Ritual 12

I want to contrast the pair that we're dealing with. One of them is Basho, the other is Jesse El Westen. But instead of reading something from Jesse el Westen, her book influenced many things, among them T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. So I'm going to contrast, without any comment, a section of Basho very short, and a section of T.S. Eliot from the Wasteland. Very short, just so you can get the difference, the differential, the oblique kind of juxtaposition that we're focusing on. And we need to get that contrast. So Basho, then T.S. Eliot. Even the woodpeckers have left untouched this tiny cottage in a summer grove, taking leave of my friend and Kurobane. I started for the murder stone, so called because it killed birds and insects that approached it. I was riding a horse that my friend had lent me. When the farmer who led the horse asked me to compose a poem for him. His request came to me as a pleasant surprise. Turned the head of your horse sideways across the field to let me hear the call of a cuckoo bird. After the torchlight red on sweaty faces after the frosty silence in the gardens, after the agony in stony places, the shouting and the crying. Prison and palace and reverberation of thunder, of spring. Over distant mountains. He who was living is now dead. We who were living are now dying. With a little patience. At the same time that Jesse L Weston was getting the inspiration to do her book, a fabulous, larger work called The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer was getting its head of steam up and the first three great huge volumes of it. Had a fourth volume that was added to it in 1906. It was called Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and it came out in two volumes in beautiful hunter green cloth with a gold stamped spine. And on the front cover of it there was an ornate Byzantine pattern that was like this golden bow, not a single bow, but a latticed bow, a Byzantine eternal knot of the mystery of life. And the volume came out at about the time that Frazier was being lionized as one of the greatest intellectuals of all time, and that the Golden Bough was almost like a third testament to the Bible. It was the discovery that underneath the civilized story that we were told about what things mean. Fraser had uncovered a secret hidden ritual schemata and its mythic, thunderous hidden implications in its symbolically piercing, visionary revelations that indeed, the civilization that we believed in was nothing but a phony veil that was clouding over the seething energies of reality that were now about to burst free. And Fraser was in being lionized at that time was given a very, very great honor. He. Was held as someone for whom the British Empire should be grateful. And when he brought out a third edition a few years later, he was knighted and became Sir James. Sir James George Frazer, and as he was knighted, and the third edition of this titanic volume of The Golden Bough came out within a month. World War One broke out, and World War One, in its relentless savagery, shredded Victorian civilisation, which had held itself. Victorian British Empire had held itself as the standard of the civilized world. The phrase was at the time that other people are subject to change, evolution evolving, but we are exempt because we have climbed ashore and are no longer in this changing, evolving barbarity called primitive life. We are. We have arrived, we're sophisticated, and nothing will ever challenge us. And of course, it's just not only broke in half, it exploded into shreds and shards and has never been put back together again. And when World War One was finally over, after year after year after year of grinding up the lives of young men along a line that stretched across most of Europe, where the advances were no more than a couple of miles either way. For four years, the Maginot Line and they finally called an end to the First World War. It's exactly at that time that Jessie Weston's book came out. As if to say, backing up Fraser, that we have been sold a bill of goods. What we thought was civilization was a cheap whitewash, and that true nature is just simply, energetically different from this patois of lies that we have been told for how long and in tracing back. Jessie Weston's book found that it goes back. For several thousand years. We've been told lies for several thousand years. And about the same time that World War One was breaking out and Sir James George Frazer's Golden Bough was reaching this muscular fame. Stravinsky produced The Rite of Spring Le Sacre du printemps. And it was produced first as a ballet in early 1913, and first as a concert piece in early 1914, just about the time that Frazer's third edition of Adonis, Addison Osiris, was coming out and everyone was filled with Stravinsky's savage music, with Frazer's learned Savaging of civilization, and most poignant of all was Jessie Weston's book, which simply put together the fact that there was a discoverable truth pattern underneath all of it, but we can't get to it. And that's why T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was an elegy, an epic elegy on Western civilization. And the conviction was we will never know. It is not discoverable, it is not knowable because the lies are so complex and have been going on so long that they have infected everything that they have touched. And what is it that they have infected most? It would have been pernicious enough if it had affected the whole form of civilization itself, that every variant of civilization carried this virulent disease of pretended ness. Nothing was real, but one could junk