Myth 2

This is myth two. And the tendency from our culture, from our society, from the habituated mores of the sociological stew, is for us to always look at something and say, what's in it for me? How does this fit in with what I'm doing? How is this going to help me? What's the payoff? What's the bottom line? What has it got to do with me? And it's interesting because the English word me, while it has no etymological tie, it goes all the way back to ancient Sumeria. And the me of someone was their authority. Their power. The me of anything was its power. We also live in a highly stylized phase of culture, of society. Where for us, me is trying to struggle to get free. And this is very unusual and uncharacteristic, because in most eras of human history, the struggle was to belong. The struggle was to fit in, to be a part of, and it was a struggle to be a part of. And the struggle to be free would have been looked upon as irrational. That one is free because you belong. Because you fit in because you you know where you are. And in our condition, our history, our society. There is a moment of great fear when someone is about to become free. And they realize that on the other side of that threshold, they don't know. And so the Shakespearean lines. Is it better to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? And when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, who knows what awaits us? And the fear of that unknown cancels out our desire for freedom and throws us back into the need for security. The most important quality of myth is that it offers a process of security. It does not offer freedom. So the highly stylized Neo Joseph Campbell thing of myths to live by, to become free individually is a complete scramble and misnomer. No one ever became free by mythology. That's not what it's for. It's to learn to belong. It's to learn that the process of our experience in life, that life, our life, the life that we're living, Belongs with nature. And so, aside from all of the questions of how does this help me, what good are these lectures? For me? What you're talking about is two general, two universal, two to to inaccessible to to forget all that. This process, this education, this delivery of sequence has its own high dharma, to use a phrase. Go with it for a while. See how walking in these moccasins for a mile changes the way in which you are walking? Try it. The flow of the frequency of the energy of life Is the synthesizing foundation of myth. So that myth has something to do with an energy frequency, which language exemplifies and which is intimately encoded in feeling. So that how you feel is what, and the way in which you will say what you say, in the way in which you will say. So that feeling and language are braided together in this wave form, energy, frequency of myth. And that braiding together gives the strength to the experience, so that language and feeling braided together are the strength of experience. And the flow of experience is the essence of one's life, and that life stream has a deep parallel with the mystery of nature, so that a mythic horizon is always healthy when it has a parallel polarity to nature. Now, if you don't follow along with that kind of dynamic, if you don't appreciate the various qualities of that, if you try to reduce that, if you try to take a snapshot of what does that mean? Mainly, let's get an idea about this. The frozen picture frame of the idea about this is, oh, well, myths about nature. And that's not it at all. Myth is not about nature. In that view, language is representational. Words represent things. And that's idiocy. That's an ego. Ignorance of the first order. It's a fallacy. Words do not represent things. And perhaps an easier way to begin a wisdom about this is, to borrow a term from Jane Ellen Harrison. She talks about how language mythic images do not represent so much as that. They reflect. They reflect. And so if you have to have a snapshot, think of the stream of life as reflecting nature rather than then representing nature. A representation stands in place of and creates a condition of mimesis. And in a very real sense, the mimetic is gestural and not lingual. And to think that language. There was a beautiful little book written one time by R.P. Blackmore. Language is gesture, but poetry. It's cute. It's not true. It's a quality that might be there in a critical assessment when you're trying to appreciate. But the actuality of poetry is not that words represent. They reflect, and because they reflect, you get this quality of life mirroring nature. And because nature is not a static collection of things. Nature is a mystery. Life also reflects the mystery of nature in itself as a mystery. And so we see in myth that the the mythic energy frequency of experience, feeling language has a mysteriousness which is reflected from nature. So that when you have myths very frequently the generating matrix out of which myths come, the generating matrix out of which a mythology has its first stage, are usually creation myths, not because they are about creation, but because they reflect generation. They reflect emergence. And this reflection of the generation of the emergence is very important. Jane Helen Harrison, in one of her chapters, The Making of a goddess, is talking about the the stages of a woman's life. How she is a maiden. Or she is a bride, a nymph, or she is a mother. Mater in Latin, but mater in Greek, or she is in the fourth stage, a grandmother, in which