Ritual 10

This is ritual ten and we're exploring and our movement has a motion which is like an arrow or like a plow or like a ship. And as it moves, the medium through which it moves ripples out and collects behind us and leaves a wake. The mind does not know that it leaves a wake. And so the mind is abstractly awake and is naturally naive. And what makes it so difficult for us is that we get caught with bodies and minds that don't get each other at all. And so there needs to be the mind thinks a synthesis or there needs to be. The body thinks a comeuppance. The body, being natural, always looks for a compensation. Always looks for a balance by. There's too much of this, so let's have some of that. The mind always looks to synthesize. And there is a constant war between The synthesis of the mind and the compensation of the body. Because there we would say in chemistry they're not miscible. They don't oil and water, they don't go together. So when you run across a real Zen master like Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in his great book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, the two little quotations from his book, I think, are useful to pair and keep together and fold together and put in your pocket as we're going to talk about Zen journeying today. The first quote is mind weeds. Mind weeds. You should rather be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice. And the other quotation constant say people who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems by constancy. And now Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was a very practiced individual and came to understand the San Francisco, United States, of the 1960s very well, and was an excellent Zen master, in that he never pretended to be the master. He was always getting out of your way so that you could realize that you didn't need to have a Zen master. Very excellent teacher. His biography just came out. It's called Crooked Cucumber. And this whole idea of crooked cucumber being a Zen master has an associative quality for me, because in 1959, this little translation of Basho came out cool melon. Saddle stitched. It was published by one of the beat poets of the United States, who in the 50s, a lot of the beat poets went to Kyoto to study Zen. And that's why Zen masters like Shunryu Suzuki Roshi came to San Francisco, because it was largely San Francisco. American beat poets who went to Japan inquiring about Zen and the Japanese Zen people said, well, These people get it more than our own people. So let's go to the United States. Let's go to San Francisco in the late 50s and the early 60s. And this was published by a press called Origin Press in 1959. Ashland, Massachusetts. And all their books were saddle stitched like this. And they all had a very similar kind of cover. This one was green. The first book that Gary Snyder ever published was called riprap, and it was published exactly like this by the same press at the same time. Riprap is the way in which you make trails in mountains by using the natural rock, but you score the natural rock in a way that it's semi cobbled like cobblestones, so that you afford good footing for horses and mules, and you can learn to hike with your. Your boots on riprap by making a kind of a loping alternate step. You you move on riprap differently than you would move on on dust or or dirt or scree or something like that. So cool. Melon was a publication of Basho, and it was one of the first times that. American poets, 1959 1960 that we saw in San Francisco the the real Zen McCoy, the real thing, and the very first poem, the very first haiku in here after this illustration, there later was a Zen artist in San Francisco named Arthur Okamura, who did some things, and one of his great covers for one of the early books by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was called mudra, and they used the Old High Dharma mudra, and Arthur Okamura drew it with the vibrations of the hand in this mudra. This also means in America. Okay. It also means in Zen zero. And Arthur Okamura gave all the resonances of the hand, so that what you saw was this resonantly out beyond the frame of reference. The first haiku in here, with odor of plum bursts. The sunrise mountain path. Our concern with ritual is to be comprehensive and to realize that that prow, that movement in space, that dynamic of time moving in space has a resonant boundary and not a drawn abstract boundary. The mind knows nothing of form. It's the body that understands form. The body is extraordinarily wise. The form, the outline, the shape, the boundary. The definition of anything is the sum spectrum of its resonance. All of the liminalities of it brought together, including its wake. What it does, so that you have to shift from an arithmetic counting to a mathematic ratio in order to understand the real. You cannot count your way to the real. And counting. Numeracy is the ritual basis of what later on becomes literacy, language, written language and the symbolic mind in its Abstractness always mistakes numeracy for certainty. And so you have logic basing itself on an arithmetic kind of referential certainty when that's not true at all. I'm the first person to conclusively show that mathematically was Sir Isaac Newton. The whole process of calculus is to calculate the infinitesimal differences between 1 and 0 and zero and one. The liminal approaches can be definitely known to any degree of specificity, in an infinity of possibilities. That we can be extraordinarily exact in an infinite spectrum is a revelation about our trueness our nature. We really are of that kind. There was a wonderful concluding