Myth 8

This is myth eight, and they begin to sound like Kandinsky paintings after a while. Composition eight. And this one is so difficult. It was very clear about 4 or 5 this morning, and by 730 it was already hopelessly lost. And so I'm going to try to reconstruct. So I'm going to use the notes more than I usually would use in order to try to use a ritual technique of objectivity to structure my language so that I can convey a very basic idea to you, the idea. Concerns. Representation. Representation does not happen in the mind. Representation is not a function of symbols. Representation happens in the body. Representation is a function of ritual, so that if we develop a theory of meaning based on representation, we are going to be in serious error and our logic will be useless in applicability to the world. It'll be a beautiful logic, but it won't do anything except confuse us and make us impractical in terms of life. So the the difficult idea here to appreciate and to understand is that the object of representation is in ritual play and not in mental calculation. So that representation has to do with ritual objectivity rather than simply symbol objectivity. It is not a function of the mind. Symbols do not represent symbols present, and it is the presentational quality of symbols that allows for them to disclose the gestalts of meaning, otherwise they wouldn't work. So there are great philosophic issues involved here, and I'm going to call upon one of the greatest of the modern teachers of logic. So Willard Van Orman Quine. The roots of reference. And Quine was at Harvard and was an extraordinary individual. And he has in this transcript of a series of lectures that he gave on the roots of reference. He has a section where he is talking about similarity, so that we're going to now set aside a very powerful logical idea called identity. And we're going to just set that aside. And we're going to talk about similarity for just a second. But similarity in the sense that Quine is going to be talking about, he writes. Having reflected on the general notion of disposition of placement and so forth, Let us now return to the notion of perception, for that was what brought dispositions up. The animal has been trained to press the lever when confronted by the circular stripe, and to refrain from pressing it when confronted with the four spots, so that there is a gestalt in the conditioning of this animal, where a circular stripe meant that it was going to get some food, and any other gestalt meant that it's not going to happen, so it could just ignore it. And there were two gestalts that were built up. One was seven dots that are enough dots to show the circularity, and just four dots which can be seen as points of a square. And the gestalt is a square different from a circle doesn't give you food, so the animal is trained not to respond. The circle was the trigger. Perception was the gestalt that led to food. Any other gestalt does not lead to food. Therefore no response, no concern. But what Quine is talking about here is a very fundamental problem. And the problem of representation. And the issue is that we cannot lean on the notion of identity in order to have a secure understanding of representation. We are trained to do that. Our civilization is largely based upon that, and our inability to be fruitful and exacting in our lives, and the inability of this civilization to have survived its own time of crisis are very closely interwoven with the erroneous expectation which identity yokes us with, and we must now divest ourselves of to some extent, and come to the idea of similarity in representation, so that Quine then says, we gain flexibility, we gain flexibility. If, instead of speaking thus flatly of what is or is not perceived, if we allow for differences of degree, latitude, flexibility. This can be done by speaking of perceptual similarity, not identity, not of matching, not of matching this point with this point. It's not a matching of points. That is important to a realistic objectivity of the mind and the body and the world of the world and the body and the mind, or the body and the mind and the spirit, the person. If we chain ourselves to a ratchet of identity, of matching point by point, we will destroy ourselves and all of our enjoyment and all of our lives and everyone else indefinitely. And it is unnecessary. It's just completely unnecessary. A machine like matching of identities of points is not at all a criteria of a human communication field like language. And that includes logic. So that we have in the 1990s, developments of whole fields called fuzzy logic, where the point by point identification was set aside, where a similarity begins to have an opening quality that eventually leads into a massively improved sense of communication, and a logic which has an applicability to whole realms that otherwise were called irrational or fictitious or impossible. And by weaving the so-called irrational, the so-called fictitious, the so-called impossible by reweaving them back into a range of possibility, we give ourselves a communicative ability which allows us to transform the ritual myth symbol integral into a vision art history differential. And by allowing for that transform to operate, it gives us, for the very first realistic time, an opportunity to develop science, a real science, not some kind of surrogate symbolism. And so this is a very, very deep issue. Let's come back to it. Let's come back here to Quine, just for a second. He's talking about the shift from perceptions to perceptual similarity brings not only flexibility, but a certain gain in ontological clarity by dismissing the percepts or perceptions. There are times in life where perceptual similarity that relates to no overall point by point similarity. There are many, many times the essential focus