Ritual 6

This is ritual six, and we're coming to the center of the second of the phases. And these phases have a very special relationship. Um, I was talking earlier to someone saying that the ideas and themes, the motifs using a Wagnerian term. For a moment, the motifs are arranged like hairs so that they're able finally, to be combed out and braided So that you can take any series of any year of this education and find a way to braid it with the other ones. The educational implications of this are ancient, but the utilization that I'm bringing into play is is new. It's never been done before in this way. And I thought that I would work into the lecture today, into the presentation, a little bit of the philosophy of learning that accompanies this particular technique. And it fits into the lecture today. For those of you who are acquainted and coming in a regular way, you know that our educational cycle follows the seasons for different seasons for a year. And in keeping with an ancient tuning fork structure, we use a pair of years so that you have four and four. You have an eight part or eight phase cycle, but the second year, the second cycle does not fit over the first, but pairs with it alongside of it. And what would have been a circle repeated ritually as another circle changes its structure so that the two circles come together in such a tangential way that they touch at one and one point only, and together make an infinity sign rather than two circles. When wisdom follows the cycle of a natural year, we recognize that this is a deep wisdom in the Asian tradition. And we're going to be talking about Asia today. It's called dharma. But when the cycle is paired like that, so that there's an infinite openness that's possible that goes cosmically beyond nature, it's no longer called dharma, but it's called high dharma. And so this education is a high dharma. It's a 21st century presentation of the best technique that our species has for learning, not just learning how to fit into nature, but how to recalibrate ourselves so that we can be in any nature and find a way to be real within our lives. And so it's good for a species who's ready to go, not only outside of the sandbox of the particular province where you might live, or city or even country, but even planet. And so an education like this is good for a star system wide inhabitants and good for any star system. So it's new and it's ready. It's. It's time is coming very quickly. The difference between a dharma and a high dharma is that a dharma always has an image base, and a high dharma has no image whatsoever. So that in the natural cycle, integration is the mode of what's happening. And images will, through the medium of a language, acquire deep enough correspondences so that they quote interiorize and further integrate into ideas. And so ideas are very common, very ordinary in the integral nature of beings like ourselves. We think and our thinking Generally comes out of our feeling toned range of experience, which is where the images play. And what our education is looking at is how at this particular point, at ritual six is at how those images occur out of the existential action of our bodies and of material things that the movement of our our bodies in a world of things, in this ritual comportment, this action, this activity existence flames into the language which carries the images, which are interior pictures of things which have an exteriority, a materiality. But at the same time as learning this kind of traditional way of integration, because we have a whole other strategy, a completely different strategy, something which people of our species have been doing for several thousand years now. We have a differential strategy as well as the integral. And so we're learning in the first year to follow nature and to integrate. But we're also learning that in tandem with nature is consciousness. And that consciousness is not integral in its mode at all, but differential. And so it takes a modicum of patience to be able to allow for this pairing the integral and the differential To come into play, and were we to do it in a strict sequence, the differential would be co-opted into an idea of the differential, and we would never be able to find our way out. So we sabotage the limiting structure of the idea of differential consciousness before we get to it. By introducing high dharma, no image qualities as early as now. Ritual six. I smell the lamps. They're just burning off a little bit of fabric, and that odor will go away if you're smelling it in the room. Don't worry, there's no fire. The quality. Of an image which is there is important in integration. Whereas in differentiation. It's important to have the liminal boundedness of the place where an image would be. But. Is not that it was there we had an image, and now the image is gone. And so the liminal. Boundaries present a form of no image. And this is not difficult at all. It goes back to. Paleolithic wisdom of the hand which is dipped into your iron oxide, or your ochre or your Soot and you make a representation, an image of the hand on the rock of the cave. That's an image of that hand. But you can, in a different way, take the material of the color and mulch it with the saliva in your hand, and hold your hand against the rock and blow the material on that, so that when you take the hand away, it leaves a negative print out. It leaves a no image of the hand, which has a particular kind of a quality. If we try to hold an image of the hand in a no image We fall into illusion automatically. There's no way that this will not happen. It's not a function of ignorance. It's a function of intelligence. This is how intelligence works. Intelligence, in order to have its operative nature effective, must integrate the mind in order to be. Its mind has to integrate. It has to see images. And