Myth 9

This is myth nine and we come to a new pair of books, and our pair this time is Ernst Cassirer Language in Myth and Wendy Doniger, her translation of the Rigveda. And we're going to pair these together. It's like having braids and braiding material together. Only I'm not teaching an academic kind of a course. I'm not interested in you reading these and giving you tests, or me showing how much I know vis a vis this material. The only process that is germane here is this braiding, this weaving process. It's only with a woven process that we have a chance to transcend the loom. And in a way, the loom is one of the most primordial of all of the frames of reference, the plane within which a composition is made, within which a a utility of our being in the world is accomplished. And it is a a very difficult thing to be able to transcend the plane of reference. It's analogous To a poet who, having written a poem on a sheet of paper, must lift that poem off the sheet of paper and deliver it so that the poem is alive in the appreciation of both the poet and the appreciator. One of the very earliest of all the great poets of the world, Petrarch in Italy in the early Renaissance, a couple of hundred years before the great Italian Renaissance patriarch wrote a series of poems that were meant to be read only to his beloved. Laura and Petrarch's sonnets Broke completely with the medieval tradition that serious language was written, it was recorded. It was something that monks did to parchment, and that it was a throwaway, to have poetry that was spoken out loud, and only bawdy songs and taverns were in that kind of a mode. And Patriarch broke that once and for all. And out of that came the whole development of a personal, lyrical love poetry that lifted poetry off the page to the person and lifted it off the plane of symbolic referent in the mind to some kind of categorical understanding of rules of grammar and application, and allowed for the spiritual person to regain the wings of expressive freedom. And of course, the great follower of Petrarch was Chaucer, and Chaucer's whole work was meant to be read out loud, to be delivered out loud. And in our time, a writer like J.R.R. Tolkien is not meant to be read silently, but to be read out loud. Dickens was meant to be read out loud. These kinds of action are a reaching back from art to myth, and myth is an oral language expression, a line of rhythmic energy in words. And it is very difficult for us to reach back to myths, to that mythic horizon of language and touch, its vivifying quality, its electric quality. And so our series of presentations on myth have sought to present pairs of books that would allow us to approach this, reaching back for us, this vivifying experience. But the way in which I've been presenting it is not so much in a reaching back mode, but trying to show how myth, how mythic language, how the experience of feeling toned energy flames out of existence, flames out of The action of existence out of ritual action. The ritual action of existence gains in intensity, and out of that language bursts into flame. It's much the same kind of phenomena as ancient fire making, where you would have the plane, the the piece of wood with the hole in it, and you would have the rod, the stick, the fire hardened stick, so that the point is very hard. And then you would take a bow with a cord and wrap that cord around so that you would loop the stick. And by moving the bow like that would ratchet the rod in the bowl of the plane, and eventually that intensity of heat would burst into flame, into fire. Language comes out of action in just that way, by an intensity, by a revving up of the periodicity by which nature generally works, by revving it up and revving the engine of action. Man learns to talk. And it isn't that he learns to talk in the colloquial form of newspapers or the reductive forms of greeting cards, but he learns to talk in a very special way. He learns to utter the joy and the pathos of his experience of that intensity. So at the origins of language, do not come out of simplistic, stupid interjections like o r a, but out of the diamond forming pressures of special actions done with such intensity that someone begins to utter sound in such a way that it forms into language and is sacred from the beginning. So that myth is a whole realm, a process realm, a flow of sacred language. And one of the Earliest of the collections of this kind of sacred hymns is the Rigveda, going back some 3500 years, back to India, back to a special time in India. The Rigveda comes from a juncture of two different cultures, two completely different cultures. And the 19th century understanding of it was topsy turvy. The 19th century understanding and the early 20th century understanding was all that sophisticated. Aryan invaders came from Central Asia and came into primitive India. And the clash of the Aryan invaders to the primitive Dravidian India produced The need for a Rigveda produced the intensity of the interchange for a Rigveda, and early in the 20th