Interval 2

This is the 26th presentation of this year and of the course and of the cycle, and we do 12 presentations and then we have a break. The 13th presentation is called an interval. And this is the second interval now. Intervals are made for articulation. If you run all of the letters together it's very difficult to get words out. So these intervals are meant to give an articulation to a phrasing. And this phrasing. Each phrase is 12 weeks long, 12 Saturdays, 12 presentations, and those sequences of those 12. Those 12 phrases together make a set, and each one of those sets is a phase that we go through in order to be in order to actually exist and to mature and develop and grow. Most education takes place in just a limited couple of those phases. Most education in a traditional way takes place in the third of our phases, which is myth. On the tribal level. On the emotional level, most learning takes place in a mythic sense. And so that mythic set, that mythic phrase of feeling toned experience is the whole world. And everything is seen through those myth colored glasses. Everything is seen as some function of feeling toned experience. And unusual adjunct to that is to add symbols. And most civilized education sequences are all based on symbols. They're all based on the mind. They're all based on thinking. Yes, there's feeling, but feeling has to mature into thinking. And so most of the education that you would receive in any kind of a standard way over the last 3000 years would be myth and symbol. Those two phases together. And because they're they go together like bacon and eggs, they really fit together. And because they're examples of two different kinds of phases, the myth phase is all about the process of experience. And the symbol phase is all about the integration of ideas. And so experience as a flow coming together, integrating as objective thoughts seems a very natural course of events. And indeed it is. As somewhat more grand and more ancient than those offered by civilizations or by tribes. Our education goes back to the old Paleolithic roots of our kind. Our species was around Paleolithic for more than 100,000 years before there was anything like a tribe, before there was anything like myths. And so most of the deep rooted objectivity, the real certainties, the real trustworthiness is on the level of the body and not on the level of feelings. It's in the objectivity of a bodily comportment towards life, rather than feeling about that, much less the objectivity of the mind, of thinking, about feeling about that. So the ancient roots of our species, Homo sapiens, and even before Homo sapiens, many other branches of that whole family, Homo Neanderthal, even going back a couple of million years. Louis Leakey named a species Homo habilis, who lived more than a million and a half years ago. Homo erectus, who lived more than 2 million years ago. All those cognate types of humanity to us share a physiological stature that's very similar. Louis and Mary Leakey's son, Richard Leakey, found a full Skeleton in what is today Ethiopia, and the Narcomey skeleton was about 2 million years old, was of a young hunter who was not at all a hunched over, primitive kind of us, but at 17 was already almost six feet tall and a tremendous athlete, and whose bone structure is similar to ours in almost every respect, so that the body that we inhabit, the ritual comportment that Paleolithic people had, is very similar to a heritage of several million years before that, so that Paleolithic men and women were a consistency of body to millions of years of development. And thus, when we say our education goes back to the Paleolithic, it doesn't mean just 100,000 years. It means a couple of million years. But one difference in those early forms of ourselves, even though the mobility of the body for running, for holding all of that is very similar. There was one basic fundamental difference which came in with our particular variety of man. Homo sapiens skeletons have a mid thoracic area of the spinal column that is larger. And of course, our brain capacity is larger, although not larger than, say, homo Neanderthal who had at least 100 or 200 A cubic centimeters more brain than we had, but not as much of the mid-thoracic spinal column. And investigating why this should be. Why does the spinal column in the mid thoracic region of Homo sapiens? Why is it so enlarged, obviously, to contain more neural matter, and that neural matter in that mid thoracic spinal column has only one function? It doesn't help you manipulate your hands or your feet, but it helps you manipulate your lungs. Breathing, breath control and the sophisticated breath control of our species is specifically so that we can talk. The physiological basis of speech. The neurological basis of language is in a rapid breath control, sometimes up to 60 or 70 times per second of modulating breath control. So when we come today to the Satipatthana Sutra, the Mindfulness Sutra, and one thinks right away that, well, one is doing a breath control yoga, that this is somehow yoga, the essence of yoga, the the central part. You have to understand that this is a very naive kind of statement. And that what a mind. The mindfulness sutra, what satipatthana is all about is not breath control. Yoga is not about that at all. It's about the focus of the body Before language comes into play. So when we hear of a word in Sanskrit which is bandied around in the West for a couple of hundred years now, and people are glib about it, and they say samadhi, a samadhi is the body's trance. It has nothing to do with the mind. It has nothing to do with the mind. And so there's a deception in the kind of language that is used in an intellectually biased education that doesn't is uninformed about the deeper aspects of existence. The idea of mindfulness is completely different from mindfulness, and mindfulness is not so much about the mind's relationship, but about the body's comportment Two integration and the body integrates by awareness, which is more primordially what mindfulness delivers in connotation. It's about awareness and that the body is extraordinarily refined. While the mind has been trained symbolically for at least 10,000 years, and the roots of symbol understanding go back at least 40,000 years. The body has been integrating awareness for millions of years. The body is much better at integration than is the