from images it has to integrate into ideas. And out of this comes a synthesizing symbol, a synthesizing idea. And that is, of ourselves, the I within Individually developed from the I without so that the image and the self-conception. Very natural always happens, does happen. This is the way the mind works when it's brain based. When perception and conception are cognate. But there is a very peculiar quality that occurs. Which in the kind of language that we would speak ordinarily in our time, there is a way in which the idea of self evaporates. It integrates to the point of vanishing. It implodes. And in that radical steep implosion vanishing, what is left is a stencil. No image printout of who we thought we were. And it is clear now that we are not that we're not that, but that we had made some identification where we believed that that was who we were, that identity. At this point, consciousness begins to occur and consciousness is different from ideas. Ideas are always integral. Consciousness is differential and works on a recognition rather than on cognition. So that as long as you are habituated ritually to cognitive integral sciences so called, you will never understand consciousness or understand consciously the person and the cosmos. It just won't occur. What you will always have are increasingly convenient ideas about these things. Representations conceptually about these things, but not the quality itself. So in this education process that we're doing now, while we have pairs of books that we use all the time, every month we change a new pair of books. These pairs of books are like a pitch pipe that tunes a choir to sing. There a registry for us for that month, for that lunar cycle to bring together two very powerful books, which generally in the course of our civilization, in the course of our history, any one and each one of these books have been used as texts to develop the integral mind, to make very powerful ideas, to make powerful ideas that have recut and stylized nature into shapes of human culture and human civilization, which are of baffling complexity today and generally in history. All of this would be fine. The only times when it's not fine is when it no longer works. And there are times in human history where men and women like ourselves have lived on the cusp, as we do now. Today, the year 2000 lived on the cusp where one old form of civilization didn't work anymore, and a new one was not there yet. Now, these are not lost generations so much as invisible generations, because the people who the men and women who find quote themselves do not find identities. They find the negative printout, no image, no mind, no identity, which has liminal boundaries of exploration rather than any kind of traditional way of fixing. And so instead of being fixed, there is rather a resonance of an infinite mobility that characterizes such men and women. And they learned that there is a different scale of freedom, that there is a freedom to be real rather than just a freedom of choice. And that freedom of choice is very low on the rung of achievement. And to have freedom of choice between A and B, between polarities, you can vote for A, or you can vote for B. The entire entourage of that kind of choice level is absurd to the differential consciousness. 1st May not need a leader, much less A or B. It isn't a question of choosing C or D or none of the above. It may be differentially determinable in consciousness in high dharma that this is a time for no leadership, but by participation of all. One saw such a thing in the India of the middle of the 20th century, the past century where the high Dharma political movement in India prized what they called Sarvodaya, which meant that sarva means all service. Service to all Sarvodaya. That nothing would be done in a village unless there was unanimous consent. Everyone had to be heard from and that an action was taken not on the basis of majority rules, but on unanimity. Now to the integral mind, unanimity is impossible. Yet there were Bhagavad Gita spirit warriors 70 or 80 years ago, who found ways to make Sarvodaya a way of life for 70 or 80 million people now. But it was founded. Sarvodaya, the Gandhian Vinoba technique of Sarvodaya was founded on Satyagraha. Graha grasp sought truth, truth in the sense of having sat and heard. The Sadh in Upanishad is very close to the site and Satyagraha. Truth holding but not truth holding in an integral way. Truth holding in a conscious gestalt where there is no integral shape, but there is a differential range of possibility that occurs. So that as such, social movements. Instead of using the laws of Manu or the Shinzou warrior ethic of politics, used the Bhagavad Gita as a karma yoga workbook. How do you do without condensing it into ideas compacted of images with identities, serving with authority in majority or at least power roles. How does anything get done? And of course, this is high drama. How it gets done that the alternative is not an alternative as like another choice, but is a completely overreaching eclipse of the entire realm in which integration happens exclusively at all. Now, 1200 years ago in Asia, all of this was daily conversation among men and women in China and in Japan. This is the way that men and women who were refined and learned talked 1200 years ago. This was the high Dharma of the East Asia civilization that changed at that time. And we're focusing because one of our books, one of our pairs of texts, is the great classic novel of Japan, The Tale of Genji. And we're pairing it with the Greek tragedy by Euripides, The Bacchae, Euripides and Genji and Lady Murasaki lived a thousand years ago. And all of this is relevant, as they used to say, 30, 40 years ago. It's all relevant because Lady Murasaki came from one of the most powerful clans in Japan, the Fujiwaras. And she wrote The