Ritual 8

This is ritual eight. And I'd like to start off with this Eskimo print. This Inuit print. The artist is a woman and her name is Pitseolak. And I think that she's passed on by now. This photo was taken about 25 years ago. Pitseolak means seagull in Inuit. Most of the Eskimo artists are women, but 95% of them. And the place that she makes her prints are Holman Island. A collection of sheds in the North Arctic. And in the life cycle of the Inuit people for many thousands of years, which they followed up until quite recently. Pitseolak being old enough to have been raised in the traditional Eskimo or Inuit culture. The long polar night was spent always out in a circulatory quest to follow the animals and the gathering together of all the various families and clans and tribes in an area would occur near dawn after six months of winter night, and it was at that time that prints were made. So they were made at dawn. But dawn was once a year. So the Inuit nature cycle is an expansion of the day into a year. And during the long night, long Arctic night. Only about a fourth or a third of the time would be taken with actual sleep and actual dreaming. And so the collection of images or images eternal, eternal images would take place largely in vision and not in dreaming. And the difference between vision and dreaming Is the difference from letting go with the body that's dreaming and letting go with the mind, which is visioning, so that the Inuit artists, these women, their prints are visionary presentations rather than dream like. And instead of being based on the ritual body having a release into mythic images, it is the release of the symbolic mind into visionary images which are rather eternal. This particular print is called bird Spirit atop dog. This dog that is bent over from the ecstasy that is taking place out of it, the emergence of this owl like visionary spirit. For while dreams are about images that come out of nature, visions are about spirits that come out of consciousness. So that there is a deep complementarity between myth and vision, which we will see in about a month. We'll finish our lectures on ritual and we'll go into myth. But the difference, the differential between vision and myth, is the difference between a mythic language and a magic language. And we'll see that a mythic language always includes us in the flow of the story. We are characters in a plot line, whereas in a magic language we are not characters in a plot line. We are not figures in a story, but we become the storyteller. And the storyteller has a has a transform quality. The archetype of a visionary storyteller is like Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights, The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade and Arabian Nights. The Thousand and One Nights does not string together dreams. She tells visions in the form that a magic language would use, which are fairy tales, so that fairy tales are radically different from dreams, as we will see. We'll come to explore and find out, and the fairy tale quality of a conscious language always carries with it in every aspect a radical, transformative quality. Every detail of a fairy tale has a transformational character. What the fairy tale as a whole does any particular part of it will also do? Which is not the same and not true of myth at all. Not true of dreams. Not true of images. And not true because of the ritual basis of it. The ritual basis ensures that the unity resides in the ritual action body and not in the mythic language. Whereas in a fairy tale, in a storyteller's vignette of consciousness and fairy tales always deliver consciousness, there is a kind of an esoteric secret quality. The best example of explaining how it is is in advanced physics. There's a principle of the soliton a soliton has a quantum integrity such that any vibration of it, any resonance of it, every aspect of the resonance will carry the entirety of the soliton. In a way, a star is a soliton acts as a soliton because we can take any photon of light from a star and put it through a spectrographic analysis, and the entire chemical composition of that particular star will be in its light, will be in every photon of its light. And technically, you could analyze the entirety of the star through one photon. Any given photon so that light carries a double quality, a double aspect light in this world is the stuff that images are made of. And is natural. But light can also undergo a transformation and can carry the essence of consciousness with it. And that's why vision is not the same as perception. Perception is always based upon a ritual comportment, an action taken, a pragmatic, something done, something pragmatic, and the very change that occurs in the action generates movement, generates what we would call in physics or in the math that goes with physics generates a vector. Generates time. Whereas compared to that, there is another quality that doesn't generate time so much, but generates space. And keeping to that kind of physics language for a moment, that's a scalar quality as different and distinct from a vector quality. So that's something that has its spatial size. Its scale has a resonance that's scalar and also has a vibration, a frequency, an oscillation of change of movement, a cycle, a rhythm of Its movement quality. That makes a vectoring kind of an energy. The most common kind in the universe is a radiation. So that there is a quality of the real in existence of something which vibrates resonantly with its presence, and at the same time, running through that are the spikes of the radiation carried by the vector energy like radiation. So that when you see a great work of art like Marc Chagall's great mural on God creating man, this huge angelic winged figures