mind. And it's true that the mind is very, very fast and that a mind that is trained is incredibly powerful in that it indexes by orders of achievement rather than by elements of action, and that the bodies elements of action can, with a very powerful mind, put be put together in one single set. And the mind can use it just like that. But the mind does not originate the body's integral. And so very often the mind mistakes the body to the point of committing suicide. So what our education is all about is stepping back from the tribal level, stepping back from the university level, stepping back at least to the Paleolithic level to get back before the mind was used to quantify everything before experience and feeling toned language colored everything back to a black and white silent world that still was existentially, enormously challenging and gave us not the roots of civilization or the roots of tribal wisdom, but gave us the foundation of our reality vis a vis the body and its actions, its activities and for existence. Action is the very first registry of objectivity. What you do do happens, and the body records quite accurately, one might almost say naively, but it isn't naive. It's just an accuracy. Whatever you do with your body. Your body has an impress of those actions. So that later on one could come back if you knew how to do it. If you were sophisticated, like the Buddha, the historical Buddha, you could go back and you could take a sequence of actions and you could train yourself to run that sequence backwards. You could go back in reverse order through a sequence of actions and discover by that recursive step, functioning where it originated and when you do so. And it was done several thousand years ago, quite accurately. When you do so, you find that when you get back to what you thought was the original action. Through a series of 12 steps, it's a 12 step program really is just like a clock. After a while, it looks exactly like a clock. And you can you could tell time by it, and you get so used to it that you just it's just something that you do. Somebody says, well, it's a, it's a 1206. And it means that that minute hand has gone six minutes beyond 12. So it's 1206. You're not limited to just 12 hours. You realize that there are another 12. The same thing happened to the historical Buddha when he ran back through the 12 stages, the 12 steps. He found that he was back at the first step after the 12th. And so he realized that this is a circle and that this circle is continuous and after 12 you get back to one and then two and so forth, and you can keep going back, and you will always run through that sequence of 12, and the 13th will always be one again. And if you run it forward, you go through one through 12. And after that you come back to one again, two, three. So the name given to that circuit, that cycle was called the cycle of dependent origination. That each stage depends on the one before it and also gives dependently the next one. Emergent. It's existentiality. The Sanskrit phrase for that was pratityasamutpada. It just means that when you look for causes, when you look for the sequence of what caused this? What caused this, what was the first cause? You get back to a threshold where the first cause has its cause in the last cause. So that that cycle turns out to be a circle. In fact, the old, uh, saying for it, the old language for it, uh, meant a frozen circle in the sense that it was really hard and objective. And of course, the immediate metaphor was that it was a wheel. And so the phrase that came out was that we are bound to a wheel of existence, and that that wheel of existence goes round and round and round, and the only. Differentiation that it has is that there are a series of 12 parts to that cycle, 12 spokes coming out holding that wheel together. But it's that wheel all the time. And that it usually suffices in a worldly kind of life, is simply to roll along on that wheel. And we'll find out when we get next week to the beginnings of our investigation of myth. We're going to do 12 lectures on myth and then have a third interval. After that, we'll find that language flows on little wheels called images, that language moves on rollers called images, and that these images constellate themselves around the kinds of existentiality that the elements of that wheel of existence have. Except that we will find that language has an affinity not with ritual action, but with a phase that occurs before ritual existence occurs, that there is something there before ritual existence, something before action, before there is existential action. There is a phase before that that is usually forgotten about, and especially people who are brought up and trained in myths and symbols. By the time they rediscover ritual and its primordiality, they forget about the fact that there is something before existence, something before ritual, and that phase is nature. That nature is there before existence. That there is a context within which existence happens if existence is forms. Nature is the background that allows those forms to occur, to emerge. And that nature, as we saw in the first 12 weeks of this education, this Paleolithic grounded education, that nature is not objective at all. Nature becomes objective in existence, in the existential, in ritual comportment, in actions, in bodies. But nature qua nature. Nature itself can only be called a mysterious process. And we started out with two, always using a pair to try and give us two hands to measure something, to hold something, to appreciate something. We started out with two ways in which to appreciate the mysterious process of nature. One of them was the Chinese, the I-Ching, and the other was the American recluse Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau. And in Thoreau, we used a couple of his little essays on walking. Because in the process, in the existential process of our species just walking, we discovered that the mysterious process of nature works in such a way that while we're just walking, we participate in that mystery of nature, and we found that primordial peoples in their ritual Action always tuned their rituals to being able to participate with nature. If they could have a participation with the mystery of nature in their rituals, they knew that those rituals were then as real as they could make them. And we will find, when we get to to myth, that language