to follow is focusing on where the action is. Um was the famous line in. Uh, Bernstein and Woodward's, uh, uh, investigation of the Watergate thing. It was always follow the money. Deep throat always cautioned them. If you want to understand the real thread that holds all these beads together, follow the money. That line of action is the one that's telling in this way. Following the action. The ritual comportment is the way in which we emerge out of a tangled skein into a woven fabric that we can wear in our lives. And it is, um, completely a metaphor which goes back to the origins of weaving. When you card the wool from a sheep or a goat or whatever animal llama, whatever you're using, it's a tangled skein. But the action of spinning the old spindle was hung, and the action of the spindle spinning pulls the thread out of the skein. It doesn't lay the tangled skein out to dice it up so it can be arranged, and then it can be put together as a thread. The thread emerges out of the chaos of the skein by the action of the spindle. And just in that way, the ritual action of human beings always pulled the thread. The clue in Greek, the clue of how we should proceed even though we don't understand the tangled mass of life at all. It's completely beyond our ability to formulate and to focus with any kind of categorical clarity. Nevertheless, we made our way for hundreds of thousands of years because we followed the action. We followed by together doing the same action that pulled the thread, which we could then use to weave our lives. And this is extremely important to to us to have. I'm going to come back to Quine. I'm going to come back to weaving, but I want to skip over here to another facet that I want to bring into play. We brought in the facet of language and logic of representation of not going by point to point identity, as the mind abstractly would expect, is the right way. But by going similarity to similarity in the way in which the body relates the body's logic of doing so, I want to come here to a second area, the area of music, because representation shows up in musical notation. And in order to make it even more universal, I'm going to use an example from the annotation of Indian music from ragas. This is a book published just a few years ago. Music as speech. And in chapter five on tones, the author takes just a moment to bring out something that usually Western music books overlook, because it is so obvious that everyone should know, but almost no one remembers. And the fact is, tones are called pitches or notes. There could be an infinite number of tones, an infinite number of tones. Now, when you talk about a tangled skein of carded wool or carded goat hair, it is nothing compared to an infinite array in its jumbled complexity. How is it, then, that we are able to pull a thread, a musical line, out of an infinite number of notes? How is it that we are able to do that? We first of all. Take a practical ritual. Comportment. The body. Music sound, the ear, the human ear can hear a range. It can now be measured to some scientific accuracy. We can hear as low as 25 cycles per second. Some people a little lower even. And we can hear as high as 20,000 cycles per second. Some people a little a little higher, but for the normal range of a meaningful sound, the range is roughly about 40 to 44,000 cycles per second. So that within that range of frequencies, What are frequencies? Frequencies are that energy, that energy wave and that energy wave as sound. And we can hear now within this range of 40 to 4000 cycles per second within that entire range. The old ritual technique was to recognize that the deepest objective form of manifestation that we know of, the deepest one, is by pairing, by pairing. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says of the ultimate reality, we can't say a thing we don't know. No one does. It is a mystery, but of what we can say. The deepest thing is that things occur in pairs. So taking that as a cue, this whole range of infinite notes now within the range of the human ear, 40 to 4000 cycles per second. The old technique was to make a ratio of 1 to 2, to divide that whole range in half. The first step in the Pythagorean orientation of Classical Greek form was to take a line and to cut it in half to make the ratio, so that now you have a ratio of 1 to 2, you have the whole and you have two halves. That's the beginning of wisdom that you can do that. The second formulation that comes from that relates to what we're doing in our education, that there is a cycle, a cycle of two cubed that seems to work as a fundamental formulation in two cubed is eight, two doubled would give you four. But if you double the 4 to 8, you get a much more workable set, as we would say in in modern language, for you have to be very intuitive to work with. A set of four notes could be done. It's extremely challenging. You'd have to have a hell of an ear and a fantastic instrument. But east and west, if you look at an octave, eight notes in a set. Then you have a chance for hearing with some degree of filigree and detail, and of playing and of singing. And so in India, as in ancient Egypt, the octave was always the set by which this 1 to 2 ratio was set up in terms of the infinite number of notes that were possible. In that octave. He gives the example here of a classic three octave tuning of classical Indian raga playing sitars, psarodes, and so forth. That is, that you would have three octave range If the lowest range in frequency of the first octave were 120. Cycles per second, it would mean because you're working with the one to. Two ratio, that the highest note in that low octave would be twice the 120. It would be 240 cycles per second. So your first octave runs in an eight note sequence of from 120 to 240 cycles per second. The insight is that the eighth