Tale of Genji around 1020 A.D., around 1020 A.D.. That period of Japanese history, if you were to look at a volume. This is one of six of the New Cambridge History of Japan. This volume was published 1999. It's called Heian Japan h e I a n. The Han dynasty started in 794 and went to 1185. So Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji is the great epic of the Han Dynasty, and it comes right in the middle of the Han dynasty. And the Fujiwara clan is extremely important because one of her ancestors was the man who founded the capital city that became the center of the world for Japan. The Heian capital city was called when it was first founded in 793 A.D. it was called Heian kyo, and today it's called Kyoto, and it was the founding of a new kind of civilization in Japan, one they had never seen before. And it was modeled at the time 794. It was modeled on, as the Japanese will always do. They picked the best in the world, and then they model their version of it, and then they improve the imitation until it becomes as refined as humanly possible. The Japanese Heian dynasty used Chinese civilization as its model, and then they improved on it until Lady Murasaki's time it became like Ace Perfect even beyond what the Chinese were we're able to accomplish. When Kyoto was founded in 793 by a distant ancestor of Lady Murasaki. The greatest city in the world was in China, the great capital of China, the Tang China, just as hey, in Japan, is the great golden age of Japanese history. The Tang Dynasty is the great golden age of Chinese history, and the best city in the world by far at that time was the capital of Tang China. It was called Chang'an, and Chang'an was in its day, at that time what New York City was in the 20th century. It was just the greatest city on earth. It was where everything went to happen. And so they modeled Kyoto on Chang'an. They wanted to have their version. And by Lady Murasaki's time, Kyoto had become so refined, the society there, using the Chinese model, had become so refined and complex as to be one of the great wonders of the world, and The Tale of Genji records the population of people who had gotten used to a civilization based upon a no image, no mind conscious brilliance that just played with the image world. And some 7 or 800 years after Lady Murasaki, when the Japanese were looking for a way to adjust to the incursion of the West, they went back to this images of the floating world and made their ukiyo e prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige and so forth, going back to their own genius, their own origins, because they had transformed China at one time. And the ukiyo e prints, the Japanese prints were the beginning move of Japan, digesting the West to a point of a perfect being able to then lead it. And the Japanese had done this in Lady Murasaki's time. Now, one of the curious qualities in all of this is that whenever you use a differential consciousness to recalibrate the spectrum of possibilities, you bring into play all of the elements that are there, whether you knew that they were there or not, and the Tang dynasty and the China Of its great heyday in Chang'an, had a secret esoteric element that almost nobody knew about, and almost nobody was conscious about for a very long time. More than a thousand years. We have to, for just a second, go back to the founding of the Tang dynasty. The emperor, his name in Chinese. Li Shimin, was always known in Chinese history after founding the Tang as Tang Taizong. He was the Augustus Caesar of the Chinese Empire. The real Cosimo de Medici of the Chinese civilization, and later on became a figure in mythological proportions in Chinese novels. When Taizong founded Chang'an again as the capital, Chang'an had been the capital for the Han dynasty some 900 years before. Tang Taizong and under the Han, the Han were the Chinese Romans. They had spread almost to Persia and went from the Pacific Ocean deep into the Gobi Desert, and when Tang Taizong founded the Tang, he wanted to not only do what the Han had done, but to go farther. And so Tang Taizong is the one who extended China from Siberia to Vietnam and all the way to the edges of the Roman Empire in the West, and sought to incorporate Japan as an inclusion. The military expeditions were unable to conquer Japan, and eventually Japan kept its independence. But Chang'an, being the center of this vast international intercultural world, had emissaries from almost every place in the known world, and the Chinese, in fact, had sent whole fleets of naval ships out along almost all of the shores of the planet. There are. There was a great stir of about 90 years ago, when a Chinese stone anchor was found in San Diego Bay, was made in China, and was brought by Chinese ships that came along the California and Mexican coast around the four hundreds A.D.. And some of the Mayan features look very much like Chinese blood in the genome, and there are many mysteries yet to come. There was once a Chinese admiral in the 1400s who compiled an enormous book called survey of the Ocean Shores, and he meant every shore in the planet, that the Chinese had been everywhere and had mapped all of this. Unfortunately for him, it was a generation that decided that ships were too expensive and the Chinese mothballed their navy, and they were never a naval power again until just recent generations. They came within an inch of colonizing Europe. They sent fleets of 100 ships at a time to Africa. The African xylophone comes from Indonesia by way of Chinese traders. And then they stopped. And it's characteristic of Chinese civilization to get to a level of incredible facility and then to be satisfied with that and stop like in The Great Science and Civilization in China volume. Some 20 huge, thick volumes published by Cambridge University Press. Joseph Needham discovered in the researches