case in Greek she is called Mythically Maya. And it's that Maya who is the mother of Hermes. But she makes it very clear that these mythic figures of Demeter and Kore. Persephone. Of the various brides of the various grandmothers, these goddesses are reflections of a woman's life. Not that a woman's life reflects the goddesses. The goddesses are not primordial in this sense. Why is that so? Why do mythic images of goddesses. Why are they not more primordial than the stages of a woman's life? They would be if you made the intellectual faulty error of thinking that language was representational. And too much bad history has happened the last 7 or 8000 years because of this kind of stupidity. It's not so. It has never been so. It is an egotistical error. It's a sociological ignorance. It's a cultural flaw and leads to all kinds of pernicious ideas. It has to be junked. Life is not representational of something else. It is reflective of the mystery of nature, and thus in itself is real. Life is real. Life is not a secondary phenomenon in the universe. It is a primordiality. If you think language is representational, then you wonder if there's life on other planets. Whereas if you understand that life reflects nature's mystery, there's life everywhere, not just on other planets, but in interstellar gaseous clouds, there are qualities of life. So that the entire universe is alive. And thus we are at home and understanding that. Then this going by Jane Ellen Harrison, just for a moment here, following this up, it it isn't then that the original stage of the feminine is a great mother. Isn't that at all? The original stage of the feminine in mythology is the lady of the Wild Things. She's not a mother yet. She's not a maiden and she's not a nymph, a bride, and she's not a grandmother. She is a mysteriousness. Who is the lady of the Wild Things and that lady of the Wild Things? In Greek, the word for it is carpophorus. Carpophorus carpophorus. The lady of the Wild Things is the generator of all life, of all things. So that the life of trees, the life of plants, the life of herbs has a common origin with us. Trees and flowers and herbs affect us not through correspondence on a representational Basis, but through resonance on a reflective basis. So that there is a threshold. There is a threshold where the mystery of nature becomes reflected in life. And so one has to apprentice oneself to the mystery of nature in order to understand the mystery of life. And you understand the mystery of life through appreciation of the mystery of nature, not through a quality of representational, but a quality of reflective resonance. The mirror is not representing anything. The mirror is reflecting. So that there is a radical difference between a mind later on, a mind which imagines by reflection rather than a mind which imagines by representation. The Nazis liked minds that represented. And we rather favour strongly minds that are reflective. In the mythology. Let's move for just a second to an example. In the mythology of of Zeus and classical Greek mythology. Zeus, who's the major figure? Zeus has several venues where he is primal. There were athletic Games devoted to the balance of the body and the mind, so that the body and the mind were balanced reflectively of the mystery of nature. And that was the whole origin of the Olympic Games. And so Olympia in the Peloponnese was one of Zeus's centers. And those games were held every four years. But games, athletic games were held every year. And there were four different places where they were held. There were Pythian Games at Delphi, there were Nemean Games, and Nemea near Corinth in Greece was also a site for Zeus. There was a temple to Zeus there, but just like the Pythian Games held at Delphi, had an oracle there. The Delphic oracle that came from Apollo. Zeus had an Original Oracle much earlier than the Delphian oracle, and that was at Dodona in the northern part of Greece, northwestern part of Greece, called Epirus, near what today is the island of Corfu. In antiquity it's called Corcyra. On that Adriatic coast, not far going across the Adriatic Sea to Brundisium in the heel of Italy. And there at Dodona was a gigantic oak. And in ancient times, the times when most of the mythology of Zeus was constellated. In the times of Homer, about 1000 B.C.. That huge oak was magnificent. It was about 600 700 years old. It was about 80ft tall. And the canopy of this massive oak was very much like a living tree. That was reflective of cumulus clouds in the sky. And the clouds were the home of the sky god Zeus. And one could see this range of hills. The pindos hills that came and had a gap in Dodona is just on the other side of the gap. If you were on those hills or in that gap, and you faced to the northeast, about 80 miles away, visible on clear days, you could see Mount Olympus, which is where Zeus had his home, so that Mount Olympus and Dodona and Olympia and Nemea. They were all linked together. All aspects of Zeus in the constellation. One of the curious qualities of Mount Olympus. It's about 10,000ft high. And it is so high vis a vis the closeness of the Aegean. There and its moisture and the valleys that the meteorological conditions frequently put a. Cloud layer, a weather layer about two thirds of the way up of Mount Olympus. And you can't generally. See it from Thessaly, that region of Greece. But if you go some distance away, you can see it. Say, like on the Chelsea Peninsula, you can see that Mount Olympus