Myth 5

This is myth five, and this is a presentation of a new pair of books. And for those who are new, we always pair up our reading material. This is to get away from the idea that there is a text which has, by the early 21st century, many problems attendant to that. We still use books because books are the way in which the mind and the culture, the civilization, have been woven and structured, and we can't do anything to transform ourselves or our lives unless we know how to use Used books as tools. It may be that in a generation or so that will be mitigated somewhat, but before 2030 we're going to have to still use books as transform tools. So we're using pairs of books, and we change these pairs of books every month, every lunar cycle. So every four weeks we get a new set of books and the new set of books that we're going to go for this next month. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is from the 14th century. It is a short literary epic from the age of Chaucer, written in the Midlands of England by somebody who was enormously wise, and we don't know who it was. It's anonymous and Zuni Ceremonialism Ruth Bunzel, three of her great papers, published in 1932 by the Smithsonian Institution and collected together. We're going to look at the Zuni Indians and. The reason for pairing them is that we're trying to recalibrate the ways in which we're able to relate to ourselves and to our lives. And part of that recalibration is not to accept any kind of standard presentations, any kind of traditional valuations of material, of experiences, of ideas, and especially not to carry those old outworn things into consciousness. Part of the problem that we have in ourselves, in our time in our lives, Is that we have a supercharged, conscious capacity and we keep trying to weave it in letter N, we keep trying to weave it into the past, a past which is unchanged. And this is not possible to do. It's as simple as the old wisdom saying, don't put new wine into old wineskins because it will burst them. You can't put the kind of supercharged consciousness which we are capable of into old traditional forms. If they weren't gone already, they would break. But fortunately for us, or I should say, unfortunately in the classic sense that the misfortune is a fortunate fall, which is a mythic theme. The fortunate fall is that the old forms of civilization are already gone. They're not there. We're running on inertia and on habit, and it's run down to the point now where even school children can simply ignore it. There is no tradition that can be brought back. There is no way to go back to a past that was secure. And so we're looking for something which is completely new, including a new past. And the new past is always synergized with the future. And so we're looking towards understanding ourselves in this kind of a process, this kind of an ongoing process of Spiraling into not the subject matter, but spiraling into our own involvement with our education. And this form of education has a great, long tradition. And this auguring in this turning the spiral of inquiry deeper and deeper, this accumulated penetration not into a subject matter as if it were some kind of target which we could identify and master and categorize. All of those qualities belong to a dead past they never will obtain again. For our species we are dealing instead of with solid things which you can pound and count on Representationally to hold in an identity form. We're now dealing largely with a state of material called plasmas. And the plasma state holds largely by magnetic structure and has a cyclic process by electromagnetic energy calibrations. And so we're living in a new situation, a completely new era on this particular planet for our species. We're living outside of the comfortable building blocks of a sandbox past. And we're facing an unlimited possibility of adventures, of life and of person. And this education is a chance to adjust yourself, to recalibrate yourself, either individually or in companionship community with others who are here, and you'll find maybe 50 or 60 people over some course of coming for a few months. The advantage of this kind of transition is that this education provides the phases of development by which you can make yourself available for a whole variety of transforms, instead of having one master symbol or one master idea, some great overwhelming doctrine, some single authoritarian book as a transform. Here, almost anything can be a transform. And so we will find that differential consciousness as part of our theme, weaves itself into the natural integrals, the way in which nature works, the way in which ritual objectifies, the way in which myth, languages, feeling. And perhaps most importantly for us, when we get to it within two more months, get to symbols the way in which minds think. But it's also a relief to come to realize that the symbolic capacity of the mind is but one phase out of eight. It isn't the be all and catch all, and it certainly isn't the our other context by which everything else can be calibrated. This is a sign of egotistical arrogance and of a very great flaw which our minds and our civilizations have carried now for quite some time. And there have been countermanding wisdom traditions always to warn us against this, of taking the power of our minds as the arbiter of everything real, but in degenerate times like our own. And we lived through the 20th century, which was about as barbaric as any times have ever been. All of those wisdom traditions were disregarded and disregarded in the most cavalier way. They were assumed that they could be taught on weekends by just about anybody who was interested in them. It's rare to find anyone in any lifetime who can teach wisdom. That's why traditional wisdom teachers like the Buddha, or like Lao Tzu or Pythagoras are so rare, and why their methods are remembered for thousands of years. It's not easy to find that kind of equality, that kind of a level. And it doesn't exist on weekends. And in comfortable retreats. It's maturation only happens when the entire life cycle is brought into a dedicated contact and you slowly mature. Education is a function of maturation and not of having the brilliant insight plopped in at the right time for a reasonable fee. So we'll come back here now to myth five. We've gone through 12 weeks of looking at nature, and we found essentially that nature is a mysterious process, mysterious in that there is no way to plumb its depths, that the more one would look into the actuality of nature's process, the deeper