Myth 6

This is myth six, and we're trying to appreciate. A mythic horizon. Is that tapestry, that woven tapestry of feeling toned experience that is conveyed by language? Oral language myth is an oral language. It's a spoken language, not something yet like a phenomenological speech acts, but spoken language, which has a metronomic Gnomic quality of rhythm that integrates around a drum beat or a heartbeat, so that the spoken language cadence of weaving is very close to the way in which nature is a process mysteriously works, so that the quality of a culture and the sustenance of a tradition are intimately paralleled with nature. It's not that one fits into nature, but that one is natural, and a culture becomes natural to the landscape in which it occurs, so that when we look at the Zuni people with fanfare, The Zuni people have been in what we know as America for so many thousands of years that they are profoundly woven into the landscape in which they occur. Now, we know from blood types that there were two major incursions of immigration from North Asia. The most recent one about 12,000 years ago. And all the blood types of those immigrants actually come down in North America almost as far as the Canadian border, Montana and so forth. So that when you look at the Blackfoot or the Cree or any of the Algonquian speaking language groups. Any of the Athabascan speaking language groups, which include recent migrants like the Navajo who went to the American Southwest about 4 or 500 years ago. All those blood types are very similar. They all came down largely through the Mackenzie River corridor about 12,000 years ago. But there was an indigenous group at that time that had come about 10,000 years before that, about 22,000 years ago. And that group that came were here so long that their migration inching went all the way to Tierra del Fuego before there was any incursion in that last melting of the glaciers 12,000 years ago. The Zuni people, the Pueblo peoples most certainly are one of the most ancient and therefore one of the pioneering groups from that earliest incursion, so that the Zuni language bears almost no resemblance to any other language family. It isn't just a different dialect. It isn't just a different language, completely different language family. Now, among the other Pueblo groups like the Hopi, their language is related to Uto-Aztecan, and there's obviously an influence from the far south of Mexico into some of the Pueblo cultures. The Zuni have a special place, and because of the duration of time that they've been here acclimating first, being, of course, nomadic hunters in the landscape and then later coming into an agricultural the Neolithic Revolution of agriculture, which in the old Eurasian places like Jericho was about 10,000 BC, in places like the Zagros Mountains of Iran about 9000 BC. In Thailand about 9000 BC. So that the Zuni people have been agricultural for a very long time. We don't know just how long, but for many thousands of years. And they were acclimated. And the sense of their acclimation to the landscape is poignant in that the central concern of the Zuni and Their, uh, their characterization of themselves is not, uh, uh, to call themselves Zuni, but the ashiwi ashiwi. Their central concern is to find and to maintain the middle place so that what is now Zuni, the Pueblo city, the village of Zuni in eastern northern New Mexico, south of Gallup, maybe 40 miles. 50 miles. That's the middle place. And one can, in a cursory way, understand. Well, this is the middle place in the spread of the Zuni Pueblo language landscape, which went from the eastern part of northern Arizona at one time all the way to the Pecos River in north west Texas, but shrank in rather historical times. The earliest European contact with the Zuni was in 1539. So almost 500 years ago, and at that time the Zuni landscape had begun to shrink. And Zuni was about in the center, between a city on a high plateau called Acoma, and on the other side, the Petrified Forest region of northern Arizona. And in that parentheses of landscape, the current place of Zuni is about in the middle. But what the Zuni word for middle place is doesn't refer just to the landscape of a geography, but to that fulcrum that focus in the universe where there are all the forces that occur in their patterns, have a pivot at that fulcrum and that focus. If you see early engravings on shells or stones from early America, say, the mounds of Ohio or Tennessee from maybe a thousand years ago, you will find repeated many times a square, a frame of reference, which is a continuous flow and there'll be three ribbons altogether. And when it comes to a corner, it will make a loop. And when it comes down to another corner, another loop, so that you get a continuous flow, you get a frame of reference, you get a square of attention that is bounded by a triple continuous flow. And it's the continuity of that flow of that kind of triple flow that makes it possible to locate the center, the middle place. And for the Zuni people, this is the central concern. Any of the other concerns that one would have, like an agriculture that originally focused around corn, squash and beans, and only later, after the conquistadors came, did they add things like peaches, But that corn, squash and beans those are themes that are there in the myths, in the mythic horizon, but they are not woven by symbols so much. The symbols later on are indexing integrals that elicit and raise the meaning in thought to much higher levels, but the original integral is not done by symbols, it's done by ritual language. And the early ritual language or prayers, so that the mythic tapestry of the horizon of an ancient people like the Zuni, they use Ritual poetry as integrals rather than symbols. The symbols are certainly there, and later on one can find them, but the original weaving was done in this other way. For instance, about 30 years ago, a man named Dennis Tedlock went down to try and do some transcriptions of Zuni poetry. He was interested in in the kind of poetic movement of the early, late 60s and early 70s that Gary Snyder was interested in, Jerome Rothenberg. I've tried to find what was the poetry of native peoples all