in the Records of Taoist Monasteries that they had discovered the mathematical techniques of calculus some 800 years before Newton and Leibniz, but they used calculus as an intellectual discipline and the Taoist monasteries to develop differential consciousness as a yoga and not as a scientific application mathematically. So that the Chinese characteristic go so far and then stop. And the Japanese, using a Chinese model, also came by swallowing that as a model came to have this quality of perfecting everything to that certain point. And then that was it. And so there's a technique limitation in the application which comes out and reads out to someone not in that particular ethos as a lack of creativity. But the time that we're talking about the Han Dynasty, where Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji is at the center of that whole development. Kyoto, based upon Chang'an, one of the most incredibly characteristic qualities of tongue tied songs. Chang'an was that it's religious. They used to use the term syncretism. Every religion in the world was presented together. It was like ancient Alexandria, so that the city was cosmopolitan. It didn't belong to any tradition. All traditions were not only woven together, but they were woven into a glistening fabric that glowed phosphorescent in the dark, so that you had magical qualities. And one of the most esoteric elements in the Chang'an On of Tongue Tied sung was that there was an esoteric Christianity woven into the Taoism and Buddhism of the day. In fact, in Chang'an, in the great imperial city outline, the imperial city of Beijing is a minuscule imitation of the imperial city of Chang'an. Kyoto has a much better. It has about a one sixth scale. The imperial palace grounds in the founding of Kyoto was based exactly on Chang'an. It was about six times smaller. And there, in the great capital grounds of Chang'an, Taizong had a great slab of stone. Stella are raised to this most esoteric of religions, and it is called the Nestorian Monument because there were Nestorian Christians in the Tang dynasty at that time. The Nestorian Documents and relics in China published in Tokyo in 1951. The Nestorian monument of Qianfu Chang'an today is known as Xi'an. What does it read? This great Rosetta Stone of religious transformation of esoteric Christianity as the transform for Buddhist Daoist differential consciousness, that esoteric Christianity should be the secret transform of Buddhist Daoist differential consciousness is an absolute astounding realization. It says it is on the Stella. It is acknowledged that there was one unchangeable, true and still the first and unoriginated incomprehensible in his intelligence and simplicity, the last and mysteriously existing, who, with his hands operating in the mysterious abyss of space, proceeded to create, and by his spirit gave existence to all the holy ones himself. The great adorable. Was this not our ilaha with his marvelous being? 3 in 1 Unoriginated true Lord. So that in the center of Chang'an is this great monument that tongue tied sung had to esoteric Christianity. And the Japanese who came to study there took this back to Japan with them. And there was an exact copy of that Nestorian monument from Chang'an, raised in one of the suburb areas of Kyoto and just north of what Heiankyo was at the time now a part of larger Kyoto, because that's a huge metropolis, was a mountain, Mount Hiei. Sometimes the temples there called Koyasan and esoteric tantric, Buddhist Daoist with a Christianity from an ancient Nestorian branch secretly worked into it. And here in Los Angeles, you can go down to 342 East first Street, because there's a Koyasan temple here, also in Los Angeles, a branch of that one there. Manley Hall once went to the Great Koyasan Temple. The esoteric tantric Buddhist monument outside of Kyoto went up the flights of steps that were as wide as football stadiums and all the way up to the top, hundreds and hundreds of them. And they're the central sacred center of the entire realization. You had to bend down in order to go inside. And when you went inside, as your eyes became used to the almost complete darkness, you saw that there were no images of anything in there whatsoever. It was empty. There were no Buddhas there. Because at the very center of this esoteric Buddhism was a vanishing point that vanished out of the Buddhist ethos, where there were statues of the Buddha and he merged into an esoteric Christianity, which was still Jewish, that there should be no graven images of God. And so one has to go back to an esoteric Hellenistic Judaism in order to understand why Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji staggered the world at the time, and Made of Japan one of the great esoteric essays in differential consciousness. It's curious because one of the greatest critics in the Tang dynasty. Of Buddhism, which had come to inhabit hundreds of thousands of monks and monasteries and places, had had sapped almost all of the available gold to make Buddhist statues. There was enough gold in the Buddhist statues of one of the leading Buddhist monasteries at the time, that it held a sizable fraction of the total amount of gold in all of China. So that there should be some critic saying, we've got to melt these golden Buddhas down and get the gold back in to make the economy run again. Also, was one of the discoverers that there was an esoteric, hidden, vanishing, no image quality to Buddhism. And that critic, his name was Han Yeo became one of the great apologists who founded the realization that there was such a thing as Chan Buddhism, which became Zen in Japan. No mind. More after we take a break. Ancient Japan and ancient Greece, and us here at the beginnings of a whole new time form. Trying to find some traction to learn. And one of the perspicacious Q's for us is the closing