carrying the form of man ready for the breath of God to invigorate him. The spikes of light coming out from this angelic figure are set in a kind of a swirl, like a spiraling swirl of color, so that there is a rotational energy and there is a radiant energy, and both together make that fabric, that time and space fabric which gels as existence. And we've talked several weeks now, a couple of months about how the concern of men and women for more than hundreds of thousands of years is to do the actions that ensure that existence is real for them. That that primordial basis is not to have sex. It's not to have even food. It's not to accumulate power. But the most primordial quality is to ensure that we participate in the reality of existence. Everything else comes out of that, and that that reality of existence is not a cross your fingers hopefulness, but almost an exacting kind of an attention to detail. Rich will always has almost infinite detail possible to it, and is developed in such a way. Where it tends to get frayed is in the language. Description. And so the way in which a ritual comportment will corral the inherent disciplinary qualities of language is to repeat so that there is a ritual formula of what you will say at this step, at this step, at this step, at each stage, for each ritual. And however, the rituals are bunched together in their sets, making that ritual structure, the language is corralled and usually it will have a repetitive quality to it. But in hidden in that repetitive quality. Which is sort of like the resonance of presence in space. There is also a respect for how time operates, the radiant quality of energy, and so braided in with a refrain or a word that will be repeated in that repetition will be braided. Something which is a slight modification, a slight variant on the repetition so that there is a development. There is a time movement element braided into the eternal founding by repetition of language being glued to the ritual, and ritual gluing us to the reality of existence. If you look at the kind of prayer that Inuit people would utter, Even the all the northern Canadian Indian tribes or northern US Indian tribes will have some variant initially on a phrase which would translate I am holy. When I stand here, I am holy. In this way I am holy. When I stand here, I am holy when I move. So that in that kind of quatrain, in that kind of quartet, the first and third lines, the first and third utterances are repetitions, the modification coming in the second and the fourth one is holy. One one stands holy here, one is holy when one stands holy when I move. So that in this kind of archetypal Formula. In this formulation, you have the ritual use of language as a verbal action, and the basis, the structure of that square, of that kind of formulaic square of ritual language is one of the deepest structures in human life. That structure carries itself all the way through the entire process of integration. The entire cycle of what is capable and possible in nature has that kind of a square in it. It's like a geometry. It's a structural geometry that's there. So that when you're looking to see how, how does all of this happen, how is it put together? How does it really work? There are a pair of pairs of qualities. One of them is a repetition that occurs that emphasizes the changeless, the cycle, the exactness, the repetition. The other is the slight modification, the slight variation, and in the natural realm, generally the variation will be a variation on. On the repetition, it will go back for its referent to the repetition. Distinctly different from that is a work of art, a conscious work of art that works with vision, where the variation will have a developing characteristic of its own and not have to go back to the ritual repetition in order to carry its own exploration of variation. The composer who most conscientiously developed this aspect was Brahms. Brahms. And his idea was, um. Uh, it's called developing variation. And that's a conscious technique in a visionary expression of musical language. Whereas in a ritual, mythic symbol way, you will always find that what carries the current is not the variation, but the repetition, the drum beat. Whereas a drum beat in a piano sonata by Brahms. By emphasizing that percussive quality, you would lose the sensitivity of the piece. Whereas in a tribal dance where you're needing to make rain, it is the drumbeat that carries the reality. And it's not whether you're a fancy player on the flute. It doesn't. That's irrelevant. So that a ritual comportment has a different quality, both in purpose and in tone, from a conscious concern. And the ritual comportment is the foundation upon which the body actually exists, so that we're learning that in ritual we're paying attention to the body as being intelligent. We don't even have a word in the English language that adequately conveys that the body is smart, the body knows its processes, its cycles, and out of those cycles will come whatever development needs to come, always with a reference back to the body, and we'll discover, and we'll find that mythic language that literally flames out of the action that we do. It's almost as simple as you have a story to tell. When you've done something and you want to convey it to someone else, you want to tell them the story. I remember, um, in, uh, in the sixth grade, I lived on the Gulf of Mexico in Corpus Christi, Texas, and it was the first time we ever started to read Homer's Odyssey. A couple of young guys and I in the sixth grade, and as soon as we got the Homeric outlook, we realized that we didn't have a lot of good stories to tell because we hadn't had great adventures yet. So we built our own raft to go out into the Gulf of Mexico and and have adventures. Maybe