century, a few archaeologists, like Sir John Marshall, investigating ruins in what is now northern Pakistan, came to understand that this picture was in verse that in fact, those peoples that came in from Central Asia were the hunters, they were the primitives, and the very sophisticated were the original civilizations of India, that India had a great urban civilization. It's called in archaeology now the Harappan civilization, and that the twin great cities of the Harappan civilization, Um Mohenjo daro in the north and Harappa further to the south, separated by about 400 miles, sort of like San Francisco and Los Angeles or say in Canada, Edmonton and Calgary, two great cities that were the centers around which a great civilization in India flourished in urban civilization that was contemporaneous with the earliest pyramids in Egypt. And that because of a climactic change, because of weather patterns, severely shifting and desiccation setting in. When the Aryan hunters came into the through the passes into northern India. It was a period of about 7 or 800 years After the Great Harappan civilization had fallen, and they had no idea that they had come in to a very sophisticated civilization that had gone underground, that had gone into a long, deep reverse, but that there were still ancient traditions that were holding it passed on in an oral way, and that those sophisticated Dravidian Indians, the dark skinned Indians, were the true masters of subtlety. A similar situation happened here in North America. All the great Indian civilizations flourished many, many hundreds of years before any Europeans arrived on the scene. And when the first Europeans began to arrive on the scene, the conquistadors in the 1540s, the English and the French in the late 1500s. They thought that they were coming upon a wilderness. They were coming upon remnants of primitive peoples who had barely scratched their way up to some kind of subsistence level, when in fact North America had been sophisticated several thousand years ago. There was a time before the colonies spread from just a few places, like Jamestown and Plymouth inland, when the whole of North America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. All of that land was tattooed by mounds, sacred ceremonial mounds, as if the entire body of North America had already been made sacred by ritual and symbol and myth that had gone back to the dawning of time in this continent, and that it's only the action of several centuries of ploughing, that now there are just isolated little islands of mounds left in state parks, in places like Ohio or Kentucky or Illinois. But if you go to a place like Saint Louis, Missouri, and you look through the Jefferson Arch east across the Mississippi River, you will see just to the left, the site of Cahokia. That was a city of 50,000 people before Columbus ever set sail. And so the true history of the world is being recalibrated. And so too, in India. And now we have come to see that the Rig Veda is an enormously interesting presentation of a mythology, a mythology that goes back not just to the zarathushtrian origins of the Aryan peoples of Central Asia, but goes all the way back to the early Shiva yogic origins of the Dravidian people also, and that they were woven together, they were braided together. And the Rig Veda has this quality of a deep, subtle mysticism, not a mysticism, but a mystic fire around which the ceremonies of the early hunters were woven into the deeper patterns of an urban civilization of maybe 1000 or 2000 years before them, so that when we come to something like the Rigveda and it's just translated as the Rigveda, if you go to someone who was a master Yogi of India, someone for whom the deeper, more ancient subtlety of Indian civilization was an everyday familiarity. Like Sri Aurobindo, his translation of the Rigveda is called hymns to the Mystic Fire. Hymns to the Mystic Fire. These are. These are not myths in a 19th century sense of stories made up by primitive people about things they didn't really have clear ideas about. These are the original sacred words of praise for the discovery that one's feeling toned experience evokes a mystery of nature and gains of fertility. Thereby. And just as existence can come out of nature, what comes out of the fertility of our experience is the development of the mind and the great objectivity of the A mind coming out of the play of language has a deep parallel, a paranoid quality, an alignment with the way in which existence comes out of nature. And so when you come to something like a creation myth in the Rig Veda, in ancient, profound India, you don't come to some kind of a standardized quote creation myth of primitive people guessing at things. The Rig Veda has this kind of a quality, this kind of a translation right at the beginning. This is in Wendy Doniger's translation. There was neither non-existence nor existence. Then There was neither zero nor one. 