comes out of that confidence that our sequencing is participatory with nature, and that the relationality between all of those elements in the sequence make gestalts, and that those gestalts have operative qualities of functioning and language depends on those two elements coming together, weaving together. It depends on nouns and verbs, depends on processes and words of relational process and upon objectivity as upon nouns or pronouns. And you can have adverbs that modify the verbs or adjectives that modify the nouns. But basically you have that, and we'll see that it isn't just parts of speech, but language itself comes out in that way. But we will discover. That the trigger for generating language occurs out of a feeling toned current of energy that charges action, that when action is given the juice of feeling, it squeezes language out automatically, or perhaps not automatically. Naturally, I'll tell you a little vignette. And this is the way that the origin of language is thought of in classical Indian yoga. There was a sage. His name was Valmiki. It means white ant hill that he was so good at meditation that he sat in a forest in central India a long time ago, so quietly and patiently that the white ants built a hill over him. And so he was sitting there as a white ant hill in the forest. He had been alone for decades, and a hunter came from the Outlands into this forest. He saw this bird, and he shot this bird with an arrow. And as the arrow killed the bird, the bird sound, his song suddenly stopped. And. Valmiki. Immediately came out of his deep samadhi and immediately cursed the hunter, who shriveled into a wisp of soot in the forest. And then Valmiki began to put his concentration, his meditation on why all this had happened, not why the hunter had turned to a soot vapour. But why did language come out in the form of this curse instantly, automatically, in response to this feeling that something had been destroyed inadvertently? And he found that the same process would happen if there was a sense of feeling toned joy that the bird is brought back to life instead of there being a curse, it would be a blessing. That language is an autonomic creation that comes out of the mystical participation with nature on the level of feeling tone. So that language has to do with expressing feeling. And that feeling is not something nebulous, but feeling is an energy frequency. And that that energy frequency has the ability to marshal the breath control breathing process into modulated, articulated sound so that sound is articulated and language emerges in this way. Valmiki then wrote the great Indian epic, the Ramayana, and found that language groups itself always into words, that group into phrases that have an operative verb in them linking, and that those phrases occur in sets called lines, and that the lines always pair, and that the pairing is so deep in the lines that the pairs of lines pair, and you get a four line, and it's called a quatrain. And that that couplet that in Sanskrit is called sloka. That couplet is a primordial form of language, and that there are many other groupings of couplets other than just the pair of couplets. For instance, Ancient Hebrew always has the second line in a pair of lines that modifies what the first line is. Ancient classical Hebrew poetics is that the second line always gives you a the vector of the variant that the poet wants to follow that's there in the first line, and that when you have couplets in ancient Hebrew, you can arrange those couplets in such a way that the first sound in a couplet is a given letter, and that in fact, because there were 22 letters in ancient Hebrew, you can have a form where there are 22 couplets, each couplet beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. And in this way you could have a poem that would be an acrostic. That's a complete spectrum of everything that could be said in the language. So that any poem delivered in that form is a poem whose deepest meaning is that this is the complete spectrum of expressivity in language. It's everything that could ever be said. And in fact, you find in the in the Bible, in the Old Testament, one of the most powerful of all the short little books in the Bible is called the Lamentations. The Lamentations, usually ascribed to Jeremiah and the Lamentations is a collection of five poems. The original of each one is 22 pairs of lines, and each one of those lines has the next letter in the Hebrew alphabet, so that the Book of Lamentations by Jeremiah about 600 BC, is an example of what Valmiki writing the Ramayana on the basis of emotion, structuring the slokas and the slokas being arranged finally into the scale of of the Ramayana, a great epic, that there is some kind of template which underlies the formation of language, and that that template has to do something with a physiological existential pattern that itself emerges whole from the mysteriousness of nature. The 22. The 22 possibilities in this kind of language that you find in Lamentations later on surfaces in such a thing as the 22 cards of the Major Arcana of the tarot deck, and between the 22 cards of the tarot deck and the 22 verses of Jeremiah's Lamentations. Somewhere in the middle of there, you get the basic sequence with operative relationalities of the way in which the primordiality of the pattern of ritual comportment existence is raised to the level of symbolic comprehension that the symbolic comprehension is. In that set of 22 cards of the tarot deck, the ritual comportment is there in Jeremiah's Book of Lamentations, and about midway you find something like this. This is a floor pattern of a medieval Christian cathedral, and it is divided into 22 venues of little ritual actions called mystery plays. Each one of these 22 venues in the floor plan of a standard medieval cathedral, is a place where little dramatic ritual skits are done to convey an image, and when you put the 22 images together, you get the iconography of the real, the total picture. Now, somebody that doesn't know that tarot decks are related to medieval cathedrals that are related to ancient Hebrew poetry, um, just fundamentally is uneducated. And that's just an opening advertisement. The depth of learning needed to float. This is oceanic. So what's being presented here is a couple of selected details. In order to give you a frame of insight to look, to see that there is a sense of