lines from a film that Robert Zemeckis did back to the future, where Christopher Lloyd shows up in this supercar from the far future. Michael J. Fox character says well, what kind of roads do they have there? And Christopher Lloyd says, man, we don't need roads. And the wheels fold under and the car shoots off into space. We don't need roads anymore. If we're going to be at home in the stars, we have to stop paving our way. That's why the spirit has wings. Here's an excerpt that heads chapter eight of The Cambridge The New 1999 Cambridge History of Japan, chapter eight Religious Practices. And this is all about ritual. It reads upon arising. First of all, repeat seven times in a low voice. The name of the star of the year. Take up a mirror and look at your face to scrutinize changes in your appearance. Then look at the calendar and see whether the day is one of good or evil omen. Next, use your toothbrush and then facing west. Wash your hands, chant the name of the Buddha and invoke those gods and divinities whom we ought always to Revere and worship. Next, make a record of the events of the previous day. Now break your fast with rice gruel. Comb your hair once every three days. Not every day. Cut your fingernails on a day of the ox or your toenails on the day of a tiger. If the day is auspicious now bathed, but only once every fifth day. This is from the testamentary admonitions of Fujiwara no Morosuke. And he was a very close relative of Lady Murasaki. The ritual comportment is the glue by which existence stabilizes and keeps cognitively familiar, and tends to become unglued to the extent that consciousness enters into free play. So that ritual is suspicious of freedom. Not from any kind of ideational stance, which integrational learning always mistakes, but because of its very nature. And the body learns to trust the stability of the world ritually. And so bodies become nervous to the extent that things might be unsettled. And cirrhosis is living in an unsettled condition without wings. So that this whole quality in our education now ritual six, is to set ourselves to appreciate how genuinely difficult it is to learn past the stage of integration of mind with ideas. It's very difficult because that threshold is like a barrier And that barrier firms up with anxiety the closer we approach to it, so that it's rather like the classic breaking of the sound barrier. There was a beautiful presentation of it in the movie The Right Stuff, where the great modern playwright Sam Shepard is playing Chuck Yeager, the jet pilot who broke the sound barrier on October 14th, 1947. And before then, the worry was that maybe no one can go through this because sound becomes like a brick wall at that speed. And that in the old Air Force jet pilot parlance, a demon lives in the air at the speed of sound. And if you hit that, you're going to disintegrate. Your instruments won't work. You can't go through it a couple hundred years from now, when the light barrier is surpassed, it'll have a similar kind of a anxiety and quality for those people about 6 or 7 generations down the line. The quality of appreciation of the fearfulness of the liminality of freedom is an essential strategy which a spiritual education encourages for the people, for us people, for all of us. We all share and participate in that. And yet, the most trusted stabilities. Are from the ritual level, and it is those trusted stabilities in a special that have to be let go at a moment where consciousness springs free. And so there is a paradox involved. The very use here in Fujiwara no Morosuke these admonitions about holding the mirror to one's face. This is a yogic technique that comes from Hellenistic Judaism by way of the esoteric. Nestorian Christianity comes into Japan with the development of the Han dynasty, and by the time this was written in the 1950s 1960s A.D., it was a part of just the daily worked in discipline. They wouldn't have known that there was such a thread even viable and going there. And yet it was. If you're looking for the classic Hellenistic Jewish presentation of it, it's in the Odes of Solomon. It's the 13th ode. That Ode of Solomon says, look in your mirror and see that this face is painted in such a way that you can wipe the paint off. And just so the face that you assume is there can be wiped off. And when you stand with no face showing in the mirror, then you're ready to praise God because you have no graven image in the way. This kind of esotericism like Another aspect of this thing from Fujiwara no Morosuke the make a record of your events of the previous day. That kind of a retrospective diary is a Pythagorean technique from around 2500 BC. Which became folded into Hellenistic Judaism at the time of The Teacher of Righteousness and the founding of Qumran and the esoteric Essene movements, and quickly went into the therapeutic communities in Alexandria and became just a part of the way in which the Hellenistic Judaism of the early first century CE had its no mind, no image gestalt of differential consciousness. But it was received in a recognition mode by Tongue Tied. Sung in China and by a recognition mode. Imitation in the Han Dynasty. In Japan. Where did that recognition come from? Where was the the seed for that and the seed for that is that. Hellenistic Judaism is carried to South India. By Thomas the Apostle. Thomas to that district known as Kerala, near the tip of South India. And he went there about 41 A.D. 41 CE. And within 50 years of that you find the Buddhism of India has gone through a sea change, not because of contact with the Greek ethos. The Greeks were We're in India and a very powerful way from Alexander's time, from the from the 300 BC. There were Greek kingdoms in northwest India for hundreds of years, 400 years before you find the first Mahayana expression of Buddhism, a complete transform of it. It's