civilization. You could go back. You could become primordial again. You could become primitive again. You could go off to some part of the world and rediscover a wilderness where you could just be primordial again. But the discovery was deeper. It wasn't only that civilization was infected, but our own minds structure was infected with the same disease that the mind had been developed for thousands of years on a pretend schedule, so that it matched up the pretense of the external cultural forms woven very tightly into an external civilization, so that the mind and the civilization were deceived to the same extent for so long that we no longer had the capacity to know what was real. Even if we went back to primordial nature, we would carry the disease with us because our minds could not be real any longer. And it was about that time that the conviction became, well, then we will not only junk civilizations, we will junk the mind. We'll go back to some basic bodily comportment and not think and not use these forms. And in trying to find a way to do that, there came a savage barbarian ringmaster who found a way to do that, and effaced the mind and a face civilization and led 50 million people into a worse hell. His name was Adolf Hitler. We will junk their civilization. We will junk their mind, and we will make a new Reich on the basis of a new understanding of man hours. And an even worse disease came in. World War two. Just savaged everything. So Titanic that World War One seemed like a magazine story. And we have lived through something even worse. We have lived through more than a half century of Cold War, which was so savage in such a subtle way that World War two seems like a pleasant little magazine article itself, with a footnote of World War One. So we come to the beginning of the 21st century. Absolutely numb beyond belief. We don't have any confidence either in the civilization or the mind. And we know that we are so crippled that we can't even go back just to our bodies. We can't go anywhere in nature without messing it up all the time. That we thought that space would be some kind of godsend for us. And in the 30 years we've put up so much debris that the the junk in Earth orbit now is like the flotsam floating on the oceans of the world. You can't take an ocean voyage anywhere in the world and not see trash floating on the surface of the ocean, and you can't go anywhere in any kind of an orbit without running into some kind of piece of debris. And so where is the promise that we would go to the moon and junk, that we would go to other star systems and junk that we are carrying a disease and it's a virulent disease. Everything that we do turns to junk. We cannot make anything real. We make a cacophony of the faults so that we end up with shards that don't fit all by itself without even not trying. And so this education is a cure for that. It's a cure for that civilization that is dead and gone for a long time. It's a cure for the mind that was ineffective for several generations at least. Because it shows us that we can indeed start from a primordiality which has no way to be trashed, and that primordiality that cannot be trashed is the mystery of nature. There is nothing that we can do to trash it. It maintains its non-whiteness in the face of all of our neutering. And so it is the mysteriousness of nature that is beyond belief, that is beyond hope, and yet still occurs. So that one of the interesting points of Miss Weston's book. Was that underneath the rock bottom foundation rituals of life. Was the expectation that there would be a way to tap into the mysteries? And she says in her book that this ancient pattern of ritual drama being. Arranged in such a way that it taps the mysterious energies of nature and allows them to come in and suffuse life, the things of life, including us, so that we have a fresh fount of mystery, combed and arranged by a primordial sequencing of ritual actions linked together by a processing function that allows for them to be woven in such a way that the mystery of nature comes straight through the rich will form into the feeling toned, languaged mythic horizon, where we experience so that the mystery of nature comes through to the experience of our life. And she says the basic thing about the mystery ritual cycles, as they allowed the experience of life to be toned by the mystery of nature, and that these ritual dramas then became, in fact, in the Middle Ages, they became cycles of mystery plays. Because the deep Middle Ages were a kind of a fall from civilization, a fall from the mind in some great, catastrophically unimaginable way. And if you look at the lowest levels of the darkest centuries. In the medieval world, you will find human nature as more primordial than you will with even primitive peoples. Because primitive peoples are still so much a part of nature that they never experienced having to make new ritual forms, they just use nature itself, the natural cycle itself. Whereas the medieval people had fallen from the ruins of Roman, from the ruins of all those civilizations that fell apart. And they were not like primordial peoples who were still in contact with nature. They had to find ritual ways of allowing the mystery of nature back into their lives. And so medieval cycles of ritual drama are revelatory. They are revelatory about how to really do this. And that somewhere around the 12th century, the 1100s ritual drama on the village level began to congeal into more effective cycles of presentation. And you had the beginnings of a transformation where these very primitive village dramas, festivals of the people, where all the shoemakers would