very often has a striation. Of weather underneath it. And the top third of Mount Olympus is in the sun. The bright sun in a cloudless sky. So that the mythological reflection of the mystery of nature found an expression there on Mount Olympus, which was characteristic of Zeus in a deep way, a mysterious way, and that if you didn't understand this, you didn't get it. It isn't that Zeus is father of the gods, plays around with mortal women, and has children all over the place, and has some philandering, blundering, uh, version of all in the family. It's not that at all. It's not Archie Zeus bunker. That quality above the clouds in Greek was called h I t h e r aether, aether, and the quality below it was called air. Air. Air. So that Mount Olympus rose out of the Earth and for its first two thirds was in the human realm of air, but the top of it was in the divine realm of ether, so that Zeus was this. We get the term ethereal, but we misuse it. We think ethereal as something fading away from nature, whereas the Greek term for ether was that it was more fundamental that ether is the context of heaven, that air is the context on earth, but ether is the context in heaven. We would call it space today. Zeus is a god of space, of the quality, not of just the sky, but the quality of the zenith of the sky, where the sky at high altitudes, the blue darkens almost to an indigo, and there are times when that indigo has a polished sheen not of a surface of reflection, but a polished sheen of something which is infinite. And you look at it sometimes, and that bright ether quality has a penetrative quality where one's vision, instead of looking at things, looks through everything. And so the earliest form of Zeus before he was Zeus in Mesopotamia is somebody whose eyes are wide, mystically, because they're seeing the mystery of nature. They're not looking at things. They're looking penetratively all the way through to see the eternal, so that Zeus is able to come from the eternal and affect the human. The air and his energy that affects the air is brought mythologically mythically into the reflective image, not the representational image, but the reflective image of lightning. That that lightning. Not just the comic strip lightning bolt of Shazam. It's not a lightning bolt like that, although it becomes stylized later on. The Greeks were just as pedestrian later on as anybody. Handy lightning bolts. Here's a sinner, pal. Zeus's lightning. Is that kind of. I don't know if you've ever seen a storm where the cumulus clouds go above 50,000ft. It's it's odd because when you get up that far into the stratosphere, the air usually is not thick enough to support cumulus. And so you have to have a huge upwelling. And when you have that huge upwelling and you get thunderheads above 50,000ft, the lightning has a very peculiar quality. It becomes surreal in its brightness. It's not just bright. It becomes surreally bright because it comes. It flashes with like about 20 miles of electrical amperage, of incredible ability. Later on in India, this brightness becomes the Purusha of the spiritual person has that kind of brightness, not just lightning bright, but super real, lightning bright. The mythological image of Jesus as someone who, after resurrection, has so much brightness of body that one can't even look to see. It's like that super, super light. It's called sometimes super light. That the super light does not come from a radiance of things in the world, in the air. It comes from an explosive disclosure of the ether that the ether itself has that kind of quality, and stars have that kind of brightness, that they are so incredibly far away that their light coming to us is like a super luminous, brighter than anything on Earth. And indeed, we have found in 20th century, in the past century, in astronomy, they found that there are stars so much more, so much larger than our sun, so much brighter than our sun. Our sun is like a lower and middle class citizen in the family of stars. There's a star, ETA Carinae, that shines about 100,000 times brighter than our sun. When you look at Sirius tonight in the night sky, Sirius is about 8 or 9 light years away. Sirius is a blue white giant that would dwarf our sun in its luminousness. Zeus's capacity is to throw that super luminous ether electrical energy to Earth. And so he has this quality of fructifying the earth by bringing divine energy down. And that that divine energy as it comes down in light. Fire made into light, made into super bright electrical lightning is a concomitant and is followed by the thunder. Very often the early mythological images of the origins mythologically of Zeus are a lion roaring, and later on in the. In India, when someone could teach the high Dharma, they used to say of it that that person could teach the lion's roar. It meant really divine teaching as opposed to just human guessing. That quality of lightning and thunder is followed by the rain and the mythological, not the representation, but the mythic image of rain reflects the semen of Zeus, the rain of the semen of Zeus, and sometimes, like in the myth of Danae, she is impregnated by a shower of gold. And in Renaissance painting you see this little gold coin. Sometimes when they get that reductive, or they would get gold sparks, sometimes when it was a little closer. What it is is that the light from the ether, the golden light from the ether, shines through the rain. It's like an irradiation. So that that rain is not just the semen