not a Greek Buddhism, it's a Hellenistic Jewish Buddhism, the first document in the Mahayana, written by ashvaghosha 90 A.D., about the same time as the Gospel of John is written, but at the same time that the Hermetic Poimandres is written. The title of Ashvaghosha book, The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana. Shraddha. The Platonic and Pythagoreans did not talk about faith. It's a Hellenistic Jewish concern to have faith in the Mahayana, and sraddha and pistis are so ambidextrously there that later on, in the development of the high dharma of the Mahayana, you find the Hellenistic Jewish cosmic person inhabiting the same kind of glow that the Purusha in the Bhagavad Gita exhibited and does exhibit. And out of that came the great ideal of the Bodhisattva, of the cosmic person, who is a helper to all, who, like a messenger angel, comes to help, to encourage and to mature. And so by the time of Tang Tide sung and setting up the great Stella in Chang'an, after 500 years of this acquaintance in Asia that had built through the Prajnaparamita literature for centuries. And had come to be the prized vision at the founding of the Tang dynasty, the esoteric Hellenistic Jewish Christian elements were so structurally expressive of the vanishing synthesizing core of Buddhism and Daoism that there was no way to disentangle them. And why would you? So that when the Han dynasty Founded Kyoto on this kind of a basis. The whole center of concern was to make a ritual comportment that does not tie you to a pride in this world, but releases you to the spiritual vision of a cosmos beyond this world, which has a concern of nourishing this world just the same. And so you find the Great Perfection Sect of Japanese Buddhism, the Tiantai heavenly, the great Heaven became in Japan Tendai. And that this Tendai, this heavenly perfection is exemplified in the ritual of transform that one has, one goes to this Sacred mountain at night with a friend. You go in pairs. Spiritual friend pairs. And around the circumference of this mountain are 100 stations. And the yoga is in a single night with your spiritual friend to make a check in at all 100 stations. So you arrive at the beginning, at dawn. And it takes a tremendous athletic discipline to be able to just physically do this. It takes a seamlessness of mind so that you allow this to just happen continuously. Because if you try to introduce the idea of the pilgrimage, the idea of the sacred into the activity, it produces minute glitches that forbid you from accomplishing, and you do not make the circuit. You can't make it. You cannot physically make the circuit. And yet thousands of people do all the time. And they make it by no mind by specifically not thinking about it while they do it. Zen. But there has to be some way in which that can inform the society of ritual, can inform the culture of mind. It has to bear some relationality to it. And the all time great example of that is Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji. She is consummate in her her appreciation Of the delicacy of not being too delicate with life. And so she is like, she's like a meta Japanese Jane Austen. She understands how it is that human life is this incredible dramatic texture of interchange between people on all kinds of levels and concerns a seething, pulsing membrane of interchange, and that all the time there's this floating world of transcendence that allows for this to happen, and that if you have a participation in that kind of a cosmic mystery, then the exchange and interchange becomes a seamless drama of true life, and the vicissitudes are not meant to defeat or encourage at all, but to simply occur on the level of appearance, because the truth registers on the levels beyond appearance, and that this is in no way a meta realm. It is simply the true realm where our reality occurs. And so we find, at the time of the founding of Heiankyo of Kyoto, of the Han dynasty, with the Fujiwara clan and Lady Murasaki, exactly at the time, you find the seeds of a Japanese version of drama that later on becomes no drama, no plays Zen Theater, And though the seeds are made there, at the time of the founding of Kyoto, the moving of the old Japanese Imperial Society from Nara to Kyoto, the old capital, to the new capital of moving from Nara to Kyoto, of moving from a kind of peasant agricultural society, a community that goes back into the distant reaches of agrarian origins at a level of culture where Shinto shrines in nature are the way in which rituals node their traction, that the nodes of effective registry that we've done this, this is how we do this. That ritual action is tied into the bows of nature, places where one sends up shrines, Shinto shrines, and the transformation from Shinto shrine to Buddhist temple happens at the founding of Kyoto, which is why you do not find so many Shinto shrines in Kyoto. But you find Buddhist temples everywhere. And yet the archetypal Buddhist temple at the top of Mount Hiei is a Buddhist temple whose altar is a Shinto shrine. A place where there are no Buddha images whatsoever. There are no fantastic paintings. There is no raked sand even. It's a building that holds openness Like nature shrines do. The old um. Habitation of of Zeus, where the oak groves of Dodona and Zeus inhabited Dodona. Only when the divinatory aspect was in play with the winds of that ancient Arcadia. Then Dodona was a prophetic place where Zeus now manifested in the divination. Otherwise, Zeus was sky god through electrical energy like lightning bolts, but came to earth in the groves, the oak groves of Dodona. When the wind rustled the trees in a certain way, one could hear if one knew how to hear the weaving of those sounds. One could get the prophecies of Zeus from that sound, the rustling of a few leaves in an oak grove. And there's a poignancy if one went to Ojai in the days when Krishnamurti was lecturing under the Oaks, Meiners Oaks, and Ojai, and you were amazed that there was no wind blowing and there was no sound, and that that was the true divinatory context within which a Krishnamurti would speak. And all of these kinds of paradoxes, all of these juxtapositions, which would never happen in nature, happen in our consciousness as a matter of course, because consciousness has a ratio reality rather than a existential reality. We put together images that would not occur in nature at all, and by juxtaposing them in new ways, we creatively discover facets and aspects that were never going to be there and are only there because we now are doing them. And so freedom turns out to be a very huge cosmic thing, and that we carry that capacity in this universe. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, written in Alexandria, one of the pinnacles of Hellenistic Jewish wisdom. The writer teacher says, man is much higher than angels. Which of the angels inherits the house of God? They're just messengers. But man is of the family. He inherits the whole estate and can pass it on to his children. So that man is wondrous beyond devils and angels both. And that this capacity needs to be disclosed in a discovery of freedom, and cannot come to reside in any kind of stability that an integral would establish, so that bodies and minds are incapable of being the alters of spiritual freedom. They at best can present an alignment which allows for that threshold to be disclosed. When the historical Buddha would describe himself, he never called himself Buddha. Never. The appellation that he used vis a vis himself was Tathagata. Gata comes from the same root word, Indo-European root word that our word gone comes from. Tathata means a suchness. It means the existentiality of stuff. So Tathagata means the existentiality gone. And in the Prajnaparamita literature, the term of high Dharma is well gone. Wisdom. That we have concourse where there is no traction of bodies and minds, is a proof of our spiritual reality, that we operate quite adequately on those true Realms shows that we were living into a small token example of the possibilities of life and not the total, not the spectrum, not the full possibility. And so dramatic action, like a Greek tragedy or a Noh drama, present us concisely with those opportunities to observe this ritually, to know this symbolically, and to go there personally. So there's a whole development here in The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki. It comes at that juncture where the early seeds of this kind of what became Noh drama, the term Sarugaku. Later on, about 600 years later, came into play Lady Murasaki's tale of Genji. Exhibits. For the first time, the cosmic tapestry of the spiritual person who has learned to be at home in a world where bodily rituals are still necessary and mental symbols still do work. But all of this is interlaced with a freedom of possibility that would never have been there before. In other words, Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji is like an educational, exemplary novel of growing up so that one becomes cosmically free even when you're in a ritual society that, by all accounts, is staggeringly frozen. And so it's the combination of fire and iron together, which would have seemed impossible, and in nature would be impossible. It would not have happened. It could not happen. And yet someone like Lady Murasaki a thousand years ago did it so gracefully that The Tale of Genji discloses again and again, and has for a thousand years that we can learn to learn to be free. And that's what it's all about here. That's what this education is about also. When Lady Murasaki began writing, her model for writing was not Japanese, but Chinese. The great Chinese language forms which were current in her day, and the great Chinese language forms that were current were what we would colloquially call Zen poetry, Daoist poetry, Tang poetry from Li Po and Du Fu, and Wang Wei going back all the way to the origins and all the way up to the beginnings of really soon. Poetry. Su Tong Po, a contemporary of Lady Murasaki. The Chinese poetic tradition was something that she learned because her family had been doing this for hundreds of years already. She came from one of the most cultivated families in Japanese history. And so she learned to use language in a differentially Conscious aesthetic, rather than to use language in a clever way to make a politic. Instead of making a politics to hold human society together, she made an aesthetics to liberate it. So at The Tale of Genji is how to grow up on a cosmic scale. Even though you're socially imprisoned in something that seems impossible to do anything about, it's only impossible to do about. If you're thinking of breaking out, you don't have to break out. You can carry your transcendence with you at any given moment, any given day. And you are free right then and there. And so this incredible discovery of spiritual poignancy, available at any time and any place and so great was her achievement. That when the Chinese came finally to the genre of writing great novels in the Ming Dynasty, they used Lady Murasaki Tale of Genji as their model. She taught the Chinese how to do it because you never had novels in China until the Ming dynasty, and then all of a sudden you have 4 or 5 of the greatest novels in world history, all written there, and all of them have this quality that The Tale of Genji has. And perhaps one of the greatest novels in the world that came out about 750 years after Lady Murasaki, at the very end of the classical civilization of China, in what is called the Chen Long period of the Qing dynasty, the kings came after the Ming and Chen Long ruled China for two thirds of a century and the greatest literary work in prose in China