put on some kind of a play, and all the leather manufacturers or all the metalworkers and all the guilds would have their own speciality, and each guild would, after work, practice their little skits, and then they would present these skits together in some kind of a New Year's festival. And we still have several cycles of these mystery plays in from England. The York mystery plays or the Towneley Mystery plays. The Chester Mystery plays. And they were revived. They were revived after the Second World War and they are put on again. But in higher medieval times, these plays, this cycle of mystery plays, and because they were common people, they used a lot of buffoonery. They used a lot of slapstick stuff, but they weren't interested in being comedic or slapstick. They were interested in having the mystery of nature touch their lives. It's about life, having the energies of mystery and about doing something in a ritual dramatic cycle that allows for that to get together. And it occurred to them, as it occurs to all men and women, that this is a fertility process. We're trying to get the mystery of nature into our lives to fertilize it. So it's creative again. So it's real. So it happens so we can continue to live. And it's not about children. Beautiful, lovable as they are, essential as they are. Yes. But it's about life being able to occur, being able to exist so that the whole cycle of ritual drama is an interfaced lens to focus the energy Frequencies of the mystery of nature so that they focus in lives, in life, so that you and I and all of us have life that is real. And it turns out that not only is this mystery of nature needing to be tapped to be brought into life, but that when you fall from a complex civilization, when you have a massive avalanche of regression. You also have to be able to find a way to bring transcendental vision, which the civilization had back into experience again. And the people, the village people, the medieval simple people, did not have the intellectual training to make complex symbol systems, to allow for that vision to come back into experience. So very often, the primordial mystery plays do not go into vision. They settle for mystery of nature, and that's why they're called mystery plays. And it became a cause celeb at the end of the Middle Ages in the in the intensity of the Renaissance, because the Renaissance was all about how do you find a way to bring the visionary energies of consciousness back into experience? And in order to do that, you have to have a symbol cycle. The ritual cycle is fine to bring the mystery of nature back into life, but to bring transcendental visionary consciousness back into life, you need not rituals, but symbols. And so the Renaissance was all about symbols and the way in which medieval mystery play drama was transformed in the Renaissance to plays that had symbolic capacity as well, to bring vision back in. Those figures were people like Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. They made a ritual drama which had a symbolic interface, that you got an annealed parfait of two different cycles that came together at the same time. And the all time great pair. Is a play by Christopher Marlowe that tells you how not to do this, and a play by William Shakespeare that tells you how to do this. Marlowe's play was Doctor Faustus, that you don't want to make symbols in this way, because what you're bringing is a regressive negative consciousness into experience. Doctor Faustus makes his pact with the devil. Faustus, in one part of Marlowe's play, looks at Mephistopheles, and he says, well, why does the devil want our souls anyway? And Mephistopheles replies in the Latin phrase, which translates as misery loves company. Oh, Kit Marlowe is a toughie. He died in a saloon brawl when he was about 30 years old. Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream is the happy side of that. And if you look at a midsummer Night's Dream, it's all about some guild members who go off to practice a little skit. Pyramus and Thisbe, off in the woods to present at court. Because these skits are always presented at a New Year's festival, which is always a sacred marriage time. You don't have to call it a hieros gamos a sacred marriage. It's just a time when disparate strands of experience intertwine and a marriage. Is that kind of a thing? And it turns out that any two people make that possible. It's like two strands of the way in which lives are lived in their ritual. Threads can be intertwined together and can weave the same pattern together. And so a midsummer Night's Dream is all about that, of how to do that. And it has an ancient yoga to it. One of the most forbidding qualities, though, is that if you overintellectualize the structure. You not only ruin the symbols, but you sabotage the rituals so that you get actions that do not do anything real. In fact, they just spin their wheels. And in spinning your wheels, you lose confidence that anything can be done at all. And so false symbols not only destroy true symbols, they sabotage rituals so that you lose confidence and lose heart. Sir James George Frazer, T.S. Eliot. There were a number of individuals at the time who were trying to bring out this quality. One of the figures very close to Frazer and Eliot was James Joyce. James Joyce, who had written at the outbreak of World War One. A portrait of the artist as a young man. And by the time that T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was coming out, Joyce had written a stream of consciousness epic called Ulysses. He took the Odyssey by Homer, and he put it into a stream of consciousness where there was a completely