your formidable penis. This was it that the boys better leave the field. Because at the end of this day, there will not be a single boy left alive. This is Mr. Shiva. Come to call. And this kind of equality was always there. When. When Homer was studied in polite Alexandrian literary critical society. One of the most puzzling words in Homer was Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires is the polite Alexandrian way of pronouncing a Greek word, which was a war cry to shatter the confidence of the opponent. It meant, um. It meant that he who shouted this was the carrier of the thunder of realization that your doom was upon you. One time, when he found somebody who was young, he was still just a boy. And he had an incredible linguistic, penetrative genius. Jesus said, I'm going to call you Buenos Aires. He said that of the young Saint John when he was just ten years old, when he first saw him, because it was just an amazing figure. It could use, could use language like thunder. And later, when he was 90, when he was Euripides. Sophocles age he wrote the Book of Revelation. He wrote the apocalypse. Because he had that quality, that penetrative quality, this shattering of the veils of ignorance was the specialty of Greek tragedy. And it was layered on three times by three tragedies in a trilogy. And then came the satyr play as the fourth. And we only have two satyr plays that have survived because the Romans didn't get it. They and the late Romans especially, they didn't preserve any of these satyr plays. They thought that they were like the cartoons right now, the throwaways. Euripides Cyclops and Sophocles Ichneutae are left two satyr plays because the satyrs Was the goat hoofed men who chased the maidens, the maenads. In Japan they were called geishas, courtesans, hetaerae. They were women who belonged to the untamed realm of existence. They were not polite because they had no social roles. They were not daughters. They were not wives. They were not mothers. They were women. They were wild in the sense that they were not tamed by convention, but they presented the energies of life unvarnished, untouched, up. And so the sound, if it were Pan, would have been sort of like a four piped piped, but when it was put into an Apollonian complementarity mode, the pipes that the satyrs played in Greek tragedy had only two a double flute, it was called the aulos aulos, and this double flute, mostly about 20in long or so. Was not a double flute in the sense that it was two flutes from a single stem. It was actually a pair of flutes that were always played together so that it was a pair and not a double. It's always referred to as a double, and one mistakes that because the idea of doubleness, even though it doubles your pleasure, if you look at the logo of Doublemint gum, it's an arrow on both sides of the same line, but the aulos, the flute of Greek tragedy of the satyrs, who had to do with the dionysiac poetic, had not the four of Pan or the six of Pan, or however it went in variations, but they had the paired flute of Greek tragedy, and originally each one of these flutes had, um. Originally there were three holes, and then it went in high tragedy to five holes on each one. And you played them together, and you wore a kind of a strap leather harness that came around to your cheeks and was fastened in the back, because the tremendous air that was needed to play two flutes, a pair of flutes at the same time, you had to keep your cheeks from over puffing. And that's what this was. And it's like the Scottish Bagpipe, and it allowed for two notes to be sounded so that to the unaware, they would be the same sound. The same note would be an identity of notes, whereas in actual ritual nuance it was a paired note going through all the time, and it was a layering, so that the only way that you could tell that this layering laminar flow of the paired note setter piping at a dionysiac poetic moment was to dance, to dance to it, to move to it, so that the movement to the satyrs Paired piping was the wild abandoned dances in the mountains by can we call them ladies? They're called ladies of the night. Politely, no. They were the existential devotees to the religious ecstasy of the Dionysiac poetic. They were not degenerate at all. They had broken through the whole tapestry, where degenerate has a moral place in some pecking order of societal designation. They were no longer in that realm at all. They were in the realm of existence, of the mystery of nature. But while the aulos produced Movement of the maenads in the mountains when it came to the Greek theater. The theater of Dionysus in Athens. The chorus, who embodied the complement to those dancing wild maenads in the mountains. The chorus was stationary, usually 12 figures that had the same mask. Um. The mask would differ from the differing tragedies, but they always wore the same. So again, you have that laminar overlay this time, say 12 masks altogether, who do not move to the music, which is meant specifically to move. You can only tell what it's real to move. So what moves? The chorus does not move. The monads that are moving in the mountains were doing that last night. You're here today in the theater of Dionysus. What moves something in? You must move. And what must move in you is the stuck frame of societal reference that's getting in your way of dancing to the freedom of life, to the luminal energies of existence. What in you is stopping you from being in that flow? That's what must move. So you can see how incredibly refined it was. One of the greatest art forms ever made on the planet. Unbelievably refined because it went below the rock bottom of the way in which we thought life was founded, down to the mysteries of nature, and carried all the way from that up to the highest