note does not belong in that sequence exclusively, but is also the first note in the next octave, so that if you looked at it in some kind of graphic reductionistic thing, you would only have seven notes. The eighth note, which completes that octave, is actually also the first node in the next octave, so that the octaves do not abut each other. They interpenetrate so that instead of getting a circle, you get an interchange point. And because these interchange points link together, you can have an ongoing series of continuity of form. And if you have an ongoing continuity of series of form, it carries transform with it all the time. It distributes the ability to take transform to every aspect of it all the time. So you don't have to wait for the right juncture. You don't have to wait 8000 years for the right second of alignment to have a transform take place. It can happen at any time in the process. So that ancient wisdom, very simple, very exacting, has nothing to do with identity, has everything to do with a reciprocity of exchange, which is one of the fulcrums of the way in which ritual action is real. Ritual action is real because this and that interpenetrate in such a way that together they become thus. And that's the way in which pairs are fertile and life is real, so that men and women like ourselves many thousands of years ago, already understood. Now, if you have if you have this kind of a cycle, this is this is the eight. When it's put like this, this is the infinity sign like this. So you get out of infinity you get an eight. But it's not just a static eight, but it's an eight that intertwines with the next eight and the next eight and the next eight. So that if you saw this 5000 years ago in a symbolic presentation, you would see a whole series of eights lined up interpenetrating together. It's like without lifting the pen, you get all these eights lined up together, and you would find such an illustration in the sarcophagus room in the pyramid of Unas, which is the place where hieroglyphs were first put into pyramids 4700 years ago. And those figure eights would be royal cobras all linked together, and it would make in this accordion of eights out of infinity. What a gurdjieffian doctor in London once called. He labeled a book about it. He called it living time. Living time. That you would have the cobra. The sacred cobra. Kundalini energy in a ongoing form that related to infinity and eternity, but in a life limited episode, but capable of transforming into the next episode so that you would have a chance to have eternity, enter into life, into life energies, that's something more useful to know than the principle of identity. That is called wisdom instead of axiom number one. One of the problems with the logic is that any logic large enough to really say anything meaningfully needs a second system of logic that defines the primal primordial axioms. Because the larger a logic system gets, any computer programmer will tell you this. It develops a bug list. The bug list are the fallacies that are built in because it's not real, because they are artifacts of the fictitiousness of the logic. Yeah, they remember a cartoon in the early 50s when computers were room sized, and they had this one called Univac, and it had two programmers in those days were like scientists. They were in white coats and the two of them were standing together. And they're saying, we don't have room for the bug list. That whole quality is obviated if you have a secondary system defining those axioms. Of course, if that gets too complicated, you'll need another system. So there is a there is a problem with this. And that problem was solved a long time ago by two individuals simultaneously. They were Isaac Newton and Leibniz in Europe. And they solved it by developing what we know today. It's taught in every high school in the world. It's called calculus. And calculus was a way to deal with the infinity of possibility vis a vis the most primordial pair in a set known zero and one. And Newton and Leibniz were able to develop this. They were able to develop calculus, the infinitely differential calculus, differential equations, and the infinite integral calculus, because they had an actual ritual comportment that was so accurate that it showed that there were no circles of identity in the universe, that instead of circles of identity, the orbits of planets made ellipses, which meant that the elliptical orbit was that it was a version of the infinity sign, so that orbits are not circular, as the mind logically had expected for 1500 years. God is perfect. He will only make perfect circles of planets will only move in circles. It's very logical. It's not true at all. No planets move in perfect circles because the principle is not an imposition of logic from the mind of God upon the universe. It doesn't work that way at all, because for planets to orbit a star, for this Earth to orbit the sun, it's just a star that's just a planet. They have to work together so that the orbit of the planet is an ellipse, because the gravity of the star and the planet Interpenetrate, and that there is a mutual center of gravity around which the ellipse itself then focuses in this double, this paired integral. And it was Kepler's. Is a determining of the mass of the elliptical orbit of Mars that led Newton and Leibniz together at the same time in the late 1670s to understand the principles of calculus. But it was an insight that Kepler got from a medieval philosopher, a man unknown today. Oresme was his name. He was the one who noticed something very peculiar about numbers, about mathematics. And when he wrote in the early 1400s, there wasn't anyone sharp enough to do much with it. It influenced a man named William of Ockham to put in a principle called Occam's razor. You better reduce everything to its simplest, because