it would become. It's a profundity that grows indefinitely as you grow in your capacity not to understand it, but to appreciate it. So that nature was a mystery, to be appreciated, and that the deepest form of ancient appreciation was to participate in it, so that the quality of ancient men and women tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago already, we found, was to find a way to have your life processes participate in the mysterious functions of nature, and that one of the qualities that nature specializes in is not giving birth so much, but in promoting and disclosing and loving emergence, that emergence is different from birth. Emergence is so that out of a zero ness comes the oneness of existence that existentials occur emergently whole. Whereas a birthing process is different and birth belongs to existence, it belongs to ritual, it belongs to the Actions of a universe that is already there. And birth is a part of a cycle. An integral cycle. A ritual cycle which has its periodicity largely in terms of. On the cultural level of seasons, so that there is such a thing as a ritual year, an annual year. Refinable, so that there is such a thing as a ritual month. A lunar cycle as compared to and distinct from, but related to and corollary to a sun cycle, which would be a year and our distant ancestors mastered many thousands of years ago. The understanding passed on through scores of generations Mentions that there are cycles of the sun and cycles of the moon that do not reoccur in one cycle of either, but reoccur in disparate multiples of durations. Sometimes, like for a lunar cycle, you might have to go for 56 years before you notice that a whole cycle of lunar cycles comes back to some master cycle, so that one of the rings around Stonehenge with 56 post holes was meant to keep track of the larger lunar cycle. Now, how many thousands of years of experience had to go before men and women like ourselves were able to understand that you can deal with sets of 56 years as if they were a cycle, and fold them into lives, which at that time probably didn't extend to 56 years on an average. So this is wisdom. Wisdom is not a response to something which is attacking you or inviting you today. It's not that simple. It never has been. And so a wisdom education is attentive to the tradition that we've received, but also alert to the fact that all traditional forms are time bound. They all factor a periodicity of ritual comportment to existence in subsets of the oneness of the universe. And some of those subsets are pretty brief. The largest of those subsets we call civilizations, and we've known now for quite some time that civilizations are born. They live, they grow old and they die. And once a civilization is dead, you cannot bring it back. The best that you can hope for is to have it transformed into a new phase, or a new variant. Or sometimes it has to be a completely new civilization. In our case, in our time, it has to be a completely new civilization. We cannot use the past as it came down to us. Traditionally, it all has to be recalibrated and transformed simply because our species is now going to inhabit, minimally, a star system, a whole star system, many bodies, planets, moons. It will extend at least 6 or 7 billion miles. And so our sandbox of the past just simply wasn't in proportion and depth and profundity to the lives that are going to increasingly be led. And so this education is a presentation of the way in which a star systems civilization generates itself, not out of someone's plan, but out of a population of men and women who have grown themselves, have matured themselves individually and together, and brought themselves into play in such a way that their consciousness and their natural integral cycle has found a way to be dimensional together, so that in a very simple way, the four dimensions of time and space need to be recalibrated so that they can accept a fifth dimension of consciousness. And our science has been sophisticated enough. Our sense of history has been sophisticated enough. Our capacities of art have been sophisticated enough for almost a century now to understand that a conscious time space is malleable to the nuances of any of the dimensions in there. The experimenter affects the experiment. And this produced some 75 years ago, an uncertainty principle which now is being transformed because uncertainty is a way of stylizing the A situation in terms of a traditional conundrum based upon an identity idea which is no longer valid, was culturally styled in the first place. There's not an uncertainty principle. There's a wisdom principle which transforms, but the principle doesn't have one variant, one way. It has what Brahms called in his musical composition, developing variation. What John Dewey called in his logic as a theory of inquiry, that there is a way to improve so that every improvement opens up possibilities of further improvement. In other words, we are a species that is now ready to be able to indefinitely refine our ability to stay refinable. And in this way, a great deal of humanity will be engendered and released and disclosed and discoverable. That not only is there a great variety of human beings, but that the variety probably is coextensive with the number of human beings that there are. That the possibilities of individual individual development, personal capacity are as wide in variation as the entire population of the species. Everyone counts. A simple way of looking at this. Some 30 years ago, a philosophy professor was writing a book called An existentialist aesthetics, taking a look at Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre and comparing it to aesthetics of the past. And the man said there used to be a categorical imperative, based upon Kant, that before you do anything, you have to ask yourself, what if everyone did this? And on that basis, there was a lot of repression. There was a lot of weeding out, some of it good, a lot of it questionable, some of it downright tragic. Whereas the existential imperative is to ask a different question, not whether what would happen if everyone did it, but what would happen if no one did it? And frequently, the answer to that, that existential imperative is that the universe would be minus a value. Add your value to the nourishing mix of the whole, and in no way does this jeopardize the capacity for a universe to be multidimensional. Now, the only way that a universe can be multidimensional like that is to have the visionary capacity of consciousness in a complementation to