of some masculine, but carries with it the energy of reality, so that someone who is fertilized by that gives birth to the real. Not just giving birth to a child, but gives birth to the real, so that one prays Praise for that kind of fertility, which is primordial from the ether and not just necessary from the air. All of this in Jane Ellen Harrison's time. Her book came out in 1902. All of this was stymied. All of this appreciation was boxed in constantly from mythic representational associations with the Old Testament. And almost all the studies of myth in the 19th century, and on almost all the way through the 20th century. Also, even though by 1902 there were people like Jane Ellen Harrison who were fully awake, fully enlightened human being. She understood and could express herself. But as someone once observed, it takes 150 years for an idea to mature from the brilliance of a single individual to become common speech on the street. So it'll be somewhere around 2050, before people on the street will catch up with Jane Ellen Harrison in 1902. She understood that this correlation constantly of mythic representations with the meaning of Old Testament things was a limiting condition, was a veil of forced analogy, was an inculcation of encoded and doctrinaire correspondence on people that they could not escape from in any ordinary way. And that the encoding, The indoctrination was even more pernicious because it registered it tied its knots in the mind. In people's ideas, so that it became absolutely forbidden to open up certain mythological discoveries because it went against our religion. One of the great mythographers of the time, um, he died when he was only 36. Uh, it was an uneducated. Formerly his name was George Smith. Can you imagine George Smith, who as a teenager was just always attracted to these archaeological, mythic discoveries and and he used to show up all the time at the British Museum and asking if he could just sweep their floors. And so finally, one of the keepers of the British Museum of the Archaeological Things let this kid sweep the floors. And over the space of about a decade, decade and a half, ten, 15 years, George Smith's self-taught himself because he examined all of the exhibits over and over and over again. He became one of the great discoverers that you could actually read some of these inscriptions that were there in the British Museum with certain grammars. A man named Delcic came out with an Assyrian grammar in the middle of the 19th century. And George Smith taught himself how to read these things. And he was reading some tablets. He was dusting one time, and he found he was aware that he was reading the story of the flood. That he wasn't reading the book of Genesis about the flood. He was reading Assyrian tablets that were copies that went back to 2000 BC. And who knows how long before that? And they were talking about the flood. And so he asked permission. And George Smith was given permission to give a lecture in London. And he gave a lecture on the pre-biblical evidence of the flood. And it caused a sensation. And of course, everyone came down on him. I think the phrase at the time was the same as as outraged authority today. You son of a bitch. But meantime, a couple of very wealthy people Said, this is an interesting young man. If he can do this sweeping around in the museum, let's see what he'll do. If we finance an archaeological expedition for him and send him off to the Mideast and let him dig for real. And of course, some people that didn't want him to succeed said, yes, let's do that, because they had absolutely no idea, much less any confidence that there was anything to find. Right? So he was dispatched. George Smith was sent off. He was he was in his late 20s. Can you imagine? He's a janitor. On the fifth day at a dig in Mesopotamia, he came up with the missing fragments of the flood story and also the missing fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh. So he came back to London after five days and blew them out. You know what that means? Yeah, he blew them out. They they couldn't believe this. And so friends and enemies alike said that's just too much. Let's send them again. Let's see what you do. And so he went again. And on the second day he found more stuff that things that were. They couldn't believe what George Smith found. And almost as if the gods had freed him from the further travail, that would have come, because he was starting to really rankle the authority on all levels. He was now 36 years old, and he understood well enough that, well, maybe the entire Old Testament is but a very recent watered down rendition of something that goes back thousands of years. And the Old Testament isn't God's sacred Scripture, but it's like fourth hand copy notes. So he was spared. He died of a fever in his third archaeological expedition. And some people said, well, let's not talk about it then. That's it, that's it. And for a long time, nobody talked about it. Nobody said anything about it. It's like in our time, 50 years after the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi, nobody talks about it anymore. I remember once I was in the Borromeo bookstore near downtown LA is the official bookstore of the Roman Catholic Church in Los Angeles, and I asked the manager of the bookstore if they had any books in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and she didn't know what they were. Yeah, I was with a priest, and he just he was so embarrassed that he turned