Myth 4

This is myth four. And I would like to start with a difference between nature and myth. Nature deals with emergence. Myth deals with birth. It's mythic to say that the universe is born. Emergence is different from birth. Emergence is always a mysterious. Appearance. Birth is a passionate process. Birthing is a part of passion, and myth has to do with the energy, frequency of language and of feeling and of experience which is generated by that. And one of the synthesizing frequencies in the energies of experience is passion, and birth is a part of the cycle of passion. Birth has to do with sexuality. It has to do with passion. Where as distinct from that, emergence is very In mysterious. We don't really know if it has to do with passion. And on a mythic horizon. We say that the gods must also be passionate and give birth. And so the world must have been born. And so creation myths very frequently will include myths of creation, as if those mythic events are births. But when it comes to acting out, to putting into a ritual foundation. The action expressions of Birthing of God's birthing of the world being birthed. We come to appreciate that this is not so, that something deeply profound and mysterious, that the world has emerged. And as it emerges, it emerges all of a sudden, and upon its emergence, it fills space. It fills the three dimensions of space, because there was a movement that came out of the mystery of nature and that movement. Had something to do with the mysterious, something to do with emergence. And now that there are spatially extensive objective things now that there are existentials, that movement is time. But that time when it was in nature's mystery was not temporal. It wasn't time yet. And so in the Timaeus, in the last great cosmological dialogue of Plato, he has an old Pythagorean teacher say time is the moving image of eternity. That the profundity in nature's mystery is that eternity. And we cannot say that eternity is there because the is Imputes a verbal existential quality to eternity, and eternity is not a thing. It doesn't exist. That its play is before existentials happen, before space, before things. But because myth is such a deep parallel to nature, the flow of nature and the flow of myth can synergize. It seems almost natural to carry the qualities of myth back over into nature. And so we tend to think, well, um, time really must be there in nature. And in fact, time is only there in ritual. Time only occurs in existence and it's the first dimension, but because it comes in, because it emerges out of the mystery of nature, when eternity emerges, it emerges as time. But they are not synonymous. They're not identical. And it is a flaw in ideation. It is a symbolic error. It's an arrogance of the mind. It's a phony idea. To think that time is identifiable with eternity. In fact, the whole idea of identity is quite suspect if you go into it in a hi Dharma way, there's really no such thing as identity. There is a provisional situation and quality. Let that person in so they come in. But that provisional quality of identity is a relational function that belongs in an abstract, symbolic realm. And we'll get to that in a couple of months when we talk about symbols. But the mysterious emergence out of nature. Eternity emerging comes through as time and time immediately constitutes the three dimensions of space. So that if you're looking for some kind of a metaphor, some kind of an image, you might think of something that is freeze dried. The three dimensions of space are freeze dried, and time adds the water so that they immediately instantly fill out and are what they are. So that existentiality has to do with space being cued by time. And for us, it's important to recognize that time is the first dimension. It's not the fourth dimension. It used to be popular in the 20s and 30s, and even in the 40s of saying time is the fourth dimension. It's not. It's the first dimension, but it instantly flowers into the three dimensions of space and creates the situation of existentiality so that when we were in ritual, those 12 lectures and On ritual. We understood that ritual has to do with establishing existence. Foremost, ritual is not superstitious. It's not repetitious. Yes, it can be superstitious, it can be repetitious. And later on, we'll see that something like repetition is essential to maintaining the establishment. But ritual is primordially, an action which establishes existence so that the most fundamental quality of a time space existentiality is that it is. And the most fundamental quality that complements that is, that is Business never has and isn't. That there's no such thing. It's a mental flaw to think that there is a non business that exists. It's one of the most fundamental mental errors of all time. And it's in every culture and it's especially in every civilization. When, when the tidal wave of barbaric reduction swept over Europe in the sixth century A.D., and the so they used to call it the Dark Ages, descended for 4 or 500 years before there was anything and maybe 