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 that is to say, there was neither zero nor infinity then. So when the first quatrain, in the first couplet of the first quatrain there is presented in a very subtle mystic way the question as to one and zero existence and Non-existence in the second couplet, completing the first quatrain. There's the question between one and infinity. So that the first pair of couplets in Sanskrit poetics they're called the sloka couplet in Sanskrit is called sloka. And when you have a pair of lines making a sloka and a pair of slokas, that you have a pair of pair of lines making four lines, making a quatrain, then you have the complete initial square, the initial frame, the initial template by which everything else will be measured, what will be measured, the pace of the language. The rhythm of the weaving. The energy of the feeling. Tone. Sentience. Not the intelligence. We're not talking about the mind yet. We're talking about the intelligence of feeling, which is called sentience. Before intelligence, there is sentience. We were a sentient long before we were intelligent. Millions of years we were sentient even 2 million years ago. But we began to be intelligent only very recently in our species. Only very recently. And the discovery of the objective mind was something that happened about 100,000 years ago. But sentience, the quality of being smart in feeling that is very, very ancient. And so the pair of pairs of lines, the quatrain, the way that the Rigveda begins, the way that its creation begins is to have a pair of lines that show how zero and one make a pair. That is a question of wonderment, and that the second pair of lines, the second sloka, is one and infinity, so that when you put them together, you have a mythic progression of beginning, middle and end of zero, one and infinity. Zero and one in the first pair. One and infinity in the second. So that the first quatrain of the Rigveda has a profound ancient mystic understanding that the template of anything that one could say whatsoever is encompassed by 0 to 1 to infinity. There was a great, wonderful physicist in the middle part of the 20th century. His name was George Gamow. He was a great physicist. He wrote many popular books. I once when I was a young man, I was the head porter at Sequoia National Park about 40 years ago. And George Gamow came to stay for a week, and he was driving a Porsche with its top down in a beautiful European blonde with a matching luggage. And he was so jovial. And I thought to myself, this is a physicist, because I was reading his book, and his book was entitled 123... infinity and 123. Infinity is one of the basic codifications in 20th century physics of the way in which a progression is amenable to an infinite analysis once you have the progression one, two, three ellipses. Infinity. You then have a sequence of cardinality that includes the possibilities of an ordinal restructuring, and you can analyze it forever. The Rigveda presents an even more primordial thing than one, two, three infinity. It presents zero, one infinity. And deeper than George Gamow's title was the insight of the original mathematical physicist. Newton and Leibniz, the creators of calculus. And they're the ones who rediscovered that between 0 and 1 there is an infinite approachability, and between one and infinity there is a complementary infinity that you can analyze either to Indefinite boundedness and boundlessness. You can bound it towards one, or you can unbound it towards infinity. And in which case the watershed is the one. The one that Plato or Plotinus would also speak of as the good, the one, the good, because it is the arbiter of the way in which existence is real in this world. Reality in nature is something that belongs to zero ness. We don't know. Not because we don't know. And we'll find out. It is that it is unknowable. It is unsayable. And that's why it's a mystery. Because nature is beginningless. It does not have a one by which one can then begin. There is no one in nature, not even the one who would say one. And so nature is truly mysterious, which is why the sentience in myth, the sentience in myth is to parallel that to have no definiteness to one's beginning. When one is speaking sacred language to the mystic fire, you simply begin like the beginning of the Torah is the word bereshith, and bereshith is a gerund. It doesn't just have a nomenclature that the beginning. There's no article there in ancient Hebrew, the only noun Now that definitely always was accompanied by an article was the word for Satan. One never said Satan as a person, as a personification. One always said thus Satan, because Satan is a neuter, neither male nor female, and thus Satan is truly an enemy of man because of being neutered, and whatever is touched by that is neutered, not returned to the Mystic Zero, and not harmonized to some kind of a calm equanimity which is a vanishing in wisdom, but a neuter, as in being grounded out, being blanked out so that the original understanding of evil was that it was oblivion. Evil is evil because it is oblivion, because it takes away any possibility of life, any fertility