over the world. What was Australian Aborigine poetry about? What was American Indian poetry about? How do they create poetry? And his book was called Finding the Center on the Zuni Indians. Their poetry is all about that all the time. But the finding of the center is not done by a geometric city. That is symbolic, but it's done by a ritual geometric city which uses a ritual form of language to integrate. If we come to this kind of a monograph, this was one of the great early monographs in American anthropology. This was published privately in New York City. Monographs of the American Ethnological Society published during the Second World War by Gladys Reichard. Prayer. The compulsive word. And we read in Ruth Bunzl's monograph on Zuni ritual poetry. She writes, prayer is never the spontaneous outpouring of the overburdened soul. It is more nearly a repetition of magical formulae. Spoken prayer in Zuni is called to prayer talk, and it includes this repetitive, ritualized phrasing and styling. And here's an example. And in Gladys Reichard of A prayer. This is a Navajo prayer, but it's very similar to derivative from the quality of the earlier Zuni or Hopi type of prayer. It begins at Rumbling Mountain. Holy man with the eagle. Tall feathered arrow Glides out this day I have come to be trustful. This day I look to you with your strong feet. Rise up to protect me. With sturdy legs. Rise up to protect me. Your strong body rise up to protect me. Your healthy mind rise up to protect me. And in this way, the language cadence establishes itself and very quickly goes into a kind of an overlay. That the repetition is not a repetition of dull rounds that are stacked, but they're overlaid so that you get this kind of overlapping, and it's almost like pleating so that the pleats have an elasticity. They're able in a twirl to balloon out and become the full fabric like an umbrella. Whereas when they're folded first into the initial declamation, they have that pleated quality, they have that repetitive quality. And towards the end of this prayer. The collection, the integration of powers. From Red mountain, it has become beautiful for me again. From where snake lies around, it has become beautiful for me again. From grinding Snake Place it has become beautiful for me again. From where female rains fall, it has become beautiful for me again. And it goes on line after line. Local. Referent after local referent until it comes to a coda of ritual summation. Not symbolic summation, not a symbolic integration, but a ritual integration. Rituals integrate. This is using language in a ritual prayer way with beauty before me. May I go about with beauty behind me? May I go about with beauty beneath me? May I go about with beauty above me? May I go about with my speech under control. May I go about restoration to youth according to beauty. I have become restoration to youth according to beauty. Perfection. These I have become again. These I have become again. These I have become again. It has become beautiful again. It has become beautiful again. It has become beautiful again. It has become beautiful again. And so the prayer quality is not a personal lamentation or a personal calling out, but it's the use of ritual language to integrate. And only later will symbols integrate, and they will take their cue from this, so that not only are we attentive to a phrase from the American aesthetic philosopher Susanne Langer, where she wrote once in a book on problems of art, she said, I'm scouting the possibility that thinking is an elaboration of feeling and that in order to think clearly, one must first need to feel clearly that sentience precedes intelligence. That the the quality of settled feeling precedes the quality of clear thought. But even deeper than that, more profound than that, is that the ritual comportment combs out action first before sentience, which is before intelligence. So that symbolic integrals are third in an alignment, third on a list. They're not first, they're not primal at all. And it's not that they're derivative, but they follow. They follow a cycle which is established Symbols follow in their integration of meaning in the interiorization of language. They follow the way in which language orally has already followed the ritual comportment, the ritual objectivity, and that one can integrate by ritual actions, speak louder than words and louder than thoughts, so that an early primordial people like the Zuni do not depend upon thinking to navigate themselves in life. They depend upon the way in which rituals are pure, because they have not been thought up by man, but they have emerged in a real way from nature. And that nature in the stage setting of the landscape has allowed for this emergence to happen. That nature not only permits, but has an osmosis process that allows. It's mysterious, not boundaries so much. They're not like outline boundaries. That's a mental mistake. Nature's boundedness has a liminality to it, and those liminal thresholds are elastic, so that there is such a thing as beginning to appreciate the form. And when you get into the rhythm of the delivery of the action in its mythic Expansion. The pleats open out and one gets the full unfolded umbrella of what this really is. And so it's liminality is elastic and expands and its boundedness opens out. And the metaphor that thought would think of is that it's like a flower emerging out of a stem, which itself emerges out of a seed. And so there are remarkably. A pair of medicine bundles that are essential to the whole mythic horizon of the Zuni, the way in which they're used in connection is profound. I have a ethnological report published by the Smithsonian, published as a part of the government, the United States government, in 1904, the 23rd annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, John Wesley Powell, director for the years 1901 1902, published in 1904. This is what a photograph of the two medicine bundles a Aten, Aten, Aten in Algonquin. Their called notos. These two medicine bundles are a complementarity. They're a pair. And if you looked at the top of them. They have this kind of shape. This stone has four bundles in it and this one has eight. This medicine bundle