line to Wallace Stevens great poem, famous, justly famous poem, The Idea of Order at Key West, and the concluding lines run. O blessed rage for order. Pale Ramon, the maker's rage to order. Words of the sea. Words of the fragrant portals. Dimly starred, and of ourselves and of our origins. In Ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds the fact that a form has always in its reality a resonance, the quality of a great artist like Morris Graves, that the blind bird of the spirit stands in a chaos of what he called white writing, that is, the scrambled resonances Says of all the context, and that the blind bird of the spirit has its resonance, but stands in a confused, in a chaotic horizon. And if one tries to straighten this out, one becomes, here's another Morris Graves, a moon mad crow in the surf. Very zen. That. That direction. That vector. That pointing at the moon. Classic Zen. Um uh uh. Koan. The finger pointing at the moon leaves a resonance, and part of the resonance of that finger is the entirety of this body, this character, this someone who's doing that pointing, and it's not the referent of the single finger at the moon and then the word moon, but that ritual action of just doing that. Can be abstracted as an arrow of intentionality by the mind, but in actual ritual basis it is a comportment, ritually, that creates, in the doing of it an existential set of the moon, the finger, the person, the act of pointing, and all of it together. And there is a sequence to that, and that sequence is stitched together just like a saddle stitch. It's all stitched together by a processing function. The processing function is the action, it's the doing of it. And so later on in our own time, when Richard Feynman, who we'll get to in science when he is trying to find a more realistic language to talk about the math of quantum physics, made his own diagrams because he found that the classical math of Newton and of Fourier of the 18th century and 19th century and early 20th century did not really follow the action. It followed the conception of the action, which was different. And if you follow the idea of something. You can take a nice photograph, but you can't eat. You have to follow the game itself. You have to. You have to be out there in the big woods. As Faulkner once said, you have to learn to put your rifle and your watch and your compass aside. And first of all, be with the forest. And when you're with the forest, the entirety of the forest is where you're participating. And if you're hungry, you will find game and the game will present itself to you, because that's the cooperative resonance of the way in which this sequence works, when the processing function is real. So if an American Indian killed an animal said a blessing to the animal, thank you for giving us the food to eat, to keep living. And we honor you. It was not a killing. It was not a death. It was participating in the constancy of the sequence and its processing function integrated together, which always delivers the real, not in a synthesis, but in kind of like a braiding, which goes into making a fabric. So reality has a fabric quality, not a synthetic quality at all. And so our concern by ritual ten is with a pair of books to help us just make a prow. Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance in Basho's narrow road to the Deep North. And their use for us is not a use of of literature, or of philosophy, or of metaphysics, or Are of occult concern or whatever. Our only concern here is to let them come together and work together, work as a pair and become aware. For ritual stirs up awareness. The body becomes aware. Bodies become extraordinarily aware, and that awareness is the foundation upon which sentience is flamed. Feeling toned. Intelligence is called sentience. And we'll see when we get to myth. That myth is all about the stories that feeling toned sentience tells about what we do and really do. And out of that, out of the awareness as a base and the flames of the sentience comes intelligence. And intelligence is like the light and the heat from that, from that campfire, that in the night of the universe, there is such a thing as storytelling around that fire, and every aspect of the universe listens. If you've ever been in a mystical situation, in the wilderness, around a campfire at night and someone tells a story for real, you feel the entirety of the forest and all of the stars are part of the listening. In some of the last sutras of the Buddha, there is specifically said that coming to hear this high drama of the old Buddha that all the gods of the universe put down their work wherever it is to come and listen, to learn to, to gain learning. Because it turns out that man is the teacher. Our place is is to teach, is to deliver. And so we must have in that processing function of teaching, we must already have woven into the fabric the sequence of learning, so that learning and teaching weave together. They make a fabric together so that while we learn, we learn not to store away, to categorize, but we learn to teach. And as we learn and teach at the same time the interface between them instead of becoming a false boundary, a separate wall. There is an interface between them, and that interface has an osmotic quality. It has a pliable quality, it has a resonance kind of liminality. And we grow wiser by learning so that we may teach, and teaching so that we may learn. So that I'm currently teaching and I'm learning a lot, and you're currently learning and currently teaching a lot, so that there is an interpenetration and that interpenetration creates, not outlines of a definition, but definition by