7 or 800 years before there was any beginning to remember, through the numbness of better days and better conditions in those deep, Dark age mythic expressions. One of the great documents that comes out of that. It's an example of a whole genre of documents. The document I'm going to use as an example is the Book of Kells, Celtic Illuminated Manuscripts of the New Testament. And if you were able to see them and try to read them, they're unreadable, because they're not the texts like books. They're just illuminated examples of pages, incomplete because no one could read. But the pages were icons. They were presentations on an emergent level. This is the existentiality of the good news, and you will see in the margin whenever they have to portray evil. Evil is always portrayed as a burnt out stick figure in the margin, not in the text, so that the is not ness of the negative is not a part of the text. It's not a part of the icon, it's in the margin outside, and you'll see the devil as like one of these burnt match stick figures on the outside trying to get in and can't get in because evil is a non-existent that really doesn't exist. And that part of the trickery of evil is to get you to believe that it exists, and that only in your belief does it get energy to play in existence. And but it doesn't play in existence because it can't exist. So it only plays in myth. Only in the mythic horizon, as they're evil. There's no evil in eternity, and there's no evil in existence. Not one atom. Not one. What do they just discover the other day? The tau neutrino. The tau particle is the third energy level of an electron. Electron has a certain amount of pizzazz and energy to exist. And the the muon is 200 times as powerful and the tau R is 3500 times. It's an electron with 3500 times the pizzazz of it. And all of these three states of the electron have shadow particles called neutrinos that really I don't know if they have mass or not. They shouldn't have mass if they have any mass at all. It throws physics into a tizzy. The neutrinos are in the late 20th century, early 21st century. What those stick figures were in Celtic manuscripts. They're in the margins outside, and they don't figure in the iconographic symbolic presentation, because the mind is sophisticated enough sometimes to know better on the mythic level. No one's mind was then or yet sophisticated enough to know that. And yet they knew that. But not from symbols. They knew it from nature. They knew it because one seeks, as we saw in ritual, one seeks to establish emergence and thus existence by participating in nature. That nature is not a static but an ongoing process. So that emergence is not something which happens and now has happened. There is no past tense in emergence. It's always an ongoing, continuous present. And so it's called presence. So emergence is a presence which has a connection to the mystery of nature, eternity And meth, which is a parallel to nature, also has a connection with ritual. Just like ritual emergence, having a presence, an ongoing presence which always is present, never is past, never is future, but always is faster than a now. And a now is like a noun. You have to take a split instant to give it a, the Greek word, for it is an eidetic place. You have to give it a bracket to make it stable. Nouns and nouns and that. But presence has no point of rest whatsoever. It's an ongoingness. And so we saw when we looked at ritual, that ritual is not on the most primal, foundational level. It's not the steps of the dance, but it's the presence coursing through it which delivers the participation of the mystery. And that's why it's it's not important to learn the steps, but only to do the dance. And the steps are there. Where is the mental arrogance of phony civilizations and phony cultures? Is that well, you have to learn the the steps first. Otherwise, how can you learn the dance? It's like saying little babies have to learn grammar and syntax before they can speak. That's nonsense. But when babies begin to speak, they confidently speak gibberish with all the confidence in the world, they're not embarrassed at all, and they make no apologies whatsoever. Their gibberish is a kind of ongoingness that is true in nature and now is true in language. And so it's okay. It's a form of play which our feeling tones recognize as a part of the passion of the birthing process. And that birthing because it's an ongoingness doesn't just happen once. The baby is now born. Okay, the birth is over. No, the birthing also continues. Any time presence is actuated and so one is can be born many, many, many times in every split particle of time. So that getting lost from the reality of eternity is a function of losing. The cadence of being present is losing the rhythm of emergence. But on the mythic level, the rhythm of emergence continuing is experienced in passion, so that an ascetic mythology is a stupidity of the first order. All mythologies, when they're real, they're passionate, they're sexual, they're passionate because it has to do with life experience. And