we can get out down to Brownsville and see what's going on. You know how you are when you're a boy. And fortunately, Padre Island is a long island that stops anyone from going out in the Gulf of Mexico. We got about a mile off shore one time, but the the whole thing about a mythic quality is that you you have stories that you must tell, you have to tell, but you have to have the adventures first. Otherwise, you don't really have anything to tell. Ritual is the realm where there are adventures with existence Actual activities that register and register in the body so that the body itself records this. The body is the record is the archive of the action. So later on, many thousands of years, tens of thousands of years later, the idea of karma is all linked to action. It's linked to what the body actually does. It doesn't have anything to do with your opinion. It has nothing to do with the brilliance or stupidity of your mind. Your ideas do not affect karma except to give slight modifications. What really happens is that the body, in doing something, actually has done it and it registers in existence so that the body becomes the first objectivity and it becomes an objectivity on the same cognate level as any physical stuff. So at the very stuff of life includes the body, rocks, plants, animals, our body. It's in the same horizon. It's objective in the same way. And so existence on that primordial level has a oneness to it. There is a thing called the universe. Now, the mind would like to think that there are different hidden structures within that universe, and we'll get to that later this year. And consciousness knows wonderfully that there are many possibilities of opening up that universe into possibilities that were never there before. There is such a thing not only as the supernatural, but the supernatural. But one of the commonest mistakes is to think that there is a transpersonal. It's a misplacement of sequence. To think that the transpersonal is where one achieves this form of one's true identity. And we'll see it in our education, that there is no such thing at all, that the personal is already a differential form, radically transformed out of the integral cycle of nature. Persons are spiritual, but their differential, they are like the spectrum of possibility. What is there registered in the body is what will come out in experience as the character. So that our sense of what psychologically is so commonly called personal today is really character that comes out of one's action with the body. And we'll see. We're going to start on a new pair of books next week. And then the a month from now we're going to have a special culmination lecture for the ritual cycle. And we're going to use the Mindfulness Sutra of the Historical Buddha. We use books from all over the planet, every kind of culture, every kind of expression, so that we don't get locked into one particular way of looking at or thinking at or expressing, because we're after a planetary culture and we're after something even beyond that, we're after a civilization that can establish itself on a level minimally, of a star system wide. We'd like to be civilized in terms of a star system, rather than civilized in terms of a river valley. We don't live on the Nile River. We don't live on the Indus. We don't even live on the Mississippi. And though here in Los Angeles, we're on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, which is a great half the planet, a Pacific civilization would be too small for our capacities. Our minds are too powerful for that scale, whereas our minds are powerful now. And that kind of scale of civilization, the scale of civilization that really is adequate for this kind of power, is a star system that will tax us for a couple of hundred years at least. It's a large enough sandbox where our play is going to be challenged. So this kind of an education has its development towards maturing us to the scale of something that's just now emerging, just coming out. But the style of its presentation is not to give a sequence that is understandable by the mind initially. The reason for that is that the mind is cooperative out of necessity because of the complexity of life that's evolved. Especially the last 3 or 400 years. And the mind is used to being cleverly preemptive and co-opts before it understands completely. And so what gets left in the lurch is the body frequently. And it is so fast now that what is left in the lurch is experience itself. So that one of the qualities that was there when this powerful complexity of mind was first being developed, the balance to it was always check observation. So that the development of science was not only fantastic symbolic mental theory, but it was also the practice in the laboratory. The checking out by observation to compare with your theory. This goes back to the ancient pairing of practice and contemplation. In a Greek, contemplation is called theoria. So theory is a contemplative presencing in the mind, so that you get a scalar resonance from the mind presence in its symbolic integral. It's a yoga, but the body has an alignment with that which cannot be left out, and the body develops dynamically. It develops in terms of time sequences. It develops in terms of repetitions that fold into the repetitions, slight variations that always refer back to the action. Again and again, we're convinced of the last 100 years or so that the logic of language resides in the certainty of the mind structures in the mind. And that's not true at all. The certainty of logic resolves in the physiological sense of touch. Touch is the basis upon which a logical sequence is trustworthy or not. So that 2500 years ago, if you were learning logic and able to follow a logical argument all the way to its