Resonance, so that the way to organize the sense of a sequence is by resonance raised to powers. Sets of resonance. And generally we in our tradition, in the Western tradition, we go by tens. The Chinese go by fives and can go by tens, but they can go also by twelves, by sixes doubled to 12 and by five doubled to ten. Our preference is for tens, but making sure that sets of nine triads cubed, that sets of nine are also a part of the structure of our intelligence, so that the farthest that one could say something would be in a ninth place in a sequence, and that when you come to the 10th, it's the set that includes it all, so that the 11th would be a repetition of the first with an increase in power. Thus, we write 11 to 1, one, one for one and two ones for 11. And if you go to 111, three ones. So there is a jump in powers of one of unity. And you can see that there is a curious quality here. In the tarot deck. The way in which one is written in the major arcanas with the magician, and the way in which 11 is written is justice. Justice in this iconography is magic raised to a higher power. But this tarot deck, done by Pamela Colman Smith and Roe Waite, is quite distinct from the way in which the more primordial Tarot of Marseilles has it the magician and force. That force, or in English, a better word for it is often strength, and strength is feminine, so that in the original iconography of the tarot, as it came into southern France a long time ago, the origins of the tarot de Marseille go back about 800 years. This presents a gender complementarity which is not there in the Waite deck. Where does force, where does strength? Where does the feminine come? In the Waite deck? It comes number eight. She's brought into number eight because the symbolic structure of the waite does not go by the more primordial set of ten, the sequence of ten, with a synthesizing function running through it. The tarot de Marseille has a set of ten. The Tarot of Waite has a set of seven, so that it divides the Major Arcana into three sets of seven cards, one through seven, then eight starts the next set, and so the raise in powers comes not in terms of the whole deck as the Marseille does, but in terms only of the Major Arcana. So the Waite understanding of ritual sequence is that the indexing function of the symbols is all you need to master, and that's rather an intellectual error. Because the Marseille deck goes back and understands that the sets of ten have something to do with the entirety of the deck, and if you don't have weave and say it of somebody who's a little cuckoo. They're not playing with a full deck. So people who take symbols to index reality are not playing with a full deck. They're we call them eggheads in the sense that they're not even born yet. They're naive. And in a way, they are the original tarot deck that tarocchi that came down and still has its structure in the Marseille deck is the tarot of reproduced in the Renaissance about 500 years ago by Mantegna, the great artist. And the Tarot of Mantegna has five sets of ten. It only has 50 cards, so that every card in the deck 500 years ago was a part of the Major Arcana. There was no Minor Arcana whatsoever because one did not play a game with that original Tarocchi. The Tarocchi that you play the game with was a version, and that version came from northern Italy and was the tarot delivered by Bembo and the tarot by Bembo does not have the same kind of understanding of the powers of ten operating throughout the whole deck. The Tarot of Marseilles still carries the Mantegna deck, and you find the 50th card in the Montana Tarot is the entire cosmos. And leading up to it in a triad. Because essentially what you have here, you have a Pythagorean understanding of symbol and structure, that is, that the symbol does not occur in the mind. The symbol occurs in the harmony of the resonance. It's a whole different emphasis so that the 48th card is the eighth sphere. The sphere of the fixed stars and the 49th car card is called Primum Mobile. The first movement. And it's an emptiness. It's a zero ness. And then you get the cosmos. This has a Pythagorean basis, as does the tarot de Marseille, whereas the Waite deck has a kabbalistic basis instead of Pythagorean. It's a totally different outlook. And the ritual reading of these decks is distinctly different, because if you apply the same ritual sequencing and the same processing function, you will mistake both. You won't know how to read either, and most people today are just they're like little kids. They just they don't know what they have. They don't know how to move with it. But even something like the Waite deck still holds that over the major indexing functions is an infinity sign, which is a not a symbol so much, but as a ritual function. The ritual function that establishes through the entirety the whole fabric of the space, and all the time it takes to traverse that space is the unity of the existence, and the unity of the existence is the fabric that we need to work with. That's the real. So that you have the distribution of space coextensive with the set sequence of the time. So at the time and space have an equanimity. They match, they go together. Later on, this kind of intelligent ritual reality was put in the very center of Charlotte Cathedral, in the floor where the two, uh, portions of the cathedral come together to make the cross, and the very place where Jesus Christ would be in the floor of Chartres Cathedral. You can still find it today. There's a labyrinth. There is a maze, an architectural maze. And in order to get to the center of that maze, the maze is arranged so that you will walk over every