that's why myth is a feeling toned quality and has its intelligence. But its intelligence is not intelligent, its intelligence is sentient sentience. And even animals have sentience. Especially animals have sentience. There. Lovely plants have sentience. You know, in the 40s they made a big thing out of the fact of discovering that if you play classical music, plants grow better, that they didn't understand. Well, how can that be? And it's a factor deep in the origins of civilization, like in ancient India, not in Aryan India of like the Rigveda, but in ancient Dravidian India, like before the Mohenjo daro. Harappa civilization, some 8 to 10,000 years ago. The native Dravidian sense in India is that man is the essence of plants, not of animals, that the declension of man's life comes through the plants and not through the animals. That we emerge through a lineage whose major phase in existence is plants and not animals. So that the quality that's there mythically in the culture of India and every civilization that ever included India and ever will include India. The mythic quality is that if you want to find yourself, you go to the mountains, to the forests. You don't go to the animal pens. You don't go to to the ranches. You go to be with the plants. You go to that place where the plant sentience and presence meets at its most refined, basic emergent point. And that would be treeline in the Himalayas for India. And if you go to treeline, which can be very high up in the Himalayas, if you go to treeline there, you get the most pristine situation where emergence out of the mystery of nature that creates existence has a deep parallel with the way in which experience mythically registers passionately. And so it comes as a great shock for someone who thought that they were going to go off on this kind of yoga and achieve ascetic perfection, and they discover that they're filled with feelings for life. And whatever practice that they use to try and squelch that, it like life comes back many, many more times and many, many more shapes not to bedevil you, not to be a stick figure out on the margins of the iconographic actuality, but to bring you back into play with that participation of the mystery of nature, so that when we come to something like mythology, Greek mythology, let's take for a second Greek mythology. The gods of Greek mythology are not the final Arbiters at all. One of the great studies in English called Moira. Fate, Good and Evil and Greek Thought, published about 50 years ago. The gods are subject to fate. Just like human beings. Just like men. In classic original Buddhism, when the Buddha or any Buddha would speak. The gods come to listen as well as men because they don't know that. They don't know the High Dharma. We live in a time where everyone is gaga over angels and angels. Angels are only messengers. They don't inherit the house. Man inherits the house. The angels are just a western Union. The gods are just the CEOs of the Western Union Corporation. So that there is a deep realization that happens when myth is healthy, when the mythic horizon is healthy, and that is that the mystery of nature has an energy that is continuously present in the way in which one's experience, established by existence and maintained through the health of feeling toned life experience that's expressible. And myth essentially has that quality of being shareable. That's why language happens, because you want to tell someone else you want to share with them. And so the mythic horizon is a horizon that spreads like a osmotic film over the surface of all existence. And wherever existence occurs, there is a possibility of a mythic layer. A mythic film occurring. And when it does, that film covering of feeling toned language experience creates a quality to the existential whereby it can receive the transforms of symbols. And in this way we learn that not only do we inherit the house, but we inherit the house because we participate. We can create. We can say the words in such a way that the forms of existence change and become what we said. Um, line from Wallace Stevens, who we quoted last week. He has a line in a poem called asides on the oboe where he says, thou are not August until I make thee so by saying so. So that on the mythic horizon there's always woven into it. That language of praise is essential. It's essential to God, the gods. It's essential to them because they can't utter praise. None of the gods can utter praise. They don't know how to do that. The angels cannot utter praise. They don't know how to do that. So that we have a deep, profound responsibility and privilege in the ecology of the real. We can praise and thus make it true. Let's take a little break and we'll come back. Emergence is a quality from nature, and birth is a mythic quality. They're different. Myth has to do with birth, which has to do with life. But the mystery of nature has to do with immortality, eternal life, or it's only eternal life when we're speaking in a mythic correspondence. We have no language to disclose whether life eternal