it is so Difficult that as long as it remains complex, we can't deal with it. So Occam's razor of powering everything down. But arrays may notice that as you approach zero and as you approach one, the intervals multiply and the activity of the dynamic slows down. That as you approach zero, you slow down mathematically because of the proliferation of the possible intervals. And as you approach one, you also slow down so that when it came time for Leibniz and Newton to understand, they threw the whole idea of identity out of the window and went back to the similarity of ancient wisdom that what is happening here is not so obviously. But eventually one can understand and piece it together. There was a Frenchman, if I can find his book, Jacques Hadamard, who did a beautiful volume, 1949, at Princeton. Princeton published this. This was when originally 1945, when Princeton had Einstein walking around the campus. And he was like this. He was like this ancient sage who was alive then, and it transformed the whole Princeton campus into a place where it was like almost sacred turf, because there was a wise man. There was a real medicine man, uh, hanging around, uh, Hadamar. This book is called The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field. How do you get creativity in a field like mathematics that you would suppose is very logical, but in fact mathematics is very realistic. And rather than being logical, it's too precise to be just logical. It's precise enough to be real. And one of the great foundations at the beginning of the 20th century was the discovery in a great three volume tone called Principia mathematica, by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, that the forms of math and the forms of language, in its logical expressiveness were the same thing, same process, with two different signs. And that because there is a infinite creativity in the mathematical field. Obviously, human communication can be developed infinitely. Like there are an infinite number of musics possible in this cosmos. And just because we have explored almost all of the music and a select number of musical sets, the octaves of Egypt and India, the pentacle quality of Chinese music, we've just begun. We've hardly scratched it. And in order to show the possibilities, Schoenberg came up with a 12 tone scale just to show you can do music in ways that were never even dreamed of. All of this Hadamard writes here, he says. One of the most striking instances in modern times is the invention of the infinite Calculus. Heraclitus profound idea that everything ought to be considered in its. And as a French word here devenir, its continuous transformation. If you want to understand the leaf on the tree, you can't look at that leaf and say leaf. And this word leaf is now representative of that leaf. That leaf is constantly changing. There is an infinitesimal range of change. And given selective times, you can take a leaf from the Bodhi tree in the back here, and you can see that it comes out as a fresh, curled little green thing. It finally opens to the familiar wisdom fan shape of the body leaf. And surprisingly, Bodhi leafs don't stay green all the time. They are deciduous. They turn brown, they curl up and they fall to the ground. The body tree leaf is not a symbol of enlightenment because it is a green, fan shaped leaf that is a reductive identification of rather grade school level. The leaf, like any leaf, the maple leaf of Canada. The leaves of grass of Walt Whitman because it has an entire life cycle career. And in order to be realistic, one has to understand it has a complete array, and that in this array there is, as Quine says, there's room for flexibility, that if we're going to communicate realistically, if our mythology is going to be a living language which applies to life. It cannot be reductive, and it cannot be when it transforms. When it interiorize into meaning, when it becomes the field in the mind which will objectify as ideas. It cannot be a stickler for identity. Representation is not there objectively. It's in the ritual action comportment. So if you want to look for the index, if you want to find the index, you have to look to ritual operators, not to notions of identity. Many billions of beings on this planet are neurotic every minute of their lives because they are searching for their identity. The word of wisdom is don't search for something that cannot be found, and it's useless if you found an identity. The identity is the very next second. You would be different because having found it, you would be different and you would have found something that's out of date. So why worry about finding something that's going to be out of date the moment you find it? Let's take a break and we'll come back. One of the one of the qualities of not going point by point, of course, we're talking about. You couldn't understand the Torah. Point by point. You have to augment it. The whole idea of series of commendations and commentators and the tradition and the overlay and the learning, all of this. It's extremely important. And just graphically, one could not hear the Torah all at once anyway. In the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah, it took three years for that lectionary cycle to deliver the Torah. And if you were not there all the time, every time, for three years of Sabbaths in a row, then you hadn't heard it, and you had to go back, and you had to start again. And if you had heard it, then you have to hear it again, because it's going to be a little different for you this time. And so the unbroken continuity of the recitations of the Torah is another infinity sign, another way of doing it. And this cycle of ancient wisdom is everywhere on the planet, in all of the great cultures and civilizations. You will find it. It's always there. We're going