beet red and he walked away. Yeah. So finally, after about 100 years, someone came out with ancient Near Eastern texts relating to the Old Testament published by Princeton University Press. And hardly anybody talks about it anymore. It's also been swept. But you can't sweep this under the rug. So what it is, it's put on the shelves as academic. So that you're embarrassed to even look at something because it's always associated guilt by association. Right. It. It represents by mimesis, dried old academic stuff. And what has that got to do with your life? Your life is all about what you can do in your Nike shoes to other people. Let's take a break. We're trying to appreciate that myth involves a stage by which experience is generated and that generation of experience. We call that process life. We call that living. That's our life. The fact that there is an identification of myth with stories is a cultural phenomenon. That's not really important to us. Myth is not about stories. Myth is about life, and it's about life in its reflective capacity to bring nature into a parallel play, so that when life has a parallel energy frequency to nature, then life has a mystery which is extraordinarily real. And it will be out of the integration of the mystery of life, that true symbols will be made. And true symbols, like true images, do not represent they present. And as images reflect symbols present, they disclose. And what they disclose is their meaning, their meaningfulness, and that that meaning is not a correlated representational referentiality. Is a fundamental error in that. Symbols can do that. Language can do that, but only within limited sets. And those limited sets are usually dramatic episodes. And so we're going to learn by the end of the year that we need to acclimate ourselves to living outside of the ritualistic, habitual, cultural, sociological sets of referential experience that are taken to be the norms, the models by which not only we should act, but by which we then project and force upon other people how they should act also. All of this comes under the aegis of a problem area called willfulness. The will. The will to power as one of Nietzsche's books is called the Will to power. And this entire entourage is suspect. And in wisdom traditions from deep Paleolithic antiquity right up until 21st century future teaching, the Maturation of our complete capacity always involves paying attention to these hooks, literally hooks, and not to get caught on them, not to get hung up. One of the techniques that's used consistently and to great advantage, is to remind us to look up from our plate, look up from what we're eating, look up from what we're doing. And that act of looking up gives us a sense of context. And that sense of context is a mythological dimension of horizon, wherein experience can do a process in its reflective form, which nature does nature's process allows for existence to emerge and become real. Nature does that. And nature allowing the emergence of objective existence out of its mysterious process. The mystery of life is that it can allow for a mind, for minds to emerge and become objectively real. Minds on this scale are not epiphenomenon. They're not artifacts. They are as objectively real as bodies. And so we are in an education maturation where the mind and the body will become objectively real on a shared horizon of language and feeling and experience, so that the symbols of that mind will have a capacity to reach an equilibrium to the existentiality of the body. The Greeks called this sophrosyne the equilibrium, the balance of body and mind. And that when one has this balance, there is a flow where tension that was there because of a disproportion in equilibrium, the flow, instead of being a tension, becomes a resonance. Instead of the tension registering as a discordance, it registers increasingly as a harmony. And that harmony has a further resonance, a further resonance from the objectivity of the body in equilibrium with the objectivity of the mind. And a third objectivity comes into play. We traditionally call the spirit, and the spirit becomes objectively real, just as real as any rock that has ever existed, as real as any proton that's ever been generated in the universe. The spirit is real. Not an epiphenomenon, not an not an artifact, not a hopefulness that one has to keep one's eyes raised and fingers crossed and toes curled occurs. But as we will see, occurs in a differential way, not in an integral way. So that there is a transformation that's necessary. Required. And the transformation Specifically, is between the mind and its presentational objectivity and the person in their differential consciousness. And we'll see that this is a very, very difficult idea to understand if you don't have a good grounding and that that grounding is what we're working on now. All of this is to make a ground and to raise a landscape out of that ground by real tectonic processes, so that when it comes time for us to learn to fly above that landscape, not only will the landscape be real, but are flying will be real also. And we can emerge off the ground into the air and transform from the air to the ether. It's as simple as that. It's as complex as that. The Egyptian mythological spectrum was one of the clearest in antiquity, and there were three levels that occurred in the Egyptian mythological spectrum three levels of emergence. One of them was to emerge into the day, the second was to emerge into life, and