deals with water, and this medicine bundle deals with seeds, water and seeds so that there is a tuning fork in the ritual comportment for the Zuni people that deals with water and seeds. Water as a mysterious process of nature, seeds as the ritual objects out of which life comes because they exist. Seeds primordially are existentials and are the first level of objectivity in a way. Protons are seeds. In a way, the advance cosmically into a neutron is the genetic morphing of the proton seed. And in an atomic nucleus, you can't have the gluing of many protons together without neutrons. They act in such a way that they create that strong force that allows it to accumulate and build. If you had just protons, it wouldn't do. The nucleus would be unstable. The seeds that are in the stone called the the chew eaten the chew. Etan has the eight reeds and the reeds about the size of a middle finger. You have to be careful demonstrating this. And these eight are arranged with one in the center and then seven around them, like a primordial clustering. Whereas in the other Aten, the Aten, which deals with water, three of the reeds are clustered together and the fourth is by itself, and the fourth is a little bit larger and contains a what the ethnologists called a diminutive toad, which is not dead, but is alive and stays alive. And these reeds, cut reeds are sealed with a kind of a black clay that comes from mythically deep under the earth, the uttermost part of the earth, the nadir, so that the nadir of the earth underneath the where the mythic horizon is. The mythic horizon, also can reach down to the nadir. And this black clay that seals these reeds and then mixed in with that black clay are bits of cotton fibers to give the clay a way to gel and maintain the sealing ness of it. And that little tiny toad about the size of a thumb first knuckle of a thumb, stays alive in that little sealed reed, in that eternity in that medicine bundle With the other three reeds containing water. And these medicine bundles, these eaten. The two kinds are kept in the place of the great Kiva at the center of the center. It's not the geometric symbolic point, but that center of the center occurs because of the crisscross focus of all six dimensions the four directions north, west, south and east, and also the nadir and the zenith. And that the way in which the vectors of the dynamic of those six directions crisscross, where they crisscross, that de facto, then, is the center. It's not that. It's a point. It is the occurrence of the intersection of all of their vectors together. Now, one would think naturally, that this must be a case where the zenith is takes the lead, but the north actually takes the lead. It's almost like the same orientation for map reading. Once you know north, then you have all of your objectivity. Once you know your origin, where you came from, how you got here onto this land, that direction from the north is the key to orienting. And so there are six special they used to call them 100 years ago. Priests. Six special priests for the the ashwani. The rain ceremony, one for each direction. It's the priest of the North. It's the medicine chief of the North. That is the one that takes care. That these two atiny are draped and hung exactly over the center of the center of the middle place, and that everything then has its ability to be coordinated. The coordination of space and time occur because one knows the placement, not according to a symbolic integrated geometry, but according to a ritual integrated geometry. And one's mythic language comes out of that pattern rather than the other way. Almost all the early ethnographers, almost all the early anthropologists got it upside down because they were men. They were European styled men. They were Anglo men. And they went and they wanted to find the essential ideas, the essential symbols. And they dealt largely with the ceremonies. And the ceremonies, like with the Zuni people, are almost all handled by the men. And it had nothing to do with life. Because in the Zuni people, like most native peoples, it's the women who give the structure to life. The men handle the ceremonies. They handle the ritual comportment that goes into making the ceremonies, but they do not handle the 95% of the rest of life. And so the early anthropologists, the ethnologists like Ruth Bunzel and Ruth Benedict, who went to Zuni in 1924, discovered that nobody had ever lived with the Zuni people and lived as Zuni and talked with the women. And when they communicated back to Columbia University, where Franz Boas was the director of the department and in charge of maybe a dozen of the great pioneering anthropologists, he said that the earlier ethnographers didn't talk to the women. The women were inaccessible to them. They wouldn't talk to them. Of course they wouldn't talk to them. So Ruth Bunzel went there. She was an interesting character, born in 1898, and she lived until till 1990. She lived to be 92. She just went to Barnard College and she was in general studies, minoring in history, and she worked as a clerk in an office and got bored with a stupid life in New York City. She'd grown up in New York City. She went over to Columbia University and got a job being the personal secretary to Franz Boas, who was in charge of the department. And after there for a couple of years, Boas was going to Europe for the summer, and Ruth Bunzel. Decided that she was going to go on a field expedition with Ruth Benedict, down to the Zuni, down to the American southwest. So she applied to be the secretary for Ruth Bunzel. And Boas said, this is disgusting. She recounted in an interview done in 1985, daughters of the American West did a whole series of interviews with some of the original people who who dealt with the First peoples. And she said Boas and his snorting way scoffed at the idea that she should go and do the typing. He said, go and have a project of your own. She said, well, I'm not trained as an anthropologist. He said, you can go and you can deal with something no one has dealt with. He said, why don't you go and deal with pottery? Do a monograph on Pueblo pottery, which he did do because pottery was made by women, not by men. Men don't make