to use a new pair of books next week. One of them is a little paperback by Ernst Cassirer called Language and Myth, and the other is by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty. Her translation of the Rigveda. Wendy Doniger is at the University of Chicago. She's done the Penguin Classic Hindu Myths and many other books, one of them a bestseller, the erotic ascetic Shiva. And she did the foreword to this little paperback version of Myth and Meaning Cracking the Code of Culture Claude Lévi-Strauss, with a foreword by Wendy Doniger. She's quite exquisite, quite fine learned. And in From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston that we used a couple of sections ago when she is writing, and here, about in the middle of From Ritual to Romance, chapter eight is about the medicine man, and chapter eight talks about, um, the Rigveda, which leads us into the use of the Rigveda. Here she writes and includes a translation of from book ten of the Rigveda. Near the end of it the 97th verse, and in this verse, the ritual use of soma in all of the healing ceremonies of Vedic India occurs, And it is the soma juice that is the thread that is spindled by language, ritual, comportment and mythic horizon rotation and symbolic plumbing of precision. It is through the use of language within the soma juice ritual myth, symbol integral that allows for the structure of wise life to emerge and to be understandable. And in the Rigveda, in the 10th book, when it's when it's just beginning to talk about Selma, it shows this hymn of creation. This is the. In the Rigveda, things are not in order. They're not in a linear order. They're not based on identity alignment, but on cycles of acquaintance, which eventually you sensitize yourself so that the landscape of the importance begins to occur to you. As your experience broadens and deepens and you realize where the mountains are, where the big river is. The Creation Hymn talks about the way in which the four great qualities of human population occur. In India, they were called the varnas. In ancient Sanskrit, the caste system not at all an imprisonment, but an early form some 4000 years ago of taking the spindle of language, following the ritual comportment of the Veda, and finding a way of a pattern of human life. In this way, the Creation Hymn and the Rigveda. This is 3500 years ago begins. There was neither nonexistence nor existence. Then right away there was neither non-existence nor existence. There was neither zero nor one. Then that there is a primordiality out of which non-existence and existence as a pair, zero and one as a binary pair emerge together. That's why pairing is the deepest. That's why looking for identity of a single point is fruitless and is nonsensical. If there's anything irrational, it's looking for a non-vanishing point that will be itself forever. Even the proton cannot be nominated as such an object. Not that if we live long enough, it's that we have already lived long enough to know that there was neither nonexistence nor existence. Then there was neither the realm of space nor the sky, which is beyond what stirred. Where, in whose protection was there? Water bottomlessly deep. There was neither death nor immortality. Then there was no distinguishing sign of night or day that one breathed windless by its own impulse. Other than that, there was nothing beyond. And this quality of creation myth. And we'll look at Wendy Doniger's Rigveda, and we're going to pair that because we're always working with pairs. We're working with pairs so that they can be calipers to measure in a ratioed way. And that's true rationality, not to identify by pointing, but to indicate by the comprehensive gesture. It's bad manners in American Indian society to point at some object. It shows a real demonic willfulness. Better to gesture with the full hand in some general way. And this is the etiquette between human beings. For the Zuni Indians, their acquaintance with the willful arrogance of the early 16th century Europeans was in 1539, and they had trouble with a pioneer priest, and they didn't realize the danger they were in until the following year, 1540, when somebody really tough showed up named Coronado. Coronado and Cortez are early 16th century conquistadors. They were not men who understood. No, they didn't understand the word that someone else would say mine. They only understood it was there for the taking, if you could take it. And they were ready to take. For the first hundred and 50 years. The Spanish conquistador priests inculcation into the Pueblo Indian areas, where from time to time accepted tentatively for a little while, and then they were killed. And after 150 years of this, in the 1690s early 1690s, the word finally came from Spain. Enough of this. Simply take them over. And from that time forward, there was this stamping of the culture with the imprimatur that you were. The citizens of a different realm, and you had to carry your identity papers with you. In the sense of you only could believe who you were, because we have trained you to understand that this is what is real. Of course, the Zuni among all the pueblos are the most effective at this kind of resistance to this kind of tyranny. The India Indians also had that kind of impress. About the same time, the British East India Company came as traders, and by the 1690s they had taken over the entire subcontinent. There were no maharajahs anywhere who could go up against the British Empire eventually, and the British Empire voluntarily left India in 1947 because it found a greater warrior in someone like Gandhi than anyone that they could send. In fact, the greatest British warrior of all time was Lord Mountbatten, because he recognised a superior warrior in Gandhi and was very glad to hand India back to the Indians in 1947. And he was a great