conclusion, your teacher would have done this That you had grasped the form, because logic has something to do with the form of language following the boundary long enough to give you the completed form, the completed object. You got it. Our language still has that confidence. To think that logic is based upon perception or on conception is to jump the gun. It's actually based on whether you can touch it or not. That sense of veracity, that certainty. You've heard the saying a blind man could see that with his cane there is. Homer himself was blind, and so his method of composition had the logic of a superior blind sage who could use language in such a ritual way that it produced a form of absolute trustworthiness. And of course, with that method he produced a pair of forms. The Iliad is an epic of masculinity, and the Odyssey is an epic of femininity. Odysseus learns through the cycle of initiation that various women present, and if it weren't for his ability to learn from the women's stages, he would never make it home. And he is the only man in the Odyssey to make it home, to have his day of homecoming, because he learns to transform his masculine, combative, heroic conflict. Overcoming capacity, which is great as long as there's something to fight and overcome. But you cannot apply that technique to yourself. It ends if you fight and win against yourself, that's a suicide. So you have to learn to transform. And so Odysseus is a man of many minds because he learns that the cycle of mysteries, of initiation, mysteries in the feminine is about how one dissolves the certainties of power and authority and place that are developed in out of the experience, symbol, sense of integration and go back to the more primordial ritual nature and so women's mystery initiations, especially at the development of logic. In we're taking classical Greece because we're looking at Euripides great Greek tragedy, The Bacchae. And we've talked about how, like Greek tragedy in The Bacchae is a summation of that dramatic form. The character develops in a drama, and that drama will have a repeatable form, like a Greek tragedy or a Greek comedy. It always has that kind of polarity to it. But in addition to the polarity, there was a middle ground that was not caught in the polarities. And the middle ground between tragedy and comedy was mystery. And so you will find In the antiquity that we're looking at classical Greece, you will never find a woman who wrote a Greek tragedy or a Greek comedy. There weren't any. But all of the mystery cycles had to do with women, with women's initiation, whether they were Orphic or they were Bacchic, they were Dionysian, whatever it was, so that the women's mysteries, the feminine was always a going back, away from experience and essence, away from myth and symbol, away from a masculine integral, back to an earlier integral that was objectified in the body doing existence for real. Out of the mysteries of nature. And so they were called mysteries, because these mysteries characterized nature, not the essence of nature, because there was no idea of them whatsoever. The classical learning is that the mysteries of nature are not realizable symbolically or in the mind at all, that they do not register in the mind, because their objective reality is that they register in existence in the body. And so the mystery religions, the mystery initiations, were always to educate the body, to not habitually consult the mind for its sense of what is real. And The Bacchae is a Greek tragedy is all about that, about how the mind, which is convinced that it is the arbiter of what is real, views basic instinctual action as a form of madness, of insanity. In The Bacchae, the women especially become Bacchantes devotees, devotees of Dionysus, and they are said to be mad. They are said to be crazy in the mountains, irrational, whereas they have gone back to an existential universe where existence is one, and the false separations of society, of political structure of the city, masculine hierarchy of kings and power, and all of that has been melted and dissolved. And from their standpoint, it is the arrogant king who is crazy. He thinks that his realm is real, more real than existence. And so the quality of initiation is a quality that is has an odd tone to it. The Greek term that translates as right or ritual actually means it connotates growing up, that one actually grows up in the sense that one continues to emerge, to emerge in such a way that you are consistently what you are, that there is a truthfulness, there is an aletheia to your actuality. Action actuality, so that the ritual concern was for the actual in existence to be real for us in our bodies, so that we have a foundation upon which our experience, our life, our character can fit in, can fit in with the universe that we are of the same stuff that life is made out of, and that we live in a way that is recognizable to life so that it sees us as a friend, not as an enemy, so that the powers of life naturally coursed through us and keep us healthy without having to constantly balance, without having to have additives constantly from some kind of compensation strategy, constantly adding minerals and vitamins to denatured food. Well, those shelves of additives are not necessary in a primordial diet that includes real food. And so the women's mysteries, the bouquet was all about coming back to a ritual comportment that was truthful with the universe. It had nothing to do with being loose women about sexuality. It had nothing even to do with dissolving tyrannical political structures. Its concern was not with issues, good issues though they may be, and interesting issues though they may be. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the actuality. And one of the ace perfect examples of this in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna and Arjuna. Krishna as the charioteer, Arjuna is the greatest warrior of his age, wheeled out into the center of these two battle lines and Arjuna, suddenly in a split instant, loses his nerve to fight in a split instant, and Krishna asks him why? And Arjuna gives every great reason under the sun. He doesn't want to kill his relatives. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And Krishna constantly tells him that's not why. That's not why, that's not why you are afraid of yourself. Because you have an idea that if you found yourself for real, you would vanish from existence. You've gotten a false idea of a super yoga that you really will be moksha. Where, as the fact is, is you really will be Arjuna, the greatest warrior of your age. Let's take a break. I want to come back to this Eskimo print for a moment. You can see in the print that the spirit that's atop the dog, that owl like figure, those two large, owl like eyes, are one of the most primordial symbols of the Great Goddess. And that infinity sign of those two wide eyes of the goddess. The Greek term for that kind of seeing. Epopteia epopteia The seeing is not to perceive. It's not an act of perception. It's an act of vision. When we look with our eyes to see forms, our perception takes a stereo optic integral and gives us the point of seeing. And depending on how good our eyes are, that's the clarity of what we can see. The wide eyes, like this owl, is the seeing within the visioning. And what is seen is the awfulness of reality. So that when you look with that kind of seeing out, what you see is the universe. Nothing and no one is outside of the unified field of reality that is there. It is a oneness that double eyed, owl like trance stare you would find if you looked at the earliest forms of civilization, the Sumerian, some 6000 years ago, you would see that the devotees of that earliest civilized Middle East religion when they stand, and there are figures that have survived archaeologically from that period. They all have these large eyes and their gowns are all embroidered with the outlines of like flower forms, not flowers, but flower like forms. And those robes, those robes of dedication, are the only covering to the human form, and the huge eyes dominating the face. In the Greek mysteries, which come about 2500 years ago, when we're talking about it, 2000 years ago, that civilized presentation was already 4000 years old. So that when you come to something like the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. Was covered by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., and it had been. Pompeii had been struck by an earthquake about 17 years before. So what we have in the ruins of Pompeii is like a frozen snapshot of the society of about 2000 years ago. Progressive archaeological excavation revealed more and more of it, and in 1930, the interior of one of the villas that had been just outside of Pompeii was shown to have intact a large peristyle room, a hall where a complete cycle of all of the initiation mysteries in the feminine Dionysian Mode were presented and are preserved. And we have books that now present these. And there are books that give the the complete sequence and in color. The archetype of the ritual comportment is very similar to those ancient Sumerian devotees who are looking with the vision of the universe. But in the Pompeii, uh, in that villa, the statue was not covered with a gown with floral designs, but with this kind of fabric wrinkle. And just above the head there's a gap. And that's because this costume was a ritual costume that was always exactly the same. It was repeated. There was no variation on it. It was the ritual presentation of the form of beholding the universe in its existential reality, which included you. And there was no variation in that. The only slight variant was the face. So on this statue, the face that's there in the Pompeii villa was the face of Augustus Caesar's wife, Livia. This face would lift off, and you could put a cast of your own face on this, or a mask of someone's own face on this. So that what you would see is that the image That you would think was you in a mirror would be put into a mask and put onto this archetypal ritual form so that you could see yourself in that mode so that you could behold yourself beholding the oneness of reality. And the cycle of the initiation of the mysteries was to prepare you for this immersion to the point of your character vanishing from the mental identity that it assumed it had. And as you would vanish from that mental identity, you would be absorbed by the ritual existential universe. You would not be absorbed into the statue. You would be absorbed into the universe, so that the oneness occurs as a pair to the vanishing. The one and the zero occur together at the same moment in time, at the same point in space. And as that time space integral point moment occurred, absorbing you. Your mental identity would vanish, leaving not the horrific nothingness, not oblivion, but the calm participation in the mystery that you are a part of the oneness of the universe, not as an idea of it, but as a bodily actuality. In India. The object of such a purification of stripping down was called moksha, but that moksha was not just a vanishing completely of everything, it was a vanishing of the idea of self, that the idea of self is only real, symbolically and in fact is but a mask when it comes to the drama of the real. The drama of existence makes our identity shrink to the point of simply a mask. And that there was a great conscious discovery further from that, and that is, we are capable of wearing several masks. We are able of floating not just the role of our