Myth 7

This is myth seven and the title today is Middle Place courage. We have 12 sections of any given phase, and I try to step it in 12, because this is a very ancient, almost an archaic way of, uh, phasing, phasing within a set. One of the earliest records that we have are the Pyramid Texts. They date from the Fourth dynasty in Egypt, about 4700 years ago, and already complete in the Pyramid Texts. The journey through the Nether World. The journey towards rebirth has 12 different phases. In the earliest Pyramid Texts, they were in a pyramid called the Pyramid of Unas, and those Pyramid Texts, the 12 phases are called caverns, so that there were 12 caverns that went when one went through. In a series, in a sequence, and you had to go through all 12 in order to achieve your journey through the netherworld and prepare yourself for being born anew. And these caverns, the very term caverns, shows the old Paleolithic origins of that wisdom cycle that went back to at least 40,000 years ago, and in the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, the 12 caverns acquire thresholds of initiation so that a little bit further along, there are 12 gates in the netherworld, so that one has not only caverns as a sequence that one goes through, but that there are gates. There are thresholds of initiation that lead into each cavern. Each underground room, as it were. And after a while there got to be gatekeepers, so that one had to know what magical formula to say to each gatekeeper to be admitted through that portal, through that gate, To achieve the transmission of one's journeying soul over the liminality of that threshold to enter into that energy place. And it's almost like stepping up in a graduated incremental of energy and the language phrasing were the tuneable use of myth to open this particular threshold and enter into this particular space, and so on. And if you didn't know the complete set, even if you knew 11 out of 12, it was not enough. You had to be able to complete. And as you went through the accumulation of the tension of the ability to remember to be exacting Acting grew and it required a courage of heart. We've somewhat forgotten that in the past century, the 20th century courage of heart was looked upon as something secondary or even tertiary at best. Courage of heart is first. It is courage of heart that determines whether or not experience will bridge from existence to essence. It is courage of the heart that anneals and holds together the ritual comportment with the symbols of meaning, so that action and meaning are only held to the extent that they are sealable as a pair by the courage of heart. And so it's courage of the heart that has the middle place, the middle place between body and mind. And later in our education, we'll see that that ceiling of body and mind together, by the courage of heart, becomes the template by which the mind and the spirit are sealed together, but in a different way. The body and the mind need to be sealed integrally so that they align, and that their alignment is rather in the sense of perfection. And later on, the image in the enlightenment of that kind of perfection, of that alignment. And that seal was called a hermetic sphere in Magdeburg, Germany, they manufactured these steel hemispheres that were milled and machined so that they could be put together perfectly. And then there was a pump. Attached to pump the air out from them, so that the inside of the sphere was as close to a vacuum as they could make. In the 1700s, and there was a great demonstration of the power of a hermetic sphere, where dozens of teams of horses were attached to both sides of one of these spheres, and they could not pull it apart, so that the whole idea of a hermetic sphere in the enlightenment goes all the way back to ancient Paleolithic wisdom, that the body and the mind must be sealed in this way, otherwise the corrosion of the body will alienate the mind so that the mind drifts and wanders endlessly and has no substance, has no existential body with which to be saved. And one gets this sense. Like in Homer, the underworld is not a place of torture, and it's not a place of rebirth, but it's a place. Homer uses the phrase the epithet. The standard ritual phrases in Homer's are called epithets, and the epithet for those who are in the underworld is that they are fading constantly the faded fields of asphodel, as Homer says, so that the longer one spends in the underworld in a Homeric sense, the more that you fade and you simply become more and more tenuous, wispy and pale, and that you can only be revived by an infusion of blood. It's only by the blood that these phantoms can get enough body in order to be spoken to by Odysseus in the Odyssey. It's a recognition in the old Homeric, Mycenaean, Minoan, Early Helladic worldview that the dead fade away without a body to accompany them. Without any blood, they become anemic. And that death is this kind of eventual ultimate wispiness. Whereas in the Palaeolithic wisdom, in the High Egyptian dama, the quality of body and mind when they are sealed exactly together, and all trace of worldliness is pumped out from that combine. They are sealed forever. And it's not so much that the body and the mind now sealed forever. That one is eternal or reborn. This is why the mummification, the body and the mind can be sealed so that the mind can return to the body. But the body cannot be revivified unless the spirit can return also, so that it's like an anesthetized