the integral cycle of nature in the first place. Otherwise, those new values tend to fracture the bricks of the old walls. And it's been a long time since human beings like ourselves have had to live within walled precincts that could not be dared not be breached. Perhaps the greatest walls ever built around a human city were the walls around Byzantium, around Constantinople, and though it took almost a full generation, culminated by the troops of Mehmed the Conqueror. The walls of Byzantium were breached and the siege was over. And not only did the city fall, but the entire civilization fell forever. That old style of learning is even more antiquated, and the vehicles that keep it alive are zombieville. And they're useless, and they're an extravagance. Now we're taking a look at myth in the sense that myths are not collected in nice texts, compendia of stories, and that these are primitive stories of men and women who were almost naive to the point of charming. Embarrassment has nothing to do with myth. Our myth is a cycle phase which occurs in between ritual and symbol, and that that cycle, that integral cycle has nature and ritual, myth and symbol, and that when all four of those are present together, when they're all functioning together, you have what the British used to call the big picture. You have a frame of reference. You have a way in which an integral can be formed. And that form is completely natural. And it includes the mind. It includes the mind. The mind is not, in its natural form, transcendental. The mind is assumed, since Immanuel Kant and Hegel and so forth. Fichte to be transcendental. It's not. The mind is basically natural. It has great affinity to the brain, and the brain is certainly very, very objectively, ritually there and real. But the mind, as we'll see, can take a transform. And when it does, something else happens called vision called consciousness. And that is certainly differential and is certainly different. So in our first year we concentrate only on the integral cycle of nature. And we've come to the third of these phases, which is myth. And we've talked now for the first month of how myth is a process like nature. Myth is languaged feeling which characterizes and generates experience. And there are even levels of this quality of life that belong to the animals and belong even to the plants. The old idea that we are completely different, completely severed from the animals and plants because we can speak, we can feel we have experience, is rather suspect on many levels and has been for a long time. Language in the way in which we're looking at it is a generative frequency of energy that has a parallel to the way that nature in its mysteriousness, nature, allows for an emergence of existence. Language allows for the emergence, as we will see of the mind. Language allows for the mind to emerge, not to be born, but to emerge. And so the objective mind will be a remarkable objectivity, capable of alignment with existence, so that minds will be just as objective as ritual actions. Not that mental things are representative of ritual existence, not that language is a medium of representational correlation. A referential capacity. Those facilities and those capabilities do come into play. But the more primordial is that language is an energy frequency. It's an energy form, and it carries in its energy. Another aspect of itself, which is very similar to it and yet is different. It's called a dynamic. And even 3000 years ago, the classical Greek language already had energia and dynamis as two completely different, though related phenomena. When Thucydides, as we will see next year, when we get into the history phase of our education, when Thucydides wanted to characterize what it was about history, that was overwhelming, he called that energy dynamics. It's the oomph, but the carrier wave of the oomph is the energy. And so we're looking now at the way in which language the mythic horizon is an undulating horizon. It's not a flat, static plane, but it's like a it's like mid-ocean in its natural, pulsating, scintillating motion. There's a quiet quality overall, but when you get close to it, it has a pulsating plane, it has a undulating surface. Tension, quality of form and language carries the energy for that. But the forms of language carry the dynamics. So there is such a thing as myth and there is such a thing as myths, and that that mythic horizon is a whole undulating plane of energy capacity, of feeling toned experience which is deeply affine to nature, to the mystery of nature. So that when we have a participation with nature ritually the ability to have a language capacity is emergent. It comes with that quality. With that achievement, the specifics of language are learned trial and error by participating, not by just imitating, but by participating in it. The child who speaks his gibberish and or in the high chair is participating in the family conversation, and that gibberish is the natural way in which, out of the mystery of nature, that facility of being able to speak emerges. And it's like all of a sudden one day they say a word and within a short compass of time, they're jabbering away. And within a short space of a couple of years, they're asking you why. How come? I remember being asked by my daughter one time, when I was trying to get out of a whole sequence of how comes of just saying, well, for various reasons, which various reasons, this capacity that we have, our language horizon is not to tell stories about nature. Creation myths are not stories about nature. They have a narrative quality to them. And this narrative quality is very, very interesting. There was a. A woman who wrote some beautiful studies, and her studies of, of mythology are extremely well appreciated, even though she's largely forgotten these days. This is, uh. This is from one of the volumes that the United States government published. Back around the turn of the 20th century. I think this was 1904. Yeah, 1904. This was a study done about one of the mythic stages. This is a corn mother. And this is from the Zuni Indians, in where Arizona and New Mexico have their border together. The Zuni, in historic times, are somewhat clustered around the border of New Mexico and Arizona. But in older times they stretched from the Petrified Forest to the Pecos River. So that entire swath of land of the southwest of the United States was inhabited by a series of peoples, now known as pueblos. There might have been 20 or 30 different kinds of pueblos. The most famous, of course, the Hopi or the