admirer of his predecessor in Winston Churchill called Gandhi a little brown man who wouldn't eat stubborn. I remember my mother characterising Gandhi in the same way. Well, he was just a little naked man who won't eat well, but that's not true. He was a Bhagavad Gita, spirit warrior of the first quality. This. Quality of Sharing where the mythic horizon is shareable. The interpenetration of things, the structures, the fact that there is an octave in India, there's an octave in Egypt, the octave in China is in the trigrams of the I Ching. The octave there are the eight trigrams. They're not in sound as in telephones interrupting the lecture, but they're in the whole process of change itself, because in China, the understanding was never lost that the mythic horizon, the flow of language, the flow of experience is within the mystery of nature. And that as nature is a mysterious flow, a process Of infinite and profound unknowability. Neither existence nor non-existence characterize it. Non-existence and existence characterize T, but not t. And so in China, the octave was in the stages of change. The eight trigrams are the two cubed. There the creative and the receptive cubed. It's the yin and the yang, but not so much yin and yang. I came to the wrong place, but you can see that we're in the right place. It's that the bifurcation does not occur. The bifurcation of yin and yang is a polarity which is characteristic of Existentials. Only existentials have yin and yang. The Dao has no yin or yang. You can find maybe 8 or 900 books in the Dao, written by Westerners and by Asians alike. There is no Dao of Yang. There's no yang in Dao at all. Not a trace. Further. There's not. Not a trace either. So if the quality of politeness in the trigrams. In the octave of the trigrams of the I-Ching, the politeness is Tao and te, not yin and yang. That's why Lao Tzu's book is not called the Yin Yang ta, but the Tao Te Ching. It is a. It is a quality of deep, profound understanding that polarity Characterizes. Existence. Existence can have a zero and a one, whereas Dow does not have any characteristic whatsoever. So the Chinese understanding of the phases of change are that they occur in nature, and that their occurrence brings the first dimension of time into play, and that's the source of dynamic for everything. If energy did not have a dynamics, it would not register at all. If there were no movement capable of receiving energy, you would not have the energy moves, that you would have a frequency. There wouldn't be any registry whatsoever. And in fact, in deep realization, One can come to a still point of non-movement. The high wisdom centre of the mind is the only place in the universe that doesn't move, because there is no movement there at all, and there is no time whatsoever. Whereas everything in the world, because time is the first dimension, is moving space all the time, is a three dimensional coordinate that also moves with it. And so anything spatial already has a time signature. And that's why we dance our truths. That's why we dance and sing. Let's come back to India for a second. The octave, the seven note sequence of which the first note was the eighth note in another octave before it so that the octaves link together, they interpenetrate together and they make a they make a living time. Or in ancient times it was called the Golden Chain of Homer. This interlinking together in Indian music, the octave can also be divided into 22 subsections. They're called Shruti. Shruti in Sanskrit, and each of these have their own names and so forth. Microtones. Here is a couple of words from Music as Speech by Anoop Chandela, written about 12 years ago. The same raga Assumes slightly different patterns every time it is created. Every time you sit down to play a raga and a sarod or a sitar. That performance is not just distinct from another performance or any other performance, but the raga itself is different. The same is true about a myth. Every time a myth is really told on the mythic horizon, it is new. It is slightly different. There are always variations. The idea of finding the identity of the true primal myth is a European projection of the 19th century. It's an inculcation that no native person anywhere on the planet would take seriously. It's just simply an indication that these people are children. Homeless children. They don't have any place to be in the world. They think there is an identity for everything. And of course, this is a belief that yields to finally a conviction that life can die, which is about as stupid as you can get. Life is eternal. What is there to die? I think this is what was said to Lazarus. Lazarus! Come out! Actually, the same raga assumes different patterns every time it is created. That is, the ethos of a raga can be determined only broadly, with a fairly wide margin for variations, so that in realism you acclimate yourself. You sensitize yourself to the fact that freedom and variation are what are indexes of the real in the natural cycle at the beginning to democratic vistas. Walt Whitman, because Lincoln was dead and there was no 1 in 1870 to speak for the United States as a whole, as a unity. Whitman spoke for the dead Lincoln, and he wrote democratic vistas to to bring this out. And he said, everywhere that we look, we see that nature really respects freedom and variation. And to have a natural basis for our population to be healthful as an American civilization, we need to have freedom and variation at that Jeffersonian level of just the basic way in which we live, to try to reduce something down to a plan of unshakable identities that can be codified is exactly what fascism is. That's exactly what a tyranny is. And some of us have pledged our lives, our honour's sacred honours, as Jefferson said, and our fortunes to simply not let that happen. And the