patient whose mind can return and one can be mentally alert. But you're still in a dead body, a frozen body. It's only the return of the further development of the spirit that revivifies the whole, so that both mind and body in their solidness live again. And so the whole notion of courage, of the heart as a mythic ceiling is a progenitor of a spiritual ceiling that comes further on. Whereas the mythic ceiling of the body and the mind take place in myth, in one of the great functions of myth is to align body and mind and to seal them. We've been looking at the way in which ritual generates myth. And now with myth seven, the second half of the myth. Myth one through six was comported towards the ritual. And now myth seven through 12, we're starting to look towards the symbolic. Towards symbols. And so we're understanding that myth seals body and mind seals ritual comportment, the action of existence with the mind's ability to develop meaning and for meaning, to further integrate, to pool together to a point where the gestalt of the meaning becomes like an idea. And that idea of the mind can be so integrated, the gestalt so finely tuned, that the mind's idea and the ritual existence becomes sealed together, so that the mind's objectivity acquires an existential Objection to corrosion, an objectivity that resists the corruptibility of things and acquires in its final stage. The idea acquires the ability to be sealed as truth. The mind's truth is the immortality of the body. As the body can have an immortality, the mind can have truth, and they can be sealed together. And yet there's something further from that, something further on than that. And that's the the spiritual aspect, the spiritual quest. And we'll see in the second year of our education, the development of vision is all about the transformation of mythic language into magic language. Mythic language is about the stories, but magic language is about the storyteller. One has to learn to be the storyteller, that simply knowing how to conduct oneself in the roles of a myth, of a even a complex mythology, and to have that sealed by courage of the heart, great as that is, it is in a larger realm only preparatory. It's only a template for a further work, a more difficult work. And that's the work of vision, of envisioning something which in terms of the integral of this world, in terms of the cycle of nature, something which We say from the world's standpoint, it's transcendent. That vision is transcendent. And when we get to there in about, uh, four months or so, we'll talk about that, of how that visionary quality, that vision quest, the the development of a magical spark from outside of the integral, something that brings into play a transform. In the integral ritual comportments that work function like operators. So if there are ritual operators and the function of ritual operators is to engender a kind of a feeling tone quality to life where experience is generated and experience with the courage of heart seals those ritual operators to the minds, operators, symbols, and so symbol operators in ritual operators can be sealed by a mythic horizon, a mythic horizon where courage of the heart takes the lead in sealing them and bringing them into an alignment, and together so that ritual and symbol operators vector together. In mathematics, it's called a tensor, so that the mythic horizon of experience develops this quality of sealing and a tensor a complexity. And one of the great examples of that is music. Especially music with dance. Music with language. Words that can be prayers can be. Hymns can be like a sacred phrasing, so that when one dances one's language with deep meaning, all of this seals together. The word synergy is paltry to describe the veracity of what happens. The highest medieval cosmic vision of Dante in the Divine Comedy in the Paradiso. What does he see when he is able to see that ultimate cosmological vision? What are what in heaven? What are they doing? What are the spirits of the blessed doing? They are singing in a choir of the blessed and they're shimmering, scintillating, translucent, pearlescent quality form like petals of a giant rose in heaven. And so this quality in myth of the courage of the heart sealing, sealing the ritual operators in the existential realm of the body to the symbol operators in the essential realm of the mind. And when they are brought together in that way, there is a synergy. And we will find when we get to symbols in another six weeks, that symbols not only can function as operators, but that they can receive a further function called a transform. Symbols can receive a transform and not only function and operate in alignment with ritual operators, but can carry over into a new functioning order. A higher order of functioning where they become transforms and as the symbol operators have been, have to use the alchemical term here have been annealed with the ritual operators. When the symbols became become capable of transformation, they carry and they carry the energies of transformation. They are the indexing ways by with which that transformation happens. They bring with them the ritual operators. Also, because the symbols and rituals are sealed together and as the symbols become transformers, ritual operators that could never Transform. Acquire that ability to do so so that there is such a thing, then a new thing that never existed before in nature, in the natural. And yet nature accepts it takes the transform. The