Zuni. And the first time that they were contacted by European civilization was in 1539. And as late as the 1690s, they were trying to get rid of the European influence. And finally, in the 1690s, a man named Vargas simply punished everyone ten times over for any infraction, and a conquistador and Catholicism was imposed upon the culture. I remember one time I was going into Alberta, Canada, about 1970, And I gave a ride to a young Blackfoot man, and he was telling me of how difficult it was for the Blackfoot Indians of his generation. He was maybe in his 30s. How difficult it was for men of his generation to talk to women, that the tribal men and women were raised separately and not allowed to speak their own language in Catholic schools, and they didn't know how to talk to each other. So that when they got together, they had to have alcohol or something as a medium. And then there was just a seizing of each other. And that was the extent of the sensitivity of the interplay. This quality of taking a civilized form and putting it over a Unnatural ritual. Mythic symbolic process is always destructive. And because the symbolic form of a civilization has a conscious transform, it always wins out. It's only when those persons are able to develop a counter transform in themselves that they have any chance at all not to become zombie ized, or to commit suicide or suicide. The quality here of the corn mother is part of the way in which the ancient peoples who were nomadic received the gift of agriculture, of planting corn, and began to be not just in nomadic journeys, but to concentrate in certain locales and have permanent settlements, and the permanent settlements originally are evidenced by the digging of wells and the digging of food storage pits. And in order to keep the food storage pits formed, lining them with stone, and finally learning to take those underground stone structures and turn them upside down so that you had granaries built. And pretty soon you were able to have linked rooms as large dwellings and large kivas, and you had the classic Pueblo civilization, the cities, the city dwellers. All of this happened between about And 1500 A.D. in that thousand year period. How long those peoples were nomadic before is Indeterminable. But in sites like Folsom Cave or Gypsum Cave, southwest southeast Nevada, there are. Arrowheads that show an ancient nest which may go back to 20,000 years. There are bones of extinct species of buffalo that hadn't been around for more than a thousand years. There were extinct species of animals very much like camels, which haven't been in the southwest for 10,000 years. These ancient nomadic ways Still carried over when the agricultural quality came in a new cultural phase, so that one of the synthesizing, integrating threads of the mythologies was the way in which a life pattern integrated itself along a road, so that one's road, one's way in life, uh, going back to the participation in nature with a nomadic way of following with the animals, of garnering the plants and their seasonal time, undergoing a change, not a sea change initially, but eventually a real sea change of managing the animals and managing the plants and saving them and rooting the civilization so that the mythology has both a hunter nomadic quality and also a settled agricultural quality, but knit together in such a way that their synthesis is along a narrative line which follows the road of life, and that the cycles of like wheels upon which that road of life flows. Those cycles belong to the seasons, they belong to the years, they belong to the way in which ritual comportment participates with nature, with the animals, with the plants, with the climate Synthesized with the landscape, so that one's road of life is an integral dynamic in a field which is further synthesized and characterized almost like a matrix by the landscape, so that the earlier nomadic qualities were to use caves for dwelling, but later on to use underground pits and caverns for food storage. And yet, oddly enough, the food storage was accompanied by the sepulchres of the dead held over from the ancient times. You would never, in any culture that had the level of need for purification that the Zuni Indians would have, you would never have the burial of dead with food storage had it not been for that Quality, that they were buried in the same kinds of vehicles, and that the association was not an impurity whatsoever. This is a way in which the ancient quality of nomadic and the new quality of the agricultural myths were brought together so that the storytellers, the singers, not so much a storyteller, but the singer, the one who sings the myths, would hold a vehicle like this. And there were two of them. There was one female and one male. The male had a white feathered motif and the female a brown feathered motif, and these narrative implements were meant to keep the cadence like a storyteller's cane, like the staff or the scepter of an ancient priest king. It's the quality where language is measured in a particular way. And we know today that it carries all the way through even something as recent as just a, I think, 30 years ago, Finding the Center The Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, edited by Dennis Tetlock, has a whole couple of pages of how to recite, how to say aloud, how to orally present the myths of the Zuni. And that one needs to pause at least half a second each time a new line begins, and at least two seconds between the separating sets of lines. Use a soft voice for words and in small type, and if we print it in large type loud voice and the chant splits the lines, there are half tones, and vowels sometimes are doubled up and stretched so that one gets into a cadence, a rhythm of declamation. And it's that rhythm of declamation that holds the energy. If you don't speak in that measured way, the energy leaks out. So that language as an energy only has dramatic form when it's presentational. Flow is in a parallel with the mystery of nature. If you try to capture nature in some static form, it always leaks out. And you're always left with something then profane. What you have bagged is bankable and nature is not ever that more after a break. We're. We're exploring, we're talking about and we're exploring in a particular way. We're talking about the road of life, the on the road of life, the way in which they singer of ceremonies, the Hatta Ali hatta Ali, will sing the ceremony so that the ceremonies as a whole, it's better to call them a sing. Not the mythology, but the sing. It's a