wonderment and that this wonderment comes out of a process that in East and West is called meditation. And that the basic comportment of a civilized person is that that meditation comes out of the mind. Whereas the primordial Paleolithic understanding is that the mind is fourth in line. We don't get to the mind until we've been through feeling symbols come after myth and myth comes after ritual, and ritual comes after nature, and that nature is primordial, not the mind. And so we're trying to teach here in a way that doesn't co-opt us into ignorance by assuming that we're talking about ideas and using symbols right away, before we even ready to understand what they are and how they work. So we're not using symbols at all, and we're only using language de facto in a ritualistic sense up to this point. And next week, we'll start for the first time to use a mythic, informed language, a feeling toned, intelligent language. And when we do, we'll start with one of the great primordial myths the myth of Inanna, written by the daughter of Sargon the Great, written about 4300 years ago. And Dana, who wrote this, was extremely wise. She was the she was the homer, the first homer in the world. She wrote about 1400 years before Homer. She wrote the the great epics in Akkadian, Sumerian civilization, and Diane von Stein's translation is just extremely well done. But because we're pairing things, we're trying to sidestep all kinds of pitfalls. If you just use something like this, you fall into textual pitfalls without even trying, and you get into academic whirlpools without even knowing. And we're not interested in academic whirlpools. We're interested in becoming feeling toned wise before we even start to think about it. And we're interested in having a ritual comportment which integrates before feelings arise. And that's where we are with today's lecture. And we'll come back in just a second. The pair to this is Jane Ellen Harrison Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Because most of the images that stylize the way feelings integrate into ideas, into symbols are in our civilization, based on Greek mythology. And a Prolegomena means what you study before you get to the study. So we're going to take a look at her primordiality of where Greek mythic images come from before they're codified into the idea of Greek mythology because we're very wary. There have been many misleading things in the last 30 or 40 years that mythology has something to do with the wholeness of human nature, and it's only a passing phase. It's only the third phase of an eight phase development, and you need all of the notes in order to be able to sing do re mi. So if you only center yourself on the note me you just keep saying me, me me me me. And you know that song. Watch out for that song. And notice that there's no note. You. So we want to have the whole octave. Because we want to make a kind of a music. Because we can understand that not only is there an octave, but that there are whole cycles of octaves that step up by orders so that you can have something called a piano that has about 11 octaves on it. Then you can really play Mozart. And we want to get educated to the point to where we can play the Mozart in our lives. We want to be the kind of human beings who really emerged out of those Paleolithic men and women who were at least as wise as us, but didn't have the technology, didn't have the range of experience that we have, but they had a more deep primordiality than we have. And so it's about dead even. When it comes to the Satipatthana Sutra, the Mindfulness Sutra, and we're going to come to it after the break. We need to keep in mind that there are several versions of that sutra in the Buddhist writings. And when we come back, we'll have to differentiate at least three basic different kinds of Satipatthana Sutra, so that we can appreciate that the one that we're looking at has a very special character. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Let me give you just a paragraph from the Satipatthana Sutra. This is in the translation of miss I.B. Horner, a very good translation. And she did an excellent job. And it reads like this. Here in Monk's, a monk fairs along, contemplating the body. In the body. Ardent. Clearly. Conscious. Mindful, so as to control the covetousness and dejection in the world. He fears along, contemplating the feelings and the feelings. Ardent. Clearly conscious. Mindful so as to control the covetous and dejection in the world. He fears along. Contemplating the mind in the mind. And you notice the repetition. This is always the earmark of a ritual that there is a repetition. In this case, in the Saudi Pattana Sutra, there are four levels the four foundations of mindfulness. The first one is that when you are contemplating notice, it's not thinking, not the same thing as thinking when you're contemplating the body. In mindfulness, you do it in the body. And when you're contemplating the feelings, you contemplate the feelings in the feelings. And when you contemplate the mind, you contemplate the mind in the mind. And the fourth one is mental objects. And he says he fears along, contemplating the mental objects in the mental objects. Ardant clearly conscious, mindful, so as to control the covetousness and dejection in the world. So they're always pairing this up. The covetousness and the dejection. This is a primordial pairing. And it occurs. For instance, we talked this morning about Jeremiah's book of Lamentations and the book that always goes with Jeremiah's lamentations about dejection in the world. Is the Book of Covetousness, which is the story of Ruth. Ruth and Esther and Judith are all objects, their women, ancient Jewish women, beautiful, who have a tough time because of others wanting them, wanting to control them. And the fourth book that deeply covers all of this is the Song of Songs. So that the deepest primordial pairing is the Book of Lamentations and the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is by Solomon, traditionally supposed to be about love, about sexual attractiveness and human love and what it is, is actually the sexual attraction and human love for a woman who loves another man. And because it's a King Solomon who can who can commandeer her, but his love loves another man, and he has to learn that he cannot covet her even though she is sexually attractive. Even though he is in love with