square inch of the maze of the labyrinth. Getting to the center, you will complete the sequence of the time, getting to the center from the beginning, when you have exactly covered all of the space of the labyrinth, so that the time and space have an equanimity. This is high dharma. This is really understanding. And of course, if you go into short by any portal, you will see arranged around the portal of entrance, all of the harmonic resonances of all the columns which contain the men and women who built that place out of understanding and you will see their grand faces and noble posture presenting themselves as the structures of the resonance of the entrances and exits of that cathedral. The Cathedral of Shard is not about doctrine. It's about architecture being presentational and not representational. A doctrine is always about representation. What does it mean? Where is reality is all about presentation. Here it is. Classic story of the difference. Salvador Dali once took an egg and he painted it gold. And then he glued little dead flies all over it. And he did some other things to it. And he wrote out a description, and he sent it to the Museum of Modern Art. The curator happy to get this odd object brought back to Salvador Dali. The Senor Dali. Muchas gracias. Uh, but can save. And he wrote back. Quién sabe? Exclamation mark. Quién sabe? Exclamation mark. Exclamation mark. Sabe. There is an infinite recursive echo to referentiality when it is not real. When reality is presented in such a way that you participate with it, there's no echo whatsoever. The fact that an echo occurs means that you're out of sync with the real, that there is an emptiness which is an architectural emptiness and not an openness, which is the real emptiness. So that one of the qualities that terrified anyone who would go to visit the most famous prophetic voice outside of the Delphic Oracle, the most famous prophetic voice in antiquity was the Sibyl of Cumae, and the Sibyl of Cumae lived in a cave underneath that volcanic field that Mount Vesuvius is a part of, just north of Naples. And the chamber that went into the cavern where the Sibyl of Cumae lived had an entrance that went along a volcanic tube that was very close to the surface of the rock, so that in one side of the rock were cut. A series of windows and a special key looks for all the world, like the. Secret key of Mayan architecture. It was a very strange. It's an ancient. Minoan-mycenaean shape. It's the entrance to the beehive tombs from Mycenae. I have about 3700 years ago. That's about the time that this kind of architecture was being first mooted. It is a diminishing square that reaches upward so that in a set of these windows, the tunnel through which you're going has these hypnotic bands of light and dark, which shift ever so slightly with the movement of the sun, and you get almost into a trance so that when you come out at the end and you come to the main portal of the Sybil's cave, you are suddenly in this trance, presented with about 100 different openings, only one of which really leads to the Sybil. But if you say one word in there, there are so many openings that the echoing cacophony of what one word you have said deafens your ears and you can't hear a thing for a while. So you can only approach through the what they used to say, the pronaos of wisdom. You can only come through the porch of the temple of Understanding silent, that the Pythagorean order is to learn to be silent. You don't ask questions. If you ask questions, all you get will be answers that will make more questions. And that's the echo in the mind. Sure that's the learned ignorance that's underway all the time. And of course, it's confusing. Of course it's maddening. And our recent Zen master, Samuel Beckett, did everything he could to show on stage. That language, which runs down into silence, doesn't produce the wisdom in the characters in the play. But when you walk out of the theater, you are used to being glad just to be quietly non-speaking. And it's that kind of language, this resonant form. Morris Graves here with birds and rocks and everything, is resonant in nature in the East Asian Zen tradition. One of the best presentations of this is by Sesshu and I brought an illustration. This is nature and man's place in nature. His house where he lives. Down here in the corner, the roofs of the houses are drawn such that they're almost like pieces of the rock. And up above you see into the mist this kind of Z of the birds migrating. This is a detail from a landscape Zen landscape scroll. And it has beyond the mist, the true mountains. As someone said once, the delectable mountains rising beyond Basho's narrow road to the deep north is like this kind of landscape scroll of Sasha. It has a foreground where man and his place in nature has been so carefully woven in that it's hard to tell him, as distinct from the rocks, that the kind of house that he would live in is so integrated ritually in its presentational mode that the action of living is real, as real as nature is, and that beyond this is some mysterious context which we don't know. And yet beyond that mysterious context, that misty vastness which we don't know is a reverberation, is a resonance of these rocks where our houses are, and those delectable mountains which are residences of the place in which we live. And we can go to those mountains by resonant transport. You couldn't ever walk there, because there's no trail through those misty vastnesses, but you can go to those mountains by harmonic resonance in just the same way. We'll someday go to the stars in exactly the same way. You can't walk across interstellar distances, but nevertheless, you can go, because the real allows us to be not only participants folded into the nature that's here on our scale, but every power of that scale is a harmonic and is available for us. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Isn't that how the rock groups used to do it in the 60s? You just kick the drum, and that would be it. That's how you began. A shaman drum. A shaman is always ritually in a trance, but cannot get into the trance unless he is woven into the trance by the rhythm. That's why he has a drum. Or they say a rattle. I know the authorities always say it's a drum or a rattle, but the rattle is to come out of the trance. And the drum is to go into the trance. In the ancient Hermetic West, in Egypt, the sistrum was the rattle. And it was the instrument that ISIS would hold and it was curved and it had several bars across, spaced with little like tambourine bells in it. And it was specifically designed to scatter sound, to scatter the order of sound, to make a chaos, a cacophony which was the same function as all the mouths of the cave of the Sibyl of Cumae. It was meant to tell you, ritually, to shut up, that this is a threshold beyond which nothing can be said. So don't say it. I remember the first time that I was I was 19. I was hiking into the High Sierras and got above tree line and and for the first time in my life got really up and I was watching some hikers come along a trail below me a couple thousand feet and the one guy had a portable radio. He was listening to on the trail, and he's in the midst of this grand High Sierra infinite sky. I felt like a mountain lion. I thought, he's lucky I don't, you know. You know how you get fierce. So a sequence has a rhythm, its frequency of its occurrence. The particles of the sequence are complemented by the frequency of the energy, the wave. So wave and particle is not a duality, but there we've able to the mind, there a duality, and you get a Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can't keep track of whether something is a wave or a particle. Light is both, depending on how you're looking at it. But if you're looking at it and being with the looking so that you're looking and you and the light are together, then something happens. It's like the frequency of the light is the same frequency as you, and you get so that your energy is with the wave of the light. And it turns out that that periodicity is Hummable. That is, you can turn light into a laser and you can be that laser and you can see in that way, and that is a very penetrative, visionary looking that's not looking to see, that's seeing the look. And so sequence and processing function in ritual, I wrote it this way in the notes about 5:00 this morning. The flow through a sequence is its processing function, the flow going through the energy frequency, the wave, the juice going through it is its processing function. And the entire pattern is a cycled circuit That is the entire pattern. The discrete pattern. The set of something functions as a circuit. So that in ritual one can become familiar with a very complex ceremony where you have a lot of circuits working together and a lot of sequences that have parenthetical sequences and arrangements, and you can have a tremendous complexity going. And it's not primitive at all. It's extraordinarily sophisticated. It's just that instead of working with electronics, one is working with. The bits and pieces that are constellated together in the ceremony, the feathers, the evergreen, whatever it is, they're not superstitious objects which are manipulated by a primitive mentality. It's not a primitive and it's not a mentality. It's a body smarts. And there are such things as body images only. They're not images as like in pictures. They're kinesthetic qualities that form an intelligibility, a constellation. There was a book that was very popular in the early 60s by German Janheinz Jahn called Muntu. It was about African philosophy and he made the point. He said the intelligence in African thought is not in ideas. It's in the complex rhythms of the body, in its motion, in its dancing. And you will find more complexity in African rhythms, and you will find anywhere else in the world, because they're extraordinarily smart in just that way. That's the alphabet. That's the language by which their intelligence of the body is brought into play. So that one has to have an enormously complex ear to hear some of the complexities of African rhythms. They're really complex. So the flow through a sequence is its processing function, and the entire pattern is a cycled circuit. One cycle defines a circuit so that you find in ritual a constant attentiveness to make sure that the cycle is completed. You don't want to leave it undone, because that nullifies the entirety, because then the pattern the circuit doesn't manifest doesn't happen. And it isn't based on ignorant superstition. It's based on very highly intelligent kinesthetic awareness that this cycle must be completed. And so if you have an eight day ceremony like the sun dance, the okan, you want to be sure that you carry all the way through the ceremony. And because all of the major things are finished on the seventh day, you want to make sure that you carry through that last day. Also, that you don't lose your ritual comportment, your attentiveness to maintaining the yoga of the action. Why would you do that? Because the primordial men and women understood not intellectually, but in a kinesthetic awareness of their body that if they carry through to completion. Their participation sews them into the fabric of reality, and they may live. If they leave it