the pottery. Women make the pottery. And no one really knew anything about the pottery. They had collected pots, but they didn't know how they were made. They didn't know the ritual of making pots. They didn't know the mythography of the pots themselves and not just the stuff on the pots. And Ruth Bunzel did the original monograph on Pueblo pottery. It's still in print from Dover Publications. It's still in print after most of the 20th century. And when one comes to. Sort of the greatest of all the Pueblo potters, here's a monograph on her, done in 1948. Maria, the Potter of San Ildefonso. This is how Maria got her start. This is how a Pueblo woman who knew nothing about art, who knew nothing about mythology, but who knew about the life of the people and herself. She was given a little shard. A man said to her, if if you will copy, here's a piece of pottery with a design on it. I wonder if you would copy it. Let me see, said Maria. The piece of pottery was thin and hard, almost like stone itself. It was dark, shiny grey, with the design drawn on it in fine black lines. Maria had never seen any pottery like it before. It was beautiful. I can try, she said when she looked at the potsherd carefully. I never saw this kind of pottery made, but I can try. I can't make the design though. Why not? Because I can't make any designs. I don't know how to draw. And finally the man says, well, I will pay you. And of course, the convincing argument. So she carried this shard home with her and she carried it around, or she would set it up and she waited for it to develop something. All the time the old potsherd was in the back of her mind. She was thinking about it as much as about her other work, and every time she was conscious of thinking about the pottery, she put the thought away. This is the way a primordial people work with rituals, integrating rather than symbols. She didn't think about it every time she had a thought about it. She suspended that thought. She didn't follow that thought. So that the thought, the symbols, the ideas do not do the integrating, the actions do the integrating. Why? Because you want your mythology to come out of life and not out of the mind. A mythology that comes out of the mind is an Ideology like the Third Reich and is a completely different thing. It has. It has a neutered taste to it, like tear gas. I don't know if you've ever been to tear gas, but tear gas has a neutered metallic taste and there's nothing organic about it at all. And it's totally offensive because it has no place in the ecology of an organism at all. Whereas the acrid smoke of the dampest wood and a stupid fire still is recognizable as part of life. So you want your mythology to come out of the ritual integrals and not of the symbol integrals. The kind of language that comes out of symbols belongs in differential consciousness, in vision. That's what those are for. And indeed they're very powerful. But it has to do with something different from tradition. Visionary, differential, conscious language that comes out of the mind's symbols eventually deliver something called history, which is a very different process from myth. And both are essential. Both are a part of the vast complex of reality which we live and deal with. So here's Maria setting this shard around, and every time a thought would come, she would put the thought out of her mind. Because the resonance of existence, existence has emerged from nature, so it has a resonance quality to it. And that resonant quality of the existentials eventually awakens. Feeling to an undulating rhythmic flow of expressiveness called myth. And the hands themselves begin to seek out some way to express this hands that will gesture. Or if you're trying to make a pot, Maria first learned that you can't make a pot until you have the clay, and you have to have the right clay. And she didn't know anyone who knew anything about clays and began asking people, and finally heard from someone that there was a special kind of clay at certain bend of one of the rivers, Zuni River, Where you could go and you could find this also this special clay in certain bends of the Rio Grande River a little further north in New Mexico. And that this clay was very, very fine grained, so that when you worked with this very fine grained clay, it would take when it was put into a pot, when it was fired up, it would take very specific thin lines or very crisp outlines of design, so that the designs were not just, like drawn on, but they had an etched quality. And that etched quality allowed for the context, the open cream colored contacts or the white colored context, or just the clay itself to be like a context which allowed the forms to emerge and they were not designs on the clay, but they were designs suspended in the emergence from the clay, that the designs were existential and the clay of the pot was natural. It had the mysteriousness of nature so that the designs, instead of being labels on something, were forms that were suspended within the mystery of the naturalness. And Maria became one of the world's great potters. I mean really, really good museum quality par excellence, because she learned how to make all of this using ritual integrals rather than symbol integrals, and how to allow the mythology, the mythic horizon, to stay suspended in the mystery of nature. And this is very, very important way when the quality of language, when the quality of a myth in its language narrative form has not only the rhythm of the drum, the cadence of the heartbeat, but has that declamation quality allowing for the language to emerge. Then you have an emergent process which is fruitful and allows for something else to emerge out of it. And what emerges out of that kind of living language is the real mind. Let's take a break. Let's come back to the way language weaves a mythic horizon, and that mythic horizon literally extends, undulating over the landscape and reaches down to the as the Zuni is the Ashiwi people would say to the uttermost part of the underworld, and reaches also to the uttermost part of the upper world. And in the great Kiva. There was a trench in the floor of the great Kiva, and in that trench, about two thirds of the way down the