of weaving, and all the sentients of myth, then, is to know that to not ever lose sight of that, and to have the joy of life in the face of profound. Horrors and profound travail, and to return, to come back again so that the idea of the cyclic return actually is an intelligent way of expressing something that was first understood in sentience, in feeling that one comes back again to sing again, and that birth and rebirth go together in this kind of a cycle, so that the creation him. Let me come to the him on Agni, which is the actual beginning of the Rigveda. This other one was from book ten, hymn number 129. Always put first, because it is the the actual beginning of the Rigveda. For those of us who could read the first hymn in the first book. There are ten books to the Rigveda, and the first hymn of the first book is to Agni, to the fire, the sacred fire. I pray to Agni, the household priest, who is the God of the sacrifice, the one who chants and invokes and brings most treasure. Treasure. Agni earned the prayers of the ancient sages and of those of the present to. He will bring the gods here so that the, uh. The fire, the mythic fire is a mystic fire. Because when it is present in the sentient mythic horizon of our experience and grounded, founded, woven into the existential actions that we do, that fire of language, that flame of language grounded on the actions of the sacrifice ceremony brings from the mysterious winds of the mysteries of nature brings the divine presences into this world. It's not about superstition, and it's not about being primitive. It's about men and women understanding the true, in depth complexity of the invitation, which will not be refused if we are ready to dance with it. And so Sri Aurobindo when he translates this hymn. I adore the flame, the vicar. The flame is the vicar. The mystic fire is the vicar, not someone. The fire. This fire, this flame. I adore the flame. The vicar, the divine Ritwik of the sacrifice. The. The one who choreographs the sacrifice, who tends it, who sees to it. The summoner who most founds the ecstasy. The flame, adorable by the ancient sages, is adorable too. By the new. He brings here the gods. By the flame. One enjoys a treasure that verily increases day by day. Glorious, most full of hero power O flame, the pilgrim sacrifice on every side of which thou art, with the Environing being that truly goes among the gods, the Environing being on every side. And so today's lecture is called the Environment of language, that mythic language which flames in its intensity to where one would have something like the Rigveda that is like a mystic flame which burns not on the wood but on the heart. Because it is the line of alignment between the flow of nature and the flow of the language, between nature and myth flowing together, and their alignment made secure by the definite ritual actions that are done and repeated and redone and redone, not in repetition, out of stupidity, but in repetition, out of building Intensity out of a periodicity whose evenness of application accumulates. Nevertheless, does not accumulate because one goes faster or one goes harder. Or one goes deeper, but it accumulates because this is the gift from nature, that the accumulation happens when there is an evenness of action, an evenness of application. And that's what's called yoga. The evenness of action is a yoga. That's what yoga is. There's nothing to do with beautiful ideas. That's just ignorance. It is the evenness of action that forms the rod, that creates the fire of language, in tune with the mysteries of nature, so that our language is truly sacred, not because it's assigned to be sacred or hope to be sacred or pretended to be sacred. It is sacred. That's how it happens. Otherwise, there would be no language. What comes out of that intensity, out of that repetition, is that gift of that flame. And many times in human life, where there has been a rediscovery of these kinds of deep roots of language, you always find a similar kind of iconography of imagery. In the Reformation. The symbol for the discovery that the revelation of the New Testament was not at all what the medieval scholastics had thought it was, pretended that it was, but that here it was founded on the presence of some one real and not just doctrine. The image was the flame on the heart. And you used to see it in the early 1540s, the same time the conquistadors were beginning to lay siege to the Zuni Indians. And what is today Arizona and New Mexico in a little place in Germany. Erasmus and Martin Luther had discovered that there was such a thing as a flame in the heart, that it has nothing to do with doctrine. It has everything to do with your participation in the way in which nature and language really form a mystical woven pair, and it's this pair of quality that comes through in language. Now we're going to we're going to take a break and come back, but we're pairing Repairing with the Rig Veda for the next four lectures today, and the three following lectures, so that those four lectures will