has a non-life possibility because it's transcendent. It's transcendent. But even that quality is already the mind using an idea to betray the actuality, because the actuality is that nature is not transcendent, but immanent. And we will find that what's transcendent is His vision. Consciousness is transcendent. And next year, when we get to vision, we'll see that vision flows remarkably in a parallel but complementary way to the way of myth and the way of nature, that consciousness is a radical reverse of the flows of myth and nature. That vision is related to them, but related to them in a complementarity way. So that vision has to do with the future, which never occurs in time, but has a deep Synergy with the imminence of eternity. Now all of this, when it's grouped together, bunched together, brought together, is so baffling to the mind that it doesn't know how to comport. Because you're you're like Buckaroo Banzai! You're born going in two directions at once. You don't you don't have any chance. And the accurate, feeling toned image of that quandary is stasis is an ultimate limbo. And we shy from that as if it were a negative. And actually it's just an accurate record of the actuality of it. And what is that actuality? That actuality is a limbo so profound that its presence. Sense, and occurs quite naturally in the mystery of nature and comes through. An existence in ritual as immanence. And so someone who is in a ritual comportment in a profound way, they physically, their body records the presence of immanence, the mysteriousness, and they seek to find a language to express that. And that's one of the motives for myth. It's like the quality in Indonesia, especially in the Balinese version of the wayang, the shadow puppet shows. Those shadow puppet shows are almost always versions of the Ramayana, Rama and Lakshmana and Sita and Ravana. And that Ramayana, one of the great mythic cycles of India, goes back to time immemorial. The Ramayana goes back to when someone like a Rama, who was a god, lived on earth with other people. When a demon like Ravana lived on earth with other people, when gods and men were mixed. And that shadow puppet show, especially in the Balinese recension of the weighing. Is presented in a graphic way, so that one experiences the physical bodily awareness of the ritual before and aside from the registry of the myth in a language way, so that the imagery is understood and you know what they're saying and what it's all about, what the story is, who the characters are, what the mythic images that are the characters are. So that in the performance of a shadow puppet, you will have a screen. I think we have we had up here a silk screen. You will have a screen and you do not see the puppets, you do not see the figures. All you see are their shadows on this screen. And as the master storyteller, the mythographer tells this story. And we'll have some assistance sometimes. But largely it's one figure moving these shadow puppets on a stick and the little hands on little sticks and telling the stories and making the dialogue and and narrating the myth as it comes out, you in the audience see the shadows against the screen. It's a bright light behind. I may be a shadow of these bright lights. Maybe this is like a way. Maybe there's someone behind this particular figure that would be very in keeping with the mysticism of Plato. But they point in a performance of the Ramayana in the shadow puppet show is that you do not have to follow the language. You don't have to follow the storyline to get it. You can if you want to, but you don't have to. You will kinesthetically register it in your body regardless, and you do not have to say on the screen side of the show. Here's the wiring, here's the screen. Here's a couple of tables with stacks and stacks of these shadow puppets. And he reaches and the performance goes on all night long. It starts at dusk. And it goes all night until morning until dawn. The entirety of this night is a mythological tapestry of the Ramayana, done in this way. And you can stay out there. And if you want to, you can walk in. Behind the screen. There is the Wang and the two piles of shadow puppets, and behind them a gamelan orchestra pounding away. June, June. June. June. June. June, June. And you can walk all the way around. You're free to do this. You're not in a Victorian theater mode. You don't have to stay in your seat. You can go backstage if you want to. You can go into the equivalent of the green room if you want to. It doesn't make any difference because what's happening registers on level of imminence mysteriousness, not mystical. Mystical is from vision. Mysterious is from nature. Mystical is consciousness. Mystical is consciousness. Rejoining mysteriousness. Consciousness in nature, mystic and mysterious. They really go together. You thought things were sealed because they were true. Because they were identities. That's nothing. The sealing of the mystic consciousness with the mysterious nature puts to shame identity. It comes into singularity and goes out into who