trench, there was a hole. And early ethnologists didn't know what to make out of that. Well, was it a fire pit? While they didn't find any charcoal? And yes, the mythology talks about how the people emerged from the underworld, that the Earth mother is not just a Earth mother because she's earthy, but because she comes from the earth and emerges out of the earth onto the plane of the mythic horizon where life happens. Our life happens. And it was only later when the oral poetry movement began to sensitize people, that someone went to the great Kiva and went to the trench in the Great Kiva, and went over the hole in the trench and the great Kiva, and played the drums and the drum echo in there sounded exactly like it went penetrated into the earth. It was a resonant chamber to carry the rhythm from the children on the mythic horizon. The reverberations all the way back to the not the earth mother, but some woman who is there before the Earth mother. She is the lady of the Wild Things. She is the. Way in which emergence happens. The Great Mother is about birth, but the lady of the Wild Things is about emergence. It's more primordial. It's of how existence happens, whereas birth is how life occurs rhythmically, seasonally, out of existence, out of the existential. But you have to have the existential first. It has to be primordial. So they were not primitive people. In Canada, they're called the First Nations. They're primordial, primordial peoples. Whose concerns, then, is that the ritual establishes that viability of existence, and the mythic horizon comes like the fire. It comes. So that language flames out of the actions of things, and the actions of things participate in the mysterious processes of nature, water and seeds. For our kind. It's like a hatha yoga. As for the body, as a seed, as a unity and the karma, yoga is for the actions. And that when those two are working together, then and only then does one have a chance to develop a Jaina yoga, a yoga of understanding, a yoga of the mind, a yoga of knowing that knowing does not come out of symbols. It comes out of that weaving in the language, flaming out of existence, life flaming out of the existential. And this quality is there in the primordial peoples of the world, and many of us learn, learn to set aside university learning to respect this not from a distance or like in a museum case type of phenomenological ethos, but to participate in that, in doing that so that one can go out in the middle of the night and stand before the starry expanse and see that a constellation like Cassiopeia, the big W in the sky, which I'm fond of, is about the size of the human hand, held out at arm's length. And that you can you can hold your hand, and you can begin to sense the constellations as what you could not grasp, but what you could address in proportion to your body. The body then has a proportionate quality. Le Corbusier called it the golden mean. It can develop a whole ecology of proportions from this, from this seed. If one knows how to develop intelligence out of sentience and sentience, out of existence and existence appreciably emerging out of the mystery of nature. So that the problem in later cultures, not so much. In cultures it doesn't arise so much in cultures, but in civilizations, civilizations which are complex interfaces of many cultures. In civilization it's a real problem because the mind is so strong, it's so powerful, it's so preempts everything that one loses touch and loses the sense of Ordination, which would allow nature to be participated with. Because the mind, as we'll see when we get to symbols, excels at abstraction. And is the only stage of integration that does not have some direct connection or some direct parallel with nature. Not that the brain is unnatural, not that the mind is unnatural, but it comes a long way around in that circle, and the mind tends to close it off as a circle. And so that whole dynamic, instead of continuing in a spiraling, feeds back upon itself. And one has de facto regression, even though no one intended it and there were no evil geniuses, there were no bad little demons. There were no devils. And still the regression occurs as if it were unavoidable. And so whole compensatory ideologies are made by civilizations to overcome this evil, especially to throttle nature so that it doesn't just do its stuff, but it does what we tell it to do because we should know better. We have minds. This is a very grave and savage error. The 20th century paid dearly in the lives of hundreds of millions of people for this kind of arrogance, and the 21st century cannot afford it. Our capacities now are too too much for words. And so an education like this is to resensitize ourselves to the way in which the wisdom of those men and women who got us here. Actually, Operatively accepted transforms from the mind because they matured out of they were further integrations of. They were indexing meaning and language and comportment that came emergently originally out of the mystery of nature. When Ruth Bunzel went with Ruth Benedict in 1924 to Zuni and began her research, she recalled 60 years later, she said. The way anthropology characterized society when I first went there is that it was somehow all of what was of interest to anthropology came from old men with long memories and that that constituted what was real. Whereas when you went there and you lived with them and went back season after season, and made pots with the women and cooked with the women, and one saw that most of life was centered around that feminine quality, and that the Lady of Wild Things was very much emergently there all the time, but was never there in some abstracted, essential presence which the men, as anthropologists, were always trying to find, always trying to sift through like good 19th century philologists, especially from Germany, looking for the slime they the ultimate foundation out of which everything came. They would have been pleased to know about diatomaceous earth from the sediments of the ocean floor. And what does diatomaceous earth do better than anything in the world? It absorbs moisture, it absorbs water many times its own weight, and you can dry it out and use it again and