identity in the drama of the world, but we could assume other roles. We could become actors in a tableau of variance of existence. And this was a great discovery later on. But the mystery initiation was on that basis. That as long as you did not know that action can be integrated to that refined point, the mind dominated the body, symbols dominated ritual and symbolic ideas confiscated language for purposes of its authority, of hierarchy of expression, so that the mysteries were not just a complement to tragedy or a complement to comedy, or even a third alternative to comedy and tragedy. But the mysteries were a feminine form of the achievement of at one ment atonement. Now, what was very difficult? It was easy for the Romans. It was easy for Romans at the time of the founding of the Roman Empire to comport this way. Not everyone did, but it was well known, and you could have it if you wanted it. You could participate in that if you wanted it. You didn't have to wait for some other mystery religion. And you can see in this Context. Early Hellenistic Judaism. Early Christianity was seen as another mystery religion. Its cycle of purification to oneness was seen as just another mystery religion. The difficulty with Hellenistic Judaism is that it did not co-opt itself into the Greek mythological spectrum. God had no part in the pantheon of the mythological figures at all, and so it wasn't a question of competition. It was a question of either or. Because the the hero Israel, the Lord thy God is one means that the universe is not a universe of nature, but is a universe of the super Supranatural. Cosmos. Zeus. Apollo. Whichever of those mythological gods they belong in the realm of myth, they belong in the realm of symbols. They're at home in the world's experience. They're even at home in the abstract mind. They even carry over temporarily into the beginnings of vision. But the more that one goes into a vision which explores possibility after possibility, the more the variants do not return back to a bodily refrain. The more they become free, they gain wings and they fly beyond the body's possibility, beyond the limitations which invalidates the entire dependence upon a mythological basis of experience and language and integration, and shows that the mind that was integrated on that basis alone is, in fact a delusion. And that one's belief in the gods was actually a form of that delusion. And so when that was understood, there was a great cry against Hellenistic Judaism. It was the radical exception to the religions of the Hellenistic world, which had been swallowed whole by Rome. It was the one example that was not a religion in the mythological sense, but was a way of coming to not in the universe, but in a cosmos that was conscious. And so it was a a beyond, not a transpersonal. But it was a beyond showing that the universe itself has a conscious time space and not just a time space of nature. One didn't just fit into nature, one belonged in an exploration of infinite openness. Which ran counter precisely against the seeing of the oneness which included you in its oneness. And so it was a very great problem at the time. And the development of early Christianity was a curious case of trying to escape the honors of persecution, saying, well, it isn't Judaism, it's this sect of Judaism. It's these people, this group, this subset. And finally, at the time of the destruction of Pompeii, which in 79 A.D. earlier that same decade, Jerusalem had been utterly destroyed by the Roman legions under the generalship of Titus. Titus, the older son of his father Vespasian, who was not only the Roman emperor but was the founder of a whole new dynasty of Roman emperors. Vespasian was the first non Caesar to be an emperor in Rome. From Julius Caesar to Nero. They were all Caesars. And Vespasian was the first. His dynasty is called the Flavians. The Flavian dynasty. The first non Caesar to become Emperor of the world, and he became emperor on the basis of a religious conviction that it was the Roman Emperor himself who was the divine god, and not Zeus or Jupiter or anyone else. And so the Jewish alternate radical alternate was a direct threat to the Roman Emperor being the divine man, and the rationale for that came from. Not from Augustus Caesar or even from Julius Caesar. And it surfaced in Nero, but it didn't come from him. The origin of that was Caligula. Caligula was the origin of that Caligula, who ruled for four years, five years, and finally was killed to get rid of him because he was absolutely crazy. He made his heir apparent to his throne. His horse. Oh yeah, it really got weird. Especially because the horse didn't want to. It said not those oats. You can see that the ritual basis as a foundation, though it seems very complicated and well, it can't be that important. The mind is much more important. The fact is that the ritual exactness is much more telling, because it is the irreducible foundation existentially upon which everything else is based, so that a power group will always commandeer the rituals and let you think whatever you want, because they know that eventually, if they have the ritual basis, they have the ideas of the next generations forever. You can think whatever you want. You give me your children and eventually I will take over the world. So by 70 A.D., when Jerusalem had been effaced from the earth. Because it was a direct competition to Rome. Because the Jewish Yahweh was a direct radical rejection of the power and authority of the Roman Emperor. It wasn't enough just to destroy the city. It had to be effaced from the earth. In fact, every single building was taken down. The precedent for it was the destruction of Carthage about 250 years before, when the Roman legions, after 17 years of Hannibal, marching up