principle is a principle that Gandhi showed the British Empire in the war with the Bhagavad Gita. Spirit warrior, you cannot win. It only takes one such warrior to hold the entire world at bay. You think Thermopylae was a great thing because a handful of Greeks held off the beloved Persians until help could come? The spectacle of Gandhi alone, holding off the entire British Empire in 30. It was called the Round Table Conference because the British Empire prided itself since Elizabethan times and being founded on the noble Round Table, King Arthur's Round Table no less. So they held Round Table conferences, so there would be no hierarchy of order at the table, and the British invited one single representative of England to come to London to the Round Table Conference to discuss matters. And so India sent one man. They sent Gandhi and Gandhi. Sitting at the round table was like Benjamin Franklin addressing the British Empire some 200 years before. All by himself. Franklin stood. He wore a little, um, kind of mottled velvet suit, and he stood leaning against the mantel of a fireplace that had the big huge clocks and the triumphal urns and so forth. While all of the British lords around Lord North just simply criticized him and cut him up, saying, how dare you presume that some kind of wilderness farmers in the 13 colonies in the New World, which have belonged to us from the very moment in which it was developed, that you can be independent of us. And they roasted him, and Franklin simply took it. And when? When they were finished, Franklin's only words were, thank you, gentlemen. And he left the room. And that was the true beginning of the American Revolution. When Gandhi was at the Round Table Conference by himself, the British authorities, in typical Empire fashion, left a lot of time for him to reconsider his position because look at how powerful we are. This is London, boy, and this is the house of Power Boy. Like Moreau's House of pain in H.G. Wells novel, what Gandhi did in the intervals is he went out to the British industrial Midlands, he went to Lancashire, he went to the whole basis of India's independence, was that it was going to have khadi hand-spun cloth, which meant that the textile industry, which was the major industry for the British Empire at that time, was going to be put out of business because they wouldn't be able to make their margin of profit of selling to the 700,000 villages of India, British textiles. So he went to the textile factories in the Midlands of England to let them see who the enemy really was. And all the photographs were of the textile workers loving Gandhi, because they they sensed that he was a real man, just because he only weighed £120 and was half naked and was brown. But here was somebody they really liked, and they loved him. And so the longer that the British Empire put off confronting Gandhi, the more that friends he made. And the British people finally loved Gandhi, just like the Indian people, because a spirit warrior has a certain charisma, not of power, but of love, of love. Because that energy of love is the conscious dimension that goes in complement to the dimension of time. Love brings the eternal back into play, into time and space, and a spirit warrior always brings that back into time and space. And anyone who is not worried about their identity can sense that. So there are always variations. This book, though, is called Music is Speech, so that a raga is different each time. And then the writer says, actually, these conclusions coincide with what has been done in linguistics on because Indians by 1988, some are very educated even about linguistics. Actually, these conclusions coincide with what has been done in linguistics under the concept of phoneme. The phonemic principle is based on range rather than on point of articulation. The sound k of the English word kin is always slightly different from each of its previous articulation, in terms of contact with the back part, the dorsum of the tongue with the velar region. In other words, the same point of the palate is not used in the production of the sound k. It's always somewhat different, and so the real quality in myth is freedom and variation, not on the basis of some principle, but on the actuality of the existential ritual of speaking itself. That's as profound and deep as you can get. It's on the basis of T and how it comes out of Tao. So we're not talking about theories of logic. We're not talking about ideas of some abstract correctness. This is a wisdom education to present the phases of articulate understanding in such a way that you yourself, will be able to show yourself in your own way, in your own time. That the complex tapestry is woven by your participation. Try and get a copy of the Rigveda, and some of you are wondering about the whole stack of Machiavelli books here. All these Machiavelli books are meant to make a point. The Prince by Machiavelli was published in 1531, just eight years before the Zuni Indians were first contacted by the Spanish conquistadors. But there's a great deal of difference between Coronado and Machiavelli, even though they were contemporaries. Machiavelli's The Prince was published after he died. He died in 1527, published a few years after his death. Machiavelli was not a protagonist in a preemptive mythological. What would you say? Tyranny. Like Coronado or like Cortez? Machiavelli was one of the world's great historians. His history of Florence is still read as one of the great histories. But deeper than that, Machiavelli's historical excellence was because of writing the Discourses on Livy. Livy, who was the great historian of how the Roman Empire came out of the Roman Republic of ancient times, when Roman men and women were free to be variable without worrying about authority and power. And Livy's massive history. It