reabsorbs moisture. It's a good moisturizer. If the ocean floors specialize in absorbing water. The cells, as we will find when we get next year to science. All cells have a very interesting paired structure in the cell walls. There's two types of tissue and the cell wall has water loving and water avoiding, and that this forms the seal. And that's how cells have their boundedness and their boundary, and one has channels through them. Usually it's a calcium atom or a sodium atom embedded in this paired cell wall of water loving and water avoiding. And it's through the ionic channels of calcium or sodium, or occasionally potassium, that one has the electrical communication between cells so that embedded in this tissue of life, which the women were participatory, not just guardians, but actuators of where the ionic channels of the ceremonies which the men were responsible for, and linking together like a neural system. But just studying the ceremonial nets from a symbolic prejudicial basis gives a distorted view. It gives an abstraction. It gives the kind of dry studies that were in plain paper covers, and soon just lined the shelves of university libraries, and no one read them. No one paid any attention to them. A different quality comes out when one participates on that existential level. This is a photograph of my spiritual grandfather, Tatanga Mani, walking buffalo. He represented the American Indians at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. He lived to be 97. And he was the keeper of the medicine bundle for the Indians that clustered around the Blackfoot and the Stoney, the Piegan, the blood in southern Alberta and northern Montana. And in order to guard against his medicine bundle going into an abstraction dimension into some museum, my spirit mother and I decided to bury it, to not let it exist on the horizon where it could be gotten, but to be returned back to its origin. And what was inside that? Nato's that medicine bundle. The center of the quality that was there was a buffalo skull with the horns intact and the hair the fur of the buffalo, though it was about 90 years old, was still red, reddish brown, tough, and still had a lanolin content to it, and nestled inside of that crown where the brain would go when you would wear that buffalo headdress. Tatanka means buffalo. Tatanka mani. Walking buffalo means that there is an interiorization of the ritual comportment of existence through the process of a language feeling toned, uh, expressiveness that accepts a transform where the symbol can do its work and not make an abstraction. But what happens when a symbol works is that it makes a vision. When the mind really works, instead of as a freeze dry frame to take a snapshot of something. It works as a lens that allows for a whole spectrum of differential consciousness to come out. This is totally different, and instead of having museum files of archival stuff, one has the visionary capacities and dimension which magically nature accepts. She accepts it, she welcomes it in and her time and her space. Her landscape facility accepts this in such a way so that an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright would talk about an organic architecture man in possession of his earth to make buildings that emerge out of the site, and that you couldn't imagine that building anywhere else except where it is, like the Johnson's Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin. Racine, sort of an industrial burg in between Chicago and Milwaukee, famous at one time for its pool halls. All the hustlers from Chicago would go up to practice in Racine. You could see all the great pool sharks in the United States in Racine and Nowhere plays. And yet the place where the Johnson's Wax Company had its headquarters, the place where the Whitman Publishing had its headquarters, that published all the little children's books. It's like the Site. The landscape. When it has a visionary quality, it exudes a fruitfulness, a fertility where you can see not only the direct line of the integration, but you can see the complementarity weaving itself back in. You can see vision and art and history and even science weaving its way back in. And this is the real. This is what is real. Existence by itself is no arbiter of the real. It's just a seed. It takes all of that maturation. That's why the universe is there for the mind. But only the cosmos is there for consciousness. That is the cosmos, this quality of looking at meth as an energy dynamic, as a frequency that language gains. It's not its utility, but its expressive imagery that images emerge in meth like existentials emerge from nature, like the proton or the electron comes out of the mystery of nature. Images emerge in that way. They have an emergent quality. They're not made. They're not manufactured so that when an image base has this living quality, the living image, it has an energy that allows Imagination to implode them together. And that's where the symbols come. Symbolic and Greek literally means thrown together. It's an implosion. And out of this comes a as Saint John of the cross once called it the living flame of love. Out of that kind of flame, very often you would see in the late Renaissance, in the what became the early 16th century, you would see it symbolized as a flame on the heart. Martin Luther, when he was first in his vision, used the flame on the heart as the as the symbolic fulcrum of what his vision was able to see. It's this quality that William Blake could because he had a mind that had come out of the mystery of nature, had come out of the ritual comportment of real Existentials had matured through a mythology which he himself had generated was pristine. He was able to look at people and see the flames of their spirit dance upon their person, or someone who has this naturalness, can look at a baby and see its character, see the character in the baby and know how to raise that baby, how to bring that baby out. Because it's this is concomitant with that baby's nature. Some little babies at two should be taught to swim because they are natural little dolphins. Others it really isn't there for it to something else. So that the primitive peoples is an abstract labeling