power of existence becomes transformed, so that it is no longer limited by the set of conditions that pertain to a birth, a maturation, a maturity, an old age, and a death. But the existentials become amenable to something further, and that is rebirth. They're able to come back into life again, whereas existentials always have a time line. Boundedness. Whatever exists exists for some while, and it's true that some existentials like atoms, last for for billions of years. Nevertheless, all existential constructs eventually decay, all of them without exception. That decay itself is an insight into the way in which there is a constant transformation happening, sometimes slowly, sometimes very rapidly. And it's that transformation, that ability for existence to decay, that is the cue for the great discovery of how to have the complementation Implementation of a transformation not built on decay, but on resurrection and rebirth. The very thing that decays existence. Taken in very small dosages. Rebirths existence again. The great discovery. Um. Ancient. Great discovery. And we'll see that there is a great joy that comes out of this. And that joy is a spiritual joy. And that spiritual joy has its basis on courage of the heart. So that courage was always the very first, um, virtue when one became a knight. The very first thing that you learned was not how to use a sword, not how to twirl the sword a la Steven Spielberg, but courage. And you had to Find within your heart fullness that reservoir of courage in face of death and in face of maiming and dismemberment, which were much more common than death. But one of the deepest qualities that one had to find was the courage to face ridicule. Men feel fear, ridicule more than death quite frequently. And we'll go to absurd lengths not to be ridiculed. It's more important to save face than it is to save one's life quite frequently. And so, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of our books, is about this courage of heart that one has to learn not only to face death and face dismemberment, possible maiming, but to face ridicule. And Sir Gwaine does this in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And in this narrative, in this story, sophisticated as it is, about a quarter of the way through, one finds a symbol which on the visionary level is the symbol of transform for the entire work, so that the mythic narrative of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has embedded in it about a quarter of the way through lines 638 to 665 out of 2530 lines has embedded in it a symbol which, in the mythic sense up to that point, is only a symbolic operator, and for a long time after. Throughout the narrative, it's only a symbol operator, and it's constantly being aligned with the ritual operators. And the ritual operators are the code of chivalry, the code of King Arthur's court. The code of the. Of the Round Table. The code of Camelot. And only towards the end, where the challenge of death and dismemberment and ridicule are converged and all brought together in a single event, a single threshold. Where all the gates are somehow parfaite together and gestalt together. So they're all there in one instant. And it's only by being able to cross over that multiple complex threshold of death, dismemberment and dishonor that Gawain is able to carry himself, and the entire ritual comportment of the Arthurian ethos into a new salvation, a new level of salvation. And the symbol operator of that new salvation became the Garter, the Woman's Garter largely green. A green woman's garter, which on one level in society, is just simply the token of the woman's sexuality. But in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it Becomes the amulet of the Ultimate Courage of Heart, which also transforms into the Courage of spirit so that ever after there was always the institution of the order of the Garter, and only those who had proved themselves in that triple consternation able to pass through, were admitted into the order of the Garter. And so esoteric and convoluted and complex was it that it was 250 years after the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that a British connoisseur antiquarian named Elias Ashmole wrote a huge tome called The History of the order of the Garter, an enormous elephant folio volume that was written over a period of maybe 30 years. And Ashmol was one of those characters in England in the 1600s. And he presented this great tome to the new sovereign who came in, Charles the Second, who came, who brought the restoration back. And the centre of the restoration. The rebirth of English society of nobility was all ensconced in the mythology of the order of the Garter brought into this expression. And when you read the order of the Garter, when you open this huge tome, the very first thing it talks about is that the essence of the order is knighthood. And the essence of the order of knighthood is are the comportements of courtesy, and the center of that is courage of heart. This is the telling fulcrum without which the sealing of body and mind do not happen. So that the dismemberment of the body will naturally lead to a bitterness of mind over the loss of something. Whereas if they are sealed together, the dismemberment of the body in battle or in tournament does not injure the mind's wholeness, and one maintains a nobility of character, which is the equanimity of body and mind brought together. This is the true nobility, not a nobility