her, she doesn't return his love. And so the Song of Songs is actually a secret mystery play about thou shalt not covet. Whereas Lamentations is about thou shalt not be dejected in the world for any reason. And so covetousness and dejection are always paired together. And here they are in the Buddhist sutra, the Satipatthana Sutra. The integrating action is the fairing along the going, along through life. That energy wave, that frequency energy wave of fairing along, going along through life has actually a complication. It's like a banding together of four different kinds of circuits into one cable. One of the circuits is a circuit of the body. One is of the circuits of feeling, one is of circuits of the mind, and the fourth is about mental objects in the mind, and that they're all distinct. And that actually the comprehensiveness of the Satipatthana Sutra is that one can take all four together and apply a Methodology that holds on all four levels at once, so that later on, if you need to, when you want to, to the extent that you do want to pursue it, you can then refine that methodology to handling one at a time. And the one that we're thinking of today, because we're at the end of ritual, is contemplating the body and the body, but because myth begins next week, we're also thinking about feelings. Or rather than thinking about feelings, we're going to start to feel about feelings. Just as in ritual we try to just do about doing. Remember in the in the ritual, one of the things that we did is we made masks. We made a pair of masks. We're always pairing things together because in the pairing there is a very good foundation for a lot of accomplishment that can happen. That's very difficult when you do it just in a singularity. In high wisdom, singularities tend to disappear. They tend to vanish if you're successful, and if you're not prepared for that, it's very, very scary. But if you pair, it tends to produce. Even though anything that exists, there's still the wake in the context that's there that you can deal with. So the historical Buddha delivers this and these four foundations of mindfulness the body and the body, feelings and the feelings, mind and the mind, mental objects and mental Metal objects. These four because they have such a deep. I reluctant to use the word archetype because archetype is a word, is operative in symbols, and we're not there yet. So I'll use the word template. That four part template comes because that's how the Buddha achieved enlightenment in the first place. However, it is that one comes to enlightenment that is such a incredible, unique event that the way in which that event happened impresses that event for that being forever in that way. It's not a curse, Nor is it a blessing. It's just a structural situation. Now, the historical Buddha that we're dealing with, uh, his name was Siddhartha. Siddhartha of the. The family clan was, uh, Gautama. The larger clan were the Sakyas. And they lived in northern India around a place called Lumbini. And in fact, about 2300 years ago, there was a great king who was an Indian, uh, version of, uh, say Ptolemy, who was one of Alexander's generals. Um, the king's name was Ashoka. And he went around, uh, he had conquered India by armies and had killed hundreds of thousands of people. And then he had come to a point of shame about that. So he disbanded all of his armies, and for 50 years under Ashoka, India was run without an army. In order to ensure that the people knew what to do, Ashoka made these columns, these pillars all over major parts of India. All the great passes that came into India. And they said, we have confidence in the method of the Buddha and we do not need armies to coerce anyone. Therefore, if you wish to understand how to be, then study the way of the Buddha. And one of these columns was put where the Buddha was born in Lumbini. And instead of there being a column at the Bodhi tree where the Buddha got enlightened, he made this. Um, I think I have. Now here's a photograph. He made a stone. I think this will come came through. Ashoka put this stone. This is a photograph that a friend of mine took about 25 years ago at the Bodhi tree. And the Bodhi tree is behind these gates. And the stone that Ashoka put there is still there. And the stone is sculpted in such a way that it looks like a civilized geode. It looks like a geode that's been cut in half, only it's a sculptural stone. And on the top, where there's a cross section, there are two huge footprints put or two huge standing prints. Put in other words, that this is a place where one can stand. This is a secure locus in whatever confusion or order exists or doesn't exist. This is a place where you can be. And several thousand years of people have made prints. In fact, I'll bring next week. I've brought it a couple of times. The cheesecloth print with saffron ink that was made for me from these feet in front of the Bodhi tree. And the Bodhi tree, still a version of it still exists in Bodhgaya, also in northern India. But the Bodhi tree was not the only tree which was involved in the Buddha's enlightenment. There were four trees. That's why the Satipatthana Sutra has four foundations of mindfulness. That four part, that quaternary, that quartered wholeness, was a part of the way in which the Buddha, the historical Buddha Siddhartha came through his enlightenment and it stamped the way that he had it. Now, the original Buddha in Indian tradition, who lived thousands of years before Siddhartha, his name was Dipankara, and he came to enlightenment a completely different way, more in a Paleolithic way than than the historical Buddha. Now the historical Buddha, because he had four trees. Maybe it's interesting just to review for a second what those four trees were, and to get an idea why the four applications of mindfulness that when you are contemplating the body, you don't contemplate the body in the mind and you don't contemplate the body in some mental object of it, and especially you don't contemplate the body in feelings. All of those turn out to be pernicious habits, which forbid you from having any contact with the real, which is contemplating the body and the body. And so the four trees. The first tree is the classic Bodhi tree, of which this is a leaf. There's a Bodhi tree behind this building that was planted about 30 years ago, is about five feet high at that time when it was put in the ground. And. The