new mind, a mind that was in a rapture trance of so much transcendental consciousness and wisdom brought back into experience that one was absolutely suspended in a rapport that was close to being intoxicated. So that Joyce's Ulysses is the symbol focus of visionary consciousness coming into experience, whereas Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is the deliriousness where the mystery of nature comes back into experience. So in a way, Stravinsky and James Joyce very similar. Two converging. It's like the convergence of something which comes together and it's implosive. Arena is the experience of life, the experience of life where we feel it in the heart. Human heartedness is what the Chinese call Jen, that yes, there is a Dao, there is a Tay, but there's also a Jen. And Tay's function in its ritual function is to bring the Dao into the human hearted Jen. But in addition to Tao, Tay, and Jen, there are two other phases. The fourth phase is in Chinese called e e, not like an e etching, a version of that E actually means symbols. And the fifth phase is a phase which refers to the the multiplicity of an infinite cosmos. The Chinese phrase for it is the 10,000 things. So that not only are there tae rituals to bring the Tao into Jen, but there are e symbols to bring the cosmos into Jen. It's a different thing, and that when you have this implosive convergence like that in a paired, measured way, you get something that is unbelievably miraculous. You do not get a natural progression where you move from one phase to another, and when you get to the fifth phase, it circles back. It returns the itching always says return or the Tao Te Ching talks about the Great Return, the Eternal return that after the fifth phase, there is not a sixth phase, but one comes back to Tao. But if you go that way, the cycle circles. But if you have a convergence from both ends, if you bring the mystery of nature and the vision of consciousness together in human hearted experience at the same time in a measured way, you get what? James Joyce, he searched for a word. He couldn't find it in English, so he took the Greek word for it. You get an epiphany, you get a moment of absolute truth, and one discovers that not the mind, but the heart is the anvil upon which one makes epiphanies. And when the heart has an epiphany, the mind is so clarified by having participated in that focus that the mind is the theater for something related to an epiphany. And while there's a feeling toned epiphany of the heart, there is a thinking tone theophany of the mind. And one beholds God in just that way, but beholds it through the purity of one's epiphany, not as some physiological creature related to animals, but as a harbinger of that kind of convergent harmony that registers reality on the divine scale. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Let's come back to Basho. Let's come back to the to the Zen travelogue, to the the different, the different presentation from T.S. Eliot. In a way. T.s. Eliot is like fire and Basho is like water. Fire and water. Fire and water are so primordial. Why are they primordial? Because they are universal solvents. Fire and water dissolve things. They're solvents. And in the natural world, fire and water as universal solvents are joined by a third alcohol. Alcohol is also a solvent, but alcohol is a transformational solvent. And so that's why it's not called liquor. It's called spirits. Alcohol is only made alchemically, but it's not made just alchemically by man. Nature also makes alcohols alchemically. So one of the deepest high Dharma wisdoms is that there are transcendental consciousnesses that are continuous with mysteries of nature, so that you will see Chinese landscape scrolls in the southern sun. And if you are able to read the inscriptions, it's a poem about man and nature being friends in an incredibly abstruse, beautiful way. That man's consciousness Righteousness belongs in the mysteries of nature, as if he were a natural stream in a mountain range, and the phrase is mountains and rivers without end. Mountains and rivers that have no ending in the sense that they are not circular, but their spirals into infinity. And we understand here, at the beginning of the 21st century, that there is a particular yoga to such a spiral, and it comes courtesy of a mathematician named Gauss. We even do a measurement of energy called Gauss. And Gauss found that if you change one and only one item in a matrix and run it through an operator influenced function, you will get. Instead of a circle, you will get the beginnings of a spiral, just one part removed from before, and that you can continue this. And if you do, the one difference grows and grows and grows at a different rate from the other, and eventually you get an opening spiral that in mythological terms is called a cornucopia. It's the basket of life that feeds everyone all the time. And so there is a quality of deep appreciation. To use the British pronunciation for a second, there's an appreciation of refinement, where consciousness as a transcendental, visionary energy is not indistinguishable from the mystery of nature, but co suffuse each other so that you get an enrichment. You get a broth that nourishes everyone all the time. This is the liquor of the bodhisattva's. This is this kind of education. This is this kind of language. It's not a language to register identities so that they can be checked by people who can then have others check that they've been checked. And in that way you get accurate, accurate ledgers that everyone files. This way you get a life that opens up indefinitely. Basho's language has that fluid