presentation. Accurate to each juncture, each movement, each number in the periodicity. Hour after hour, day after day, until the ceremony is presented in such a way that that ceremony presented makes a form. The ritual actions establish its existentiality and the feeling toned language. The. The mythos establishes that that energy will flow that way and carry in the participation of the mystery of nature will carry it through so that an integration occurs. It happens just as ritual was the actions that establish and maintain existence. Myth is an endeavor to carry that existence in such a way that the mystery of nature infuses our life, so that the road of our life is the good red road. To paraphrase our ancestors in this landscape, and there's a great deal of difference between making an appraisal or even an appraisal of these people and these things in an academic way, from understanding as a human being whose own appreciation can deepen into wisdom. It's different. It's a difference between philology and linguistics. Philology is a 19th century study of languages. To get back to the other language, the underneath the Greek and the Sanskrit, to get back to the Indo-European er, language. And it's all an integral concern. But linguistics is a differential consciousness. It's not about getting back to an other language. It's about understanding all possible languages. How to speak in not just many tongues, but any tongues. That one could speak with beings from a completely different star system and understand their linguistics. It's about that kind of humanity which we are now. We're being emergent into that, not burst into that, but emergent whole. And it takes time to get used to it. Our Zuni Ceremonialism papers by Ruth Bunzel. She belonged to a whole generation of genius anthropologists. They were largely women. Ruth Bunzel co-edited with Margaret Mead this commemorative volume, The Golden Age of American Anthropology, selected and edited with introduction and notes. Margaret Mead and Ruth Bunzel. And just because Ruth Bunzel is forgotten by most people doesn't mean she isn't major. She belonged to a population of maybe two dozen women. Many of them studied with Franz Boas, who went out and became a part of the people, about the only masculine anthropologist who went into the depth that these women went into was Bronislaw Malinowski, who, when he was investigating in the Solomons, north of New Guinea. The World war broke out and he couldn't leave, and he had to live with the people for 3 or 4 years. And he came to understand that he hadn't understood before. He had learned about, but he hadn't understood. And so the mythic horizon is only appreciable from a depth of understanding, a profoundness of participation in the nature of the reality here. One of the women who is completely forgotten. I was showing you the corn mother from one of her great manuscripts has the name Alice C Fletcher. Has anyone ever heard of Alice Fletcher. And yet her study of the Pawnee Indian ceremony was epochal. And as someone at the Smithsonian Institution 100 years ago writing about her. Saying during earlier days the rituals were so far esoteric as to generally escape the notion and the notice of ethnologists. They didn't even see that they were forms, that they were things. But during recent years, a few students, notably Miss Fletcher, have been permitted to witness the sacred ceremonies through invitation because she was a part had become a part of the population. And even to examine and obtain interpretations of the magic bundles, which serve as the tangible basis of the rituals. In Algonquin, the term for that is a knot. The ritual bundle, where the the keys of tuning the energy so that the process in all of its phases will flow as one. And it's not just that these are stupid primitive items out of superstition at all. It's like a musician who needs to score. He needs to know in what key is he scoring. And he needs to know his time signature. And then if there is a melodic line, he can work that in, in such a way and compose with it. The medicine bundles the notes like that. These sacred ceremonies, all of these rituals are impressive. Some, like the Hako, are of remarkable richness, not only in gesture, in gesture, to go with the cadence of the language in gesture and measured movement, but in the poetic imagery expressed in word music and pantomime. There was a great deal made at one time of how could you index gesture and motion? How could you come up with a way to talk about that? And there is such a thing as labanotation in dance of how to note down and choreograph movement and viola Spolin, who developed the whole idea that there are choreographical scenes, episodes of action and activity that are universal in drama. And she found 214 of them. I remember talking to her one time and saying, do you know, that's almost the number of primordial radicals in the Chinese language that, aside from all of the characters that one could learn in Chinese, there are about 214 radicals that are like the medicine bundles of the way in which that language works. And if you don't know those, you can't write and speak Chinese. Even though you might have the vocabulary, it doesn't come together. It doesn't gel as a language. And so myth is about how language not only gels, has it's integral, but has it's integral in a plasma energy. So it flows so that life is secure in that not secure because the portfolio is fat. Because life is rich, it's nourished. That birth can happen because emergence is already real. There's a place for them to be born into. And if existence hadn't emerged already, life giving birth would be a travesty. So there are number of levels here. 100 years ago, Miss Fletcher's record appears to be perfect, and she has analyzed with acumen the rhythm and melody of the chants, the symbolic harmony of the accompanying pantomime, and the meaning expressed in the intricate figures of the dance and movements of the march that form essential features of the ceremony. From Miss Fletcher's rendition and interpretation, it would seem that these elaborate rituals Open a vista. Looking directly on the beginnings of song, dance, drama, poesy. That's poetry. And they're relevant to any of us who will understand ourselves. These kinds of words were true then. They are true now. And it's out of the study of the welter, the complexity of American Indian languages that linguistics got born not philology, but linguistics. And it was discovered that there is an enormous difference between the language that the Zuni speak and the