owners planted that. It was a tree brought here by Teittinen, who planted about a tree at the same time at the University of Oriental Studies over on New Hampshire Boulevard near Olympic. That historical Bodhi tree was located on the banks of the Angara River in northern India. The place today is called Bodhgaya, and Bodhgaya was north of a very large city called Benares. Sometimes Benares is called the City of Light and Benares is on the Ganges. Ganges huge river. So the Angara runs into the Ganges, but up country on the Niagara River. Alongside the banks, the Bodhi tree was growing there. This fig tree, you can feel its leaves are sort of leathery. And it was the first of four trees. And they form like a diamond shape. One thinks of a diamond rather than a square. You can think of a square, But in the Buddhist tradition, it's always thought of as a diamond because of later on, the Diamond Cutter Sutra was the perfect expression of what the Satipatthana Sutra was, the great expression up until that time, the Diamond Cutter Sutra and in Sanskrit is called Vajracchedika. It doesn't mean the diamond, it means the diamond cutter. The person who knows how to cut the polished diamond out of the raw diamond is a very rare individual, and the only way to cut a gem out of the native stone is to know where the lines of the lattice structure will allow you to cut. Otherwise, you fracture the stone. You fracture the medium. So the Diamond Cutter Sutra Relates to the diamond shape of the four trees of the experience of enlightenment relates to the four foundations of mindfulness. One has to know what the structure is, so that when you're moving to cut a shape out of it, you follow the structural lines, not the outline of the thing, but the structure of how it really is made, of what it is made out of. And so our being is such that we have a structure. It has nothing to do with the defining shape of our skin. It has nothing to do with the defining shape of our skeleton. Even that even our minds, the shape of our minds, have nothing to do with who we are at all. And that in order to discover who we really are, we need to learn to be a diamond cutter and to cut out from a four dimensional continuum that four dimensions of time and space, to cut out a shape which achieves reality in a different dimensionality from the four. And that traditionally is like a five dimensional continuum of conscious space time. The. In ancient India, the phrase was somebody who exists in a conscious space. Time is not just a man, but is a further man, not just someone who lives in the natural world that most human beings live in, along with the animals and everything else, but lives in a transcendental realm, a dharma realm where someone is the Buddhist phrase on the other shore. And as a matter of discipline, this historical Buddha, Siddhartha, never talked about the other shore. I talked about cutting through according to the nature and structure of this world, so that your deeper shape can emerge whole unfractured. And there you are, the jewel of the spirit, who you really are. And later on in the Mahayana, in the great tradition in Buddhism, one talked about not the universe, but one talked about the jewel studded matrix, that this has happened so many times without end on so many planets, of so many star systems that the cosmos is like the vast field of an endless jeweled domain. And that we belong there. At home there. In the scintillation. So deep in Cara. Many thousands of years before, the historical Buddha had a different way. A different enlightenment experience. And at that time, everything was delivered in a different mode. But the historical Buddha had four trees, the Bodhi tree being the first of the four. And when he was there under the Bodhi tree. The traditional story of this occurs in one of the classic collections of texts called the Vinaya Vinaya texts, and this is in a section of it called the Mahavagga. Varga is like a way. And Maha is great. The great way. The great way. For seven days he was going to be under the Bodhi tree. And then each of the other trees will be seven days, so that you have four sevens. And because you have four sevens, you have a week under each of four trees. And altogether that makes a 28 day cycle. It makes a lunar cycle so that in classic Buddhism, the full moon was always the culmination of that lunar cycle. So on a full moon, one would use that to set all night with one's friends and companions along the way, and let the impress of the entire cycle occur to one. Open oneself up to the entirety of that cycle that all four of those seven days, all four of those trees together make a complete gestalt, a total gestalt. And it includes not only the objective Bodhi tree experience, but the other three trees and the relationalities between them, so that you get the totality of it later on in the Mahayana. The wholeness of that was seen as not a circle so much as a flower. So you have sutras called the jewel ornament of liberation, or the Great Flower of Awakening. And so you have all of these kinds of descriptive phrases for larger and more appreciative ways of looking at this. So the Bodhi tree is the first and for seven days. Sitting under the Bodhi tree at the end of the seven days is when the historical Buddha had occurred to him. This pratityasamutpada, this dependent circle of origination, the clock where if you go past 12, you get back to one and it goes back through the cycle, and you can run it forwards or backwards. You always have the same set so that one becomes familiar. And in the Satipatthana Sutra you have some allusion to it. But in the Vinaya text you have it spelled out what each of these steps is in this law of dependent origination, and one of the steps is ignorance. Avidya not being able to see. And that ignorance, whether it's intentional or not, is still a kind of a blindness. One simply doesn't see, one doesn't not know, does not know because one does not know how to see. And one of the qualities that's in there is that if you're constantly looking to see something, you miss getting sensitized to the lookingness itself, to how to look. So one of the things in art is to teach one how to look, how just to look, not at what to look, but how to look. So that seeing itself as a process that's of interest. And when this occurs, one can learn to be aware that you're seeing, to enjoy seeing and you don't care