include not only the Rig Veda, but Cassirer's language and myth. And after the break, I'm going to come back to Cassirer and to language and myth, back to a very deep and profound way to understand. In the 20th century, a great deal of effort was made to show that language in a science of linguistics was better understood in structure, abstracted from action. This, in a way, is a frankensteinian type of a technique, and the divorce of understanding from action has led to the impasse that we suffer. Now there are many supercomputers and they operate increasingly in a world of junk. Let's take a break. Let's come back to Ernst Kaiser. Let's come back to language and math. It's very short. It's less than 100 pages. And on page 40, he says he writes primitive languages especially furnish many further examples in support of the principle that the order of nomenclature does not rest on the external similarities among things or events, but that different items bear the same name and are subsumed under the same Concept. Whenever their functional significance is the same, so that language is not a matter of pointing and naming. Me Tarzan, you Jane is good for the movies. It don't happen that way. Language flames out of action verbs. If you try to learn another language, you're difficulty is in getting all the declension of the verbs. It isn't a matter of vocabulary of nouns. It is not a process of identification. Language is not about that. And so logic is not about that. It's an ordering of processes. It's a combing of process so that one can keep track not of some line, but of the weave of what's going on. And language helps us weave the world, and that's what makes culture. That's what makes the human world. And so the mythic horizon has a complexity which you can say is indexed by language, but that would be an idea of its function. The actual function is the weaving of it. One of the most conscientious of all writers in the 19th century was Thoreau, the American sage Henry David Thoreau. And Thoreau kept journals through many decades of his life, and he would use materials out of those journals to make his books. And his first book, A week on the Concord and Merrimack River, reads like it was just a travelogue that he and his brother took a week to go down the Concord and Merrimack rivers. And you go by the days Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And there's the week, the week, which is the sacred, sacrificial set of time at the end of the week is the Sabbath. So a week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers isn't just written down. It isn't just notes, though. It reads like notes. He wrote and rewrote it for almost a decade to get it absolutely perfect so that the weave of the language had the Asset of clothing. The man in a real world. Thoreaus Complex Weave is the title of one great study of this technique. Dylan Thomas was another who, very early in his life, set himself to be one of the world's great poets, and he wrote huge notebooks at a furious intensity to get it all out, all down, before he had any time to think about what it meant to go through the filtering process of judgment. And then he would write his poems mined from these notebooks. And in one candid moment when he was visiting the United States on a tour, because he loved to read his poetry, because he knew the veracity of an oral delivery. One of the greatest poets of all time in any language who could read his work. Anyone who has ever heard him read on record or CD. A Child's Christmas in Wales. Can hear the incredibly sophisticated tapestry of the weave, where the images blossom in the flow of the verbal action that on the surface is so simple of a little boy in a Welsh village in wintertime. But what a world of wonder it discloses and reveals this is myth. And Dylan Thomas, in his American visit to a direct question about poetry. And don't you take it really sophisticated to perfect this poem and put it out, He said, well, you know, a good poem has chinks and misfit areas all the way through because you have to have spaces, secret spaces for the lightning and thunder to come through that. If you brick it all, you will suffocate the meaning. I told the story many times of a conversation in a kitchen in San Francisco in the early 60s, between Chuck Berry and Boz Scaggs and Steve Miller, and the wonderful wisdom of Mr. Berry saying, you white boys are pretty good, but you make a big mistake. You try to play all the notes. You miss a few, and if the audience is with you, they'll fill it in. That's the secret of rhythm and blues, which is different from rock. Rock is the beat. Rhythm and blues is the lilting cadence of the mythic language coming true and creating world. What was the Mr. Berry's great quatrain? You know, the temperature's rising. The jukebox is blowing a fuse. I got the rockin pneumonia I need a shot of rhythm and blues. Roll over Beethoven, they're rocking in two by two. The wisdom of the paradox. Because at the depths of the structure is always a polarity. Not a duality, but a paradox. A