language that any other people around them speak. They didn't speak a dialect that was different. Their language was of a completely different family. They'd come from somewhere else so long before that they had no linguistic relationship to anybody else around. We know that the Navajo came into that northern Arizona region about 5600 years ago, and their language belongs to the Athabascan language of British Columbia and southern Alaska. That's their family. Whereas the Hopi, their language, belongs to the Uto-Aztecan language from southern Mexico. The fact is, is that there have been men and women in this Americas continental sequence for long enough that there are so many different language families and groups as to almost stagger the imagination. The Los Angeles area had more than 20 language families. They had more linguistic Diversity in the Los Angeles Basin than all of Europe. Why? Because people were coming over large durations of time, and they were cutting and breaking with whatever they were leaving and coming and pioneering into a new wilderness and starting often from scratch and carrying almost nothing over again and again. And so you find American language groups in the Indian population of being miniature developments, of whole alternate histories of expressive mankind. And so linguistics, when it had this kind of an array, hundreds of different language families was able to begin to look at how then does language work not to find an oral language, but to find a way to appreciate the mysteriousness of that mythic element, a feeling toned experience of the communication of the human, of the way in which life receives its energy, striations that allow it to flow and continue, and to synergize with the way in which nature happens. Not because we have guessed our way, right, but because we are living realistically in the very mysterious context of nature, out of which emergence occurs, and now out of which our birthing can occur and our lives can be real and our deaths not terminal. So that the whole ecology of these things we're looking at and we're pairing with Ruth Bunzl's work on the Zuni, the ritual language. The ceremonies were pairing with her Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Here's the Penguin Classics edition and the Oxford World's Classics edition, two different editions. There are many translations of it. I used to like Marie Boroff's translation in the Norton paperback, which you can find. Whoever it was 600 years ago that used the English language like this, was really somebody and disclosed that in that mid section of England, some 6 or 700 years ago, there was a monumental shift in the way in which language was used, characterized now for us by Chaucer, that the English language before that had a kind of very heavy Germanic kind of an origin, had a kind of a deep Latin affinity for some of the newer words, so that when you go back and you try to read the Venerable Bede, his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, written in the late 600 seconds, you find that it's very similar to the kind of English that Beowulf is written in. But if you compare Beowulf's Old English with Chaucer's Middle English, you're you're dazzled. All of a sudden there's a whole different concern. It's not a concern to characterize the ritual comportment of the action as the foundation, but to allow for the characterization of an enrichment of life through symbolic challenge and Chaucer's Middle English. He once characterized it himself. They said, my stories are about a fair field full of folk. It's about the variety of human character. And you can read Beowulf thousand times. It's not concerned with the variety of human character. It's concerned with the king slaying the monster Grendel and then discovering 50 years later that he has to slay something even worse. And that's the monster's mother. That Grendel's mother comes back to haunt him, comes back to kill him. And that Beowulf, English national hero as he is, will die in that. But by the time of Middle English, there is a transform understanding that there is a realm of mysteriousness in nature, that if our mythic language happens in just the right, balanced way that the mystery of nature is balanced by the mystic capacities of visionary consciousness, that the mystery of nature and the magic of a supernatural realm come to focus in the flow of that mythic language. And so Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written in one of the most demanding cadences of a storyteller ever invented. Every single line of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has triple alliteration. Three words in every line have the same alliterative beginning, so that one is disciplined to speak in a way in which you have cascades of triads all the time. It's even more difficult than the rhyme of Dante And though it's short, it is colossal in its effect because you get this accumulation of resonance that the language, the Middle English language here carries a sense where this myth, this myth of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight brings the mystery of nature and the magic of the supernatural into such a synergy that they play as the dynamic that's carried by the energy of this, so that there is a double mystery disclosed in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And the setting for it. Takes the much vaunted Knights of King Arthur, the King Arthur, as the foundation. Even before Beowulf, Arthur's Round table, his knights, his Camelot, his Archetype. That archetype, which John Day sold to Queen Elizabeth as being the great foundation for an English hegemony in the world and founded the British Empire on it. But here, in Chaucer's time, somebody in the Midlands of England began this. In the same way in which Homer's epics ended after the battle and the attack were over at Troy, the town beaten down to smoking brands and ashes, that man enmeshed in the nets of treasury, the truest of men, was tried for treason. I mean Aeneas, the high born who? So it begins as a continuation of the epics which established civilization in the Greco-Roman antiquity at the foundations of Europe. So who's writing this? Is saying this is a new epoch to found a new civilization like Greece was founded on Homer and Rome was founded on Virgil. Here's a new epoch to found a new civilization. And in fact, it did. It found a civilization of a personally expressive English language. Because after Chaucer, you get the development of English as a personal language. And after only 200 years of acquaintance with this kind of personally expressive Middle English language, you find someone who can raise the personal expression to a cosmic spectrum. 