incomplete or if they scramble it somehow, what you're left with is something that produces chaotic echoes and life goes to hell in a handbasket in a hurry. So that primordial peoples are always destroyed by their inability to keep a health of their ritual comportment, which comes through to more advanced cultures in the sense that bodies begin not to know how to live and get diseased very easily, because they're not participating in the fabric of the real. They're trying to keep up with some kind of idea of that reality. And bodies are not made to keep up with that. They're made to keep up with nature. And nature's cycles have as a common denominator the mysteriousness of nature. The zero of nature is always a common denominator of the unity of ritual, of a ritual cycle, of a ritual circuit. The circuit names the pattern limits, cycle names, the liminal patterning. It's a little difficult to follow because it's intellectual in its presentation. But what this delivers in a kind of an intellectualizing way of expressing it. If we have a ceremony together, say we take all the masks that you have made. Everyone's made a mask of feeling and a mask of food. The food is something which we take into ourselves. The feeling is something that comes out of ourselves. If we put those masks together, feeling and food together, the utter that goes in the inner that goes out, they will form an inner face. They will form a kind of a pulsating interface, especially because both have their own resonances. This has a resonance of the outer coming in the food. This has a resonance of the inner going out. And if we meld, if we merge, if we interpenetrate, if we bring the resonant qualities of both interweave ability, then what we have established is a locus, is a place, is a point on the true surface of who we really are. We don't know the extent of all of that liminal form, but we have the beginning. We have the seed. And so these pair of masks in their primordiality done in that way, would establish a true seed out of which one could generate the entirety of the realistic form of the person. Cosmic person actually. And it doesn't matter whether it is in a rational or a chaotic sense, even in chaos theory. Once you know the beginning accurately, you can run that accurate beginning even through a random process and come out with a universal form. Because the real is real, it isn't a projected phantom of hopefulness of the mind. It can be that, but it doesn't need to be. And so, in a very odd way, the body and the spirit are really can see eye to eye. The difficulty at the card game is that the mind doesn't believe that. Doesn't believe that bodies and spirits are really go together. Thinks they're really different. And I better always handle the negotiations for a fee. And the fee, of course, is that it gets to continue to stay in business. And what is the business of the mind to work abstractly on making sure that order is rational and the logical movement is analyzable and so forth and so forth? There are a lot of considerations that come in. What happens in a ritual comportment is that the action always seeks an integral of a unity. If we have a ritual for rain making, we want to make sure that the entirety of that ceremony is completed. And if it's completed, and we're all woven into that participation with the mystery of nature, it will rain. There was a beautiful film made by a friend of mine, Chilean filmmaker and the in the 60s Rolando Klein called chalk. Chalk is Chac-mool, the Mayan rain god, and he went into the Mayan highlands of southern Mexico. And he used just native villagers to make the film. And they said to him, no, do you know what you're getting into in this? He said, I think I do. And they went through the whole ceremony. And of course, the prelude to the ceremony is that you have to have a seed for the water to make the rain, and the seed for the water meant that they had to go out of the highlands, down into the dangerous jungles, down to one of those cenote caves, way down underground to a hidden spring, and bring a bucket of water back from that spring all the way to the Highlands. And it's a very dangerous journey to do that, because the the jungle Indians think these, these very shallow peasants from the high grounds are really rural and stupid, and they're in their hammocks with their cigars of various plants, watching all of this with the glee of far out cats watching defenseless little mice. But in the film, they do manage to bring back that bucket of water, that seed that beginning, and put on the whole ceremony under the guidance of a shaman who is, in a Fellini way, choreographing all of this. And they've had to convince him to do this, and it's taken them a long time to convince him to do this. And he runs it through, and they don't understand. When the ceremony is over and it doesn't rain. They kill him. And as soon as he's dead, it rains. And he knew that. That's why he was reluctant. But he gave his life. Because the end, the conclusion, the making of the circuit in that ritual was that he had to give up his life. It was their disappointment in the efficacy of all of the action that led them to kill him. And it was their belief that by killing him, they got even that brought the rain. The whole ceremony was not to bring the rain, but to bring them to believe that if they did it, they would have rain. And then to understand that it didn't work so that their disbelief shattered. And then they killed him. And out of that belief, it rained. So that deep wisdom is esoteric, like the infinity sign. And you never approach anything directly in ritual. There's always a courtesy, there's always a