of disservice, which as a generator of theories of myth, is totally worthless. It's useless. And the compendium of myth. On that basis I have have no value whatsoever. Where is this other way that we're beginning to sensitize ourselves to appreciate? All of a sudden you can realize the profound mystery in something like Homer's Odyssey. We're using Homer's Odyssey or Moby Dick as year long readings. These are our mythic narratives that are integrating the whole year of Saturdays for ourselves. Either one in The Odyssey, Homer has his protagonist, Odysseus. Definitely a man, But the Odyssey does not move by a masculine ecology of event. It moves by a feminine ecology of event. All of the centers of focus pivot around women, around Calypso, around Circe, around Nausicaa, around Athena, and always looming in the background for Odysseus, around Penelope. And if you pronounce her name in the old mythic cadence in the Homeric Greek pay, Nello, pay she is the mythic presentation of perfect balance. Pay nello. Pay what she weaves by day. She weaves by night So that her woven tapestry is never advanced nor regressed from exactly where it was when she began it. Why is she doing this? Because she has become the context within which Odysseus ultimately can come back to his day of homecoming. He could be Odysseus, and he could be some variant of Odysseus on his own, but he could not ever have his day of homecoming unless he could come home. And his coming home is not just regaining his kingdom. He's king of Ithaca. Nor is it the further concern, which is also very important, of regaining his son Telemachus, who in the Odyssey has just turned 21 and doesn't yet know how to be a man. He knows how to be a prince, but he doesn't know how to be a king. Further from that is Penelope. Odysseus only will have his day of homecoming if Penelope is there to receive him, to accept him, and her acceptance is on the basis that she has maintained an equilibrium, which is what acceptance is really all about. And at the end of the Odyssey, when all the suitors are killed, when Telemachus is shown how to become a king, how to make the transition from a prince to a king. The final thing that makes the entire epic happen, its mythic horizon, come full round, is that he must be accepted by her. And of course, she says, well, after 20 years, I don't know if you're the man that that left. You've killed a lot of people in the meantime. I've heard stories, and I've heard all the stories that you've made up about all your adventures and all these women. You live with Calypso. For many years, you were in bed with Cersei, the great sorcerers. I don't know who you are. And so she says to him, we'll talk about it in the morning. In the meantime, I'll have the servants set the bed outside in the hallway, and that's when he loses his temper. He says the equivalent of son of a bitch. He says, has someone cut loose my bed? I'll kill them Because when we were married, I took a living olive tree and made the first post of our bed out of the living olive tree. Has someone cut the goddamn tree and moved my bed? Our marriage bed. And then she knows that it's him. Because only to him. Would that be that important? Only to him would he know that that's how that was. No one else has ever known that. No one else has ever seen the bed other than where it is. It couldn't be moved. And then she accepts him because she has maintained that olive tree. Exactly where it is. That marriage bed is founded, where it grew, where it emerged from the earth, from the under earth. And in this way, Penelope is not just the mother of Telemachus, and she's not just the wife of Odysseus, but she, in that mode is the lady of the Wild Things. She harbors the mystery of nature that allows for all these complexions of human life, all the complexities in their variety to come to a focus. Calypso can't do that, goddess though she is. Cersei can't do that. Athena herself cannot do that. But Penelope can. She can accept the entire ecology of the integral. And by accepting it, allow for the fertility that allows for the emergence of spiritual consciousness itself. And so Odysseus is home and we're using the Odyssey like Moby Dick in its way, as a year long reading to show us, to demonstrate to us by our participation with it, reading just 4 or 5 pages a day for an entire year, not cramming it all together. It does no good to read this altogether. It's meant to be distributed over an entire cycle, over an entire year. In this case, it's like when the Jewish people came back from the Babylonian exile. They were completely ruined. As to understanding the the Torah. Oh, they could intellectually, they were very sophisticated. They could tell you all kinds of ideas about it. They didn't know how to live real by it. With it. In it. And so Ezra and Nehemiah decided to portion out the reading out loud of the Torah, so that on every Sabbath only a certain portion was put out. And it took three years to hear the entire Torah. And every man was required to go and patiently put the beads of the Sabbath hearings together, so that one heard the law over a three year. It's called a lectionary cycle. And if you didn't have the entire cycle unbroken, you never heard the law. So you go back to go and start all over again. Or if you did it, then it was time to hear it again in more depth and more resonance. In this way, Ezra and Nehemiah went back to the old primordial way of distributing the mythic horizon over the years of life in its cycle. And this way one began to understand and hear the Quran must be recited. Just reading it or reading commentaries are having a symbolic approaches. It's not it. It's there to be recited, and in this case it can be recited because it has a multidimensional matrix not based like the Torah on its relative narrative dynamic accumulating, but any part at any time. But one must hear it, and eventually, in this way, hear it all. The Buddha's sutras are not meant to be read. Every single one of them begins with the phrase, thus have I heard. If you haven't heard it, you haven't heard it. I remember in the midst of the torrential. Social upheaval in Berkeley in the 60s, when it was just absolutely mad. I remember going