200 years after Chaucer comes Shakespeare, and he takes that revolutionary transform of English And splays it out into a differential consciousness that is truly cosmic. Shakespeare is not writing on the basis of a ritual universe. He is writing on the basis of an infinitely differential conscious cosmos in which we are staggered by the possibilities of our own freedom and fearful deepest of all, of not of Grendel, or even of his mother, but of ourselves. And so this is a monumental difference. And Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the epic that begins that, not The Canterbury Tales, but Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And it's as if at the same time, in the same place, because the language had come to a threshold where it would receive this visionary transform, and that the new language was characterized by a sudden, brilliant splendor of openness that only a couple of times in civilizations on this planet have we ever seen the like. A contemporaneous writer with the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a little religious tract written in the same place at the same time. It's a middle English Upanishad, and The Cloud of Unknowing stretches out to show not only do we have to get such a deep wisdom that we don't know what is behind us anymore, it's covered by a cloud of unknowing, but that we are also have the courage of spirit and the purity of heart to continue, even though the cloud of unknowing extends before us into the future so that unable to see the past or the future, we can, with the spiritual courage of the pristine present, continue in our lives, confident that these lives are in the mystery of nature, and therefore they must also in some way yet to be found, be in the mystery of the magic of consciousness and the future. And so human beings, for a brief shining moment, found themselves totally, absolutely free in their language, their ability to communicate with each other. It's like the Chinese language at the beginning of the Zhou dynasty, 1200 BC. The Chinese language at that time flamed into the ability to have lyric poetry for the first time in their history. And you see the Confucian classic The Song of Songs. And what are those poems about? What are those hymns about? What are those songs about? But the gorgeous splendor of the new people who have this courage and confidence. They don't have to hide behind the Shang bronzes of armor. They emerge with the mobility of people who are able to re calibrate the world for themselves. And the old divinatory process of the tortoise shell gave way to the new transform of using the agricultural stocks. And you've got a new I-Ching instead of an etching. That was a divination of events of which you report to the head of the dynasty of the time. This was a way that anyone could do, not just a divination for themselves. You didn't have to report it to anyone, but you could find a way to understand that this was not about divination of how to do the right thing. This was how to understand the possibilities of mobility in your own life, so that the phrase in the new E Ching, in fact, the alternate name for the I Ching to this day, 3000 years later, is the GE, The Book of Jo. We don't even have the pre jo dynasty e Ching because it was never written as a book. It was only marshaled by those divinatory augurs who would report only to the Emperor, whereas the itching that we have today is a book of wisdom that one can learn a matrix of transform, that one can master, a tool of differentiation that one can bring into play for both consciousness and the mastery of nature together. And so the language of the Joey, the I Ching, transforms from a ritual base to a symbol transform. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight belongs to this era where the English language changed and revealed the possibilities of being human on a scale that was unimaginable before then, and it took as its theme the pride of that ancient foundation of that old culture and showed its vulnerability. The Knights of the Round Table. Arthur's court gathered together. The epic is placed so that it begins on Christmas Eve, the holiest time of their ritual year, and ends a year later in just a couple of days. It ends on New Year's Day, and in between you have the nail biting tension. Because the whole Arthurian mythos of invincible traditional courage has been fractured permanently. And in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, all of the knights are gathered with King Arthur and Guinevere and the entire court and the entire kingdom is at peace because it's contained in this form, and that form is fractured in one brief episode. They thought they had prepared even to the nth degree, because they left one seat at the Round table open, unmanned by someone called the Siege Perilous. It was a perilous seat. You didn't want to sit there. The only person who would sit there would be someone of ultimate purity, who would be able to find the Grail to complete the Grail quest. Until that perfect knight came, that chair was unoccupied. And so they thought that they had covered every aspect, even this mystical humility. And yet they were not prepared for the challenge that came to them in the figure. The mythic figure of the Green Knight and the Green Knight Strides in brilliant green green livery, and he challenges anyone at Arthur's Court to a beheading contest. And he says, I will let any of your knights behead me if you will send that knight on a quest to my castle in a year and a day, and let me behead him. Of course, everyone clamors to be the one to take his head off. This is an easy way to win. No it's not. It's a sucker bet. They didn't recognize it was Willie Mosconi in armor. You can't run the table on Willie the Green Knight is appointed to be challenged by Sir Gawain, who is Arthur's relative and is also before Lancelot. Going was the number one knight in the Round Table. Gwen is the ancient version of of the gritty hero, not landslide. He's a winner of tournaments and. But Gwen is is the toughie that you want on the battlefield. He's like an Arjuna. And Gwen cuts off the head of the Green Knight. And it bounces and rolls on the floor. And the Green Knight headless strode's over and picks up his head and holds his head up. And the head says, I will see you at my castle in a year. Be prepared and walks out. And all this time for a year, Gwen goes through the