visionary possibilities of consciousness, so that both Apollo and Dionysus were at home together both ways. We're at home together. And the satyr play that came as the fourth play took the three tragedies woven into this trilogy, braided into this trilogy, three different penetrations that were aligned into a pattern, into a gestalt, a penetrative gestalt, almost as if they were like three stars forming an asterism in the sky and the heaven in your revealed mystery of nature, visionary consciousness, there were a cluster of three points of penetration through the veil. The satyr play was the invitation for you to dance in this new way, go out and live now with the realization that you have been shown that has been disclosed for you. So that Greek tragedy was never an entertainment. It wasn't like going to the theater at all. It was a required necessity of everyone who held land or property or voting, or was a part of the society of the families, of the clans. You had to go. And this the festivals, the Linnaean Festival, at which most of the great Greek tragedies presented in the spring, actually had proctors that went throughout the city, making sure that you went, that you took in because these Greek tragedies were a necessary part of the advanced consciousness needing to be balanced, not by extending the cultural society reach, by having more laws and a wider kingdom, but showing that the true base of it was on the basis of life that high consciousness, in its verticality, balances only on the broad spectrum of free life. And that was the central realization. So that the form of Greek tragedy, the dialogue between the actor or actors and the chorus in terms of these great themes, that dialogue became presented in a form known as Plato's dialogues. And Plato's dialogues are the refined distilled liquor of Greek tragedy. And the greatest dramatic performance of Plato's dialogues is the symposium, which can actually actually has been staged many times. And what stage? There is not Greek tragedy or its paired complement, because not only was there Greek tragedy, but there was Greek comedy, tragedy and comedy. But Plato's dialogues show that there's not only tragedy and comedy, but there's a third dramatic form known as mystery. There's such a thing as mystery. Plays and education, when it's done right, is a mystery play. You get the oh my God discovery when you realize that this is really being done. It's really happening and you really get to do it, that all the philosophies were right, all the religious insights were true, all the artistic hopefulness are rewarded. There. It is that, unbelievably, it really does sometimes actually happen to you. And this quality of that triad, the tragedy, the comedy, the mystery have in themselves, in their gestalt, in their relatedness have a particular relationship to Apollo. Apollo's Homeric epithet, the little phrase that characterized Apollo was always far, darting. Like the sun's rays. Apollo's resonances are like the sun's resonances, which are its rays, and the sun's rays go everywhere all the time. A solar wind so incredible that it blows out dust particles to the extent of like over a light year in diameter. And our sun is a little tiny star compared to some stars whose stellar winds blow dust particles out of the whole part of a galaxy. Apollo's resonances, far darting are the high conscious art realizations that that consciousness is of such poignancy that it weaves itself into time and space, so that time and space themselves become tri dimensional with consciousness. And Apollo was the god of the focus of three ways of leaving yourself. You could leave yourself. You could be frightened out of your wits. You could leave yourself through terror. And that was Aries, Mars, the god of war. Or you could leave yourself not out of terror, but out of ecstasy. The Aphrodite. Or you could leave yourself not only just out of terror and out of ecstasy, but you could leave yourself out of transcendental wisdom, which was Athena. And Apollo was the focus of all three ways that one can color outside the lines and the shapes of what you thought you were, and show you that your energies in a radiant form are capable of going on forever. And so Apollo was that focus, that mythological God figure of that transcendent radiance. And Dionysos was the complement of that that that transcendence, that ecstasy, that terror, that mystery not only focus above, but they also focus below. They focus lower than even the animal realms to identify them with just being an animal, letting oneself go to animal instincts. That's very prosaic. That's not even good for kindergarten anymore. The lowest is not low, but it is the complement to the zenith. It's the nadir. It's the fount and the fount was the terror, the ecstasy and the mystery of existence itself. And that's where Dionysius was. And so great tragedy was that whole axial from nadir to zenith presentation, that that axis is a spiritual core that can hold any kind of vertical that man could ever want to make. But what it will not hold is the purely imaginary. You have to live it for nature to accept it as a part of that axial reality. If you don't live it, if you can't live it, then it is a fantasy ization that should be blown off by a stellar wind from an interior star. Well, if you can live it, then it might be a new possibility of life. It might enrich the possibilities of life by Euripides day when he wrote The Bacchae. He was on one of those laminal verges of realizing that a whole new scale of person was possible, that no one had really believed before. Not the God who becomes man, but that man who learns to spread his wings and fly into heaven itself, who can ride in Apollo's chariot into the sky and transcend the limitations of the earth. More next week.