of birth, but a nobility of emergence. So that the highest level of knighthood one did not owe Fealty to the king so much, but to the King of kings to God. So the greatest nights were filled, showed fealty towards God, exemplified by a fealty towards one's king, and also the quality that one entered into a battle not to win territory, not to win riches, nor to win fame, but to win the day for courage of the heart, so that it could lead to the further development of courage of the spirit, and that this courage of the heart was something that one won for oneself. But courage of the spirit is what one won for one's Ones people. And so that transcendent night, who wins? The courage of the spirit is a hero. Brings back the gift of that further accomplishment and is able to bestow it upon the people. Gifts the people with it, so that a hero is someone who brings back from the beyond this great treasure of the spirit and shares it, infuses it with the people, so that the people have a spiritual vision without which they would indeed perish in any realms beyond just simple symbol operator functioning. If one tried to go an inch beyond that simplistic level, rather simplistic level though it seems sophisticated in this world in the kind of lifetimes that most people live in the larger realms of stars and stones. It's a great school. One wouldn't be able to go into those further realms without that. So that there is such a thing then as a middle place courage a middle place, courage which seals ritual action and symbol meaning together and where they are sealed. The thread of that synergy is the mythic narrative line. It's not the story line as in a literary plot, but it is this fusion thread that one can follow, and it doesn't keep to the straight and narrow. It has its own motion and its motion is a double. It's always paired. There's always a paradox. There's always a polarity that happens with it so that the moving thread of a mythic horizon line weaves. It weaves warp and woof together so that you get this tapestry, you get this woven quality. And so the highest mythic language is a language which weaves meaning and action together in the language of experience, so that not only does something happen, something traditional happens, but that the traditional happening has a meaning and that the meaning comes through and that this woven language is synched by symbols which not only operate as the stitching holding that language together, but there are points at which transforms can be introduced so that the the breaths of the spirit can animate a woven language that's been synched by those kinds of symbols, so that one finds in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The writer says, this is a very proper story, a very traditional story. And synching the language together are letters, alphabet, letters, so that each line in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has a triple alliteration. Three words always begin with the same letter in every single line of the poem, and that the synching of the woven ness Us together by this quality of these letters displays what in the world is usually called esoteric, but it's actually just ancient wisdom. It displays a quality when it's just letters by itself. It makes a magic word, like a sigil, which can be inscribed like on an amulet, and it will seal the meaning and hold it there. It's a magical thing indeed. The ancient Egyptian uh, um, word nathir, which means one soul had no vowels in it whatsoever. It just had the three consonants and t r so that they were. Those three consonants were sealed. They were woven together as that sigil, which is the word then that does not stand for soul, but presents symbolically soulness. So the language itself was capable of sealing meaning and action together in the mythic horizon of sigils, words that could receive the breath of life later on and become living language. Living word at such a word, sealed in the right way, could receive the spirit of conscious life and achieve eternal life, so that such a teacher was then called the word. That's how that worked, and it worked very well. This kind of woven language, then that has, like in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the triple alliteration, the letters that seal them together. It works, then, as a kind of a symbol which a quarter of the way through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is disclosed as the pentacle. This five pointed star a gold star on a vermilion background. It means the star, the spirit, on the blood of courage. That's essentially what it is. But here one reads in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the development of the way in which this symbol, which had been of ritual usage in many cultural styles in the past. A mythic image from the ritual comportment of many different societies, many different cultures in the past, all of a sudden is shown to have a further threshold into a beyond, where symbolic meaning can become transformational. And it reads like this. In this translation from the Oxford World's Classics, the pentacle he was wearing. This is Sir Gawain, this is his livery. This is on his shield, on his horse Gringolet on the pennant that his squires would hold, and it would be embossed on his helmet on his helm. The pentacle he was wearing on surcoat and on shield bespoke his gentle bearing and trust that would not yield courage of the heart is a trust that will not yield. It's not that it doesn't