and down Italy and terrorizing a whole generation of Republican Romans, finally a Roman general came who was greater than Hannibal named Scipio Africanus, and he just absolutely, militarily beat Hannibal out of sheer brilliance of strategy. And when the Carthaginians were beaten. The Roman Senate decreed that Carthage should be effaced from the earth forever. And so they pried up even the foundation stones of every building, and they put poison salt. On the land, so that where classical Carthage was there was a swamp where nothing would ever. Grow again. They used that as a precedent for Jerusalem. The Wailing Wall that's there in Jerusalem is of a later date. It's not even of the Second Temple. Much less Solomon's Temple. And as a theft of the energy of the effaced city of Jerusalem, the great menorah from the temple was taken to Rome, and it was put as as a symbol of conquered power and the throne room. Of Vespasian, his son Titus brought it to Rome. It was huge, and so it was packed in the back of an elephant. We know because to celebrate this, the Romans built the Arch of Titus right at the entrance to the Forum Romanum. And the Arch of Titus is still there. And if you look at the structural key of the Arch of Titus, not on the facade of the Arch of Titus, but inside of the top arch, you will find there the frieze, the carving in stone of the great menorah from the Temple in Jerusalem, on the back of an elephant being brought as ritual Body to Rome because now they would have this power. It had been absorbed into its oneness of rule, and the place where this oneness of rule was established permanently was called at that time, the beginnings of it being called Rome, the Eternal City. Rome would always be what it was because having achieved this in this world, on this planet, no one would ever achieve that again in exactly that way. And since then, 2000 years, all tyrannies in that cognate realm, from Ireland to India, have always patterned themselves on being the new Romans. Napoleon was so convinced that he was the carrier of a new Roman Empire based in Paris instead of Rome, that he went on an expensive military soiree to capture Egypt, because he knew that Egypt was the source of the Greek wisdom and the Greek learning of that Egyptian wisdom was what had made Rome finally able to have the empire. And so he went to the very source to commandeer it. And a lot of the iconography of the Third Reich is that kind of Napoleonic Roman Empire, legions that are professionally there to assert the dictatorship of the figure, who is the oneness and the only one that counts. And all of this is available. When one understands that it is the ritual action that guarantees and secures this, not the ideas. To fight against this kind of tyranny by fighting against the ideas is ineffectual. It is not possible to make any kind of headway or traction. It is the ritual comportment not to be challenged, because the ritual comportment has been developed in a polarized situation, where it views challenge as a part of its substance and its use to co-opting any challenge. Given enough time, we will work in anything. Nothing is permanently heretical. Everything is grist for our mill, but what it cannot absorb, what it cannot factor in is a visionary person who is not an integral, based upon a mind that's aligned with a body. The spiritual person is not factorable into an empire. There's no place for them, because the way that the sets of the polarity have been set up, there's no way to hold them, to have them. And so the spiritual person is not only free, but becomes like a virus to the integrity of that whole universe. If there's anyone alive who is free in that way, they are an ultimate threat. So that the spiritual person, even if there's just one, has to be hunted down and killed. And of course, the danger for them is that spiritual persons have a way of proliferating and becoming more than you can kill, and they literally dissolve from the ritual foundations, the entire structure of the tyranny. It literally dissolves in that way. We saw it in this continent 200 years ago, not on the basis of Washington. George Washington winning the Revolutionary War in a military way is an absurdity that doesn't do anything but the Benjamin Franklin Thomas Jefferson refashioning of the nature of the person so that they were not co-opted by empires. The British Empire at the time was very Roman. Very, very much like the Roman Empire. Very. That's why Napoleon was always fighting against the English. He knew they were the best competition. And the United States was founded not on Washington's military prowess, but upon the conscious spiritual person making capacities of a Franklin and a Jefferson. They made it possible for there to be millions of spiritually free people at a time where there wasn't more than several thousand in the whole of the rest of the spread of civilization. So that you have you have a chance now to appreciate what a powerful, arcane, and radical, though completely understandable effect it has when we make a square of attention, a frame of reference that includes four and only four phases of our education. That that frame, that square of attention, that frame of reference, that picture that we are able to entertain, that pair of pairs that makes a square, makes a makes a frame, makes a a composition which we can gestalt as a stability in one apperceptive grasp. When it's founded on nature, as far as that square can go is the mind. And the mind is most certainly, as we will see, a part of nature. The mind based on the brain is most certainly a part of the ritual objectivity, the comportment of physical stuff. But that brain, that mind based on that brain can turn around within itself. The Greek word for that is metanoia. It can