paradox which is a polarity. And that polarity gives rise to analogy. Because polarity and analogy go together, they weave together. They come in such a way that if you put that language in this kind of periodicity, this kind of sequencing, so that the polarities are balanced and unbalanced in a kind of a cadence, then the analogical meaning will be there, and the interiorization of that language gives birth to the logic of the meaning. And that's how that happens. Polarity and analogy by paradox. It's a deep quality of language, and that flow of function guarantees that the language will follow the action so that when you have a mythos, when you have a plot line, that mythic line that navigating through the fire, the conflagration of images that come one knows one's way not from rote, but from reweaving in the moment, a real mythic storyteller tells you the myth pristinely. Now, for the first time you hear it. Now, he may have told it a thousand times, but now he's telling it. Now it's like these lectures. I'm not consulting any kind of documentation of how I said it over the last 40 years. It's now it's spontaneously now. It's got to be a living language. Otherwise it doesn't weave in such a way as to invite the mystery of nature to come into play. And when that invitation is issued, the gods will be there. Or as Jung put over the lintel of his house at Bollingen, on the lake outside of Zurich, called or not, God will be there. It's that we don't know that God is there until we have the sentience to praise. And in that sentience of praising, then we realize, oh yes, and in any language it's yes. Yeah. Even in the northern Mississippi, uh, garbled poetry of Elvis Presley. Yeah. That quality of myth weaving brings the energy of experience into the tapestry of feeling, tone, sentience, out of which then the mind comes. The mind is born out of that, not born so much. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but emerges the mind emerges so that the yogic understanding is that enlightenment is like the clouds being dispersed, and suddenly there's a full sun. By the way, that's a terrestrial yoga, a really deep bodhisattva, high Dharma yoga. Is that what is revealed is the cosmos. Maybe 8 trillion galaxies all at once. So just seeing the sun shine. Don't feel too proud. Keep at it, keep at it. You remember, one of the biggest cheers that went up was the when Star Wars first came out in 1977, I think it was. And the first time they went into light speed and the audiences rose en masse and cheered because it was an image of transcendence getting into the high Dharma vision. Yeah. Let's go. This quality of language so that it doesn't hypnotize itself to taking little baby steps. The dance is not in keeping track of the steps, but in participating in the rhythm of the dancers, the population of the dancers to the music. So that in an India, the ancient Dravidian wisdom is not in the sophisticated grammatical language of the words, but is hidden deep in the foundations of the music. In the rhythms of the music you will find the wisdom of ancient India. The. Here's a volume on the Indian concept of rhythm. There's the sitar and there's the tabla. It's in the work of the tabla that you will find the wisdom of ancient Dravidian India. And there are many models showing the complexity of rhythm in Indian music. The the art of the tabla is profound because the time signatures of Indian music are complex, almost beyond belief. The same way as understanding African music, the wisdom of Africa is there in the complex sentience of the way in which rhythmic complexity delivers an existential emergence into the real. And it is in the rhythms of African movement that you find some of the deepest wisdom of ancient Africa. In India, it's not only the tabla that carries the rhythm, but there is a kind of a rhythm which is there in silences, in the intervals between notes is another way of subtly carrying the mystic quality of rhythm. And you'll find it in Indian music in ancient flute, not the high piccolo type flute, but the ancient Dravidian flutes were wooden flutes long before metallurgy was able to make metal flutes. The ancient large, long wooden flutes of central India around Nagpur in those areas. One of the greatest practitioners in our time was a man named Pannalal Ghosh g h o s h Pannalal Ghosh. And when you hear the timbre and pitch and flow of his mystic wooden flute music, almost unaccompanied, except by the rhythm of silence in its complexity, you can feel what that ancient wisdom was like. You can feel the timeless, staggering profundity that was there before any words were uttered, before any mind thought, and it is this abysm of mystic profundity that staggered Europeans like an Em forester who, in a Passage to India, has one of the protagonists almost go crazy by going into an ancient Indian cave, Dravidian cave, and being confronted by the utter darkness and the utter silence. Let the European psychic couldn't stand the confrontation with such a blunt, mysterious, open nothingness. Whereas