give up. Courage of the heart simply doesn't give up. It's not a question of toughing it out. It's that it's eternally there. Demons will break their teeth on it. First, he was found without fault in five senses. Again, his five fingers never failed him. And all his faith in the world was in five wounds. And then he goes on. These are the wounds on, on the cross of of Christ. Then he goes on to say. The first four of the honored qualities. Cleanliness. Courtesy. Uncurbed and unimpaired. Lastly, compassion. Surpassing all these final five more firmly compounded by faith conjoined in him, each one woven with the other, each one unending. The quality of this kind of a symbol is that it is unending, because the pencil, the pen, the stylus that writes, never lifts off the page and can trace that design indefinitely so that it is. It was called a knot of eternity. That was the phrase used when you were told what this means. And finally, and you were beginning to understand and you were told this is a knot of eternity, that it is clearly bounded, but is unbounded in its existential actuality, that the actuality and the ideality were perfectly bound together so that the action became ideal and the ideal became actual. And that was the whole purpose of a series of initiations, was to bring you to the point where you could be sealed in just this way, that all the actions of your body were sealed with all the ideals of your mind, and that that person then was capable of receiving the breath of the spirit, eternal life, that you were ready then to receive, and that that state of being ready was an equilibrium in the esoteric late Hellenistic language of Judaism and of early Christianity. It was said that one entered into the rest, the equilibrium, the rest of the word, And in that restfulness, in that peace, that peace that passes understanding, one was ready to receive the breath of the spirit, the life eternal. In the earliest Upanishad, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, about 2800 years ago, a brihad means great breath like that. Aranyaka means a forest teaching. It means that you were taught this in the depths of the forest with great breath of the spirit. And what did that great breath of the spirit do? It didn't just blow on you, but it conveyed to you the consciousness understanding of what all this was, so that then you knew. All of these are woven, each one unending, fastened on five points that never faltered. The. The star sometimes was called an esoteric lineages as the Hermetic star. Nor strayed from each other, but stayed together always without end. As I have found, no matter where a man might begin the design or strive to close it. Therefore, the knot on this new shield was fashioned royally in red gold on red gules. Now red gold is an alchemical goal. It's alchemical. Gold isn't just gold that you get out of the ground, but you have to smelt that ore, and then you smelt what you have gotten out of the smelting of the ore, and you pass it through a series of smelting stages So that any impurities in the gold are leached away, literally, physically, chemically leached away. So at the final phase of that, there was a crucible which was made out of a kind of a sort of an asbestos type of material. And the final smelting of the gold left 100% pure gold button liquid in the bottom of the crucible, because every other aspect of impurity had been turned through chemical processes to ash, which the crucible absorbed, so that when one poured the button of pure gold out, the crucible was left completely empty, and the empty crucible was the hand sized sarcophagus that was empty because it absorbed the impurities of the body and left it pure spirit openness. So that one valued then not the gold. You were foolish if you thought, well, I've got the gold now. One had the empty crucible. That was the sign of the spirit. That's the cup. More later. Let's come back to this issue of sealing. The whole cycle of nature is for integration. Nature is specializes in integration. But when we're wise, we discover that paired with integration is differentiation, which is a completely different process. So that one of the archetypal forms in sacred dance is that you will make a pass in a clockwise fashion, and before you complete the circle of it, you will turn, you will pivot. And this pivot leads you then to make a counterclockwise movement that balances the first. And if dancers are informed, they will not begin from a point. They will just let the movement emerge out of the space, and they will pivot and they will come back and they will not complete the coming back, but just let it fade back in. So that there was no beginning. There is nothing there in the middle and there's no end. Now, this particular form comes down through all the cultures, all the civilizations. You find it in the poetry of Pindar, classical Athens. Then it acquires the rhetorical name for a poetic form, the chorea, where you have a movement and then you have a stand, and then you have a counter movement. You have a strophe and a stand and antistrophe, and you find this in Pindar, and then you find it in his friend Aeschylus at the beginnings of Greek tragedy. And you find it all the way through. You learn to see that this is the way in which the ritual action gestalts itself, and receives a symbolic Operator with the ritual operator and the sealed by the language form, and that language form is not just sealed so that it holds in an alignment. That's