the third was to emerge into eternity. And each one was a larger scale of the one before it, so that when you got to eternity, you got to an infinite, an infinity that had scale all the way back to the day, and the Egyptian mythological day was the unit by which time became real, existentially, one at a time. The Egyptian Book of the dead, so called its title translated literally means the Book of coming forth. By day. When the sun rises over that horizon, we rise with it, and that day becomes existentially real. And to the Egyptian ancient wisdom mythological horizon. That day then joins the previous days, which were also emerged and made real one at a time, so that each day joins with the other days, and they make a horizon that has been going on so long that the Supreme God is called the Lord of millions of years. Made one day at a time to misidentify time as a flow and project that back or retrospect, that back onto the ancient Egyptians is a deep flaw. Deep error. So that the book of coming forth by day happens each day. The Book of Coming Forth by Light is not a book so much, but is a deep wisdom of that ether level. Coming forth by day belongs to the human level of the air. The coming forth into life is a divine quality. But coming forth into eternity. Both gods and men must learn that equally. That there is no mythological image for that emergence. And so the mythology is wisely silent. Exactly. There. Now, the symbol of coming forth by day is the sun, literally the sun's disk. And that image of the sun later on becomes even a symbol. Solar symbol. The symbol that conveys the emergence into life was the ankh. And appropriately, because there is a fractal quality of objectivity, every ray of light from the sun carries its own individual ink so that you receive life in this transmission of inks. Every ray of sun has one and only one, and so as many rays of sun as you receive, you receive as many of those inks, and that they accumulate so that there are two qualities of life process to keep track of, in terms of the wisdom of experience. And that is accumulation and penetration, accumulation of feminine quality, penetration of masculine quality. If they work together and produce a fertility of life together, the accumulation sometimes in the in the Mahayana. It was called The Accumulation of Precious Qualities, and later on in the course we'll use one of the Prajnaparamita sutras, which the Ratna paramita Samgraha Sutra. It's about the accumulation of precious qualities in that feminine mode. It's not just for women, but in that feminine mode, but it's the feminine, not of the mother or the daughter, or the bride, or the grandmother, but the feminine of the kanephoros, the lady of the wild things. That high wisdom is a wild thing. No one puts a leash on the wildness of high wisdom. And so that quality always in its process of being included is like including the zeros, including the the emptiness, the silence. And it's the inclusion of the silence in sound that gives the measure capacity for sound, for noise to become music. Otherwise it couldn't do it. And so measured interval is essential to the structure of a harmonic and a music and an articulate discursiveness. And so too in language. And so there was a difference between just speaking in any kind of garbled way and speaking in that measured way of disclosure. And so a sacred language always had its pace. And even now you can find. I'll bring it in next week. Um, I brought in a couple of times, uh, a storyteller's cane from West Africa, from Cameroon. And you can still see in the storyteller's cane from Cameroon the image 5000 years ago of the scepter of the divine King. In original ancient Egypt, the divine king knows how to speak the sacred language, wherein occur the names of parts of things when brought together. One then names the thing, and it is existentially real. So that the name becomes that objectivity, which is conferred in symbol and in ritual, and is uttered in myth, so that one sees, for instance, the names of a spiritual. Objectivity, a divine being. A spirit whose objectivity in the beyond. The ether has become objectified. Then that name is surrounded by a cartouche. Is given a form, a symbolic form. Later on, the incorporation of the silence that one should be conscious not to. Talk about mysteries. And yet, if you have to convey a sacred word, the. Way in which that was symbolized in the high wisdom Greek language is that you would take the first and last letters of a sacred word and put them together and put a little highlight over them, so that in sacred manuscripts there would be these secret words that were not spelled out, and they're not to be pronounced out, but they're made to be uttered in a secret form so that you just begin it. You leave an ellipsis in the middle, and then you end it and you speak in that way. It's kind of like a paradoxical contraction. Even the word or the hieroglyphs that spell God in Egyptian. If you were to bring those into a phonetic sounding, they sound n t r with no vowel usually spelled out in classical Egyptology as n e t e r, pronounced neater, but in the sacred hieroglyphic language of the old Egyptian wisdom, you would just pronounce enter without making the t nt or ner ner. It's a quality where one's language reflects the mystery of nature in the language itself. In the Zohar, in the Book of Splendor, high medieval Jewish wisdom had an esoteric use of the name for Yeshua. But instead of spelling it with all of its