knows? Identity is a very slovenly compared to that. And so if you don't have a logic that meets in that complementary way, you don't have any understanding yet of what truth might be. You think it's something that's total bull in terms of adding up or subtracting or any of the other functions multiplication and division. It's not a function of arithmetical operations. Those are purely mental mind manipulations and they are true in the mind. They're objective in the mind. Body doesn't need them. And the mystery of nature certainly doesn't need them. And eternity doesn't even want their phone number. They don't want to hear from that. So you're busy praying for this identity to happen. I'm going to get that Bentley and it's going to be a convertible. Well, no, of course that language doesn't register. The only language that registers is praise, because praise is the mythic expressiveness of the deep feeling that is synergetically flowing with the mysterious immanence in nature and is present in the ritual Will actions, the making of the praise and all of that is in alignment, not in geometric, but in reality. And just like the mind's version of alignment as a geometric city in a very similar way, the mystery of nature, the presence existentially, and the mythic expressiveness of language can come together not only in a version of real geometry, but can transform in a version of trigonometry. You can go away from the plane, the plane where geometric registers. That's why it's called plane geometry. All the figures are on a two dimensional plane. Playing, but you can learn to open up that geometry, that plane geometry, to the functions of a trigonometric metric. Spherical. And so one's alignment. It doesn't just have a geometric, but it has a trigonometric functioning. It gains into a spherical reality. So that language, when it is real, is parallel to the mystery of nature connected to the imminence of existence, and also therefore connects to a parallel to the ritual objectivity of existence. It makes the mind objectively real. And we'll see the mind becomes as real as the existentials that emerge out of nature. But the mind emerges out of the meaningfulness of the physicality of the trigonometric functions of sentient language. Mythic horizon, where the horizon transforms into a sphere, but that sphere is not out there. That sphere is an inner sense that the language generates. That sphere is an inner world. And so myth has a very powerful function. Myth generates the transformed symbols by which the mind begins to occur. And there can be such things as mental objectivity. Ideas cast shadows. Somebody was once asking William Faulkner about his early writing career, and he said, well, I just wanted to get published when I was young. So I wrote all these potboilers. But he said, then it occurred to me. That literary figures cast shadows. And so I stopped that, and I started to write for real. And of course, the first thing that he wrote for real was the book that we're going to one of the books that we use in the symbol section, as I Lay Dying. And as I Lay Dying is the perfect mythological horizon of language, transformed in the spirituality of where symbols become real enough to cast their shadows, which become persons in a spiritual way. The literary figures in the novel as I Lay Dying, become spiritual figures that one can get to know. Faulkner wrote as I lay dying in six weeks and never changed, a word sent the manuscript in, and it was published exactly as though he wrote it at night. He wrote it when the sun went down, and until dawn, because he was working the night shift at the boiler room of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, northern Mississippi, shoveling coal to keep the boilers stoked. And he was all alone. And so, like a wayang, he learned to tell the truth and that this is no longer fiction. This becomes a quality where myth shows that it can generate a new level of integration, and that new level of integration is where the symbols emerge out of that language and are objectively real enough to bear the tremendous radical energy of a conscious transform which makes it into a personal. This is big magic. Candle burning is nothing. I remember talking one time to my old Dharma pal Karma Thinley about 25 years ago, and he was. I brought him here to Los Angeles in 1975, because there was so much talk around here about the Tibetans and the Vajrayana. We know it. And I thought, you know, they really need to have some first hand experience. And in 1975, there were very few people who had any first hand experience. So I brought him from Toronto And he delivered two concurrent lecture series, one on the Tibetan language. This was not a language of peasants. The Tibetans never had a written language. The Tibetan language was made specifically to communicate. Hi, Dharma. And secondly, to deliver a lecture on the karmapa's. What is a lineage? What is a reincarnation lineage? And that lecture series became his book, The History of the 16 Karmapa's. But when he was here, it was interesting because