was massive because it was meant to be read over a period of so many years that somebody would literally grow up by the time they were finished reading it. And Livy's Latin language in antiquity is called the Milky Lines of Livy. It was a language especially made to show the other side of Latin, the other side from the language of the Lex Talionis, the Roman law, the Roman legion power instead of the Latin of the tyranny. It was the Latin that Italian people would speak to each other, because the Romans were really Italians all this time. Can you imagine? There were Italians. They loved to eat together. They loved to dance together. And they hold no grudges against anyone. As long as you can dance and sing and cook. The word is paisano. Italian family cooking is to have one bowl in the center of the table, and you take what you need. That's a democracy without having to have a principle of it. Machiavelli wrote his discourses on Livy at the height of the Florentine tyranny. It had seen the Florentine Renaissance. It had devolved into a Florentine tyranny. A religious tyranny, by the way, didn't last very long. It lasted long enough so that many people were killed. A monk named Savonarola took over the whole city of Florence and said, we've got to get rid of all these vulgar paintings and, and stupid occult philosophy and all of this trash, and we need repentance and we need it now. Well, they finally gave Savonarola a just desserts, Italian style. They burned him at the stake at the center of Florence. Our friend Machiavelli also was one of the greatest dramatists in Italian history, and his play The Mandrake la Mandragola. The mandrake root is a root that looks like a man. One of the greatest of all comedies, it's in this Penguin Classics five Italian Renaissance comedies. It's worth reading. But there's another note, and I'll end with this about Machiavelli. Machiavelli was several all times put into very dangerous retreat because the authorities did not like to have someone who was historically conscious, and Machiavelli certainly was, that it interferes with the mythic manipulation of populations and the inculcation of symbolic power, because someone who is historically conscious can find a way to educate a whole population of people to be free in the sense of not just opting for a choice Democrat or Republican, but looking at the variations of the ways in which life needs to take place. And maybe one doesn't even need political parties for that. Maybe that's a false bifurcation based on tyrannical principles of identity gone mad. Maybe the party system is an example of a nightmare of polarized ignorance. So Machiavelli, several times in his life found himself on the outs with authorities, and so they exiled him to a little place called Carpi. Carpi is down in the middle of Italy, in what's called the Romagna, south of Rome, the the plains and so forth. And so Machiavelli was down there under these extenuating circumstances, and he was very good friends with another great historian named Guicciardini, whose histories are still in print and are read also two of the greatest historians of all time. And they were buddies. So when Machiavelli was sent down to Carpi, Carpi was overseen by the general chapter of the Minorite Friars. The whole town was dominated, so Machiavelli recorded his activities there in a series of letters to Francesco Guicciardini, then governor of the Papal States and the Romagna. We've already examined these letters briefly. Machiavelli's task at Carpi was twofold. First, on behalf of the Signore and the Cardinal, Giulio de Medici was to secure a separation of the Minorite convents in Florentine territories from those in the rest of Tuscany. And he had a few other tasks, but in the intervals between waiting for the appointments to mature, the time was right to effect these tasks, which were no big task. Machiavelli, like Gandhi going to the Midlands in England, went to his favourite constituency. He began to play confidence games with the Friars Minor monks. He loved to challenge people who were frozen, especially in religious mythological politics of tyranny, and he loved to play confidence games with them. And so he devised an immense practical joke. He called it a scherzo in music, it's to play with vigor to to pass the time, to play on the poor Frati and the people of the town. This joke springs. This is from a book published a few years ago called Foxes and Lions Machiavelli's Confidence men, the Confidence Man. Melville wrote a novel called The Confidence Man. Thomas Mann wrote Felix Krull, Confidence Man the confidence man is the trickster in civilization. The joke springs from the very core of Machiavelli's personality, and shows how deeply the model of the confidence man influenced his conceptions of his own activity and of the world about him. It also shows just how powerful the dialectic of confidence, man and dupe was for him, and how immediately he experienced, and thus came to recognize fully the limits of the confidence games he played. Meanwhile, Machiavelli's letters from Capri reveal that he could never escape. He knew he could never escape from the dialectic of confidence, man and dupe, no matter what strategy he adopted. His irony and self-reflexive laughter at least enabled him to live with it, and with the degradation to which it seemed inevitably to lead because Machiavelli lived 420 years too soon. It wasn't until Johnny von Neumann, during the Second World War that somebody could think clear enough about the theory of games to understand how you get out of game playing, even when it's endemic in your personality, even when it's endemic in the very structure of the activity in which you're engaged. And we know now, at the beginning of the 21st century, not only how to play games, but how to stop playing games. More next week.