what you're looking at. And that there is a point where one gets immersed in that. This is where that samadhi comes in, where not only are you disinterested in what you're looking at, but you find that you get disinterested in who's looking. So that your attentiveness, your awareness is just in the process of seeing. And when this happens, seeing as an independent activity, because it doesn't have any indexing object to modify it and it doesn't have any indexing subject to modify, it just becomes a process like the mystery of nature. It becomes absolutely pure and just occurs. It just happens, and it happens without anything being seen or anyone seeing in. In the higher forms of Judaism, this was called the highest form of charity. It was written about in that way by Moses Maimonides in the 1200s. He said the highest form of charity is that no one knows who gave and no one knows who received. There's just the givingness so that the charity is not charity, but it becomes a quality of just givingness, which is universally shareable. And the giver and the donors and those who receive and those everyone is interchangeable. And so we become like a mysterious matrix where there's just a single family. Um, in historical Buddhism, that high givingness was called Donna. Donna. And Donna is the first perfection. And later on, when the Mahayana was trying to find a way to make a transform out of the four part pattern out of the diamond pattern. The four trees. The four foundations of mindfulness. They went to a six part, a hexagram, a snowflake, a six relationality, and they had the six perfections, the six paramitas. And Donna was the first of of the six. And usually they would teach it in a way where you would have a pair of threes. Uh, universally handling six comes out either as a hexagram or a snowflake. I don't know if, you know, snowflakes are very esoteric. No two snowflakes are ever alike. Every six pointed snowflake that is ever and will ever exist on whatever planet, in whatever star system, is always unique and different. The great mathematician Johann Kepler, who discovered first that orbits of planets were ellipses and not circles about 400 years ago, wrote a monograph mathematically on the snowflake in Shakespeare's time. Very esoteric. So the six parameters were always taught in a pair of threes, and the first three, Donna Sila and Shanti Givingness. Morality and patience were so fundamental that you could teach it to children, and you could also teach it to animals. You can also teach it to plants. The the original developers of gardens always knew that plants were sentient. In India, man is given a declension not through animals, but through plants and the chug chug Doga Upanishad. Plants are the essence of life. Men are the essence of plants. Speech is the essence of man. Whom is the essence of speech? So those are the orders. So the first three, Donna, sila and Krishanti patients givingness and morality can be taught to plants, animals and children. But those three transform when they become energized. How do they become energized? They become energized because feelings and the mind thinking. Because feeling and thinking energize them and raise them to a higher level, a more intensity, so that you have those fundamental three transform into a higher order. Three you have Um. The patient's Garzanti transforms through the energies of feeling and thinking through myth and symbols into a powerful, visionary energy called viria means strength. We still have our word in English virile. It means not just strength like this, but the strength to, for fertility, a real strength. And so you have patients becoming virility, and you have a morality that transforms into what was called in Sanskrit dhyana or concentration or meditation, so that the ethical basis of meditation is its foundation, that morality is not just some nice thing to do because you don't want them to do something else to you. It's that it lays the basis for the way in which integration becomes very powerfully concentrated, so that one can even come down to what was called in Sanskrit Ekagrata one Pointedness. And when you get to one pointedness, you come to the aspect of the writing point of the pen so that you can begin to make whatever creativity you need to out of that. And surprisingly, what becomes wisdom, what becomes prajna is givingness Donna. So that charity givingness is not a small thing. It's the most fundamental of all things because that becomes wisdom when feeling and thought Energize Givingness. That's what Prajna is. That's what wisdom is. High transcendental wisdom is that. So the Buddha under the Bodhi tree thought of the dependent chain of origination. He thought of that circle. And when he had come to contemplate that circle of dependent origination, he got up from under the Bodhi tree, and he went to the second tree, which was a big banyan tree. It's called the, uh, Agha Paula, uh, banyan tree. It means so wide that whole herds of animals can be sheltered under it. Indian banyan trees can spread for acres. And so he left the Bodhi tree and went to this banyan tree. And as he sat under this banyan tree for seven days. Of figure came and saw him sitting under there. Now, in some versions he's called the naked ascetic. In Sanskrit it's Ajivika, the native ascetic, and others he's called a certain haughty Brahmin, somebody who who's born to the purple and who knows it. And who are you? And what are you doing here? But he pays deep respect on the surface. He calls him Reverend Sir. But the fact is, is that this etiquette is a ritual comportment which has no bearing upon the Buddha at that point at all, and that it was a misapprehension to even address him as a reverend, Sir, because the naked ascetic is so prideful that he co-opts everyone into his universe. So he doesn't recognize that this is this is different. This being is not here in this world in the way in which you are. This being is the Buddha's word for himself was a Tathagata, someone who's thus ness was gone. Someone who's that ness was gone. That the only way to comport was that this was an open threshold into mysterious beyondness, that the figure who was there was just a an outline of a gateway, and whose interior substance was not there at all, so that your comportment to that was that, uh, As someone moving towards an open door and that you could go through that. We've had several science