was written at that time. It's called dream of the Red chamber, Hung Lu Meng. And when you look at the beginning of dream of the Red chamber. Heaven has been made out of all of these fundamental stones. But when the vault of heaven was finished, there was one stone too many. It was left over. And so the maker of the dome of Heaven just threw this extra stone away. But when God throws a stone away, where does it go? When does it go? That is, it goes where? And it goes into what? When? And so at the beginning of the dream of the Red chamber, the Daoist of Infinite Space meets the Buddhist of infinite time, and at this juncture, at this crossroad of differentially infinite time and space, they have a conversation which this cast away stone overhears because it's made by God himself, has all the sentience and intelligence, and the Buddhist of infinite time and the Daoist of Infinite Space are talking about the marvelous adventures that man has out of all the creations that there are, human beings are the most fabulous, and in their infinite and indefinitely complex fractal conversation, they come to tell each other of the saddest story they have ever heard. And so the stone remembers this story. And when it comes time for this certain gifted writer to write something, he learns from that stone, that story that those two infinite spirits told of the saddest tale they have ever heard. And that tale is the dream of the Red chamber has a direct link back to The Tale of Genji. It is a direct link back to the way in which Lady Murasaki exemplified not just the sophistication of her family tradition, which was the best that there was, but she reached differentially into all of the possibilities that were hidden as well as apparent, and brought out one of the great treasures of world civilization. Still good for a star civilization, because it has to do with the discovery within a ritual bound society, within a symbol bound mind. Personal freedom and cosmic possibility. And that all four of them have an objectivity that shares together an ordination that one hadn't supposed was there before. That those four together make up four quarters of a completely new realm called reality, and that the center of those four quarters of that realm of the real is a pivot. It's called the pivot of the four quarters. And that was the old archetypal foundation upon which the architecture of royalty was always founded. And the largest expression of the architecture of royalty was not a building, but was a city. And that the city, whether it's the city of God or it's the Rome of Augustus Caesar, or it's the Florence of the Medici, or it's the Athens of Pericles, or it's the Chang'an of Tang Sung, or it's the Kyoto of the Fujiwaras. It's always that there is this city which has a shape of cosmic man, that not only is placed in a space on the Earth, but serves as a transform between the earthly life and the celestial realms of freedom. The holy city. Whose perhaps greatest recognizable archetype in the West is Jerusalem. That a Jerusalem exists as a portal to transform everyone between the earth and the heavens and back from the heavens to the earth, so that it's the place, it's the osmotic focus. It's the threshold by which heaven and earth find their exchangeable wholeness through the creative gifting of man, using his divine powers to be divine, using a function which only he alone can do. And if he does not perform that function, it is not done. And the universe becomes static and the cosmos de-energized and all of the spirits, demonic and divine, beseech man to wake up and fulfill his function. Otherwise the cosmos is dead. And so it's this kind of quality that's there in The Tale of Genji. Lady Murasaki. Incredible. And one of the elements. Not the least. One of the elements that's current in her is her femininity, her womanliness. Her distant ancestors came from the Hata clan that inhabited Kyoto before there was a Kyoto. Thousands of years ago, the Kyoto Basin was a bay of the Sea of Japan, the Inland Sea. And when Kyoto was founded in 1190s, it was still sort of marshy, crisscrossed by 5 or 6 rivers. There was a huge pond. There was a fabulous lake which is still there, Lake Biwa. Biwa is the musical instrument, like a banjo, mandolin. And the lake is shaped like that. So that's Lake Biwa lake music. Her people were in the earliest Neolithic times, thousands of years before there was a Han dynasty. They were already the cream of the royalty of the region, and women were always chosen by the Fujiwara clan men for wives. They became the mothers. They became the grandmothers. They became the carriers of this contact to the primordial earth. And that this holy Jerusalem city of Kyoto, that's this great architectural osmotic focus of heaven and earth to make not just a dynasty, but to make a portal by which the cosmos Inhabits life that the earth is fructified. This is the word not just that it's fertile to make food, but it's fertile to make spiritual people. Because when the land can make spiritual people, then it is a part of the cosmos. It belongs in the everywhere and thus is real. So that its true existence is not existential just to be atoms, but to spiritual to be atoms, resonant in a harmony of the real. And when one understands that kind of depth, then you have a high dharma. It's not a sociological truth. It's not a psychological principle. It's not a mental idea. Those are wonderful. They're sandbox toys. They're hardly Noticeable in the effervescent, gossamer joy of spiritual creation. But it's not that the Earth is some kind of thrown away speck. It's a sacred stone that overhears the archetypal story that when it's told in the right aesthetic way, dissolves the tyrannies of all political, ritual bound, idea bound hells and opens those portals to fresh air and starlight and spiritual concourse. More next week.