machinations, and the writer of this says goin was a very peculiar type of hero. He had a stellar radiance to his capacities, and his livery was of vermilion colored with a gold star that was done in such a way that the line never lifts from the plain. So that this is like a royal blood color. If it were blood in light, if light were in a plasma like blood, it would show in sunlight this color. And the gold star is the sacred pentacle of the old hermetic star, meaning unending form, a form that is not limited but is unending, so that even though it is not infinite in itself, it has the capacity to endure it eternally and becomes de facto an infinity, and Gawain's livery stands him in very good stead until it comes time to depart. And he rides to the far north, goes to the wilds of Scotland, and there, at the Green Knight's castle, the day before he is to fight, he finds a man and his wife, a knight and his beautiful wife, who take him in for the evening, and they feed him, and the wife raises an eye at Sir Gawain, who has an eye for the ladies always. And as Sir Bertilak in the morning is going off on his hunt. Knights used to just hunt, And he says, I will make an exchange with you. Whatever I get during the day, I will give to you. If you will give whatever you get during the day to me. And of course, the wife immediately slips into his chambers and manages, after some delicate conversation, to give him a kiss. And Sir Gawain. When the knight, Sir Bertilak, comes back, Gwen kisses him and says, I did receive this from your wife. And Bertilak gives him the game and this riddle of exchange, this mystery of reciprocity, which is the ritual foundation for complementarity, continues for three nights. It has to go. It has to go into this kind of a triad. And finally at the end. The wife, sensing this is her last opportunity, offers herself to him, and Gwen manages to say no and she gives him her garter to taunt him just a little further, but also to reward him. And Gwen wears her green garter on his armor, and when he rides out the next day, he finds the Green Knight, and the Green Knight takes this huge curved blade and he says, ah, you're the noblest knight of King Arthur's realm. You're the most complete and perfect knight of the courtesy of this entire civilization. Well, it's time for you to go on one knee and bow your neck. And he brings the blade down and stops it just before it touches. And then he laughs at Gwen. He says, you flinched. And Gwen waits, and a second time he brings the blade down and just barely creases his neck. So it begins to. In a wound like that, blood will ooze out. And you, what you feel is you feel the welling of the blood, and it becomes heavy, almost like a deep, viscous sweat on the back of his neck, which is where fear registers. And then he says, I need to try one more time. And the next time that he brings the blade down, it just barely misses him. And Gwen immediately leaps up with his sword. And then the Green Knight says, you wouldn't have been nicked if you hadn't accepted that garter. You had been perfect up to that point in your life would have been spared completely without a blemish, but because of taking the garter, you will wear that scar. That blemish. And that garter became the order of the Garter, the most sacred institution in English history, of which the history was written by Elias Ashmole at the time of Samuel Pepys in the late 1600s in England. It's the way in which knighthood is not a spiritual perfection of differential consciousness, but is the highest level to which worldly men can achieve, and that is a level not of perfection, but of remaining open to further education, to further improvement. And so, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This Middle English epic, this quality of a transform powered by a new language by the Chaucerian. Middle English, by the. The new way to express one's richness of experience is coupled with the Zuni ceremonies that Ruth Bunzel found that the Zuni language was so ancient and so distinct, that the Zuni mythology became an index to the completeness of a world, even though the population of people was never more than a couple of thousand. There are more Zuni alive today in 2000 than there have ever been, and there are about 7 or 8000 Zuni, so that all of this richness came out of a population about the size of a city block in a city like Los Angeles. It is staggering to think of the richness and excellence of a small group of men and women as a comparative index before we break for today. The Blackfoot nation in Alberta and Montana controlled an area the size of France, and they never had more than 2200 men who could ride at any one time. So when we're talking about American Indian tribes, we're not talking about primitive people, very sophisticated human beings. What's of interest to us, from them here is the same as the Middle English of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Their mythos, their mythic language, their mythic horizon is complete enough and different enough from everyone else to disclose to us something that we need to know because we are trying to find a new mythic horizon for ourselves. Not to stop there, but that that stage is necessary. And it's not a quality of finding new myths. That's not it at all, but the quality of finding a way so that our language feeling toned experience. Ah, living language is participatory in the mysteries of nature enough so that we can truly live, but also evoke that language of the conscious future to come into play. When you have both those together, you get a resonance of wholeness. It's a mystery that 2000 years ago entered into the final stage of the Greek language. Greek in the late first century AD, became the Greek of the Hermetic treatises, became the Greek of the Gospel of Saint John, became the Greek of the Book of Revelation, became the Greek that Plotinus used, and that Greek language then recognized that past and future were resonantly symmetrical align along a line of development that somehow is what history really is, and that events in the present have reverberations in the past as well as in the future, and that one of the qualities of prophecy was to show what the future resonance will be, because it will be in some way symmetrical to a past arc of resonance, and that one of the mysteries of cosmic history is that our road of life moves through a form of resonance, a target of harmonic, of which we experience the first arcs, maybe hundreds of years before the complementary arcs occur. Deep wisdom. More next week.