flow of the water and it runs like this. Taking up where we left off. We left off where there's the prose about going out to visit that murder stone, that the birds die. And then there's a moment where the prose stops and one gets the framed space punctuated by a haiku, and the haiku was turn the head of your horse sideways across the field to let me hear the cry of a cuckoo. And then he goes on after that hiatus, after that haiku and the prose begins exactly where it left off, so that you understand that the haiku occurred suspended above the line of the prose. This is an ancient technique of alerting the reader that there is high Dharma working here. Not just not just prose and not just truthful prose as in dharma. But there's high Dharma. There's mystery mixed with visionary consciousness here in the classical Greek way of doing this, you would take sacred words and you would just take the first and the last letters, and you would run them together, and you would put a little bit of a superscript so that these words would occur in the sentence in a specialized way. And so sacred Greek would have these special words that were contracted and put into superscript, so that if you didn't know what they were, you couldn't read them. It wasn't because they were in a code, a secret code, but they were in a form that only someone with a high consciousness tuned to the mystery of nature would be able to appreciate. So here is here's Basho. The murder stone was a dark corner of a mountain near a hot spring. Bring. So you get the light in the dark. A dark corner of the mountain near a hot spring. And was completely wrapped in the poisonous gas escaping from it. So there were chemical esters in the geology of this stone that, in the heat of the day, would heat those esters so that they would emit this poisonous gas, and any birds flying by would die. So it was called the murder stone. And here's Basho, whose haiku was about the sound of a bird off in the distance, still alive. And here he comes. The murdered stone was a dark corner of a mountain near a hot spring, and was completely wrapped in the poisonous gas rising from it. There was such a pile of dead bees, butterflies, and other insects that the real color of the ground was hardly Discernible. So sophisticated. I went then to see the willow tree, which Saigyo, an ancient traveling monk poet that Basho admired. I went then to see the willow tree, which Saigyo celebrated in his poem when he wrote, spreading its shade over a crystal stream. And he's remembering this line from Saigo's poem. This tree spreading its boughs over a crystal stream. Basho says, then I found it near the village of Yoshino, on the bank of a rice field. I'd been wandering in my mind. Where was this tree situated for the ruler of this province had repeatedly talked to me about it. But this day, for the first time in my life, I had an opportunity to rest my worn out legs under its shade. And then haiku. When the girls had planted a square of paddy field, I stepped out of the shade of a willow tree. And then his prose continues. But it continues with that Dharma hi Dharma moment, secretly infused into it, so that now the prose reads exactly the same. But what he's saying is remarkable. After many days of solitary wandering, I came at last to the barrier gate of Shirakawa, which marks the entrance to the northern regions. Here, for the first time, my mind was able to gain a certain balance and composure. No longer a victim to pestering anxiety. So it was with a mild sense of detachment that he crosses that threshold. This is the. This is the wave water. This is the solvent of water. That one does it effortlessly. There's no effort. There's no conflict whatsoever. But the way of fire is different. That solvent is that's the intensity. That's the not a confrontation. It's an apocalypse. It's do or die. It's no prisoners. And that is a different quality. And yet one of the dangers of the solvent by fire is that you can mistake, because the fire turns out to be a very powerful, critical mind. The solvent of water is a fluid flowing heartfulness. The way of fire is a critical mind which has a danger in that it can, with its critical intensity, burn everything up into cinders. Here's a book. It's a study. It's entitled myth, rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority a Critique of Sir James George Frazer T.S. Eliot, literary critic, named Northrop Frye from Toronto. And Joseph Campbell. On Joseph Campbell, who did a skeleton key to Joyce's Finnegans Wake. When Joyce finished writing Ulysses, he wrote a letter to Ezra Pound. He said, I'm going to take that stream of consciousness, epic Ulysses, and I'm going to make it so incredibly consciously convoluted and ornate. It'll look like a page of manuscript. After the illuminating Monks of the Celtic Book of Kells got through with it, and Finnegans Wake is that. But this writer says of Joseph Campbell, of his skeleton key of Joseph Campbell's fire. Critical technique. Campbell's account of the book's methodology stresses the reduction of distracting difference to sameness, the deletion of the difficult, and shifting to the simple and stable. In this condensed version, the dense, even dizzying metaphors of Joyce's text are seen as obstacles to overcome unfortunate accidents around which one must deter through the multiple possibilities within joyous text are signs of its greatness. They are only valuable if they are paired to their essential meanings in a never ending struggle for the unimaginable prize of complete understanding. Campbell admits to failures in deleting and interpreting by those editorial shortcomings. They're