fiction films recently, Event Horizon and uh, um, some of the other ones, The Matrix, where you go through and or Stargate, you go through and you're somewhere else. So the Buddha was one of those thresholds, but a threshold of pure consciousness, pure conscious time, space, so that he didn't pull you through and you didn't get pulled through by him, but that if you went through that portal, you did it yourself, your own way. And he was just the threshold that gave you an ordination to keep track of the fact that you were leaving this world and going elsewhere. So that that quality, the naked ascetic. The haughty Brahmin. The certain haughty Brahmin. He didn't understand at all. And so he. It says in the old documents that he shook his head, and he went away, and didn't stay there to learn or to approach or to go through. So after seven days under the banyan tree, he, the historical Buddha, got up from that and went to a third tree. The third tree is called the Mucalinda tree, and under the mucalinda tree, one of these trees that had these huge flowers, enormous flowers. I saw once a painting by the great Mexican artist Siqueiros of one of these trees in the jungles down in Yucatan. And it had the same kind of flowers that the mucalinda tree has. Amazing to see. The Buddha sat for seven days, and as he sat under the mucalinda tree, a tremendous monsoon storm. Thunderstorm came and raged for all seven days with lightning. And because he was in such a highly charged situation, he was like a light, natural lightning rod for the electrical energy, for the lightning. And so this huge cobra, in fact, the largest cobra in the world, it's called in the text the Naga king, the king of all king cobras, came out and was so protective of the Tathagata that he encircled him seven times with his coil, and then put his hooded head over him to shelter him from the lightning, so that any lightning would strike him and be coiled and grounded into the ground. And so under the mucalinda tree for seven days, and as he was there, and the storm finally passed and the Naga King uncoiled its seven coils and took its hood away and went away. A thought came, and in Buddhism it the word for thought is called chitta chitta. A pinpoint moment of thought is called a cheetah, and the thought of enlightenment is called a bodhichitta. This is very deep, logical, uh, consequences later on in Buddhist thought, because it shows that time space is granular, can be granulated into momentariness particle momentariness. And because of this, it means that logical sequence and relationality has a very difficult time being objective because the granularity, the momentariness. Is itself momentary and granular. And so you get into an infinity problem. It's difficult to pinpoint exactness under those conditions. So this thought came to the Buddha suspended. And the thought was, um, no one else will be able to understand. In other words, there is no way to teach this. Not only is there no way to teach this because there's no this here and there's no teacher here. And he discovered that because, um, he got up from the mucalinda tree with this suspended, this problem, this thought, and he went to the fourth tree. It was called the Raja. Tanah Raja is a king. Raja Tanah Yatana means the apartments of the king. This tree was so huge that lots of birds made their home into it. It's called the Raja tree. And he sat under there. And as he sat under there, with this problem suspended, there's no way to tell anyone else. Because there's no one to tell, there's nothing to tell, and there's no one to tell. So there's nothing happening. Two merchants came along. It's interesting that the primordiality of the teaching of the Dharma was because of businessmen and not because of monks. Two merchants. And like wise merchants, they saw this is a very extraordinary character. And like, it's good luck to be kind to extraordinary characters when you're on the road trying to get business and contacts, you're trying to find venture capital in northern India, and we need some luck. So they offered rice cakes and honey to the Tathagata. And immediately what replaced the thought that there's no way to teach was replaced? That the realization that the classic words are. The Tathagata has no hands with which to accept food. So how does a Tathagata eat? Not only does he have no hands, he has no stomach. So the historical Buddha simply reached out his hand and took the rice cakes and honey and ate them. And as he did that, it occurred to him in response to their questions. Well, you know, tell us something wise. He began teaching and just doing it. He didn't think about it because it was impossible to do it by thought. The thought process showed that nothing can happen. He didn't do it by feeling because there was no way to. To feel this, he just simply did it. In other words, it was pure action by itself which grounded existence accurately in an originating point. This teaching, which, because it wasn't conditioned by thought or feeling, had its only limitations, were the mystery of nature, which were infinite, so that the teaching came out in an action way that had no karma at all. So that in following that path of this dharma, one doesn't incur karma at all, because the karma had no conditional existential way to be. Karma only is there in actions that have the experience and the mind and mental object and all these other aspects to it, but in pure doing it's not there. Which means in Western theological terms that there's no original sin, just life itself. Being life is not sinful, it's just life being life, just animals being animals, plants being plants. And that there's a way for us to be what we are, which is discoverable only on a radiant further shore of the spirit, that we are not what we're supposed to be. According to the designations of labels. We're not any of the above, nor all of the above. Together we are something completely different. In other words, we are real and not temporary. We are not subject to conditional constraints and definitions, and that the belief that we are is exactly what is the source of the chaos. I did once a whole lecture series on the Majjhima Nikaya, and one of the lectures is on the Satipatthana Sutra. And if you get interested, I can make tapes for you and you can just get the sutra as it was delivered 2500 years ago, complete with handwritten notes. That's enough for today.