one time to the Vedanta Center just to hear the Upanishads. I know it's boring. Instantly cleared 7 or 8 years of complexities around arguments over ever refined injustices of languages, hearing the Upanishads and Sanskrit. It's not that you understand the Sanskrit, but you have. If you're open, you have the experience that you heard it straight, you heard it from that kind of depths that the pit in the trench of the great Kiva reverberates in such a way. You know that the bones have been touched, the bones have vibrated. They feel that vibration. Thus have I heard. And even later on in the Vajrayana, in Tibetan, the Tibetan character for thus in Tibetan thus is Evam. When one would just say evam, it was like the first word. It was like the beginning. And instead of having om, one would have evam and just that, just that word. And later on, just that symbol had a reverberatory. That's the whole seed right there. In Buddhism, it's called the bodhicitta. The moment of the thought of enlightenment is a seed, and without that seed, it doesn't matter how much practice or how much theory one has, nothing is going to happen ever so that the initiation is to introduce the seed in a ritual comportment and the chanting, the myths, the prayers, the hymns, the mythology is the nourishing of that seed, the giving it of the nourishment. And when that plant matures, its flowering is the mind, and that mind is the source of many seeds. It's a whole different ecology, and it has nothing to do with an intellectual appraisal of a subject called mythology that happens to be irrelevant and has really minor place. It's on level of telephone book. What carries the energy of language is this ritual comportment dynamic? If one did not dance it out, then the language would not have its objective ground and the integrals would not work. We say of somebody who's a dried out intellectual, they're not very well grounded. It's a colloquial way of saying that whereas someone who is really grounded, first thing they want to do is they want to find their way in the landscape and become a part of that landscape. How else can you how else can you know? It's like one of the simplest landscapes in the world to get used to as the desert. When I was a boy in the high Mojave, you could still go out in the 40s and you could find stretches of the high Mojave where there was no sign of anybody, ever. Nobody was never, ever there. It was pristine landscape that had never been touched by anybody. You could still find places like that. I remember once, at about the age of seven, going out to on the way out to where they were shooting a Cisco The Kid movie. Leo Carrillo was a friend of my father's. We drove across the upper Mojave and got out way beyond China Lake. And it was. You could have been on Mars. There was no sign that anyone had ever been there and probably had not been. Not only was it off the highways or off the dirt ways, but it was also off the primordial Indian paths. But if you came upon those primordial Indian paths, you could tell right away that this was something from an archaic California. And there are still places that are there in a area of Los Angeles called Sand Canyon that were a big Tujunga, comes into Sand Canyon, and Sand Canyon feeds into the Antelope Valley, where Lancaster and Palmdale is. The ancient route used to go along that Tujunga sand Canyon, and there's a little waterfall that's there called Zamia Springs. It flows all year round. You can always count on water there, even in the driest parched years, because the water table there is always kept high because of the San Gabriel runoff. Even if there's just a little snow, the water table is there and you can count on water being there. So the ancient primordial roots 10,000 years ago ran along that way. This quality of land, of landscape, of orientation in the landscape to put your place of center. But that place of center occurs where the confluence of language narratives of the mythic vectors carrying their energy and delivering their dynamic, and where they overlap, where they intersect, where they all finally come together. That center is not a point. It doesn't have symbolic value it can have later, but it doesn't in a primordial way. And in myth, it never has it. There's no point to understand about myth. Myth in itself has no points to make. It has no argument quality to it whatsoever. But what it does in its dynamic is to deliver emergence the quality, the energy of emergence, and the form that emerges out of language as the mind. So myth is an extraordinary parallel to nature, as nature makes existence. Language makes mind. And when language and nature have their parallel, they have a quality of wonderment to them. And as Socrates once observed, according to Plato, philosophy begins with a sense of wonder. That sense of wonder, wonderment. We're going to do more next week. I urge you to try and get a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I'm going to come back to that Zuni ceremonialism. It's a little difficult to get. I'll xerox a couple of pages that I'd like you to take a look at. This translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a little better than the one I've used for 25 years from the Penguin. But there's also Tolkien's version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien, as you might know, was a language specialist, and his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was one of his greatest achievements. To master the language of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight takes a sensitivity for myth and a sensitivity for vision both, and you have to hold them in balance in your symbolic, um, theory. Theoria in Greek means contemplation. It doesn't mean an abstraction. We think theory is an abstraction. That's how far gone we are. Theoria means contemplative contemplation, and contemplation is allowing for the reverberations of the resonance of meaning to pool and to come to rest. In some of the Nahmad manuscripts. Jesus talks about entering my rest. That rest is not a static rest, but is the seed of equilibrium. And that seed of equilibrium allows for the acceptance of everything. That's how man becomes cosmic. More next week.