sophomoric to think that that would be then deep wisdom. And of course, it's hard to do, but that's only preparatory. That's just great school because that alignment has to survive the transformation. It has to survive the application of transforms which are radical, which are supernatural, they're supernatural. And because they don't occur in nature, you have to make room for the expansions and contractions that nature never planned on. You have to load it with zeros. Because the transforms are radical, and if you don't have it sealed in such a way that it has lots of openness distributed all through, the form will crack when it receives the transform. People are greedy today for spiritual wisdom. Good thing they don't know how to find it. They never last. If you think neurosis is tough, a psychosis is deadly. So you have to prepare that integral in such a way that it has its spaces, its openness, its emptiness is distributed all through. So it can take the transform. And this is the jewel. Then this is the jewel. Om mani padme hum. Home. Hail the jewel in the lotus. The lotus is a flower. And it's a natural integral. It's a symbol of calm achievement. But it's not the jewel. And the jewel comes through the fires of transformation. So that when we come to something like Maria, the potter of San Ildefonso. Zuni Indian woman who learned to make pots, she didn't know anything about pot making. She had to learn everything. She had to learn where to find the right clay. She had to learn how to put the lump of clay on the spinning wheel, and how to find the center, and how to pair your thumbs and go into the center and let the form come out not by your eyes, but by the sense of touch. And to do a part in such a way that its form is evenly distributed by the hands, by the thumbs and the fingers, by the pair of hands, so that there's an even consistency to the thickness, not too thin and not too thick, and not variant, but consistent all the way through so that the pot will take firing. Because in order to cinch the pot into art, you have to fire it. You have to put it in the fire. The clay has to take a radical transform. Here's how she, the author, here gives the rendition. This is Alice Marriott, who is very famous for a book that she did on the Indian tradition called ten grandmothers. Traditional Indian wisdom, like ancient wisdom in India, was always based on that. You learn birth things from your father and mother, but you learn rebirth things from your grandfather and from your grandmother so that spiritual things are grandfathered. Our grandmothers, they come every other generation. And so you have to you have to look beyond the birth context out of which you came naturally to the larger context in which you are able to come spiritually. Here's Alice Marriott's presentation of how Maria first fired a pot. Maria sat her painted bowls carefully down on the firewood. This would be cedar wood, largely. So that one of the characteristics of Zuni civilization is the smell of cedar wood smoke. And it's unmistakable. Maria said her painted bowls carefully down on the firewood, and placed another rack of cedar over them, so that the pot has a woven cedar wood construct underneath and on top. So it's ensconced. It's like a pair. It's like a parenthesis. It's like the cloud of unknowing, which is not only below you, but above you, and sealing you hermetically in unknowingness so that you can take the transform. Here the pot is set between the woven cedar wood, which is not just a wood, but is to give itself over to the transformation of fire and to carry that transformation into the pot. By that time, Julian was back with Tia Nicolas Pottery and they made a top layer of that. Then they covered the pottery with more cedar like a parfait. You can do it many times. And then Tia also took a little buckskin bag from the front of her dress and sprinkled cornmeal over the whole pile while she said a prayer for the pottery to be good. Just because it's inanimate doesn't mean that it cannot receive blessing. It's not inanimate. Teilhard de Chardin, once in a vision in the Gobi Desert, where he was exiled by the Catholic Church for offering up the whole world for a mass during World War One. In the trenches, he had nothing to offer, so he offered the whole world. And the authorities said, we can't have this. I said, you're not allowed to study God anymore. You have to study. Let's pick something diametrically opposite. Let's pick stones. So they made him into a paleontologist, and they exiled him for 40 years to the Gobi Desert. Go look at stones in the Gobi Desert. And he came out with a series of mystical books. And in one of them he says, rocks are not dead. They're pre-life. They can come alive. Those bones can get up and walk. Not only that, they can dance and they will sing regardless of what the authorities say, they all sing. So she sprinkles cornmeal over the whole pile, and she said a prayer for the pottery to be good. Then all together they heaped on more cedar, covered the whole pile, sides and top with cakes of dried cow dung. Now said to Nicolasa, and she lighted the pile at the bottom with a brand from the kitchen fire. It's like cooking a different kind of meal. They all stood by and waited for the pottery to cook. The cedar and dung burned fiercely with a clear, hot flame. It was too hot for anyone to get close to the fire, but Tia Nicolas watched it carefully when the flames died down, and she could see that there was more