letters in the middle of the name, there was a aspirant that was just indicated. And so you had four letters with an aspirant in the middle. You had a Five quality to the spelling of the name, but it was then a mystical name. Didn't refer to a man. Didn't refer to something on Earth. Didn't even refer to a symbol in the mind of someone, but referred to a transcendental, mysterious spirit. And it was a high medieval Jewish way of incorporating that name into the development. This was in the origins of Kabbalistic times a long while ago. The point being is that language has its articulation, its spacing not only in between words, but even within words themselves. We had in the early 20th century a poet, E.E. Cummings, who used to break up his poems so that sometimes words were broken up on different lines, so that if one were able to as as it would be disclaim an E.E. Cummings poem, you would get in the articulation of the language a different quality, one that could not be understood from a representational or a referential standpoint at all. It was a reflection that was transformed. It's like a mirror that will give you a reflection, and then you take the mirror surface away. What happens to the reflection? You say, well, it disappears. Where did it disappear to? That that reflection would re-occur somewhere else where there was a mirror meant that it had gone through a threshold. So that there are such things as thresholds for spiritual reflection that give the reflection where there are mirrors, but they themselves don't reflect anything. It's called a no mind in Zen. Such a person is a teacher does not generate a mind which is a mirror for themselves, but allows for the day, the life, the eternity to reoccur for others through their transform openness. It's called a bodhisattva in the Mahayana. The sun as a symbol for the emergence by day. The act for an emergence into life. The symbol for the emergence into eternity was called the Shen. It's a circle. The hole in the middle and a bar at the bottom. It's a version of the infinity sign. And that. Shen. When. When a body, a royal body, was laid out to be transformed. The corpse was laid out on a on a slab, on a table. And there were two lights. Oil lamps. Later on in in Hasidic Judaism, there were candles that were put by the body laid out on the floor, and this supine corpse, illuminated by these oil lamps or candle lights, would receive. In the Egyptian Horus would come and in Horace's Talons. In the right one would be the Shen, and the left one would be the scepter. One becomes a royal king in the lineage of eternity. By that transform there each and every one is a king. Exactly a queen exactly. Each and every one is a royal, exactly one at a time, but accumulate also. So there is such a thing as the flowers of heaven. All the petals, all of. How does Dante say it? In the Paradiso the choirs of angels formed a cosmic rows around the throne of God. And they were all singing. But it's not something that one can see with the eye. One cannot see it with eyes of this world. The eyes of this world are made to focus on things, on existentiality. And even dealing with the mind, you can't take that technique and turn it so that it works inwardly. In this case, you get a kind of a cult quality of visualization, of images of things that then represent something else. Very regressive. It's taught every day all over the world. It's still regressive. It keeps everyone beggared. There is no royalty on that at all, much less the eye of the spirit which sees all because it penetrates as well as accumulates, penetrates like the lightning bolts of Zeus. The energy frequency of Zeus's lightning penetrates through and makes fertile, so that not only is there a day and a life, but there is also an eternity one the eternity. Take away the thee, because even the article of language is a stylization from a referential, representational sense of language. It's not that at all. So our lecture last week was entitled re hyphen Actioning language horizon, not stories. We don't need a new story of the universe. It's not that at all. We haven't been children for at least 2 or 300,000 years. So we don't need to do that. We haven't needed to do that. We don't now especially need to do that. But a re Actioning language horizon brings us to today, and the lecture today is Inanna and Jane Harrison. There is something like a harmonic that occurs and someone like Jane Harrison, Jane Ellen Harrison received in her reflective capacity something that went through an openness at least 4500 years before her, from another woman who wrote the Inanna Cycle of Myths Down. Her name was Nhay Dewana and her father was Sargon the Great, and he was the first King of kings. He was the first that was styled in that way, not just king of a territory, of a kingdom, but he was a king over many kings And his sense of kingdoms was styled the Fertile Crescent and ran from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. In that Fertile Crescent, and of course, the synthesizing line of that cultural viability was caravan routes that followed largely the Tigris and Euphrates River, especially the Euphrates. And where that those caravan routes that systematized and organized and synthesized, that fertile crescent, that quality, the highest city on that apex was called Harran. And that's where Abraham's father had the business of running caravans. And Abraham inherited the caravan route that synthesized the Fertile Crescent. That's why the