circumambulation. And it's rather like being in Earth orbit. We set or any kind of orbit. We sent a probe to the little asteroid Eros, which is now circling Eros. Eros, which is moving about 18 times the speed of a rifle bullet. And our satellite is going at three miles an hour around this, at 18 times the speed of a rifle bullet, about 3 million miles from here. And it had to slowly acquire a very large orbit and slowly spiral in so that it's going to eventually be just about 50ft above it. And perhaps we'll land later this year. You can't go directly to anything in reality. And so the ritual awareness, the comportment is that one circumambulates. And there are two different ways. There's always a pair you can circumambulate clockwise or counterclockwise. And we call that a nuclear physics. It's called spin. So that spin as well as charge, positive and negative are universals in terms of nature and in terms of the ritual existence of things, of stuff. It's the polarization that holds as a polarity that makes charge, that makes electromagnetism effective, and it's the freeze drying of spin into clockwise and anti-clockwise to keep them distinct and separate. It's that polarity that allows for a kind of a rotational quality to everything from electrons and atomic nuclei, right up to galactic clusters like the Virgo cluster that has as many galaxies as we have stars in our galaxy, so that there is a deep resonance all the way through of orders, of powers, of actuality. And the wisdom is that if you become participatory, absorbed on any level, for real, You can move through the powers, through the orders, and be there, which is true. Thus, coming back to the notes here. Thus the action you have to follow. The action, the action, the karma, the pragmatics, the doing, the dynamics. All these are words for that the action. The action has a liminality in patterning for repeated flows if you keep doing a similar activity. That similarity of repeated activity will begin to literally shape out of the mystery of nature, a form which will eventually hold. And so there there is this aspect. The outlines of the forms in resonant layers of repeat, reinforce and structure so that the stuff of the flow is the stuff giving boundedness and definition to the pattern. And these make the things, these make the existentials. And this is how things are made. But you can't go directly and have some idea. We're going to burn three candles at midnight and paste some flies on an egg and mail it to the Museum of Metropolitan Art. And New York's going to become an asteroid. This kind of thinking is garbled. It's full of echoey nonsense. And you'll never get to speak to the Sibyl of Cumae. That way you can't get her phone number that way. She's not going to answer. So that the actuality in a ritual comportment is to be respectful, that there is a vibration for the particles all the time, and there's a frequency for the waves, the energy all the time. And that they do make a fabric together. And if you're with them in just that way, they'll dance, they will dance, the universe will dance. And all of this participatory dance one hears use a Pythagorean phrase. One hears the music of the spheres. Yeah, not just the music of the spheres in some late Alexandrian Ptolemaic cosmology, but the music of the spheres, in terms of the planets that are really there themselves, every planet in orbit around our star has a particular sound. I think I brought in once the little whistle of the sound of our planet in orbit around our star. And I also put out this little whistle, and you can blow it, and you can hear the sound of our planet in orbit. And they also had I got smuggled out a little cassette that had the sound of all the planets that Voyager went to, so that you can hear the sound of each planet. And they're all very similar and yet distinct, so that one could play the sounds of all of the planets of our star system and hear the chord of the star system for the first time. We can do that. We can do that. So that there is this quality that we have at the beginning of the 21st century. We know how to do this, but the educational presentation of maturation is still back in a echoing cacophony of centuries that are out of date. Truly, it isn't that past times are out of date. It's that if they're in a cacophony, if they're not in harmonics of the power of the real, so that the present absorbs you and you can be there, then the past indeed is just a nightmare and the future too. And that's why most science fiction is about monsters now in arcade games, nail biting suspense. And it's not real at all. It's just very elaborate psychosis. So if we would like to be free in the cosmos on whatever levels we would like to operate, we need to wake up from those nightmares and stop playing those arcade games. And that's what our forbearers did at least a million years ago. They got those who got those, who got those who got us here. We're here. And we're so far pretty viable because those men and women for 10,000 generations were really together. They made their lives real. And part of a good education is that you're real within your own life. However you choose to live. It is your privilege and your concern. What the education here is to do is to help bring you being at home in your own life as the quality initially ritual, eventually symbol. And we can even get to the art of that. There's such a thing as the art of the person, and then there's something even beyond that which accepts us. And that's the art of the cosmos as a whole. We are at home there. We're not servants mopping the floors and washing the dishes. That's our home. One more next week.