in, like the flute playing of Pannalal Ghosh, you hear that perfume of open, mysterious zero ness everywhere but coming into play, also woven with the music that as long as someone would bring a music emergent out of that silence, we can then live there, but that we are not limited by where we live, that that stage, that life, that focus is a conditional temporariness kept in structure by polarity. But that that polarity came from a place where there is no polarity and no place, and didn't just come from it in a causal way, but emerged whole, mysteriously discovered, and returns the same way that death is not an end. That's it. You're over. You're out. Know that there is such a thing as a re-emergence into the primordial, into that infinity, which is in every logical system in the world. There is no way to make a distinction between zero and infinity. They function the same way interchangeably. It's like water and fire. The two great universal solvents. But there comes a time when our kind discovered and realized that along with fire and water is universal solvents. There was a third solvent. A third solvent is alcohol because a lot of organic material dissolves in alcohol, spirits, spirited water, so that it's like the neural fluid that runs through our neural systems is 99.9% 9% water, but the 1% that has a mineral content makes of it a kind of an alcohol. It dissolves and carries the electronic impulses of the central nervous system, and without that, none of it would work. Thought wouldn't happen. And so thought, too, has its ritual foundation in a flow. And that's why yoga deals with combing the body first. And the first images of yoga in India are not from the Aryans, they're from Dravidian India. You find a Shiva in full asana. In the ruins of Mohenjo-daro 5000 years ago. It's already there, complete. It's already there in process. So that when you come to this translation. Hymns of the Mystic Fire Sri Aurobindo from the Rigveda. O flame, O purifier, bring to us by thy tongue of rapture. O God, the gods, and offer to them sacrifice. Thou who drivest the clarity if to understand. Dripping the clarity as the ghee, the butter. Thou who drips the clarity. Thou of the rich and varied luminousness. We desire thee. Because thou hast the vision of our world, of the truth. Bring to us the gods for their manifesting. O seer, we kindle thee in thy light and thy vastness, in the march of our sacrifice, who carries the offerings on their journey, So that the flow of the journey of life, the offerings are dissolved by this solvent that the language brings forth. And it's that language solvent that carries the actions and the world into our neural system, into our mind, and creates the possibility of the vision of the disclosure. And that does it really happen? It most certainly happens. Most certainly happens. So that there is a quality here that we're trying to appreciate more than understand, more than make a judgment of, more than come to some sum total. Is this true or is this not true? That's sophomoric. Participate with it. Flow with it. Live with it for a while, and that quality of disclosure appeals and the disclosure happens. One of the most, um, interesting books on logic appeared in the first were lectures at Cambridge University in England at Keyes College, very potent college in the 1870s 1880s. Uh King's College, Cambridge finally became perhaps the top institution in the world in the 1870s and 1880s, and the great professor of logic at that time, there was John Venn and his book. This is the second edition, 1907, The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic. And Venn is famous in these lectures for laying the basis of what today are called Venn diagrams. The basis of finite mathematics. The way in which to visualize through the weaving of geometry, the order of meaning in its sequential disclosure by the woven ness. If you want to understand intersection, take two circles and pull them together. You don't obviate the two circles by having an intersection. And these are just the beginnings of understanding. And here is a way in which Venn. Says. Since logic, as conceived and expounded in this work, is not an ultimate science in the sense of being concerned directly with really first principles of any kind, we find ourselves obliged on a general survey of our province to take for granted that a great deal has already been accomplished or decided for us in various directions. And he goes on to disclose that at the really deep foundations and at the really deep purposes, there is a great deal that one has to understand is not encompassed by a study of logic, which happens as a torus in the middle and certainly has its place where polarity and analogy weave. But as to ultimate significance, the zeros and the infinities, one needs to pay heed to poetry. And of course, it comes as a great surprise to those who actually read original documents and not just little selections in textbooks that on page four. Then brings in a mystical poem, he says, but very much more than this is