Old Testament is so powerful because it comes into play at a time when one was for the first time, understanding that there is an enormous transform that myth is capable of. If one has a threshold mind, which is capable of openness to the point of stepping outside of one's cultural frame completely, and not just stepping outside of this cultural frame into another cultural frame, but stepping outside of the frames of cultural ordination completely and stepping into what is called vision a vision. The vision is like a dream of civilization. Just as individuals dream, civilizations dream that one can understand cosmic dreams on that level, because that accumulation complex as it is, is deeply, structurally amenable to a penetration which the spirit objectively is capable of doing. Its eyes are perfect lenses to see in exactly that way. And so a deep wisdom education matured people not to fit into security, or even to not fit into freedom from something, but to those further realms. And that's what's happening here. But it takes a while to acclimate, because all of the senses of acclimation, of ordination, of contextuality are all co-opted on so many levels that it would take you forever just to fight yourself clear of one little sandbox full of it. No one would ever live long enough to do that. And so it's not a process of patiently identifying a problem and then patiently learning how to fight that problem. That's an outlook of losers. You can never. No one could ever win at that. And so there has to be a way to accumulate and penetrate beyond that kind of false economy of practicality. And people who are addicted to the practical. Let's get down to what I'm doing. That's the ego talking. The ego loves it because it knows you will never be free that way. It has lifelong paying customer good business for the ego. Oh, boy. Let's go for another weekend for a spiritual retreat. How wonderful. And $3,000 later, you're back in the grind and that's ground. And now you need another hit. It's useless beyond belief. And yet, 4500 years ago, the epic, the mythological cycle of Inanna discloses the entire ecology of that wisdom. Already really wise energy was raised by a father who was an incredible figure and had all of the advantages that anyone could ever have of being exposed to one of the broadest swaths of civilization of all time at that time. And that is exactly the time when the Epic of Gilgamesh is also written. So the whole understanding of an epic scale of story comes into play at that time. And so epic the epic. Any epic? All epics have that quality of making a fertile crescent reflectiveness so that one is not speaking of a culture or a number of cultures, but you're speaking of a fabric of cultures woven together so that literally one has in civilization a fabric which is able to take both in its structure, in its weave, and in its surface illustration, the imagery at the same time, and convey to that a new way to live. Why would we do all this? Why? Why have men and women gone to all of this trouble for all these tens of thousands of years in order to live? Because there is a pressure of emergence that happens. No one has to hope for it. No one has to even pray for it. No one has to make it happen. No one has to burn candles or whatever. It does happen. Emergence occurs, life occurs, and as it becomes full at a certain stage, the next stage emerges out of it. And you have to be not only prepared, but you have to be prepared to be prepared because you might be prepared and get the next stage. But that might fill really quickly, and you're unprepared for the fact that what you thought was it was only a first step in a whole dance, and you weren't ready to dance. You were only ready to shift your balance from one foot to the other, and all of a sudden you have to move and move in a dance. This is very difficult and it's not something that is taught. It's there. I remember the most graphic example I ever saw in this life. My daughter was two. On her second birthday, I played a recording. She was Blackfoot Indian, played a recording of the Blackfoot A1 dancers and singers, the drums and the chanting, and as soon as she heard it at two, never heard it before. Her elbows came up and she started dancing with that four step shuffle of the Blackfoot nation. Because it's there in the body, the tissue is wise, the bones are real, the blood carries it. It's not a function purely of intellectuality. It's not a function of culture, it's in the body. So there is such a thing as being friends with the body, being friends with tissue, respecting tissue. Philo plasm, that that body is enormously wise because it objectively registers the truth of existence, and that life is founded on that existence, being objectively real and having emerged out of nature, out of the mystery of nature, so that when mythology discloses the mystery of nature through the lens of the body, it's not discovering something for the first time. It's recognizing what was already in play. And that's why it's a reflection and not a representation, It representation involves a time sequence of mechanical causation, which is it ain't necessarily so, as the song says, it can be so, but it ain't necessarily so. And in this wide universe, there are more non-causal realities than there are causal by far. And in order to be home on that kind of scale and that kind of accumulation in that kind of penetration, you have to stop the bad habits of a nasty childhood. So come back next week.