karma was a head of the center in Toronto and was really enormously capable. Very big for a Tibetan is about six. One wore cowboy boots because they liked to stomp. And he used to have to shield his eyes because he said there were two furious and that Westerners got freaked out, you know. Oh my God. You know, he could see right through me. Well, he knows what I'm like. Oh. He said one time we were coming back from some place and went to some house on Avenue 64, and it was filled with devotees. They were lining the walls, sitting on the floors and up the stairwells, and everything waded through these people. Several hundred people in this house went up to a little bedroom, and we were eating some fruit because we were sort of hungry. And I said, well, I've got to go back and and do some work. And he said, well, I have to go back and be a lama. That level of mythos is all right, and it has its play, but it's in the realm of play when it's in the mythic language plays baby gibberish, grows up and becomes sweet talk. And they jabber. And once they can talk, they just, they go. And there's a quality wherein your education here, if it's all gibberish to you at first, don't worry about it. It's like the wayang making the shadow puppet show. That's what's going on here. The first impress is kinesthetic in the tissue. Later on, you'll hear the language. Later on you'll know, oh, well, this is from this epic, or this is from that epic, or this is from this set of things. And oh, all of this goes together like that. There's hardly any villager in Indonesia who Knows about Valmiki, who originally wrote the Ramayana down. Valmiki, whose name means white ant hill because he could meditate in the forests of India long enough that the white ants would build this mound over him. And so he would be in this mound. And one day in the forest, a hunter who was very far from civilization came into the deep forest where Valmiki was in his deep samadhi. And there was this bird singing, and the hunter shot the bird and killed it. And immediately the song ended, and Valmiki, without thinking about it, uttered a curse. And of course, the hunter was just a little wisp of soot in the sunlight. And one clearing of the forest. And then he meditated on the form of the language, and it came out in the form which is the form of mythology and poetry. In Sanskrit, it's called the sloka. It's a couplet. It's a two line couplet that go together and is powerful because those couplets can pair together and you get a quatrain, and a quatrain is like a beginning or stanza for continuance of language, so that you can get a cascade of quatrains. That's unending. Yes, it's finite in terms of the number that are here, but you could say them again and again. Repeat them infinitely, like Omar Khayyam's quatrains of the Rubaiyat. They're sayable indefinitely because they are a mystical language that complements the mystery of nature. And they're always real all the time because their imminence is physically there and registers in the body quite truthfully in that way. And the mythic tone is a horizon that generates meaning through the play of images, and has a base to it, so that the images later on in their play will disclose a structure. And because images have a base, there is such a thing as an image base. It means there is a thread that will sinuously weave its way on the geometric plane of figures and will, when it transforms into a trigonometric spherical deity, that sinuous thread will blossom and will become a figure in spherical Trigonometric space, it will become the convoluted shape by which the idea germinates around a symbolic tensor. A tensor is at least two vectors which are capable of taking a transform, and so you will not just be able to say something in a melodic line or a rhythmic sequence, but you will be able to transform that melodic line or that ritual sequence into a harmonic, a harmonic. Then you have something really grand. Then the mystery of nature reaches an integral culmination, a kind of a completeness. Every possibility that ever could possibly be, then is on the verge of being discoverable. And that moment is that moment of realization, not realization of a thing or of something or oh, it's realization. That's a reductive stupidity that even grade school children should not even pay any respect to. That's nothing. The threshold of consciousness, of that realization is a deep complementarity to the eternity in the mystery of nature, for sure. Transcendence and divine passion. They're related. This is the title of a book about the Queen mother of the West, Susan Cahill. Her father was a great expert on Chinese painting. The Queen mother of the West. In China, there was a figure, XI Wangmu, who lived in the far, far west of China and the far, far west of China, of course, is ancient northern Iran. Not the Iran of the plateau and the southern reaches. Not the Iran of Tehran, but the Iran that's Transoxiana across the Oxus River in what today is Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in that ancient region. There was