heat in one place than another. She hurried up to the fire and added fuel to the spot that was not hot enough so that you distribute not only you distribute the clay of the pot, but you distribute the fire. Thus, the fire is not just a fire, it's a refining fire. You have to keep the equilibrium of the transform all the way through the process. All 12 gates, all 12 caverns. You have to complete the set because if the set is not completed, you don't have a pot at the end. You don't have a vehicle that can receive a spirit at the end. So why is the attention to detail not because of superstition? We're not working on the level of superstition. We haven't for 250,000 years, because this is the only way to prepare a vehicle that can survive the transform and receive the breath of life. The heat from the embers was still strong and clear as the flames died away and a little wind came up. The last of the smoke flickered and waved in the air, and what had been a straight line of smoke reaching up towards the sky, bent in the middle like a tree and like a tree, stooped as if to touch the ground. Oh, Maria, cried my pots, my painted pots! They'll all be smoked. Maybe not, said Tia Nicholas, a comforting. Maybe some of them will have a little smoke cloud on one side, but I think that's all that will happen. We wanted them to be perfect, said Julian. We wanted them to come out just right the way they went in. But there doesn't seem to be any way to make all the pottery you fire come out right every time. Just a view, a vignette out of the the life that any potter and any society, any culture will have. And it's difficult when you want to put color on a pot. It's you have to have the temperature very hot to get some colors. Reds are particularly difficult. Blues are all right. Greens are very touchy. All of this has a mythic quality of imagery which carries over, and it's a part of what we would then call the mythos. The mythos is the matrix of myths in a traditional ethos. I'm going to use a Greek term here. Ethos and an ethos is the social realm of shared tradition and culture. The shared ness and the shared ness is not just that one holds it in common or one holds it together. That's not it at all. It's that it is linked. Deeper. It's interlinked so that the people of a culture are woven together. And what does the weaving is the language horizon. It isn't just simply communication. It isn't like person A is talking to person B. Did they communicate? Did you get what I said? It's not that at all. That's a reductiveness that is so simplistic and abstract as to forbid anyone to understand what it's all about. It's the interwovenness, so that the mythic horizon is a scintillating ocean on the realm of Mythos and ethos, and has its parallel with the mystery of nature. Not just the connection to existence which it has, and the sealing function with existentials and ideals, actuals and ideals. But it has a further parallel. It has a vibration resonance with the mystery of nature, so that language becomes mysterious, in that it is a medium that allows for emergence, and a language that is mysterious in that way. What will emerge out of that language? A mind, the mind, the real mind, not the product of some kind of abstract school book education. That's not a mind, not some kind of guesswork or egotistical hopefulness. That's not a mind. But when the natural mind emerges out of the mystery of woven language, it's unmistakable because that mind will have an instant, deep, parallel resonance with the body in its wholeness. And the wholeness of the body and the wholeness of the mind are together and are sealable in just that way. Otherwise, the transform of the spirit would shatter that form. What is the the Bardo Thodol? The Tibetan Book of the dead says, the very first thing that happens is that you drift very pleasantly for a day or so, and then comes the wind of dissolution that shatters the body and the minds into a reign of chaotic shards. Was Hieronymus Bosch's mural of people being eaten and dismembered by all the demons of hell? All of these are mythic images of that kind of dissolution, because the pot doesn't take the firing, because the body and mind were not annealed together and sealed, because there was no courage of heart. So one of the earliest qualities of wholeness that is taught in traditional wisdom is that in order to engender courage of the heart, we need to develop character Before consciousness is even an issue, we need to develop character. So that the complementarity is not just integration and differentiation. Differentiation. It's about character and consciousness. And it's in myth that character is developed and it's not like it's made. It's not like it's birthed, it's there. The baby has that character already. Anyone who has done any kind of a deep samadhi with a little baby, can't you. You get it right away. This baby has this character which can be developed, can be nourished, can be brought out. And it's that character that will do the work later on in maturation of sealing the rich will actions with the symbol ideals. And it's on the basis of courage, of the heart, of the character. That myth has its real function. That's how we have lived for millions of years successfully, because on every level we have been able to do that. The last couple of generations have not been able to do this, and we are close to tragedy. We're close to not having anyone alive who knows how to do anything for real. More next week.