absolved by the ultimate success of reducing Finnegans Wake to its primary structure. Nowhere does Campbell question the motivation to cut the text down to its underlying logic. In fact, the desire to make sense of the text leads inexorably to the claim that there is nothing in Joyce's text that cannot be traced to a logical equivalent. Amidst a sea of uncertainties of one thing, we can be sure there are no nonsense syllables in Joyce. The danger is this kind of reductiveness, and you can become world famous as a wise man by carrying through that kind of reductiveness and selling millions of copies. It is an idiot's game, and it sabotages the very critical fire that the mind needs in order to think. And it also sabotages the ritual comportment that would allow the mystery of nature to suffuse experience again. And so you lose on both accounts. And we live in a civilization where we have been awash and adrift in this kind of flotsam For about 3 or 4 generations without break. They are not only wrong, they can never be right. And so this kind of education is a complete affront to that kind of ridiculousness and a challenge, and has built in a quality which we have come to understand, especially the last 20 years, that is, of an algorithm of improvement. Taking Mr. Gauss's technique that if you build in the ability to change so that that change is factored in so that the change keeps factoring in. It's called recursion in mathematics, if you get an algorithm of recursive improvement so that every time you have an improvement, you do an improvement on the improvement, you can pragmatically take yourself, even out of pure chaos, into a universal form of understanding. And we know that that's true now. Impossible. It can be done. The problem is, can it be delivered on a scale of hundreds of millions of people, so that they stop regressing in a landslide back into medievalism, into thinking that just the if we have the right bodily comportment, we'll be able to get nature on our side. And if we have the right metaphysics, we'll be able to get consciousness on our side, and then we'll be okay, won't we? And the answer is no. You won't. Never. There is no chance at all that way. And so this kind of education takes its time is not clear immediately, ever. Because what would be clear now is going to have to be dissolved later anyway. So we keep it in a lightly suspended form so it's easier to dissolve later on, easier to improve later on so that we build wisdom into the learning from scratch. And as we go along, more and more, the lightly held understanding is not so much chiffon or Swiss cheese, but is the kind of a matrix that lends itself to improvement on every angle, so that the least bit of recursive learning can come back and change the mix, and so one learns, instead of following the dots, how to be a master chef and really serve something nourishing to experience. Because experiences we will see in the myth section is everything that mythic horizon in between ritual and symbol, in between the body's rituals and the mind's symbols. That mythic horizon of feeling toned, human hearted experience is where most of us live. It's where life lives. And life. Jessie Weston's book makes it very clear. What's the purpose of all of these? All of the struggle, all of this travail, all of this hopefulness or the abandoning of hopefulness? What's what is it all about? It's all about life being able to live and us being able to be at home in our own lives. If we can't be at home in our own lives, then we are truly lost in deception. And if we no longer believe that there is such a thing as our own lives of which we can be comfortable in, then indeed we have fallen into the worst of the hells. This ability of life to infuse our experience, Jessie Weston says, has everything to do with fertility. That's what fertility is all about. And, um, on page 42 of her book, a little quotation, an excerpt. Each and all of the ritual dramas reconstructed in the pages of a book that she refers to about mystery and minimum um, bare more or less distinctly, the stamp of their fertility origin, the widespread and persistent survival of the rights, and their successful defiance of the spread of civilization. Now, at this point, her book came out in 1920. T.s. Eliot's The Wasteland came out in 1922. The National Socialist Party took over Germany in 1933. One has to be very careful that in a fiery critique of civilization, you do not turn it into a cinder. Because in doing that, you end up with mental ability to see people as stick figures by the millions. We are not going to countenance that again. Not ever. And so an education like this takes great care in building towards the symbol section, where we develop the power of a critical mind. If you want to take something apart critically, you can really do it now. In mathematics, it's called real analysis. And we can take it apart to the level of quantum particles. That's no longer an issue. But what is an unresolved issue? Is there any way for us to be human in our own lives, individually or communally, or on a planetary scale of civilization. Is there any way for that to happen? And so far, the number of answers that have come up have been zero. The number of possibilities have been zero. Is a brick wall, but thankfully something like this is like gamma rays. They can go through brick walls. So just continue because the education is not something for you to understand. Did he make sense today? It's not whether he makes sense or not. It's can you live with the nonsense long enough that you lose the habitual taste of the addiction of sense and learn real sense? More next week.