a very high civilization, and that high civilization had a quality of running very long caravan routes, because they were the first people in the world to tame horses, and they tamed horses at a time so early on that when other people saw them, they couldn't register that these were human beings on animals. They saw them together. And centaurs are that image, that mythic image. It never occurred to them that you could ride an animal like that. And these horsemen ran caravan routes to this lucrative area on the other side Of huge mountain ranges like the Hindu Kush, and they ran caravans over these routes and into an area that today is the Gobi Desert. And then like the Sahara, then this is many thousands of years ago, was still fairly fertile. And those caravan routes ran from along the Amu Darya river all the way into an area of what is today China. And there is a city there, an ancient city. It's called Khotan today, sometimes Hotan, Khotan. And Hotan was the center of the transmission of all of the caravan routes that came together from the Deep West, going from there, then into China. And one of the first things that China developed out of that contact was the idea of a dynastic civilization that they never had before. And out of that came the first Chinese dynasty, the Xia. 2250 BC. And one of the distinguishing mythic images of the Shang dynasty is for the first time you see Chinese and chariots. Drawn by pairs of horses that are tamed and trained to do that. You never saw that before then. And the second distinguishing mark is that for the very first time in Chinese civilization, you get the powerful mythic image capable of being a symbol of jade. And there are so many mysteries tied up in that. But part of the whole quality of the Queen mother of the West is that when Chinese civilization became mature, when the dynastic development over several thousand years became really matured in the Han dynasty, the Chinese Romans, the Han dynasty sent out its resonant purview all the way to the farthest reaches of the west, so that it occurred to them that Mythically mythologically their domain stretched to and touched the domain of the mythical Queen mother of the West, XI Wangmu. And in Chinese history. You run across Han Wuti about 140 BC, who was one of the strongest Chinese emperors of that whole era, and He Mythically receives an envoy from the Queen mother of the West, who sends to him a peach tree. Because peaches were first cultivated roses and peaches, and these things were first cultivated by the Queen mother of the West. Because she was the lady of the wild things, she could teach man how to cultivate plants and animals that had never been cultivated before. And the envoy from the Queen mother of the West said to Han Wuti, when this peach tree blooms and ripens, if you eat that peach, you will become immortal. The unfortunate fortunate hitch in that is that the peach tree blossoms once in 3000 years. And if you miss it. And that mythological element becomes so ingrained in the high qualities of East Asian civilization that in Japan they're always imitating. So they imitated the Chinese before they imitated the West. So you find Momotaro in Japanese folklore, peach boy, who brings the gift of immortality to his aged parents. And it goes on magical journeys. Or you find in Chinese literature an epic novel of adventures into the Far West. To this paradisical realm of Arthur. Waley translated that part of that story as monkey. Actually, it's a big four volume translation by several modern translators of the journey to the West to find the great Paradisical realms, and to bring back that understanding. All of this is not just myths of a quest, or myths of a journey to be subsumed under mental categories of mythology. One has to know the culture. One has to be able to feel the image base as well as the imagery, and to have a profound acquaintance with this, to be able to have lived this way for a while. And then the mythology discloses its beautiful function, just like the wayang is not just telling the myths as a storyline. That's not myth. Those are just the stories. The myth is the impress on your tissue. The body will register in the morning when the shadow puppet show is finally finished. After hours and hours, you may have gone to sleep. You may have gotten up and talked with other people for a couple of hours. You may have had a couple of meals. You may have walked around the thing may have even left the venue and come back. All of that is irrelevant because you have been exposed to the radiance, not radiation, but the radiance of the mystery of nature through someone's language flow that had the physical existential Impress of eminence because the language was real, because someone who can speak a real language can make that happen. Everything else is just guesswork. Everything else is just people playing at being teacher. It's various forms of instruction. They don't sit in the deep forest with campfires of the real and tell the stories that haunt the universe. But that happens here. More next week.