demanded. Detached fragments of externality, that is to say, independent things. Detached fragments of externality, however completely we may have thus projected them outside our own personality, will not suffice to produce even an irregular and chaotic world, however. For they will not avail to constitute the separate objects, however fragmentary and disorderly these may be, with which even a chaos must be conceived to be occupied, a good deal of positive construction. Constructive effort is demanded in order to bring them into being even. And then he quotes a poem which reads A dark illimitable ocean without bound, without dimension, without length, breadth and height, and time and place are lost, where eldest night and chaos, ancestors of nature, hold eternal anarchy. Amidst the noise of endless wars, and by confusion stand. And so when one gets to the roots of the way in which language begins its weaving towards sentience and meaning, we need to be circumspect indeed about using any kinds of guides other than our participation from a primordiality of experiencing how our language flames from our actions, and thus by paying attention to what we really are doing and speak from that. We haven't yet experienced how language appears suddenly whole, not in fragmentary syllables, and not just in words that identify, but in whole cadenced sequence of phrases that present the atoms out of which the molecules of images are formed. And this is the mythic horizon, indeed. And it's only on this level that someone like an Ernst Cassirer dealing with language and myth, finally dealing with it finally, because he spent a whole lifetime trying to understand how language, uh, in the first place, came out and made the mind because for him, he was one of the first people on the list that the Nazis wanted to kill. And left the Germany where he was born and raised, and made it to Yale University in the United States. And during the entirety of the Second World War, was one of the great spokesmen for the difficulties of a so-called civilization being patsies for a political mythology which almost any other century would have rejected, but which the 20th century, early 20th century was a sitting duck. And there is a great deal that he wrote. Um. He wrote a huge book called The Myth of the state. Uh, one little lecture included in symbol, Myth and Culture Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer in 1935 to 1945. And one of the most profound is is on page 242, the technique of our modern political myths. And it isn't just about the Nazis. The entire discipline of politics has a mythic undertow, which, without careful, deep guiding regard, sweeps us up against our volition. Even. It's an undertow. And if you don't know how to swim in the ocean, don't go in. It's a very big problem. And one of the first philosophers to address this was Plato. And you find again and again in Plato's work, culminating in the Republic, the sensitivity to how to use myth in a sentient way to prepare you for an intelligent realization. And if it goes the other way. Not even wanting to. Mental indoctrination will reach in an undertow way and pull your feelings along ways that you have no defense against. And you find yourself suddenly shouting obscenities at someone because they are different from what you would expect or want or need. Today. And this is very fearsome. This is one of the great. Horrors of civilization. That this is possible. And so it brings a sobering profundity to the understanding of mythology and myth. And it's not about primitive people appreciating the mysteries of nature and singing beautifully. It's about how ritual action can either be habitual and habituating, and thus inculcating of a propensity to doctrine and indoctrination. And you find yourself goose stepping along with several hundred million others without even knowing how you got there. The difference between that and someone who is able to not only hear a storyteller in a primordial way, but to later on go through the transforms of differential consciousness so that you can be a storyteller in this next 200 years. We need to have general population of several billion people who can be themselves storytellers. At the end of his series on the Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski in the 13th episode of The Ascent of Man, stood before the cameras. He's a little man. He took off his glasses and he said directly, without glasses to the camera. He said all this immense learning in the hands of geniuses and the intellectual elite and the culturally able is meaningless in the future unless all of this great power and sophistication rests in men and women, in their living rooms, in their own homes, by the millions. We will be sitting ducks again for some future tyranny. Because the undertone, the undercurrent of manipulation on the atomic molecular level is beyond belief. Our only defense is to know ahead of time not to do that, and to teach ourselves and each other and our children a better way. And that's what all this is about. More next week.