turn around from making a correlation, a referential correlation of its expression of experience, from having reference in the world to having reference in a different mode, not in an integral mode, but in a differential mode, so that the language no longer has reference to things, but it's referentiality changes to ratios, ratios of things in juxtaposition so that one begins to see that there is a hidden structure that nature does, keeps hidden away in its mysteriousness, and that ritual existence doesn't make use of and forgets. And that is the fractions, the fractals, the ratios, and the mind learns. Then not to see in terms of what it can count on fingers or grasp with hands, but in terms of a field of open possibilities, which is larger than the spread of open arms. And that mind becomes visionary and sees that the entirety of the universe, though it is one, is one courtesy of an open mysteriousness of nature. And that the oneness of the universe maintains itself only as long as you start counting from the ritual comportment of action from the practice. The Greek word practice translates directly to practice. When one's frame of reference is based on practice, on what you do or anyone does, on what it is possible to do, to actually do, then that frame of reference going from ritual through myth, through symbol to vision, that square of attention, even including vision, even including the beginnings of consciousness. But if you shift the foundations of that back from ritual to nature, not to nature as an existential, but nature as the mysterious, as the women's mystery religions and antiquity did. The frame of reference was shifted back. It was like a 90 degree turn to go back to something more primordial than what was here as stuff, back to the pre objectivity, back to the mysteriousness of the process of change. And when you went back that far, the frame of reference, the picture shifted from the vision of beginning consciousness back into the mind. And the mind became aware that it had come back into itself with an awareness of something other than what it was. And so the practice in the mystery religions was a pair of practices at the same time. One was to take practice back deeper than existence, back to the mystery of nature. That's why they were called mysteries. But at the same time, it shifted consciousness back into the brain so that the consciousness didn't fit in the brain exactly anymore. It had come from somewhere else. It was expanded beyond just the brain, so that it was able, for the first time, to consider rationally why it was more than just its brain, why it was more than the integral cycle of the mind, why it was something other. It didn't know what it was at that point, but it knew that it could not accept that as an identity, as an arbiter of the real, that there was a mysteriousness and that little bit of visionary openness that came back wild and free, because it wasn't co-opted by the integral structures of the mind. There was no way to co-opt it. It found great affinity with the mysteries in nature. It found that it was of the same stuff, that the mysteries of nature were, so that the spiritual freedom and the mysteries of nature were a continuity. There was no difference between them. It was another kind of universe, but it was a universe. Phantom lady laid on top of the material. So it was like an immateriality. It was a subtleness slight, not graphically large, but unmistakably always there. So it became a denominator whose designation was unknown. Not unknown as you didn't know it, but unknown because it was of an ex possibility. You didn't know what possibilities it had. And in fact, one of the, uh, one of the great spirits of the late 19th century, early 20th century, one of the most titanically, honest, vigorous men who's ever lived. Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace when he was still a young man, when he was an old man nearing death in his 80s, he was determined. In his last year he wrote a diary and the last year's diary of Tolstoy. He was trying to find a way to express God that was not in any kind of traditional way. And he records in his diary one day he was triumphant. He said, if I express God as X over zero, I understand what I mean. And he was so triumphant that he decided he was going to leave the sociological cultural safety of his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, which is still a national treasure in Russia. Going to leave his wife, going to leave everything and go out free on the road to become a Dharma bum. And he was so old. It was such a shock to him that he died in a railway station at Astapovo on his way, just not fleeing from anything but going out to explore the infinite possibilities of the new real that he had found. Yeah. Absolutely true. 1910 it happened. The ritual comportment acts in nature as The stuff which experience glues together. The mind takes that glued stuff and cuts out shapes and builds with it to a point to where it becomes appreciative that what it has built has developed something other than what was meant to be there, thought to be there, and that other begins to be like a tantalizing resonance of something further, instead of it just being integral. It has a touch of the unknown possibilities that might come out. And so this freedom of insight to not just see the world as it is to be practical, but to see the world changed by what could be. That the possibilities of could be become more dominant towards the what turned out to be the end of his life. For Robert Kennedy put it very succinctly again. Some men look at this world and see it for what it is and ask why. Others look from within and see possibilities that never were and ask, why not? Those are the men who go to the moon. More next week.